The Stone in the Skull Read online

  The pistol slammed his palm. He held on to it, turning to see if the wyrm was hit. He didn’t imagine he could have missed. Not so close, at something so large. How hard were those scales, anyway? The thing looked clinker-built, with its overlapping rows of them; could they turn a pistol ball?

  If he had hurt it, it did not seem to have been badly. It struck like a seabird fishing, reaching down with hooked talons on its powerful hindlimbs and backwinging to attempt to pluck the more flashily jeweled of the two noblemen (the one in the sedan chair) from the ice.

  It would have succeeded, too, if one of the prince’s loyal retainers hadn’t thrown himself under the talons, overturning the Song prince and his chair.

  The bearers staggered under the dual blow. The foremost went to his knees; the rearmost was knocked sprawling. The loyal retainer shrieked once as a fish-hook talon long and curved as a scimitar emerged from his chest, showering red on his lord’s silks and jewels and all the snow surrounding. The retainer clutched at the talon with both hands. Another shriek was cut off as the wyrm lofted on the updraft out of the notch, its great wing membranes bellying taut.

  If there were any blood from a—strictly hypothetical—bullet wound, it was lost in the crimson spray.

  The prince leapt to his feet and shrieked after the wyrm. Or after the retainer, the Dead Man realized, when a few words of the shrieking carried. He was promising retribution on the poor retainer’s family, for the sin of having laid hands on the prince.

  Fortunately for him, the retainer was too dead by now to regret his self-sacrifice. The prince hopped in the snow, shaking his jeweled fist so facets flashed in the sun. Probably, the Dead Man considered, a poor idea given the existing body of evidence on what provoked ice-wyrm attacks.

  Blood rained down on the caravan as the wyrm ascended, banked, and turned its head to snap the now-limp retainer in two. It spiraled up, dining, shedding horrible bits as it rose.

  Now the cattle shrilled in panic, surging and falling, as blood and shreds of meat drenched them. “Set the brakes,” someone yelled from the nearest ice-ship, but it didn’t carry.

  The unfortunate retainer’s robes fluttered empty from the wan, white sky, trailing like a defeated banner.

  “Clear the ice,” someone else cried—a woman’s voice, clarion-carrying. “Climb, you idiots! Climb!”

  That seemed like good advice. The Dead Man floundered uphill, toward the steep slope along the side of the notch. He tried to keep facing the wyrm as he struggled through unpacked, waist-deep drifts, and with his teeth he yanked the larger, bone pin from his horn. In a lack of foresight, his premeasured loads were inside their usual pocket, on the inside hem of his once-red coat, tucked safely away and far out of reach. He would not make that mistake again, if he lived long enough to amend it.

  He had to stop climbing to measure the powder. His ammunition case was on the same baldric, and he dragged it out of his open coat-front, not even really feeling the chill. He’d dropped his mittens somewhere and his fingers were numb and clumsy, but he got the case open. The balls were already wadded in oiled patches, and he shook one loose.

  A huge voice boomed, resonating as if through a speaking horn. “SET THE BRAKES!”

  It was the voice of the Gage, might the Scholar-God bless him, infidel though he was.

  The Dead Man fell on ice then, and dropped the ball. But he managed to hold the pistol up, and the pan stayed dry, and the barrel too. He hoped, he hoped. He didn’t stand, but balanced on one knee and fumbled for another ball.

  Oiled flannel left its grease on his fingers, and the ball slid down the barrel. He pressed the flint back against its spring and primed the pan, not daring to look up until the pistol was loaded and cocked, despite the echoes of screams.

  Profoundly, the Dead Man hoped the tales of avalanches provoked by careless whispers were oversold. He did not merely hope; being a religious man he also prayed.

  Banks of snow blocked his view on every side around where he crouched. In cold so sharp, the snow was light, powdery. He forced himself to lift his head. He lifted, also, the pistol. His hand shook.

  The rearmost ice-ship was in trouble. The laborers had deserted their lines, which tangled the hooves of the yaks. The oxen fought the yoke and one another, and whether the spring-loaded spikes that served the ships as brakes were set or not, it had begun a ponderous, inexorable diagonal slide. Acrobats hustled less-agile nobles and retainers out of the way as the thing skidded and began to grind downward, dragging the bawling cattle with it. The spikes had fired. He could tell by the plumes of ice they scraped up on either side of the bow and stern as the thing’s plunge accelerated.

