Dragon's Trail

III: FUGUE-5

Someone poured him a cup of dandy, the roasted dandelion-root coffee. He stared at it, saying only, “What a night.”

“I’ll say. You enjoyed yourself?”

Jarrod only grinned. Grinning, though, made the din louder. “I feel awful,” he admitted as his grin faded.

Javal cut off a big slab of ham and helped himself to it. “Good.”

“You’re just cranky ‘cuz you didn’t get laid last night.”

“As far as you know,” the knight admitted. “Ah, what wouldn’t I give to be twenty winters again.”

“Twenty-eight winters, pal. And it’s been a great couple of days. Can we talk?”

“We’re talking.”

“I was pretty drunk, but she, uh, she said something about the moon taking care of, you know.”

“I do?”

“The whole kid thing.”

Javal waved it off. “It’s decent of you to be concerned.”

“Yeah, where I’m from, that doesn’t work so good.”

“You don’t have to worry.”

“Uh—”

Javal appeared impatient. “Trust me on this.”

“And that works?”

“Do you see me with children in tow?”

Jarrod looked around. “I haven’t seen any children at all, come to think of it.”

“This is the palace,” said Javal. “This is not a place for children.”

“Good,” said Jarrod.

“You don’t care for children?” asked Javal.

“Not particularly,” Jarrod admitted. “Man, these women are gonna kill me.”

“They might,” the knight agreed.

A handful of small speckled eggs were placed on Jarrod’s plate. “Meaning?”

The knight c****d his head and chewed thoughtfully. “Pick your companions carefully. If word of your excesses gets out, a dear friend of one of your casual acquaintances may be waiting for you with a dagger some night. It’s unlikely, but it’s been known to happen.”

“Ah,” Jarrod wiped his nose with his palm. “This is a weakness.”

Javal shrugged. “There are worse weaknesses. Were I you, I would stay off the liquor. It’s a hundred times more dangerous than debauchery. Besides, it rots your liver, sharpens your temper, and softens your reflexes.”

“So, I can quit drinking so much, and still—?” Jarrod made the more explicative half of an obscene gesture.

“Certainly. I do.”

“So, what’s on the agenda for today?”

“I spoke with Crius this morning.”

“Crius? He’s here?”

“Not exactly. You and I have a great deal to discuss.”

“Such as?”

“Let’s finish breakfast and suit up. I’ll tell you on the road.”

The sun rose over the fog-shrouded great tower of the Hold of Gavria, and cast feeble rays through the east-facing window of a lavish apartment in the uppermost floor. On the sill, a raven’s grating caw disturbed the sleeping form of Ulo Sabbaghian.

He rolled over with a snarl. His eyes, nuclear blue under a tangle of black hair, flicked to a paperweight from the nearby desk. It flew across the room, smashing the bird off the window sill.

He found that this expenditure of energy served only to wake him further, and he shoved the quietly snoring form of his bedmate. His voice was slow, grating and inhumanly deep. “Get up.”

“Milord?” asked the girl, rubbing her eyes.

“Close the shade,” he hid his face in his armpit. His skin was toffee stretched taut over ripples of muscle, scarified into a quilt of patterns and symbols. “Then go, and tell the Chancellor I want a larger shade for that east window by nightfall. Go!”

Three sons and fourteen daughters had been born to Lord Sabbaghian, but the inherent gift of their father’s magic ran strongest in Ulo’s veins. Banished to Earth shortly before birth, Ulo Sabbaghian had learned that he could accomplish magic at an early age, and spent the better part of twenty years developing his tricks—the press had called them gimmicks—until he could build a meager show business career with a devoted cult following.

Arriving in the Gavrian outlands—arguably the Eastern Freehold, depending on whom you'd asked at the time—and summoned by a pair of neophyte sorcerers on a dare, of all ridiculous things, he’d learned of his father and his true lineage. More, though, he found himself suddenly and immensely powerful. He brought and dispelled storms, saw through animals’ eyes, and communicated without words across distances to others who also held the gift. He carved a small fiefdom out of the wasteland that had once been his family's hold.

