We left Elvenset more or less in one piece. Durlan stayed behind to help with the cleanup and to comb through Beiydark’s research — his order’s copy of it, anyway — with a promise to relay anything useful once he made his way back to the fief. Momen had his books back. I had my musket, and a second one besides. There was nothing left to do in that town but leave it.
Getting out was the trouble. We’d come in on Rafnar’s teleport, which meant we needed Rafnar to get us out, and the temple barrier doesn’t let just anyone through. Drusilia offered to open a channel for him — something she said Beiydark would never have permitted, but Beiydark isn’t here to object anymore. I focused on Rafnar’s card and put the call through.
He arrived furious, and looking it. As it turns out, three days ago — when Lathaeril and Durlan’s bickering threw off the casting meant to bring us all in together — Rafnar didn’t simply set us down in the wrong patch of forest and wander off. He landed above a tree, in a nest of webs, with drow swarming all around him mid-ritual. He had to kill something like thirty spiders, fight clear through the interference of the barrier and the rituals both, and figure out where in the world he even was. We never once thought to check on him. I remember meaning to, in the moment, and then there was always something else bleeding or on fire. He swears he’ll never teleport to that place again. I didn’t argue. The one mercy was that we weren’t bringing Lathaeril or Durlan along this time.
Before we went anywhere we collected Professor Lassagaseer, who has decided to throw in with us as visiting faculty rather than chance whatever happens to him back in Torveldus. He’s the only one of us with a first-hand account of what’s happening there, so when the question came up of where to go first, the answer chose itself: not home, but straight to the nobles, to put what we know in front of them in person. Rafnar dropped the lot of us in the Imperial Plains, outside Elkenalden. I tipped him extra for his trouble. It did not improve his mood.
We found the Empress draped sideways across her throne with her legs over one arm of it, looking fit to burst — she has been pregnant a long while now, and is near the end of it. The throne sits right inside the front door, so that anyone who wishes an audience must walk past her to get anywhere. As we came in, a Marquis stormed off in a huff — the same one, I gather, who’d been egging the Empress to invade Torveldus the last time we were here. Duke Oberstein broke off from him to greet us. Then the Empress called out, “Honey, I’m hungry,” and the Duke excused himself, fetched a plate, handed it over, and let her pat him on the head before he came back to us. Not the work of a servant. But this is a woman who fought goblins on the front lines while carrying a child, so I suppose feeding her is the one duty he doesn’t delegate.
He brought us somewhere quieter to talk. Lassagaseer gave his account, and it is not a comfortable one. The Marquis Marquaad has started a civil war in Torveldus through assassination and open warfare both, and has taken the eastern half of the country. In answer, Duke Reinhardt seems to have turned to bio-warfare: town guards biting people, spreading the Minamata Malady — the silvery skin, the irritability and lethargy and failing memory, and at the end of it the body becoming a vessel for the ancient dragon Hydrargyrum. Momen filled in the rest of what we’d seen at Elvenset — four schemes piled on top of one another, the malady and Aemmin Simserion’s ritual and the mind flayers and the drow, all clawing at the same town at once. The temple held. The Moonblade found itself a new champion who is busy carving through the drow, so that corner is quiet for now. But Aemmin finished his phylactery. We were a quarter of an hour too late.
The worse news came from the Duke. In the few days we’d been gone, reports had started coming in of the same malady cropping up across Datrus itself. He sent Momen and Lassagaseer off to pore over Beiydark’s notes for anything that might help contain it, and asked the rest of us — myself and Tittlin — whether we cared to sit in the sauna while they worked.
That sauna is where the Duke does his real talking. With Momen safely buried in research and still in the dark, he asked whether we’d told the Professor anything yet — meaning both Momen and Lassagaseer, who know nothing of the conspiracy and are, Tittlin pointed out, useful precisely because they can look anyone in the eye and mean it when they says we’re up to nothing. The Duke offered to summon Momen later and lay the whole thing out himself, as though recruiting us fresh, so Momen wouldn’t stew over having been kept out of it. I told him that would help. I can see Momen taking it hard otherwise.
Then he gave us the timeline. The Empress is near her due date, and the strike on the Lord of Ice is to come just after she gives birth — about a month out, five weeks at the most — because that is when the dragon’s hold over her is weakest. Tittlin, ever practical about killing things, asked what manner of dragon we’d be facing so his Fletcher could prepare arrows for it. The answer: an ancient cobalt dragon, so old it is nearing Great Worm, bordering on divine. Extremely hard to kill. Leave it a few more years and it becomes impossible. The Duke told Tittlin to send the invoices for the arrows to the Imperial Capital.
