Dragon

None of my answers satisfied me.

I stepped out into the river, just a few feet, and felt the bitter current against my legs and the sand between my toes. I stood there, alone amongst thousands, and only then became aware that my knees were trembling, and that I felt light-headed, and that my arms were without strength. Whatever the sorcery had done to my mind, which was, apparently, a great deal, it had also taken a lot out of me physically. I wondered if I'd be able to fight the next day. I began to shiver uncontrollably, but I stayed where I was. It would be wonderfully ironic if I passed out from weakness and drowned in two feet of water.

"You have any answers, Loiosh?"

"To what, Boss?"

"To why Dragons are the way they are."

"That's easy, Boss: They can't help it."

Well, there was maybe something to that, but it was hardly satisfying. When I thought about it, the differences in character among Morrolan and Aliera and Virt and Napper, to pick four, were greater than the similarities. What was the common thread? Put that way, the answer was obvious: Once having decided on a course, motivated by greed, or by anger, or by the highest moral outrage, they attacked with a ruthlessness that would excite envy—or disgust—in a hardened Jhereg operative. I tried to decide if this were inherently a bad thing, and I could come to no conclusion. Fortunately, no conclusion was demanded of me.

I did, however, come to two other conclusions. The first being that, if one were forced into the service of a Dragonlord, one was better off serving a Dragonlord who was better at being ruthless than the other Dragonlord. The second being that the river was bloody damned cold, and that it was surpassing stupid for me to be standing in it when I hardly had the strength to remain upright.

"I bid you a pleasant evening, Lord Taltos."

The voice came out of nowhere, but I must have subconsciously known there was someone around, because it didn't startle me.

"Who is it?"

I turned around. At first I couldn't see her, but then she came up to the edge of the water and nodded to me, and then I recognized her. It took me a moment to reconstruct where I had met her before, but it came back to me at last.

"You're the Necromancer," I said.

"What are you doing?" she asked me.

I considered the question carefully, then said, "Dreamwalking, I think."

Her head tilted. She was very, very thin, wispy, and her skin was so pale it almost glowed against the darkness and against the black of her garments. "I didn't know Easterners did that," she said.

"Neither did I."

"I sense that you've been injured."

I turned enough to show her my back, then faced her again.

"I understand," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"I understand why you're dreamwalking."

"Ah. But I'm really here, aren't I?"

"How do you mean that?"

Crap. Even while dreamwalking there was only so much mysticism I could take. I said, "I mean that if I drop dead I'll be really dead, and my body will be found here in the morning."

"No."

"No?"

"No. Your body will actually float downriver from here, at least as far as the next bend. If you climb up on the shore—"

I laughed, probably more than it was worth.

"You did that on purpose, didn't you?"

"Did what?" she said.

"Made me laugh. Brought me back."

"Oh. Well, yes. You may have to fight tomorrow."

"Not the way I'm feeling now."

"Oh? Oh, of course. You were hit hard, weren't you? Come here for a moment."

I did, walking up to the bank until only my ankles were in the river, and she reached out and cradled my face in her hands. Her hands were very, very cold, and I tried not to think about what was touching me. I looked into her eyes, and it seemed she was a long way away, speaking to me from another world. I got the sense that speech for her required effort; she didn't think in words the way I did, she probably thought in—no, I didn't want to consider what forms her thoughts might take; I probably couldn't understand them anyway.

She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them, and said, "Go back to your camp and sleep, dream-walker. You'll feel better in the morning."

"Right," I said. "And I'll think this was all a dream."

"Maybe. Maybe it is."

"We've been through that."

"Go back to your tent, Easterner. Go to sleep. Dream of bearded women."

"Excuse me? No, never mind. Don't explain. I don't want to know."

Now that I was myself again, the wind was really cold, especially on my wet legs. And the rocks hurt my bare feet. And I had to work to slip past several sets of pickets, more of them than I remembered from getting there.

"Well, she was pretty weird."

"Who was, Boss?"

"I hope," I said after a moment, "that you're joking, Loiosh."

"Ummmm."

"I've just had a conversation with the Necromancer, Loiosh. A real conversation. Out loud and everything. You really didn't see her?"

"Boss, I didn't see her, I didn't hear her, and I didn't hear you talking. You just walked out into the river, stood there for a while, and walked back."

"Grand," I said. "Just grand. I get myself into the army, stand up in battles I have no business in, get nailed in the back by sorcery, accept an impossible assignment to be carried out in the middle of it all, and then, just to top things off, I have to go have a mystical fucking experience. This is just great."

"Whatever it was, Boss, I think it helped. You're sounding like yourself."

"Oh, thank you so much, Loiosh."

I made it back to the camp, and to my tent, and to my cot, and I remembered to lie down on my stomach, and it was only then that I realized that whatever weakness I'd felt before was, if not gone, at least diminished. I tried to make sense of it, but I must have fallen asleep, because then it was morning, and I got up to the sound of the drum before I remembered that I probably wouldn't have had to. Rascha was outside the tent when I emerged, bare-chested and blinking.

"You all right?" she said.

In spite of everything, I managed to give her a straight answer. "A bit wobbly on my feet, and my back itches, and I could use about another forty or fifty hours of sleep, but yeah, I'm okay."

"Think you can take a spot on the line?"

"Sure."

"Good. We had some casualties."

"Did they attack last night?"

She looked at me. "Just before dawn. Glad we didn't wake you up."

"I think you could have burned the tent down without waking me up."

"Today, I think."

"Hmmm?"

"I think today will settle things."

"Oh. That's good."

"Yes. And our end of it shouldn't be too bad. All we have to do is hold this hill. Unless, of course, the powers-that-be change their minds and have us do something else."

"Holding the hill might be rough enough," I said.

"Maybe. Go get some food in you."

"Good idea," I said.

I went back inside and grabbed my jerkin and inspected it. I found that it no longer had a back—just a big hole, about a foot in diameter, with ugly burn marks around the edges. I started to feel queasy again.

"Boss—"

"Yeah. Impressive, isn't it?"

"What are you going to do for a jerkin?"

"I brought a spare."

"Oh. Good thinking."

I put it on and my back started itching. I filled the ribs and sleeves and the collar from my old shirt, then put a light cloak over it, and made sure that I was properly packed. I ate three biscuits and drank a lot of water, then got myself shaved and cleaned up as best I could.

My knees felt very shaky by then, and I wasn't looking forward to taking a spot on the line. If I'd remembered what I had promised Morrolan I'd do I might have panicked, but my brain was still a bit scrambled and that didn't occur to me until later. The experiences of the night before came back in pieces, and I kept wanting to think of the whole thing as a dream, but I couldn't convince myself, and then I made the mistake of asking Loiosh, who confirmed that at least some of it had actually happened.