The Veiled Dragon

Three

The caravel’s bowsprit shot over the dune crest, less the twenty yards from the raft. Beneath the giant spar, illuminated by the pearlescent sphere of a silver glass lantern, hung the magnificent sculpture of a square-snouted dragon. With its delicately curled horns, ball-shaped eyes, and lustrous green scales, the beast looked nothing like the wyrm that had destroyed the Storm Sprite. The figurehead’s glowering face appeared more reproachful than vicious, and there was nothing in its expression to suggest bloodlust or insatiable greed. Still, the thing was clearly a dragon, and that was enough to give Ruha pause.

The caravel’s great prow burst through the back side of the dune, hurling curtains of spray high into the air. Ruha pointed at the figurehead.

“Do you see that, Captain Fowler? Is that not a dragon’s head?”

The witch sat near the back corner of the raft, her mangled thigh extended before her. During the twenty minutes it had taken Fowler and Arvold to paddle into the caravel’s path, everything below the tourniquet had grown numb and cool to the touch, and now the leg was beginning to turn blue, as she could tell whenever the moon’s silver light flashed across her bare flesh.

When Captain Fowler did not comment on the figurehead, Ruha asked, “Why does the caravel carry such a thing on its bow? Could that be the reason the dragon attacked it?”

Fowler set aside the plank he had been using as a paddle. “I think not, Witch. Half the prows on the Dragonmere bear figureheads of such fiends, to scare off monsters of the deep.”

Ruha studied the figurehead more carefully, then shook her head. “That carving does not look frightening to me.”

The captain had no time to answer, for the bow of the great caravel was already slipping past. Along the wales stood a dozen dark figures, all shining storm lanterns over the rail. Both Fowler and Arvold jumped to their feet and waved their arms in excitement. From the shadows behind the lantern bearers emerged a figure holding a large bow nocked with a white, round-nosed arrow.

The man loosed his bowstring. The white shaft sailed over the raft, trailing a thick dark cord. Fowler let the line fall upon the planks, then grabbed it and pulled the arrow aboard. He snapped the shank at its base, then he and Arvold started to thread the rope through the raft lashings. As they worked, the caravel continued to lumber past, taking up the rescue line’s slack at an alarming pace. The lantern bearers walked toward the great ship’s stern, trying to keep their lights focused upon the raft. The heaving sea made their task an impossible one, forcing Ruha’s companions to labor in an irritating kaleidoscope of flashing beams. By the time the pair finished, the rescue line was stretching taut and the lantern bearers were standing atop what remained of their ship’s battered poop deck.

“Hold fast!”

Resuming his place at the front corner, Arvold fell to the deck and grabbed the edges of the planks. Fowler dropped beside Ruha, flinging one arm over her shoulders and pinning her to the wet planks. The witch had barely twined her fingers into the lashings before the rescue line snapped tight and jerked the raft so violently it left the water.

The flimsy vessel splashed into the water an instant later. From that moment on, it seemed to Ruha that they spent as much time traveling beneath the surface as they did above it. Every time they came to another sea dune, the rescue line would drag them through its steep face, burying the raft under a foamy torrent that threatened to sweep the witch and her companions into the Dragonmere. A moment later, they would emerge on the other side and drop into the trough, then slam into the face of the next dune and disappear beneath the raging sea.

Between dousings, Ruha gasped, “Surely, there is a—” She grunted as they slammed into a trough. “—a better way to bring us aboard!”

The caravel pulled them through another sea dune. When they came out the other side, Fowler asked, “Can you fly, Witch?”

“That is bird magic,” Ruha answered. “If I could fly, why would … ugh!… why would I have hired you to sail me across the Dragonmere?”

After they plunged through another dune, Fowler said, “Then this is the only way. In a sea this rough, a big ship like that can’t be stopping to take aboard passengers!”

