Dragon Unleashed Read online

  He’d camp for the night and renew his search in the morning. Reconnoitering in darkness had its benefits, but this was a large tent city populated with enough watchmen that someone would interpret his investigating as nefarious and try either to shoot him or to knife him. Confrontations never went unnoticed, and he didn’t want to give any warning to his prey of his presence here. For all they knew, his ship had gone down in an angry sea and he along with it. He didn’t want to disabuse them of the notion in case they’d made such a fortuitous assumption.

  The spot where he chose to camp was no more than a patch of wet ground away from the meandering patterns of flattened grass that marked a well-traveled trek made by campers who wished to relieve themselves away from their living spaces.

  The night sky stayed clear, and he counted the stars salting its expanse from his supine view on Batraza’s saddle blanket. The mare grazed nearby, her lead rope staked within easy reach. Malachus listened to the sounds around him—the call of a night bird, the distant ululation of wolves, the rustle of some rodent hiding from predators looking to catch their dinner. Above those, the murmur and flow of voices, their words indistinct. Friendly conversations and hot arguments, the intense sensuality of moans during lovemaking, a woman’s sweet lullaby to a fretful baby.

  These were the things that reminded him there was more to humanity than its larceny, its petty cruelties. His understanding, and the empathy that came with it, was a fragile thing, even after decades of living among humans outside the monastery. He looked like them, but they possessed dark depths he’d never fully comprehend, nor did he want to. The sounds he listened to now, of mundane lives lived in peaceful hours, softened his attitude a small bit. It wouldn’t last. It never did.

  His thoughts settled once more on the gray-eyed woman the lightning had shown him earlier. Attractive, but he had known sublime. Dignified, but he had met majestic. There was nothing about her appearance that strayed from the conventional into the remarkable, yet her image remained emblazoned in his mind. He saw it overlaid across a spectacle of starlight and behind his lids when he closed them. It was more than a suspected connection to his mother-bond. He wanted to know her name, hear her voice, learn what lay behind those eyes the color of dove’s wings. His fascination with her made no sense, but Malachus didn’t question it. His spirit understood his instinct better than his mind did, and he couldn’t shunt its message aside. The lightning had shown her to him for a reason.

  He drifted into a fitful slumber, wondering how her misty eyes might change when she laughed and how that laughter might sound.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Halani searched the crowd from her spot at the stall she manned alongside Gilene, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Savatar clansmen everyone in the Goban market was talking about, including her. She’d bought a shawl for her mother, Asil, from a Palizi trader, when word of the nomads’ arrival spread like a brushfire through the market. Asil was somewhere in the crowd with Talen and Dennefel, scouting the many stalls for to what to buy and resell later for a profit. Knowing her mother, Asil would race back to their own stall and demand Halani go with her to find the Savatar and admire those who had challenged the Empire and actually won.

  Instead of hunting for her mother, she’d returned to the stall to help Gilene and share the latest market gossip. Not everyone expressed excitement over the Savatars’ arrival. Gilene’s reaction to the news surprised Halani. A stillness fell over her, as if she’d just spotted a hunter with his bow trained on her. Her voice was thick with conflicting notes of both dread and hope when she said, “Are you sure?”

  Halani nodded. “They’re roaming through the market now. Word is their leaders are honored guests of the Goban chief who controls this territory.”

  She considered climbing onto the table for an overhead view of the crowd and possible glimpse of the new arrivals but settled instead for standing on tiptoe and craning her neck to see over the crowd.

  A piercing whistle whose modulations Halani instantly recognized cut through the marketplace’s dull roar. A summons from Hamod, one that never failed to make her bristle. She wasn’t a dog, and her uncle’s assurances that the whistle was simply more effective than trying to shout didn’t soothe her indignation. She was tempted to ignore it, but Hamod used the whistle judiciously. He needed her.

  She spotted him through a gap in the crowd, standing with a group of traders. One held something wrapped in a scrap of violet silk.

