Dave Duncan – The Living God – A Handful of Men. Book 4

“And we continue our journey to Thume?”

Trolls and cannibals all scowled. Witch Grunth snorted disbelievingly in the chain locker. It was one thing to accept in an intellectual way that there must be some vast unknown power at work in Thume. To accept it emotionally was barely possible even inside any occult shielding; out in the open where its aversion spell was effective, Thume seemed like the wildest sort of mirage, irrelevant nonsense.

Perhaps because he was a mundane, Sagorn believed in Thume. He was nodding sardonically. “But it will take us weeks to get there,” he said. ”Years at this pace. I don’t suppose you ladies and gentlemen could magic up a cooling breeze?”

All heads shook. Meddling with the weather would be a recklessly conspicuous use of sorcery, as he well knew. He was just being tiresome.

“Big storm coming,” Thrugg mumbled, sniffing the air. Rap abandoned the idea of Thume. His army would not follow him there. He had better fund a better plan, and soon. An idea began to glimmer at the back of his mind. It needed time to germinate, though. Distraction . . .

“Sagorn, you’re a historian. In any of the dragon wars, did anyone ever raise all the dragons?”

For a moment the old scholar’s pale blue eyes went as blank as the sky. Then their usual penetrating gleam returned. “Not that I can recall. But in ancient times there were many more of the worms. What you want me to tell you is whether anyone ever flew as many as Zinixo did today?”

“Er, yes.”

“Well? How many was that?” Sagorn demanded triumphantly.

Rap just knew that it had been a lot. He referred the question to the others, whose greater power would have granted them better vision in the ambience.

Tik Tok said three hundred and the anthropophagi backed their chief. Thrugg estimated two hundred and the trolls backed him, although with less fervor. The split was becoming worrisomely obvious. Sagorn had noticed it, and his haggard old face bore a sardonic sneer as he answered Rap’s question.

“No. The highest count I can ever recall reading of was fifteen. Of course record keeping, like many other things, tends to become spotty in the aftermath of a dragon wasting. Most areas do not recover for several centuries. But one dragon per legion was regarded as a pushover for the dragon. They’re just about indestructible.” The gangly old man smirked to himself, admiring his own universal expertise.

“So why did Zinixo raise so many?” Rap demanded. “Terror?” That thought came from Grunth belowdecks. “To see if he could control so many?” suggested one of the trolls.

“A little boy playing with Daddy’s spear?” said a cannibal. ”Because he is insane,” Sagorn snapped. “He is trying to convince himself that he is invincible, and the harder he tries the less he believes himself.”

“Don’t suppose it matters much.” Rap was surprised that no one else had caught up with his idea yet, but he was sure of it now. “What does matter is that here on this ship we have the second-greatest concentration of sorcery in the world, and Dragon Reach is just over there. Thataway. I say that that’s our part in the war! We go to Dragon Reach and make certain Zinixo never uses the worms again!”

A flash of satisfaction brightened the ambience and was hastily suppressed.

Tik Tok beamed. “A brilliant perspiration!”

“Clever!” Sagorn murmured. “How do you feel about destroying dragons, Master Thrugg?”

Thrugg was already nodding. “Monsters!” he growled. He would not willingly hurt any person and perhaps no animal, either, but a dragon would be fair game even for him. That was a war that trolls could fight.

“Of course,” the old jotunn added, with an admiring glance at Rap, ”such an act is a flagrant breach of the Protocol, but the usurper has already nullified the Protocol. Today Zinixo set the precedent, so the warlock of the south can no longer claim the dragons as his prerogative! Oh, very appropriate! You can rid the world of the worms at last!”

Rap had not thought of going that far. He often recalled the breathtaking beauty of the dawn rising he had once witnessed at Wurth Redoubt. That had been one of the most moving experiences of his life, but no beauty could justify the evil those monsters had wrought throughout history. The world would be a better place without the dragons. He nodded sadly.

Lith’rian would be incensed beyond imagining.

