Meghan's Dragon (15 page)

Chapter 44

“There doesn’t seem to be much going on,” Meghan said, peering around the dim courtyard. The two invaders remained in the shadows at the base of the wall inside the castle, waiting to time the patrols that never came. “Maybe it’s protected by magic.”

“How often does a castle like this get attacked?” Bryan asked.

“I don’t have a clue,” Meghan admitted. “Castle Refuge was besieged once in the last seven years, but our baron was always making enemies. This is the northern duke’s castle, and it may go for decades at a time without being attacked. Maybe longer.”

Bryan straightened up, shaking free of Meghan’s grip on his arm, and began striding towards the tower.

“What are you doing?” she hissed, catching up with him. “You’re going to get us killed.”

“I’ve got better vision and hearing than you, and I haven’t seen or heard a thing since we got here,” he replied quietly. “Maybe the guards are all at the front gate, maybe there are some in the tower, but I can hear hundreds of people snoring and not one conversation.”

Meghan opened her mouth to argue, but realized she didn’t have anything to say. She had rarely left her room at night after returning from work back home, and then only to visit Hadrixia. There were late feasts from time to time, but obviously, this wasn’t one of those nights. Before she knew it, they were at the tower. The massive metal-studded wooden doors were closed.

“You know how to pick locks, right?” Bryan asked in a low tone.

“Did you try opening it yet?”

Bryan pushed on the right-hand door, and it yielded inward with a loud creak that told of insufficient lubrication.

“Who’s there?” a voice called from somewhere above.

“Quick,” Meghan said, slipping through the crack and pulling Bryan after her. “Make me a light so I can see what I’m doing.”

A subdued globe of fire appeared floating above their heads, and Meghan squinted around the circular room at the base of the tower.

“The stairway looks solid at the bottom,” Bryan observed. “But that doesn’t make any sense, since the rest of the steps are on beams stuck into the walls.”

A bell began to ring above their heads, and other bells rang in response. Bryan pushed the door shut, causing another loud creak, and then he slid the heavy bar into place. “I’ll watch the stairs,” he said, drawing his practice sword. “You work on the knot thing.”

Meghan wondered for a moment how he thought they would escape with the door barred, but given that the bells had started sounding around the castle, she realized it was the only sensible thing to do. She approached the blank wall beneath the stairway where a door to another flight would appear in a multi-story dwelling and flew through the intricate hand motions diagramed on her pendant. Nothing happened.

“It didn’t work,” she shouted at Bryan.

“Try it again, go slower,” he called back. Somebody began beating against the tower door with something heavy, probably the butt of a spear, and two arrows suddenly shattered on the floor, one of them leaving a bloody cut on Bryan’s shoulder. Without thinking, he cast a fireball up the center of the circular stairwell. There was the sound of a trapdoor being pulled shut, and the arrows stopped.

“I know I did it right this time, but nothing’s happening,” Meghan said desperately.

“Maybe you have to say something, like, ‘Open Sesame.’”

“What?” The reply was so nonsensical that Meghan halted her third attempt to make sure Bryan hadn’t been hit in the head. The moment she dropped her hands so they were pointing down, the stone beneath her feet suddenly opened up and she vanished.

“I guess that counts as under the stairs,” Bryan muttered as he dove into the passage after her.

“Stay out of the way,” she warned him, after he landed with the crash of his drawn sword beside her. “I need to do the untying in reverse and put the stone back into place.”

“Huh?” Bryan watched without understanding as Meghan went through another bout of hand waving. Suddenly, the light from the orb he had left floating above was cut off by the return of the rock slab, and they found themselves in pitch darkness.

“And give me back my ring,” she added.

Chapter 45

“Put it out!” Meghan hissed, as a suspicious glow began to form over their heads. “How many times do I have to explain it to you?”

“They aren’t working in the dark up there, and I’m getting tired of listening to all that tapping,” he retorted. “If there were any cracks in the rock, we’d see their light from above after sitting here in the dark forever.”

“It’s hasn’t been forever, it’s been like a half a short candle. It took a while for the watchmen from the top of the tower to work up the courage to come down and let the guard in after you tossed a fireball up there. But I guess you’re right that we would have seen a light leak by now,” she admitted. “Don’t make it bright or you’ll blind us.”

Bryan immediately kindled a small orb and used the light to examine the thick slab of rock above their heads. “It looks almost real.”

