Son of the Hero (34 page)

The dragon’s second pass was a carbon copy of the first. Dragons didn’t seem to have a very wide repertory of offensive moves. This time I saw an arrow blossom from the dragon’s forehead, so I knew that Annick had found the range. But the arrow didn’t weaken or deflect the beast any more than my first swipes had. I slashed at the snout and jumped right this time, while the dragon’s jaws snapped toward the other side, where I had gone the first time.

Odds and evens.

Something new came over me then. I’m not sure I can describe it. Maybe it doesn’t need any more than to say that I became fey—deathbound and crazy with it, manic. A new power seemed to settle in me, or waken. I felt as if I were growing inside my skin, but I wasn’t turning into the Incredible Hulk or anything like that. It was all—I don’t know—just a sensation within my mind. I moved a few steps toward the watching Etevar and his wizard. I drew the wizard’s eyes to me again, somehow
forced
him to meet my stare.

I am Vara returned!
my mind screamed at him.

I had no idea at all where that boast originated, certainly not in
my
brain. Sure, I had been told that the magic of Varay’s Hero was supposed to include some of Vara’s strength and skill, but I hadn’t been idling away at that kind of musing. With a dragon coming at me? The boast just sprang from my head. I didn’t even have time just then to look around to see if Vara and Dad were there with me.

When the dragon dove at me this time, I planted my feet and held my sword at full reach over my head—just the way I had seen the elf warrior do it. I didn’t duck to either side this time either, and that was sheer madness. I just brought Dragon’s Death straight forward with all of my strength, and then some, I guess, as if I seriously thought that I might be able to split that dragon fore to aft.

The shock of the collision could hardly have been worse if I’d been hit by an out-of-control semi. The dragon knocked me down, dragged and bounced me along the ground, and finally ripped the elf sword from my hands. I didn’t even have the wit to let go of the sword. As soon as I slowed down enough to get some control over my own movements, I rolled left,
fast
, to get out from under the collapsing body of the gargantuan beast. Pain stabbed at me from every part of my body. The dragon’s wing and leg pummeled me. I felt skin and muscle tear,
my
skin and muscle. The wing’s trailing edge bounced me forward again and finally pinned me against the dragon’s flank for a moment before I bounced clear—butt over brains.

“We’re here, son.” I heard Dad’s voice as plainly as I had ever heard any sound in my life. I couldn’t move. For a time, I couldn’t even get my eyes open.

Am I dead yet? I wondered. Mentally, at least, I shook my head. I hurt so much that I had to be alive. My heart was still pounding. I inhaled. That added to the pain.

It won’t be long, I decided. If I wasn’t already mortally wounded, the dragon would finish the job soon enough.

“We’re here, son,” Dad’s voice said again. “We’re waiting for you.”

More than anything, that was what forced me to keep trying.

I got my eyes open. They burned. I saw sky above me … and dragon to the side. I was flat on my back. I rolled over on my side, facing the dragon. Everything seemed willing to move, though not without complaint. My chest hurt. More than one rib had to be broken now. My arms were both bloody, but I could make fists with both hands. I could move the fingers.

The dragon didn’t fly off for another go-round. That didn’t feel like much of a victory, though. The damn thing was a mountain next to me. The tail was moving from side to side, not all that fast, but enough to keep anyone from coming close. The neck and head were swaying too—not as much as the tail.

I didn’t see any people, just dragon.

The feeling of power—or whatever I had felt before—had deserted me, been dragged out of me. I had to finish rolling over, onto my stomach, before I could start to get up. I got up on hands and knees … one knee. My left knee didn’t want to bend in the middle. And the foot felt as if it had been crammed into a boot that was only half as big as it needed to be. I tried to reach for my hip pocket to get the silver flask that Mother had given me, but the flask was gone. So was the pocket. No painkiller.

I retched, threw up. No blood in it, I told myself. I thought that might be a hopeful sign.

The dragon bellowed in what I hoped was intense pain.

“Get up,” I told myself. “Get up and finish the job while you can.”

Dreamer, another part of my mind said, laughing at me. Why not lie back down and wait?

