The Saint of Dragons (14 page)

T
HE WIND DIED DOWN
, whispering around the ship, taunting the survivors.

They had run aground.

Simon stood up weakly. The ship seemed mostly undamaged, from what he could see. His eyes met Alaythia’s. She put her hand up, as if to say,
Don’t worry, I’m okay, and Simon moved to
the side of the ship, looking for Aldric.

He was lying in the snow, just now lifting his head. He seemed to be all right.

Simon yelled down to him, rattled. “What do we do now?”

Tense with worry, Aldric gestured behind him. “Ransack the graveyard,” he answered.

Simon and Alaythia looked up, surprised. On the coast was a blight of dead trees and a trail of skeletal remains, human-sized Dragons, each one encircled in a little tornado of ashes and embers, still burning.

They had found the graveyard of Dragons.

Aldric headed back to board the ship. It was lodged just out of the water. Now the damage could be seen clearly.

“We’ve got ourselves a wreck,” Aldric complained as he boarded. Parts of the ship’s deck had been cracked. The top of one mast had fallen.

“It could be worse,” said Alaythia.

“You should’ve cut sail when you saw we were going too fast,” said Aldric.

Alaythia looked at him sharply. “You can’t possibly blame this on me. I was doing all I could.”

“It’s all I have left of her,” Aldric answered, not meeting Alaythia’s gaze.

Simon could feel the tension between Aldric and Alaythia, and decided to focus on the next step: “What do we do now? We haven’t got a ship.”

“The wood will heal itself,” said Aldric, “but it could take a very long time.”

Fenwick came out of hiding, running up and down the deck, highly disturbed.

“I know, I know,” Aldric said, calling to the fox. “Quit complaining—I’m not happy about it, either. Put the cabin in order, and take care of Valsephany. We have other things to worry about now.”

Simon looked at the landscape. “Looks almost peaceful,” he said. “Just dead. Maybe the legends
were
wrong.”

They would find out for themselves. They changed into dry clothes and gathered gear for an expedition. Alaythia stayed behind clearing debris and keeping watch, while Simon and Aldric forged into the icy region. As dawn broke, they discovered that the trail of Dragon bones led to a stone ruin. As Simon
reached the top of a hill, he stared in awe at what lay hidden in the dim light: A castle in the snow. It had clearly been through some terrible times. Little was left of its crumbling towers. Ice had formed into unearthly shapes atop its decrepit walls.

In the courtyard, Aldric found a sword in the ice, marked with the Dragonhunter symbol. Simon and Aldric began digging there, searching for the Lost Book of Saint George.

They uncovered the armor and weapons of many Knights, but there was no trace of the people who lived in the fortress. “They were burned away,” concluded Aldric. “The battle was here. The Dragon got through the outer defenses, and they resisted him ’til there was no one left to fight.”

He pointed to a Serpentine form near a tower, the burned bones of the Daggerblood Dragon.

Aldric theorized the other dragon bones they’d seen had come from later visitors here. But there was something else bothering Simon. “I want to know about Alaythia, but you keep changing the subject—she went up in the mast, she did something, and the wind came out of nowhere. I mean, how do you explain that?”

“Let’s get this done,” said his father, as Alaythia came from the ship, bringing more digging tools.

“I’m not waiting out there alone,” she said. “The animals are fine, and you don’t have to worry, I got all my artwork put away.”

Aldric kept digging. “Good. I was worried sick. You can help us now. I want to get out of here as fast as possible.” But his shovel had just hit something hard.

Simon leaned down with Aldric. It was a grim treasure they had found. A human skeleton in armor stared out at them.

“Fioth St. George,” said Aldric.

Alaythia came closer, intrigued. “How do you know?” she whispered.

Aldric cleared away more ice. “He carries the book.”

In the arms of the skeletal Knight lay the Lost Book of Saint George. Aldric gingerly pulled the very old, leatherbound volume from his ancestor’s clutches. It was slightly larger than an average Bible, and Aldric treated it with great care.

“Sorry, old fellow,” said Aldric. Several Dragon-daggers lay embedded in the Knight’s skull, still burning faintly with red dragonfire.

