Dragon's Teeth Read online

  Lyran half-carried, half-dragged the mage up the last few feet of the road to the gates of Lyosten. The horses were gone, and the mule, and with them everything except what they had carried on their persons that had not been ripped away by the flood waters. His two swords were gone; he had only his knife, his clothing, and the money belt beneath his tunic. Martis had only her robes; no implements of magic or healing, no cloak to keep her warm—

  At least she had not succumbed to shock or the cold-death; she was intermittently conscious, if not coherent. But she was ill—very ill, and like to become worse.

  The last few furlongs of road had been a waking nightmare; the rain stopped as if it had been shut off, but the breeze that had sprung up had chilled them even as it had dried their clothing. Once past the thin screen of trees lining the river, there had been nothing to buffer it. It hadn’t helped that Lyran could see the bulk of Lyosten looming in the distance, dark gray against a lighter gray sky. He’d forced himself and Martis into motion, but more often than not he was supporting her; sheer exhaustion made them stagger along the muddy road like a pair of drunks, getting mired to the knees in the process. It was nearly sunset when they reached the gates of the city.

  He left Martis leaning against the wood of the wall and went to pound on the closed gates themselves, while she slid slowly down to crouch in a miserable huddle, fruitlessly seeking shelter from the wind.

  A man-sized door opened in the greater gate, and a surly, bearded fighter blocked it.

  “What’s the ruckus?” he growled.

  Lyran drew himself up and tried not to shiver. “This one is guard to Martis, Master Sorceress and envoy of the Mage Guild,” he replied, his voice hoarse, his throat rasping. “There has been an accident—”

  “Sure, tell me another one,” the guard jeered, looking from Lyran, to the bedraggled huddle that was Martis, and back again. He started to close the portal. “You think I’ve never heard that one before? Go around to th’ Beggar’s Gate.”

  “Wait!” Lyran blocked the door with his foot, but before he could get another word out, the guard unexpectedly lashed out with the butt of his pike, catching him with a painful blow to the stomach. It knocked the wind out of him and caused him to land on his rump in the mud of the road. The door in the gate slammed shut.

  Lyran lowered Martis down onto the pallet, and knelt beside her. He covered her with every scrap of ragged blanket or quilt that he could find. She was half out of her mind with fever now, and coughing almost constantly. The cheap lamp of rock-oil gave off almost as much smoke as light, which probably didn’t help the coughing any.

  “Martis?” he whispered, hoping against hope for a sane response.

  This time he finally got one. Her eyes opened, and there was sense in them. “Lyr—” she went into a coughing fit. He helped her to sit up, and held a mug of water to her mouth. She drank, her hand pressed against his, and the hand was so hot it frightened him. “Thena,” he said urgently. “You are ill, very ill. I cannot heal sickness, only hurts. Tell me what I must do.”

  “Take me—to the Citymaster—” He shook his head. “I tried; they will not let me near. I cannot prove that I am what I say—”

  “Gods. And I can’t—magic to prove it.”

  “You haven’t even been answering me.” He put the cup on the floor and wedged himself in behind her, supporting her. She closed her eyes as if even the dim light of the lamp hurt them. Her skin was hot and dry, and tight-feeling, as he stroked her forehead. “The storm—witched.”

  “You said as much in raving, so I guessed it better to avoid looking for the city wizard. Tell me what I must do!”

  “Is there—money—?”

  “A little. A very little.”

  “Get—trevaine-root. Make tea.”

  He started. “And poison you? Gods and demons—!”

  “Not poison.” She coughed again. “It’ll put me—where I can trance. Heal myself. Only way.”

  “But—”

  “Only way I know,” she repeated, and closed her eyes. Within moments the slackness of her muscles told him she’d drifted off into delirium again.

  He lowered her back down to the pallet, and levered himself to his feet. The bed and the lamp were all the furnishings this hole of a room had; Martis had bigger closets back at High Ridings. And he’d been lucky to find the room in the first place. The old woman who rented it to him had been the first person he’d accosted that had “felt” honest.

