The Dragon Lord by Peter Morwood Read Free Book Online Page A

returned, faltered again once, twice…
    And stopped.
    No more blood dribbled from Dewan’s mouth. The trickle of fluids from his torn arm ceased. He no longer breathed.
    He no longer lived…
    Gemmel’s knuckles blanched as his grip tightened on the Dragonwand’s adamantine surface; but he had learned during the past few terrible minutes that he could no longer trust the talisman to do his bidding. Its powers had passed beyond his control—and he suspected to his own great secret shame that he knew the reason why.
    Ykraith dropped with an unheeded thud as his hand opened, and when it closed again it was to form a clenched fist which with carefully-judged force slammed squarely against Dewan’s chest. Gemmel struck twice, then gripped his own wrist and began a rhythmic pressure with the heel of the free hand that was almost enough to break the bone beneath it. Almost, but not quite.
    Push—push—push; fist, then pressure, then fist, then the firm steady pressure which tried to persuade Dewan’s heart to beat again for itself. Again, and again— a hard task for two people, it was well-nigh impossible for one alone. Gemmel was panting now, breathless and sweaty with exertion and with the fear born of his own increasing despair.
    Suddenly the bruised and battered rib-cage expanded with a convulsive jerk as Dewan’s lungs wrenched in a whooping gasp of air. Gemmel felt the movement under his hands, and his fingertips sensed the drumming of a renewed heartbeat which pounded almost loudly enough to hear.
    Ar Korentin began to breathe, and bleed, and live again.
    The old enchanter, now feeling truly old, sat back on his heels and watched while his own heart-rate slowed and the sweat cooled on his trembling limbs. A little smile stretched his thin mouth thinner still as he realized that even without the Dragonwand, he had performed magic of a sort after all. Necromancy. Restoring the dead to life.
    “I think,” he whispered to nobody at all, “that makes us even.”
    After a short while he straightened, easing the kinks out of his spine, and cast a wary glance towards the other bodies which littered the beach. No worries there; they would be a quarter-hour or more just remembering how to use their legs. He squatted and slid the Dragonwand into the back of his belt, silently reminding himself for perhaps the hundredth time to buy or make the spell-stave some kind of shoulder-strap; then hunkered lower still and lifted ar Korentin from the ground.
    There was no visible expenditure of effort now: only a smooth surge of strength that seemed somehow more than human. He cradled the big man’s limp body in both arms as he might a child; as he had once carried his dead son; as he had once carried the young Alban warlord who was now his son. His own, most honorable son.
    Gemmel laid Dewan gently athwart the stern of the boat; then he raised the sail, steadied the tiller and spoke the soft sibilants which summoned up an offshore breeze, and though he was tired, unutterably drained and wearied by fear and physical effort and mental strain, he did all in the same abstracted manner—automatically, without thought.
    For his thoughts were elsewhere now. They were out
there
: across and beyond forty miles of gray water, a distance too far for even a suggestion of the Empire’s coast to shadow the horizon. All his thoughts, his hopes, his fears both real and imagined. Out in that far place. With the son who was not his son.
    And he wondered if his son was safe.

Chapter Three
Fire in the Night
    Outside was dark and cold; an autumn night already edged with the oncoming winter. A scimitar moon cut fitfully through weak places in the overlay of rain-swollen clouds.
    Inside was almost as dark, but within the small anonymous tavern the night was distinctly warmer. Flame-lapped pine logs burned slowly in a hearth of black wrought iron. Sparks glowed and spat; the blue, smoky air was scented with a sharp tang of resin; nimble shadows danced