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  Master of Dragons

  Dragonvarld Book 3

  Margaret Weis

  To all those with dragon-magic in their blood,

  this hook is fondly dedicated.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to acknowledge the assistance of my friend and military adviser, Robert Krammes, who has been of such inestimable help to me on these novels, and to his wife and my dear friend, Mary Krammes, who has served as wardrobe mistress to Evelina.

  PROLOGUE

  LYSIRA ENTERED THE ENORMOUS CAVERN THAT WAS THE ANCIENT Hall of Parliament for dragonkind. The entrance was located in the tallest peak of a snow-capped mountain range. Gaping black against the white-shrouded crags, the opening had been carved hundreds of centuries ago by dragon-magic. No need to hide it from humans, not this far up the mountainside. The entrance was large enough to accommodate a dragon in flight. Lysira was small for her kind, and she swooped into the entryway with ease, glad to leave behind the glare of the sun glittering on the snow for the restful darkness of the Hall.

  The dragon spiraled downward, drifting on the whispering air currents, listening to the silence that was dark in her mind. The Hall was empty. Parliament was not in session. She was not really supposed to be here, but she felt drawn to this place. Disturbed and troubled, she did not know what to do or where to turn for answers, and so she decided to come here. Perhaps if she were in the Hall itself, she would be able to glean some of the wisdom of those who came before her, pick up a trace of their colors. Learn from their experience. At least, that’s what she’d told herself.

  Gliding downward on still wings toward the floor that was far, far below her, Lysira was bitterly disappointed. She saw only darkness. The cavern was empty. If there were ghosts, they slumbered in the eternal dragon dream that was death.

  Upset, Lysira was not paying attention to what she was doing, and the floor came up on her before she was ready for it. She landed with an ungraceful thud, nearly going over on her nose. Recovering, she was thankful that no one was here to have witnessed such a fledgling bumble.

  She was especially glad that one particular dragon was not present—the Walker, Draconas. Her scales rippled all over in embarrassment at the thought. In truth, it was because she’d been thinking of him and everything he’d said at the last session of Parliament that she had botched her landing. But she couldn’t decide if it was his words that bothered her or if it was the way his colors had so gently touched her.

  Settling on the floor, tucking her wings in at her flanks and wrapping her long tail around her feet, Lysira gazed around the dark and empty cavern and sighed. She could at last admit to herself that she’d been hoping—rather unrealistically—that she would find Draconas here.

  She didn’t know why she expected him to be in the empty Hall.

  Perhaps because he wasn’t anywhere else.

  Dragons communicate mentally, mind-to-mind, using images and vibrant colors to exchange ideas. A dragon may block another from entering his mind, just as a human can stop others from entering his house. But, just as the house is still there, so is the mind of the dragon. Though the colors are unreadable and prohibit entry, they shimmer like foxfire in the night. And Draconas’s colors were nowhere to be seen.

  Dragons dislike making hasty decisions. Lysira had been unsettled ever since the last meeting of Parliament—the meeting that had thrown the dragons into turmoil, the meeting in which Draconas had disclosed that the two children born to the human woman Melisande could communicate mind-to-mind, as could dragons. Not only that, but these humans could actually enter the minds of dragons! This was an awful, dreadful, catastrophic calamity. What’s more, Draconas had told Parliament that one of their number was a traitor, one of them was feeding information to the rogue dragon Maristara and her cohort, Grald. Because of this, Draconas had hidden away the two children, and he refused to tell anyone—even Anora, the wise elder dragon, the Minister of the Parliament—where they were to be found. He’d also claimed that this same traitor had been responsible for the deaths of her father and Braun, Lysira’s brother.

  That meeting had taken place sixteen years ago. A long time, by human standards. A mere eye blink by dragon measuring. Lysira had spent those years dithering, wavering back and forth, trying to decide if she would talk to Draconas or not. For a couple of years, she thought she wouldn’t. He was the Walker, the dragon who took human shape to walk among humans and keep an eye on them. He had, therefore, lots of humans’ images in his mind, images Lysira found disturbing and distasteful. And fascinating.

