A Guile of Dragons (22 page)

His legs gave way and he fell to his knees before the Two Powers.

“Our war makes the world that you know,” said the white Presence on the black throne. (Torlan? Or Zahkaar?) “Your disbelief is as irrelevant as your belief would be. Our existences do not require your belief.”

“Our power can, however, in some measure descend to yourself,” said the black Presence on the white throne. (Zahkaar? Or Torlan?) “Only that power, believe in it or not, can give you victory over your enemies in the Wardlands.”

“Your enemies,” he replied absently, pondering the spell that bound him. It emanated from a place between the two thrones, shifting back and forth as the Powers exerted their tension on each other. His Sight could trace the spells' invisible patterns in the stale air. His staff was with him, and his crystalline focus was bound up in a corner of his cloak. He could break the spell. But he waited. The two voices spoke on, in careful inimical alternation.

“We require your consent,” asserted one, and paused.

“To consent, you will require proof,” said the other.

He found himself able to rise. He did so more slowly than was necessary, leaning heavily on his staff. When he had risen he put his hand under his cloak, as if to press against his heart. He wheezed loudly. His fingers closed on the cold smooth surface of his focus.

“Go back as you came. Go back.”

“Go back.”

He turned and went slowly—not exactly as he had come, but in the manner of an old beaten man. He went from the place of pillars on the high dark island in the glowing mist. He went down the white-and-black, black-and-white stone stairway to the edge of the mist. The Two Powers stayed where they were (if that was where they were), but their voices followed him.

“The two greatest masters of the Blackthorn Range. Saijok Mahr—”

“—and Vild Kharum. They were extending hegemonies . . .”

“It was natural law, the conflict of our wills. The guiles would unite.”

“The function of this development was clear.”

“They would move to settle their ancient grudge against the Seven Clans under Thrymhaiam—since passed under the Guard.”

“This suited our opposing purposes.”

“It was not even necessary for us to summon them.”

“They had already sought us out.”

He descended toward the mist, which opened like a tunnel before him.

“Imagine, Ambrosius, the powers that can be yours—”

“Remember, also, the vengeance your pride requires—”

(The memories were becoming painful. Morlock, lying in the wrecked house, wondered dimly why he had not told them he was not an Ambrosius, had never been an Ambrosius.)

He walked down into the dark hole in the mist and passed along the tunnel beyond.

“The kingship will finally be yours.”

“And not only of one land.”

“You need not fear us.”

“We need no kingship.”

“Yet natural law, the conflict of our wills, informs us—”

“The growing influence of the Two Powers in Kaen threatens the Wardlands.”

“The Guardians are already grown curious; soon they will act. . . .”

The mist grew red, before and above him. Still he walked on until the mist rolled back like a curtain, revealing two dragons drifting in midair above him. One was greenish black. The other was a red, and he recognized this one instantly.

“Vild Kharum,” he muttered. Long ago, when he was still only a vocate, the people of Aflraun had offered him a tithe of all they possessed to fend off an attack by Vild and his ruin. He had done it, too—and, like a fool, refused the money. A capable maker could make his own money, of course, but he later learned how much people valued what they had to pay for—and how little they valued anything else.

“How are the spoils of Aflraun, Vild?” he called out mockingly in greeting.

The dragon roared. He did not move to avoid the flames but stood, bracing himself with his staff. His bravado was wasted, though; the flames never reached him. They turned back and engulfed Vild.

Soon he realized why. Both dragons were surrounded by a net of fine fiery lines.
The net narrowed in its middle, as if it had been twisted to make separate chambers for the two dragons. But the situation was more complicated than that. He traced one line from Vild's end across the narrow separation to the stranger dragon's side. He saw that it looped back to join itself, forming a continuous double loop—the symbol for eternity or infinity in many cultures, especially those under the sway of the Two Powers. He wondered how many lines there were, and tried to count a cross-section. He found he could not. Between every two lines there was another; another, too, between that one and either of the adjacent lines. . . . An infinite series of parallel lines. But if he stood back and looked at the whole he found the dragons clearly visible, as they should not have been.

The two dragons reacted differently to their imprisonment. Vild was roaring again, trying to break through the fiery lines with fire. The lines about him were vivid and distinct. The stranger dragon was doing otherwise; he waited, almost quiescent, smoke trailing from his distended nostrils. Around him the lines were dim, almost invisible. It suggested the stranger dragon was more subtle, and therefore more dangerous, than the red-gold rival master.

Perhaps the green-black dragon had simply realized what he himself had known almost instantly: those mind-bending lines of fire were merely an illusion. The real containment spell came from elsewhere, a variation of the one that had held him earlier. It proceeded from the same source: the shifting point of balance between the thrones of the Two Powers. Still holding his focus, he could trace the web of force back through the misty firelit air.

The voices were speaking again in his ear, but he didn't listen to them. He was weighing in his mind the consequences of cancelling the spell and releasing the dragons. And, since he was who he was
—(the memories became painful here; Morlock put his hands over his face)—
Ambrosius, the pause was a brief one. He put his thumb, second finger, and forefinger around the focus and let an image form in his mind. The image formed also in the focus. A lesser maker would have had to see the focus to know that the image was forming: to concentrate on the details, execute the lines. But he was who he was. The image formed; he knew it; that knowledge was simply a recognition of his own strength.