“It
is
real,” Meghan replied, frustrated that Bryan needed to hear everything repeated at least three times before it sank in. “If it were an illusion or some other trick, anybody who stepped on it would have fallen through. The untying spell temporarily moves a section of the rock to a magically prepared place somewhere else, probably nearby. It takes a great deal of energy and skill to create this kind of doorway, I think it has to do with the weight involved. There’s a balance between the two locations where the rock can exist and it doesn’t require much work to move it back and forth, but…”

“Too much information,” Bryan cut her off. He stood up and bumped his head on the rough-hewn ceiling. “Either we’re in a tunnel or in a crevice that got roofed over. I don’t see anything that looks like a dragon’s tooth.”

“It may be hidden,” Meghan said, peering around in the dim light. “Is that the entrance to another chamber, or just a shadow?”

“Follow me,” Bryan said, and crouching to avoid hitting his head again, disappeared through the opening. “The stairs are steep, so be careful.”

Meghan created her own light and ducked through the opening after Bryan, pausing to look ahead. The walls of the new passage were glassy smooth, as if the tunnel had been melted through the rock, but a set of stairs had been cut into the floor. She counted them as she followed, ninety-four stairs in all, before the journey ended in what appeared to be a large natural cavern.

“There’s nothing here but a giant slab, a bunch of bones, and a pile of old rags,” Bryan complained from the middle of the space. He kicked at the offending garments, which sent up a cloud of dust and fibers.

“Bones? What kind of bones?” Meghan halted to wait for the answer.

“I don’t know, animals I guess. I don’t see any human skulls, anyway. Maybe the dragon’s tooth is in with all the other bones and we’re supposed to find it.”

“Either those clothes are pretty old or they were never fixed,” Meghan observed. She approached the pile and nudged it with her foot. “Is there something covered up here?”

“Let me in there,” Bryan said, using the leg bone from what might have been an ox to prod the disintegrating textiles out of the way. “It looks like a roll of oilcloth—no, there’s something sticking out the end. It’s a sword!”

A moment later, he had unwrapped the scabbard and drawn the sword. He held it aloft, admiring the narrow blade that made his training sword look like a bludgeon by comparison. Meghan saw a faint green fire rippling in the polished surface that looked like it had just been delivered from the swordsmith.

“Are you doing that, or is the sword enchanted?” she asked. She had to repeat herself twice, nearly shouting the question the third time to get his attention.

“What? I’m not doing anything,” he replied, fluidly working through the forms he’d been taught just two weeks earlier. “Is it really enchanted? What does it do?”

“Well, it’s glowing, for one thing,” Meghan pointed out. “I think its humming too. Can you hear that?”

“I can feel it,” Bryan growled, cutting energetically at the air. Then he took an experimental slice at a pile of bones, and the blade slipped through so easily that it seemed as if the skeletal remains had parted of their own accord to make way. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Go where? We have to find the tooth.”

“You keep saying I’m your dragon, so this must be my tooth. Now let’s go see what it can do.”

“Wait. Stop!” Meghan ran to get ahead and turned to face Bryan at the opening to the passage. “What are you going to do?”

“We’re going back up there, and we’ll see who’s boss.” His voice was low and threatening, and the hints of green fire dancing along the blade were increasing in intensity to match the flames in his eyes.

“No!” Meghan said, stretching her arms to fill the space so he couldn’t brush past her. “They’ll give up searching soon, if they haven’t already, and we can sneak out without a fight. They probably think it was some kind of false alarm, with the drunk watchmen seeing things and firing arrows at shadows. Why are you so anxious to kill somebody?”

“Come on, let me past,” Bryan pleaded. He was reluctant to force his way for fear he might hurt her in the process. “It’s always hiding and sneaking around with you. I could take on the whole castle with this sword.”

“Whether that’s true or not, it doesn’t mean you should,” Meghan said. “Why do you think there are so few dragons left? According to the scrolls, fighting and killing became such a habit with some of them that either they destroyed each other or their behavior forced warriors and lesser mages to band together to hunt them. Even if your magic combined with that sword can make you equal to trained fighters, I don’t want a dragon who falls in love with death. Besides, you’ll just get a spear in the back.”

“I’m getting really tired of you stopping me all the time,” he grumbled, but the comment about getting stabbed in the back made sense. It was a long way from the tower to the wall, and he didn’t have any reason to believe he could stop arrows like an experienced war mage. In truth, Bryan wasn’t that anxious to kill somebody—he just wanted to try out the sword.

