Well, at least I’d burst the bars open, he thought, and tried not to panic.
About the time darkness fell, the towing stopped, with a sort of croak. Blade almost went to sleep in the blessed peace. Then doors banged, and voices woke him up, in the middle of an argument.
“Just no damned good!” said a man. “What’s the hurry?”
“I’ve told you,” said Barnabas’s voice, sounding breathy and frightened, “I need this cargo delivered to Costamaret tonight.”
“Well, it’s not going to be,” said another man.
The first man said, like somebody explaining to an infant, “This wizard glow of yours doesn’t light up the road enough. Not a rough road like this, going so fast, and towing. You want to risk a spill? Break all our necks?”
“So we wait out the night here and go on in the morning,” said the second man. “I could use some sleep.”
“I want a guard on the cargo then,” said Barnabas. “One of you sleep in the trailer.”
Cargo, thought Blade. That’s me. It was not good to know that someone who had been like an uncle to you all your life could talk of you as cargo. And mean it. Costamaret was even less good to think of. It was one of those places—No. Blade listened to one of the men climbing up beside the cage, snorting and grumbling as he wrapped himself in layers of coats against the cold. Don’t offer me one, will you? Blade thought. He listened and waited. The man in the cart fell asleep quickly, but Barnabas wandered in the road for a while, smoking a cigar. At last he climbed inside the horseless carriage and there was silence. Get drunk again, why don’t you? Blade thought. Very cautiously he reached up with his free left hand and began trying to undo the cage.
It fastened with a long bolt that had a padlock on the end of it. For a moment Blade thought he could undo it easily. Then his fingers closed around the padlock and were flung off by a feeling like an electric shock. A spell on it. An iron padlock, too. It took real wizard skills to bespell iron. Yet again Blade cursed the way Dad had refused to let him go to the University. He crouched with his face on the floor, wondering what to do.
Light feet landed on the roof of the cage, two pairs of them. Reville and Sukey? Blade thought, in a surge of hope he had not dared feel before. But there had been the faint ting of a claw on iron as the second pair of feet came down. “Blade?” whispered a well-known voice.
Blade nearly hit his head on the roof. “Lydda! Lydda, what are you doing here?”
“Ssh!” The man by the cage was stirring. Lydda waited until he had settled down again and then stuck her beak between the bars. It was an advantage griffins had over humans. They could direct a whisper with their beaks so that only one person could hear it. “I’ve been following you for hours,” Lydda whispered. “I smelled you in there.”
Lydda had always had the most acute sense of smell of all the griffins. What luck she was near! “But what are you doing here?” Blade whispered. “This is the road to Costamaret. I heard them say.”
“Flying about. Having fun,” Lydda replied. “I’d never been on my own before. I like it. Making campfires, cooking things I caught. Fun. But how do I get you out? There’s a spell on this padlock.”
“Try. It’s a bit like a stasis spell,” Blade whispered. “You could undo the ones in the kitchen.”
“Usually. Elda’s better at that than me. But I’ll have a go.” Lydda, by the faint sounds, sat back on her haunches and took a look at the padlock. At last, Blade heard a tiny scratching as Lydda put out one cautious talon and plucked at the spell. He felt the spell yielding.
And Barnabas exploded out of the carriage, shouting, in sheets of wizard fire.
Lydda screamed. Her wings whupped. And whupped again. Then she was gone, but whether she was safe or badly burned Blade had no idea. He touched the roof of the cage, and his fingers fizzled. He snatched them away. Oh, damn. Poor Lydda. Poorer me.
“What was that? What was that creature?” the man in the cart was demanding.
“I didn’t see. A small dragon, I think,” Barnabas said. “I just felt it fiddling with the lock spell. While you snored. Get up on top of the cage and sleep there.”
“No fear,” the man said earnestly.
“Do it, or I’ll burn you, too,” Barnabas said. “You’ve got a gun, haven’t you? Then get up there. Shoot the thing if it comes back.”