Refugees from a border war, given haven in return for work, rebuilt his father’s castle with the dark rock that had composed half his lands at the outset. They were decent, rugged people, and he’d been good to them. He could inflict pain as easily as he relieved it; knock a house down with the same effort as he could bind its mortar with blessings. His people loved him, for he blessed their homes with strength and their animals with health, and the crops had been excellent year after year. Perhaps it was truly his magic. Perhaps the spirits of his ancestors smiled upon him.

Perhaps—and he personally thought this the case—he was just one wily son of a b***h who had stumbled into a power vacuum with three thousand years of knowledge to his advantage and the loyalty of several tribes of hard-working and likeable people.

The castle went up quickly.

He used the rock to build roads and bridges through the muddy wastelands that bordered his keep, eventually reaching farming villages claimed by no lord.

He instituted the concept of civil service, employing the locals to build and maintain the roads as part of their feudal duties.

Within a year, the roads from the villages reached the mountain passes that connected the Gavrian outlands and the Eastern Freehold. Roads brought trade. Trade brought wealth enough to gild the black palace in silver, gleaming in the sun, a beacon to traders clear to the Eastern Freehold. Wealth brought men to guard commerce as traders traveled the black roads for a fare. Mercenary guards became a paid police force, who became lords, whose forces became the foundation for an army, and he himself became a king, ruler of the new nation of Ulorak.

The Eastern Freehold had moved on him five years ago, but he’d used the small army he’d built, hiring retired Gavrian soldiers to train a large, if rudimentary, militia. With sheer overwhelming numbers, some clever leadership, and the ability to control the weather, he’d handed the Eastern Freehold its ass. At the deciding battle, the Freeholders had been forced to slog uphill through torrential rain and knee-deep mud, reaching Ulo’s forces exhausted before a single blow had been landed. The ensuing slaughter was so massive and one-sided that the people in neighboring villages had used Freeholders’ bones to build their fences and tilled the bodies into their soil, which became some of the most productive on the continent.

Ulo had handed control of that province to his commanding general, a blood-under-his-nails type named Elgast who’d had the outpost at the battle site rebuilt with Freeholder skulls mortared both into the outer walls and into a beautiful throne made of the dark black rock. Lord Elgast of Skullsmortar, atop his grisly throne, drank liquor distilled from fields fertilized with Freeholder corpses and kept the neighboring militaries lying awake at night.

Ulo thought it was all a little heavy-handed, but had to admit the man had a knack for getting his point across.

Word traveled of the powerful sorcerer in the silver palace bordering the Eastern Freehold—as well as his Lord Protector on a nearby throne of skulls—and the Gavrian Parliament decided that his fledgling nation of Ulorak was in fact a state of Gavria and demanded back taxes.

He’d met their emissaries with a delegation of his own, bearing not only his back taxes in gold, but also a contingent of nubile whores and several casks of Skullsmortar Whisky as an apology for his oversight.

It had been twelve years since Ulo had first arrived, twitching and shitting his pants in a thaumaturgic triangle in a forgotten corner of Gavria, and he was about to receive appointment to Lord High Sorcerer. Not bad work if you could get it.

The girl, a concubine reserved for visitors and nobility, stooped to pick up her gown, to which he snapped, without looking, “Don’t dress. Your work here is hardly done.”

“Yes, milord.”

“Hurry back,” he ordered, and shoved his face further into the bed as she dropped the gown, tied down the shade, and scampered from the apartment. He knew that once he awoke, he would have much work to do. He pulled the feather pillow over his head and swore softly.

“Ulo, son of Sabbaghian, Lord of Ulorak,” a huge voice accompanied an intrusive blow against the doorframe. It seemed to Ulo to only have been a moment, but in fact, it had been some minutes since his companion had left.

“Enter,” Ulo growled. He’d been King of Ulorak until just recently.

