Tales of Ethshar Read online

  And on those battlements two soldiers were setting a pike into place, with Therindallo’s head impaled upon the pike.

  Irillon had heard of people putting heads on pikes as a warning to others, but she had never seen it done before; she blinked, and swallowed bile.

  It was truly disgusting. Therindallo’s mouth hung hideously open, and something dark was oozing down the pikeshaft.

  On the other hand, now she knew where she could get the hair she needed. She even knew how. The pike was set leaning out over the castle wall, for better display—all she needed to do was stand directly below it, then use Tracel’s Levitation to rise straight up until she could reach out and cut a lock of hair.

  But she would, of course, have to wait until the guards left. She leaned back against the wooden corner of a nearby shop, rubbing her hands together to warm them, and watched.

  The pike was in place and left unattended within a minute or two; the scaffold was cleared away in perhaps a quarter of an hour. The guards ambled away—except for one, who stood by the gate, looking bored.

  Irillon frowned, shuffling her feet to warm them and clear away the slush; was he going to stay there?

  Apparently he was. She watched, shivering, hoping he would doze off, or step away for a moment.

  If he did step away, she realized, he might not be gone for long. She would need to act quickly when the opportunity arose. Tracel’s Levitation took four or five minutes to prepare—she couldn’t afford to waste a second.

  She opened her pouch and rummaged through it. She had brought the ingredients for all the spells she knew—tannis root for the Dismal Itch, dust for Felshen’s First Hypnotic Spell, a whistle and tiny tray for the Spell of Prismatic Pyrotechnics, and so on. For the Levitation she needed a rooster’s toe, an empty vial, a raindrop caught in mid-air, and her athame. She found them all, then stuffed everything else back.

  Someone brushed past her, bundled up against the cold, and hurried across the plaza. That reminded her that it wasn’t just the guard she needed to avoid; it was anyone in this hostile town. Fortunately, the gloomy cold and damp seemed to be keeping almost everyone inside.

  With the ingredients in her hand she watched the guard; he didn’t seem to have noticed her presence at all. He was staring dully straight ahead, at the next street over from the corner where she stood.

  All the same, she decided she had stood in one place long enough; it might be suspicious, and besides, the cold wasn’t as bad when she was moving. She began strolling along, looking in the shop windows, as if she were simply bored.

  She was actually watching the reflections in the windows more than looking at the goods displayed, but she hoped no one would notice.

  She had been wandering aimlessly back and forth, staying always in sight of the gate and its guard, for what seemed like hours, when at last the guard shifted uneasily, turned, and trotted out of sight down an alley, one hand tugging at his kilt.

  Irillon dashed across the square, her hands already busy with the spell’s preparatory gestures. She mumbled the incantation quickly as she ran.

  She came to a stop with her nose to the castle wall, beside the gate and below the pike, still chanting. She dipped the raindrop up with the cock’s toe, performed the necessary ritual gestures, transferred the drop to the empty vial, then closed the vial and tapped it with her athame.

  At that tap she felt suddenly light; she tucked everything but her knife away and spoke the final word, and rose from the muddy ground.

  A moment later she stopped herself, hanging unsupported thirty feet in the air, just a foot or two from poor Therindallo’s ruined face. He looked much worse close up, but she refused to let herself think about that as she grabbed a hank of his hair and began sawing it free.

  Seconds later, with her knife sheathed and the hair safely stuffed into yet another vial, she spoke the word that would trigger her descent.

  Only then did she remember to look down.

  The guard was back at his post, but now he had his sword drawn and was staring up at her.

  There was nothing she could do, though; she was sinking slowly downward, like a pebble in oil, and there was no way to restore the spell before she touched ground.

  Desperately, she drew her knife again and tried to think what she could do.

  She was a girl of fourteen, not large for her age, armed with a belt-knife; he was a burly guardsman with a sword. She couldn’t fight him fairly.

