Legacy of the Darksword (43 page)

“We cannot challenge a Dragon of
the Night,” Saryon protested vigorously. “They are terrible creatures.
Terrible!”

“The dragon is before us, but the
Technomancers are behind us,” Mosiah pointed out. “We can’t very well go back.”

At last, as I said, I was
beginning to have a glimmer of understanding. I touched Saryon’s arm, to draw
attention to myself.

“You can charm the dragon,
Father,” I signed.

“No,” he returned hurriedly.
“Absolutely not.”

“Yes,” I repeated. “You did it
before, in the other life.”

“What other life?” Saryon stared
at me in perplexity. “I charmed a dragon? I am certain I would recall doing
such a thing,” he added more testily, “and I assure you that I do not.”

“If he’s going to do it, he must
act swiftly,” Mosiah warned.
“While the sun is still shining.
When night falls, the dragon .will
awaken
and go out
in search of food. It is twilight now.”

Eliza kept watch beside her
father, her attention divided between ourselves and him. She did not understand
completely what we were saying, but she understood the urgency and did not
interrupt us with demands for us to explain. She trusted us. I smiled at her
reassuringly.

“I tell you I know nothing about
charming dragons!” Saryon was shaking his head.

“You do,” said Mosiah. “You are
the only one of us who does. I cannot.”

“You are
Duuk-tsarith,”
Saryon
argued.

“But I was trained on Earth. The
only dragons I ever saw were created by special effects. I can’t take time to
explain, but in an alternate time, Father, a time in which Joram died twenty
years ago, you came upon a Dragon of the Night—this very dragon, or so I
believe—and you were able to charm it. Think, Father! Lessons you learned at
the Font. All catalysts were taught the spells of the war wizards.”

“I ... It’s been so long. . . .”
Saryon put his hand to his temples, as if they ached. “If I fail, we would all
die. Die most horribly.”

“We know,” Mosiah said.

I noticed in all this that Scylla
kept silent. She did not venture to persuade or argue. I could not yet
understand, but I was beginning to understand, if that makes any sense.

“Father Saryon.” It was Joram who
spoke.

So intent had we been on our
discussion I had not noticed that he had regained consciousness. His head was
pillowed in his daughter’s lap. She wiped the sweat from his brow, smoothed
back the damp hair, and watched over him anxiously, lovingly.

Joram smiled. He lifted his hand.
Saryon knelt and clasped Joram’s hand to his breast. It was obvious to him, to
all of us, that Joram had very little time left to live.

“Father Saryon,” he said, and it
took an effort for him to speak. “You were able to charm me. What is a dragon,
compared to that?”

“I will,” Saryon said brokenly. “I
will . . . try. The rest of you . . . wait here.”

He stood up and would have rushed
down the tunnel, then and there, if we hadn’t stopped him.

“You cannot charm the dragon and
retrieve the Darksword at the same time,” Mosiah pointed out. “The Darksword
would disrupt the charm.”

“That’s true,” Saryon admitted.

“I will recover the Darksword—”
Mosiah began.

“I will recover the Darksword,”
said Eliza firmly. “It is my legacy.”

A spasm of agony contorted Joram’s
face. He shook his head, but he was too weak to argue or try to stop her. A
single tear tracked through the blood on his cheek.
A tear
that was not wrung from him by his own physical pain, but by the pain of
regret, remorse.

Eliza saw the tear and gathered
her father close, hugging him to her. “Don’t, Father!” She wept with him. “I am
proud to bear this!
Proud to be your daughter.
You
shattered the world. Perhaps it is left to me to save it!”

Kissing him, she rose quickly to
her feet. “I am ready.”

I was afraid Mosiah would argue
or try to dissuade her. He regarded her intently for a moment,
then
he bowed. “Very well,
Your
Majesty,” he said. “I will go, and of course Reuven will go as well. I may need
my catalyst,” he added.

I was filled with pride, so much
that it almost pushed out my fear.
Almost.
I could not
forget the terror of the last time we had faced the Dragon of the Night.
The terror and pain of my own death.
Worse—the
horror of seeing Eliza die
. Resolutely, I trampled down the
memory. I would never have found the courage to stir a step otherwise.

“Someone must stay with my
father,” Eliza said, looking at me. “I had hoped that Reuven—”

“I will stay with Joram,” Scylla
volunteered. She grinned at us. The ring in her eyebrow glinted. “You’re on
your own now.”

“I do not understand any of this,”
Saryon said plaintively.

“You must have faith,” I signed
to him.

“And you are impertinent to your
teacher,” he said with a wan smile. He gave a bleak sigh. “Come, then. We will
go charm this dragon.”

The Dragons of the Night loathe
sunlight to such an extent that even though they burrow down into the deepest,
darkest parts of Thimhallan they can find, they sleep during the daytime. This
dragon was asleep, to judge by its rhythmic breathing, but its sleep appeared
restless and shallow. We could hear the gigantic body move, scales scraping
against the rock floor. I recalled in that other life what the dragon had said
about the presence of the Darksword in its lair, how it had disturbed its rest.
Either
that,
or its waking time was very near.

I remembered the stench from my
last visit to this place. The smell seemed worse, this time. We all of us
covered our noses and mouths, to keep from retching. We brought no light with
us,
for fear that even the beam of the flashlight might wake
the dragon and arouse its ire. Moving slowly and silently, feeling our way with
our hands, we crept along the last few yards of the tunnel. We rounded a
corner, and came upon the dragon’s lair.

The diamond embedded in its
forehead shone with a cold, sharp brilliance. It did not illuminate. We could
not see the dragon. We could see nothing, not even each other, though we stood
bunched together, side by side.