Blade listened to the man spreading coats on the hot roof and then climbing up there himself. There was no chance of anyone undoing the padlock now. He almost cried. He wished he knew where Lydda had gone, but there was no sign of her. Perhaps she had been very badly burned. He waited, hoping she would come back all the same, and fell asleep in the end, out of sheer misery.
At dawn the vehicle started off again. The men were complaining they were hungry and saying they could get breakfast in Costamaret. Barnabas said, “You could have been back in the mine by now,” as he checked to see if Blade was still crouched inside the cage. He did not speak to Blade. Just cargo, Blade thought.
The juddering and jolting were worse this time. The driver was going fast, causing the cart to slew about sick-makingly. Blade went back to just living again, with his chained arm wrapped around his head. It seemed to go on for hours.
Then suddenly there were houses whipping past outside and people getting out of the way. None of them seemed troubled at the sight of Blade rumbling by inside his cage. He got the idea that this was something they were quite used to seeing. But this part did not go on for long. The vehicle surged into a huge chilly shed, where a crane of some kind swung the cage off the cart and clanged it down on a stone floor.
“… so he can’t translocate,” Blade heard Barnabas saying breathily, not far away. “And I want this one dead as soon as possible. Understood?”
“Perfectly, Lord Wizard,” someone answered oilily. “We have the very thing.”
Barnabas left then. Blade was hauled out of the cage by cheerful brown men in loincloths. He was so jolted and cold and cramped that he could hardly walk. But they supported him expertly and rushed him to a small cubicle with a high bed in it, where one of them snapped the end of the chain into a fastening on the wall, and they left Blade alone there.
But not for long enough. Blade was still trying to get either his hand out of the cuff or the chain out of its lock when he was interrupted by another cheerful man in a loincloth. This one was twice the size of the first two.
“Oh, no, you won’t get loose like that!” this one told him jovially. “Stop wasting your strength, boyo, and turn over on your front.”
“Why?” Blade asked suspiciously.
“Because I’ve got to massage you to get you combat-fit. You go in the arena this afternoon,” the man told him. “This is Costamaret here, where we love to watch a proper fight. And we love the Pilgrim Parties for bringing us the idea. Of course we’ve improved on it. Got contests you’d never dream of. You’re booked for one of those. So lie flat, boyo, because I’ve only got four hours, and by the look of you, I’m going to need every minute.”
Blade looked at the man’s size. He sighed and wriggled flat on the high bed. “I’ve not done anything wrong,” he said. “I was kidnapped.”
“They all say that,” the large man said cheerfully. “Makes no difference to us. They all go in the arena, just the same.”
He set to work spreading Blade with oils until Blade felt like a salad—which made him think yearningly of Lydda again—and then pummeling and squeezing and bending Blade. It was not unpleasant. Blade could feel every single one of his muscles being made to work without using any energy. A bit later it was punishing. Then it got pleasant again. But the worst part was the way the man talked.
“Only two ways for you to get out of here, boyo,” he said, swatting at Blade’s stomach with the edges of his hands—bang, bang, bangbangbangbang. “Get carried out in a bucket or get the other man carried out. Kill enough of your opponents and they let you go free.” Bang, bang, bangbangbang.
“How many?”
Blade managed to ask.
“They keep putting the number up. Not sure what it is this week. Fifty?” Bang, bang, bangbangbang.
I am dead, Blade thought. He felt strange, as if he were not really present in the body the big man was so carefully kneading into shape.
“Starting your growth spurt, aren’t you?” the man remarked as he pulled and bent at Blade’s legs. “Lucky we got you at this stage. Much more impressive if you’re small in front of someone big. Much better show. Do well at it and we put a plaque up on your grave.”
At long last, the kneading and pummeling were finished. “There,” said the man. “Now you get a good meal. It’s up to you whether you eat it or not, but I advise you to try. More strength, better show.”
Blade was, in a remote, indifferent way, extremely hungry. When they brought the food, he propped it on his knees and ate it all. Then, rather to his own surprise, he fell asleep.