“You had better warn him what you plan,” Grunth sent. “He has a soft spot for his dragons.”

She was right, of course. The warlock of the south was the one essential character still missing from the stage. He had not yet been heard from, although he was almost certainly skulking somewhere in IIrane. Somewhere? Ilrane was only a subcontinent! He must still control a powerful band of votaries. As an elf he could never support Zinixo, a dwarf. They had been virulent opponents in the past and would always remain so, but elvish thinking was never predictable and Rap could not automatically count on Lith’rian’s assistance.

He groaned. “Someone will have to go and explain to him.” Everyone smiled encouragingly in his direction.

“I think Witch Grunth is the logical ambassador,” he protested. ”Wardens should speak to wardens.” Lith’rian was fascinating, charming, and infinitely ruthless. Merely thinking about him gave Rap cold shivers.

Sagorn snorted. “I can just see her Omnipotence going ashore in Ilrane unnoticed.”

“She would be rather contiguous,” Tik Tok agreed thoughtfully. ”Unless she was heavily despised.”

Now Rap was seriously alarmed. “You’re suggesting I go and tell the warlock of the south that we’re going to kill off all his rootin’ dragons?” he squealed. He glanced around and saw that was exactly what they were suggesting—the ship was full of smiles.

“We’ll deal with the dragons,” Thrugg rumbled in his cheerful-earthquake register, thumping Rap on the shoulder so enthusiastically that he almost crumpled to the deck. “You deal with the warlock.”

“Carried anonymously!” Tik Tok proclaimed.

Rap consoled himself with the thought that nothing was likely to happen for a few days yet. Perhaps he would think up a better idea before then. Meanwhile, he had proposed a definite course of action and won back his army’s loyalty, at least for the moment.

“I see I have just been volunteered to be ambassador to Ilrane. Meanwhile, how about lunch?”

“Make up your mind,” Tik Tok said. “Which do you want to be?”

5

A phaeton, a stagecoach, a longship, a leaky old coaster—and a rock.

Princess Kadolan, Rap’s elder daughter, sat on a boulder on a hilltop. The scenery was heart-achingly familiar, niggling at her homesickness—the slopes all carpeted with low herbs, some bearing tiny flowers as if a shower of many-colored stars had just passed over. Scraggy grass between the rocks fluttered in the cool breeze blowing from the washed-out blue sky, but there were no trees at all here in the tundra. Down in the hollows the ground was bright green with bog moss and sedge.

Just over the northern horizon lay the Winter Ocean, and Krasnegar, the home she had not seen in months and had not truly expected to see again. She shivered with eagerness to get there. Then all those terrible months she had spent with the goblins would fade like a nightmare, wouldn’t they? Perhaps her parents would be home before her, and oh, what a welcome they would give her! Even if they weren’t there yet, there would be Eva and little Holi, who must have grown a lot and would be talking more now. There would be hundreds of old friends and they would all be eager to hear Kadie’s news. She would introduce them all to her new friend and rescuer, Thaile.

The pixie also sat on the boulder, staring intently at nothing. She had chosen her seat and it was not really large enough for two. There were many other boulders nearby, but Kadie wanted to stay as close to her new protector as possible.

Thaile was little older than Kadie herself and looked a lot like the pictures of elves Kadie had seen in books. Her ears were pointed, her eyes large and gold, oddly slanted, and she had a wide nose, a little like Dad’s. She was very pretty, though, and to be rescued by a pixie sorceress was an extremely romantic adventure. No one had seen a pixie in a thousand years.

Kadie was bursting with questions, but she thought it would be unwise to interrupt a sorceress when she was thinking, or whatever Thaile was doing. Traveling by magic was a very odd business, not at all what the books had led her to expect. There had been a sort of whoosh! and a flying blackness. Then she had expected to be in Krasnegar, but instead the two of them had been here in the tundra, as if they’d fallen a little short, like Gath’s arrows when he tried archery. But it wasn’t that the magic had run out, or anything. Thaile had said something about watchers, and needing to plan the last bit.