The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

the rest of Coronnan, inbred to the point of alienness. But the name was strange even for the Guild. Curiosity and admiration of Margit’s courage propelled Yaakke forward.
    He threw an illegal spell, a small delusion. The surge of magic didn’t return to combat him. Reflection from the Guildsman’s eyes showed the short apprentice as an army officer twice the man’s height and double his breadth of shoulder.
    “You’ll pay for the pasty, or I’ll lay you out as fish food,” Yaakke hissed at Paetor, grabbing the haft of the boat hook with one hand. His little boot knife suddenly appeared in his other hand looking very much like a foot-long dagger tickling the pilot’s throat.
    Paetor’s jaw opened, then shut.
    The crowd edged backward, suddenly silent.
    “She gave me refuse from the gutter to eat!” Paetor fingered his purse but didn’t open it. Some of the arrogance slid out of his posture. His eyes darted to the thinning crowd.
    “That’s good sausage!” Margit protested. “If you don’t like it, fine. But you ate it, now pay for it.”
    An angry tirade from Paetor’s mind filtered through to Yaakke’s mental ears, in a very foreign language. This was no Bay Pilot with a few strange ways, but a foreign smuggler up to no good. The strange source of magic must come from him.
    Jaylor! Yaakke sent a telepathic plea to his new master, the Senior Magician. We’ve got trouble.
    No answer. Jaylor’s thoughts were normally easy to find and separate from a crowd. Something must be terribly wrong in the Grand Court, where the coronation was about to take place, if Jaylor didn’t answer a message of trouble.
    The smuggler wrenched himself free. He took off at a run over the bridge to the next city island. Yaakke followed him. He discarded his spell of delusion and became, once more, the undersized, nameless drudge from the University kitchens he had been until last spring. No one took much note of his running pursuit of the smuggler except to protest his jabbing elbows as he cleared a passage.
    He lost sight of the smuggler in the crowds of dancing and singing citizens who thronged along the processional route. More tavern pavilions sprang up along the way, offering a dozen places for the man to hide.
    Think! Yaakke admonished himself. Think like a smuggler. The docks were too obvious. Where else would a fleeing foreigner head?
    Yaakke calmed his panic-driven heart rate and focused his psychic powers on one specific accent. The physical and telepathic din from the crowds dropped to a murmur. Two men thought with that peculiar clicking rhythm to their mental voices. Yaakke tuned in to them. One was at a distance, probably the other side of the capital. One was just ahead.
    Yaakke fine-tuned his listening and heard surface thoughts in a foreign language. He probed deeper, seeking meaning in images rather than words. He encountered a little resistance, then the man’s thoughts became clear.
    I’ve got to get to the boat and close the cargo hatches, the accented mental voice hummed anxiously. Can’t let the guard find those s’murghing Tambootie seedlings before the assassination.
    What? Yaakke sought the source of that desperate thought. The smuggler had to be stopped. He had to discover who was going to be killed and when.
    But the significance of the Tambootie bothered him more. If Coronnite Tambooties grew anywhere else, the dragons would seek it, and they’d never be enticed back to their homeland. Magic and magicians would be illegal in Coronnan forever without the dragons. The border to keep out King Simeon’s invading armies would remain collapsed without dragons and dragon magic. Yaakke listened for the elusive mental voice again.
    Nothing. Almost as if the smuggler and his thoughts had been swallowed whole by the void. Further probes from Yaakke’s mind met a wall of resistance. Some kind of internal armor.
    He sniffed the magic that surrounded the foreigner’s mind as he edged his physical body closer. The magic didn’t come from within the smuggler. Only a powerful and well-trained magician could impose that kind of subtle protection on another man. And this magic didn’t smell like anyone in the Commune.
    Carefully, Yaakke probed the “nothing” with a finely honed magic dart. In his mind’s eye he saw the witch bolt of questing magic pierce the armor. The invisible arrow came up against an undulating wall of power and slid around it. Glaring white light filled the dart with