The Dragon and the George (32 page)

Only Carolinus, among the humans, bent his fierce old eyes on the scene before them with something besides horror. The magician poked with his staff at a wide trail of slime that led around and over the body and back in the direction of the tower. It was the sort of trail a garden slug leaves; only, to leave such a trail the slug would have had to be two feet wide where it touched the ground.

"A worm…" said Carolinus to himself. "But it was no worm that killed this man so. Worms are mindless. Something with great strength and patience plucked and crushed, in that slow fashion—"

He stared at Smrgol suddenly; and Smrgol bobbed his massive head in an oddly embarrassed gesture.

"I didn't say it, Mage," the old dragon protested.

"It'll be best none of us says it until we're sure," retorted the magician. "Come along!"

Brian rose from beside the corpse; made a small, helpless gesture over it, as if he wished to straighten out the limbs but saw the utter futility of bringing anything like decent order to what remained; and climbed back on Blanchard. The group went on up the causeway to perhaps a hundred yards from the tower; and here Carolinus stopped, driving his wand once more into the earth so that it stood upright.

Aragh dropped, panting, into a lying position and Danielle, getting to her knees beside him, began to set and splint his leg, using some dry, fallen limbs from a stunted tree nearby and a sleeve of her doublet cut into strips.

"Now," said Carolinus; and the word tolled on Jim's ear like the sound of a bell.

The mist had closed in on them. Whiteness was on all sides and close overhead. Only the tiny plain where they stood below the tumbled boulders of the tower hill, the boulders themselves and the tower were clear of it. Or was it quite clear? Tendrils of mist drifted above it below the clouds, and something about the air and the light filtering through the clouds themselves baffled the eyes and made it hard to focus on any one thing.

"As long as my wand and I stand," said Carolinus, "no power of theirs can completely take from us light, breath or strength of will. But stay within the space the wand keeps clear, or it and I may not be able to protect you. Let our enemies come to us here."

"Where are they?" asked Jim, glancing around.

"Patience," said Carolinus, sardonically, "they'll come soon enough; and not in such form as you may expect."

Jim looked around himself at the causeway's end: the boulders and the tower. No breeze stirred from out of the mist. The air was heavy and still. No, it was not exactly still; it seemed to shiver faintly, with a quivering unnaturalness, like that of an atmosphere dancing to heat waves. Only, here it was all dim, wintry and chill. As Jim noted this trembling of the air, there came to his ears—from where, he did not know—a high-pitched, dizzy singing like that which sometimes accompanies delirium or high fever.

When he looked again at the tower, it seemed to him that the appearance of the structure itself was distorted by these happenings. Although it had seemed only an ancient, ruined shell of a building, between one heartbeat and the next it had appeared to change.

Almost, but not quite, he thought he caught glimpses of it unbroken and. alive, thronged about with half-seen figures. His heart thudded more strongly; and the causeway and the tower upon it seemed to shake with every contraction of his chest, seemed to go in and out of focus, in and out, in and out…

Then he saw Angie.

He knew he was too far from the tower to see her as clearly as he now saw her. At this distance, in this light, her face should have been hard to make out. But he saw her both from a distance and as if from close up, with a sharp and perfect clarity. She stood in the slight shadow of a ruined doorway opening on a balcony halfway up the side of the tower. Her blouse stirred to the slow movement of her breath. Her calm blue eyes stared closely into him. Her lips were half parted.

"Angie!" he cried.

He had not realized how much he had missed her. He had not understood how much he had wanted her. He took a step forward and found his way blocked by something as unyielding as an iron bar set in posts of concrete. He looked down. It was only the length of the wand, held in the old arm of Carolinus, but it was a barrier beyond his strength to pass.

"Where?" Carolinus demanded.

"There! On the balcony of the tower, there! See?" Jim pointed; and the others lifted their heads to peer where he indicated. "In the doorway! Can't you see? Up on the side of the tower, in the doorway!"

"Not a thing!" said Brian, gruffly, dropping the hand with which he had been shading his eyes.

"Maybe," said the mere-dragon, doubtfully. "Maybe… back in the shadows, there. I'm not sure, really…"

"Jim," said Angie.

"There!" cried Jim. "You hear her?"

He pushed the restraining staff once again. But it was no use.

