Dragon Weather (3 page)

Arlian squatted and began counting the big drums of cheese—the black wax did tend to fade into the dark background, and he could see how Grandsir might have trouble.

More voices were shouting somewhere in the distance, Arlian realized as he counted—had those girls started the adults arguing?

Then he heard another sound, a hollow metallic booming, and started up so suddenly he almost knocked the candle from Grandsir's hand.

The old man hardly noticed; he had heard the same sound, and was staring at the open door at the top of the ladderwell. From where they stood only a corner of the opening was visible, a triangle of dull gray light in the brown darkness.

They both knew that sound. Everyone in the village knew it. Once a year everyone gathered around and solemnly listened to it, simply so they
would
know it when they heard it. It was the ringing of the great brass warning bell that hung in the otherwise abandoned village shrine.

“Do you think the mountain's erupting, Grandsir?” Arlian asked.

“I don't know,” his grandfather replied, taking a step toward the ladder, the candle held high. “It could be. But I don't hear any rumbling…”

Then he stopped moving, stopped talking. People were shrieking again—but this was no game. These were screams of mortal terror, from grown men and women as well as children.

“What's happening?”
Arlian whispered hoarsely. He stared at the ladder.

Then a rush of hot air swept down into the cellars, flinging long-settled dust into the air in great swirls; dust stung Arlian's eyes, blinding him momentarily. He blinked frantically, and dabbed at his watering eyes.

Somewhere overhead he heard a tremendous roaring.

“Come on,” Grandsir said. “Whatever's happening, we don't want to be trapped down here.” He tugged at Arlian's arm.

Still squinting, Arlian came, staggering toward the ladder. The doorway seemed much brighter now—much
too
bright, Arlian thought. He realized with a start that the wind had blown out the candle and he hadn't even noticed at first, so much more light was spilling down from above.

Hot air roiled about them when they reached the ladder. Grandsir gestured for Arlian to wait, and began climbing.

He reached the top and took a step forward, and Arlian did not wait for a signal, but started up the ladder himself.

The minute his head cleared the pantry floor and he could see through the other door he knew why there was so much more light; the kitchen roof was gone, torn away, and the kitchen walls were ablaze. The pantry's stone walls were intact, but the wooden ceiling was beginning to smolder and blacken, and the top shelf on one side was askew.

“What's happening?” he shouted—he had to shout to have any hope of being heard over the immense roaring that now seemed to fill the entire world. Hot whirlpools of smoke and air spilled through the pantry, blinding him anew. “Where's Mother? And Father, and Korian?”

“I don't know,” Grandsir said, stepping forward, arms raised to shield his face against the fire.

“Is it an eruption?” Arlian shouted.

Grandsir stopped dead, staring.

“No,” he said. “It's not an eruption.”

Arlian stared as well; still on the ladder, his waist level with the pantry floor, his vision was limited to what he could see by peering around his grandfather's legs and out through the door to the kitchen. He could see a corner of the kitchen table, a burning fragment of wall, and a wedge of gray sky—and framed in that wedge he saw the dragon.

He could not judge its size accurately, but he knew it was huge. It hung there, flapping its tremendous wings, and Arlian knew that that flapping was what had caused the whirlwinds that had swept through the cellars.

It looked black against the sky, but Arlian could not be sure that was its true color. Its eyes were the color of flame, but perhaps they merely reflected the blazing village.

Its wings swept up in a graceful, gigantic curve, then snapped down, then swept upward again, and between them hung a body as long and lithe as a snake, tail whipping and winding below. Its long neck arched elegantly, and it seemed to be staring right at Arlian.

“Oh,” Arlian breathed. The dragon was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most terrifying thing he had ever seen.

Then it turned and soared away, moving through the sky as smoothly and effortlessly as a fish moves through water.

“It's gone,” Arlian said.

His grandfather took a cautious step forward, and Arlian hoisted himself up off the ladder, stepping through the doorway into the pantry.

Then they both froze as the second dragon appeared.

