Dragonsight (29 page)

‘Then why can’t
we
go back? Daretor asked.

‘Because if I’m wrong, and we miss Hakat’s machine calling us back at a given time, we too could wind up somewhere days away from them. And we don’t have days to waste.’

Melyar was shaking with excitement. ‘I feel as though I’ve wasted my life,’ she said, clasping Jelindel’s hands tightly. ‘I will never be able to repay you.’

‘Repay me by helping someone else,’ Jelindel said. She gently unclasped Melyar’s hands and bade her stand back. Then she murmured a long intricate spell and conjured an intense coruscation of blue light that shot out and engulfed Melyar in a whirling funnel. Melyar let out a frightened squeak, and then she was gone.

Jelindel stood transfixed.

‘Are you ill?’ Daretor asked. He had to shake Jelindel for a response.

‘I think it worked,’ she said. ‘I’m getting pretty good at this, aren’t I?’ She poked her tongue through her lips in thought. ‘Then again, I can’t guarantee where precisely Melyar went to on Q’zar, and that troubles me.’

‘As she said, anywhere is better than here,’ Daretor said, pulling her to the designated spot. His inner time sense told him that they had less than a minute till the transfer.

‘Let’s hope it works this time for us,’ he said. ‘I don’t fancy ending up like Melyar. Did you see the look on her face? I’ve never seen someone so happy.’

‘Now we need to concentrate,’ Jelindel said. ‘We could well be stepping into instant danger.’

‘I look forward to the time we step
out
of it,’ Daretor mumbled. The appointed time came. And went. Daretor groaned inwardly.

‘Well, it looks as if we’re here for another –’

They entered the paraplane just as a door opened and a man in a white apron came out carrying a garbage can. He stared at their twinkling afterimage as they dematerialised then dropped the can and bolted back inside, yelling.

Jelindel and Daretor materialised back in the same alleyway. ‘– day,’ Jelindel finished, then looked around. ‘Or maybe not.’

‘Did we –?’ Daretor asked.

‘I’m afraid so. Look.’ It was true. The walls enclosing the alleyway were different, more damaged and definitely more weathered, though the smell of decay still hung in the air.

More obvious still was the view from the alleyway, which was in a section of streets that quartered the side of a fairly steep hill. On the previous paraworld – the paraworld of the metal bird – a large building with many glass windows had stood opposite, blocking their view. Now it was gone. From where they stood they could see that they were in a ruined city. The buildings were crumbled and many had collapsed. All were covered with the stain of time, and silver-grey lichens that lent the ruins an air of dubious respectability. The streets were filled with debris and dirt. Plants and small trees grew everywhere, even from the walls of buildings and from rooftops. It looked like the city had been abandoned for many decades.

A bloodcurdling howl broke the strange silence and raised the hair on the nape of Jelindel’s neck. It was a sound humankind knew in its infancy and would fear for as long as it existed.
Wolves.

Another howl answered the first, then another and another. They seemed to be all around and each howl was closer than the one preceding it.

‘Remind me to wring Hakat’s neck when I see him,’ said Daretor, preparing to defend himself.

They still had not moved from the point on which they had materialised. It had already been several long minutes since they had arrived. It appeared that Hakat had been unable to transfer them out of this paraworld.

‘We need to get off the street,’ Jelindel said. ‘Maybe high up in one of these ruins.’

Daretor jumped up to a window ledge and leaned down to pull up Jelindel. Dark shapes moved lithely into the mouth of the alleyway. Although they were clearly of the wolf family, they were like no wolf either of them had ever seen. The creatures were the size of bulls and with something of their ferocious physique. Bunched rippling muscles swelled their forequarters, sloping down to smaller legs at the back. They had a single small horn on the snout, like a rhinoceros, and huge canines protruded from their upper jaw even when their mouths were closed. Their glinting red eyes reflected rage and hunger.

‘Maybe it’s time we –’ Daretor never finished the sentence. The wolves uttered a low gurgling noise then sped towards them. At the same moment they entered yet another paraworld.

Chapter 11

THE STONE PEOPLE

J

elindel and Daretor reappeared on a narrow ledge halfway up the wall of an underground cavern. Its vastness took their breath away. The cavern was easily several leagues across and a league high. It was lit by a strange pearly light that diminished shadows.

Enormous stalactites and stalagmites of myriad colours reached down from the ceiling and up from the floor like gnarled dragons’ teeth, shining with a hypnotic iridescence.

In the space around the stalagmites, the floor of the cavern was cut by fissures and pocked with deep pits in which lava bubbled with a harsh light. It reminded Jelindel and Daretor of the lair of the Sacred One in the Tower Inviolate.

A rough and precarious track led down from the ledge to the cavern floor.

