Dragon Hunters Read online

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  FOR DAD,

  who must be reading the Karmel storyline

  and scratching his head at where that came from

  PROLOGUE

  THROUGH THE eye slits of her mask, the woman studied the Chameleon priest. Standing motionless in the darkness beyond the doorway, he blended in seamlessly with the other shadows. With his power employed he would have been invisible to eyes other than the woman’s. His gaze lingered on her before moving off to scan the room in which she waited. He took in its walls with their carvings of masked and animal-headed figures, its headless statue of a winged creature in the southwest corner, its large arched window in the wall behind the woman.

  Then he surrendered his power and entered the chamber. Potsherds and shattered floor tiles crunched beneath his sandals. He advanced to within a dozen paces of the woman.

  “That’s close enough,” she said, her hand straying to the hilt of her sword.

  He halted.

  The moonlight spilling through the window to his right gave one side of his face a ghostly sheen. So deeply was the darkness gathered in his sunken eyes that it seemed as if he’d brought some of the shadows in with him from the passage. The gray streaks in his hair gave him the look of a man old before his time. He carried no weapons—as she had insisted in her message. Round his lower arms were armguards of blackened metal.

  The silence dragged out. The woman could hear the hiss of waves breaking against the Natillian cliffs, then over that the clang, clang, clang—regular as a shipwright’s hammer—of a sea dragon ramming its head into the Dragon Gate. The floor trembled.

  When the priest spoke, his voice was scratchy from lack of use. “This used to be a temple of the Lord of Hidden Faces.”

  The woman smiled behind her mask. The priest would be feeling uncomfortable in another god’s abode, she knew, no matter that the shrine had long since been abandoned. There was an emptiness to the place that was more than just the stillness of the night. The air in the chamber felt thin, as if it had passed through the lungs of too many people.

  “Strange place for a meeting,” the priest added.

  “I like it here. It’s quiet.”

  “Also gives you access to the rooftops in case you need to make a sharp exit.”

  “I hadn’t noticed. Now, where is my payment?”

  From a pocket in his robe the priest produced a perfume bottle made of pearlshell. The woman could sense the protective sorcery invested in the container to protect it from its contents.

  “Put it on the floor and step back.”

  He did as he was bid.

  The woman edged forward, her gaze not leaving the priest, then picked up the bottle before retreating. She withdrew the stopper and sniffed its contents. The metallic sharpness of dragon blood made her eyes water. Replacing the stopper, she gave the bottle a shake.

  “A little less in here than we agreed, I think, but still enough to set me up far beyond the reach of your mistress.”

  The priest’s eyes narrowed. “My mistress?”

  “Oh, come now, how many people in the Sabian League can lay their hands on dragon blood at short notice? How many of those people have an interest in the information on this scroll?” She tossed the parchment in her left hand onto the floor. “It’s all there—everything you need to know about the Dianese citadel.”

  He made no move to collect it. “Tell me.”

  The woman considered, then began speaking. She told the priest about the guard postings and squad rotations, about the bastions along the fortress’s outer walls, about the invisible pockets of sorcerously condensed air scattered about the guardhouse to ensnare intruders.

  “What about the chamber with the mechanism that raises the Dragon Gate?” the priest said when she had finished.

  The woman laughed. “You haven’t been listening, have you? You won’t make it as far as the fortress’s grounds, never mind the control room. In the week leading up to Dragon Day, the number of soldiers patrolling the outer wall is trebled. All of the gates are sealed, except for the main gate, which is guarded by fifty of the governor’s elite.” The corners of her mouth turned up. “Not even the Chameleon god himself could slip through undetected.”

  “Humor me.”

  Humor him? Judging by the priest’s dour demeanour, she stood as much chance of doing that as he did of piercing the citadel’s defenses. “The door to the control room is locked from the inside,” she said, “and the corridor leading to it is guarded by twenty soldiers. Two more soldiers are stationed inside the chamber itself. Then there are the men whose job it will be to raise the gate.” She lifted the bottle of dragon blood as if toasting him before slipping it into a pocket. “I almost feel bad taking this from your mistress. The information she has paid for is useless to her.”

  “The more closely a place is guarded, the less wary are the soldiers who’re watching it.”

  “If you say so.”

  A scratching sound came from the doorway through which the priest had entered. He looked across. The woman followed his gaze, but it was only a rat nosing along the passage outside.

  She said, “One more thing you should know—”

  The priest sprang to the attack.

  For a heartbeat the woman stood frozen in surprise. Then she pushed herself into motion. She’d been careful to keep her distance from the man, yet he closed the gap between them so quickly she barely had time to draw her sword. Her backhand slash was deflected by one of the priest’s armguards. Before she could recover her blade, his hand closed around her wrist. The fingers of his other hand formed a spear that jabbed toward her throat. She swayed aside.

  Too late.