“Well done, boyo,” the large man said, waking him up. “Done everything right. Time to go. Get into these clothes.”
The clothes were of shoddy cloth, but very bright, scarlet breeches and crimson vest. Blade put them on, with the large man holding the chain and threading it through the vest for him, and then he was taken by other people down a corridor smelling of illness to a huge iron door. Just beside the door was a long coil of very thin chain attached to a sturdy staple. Blade watched, feeling depressed, while his own chain was fastened to the end of the thin chain. Beyond the door he could hear the noise of a large crowd of people chattering cheerfully. The audience, he thought. If I kill fifty opponents, he thought. No.
Another man came up with a list. “You’re down as expendable. You don’t get a weapon,” he told Blade. “But you’re allowed to use the chain. And remember. You fight, or you get a squirt of the fire hose. Ready?”
Blade shrugged. The list man took that as an answer and opened the iron door. When Blade did not move, two people took him by the shoulders and pushed him through.
There was quite a big oval space beyond, floored with sand. Benches went up all around, full of happy, chatting people. When they saw Blade stagger through the iron door, unreeling chain behind him, they cheered and clapped and gave catcalls. There were much louder howls for Blade’s opponent, who was being pushed through the door opposite on the end of six pitchforks. Blade’s stomach sank as he saw what he was supposed to fight with just a chain. It was a huge black griffin. One of its wings trailed, and it limped from a fire hose burn on one flank, but it was utterly formidable all the same.
I shall just walk to the middle and let it kill me, Blade thought. Then he recognized the griffin. It was Kit. But Kit so ragged, red-eyed, and shamed that Blade still hardly knew him.
Blade raced across the sand, dragging chain as he ran. The crowd got very excited, thinking Blade was going for a head-on attack. “Kit! Kit, what are you doing here?”
“Oh, gods!” said Kit. “How do we work this?”
“But—” Blade could see Kit was not chained the way he was himself. “But why don’t you just fly away?”
“One broken wing, both clipped,” Kit snapped, more thoroughly shamed than Blade had ever seen him. “Shut up, Blade. They burn you for not fighting. I’m supposed to kill you. What do we do?”
“False fight?” Blade suggested. “The way we used to frighten Mum?”
Kit brightened. “That might work. All right. One, two, and three!”
They jumped toward one another. False fighting, as they had perfected it when Kit was eleven and Blade ten, involved a lot of yelling, even more quick movement that meant nothing, and a great deal of rolling around. The crowd loved it. But it took Blade only half a minute to see it was not really working. He kept getting tripped by his own chain. Kit was even more hampered by his broken wing. When they tried the rapid roll over and over, Kit screamed and actually slashed at Blade in his pain. The crowd thumped feet on the wooden benches and roared. Blade rolled hurriedly away, as far as he could for the chain, which had somehow got wrapped around Kit’s right hind leg, and found that his crimson vest was split diagonally down the front to show a long, bleeding gash. He and Kit lay panting on the sand, staring at one another.
“Sorry,” Kit gasped. “I was going to let the next person kill me. Get the chain around my neck next time.”
“No,” said Blade. “Get this handcuff off me somehow. Then I can translocate us.”
“I’m too big.”
“I’ll do it somehow. I did Elda easily.”
“But I’d have to bite your hand off.”
The slash down Blade’s chest began to hurt fierily. He clenched his teeth. “If that’s what it takes, then bite it off.”
The crowd began a slow handclap. At the sides of the sandy arena, men in loincloths took the clips off the ends of hoses fastened to barrels and others stood up ready with tapers to light the gas that came out. Kit rolled an eye at them.
“We have to keep moving or they’ll burn us.”
“Let’s do the savage chase then,” Blade said. “Ready, steady, go!”
He got up and ran, sprinkling blood on the sand to the crowd’s great pleasure. Kit kicked his back leg free of chain and came after Blade with his neck stretched out, one wing spread and the other raised as far as it would go, moving his legs very fast almost on the spot. It looked spectacular. Shona always used to scream when they did it. This crowd screamed, too, and clapped, while Blade ran in an arc at the full stretch of his chain and the men with the fire hoses relaxed.
