The Will and the Dragon
“Are you certain he is ready for this?” Allystaire stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt. Despite the deep chill hanging in the air, he wore no jacket or vest, and his arms and neck were thick with dust and sweat.
“For the past two weeks, you’ve had him up at dawn, hauling rocks, getting hit with sticks, hitting you with a stick, fetching water, riding, running, cutting timber, and Mother knows what else sort of fool’s labor—and you’re wondering if he’s ready to do the kind of thing he was made to do?” Torvul looked up from the tools he was preparing—his risers, his glass stems, bottles of vapor. Torvul wore his deep blue robes, with the sleeves pushed up over his elbows as he tinkered.
“The work I have had him doing is for his own good, and ours.”
“He’s not a knight, Ally. Ya can’t make him one.”
“If I wanted him to be a knight I would be having you make him a set of armor.” With only the slightest pause, he added, “Speaking of armor…”
“I’ve almost got it ready,” Torvul held up a hand to forestall him. “We get this done with fast enough, and it’ll be tonight. I think.”
“You told me that two nights ago.”
“Ah, well, there was a bit of a hang up. I had it right, ya see, precisely how I wanted. But, ah, well. Then a thought came into my head, unbidden, just sort of tunneled its way in as thoughts are wont to do, crashing about like trolls.”
“What thought?”
“The thought of how much weight I could pull by selling what I’m working on,” Torvul said hastily. “I know, I know. Her gifts are contingent on charity. It was unworthy of Her service. It came and was gone, and so were my results.”
“Have you damaged—”
“Stones above, no, I’ve not damaged it. Anything I do to it will improve it. Now go tell Gideon we’re ready.”
“Aye.” Allystaire turned on his heel and followed the dirt track deeper into the village, towards the Temple where the Will of the Mother waited in prayer for his task. Grey clouds, heavy with rain, circled Thornhurst. A half a day’s ride in either direction, Allystaire was sure, would mean rain, but Braech’s priests, according to Mol, kept it at bay. It was time for Gideon to pull it down.
At least that is a longer game, Allystaire thought. Gives us time to breathe. Though how much time they truly had, he wasn’t sure. Not enough. Even so, the timber in the northeast hills was being cleared and slowly turned into a palisade wall around the village proper, and such of the village men as could work metal or stone were busy figuring out a pair of gates as designed by Torvul.
He swung open the doors of the Temple, letting the cold air in with him. Fires burned low in braziers set around the room, warming it, but the sweat of labor had dried on his skin and he found himself unrolling his sleeves and pulling them down.
Gideon stood by the altar, in front of the Pillar of the Will, one hand extended to it, pressed against the smooth red-gold stone. Though it had only been a few weeks of working with him, Allystaire thought he could already see a change in the boy. A straighter spine, a thicker chest, a more possessed manner.
Without turning to face him, Gideon said, “Is Torvul ready for me?”
“Aye. Are you ready for this?”
“Allystaire,” Gideon said, turning from the altar and stepping away from it, “I’ve faced down two deities already. What great matter is a third?”
Allystaire frowned, carving deep lines around his mouth. “That kind of arrogance does not become us.”
Gideon stopped and tilted his head. “I have heard you, and Idgen Marte, and Torvul, all speak that way. Not about gods, it is true, yet the point remains; why may you express confidence while I must not?”
“Confidence is good. A man needs to carry some with him, certainly. Braech, though, is not Fortune, and his clergy are not going to be unprepared. The Choiron himself may be involved, and he can wield his power like a blade or like a maul—if you let confidence become arrogance, and you do not take him as a genuine threat to your life, and the lives of everyone depending upon us, he will find a way to hurt you.”
“How did you withstand him, then? Didn’t he try to bring his will to bear on you?”
“The Mother was already behind and within me then. Truthfully, though, I am not sure. Most of what I remember of that moment was an anger I had never known before. It was cold and bright and hard, and it was like a goad driving me away from him. Through him, if need be.”
“How can mercy and anger come from the same source?” Gideon wondered aloud, but was cut off when Allystaire gave him a gentle, almost playful shove on the shoulder.
“Enough words. Time for action.”
Gideon brushed his hand away but went outside all the same. Allystaire gave him distance as they walked. The boy began chafing his arms against the cold, only to look back at Allystaire and drop his hands to his sides.
Don’t be daft boy, put on a cloak or a coat if you’re cold, Allystaire thought, but didn’t say, as he felt the chill move up his own arms. At least it is not quite a freeze yet. We’ll have rain and not snow.
They found Torvul with his inflated paper-and-wood contraptions, four of them, staked to the ground, leaving little slack in the ropes. Mol waited next to him, silent as the dwarf worked, and turned to face Gideon as he approached.