They slammed into another trough; then the ride smoothed out as they entered the caravel’s wake. The ship’s crew hauled the raft up to the stern corner and lowered a rope. Fowler tied Ruha in first, and the line tightened around her chest. She rose alongside the rudder more than fifteen feet before she reached the somercastle and began to scrape along its back wall. The witch bit her lip to keep from crying out. Though her mangled leg was too numb to feel anything, she had many other cuts and bruises that protested the rough treatment.

After a painful ascent of another ten feet, several pairs of hands caught her beneath the arms and pulled her into the ruins of a luxurious officer’s cabin. The walls, or rather what remained of them, were draped with silken tapestries depicting fanciful scenes of domestic bliss, and the floor was covered by wool carpet as plush and finely loomed as those woven by Ruha’s own people.

A pair of rescuers leaned over the witch, and she gasped. Both men had smooth, yellow-tinted features, with small noses and narrow, slanted eyes. Neither face matched the one she had seen in her vision, but they obviously belonged to the same race as the man in the mirage.

The elder of the pair, a distinguished-looking man with graying hair and a yellow patch over one eye, spoke to the other in a lilting language of short syllables and fluctuating pitches. Both men were slight of build and no taller than Ruha herself, and they wore high-necked tunics with long sleeves and hems that swept the floor.

When the first man finished speaking, the second bowed to him, then bowed to Ruha. “Please to allow me to present Mandarin Hsieh Han Liu, Imperial Minister of Spices to Emperor Kao Tsao Shou Tang, Jade—”

The one-eyed man hissed at the speaker, who continued his introduction with barely a pause, “Jade Monarch of Shou Lung and of all Civilized Lands.”

The one-eyed man bowed to Ruha, who sat upright and dipped her chin in return. Across the cabin, several more small, yellow-skinned men were hauling up the other end of the rescue line, which they had tossed down to the raft once she was aboard. Anxious to avoid being dragged overboard if their hands slipped, the witch began to untie herself.

“I am called Ruha.” She spoke directly to the one-eyed man, who could hardly have corrected his translator without himself understanding Common. “I thank you for saving my life, Minister Hsieh.”

“Many thanks to you, also. You save Emperor’s ship, and lives of many humble servants.” Hsieh bowed again, letting pass his façade of not speaking Common. He motioned to a corner behind Ruha, and an old man with a knobby, shaven head stepped out of the shadows. “Please to allow physician to see leg.”

“Physician?”

“The mandarin’s healer,” explained Hsieh’s assistant.

When the witch nodded, the physician kneeled at her side and set a box of carved ivory upon the floor. He pulled her tattered aba away to inspect the savaged leg. The constant deluge of sea water had kept the wound surprisingly clean, so Ruha saw that the fish had cut a circular laceration into the side of her thigh. The bite was nearly a foot in diameter, and in one place so deep she saw a white sliver of bone.

Captain Fowler clambered into the cabin and stepped brusquely to Ruha’s side, mercifully drawing her attention away from her leg. “How you faring? Will you live until I get my cog?”

Frowning at the half-orc’s swinish face, Hsieh stepped back and called something sharp through the cabin’s shattered doorway.

Ruha cocked an eyebrow at Fowler. “Surely, you do not intend to be rude, Captain.” She gestured to the mandarin. “Allow me to present you to Minister Hsieh Han Liu, Imperial Minister of Spices to the Emperor Kao Tsao Shou Tang—”

“Jade Dragon of Shou Lung and all civilized lands—I know.” Despite the undue emphasis he had placed on the word civilized, Fowler bowed deeply to the mandarin. “I’ve run cargo for the Ginger Palace a time or two—though I’ve never had the pleasure of boarding one of your junks before.”

Hsieh relaxed and once again called down the corridor, then returned the half-orc’s bow—though not so deeply, and without taking his gaze from Fowler’s eyes. “Captain Fowler? Then you give order to attack dragon?”

“Aye.” Fowler nodded. “But it was the Lady Witch’s idea, and her magic that destroyed it.”

Both the mandarin and his assistant regarded Ruha with renewed respect, and the physician began to probe her wounds more gently. Hsieh bowed to Ruha again. “Forgive my discourtesy, but you do not call yourself Lady Ruha. Do you require anything?”

