Return of the Guardian-King (45 page)

Now, as if their minds were linked, other dragons noticed him, too, and closed in upon him. Heart pounding, he brought his staff horizontal. . . .

And was saved when a huge silver dragon crashed through a gap in the far wall and scuttled across the yard, long tail flicking back and forth to balance the motion of its thick, powerful legs. A blue dragon burst from the same gap in pursuit, a green right behind it. The silver whirled back to face its pursuers. Immediately all the other dragons abandoned Abramm to focus on this new interest.

Some of the silver’s scales had been torn free, while others hung loosely from great bloody wounds. The beast’s forked tongue flicked in and out, its ribs lifting and falling rapidly. Big as it was, its attackers were bigger.

For a long moment they held position, unmoving save for tongues and heaving sides. Then the silver bugled a challenge, a bright red ruff flaring round its neck. With a roar, the green one charged, slamming into the silver with a heavy thud and bowling it back through the dust and rock.

Then the blue was upon it, as well, dust boiling up around them. They killed their fellow with alarming swiftness and fell to ripping it apart, tossing great gobbets of meat into the air and swallowing them whole. Before Abramm knew it, five others had joined the first two, and the rest of the beasts in the square, all of them smaller, drew near the kill, watching avidly as the others fed.

Seizing his chance, Abramm hurried across the gap to the thoroughfare. When he glanced back, the big dragons were already withdrawing from the near-stripped carcass to flop down in the dust, satiated, while the youngsters crowded in for their turn.

Revolted and unnerved, he turned away and, eyeing the mist-hung thoroughfare before him, wondered again what he was doing there. He hadn’t gone two steps when a pleasant voice remarked behind him, “They used to be men.”

He whirled to find a lithe young man in a white linen tunic leaning with arms folded in one of the open doorways lining the street. He was cleanshaven and so handsome he was almost pretty. Blond curls tumbled in a gleaming mass about his shoulders, and his long-lashed blue eyes were the sort that set women’s hearts aflutter and drove men to valiant deeds.

“Who are you?” Abramm asked suspiciously.

“You can call me Lema,” the man said, stepping from the doorway and coming toward him. “And you are?”

“Alaric.” Abramm glanced about. “You live here?”

“I do.” The blue eyes flicked up and down Abramm’s form. “You look like a warrior, Alaric, though somehow that name does not seem proper for you.”

“Well, Lema doesn’t seem a proper name for you, so I suppose we are even.” Abramm stepped away from him. Closer now, he realized the man’s proportions were scaled to the city’s gargantuan architecture, so he’d not seemed unusually large until they stood face-to-face. Now he towered over Abramm, his broad chest and powerful shoulders almost double the width of Abramm’s.

The stranger cocked his head, looking almost pleased. “You don’t think Lema suits me? Why not? Too . . . ordinary? Too plain?”

“Too small.” Abramm took another step back.

Lema threw back his head and laughed. “Where are you headed, Alaric?” he asked when he had finished.

“I thought I’d follow this road,” Abramm said, gesturing vaguely up the street, which was littered with weeds, fallen rocks, and the ever-present piles of scat. Broken-off pillars marched in line along the central divider on his left, while in the tall masonry walls soaring to right and left, the high-placed window holes and remains of stone balconies gave evidence of long-lost upper stories.

“Ah, that’ll be the Central Plaza, then.” Lema nodded and eyed him with a knowing gleam. “I guess we know what
you’re
after.”

“And what would that be?”

“The treasure of Chena’ag Tor, of course.”

“I don’t think so,” Abramm said. He started down the thoroughfare.

“Well, you’re headed right for it,” Lema said, falling into step with him.

Abramm said nothing, wondering suddenly if he might be right. Riches such as Chena’ag Tor was said to hold would certainly build him the kind of army he’d need to take back his homeland and defeat the Esurhites.

“You’re not the first to come here looking for the treasure, you know,” Lema remarked cheerfully. “In fact, it’s the only reason any of your kind ever come here.”

“There are more of my kind here?”

Lema waved a dismissive hand. “They’re all dead. Last one passed a few years ago, I think. It’s hard to keep the time straight anymore. They never seem to last long, but maybe that’s just relative since the rest of us have been here so much longer.”