  She was a wizard’s apprentice, and knew just seven spells. She couldn’t use Tracel’s Levitation again in time to be any help; the Dismal Itch would just annoy him; and Fendel’s Elementary Protection wouldn’t stop cold iron, such as a sword. The Spell of Prismatic Pyrotechnics or the Sanguinary Deception or the Spell of the Spinning Coin wouldn’t do any good here at all.

  That left Felshen’s First Hypnotic as her only chance; if she could daze the guard with it she might be able to escape before he recovered. She reached for her pouch…

  But not in time; the guardsman stepped forward and grabbed her ankle before she could get the flap open. She yelped, startled, and tried to wrench free, but could not escape, and as the Levitation continued to fade she tumbled backward until she was lying on her back in the snow, one leg raised, the guardsman gripping the ankle tightly with one hand, and pointing his sword at her chest with the other.

  “I think you need to speak to the Captain,” the guard said, not unkindly.

  Irillon, flustered but not so distraught as to forget her Islander accent, didn’t reply at all.

  A few moments later she was inside the castle, being escorted into a small, wonderfully warm room; guardsmen gripped both her arms, and her knife had been carefully taken away. A fire burned cheerily on the hearth at one end of the room, while armor and weapons adorned the other walls. Much of the floorspace was taken up by a heavy wooden table, its surface strewn with rolls of paper; on the far side of that table sat another guardsman, but this one was older and more elegantly attired, with rings on his fingers and a golden band about his right arm.

  He looked up. “What’s this?” he asked.

  The right-hand guard explained, “She was stealing hair from the piked head over the gate. She flew up there and back.”

  The seated guardsman leaned back in his chair. “Flew?”

  “Yes, sir,” the guard replied.

  “Just the hair? Not the whole head?”

  “Just hair.”

  “Then she’s not a relative trying to give it a proper pyre.”

  The guard shrugged.

  The seated man looked Irillon in the eye. “I’m Captain Alderamon,” he said. “Who are you?”

  Irillon swallowed and said nothing.

  Alderamon waited a moment, giving her time to change her mind, then sighed.

  “You’re a thief,” he said. “Thieves we punish. If you flew, though, you might be a magician, and magicians we treat more respectfully. Now, thieves might be mute, I suppose, or deaf, but a wizard or a theurgist or a demonologist can’t be, because then he couldn’t recite incantations. I don’t know for certain about witches or warlocks, or all the other sorts of magician, but I never met one who couldn’t speak. Let me ask again—who are you?”

  She looked at him, at his unyielding face, and realized that if she remained silent she would be treated as a common thief. While that would probably mean flogging or imprisonment rather than beheading, it still wasn’t anything she cared to experience. Islander accent or not, she had to speak.

  “I’m Irillon of…Irillon the Apprentice,” she said, trying to imitate the captain’s accent.

  “Apprentice what? Who’s your master?”

  “Apprentice to Ethtallion the Mage. I’m a wizard.”

  “I thought so. Only a wizard would have any immediate use for a dead man’s hair.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Well, Irillon, we don’t want any trouble with the Wizards’ Guild, but you were caught stealing. Can you prove you’re a wizard’s apprentic
e?”

  “Yes,” Irillon said. “If you give me back my knife I can show you a spell. And there’s a spell on me that will tell my master if I’m harmed…”

  “The Spell of the Spinning Coin, I suppose?” Alderamon interrupted.

  “Yes,” Irillon admitted, startled that a non-wizard had ever heard of it. She had certainly never heard of it before her apprenticeship.

  “So if your heart stops, the coin will stop spinning. I’ve had it explained to me before. We certainly don’t want that. Now, what spell can you demonstrate? Something harmless, please!”

  “Ah…the Spell of Prismatic Pyrotechnics?”

  Alderamon nodded, and a moment later Irillon had the spell ready. She blew on the silver whistle, and a shower of sparks in a hundred different hues sprang up from the little silver tray, exploding in tiny bursts of color.

  “Very pretty,” Alderamon acknowledged. “It would seem you are indeed a wizard’s apprentice. Now, in that case, why were you stealing that hair, rather than buying it?”

