Dragon's Ring Read online

  Dragon's Ring

  by

  Dave Freer

  Table of Contents

  DRAGON'S RING

  Dave Freer

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Dave Freer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4391-3319-4

  Cover art by Bob Eggleton

  First printing, October 2009

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Freer, Dave.

  Dragon's ring / Dave Freer.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3319-4 (hc)

  ISBN-10: 1-4391-3319-0

  1. Magic—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9369.3.F695D73 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2009017405

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  This one is for my sons, Paddy and James,

  the two finest lads in my universe.

  I hope it may give you even one thousandth

  as much pride and joy as you have given to me.

  BAEN BOOKS by DAVE FREER

  Dragon's Ring

  A Mankind Witch

  The Forlorn

  with Eric Flint

  Rats, Bats & Vats

  The Rats, The Bats & the Ugly

  Pyramid Scheme

  Pyramid Power

  Slow Train to Arcturus

  The Sorceress of Karres (forthcoming)

  with Eric Flint & Mercedes Lackey

  The Shadow of the Lion

  This Rough Magic

  Much Fall of Blood (forthcoming)

  The Wizard of Karres

  Acknowledgements

  This book owes its existence to my agent Mike Kabongo, and to editor extraordinaire Toni Weisskopf at Baen Books. My thanks to Artist Bob Eggleton for giving me a great cover, and to Jennie Faries and Carol Russo for fixing the last minute glitch with the name, which I appreciate ever so much.

  My first readers: thank you, my friends, for putting up with erratic grammar and worse spelling and helping me chop the story out from the raw state, for seeing its potential in the rough, and for the constructive shredding. It's the cutter who turns the gemstone from a mere rock into a jewel.

  And finally, thanks to my wife Barbara, who somehow copes with a husband whose head is often in another world entirely, and still does more for my writing than anyone else.

  Characters

  Actaeon

  Centaur exile.

  Belet

  A king among the creatures of smokeless flame.

  Brennarn

  Dragon, ruler of Cark.

  Breshy/Dvalinn

  The leading artificer of the dvergar.

  Díleas

  Black and white sheepdog.

  Finn/Fionn

  Black dragon. (The word means "fair.")

  Gywndar

  Alv prince of Yenfar.

  Groblek

  Lord of the mountains. Possibly a mountain.

  Haborym

  A duke among the creatures of smokeless flame.

  Hallgerd

  Meb's stepmother.

  Hrodenynbrys

  Merrow and magical musician.

  Hrolf

  Meb's older step-brother, skipper of the fishing vessel.

  Ixion

  A centaur head of a phalanx.

  Jakarin

  Dragon who had lost her hoard. Friend of Myrcupa.

  Justin

  Scribe, petty thief, informer.

  Keri

  Innkeeper's daughter, Justin's lover.

  Margetha

  Chieftainess of the Merrow.

  Meb/Anghared/Scrap

  Human magic worker.

  Mikka

  Meb's younger stepbrother. A fisherman.

  Myrcupa

  Dragon, nasty piece of work.

  Leilin

  Loftafar woman, seamstress.

  Lyr

  All sprites are called Lyr.

  Motsognir

  Elderly king of the dvergar.

  Ragath

  Alvar duke of Starsey.

  Rennalinn

  An alvar lord from Maygn Isle.

  Tessara

  Female dragon, much involved in the dragon sisterhood.

  Vorlian

  Dragon overlord of Starsey. A large powerful dragon.

  Zuamar

  Dragon, old, rich and powerful. Ruler of Yenfar.

  Prologue

  The dragon flew above the rage of the elements. Above the tumultuous maelstrom of ocean swirling into the void. Above the sheet lightnings and vortexes of dark energies released as the tower fell, with the vast granite masonry shattering into swirling dust.

  A fierce delight filled his dragonish heart as he looked down on it.

  The narrow—and, to Fionn's strange vision—coruscating band of twisted and constrained elsewhere that was one of the seven anchors of the place of dragons, stretched. Torrents of energy, shimmering fountains of it, across all the spectra, crackled and shrieked away into parallel planes. Great gouts of paramatter appeared briefly to interact with here-matter, before reaching an implosive null-state, destroying more and more of the magical foundation of the guardian tower.

  The tower fell at last, into the endless void . . . and the threads of constrained elsewhere parted.

  The dragon, his work done, fled.

  Even a dragon could be destroyed by that cataclysm he'd caused. Pieces of here and elsewhere roiled in the backlash wave, a tsunami of water and debris that bore all before it.

  Nothing could live through that wave.

  Except . . . something did.