Ruha scowled, puzzled by Hsieh’s reaction. She was accustomed to strange reactions when people discovered she was a witch, but that did not seem to be what troubled the mandarin.

“Please, Minister Hsieh, I am not …”

Fowler’s head twisted ever so slightly from side to side.

Since the captain had at least some acquaintance with the Shou, Ruha decided to follow his lead. “Please, I am not accustomed to showing my face. I need a shawl and veil.”

Hsieh glanced at his translator, who said something into his ear. The mandarin scowled, and they had a short exchange, then the assistant bowed and scurried out of the cabin.

“Yu Po goes to fetch finest scarves from our cargo.”

As Hsieh spoke, the physician pulled a pair of silver tongs from his box. The old man opened the instrument slightly and slipped the jaws into the deepest part of Ruha’s wound, where she had glimpsed her white bone.

“Say if this hurt, Lady Ruha.”

The physician closed the tongs, then worked them back and forth. Ruha heard a faint crunching sound. She felt a gentle vibration deep in her hip, but her leg had gone so numb below the tourniquet that she barely noticed the metal rubbing her mangled flesh. The old man gave his instrument a final twist and withdrew a huge triangle of serrated tooth.

“When the fish attacked, I … I heard something crack,” Ruha gasped. “I thought the thing had broken my leg.”

“Leg fine. Bone strong.”

The physician returned his tongs to the ivory box and withdrew a handful of yellow powder, which he carefully sprinkled into the bite. Once the entire gash was filled with the dust, he half-whistled a series of strange, high-pitched syllables. The powder vanished with a flash of golden light; then a ring of brownish smoke drifted from the wound and filled the little cabin with the smell of brine and burnt flesh. The old man inspected the results, then took a hooked needle and a length of black thread from his box. When he began to sew, Ruha felt nothing more than an occasional tug.

The Shou crewmen soon pulled the raft’s last survivor, Arvold, into the cabin. Hsieh regarded the bedraggled sailmender with an enigmatic gaze, scrutinizing the shabby tunic and the length of rope that held up his trousers. He glanced at Captain Fowler, whose dress was only marginally better, then looked back to Ruha for an introduction.

“The sailmender,” Ruha explained.

“Put him where you can watch him,” warned Fowler. “He’s a hopeless thief, but he’s good with a needle. I’d hate for you to lop off one of his hands.”

Hsieh raised his brow at the frank appraisal, then spoke to two of his men, who promptly escorted the sailmender out of the cabin.

“They put him with others,” explained the mandarin.

“Others?” Ruha could not keep the hope out of her voice. She considered the sinking of the Storm Sprite her doing, and it would ease her conscience to hear the crew had survived. “How many did you save?”

Hsieh’s lip curled disdainfully, whether at the witch’s concern or the memory of the human dregs his crew had dragged from the sea, Ruha did not know.

“We save ten men,” the mandarin reported. “But tonrongs do not treat them well.”

“Tonrongs?” Ruha asked.

“Sharks,” Fowler explained. “The lions of the sea, ’cept they eat anything, and they’re always hungry.”

Hsieh nodded. “Yes. Tonrongs take limbs from four of your men, and they soon die.”

Ruha felt a guilty emptiness in her stomach. Unless they found more survivors, three-quarters of the Storm Sprite’s crew would perish. She let a weary groan slip from her lips, which caused the physician to jerk his bloody finger out of her wound.

“So sorry, Lady! Did not mean to cause pain.”

Fowler regarded Ruha with renewed concern, then turned to the physician. “She going to die before we reach port?”

The physician’s shaved scalp turned an angry orange. “Not die at all! I treat Emperor once!” He tried to slip a finger under Ruha’s tourniquet and barely succeeded, then nodded his head approvingly. “Not even lose leg—maybe.”

Ruha mewled, then clamped her jaw shut to keep from showing any more fear. Despite her efforts, her lips began to tremble and beads of cold sweat rolled down her brow.

