Dragon Venom (Obsidian Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  "You in the center, form a line!" Arlian called. "You might miss an opening if you just wander about like dazed sheep!"

  Some of the men glanced back at him; one called, "Yes, my lord!"

  Then they wandered on as they had before.

  Arlian sighed. These were good men, for the most part, strong and brave and obedient; except for young Lord Rolinor they had all been with him for at least two or three years now, and he knew them and was proud to lead them. Still, they were not as disciplined and thoughtful as he might have wished.

  He considered sending Rolinor down to direct them into a better line, but then rejected the idea; Rolinor was no more disciplined than the others, and a good bit less dedicated and eager.

  Lord Rolinor was, in fact, the only one in the party who had not really volunteered. Oh, he had made a show of enthusiasm when he first arrived a week before, made a little speech about how pleased he was to join the great Lord Obsidian in his crusade against the dragons, but Arlian and Rolinor both knew it was all for show. Rolinor was here because he was trying to impress the Duke in order to establish himself in the government, and slaying dragons in their lairs was more impressive than overseeing fortifications or financing caravans—and probably safer than attacking the Dragon Society's strongholds, tracking down the Society's assassins, or attempting to capture the dragonhearts themselves.

  Rolinor's family had sent him to court to carry on their long tradition of service to the Dukes of Manfort, and Rolinor was doing his best to cooperate, but his heart was not in it. Court intrigue suited him well enough, and he had no trouble playing the sycophant, but fighting dragons was clearly not something that held any appeal for him. He had not asked for a killing spear, and appeared to have lost even his short spear; he had not approached any of the dragons closely until after they were dead. He was here to advance his career, not because he hated the dragons.

  Rolinor had not lost family or friends to dragons, as Arlian had. He had not twice seen his home destroyed by dragonfire. He had not conversed with dragons and felt their scorn and hatred. He had not seen a newborn dragon tear its way from a man's chest. While Arlian knew that another such monster was growing in his own tainted blood, Rolinor had never been thus polluted, never lived in dread of such a death.

  To Rolinor vengeance was only a word, an abstract concept.

  To Arlian, vengeance upon the dragons was everything. Vengeance was why he lived, why he fought, the entire reason he had sought wealth and power, his purpose as warlord to the Duke of Manfort. Destroying the dragons and their human allies, protecting innocents from them, was far more important to him than his own survival.

  "My lord!" One of the soldiers was bending down, waving his torch.

  He had found an opening in the cavern floor, and thrust his spear into it without striking bottom.

  "I see it," Arlian called, starting forward down the sloping stone surface. "Stand clear! Spears ready!"

  2

  The Warlord's Mercy

  The Warlord's Mercy

  Arlian knelt beside the hole, his torch high, peering down into the darkness beneath. The soldiers formed a ring around him, and he was vaguely aware that young Lord Rolinor was not among them.

  "Surely, that's not big enough for a dragon!" one man said—one of the newer recruits, a fellow the others called Leather.

  He had a point; the hole in the stone was no more than four feet across at its widest, perhaps six feet from end to end.

  "Not for a large dragon, certainly," Arlian conceded.

  "Are any so small as that?" Stabber asked.

  "They can compress themselves most amazingly; remember that a newborn dragon rises from within a man's chest," Quickhand replied. "I have seen the smallest in one lair squeeze through an opening not so very much larger than this."

  Arlian glanced at Quickhand. For centuries the knowledge that dragons spawned their young in human hosts had been the deepest and darkest of secrets, known only to one living man, but then Arlian had learned it, and had been far less adept at secrecy than the late Lord Enziet. Now it was common knowledge among the Duke of Manfort's soldiers, and throughout much of the Lands of Man.

  Quickhand had never seen a dragon's birth, as Arlian had, but he had obviously heard the stories.

  Quickhand met Arlian's gaze for an instant, and then both men returned their attention to the task at hand. Arlian lowered his torch down into the hole, as far as he could reach; the orange light shone only on bare stone and blackness. He could see no sign of a dragon, nor any indication that a dragon had ever dwelt therein—but he could not see the full extent of the chamber below.

  "Stand ready," he said.