  He blew out the lamp and made his way down to the street. Getting directions from his hostess, he headed for the marketplace. The ragged and threadbare folk who jostled him roused his anxiety to a fever-pitch. He sensed that many of them would willingly knife him from behind for little or no reason. He withdrew into himself, shivering mentally, and put on an icy shell of outward calm.

  The streets were crowded; Lyran moved carefully within the flow of traffic, being cautious to draw no attention to himself. He was wearing a threadbare tunic and breeches nearly identical to a dozen others around him; his own mage-hireling silk was currently adorning Martis’ limbs beneath her mage-robes. The silk was one more layer of covering against the chill—and he didn’t like the notion of appearing in even stained mage-hireling red in public; not around here. He closed his mind to the babble and his nose to the stench of unwashed bodies, uncleaned privies, and garbage that thickened the air about him. But these people worried him; he had only his knife for defense. What if some of this street-scum should learn about Martis, and decide she was worth killing and robbing? If he had his swords, or even just a single sword of the right reach and weight, he could hold off an army—but he didn’t, nor could he afford one. The only blades he’d seen yet within his scanty resources were not much better than cheap metal clubs.

  Finally he reached the marketplace. Trevaine-root was easy enough to find, being a common rat-poison. He chose a stall whose owner “felt” reasonably honest and whose wares looked properly preserved, and began haggling.

  A few moments later he slid his hand inside his tunic to extract the single coin he required from the heart-breakingly light money-belt, separating it from the others by feel. The herbalist handed over the scrap of root bound up in a bit of old paper without a second glance; Lyran hadn’t bought enough to seem suspicious. But then, it didn’t take much to make a single cup of strong tea.

  Lyran turned, and narrowly avoided colliding with a scarred man, a man who walked with the air of a tiger, and whose eyes were more than a little mad. Lyran ducked his head, and willed himself invisible with all his strength. If only he had a sword! The need was beginning to be more than an itch—it was becoming an ache.

  Lyran was heading out of the market and back to the boarding-house when he felt an unmistakable mental “pull,” not unlike the calling he had felt when he first was moved to take up the Way of the sword, the pull he had felt when he had chosen his Teacher. It did not “feel” wrong, or unbalanced. Rather, it was as if Something was sensing the need in him for a means to protect Martis, and was answering that need.

  Hardly thinking, he followed that pull, trusting to it as he had trusted to the pull that led him to the doorstep of the woman destined to be his Teacher, and as he had followed the pull that had led him ultimately to the Mage Guild at High Ridings and to Martis. This time it led him down the twisting, crooked path of a strangely silent street, a street hemmed by tall buildings so that it scarcely saw the sun; a narrow street that was wide enough only for two people to pass abreast. And at the end of it—for it proved to be a dead-end street, which accounted in part for the silence—was an odd little junk shop.

  There were the expected bins of rags, cracked pottery pieces, the scavenged flotsam of a thousand lives. Nothing ever went to waste in this quarter. Rags could be patched together into clothing or quilts like those now covering Martis; bits of crockery were destined to be fitted and cemented into a crazy-paving that would pass as a tiled floor. Old papers went to wrap parcels, or to eke out a thin
ning shoe-sole. No, nothing was ever thrown away here; but there was more to this shop than junk, Lyran could sense it. People could find what they needed here.

  “You require something, lad,” said a soft voice at his elbow.

  Lyran jumped—he hadn’t sensed any presence at his side—yet there was a strange little man, scarcely half Lyran’s height; a dwarf, with short legs, and blunt, clever hands, and bright, birdlike eyes. And a kindness like that of the widow who had rented them her extra room, then brought every bit of covering she had to spare to keep Martis warm. “A sword,” Lyran said hesitantly. “This one needs a sword.”

  “I should think you do,” replied the little man, after a long moment of sizing Lyran up. “A swordsman generally does need a sword. And it can’t be an ill-balanced bludgeon, either—that would be worse than nothing, eh, lad?”

