“My point exactly,” Olive said. “And next time you’ll have both Dragonbait and Alias to deal with. Now, if, my services were suddenly available on your side of the dispute …” Again she let her voice trail off.
For several moments, the only sound was the rush of the wind. Finally, Mist said, “Why the shift in loyalties?”
The halfling considered how much she wanted the dragon to know. The game I’ve been playing for Phalse has become too dangerous, Olive thought. I’d have no trouble fooling Alias. Dragonbait, however, is not so easily deceived.
To Mist Olive simply said, “Let’s just say I do not trust our companion. He has misrepresented himself and that makes me uncomfortable. I’m not sure I want to continue traveling with him much longer.”
“But you still want to rescue the woman.”
The dragon was no dotard, Olive realized. “Yes,” she admitted. “I want to rescue Alias. You might wish to reconsider which warrior has done the most to earn your vengeance. If you decide on the lizard rather than the woman, you will find yourself with an ally.”
“I see.”
“Besides,” the halfling added, “Alias has a lot of enemies. She is bound to get her comeuppance sooner or later.”
The dragon banked again, then spoke. “I’ll take your suggestion under advisement. Speaking of His Righteousness, turn around and see what he wants.”
The bard twisted in her makeshift saddle. Dragonbait was banging on the side of Mist’s neck with the flat of his blade. Having caught the bard’s attention, he pointed southward.
“I think he wants you to get on with the hunt. He’s pointing south.”
“Everyone thinks they’re an expert.”
“I imagine he thinks he’s the boss,” Olive replied slyly.
Mist’s neck stiffened some, and she remained silent. She banked again and began to glide away from Yulash.
“Can you see the monster’s trail from this height?” the halfling asked.
“Bard, I can see field mice from this height.”
“Um, I guess I meant, could I have a look?”
Mist turned her head ever so slightly so Olive could peer down at the ground. Yulash looked as though it would fit in the palm of her hand. Four roads stretched away from it, east, west, northeast, and northwest, but far wider than the roads was a path of crushed vegetation and broken copses of trees heading south by southeast.
“Just how wide is that trail?” Olive asked, unable to judge size from such a distance.
“About fifty feet. Though it seems to be growing the farther south we go,” Mist mused.
“This Abomination must be huge,” the halfling cautioned. “Think you can handle it?”
“Not handle a shambling mound with a gland problem?” Mist sniffed. “So far you’ve only seen me in action in Feints of Honor. Unfettered by conventions, I am a force to be reckoned with.”
“You fight dirty,” Olive translated.
“That walking garbage heap will want a bath when I’m through with it,” Mist bragged.
The bard smiled. She turned to look at Dragonbait. He kept his eyes fixed on the plains.
“Does he have a name? Besides Dragonbait, I mean.”
“Indeed,” the dragon answered. “But it doesn’t translate well. I much prefer Dragonbait. It’s so appropriate.”
Without the thermals rising from Yulash, Mist was forced to pump her wings to preserve her altitude. The conversation with the halfling ended as Mist conserved her breath for the exertion of flying.
Far in the distance, on the southern horizon, a line of green marked the Abomination’s destination—the Elven Wood.
22
Moander’s Revelation and the Rescue Attempt
“You really don’t know, do you?” Moander asked with Akabar’s tongue. Carefully it rearranged the merchant-mage’s face. Placing a hand against his cheek, it dropped his jaw, mimicking a look of extreme shock.
“I don’t know what?” Alias asked, but even as she spoke, some notion stirred deep within her consciousness like a serpent that had slumbered heavily and was only now rising, rising quickly to strike at unwary prey—her.
“You carry my sign,” Moander said in Akabar’s cheeriest voice. “And you have done me a great service, so I should return the favor. It will help pass the time, and, I think, upset you.”
“First, understand this,” Moander said, using the formal words of a southern scholar. It pointed one of Akabar’s fingers at her face. “You are a made thing, no different than a clay pot or a forged sword or some creeping bit of gunk in an alchemist’s lab. Is that clear?”
“I don’t belie—” Alias began, but the serpent notion sank its fangs deep into her heart. Beneath the mossy blankets her branded sword arm responded with a sympathetic ache.
“Yes, you do believe me,” Moander insisted. “Now that I have told you, you cannot resist the truth. Golem. Homonculous. Simulacrum. Clone. Automaton. All these things come close to describing what you are. But not completely. You are a new thing, for the moment unique. A fake human, but to all appearances the real thing. You are an abomination cloaked in the manner and dress of the everyday.”
As a mage and scholar, Akabar would no doubt have recognized the words Moander used to describe her, but to Alias most of them were gibberish. She had a notion they involved arcane rituals of the type that made her not only non-born, but inhuman as well.
“Now, know this,” it demanded. “Your spirit is enslaved in the prison of that body, and that body is a puppet. A puppet made of meat, you might say, in much the same way as is the body I use to speak with you.” To dramatize its point, Moander lifted Akabar’s elbow into the air, leaving his forearm and hand to droop, and slouching his other shoulder downward so he resembled a marionette supported only by a single invisible thread.
Alias’s mouth opened and closed, but she could think of no retort. Moander continued its lecture without acknowledging her distress.
“Now, golems and automatons follow a set pattern, invested into their make-up at their creation. These patterns are usually very rigid, no more complicated than ‘guard this room,’ or ‘kill the first man to enter.’ Useless rot, entirely too limited. No creativity or resourcefulness or initiative.
“But you,” his tone lowered with pride, “you were built differently. It took many hands to create you. My followers allied with mages, thieves and assassins, a daemon of great power, and … well, the other hardly matters. With your deceptive appearance you can allay suspicion and travel at will until you have fulfilled your patterns—traveled all the paths set before you.”
“Paths?” said Alias. Her chest felt tight, as though she were being crushed by the mad god’s words. Each claim it made struck a resonant chord inside her, leaving her unable to deny what the god said. She choked back her screams, determined not to show this monster her helpless rage.
“Yes, paths or patterns, whose eventual outcome will be the accomplishment of some goal set by each of your makers. Rather than simply issue you some rigid order, we set you on a course whereupon you would achieve these goals without knowing what they were, or even, once they were achieved, that you had done so. You could commit theft, espionage, sabotage, murder, and never know why or for whom, not always remembering, other times believing it to have been your own idea.”
They’ve made me a damned thing, Alias thought, like the bowl that carries poison or the sword that deals a death blow. She pressed her nails into her palms and once again began breathing too fast.
“The goal set for you by my last few followers was to seek my prison and release my Abomination form so that my spirit could return to this world. It was my life energy, summoned and collected by my followers, that brought you to life, you see, so that you, the non-born child, could free me.”