Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (31 page)

They followed the windings of the canyon for some distance, through a wasteland of fetid puddles and crippled, dying trees. A final turning brought them within sight of the end—desolate, stinking, a dark cave mouth amid broken slopes of shale and boulders. The sand around the cave was cut by filthy runnels of black and violent yellow slime. An oily suggestion of a putrid, greenish mist hung low over the ground. Beyond, on the higher slopes above the cave, the trees grew clean. But the woods were silent, unstirred by so much as a bird song, and Rudy heard the intaken hiss of Ingold's breath.

“What is it?” he asked softly, and the wizard touched his lips for silence.

In a voice indistinguishable from the flicker of wind in grass, he cautioned, “They have excellent hearing.”

Apprehensively, Rudy dropped his voice to a subvocal whisper. “What do?”

The old man had already begun to retreat soundlessly behind the rocks. He replied in a murmur of breath. “Dragons.”

“There's no chance he's out hunting?” Rudy whispered hopefully.

lie and Ingold stood side by side in the black shadow of a massive boulder of splintered granite that shielded them from the cave beyond. They had scouted the walls of the canyon back for miles, but the only trail leading out of it was the one they had come down from the haunted woods.

“Of course not,” the wizard replied in a soft, almost inaudible breath. “Can't you hear his scales sliding on the rocks of the cave?”

Rudy was silent, listening, casting his senses into the dark pit that loomed before them. In all the world there seemed no other noises but the hrssh of wind through Che's dusty pelt and the nervous jitter of his little hooves on the rocks. Then he heard the dry grating of incalculable weight and the thick drag of fetid breath.

“How big is that thing?” he whispered, aghast.

Ingold drew himself back from the edge of the boulders. “Forty feet at least. I'm told the old bulls can get to almost twice that.”

“Eighty feet!” Rudy wailed soundlessly. He calculated the distance from their rock to the boulders that flanked the cave—it looked like miles, with or without Godzilla lurking in between.

“It may be sleeping,” the wizard continued softly, “but I doubt it. Judging by the amount of discoloration on the trees, it's laired here for a little over two months. Probably it was trapped here when the mazes surrounding Quo were shifted and strengthened. But there's little game in these mountains, and certainly nothing large enough to interest a dragon. You can see for yourself that there are no bones near the mouth of the cave.”

“Wonderful,” Rudy said shakily. “Our friend should be just tickled pink to see us.” He edged his way around the boulders and surveyed the ground before the cave.

Here at the ends of the canyon, the stink of the beast was overwhelming. The deep bed of river sand was littered with fallen or rotting trees, eucalyptus, cottonwood, or oak, whose roots had been eaten away by the poisonous fluids that dribbled from the mouth of the cave. Violently discolored tangles of weeds and distorted brush flanked the cave itself and grew halfway up the boulders on either side. Rudy felt a light touch on his shoulder as Ingold came around beside him.

“You bear left up the rocks there; I'll take Che and climb the talus slope to the right of the cave. Go as swiftly as you can in silence. If it does come out and attack you, dive for shelter—any kind of shelter—and I'll try to draw it off. On the whole, it's more likely to attack me, since I'll have the burro. If that happens, you've got to go in and do the axwork. Cut it behind the forelegs or through the belly or up behind the neck, if you can get that close. And stay away from its tail. It can club you senseless before you realize what's hit you.”

Ingold started to move forward, and Rudy caught his sleeve. “It doesn't—it can't fly, can it?” he whispered anxiously.

The wizard appeared startled by the question. “Good heavens, no.”

“Or breathe fire?”

“No, although its slime and spittle can be corrosive in wounds, and its blood will burn you. No—the deadliness of the dragon lies in its speed, its strength—and its magic.”

Rudy whispered in horror, “Magic?”

One white eyebrow lifted. “After your experience with the Dark, you surely cannot believe that the seed of magic is limited to humankind,. Dragons do not have human intelligence; their magic is a beast's magic, the magic that lures the prey to the hunter—a magic of illusion and invisibility, for the most part. No cloaking-spell will work against a dragon; no illusion will turn it aside. Remember that.” His hand closed around Che's headstall, and he stepped out into the pale daylight, beyond the shelter of the rocks. Rudy gathered up his staff, preparing to make a run for the canyon's left-hand wall. Ingold's whisper stopped him. “And one more thing. Whatever you do— don't look into the dragon's eyes.”

