Dragonslayer: A Novel (22 page)

"Because the dragon is not dead, my dear." Casiodorus sighed heavily. "The dragon has been slumbering only, and is now awakening, and is angered to find the stone at the cave's mouth. Very soon it will burst out through the rock our young conjurer put in front of it. Very soon it will be rampant again, wreaking vengeance for his affront."

"And then," Elspeth said after a moment, her head raised and her eyes curiously bright, "there will be an Extraordinary Lottery."

Casiodorus nodded. "Tyrian has orders to begin." He laid the amulet on the table.

Another, more violent tremor shook the room. Elspeth stood quite still while Knurl scuttled away; then she moved closer to her father. Her walk was stiff, her gaze fixed upon him. When she was quite close, she asked, "Father, this time may I put my own lot into the bowl for the Choosing?"

Casiodorus looked up quickly. "Horsrick would never permit that," he said. "Nor would I. It would violate the
Codex.
Horsrick's men bring all the tiles to the bowl, in the collecting sacks. You know that."

"Then may I put my own lot into one of the sacks?"

The king shifted uneasily in his chair. "There's no need of that, my child. I have always done that for you."

She touched the side of his face and raised his head so that his gaze met hers.
"Have
you, Father?"

Casiodorus turned very pale. "What are you suggesting, Elspeth?"

She smiled sadly. "Only that you love me. . ."

"Yes, very much."

"And that you have protected me, as you protected my mother, from everything unseemly and threatening . . ."

Casiodorus said nothing. Very slowly, his head dropped forward; as it did so, the room trembled again, so violently that it seemed for a moment the wall of Morgenthorme might collapse. For a crazed instant, Casiodorus saw that event as appropriate, mirroring the collapse of all safety that for eighteen careful years he had built around her. He laughed abruptly. Then he wept.

Again the dragon shook them.

Elspeth crossed to her father and held his head against her breast. Her hair fell forward like a curtain around his face. "Dear Father," she said. "If I am not first a woman and prepared to take my place in this, this most important event in all our Urland, how can I be a princess?"

When Casiodorus had returned from the journey he had taken as his tears fell, a journey during which he had drifted over his daughter's years as a bird drifts over a green land, where it may never light again, she was gone. He was alone with the grotesquely twisted chunks of lead, with the alien and weirdly shimmering stone, and with a kingdom that had begun to crumble under him. For the first time in all the years of his reign he envied his dead brother, who had never sought to appease the dragon, but who had taken his lance and his best stallion and gone to battle it. Better to have died like that, in a hot white light, than to have lived all of one's life in shadows and uncertainties. He gripped the amulet once again and felt in it now a receptive and forgiving warmth into which he sank with profound gratitude.

When she left her father, Elspeth went straight to the room where Galen had been put and drew back the heavy bolt. The door creaked open, hitting the wall with a soft thud. "You were right," she said. The room shook as she spoke. "My father has been protecting me. I want to repay my debt, beginning now. Please go. Behind the arras at the end of the hall you will find a secret stair. It leads to the stables and the courtyard. Take a fast horse! Flee! Quickly, before Tyrian returns. He is certain to take vengeance on you. Go, for your life!"

Without waiting for an answer she hurried down the hall to her own apartment and then out into the courtyard. The spasms of the dragon's rage had become more violent, and chunks of masonry were now tumbling from the walls. The white animals cowered around her feet, wide-eyed with terror. Those that were tethered strained at their restraints. "Go," she said, freeing them one by one. "We must all find our own ways, now. There are no more protectors." She spoke with a cool decisiveness that the animals had not heard in her voice before, and it further bewildered them. In all their secluded lives, she had never sent them from her. They clustered pitifully closer. "Go. You are free. You must make your own way. Go now. Go!" She waved her arms and prodded them with her toe, and one by one they left her, fleeing through the crumbling walls or lifting above them toward an unknown wilderness. Gringe, the last to come to her, was also the last to leave; unlike the others, he did not fly to the safety of trees and crags, but continued to circle over Morgenthorme.

