The Dragon's Path

darkness.
    “Not a good time, Yardem,” Wester said.
    “Took that from the shouting, sir. There’s soldiers.”
    Wester changed between one heartbeat and the next. His face cleared, his body pulled back a degree. Their confrontation evaporated, and Cithrin felt herself unnerved by the sudden shift. It seemed unfair that the captain had abandoned their conflict with things still unsettled.
    “Where?” Wester asked.
    “Camped over the ridge to the east,” the Tralgu said. “Two dozen. Antean banner, Vanai tents.”
    “Well, God smiled,” Wester said. “Any chance their scouts overlooked us?”
    “None.”
    “Did they see you?”
    “No.”
    Cithrin’s rage collapsed as the words fought through the wine fumes and trailing remnants of anger. Wester was already pacing the length of her cart. He considered Sandr still wobbling on his skates, the half-buried wineskin, the pond with the white scoring of blade tracks still on the ice.
    “Sandr,” he said. “Get Master Kit.”
    “Yes, sir,” Sandr said and awkwardly scampered off toward the mill house.
    Wester sheathed his sword absentmindedly. His eyes shifted across the landscape, searching for something. Cithrin waited, her heart in her throat. They couldn’t run. Against two dozen, they couldn’t fight. Any goodwill she might have expected from Wester was certainly gone now.
    The seconds stretched by endlessly. Wester took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
    “We’ll need a broom,” he said.

Geder
     
    T he bitterly cold predawn breeze murmured through the walls of Geder’s tent and set the flame on his oil lamp dancing. He leaned closer, then cursed softly and turned up the wick. The flame brightened and then smoked. He backed it down slowly until the smoke disappeared. In the brighter light, the pale ink grew, if not clear, at least legible. He stuck his hands into his armpits for warmth and leaned in closer.
     
And so it came that in these final days, the three great factions entered into a war of both blood and terrible cunning such that measureless stone ships flew through the skies with great iron thorns that slaughtered dragons as they flew and also deep pods found manners to hide themselves from their enemies until they should be forgotten that they might attack an unprotected enemy and also swords envenomed to slay both master and slave. The mighty silver-scaled Morade, maddest and mightiest of the warring clutch-mates, fashioned a tool more devious than the world had known, and in the high mountains south of Haakapel (which, Geder thought, would be Hallskar now) and east of Sammer (which Geder was almost certain was the fifth-polis name for the Keshet), he forged the Righteous Servant to whom none could lie nor no one could long disbelieve, and its sigilwas of cardinal and intercardinal showing the eight directions of the world in which no falsehood could hide, and in this great Morade found his subtlest power.
     
    He rubbed his eyes. The thick, yellowed pages of the book smelled of dust and mold and the odd sweet binder’s glue that no one had used in half a thousand years. When he’d found it in the deep shadows of a rag-and-bone shop in Vanai, it delighted him. As he struggled through his translation, his enthusiasm waned.
    The author claimed to have copied and translated a much older scroll, long since lost, that dated back to the first generations after the fall of the Dragon Empire. That was, for the first part, a framing device for speculative essay so trite and overdone that Geder’s heart sank when he read it. In the second part, it meant that everything else in the essay was presented as legitimate history, which he found less interesting. And finally, the author had embraced long sentences and complex grammar in an attempt to make the text feel authentic, and it made every page an endurance test. By the time Geder reached the verbs, he had to turn back and remind himself what they were talking about.
    If he’d been back in Vanai, he would have put the work aside. But Sir Alan Klin, Protector of Vanai, had heard of the caravan smuggling out the secret wealth of the city and made its recovery his first priority. This meant sending his favorites along the dragon’s roads to Carse, and every man’s status after that took his search party farther and farther from the likely hunting grounds until Jorey Kalliam was left with the Dry Wastes, Fallon Broot on the sea road to Elassae, and Geder Palliako leading two dozen