Throne of Dragons

“Yes,” Void said. He passed Renard a bag. “Your tools.”

“Thank you. Just one question.”

“No questions!” Wrath snapped from the side.

“This is kind of an important one: what does the item actually look like?”

“We believe it to be an amulet,” Void said, while Wrath looked at him with undisguised hate. “Worked with dragon designs, no bigger than a man’s hand.”

Renard nodded. “And what about—”

“You are trying to delay,” Verdant said from his other side. “Delaying will not work, nor pleading, nor anything else. Begin your work, thief, or I will fill your flesh with vines that expand through it.”

Renard had no doubt that she could. He swallowed. “All right.”

Renard focused his attention on the wall before him. It was vertical, but craggy and gnarled. Aside from the spots that looked glassy and sharp, the climb did not look difficult. Wrapping his hands in lengths of cloth to limit the potential for damage, Renard threw himself at the cliff and set off upward.

He’d climbed many things over the years: trees, walls, once an ornamental trellis when an angry husband had returned unexpectedly. This rock face was one of the easier ones, and Renard scampered up it almost as quickly as walking it.

Above, he found an entrance that made him stop: three blocks of carved stone formed a doorway, while the door itself was made from slabs of granite, carved with two dragons standing sternly. There was a lock set into it, and Renard fished out his picks. He was about to set to work when he spotted the second hole next to the obvious lock, one of the dragons’ claws giving way to reveal it. In the main lock, Renard saw the point of a dart gleaming. He set to work on the hidden lock instead, and soon the door snapped open.

Within was a tunnel, set on each side with niches that held stone caskets. Each was carved in a language Renard didn’t know, but it was thick with cobwebs. Renard took out a small lantern, lighting it so he could see his way as he went deeper.

The second trap almost caught him, buried as it was under layers of dust. Ordinarily, Renard would have spotted the shift in the floor from cobbles to black-and-white tiles, and would have been instantly suspicious. Now, his foot touched one before his mind registered the shift, and he threw himself back on instinct as a pendulum like blade scythed down from the ceiling, right through the spot where he had stood. He lay on his back panting, before forcing himself back to his feet.

He ignored the swish of the blades, ignored the floor that had triggered the trap. Access was the key. People who set traps like this wanted to be able to come and go if they needed to, which meant that there always had to be some way to disarm what they had put in place. He looked closely at the surrounding walls, examining each in turn, searching until he found a lever. Renard didn’t pull it, but kept looking until he found the lock beside that lever, the sphere that would drop otherwise to release poison, or fire, or acid.

He disarmed it and set off, deeper into the complex. He came out into a large, open space, filled on every side with mausoleums and tributes to the dead. There was no roof in this space; it seemed to have been lost in some long ago eruption, or perhaps there had never been one. Perhaps this had always been a place where the sun could shine down on a floor patterned with a map that was not the world as Renard knew it. There was no Slate in that map, while Sarras to the west looked green and wholesome, alive, not devastated by fire.

There was another doorway at the far side of the room, this one outlined in what looked like gold rather than stone, with strange gouges on it, as if something had tried to get in there. Somehow, Renard knew that what he sought would be there. He set out across the floor…

A roar from above him made him look up in a terror that was so old it seemed to be baked into his bones. A shape sat above him, perched on the lip of the open space, and even though Renard had never seen a creature like the one that sat there, stories and pictures and more all told him what it was: a dragon.

How could there be a dragon? There had been no dragons seen in the kingdom in years. Terror flooded through Renard, and he forced himself to stare at it solely because he wasn’t a man who gave in to terror… well, not often. He swallowed and stared up at it.

It was huge, and it was terrifying, blue scales gleaming, other colors seeming to flicker across them like a rainbow after a storm. Then the great mouth opened, and Renard realized just in time what was about to happen.

He flung himself down among the tombs as flames licked over his head, rolling between two, keeping low as he darted past another. He saw a blue form plunging down toward him, and he went flat again, great claws missing him by inches.

He was down there when he saw the bones and the corpses laid in one spot on the floor, a clear space among them just large enough for that huge form to curl up in sleep. Its nesting site! Why would a dragon nest here of all places?

The dragon landed, stalking through the tombs. Its jaws snapped out, taking the remains of a charred cow, obviously hunted on some farmer’s lands. It gulped them down, then tossed them aside, and Renard took a moment to move sideways, away from the creature’s path.

To his astonishment, it went to the door, clawing at the frame as if trying to fit through. It couldn’t, too large by far to fit through there. That meant that soon, it would turn its attention back to Renard, and it would find him. Even if he weren’t ripe from riding too long, it would scent him, and find him.

He needed a distraction. Crawling among the tombs, Renard searched until his hand found a discarded bone. He threw it, and the clatter of it among the stone of the rest seemed to be enough. The dragon’s head snapped round, and its bulk shifted as it turned, following the sound, led by its hunger.

