Dragon - Dragon Companion - Dragon - Dragon Companion Part 33
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Dragon - Dragon Companion Part 33

IT was later that morning, in the king's study.

"The boy Ednoll was the first of the two. If anything happens to me, Murdan will be his regent, of course, until he reaches twenty years. I'll make a binding decree to that during Fall Session. And you are to assist him, Tom. You and Manda, both."

"I'm honored," Tom said simply, "as Manda will be, also, I know. But that may never be necessary."

"I know and hope so, but we kings must plan for all contingencies if we can. Someday the boy will be king in my place."

"It will take a great load off Manda's mind," Tom said.

"And put one on Gantrell's," the king agreed, looking worried again. "What will he do?"

"I want your permission to take Retruance and fly to Overhall, at top speed," said Tom. "The Historian must leam of this twin birth before Gantrell, who is at his seat in Override, I hear."

"I agree. Ask Murdan to return with you. We must anticipate what our enemy will do and prepare for it. My imagination is filled with gambits Gantrell might spring on us."

"I'm off!"

King Eduard Ten saw the Overhall Librarian off on his flight. Companion and Dragon hurtling into the dark sky, accompanied by bolts of lightning and tremendous thunderclaps.

^:23^ Snow Time "OVERHALL looks different somehow," said Retruance.

They'd flown very high, where the winds were less turbulent. Tom shivered, clothed though he was in woolens and warmed by the Dragon's heat. Overhall was a mere speck in the foothills of the Snow Mountains below.

"What do you see?" asked Tom.

"Nothing a and that's what's strange," replied the Dra-gon, warping his great leathery wings to begin a spiral descent. "No flags flying, for one thing. Nobody abroad and it's midaftemoon. I don't even see guards on the battlements, and that's not like Graham at all."

Tom peered worriedly over the Dragon's nose but they were still too high for him to make out details.

"Maybe it's just this sudden cold," he suggested. "Everybody's keeping indoors."

The Dragon snorted impatiently and plummeted toward the castle. Tom clutched the saddle's pommel with one 254.

Don Callander hand and his knit cap with the other. The wind shrieked past his cold-bumed ears and brought tears to his eyes.

The beast dived straight for Foretower, pulling up abruptly at the last moment, his wings booming and echoing between the stone walls. No guards called out challenge or greeting. No stableboys came running to help the Librarian dismount. The windows of the three soaring towers were slitted, empty eyes, seeing nothing. In spite of the chill, there was no smoke from any of the castle's myriad chimneys.

"Hello!" roared the Dragon as Tom slid to the frozen ground of the outer bailey. "Is anybody home?"

Echoes and silencea except for the icy mutter of Gugglerun in its channel.

"Even if Murdan's already left for Lexor," Tom said, heading for the Great Hall at a run, "somebody should be here!"

"Foul play!" muttered Retruance in a gush of blue-white flame. "Something's badly amiss, Tom!"

The Librarian tugged Great Hall's door open and rushed in. The hall was empty and still, as cold as the outside, its four fires extinguished. He circled the huge room, looking for any signs of the residents. Nothing appeared out of place or out of ordinary, save a total lack of occupants.

"I'll check the other towers," said Retruance, who had stuck his head through the door to watch. He dashed through the gate into the middle bailey, shouting hello in a voice that shook the stones.

In the empty courtyard Tom stopped to look about, listen, and think. A door to the guard's barracks against the far wall swung in a sudden gust of wind and banged loudly against its stop. Tom ran that way, drawing his sword as he went.

Inside, the scene was horrifying. Twelve soldiers lay in their bunks, either dead or deeply unconscious. "My God!" Tom gasped. "Retruance! Come here!" The Dragon's eye appeared in the open barracks door.

He took in the scene at a glance.

"They're not dead," he declared. "Enchanted, I think." "Frozen stiff!" cried Toni. "Look! They're blue from the cold."

DRAGON COMPANION 255.

"There's magic here. Companion," breathed Retruance. "I can feel it!"

Tom stood very still and it came to him at once, a tingling in the air, a twisting vibration, like the faintest echo of distant, derisive laughter.

"I-I-I can feel it, too," he said, shivering. "Gantrell's work, do you think?"

"Not Gantrell himself, perhaps, but someone, some magician or wizard, paid to do this. By Lord Peter, of course, who else? But why?"

"Manda!" cried Tom.

"She's not there," Retruance said, quickly. "From the looks of her rooms, she packed up and left before the spell was cast."

"Thank God!" the Librarian sputtered. "How about Murdan?"

He climbed to the Historian's quarters in Foretower and found everything in order there, too. Murdan's best court clothes and his satchels and trunks were gone.

The Dragon hurriedly inspected the other living quarters in the castle. He found the entire household as frozen in enchanted sleep as the soldiers: the cooks, scullery boys, blacksmith, hostler, saddler, carpenters, and charwomen, everyone who would have been left behind.

