Dragon (Vlad Taltos) Read Online Free

and sweat creating, and moved forward at a steady pace; not too fast, not too slow. No, come to think of it, much too fast. A slow crawl would have been much too fast.
    I adjusted my uniform sash, which was the only mark I carried to show which side I was on, since I’d lost my cute little cap somewhere during the last couple of attacks. About half of the company had lost their cute little caps, and many of the enemy had, too. But we all had sashes, which identified the side we were on, like the ribbons that identify sandball teams. I never played sandball. I’d seen Dragons playing sandball in West Side Park, alongside of Teckla, though never in the same game at the same time, and certainly not on the same team. Make of that what you will.
    “Have you thought about getting up in the air and away from this? ” I asked my familiar for the fifth time.
    “I’ve thought about it ,” he answered for the fourth (the first time he hadn’t made any response at all, so I’d had to repeat the question; we’d only sustained three attacks hitherto). And, “How did we get into this, anyway? ” I’d lost count of how many times he’d asked me that; not as many as I’d asked myself.
    We moved forward.
    How did we get ourselves into this?
    I asked Sethra, not long ago, why she ordered us to hold that position, which never looked terribly important from where I sat—except to me, of course, for personal reasons that I’ll go into later. She said, “For the same reason I had Gutrin’s spear phalanx attack that little dale to your left. By holding that spot, you threatened an entire flank, and I needed to freeze a portion of the enemy’s reserves. As long as you kept threatening that position, he had to either reinforce it or remain ready to reinforce it. That way I could wait for the right time and place to commit my reserves, which I did when—”
    “All right, all right,” I said. “Never mind.”
    I hadn’t wanted a technical answer, I’d wanted her to say “It was vital to the entire campaign.” I wanted to have had a more important role. We were one piece on the board, and only as important as any other. All the pieces wish to be, if not a player, at least the piece the players are most concerned with.
    Not being a player was one of the things that bothered me. I was, I suppose, only a piece and not a player when I would carry out the order of one of my Jhereg superiors, but I had been running my own territory for a short while at that point, and had already become used to it. That was part of the problem: In the Jhereg, I was, if not a commander-in-chief, at least a high ranking field officer. Here, I was, well, I guess I was a number of things, but put them all together and they still didn’t amount to much.
    But how did we get ourselves into this? There were no great principles involved. I mean, you judge a war according to who is in the right as long as you have no interest in the outcome; if you’re one of the participants, or if the result is going to have a major effect on you, then you have to create the moral principles that put you in the right—that’s nothing new, everyone
knows it. But this one was so raw . No one could even come up with a good mask to put over it. It was over land, and power, and who got to expand where, without even the thinnest veneer of anything else.
    Those veneers can be important when you’re marching down toward rows of nasty pointy things.
    Baritt died, that’s what started it all. And Morrolan convinced me to set up a trap to find out who would be likely to steal what I preferred not to come anywhere near. Kragar, my lieutenant in the organization, looked worried when I told him about it, but I’m sure even he, who knew Dragons better than I ever would, had no clue how it would end up.
    “What if someone does steal one, and you find out who,” he said, “and it turns out to be someone you don’t want to mess with?”
    “That, of course, is the question. But it