  Lyran nodded, slowly. “But this one—has but little—” The man barked rather than laughed, but his good humor sounded far more genuine than anything coming from the main street and marketplace. “Lad, if you had money, you wouldn’t be here, now, would you? Let me see what I can do for you.”

  He waddled into the shop door, past the bins of rags and whatnot; Lyran’s eyes followed him into the darkness of the doorway, but couldn’t penetrate the gloom. In a moment, the shopkeeper was back, a long, slim shape wrapped in oily rags in both his hands. He handed the burden to Lyran with a kind of courtly flourish.

  “Here you be, lad,” he said. “I think that may have been what was calling you.”

  The rags fell away, and the little man caught them before they hit the paving stones—

  At first Lyran was conscious only of disappointment. The hilt of this weapon had once been ornamented, wrapped in gold wire, perhaps—but there were empty sockets where the gems had been, and all traces of gold had been stripped away.

  “Left in pawn to me, but the owner never came back, poor man,” the shopkeeper said, shaking his head. “A good man fallen on hard times—unsheath it, lad.”

  The blade was awkward in his hand for a moment, the hilt hard to hold with the rough metal bare in his palm—but as he pulled it from its sheath, it seemed to come almost alive; he suddenly found the balancing of it, and as the point cleared the sheath it had turned from a piece of dead metal to an extension of his arm.

  He had feared that it was another of the useless dress-swords, the ones he had seen too many times, worthless mild steel done up in long-gone jewels and plating. This sword—this blade had belonged to a fighter, had been made for a swordsman. The balance, the temper were almost too good to be true. It more than equaled his lost twin blades, it surpassed them. With this one blade in hand he could easily have bested a twin-Lyran armed with his old sword-pair; that was the extent of the “edge” this blade could give him.

  “How—how much?” he asked, mouth dry.

  “First you must answer me true,” the little man said softly. “You be the lad with the sick lady, no? The one that claimed the lady to be from the Mage Guild?”

  Lyran whirled, stance proclaiming that he was on his guard. The dwarf simply held out empty hands. “No harm to you, lad. No harm meant. Tell me true, and the blade’s yours for three copper bits. Tell me not, or tell me lie—I won’t sell it. Flat.”

  “What if this one is not that person?” Lyran hedged.

  “So long as the answer be true, the bargain be true.”

  Lyran swallowed hard, and followed the promptings of his inner guides. “This one—is,” he admitted with reluctance. “This one and the lady are what this one claims—but none will heed.”

  The dwarf held out his hand, “Three copper bits,” he said mildly. “And some advice for free.”

  Lyran fumbled out the coins, hardly able to believe his luck. The worst pieces of pot-metal pounded into the shape of a sword were selling for a silver—yet this strange little man had sold him a blade worth a hundred times that for the price of a round of cheese! “This one never rejects advice.”

  “But you may or may not heed it, eh?” The man smiled, showing a fine set of startlingly white teeth. “Right enough; you get your lady to tell you the story of the dragon’s teeth. Then tell her that Bolger Freedman has sown them, but can’t harvest them.”

  Lyran nodded, though without understanding. “There’s some of us that never agreed with him. There’s some of us would pay dearly to get shut of what we’ve managed to get into. Tell your lady that—and watch your backs. I’m not the only one who’s guessed.”

  Lyran learned the truth of the little man’s words long before he reached the widow’s boarding-house.

  The gang of street-toughs lying in ambush for him were probably considered canny, crafty and subtle by the standards of the area. But Lyran knew that they were there as he entered the side-street; and he knew where they were moments before they attacked him.

  The new sword was in his hands and moving as the first of them struck him from behind. It sliced across the thug’s midsection as easily as if Lyran had been cutting bread, not flesh, and with just about as much resistance. While the bully was still falling, Lyran took out the one dropping on him from the wall beside him with a graceful continuation of that cut, and kicked a third rushing him from out of an alley, delivering a blow to his knee that shattered the kneecap, and then forced the knee to bend in the direction opposite to that which nature had intended for a human.