  Irillon blinked in surprise.

  “Buying it?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “Ethtallion…my master just said to fetch the ingredients…”

  “And he didn’t mention that we sell them?” Alderamon sighed. “Well, we do. I told you, we don’t want any trouble with the Wizards’ Guild. That means we don’t try to withhold ingredients wizards need for their spells—but that doesn’t mean we’ll just give them away! You don’t give away your spells, do you?”

  Irillon stared at him in amazed silence.

  “Wizardry has been around for centuries, Irillon,” the captain said. “In all that time, naturally we’ve found arrangements that are comfortable for everyone. What sort of fools would we be if we didn’t know wizards use hair and blood and bone, and pieces of scaffold, and fireplace ash, and dragon’s scales, and a thousand other things? And what would be gained by either denying wizards those ingredients, or giving them away for free?”

  Irillon still couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Now, do you have coins, or will we need to work out an exchange?”

  “Uh…how much…I have some…”

  And the dickering began.

  In the end, Irillon paid seven bits in silver—all she had with her—and placed the Dismal Itch on two guardsmen who had been involved in a drunken brawl, promising to remove it again in three days. In exchange, she kept the blood, hair, and splinters she had already collected, and was allowed to depart freely.

  Captain Alderamon escorted her to the castle gate. There he patted her on the shoulder and said quietly, “Here you go, girl, safe and sound—but take my advice and don’t come back here. I told you we didn’t want any trouble with the Wizards’ Guild, and we don’t, but next time might be different. Don’t come here again.”

  Irillon, greatly relieved that her mission appeared to be a success and made bold thereby, looked up at him. “Why not?” she asked.

  Alderamon grimaced. “Do you really need to ask? Your imitation of a Coastal accent is terrible.”

  Then he pushed her out the gate and turned away.

  About “Sirinita’s Dragon”

  I was invited to contribute a story to an anthology called The Ultimate Dragon. I saw no reason it shouldn’t be an Ethshar story, and something other than the standard hero-slays-dragon piece. I had previously mentioned wealthy Ethsharites keeping baby dragons as pets, and babies grow up, so what happened to those pets? Sirinita finds out.

  Sirinita’s Dragon

  “You’re going to kill him?” Sirinita said, staring at her mother in disbelief.

  Sensella of Seagate looked at her daughter with surprised annoyance.

  “Well, of course we’re going to kill it,” she said. “What else could we do? In a few sixnights it’ll be eating us out of house and home—and in a year or two it might very well eat us. Just look how big it’s getting!”

  Sirinita looked.

  She had to admit, Tharn was getting large. When he had first hatched she could sit him on her shoulder, with his tail around her neck, and almost forget he was there; now she could barely pick him up with both hands, and he certainly didn’t fit on her shoulders.

  And he did eat a lot.

  “Really, Sirinita,” her mother said, “you didn’t think we could keep a full-grown dragon around the house, did you?”

  “No,” Sirinita admitted, “but I thought you could just let him go, somewhere outside the walls—I didn’t know you were going to kill him!”

  “Now, you ought to know better than that,” Sensella said. “If we turned it loose it would eat people’s livestock—and that’s assuming it didn’t eat people. Dragons are dangerous, honey.”

  “Tharn isn’t!”

  “But it will be.” Sensella hesitated, then added, “Besides, we can sell the blood and hide to wizards. I understand it’s quite valuable.”

  “Sell pieces of him?” This was too much; Sirinita was utterly horrified.

  Sensella sighed. “I should have known this would happen. I should never have let you hatch that egg in the first place. What was your father thinking of, bringing you a dragon’s egg?”

  “I don’t know,” Sirinita said. “Maybe he wasn’t thinking anything.”

  Sensella chuckled sourly. “You’re probably right, Siri. You’re probably just exactly right.” She glanced over at the dragon.

  Tharn was trying to eat the curtains again.

  Sirinita followed her mother’s gaze. “Tharn!” she shouted. “Stop that this instant!”