Hsieh spoke harshly to the old man, who paled and stooped even closer to his work.

“I tell physician if you lose leg, he lose leg. But if he fail anyway, I give you leg’s weight in gold.” The generous offer drew an astonished gasp from Fowler, but the mandarin was not finished. “Also, Emperor’s treasury pays for loss of ship, and more, when we reach Ilipur.”

Deciding it would be wiser to let Hsieh draw his own conclusions about who owned the Storm Sprite, Ruha said, “My business is in Pros, Minister Hsieh. I understand it is on the way. Perhaps you would put us ashore there?”

A look of chagrin flashed across the mandarin’s face. “All our gold vanish with dragon. Nothing left on Ginger Lady but spice and ylang blossom.”

“Nevertheless, I prefer—”

“Lady Witch, Ilipur’s but a short distance up the shore.” Fowler narrowed his eyes, trying to fill his glower with subtle menace. “It’ll take only a few days extra.”

Ruha returned Fowler’s glare with a disdainful glance. “And what of the people I am to meet in Pros? How long will they wait?” She looked back to Hsieh. “Put us ashore in Pros, and I will ask only one reward of you.”

Hsieh glanced at her sodden aba, no doubt reevaluating his first impression of her wealth. Only a woman of great resources would decline the reward he had promised.

The mandarin inclined his head. “If it is in my power, I give you whatever you ask.”

“Please tell me about the dragon. Why did it attack your ship?”

“That’s our reward?” Fowler bellowed.

Hsieh’s glance darted from Fowler to his crewmen. Two men quickly flanked the captain, their heads rising barely as high as the half-orc’s brawny shoulders.

“Aboard Ginger Lady, even captain respect Lady,” Hsieh warned.

Fowler’s eyes flashed at the admonishment, but he stood very still and made no further protests.

Hsieh turned back to Ruha, arching his fine eyebrows. “I do not understand question. Dragon attacks ship to steal gold. That is reason dragon does anything.”

Ruha shook her head. “That wyrm was not an ordinary one, nor does the Ginger Lady seem an ordinary ship. The creature attacked you for another reason, and the reward I ask is that you tell me why.”

A nervous croak slipped from Fowler’s lips. Before the sound could become a word, the guards seized his hands and folded his wrists inward against their joints. The half-orc hissed in pain and looked away from the witch.

The mandarin pretended not to notice the captain’s slip, but his face lost all expression and became as unreadable as a stone. “I do not understand, Lady Ruha. Why do you believe we know dragon?”

The image of a yellow face changing into a black dragon flashed through Ruha’s mind, but she did not even consider telling Hsieh about the mirage. Judging by Fowler’s reactions so far, the Shou were a dangerous people, and she had no idea how they might react to her visions.

Ruha paused to pick her words, then said, “Does the Ginger Lady not carry a dragon’s figurehead on her prow? And was my captain mistaken when he called your emperor the Jade Dragon instead of the Jade Monarch?”

Fowler closed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.

The mandarin showed no sign of anger—or any other emotion. “Lady Ruha, greatest dragons are not evil. I do not know why evil dragon attacks Ginger Lady, except to take gold. I go to Elversult on unfortunate business that has nothing to do with dragon. I never see that dragon before.”

“This unfortunate business you speak of, could it involve the dragon?” Ruha asked.

The narrowing of Hsieh’s eyes was barely perceptible, but it was enough to alarm Fowler.

“Lady Ruha, the Shou are an honorable bunch.” Though the captain struggled to keep his tone deferential, Ruha could hear both anger and fear lurking just beneath the surface. “If the mandarin’s business has something to do with the dragon, he’d say so. It’s—uh—bad manners to hint he’s holding back.”

Hsieh nodded. “Am so sorry, Lady Ruha, but you make poor bargain to trade your due for what little I know of dragon. Perhaps I find some other way to reward your noble service.” The mandarin spoke to his men, then went to the cabin’s shattered doorway and bowed to Ruha. “Until then, I am most happy to leave you in Pros.”