When the image had fully formed in the crystalline focus, he exerted his will through the focus and the image appeared in the mist above. It was an image of the two dragons, coiled and writhing in midair, mirror-perfect reflections of Vild Kharum and Saijok Mahr.

The mechanism of the spell perceived its objects and wrapped itself around the images, leaving the real dragons free. For a moment he wished he had Gryregaest in his hands again: this would have been a battle to equal that night on Tunglskin!

Vild fell on him, breathing fire. The voices behind him called out, “Merlin, you are twice a traitor—”

The memories became too tormenting to bear. Morlock shook free of them, shouting that it was a lie: he was no Ambrosius, no traitor, no Merlin. It was only when the echoes of his own voice returned to him, as he lay in the ruined house, that he realized he'd been a fool. Soon afterward, he heard the speech of dragons.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Maijarra

O
ne day it occurred to Deor that Morlock was dead. The thought came to him suddenly. It was too quick to be painful. He was polishing one of his gems. It was new work . . . and poor stuff. But better than he had grown before. He remembered that Morlock promised to help him with his gems, but never had the chance.
Ah, well
, he thought,
the promise is at peace
. The phrase was a ritual formula, referring to unkept obligations of the dead.

It surprised him a little that the idea did not surprise him. Yes, Morlock was almost certainly dead. The thought had a dense black finality to it, but no pain, not yet.

He finished polishing the stone and looked at it. Yes, it was bad. The color was not what he had wanted, and light passed through it milkily. He fell to thinking of the gems Morlock had grown: how fine they were, how large and full of light. Morlock had been incredibly gifted at that kind of making. Clever at it. It was a game. Once he had grown a gem with Deor's name in it, written in runic letters. It hadn't looked well—they both admitted that—but who else could have done it at all? Then there was that night he had blown up the work chambers, making the freakish flawed gem that Tyr still wore as a pendant. Deor laughed about that whenever he thought of it, and he laughed a little now.

There was some pain, now, though. Once Morlock, before he had reached his full growth, had burst into Deor's workroom. “I need air!” he shouted. Deor dropped his tools and, an hour or so later, found himself following Morlock out of the unglazed window in the Eldest's audience chamber. They crossed the ice lake atop Thrymhaiam, went through the Firehills and on to the Broken Coast, where the Whitethorns ran into the northern ocean.

They didn't return for more than a year, because Eldest Tyr sent a message after them, commanding them to work at the trading house the clans had set up on the Broken Coast, to deal with the ships that came north from Westhold. Perhaps it was a kind of punishment, an exile, and perhaps it was something else. Perhaps the Eldest had already realized what Deor and Morlock himself learned more slowly: that Morlock would never be at peace under Thrymhaiam.

Now it would never be like that again. No one would ever stand outside his door at midnight shouting, “Air! Air!” It would never be the same. Or rather: it would
always
be the same now. Morlock had been a brief flash of light in Thrymhaiam's caverns. Inevitably he had flickered and gone out.

“I need air,” muttered Deor, in a kind of rebellion. But it wasn't true. The greatest part of him was content, even in grief, in the niche that the countless ages of Thrymhaiam's history had provided him. For a time, though, he had shared the senseless painful freedom of one who did not know his place, who did not belong. He could not forget it.

He wondered how Morlock had died. Suddenly he could no longer sit still. He got to his feet and moved restlessly about the room. Then something occurred to him. It was a bizarre thought, against the rules, and none of his business anyway. So he decided to do it. He would do it for Morlock.

He left his workshop and went to the Healing Chambers. There he met strange Vyrlaeth with his lizardlike smile, and they had a brief discussion. Deor left with a small tightly wrapped packet of maijarra leaves. Deor returned to his rooms and made a triply powerful infusion of the stuff, as if it were tea. Then he poured it into an empty bottle and plugged it with wax. He carried this with him as he returned to the Healing Chambers.

Seven full days after the first assault on Thrymhaiam there was only one dwarf still subject to dragonspell. This was Vendas. He lay in a separate chamber, a guard with him at all times. Deor went to the chamber and entered it.

The sick dwarf lay on a bed with no coverings. He was fully clothed, except for his boots, which stood beside the bed. The guard was sitting glumly on a stool against the far wall. The set of his shoulders was patient, but his hands were restless. He looked up without hope as Deor entered.

“Go home, Orn,” said Deor.

Orn leapt to his feet, then hesitated. “You mean it?” he asked. “I was to stay all night.”

“I mean it. My family has gone to the Deep Shelters, and I don't seem to sleep the same without them. ”

Orn nodded. It was a common complaint. “I would stay . . . except I left something unfinished at my bench. I would have brought it with me, but they told me not.”

“You know what I usually do? Bring wax tablets and a stylus. That way you can at least sketch out what you're working on. It helps.”

“Ach. I can't work that way. I never know what I'm going to do until I heft the stuff with my hands.”

“Well.”

“Besides, you don't have any tablets with you. I'll wait until you get some.”

“Never mind. I've got this.” Deor showed him the bottle. Dwarves are beer-drinkers, as a rule, but Deor was known to have picked up southern habits.

Orn laughed and said, “Well, I'll leave Ven to you. Pour some of that Southhold wine down his throat and see what he does.”