I wouldn’t do that.

Instead, I fought my way to my feet. With a leg that wouldn’t do much of anything but throb, getting up was difficult—and agonizing. I stood and limped toward the dragon’s head, making a wide circle and watching it closely. It was slow going. I had to step forward with my right leg and then drag the left leg up into place. The leg would hold me, but I couldn’t do much else with it.

I had to stop and fight back the waves of pain every few steps. I had never dreamed that so much pain was possible.

For the first time, I got a chance to see just how damn huge that dragon really was. I don’t think I could possibly exaggerate its size. You could have put a football field on its back and left room for cheerleaders. The neck and tail were each longer than the back. Its thighs were like those old redwood trees with roads cut right through their trunks. A circus could have used one of its wings for its big top. The teeth were big enough to serve as headstones. It was as tall as a four-story building. New York City and Chicago could have met for a barbecue with steaks for everyone from its meat, with enough leftovers to stuff the entire NFL.

Big. Maybe a quarter mile long.

I don’t know how long I stared at the dragon, running those stupid comparisons through my mind. It probably wasn’t nearly as long as it seemed at the time. I started walking again, coughing dust and retching. Every time the pains got together and squeezed, strange things happened to my head and gut—none of them pleasant.

Eventually, I got around in front of the dragon. My elf sword had split the top of its snout from between nostrils the size of basketball hoops to between eyes the size of hula hoops. The eyes were open, though the fletching of one of Annick’s arrows protruded from the pupil of the left eye. I couldn’t reach Dragon’s Death. I stretched as far as I could, but my fingers fell a good eighteen inches short of the sword’s hilt. Finally, I leaned against the dragon’s snout, put my good foot on the corner of its lower lip—gingerly—and got up just far enough to reach the elf sword. I pulled on Dragon’s Death and fell backward when it came free.

The dragon moaned and moved its head from side to side, just a little.

“I hope you’re hurting as much as I am,” I said,
very
softly. I rubbed a sleeve across my eyes. They were watering constantly from the pain. Getting to my feet again was as painful as the first time, and just as slow. I stood there—ten feet from the dragon—and looked up at it. Its eyes were definitely out of reach, even with Dragon’s Death, as long as I was on the ground.

I came close to giving up then. The only way I would be able to reach this dragon’s eye to put that long thrust into it would be to climb up on top of the snout. Even if I could manage that, all the beast would have to do was toss its head to throw me far enough to finish the job of killing me.

Static electricity started to pop and crackle all over me again. I got hot—roasting. The wizards were dueling over me again. I glanced toward the battlements of Castle Thyme. Parthet was still there. He didn’t seem to be looking at me, but somewhere past me, past the dragon. I turned my head and spotted the Dorthini wizard. I didn’t have an up-close-and-personal view this time, so I couldn’t see the expression on his face, couldn’t tell if he was nervous or ready to gloat.

The Etevar was next to him, holding his horse quiet, watching.

I advanced on the dragon again, slowly, still dragging my left leg, using it only as a prop to hold me up. When I got right up to the dragon’s bleeding snout, I was temporarily out of his sight. I rested there a moment, in the shade, trying to gather my strength, and my nerve. With only one good leg, I was going to need both arms to climb, so I slipped Dragon’s Death into its clips on my back. Then I got my toehold at the corner of the dragon’s mouth and scrambled for the top of its snout.

The head rolled to the side. I held on to a couple of knobby wartlike projections until the rolling stopped. Then I got up—on one knee with the other leg trailing behind—and drew Dragon’s Death again. The whistling started immediately. I rammed the point of the elf sword into the dragon’s uninjured eye and leaned in and down, uncertain that the blade could even reach
this
monster’s brain. I pushed and twisted, and the dragon bucked and tried to roll its head again. For an instant, I was dangling from the sword’s hilt, holding on desperately. The dragon flapped its wings a couple of times but couldn’t generate enough lift to get off the ground. It couldn’t even get its chin more than a couple feet of the ground.

When the beast quieted down again, I maneuvered back into position. This time, I put all of my weight behind the sword until the guard was sinking into the eyeball itself.