“So there are others like you here, then?”

“Oh yes. Many of us, in fact. Most live down near the plaza, where it’s nicer.” He paused as a loud snort erupted from the shadowed interior of a room beyond the street-level doorway they were passing, then said, as if it were nothing, “You can’t take the treasure away, you know. The road will only bring you back.” He paused again, then added, “Of course, it would do that even if you didn’t have the treasure.” And the grin he flashed at Abramm seemed almost a leer, as if he hoped his words might have provoked fear and dismay in his listener.

Abramm shrugged. “Well, since I didn’t follow the road here in the first place, I doubt I’ll be relying on it to leave.”

“When you leave—”

He was cut off by another snort, followed by the sudden appearance of a fat yellow dragon lumbering out of a gap in the wall to their right. It scuttled into their path and stopped when it saw them, as if startled. Topaz eyes fixed upon them as its black tongue tasted the air. It was twice the size of the pair that had killed the silver back in the square.

Lema made a shooing motion at it. “Go on!” he said as if it were a stray dog. The beast ignored him, staring at Abramm as if it were trying to figure out what he was. In that instant something about it looked almost human.

Lema waved his hand again. “Go on! Get out of the way.”

The creature flinched, then turned and scuffled across the divider into the adjoining street, where it turned back to watch them.

Abramm stared back at it. “What did you mean earlier when you said they used to be men?”

“Before they were trapped here,” Lema said as he tugged Abramm around and forward, “they were men. Well, not ‘men’ as you take the word. Ban’astori we call ourselves. The Shining Ones. Like us they were once beautiful and talented and wise. They flew above the clouds, composed odes and poetry, and built many great and wondrous cities.” He gestured around. “Like this one.”

“Trapped here?” Abramm frowned, remembering the open gateway through which he had entered the city.

“By the Old One’s decree. He was angry with us—he was
afraid
of us, because of our dual natures. So he cursed us and put us here.” Bitterness laced his voice. “Now some of us”—he gestured at a big dragon lying along the wall—“have been so long in this place, so long frustrated with the injustice of their fate, they have lapsed into the forms you see now and have forgotten how to change back.”

Abramm contemplated that for a moment, then asked, “And who is the Old One?”

“Oh, he goes by many names—Eloshin, Sheleft’Ai, the Dying One . . .” Lema turned toward him. “I’ve heard that more recently his followers are calling him Eidon.”

Abramm met his fierce gaze stoically, surprised and yet not, for on some level he’d seen this coming. “You
are
the fathers of the tanniym, then,” he murmured.
Oh, my Lord Eidon, what are you doing? Why have you brought me
here?

Lema regarded him narrowly. “All we did was seek the freedom to make our own decisions and live out our lives as we chose. Is that so bad a thing?”

“You raped the wives and daughters of men!”

“Rape?! Is that what he’s told you?” Lema shook his head, laughing. “It wasn’t that at all. The women
wanted
us. Loved us. Begged us to take them. And we loved them in our turn.” The amused expression became a scowl. “But he could not abide that. He had to be center of everything. As if his ideas and ways were the only ones of any worth.”

“Well, seeing as he knows the end from the beginning and has made us all—”

Lema snapped around, fast as a dragon, nostrils flaring, blue eyes fierce and cold. “What do you know!” he sneered, cutting Abramm off. His brows drew down and his face flashed with a preternatural fire. “Blind, stupid little termite. The Old One made us all! Ha! If you had the least idea what he
really
was . . .” He had leaned so close Abramm could smell his astringent breath. Now he stopped as if coming to his senses. “Why am I wasting words on you? You’ll never understand until it’s too late.”

He turned and walked away, leaving Abramm to breathe a sigh of relief, happy to be rid of him. But Lema hadn’t gone far before he turned back. “Come along. It’s not far now.” And it was as if a different person spoke. All the dark rage was gone, the man’s breezy golden air returned as if it had never left.

Unnerved by the change, knowing for certain now that this man was his enemy, the last thing Abramm wanted to do was come along. But what else could he do? Even if he had been shown another way to go, Lema would undoubtedly follow.