This one did not look their way, but simply flew across their field of vision, left to right and angling upward. Its scaled flank caught a gleam of sunlight and shone a dark, rich green, though the rest of it seemed as black as the other.

It was definitely not the same dragon, however. The proportions were different—and the face, even when seen only from the side, was different.

Arlian was startled at how readily he could know that. The dragons, he discovered, had faces as distinctive and as instantly recognizable as people. Why or how it could be so he did not know, but he knew it was.

“Two of them,” Grandsir said—he, too, had seen immediately that the two were not the same creature. “
Two
dragons!”

“Are they gone?” Arlian asked.

“I don't know,” Grandsir said, stepping cautiously forward. He coughed as a swirl of smoke reached him.

Just then a dragon reappeared—the first one, Arlian was sure. It swept down from the sky toward something Arlian could not see through the burning ruins of his family kitchen, and spat flame.

It was just as Grandsir had said three days before—the dragon opened its mouth and flexed its jaw, and something sprayed out, then burst into flame. The fire never touched the dragon itself; instead a burning mist spattered down across the village below.

Grandsir coughed again.

“Dragons or no, we can't stay in here,” he said. “The smoke will kill us both. Maybe we can get to the cisterns—if we hide in there the flames can't touch us.”

Arlian nodded hesitantly, and stepped forward—and that was when the third dragon appeared in the kitchen doorway. It was afoot, strolling through the village rather than flying, and had thrust its immense black head into the flaming ruins of the kitchen to see what might be in the depths of the house. It stared into the pantry, directly at Arlian and his grandfather.

Arlian screamed and stepped back involuntarily, back through the door. His foot missed the edge of the floor and he fell backward, hands flinging out in an unsuccessful attempt to catch himself on the doorframe. He tumbled heels over head down the ladder into the cellars and landed, bruised and dazed, on the warm stone floor.

He heard his grandfather shouting wildly; at first he was too stunned to make out the words, but then his senses began to return.

“… our home! May the dead gods curse you and all your kin, dragon—what have you done with my daughter and her husband, and my grandson? You get out of here, back to your caverns! Your time is over! You have no place in the Lands of Man!”

Arlian looked up and saw flames and smoke licking across the pantry ceiling, turning the familiar surface fierce and strange. Still bleary and stiff from his fall but desperate to get out, to not be trapped down here, he struggled to pull himself upright on the ladder.

Then a shadow fell across him and he looked up again to see Grandsir standing on the brink, his back to the cellars, his heels almost over the edge.

“You get away from me!” the old man shrieked, his voice cracking with terror.

And then there was a rush of air, of hot, fetid air laced with a biting acid stench like nothing Arlian had ever smelled before, and a deep, deep sound that was neither growl nor cough nor roar nor rumble nor bellow, and Grandsir let out a scream and fell backward into the cellars, pulling the ladder down with him, knocking Arlian down and landing atop him, the ladder wedged across the passageway over both of them.

Somewhere above, flames blossomed into roaring brilliance.

The boy's head hit the stone, and again Arlian was dazed; pain shot through his head and neck, and he tried to contract his spine, to pull himself inward in self-defense, but he was unable to move.

He lay sprawled on the stone, and Grandsir was sprawled atop him; the back of his grandfather's head was pressing down on his right eye, blocking his vision on that side. With his left eye he could see the burning ceiling far above, now pierced by widening flame-lit cracks, the remaining ceiling black between the lines of fire. Swirls of gray smoke filled much of the ladderwell now and dimmed the light, even though the flames were bright and the ceiling was splitting and crumbling. He could see the left side of his grandfather's face, more or less, but it was so close he had difficulty focusing on it.

Grandsir's weight on Arlian's chest was so much, and the smoke so thick, that he couldn't get his breath to speak—and Grandsir did not speak.

Even if Arlian had been able to speak, and Grandsir to hear, he wasn't sure he would be heard. Above them the pantry and the surrounding village were roaring chaos, a constant hammering of undifferentiated sound—flame and wind and terror.

