The Hero of Varay (36 page)

“You’ve sealed your doom now, Hero!” Wellivazey’s voice said, but those were his final words. Aaron reached up and pulled the elf’s head off of his own, then held it off to the side for someone to take.

Harkane took the head and tucked it under his arm.

I looked at Aaron. He had changed. The elf had left a little of himself behind, a jagged streak of his pale white skin, running from a point at Aaron’s left temple down the side of his face to the jawbone, where it came to another point. Along the cheek, the streak was maybe an inch wide. I took the head from Harkane and held it up to look. The corresponding section of the elf’s face was black. Then—because I couldn’t help myself—I turned the head over. There was no hole large enough for another head in there. I saw the end of the elf’s spinal cord, the flesh and blood vessels, the bone of his skull, the dead gray of the bottom of his brain even.

I closed my eyes while I righted the head and looked at it again. It was not just the patch of skin that was different. At the top of the streaks, the two had also exchanged a small patch of hair—kinky black on the elf, smooth platinum blond on the wizard.

“It wasn’t a perfect spell,” Aaron said—his own voice back. “I held it far too long.”

I reached out and touched his face, hesitantly. I couldn’t hold back, though. There was no real break between white and black. The skin was smooth, unbroken, across the patch.

“We’re still in danger,” Aaron said, sadness in his eyes.

I looked at the sky in time to see the start of the rain of dragons. Suddenly, they were all falling, and many of them were changing into other creatures—chickens mostly, but I also saw cats and dogs, horses and fish fall onto the beach, into the sea, and onto our damaged boat. A huge bull elephant crashed through the bow of
Beathe
, permanently grounding it.

“No way home,” I said, taking one step toward the boat.

“A moment,” Aaron said. He held out a hand to stop me. Then he turned to face the horde of soldiers that had been created from the rocks. Their ranks had been greatly thinned by the falling animals, but there were still a couple of hundred of them. Aaron started chanting. After a moment, he went silent and opened his mouth as wide as it would go.

I still don’t believe that I saw what I saw next. Impossible things happen almost routinely in the seven kingdoms and in Fairy, but this went so far beyond the usual impossibilities that I still can’t convince myself that it actually happened.

Aaron exhaled in an incredibly long puff, but that wasn’t what was so remarkable. That
sea serpent
emerged from a mouth two or three inches wide. As near to Aaron’s lips as my eyes could place the beast, though, it was full-size—several times as tall as Aaron—and he just propelled it out onto the beach, where it started wriggling around eating the massed soldiery charging toward us. In a grossly magnified way, it was like one of those party noisemakers that you blow into and a paper tube expands and unrolls with a razzing sound.

This time, I think that all of us with Aaron vomited.

The serpent coiled back and forth across the beach, eating soldiers and the fallen metamorphosed dragons.

Before the tail emerged from Aaron’s mouth, the island started to tremble and shake.
Earthquake
. I had never experienced one before, but I didn’t need experience to know what it was, a powerful earthquake.

As soon as the last of the serpent was out of Aaron’s mouth, I started dragging Aaron back, away from it.

“We’ve got to get out in the open, away from the building,” I shouted at the others. There was a lot of noise, from the dining serpent, from the screaming soldiers, and from the rumbling ground.

Aaron gagged and coughed, and spit up blood.

“No!” he managed finally. “Inside the shrine. Quickly, inside.”

“The building might fall on us,” I protested.

“We have to take the chance,” Aaron said. “We can’t stay out here or that beast will eat us too, without any ‘might’ about it.”

That settled it. Maybe the shrine would fall on us, but that didn’t sound nearly as horrifying as the prospect of that sea serpent eating us the way it was slurping down all those soldiers and dead other things. We went back through the double doors. Lesh and I nearly had to carry Aaron. His guts were still convulsing. More blood came out of his mouth. Not all magic is painless, I guess.

“Find a single door that will open,” Aaron said when he could, and then he went back to spitting and retching.

We had to try a half-dozen doors before we found one that opened without trouble.

Aaron straightened up, started chanting, and put his hands on the doorjamb—one on either side—in a gesture I couldn’t mistake. There was no silver tracing around the doorway, but I knew what Aaron was doing. I wasn’t nearly surprised when a familiar setting opened beyond the doorway.

“Get through, everyone,” Aaron said, and the words seemed to be quite an effort.

I waited until all of the others were through—including Harkane, who had the head of our elf.

“Get through,” Aaron told me. I obeyed, but I grabbed his arm and pulled him through into Arrowroot behind me, as the shrine of the Great Earth Mother started to collapse on itself.