  Something small, soft and terribly fragile, which was torn from a desperate mother's arms. A mother somewhere on the other side of elsewhere.

  The dragon, winging his way south, was not aware of it, in all the chaos he had caused.

  This was beyond the babe's understanding too. She only knew that she was suddenly cold, wet and frightened. But the sea would not hold her, nor could the wild surge warm and caress her. She screamed, demanded that it be changed. She did not understand how or what was happening. But she wanted it to stop, NOW.

  And it did. Her kind could not drown. The wave cast her up on the broken shell shingle. She wanted warmth, and she wanted a breast. For comfort, as much as anything. So she called for it.

  "It's alive!"

  "Leave it. It's no mortal child, Hallgerd. Let the sea take it back to where it belongs."

  "It's a baby, Wulfstan. I know a human baby when I see one," said Hallgerd, picking up the girl-child up. It burrowed into her arms, nuzzling. She knew right then that she'd never give it up, no matter what the headman said. It filled the hole her own lost child left in her heart.

  "It's ill luck to cheat the sea of its meat," he said, crossly.

  "The sea spat it out," said Hallgerd, unbuttoning her blouse.

  Wulfstan spat too, onto the wet shingle. "Nothing good will come of it, mark my words."

  Chapter 1

  A few yards in front of Meb, the green headland dropped away to the sea far below the fractured basalt of the cliff. The wind carried the shriek and mew of the gray-backed gulls swooping out from their cliff-nests. That sho
uld have been a warning to her.

  But Meb was too busy. Dreaming, and lost in her dream.

  When the boats came in on the morrow's tide, she'd be working too hard to dream. Along with every other woman in the fishing hamlet, she'd be gilling and gutting fish, as fast as her hands could work. A person had to concentrate when they had a razor-sharp knife in their hand. She still had the scar from learning that lesson. Today . . . well, today the East wind had kept everyone home, with not as much as a coble out on the bay. A cold mist clung to the water out there, as it did when the wind was in this quarter, hiding reefs and landmarks, muffling the warning sounds of surf.

  She sighed. There had to be more to life than fish-guts. She turned the focus of her attention inward again, not sure what had disturbed her. In her mind, she rode a dragon across the sky of Tasmarin. His scales gleamed obsidian . . .

  Being precise by nature she tried to get the details of the dragon right, but it evaded her. Of course, there was no such thing as a black dragon, but the basic shape was the same for all dragons. Their overlord, the dragon Lord Zuamar, flew seldom, but if only he would appear and take a turn over the bay, and land on the fang-rocks across the inlet.

  She looked out across the sea, her gaze drifting unseeing across the black ship clawing its way inwards across the bay. Another, and then another, followed it, sliding out of the cloaking sea-mist, long oars raking herringbone patterns on the still water. Meb was not truly aware of their presence. They were not what she was looking for.

  And then, to her delight, she saw the dragon spin down from heaven in a tasseled and spiky spiral of shimmer of sable, flaring its wings to land on the rocks across the water from the ships.

  Suddenly her mind registered the shrieking gulls . . . and the ships. Her first thought was that the fleet must be in early—the gulls were flying off to feast on the scraps. And here she was idling on the cliff-top! She stood up hastily, wiping her hands on her patched skirts.

  But . . . but they hadn't gone to sea today!

  A second, incredulous look told her that this was something far worse than being late for the gutting. The gulls might be fooled into believing that all ships were fishing-boats, but Meb wasn't. She knew a galley from a fat-bottomed fishing smack, no matter what her adopted family said about her.

  A bare second's hesitation and she lifted her skirts and began to sprint back, frantically screaming "raiders!"

  The broken basalt of the cliff curved high above the bay. From time to time pieces fell off, down into the hungry waves that ate at its foot. Running along its edge Meb was gasping for breath already. If she'd stopped to think for a moment, she'd have realized that she couldn't both run and yell, but she wasn't thinking, right then. Still doing her best to sprint, she cut as close to the curve of the rotting cliff-top as she dared. She had to get to the village before them.

  Too late, Meb realized that she'd dared too much.

  A curl of white-hot steam drifted away from Fionn's mouth. His talons dug into the sea-etched basalt. He twitched, sending a shimmering shiver through his ebony scales. He'd always been a bit wary about the vast surge of salt water. It was even more relentless than dragons.

  You had to see the funny side of it, he thought, grinning wryly to himself. He was aware that the force lines of everything from water to earth had been badly twisted and torn here by some adept's bungling magics. That was not surprising. Magic workers usually used magic, without understanding how—or what—they were doing, simply following a rote. He was used to having to adjust objects and tweak forces after their bungling. But it was the first time he'd actually been a part of the crude tangle. Well, the balances out here near the edge of the world were unstable anyway. There was a seasonal flux, something you got so close to the edge of existence, where matter had been twisted and abused. Still: Yenfar was one of the largest and most stable of the islands. He had not expected it here.

