The Dragon Lord Read Online Free Page A

stopped in his tracks with anger livid on his high-cheekboned face. “Compassion of God, must I draw diagrams?” That shrillness which Dewan had heard only once before was threading his voice again like poison in wine. “I had almost four years to kill the habit of idiot questions in my son!” His lips writhed back from his teeth in an expression which might have been many things but most definitely was not a smile. “My
foster-
son,” he corrected himself with ponderous irony. “You had best learn it in the next four minutes, Dewan ar Korentin, if you want to survive the next four hours. Know this: you have crossed Rynert of Alba—so you are a dead man.”
    “But I have served him faithfully for—”
    “Years… ?” Gemmel sneered. “And now you no longer serve him. Therefore you are no longer of use to him. So you are
dead
!”
    That was a moment which Dewan knew would haunt[* *]his dreams, should he live long enough to have any—the moment when a sorcerer whose eyes blazed like phosphorescent emeralds told him in tones which defied doubt that he had been utterly betrayed. And betrayed, moreover, by the lord for whom he had shed blood, lost blood, suffered pain and gained his first-through-fiftieth gray hairs. That he had been cast aside like a torn cloak; that he was to be smashed into oblivion by “accident” and by the men he had trained himself, so that the embarrassment of a difference of opinion would be snuffed before it passed the bounds of simple gossip.
    “If I live through this—” he began savagely.
    “If any of us live through it, you’ll have to take your turn after my foster-son.” Again there was a hard gleam of teeth in the foggy light. “No. Call him my son. For he is. And more than I deserve to regain, even though I don’t yet deserve to be called his father. Now run, Dewan ar Korentin. Run as if your life depended on it—for it does!”
    They ran, a slop of wet and salty sand flying up around their booted legs at each footfall. Somehow the mass of gear across Dewan’s back was lighter than it had been— still as bulky, still as awkward, but no longer the same crushing dead-weight. Gemmel’s work? Or just adrenalin?
    He neither knew nor cared—but he was thankful all the same.
    The wizard’s voice reached his ears again, piercing the sounds of wind and water, gasping breath and the thick wet splat of running feet; but this time the old man was not addressing him.
    Gemmel was speaking to the fog!
    Something—some
thing
—sighed over Dewan’s shoulder and for one heart-stopping instant he thought that Dunacre’s weapon batteries had opened up on them. Even shooting blind into the mist, those things were capable of setting the beach aflame from surf-line to shingle and in the process roasting any living creature on it. But whatever passed Dewan had nothing to do with human weapons. Or even with humanity at all…
    The surge of energy which had passed him on the wings of a hot wind tore open a tunnel in the fog that was two men wide, one man high and ran straight as a spear-shaft out towards the sea. He could suddenly see parallel white bars of foam where waves curled in to break on the shores of Alba, and beyond them the small dark blot sliding swiftly closer which could only be the wizard’s promised boat. Boat, not ship, was right.
    Cockleshell was more right still.
    Had he possessed more breath than that required for running, Dewan might have made some biting remarks about the vessel’s size, speed and potential seaworthiness, not to mention passing comment on certain sorcerers who seemed to think that if something could float then that sufficed.
    But all criticism was leached from his mind by the sound in the sky.
    It was a huge rash of displaced air, as if something monstrous was falling from the clouds—and if Dewan’s wild guess was correct, then that was no more than the truth. He flung himself bodily at Gemmel and both men went headlong onto the sand… and into