  It was the fascinating part that bothered her. She’d seen only a few of these images the last time he’d spoken to her, and she had since discovered that they kept cropping up in her dreams, breaking her tranquillity. Try as she might, she couldn’t banish them. She didn’t want to see any more of them. And yet, she did.

  Once she had made up her mind that she would talk to him, a few more years passed before she found the courage to do so. She would start to approach him and then she would shy away and retreat back to her lair in a flutter of confusion.

  This made her angry, and for the next year or so, she turned her anger at Draconas and blamed him as the cause of all the trouble. She knew she was being irrational. He wasn’t the cause. Maristara had started it all by seizing that human kingdom and then breeding humans with dragons to produce humans with dragon magic. Lysira didn’t like to admit that part.

  At this point, she decided that she didn’t need Draconas. She would find out who the traitor dragon was on her own. Lysira’s investigations were halfhearted, however, and didn’t get her anywhere. The other dragons she questioned were brusque and even rude. They obviously did not want to think about any of this. They were hoping it would all go away. They shut their minds to her and shooed her off.

  Which brought Lysira right back to Draconas. She would talk to him. She was determined to talk to him. Boldly, trembling, Lysira reached out her colors to him.

  Only to find that the colors of his mind were gone, as though they had been wiped away by a wet sponge.

  Lysira crouched in the empty Hall of Parliament and, for the first time, she began to be afraid. Not only for Draconas, but for herself. And all of dragonkind.

  Anora felt true regret that she had to kill Draconas.

  Of all the walkers who had sacrificed their dragon form to take on the illusion of a human, Draconas had been the best. One of the hazards of being a walker, of living among humans, was that the dragon tended to either become too human—in which case he forgot the reason he’d been sent to walk among humans in the first place—or he remained too dragon—in which case he moped and pouted and whined about having to put up with the inconveniences of being human.

  Draconas had been the first to separate the two halves of his being, maintaining a firm division between the dragon and the human. Even now, though it appeared that he was acting for the humans, siding with the humans, and protecting the humans, Anora knew better. Draconas was doing what he was doing because he firmly believed he was helping his own kind.

  Admirable. Mistaken, but admirable.

  She stood, masked by illusion, inside the building where she’d set her trap for Draconas. Watching him from the shadows, she pondered the idea of letting him live. She could try to explain to him that he was wrong, hoping he’d see reason. She discarded that thought with a regretful sigh.

  Draconas’s asset had become his liability. He was working hard to keep humans and dragons at peace, as they had been since the first human had raised himself up off all fours. Draconas would never understand why that peace had to end, and Anora knew he could never be made to understand.

  He had to die.

  Draconas had his back to her. She�
�d been spying on him from the moment he’d entered the abandoned building. He was here to set a trap for the dragon Grald, the master of Dragonkeep. Grald, disguised in his own stolen human body, was heading this direction.

  Grald and Anora were in contact, the colors of their minds blending, though not very harmoniously. Anora was thinking of her own lofty goals. Grald was thinking of vengeance. But what could you expect? Grald was a dragon of the baser sort. He did not come from one of the noble families of dragonkind, who had ruled the world for centuries. In human terms, Grald was a peasant.

  He’d been brought into this conspiracy by Maristara, who had chosen him because he was a peasant—rough and crude and not overly educated.

  The elder female dragon, Maristara, had formed a theory—a brilliant theory—that if dragons and humans bred, they would produce offspring that would look human, but would be capable of using dragon-magic. Anora remembered how shocked and appalled she’d been at first hearing Maristara’s proposal, brought to her in secret. She’d been adamantly opposed to it—not only did it break all the laws of dragonkind, it could prove dangerous for dragons. Creating humans with magical powers! It was not to be considered. When Maristara had defied her and seized a human kingdom in order to begin her experiments, Anora had vowed that she would do everything in her power to stop her.