“
That
is hate.” Simon stared somberly. “Why didn’t the Dragon just burn the book after doing this?”

“The books can’t be destroyed,” said Aldric, moving away from the fallen Knight. “And the curse did its work: The Dragon never got out alive.”

Simon watched as Aldric turned the pages. It was a white book, not the black one Simon was used to calling the Book of Saint George.

“There’s a lesson to all this,” muttered Aldric. “Back in the late medieval ages, there were two groups of Dragonhunters, those that followed Arthur St. George and those that followed Fioth St. George. They kept their work secret from the other so that if one group was destroyed, the other could fight on and not be discovered. But there were too many secrets. It would seem they worked from two different spellbooks. We didn’t even know this book existed.”

“Is it going to help us?” asked Alaythia.

“They’re in here,” Aldric said, satisfied. “The deathspells are in here.”

And then he realized what he said, and his face fell into sadness.

Simon moved near him to see better. “No, this is—this is impossible,” Simon stammered. His eyes ran down the long list of Serpents.

“Hundreds,” said Aldric, his voice catching. It was like finding a new ocean after having just crossed one. “God help us. How many are still out there to this day?”

The wind and the shock froze out any more words for a moment. The Venice Dragon now seemed to be only the start of their worries. A spark in a vast bonfire. The danger before them was so infinite they could hardly bear to talk about it.

“What is…Whose deathspell is this?”

Simon pointed. At the bottom of the list was a group of words, fancily written in the human magician language. Like all magic writing, it was partly in Dragontongue, but the words did not match up with any particular Dragon.

“Not sure what that means,” said Aldric. “Some old warning, perhaps. The important thing is, the book is undamaged. Let’s just get it out of here.”

“Why?” said Simon, his shoulders falling. “We can’t get them all, just the three of us.”

Aldric pocketed the book, looking at him. “We must.”

It was the lowest they had ever been.

The threat of the Dead Coast was nothing compared to its secret.

With a sad fury, Aldric picked up the torch of blue dragonfire they had been using to light their work and tipped his arrow with it. He lit another with the dark red fire from the Dragon-daggers. Simon wondered what he was doing.

Angrily, he fired the first arrow into the body of the Daggerblood Dragon.

“I’m too late to kill you,” snarled Aldric, and Simon was amazed at his wrath. “But I can burn you until there’s no trace of you on this earth.”

With a cry of desperation, he shot the red-fire arrow into the same spot on the Dragon’s skeleton.

The two flames on the arrows came together and blew up with a calamitous blast. The skeleton was blown to bits. The exploded parts came down in pieces of burning bone. But immediately the fire turned into a quick, screaming inferno, and they were forced to run from it. Simon ran hard toward the ship, looking back to see the flames reaching across the winterscape.

Simon, Aldric, and Alaythia ran until they crossed a fallen fortress gate, and stopped to look back. The fire was still crawling toward them.

“When the fire of two Dragons crosses,” Aldric said, breathing hard, “it unleashes immense power. I didn’t know how bad it would be.”

The flames would reach them soon. But Simon and Alaythia were already exhausted.

“Well, I promised you near-death experiences,” said Aldric.

Alaythia groaned. “Feel free to break your promises.”

They fled the fire, seeking safety. They found instead a wall of fog.

In the growing daylight, Simon watched, disturbed, as the fog expanded and blotted out the view of the ship, of the fire, of the dead fortress, and soon all traces of the landscape.

“Of course the Dragons left the book here,” said Aldric. “No
one ever comes here; no one ever leaves.”

Simon and Aldric felt themselves grow dizzy. Alaythia said she felt it as well, a nausea taking over so strongly that she couldn’t go far without help.

She stuck close to them, but it was clear no one knew which direction they were headed. There was nothing to guide them. They hiked in the snow for a long time, hearing horrible sounds in the fog, like wild predators killing their prey, snapping and tearing. Later they heard the cries and clanging of an old battle of Knights and Serpents, like an echo in history. Voices in the mist called out for them to run. They heeded the warning.

At last Aldric found the way to the waterline, and they followed it, heading back to the ship, but their path along the edge of the coast was now broken up by cracking ice. Simon looked down to see the white ground breaking up beneath him—and hundreds of snapping, piranha-like creatures furiously churning the water between the cracks. All Simon could see were their sharp, tiny, glittering jaws.