“My lord, I am General Loth, Lord of Hwarthar.” The visitor was a bull-necked, ponytailed warrior dressed in the crimson tunic and black jerkin of a Gavrian soldier. He knelt in the doorway, his head bowed in respect. “I am a High Warlord of the forces amassing here in Gavria, and am assigned as your personal retainer by His Eminence, King Xaxarharas.”

Ulo opened one eye from under the pillow. “Bullshit. Where’s Elgast?”

Lord Loth was still. “I await your orders, my lord.”

Ulo’s voice was sour. “Where is Lord Elgast?”

Loth arose, effectively blocking the doorframe. “Lord Elgast has been relieved, and is returning to his lands. I am your retainer while you’re at court, my lord. So it is ordered by King Xaxarharas.”

Ulo lifted the pillow. “The king?”

Like most Gavrian warriors, Loth was copper-skinned and thick-browed, with a blocky build and a heavy forehead. His eyes were the color of tobacco and set unusually distant from each other, as if his fighting skills would be augmented by a widened field of vision. His jaw, clean-shaven, was emotionless.

His hands were leathery and broad, his dark forearms slashed with scars and his left hand, Ulo noted, had lost the last joint of the thumb. He wore a sword and an axe at his belt side by side, the sheaths ornate but not jeweled. Gold embroidery denoting awards, campaigns, and marks of rank decorated his jerkin.

“No orders yet,” said Ulo.

“Then are you getting up, my lord?”

“No,” said Ulo. “I’ve got a few things I want to do first.”

“Call for me, my lord, when you need me.” And touching his fist to his forehead and snapping it out in the Gavrian salute, Loth spun on his heel and disappeared from view.

Ulo chuckled silently, pleased with himself, and with his new bodyguard, as the concubine returned.

She stood silently before the bed, averting her eyes and awaiting his word.

And at that moment, the shimmering feelings that had taunted Ulo since his arrival began to turn to certainty. Certainty that after his years of toil, the great wheels were turning for him again, and that this fragile, obsolete world truly had no idea what it was in for.

Later, in the Parliament’s war chambers, Ulo sipped at a mug of herb tea, eyeing the others in the room with cautious interest.

Like most Gavrians, Ulo Sabbaghian was tall and muscular. His kingdom of Ulorak—now a state, he had to remind himself—was a rainy, fertile, high country; he wore sandals and light, loose clothing of silver and black tied up with cross garters, and a dark silk cape with a hood that was usually up because there were no sunglasses here and the Gavrian sun was f*****g relentless.

Sabbaghian The Silver, the Gavrians called him.

His skin was the tone of most Gavrians; on Earth he would have been regarded as American Indian were it not for his electric blue eyes. His hair was long and straight and black, parted in the center with a wisp or two in his face.

Ulo radiated quiet and calm. He was a mountaintop among men.

Directly to Ulo’s right, Loth crammed his mouth with hot sausages and tea.

Kaslix, Lord High Chancellor of Gavria—and until recently, the leading contender for Lord High Sorcerer—opened the wide oaken door with a wave of his hand, as he often enjoyed doing, and greeted Ulo, Loth, and the other warlords and members of Parliament with a shallow nod of his black hood. The door slammed shut behind him, and all was silent for a long moment as the echoes faded.

“I would like you all to welcome our newest court advisor,” said Kaslix, “Master Ulo, Lord of Ulorak, son of Sabbaghian the Black. But this is not Sabbaghian the Black. This man is Sabbaghian the Silver.”

“He’s still a Sabbaghian,” grumbled Parliamentarian Rute, a thin, grave man with a long black beard and purple robes.

Kaslix continued, “He has returned not to avenge his father’s persecution, but to aid us in laying the foundation for our next undertaking.

“Though his family name has been bane to our lips, we must forgive this, and interpret with broad minds all he has to offer. The War Council has chosen Sabbaghian the Silver as our next Lord High Sorcerer.”