“Going to spring,” Kit warned Blade. “Now!”
He leaped, high and mightily. Blade plowed to a stop, fell on his back underneath Kit as Kit jumped, and ended up clinging to the underside of Kit’s body with his legs and arms. Kit yelled. Blade hastily moved so as not to hurt the broken wing any more than he had to. Kit began running back and forth in short charges, pretending to worry at Blade, with his head down between his own forelegs.
“What now?” he asked, looking upside down into Blade’s face. “I really don’t want to bite your hand off. The man I did that to—he bled to death.”
“But the cuff hasn’t got a lock,” Blade panted. “I think Barnabas put it on by magic. Can you get it off by magic?”
“No,” said Kit. “All the cuffs are fastened by a spell I don’t understand. That’s why I bit—”
Blade saw him look sideways and then upward. He rolled his head against the sticky, sandy fur of Kit’s chest and saw the fire hoses being lighted.
“Drop,” said Kit. “We may be lucky. I think it’s going to rain. Drop and run.”
Blade thumped to his back on the sand. It had certainly gone very dark, he saw, as Kit jumped aside. The crowd was bawling and screaming, and the men with the hoses were, for some reason, pointing their streams of fire up into the air. Perhaps the gas did not go out quite at once. Blade jumped to his feet, into a tremendous roll of fire. Both sides of the arena vanished in it for a moment. There was a sound that seemed to be thunder. As Blade staggered a few steps, fairly sure that the arena had been struck by lightning, the blaze cleared to show the exploded remains of barrels, shriveled hoses, and charred benches with little flames flickering on their edges. At the narrow ends of the arena, people were fighting one another to get out. And the thunder was louder than ever.
An enormous voice boomed out of the thunder. “Can’t you fly, cat-bird?”
“No, sir,” Kit shrieked. “Broken wing.”
“And I can’t land. Place too small. What’s wrong with the boy?”
“Iron!” bellowed Kit. “Stops his magic.”
“Stupid little beasts. Get beside him and keep still then.”
Blade collected his wits enough to look upward. Scales was hovering over the arena, filling the whole sky with the booming of his webby green wings. As Blade looked, Scales extended both gigantic forelegs and scooped Blade and Kit up in his talons. They might have been dolls. The great wings cracked like whips as Scales fought for height to get out of th
e burning arena, clutching the two of them to his hot, scaly chest. There came a painful jerk as they got to the end of Blade’s chain. Blade felt the cuff leave his wrist and craned out to watch it fall, chain and all, back into the sand, and wondered for a moment if his hand was down there with it. He held it up, in front of a whirling, diminishing view of a town with a huge pile of smoke rising from somewhere in the middle, and found he still had a hand after all. Then they were going up again, to level out. Kit, dangling like a kitten being carried, shot Blade a look, a mixture of shame and delight. Blade knew how Kit felt. You felt stupid, being carried by something this large, and very uncomfortable. Scales’s horny claws bit in around you, and Scales’s great voice came rumbling through the enormous, hard, bellowslike chest the claws had you clamped against.
“Stupid. One of them can’t heal himself; the other one can’t do iron spells. Any hatchling dragon would be better off than that.”
Though it was plain that Scales was simply grumbling to himself, Blade and Kit both squirmed. “Nobody taught me iron spells!” Blade called out.
“Even if I did know how to heal myself, it wouldn’t have helped!” Kit bellowed. “They clipped my wings!”
“Quiet,” Scales grunted. “Got to find the place—Oh, there she is.”
They were now well out over grasslands, faded creamy with the autumn. Blade saw the pale stretch of the earth tilt and rotate beneath them as Scales wheeled in against the wind. The great wings above and behind him cupped with a sound like a storm. The ground came rushing in toward them. It was much rougher than Blade had thought, and full of rocks. Scales’s voice rumbled, “Letting go now.”