  Pain exploded in her neck. She tried to draw a breath, but her throat felt as if a rock had lodged in it. She tried to scream, but all that came out was a wheeze. The priest’s hand about her wrist twisted and squeezed, and her sword slipped from her fingers. She tried to pull loose from his grip, but he was too strong. She flailed with her free arm, hoping to catch him a chance blow, but he ducked and moved behind her.

  A kick to the back of her legs, and she fell to her knees. Her sword lay on the floor, but when she reached for it, the priest curled an arm round her neck and hauled her back. The pressure on her wounded throat caused another stab of agony. Black spots flashed before her eyes. She bucked and heaved, but there was no give in her attacker’s arm. She opened her mouth to try to reason with him, but the words would not come.

  The pressure on her throat intensified.

  Darkness gathered at the edges of her vision.

  * * *

  Fingers fluttering, the goddess known as the Spider looked down at the woman’s corpse.
r />   Since throttling his victim, the Chameleon priest had made himself busy. After retrieving the bottle of dragon blood, he’d removed the woman’s rings and the fishbone charm round her neck. Next he had stripped her naked and checked her body for distinguishing scars or birthmarks. Finally he’d used the pommel of her sword to smash her mask and the face beneath it into bloody ruin. And all so she wouldn’t be identified by her masters at the Dianese citadel, for surely the disappearance of someone so familiar with the workings of the fortress would not go unnoticed.

  A reasonable assumption, but wrong, as it turned out.

  The goddess waved her fingers, and the illusion of the woman’s corpse, along with the pool of blood beneath it, faded to nothing.

  “Perrrfect.”

  Looking out of the window, the Spider saw the priest leave the temple and move along Gable Street, hugging the walls of the Elissian Sanctum. He’d been clever, she conceded, to keep the woman talking until the rat distracted her. Even though the goddess had suspected he would attack, his speed had still caught her off guard. Doubtless he was wondering what his victim had intended to reveal with her final words—One more thing you should know—but he’d already made his move by then, and he could hardly have broken off his assault to let the woman finish her sentence. The Spider smiled. If he made it as far as the Dianese control room, he’d be in for a surprise—a surprise that could jeopardize the success of both his and the goddess’s own schemes. But that only added more spice to the pot.

  The rhythmic clang of the dragon bashing its head into the Dragon Gate started up again. Strange that one of the creatures should stray so far north at this time of year. Usually they prowled the Southern Wastes until they were lured here at the end of the summer in readiness for the Dragon Hunt. The goddess’s fingers fluttered. Dragon Day and all it presaged was still months away, but she would have to be patient. Today she had set a spark to the kindling. Soon it would grow into a fire that swept the length and breadth of the Sabian League.

  And where chaos ruled, there was only one place for the Spider to be.

  Right at its heart.

  PART I

  THE DROWNING CITY

  CHAPTER 1

  THE TIME had come for Senar Sol to learn his fate.

  The Guardian had known it as soon as the bolts of his cell door were thrown back, for this was the first time it had happened in all the months he had been imprisoned. He pushed himself to his feet, found his legs were trembling. How long had he been a captive? How long since he’d stepped through the Merigan portal and swapped Emperor Avallon Delamar’s knife at his back for a sword at his throat? The best part of a year, he realized, for through the bars across his room’s window he had seen autumn, winter, spring, and much of summer pass by. As the weeks of his imprisonment had turned into months, he’d begun to wonder if his jailers would just leave him there to rot. But then why had they kept passing food and water through the grille of his cell door? Why bother keeping him alive at all?

  Something told him he was about to find out.

  The door opened and torchlight flooded through the doorway, banishing the gloom about the cell. Senar squinted into the light. A balding man entered—the same man to whom the Guardian had surrendered his sword on stepping through the Merigan portal all those months ago to find himself surrounded by enemy soldiers. The guard wore leather armor covered with metal plates that overlapped like fish scales. In one hand he held a sword with a blade made from the snout of a sawfish. Three stripes on his left shoulder marked him as an officer. Senar searched his gaze for any hint as to what his coming here signified, but the man’s expression was masked. He gestured to the open doorway.

  Senar scratched at the stubs that were all that remained of the two smallest fingers of his left hand. Beyond the officer waited an escort of no fewer than twelve soldiers. High honor, indeed. Another time, odds of thirteen to one would have meant nothing to the Guardian, but he rejected the idea of attacking for the same reason he’d yielded up his blade after he passed through the portal three seasons ago: even if he could defeat the guards facing him, what about the reinforcements that would inevitably come? And what was the point in trying to escape when he didn’t know what lay beyond the four walls of his cell, didn’t even know in which city of which empire he was imprisoned? Then there was the fact that his time in captivity would have left his skills as rusty as the hinges of his cell door. No, he would not throw his life away while his captors’ intentions remained unclear.