"The Historian and Princess Manda left for Lexor before whatever happened, happened," decided Tom, somewhat relieved. "They're somewhere on the road."

"They'll have gone by way of Sprend and Ffallmar Farm and on to Lakehead, then," said Retruance. "We flew too high and missed them. Their entourage would be large, especially with half the guard going with them. Fifty or so, I would expect."

"What's to do?" asked the distraught Librarian. "I can't think!"

He returned to the Great Hall and laid a fire in one of the fireplaces. Retruance, squeezing through the doors, set the kindling afire with a puff and in a few minutes the place began to recover some of its normal warmtha-but none of its accustomed cheeriness.

"I'll see if I can find something to eat," decided Tom. "We'll both think better on full stomachs."

256.

Don Callander DRAGON COMPANION.

257.

He lighted a pine-pitch torch and went to the kitchens, searching until he found a baked ham, some loaves of breada and a frozen cook sitting slumped beside a cold range where the spell had caught him taking a midmoming nap.

He tried to slice the ham but found it, too, was frozen hard as stone. Putting it under his arm, and several loaves of bread under the other and a crock of mustard in his pocket, he hurried back to Great Hall. A blast of Dragon's hot breath thawed the meat and bread enough to cut and the two made a quick, lonely meal.

Retruance flew off, saying he wanted to check further afield. He returned after dark, as the Librarian was rolling himself in two woolen blankets on a bearskin rug before the fire.

"You'd be warmer in a smaller room," the Dragon suggested.

"Now that you're back, this is where I'll stay," Tom said, sleepily yawning. "Sorry! This warmth after being so cold makes me drowsy. What did you find out?"

The Dragon crept entirely into Great Hall, almost filling it and raising the temperature by forty degrees.

"I flew to Ffallmar, of course," he said. "Ffallmar and Rosemary are still there. They'll go to Lexor in a week or less, depending on their harvesting. Murdan, Manda, and their people, forty in all counting the soldiers and Freddie the prisoner, stopped overnight with them three days ago. Clem was with them."

"Thank goodness!" cried Tom. "They're safe then!"

"Wait! Ffallmar had word from our friend the dove seller, in Lakehead. The message said all the lake ships had been hauled ashore because of the coming storm."

"He'd seen Murdan?"

"Yes, Murdan reached Lakehead and then went on by the North Shore road when he found no captains willing to risk the storm."

Tom thought this over. The Dragon went on.

"It was getting dark by then and beginning to snow, so I came back to tell you what I'd learned."

"We'd better get some sleep, I guess," said the Librarian, sighing. "And start out early in the morning."

He punctuated his remark with another great yawn. The bed he'd made before the fire was cozy and he'd been in the cold wind all day. In a moment he was sound asleep.

The Dragon tried to sleep, too, but Great Hall was stuffy with his own heat. He wormed his way out and toured the whole castle once again. Everywhere he found the Historian's retainers and staff in the deep, enchanted sleep, in their rooms or at the tasks they had been doing when the spell had been cast over them.

By carefully inserting his head and long, supple neck into the windowless basement of Middletower, he found Mistress Plume asleep in her frosty bed, but alone. The sour-faced comptroller himself was nowhere to be found. Surprising, as Murdan had said he would not take Plume to Lexor for Session as he had in the past.

*THAT slimy, sneaky old ingrate!" cried Tom upon wak-ing the next morning. "Plume was selling our secrets to Gantrell. He was the one who let the Mercenary Knights into Overhall! We should have locked the double-dealing old pencil-chewer in Aftertower!"

"Be that as it may, we've other problems just now," said Retruance. "It's been snowing hard all night, as the lake men predicted. If we fly to Lakehead and along the lakeshore road, we might find them. But their tracks will be covered by the snow!"

"Worse luck!" exclaimed Tom. He heated slices of the ham and made some toast and tea. "Can we do anything for these poor people?"

"We'd better leave them as they are until we can send a skilled wizard to undo the spell. Arcolas is with Murdan, of course. I'll get word to someone I know who owes Murdan a favor. He'll come as soon as the roads are open. In the meantime, they'll be safe enough behind barred gates."

The temperature had dropped even lower arid snow still fell in huge, soft flakes, blotting out all sight and most sounds.

"I've brought you a warmer cloak and your warm Ramhold boots from your wardrobe," the Dragon added.

"You're one of nature's kindest creatures!" exclaimed Tom in gratitude, pulling on the lamb's-wool-lined over-boots given him by Talber of Ramhold that spring morning long ago.

Don Callander 258.

"Not to Gantrell!" snarled the huge flier. "When I catch that blackguard I'll char him completely and stomp his ashes into the soil as fertilizer!"

