“Falon’s gone,” replied Blot casually.
“Gone?”
“And the old outpost, too. After I delivered your entry to him, I returned the horse to the innkeeper, and when I came back, the place was totally flattened, absolutely destroyed. Nothing left standing. Everything covered in frost. Lot of folks spotted the dragon flying out from the mountain and some said they heard the explosion from seven miles away. You never saw such a mess, Ander. Gonna take a lot of work to rebuild the outpost. Innkeeper, another tankard, please.”
Ander shook his head in amazement.
“But I’ve saved the best for last, Ander. Look what I found in the rubble. Everything is here, except for the scale.” Blot held out a tablet, its edges still coated with gleaming frost.
“That’s my entry-my observation on the dragon!”
Blot broke into a huge grin. “So it is, Ander. And now there’s nobody to head the outpost.”
“So…”
“So, don’t you see?” Blot took a big gulp of grog and slapped Ander on the back. “Looks to me like Outpost Twelve is in need of a new chief scribe. I’d say you’ve just been … promoted!”
Even Dragon Blood
J. Robert King
It was the early days of the War of the Lance. So early, most people in Ansalon didn’t even know there was a war. The town of Sanction knew, though it liked to pretend it didn’t. The afternoon sun still hung, swollen and bloated, above Sanction’s steaming harbor. The two at the bar were as drunk as if it were closing time. Aside from a half-asleep bartender, they were alone in the small wood-smelling place.
The two had been strangers when they walked in. Now, after a few pints of dragon blood ale, a few fifths of highlord hooch, and more than a few steels passing hands in a friendly card game, the two were thicker than thieves. Which was what one of them was.
The thief-a short stout man with a balding head and a beard like soot smeared across his chin-dealt another card to his besotted companion. Another card from the bottom of the deck. “Your luck will turn any moment now, my friend.”
The tall man beside him nodded. His piercing brown eyes blinked. “It’s got to. You’ve nearly cleaned me out. If I don’t win something back, I’ll have to walk out on Martha and the triplets, for sure.” It was a standard loser’s line.
The two slid into intoxicated silence as they studied the cards that jittered in their hands and blurred in their eyesight. The soot-jawed fat man gritted his teeth in a smile that might have been apprehension, or ecstasy.
“Something’s coming for you, my friend. Your luck is changing.”
The lean man glanced up and saw the inadvertent fulfillment of his companion’s prophecy. Something was coming for him-something in a steel scroll case carried in the hands of a young man. He was a dark-haired youth, wearing the stern face of a stripling who wants to prove himself at his assigned task. He wore, too, the grim livery of the Blue Dragonarmy, with its occupation forces in Sanction.
If the fat man were less drunk and less recently rich from sharping his companion, he would have held his tongue in the presence of any representative of Ariakas’s army. But he was both. “Your luck has changed, looks like,” said the thief, and he gestured to the messenger standing in rigid attention behind his companion. “But for the worse.”
“Kith Krowly of East Waverly Road?” the young man asked, his eyebrows drawn in a serious line. “You have just been conscripted into the Blue Dragonarmy, in the service of Highlord Ariakas. Here are your orders.”
Kith reached for the scroll case, his thin hand trembling even more than it had when he had first seen the terrible cards dealt him. He took the case, goggled for a moment at the forbidding wax seal that had been stamped with Ariakas’s own ring, and then solemnly opened it. A rolled piece of parchment slid forth, and he held it closer to his chest than he’d held his cards. He squinted down at the page, and read.
To the Esteemed Kith Krowly of East Waverly Road,