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Dave Smeds: The Schemes of Dragons

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Dave Smeds The Schemes of Dragons

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Toren panicked. He watched in horror as his totem emerged from his mouth and began walking down his body. When it slid off his thigh to the ground, he could freely observe that which he had seen only once before in all his life, on the day of his manhood ceremony.

His totem was a tortoise. It was blue, translucent, with white, pupilless eyes. It walked sluggishly toward the bracelet. One of the gems-not the same one that had been flashing earlier-was starting to gleam. The tortoise walked straight into the illumination, shrinking, until it vanished within the facets. Ivayer ceased his spellweaving, and exhaled sharply. A droplet of sweat fell from his chin.

"You've taken my ancestors," Toren whispered. He listened in the places of his mind where the familiar voices should be and found silence. The remembrances of past generations, which had seemed so much like his own memories, would no longer come to consciousness. He stared forlornly as Ivayer picked up the bracelet.

"We are sorry it has to be this way," Geim said. "If you had lived in the civilized lands, we might have offered you gold or iron. But we had nothing you value enough to make you leave the Wood, until now."

"You have made me a cheli. It would have been more merciful to kill me."

"The process can be reversed. Your ancestors can be returned to you."

Toren looked up, startled and suspicious. "After I've killed your dragon for you?"

"Before," Geim said. "All we ask is that you come with us to Serthe, and speak to Struth. She'll give your totem back to you. In fact, she's the only one who can. It's easy to put it in the gem, but only a god has sufficient magic to restore it to your body."

Toren stared at his feet. Ivayer spoke.

"Perhaps we should put it another way," Geim translated. Ivayer gestured to Deena, who untied the ropes. Toren winced as a rush of blood returned to his extremities. Ivayer held out the bracelet.

"Take it, return to your shaman. See if he can free your ancestors," Geim said.

"They would cast me out if they knew I had let foreigners defile my totem." Even his son would be compelled to shun him.

"Then it seems to me your choices are suicide, or coming with us, letting Struth restore you, and in time being able to return as a complete man."

Toren found it difficult to care what his alternatives were. That morning he had been a modhiv, one of the best scouts his tribe had. Now he was not even a true Fhali. He could no longer call up the memory of the founder planting the tribe's home tree, only his own meager recollections of the tree at its present, mighty girth. When he rose, it was almost as if someone else moved his muscles.

Geim seemed to smile. "This is not funny," Toren snapped.

"No," Geim answered quickly. "I was merely thinking of something that Struth said. She assured us that you would be a person with a well-developed sense of self-preservation."

Toren glowered. When Ivayer offered him the bracelet again, he waved it away. He would walk north for now. There did not seem to be any alternative. But that did not mean he had to stop behaving like a modhiv. When they set out, he was in the lead, as if he were the master, not the slave.

II

THE MAIN STREET OF THE hamlet of Old Stump rumbled with the sound of mounted soldiers. Citizens prudently sought the shelter of the buildings, where they peered cautiously from shadowed doorways and curtained windows. A high noon sun washed the community with hard, revealing light, giving the watchers a view more vivid than they would have preferred.

They saw twenty riders seated atop heavy battle oeikani, the thick-necked breed seldom seen in Cilendrodel. The animals' short, knobby antlers had been capped with brass cones, and on their forward feet their cloven hooves had been filed to cleaverlike sharpness, so that they clicked as they crossed the tiles between the hall of the elders and the home of the mayor, the only paved section of roadway in the region. The mayor's wife and daughters heard the clicking and struggled to banish the unwelcome memories summoned to their minds.

The riders were all dressed alike, in chain mail hauberks and bronze greaves. They carried broadswords, dirks, and wooden shields reinforced with copper bands, except that the pair of archers at front and rear had substituted bows and quivers for the shields. But most important for Old Stump's populace, each of the soldiers wore a red and black design on the right breast of their jupons, so that there could be no doubt that they were the Dragon's men.

The second group of ten rode somewhat behind the first, leaving a gap at the center of the procession. In that gap something was being dragged in the dust. Owl the tavernmaster, peering tentatively out through the open half of his main doorway, decided the thing must have once been a man.

It was not easy to tell, even after the soldiers had reined up in the center square of the hamlet and lifted their burden up out of the dirt. The body had no eyes, no nose, no genitals. Several fingers and toes bent at impossible angles. His skin was covered with welts, burns, clotted blood, or in some cases was simply missing.

Four of the soldiers dragged the dead man to the center of the square. Until three years earlier the site had been home to Old Stump's great father tree, which antedated the first house. Now there was only a crudely hacked-off trunk, eight feet high, to which the soldiers tied their trophy. When the last knot had been cinched, the patrol leader dismounted and shuffled lazily to the spot.

The latter was stout but muscular, perhaps a bit less than forty years of age. He wore brass knuckles, polished to hot brilliance, and a sash of fine quarn silk. His cheeks bore shallow scars from a childhood bout with the pox. There were those in the hamlet who could remember the year when that sickness had swept through, taking one in ten of the children, and one in twenty of the adults. Others could recall when the man had been taunted by his juvenile peers because he had been afraid to climb the great father tree. Those were the days before Lord Puriel's nearby castle had been fortified as one of the Dragon's outposts, and many of Old Stump's homes taken over in order to quarter the men of the garrison.

The patrol leader pulled his dirk from its sheath and used the tip to carve a pattern in the corpse's abdomen, leaving gouges that seeped a few drops of cold blood. There were not many in the village who could read what was written; even the writer was merely copying it from a design he had memorized an hour earlier. They were characters of the High Speech of the Calinin, and they formed a name: Milec. In ancient days in the kingdom of Aleoth, this had meant fifthborn son of the weaver. It was a common enough name in Cilendrodel, but there was one particular Milec more famous than any other. When certain watchers saw the letters formed, they knew the rumor of his capture was true.

The carver finished his work and turned away. He found that an old woman was standing in the middle of the street, watching him. She lifted a bony finger at him and shook it.

"May your mother turn in her grave, Claric," she said, strong-voiced in spite of her age.

He laughed. "Aunt Seerie. Where are the menfolk? Afraid to show their faces? They leave old women to render their complaints?"

"This is a good man you have murdered," Seerie continued, as if Claric had not spoken.

"He was a criminal, condemned by Governor Puriel himself," Claric answered hotly. "It isn't murder to execute a rebel."

"And to mutilate him?"

"If he had told us what we wanted to know, he could have saved himself most of that." Claric climbed into his saddle. "The Dragon is not unkind to those who acknowledge his lawful rule."

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