Hurriedly, Aldric led Simon and Alaythia to the ship, as the piranha-animals began eating at the ice around them, nearly chewing away the path.

The damaged ship launched, and its tattered sails carried them away from the small, frenzying creatures. Simon looked back to see the shapes of skeletal faces in the ghostly mist. The battered ship was making terrible creaking noises, but it had taken them from the Coast of the Dead. Simon’s heart calmed; he felt his head clearing.

Within a few hours the sailboat, tilting unevenly in the water, limped to a misty harbor in Russia. Aldric told Simon to be on
guard. He had noticed something. They had been followed for some time by a military vessel.

As Simon, Aldric, and Alaythia stepped off the boat to the pier, the soldiers from the vessel moved in. Aldric was dragging a huge black supply trunk, hoping to refill some of the ship’s supplies. He yelled to the ship, “Lock up,” and the cabin doors and windows locked soundly.

Soldiers swarmed around them. The men were barking questions already.

“Russian,” said Simon, recognizing their language.

Aldric felt in his coat for the White Book of Saint George. Simon could see his nervousness.

The Russians came in and looked them over, as well as the supply trunk. They did not speak English very well, and they were very suspicious of these new arrivals. They ordered the St. Georges and Alaythia back to their station house in a nearby village.

Since more soldiers were arriving out of the snowy forest, Aldric decided to go without a fight for now.

Simon was very worried as the hostile Russians pulled them away. Suspicion was bred into the bone with these men; not just anyone could get past them. At the coastal station, they asked many questions, and if they didn’t like the looks of you, off you’d go to a cold Siberian prison. Or so they threatened.

“You have nice digits,” said one soldier to Alaythia. His English was bad. He meant to say she had a nice figure. Aldric was now clenching his fists, watching and clearly wishing he could get to his weapons.

There were many, many soldiers here, and they were large,
and it seemed to Simon they were angry, waiting for any excuse to strike them.

Just then, a smiling Russian, smooth and well-dressed, entered behind the hulking guards. He was clearly the boss. “It is our displeasure to detain you.” He grinned. “Please enjoy a view of television while we review your case.”

Literally. The Russians were trying to open Aldric’s black steamer trunk marked with the Dragonhunter symbol. In the meantime, Simon glanced over at the TV news. He was astonished at the images he saw.

The news showed tremendous devastation, some kind of horrid storm destruction that ran throughout the French countryside. There were images of a beaten Paris, a smashed Berlin, a storm-struck Geneva—homes were leveled, people were crying, wandering aimlessly.

“That storm went through France, Germany, Poland…,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” said Alaythia.

“It is beginning. Whatever the Venetian is planning, this is the start of it all,” Aldric said. “He’s building toward his ‘Fire Eternal.’”

The news showed coffins being prepared in the hundreds. Parts of Berlin looked as it had after World War II—broken buildings, shivering people. A world map showed the giant storm headed for the Russian plains.

“It’s headed for Moscow,” whispered Alaythia.

Aldric pondered this. “Why…?”

The smiling Russian returned to them. “We have found cause for concern,” he said. “I would like to see personally that
you get to my superior. Please come with the guards. No cause for concern.” His smile never left his face.

Aldric looked angry, sizing up the hulking men. One of them pushed up his sleeves, ready to fight, revealing a Dragon tattoo with runic writing. Simon looked at his father. He could see the tension leave him.

The grinning Russian escorted them all to an ancient, rickety train.

Aldric whispered to Simon with satisfaction, “These are the servants of a Serpent. There must be a Russian Dragon. They’ll be taking us right to him.”

Thank goodness
, Simon thought miserably.

Aboard the train, the lead guard sat opposite them, smiling. In the train car was a large portrait of a hefty old general. He did not look like a Dragon. In photographs, they never do.

“General Pirakov, de facto chief of the military,” Aldric told Simon. “Always nice when a Dragon is in command of a nuclear arsenal.”

The thought gave Simon a chill.

There were two other guards aboard, toying with Aldric’s black steamer trunk.