  Halani groaned and silently cursed. She offered Gilene an apologetic smile. “Probably another statue Uncle wants me to look at. I’m better than he is at spotting a fake. I’ll have to leave you again for a moment.”

  Gilene returned Halani’s smile with a thin one of her own, gaze sweeping the crowd as she replied. “It’s all right. See to your uncle. We’ll switch places when you return.”

  Halani hesitated. She’d known Gilene for less than a year, nursed her through two bouts of illness, and shared a wagon with her. Life had not been kind to Gilene. She’d almost died in the grotesque Flowers of Spring ritual and ended up separated from her husband, Valdan, still not knowing if slavers had killed him. A quiet, reserved woman who worked hard and rarely laughed, she was unfailingly kind to Asil and grateful to Halani for her aid. Her dark eyes cached a hoard of secrets, and she minded her own business so well even Hamod felt comfortable enough offering her a place among his free traders. But Gilene’s response to Halani’s revelation regarding the Savatars was strange. The air around her practically vibrated with a kind of harrowing anticipation, as if she half expected the Savatar to charge in on their horses and attack the market.

  Were Hamod’s whistles not growing more commanding, Halani would have stayed at the table. She gave a pained sigh and left the stall to shoulder her way through the throng.

  The Goban marketplace’s already lively atmosphere turned frenetic as rumor spread of the Savatars’ arrival. To those who had lived in the shadows of the destroyed garrisons, they were heroes. To the free traders gathered here, the Savatar clans were the hammer that broke the Trade Guild’s hold on the Golden Serpent. Gossip and retellings of the siege at Kraelag had reached epic proportions, until it was no longer a battle between the Empire army and barbarian steppe clans, but a clash between gods. A true goddess did make an appearance, one who left destruction in her wake, a city burned to the ground, and an empire shaken to its foundations by what she’d wrought. The Savatar called her Agna and, according to rumor, beseeched her aid in their bid to crack open Kraelag’s defensive walls. The goddess had done so and more, leaving nothing to pillage and an empire that lost its sense of identity along with its corrupt capital.

  Hamod’s caravan had stopped several leagues away from the city, away from Kraelag and the invading armies. Halani had seen the black smoke billowing skyward in the distance. Only later did they get details of the siege, and those were recounted by an ill, traumatized Gilene, who told of a fortuitous escape from the terrible fate of a Flower of Spring thanks to the Savatar invaders, whose goddess had made a Flower of Spring of everyone who didn’t flee Kraelag, immolating everything in holy fire.

  Even Halani, a storyteller who understood how the most mundane events achieved grandiose proportions with time and numerous retellings, wanted to see a Savatar clansman, majestic on his horse, who didn’t wait for the rapacious Empire to attack his homeland but brought the battle to the Empire’s very gates himself. Unfortunately, it was time to play the guessing game of “real or fake.” Halani had not lost yet, and her uncle counted on it.

  The cluster of men standing with him was a motley lot. She recognized one, a free trader from Okeshen Flat Nose’s caravan. Halani couldn’t remember his name, but she remembered his hands, quick to grope any woman unfortunate enough to walk within reach. The one time he’d tried it with Halani, she’d broken his fingers with a pair of iron tongs. He caught sight of her striding toward them, went wide-eyed, and abruptly aba
ndoned their group.

  Conversation among the remaining four men stuttered to a halt as they watched the man flee before turning to see what had sent him racing away like a scared rabbit.

  She didn’t recognize those who stayed with Hamod. One wore the garb she’d seen on many of the Goban men attending the market gathering here: vests with three-quarter-length sleeves over ivory shirts whose hems were almost as long as a woman’s frock. Wide sashes cinched the two garments close to the waist. The shirt and tunic had split sides that revealed loose breeches tucked into boots strapped to the legs with leather ties.

