‘You dung-rats!’ bellowed the blond giant. ‘Call yourselves soldiers?’
The pictures faded against the ghostly white emptiness of reality and Tenaka shivered. He moved to the well where an old bucket lay, its handle still tied to a rotting rope. He dropped the bucket into the well and heard the ice break, then hauled it up and carried it to the dragon.
The dye was hard to shift, but he worked at it for almost an hour, scraping the last traces of red from the stone with his dagger.
Then he jumped to the ground and looked at his handiwork.
Even without the dye she looked pitiful, her pride broken. Tenaka thought once more of Ananais.
‘Maybe it is better you died, rather than living to see this,’ he said.
It began to rain, icy needles that stung his face. Tenaka scooped his pack to his shoulder and ran for the deserted barracks. The door hung open and he stepped inside the old officers’ quarters. A rat scurried into the dark as he passed but Tenaka ignored it, pushing on to the wider rooms at the rear. He dumped his pack in his old room and then chuckled as he saw the fireplace: it was stacked with wood, the fire laid.
On the last day, knowing that they were leaving, someone had come into his room and laid the fire.
Decado, his aide?
No. There is no romantic element in his make-up. He was a vicious killer, held in check only by the iron discipline of the Dragon and his own rigid sense of loyalty to the regiment.
Who else?
After a while he stopped scanning the faces his memory threw at him. He would never know.
After fifteen years the wood should be dry enough to burn without smoke, he told himself, and placed fresh tinder below the logs. Soon the tongues of flame spread and the blaze took hold.
On a sudden impulse he moved to the panelled wall, seeking the hidden niche. Where once it had sprung open at the touch of a button, now it creaked on a rusted spring. Gently he prised open the panelling. Behind was a small recess, created by the removal of a stone slab many years before the disbanding. On the back wall, in Nadir script, was written:
Nadir we,
Youth born,
Blood letters,
Axe wielders,
Victors still.
Tenaka smiled for the first time in months and some of the burden he carried lifted from his soul. The years swept away and he saw himself once more as a young man, fresh from the Steppes, arriving to take up his commission with the Dragon; felt again the stares of his new brother officers and their scarcely veiled hostility.
A Nadir prince in the Dragon? It was inconceivable – some even thought obscene. But his was a special case.
The Dragon had been formed by Magnus Woundweaver after the First Nadir Wars a century before, when the invincible warlord Ulric had led his hordes against the walls of Dros Delnoch, the most powerful fortress in the world, only to be turned back by the Earl of Bronze and his warriors.
The Dragon was to be the Drenai weapon against future Nadir invasions.
And then, like a nightmare come true – and while memories were still fresh of the Second Nadir War – a tribesman had been admitted to the regiment. Worse, he was a direct descendant of Ulric himself. And yet they had no choice but to allow him his sabre.
For he was Nadir only on his mother’s side.
Through the line of his father he was the great-grandson of Regnak the Wanderer: the Earl of Bronze.
It was a problem for those who yearned to hate him.
How could they visit their hatred upon the descendant of the Drenai’s greatest hero? It was not easy for them, but they managed it.
Goat’s blood was daubed on his pillow, scorpions hidden in his boots. Saddle-straps were severed and finally a viper was placed in his bed.
It almost killed him as he rolled upon it, its fangs sinking into his thigh. Snatching a dagger from his bedside table, he killed the snake and then slashed a cross-cut by the fang marks, hoping the rush of blood would carry the venom clear. Then he lay very still, knowing any movement would accelerate the poison in his system. He heard footsteps in the corridor and knew it was Ananais, the officer of the guard, returning to his room after completing his shift.