  Not when he still had unfinished business with the emperor who had sent him here to die.

  Why, then, when the officer beckoned him through the door again did Senar hold back? A smile touched his lips. He had been a prisoner all this time, yet now when he was offered a glimpse of freedom, he hesitated? Better the gallows than this lingering death of the spirit he’d endured these past few months. Though he might see things differently, of course, when he was swinging from the noose.

  He hadn’t been heedless of the risks of traveling through the Merigan portals when he stepped through all those months ago. Only two such gateways had been found in Erin Elal—at Bastion and at Amenor—but there were innumerable others beyond the borders of the empire. And while the symbols etched into each portal’s architrave denoted the destinations to which one could travel, the emperor’s scholars had yet to decipher the code behind those symbols. Senar’s destination had been chosen at random, and if that destination had proved to be a gateway that no longer existed, his journey to it would have killed him instantly. Even if the passage had not proved immediately fatal, Senar could have been transported to any one of a hundred different kingdoms, thousands of leagues from home. Few of those kingdoms would look kindly on visitors dropping by unannounced.

  So where had the portal brought him? He hadn’t had any visitors in his time here, so no help there. Nor had his captors left any clues in his cell, for the books of poetry and philosophy he’d been given were written in the common tongue by authors from numerous different cultures. Badly written, as it happened. He’d tried looking out of his cell’s window for clues, but there was only so much information he could deduce from the blank wall opposite. From time to time he’d heard people talking outside, but never clearly enough to make out their words. And why? Because they were drowned by the sound of the sea.

  The sea.

  Senar had come to know its many voices in the months he’d been a prisoner. At times its gentle gurgle put him in mind of sleepy days spent fishing with his father in the sheltered bays east of Amenor—before his father had died. At other times it would rage in the grip of a storm so savage it seemed the Furies themselves were battering at the shutters. Those storms had been one of the things to awaken in Senar a suspicion as to his location. Then there was the style of the armor and sword worn by the officer before him, together with the emblem on the man’s breast of a shaft of silver lightning over a storm cloud.

  The Storm Isles—that was where the clues were leading him.

  Throughout his imprisonment, he had tried to remember everything he’d heard of that empire. Located in the Sabian Sea to the north and east of Erin Elal, the Storm Isles were a chain of islands ruled by a fellowship of water-mages—the Storm Lords—that held in its thrall a confederation of cities known as the Sabian League. In return for the Storm Lords protecting the League’s shipping from pirates, as well as from the supernatural storms that swept down from the Broken Lands, the League’s members paid tribute to the Storm Lords. The Storm Lords’ seat of government was the city of Olaire on the island of Faeron, a handful of leagues from the fabled Dragon Gate that spanned the Cappel Strait between Dian and Natilly.

  The Dragon Gate. Just to speak the name in his mind made Senar’s pulse quicken. Once each year the gate was raised to allow a sea dragon to pass into the Sabian Sea. Awaiting it would be ships from the Storm Isles and the cities of the Sabian League, and they would hunt the creature for the honor and riches that came to the vessel that slew
it. Dragon Day. Two words that inspired awe even in Erin Elal.

  The balding officer gestured again to the open door, and Senar glanced down at his clothes. They were the same clothes he’d arrived in last year. He looked like a beggar, and he smelled like one too, but if they’d been going to kill him, surely they’d have let him wash and change first. Die with a little dignity, and all that. He stepped through the doorway.

  To his right stretched a passage that was featureless but for several closed doors to either side. At the end of the passage was another door, and beyond it was a corridor that seemed cavernous to Senar after the confines of his cell. Its floor was covered by a blue and white mosaic so artfully crafted that, for an improbable moment, the Guardian thought he was standing on a frothing tide.

  The officer led the way through a maze of passages. Senar’s legs ached as he struggled to keep pace, but then the months of captivity would have left a few creases it would take time to iron out. The sound of the sea grew louder until eventually he came to a corridor where the boom of waves made it feel as if he were inside a drum. The wall to his right had no windows and was imbued with such powerful water-magic he suspected the sea lay just the other side.

  And where there was powerful water-magic, there were powerful water-mages.

  The Storm Isles. It has to be.

  If Senar’s theory concerning his location was correct, the news was both good and bad. Good in that if he ever got the chance to return home, Erin Elal was only a few weeks’ travel away.

  But bad for the same reason. For even though Emperor Avallon Delamar had yet to lock horns with the Storm Lords, it could only be a matter of time. Over the past decade Erin Elal had fought its northwestern neighbor, Kal, to a standstill, and while Avallon would never abandon his ambition to conquer the Kalanese empire, the loosely allied nations to the northeast of Erin Elal surely represented easier pickings. If the emperor were to learn of the Merigan portal in the Storm Isles, the strategic advantages he would gain from a back door to the Storm Lords’ empire could not be overstated.