“The clouds are near, and Braech’s priests hold them back unnaturally.” Mol gestured with one hand towards the sky. “Do what you think you must—if they are too strong, or you need time to understand what it is they do, remember that this isn’t a crisis. We’ll not starve this winter if it doesn’t rain now.”
No, Allystaire thought grimly, we will starve in the summer or the next winter.
“I know,” Gideon said. “Everyone stand back. And do not be concerned. Whatever happens. I will come back.”
The boy went to a knee. He placed one hand on the grass next to his leg, and the other he rested on his bent knee. And then, to the shock of the three standing there, he disappeared.
* * *
His task was in the air, among the clouds. So, he reasoned, he needed to be in the air.
He needed to be air.
He realized almost instantly the flaw in the plan. As it was formless and without sense organs, air could see nothing. So as fast as the speed of thought, as fast as the idea formed, he was no longer simply formless, barely collected air, but rather air in the shape of himself.
No. He was himself, the Will of the Mother, in a familiar shape. The shape he knew the best, only it was a shape that was as light—no, lighter than the air—and as invisible. He floated, observed the clouds. Understanding that he needed wings to propel himself, he willed them, and they unfurled from his shoulders. Or, he thought, they felt as though they unfurled—since they had no discernible weight and no visible shape, unfurling was simply how he made the sensation intelligible.
Flight was a new sensation. It was interesting, but he could not linger. Drawn by the feel and even the smell of the rain that fattened the nearby clouds, he beat his wings and flew like a loosed arrow straight towards one.
Near the edges of the air above Thornhurst, he felt it. If he had to describe it, he would’ve called it a net, a great, finely woven net of air and water. The word, of course, was an imperfect reflection of the thing. All words are, he reasoned.
A net can be cut, he thought, and in the next moment, one of his hands had lengthened, flattened, and sharpened into a kind of blade. He reached for the net with his other hand and set the blade against its edge, and began to cut.
* * *
In the Great Temple of Braech in Keersvast, a huge blue marble edifice occupying its own island on the Keersvast Archipelago, the island chain on which the greatest city of the northern world was built, a circle of priests knew instantly that they were threatened.
The weather over the eastern border of Barony Delondeur, many hundreds of miles away, had required their specific attention this day, according to the Choiron Symod and his Marynth, both of whom had come to the City of Islands some weeks ago and taken council with the present members of the Choironate. Artifacts that resided in the Great Temple, and could not leave it, were needed to battle some threat to the Sea Dragon, or so the gossip would have it.
This was why, headed by the Marynth Oritius—a stout, bearded man of middle years and tremendous will, if very little political acumen—a circle of half a dozen priests in Braech’s sea-blue robes stood around an incredibly finely wrought and detailed globe, with islands and continents worked in gold and silver and set into a massive blue crystal so minutely faceted it appeared round.
When they felt the presence begin to assault the construct of their will, they did not panic, and they did not scatter. Oritius’s back stiffened as he stood up straighter. “Harden it,” he commanded. “Harden yourselves.”
* * *
For the briefest of moments, the Will of the Mother thought the moment would come easily. The blade of his hand parted a few strings of the net, and he could see how the whole would unravel.
Then the net became a chain, and his blade snagged inside of a link. He pulled it free.
He set both hands against the link and pulled. Slowly, agonizingly, it began to part, but he felt even as he was tearing it, the others were growing smaller, tighter, offering no purchase.
What he wanted was neither tool nor raw strength.
What he needed was fire.
* * *
It was a sudden and intense agony for the six blue-robed priests, till Oritius, sturdy and strong-willed Oritius, yelled another command. “Separate! Pull the clouds away but do not give this thing a target to focus upon!”
* * *
It was as though the lengths of chain suddenly became a flock of birds that exploded from his grip and disappeared. Even as he sensed that he was chasing after them, for they weren’t flocks—rather quickly they coalesced into larger birds, and they gripped the clouds, the prize he had come for, in their talons and began to pull them, wrench them away from Thornhurst.
His weightless and invisible form stretched and expanded, his wings growing huge and ready to pound the air and throw him forward like a spear, but then a new thought overcame him, and just as quickly the wings became leathery, his neck stretched and thinned and his face became a snout rather than a beak, and feathers drew flat against his body and turned into scales.
With a contemptuous snort that turned the air in front of him to steam, the Will of the Mother, in the aspect of a great dragon of the air, dove for the nearest of the Sea Dragon’s priests.
He would admit that the irony appealed to him.
His jaws closed around one of the fleeing birds before it even knew what hunted it.
* * *
Oritius fell to the ground like a man stunned by a hammer blow. With their leader down, the others instantly abandoned their task, drawing their wills back through the globe in the center of the room into themselves.
“Oh, Braech,” one cried out, as they all stared at the artifact in dawning horror. “It follows!”