‘Hooray for Hakat. I think he’s done it.’

Daretor looked into the shadows as though expecting the wolves to materialise. Without his sword, he felt particularly vulnerable.

Jelindel started downwards immediately. After one more glance at the sheer beauty of the cavern, Daretor followed. They had to watch where they put their feet; one step, if miscalculated, could plunge them instantly to their deaths on the sharp stalagmites far below. As it was, pebbles cascaded down the ragged edges and created larger landslides further down the sheer drop.

It was an exhausting journey and they had little breath or concentration to spare for conversation. Only once did they speak on the way down. Jelindel had nearly fallen and had stopped to catch her breath and calm her nerves. If Daretor was uneasy with closed-in spaces, she was less than happy with heights.

‘I should have let S’cressling fry Fa’red when I had the chance,’ Jelindel swore under her breath.

‘You had him more or less disarmed,’ Daretor pointed out. ‘It wouldn’t have been honourable to kill him – though I could be persuaded otherwise now.’

‘Trust me, Daretor. An Adept 12 is never “disarmed”. I learned that much from Lady Forturian and Madame Dione.’

They continued in silence. A little over an hour later they reached the ground and stopped to rest. Jelindel gazed about. ‘I need to go into the paraplane. The dragonsight should be visible from there.’

Jelindel sat cross-legged on the ground and her gaze turned inward. From the outside, Daretor noticed little except that she sat still as stone. It was almost as if Jelindel had stopped breathing. Though Daretor would never admit it, he was frightened. He wondered what would happen if she did not find her way back. Would her body stay like that, growing weaker and weaker? Would it die and yet continue to sit there, unaware that it was dead? He shivered. Such thoughts were not worthy of a warrior.

Jelindel was aware of his fears and almost smiled to herself. Normal human emotions became attenuated and strange in this place of shifting dimension and thought. In some ways it was like hiding in the ceiling of a building and gazing down through air vents into particular rooms. But it was also like being in the rooms looking up at the unseen watcher in the ceiling. In a sense she was watching herself watching herself.

She pried her awareness away from this self-replicating process. The paraplane was notorious for its capacity to ensnare the untrained mind within its endless spider web of thought within thought, of sight inside seeing, of a maze of perception in which one could be lost forever.

The secret was in the negation of the ego, the putting aside of self, and embracing all of creation. In this way her awareness moved out from herself, spun through the manifold dimensions that was the paraplane, and found what she was seeking.

The dragonsight pulsed with an unearthly vitality. It possessed a signature that was utterly alien, yet not frighteningly so. It was not like most talismanic objects that harboured magic so black and corrosive that they could annihilate a mind that even casually brushed by them.

The dragonsight was simply different. Not bad, not good. Just different and very powerful. She saw that it was, indeed, with a group of Stone People and that they were trying to hide it. It was some distance from where they were, and the path was unclear.

‘Jelindel!’ She vaguely heard Daretor’s cry and swept her awareness back in his direction. They were no longer alone. The newcomers’ intention was not clear to her, nor was their true nature in the physical realm she occupied with Daretor. She saw, branching off from herself and Daretor, all the past choices that had led them here and all the future ones that stemmed from this moment. In some of these, she and her lover lay dead.

She brought herself back to her body and opened her eyes.

‘We have company,’ Daretor said.

Standing silently some twenty yards away were a dozen Stone People.

Jelindel nodded slowly, realising she had made a novice’s mistake. She had thought the name was somehow ornamental, but she had been wrong. These creatures appeared to be made of stone; they stood some four to five feet in height and their limbs and bodies were composed of slabs of crumbling rust-brown rock, though their eyes were as black as basalt.

When their presence was acknowledged, the creatures moved forward a little. Despite their obvious great weight and solidity they moved with surprising agility.

Jelindel had a vision of what it might be like to have one of these creatures come after her: a single-minded and inexorable boulder that never rested, never slept, till it squashed its prey.

Jelindel held up her hand, palm outwards, in what she hoped was a common gesture. ‘I am Jelindel dek Mediesar from Skelt, a coastal realm of the upper world. This is my companion, Daretor.’

‘Why are you here?’ asked one, his voice like the grinding of stone on stone. Surrounded as they were by a sheer granite face, it felt as though the entire cavern had spoken.

‘We seek that which was stolen.’

‘Do you accuse us?’ rumbled the speaker.

‘No. This thing was stolen by a magician called Fa’red.’

‘You seek the dragonsight.’

‘Yes, we do.’

‘We do not have it.’

She could not tell from his voice if he intended ill or not. The inflections were too strange, too guttural, to translate into human experience. She flicked a look at the walls of the cavern and saw no escape path. Fa’red had chosen well.

