government of all Ethshar. Or both. If any capital had ever actually existed, its location was long since forgotten. “Tillis,” he asked, “how do you expect to kill a dragon?”
“I don’t know,” Tillis confessed. “I hadn’t really thought about it. How big a dragon do you suppose it is?”
“I don’t know,” Tobas replied. “But it’s big enough to eat people.”
“That’s pretty big,” Tillis said, his voice hushed and uncertain. Then, more confidently, “But a good sword and a stout heart should serve!”
“Tillis,” Tobas said in exasperation, “unless you’ve been hiding it somewhere in the hold, you haven’t got a sword.”
“No, I don’t, but I can get one from the castle armory, I’m sure.”
Tobas sighed again. “What in the world made you decide to sign up to be a dragon slayer, anyway?”
Tillis was silent for a long moment before replying, “Sixteen siblings.”
“What?”
“I have sixteen older siblings. Every single inheritance or apprenticeship or wealthy marriage, or any sort of arranged marriage, my parents could possibly claim was spoken for before they got to me. Nine brothers and seven sisters can use up a lot of property, and my parents were never rich.”
Tobas whistled. “If they were raising seventeen children, it’s no wonder! They wouldn’t have time to get rich, and that crowd would eat it as fast as they brought it in!”
Tillis nodded silently.
Tobas lay for a moment, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in such a large family. He had sometimes pretended Peretta and Detha and Garander were his siblings instead of his cousins, but he had never considered what a really large family would be like.
He didn’t think he would like it. “How old’s the oldest?” he asked.
Before Tillis could answer, a voice came from another hammock. “Aren’t you two ever going to shut up?” “Sorry,” Tobas said. He rolled over to face the wall. The speaker was one of those he had classified as blackguards or scoundrels, a small man with a scarred face, at least ten years older than himself, who carried no fewer than three knives. Tobas had not caught his entire name — Arnen of something.
He was not someone Tobas cared to argue with.
He lay silently awake for some time after that, reassured that there were others, like Tillis, at least as ill prepared as himself, but more worried than ever about facing the dragon. He had assumed that the crew would include a genuine dragon fighter or two, so that, if a mere unskilled nobody like himself were to hang back or simply vanish, nobody would much care, and the dragon would eventually be disposed of just the same.
Now that he had met the other recruits, he was not at all sure that as a wizard, even a wizard with a single spell, he might not be the best chance the kingdom of Dwomor had. Dragons were usually said to breathe fire and were therefore presumably fire-resistant, but some way of using Thrindle’s Combustion against a dragon might still exist.
He dozed at last, as the ship sailed on into the east.
At dawn the next day, the lookout sighted land ahead; they had crossed the Gulf of the East, leaving the Hegemony of Ethshar for the Small Kingdoms. Tobas and the other adventurers came on deck to see the jagged, rocky coastline for themselves.
“Is that Dwomor?” someone asked a crewwoman, pointing at the cliffs.
“No, of course not,” she replied in heavily accented Ethsharitic. “Unless the captain’s gotten us off course again, that’s Morria; we should be able to see the castle in an hour or so.”
Tobas had never actually seen a castle, though he had heard numerous descriptions, some of them going into elaborate detail; the only castles were in the Small Kingdoms, the other nations of the World being either too advanced and peaceful or too barbaric and primitive to have any. He resolved to watch carefully, so as not to miss it. One story he had heard as a child had described a castle as a great pile of stone, leading him to believe that some were camouflaged, and he was afraid that he might mistake this one for a natural outcropping.
He need not have worried; Morria Castle towered up quite unmistakably atop a low cliff, with no fewer than six turrets jutting above its battlements.
“Will we be putting in there?” he asked, noticing the small harbor below the cliff.
“No,” a sailor replied briefly.
“What’s our course, then?”
The crewman looked him over. “You’ve been to sea before?” He spoke with the accent of Ethshar of the Spices.
“My father was a captain, and I worked my passage to Ethshar,” Tobas replied.
The sailor nodded. “Well, we’ll be cruising down the length of Morria here, and on past Stralya, and then up the river at Londa to Ekeroa, where we’ll put your party ashore. No stops; I think your leader is afraid he’d lose some of you if we put in anywhere before that. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s right, in fact, he’ll probably lose a couple during the overland trip. It’s a good seven leagues of rough travel from Ekeroa to Dwomor Keep.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Not I!” The sailor laughed, though Tobas saw nothing humorous in the question. “No, I’ve never been there, but all the traffic from Dwomor comes along the same route. There isn’t any other way, I suppose.”
“Oh. Ah... have you heard anything about this dragon?”
“A little. Rumors say it’s a fifty-footer, that’s a bad size, big enough to be smart and strong, small enough to be fast and vicious. It breathes fire, they say, but that might be an exaggeration. Some people seem to think all dragons do.”
Tobas shivered. “You’re not very encouraging.” “Oh, don’t worry,” the sailor said. “It’s not all your problem. Look at all these other heroes coming to kill it. And this is just the group from Ethshar of the Spices; there are bound to be others as well. Chances are the old king will be sending an entire army of volunteers against the poor beast, and you’ll be lucky to get a few whacks at its tail.” He paused. “Assuming they don’t all back out, anyway. It’s a mystery to me why he didn’t just hire a real expert; there must be some. Maybe he couldn’t find any.”
Tobas, who had wondered the same thing, glanced at his comrades, those who were on deck, at any rate. Tillis was staring eagerly ahead, holding onto a foremast shroud and staggering every time the ship rolled. Arnen was talking to a knot of off-watch sailors by the mainmast; Tobas thought he saw the flash of coins and suspected that the group was involved in some sort of wager. Three others — Peren the White, Arden Adar’s son, and a fifteen-year-old orphan girl named Azraya of Ethshar whom Tobas suspected of being not merely a fool but actually insane — were in various places on deck.
The other three were presumably below somewhere, still being seasick. Peren, whose cognomen came from his bone-white hair and pale skin, had been sick the first day, but recovered quickly; the others had not been bothered.
None of them looked much like dragon slayers to Tobas. He was, so far as he knew, the only magician in the bunch; Peren had the only real sword, and Arden, between them in age, was the only particularly large, strong one. It was confusing, having both an Arnen and an Arden, at least they had no two with exactly the same name, and no one named Kelder. Practically every village in the Free Lands, and presumably every street in Ethshar, held a Kelder or two.
Tobas classed Arnen and two of the trio struck down by seasickness as scoundrels and the other five as various sorts of fool. Peren, a tall, thin, frail fellow two or three years older than Tobas, seemed determined to prove he was stronger than anyone else, which he obviously wasn’t, though he might well outclass Tobas; Arden, a big man in his twenties, was simply stupid; Azraya, fifteen and wild, was perpetually angry about something and would willfully misinterpret anything said to her as an insult; Tillis was lost in ancient legends of heroism; and the seasick Elner seemed to honestly believe he could single-handedly slay the dragon and, in his lucid moments before succumbing to the ship’s motion, had already been bragging about how he would spend his reward money.
The scoundrels talked less and appeared far more dangerous, but Tobas thought it far more likely that they would kill their comrades than that they would kill a dragon. Knives, lies, and stealth would not be much use against dragons.
He hoped that Dwomor did have other recruits, because he did not believe this bunch could kill even a small dragon.
Of course, that meant that he wasn’t going to get rich.