And then some enormous Will, something that dwarfed any of them on their own, was in the room with them. Its attention fixed upon the globe, and almost contemptuously, they heard a simple, resonant, “No.”
* * *
Gideon’s form slowly materialized on the ground in Thornhurst again. “Let them go, Torvul,” he said hoarsely “And if someone would bring me water I would…” He coughed then, weakly, and sank forward onto the ground, hands and knees both beneath him.
The dwarf cut the ropes holding the risers, and the contraptions sped into the air and towards the clouds.
* * *
Symod paced the room that had held the artifact, the globe which the Sea Dragon’s priests had used for hundreds of years to monitor the weather, to assist or impede vessels at sea, to guide their favored army or stymie the efforts of another.
Nothing was left of it but fragments of crystal and blobs of melted metal. There was a rap at the doorway behind him. Symod did not turn around.
“They say that Oritius’s mind is gone,” Evolyn ventured cautiously. She chose her steps carefully, stepping between hunks of the blue crystal. “He lives, but with no more sense than an infant.”
“Better to send him to Braech than to let him live on as a mockery of what he was,” Symod replied, his deep and rolling voice subdued in the wreckage of the room. “What of the others?”
“They will live, though the chirurgeons will have a long night of it, picking fragments of crystal and metal out of their skin. They do babble, though.”
“What of?”
“A dragon in the clouds. A demon of the sun. An air spirit that cut and burned and pursued them.”
“What is it, then? A dragon or a demon?”
Evolyn sighed. “They do not know, Symod.” She bent down and picked up a bent and twisted blob of metal that had been one of the main islands of the Archipelago. “Will the destruction of the artifact fall back upon us?”
“Oritius was in charge. He has paid. We set the course, but did not steer the ship. If anything, it will drive the rest of the Choironate into our arms. They’ll have no choice but to see Allystaire as a threat now.”
Evolyn recalled her one face-to-face encounter with the paladin, frowned, and stole a glance at Symod. He projected calm and poise, yet there were new lines graven into the sides of his face, a pinched quality to his cheeks that belied the smooth surface, the aura of easy power. “Do you think this was him? The paladin?”
“Certainly not. He hasn’t that kind of power, whatever he is.”
“He seems more likely to confront you more personally.”
“Why, Lady Lamaliere,” Symod said, turning the full force of his sea-green eyes upon her. “That almost sounds like admiration.”
A tiny note of panic sounded in Evolyn’s head, but she suppressed it, and didn’t waste time wondering if any of it showed in her features. It hadn’t. “Not at all, Choiron. Merely that this does not seem like his work. And, if I may speak freely…”
“Your rank entitles you to that.”
“It does not seem Braech’s way to confront our enemies thus. To attempt to use our wills to, what, make a few score peasants starve to death?”
“We play a greater game. Surely you are aware of the stakes.”
“Why not simply scatter them? Trod the place to dust. Salt the ground. Tear the stones of their would-be temple down and use them to build a shrine to the Sea Dragon.”
“And it would be so simple? Perhaps I should simply give you command of some men and have you take charge of it.” Symod took three slow steps towards her, a faint air of menace gathering around him, as bits of crystal shattered under his boots. “And yet I already did as much, at great expense and much risk. And after that, your assassin failed—at great cost to our Temple’s treasury. Why should I throw two or three score more men, and all it would cost, after that one? That one who could not fail, and yet did.”
“There are unforeseen powers among them, Choiron,” Evolyn said, meeting him eye to eye and standing her ground. “There must be. Without the corrective immediately to hand he should have died.”
“And yet he lives, and this new faith grows. Tales of the ‘Arm’ and ‘the Shadow’ have even reached the Archipelago. Here, in our city, where the Sea Dragon first roared, there are people who speak of them, speak of some inland cult of weaklings. Already the rabble of the baronies flock there. Do you know what happens if our own begin to do this? Have you any idea what it means? With greater numbers, greater power. Literally! Their goddess’s strength will wax, and it will be us, and our allies in Fortune’s Temple, that suffer.”
“Fortune’s delegation met with failure.” In fact, Evolyn pondered the message she had just received, the first letter arriving on Keersvast explaining what had happened. Their losses, the catastrophic failure. She considered sharing more of it with Symod, but said nothing. That is for calling my people rabble, Symod, she thought.
“Of course they did. Led by that weak-minded strumpet, how could they not?” He smoothed his beard with one hand, and said, “In truth, though, Lady Evolyn, you speak with some measure of insight. It is time to return to the baronies and prod the one with the most to lose to move on Thornhurst.”
“The Baron Delondeur?”
“The same.”
“How can he move on Thornhurst when he cannot even control his own seat? Rumor has him imprisoned in the Dunes by his natural son. Half of Londray has declared for this bastard pretender, and riots in his name. By the time any delegation arrives there his men will long since have settled into winter quarters.”