Back at the table, Momen and Lassagaseer had wrung a great deal out of Beiydark’s notes. The malady has three routes: a bite mixing saliva into blood, which we knew; anything vampiric — a mosquito, say — carrying it blood to blood; and, most unsettling, the quicksilver blood itself being contagious if inhaled or drowned in. It incubates a fortnight before any sign shows, then takes its victim a few days after — which lines up neatly with when the war began and when the reports started. There are three cures as well: lesser restoration, of which there are never enough priests; Sailor’s Omen, a rare reddish algae you find where sharks have fed, good against sea-poison and as a hangover cure, which I know from time spent at sea; and the blood of non-metallic dragons, where a single beast yields thousands of doses. Non-metallic — which means killing the Lord of Ice won’t cure a single soul, since cobalt is metallic. It does dovetail with Momen’s own work, though; he needs an adult dragon regardless, and a drained one would cure a great many people. The Duke resolved to put bounties on Sailor’s Omen, direct the priests, and arrange a dragon hunt for us besides. Beiydark’s notes, for what it’s worth, show a woman who cared more for studying the disease than stopping the drow, and who killed people to have subjects to study — not spreading it on purpose, perhaps, but no innocent either.
Then Lassagaseer was sent off to bathe in peace, and the Duke took the three of us back to the sauna, and at last told us the truth of the thing.
The story Datrus tells of its founding is a lie of omission. Melicenda was not born to noble rebels. She was born in a warlord’s harem, and when the women fled she ran into a cave the goblins themselves wouldn’t enter, going deeper and colder until she came on a dragon with scales like sapphires. It tried to enchant her; she put an enchanted shield into its eye instead. From the wound she struck, she made her bargain — power and wisdom to destroy the goblins, in exchange for returning to bear the dragon’s children — and she drank its blood, and it gave her its name. That dragon is the Lord of Ice, and it lies still in the Imperial Crypt, wound through the Imperial line. The ice in the Empress, in young Sofia, the warmth that keeps Elkenalden from freezing in winter — all of it runs back to the thing in the crypt. “We got history,” the Duke kept saying, and we did.
That is what he wants Momen for. He summoned him to the sauna, told the tale again, and made the offer plainly: help us kill the Lord of Ice, and you may keep the body of an ancient dragon for your research. Momen flinched at the word conspirator, as well he might. The Duke’s plan, as he laid it out for us in objectives:
First, weaken the Imperial Guard — either by slipping into the guard house and reassigning them off the heat pumps, or by staging a false-flag attempt on the Empress’s life to pull them all toward the palace. Then destroy the three magical heat pumps that keep the lair too cold for any unblessed man to enter, in quick succession — a bonus if we manage all three inside three hours. Then down into the Imperial Catacombs to kill the dragon.
On our side we have the Cedar Combe Monster Bashers, the Duke himself — the greatest warrior the line has produced — and Friar Zeckus, one of the most powerful clerics in the country and a dwarf who, mercifully, says very little. And one more. The rusty old sword we pulled from that crypt belonged to Isabel the Second, the woman who won the Civil War by killing her sisters, who lies in the Imperial Crypt buried under another name — Eornthryth Touchet’s, whose true grave is elsewhere in the Dorthana crypt. The Duke means to resurrect her and point her at the dragon. Friar Zeckus can do the tearing-back-of-a-soul that Momen, sensibly, refuses to touch himself.
I put forward the giants we helped, who hate dragons — but the trouble is getting them into the capital, and Momen tells me giants and dwarves have never gotten along, so he’d be a poor envoy. Momen offered two of his own: the would-be Níðhöggr, the unusually clever melanistic white dragon scheming to supplant the current one and ascend to Great Worm — a thing he might be baited into by the chance to prove his claim to godhood — and TM Opera, the silver dragon we assisted at the Derby. The Duke told us to try recruiting all of them: the giants, the would-be Níðhöggr, whoever we can reach.
So there it is. Five weeks to gather enough power and allies to kill an ancient dragon that has been the engine of the Empire since its founding — while a civil war burns in Torveldus, a plague spreads across Datrus, and Aemmin works toward lichdom, all at once. A coup that the public will never see, because the hands of government won’t change. When I said it didn’t seem we had much of a choice, the Duke didn’t disagree. A building’s merely a building, he said. It can be rebuilt.
Tittlin made a remark that might have been a bit of a tell, but the Duke covered for him with a straight face. Momen was a bit suspicious but let it go after the Duke’s persuasion. Then he gave his word, against his better judgment, and so did I — if the Professor’s in, I’m in. After that there was nothing left to do but sweat in silence a while longer and try not to think too hard about what we’d just agreed to.