  Around him the men stepped back, adjusting their black-tipped weapons; then Arlian dropped his torch.

  He watched it fall for a second, strike a jagged chunk of rock and tumble down a slope—and at the last instant he saw the gleaming fluid and snatched his head back, away from the opening.

  The pool of venom in the bottom of the pit ignited, and a swirling cloud of yellow flame filled the entire lower chamber, bursting up through the opening in a coil of light, heat, and smoke. Arlian could feel his hair and eyebrows singeing as he tumbled backward, away from the blinding, searing blaze. Around him his men cursed and mumbled and coughed.

  And then the dragonfire was gone, almost as swiftly as it had erupted, and Arlian blinked at the darkness, his eyes struggling to read-just to the restored gloom. The stench of venom smoke and burned hair filled his nostrils, and sweat crawled on his brow and under his shirt.

  The weight of his mail suddenly seemed greater.

  He coughed once, wiped soot from his eyes, then leaned forward to peer down into the hole.

  Traces of burning venom still flickered here and there on the walls and floor of the lower chamber, seeping out of cracks in the rock, and these gave enough light to see that indeed, there were no dragons down there, nor room for them, nor further openings.

  There were charred brown bones, however, many of them. Old

  bones, by the look of them—very old. None of them were big enough to be dragon bones; a few were unquestionably fragmentary human skulls.

  "A charnel-pit," Stabber said, kneeling beside him.

  "An oubliette, perhaps," a man called Edge suggested, as he, too, stepped forward and looked down.

  "Or worse," Arlian said, not voicing his suspicion—near-certainty, really—that the dragons had used this hole simply for waste disposal, making no distinction between human remains and any other unwanted debris.

  Although why the dragons would have brought humans here he was not entirely sure. The dragons, contrary to widespread belief, did not seem to actually eat people—or for that matter, anything else. They apparently subsisted on magic alone. Enziet had told him long ago,

  "They are the magic of the Lands of Man made flesh, a primal force drained from the earth and given shape," and whether that was die precise truth or not, it did appear that they did not need solid food.

  On the other hand, they did seem to enjoy tormenting and killing people, and might well have dragged a few back to the lair as playthings—though Arlian had never heard any reliable reports of such a thing, nor found any evidence in the other lairs he had explored over the past fourteen years.

  The thought occurred to Arlian that those bones down there might have once belonged to the very men and women who spawned the four dragons whose rotting carcasses lay a dozen yards away. It seemed incredible, though, that anything recognizable could still remain after so very long, even in the dry, dead air of a cave; the dragons here had surely been thousands of years old. Their hides had been entirely black, the sign of a fully mature, even elderly, dragon; newborns were blood-red, a color that faded swiftly to golden yellow, and then to green, before giving way to the final black.

  Every adult dragon Arlian had ever seen had been black. At least one of the three that destroyed his village and slaughtered his family had still shown faint traces
of green when sunlight caught its scales at the right angle, and as a much younger man Arlian had encountered two bright red newborns, but none he had seen since had been anything but utterly black. Arlian turned to glance at the dead monsters, as if he could still somehow judge their age from the rotting remains.

  He froze for an instant at what he saw in the torchlight, then closed his eyes wearily. He sighed, and turned back to the others.

  "There may be more openings," he said. "Let us continue our search."

  "As you will, my lord," Quickhand said, lifting his torch. The circle of soldiers broke, the men scattering again.

  "Form a line!" Arlian called uselessly after them, as he got to his feet.

  He stood and watched as they once again failed to obey, but he made no effort to pursue and coax them into a proper formation.

  Instead he waited for a moment, then turned his attention back toward Lord Rolinor.

  Arlian saw that the man—hardly more than a boy, really—had at least had the sense to move well clear of the dragons again. That did not alter what Arlian had seen. He wished he could have dismissed it as a trick of the poor light, an illusion, an unfortunate appearance of an innocent act, but he knew it was none of those. The light had been sufficient, the actions unmistakable.

  Rolinor had been collecting venom. He had brought a bottle, and had been thrusting it into the rotting venom sac at the base of one dragon's sagging jaw. He had tucked the bottle out of sight now, but still wore the heavy gloves he had donned to handle it.

