A Dragon From the Desert Read online

  A Dragon From The Desert

  Book One of the Dragonbond Trilogy

  William King

  Typhon Press

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  It was not the approaching soldiers who frightened me. It was the woman with blood-red hair. The soldiers were big, heavily armed men riding as if ready for war, but she was far more terrifying. She reminded me of the figures I had seen in the strange nightmares that had plagued me over the past few weeks.

  I ducked out of sight, crouching in the cool shadows behind the ancient wall, praying to the Sun, the Moon and the Elders that she had not noticed me. Sweat ran down my back and my mouth felt dry. The riders were two hundred strides away, but I feared they would hear the pounding of my heart. Dragonlings circled overhead on leathery wings, hunting for desert hares amid the scrub and creosote bushes.

  My first thought was that these newcomers were bandits, but they were too well armed to be mere highway robbers. They rode with the same discipline as our liege lord’s tax collectors. Surely it could not be that time of year again so soon.

  Despite my fear, I could not resist taking another look. What fifteen-year-old boy could? I raised my head above the broken parapet and risked another glimpse at the strangers.

  The riders were strung out along the road, moving slowly in the full heat of the late afternoon. At the head of their column a herald carried a fluttering standard displaying a yellow tower beneath a stylised sun, the same sign that showed on the riders’ white tabards. I knew they did not follow our liege. His soldiers always wore black tunics with a red hawk.

  Behind the riders came several wagons, the covered type favoured by pedlars and wealthy farmers. One vehicle was a coach, even more elaborate than the one our lord’s wife rode in. Behind it, a column of infantry marched. Some carried pikes. Others had crossbows slung over their shoulders. A few bore heavy axes. At the very rear came more riders, shabbier than the ones in the front.

  The woman with blood-red hair drove the leading wagon. Her head turned as she scanned the horizon. When she looked in my direction, I knew she had spotted me.

  Unlike the men, she did not wear chain mail and she carried no sword. Her dyed hair was cropped short. I had a clear view of it because she wore no helmet. Her pale face did not have the natural lightness of the untanned lady aristocrat. It was more like the white-washed sides of our cottage. The colour reminded me of a bleached skull. Black painted circles surrounded her eyes, making her face even more skeletal.

  A drum was attached to a wide leather belt at her waist by a thick bronze chain. It blazed like a campfire on a winter night. I wondered how she could carry it so close to her skin, especially on a hot afternoon like this.

  She pointed right at me and said something to the nearest rider. He and another knight broke away from the column and galloped straight towards my hiding place. How had she known I was there? I had been quick, and I was good at hiding. No one else had noticed me yet she had sensed my presence.

  Instinct drove me to arm myself, the urge to make a gesture of defiance on in the face of oncoming death. I stooped to pick up a stone then unwrapped the sling from around my neck. I was a fair shot, but it would do me no good against so many armed men. If I was lucky, I might take down one the way I killed that blight wolf from the mountains a year back.

  Fear urged me to run but I knew it was pointless. Those big chargers would soon overhaul me. I toyed with loading the sling, but the men had not lowered their lances or drawn any other weapons. As they got closer, they slowed their mounts. The largest shouted, “Hey there, boy, a good day to you.”

  I tried to speak but I was so nervous I could not force the words out. I just stared at them, taking in their stubbled faces and well-worn gear.

  “What’s the matter, boy? Can’t you speak?” asked the big rider. His skin was almost as dark as mine. There was a spider tattoo on his face running from his forehead to his chin. The legs splayed out across his cheeks and ran all the way to his neck.

  “Maybe he’s an idiot,” said his companion, a beefy youth with the golden hair and lightly tanned skin of a Sunlander who spent a lot of time outdoors. “A lot of these moondogs are.”

  There was a mean edge to his aristocratic voice when he said moondog. He gave the first speaker a provoking look. I sensed the tension between the two of them.

  “And a good day to you, sir,” I said, responding to the men the way I would to the Lord’s tax collectors. The note of subservience made me despise myself.

  “This your father’s land?” the man with the spider tattoo asked. This time I noticed his accent was coarse, more like my father’s than a noble’s. It was not quite as rough but there was the tang of the peasant or freeholder to it.

  “It is, sir.”

  The spider-tattooed knight surveyed the scrubby land then looked down at me again. I was suddenly aware how ragged my tunic was and how patched my britches were. My feet were bare and dirty.

  He was not much better though. His face and clothing were grubby from the road. The fabrics he wore were rich, but they had the washed out look of something that had been scrubbed too often.

