Straken (37 page)

The dragon was right where it had been the night before, stretched in front of his shelter like a wall.

Only now, it was sleeping.

Pen stared at it for a moment, not quite believing. Yes, the dragon was asleep, its eyelids closed, its huge, horn-encrusted snout resting comfortably on its wagon-wheel feet, a steady snoring issuing from its maw, and its nostrils flaring at regular intervals as it inhaled and exhaled.

He waited long moments to be certain, then carefully climbed to his feet, his cloak wrapped close and the darkwand gripped firmly in one hand. A corridor opened to his left, leading just past the dragon’s outstretched head, passing wickedly close to those teeth and claws but offering a narrow avenue of escape. He just needed to be very quiet. And lucky.

He took a deep breath and stepped from his shelter into the thin dawn light.

Instantly, one scaly lid slipped open and the dragon’s yellow eye stared at him.

He froze, his blood gone cold, waiting to see if maybe, just possibly, the eye might not register his presence and simply close again. But it fixed firmly on him and did not move. He watched it for long moments, debating if he should try to go farther, then backed slowly into his shelter and sat down again.

So much for that.

He sat looking out at the dragon for a long time. He was so hungry he could hear his stomach growl. His nerves were ragged, and his hopes for reaching his aunt fading fast. Somehow, he had to get past the monster. To spend another day trapped in those rocks was unacceptable.

He closed his eyes in despair. Didn’t the dragon ever get hungry? Why didn’t it leave and go off to find something to eat?

Of course, dragons might not have to eat all that often, he reasoned. Maybe they only ate once a week, like the moor cats in the Four Lands. Maybe it had just eaten before it found him. Maybe it would never want to eat anything again as long as it had him to entertain it.

“Get out of here!” he screamed in a rush of frustration.

The dragon didn’t move. It didn’t even blink.

But the runes on the darkwand began to dance wildly.

He stared at them in confusion and surprise. The dancing continued for a few seconds more, and then slowed. He furrowed his brow. His voice had disturbed them. They had become more active because he had shouted at the dragon.

He found himself thinking again about how the runes continued to glow even while he was asleep and paying no attention to the staff at all. He had thought at first that the runes only brightened when they were responding to his thoughts. But that didn’t seem to be the case. Hadn’t been the case ever. From the moment he had encountered the dragon, the runes had acted independently of anything he had done, keeping the monster transfixed and at bay.

Even while he was sleeping.

Why would they do that?

They would do it, he thought suddenly, because the darkwand was
sentient. The tanequil had given him a living piece of itself. That was what had enabled him to carve the runes without seeing what he was doing. That was what had transported him from the Four Lands into the Forbidding. It knew to use the runes to charm the dragon, to mesmerize it so that it would not attack Pen. Just as it knew to guide him to the Ard Rhys, it knew to protect him.

But why had the runes responded to his voice?

Shades!

Because it was a thing of magic and it would always respond to other magic. His magic. Not his little magic, his ability to read the actions and behavior of other creatures in an effort to communicate with them. Not the magic he had grown up with and kept secret even from his parents because he never thought it mattered. No, not that magic.

Another magic. The wishsong magic.

Like father, like son.

He could scarcely believe it. He had always understood there was a possibility of his inheriting such magic. But he had thought that possibility long past, faded with the passing of the years. He was too old. If it was going to happen, it would have happened earlier.

Yet it hadn’t happened to his father, either, until he was a few years older than Pen was now. So it was possible that history was repeating itself. The blood heritage was a part of his past. But perhaps it was also a part of his future, its seeds locked deep inside him. He knew that his small communicative magic was born of it, even if it wasn’t as powerful.

And now, for reasons he didn’t understand, the wishsong had surfaced in him as it had surfaced twenty years earlier in his father. It had awakened in his voice and given him a way to connect to the magic of the darkwand.

Except, he thought excitedly, he
did
understand the reasons for its emergence. The darkwand had awakened the wishsong. His joining to the staff in the carving of its intricate web of runes had brought the magic to life.