At a quick, steady walk, Ingold started for the talus spill that formed a steep gray slope up the mountain to the right of the cave. Che braced his feet and shook his short mane, unwilling to walk toward the chemical stench of the dragon's lair, but Ingold, Rudy knew, was a lot stronger than he looked.

Rudy moved in the opposite direction, skirting the discolored pools and the rotting stands of dying trees along the foot of the cliff, uncomfortably aware of the possibility of rattlesnakes in the rocks he'd have to climb. His hands felt tied up with the staff he carried. Across the seventy feet or so of sand that separated the canyon walls, Ingold and Che glided in an almost invisible medley of brown.

Ahead of him, Rudy heard the slithering noise of tons of slipping iron. Something round and gold and glassy flashed in the darkness of the cave, and he stopped in his tracks, paralyzed by something closer to fascination than by horror. A preliminary hiss came from the darkness, with a rolling breath of oily stench and fumes that stung his eyes. Rudy blinked, blinded, wiped at the burning tears…

And there it was.

He had never imagined anything so hideous or so gaudy. He had been expecting something green and vaguely crocodilian, like the dragons in picture books, not the product of an unnatural mating between a dinosaur and a calliope. It was enameled Chinese red and flaming gold, flickering with bands of green and black and white that mottled the lean-ribbed sides like a beadwork on a pair of slippers. The head was massive, horned, mailed, and bristling with flared scales of purple, black, and gold, which gave it a curiously beribboned effect; from the tufted whorls of streamers, spikes, and fins on that snake-like nape, a long ridge ran backward, up over the towering fulcrum of the mighty hind legs and down the counterpoised bulk of the spined, deadly tail. Green slime dripped from the armored chin as it champed and swallowed. The huge head turned, not with the slow, saurian deliberation of a movie monster's, but as quick as a bird's. Rudy found himself looking into round, golden eyes.

The amber quicksilver of those twin mirrors drank his soul. He did not understand the vision that he saw in them, distant and clear, striking resonances of certainty within his heart. He saw the far-off image of his own chained hands silhouetted against the freezing arch of winter stars. An echo of bitter cold and blinding despair pierced him from what he knew, as surely as he knew his name, was his own future. Mesmerized, he could neither have moved nor looked away, had he willed it. He had to see, to understand…

He had never thought that anything that huge could move so fast. The dragon lunged like a lizard. Waking from his trance, Rudy could scarcely have moved if he had been ready. But instead of ripping, eight-inch fangs, all that struck him was a whiplash of kicked sand, for the dragon turned in mid-spring with a metallic hiss of rage and pain. Rudy threw himself aside to avoid the lashing hind foot, then raised his head from the ground in time to see Ingold leap away from the steaming deluge of blood that burst from the monster's slashed flank. From the end of that long neck, the armored head struck like a snake, Ingold sprang clear of it, his sword striking sparks from the mailed nose.

The dragon reared itself back on the massive fulcrum of its long hind legs, its belly gleaming like stained ivory in the sick gray light. It strode forward and lunged down again, snapping, then half-turned to slash with twenty-five feet of spined tail whose force could easily have broken a man's back. Ingold moved out of range, but a moment later his sword whined in again, cleaving through air rotten with the choking fumes of the dragon's breath, to strike at the slashing teeth and iron mouth.

Don't go for the head, dammit
, Rudy thought cloudily. There's nothing but armor there. Then, as the wizard ducked back from the lash of the tail again, he realized what Ingold was doing. He was opening the dragon up, distracting its attention, so that Rudy could go in for the kill.

The fanning mane of its protective bone shield guarded the dragon's neck from the front, making it impossible for its victim to get in any kind of killing blow. But every time the monster brought its head down to snap at Ingold, the whole of its neck brushed the ground. From where he lay belly-down in the sand, Rudy could see how delicate were the beaded scales covering the pumping arteries of the throat. A single blow would do it—provided, of course, a man was willing to run in under that heaving crimson wall of angry flesh.

His knees weak at the thought, Rudy scanned that mountain of scarlet iron for another target.

