Free The Dragon Lord by Peter Morwood Page A

hesitated. “You want Talvalin alive?”
    “Of course. Why?”
    “So do I. And untouched. There is a distinct difference. Make sure that Voord remembers it.”
    “The wound is new. And he has a beard.”
    “The
beard
is new—and it isn’t so much a beard as a need to shave. That’s something I’m better qualified to know than you, my lady. But the wound was old when I saw it.”
    “When you saw it? When you thought you saw it—or when you saw what you wanted to see?”
    “I saw what I saw. Look for yourself and then say I was wrong.”
    Paper rustled crisply.
    “Close. Very close. This is an excellent likeness… of somebody. But is it close enough?”
    “Close enough for me. I sent the messages last night and this morning: one by courier, one by pigeon. The usual.”
    “Without consulting me?”
    “I saw no need; I thought you would approve.”
    “Never presume what I will or will not do. But yes, I do approve.”
    “And the Lord-Commander? What will Voord say?”
    “Voord will be… very pleased.”
    It was surely a dream; a soft murmur of sound that droned like insects on a warm summer night. The sound took shape and became voices, a man’s and a woman’s. They ebbed and flowed, weaving patterns of words. But whatever language it was that the voices spoke, none of the words made sense.
    The dream faded. His eyes remained shut; other than the slow rise and fall of his chest and the never-ending tic of pulses beneath his skin, he did not move. But with a swiftness that fell between one breath and the next, Aldric was totally aware of his surroundings.
    There was softness above and below him; that was the yielding warmth of quilts, and it was comforting in its familiarity. Light surrounded him, for he was conscious of its brilliance beyond his eyelids. A faint taste of bitter herbs left a flavor like steel in his mouth, and there was a scent of flowers in his nostrils—the arid, delicate fragrance of dried blossoms set out to perfume the air. He opened his eyes to see them, to see where he was—
    —and saw only featureless white, and knew that he was blind.
    Sweat beaded on Aldric’s skin and now he could not,, would not move, even though each breath was coming faster and faster and the blood-pulse in his ears was running wild.
The fire
!
    Memories crashed back into his brain: monstrous heat, smoke and flames surging in his wake as he fled for ever; the roof coming down, the blow across his back and the midnight embrace of oblivion. The long fall into the dark which had never reached bottom.
    A fall as black as blindness…
    His skin was no longer beaded by perspiration, but slickly sheathed in it. Aldric could feel each droplet forming, running down his ribs, his jaw, his temples. What had happened could never, never have been so subtly selective as to destroy only his sight. Not that inferno. And if blindness was black, as the proverb claimed, then was this flaring whiteness—
    Death
... ?
    With that thought came the great uncontrolled intake of breath which could only return as a scream.
    Or a gasp; for in the same instant someone took the light bandage from his face and pressed a cool, moist pad against each eye in turn, and when they opened again Aldric’s world lurched back to reality and equilibrium with a vertiginous jolt. The unborn cry became a hissing exhalation that trickled out between his teeth, for he was shamed by the sleek lacquering of fear that glossed his skin and by the—surely audible!—thudding of his heart. But the woman who sat by his bed and gazed down at him either did not or courteously feigned not to notice.
    Without her furs and her guards and her imperious air, she looked very different. Her hair was unbound now, and in the lamplight which filled the room it was the deep rich russet of a fox’s pelt. She was smiling.
    “I thought…” he faltered; the admission was going to sound foolish, or cowardly, or both. “I thought that I was dead.”
    “Quite so. There