Renard moved in silence, hurrying down between the tombs, keeping his head low and scurrying for that doorway. He was a big man, but now he made himself small, knowing that one glimpse, one sound, might send a dragon’s fire burning after him.

Renard felt the pebble beneath his foot, felt it give and scatter. It bounced from the nearest of the tombs, making a faint clunk as it did so.

Renard was already sprinting when the fire came behind him. He dove through the doorway, ahead of a spurt of flame, and there were golden doors there, open and hanging back against the wall. Renard slammed them, hearing the click of yet another lock. It didn’t matter; he wasn’t getting out that way. He heard the dragon’s claws scrape against the door, but it held.

Renard breathed a sigh of relief, and dared to look around the room. It was smaller than the one beyond, but it seemed that every surface was gilded, or painted, or both. Scene after scene showed dragons, intertwining, fighting, flying. Where there must have been a hundred tombs in the room beyond, here, there was only one, standing at the center of the room, the figure of a man in full armor worked into its surface with its hands clasped over its chest.

Those hands held something, and instantly, Renard knew that it was what the Hidden had sent him to find. It was an octagonal amulet, small enough that it could have fit into the palm of his hand, if only barely. There were runes around the edges, each one filled in with a different color of gemstone. The amulet’s heart was a single scale, and Renard could guess from the scratching on the door what kind of animal it had come from.

He reached for the amulet, and stopped, but there seemed to be no traps here, no tricks or threats. There was only the amulet, to take if he wished.

Renard lifted it, and the moment he did, he felt two things at once. The first was almost overwhelming. He felt the dragon outside the room, felt a connection to it that he could have reached out and touched easily. He felt… inexplicably, he knew that it was young, grown impossibly quickly on the magic of the world, filled with power. A name came into his head: Alith. More threads of connection reached out, stretching into the far distance. Renard could see now why the Hidden had wanted this: with something like this, they could reach out to a dragon, control it, use it.

That thought was almost enough to make him drop it, and not just because the knowledge of it seemed to fall into his head almost like a stone falling into a pool. Renard was a man who was used to flickers of memory coming out of nowhere, but that usually had to do with remembering the day after too much drink. This… the sheer enormity of what it represented was too much, the things a man might do too great.

He could also feel why they had sent him, rather than coming for it themselves; from the moment he touched it, something seemed to leach into him, pulling at all that made Renard who he was. Again, the knowledge was simply there. Wear this amulet or hold it for more than the briefest time, and someone would find their life force drawn from them.

He threw it from him, but it made no difference. It seemed that the pull of energy into the amulet merely slowed, rather than stopping. It was no more than a trickle, but left long enough, even a trickle would prove deadly.

The only question was what to do now. By rights, he should find another way out of this mausoleum, descend the volcano, and hand the amulet to the Hidden. Feeling it now though, feeling the power within it, Renard knew that he couldn’t do that.

Keeping this amulet would kill him.

Yet he knew, then and there, even though the hordes of the world come after him, he would not give it back.

It was his now. His greatest theft of all time.

All he had to do was escape.

CHAPTER THIRTY

“I’m not sure I can do this,” Lenore said to her mother, as Queen Aethe adjusted the veil on her bridal gown. They stood in an ante-chamber outside the great hall, where her maidservants had set everything out for her before the queen had ordered them to leave.

“There, there,” her mother said. “It is no more than nerves, and Finnal has insisted to Vars that things should go ahead as quickly as possible. Remember how you felt when you first set eyes on Finnal? That same joy will soon come to you again. This has been a… hard time, for all of us.”

Did she think that Lenore didn’t know that, when she’d been the one kidnapped by King Ravin’s people? Did she think that Lenore was unaffected by the death of her brother, or her father? Her mother might be the one who knelt by the king’s recumbent form for hours each day, but that didn’t mean that Lenore hurt any less than her.

“Mother…” Lenore began, but Vars was there then, standing waiting in the spot her father should have held. He was dressed in royal robes of ermine and velvet, no crown on his head for now, but royal looking in every other respect.

“It’s time,” he said. He held out an arm for Lenore to take. “Your husband is waiting for you.”

Lenore wanted to shy away, wanted to tell him that this was all some big mistake, but there was no give in his expression, no hint that he would even listen if she said something. Rodry would have listened, or one of her sisters, or even probably Greave, if they could get his head out of a book for long enough. Not Vars though.

“It’s a pity that Greave can’t be here,” Lenore said, hoping for some delay, some postponement to what was to come.

Vars continued to hold his arm out, waiting. Lenore took the hint and rested her own gloved fingers lightly on his sleeve.

“If we were to wait for our brother to dig his head out of whatever book it’s buried in, we might still be here a year from now,” he said. “No, this wedding happens today. It will… remind the people that there is still joy to be found even in times of great sadness.”

The hesitation told Lenore that it wasn’t the real reason he was going ahead with it. Probably that had to do with the alliance between the royal house and that of Duke Viris. The firmness of Vars’s voice brooked no argument, though. Lenore had to do this.