“Aren’t you hungry?” she asked, relaxing her arms and shouldering off her pack. “I brought supplies.”

Chapter 46

By the time Bryan finished devouring everything in the pack, his mood improved markedly. The girl limited herself to a drink from the waterskin, but she wasn’t the one who had climbed a cliff in the dark, not to mention hauling up her dead weight.

“My pendant said that our path would be laid bare,” the girl said. “What do you think it meant?”

“The pendant was probably wrong.”

“How can a pendant be wrong?” Meghan demanded. “It told us about the secret passage, showed me how to open the stone, and you found your enchanted sword.”

“That’s three out of four,” Bryan responded, peering around the cavern. “There must be half a dozen tunnels leading out of here. We’re already at the top of the mountain, so any of the uphill ones should come out somewhere.”

“If they came out near the castle, somebody would have found them by now, and the sword wouldn’t have been here,” Meghan argued. She sifted through the mound of disintegrating clothes. “Are you sure there wasn’t anything else?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get us out of here. Just stay behind me and don’t get freaked out if we run into a lot of bats.”

“Bats? Hey, come back here.”

“They won’t hurt you, and we might not come across any if it’s still dark out.”

“Bryan!”

The young man came to a halt at her unusually sharp tone.

“What does this look like to you?”

“That’s the oilcloth my sword was wrapped in,” he replied in irritation. “You’re going to pester me about littering in this dump?”

“And the map on it, with the instructions in your language?”

“Oh.” Bryan returned reluctantly and looked at the oilcloth that Meghan spread out on the flat slab. He followed her finger to where it tapped on the text next to a drawing of a sword, and read out loud, “You are here.”

“That’s a good start. How about this path with the arrows?”

“Exit to river,” he read, pointing in the opposite direction from the tunnel he had been about to try. “I guess it’s over there.”

“The rest can wait until we’re back home,” Meghan said, folding the oilskin and placing it in her now-empty pack. She frowned for a moment when she realized she had referred to their tent with Rowan’s troupe as home, but she supposed it was the simple truth.

“Let’s go,” Bryan said, stalking off towards the tunnel entrance indicated by the map. If he was embarrassed at all by his prior attempt to lead them off in the wrong direction, he showed no sign of it. “Don’t forget what I said about the bats.”

“Now you’re just trying to scare me,” Meghan retorted. “If the tunnel is sealed, how can bats get in?”

“It’s steep, be careful,” he called back over his shoulder.

Meghan saw that he hadn’t been kidding when she started down the tunnel, the floor of which consisted of long, slanted steps. She quickly became convinced that the original passage had been a narrow fissure, widened with magical fire, the melted rock pooling below and forming the oddly shaped stairs. The descent went on for what seemed like all night before she stumbled into Bryan’s back while she was watching her feet.

“What is it?”

“Dead end,” Bryan said, pointing out the obvious. “I guess your map isn’t so smart after all.”

“Let me see. It’s probably just a plug stone, like in the tower.”

“Then try your eighteen-step thing.”

Meghan went through the motions calmly but nothing happened. “Open Sesame,” she muttered, hoping that Bryan wouldn’t notice her adoption of his nonsense phrase.

“It wasn’t that,” Bryan said, trying his best not to laugh at the flustered mage. “The rock disappeared when your hands pointed at the floor. Maybe it’s the same thing here.”

“But we’re already at the bottom,” she protested, lowering her arms. A moment later, she was underwater, choking. She panicked and started to flail about, barely aware of a large body hitting the water right beside her. Then she felt Bryan’s strong hands around her waist as he lifted the whole upper half of her body above the surface.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

Meghan coughed up some water in response.

“We’re just below an outcrop near the bank,” Bryan told her. “If you had put your feet down instead of kicking, your head would have been out of the water. Remind me to teach you how to swim.”

“Fish swim,” she retorted when the coughing subsided. “Just hold me up while I close the stone. You never know if it will come in handy sometime to have a secret passage into a duke’s castle.”

Bryan lifted her high out of the river and set her on his shoulders. After the tunnel exit was closed, her weight helped him walk along through the water until the steep, rocky bank became climbable. The dawn was just starting to break when they reached the King’s Highway, and the two were back with the players before the wagon train set off. Nobody asked about their sodden appearance, but everybody noticed that the young man now had two sword belts slung loosely over his shoulder.