Key of Living Fire (The Sword of the Dragon) (31 page)

A dozen eager hands pulled him to a sitting position as he groaned from the pain of his wound. “Bring me my sword.”

A heavy clawed hand reached out of the crowd, the sword of the dragon lain across it, and the young Megatrath lumbered forward. Its mouth twisted into what Ilfedo knew to be a Megatrath smile, but the people screamed and started to run. The creature made no attempt to follow. The people stood away from the creature as Everett smiled and stepped up to it. “Everyone,” he said, “may I have the honor of introducing Arvidane, whose body has been cleansed of evil possession through the Creator’s grace.”

“Honor?” A man limped toward the Megatrath. “I know this species. I fought its kind, and many of our good men have died defending our borders from them. Step aside, Minister, and let justice be served in the form of death to this beast.”

The Megatrath hunkered backward, pulling out of the crowd. Someone raised a sword and another cried out for silence, yet pandemonium broke instead. As fear filled the Megatrath’s eyes, it roared and batted away a sword.

A young boy ran to the Megatrath and gently wrapped his arms around the beast’s leg. “Stop! Don’t hurt him. Can’t you see how scared he is?” The child beckoned to several other children and they joined him. Soon the Megatrath stood in a protective crowd of children.

A man rushed from the crowd, ordering the children away even as he raised a sword at the beast’s back. With surprising agility three girls, no older than six, ascended the Megatrath’s leg and sprawled over its back. But the girls cried out, “Don’t hurt him!”

The creature still held the sword of the dragon. Ilfedo grunted, rolled toward the beast, and came within reach of the Megatrath’s hand. He turned his face up to see into the creature’s eyes. Their eyes met and the creature’s relaxed. Timidly it held forth the sword, and Ilfedo wrapped his fingers around its warm hilt.

The Living Fire leaped from the blade, the armor of light covered his body in warmth, and he felt his wound cauterize. A tingling filled his lower ribcage, as if internal healing was begun. Gradually his strength returned until he stumbled to his feet, leaning on the sword for support.

Facing the Megatrath, he smiled. “I know your kind, Megatrath, for in Resgeria I have an ally. She is strong and honorable.” He pointed in the direction Bromstead had gone. “If you are honorable as well, rectify your deeds by bringing that man to me . . . Bring him alive and disarmed. For only then do I believe the people of this city will forgive your past deeds, though they were not your own deeds but those of the demons within you.”

The creature shrank away, shaking its head. “I cannot! The man placed the demons in me before; he would do so again.”

“You are larger now, Arvidane. You have great strength and speed, not to mention experience with what he did to you before.”

“Hear him.” Everett stepped close to the Megatrath and stroked its long snout.

And the crowd echoed with exuberant shouts.

Arvidane straightened his legs as the monks assisted the children off his back. He swiveled his face to look around at the people, then stared at Ilfedo. “I-If you will join me, I will do it.”

The giant of a man stood on the steps to the city hall, the wicked green blade glowing in his hand. Smoke gathered around him as he looked upon the wounded men he had strewn over the steps. He directed his sword at the city hall’s doors, and green flames lapped at them until the wood darkened. Flames crackled along the doors, wrapped around the trim. The paint peeled, and thick smoke rose over the building’s face.

Down the street Ilfedo came, purposeful strides bringing him nearer the possessed man. In the side streets the monks gathered the people in huddles. He took great comfort in the prayers they were offering.

“Bromstead, hearken to me! What is this madness?” Ilfedo sheathed his sword and spread his arms. “You are in there still. Surely you have not been destroyed. You are a man of honor, so how did this spirit come to reside in you? How can you let him use you thus?”

The man regarded him with an indifferent gaze as the building crackled and smoked, its windows turning deep gray. He descended the steps as Ilfedo drew within a dozen feet of him, then he stepped close, and, though Ilfedo moved quickly to draw his sword, the green blade smote him broadside on his knee.

As Ilfedo fell, the man shook his head down at him. “A puzzle indeed. You bear the Living Fire, yet you haven’t the knowledge or means to properly wield it. Would that you knew its true potential, Warrior; then fear me you would not, and this city would be yours. Ah, but my defeat requires more than you have brought against me. Take me from this body, and I shall live in another.” Bromstead knelt and rested his knee on Ilfedo’s chest. “Thou hast proven yourself a capable warrior, a threat even. I am almost sorry to be the agent of your death.” He raised his green blade in both hands, pointing it at Ilfedo’s throat. He thrust downward—

The dragon ring hissed a jet of steam and growled.

Bromstead’s arm froze, the blade mere millimeters from Ilfedo’s jugular. His eyes narrowed as he looked at the little ring.

The gold dragon’s neck tripled its length, and its body doubled in size. Its amethyst eyes swelled, and its metal claws drew blood droplets from Ilfedo’s finger. Ilfedo cried out, pain lancing his wrist with the intensity of a pot of scalding water.

The young black Megatrath barreled out of a nearby street, yellow vapors wafting from its maw. Bromstead stood to meet it with a frown upon his face. “You could not keep this man restrained?”