He could see none. His scanty knowledge of anatomy didn't cover dragons. He had no idea where they kept their hearts; and anyway, he doubted his sword would pierce the polychrome mail of its side.

The spiked club of the tail cut the air like a whip, its barbs skimming Ingold's shoulder as he dodged it, with a force that spun him, bleeding, into the sand. The claws raked at him like swords; Ingold cut at them desperately from where he lay. Rudy knew that if the dragon pinned the old man, it would be all over for them both. He gathered his feet under him and drew his sword, watching for his chance. The wizard rolled to his feet somehow, staggering, but kept drawing the attack backward and in his direction, never letting Rudy get within the creature's line of sight. Absurdly, Rudy heard the old man saying far back along the trail, “I have even actually slain a dragon— rather, I acted as decoy and Lohiro did the sword work…”

If Lohiro could do it
, Rudy thought grimly, so can I. Anyway, it was a curious comfort to. know that the Archmage had been relegated to the butcher position, rather than the infinitely trickier post as decoy.

The dragon struck out with its claws again, and Ingold went down, his bloodied sword gleaming as he slashed at the snatching mouth. The huge shadow spread over him in the drenched and smoking sand. Rudy was on his feet as the massive head reached down. Ingold saw him coming, cut, and rolled, the great head swinging to follow, green drool splattering from the chisel teeth. Rudy's sword cleaved the air as if he were chopping wood. It split the jugular vein, and he barely ducked aside in time to avoid the firehose of blood that exploded outward, steaming in the air as it roared thickly against the rock of the canyon wall, some forty feet away. The dragon screamed, flinging up its head, its huge tail lashing as it clawed at the streaming wound.

Rudy plunged in under the writhing shadow to drag Ingold to his feet, hauling him toward the talus slope as the ground all around them was drenched in a burning rain of splattering blood. His hands felt scorched by it; his lungs were seared by the fumes. The lashing tail struck the ground so near that it covered them in a wave of thrown sand. Stumbling on the base of the slope, Rudy looked back, staring upward in horror at that huge, gaudy body swaying against the pallid sky.

Then the dragon fell, hitting the earth like a derailed freight train, and the ground shook under the impact of its weight. It heaved itself halfway up, screaming harshly and metallically, its beribboned mane lashing in the frenzy of its death throes. The trees cracked where it heaved against them, their leaves shriveling in the scorch of its blood.

Rudy pulled Ingold a little farther up the loose rock of the slope, so weak with terror and reaction that he felt he could hardly move himself. The old man was a dead weight in his arms, the back of his mantle sticky where the claws had raked through to the flesh.

In malice or unknowing agony, the dragon reared and made one final lunge at them, the vast jaws snapping shut in a spew of blood and drool. Then the great body twisted in one last convulsive heave and lay still. Black liquid trickled from between the chisel teeth.

Rudy whispered, “Jesus Christ…”

But Ingold said softly, “Hush.”

The gold eyes opened. They stared upward, baleful, inhuman, at the two wizards crouched out of its reach on the slope. Then they blinked, filmy, translucent shutters sliding down over the dying inner fire, and for a moment there was a blank, curious question in the dragon's eyes. The hideous mask of scarlet bone was incapable of expression; but for a fleeting instant, Rudy had the impression of some other personality looking out through the sunken eyes. A thin, dark, bearded face, he thought, whose dragon gaze rested briefly on Ingold before those dim, amber lamps were extinguished forever.

Around them, the hush was like the draw of expectant breath. Rudy felt the air stir and change, though there was no breeze; it was like the shifting in a curtain of perception.

“Look behind you,” Ingold said softly.

Rudy turned his head to look. A path, old and overgrown, wound on up toward the pass that was, he saw now, less than five miles from the end of the canyon. For the first time since they'd come to the Seaward
Mountains, he had no sense of illusion or misdirection. He looked down at the crimson carcass where it lay amid the decaying broken trees and smoking sand, its gaudy tags and scales already beginning to blacken in the virulence of its own body chemistry. Then he looked back at Ingold's face, to see it white with shock, hollow and stretched and old.

“What is it?” Rudy whispered.

Bleak blue eyes shifted to his own. “It's the road to the pass, Rudy,” he said quietly. “The road into Quo.”