They continued through the city, the mist unveiling new sights ahead as it closed in from behind. Dragons rose and scuttled out of their way, or grunted and stirred behind the open street-level doorways, and it wasn’t long before Abramm noticed he and Lema had acquired a procession of reptilian attendants following along after them.

Lema ignored them, taking it upon himself to serve as impromptu tour guide and consumed with his descriptions and explanations.

His great city had once been divided into three distinct regions—the outer two now lost—and was so vast that it had taken a man ten days to traverse and three times that to encircle. Those who could always flew. Common men, such as Abramm, with their short legs and constant need for rest and replenishment, took even longer to cross it.

He delighted in pointing out the ruins of an ancient theater here, a marketplace there, the home of a once-prominent resident, a particularly well-preserved artwork or architectural detail. He waxed eloquently on the Ban’astori’s skill and grace in the arts. And even in its present state of decline, Abramm saw signs of wondrous beauty—like the stone fig trees that marched down the divider of the thoroughfare. The sheered-off pillars Abramm had seen near the dragon square were actually beautifully rendered tree stumps, broken by the heedlessness of fighting dragons. As they progressed toward the city’s center, more and more trees remained intact and were as amazingly crafted as the dragon statue in the square—accurate down to each twig and leaf, and so cunningly shaped they seemed to quiver in a nonexistent breeze.

Though usually he agreed with Lema that all had been quite magnificent, he once made the mistake of wondering why it had been allowed to fall into such ruin. Lema’s tone sharpened as he attributed the decline to the Old One and reverted to complaining of how unjustly he and his people had been trapped here. As he went on and on, Abramm came to understand that not all the dragons in the city were Ban’astori in various states of regression. Some, like Lema, had retained the full awareness and use of their dual natures. Others, consumed by bitterness and anger, had lived in their dragon aspects so long, the strength of their gentler, more civilized side had wasted away. Now, living only in their lusts of the moment, those poor beings had lost even some of the higher characteristics of the dragon, like their wings and the beauty of their scaling, becoming little more than overgrown lizards.

“It will not always be like this, though,” Lema promised. “One day the Chosen One will come to set us free. Some of us think it will be soon.” He eyed Abramm speculatively. “With us as his army, he will unite the realms into one and end the divisiveness that has so long plagued the world. We will regain what has always been ours, and the Old One will be exposed for the fraud he is. A drooling, hunchbacked old man, who survives only so long as other foolish men believe in him. Maybe we will save a little bit of the desert just for him and those he has deceived to wander in for the rest of time.” He thought for a moment, then chuckled. “Then again, maybe not, since there’d be no one to care enough about him to keep him alive.”

Something big flew over their heads, hidden in the mist but for the wind its passage generated.

“We will set forth a new order where men will be cared for properly and no one will go without. Where wisdom and talent will be appreciated, where faith will mean peace not war and worship will become the greatest joy ever known. Where men will know no limits, free to progress beyond anything they can even imagine.” He smiled and glanced at Abramm. “What say you to that, friend Alaric? Does that sound like such a dreadful thing?”

Abramm found himself unable to speak. Even aside from Lema’s boasting at the demise of Eidon, his glowing description of the new order had made Abramm’s skin crawl, for he’d remembered all too clearly how earlier Lema, bristling with hatred and disgust, had called him a termite. As if he were some kind of infestation needing to be removed, not “cared for properly . . .”

And he was more at a loss than ever to explain why he had been brought here.

The crowd of dragons following them continued to grow, both behind and before them, joined now by large men of Lema’s kind. They stood at the side of the street, watching silently as the two passed. Lema ignored them all, and Abramm supposed himself to be something of a novelty here, so why wouldn’t the locals turn out to have a look at him?

Yet, despite the sense they were about to reach their destination, they walked on and on, until it seemed they’d walked three times the distance he’d walked in the desert. His legs and back and hips ached with fatigue, and he was beginning to wonder if they were walking in circles when the mist dissolved before them to reveal a sudden drop in the city’s elevation. Stairs descended to and through a landing from which flat rooftops extended into one long connected network of buildings. These encircled a vast, circular flat that sloped down to a dark central pit from which a gout of mist arose to meet the cloud overhead.