The dragon’s breathing
reverberated through the tunnel. It shifted its body again as we stood outside
its lair, and the floor shook as it flopped over on its side, its tail
thrashing against the wall. The diamond lowered, the dragon had settled its
head on its side, apparently. We stood in the darkness, immersed in fear and
awe.

I could not have ventured inside
that cavern. I don’t know where Saryon found the courage to do so. But then,
where had he found the courage to suffer himself to be turned into living
stone?

“Wait here,” he said to us, his
words no more than a breath. “I must do this alone.”

He left us and walked into the
cavern. I could not see him, but I could hear his robes rustle and the soft
padding of his feet. His figure passed in front of me, blotting from my sight
the light of the diamond.

Eliza clasped my hand. I held on
to her tightly. Mosiah stood beside us, tense. Sometimes I could hear whispered
words and I guessed that he was rehearsing his magic in his mind. Not that it
would do us much good. We’d been through that before.

The
Duuk-tsarithl
Were
they here now as they had been here in that other time? Would they try to seize
the sword?

Taking hold of Mosiah’s hand, I
signed my question with my fingers pressed against his palm. If he could not
see my words, at least he could feel them.

“I thought of that myself,” he
said back to me, his mouth against my ear. “I have sought my brethren. They are
not here.”

At least that was one worry off
my mind.

I had not forgotten Saryon. I
walked with him in spirit every step of the way. The dragon snuffled and
shifted once again. A gleam of pale light beamed from a slit in its eyelids. My
heart stopped. Eliza gripped my hand so tightly that she left bruise marks on
it, yet I don’t recall feeling any pain at the time.

Saryon halted, held still. The
dragon breathed a great sigh, and the eyelids closed. The light vanished. Those
of us in the cavern added our sighs to the
dragon’s
.

Saryon moved forward once more.
He must be very close to the dragon’s head now, I thought. I could see the
diamond again, since the dragon had changed position. The massive head was
lying completely on its side, resting on the jawbone. And then I saw a hand,
Saryon’s hand, looking frail and fragile, silhouetted against the diamond’s
bright chill light.

The hand hesitated a moment. He
must be asking the Almin for strength, as I was praying to the Almin to protect
him, protect us all.

Saryon’s hand touched the
diamond.

The diamond flashed. The dragon
twitched, muscles contracting, a tremor passed through it. In the alternate
time the Dragon of the Night had been injured, caught out in full sunlight.
This dragon was probably very healthy and it was inside its dark lair. The
dragon made a rumbling sound, deep in its chest. Its claws scrabbled against
the floor.

“Now!”
Mosiah whispered urgently,
though Saryon could not hear him. “What is he waiting for? Cast the spell now!”

I cannot imagine what it would
have been like to have had my hand on the dragon’s head, to feel that great
beast move beneath my fingers. I could not blame my master for faltering at
this juncture. His hand jerked back, the fingers clenched.

Mosiah took a step forward. Eliza
pressed her cheek against my arm.

The diamond moved. The dragon was
raising its head.

Saryon gave a great
gasp, that
I could hear distinctly, and then his hand
pressed down hard against the diamond.

He spoke words that I didn’t
understand.
Words of power and authority.
The dragon
ceased to move. It might have melded with the stone around us.

Saryon finished speaking the
charm and stepped back, removing his hand from the diamond.

This was the moment when we would
know whether we lived or died.

The dragon reared its head up off
the cavern floor. The eyes opened and the pale light that was like the light of
a gibbous moon bathed us.

“Do not look into the eyes!”
Mosiah cautioned loudly, loud enough for Saryon to hear.

The dragon spread its wings. I
could hear the rustle and the creaking of its tendons, and thousands of tiny,
sparkling deadly lights appeared in the cavern’s darkness.

The dragon spoke, the voice
vibrated with fury, and I breathed easier.

“You are the master,” it said.

“I am,” Saryon replied, his own
voice firm. “You will do as I command.”

“I do so because I am constrained
to do so,” the dragon answered. “Take care that you do not lose your hold over
me. What is it you want?”

“In your lair is an object which
we greatly value. We want to retrieve it safely and take it away with us. After
that, we will trouble you no more.”

“I know of that object,” said the
dragon. “It is a sword of light. It hurts my eyes, destroys my rest. Take it
and be gone.”

“
A sword of
light?”
Eliza whispered wonderingly.

“Eliza,” Saryon called to her,
without turning his gaze away from the dragon. “Come and take the Darksword.”

“Go with her, Reuven,”
said
Mosiah.

I could not have stayed behind.
We walked forward, Eliza and
I
, into the dragon’s
lair. The light of the eyes focused on us, flared around us.

Though spellbound and constrained
not to harm us, the dragon was tempting us to lift our gaze and meet its eyes,
hoping we would fall victim to the madness. The feeling was in my heart that it
would almost be worth the madness in exchange for a single glimpse of a
creature of such wondrous, cruel beauty.

To banish the temptation, I kept
my gaze on Eliza. She looked to the rock cairn that covered the Darksword.

“Make haste, my children,” urged
Saryon quietly.

Was he at last recalling that
other time?
The time in which we were his children?
I
hoped he was. Though it had ended in tragedy, I wanted him to know the love I
bore him flowed from that time, as well as my own. He was my father.

Reaching the rock cairn, Eliza
and I began to take it apart. We worked as swiftly as we could, lifting the
rocks and tossing them aside. At last, the Darksword came into view. It did not
shine, as I had almost expected from the dragon’s words. It did not reflect the
moonlight of the dragon’s eyes. It seemed, instead, to reflect the dragon’s
darkness. Eliza took hold of the Darksword by the handle and raised it up.