  Time passed. The dragons, with their usual ineptness and inability to make decisions, bungled any chance of halting Maristara. The experiments in breeding proceeded and went far better than even Maristara had hoped. Sadly, as time passed, Anora had come to see things Maristara’s way.

  These humans with the dragon-magic in their blood proved to be so powerful that they intimidated lesser humans. Thus, they made perfect rulers. And, because these humans had dragon-blood in their veins, they were easily manipulated by the dragons. Dragons ruled the half-dragon humans who ruled the humans. Perfect all around.

  Maristara needed a male dragon to start the breeding program with the human females of Seth. She didn’t dare choose one of the males of the noble houses, for fear word would get out. She selected a male from a family of lesser dragons, a young male, aggressive and ambitious and cruel.

  His name was Grald.

  She taught Grald the secret of ripping the heart out of a living human body and taking over that body, making it his own—a task far less complicated and time-consuming than casting the supreme illusion spell that changed Draconas into a human. Unlike Maristara, who used the human bodies she took to disguise her true form, Grald usurped the human bodies, giving them his name and taking over their personalities. He was on his sixth human right now, and this was his favorite. He had found something better, however, and he was looking forward eagerly to taking over the next body—that of his own son.

  Before that could happen, Anora and Grald had to kill Draconas, who had done everything in his power to thwart them.

  “I think you would understand,” Anora said silently to Draconas, speaking to his back, as he stood across from her in the doorway of the building, sharpening his walking staff into a spear. “I think you might even take our side, but ... I can’t be sure. You have formed attachments among the humans. You hid Melisande’s children away from us. If Ven had not cried out to us for help, we might never have discovered them.”

  “Quit sniveling, Anora. He should have died long ago.”

  Grald’s colors intruded rudely into hers, and Anora, haughtily, didn’t deign to reply She saw no need to explain herself to underlings. Maristara let Grald take too many liberties. She should keep him in his place.

  “Where are you?” Anora asked, her colors chill.

  “I am in sight of the house. My son summoned me,” Grald added with smug triumph. “He betrayed his brother, as I told you he would, to gain the female. Like father, like son.” Grald chuckled.

  “I don’t trust him,” Anora said. “Ven is devious—devious as a dragon—in many ways. I should know. I spent weeks in his company.”

  “All the better for me when I take over his body.”

  You’ll acquire a brain, at least, Anora thought, but she kept that caustic comment concealed beneath the cold flow of her colors. Dissimulation was not difficult to practice on Grald, who never bothered to look beneath the surface of any conversation.

  “Don’t come any closer,” Anora warned. “I’m about to strike.”

  “Take care you don’t hurt Ven,” Grald said. “I need his body whole and strong.”

  “The only one hurt will be Draconas,” Anora said softly.

  She began to creep up on him as he stood, unsuspecting, staring out the door. He was in his human form, holding the spear he’d fashioned in his hand. Across the street, Anora could hear the voices of the human males raised in argument, probably squabbling over the human female. Ideal cover, for they were proving a distraction to Draconas, who looked in that direction and frowned.

  “Strike now!” Grald ordered suddenly. “Strike him from behind, before he knows what’s hit him!”

  Concentrating on Draconas, Anora had unwittingly left her mental processes open to Grald. She slammed shut the door to her thoughts and refused to answer him. He couldn’t understand her strategy anyway.

  It is difficult to take a dragon by surprise.

  While a dragon is conscious, he can easily defend himself. Dragons must sleep, however, and when they sleep, they sleep deeply—for years at a time. There was the chance that another dragon or some enterprising human might slay the slumbering dragon. Thus, over the centuries, dragons had developed a means of self-protection. The moment Anora launched a weapon at Draconas—magical or otherwise—his dragon being would act to take defensive measures and fight back. Her plan was to reveal herself to him, let him see that the human he’d known all these years as the holy sister, was, in truth, the Head of Parliament, a venerable dragon he had long respected and trusted. She calculated that the shock of seeing her, of knowing—at the last moment—that she was going to be his doom, would suck all the fight out of him, leave him breathless, winded, amazed. Then dead.