  Dragon venom had only three known uses, and only one of those could not be achieved more easily with less precious fluids. It was a deadly and corrosive poison, and highly flammable, but its unique purpose lay in the fact that when venom was mixed with human blood, it became the elixir that turned an ordinary human being into a dragonheart.

  A man with the heart of the dragon was immune to poisons, disease, and aging, and acquired a strength of personality that allowed him to command the attention of ordinary men. Dragonhearts also seemed to be a little stronger and a little faster than they should rightfully be, and to have superhuman endurance.

  Dragonhearts were also unable to sire or bear children, and tended to grow cold and detached over time.

  And after an incubation of roughly a thousand years, each dragonheart would die giving birth to a dragon. Only death or a hideously painful magical ritual that would cleanse the draconic taint and restore the dragonheart to normal humanity could prevent this eventual transformation.

  The Duke of Manfort, ruler of all the Lands of Man, had decreed fourteen years ago that every dragonheart in his realm—or rather, every dragonheart but Arlian, who had been given a special exemption until such time as the dragons were destroyed—must either submit to the Aritheian purification spell or die.

  Most of the dragonhearts had refused and fled Manfort, establishing a new headquarters for the Dragon Society in the eastern port city of Sarkan-Mendoth; the Duke's armies had waged constant war against them ever since, trying to enforce the edict. The Duke had law and tradition on his side, and all the legitimate forces of die Lands of Man, but the lords of the Dragon Society, who had had centuries to build their fortunes and who could to some extent communicate and cooperate with the dragons themselves, had considerable resources of their own.

  The Dragon Society could also offer one very strong incentive to ensure the loyalty of their troops. It was said that those followers they deemed worthy were rewarded with the elixir, and became dragonhearts themselves, with a thousand years of life ahead of them.

  That was a strong enticement. To Arlian and some of the others the prospect of becoming a dragon at the end took the appeal out of the idea, but not everyone thought the price too high.

  And apparently Lord Rolinor had given in to the temptation. Now he stood on a rise in the cavern floor, watching Arlian nervously.

  Arlian began trudging slowly back up toward the nobleman, and Rolinor stood, waiting. At least, Arlian thought, he did not embarrass himself further by fleeing.

  "Lord Rolinor," Arlian said, "a word with you."

  "Of course, my lord," Rolinor replied. He did a surprisingly good job of concealing his nervousness.

  Arlian approached to a comfortable conversational distance, his spear held casually in his hand. He made no threatening moves, and his tone was mild as he asked, "Did you want the venom for yourself, or were you planning to sell it?"

  "My lord?" Rolinor's handsome face shaped itself into a carefully crafted look of confusion.

  "I believe I spoke plainly enough."

  " I . . . Yet I fear I do not understand the question, my lord." Rolinor's expression was becoming worried, but not yet frightened.

  Arlian sighed, and the point of his spear was suddenly aimed at Rolinor's throat. Fear appeared in Rolinor's eyes, but still he made no attempt at flight.

  "You filled a bottle with this monster's venom," Arlian said, jerking his head to indicate the nearest of the dead dragons. "I want to know whether you intended to use it to prepare an elixir for your own use, or whether you intended to sell it to other would-be dragonhearts."

  "I did not . . ."

  The black stone point of the spear was under Rolinor's chin, pressing into the soft flesh. "I saw you fill the bottle," Arlian said. "Now, answer my question, or die. The choice is yours."

  Rolinor swallowed. "And if I admitted that I had collected venom, would I not die in any case? We are forbidden . . ."

  "Indeed you are forbidden to collect venom, and as you suggest, the penalty is death," Arlian interrupted, "but you are young, and I may show mercy. If I am forced to strip you naked to find the bottle, the urge to be merciful shall be tempered by irritation at the inconvenience.

  Now, answer my question—what did you intend?"

  Rolinor drew himself up to his full height—several inches less than Arlian's own—and said, "I had not yet decided, my lord. I saw an opportunity that might not come again, and chose to avail myself of it . . ."

  Arlian interrupted him again. "You had brought the bottle with you.

  This was no mere whim, no spur of the moment."