Galen, meanwhile, lost no time in making his escape. The hidden stairway was steep, narrow, smelly, and dark. Stumbling and falling, banging his head on the low ceiling, he emerged into the stable just as a particularly severe shock collapsed the archway and engulfed him in a cloud of dust. The corralled horses broke into snorting frenzy. Before he regained his feet, several of them had shattered their stalls and were leaping toward the door that had been knocked open by the tremor. Choking and gagging, Galen found his feet and flattened himself into an indentation in the wall while all but two thundered past; then, while those two were whinnying indecisively in their stalls, he staggered to the door and looked out.

In the courtyard that had been so peaceful and bucolic only an hour earlier, mayhem reigned. The white animals had vanished, replaced by a melee of running people, all glancing fearfully upward at the crumbling walls. Morgenthorme's gate was already open, and knights and retainers alike were dashing through it to the safety of the surrounding fields. Galen was on the point of running to join this exodus when he was stopped by a glimpse of a figure that was not running, a figure utterly still.

Tyrian.

Black against the pale wall, the centurion gazed over the heads of the scurrying peasants, searching. Galen shrank back, but he was not quick enough; Tyrian had seen him. The big man seemed in that instant to grow bigger. His back straightened, his shoulders swelled, his right arm dropped to the hilt of his great sword.

He advanced with the feline grace with which, Galen remembered all too clearly, he had descended after the slaying of Hodge; and as he came his blade, Tendrun, flashed from its sheath. Its magical amber and crystal pendants caught the pale sun. Tyrian carried it to the side, in the manner of a berserk warrior who, beyond himself, longed only to cut a swath through the insignificant foe. The stream of fleeing servants split, flowed around him. Galen could see the cold fury in his face, and could see too that he was speaking, although he heard nothing but the hubbub in front and the rising tumult of the two trapped horses behind. And then Tyrian was suddenly close enough to be heard: "Meddler!" he said with a horrible vehemence. "Little, meddling fool!"

Galen stood paralyzed with terror. He watched the sword rise, he watched Tyrian's left hand swing across to the hilt to strengthen the slashing blow at his neck. He ducked. He heard the blade sing above his head, heard its clangor on the stone doorframe, heard Tyrian's curse.

Several things happened then in swift succession. Off balance, Tyrian reeled backwards. At the same instant the earth trembled again, and this shock sent the remaining two horses racing fren-ziedly for the stable door. Still crouched, Galen heard them coming and he leaped back just in time to let the first one through.

Tyrian was less lucky; the horse's shoulder dealt him a glancing blow on the chest and sent him sprawling in the manure heap. As the second animal crossed the threshold, Galen saw his chance. He grasped the bridle of the horse—Tyrian's own black stallion, still haltered from the night's ride—leaped and swung aboard. By the time Tyrian had sat up and found breath to shout to Jerbul, who was lurking near the gate, Galen was halfway across the courtyard. Jerbul reacted quickly, however. He seized a pike, a vicious barbed, hacking instrument on a long pole, and aimed it with lethal skill at the boy and the stallion lunging toward him. The horse slowed, hesitated, balked, reared. Jerbul took two grim steps forward and would, the next moment, have opened its belly with a single blow, just as he would cleave with the following blow the thrown and sprawling Galen, if a shrieking white shape had not plummeted down and attached itself to Jerbul's face.

"Gringe!"

Jerbul's cry joined the raven's, but what began as a shout of rage turned to agony as keen talons pierced his eyes. The next moment, the stallion's pawing forehooves had snapped Jerbul's neck and caved his chest, and Galen and the horse were across the drawbridge and on the open road to Swanscombe.

For only a moment, Galen's thoughts dwelt with gratitude on the raven before they rushed ahead to Swanscombe and Valerian. He assumed the bird was with him; but Gringe followed only briefly before veering away and rising high enough to get a panoramic view of several hectares of Urland. Directly below lay Morgenthorme, with its inhabitants still milling out into the furrowed fields. Far to the southeast lay Swanscombe, its thatched roofs tranquil under the noon sun. Between lay the Blight. Gringe looked there last, for he sensed a direness far more grave than the threat of Jerbul. From the Blight the earth-shaking radiated, and in its center arose a plume of smoke and furious steam. Even as Gringe watched, the earth yawned in a ragged, fresh split, out of which rose a wing, and then another, and then a screaming head. Suddenly, the whole hillside surrounding the dragon was molten, glowing with a radiance that rivaled the sun.