  Fionn blinked his huge scarlet eyes, adjusting his vision to the entire spectrum of energies, not just the visible spectra, but all of them. Now he saw the world as a swirling soup of complex patterns, not merely as reflections of light. And the weave here was indeed twisted, dented and torn. Water, sky and earth energies swirled well away from the true shape of their physical being. Chaos and misery! He sighed. A planomancer's work was never done. He'd rather be sitting in the shade, drinking cool wine, with a platter of crispy fried whitebait and baby squid on the side—which was exactly what he had been doing before the summonsing—than wrestling with this mess. He chuckled. Ah well. It had got him out of paying for the earlier bottles of wine and platters of food rather neatly. Saved him a bit of trouble.

  It was odd, though. The summonsing had felt like human magic. But there were no human magicians in Tasmarin.

  Dragonkind had hunted down and killed all of them.

  Falling takes a long, long time, thought Meb. It was either that, or time itself that stretched. The first idea was somehow easier to deal with. Like the scream that came from her mouth, falling to her death seemed to be happening to someone else. Even if she survived the fall, the sea would kill her. The villagers knew perfectly well that it killed men, let alone women. Women didn't even go out on the fishing boats, never mind into the sea. The blue water was full of sharks, rays, whales and merrows. She'd never actually seen one of the merpeople. She had, somehow, a time for regret and to try and imagine what a half-fish half-man really looked like before she hit the water.

  It was a lot harder than she'd thought it would be.

  * * *

  Fionn shifted his weight uneasily. There it was again. Just as he'd worked out what would need re-alignment, something plucked and twisted at the water energy lines, changing them. The cliff on the far side of the bay was re-aligning itself, cascading in a shower of rocks and turf into the foam-edged blue. That could not account for this tweak, however. It was more like a great, clumsy hand pulling fatelines, with no care for what it did to water or earth or even fire. He frowned.

  Humans!

  Fionn paid more attention to humankind—the lice, as the others put it—than most dragons in Tasmarin did. They were an unusual interest for a dragon. But then, he was an unusual dragon. Unique on this plane, possibly the last of his kind on any plane, anywhere.

  That didn't mean that he interfered with human affairs, any more than other dragons who merely taxed them.

  It would have been a great deal too much like hard work, for a start.

  He paid no attention to the raider-galleys whose keels were crunching onto the shingle. Instead, he reached a long-taloned forepaw into his front-pouch and hauled out a wad of folded parchment. He looked around and grimaced. These rocks were not a good spot. Nowhere flat to lay out the diagrams. In truth he didn't really need them, but he loved the detail and intricacy of them. They helped him decide. He spread his wings, unfolding the joints, extending them. It was a lousy place to launch from, but it was either fly from here or swim. The water looked cold, and might get at the charts. There was much labor in the drawing of them, and didn't feel like doing it again. The way things were finally falling apart on this plane of existence, he didn't think that he'd have enough time to, before the end.

  He'd done enough work to get it into this dire state.

  He launched. A trailing tip of his vast wings just touched the water. It was, indeed, cold.

  Meb found that the water was not only hard, but also icy. The sudden shock of the cold broke the odd unreality of her falling trance. She was going to die! DIE!

  Eyes wide open, all she could see was trailing bubbles and blue. She thrashed wildly, panic overwhelming thought.

  Her head broke through into the air. She gasped for breath, frantically flailing at the water to stay afloat.

  A wave hit her in the face, tumbling her.

  And then strong, web-fingered hands seized her, dragging her under.

  She fought them with all her remaining strength as they hauled her down into the watery darkness.


  She was so busy struggling that she took a while to realize that she could breathe. And hear.

  "Will you stop all this thrashing about, woman!" said someone irritably. " 'tis hard enough swimming with you, without that."

  Part of Meb was unwilling to let go of her panic. This was the sea. You died in the sea. Another part of her, the odd rational bit that poked fun at the rest of her, that also dreamed dreams that rose along way above fish-guts, said: Don't be afraid. Be terrified. And breathe deeply.

  As usual, the ordinary village Meb listened to the inner voice, after a while. She was stiff with fear, but at least she could breathe . . . And cough. It was amazing that there still was any sea left out there. She seemed to have swallowed most of it. And now she was dead.

  The rational part of her mind said: so why are you still breathing?

  "Sit here. There's a bit of a shelf," said the voice. "I'll need to make a light so that we can inspect the damage."