  Halani’s attention moved to his compatriots. Their garb was rougher, stranger, proclaiming them outlanders. Nor did they look like merchants. More like mercenaries who’d found another way to earn a coin or two beyond sell-swording. Their cheap hunting armor had seen better days, and they didn’t bother concealing the weaponry they carried. She ran a practiced eye over the sheaths that covered their knives as well as the bow and quiver one wore across his back. Hamod and his folk dealt in all manner of goods, and while Halani wasn’t an expert in sharp steel and armor, it didn’t take a great deal of expertise to tell her these men either scavenged the dead on a battlefield or bought their garb and weapons from a vendor who traded in goods Hamod turned his nose up at and refused to sell.

  One of the men held a square of the purple cloth she’d glimpsed earlier, within its folds a piece of ivory. She resisted rolling her eyes. If she had a silver belsha for every bit of bone she’d examined to determine its value, she’d be a rich woman. If this went like previous transactions of its ilk, she was about to get an earful of boasts and lies regarding the bone’s origin. Which was no doubt of far humbler roots than what these two planned to tout.

  Most bone traders dealt in common ivory bits they tried to pass off as something more exotic. Dog, cat, and snake skeletons were sometimes fused together in twisted new incarnations and peddled as remains of rare or mythical beasts worthy of the high price the bone merchants charged for them.

  Hamod was a wily trader and taught everything he knew to his niece. Charming, sly, and armed with a repertoire of half-truths, he could sell a beggar his own rags back to him given enough time, and spot a costly trinket in a midden heap at a hundred paces. Never an easy mark, he still deferred to Halani on some things, like determining the authenticity of an artifact. Hamod graced her with a jovial smile that didn’t reach his eyes or hide the avaricious gleam sparkling in his pupils—a telltale sign that whatever these men had told or shown him, it had caught his interest in the worst way. The Goban merchant seemed more a curious onlooker, while the two mercenaries—and she grew more certain of their profession the closer she got to them—appeared ready to bolt at the first sneeze, their gazes never settling for long on one person or one spot, shifting constantly to scan the busy market’s bustling crowd as if searching for someone.

  Hamod didn’t introduce her. As free traders, they came in contact with all sorts of people, honest and unsavory alike. None of the men had looked at Halani with anything resembling lust, but Hamod chose not to reveal anything about his niece.

  He gestured to the silk cloth the one man held. “Take a look,” he said, “and tell me what you think.”

  The mercenary-trader passed the ivory to Halani with a willingness that surprised her, dropping it into her open palm as if he found the thing repulsive to the touch. A rush of vibration shuddered up her arm, and she swallowed a gasp at the sensation. Cold, prickly, pulsing.

  The bone’s weight surprised her as well. Its shape hinted that she held the end bit of a claw. She ran her thumb over its interior curve, careful not to slice her flesh on its outer edge or prick her finger on its pointed tip. Good gods! If merely a fragment, then whatever this once belonged to, the creature had been gigantic. Several more passes of her thumb revealed a new discovery. A shape not naturally made by bone growth was engraved into the claw’s flat plane at the spot where the arc was widest. Here, too, the sharpest sensations punctured her fingers like needles dipped in ice water. She held the claw bit up to the sun, seeing nothing. Wait. She peered a little closer. Was that a glow around the perimeter of the engraved shape? Halani blinked, and it was gone, though the needle pinpricks remained as strong.

  “Our friends here say it’s from a draga.” That greedy light in Hamod’s gaze grew from a sparkle to a blaze the longer she held the bone fragment in her hand.

  Despite the odd vibration still coursing through her hand and her arm, Halani only raised a doubtful eyebrow. “Is that so?”

  How many times had she heard such a fanciful boast told by a trader working easy marks in a crowd eager to part with their coins? Real draga bones, even the fragments, were hard to come by, mostly sold to rich collectors.