  “He got water and beasts?”

  “We got a spring near the house, sir, and I am sure my Da would not grudge any rider a drink on a hot day like this.”

  Not that my father would make any objections in the face of so many armed men. He owned a dagger and a sling and had gone to war as part of the Lord’s retinue before he got sick, but there was nothing a single man could do against the small army approaching.

  The tattooed knight looked at his companion and then back at me. “Can you show us to the spring, boy?”

  That would mean showing them to the house, and where Da and Ma and my brother and sisters were. I considered making a run for it, but I feared these big men and their even bigger horses. My voice shook when I said, “I could, sir.”

  “Then what are you waiting for. Lead on,” said the second rider with nothing but contempt in his voice. There was no suggestion of a request. It was an order given by someone who expected to be obeyed.

  I considered telling them that I was supposed to be minding the goats then decided they might think I suspected them of wanting to steal the flock. Truth to tell, it seemed likely but one thing I had learned was that you did not say such things to men who looked like tax collectors, not if you wanted to keep your teeth anyway.

  I did not like sound of the horses’ hooves crunching the baked soil behind me. I did not like their closeness or the way I could hear their breathing. I did not like the way the men talked to each other as if I was not there, but there was nothing I could do about any of it. These lands lay close to where Umbrea bordered the Shadow Kingdoms, a place where men and things other than men had warred for centuries. My people had always come out on the bottom of such struggles. Any objections I made would count for nothing.

  A horn blared close behind me.

  I risked a glance over my shoulder and saw the tattooed knight had sounded the instrument. Now the whole column left the road and rumbled along behind us, raising plumes of dust. At least my family would have some warning of the approach and could hide in the caves in the hillside. All of them except Da, who was sick again, which meant Ma would not leave his side, and I thought it unlikely the young ones would go without Ma.

  I cursed the curiosity which had brought me off the hillside to investigate those dust plumes when I had seen them in the distance. I had been too sure that I could keep myself hidden. Perhaps my whole family would pay for that now.

  I walked in silence as the Holy Sun slid towards the western horizon. The heat had risen till the plains shimmered and the cool shadows of the distant mountains beckoned like the promise of paradise. A few straggling clouds limped across the sky. Their shadows fell on the haunted ruins off to the south, the ones I had never been bold enough to explore despite all the dares of my brother.

  “We got much further to go, moondog?” the younger rider asked. It was the first time either of them had spoken to me since commanding me to lead on. He did not sound best pleased and when I looked up at him, I understood why. His face glistened with sweat.

  Why did he wear the armour in this heat? Surely, he understood no one around here was likely to attack him. My entire family and all their kin could not menace one of these brutal warriors let alone the force that came along behin
d him.

  “Not much further now, sir,” I said.

  “You’d better be right,” he said in a tone that made me glad I had not led them astray as I had considered doing. It was all very well imagining yourself doing something heroic when you were lying on your back, listening to the flocks and dreaming of the stories Da had told in better days. It was a different thing entirely when there was a pack of armoured killers mounted on massive warhorses riding along behind you.

  I took the path that turned down into the hollow, passed the elder sign Da’s grandfather had scratched on the stone to keep the Old Ones away and led the strangers down into the little valley where my family lived.

  I prayed I had not just made the worst mistake of my life.

  One of the children must have seen us coming and ran to give warning. Da sat on the big boulder near the well, resting his too-thin body. Ma stood beside him, the children strung out beside her, as neatly lined up as they always were when the tax collectors came. Da would be wondering what was going on. The collectors were not due for another season; unless the Lord had decided that he needed to raise some emergency tax to fight a new war with his neighbours.

  I ground my teeth at the unfairness of it. My father was a freeman, not a thrall. He was under no obligation to the Lord other than to make sure his rent was paid on time. It was something he grumbled about often, just not when the collectors were at the door. If the Lord wanted to raise illegal taxes, a scrub farmer was not going to stop him. The Duke’s court was a long way away, and chances were he would side with his Sunlander vassals anyway.

  I wanted to shout at my folks, to tell them to run and hide, that these soldiers had not come from the Lord, that more of them were just about to ride into the valley. It was pointless now. There was nowhere for the family to run without being spotted, even if Da was capable of it. They would be ridden down without mercy.

  I glanced up at the riders and saw that they were grinning, although whether it was at the sight of the well or the family house to plunder, I was not sure.

  The soldiers made their way down into the valley. They brought their horses to a halt directly in front of the boulder on which my father sat. The tattooed man greeted him politely and much to my surprise asked his permission to draw water and give their horses something to drink. My father nodded as if he had some choice in the matter. I wondered what the horseman would have done if my father had said no.