“Proper leverage, Marynth. Which is up to you to provide. You will depart the Archipelago within two days. You will take with you a small escort of priests and Islandmen warriors.”
“What of the Dragonscales? If we are to confront the paladin, let us make an end of him with our largest and most dangerous weapon.”
Symod tsked. “No need. And besides, it would be unwise, perhaps, to loose the berzerkers upon the lands of a Baron we wish to ally with.”
Evolyn lowered her head to concede the point, and she heard Symod chuckle. “Besides, there is leverage to hand right here in Keersvast. You need only find it.”
“What do you mean, Symod? Please, spare me the guesswork.”
Symod swept through a cluster of once-priceless crystal as he walked to an opened window and leaned his hands against the stone sill. “It is a tradition for the Delondeur children to leave and engage in errantries, to write their names in blood and deeds. Whichever returns with the best roll of deeds attached to their name is named the heir.”
“With all due respect, Choiron, you need not speak to me of the traditions of my own home barony,” Evolyn said, barely keeping the sneer out of her voice. “I knew all of Baron Lionel Delondeur’s children when I was younger.”
“Then you will have no trouble locating the one who is said to be in Keersvast, leading a crew of swords-at-hire,” Symod said, turning from the window to face her with a smirk. “Landen, I think.”
Evolyn tried not to let her surprise show, but as Symod whirled on her she knew she had failed. “And what am I to do?”
Symod exhaled heavily. “Tell me, Marynth, what your plan ought to be.”
She considered the question, her face impassive. “Encourage Landen to return and seek the Baron’s rescue, submitting that as proof of fitness to rule as Lionel’s heir.”
“That is a first step, yes.”
“Provide assistance in the rescue and in putting Lionel back on his seat.”
“Then,” Symod said, the corners of his mouth quirking upwards, sharp grey beard bristling. “Lionel must be driven to attack and destroy the paladin and his nascent heresy. The fact that Fortune’s emissary failed becomes two pieces of luck. First, that Fortune’s church is unable to fold this new faith into its own. Second, with their backing, you will carry a Declaration of Anathemata upon the Mother, Her so-called paladin, her other servants, clergy, and followers.”
Evolyn stood straighter, curling her hands into loose fists to keep them from clutching at her belt. “Declaration of Anathemata?”
“A rare thing, yes, but politically useful. Urdaran’s church will do nothing, of course. That is rather their trademark, after all. Yet two of the three Major Temples will suffice. With the Anathemata issued, and indebted as he will be for his rescue, Lionel Delondeur will have little choice but to marshal a force to stamp that village, and everyone residing in it, to dust.”
“No matter what pressure is brought upon him, Lionel is unlikely to put men on the march in the depths of winter,” Evolyn said, thinking of the barony winters she had known in her life, the daily grinding misery of them. The entire Lamaliere family and most of the servants tried never to leave the great hall of her father’s keep, with its massive, never-cold hearths, once the sky turned and the wind grew its winter teeth. Men on watch upon the curtain wall froze in their steps if they went too far from a fire and were caught by a bad wind. The snow piled taller than her, taller than Symod, taller than one stacked upon the other in a bad year.
“He will,” Symod said. “He will have no choice, for not only will you bring him his heir and the Declaration of Anathemata. You will be bringing him new allies to replace one he has lost.”
“Are Braechsworn and Dragonscales going to do battle there or not, Symod?”
“They will not be required.”
“Then who?”
“Do not burden yourself with an answer to that question.” Symod cut her off sharply, in a tone Evolyn well knew she shouldn’t challenge. “You have two days to find Landen Delondeur. Do not waste them.”
“What if more of Lionel’s children rush to his aid? We would be throwing a Temple’s weight behind a question of succession. Wars have started over less.”
“You needn’t worry about Lionel’s other children. I am given to understand that one has settled quite happily in the Concordat as a warband captain. And another will not be returning home under any circumstances.” Symod looked down at the shattered crystal and melted gold around him. “Fetch someone to clean this up as you go,” he murmured.
I know a dismissal when I hear it, Evolyn thought. She bowed very lightly, barely inclining her head and not lowering her eyes, and began stepping carefully among the wreckage of their priceless artifact on her way to her work.
When she passed near him, Symod leaned close to her, enough that she could feel the power emanating from his long, self-contained frame. “I suggest making sure of it, this time. I doubt he is likely to allow you to walk away yet again.”
Evolyn took a moment to gather herself, trying to push away the image of a hammer resting upon her desk, of the horrible certainty in the eyes of the man holding it. “Braech, Sea Dragon, Father of Waves and Master of Accords,” she murmured in a quick prayer, “grant me the strength to see him dead this time.”