"I can hear you, Angie!" he shouted.

"You don't have to raise your voice," she answered, softly. "I can hear you, too. Jim, it's all right. It's just all those others that don't belong here. If you come up by yourself and get me, I can leave, and we can go home and everything will be fine."

"I can't!" cried Jim, almost sobbing, for Carolinus's staff would still not let him pass. "They won't let me go!"

"They've got no right to keep you, Jim. Ask the Mage what right he has to keep you, and he'll have to let you go. Ask him, and then come up here by yourself to get me."

Jim turned, raging, on Carolinus.

"What right—?" he began.

"STOP!" Carolinus's voice went off like a cannon exploding in Jim's ears.

It dizzied, deafened and half blinded him, so that vision and hearing were blocked as if by thick, soft barriers. His unnaturally keen vision and hearing of Angie were gone, but he could still make himself think he saw her—as a shadow-in-shadow in the doorway behind a balcony on the tower.

"Why?" Jim turned on Carolinus in fury.

The magician did not back off an inch. His dark eyes glittered above his white beard.

"By the Powers!" he shouted, and his words came very clearly to Jim's ears. "Will you walk blindly into the very first trap They set for you?"

"What trap?" Jim demanded. "I was just talking to Angie—!"

The sentence broke off on his lips as Carolinus swung his staff to point. About the base of the tower, between it and the boulders on the slope, had just arisen the wicked head of a dragon as large as Jim himself.

Smrgol's thunderous bellow split the strangely singing air.

"Bryagh! Traitor! Thief—inchworm! Come down here!"

The distant dragon opened his mouth. His booming answer rolled down to them.

"Tell us about Gormely Keep, old bag of bones!" he thundered. "Ancient mud puppy, fat lizard, scare us with words!"

"Why, you—" Smrgol lurched forward.

"Hold!" shouted Carolinus; and Smrgol reared high, checking himself, his heavy foreclaws digging deep into the sandy soil as his body came down.

"True…" he rumbled, his eyes hot.

"Old iguana! Go sleep in the sun!" Bryagh taunted.

But the older dragon now turned away, without answering, to the magician.

"What's hidden, Mage?" he asked.

"We'll see."

Carolinus's voice was tight. He raised his staff and brought it down endwise, three times, on the earth. With each impact the whole causeway seemed to shake.

Up among the rocks, one particularly large boulder tottered and rolled out of the way. Jim's breath shuddered in his throat and he heard Brian, behind him, grunt hoarsely. Secoh cried out on a thin, sharp note.

In the space that the dislodged boulder had revealed, a huge, slug-like head lifted from the ground. It raised up even higher as they watched, yellow-brown in the harsh sunlight, its two sets of horns searching as its upper body waved from side to side, revealing a light external shell, a platelet with the merest hint of a spire. Its horns twitched and the eyes on the end of the primary pair aimed themselves at the group below. Slowly, it began to creep down the slope toward them, leaving a glistening trail on boulders and sand behind it.

"The Worm," said Carolinus, softly.

"… that can be killed," growled Smrgol, thoughtfully. "Though not easily. Blast it, I wish it were Bryagh alone!"

"Nor is it those two alone." Carolinus struck at the ground three times again.

"Come forth!" he cried, his old voice piping high on the quivering air. "By the Powers! Come forth!"

And then they saw it.

From behind the great barricade of enormous rocks near the top of the tower hill, there slowly raised a bald and glistening dome of hairless gray skin. Gradually, this revealed two perfectly round blue eyes, below which was exposed no proper nose but, instead, two air slits side by side, as if the whole of the bare, enormous skull was covered with a simple sheet of thick skin. As it rose still farther, this unnatural head—as big around as a beach ball—showed its wide and idiotically grinning mouth, entirely lipless and with two jagged but matching rows of pointed teeth.

With a clumsy, studied motion, the whole creature rose to its feet and stood among the boulders. It was man-like in shape, but was clearly nothing ever spawned by the human race. A good twelve feet in height it stood, a rough patchwork of untanned hides studded with bones, bits of metal and clusters of tiny color points that could have been gems and made a kilt around its thick waist.