  Despite the slitted goggles, he’d lost the wyrm in the glare of the sky.

  Seasoned warrior, he thought. Misplacing a whole God-forsaken ice-wyrm.

  He shaded his eyes with cold-blued fingers and searched again. He hoped he lived long enough to continue missing his mittens. It would serve him right to die here, in the snow and the mountains, miserable and cold—

  There! A shimmer off scales like sun off ice, a thousand shades of gray and white and ivory all rimmed with silver at the edge. It had circled the peak, and now it fanned like a waiting hawk and hovered on still wings, having found some sufficient updraft. He lifted his pistol as it hung in the sky as if magicked there.

  The sharp tang of powder brushed past him as an eddy of wind swept the primer from the pan.

  The Dead Man didn’t curse. He was not a blasphemer. But he grabbed and released one deep breath between his teeth as he fumbled, again, for the horn.

  The skidding ice-boat crashed to a halt in a drift just below the Dead Man. It stuck there, canted among rocks, cargo spilling from the staved hull. The oxen cried piteously, battling the snow to a pinkened mire.

  The wyrm’s head turned from side to side as it considered its next target. One plump retainer wasn’t much of a snack for a creature forty cubits long. Though he pitied the struggling cattle, the Dead Man hoped its attention would be drawn by them rather than the running people, though that idiot prince deserved whatever evil might befall.

  The cattle were closer to the Dead Man and tethered to the wrecked ice-ship. Too big to carry off, he hoped. And he had the snaplock loaded and primed again, finally. If the damned wyrm would just settle down and take a few bites, he might be able to get off a shot from close enough range to make a difference. He’d glimpsed the vast, blue, faceted eyes.

  They’d make a good target.

  The wyrm swooped past again, the herding, flushing behavior rather than the stoop to kill. The Dead Man crouched, head barely above the level of his snowdrift, and tracked the beast with his pistol sight. Too fast, too high. He could take another shot, see the bullet deflected, and spend another long minute fumbling his reload with ever-colder fingers.

  But he thought the wyrm was focused on the broken ice-ship, and somebody had gotten the Song prince to put his head down and start moving again. Now he was largely anonymous among the figures floundering upward through the snow.

  If the thing settles down on the wrecked ship, the Dead Man thought, maybe we can get everybody else moving and escape up the pass while it eats. Two yaks ought to be a big enough supper.…

  Since he wasn’t sure he could kill it with one shot, maybe he ought to hold his fire if it settled in to dine. Rather than getting it riled up again.

  It circled back, and the shadow of its wings fell over him. Terror welled inside the Dead Man like water from an icy spring. He flinched, huddling lower in the snow, though in his time he’d faced down wild beasts, murderous necromancers, and the odd cavalry charge. He saw the great wyrm tip side to side between the steady cantilever of its wings, then furl them slightly and begin to settle.

  The hairy oxen cried out in fear and outrage as their death descended. The Dead Man wished he had a bullet for each of them, to end their terror and pain. There was nothing else he could have done from this distance, under these circumstances.
/>   He braced his pistol in both hands, consciously relaxing the muscles of his arms and fingers to still his shaking. It worked, somewhat.

  He drew a bead on the ice-wyrm’s nearer eye. The angle was still bad, as it was above him and the eye was protected by the bony shelf of cheek below. The best shot would come when it descended past him, into the bottom of the valley. After that, he’d be aiming at the top of its head.

  He forced himself to breathe as smoothly as possible, though the cold made his lungs wheeze and whistle. He rested a finger on the trigger. Another moment, while the ice-wyrm cupped air and calculated its descent. Hard sunlight shattered off its back as if the thing were faceted from crystal.

  He was sure it hadn’t seen him. He prayed to the Scholar-God and all her mercies that it hadn’t seen him.

  Now, he thought—as a glittering figure, brilliant as the wyrm but warmer-colored, launched itself into the air on a long, improbable arc and struck the ice-wyrm hard.