  Rolinor grimaced. "The bottle was not empty when we came, my lord; it contained brandy, with which I fortified my courage before facing a caveful of dragons."

  "Oh?" Arlian leaned forward to smell the younger man's breath.

  "I had never seen a dragon, my lord, and the tales were hardly encouraging. The reality was daunting enough that I made good use of the brandy, and when I was done I had the bottle, and there was the dragon, and the rest of you were all looking the other way, and a sudden impulse . . ." He shrugged.

  Despite the cavern's reek the faintest whiff of brandy was indeed just barely discernible, and Arlian could hear the slurring in the younger man's speech. Arlian lessened the pressure on the spear ever so slightly, held out his other hand, and demanded, "The bottle."

  "More of a flask, really . . ." Rolinor said as he reached into his buff suede waistcoat and drew out a flat brown glass bottle.

  Of course it was glass; few other substances could hold venom without corroding. Arlian snatched it away, then turned to glance at the rest of the party.

  They had reached the far end of the cavern, the light of their torches illuminating a blank stone wall, and as Arlian looked. Stabber called, "Nothing here, my lord!"

  "Then let us be out of here, before we smother in this foul air,"

  Arlian called back. He lowered the spear and trotted quickly to the edge of the opening in the floor, where he tossed the bottle in.

  The glass shattered with a satisfying crash, and a hiss sounded as its noxious content spilled across the stone.

  That done, he marched back to Rolinor's side and took him by one arm, leading him toward the cavern mouth. "Come on, all of you!" he called back over one shoulder.

  Then, without looking directly at Rolinor, he murmured, "You're young, and you were perhaps drunk—I have heard from my men that venom fumes
can combine with alcohol in unfortunate ways, though I myself have never been fool enough to drink before entering a dragon's lair. I will assume your wits were addled, and once we are out in the open air we will say no more about this. But understand, my lord Rolinor, that addled wits or no, you gave your life entirely into my keeping today, and you still live only because I choose to allow it. Do not rely on any further mercy."

  Rolinor threw him a quick, uneasy glance, then looked down at his own feet and the stone floor. "Thank you, Lord Obsidian," he said.

  Arlian clapped him on the shoulder, and said loudly, "Not the half-dozen I hoped, but still, four dead dragons is a good day's work, is it not? And our young Lord Rolinor is blooded at last; even if the hand that struck the killing blow was never his, he stood at the ready every time, and did not hesitate to approach. Perhaps he likes the stench of venom, eh?"

  A few of the soldiers laughed. Rolinor coughed, but said nothing.

  And then they were in the steeply sloping passage that led up from the torch lit and reeking gloom of the cavern into the cold sunlit open air, and too busy watching their footing to speak further.

  3

  Wine and Conversation

  Wine and Conversation

  The long walk back down from the cave mouth through the pine forest to the camp was largely silent, save for the crunch of footsteps trudging through the crusted snow, the men were tired and somewhat nauseated by the fumes, and opening one's mouth to speak would let precious warmth escape into the bitter wind of late winter. The party stayed together until they had passed the pickets and been recognized, but then the others proceeded onward while Arlian paused to talk to a sentry.

  "Any news?" he asked.

  The guard straightened. "No, my lord; all's quiet."

  "No sign of the Dragon Society's spies? No word from Manfort?"

  "Not that I've seen or heard, my lord."

  "Good man," Arlian said, clapping the soldier on the shoulder. He glanced after the rest of his company as they dispersed in the deepening gloom of early evening.

  Although the party that had entered the cave had been a mere fourteen men, the camp held over a hundred—enough warriors to fend off any attack the Dragon Society was likely to send in winter, along with a couple of dozen cooks, drivers, smiths, armorers, clerks, grooms, and spencers, and of course the three sorcerers whose magic had helped locate the cave mouth. Thirty tents were arranged under the tall trees, the paths between them trodden almost free of snow. A score of horses were tethered in a clearing to one side, their breath fogging the air as they nosed at their hay, and to the other side a line of wagons held the expedition's supplies. The smell of wood smoke and the faint murmur of voices filled the air; Arlian's men were returning to warm campfires and good company, not just cold wagons and empty tents.