  She was quite close to Draconas now.

  He was preoccupied, tense for the kill. He didn’t hear a sound, didn’t sense her presence.

  “Draconas,” said Anora gently, in her human voice.

  He jumped, startled, and looked over his shoulder.

  “Get out of here, Sister,” Draconas told her roughly. “This is none of your concern.”

  “Ah, but it is,” said Anora.

  In that moment, Draconas knew. She saw the knowledge in his eyes as she saw her own reflection, the shadow of the dragon, rising up behind the holy sister, extending its wings and its claws.

  The colors of Draconas’s mind came crashing down around him.

  “I don’t understand . . . ,” he gasped.

  “I know, Draconas,” said Anora softly, and her colors were gray ash. “The pity is—you never will.”

  Lightning crackled from her jaws . . .

  1

  MARCUS EXTENDED HIS HAND, POINTED BEHIND HIMSELF TO THE buildings that stood at the entrance to the alley. The magic rolled out of him, rumbled through the earth. Stone walls shook and trembled, and with a roar like an avalanche, the two buildings collapsed. Marcus heard screams and cries and guessed that at least some of his pursuers had been caught in the cascade of rock and debris. He dashed out into the alley, with Evelina at his side, and it was then he felt the weakness.

  It came over him suddenly, unexpectedly, a sensation of being exhausted, drained of energy. He could not catch his breath. His legs and arms and hands tingled. He stumbled and nearly fell.

  Evelina caught hold of him.

  “What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”

  He couldn’t answer. He had to use his breath for breathing. Talking required more strength than he had, and he couldn’t explain to her what was happening anyway. Nothing is free in this world. Everything has a price, including the magic.

  Conjuring pixies from dust motes had been a litt
le fatiguing, but the magic had never before sent him to his bed. Bringing down stone buildings and raising ice storms was apparently different. He was so exhausted, he could scarcely move.

  Behind him, he could hear behind him the monks clawing their way through the rubble. He had to run or give up and die.

  “Dearest Marcus, sweet love, we have to keep going!” Evelina was saying, her voice trembling with fear. “Please, fust a little ways and we are there, my heart, my own.”

  She tugged at him, pleaded with him. He nodded and continued on. But he could no longer run. It took all his resolve just to walk.

  “It’s not far now,” she said, sliding her arm around him, supporting him.

  He wearily raised his head to see that they had come farther than he’d hoped. The wall was directly ahead of them. They had only to cross a street and they would be standing in front of it. Fifty, a hundred steps.

  And then what? He remembered entering Dragonkeep, remembered looking back at the wall through which he’d just passed and seeing no gate, no entrance, only solid stone. On and on the wall ran, without end. Around and around the city. No break. No way out. A dragon eating its own tail . . .

  “Marcus!” Evelina cried sharply, frightened.

  He jerked his head up, shook his head to clear it, kept moving, kept walking. He concentrated on picking up his feet and putting them down, picking them up, putting them down.

  The wall came closer. Solid stone. Fused with fire.

  Marcus called again, one last time. “Draconas . . .”

  The name echoed in the darkness of his little room. Echoed back to him.

  One by one, the echoes died.

  The street that ran along the wall was empty. He’d expected to find a river of brown robes. If the monks were coming, they had not yet arrived.

  “Yet why should they hurry?” Marcus asked himself. “I’m not going anywhere and neither is Evelina.”

  He stood in front of the guard wall, staring at it, pouring his whole being into that stare, wishing it, willing it to give him some hint, some clue of the way out. He risked leaving his little room, risked roaming up and down the length of the wall, as far as he could see, risked using his magic to search for a crack, a chink in the endless stone. He stared at the wall so long that the stones began to shift and glide and he wrenched his gaze away.