  Plenty of gossip ran the breadth and length of the Krael Empire that Empress Dalvila once had the complete skeleton of the fabled Golnar suspended from her bedchamber’s ceiling. Halani had never seen it for herself or known of anyone who had, but such notions made for good storytelling fodder. Now those rumors would remain only hearsay. Golnar’s bones had burned with the rest of the palace, even the legendary strength of draga-kind unable to withstand the destroying power of god-fire.

  “It’s true,” the second mercenary-trader said in response to her skeptical look. “Draga through and through. If you can find some way to grind it into powder and sell it in small quantities, you’ll be rich. Draga bone is magic.”

  “If that’s so, then why would you want to sell it to us, knowing you’ll get far less from a fellow trader than you would from a regular buyer?”

  Hamod’s scrutiny switched from her to the two men, and he eyed them with the same skepticism. “Good question.”

  She and Hamod had done this before, teamed up to work over a difficult seller: one playing the role of eager, unwary buyer, the other the reluctant miser unwilling to buy a dram of wine unless he could get the entire barrel it came from thrown in for the price. This time was different. Halani wondered why these two would want to give up something with significant value by selling it to a free trader, that notorious group of merchants who refused to serve the Guild and obtained their goods to sell by questionable means.

  The two men shared a glance before the second one spoke. “We know others want it, but trade isn’t our calling. We’re hired swords who bought the draga bone for a good price from a man eager to get rid of it himself. Now we know why. Those who covet it will do anything to have it. It’s not worth it to us to keep it, and it’s getting in our way of hiring on for other work.”

  In other words, they or the previous owner stole it, and someone with clout wanted it back. Halani estimated that half of what the man just spouted was truth and half was so much horseshit. At the moment she couldn’t quite tell which of the two was the greater. Once more she ran the pad of her thumb over the claw’s flat curve, distracted by the magic suffusing her body. She was surprised no one yet had commented on her hair standing on end. Every strand felt as if it were vibrating, and her eyelids twitched involuntarily.

  The sensation was both strange and familiar. Familiar in that it carried the hum of earth magic, a tune all its own that shared some similarities with the music she sensed in everything born of soil, rock, and tree. Music that hummed to a lesser degree in the herbs she harvested for healing salves and in the grave dirt she dug when raiding a barrow. Those vibrations were gentle tones of varying pitch. This . . . this was a roar.

  Hamod’s thin veneer of casual boredom began to fracture as Halani stood there, weighing the man’s words and stroking the ivory. The calculating gleam in his eye warned her that no matter what argument she used to convince him not to make the sale, it would fall on deaf ears.

  I think we should return whatever this bone is to those who took it, walk away, and not look back.

  They were the words she wanted to say but didn’t. Her uncle reveled in the embrace of the mis
tress that ruled him best—greed. Instead of sound argument, Halani employed a weapon she rarely used on the wily Hamod. She lied.

  “It’s an interesting piece,” she said, adopting a regretful sigh. “But it looks like any old bone one might pick off a large animal carcass.”

  The dismay on the men’s faces might have been comical were Halani not so focused on fooling her uncle. She held out the bone to the man who’d given it to her. He took a step back as if she offered him a live viper.

  Hamod reached for the artifact, only to have Halani hold it away from him. She surprised herself, but something instinctive told her that to surrender it to him meant he wouldn’t give it up, no matter her false assurances that the bone was nothing special.

  His eyes narrowed before he gave the two men a thin smile. “Give me a moment. Sometimes we differ on those items we think will interest our buyers.” That was no more true than her assertion about the bone fragment, but she didn’t argue when Hamod pulled her to the side out of earshot of the traders and gave them his back so they couldn’t see his scowl.

  “Don’t lie to me, girl,” he said. “To them, fine. We can bargain for a better price if we insist it’s fit only for the midden heap.”

  She’d never been able to fool Hamod. He was, and always would be, a master of mendacity.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle.” She glanced down at the bone on its bed of silk. “Whatever creature this belonged to, no good can come from owning it. It has the feel of a lodestone about it. Its purpose is to lure someone or something to it.”