  He couldn’t get the blade around in time to deal with the fourth, so he ducked under the blow and brought the pommel up into the man’s nose, shattering the bone and driving the splinters into the brain.

  And while the fifth man stared in open-mouthed stupefication, Lyran separated his body from his head.

  Before anyone could poke a curious nose into the street to see what all the noise was about, Lyran vaulted to the top of the wall to his left, and from there to the roof of the building it surrounded. He scampered quickly over the roof and down again on the other side, taking the time to clean and sheath the sword and put it away before dropping down into the next street.

  After all, he hadn’t spent his childhood as a thief without learning something about finding unconventional escape routes.

  About the time he had taken a half a dozen paces, alarm was raised in the next street. Rather than running away, Lyran joined the crowd that gathered about the five bodies, craning his neck like any of the people around him, wandering off when he “couldn’t get a look.”

  A childhood of thieving had taught him the truth of what his People often said: “If you would be taken for a crow, join the flock and caw.”

  Lyran took the cracked mug of hot water from his hostess, then shooed her gently out. He didn’t want her to see—and perhaps recognize—what he was going to drop into it. She probably wouldn’t understand. For that matter, he didn’t understand; he just trusted Martis.

  His lover tossed her head on the bundle of rags that passed for a pillow and muttered, her face sweat-streaked, her hair lank and sodden. He soothed her as best he could, feeling oddly helpless.

  When the water was lukewarm and nearly black, he went into a half-trance and soul-called her until she woke. Again—to his relief—when he finally brought her to consciousness, there was foggy sense in her gray eyes.

  “I have the tea, thena,” he said, helping her into a sitting position. She nodded, stifling a coughing fit, and made a weak motion with her hand. Interpreting it correctly, he held the mug to her lips. She clutched at it with both hands, but her hands shook so that he did not release the mug, only let her guide it.

  He lowered her again to the pallet when she had finished the foul stuff, sitting beside her and holding her hands in his afterwards.

  “How long will this take?”

  She shook her head. “A bit of time before the drug takes; after that, I don’t know.” She coughed, doubling over; he supported her.

  “Have you ever known any story about ‘dragon’s teeth,’ my lady?” he asked, reluctantly. “I—was advised to tell you tha
t Bolger has sown the dragon’s teeth, but cannot harvest them.”

  She shook her head slightly, a puzzled frown creasing her forehead—then her eyes widened. “Harvest! Gods! I—”

  The drug chose that moment to take her; between one word and the next her eyes glazed, then closed. Lyran swore, in three languages, fluently and creatively. It was some time before he ran out of invective.

  “I know ’bout dragon’s teeth,” said a high, young voice from the half-open door behind him. Lyran jumped in startlement for the second time that day. Truly, anxiety for Martis was dulling his edge!

  He turned slowly, to see the widow’s youngest son peeking around the doorframe.

  “And would you tell this one of dragon’s teeth?” he asked the dirty-faced urchin as politely as he could manage.

  Encouraged, the youngster pushed the door open a little more. “You ain’t never seen a dragon?” he asked.

  Lyran shook his head, and crooked his finger. The boy sidled into the room, clasping his hands behind his back. To the widow’s credit, only the child’s face was dirty—the cut-down tunic he wore was threadbare, but reasonably clean. “There are no dragons in this one’s homeland.”

  “Be there mages?” the boy asked, and at Lyran’s negative headshake, the child nodded. “That be why. Dragons ain’t natural beasts, they be mage-made. Don’t breed, neither. You want ’nother dragon, you take tooth from a live dragon an’ plant it. Only thing is, baby dragons come up hungry an’ mean. Takes a tamed dragon to harvest ’em, else they go out killin’ an feedin’ an’ get the taste fer fear. Then their brains go bad, an’ they gotta be killed thesselves.”

  “This one thanks you,” Lyran replied formally. The child grinned, and vanished.

  Well, now he knew about dragon’s teeth. The only problem was that the information made no sense—at least not to him! It had evidently meant something to Martis, though. She must have some bit of information that he didn’t have.