“You saw him?” he breathed. “I played all night, hoping to hear his fabled harping, but he never answered with a note.”
“Maybe you never stopped to listen,” I said, in growing despair over the blind way he blundered through the land. “And one to the imps under the mountain.”
“What imps?”
“And last,” I said tightly, “in a riddle-game to the sorceress with the jewelled staff. You were to be the prize.”
He shifted, chain and coins rattling. “She only told me where to find what I was searching for, she didn’t warn me of the dangers. She could have helped me! She never said she was a sorceress.”
“Did she tell you her name?”
“I don’t remember—what difference does it make? Hurry with the key before the dragon smells you here. It would have been so much easier for me if your companion had not lost the riddle-game.”
I paused in my searching to gaze at him. “Yes,” I said finally, “and it would have been easier than that for all of us if you had never come here. Why did you?”
He pointed. “I came for that.”
“That” was a harp of bone. Its strings glistened with the same elusive, shimmering colors that stained the passageways. A golden key lay next to it. I am as musical as the next, no more, but when I saw those strange, glowing strings I was filled with wonder at what music they might make and I paused, before I touched the key, to pluck a note.
It seemed the mountain hummed.
“No!” the harper cried, heaving to his feet in a tide of gold. Wind sucked out of the cave, as at the draw of some gigantic wing. “You stupid, blundering—How do you think I got caught? Throw me the key! Quickly!”
I weighed the key in my hand, prickling at his rudeness. But he was, after all, what I had promised Celandine to find, and I imagined that washed and fed and in the queen’s hands, he would assert his charms again. I tossed the key; it fell a little short of his outstretched hand.
“Fool!” he snapped. “You are as clumsy as the queen.”
Stone-still, I stared at him, as he strained, groping for the key. I turned abruptly to the harp and ran my hand down all the strings.
What travelled down the passages to find us shed smoke and fire and broken stone behind it. The harper groaned and hid behind his arms. Smoke cleared; great eyes like moons of fire gazed at us near the high ceiling. A single claw as long as my shin dropped within an inch of my foot. Courtesy, I thought frantically. Courtesy, she said. It was like offering idle chatter to the sun. Before I could speak, the harper cried,
“She played it! She came in here searching for it, too, though I tried to stop her—”
Heat whuffed at me; I felt the gold I wore burn my neck. I said, feeling scorched within as well, “I ask your pardon if I have offended you. I came, at my queen’s request, to rescue her harper. It seems you do not care for harping. If it pleases you, I will take what must be an annoyance out of your house.” I paused. The great eyes sank a little toward me. I added, for such things seemed important in this land, “My name is Anne.”
“Anne,” the smoke whispered. I heard the harper jerk in his chain. The claw retreated slightly; the immense flat lizard’s head lowered, its fiery scales charred dark with smoke, tiny sparks of fire winking between its teeth. “What is his name?”
“Kestral,” the harper said quickly. “Kestral Hunt.”
“You are right,” the hot breath sighed. “He is an annoyance. Are you sure you want him back?”
“No,” I said, my eyes blurring in wonder and relief that I had finally found, in this dangerous land, something I did not need to fear. “He is extremely rude, ungrateful and insensitive. I imagine that my queen loves him for his hair or for his harper’s hands; she must not listen to him speak. So I had better take him. I am sorry that he snuck into your house and tried to steal from you.”
“It is a harp made of dragon bone and sinew,” the dragon said. “It is why I dislike harpers, who make such things and then sing songs of their great cleverness. As this one would have.” Its jaws yawned; a tongue of fire shot out, melted gold beside the harper’s hand. He scuttled against the wall.
“I beg your pardon,” he said hastily. A dark curved dragon’s smile hung in the fading smoke; it snorted heat.
“Perhaps I will keep you and make a harp of your bones.”
“It would be miserably out of tune,” I commented. “Is there something I can do for you in exchange for the harper’s freedom?”
An eye dropped close, moon-round, shadows of color constantly disappearing through it. “Tell me my name,” the dragon whispered. Slowly I realized it was not a challenge but a plea. “A woman took my name from me long ago, in a riddle-game. I have been trying to remember it for years.”
“Yrecros?” I breathed. So did the dragon, nearly singeing my hair.
“You know her.”
“She took something from me: my dearest friend. Of you she said: the dragon’s name is hidden within a riddle.”
“Where is she?”
“Walking paths of sorcery in this land.”
Claws flexed across the stones, smooth and beetle-black. “I used to know a little sorcery. Enough to walk as man. Will you help me find my name?”
“Will you help me find my friends?” I pleaded in return. “I lost four, searching for this unbearable harper. One or two may not want my help, but I will never know until I see them.”
“Let me think …” the dragon said. Smoke billowed around me suddenly, acrid, ash-white. I swallowed smoke, coughed it out. When my stinging eyes could see again, a gold-haired harper stood in front of me. He had the dragon’s eyes.
I drew in smoke again, astonished. Through my noise, I could hear Kestral behind me, tugging at his chain and shouting.
“What of me?” he cried furiously. “You were sent to rescue me! What will you tell Celandine? That you found her harper and brought the dragon home instead?” His own face gazed back at him, drained the voice out of him a moment. He tugged at the chain frantically, desperately. “You cannot harp! She’d know you false by that, and by your ancient eyes.”
“Perhaps,” I said, charmed by his suggestion, “she will not care.”
“Her knights will find me. You said they seek to kill me! You will murder me.”
“Those that want you dead will likely follow me,” I said wearily, “for the gold-haired harper who rides with me. It is for the dragon to free you, not me. If he chooses to, you will have to find your own way back to Celandine, or else promise not to speak except to sing.”
I turned away from him. The dragon-harper picked up his harp of bone. He said, in his husky, smoky voice,
“I keep my bargains. The key to your freedom lies in a song.”
We left the harper chained to his harping, listening puzzledly with his deaf ear and untuned brain, for the one song, of all he had ever played and never heard, that would bring him back to Celandine. Outside, in the light, I led dragon-fire to the stone that had swallowed Danica, and began my backward journey toward Yrecros.
The Decoy Duck
Harry Turtledove
The Videssian dromon centipede-walked its oared way into Lygra Fjord. Something about it struck Skatval the Brisk as wrong, wrong. Wondering what, the Haloga chief used the palm of a horn-hard hand to shield eyes against morning sun as he stared out to sea.
He reluctantly decided it was not the imperial banner itself, gold sunburst on blue, that fluttered from the top of the dromon’s mast. He had seen that banner before, had clashed with those who bore it, too often to suit him.
Nor was it the twin suns the Videssians drew to help the warship see its proper path, though his own folk would have painted eyes instead. Coming from the far south, the Videssians naturally had more confidence in the sun than Halogai could give it. Hereabouts, in the ice and dark and hunger of winter, the sun seemed sometimes but a distant, fading memory. Not for the first time, Skatval wondered why the Empire of Videssos, which had so much, sought to swallow Halogaland and its unending dearth.