And then the eyeball popped like a gigantic zit and foul-smelling crud gushed all over me, topped by gallons of black blood. It came so hard and fast that for a moment I thought I was going to drown in it. I choked and gagged and retched so hard that I almost lost my grip on the elf sword. My hands were deep in what was left of the eyeball now. The dragon moaned, then screeched and gave one last violent shake that tossed me and the sword to the ground. More blood—barrels of it—spurted from the wound and poured down on me. It was all I could do to get my face free of the flash flood.

As the dragon died—with a noisy death rattle that sounded like someone dropping a junkyard on a tin roof—the line that no mortal could kill a dragon and live through it also died a final death … or would if I somehow managed to get up and limp away. There would be a new old wives’ tale.
Only a mortal who
has
killed a dragon
can
kill one
.

A big if: I wasn’t at all sure that I would be able to get up and move away from the dead dragon. Only my continuing pain convinced me that I wasn’t already dead. Unless death didn’t end the pain—not a very comforting possibility. I got my hands and arms under me, and rested my head on an arm to keep my face out of the pool of blood. I was soaked, covered in blood and gore and goo and dust—stinking, rancid. Father and Vara seemed to call to me again, and I had to bite my lip to keep from saying, “I’m ready. Carry me off.”

It wasn’t just the pain, though a new throbbing in my head was so severe that it almost eclipsed the roster of other pains through my body and left leg. I was groggy with the pain, probably delirious—or near it. Retching, vomiting, came in cycles and kept me weak. There was also exhaustion and a sudden fear that I could never escape the smell of death, the stink of the dragon’s blood and innards.

The smell of the goop I was lying in was what finally made me fight my way to my feet. The slippery footing made it harder than ever. I needed the elf sword as a crutch now, and that is one thing that it wasn’t very good at. The damn think kept sticking into the ground. I swayed so wildly that I thought I was going to fall again. I don’t know how much time passed before I even thought to look for the Etevar, his wizard, and his army. I can’t even say how long my fight with the dragon lasted—probably not half as long as it’s taken me to tell the story.

I stumbled away from the dragon, looking for dry, solid ground, trying to get out of the shadow of the damn thing before I collapsed again.

21
The Eyes of Thyme

The two armies were still facing each other. Apparently, the war had taken a time out for my halftime entertainment with the dragon. With the dragon dead and me back on my feet—at least for the moment—the Varayan army started moving forward again, slowly, almost too slowly for it to be real.

My companions came back to me—all their faces as pale as Annick’s normal complexion. Harkane had my horse. Gold was still nervous about getting close to the dragon, but he wasn’t fighting the reins. Lesh and Hambert supported my weight while Harkane wiped as much of the sludge off me as he could with a large wad of rough cloth. Then he dried the hilt and blade of Dragon’s Death.

“Are you all right?” Annick asked, her voice sounding almost fearful.

“No,” came out as a hoarse croak. I coughed and spit. “I’m not in much better shape than that goddam dragon.” It was a stupid question, but I didn’t have the energy to point that out.

“Look, lord,” Lesh said, nodding off to the southeast. He turned me so I could see the Dorthini reaction to my victory.

The Etevar’s army was coming apart at the seams. Groups of soldiers, some large and some small, were breaking away, running. I guess that seeing their wizard and his dragon defeated was enough for those deserters. But it wasn’t a general rout by any means. The Etevar was busy, rallying as many as he could. Warlords were trying to keep more detachments from running off, sometimes even whipping men back to face us.

“Mount up, lad,” Parthet’s voice said in my ear. “You’ve got to finish the job.” I looked around, but Parthet was still on the battlements of the castle. The distant-whispering was still spooky.

I looked up at Parthet. His eyes were on me. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

“You have to, lad. It’s the only way.”

I couldn’t. There was just no way. If it hadn’t been for Lesh and Hambert at my sides, holding ninety-five percent of my weight, I couldn’t even have stayed on my feet.

“It’s your duty,” Annick said, a blank look behind her eyes. She stared at me, past me, daring me to get angry with her again.

Hell, that was probably the only thing that could have got me moving.