‘That does not mean we cannot retrieve it,’ the speaker added. Now there was a hint of menace in his words.

She gazed at the phalanx of Stone People with some uncertainty and took a deep breath. ‘You must know that this artefact is of great importance.’

‘It is of great importance to you. It is nothing to us. We do not concern ourselves with the doings of the upper world. Nor do we favour trespassers in our realm.’

The creatures moved closer and there was now definite menace in how they regarded the trespassers. ‘You must go back to your world,’ said the one who had spoken first. ‘You are not welcome here.’

‘We cannot return until our quest is complete.’

‘Then perhaps you will never return.’ There was a rumble of agreement from the other Stone People and they began to edge forward. Jelindel and Daretor took a step back. Daretor laid his hand on his scabbard, forgetting he no longer had a sword. In any case, it would have been useless against the granite hides of these creatures.

‘Wait.’

The others stopped as one of their own pushed forward. He came close to Jelindel and Daretor and almost seemed to be sniffing.

Then he turned back to his kin. ‘We must help these soft skins,’ he said.

The first speaker rumbled in what the Q’zarans took to be dissent. ‘We do not meddle, Olag. You know this. If they cannot leave as they have come, then their lives are forfeit.’

‘You do not understand, Taroc,’ Olag hissed. ‘They have been inside the Stone of Temis!’

The Stone People stared at Jelindel and Daretor in awe. Finally Taroc said, ‘Is this true? You have been inside the Ark of the People?’

Jelindel returned the stare. To Daretor, she said, ‘He refers to the Tower Inviolate …’

The swordsman nodded cautiously. A great sigh escaped the mass of Stone People, and the tension eased.

‘We will help you.’

‘Why is the … Stone of Temis so important to you?’ Jelindel asked gently, not wishing to offend.

‘That is a story as long as the universe and twice as wide,’ said the speaker. ‘Suffice to say that it is the vessel that brought my people to this world, that gave us this great rock as home and harbour, after a journey lasting many long ages. It is the holy place of my people. The Ark. The New Beginning. By some miscalculation, or evil, the Stone of Temis vanished, leaving a wasteland in its wake, the one you call Dragonfrost. With it went the dragons.’

‘You don’t mind that we have violated your fabled ark?’

‘Mind? How could we mind? If we should forbid others to gaze upon the greatest jewel of this or any other paraworld, we would know no end to our shame.’

‘Even villains?’ Daretor asked.

The Stone Man shook. A shroud of dust and pebbles tumbled from him. ‘How may bad people become good, unless they come to know ultimate goodness?’

There seemed no answer to this and the Q’zarans made no effort to find one.

Jelindel returned to the quest at hand. ‘About the dragonsight,’ she said. ‘You should know that the dragons have come back to Q’zar, and the talisman we seek is –’

The Stone People suddenly erupted into a clamour that sounded like an avalanche. They ignored the Q’zarans for several long minutes. Finally the grinding hubbub subsided and Taroc addressed them.

‘I apologise for our inattention. We are overjoyed by this news. Of old, my people knew the dragons. We were allies. They were of the sky, but their bones were as old as the earth, and we forged a kinship that was rare in those ancient times.

‘When they went away we mourned for centuries, never expecting to see them again. Tell me, soft one, have they returned to Dragonfrost from whence they departed?’

Jelindel nodded cautiously.

‘What has the dragonsight to do with all this?’ the grinding voice asked.

Jelindel explained that she deduced the dragonsight was the heart of the old dragon itself, the Sacred One, and that with its aid the rulers of the Tower Inviolate had enslaved the dragons for a thousand years. The gem had to be returned to the dragons to set them free.

‘You go then to set them free?’ a Stone Man asked. ‘Not to enslave, not to destroy?’

‘We go to liberate, even if we lose our lives in the doing,’ Jelindel said. Beside her, Daretor nodded his support.

The Stone People held a low grinding conference. After a time they turned to Jelindel and Daretor. ‘We will help. There is a small band of our people that have been led astray by the magician you named. He poisoned their hearts and ruined their minds, and now they do not know the difference between good rock and bad, between day and night. We have left them to themselves for too long perhaps. We will now rectify this matter. They have the dragonsight.’

Moving through rough-hewn tunnels that reached deep within the earth, an army of Stone People tromped the ground with barely more than a tremor. Jelindel and Daretor had difficulty accepting their situation. They had been startled to discover that the Stone People could literally walk through walls, melting into the rock and passing through it, albeit slowly, as if they moved through thick treacle. Just as easily, they could sink into the ground, and create fissures through which their guests could squeeze. The Stone People were to the rocky earth what fish, or perhaps sharks, were to the great oceans.