"Well enough, but we've got to find Murdan and Manda and the rest first. Then I'll help you char and stomp. Let's go see if we can find their trail along the lake."

They flew fast and high, over Sprend and Ffallmar Farm early in the morning, without stoppinga-"No need to worry them, just yet," Tom decideda-and by noon they passed over a Lakehead buried in enough snow to cover more than a man's height. Only thin streams of blue smoke from smooth, white mounds marked the town at the head of the lake. The lake itself was a glassy expanse of windswept ice across which billows of blown snow drifted, twisted, and swirled.

Retruance flew almost at the tops of the drifted snowbanks, following the faint trace of the shore outlined by the water-edge pines. He and his rider peered down at the glaring white snow, but saw no sign of the passage-two days before of a party of forty.

After a while, Tom complained that the glare on the snow was giving him a headache, so the Dragon swooped down into the lee of a particularly thick stand of ship-mast pines. Tom ate cold ham and dry bread, and drank handfuls of snow. Retruance fanned his immense wings back and forth, sweeping the loose snow in a wide swatch across the shore road.

"Here's the road, I believe," he called after fifteen minutes' hard work. "Just a path, really. The ground was soft before it froze, and look! There are hoofprints."

"Wish we had Clem with us," cried Tom, running over to where the Dragon had stopped blowing snow. "He'd know at a glance if the prints are those of our people, or not."

"Let's see," pondered Retruance. "They came at least this far before the snow started in earnest, I figure. As the weather got worse, they probably found a sheltered place to camp. Clem would certainly know to stop before the snow got too deep even for the horses."

"Cold comfort," said Tom, discouraged. A clot of snow as large as a wagon suddenly slid from an overhanging bough and dropped to the frozen ground with a loud plump, DRAGON COMPANION 259.

making them both jump in alarm. "Is it getting warmer, do you think? Will it get warmer? This is pretty early in the year for such a bad storm, isn't it? It isn't even October yet."

"I'd say so," the Dragon said doubtfully. "I never pay much attention to weather, being able to fly over it, usually."

They sat on a bed of needles under the pines, where the ground was clear. "Lakehead will be hours digging out, even if I helped them with the old wings or a few blasts of fire breath," declared the Dragon.

"Yes, otherwise we could expect Mayor Fellows, a good sort for all of being a Gantrell man, to organize a search," said Tom.

"With a change of weather for the better, Ffallmar could muster all the farmers to form searching parties, too. If we flew back to Sweetwater Tower, the king would do the same. But none of that does any good until the snow stops and it gets warmer."

"We can't afford to wait! Retruance, this storm was just too convenient. Murdan says Gantrell can afford to buy the best wizards and most effective magic. This snow and the sleeping spell at Overhall add up to expensive enchanting."

Retruance nodded sober agreement.

"Gantrell's captured the two people he most wants to miss Session, and rescued Freddie the Sponge, too. Freddie is not the least of Peter's concerns, even the king agrees. He said the kidnapper's trial would greatly weaken Peter's influence over the undecided nobles and even many of his friends."

"Let me guess," said Retruance, stroking his chin thoughtfully. "Gantrell'will maintain the queen and Murdan con-spired, captured Manda to keep her from declaring for her Uncle Peter at Fall Session. The king cannot hear the case of Brevory because key witnesses are missing. The king will be forced to bow to the demands of Gantrell and his cronies that a suitable guardian be appointed to care for little Prince Ednoll, as they did Manda. Who better for guardian than kindly, wise, rich old Uncle Peter? If needed, Gantrell can force Eduard with threats of harm to Manda."

260 Don Callander "Whew!" exclaimed Tom. "What a mess!" "Well, what's to do, now?" the Dragon sighed. "We can't possibly track the captors in this stuff. We must go directly to the one person who knows where our people are."

"You mean, go toa"

"Exactly! To Gantrell and somehow force him or trick him him into revealing where he's hiding Manda, the Historian, and Clem."

"I'll go with you." "No, this calls for stealth. A fifty-foot Dragon can't go sneaking about without being seen."

"I suppose I could shrink myself again."

"I need your speed more. See to it that Rosemary gets safely to Lexor. Remember, she's the real key witness. And ask the king to delay the trial as long as possible."

"Peter couldn't touch you while you were so highly visible at Sweetwater Tower. Be careful, Tom! You stole his royal pawn from him. He wants you out of the way, too."

"I've already thought of that. Perhaps his spies told him that a young man wearing Overhall' s blazon rode to Overhall just before the babes were born. It was Clem, but Peter thought it was me! Or he thinks that the Librarian who rescued Rosemary is still at Sweetwater Tower."

"Where do we start?" asked Retruance, lifting his wings high to rid them of snow and ice.

"Peter will be at his Achievement in Overtide until Sessions begins, I think. It's a good place to start looking for him, at least. Take me there, then go quickly to report to the king."