  Da’s head swivelled to watch the rest of the riders arrive. He took in the other armed men and the wagons and the woman with the blood-red hair and his face fell. It seemed that my father felt the same dismay I did when he looked at her. Maybe he even felt the same fear. I moved closer to my family and my father gave me a look, eyes narrowed, lips pursed, that told me how unhappy he was with this turn of events. I could not blame him.

  My mother looked scared, her eyes darting from the mounted warriors to the wagons and then to her children. Ma’s hands clenched into fists but there was nothing much that she could do. All my life I had been frightened of my mother’s anger. She had seemed a much more formidable figure than my father but now, in the face of these armed strangers, she dwindled into a small skinny powerless woman who looked old before her time.

  The lead wagon rumbled closer and I could see that it was drawn by two cart horses even larger than the warhorses of the knights but far more docile looking.

  The woman with red hair looked directly at me now. I could not meet her gaze and my eye slid down to the drum that was not a drum. It shimmered, as if made of paper. A snake of fire slithered around within it.

  I also saw that there was an elder sign, a five-pointed star within a circle, inscribed on the top. Looking at that made me even more frightened because that was the sign of the Holy Sun, protector of mankind against all the evils of the Shadow. What sort of thing was in the drum that it needed a holy symbol to contain it?

  The other wagons descended into the valley. One of them was crowded with soldiers. Another teemed with men and women in the liveries of servants. A chubby looking soldier with a cheerful face drove one. He winked at me as he passed, but that did nothing to reassure me.

  Then came the coach, guided as carefully by its driver as if it contained a cargo of precious gems. Servants walked beside each of the horses to make sure they stayed under control.

  It struck me that the woman with the drum rode on her own, as if everyone else was afraid to ride with her.

  All the riders dismounted and made their way towards the well. The man with the spider tattoo raised the bucket from the depths, drank then splashed some water on his face before passing it to the second.

  I had always heard that knights looked after their horses first but that did not seem to be the case here. The men laughed, clearly relieved to have something to drink. Their companions rode up to the well and demanded some water themselves and only after everyone had drunk did they begin measuring out small amounts for their steeds.

  Mixed among their crossbowmen were warriors with axes and swords. One of them was the most striking youth I had ever seen. He was taller than any of the nobles. His skin was freckled and his hair was red, marking him as an outlander of some sort. Slung over his back was a massive axe that I would have struggled to lift with both hands. He saw me looking at it and nodded pleasantly.

  The tattooed knight rode back to the carriage. He said something to the curtained window and appeared to get a response.

  The youth who had sneered at me earlier rode forward and said, “You have noble guests. You should be grateful.”

  My father looked at him and said nothing. There was a time when he might have grovelled and a time before that when he might have been defiant but now he was too sick to care.

  My mother glanced at my brothers and sisters and then at me and said, “We are, sir. May we ask who?”

  The knight simply spat on the ground in front of her. My mother’s face was blank, but I saw anger and fear in the tightness around her eyes and the tense way she held her hands.

  The big man with a spider tattoo returned and asked my father whether he had any beasts to sell, glancing significantly had the pen beside the cottage which held a few sheep and then at the goat tethered near the shed with the milking stool next to it.

  My father considered this for a moment. He was obviously as frightened as I was, but he hid it better and he did not look quite so nervous now. The fact that the strangers had not immediately put everyone to the sword seemed to have reassured him. He said that it could be arranged, and the spider faced knight asked him to prepare a beast for slaughter.

  “Mind if we make camp for the night,” the tattooed man asked. “It’s going to be dark soon and we will not be going much further anyway.”

  I studied him closely. He was polite of speech and did not act the way other knight did, with the habitual Sunlander contempt for the local peasants.

  Even as that thought struck me, I became uncomfortably aware that the woman with blood-red hair was staring at me. I knew it even before I looked at her and saw her bloodshot eyes fixed on me. Once again, I let my gaze drift to the drum attached to the belt on her waist. Once again, I was aware that there was something moving inside it, something that made me deeply uneasy, something that was not in the slightest natural.

  And I felt as if she knew what I was thinking.

  Chapter Two

  Darkness gathered. The moon rose. Somewhere in the distance something howled, maybe a blight jackal or one of the evil spirits that haunted this part of the Umbrean wastelands. I should have felt reassured by the presence of these armed men, but I did not. Having so many strangers around our home was deeply unsettling.