Grandsir did not move to get up, did not stir, did not raise his hands or shift his feet. He lay still. Arlian thought he might be dead, but that blurry, out-of-focus bit he could see did not seem lifeless—Arlian could see motion, as if Grandsir were blinking, or twitching.

But then he managed to blink the smoke from his eye and get a clearer look, and realized that what he could see was not Grandsir's own face moving, but something
on
his face—something liquid, something that seethed and steamed and roiled.

Arlian desperately wanted to shriek at the sight of that, but he couldn't get enough air; he let out a strangled moan and struggled to free his left arm—his right was too securely pinned under Grandsir's body.

Red and gray fluid was bubbling up where Grandsir's left eye should have been; a bright, sharp stink scorched through Arlian's nostrils, making it even harder to draw the deep breath he desperately needed. Arlian's mouth was wide open as he sucked frantically for air.

He watched in sickened horror as the thick red fluid oozed down Grandsir's cheek.

That was not just blood. Blood would have been bad enough—to have his grandfather lying atop him, perhaps dead, perhaps dying, with blood welling up from his eye socket, would have been terrible enough to give Arlian nightmares for years. But this was
not
just blood; human blood did not steam and bubble, and was never so viscous.

Arlian knew what had happened. The third dragon had looked into the pantry and seen Grandsir there, and Grandsir had shouted defiance. The dragon had listened for a moment, then grown annoyed. It had been unable to reach into the stone pantry with fang or claw, had not wanted to trouble itself with smashing down the stone walls, so it had breathed its fiery venom at Grandsir.

But the dragon had been so close to the old man that the venom would not burn, so close it had not time to ignite; instead it had struck Grandsir full in the face as a toxic spray. Some had burst into flame when it struck the hot ceiling or the back wall of the ladderwell, but the liquid that had hit Grandsir had remained venom, rather than fuel.

And if the stories were right, it was eating the flesh from his grandfather's bones.

Arlian almost
hoped
Grandsir was dead, for his sake—but for his own, he hoped the old man still lived, and might somehow help them both survive.

Survival did not seem very likely for either of them, though. The smoke was growing denser, the roar of the flames louder, and Arlian thought the whole cellar might yet cave in upon him.

And that thick red trickle moved slowly down Grandsir's cheek, and finally dripped down, the first fat drop landing squarely in Arlian's open, gasping mouth.

3

Lord Dragon

The shock of that impact on his parched tongue, the indescribably vile taste, the unbearable stench, the corrosive burning that seemed to be tearing the lining from his mouth and throat, the knowledge of what was happening, was more than Arlian could bear; he fainted.

He awoke choking in the dark, coughing up slime, and in his convulsions threw his grandfather's body off him; the ladder that had pinned them both down snapped free and rattled to one side, one rail broken off short.

Arlian rolled over and vomited up everything he could bring up, vomited until his chin dripped with stinking ooze and his elbows rested in a widening pool of acidic detritus. His eyes filled with tears, both from the agony in his gut and the awareness of utter disaster, the knowledge that his home and his family had been destroyed. He pulled himself clear, away from the corruption his body had expelled, away from the ladder and Grandsir, into relatively cool darkness and sweeter air. There he fainted again.

He was awakened again, after how long he did not know, by voices, by laughter. He blinked and lay still, trying to remember where he was, what had happened.

He was in the cellars, he remembered. He could see that he was still in the cellars, looking at the bottom shelf of one rack of preserves. Daylight filtered down from above, daylight thick with drifting dust.

He was alive—the fire had passed over him and the cellars had not fallen in.

He heard footsteps somewhere above, heavy footsteps that crunched as if walking on the black ash the volcano sometimes spewed.

Daylight in the cellars—the roof was gone. Arlian remembered the fire, the smoke, the heat. He remembered the dragons; he remembered the third one's face when it peered into the pantry, its eyes huge and alien and knowing.

It had been the eyes that frightened him into stepping back and falling, far more than anything else. The fangs, the jaws, the dripping venom—he had hardly noticed those. He had seen only those great dark eyes, bottomless and terrifying.