Freer - Dog and Dragon

D OG AND

D RAGON

DAVE FREER

Baen

BAEN BOOKS by DAVE FREER

Dragons 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

WITH ERIC FLINT & MERCEDES LACKEY

The Shadow of the Lion

This Rough Magic

Much Fall of Blood

The Wizard of Karres

D OG AND D RAGON

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 2012 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: 978-1-4165-3811-0

Cover art by Bob Eggleton

First printing, April 2012

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Freer, Dave.

Dog and dragon / Dave Freer.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4516-3811-0 (trade pb)

I. Title.

PR9369.3.F695D64 2012

823.914dc23

2011053038

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

Printed in the United States of America

This one is for my Old English Sheepdog,

Roland, loyal companion, faithful friend.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to the many readers who asked for this, and to my editor, Toni Weisskopf, for listening. To my agent, Mike Kabongo, for getting me to write a high fantasy in the first place. As this is my first entirely Australian-written novel: To the Australian immigration authorities for letting us come here to our own enchanted island, Flinders, and to all those who saw our animals (Roly, Puggles, Wednesday, and Duchess, Robin and Batman) safe through quarantine and here with us. To the friends who helped us settle in so that I could write, and the ones (thats you, Jamie) who came up with good ways to kill monsters.

And, as always, most thanks to Barbara, for editing, supporting and driving through Melbourne traffic.

Characters

Chapter 1

Back to the sunset bound of Lyonesse

A land of old upheaven from the abyss

By fire, to sink into the abyss again;

Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,

And the long mountains ended in a coast

Of ever-shifting sand, and far away

The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

Idylls of the King, Tennyson

Who are you? hissed the lithe, dark-eyed man with the drawn sword.

Meb blinked at him. Her transition from the green forests of Arcady to this dark, stone-flagged hall had been instantaneous. The stone walls were hung with displays of arms and the horns of stags. Otherwise there was not much to separate it from a cave or prison, with not so much as an arrow slitlet alone a windowto be seen in the stone walls.

In Tasmarin from whence she had come, she had known just who she was: Scrap, apprentice to the black dragon that destroyed the worlds. You could call her anything else, but that was who she had been. Now...

Cat got your tongue, wench? he said quietly. Well, no matter, Ill have to kill you anyway.

He swung the sword at her in a vicious arc.

Moments ago, before shed made the choice that swept her magically from Tasmarin, from the green forest of Arcady, shed thought she might be better off dead rather than leaving them behind. Leaving him behind.

Now she discovered that her body didnt want to die just yet. She threw herself backwards, not caring where she landed, as long as it was out of reach of the sword.

She screamed. And then swore as the blade shaved along her arm to thud into the kist she had fallen over. She kicked out, hard, catching her attacker in the midriff, knocking the breath out of him in an explosive gasp. Trying to find breath, he still pulled weakly at the sword now a good two-finger-widths deep into the polished timber of the kist. Meb wasnt going to wait.

But it looked as if she wasnt going to run very far either. Her scream, and possibly the swearing, had called others, and the great iron-studded doors were flung open as men-at-arms with bright swords and scale armor rushed in.

As she turned to run the other way, her passage was blocked by a sleepy-looking manalso with a sword, emerging from the only other doorway.

There wasnt a window to be seen.

She wanted one, badly.

And then she saw one, in the recessed wall to her left. She just plainly hadnt spotted it before.

She ran to it, and realized it wasnt going to help much. In the moonlight she could see that it opened onto a hundred feet of jagged cliff, to an angry sea, frothing around sharp rock teeth far below.

Some of the soldiers surrounded the man shed kicked. Theyd blocked her escape too, but you couldnt really call it surrounding her. Not unless that included getting as far from her as possible, while not leaving the other prisoner, or the room.

The man who had looked so sleepy moments before didnt anymore. His sword was up, ready, his eyes wide as they darted from the window to her, seemingly unsure which was more shocking.

Who are you? he asked.

There was something weaselly about him that made her very wary about answering, in case her words were twisted against her.

And why did they all want to know something she wasnt too sure of herself?

* * *

There was a narrow bridge across the void. Along it walked a black-and-white sheepdog, followed by a black dragon. The dog never looked back at the dragon, just forward, his questing written into every line of his body, from the mobile, pointed ears to the feathered tail.

The bridge itself was narrowmade of vast, interlocking blocks of adamantineor at least that is the way it looked. Reality might be somewhat different, at least to the eyes of a planomancer. Such eyes would see deeper than the ordinary spectra of light, and could see patterns of energy. Fionn, the black dragon, saw it all as the weave of magics that made the bridge between the planes of existence. He knew the bridge was fragile and fraught with danger. That did not stop him walking along it, any more than it stopped Dleas the sheepdog.

The bridge was barely two cubits wide and had no rail. Far, far below seethed the tumult of primal chaos. The only way the dog could go was straight ahead. He kept looking left though.

That was where he wanted to go. Sometimes he would raise his nose and sniff.

Fionn knew there was nothing to smell out here. The air that surrounded the bridge was drawn and melded by the magics of it, from the raw chaos. It was new air, and Fionn knew that it did not exist a few paces behind them, or a few paces ahead.

He was still sure Dleas was following the faint trail of something. A something which even a very clever dog could best understand as scent... even if there was nothing to smell.

At least he hoped that was the case.

Hoped with ever fiber of his very ancient being.

Fionn had long since given up on caring too much. He was not immortal, as far as he knew. He could certainly be killed. But compared to others, even of his own kind, the black dragon was long-lived. Time passed, and so did friends. His work was never done, fixing the balance, keeping the planes stable. He moved on.