But this was not the extent of its difference from the race of man. It had, to begin with, no neck at all. Its unnatural hairless, near-featureless head was balanced like an apple atop perfectly square shoulders of gray, coarse-looking skin. Its torso was one straight trunk, from which arms and legs sprouted with disproportionate thickness and roundness, like sections of pipe. Its knees were hidden by its kilt and its lower legs by the rocks; but the elbows of its oversize arms had unnatural hinges to them, while the lower arms were almost as large as the upper and near-wristless, and the hands themselves awkward, thick-fingered parodies of the human extremities, with only three digits, one of which was a single-jointed, opposed thumb.

The right hand held a club, bound with rusty metal, that surely not even such a monster should have been able to lift. Yet one thick, crook-fingered hand hefted it lightly, as deftly as Carolinus had carried his staff.

The monster opened its mouth.

"
He
!" it went. "
He! He
!"

The sound was chilling. It was an incredibly bass titter, if such a thing can be imagined. And though the tone was about that of the low note of a three-valve tuba, it clearly came from the creature's upper throat and head. Nor was there any real humor in it. Having sounded its voice, the monster fell silent, watching the advance of the great slug with its round, light blue eyes.

Jim found his dragon jaws open, panting like a dog after a long run. Beside him, Smrgol stirred slowly.

"Yes," he rumbled sadly, almost as if to himself, "what I was afraid of. An ogre."

In the silence that followed, Sir Brian got down from Blanchard and began to tighten the girths of his saddle.

"So, so, Blanchard," he crooned, softly. But the large white horse was trembling so violently it could not stand still. Brian shook his head, and his hands fell from the girths. "I must fight on foot, it seems," he said.

The rest were watching Carolinus. The magician leaned on his staff, looking very old indeed, the lines looking even deeper in the ancient skin of his face. He had been watching the ogre, but now he turned back to Jim and the other two dragons.

"I'd hoped all along," he said, "that it needn't come to this. However"—he waved his hand at the approaching worm, the now-silent Bryagh and the watching ogre—"as you see, the world goes never the way we want it, but must be haltered and led."

He winced, produced his flask and cup, and took a drink of milk. Putting the utensils back again, he turned to Dafydd.

"Master Bowman," he said, almost formally. "The harpies are again in the tower, but when the others attack they'll be out again. See how the clouds overhead now sag down from the tower's height."

He pointed upward. It was true: the cloud cover now bellied down like the worn-out ceiling of some ancient room. The thick, eye-baffling vapor hung less than thirty feet above their heads.

"The harpies will come diving swiftly out of that cover," said the magician, "giving you all but no time whatsoever to shoot before they're on you. Do you think you can hit them with those arrows of yours under such conditions?"

Dafydd cocked an eye upward.

"If the clouds come no lower—" he began.

"They cannot," said Carolinus. "The power of my staff holds them at no closer than this."

"Then," Dafydd replied, "provided they come no faster than the one I shot a short while ago, I have a fair chance, look you. I do not say that one may not get through, for I am but a man, after all—though there have been those who thought I was something more, with bow and arrow. But it is a fair chance I can put a shaft through each of them before it can do us harm."

"Good!" said Carolinus. "More than a fair chance, none of us can ask for. Don't forget that their bite is poisonous, however, even when the harpy itself is dead."

He turned back to Brian.

"I'd suggest, Sir Brian," he said, "particularly since you're to be on foot, that you take the worm. You'll be most useful that way. I know you'd prefer that renegade dragon, but the worm is the greater danger to the others who have no armor."

"Difficult to slay, I imagine?" queried the knight, stopping from adjusting the armstrap on the inner face of his shield to squint up the slope at the approaching slug shape.

"Its vital organs are hidden deep inside it," Carolinus explained, "and, being mindless, it will fight on long after being mortally wounded. Cut off those eye stalks and blind it first, if you can."

"What—" Jim began, then found his voice hampered by the dry throat. He had to swallow before he could continue. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Why fight the ogre, boy! Fight the ogre!" roared Smrgol; and the inhuman giant up on the slope, hearing him, shifted his round-eyed gaze from the worm to fasten it on the old dragon. "And I'll take on that louse of a Bryagh. The george here'll chop up the worm, the Bowman'll deal with the harpies, the Mage'll hold back the evil influences, the wolf keep off the sandmirks—and that'll be that!"