  The Dead Man managed not to yank the trigger as the Gage wrapped both arms around the ice-wyrm’s long neck and began to squeeze. The ball probably wouldn’t have hurt his old friend—in fact, he was morally certain that it wouldn’t do more than dent the Gage’s hide—but he’d hate to miss a second shot. And now the Gage’s enormous weight was dragging the wyrm’s head down, pulling it off course as the wyrm beat its wings frantically to try to reclaim flight.

  It flapped and staggered in the air, tail and head thrashing, flurrying out of control. The wyrm screamed; the cattle screamed; the Gage was deathly silent except for the clashing of strained gears.

  The wyrm and the Gage crashed into the slope below in a tumble of wings and metal. The next the Dead Man knew, he was running—or sliding—or plowing—through the drifts, trying to keep the snaplock upright so the primer didn’t spill from the pan again, trying not to simply catapult head over heels the length of the slope and wind up sprawled under the hooves of the panicked, injured cattle. Or, better yet, slide right down into reach of the ice-wyrm.

  The beast had shaken the Gage from its neck, though the Dead Man could see long smears of blood where escaping had cost it tissue and scales. Now it reared back, wings beating, as if it had thought better of its dinner and wished only to escape. Predators generally were willing to risk less than their prey in any confrontation—representing the difference between a meal, and a life.

  But the Gage had the thing by the ankle, as if he were a heavy brass shackle binding it to earth, and had hunched over to bend its talon up and back. The wyrm’s head whipped around and it blunted its teeth on the Gage’s glinting armor with a hair-raising scrape.

  The ice-wyrm beat heavily against the thin, cold air. It lifted, a little, and suddenly the Dead Man’s inner eye filled with the image of the Gage tumbling, sparkling, from a tremendous height.

  The Dead Man’s breath hurt him. The Gage could not get crushed by a dragon. If everyone else got eaten up here, the brass man still had to get his package to the queen.

  The eye. The eye. It shimmered like a watery aquamarine as the Dead Man sighted along his barrel. He braced himself and—just as there was a tremendous snapping sound—he squeezed the trigger. The incense of powder smoke, whipped back on the strong wind up the valley, stung.

  The thing didn’t shriek, but it exhaled explosively with a hiss like a punctured lung. It kicked out, hard, and the Gage was thrown loose and thumped into snow just a handful of cubits downslope from the Dead Man. The earth shook with the impact, but he kept his footing and offered a quick prayer of thanks that the Gage hadn’t landed a little higher, where the Dead Man would have been crushed.

  The Dead Man snatched up his powder horn and began to reload.

  The wyrm’s head snaked around. It took a hopping, hobbling step upslope, one of its killing talons flopping broken. It made a horrible, breathy hiss and spread its wings, raising them for a downstroke. Its eyes, both unharmed, fastened on the sprawled Gage and the huddled Dead Man.

  The Dead Man dropped the pistol into his overcoat pocket, grasped the hilt of his saber, and drew it out without ever lowering his eyes from the wyrm. A white-edged gouge furrowed the tendriled, toothy face just below the eye he’d been aiming for, streaming red blood like a weeping queen’s kohl. A bad wound, but as the beast lunged upward, patently not an incapacitating one.

  The Gage was creaking slowly to his feet. The Dead Man saw dents and scrapes, the marks of impact and enormous teeth, in the hard brass shell. He took two hops downward through the snow to stand beside his friend.

  “You ought to run,” the Gage said conversationally. “I’ll hold it as long as I can.”

  “Ehn,” the Dead Man replied. “For what other reason do I live?”

  He couldn’t leave. The Gage had the message. He raised his saber as the thing’s head darted forward, teeth snapping a cubit or two shy. One more wing-bating hop would do it, though, and as the creature launched itself he extended his saber in a crude stop-thrust unsuited to the curve of the blade and stood ready to at least stab it up the nose while it swallowed him.

  The shock on his extended saber never came. He hadn’t flinched, but he was focused. So he found himself whipping his head up in surprise as someone cried out behind him and the Gage.

  The wyrm twisted in midair, made its pounce a leap into flight, and skimmed over them with terrible clawed wing-tips brushing the snow to either side. The Dead Man turned in his tracks. The Gage, who had no eyes, didn’t bother. Pillars of snow swirled in the breeze and settled over them. The Dead Man stared up the slope, lifting his eyes from the blue shadows that lay in the furrowed drifts as the wyrm passed hard and low. The Gage stood expectantly beside him.