He looked into the distance, thinking that he was being foolish, that he had no reason to believe any of his conclusions. He glanced down at the staff, at the softly glowing runes, their patterns changing endlessly, dancing hypnotically across the darkened, burnished wood. He had no proof that the wishsong’s magic was what had
stirred those runes or, even if it had, that he could implement it in any useful way.

But where was the harm in trying to find out?

He began to hum, soft and steady, shifting tones and pitches, trying anything and everything. He kept at it, not knowing exactly what he was doing, just testing to see if anything he tried would make a difference. The response from the runes was immediate. They throbbed and pulsed, the glow shifting from rune to rune and from row to row, skipping here and there as if a thing alive. Patterns formed and were replaced almost quicker than the eye could follow, a kaleidoscope of brilliant images.

The dragon lifted its head, fascinated.

Pen changed from humming to stringing together words, not singing any specific song, just phrases that seemed to go together, seeking ways to make the runes do other things. But the runes just kept shifting about as they chose with little regard to anything he did. They seemed to respond only to sound and not to specific words or meanings. Frustrated, unable to see how this was helping anything, he tightened his resolve, burrowed down inside himself, and gave a harder push to what he was doing.

Get away from me
, he sang in a dozen different ways.
Go far, far away from me
.

Suddenly, there was a different response from the staff. Imprints of the runes literally jumped off the wood and into the air, glowing images that hung like fireflies against the sullen morning light. Still throbbing and pulsing, still shifting about in intricate patterns that kept the dragon mesmerized, the rune images danced about and then flew off into the morning mist. Line after line of glowing symbols broke free of the darkwand and winged away like birds taking flight.

The dragon sniffed at them as they passed, and then licked out at them with its long, mottled tongue, but it could not capture them. Frustrated, it heaved its bulk off the ground and rose on its hind legs, maw splitting wide, scaly lips drawing back to reveal blackened teeth. Hissing and spitting, it snapped wildly at the images as they flitted past. Pen shrank back against the rock of his shelter in terror, but managed to keep singing. The dragon ripped at the images with its forelegs, and then finally, screaming with frustration as they continued to elude it, it spread great leathery wings and took flight, chasing after them.

It happened so fast that Pen barely had time to register his sudden change of fortune before the dragon was gone, a dark speck in the distance, pursuing the still-glowing images. Seconds later, it disappeared completely.

Pen kept singing anyway, sending more flights of glowing runes in the same direction, worried that the dragon would decide to come back. When he finally thought it safe, he went silent. The images faded and the runes on the staff ceased their excited dance and resumed a soft, gentle pulsing against the dark surface of the wood. All about, silence hung deep and pervasive on the hazy morning air.

Pen exhaled sharply. What in the world had happened?

The truth was, he didn’t know. Obviously he had tapped into the magic of the wishsong, successfully summoning it from where it lay dormant within him. Probably his link with the darkwand enabled him to do so, to bring the magic to life and to make use of it to save himself. But he had no idea what sort of magic he had conjured. He didn’t know how to control it; he didn’t really even understand how to use it. All he had managed to do was to make the darkwand’s runes respond to him in a way that had lured the dragon away and given him a chance to be free. Beyond that, he hadn’t learned a thing.

But that was good enough.

Wrapping his cloak close about him once more and gripping the darkwand firmly in one hand, he stepped out of his shelter and looked about. There was no sign of the dragon or anything else. The day was sullen and dark, and the air smelled of damp and rot. He needed to get out of that place; he needed to find Grianne Ohmsford and go home again.

Turning his thoughts to his aunt and mindful of how he had begun his search two days before, he held up the staff, pointed it south again, and watched the runes brighten.

Then, with a last cautious look skyward, he set out.

