The Wandering Dragon (Children of the Dragon Nimbus) Read Free

companion the wandering bard would leave him as soon as they reached his home in Amazonia.

CHAPTER 2
    M ASTER MAGICIAN ROBB stuffed his aching and swollen hands inside the sleeves of his once-pristine formal robe as he paced. At dawn, damp chill permeated the walls of his small cell. By midday he’d have to shed both the robe and shirt while he sweated in desert heat. If Maigret could see him now, she’d scold him mightily for his disheveled appearance, even as she held his hands and lovingly examined every pore on his body for signs of illness.
    She’d also make him shave, two or three times, before his face was smooth enough for her standards. His captors hadn’t let him near any kind of blade.
    His gut ached from missing his wife and their two young sons. His heart skipped a beat at the thought that he might never see them again, or touch them again, or bear up to Maigret’s scoldings again . . .
    He yanked his thoughts out of that destructive loop. Again.
    His captor had preserved his health. Freedom, light, and dignity had been denied.
    Whoever kept him in this benighted cell needed him alive for some reason Robb could not fathom. Of course, it would help if he knew who held him, and why.
    Had three moons passed since he’d been whisked out of a transport spell into an alien land? Or was it four? He’d meant to transport to Coronnan City. Had he made a mistake in the tricky and dangerous spell?
    Or had a rogue magician manipulated the layers of visualization and precise timing required?
    He’d thought and thought through all the permutations—he didn’t have much else to do—and drawn the conclusion that a rogue had added an extra layer of images to his own to bring him here. And he thought he knew which rogue was involved. Samlan had a lot to answer for when Robb got out of this
S’murghin
prison. If he didn’t go insane first.
    To ward off such dangerous thoughts, Robb paced his cell, five steps to a side. He checked the scratches on the wall he’d made to keep track of the days. Had he made one yet since the sun rose?
    He didn’t think so. His wooden spoon lay on the end of his cot ready for him. He grasped the bowl in his right hand, balanced his left against the wall and scratched hard against the dressed stones with the worn handle. A new line appeared gradually, only slightly lighter than the background. Another fraction of an inch splintered off the handle. His work showed well enough to mark another day. He counted each grouping of five, as he did every morning. One hundred thirty-six.
    Surely that couldn’t be right. When had thirty days become sixty? Then ninety? Fear broke out in cold sweat down his spine. Praying to the Stargods that he hadn’t lost his mind along with time, he counted again, each individual slash against the stone. One hundred thirty-six.
    Robb almost wept. “No, no, no,” he cried out as loudly as he could, slamming his fist against the wall. “I’ve cried enough. I’ve languished enough. I have to get out of here.” He looked around at the same four walls he’d addressed every day for the last one hundred and thirty-six days.
    “Wizard,” a small lisping voice whispered to him from the barred window in the ironbound door of his prison. Iron. Poison to magicians according to myth and legend. But it wasn’t the iron in the door that kept Robb’s magic dormant. The iron underground, massive and buried beneath ten feet of stone and dirt, hampered his powers. Only one small window near the ceiling marked the passage of light and dark. Not enough access to the air to gather dragon magic—if any dragons flew the skies of this land—and the floor too thick to tap a ley line—if any of the silvery blue streams of energy ran through here.
    “Yes?” he asked wearily. The same voice spoke every morning, making certain he lived before wasting a tray of food on a corpse.
    Robb thought it might belong to a beardless boy, perhaps a scullery maid, no one more