  The dragon stopped, startled, and turned to look at his mistress with his golden slit-pupilled eyes. The curtain, caught on one of his fangs, turned with him, and tore slightly. The dragon looked up at the curtain with an offended expression, and used a foreclaw to pry the fabric off his teeth.

  Sensella sighed. Sirinita almost giggled, Tharn’s expression was so funny, but then she remembered what was going to happen to her beloved dragon in a few days’ time, and the urge to giggle vanished completely.

  “Come on, Tharn,” she said. “Let’s go outside.”

  Sensella watched as her daughter and her pet ran out of the house onto the streets of Ethshar.

  She hoped they wouldn’t get into any trouble. Both of them meant well enough, but the dragon did have all those claws and teeth, and while it couldn’t yet spit fire it was beginning to breathe hot vapor. And sometimes Sirinita just didn’t think about the consequences of her actions.

  But then, that was hardly a unique fault, or even one limited to children. Sensella wondered again just what Gar had thought he was doing when he brought back a dragon’s egg from one of his trading expeditions.

  One of the farmers had found it in the woods while berry-picking, Gar had said—had found a whole nest, in fact, though he wouldn’t say what had happened to the other eggs. Probably sold them to wizards.

  And why in the World had she and Gar let Sirinita hatch the egg, and keep the baby dragon long enough to become so attached? That had been very foolish indeed. Baby dragons were very fashionable, of course—parading through the streets with a dragon on a leash was the height of social display, and a sure way to garner invitations to all the right parties.

  But the dowagers and matrons who did that didn’t let their children make playmates of the little monsters! The sensible ones didn’t use real dragons at all, they bought magical imitations, like that beautiful wood-and-lacquer thing Lady Nuvielle carried about, with its red glass eyes and splendid black wings. It moved and hissed and flew with a perfect semblance of life, thanks to a wizard’s skill, and it didn’t eat a thing, and would never grow an inch.

  Tharn ate everything, grew constantly, and couldn’t yet fly more than a few feet without tangling itself up in its own wings and falling out of the sky.

  Sirinita adored it.

  Sensella sighed again.

  Outside, Sirinita and Tharn were racing down Wargate High Street, toward the Arena
—and Tharn was almost winning, to Sirinita’s surprise. He was getting bigger. He was at least as big as any dog Sirinita had ever seen—but then, she hadn’t seen very many, and she had heard that out in the country dogs sometimes grew much larger than the ones inside the city walls.

  Much as Sirinita hated to admit it, her mother was right. Tharn was getting too big to keep at home. He had knocked over the washbasin in her bedroom that morning, and Sirinita suspected that he’d eaten the neighbors’ cat yesterday, though maybe the stuck-up thing was just hiding somewhere.

  But did Tharn have to die, just because he was a dragon?

  There had to be someplace a dragon could live.

  She stopped, out of breath, at the corner of Center Street. Tharn tried to stop beside her, but tripped over his own foreclaws and fell in a tangle of wings and tail. Sirinita laughed, but a moment later Tharn was upright again, his head bumping scratchily against her hip. If she’d been wearing a lighter tunic, Sirinita thought, those sharp little scales would leave welts.

  He really did have to go.

  But where?

  She peered down Center Street to the west; that led to the shipyards. Tharn would hardly be welcome there, especially if he started breathing fire around all that wood and pitch, but maybe somewhere out at sea? Was there some island where a dragon could live in safety, some other land where dragons were welcome?

  Probably not.

  There were stories about dragons that lived in the sea itself, but somehow she couldn’t imagine Tharn being that sort. His egg had been found in a forest, after all, up near the Tintallionese border, and he’d never shown any interest in learning to swim.

  The shipyards weren’t any help.

  In the other direction both Center Street and Wargate High Street led to the Arena—Wargate High Street led straight to the south side, four blocks away, while Center looped around and wound up on the north side after six blocks.

  Could the Arena use a dragon?

  That seemed promising. Dragons were impressive, and people liked to look at them.

  At least, in pictures; in real life people tended to be too frightened of adult dragons to want to look at them.