Gringe could not bear to watch. Fretting quietly, he sank in a gentle spiral back to Morgenthorme and to the white figure of Elspeth who had emerged from her chambers and was crossing the ruined courtyard. . . .

Two hours down the road, Galen smelled smoke. It was not the musky smoke of peat fires, nor the hot clean smoke of a stick campfire. This smoke was thick and heavy, laden with the odors of dry grass, and smoldering timbers. As he rode, bits of ash and ember fell at the roadside, threatening despite the rain of the previous night to ignite the forest debris. But when he reached the crossroads where a branch led east toward the Lake of Passages, and where the chalky figure of an old Celtic bird or bat rose balefully from the forest, he saw the thick plume itself and knew what must be burning. Another short, hard ride brought him to the first of the hill hamlets in Swanscombe Valley. The whole place was ablaze. Each flaming building added its heat and smoke to the conflagration that swirled upward in massive billows. Cattle screamed. People either stood on the hillside, too shocked to move, or howled their outrage and fear and lifted fists at something in the heavens Galen could not see. The crops were burning, as were the woods behind; and even as Galen watched, a copse of oak beside him burst into flames. His horse shied, twisting snakelike in tight circles of terror. He gave it its head and was off again toward Swanscombe, choking, his eyes streaming and his belly full of dread.

The road lay straight and empty. No birds fluttered across his path, no rabbits bounded away, no squirrels ran chattering through the branches. For several leagues he and the horse were utterly alone.

Then, without being able to tell how, he was suddenly aware of another presence. His back felt cold and vulnerable, as if his shirt and jerkin had been ripped off by invisible hands, and his neck and the back of his head were also chilled, paralyzingly chilled, as if talons of ice had brushed them. He hunched over the horse's mane and glanced back, right, left, saw nothing—nothing but the flicker of a shadow on the road, and other shadows, hundreds, moving at various levels across the trees and bushes of the forest. Only after he had looked ahead again did the grim truth strike:
they were all the same shadow!
The same! An undulating, speeding blot on the forest. The horse, foam-flecked, had already sensed some approaching horror, and it was galloping in tremendous bounds, its neck flattened and straining against the reins, the bit clamped in its teeth, its breath welling up in wheezing gouts. All its efforts were futile, for the chilling shade crept relentlessly forward, edging up Galen's spine, across his shoulders, falling like a cowl over his head and onto the neck of the stallion. The terrified creature wheeled and reared, blindly flailing the air. Galen was almost thrown, but he flung his arms around the horse's neck and stayed on. In this position, dangling helplessly, he first saw Vermithrax.

The dragon came low, so low that when the tips of its black wings moved they almost touched the trees. And it was so slow that in a moment of surpassing panic Galen believed it was on a gliding descent toward him and would land with an obscene and gentle scraping on his face. He imagined himself smothered by the scaled underbelly of the creature. He screamed, and his cry blended with the wretched shrieking of the horse.

But the dragon did not land. Nor did it exhale flames. Vermithrax's rage had caused it to spew much fire in its rampage; at the moment when it chanced upon Galen, it was restoring that fire, building it for an onslaught on the next village, which it could already see ahead. Besides, it had sensed no threat from this fleeing man-thing, no latent force in or around him.

In Morgenthorme, on the other hand, it had sensed real challenge. It had been strangely drawn there after its emergence from the cave, and it had circled for several minutes above the castle, uncertain whether to descend for combat. Something lay there, something deep within the castle walls, that caused Vermithrax's inner eye to flicker with a vision from the lake of fire. But at last the dragon had glided off to the southeast, spewing gouts of defiance that exploded on the hillsides in fiery blooms.