  A human figure stood above them. The tattered sleeves of black woolen robes belled from upraised wrists in the wind of the ice-wyrm’s passage. The hair was a wiry twist of curls and the skin as black as any Aezin noble’s, but with an olive tone underlying the darkness rather than burnished red. The figure was a slash of midnight on the burning snow, a pen-stroke authoritative on bleached paper. Something metallic glittered in the socket of the left eye.

  There was a whistle of mighty wings, and a spatter of red melted into the snow as the wyrm made another low pass. The Dead Man ducked away, raising his saber to fend, but the figure in black stood unmoving. It held its hands higher, and cried out in that Lotus tongue called Saratahi: “In the name of the Good Daughter, reaver, leave us in peace and be gone with thee!”

  The voice was deep and, despite the figure’s Southern complexion, carried the inflections of the northern Lotus Kingdoms. Despite the frailness of the robed outline, the wyrm sheered off again, shaking blood from its muzzle. It climbed, wings thundering, and vanished up the slope toward the peak from whence it had first fallen on them.

  The Sarathai priest—if that was what the figure was—watched it go, and then for long moments watched also the place where it had vanished to. Satisfied at last, the figure sighed, lowered bare hands, and dusted them together.

  The priest stepped forward. Feet rested barefoot on the waist-deep snow, barely denting it, so the figure towered over the floundering Gage and Dead Man.

  “That damned thing,” the priest said. Gaunt features arranged themselves in a smile. They were elegant, and on another day the Dead Man might have paused to appreciate them, and the priest’s thin tall frame like a willow swaying. But what he noticed now was not the high ledges of cheekbones under drawn skin, but the smooth, burnished, golden orb that rested in what should have been the socket of the left eye.

  Still, that deep voice was warm as their rescuer continued, “How badly are your people hurt?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said the Gage. “One dead at least.”

  The priest might have nodded, or perhaps a slight incline of the head simply caused light to flash off the gilded eye.

  The Dead Man caught his breath. His cold fingers numb on the hilt of his sword, he fumbled for the scabbard with his other hand. He couldn’t feel
it. He needed his mittens.

  He turned to the Gage and gasped, “Is it safe? Do you have it?”

  Lightly, the Gage touched his chest where scratched brass showed under torn rough-spun.

  Other travelers were stepping out, calling to one another. “Is it gone?” “Roiieh, where are you?” Some approached the stricken yaks. Some approached the three figures on the hill.

  “I’m Nizhvashiti,” the enigma said. One bare hand indicated the Dead Man’s. “You’re going to have frostbite if you don’t get warm.”

  “I know it,” he replied.

  Nizhvashiti cupped the Dead Man’s hands, crouching and stooping to do so. Warmth flooded him, and well-being. All the little aches and pains and stiffnesses of his hard life on the road seemed to lift away, as they might with the first soothing flush of wine. He gasped, and with a little laugh the priest let his fingers drop.

  “That should take care of you until you find your mittens.”

  People had come up the hillside. The Dead Man heard the whispers behind him over the creaks of the Gage shifting his weight in the cold: Saint. Godmade.

  No saint of his, he decided, looking at the scarred, hard, elegant visage. No sainted follower of the Scholar-God. Instead, some heathen creature. Absently, he rubbed his hands together. They tingled. Nizhvashiti could talk to the wyrm. Make it follow commands. What if the priest could do more?

  What if the priest had sent it?

  The caravan master, a small sturdy Sarathai by the name of Druja, came up, stomping his feet in his boots for warmth. “Prince Mi Ren is furious,” he said to the Dead Man, in the sort of tone that indicated he thought it was the Dead Man’s job to do something about it.

  It was the Gage who answered. “At least he’s alive to be furious.”

  “Who’s this?” the caravan master said.

  “Priest,” the Gage answered.

  Nizhvashiti stepped forward and again made an introduction. Having determined that the person speaking was, in fact, the caravan master, Nizhvashiti added, “I’ve been waiting for a caravan. I made a nest in one of the old wrecked ice-ships and have been meditating to conserve my resources. I’ve only three days of food left. I’m so glad you came when you did. I need to get to Sarathai-tia, to the kingdom of Mrithuri Rajni.”