H
e walked all the rest of that day through country so bleak and so heavy with the promise of evil that he found himself constantly looking over his shoulder for what he imagined might be following. He took the trail leading up into the mountains, the passage he had chosen before the dragon trapped him, climbing steadily into the rocks through the morning, and then descending on the other side in
the afternoon. The day stayed dreary, the mountain air of no better quality than what he had found below. The haziness of the landscape was deep and pervasive. Not much grew anywhere he passed through. Mostly, the terrain was marked by different striations of earth and rock, a blending of washed-out grays and blacks and browns.

It rained a little at midday. He cupped his hands to catch the precious liquid and licked the dampness from his palms. Other than that, he found only stagnant ponds and sediment-fouled trickles coming out of the rocks. Higher up, he encountered trees that bore a vivid crimson fruit, but he knew that bright colors in living things frequently indicated danger, and he passed the fruit by. He found a flock of crowlike birds eating berries from a bush, and though the berries looked unpleasant, he tried one anyway and found it edible. With an eye toward the crow-birds, which were squawking at him angrily, he ate the rest.

Weary from his ordeal of the past few days, drained of energy in a way he had not expected, he rested at the crest of the pass for a time before starting down. Some of that had to do with the stress and fear that his encounter with the dragon had created, but some had to do with his not eating or sleeping well. The land had a draining effect on him, its blasted, empty terrain unbearably depressing. How anything could live in that world escaped him. He guessed that what lived there was a match for the land. Certainly the dragon was. He found himself hoping that the dragon was the most dangerous creature he would come across, but what were the chances of that?

After his rest, he descended the far side of the mountains, following the long, winding thread of the pass toward a vast misted plain that stretched away as far as the eye could see. The plain looked devoid of life, but he knew better than to expect that it was. Mist clung to its surface, twisting and writhing through deep ravines and skirting broad plateaus that lifted out of the flats like beasts rising from sleep. Skeletal trees jutted from the plains like bones, and here and there black pools of water shimmered slickly.

He looked out across the plains in despair. Crossing those flats was not something he wanted to do.

But what choice did he have?

He had no idea how far he would have to travel to reach his aunt
or what he would find when he did. She had been there a long time by then; anything could have happened to her. He took it on faith that she was still alive. He did not think the runes would direct him to her lifeless body. But she could be hurt or damaged mentally or emotionally. She could have been made a captive or forced to endure any number of other unpleasant things. If she required physical assistance to get back to the doorway of the Forbidding, how was he going to manage that? If she required medical help, what could he do to heal her? The more he thought about it, the more daunting the prospects seemed. Too much time had passed for everything to be unchanged in her life. Something would be wrong with her; something would have happened.

He was not looking forward to finding out what that was.

He trudged on, reached the bottom of the pass, and struck out across the plains toward the heavily misted horizon. The darkwand was taking him south and east, turning him slightly from his previous path. The way forward was swathed in encroaching darkness that lifted out of the east like a shroud ready to be laid over a corpse. The land felt and looked like that corpse, and Pen supposed that it would be appropriate to lay a shroud over it. He did not care to be out and about when that happened, however, and he began to look for somewhere to spend the night. The clumps of rocks he had relied upon for protection and shelter the past few nights were missing here. All that was available were promontories, deep ravines, and stands of stunted trees. He chose the latter, thinking that if he could find a suitable clump in which to nest, he could conceal himself from whatever might come hunting by night.

For what must have been the hundredth time, he wished he knew more about the land and its inhabitants, knowledge that might help keep him safe. But there was nothing he could do about his ignorance; he was there, and the only person likely to give him any sort of useful information was the person he was searching for.

The light darkened from misty gray to deep twilight. A fog settled in, a thickening of the mist that slowly shortened visibility to a dozen yards. Pen had been making his way toward a particularly thick stand of broad-limbed trees with branches so thoroughly intertwined it was difficult to tell where one tree stopped and another began. The canopy of limbs provided a shelter that might hide him
while he sought to gain a little sleep. He questioned whether he could sleep at all given his uneasiness after the dragon experience, but he knew he had to try.