The creature swiped its claws toward Brunster’s sword, hooking its claws around the blade and throwing it end over end. Bromstead watched the blade depart until it stabbed into the thick beam along a porch front. A cry of jubilation sounded from the streets. People rushed from hiding. A man lifted a boy on his shoulders. The boy grasped the green sword—its flames dying—and pulled it down. The sword was handed through the crowd and vanished from sight, carried to only the crowd knew where.

“No!” Bromstead charged Arvidane the Megatrath, and the creature smote him in the chest.

But Ilfedo could watch no longer. The dragon ring grew ever larger. The band snapped off his finger, and the gold dragon stood on the ground. Its legs grew seven feet long and its body grew in proportion. The crowd gasped.

A snarling dragon of pure shining gold rose twenty feet over Ilfedo. It had no wings, yet its gold scales sprayed the Dewobins’ glow in every direction. Its feet clinked against the ground as it stepped over him. With an effortless sweep of its hand, it grabbed Ilfedo by the torso. It pressed him against its belly, and a gold band hinged from its side and pinned him in place.

Seivar attacked it, leaving not even a scratch for his efforts on the metal monster. The bird screeched, flying circles around the gold monstrosity as it lumbered into the main road. The gold dragon carried Ilfedo to the far west side of the city. The city guards struck it with their swords, without avail.

The gold dragon raced down the road, leaving the city’s inhabitants far behind. It stabbed its claws into the cavern wall and pulled itself up, hand over hand, with the speed of a leopard. Stone fell away as it tore upward a hundred feet, two hundred. The city became a child’s plaything far below. Then the gold thing stopped. Holding itself on the wall with three feet, it tore a hole in the rock with its free hand. Gold flaked from its claws, and sparks erupted as it viciously attacked the cavern wall.

It dug a hole and lurched inside. Seivar flew on its heels. His wings flapped unseen in the blackness, and the gold dragon ground the stones into dust, burrowing a tunnel toward—Ilfedo knew it to be true—Resgeria. He could only hope that his efforts had been enough to give the people of Dresdyn the upper hand in their struggle against Brunster Thadius Oldwell. There was no way for him to return, not now when he was held to this thing’s metal underside, and there was no conceivable means for the people of Dresdyn to follow him. A thousand people could not scale that wall. At least, not before he was so far away that—

As Seivar landed on the gold dragon’s back and cawed, the gold dragon’s tail lashed the ceiling and walls of its created tunnel. Staring behind at the dim pink light at the tunnel’s opening, Ilfedo’s throat tightened. The dragon’s tail crumbled the stones, and they rained from the ceiling, broke off the walls, avalanching into the tunnel. A shadow of dust and stones filled in the tunnel behind him.

The gold dragon surged forward. It released him from its belly only to hold him in one of its hard hands. Its body crashed into the stone, and the stone did not deny it. Dust blanketed Ilfedo’s body as he reached for his sword and drew it from its sheath. By the Living Fire’s light, the gold dragon glared brilliantly, as if chiseled from a single enormous gold nugget.

Ilfedo considered speaking to the creature. If he ordered it to turn back . . . but that would be futile. The creature’s amethyst eyes were unblinking as they stared into space. It was not a living thing to be convinced. It had a mission to bring him to Albino’s agent and reveal the agent to him. It had no other purpose.

“Master, are you all right?” The bird’s silvery eyes flashed in the light of his armor, and its wings spread to balance it atop the metal beast.

Ilfedo shouted back, “I will be. I suppose.”

The gold dragon’s claws raked the stones. It balled a fist and crushed it forward. Inside of a few seconds the tunnel extended a few feet farther.

“I see no way out of this, my friend.”

“Nor do I, Master.”

Ilfedo smote his blade against the gold dragon’s back, sending a shower of gold to the ground. “But I will return. The people of Dresdyn deserve that much.”

For several hours the gold dragon tunneled. The tunnel collapsed behind it as it pressed forward. At last, its claws tore into brown stone that flaked into tiny bits and fell into an enormous cavern beyond.

Light filled the cavern, a pure blue light that danced over the gold dragon and upon the terrain before it. The cavern was shaped like a teardrop and had a pillar of gray stone from its peaked ceiling to the bowl of a floor below. Ribbons of water trickled into the bowl, and from nearby twin rivers gushed out of the rocks, wending through the bowl and out its other end.

The gold dragon raised its hand and pointed its sharp metal claw at a tunnel opening far on the cavern’s opposing wall just above the bowl. In that moment the dragon ceased to move. With the sudden loss in momentum, Ilfedo was thrown forward out of the dragon’s opened hand. He tumbled, slamming his shoulder on a boulder.

Groaning, he stood, and the Nuvitor perched on the boulder, flapping its wings. Ilfedo walked down the walls of the bowl. It was a gentle descent. When he had proceeded a hundred feet, he turned back and gazed upon the gold dragon. It was a statue now, frozen in the gaping mouth of its tunnel. The amethyst eyes seemed to accuse him, and the gold claw pointed across the rivers. “Go,” it seemed to order him. “Go before all that the white dragon has ordered falls into ruin.”