The Dragonbone Chair

by Tad Williams

  A pinprick of light flared before him—a needle hole in the sunshrouding curtain of night. He rubbed harder and stared. The light bloomed, folding back the shadows; the passageway’s walls leaped out on either side, brushed with glowing amber. Air seemed to rush into his lungs. He could see!

  The momentary elation evaporated as he turned to look up and down the corridor. A pain in his head made the walls waver before his gaze. The tunnel was nearly featureless, a lonely hole burrowing down into the underbelly of the castle, festooned with pale cobwebs. Back up the passage he could see a crossway he had already passed, a gaping mouth in the wall. He walked back. A quick shine of the crystal revealed nothing beyond the opening but tailings and rubble, a sloping pile of debris leading down out of reach of the sphere’s thin light. How many other cross-paths had he missed? And how would he know which ones were the right ones? Another wave of choking hopelessness washed over him. He was hopelessly alone, hopelessly lost. He would never find himself back in the world of light.

  Simon Pilgrim, Simon mooncalf…family dead. friend dead, see him wander and wander forever…

  “Silence!” he growled out loud, and was startled to hear the word caroming down the path before him, a messenger carrying a proclamation from the king of Under-the-ground: “Silence…silence…silen…si…”

  King Simon of the Tunnels began his staggering progress.

  The passageway squirmed downward into the stone heart of the Hayholt, a smothering, winding, cobwebbed track lit only by the gleam of Morgenes’ crystal sphere. Broken spiderwebs performed a slow, ghostly dance in the wake of his passage; when he turned to look back the strands seemed to wave after him, like the clutching, boneless fingers of the drowned. Hanks of silky thread stuck to his hair and draped stickily across his face, so that he had to hold his hand before his eyes as he walked. Often he would feel some small, leggy thing scuttling away across his fingers as he broke through its netting, and would have to stop for a moment, head down, until the shivers of disgust subsided.

  It was becoming colder, and the close-cramped walls of the passageway seemed to breathe with moisture. Parts of the tunnel had crumbled; in some places dislodged dirt and stone were piled so high in the center of the path that he had to push his back against the damp walls and edge around them.

  He was doing just that—squeezing around an obstruction, the light-wielding hand held over his head, the other feeling before him for a way past—when he felt a searing pain like a thousand needlepricks run up his questing hand and onto his arm. A flash of the crystal brought a vision of horror—hundreds, no, thousands of tiny white spiders swarming up his wrist and under his shirt sleeve, biting like a thousand burning fires. Simon shrieked and slammed his arm against the tunnel wall, bringing a shower of clotted dirt down into his mouth and eyes. His terrified shouts echoed down the passageway, quickly failing. He fell to his knees in damp soil, smacking his stinging arm up and down into the dirt until the flaring pain began to subside, then crawled forward on his hands and knees, away from whatever horrible nest or den he had disturbed. As he crouched and frantically scrubbed his arm with loose soil the tears came again, racking him like a whipping.

  When he could stand to look at his arm, the crystal’s light revealed only reddening and swelling skin beneath the dirt, instead of the bloody wounds he had been sure he would find. The arm throbbed, and he wondered dully if the spiders were poisonous—if the worst was yet to come. When he felt the sobs climbing once more in his chest, shortening his breath, he forced himself to his feet. He must go on. He must.

  A thousand white spiders.

  He must go on.

  He followed the sphere’s dim light downward. It gleamed on moisture-slick stone and earth-choked cross-corridors, twining with pallid roots. Surely he must be far below the castle by now—far down into the black earth. There was no sign of Josua’s passage, or of anyone’s. He was sickeningly certain he had missed some turningplace in the darkness and confusion, and was even now spiraling downward into an inescapable pit.

  He had trudged on so long, making so many twists and turns, that the memory of the narrow red line on Morgenes’ old parchment was now useless. There was nothing remotely like stairs anywhere in these narrow, strangling wormholes. Even the glowing crystal was beginning to flicker. The voices escaped his control again, surrounding him in the crazy shadows like a shouting throng.

  Dark and getting darker. Dark and getting darker.

  Let us lie down for a while. We want to sleep, just for a while, sleep…

  The king has an animal inside him, and Pryrates is its keeper…

  “My Simon.” Morgenes called you “my Simon”…he knew your father. He kept secrets.

  Josua is going to Naglimund. The sun shines there all day and night Naglimund. They eat sweet cream and drink clear, shining water at Naglimund. The sun is bright.

  Bright and hot. It is hot. Why?

  The damp tunnel was suddenly very warm. He stumbled on, hopelessly sure that he felt the first fever of spider-poison. He would die in the dark, the terrible dark. He would never again see the sun, or feel its…

  The warmth seemed to push into his lungs. It was getting hotter!

  Stifling air enfolded him, sticking his shirt to his chest and his hair to his forehead. He felt a moment of even greater panic.

  Have I circled round? Have I walked for years only to come back to the ruins of Morgenes’ chamber—the burned, blackened remains of his life?

  But it was not possible. He had been going downward steadily, never once mounting back to anything more than a moment’s level going. Why was it so hot?

  The memory of one of Shem Horsegroom’s stories pushed forward, a story of young Prester John wandering through darkness toward a great, brooding heat—the dragon Shurakai in its lair beneath the castle…this castle.

  But the dragon is dead! I’ve touched its bones, a yellow chair in the throne room. There is no dragon anymore—no sleepless, deepbreathing red hulk the size of the tourney field, waiting in the darkness with claws like swords and a soul as old as the stones of Osten Ard—the dragon is dead.

  But did dragons never have brothers? And what was that sound? That dull, grumbling roar? The heat was oppressive, and the air was thick with itching smoke. Simon’s heart was a lump of dull lead in his chest. The crystal began to dim as broad smears of reddish light blotted out the sphere’s weaker radiance. The tunnel flattened, turning now neither left nor right, leading down a long, eroded gallery to an arched doorway that danced with a flickering orange radiance. Shivering despite the sweat streaming down his face, Simon felt himself drawn toward it,

  Turn and run, mooncalf!

  He could not. Each step was a labor, but he moved closer. He reached the archway and craned his neck fearfully around the portal’s rim.

  It was a great cavern, awash in leaping light. The rock walls seemed to have melted and set like wax at the base of a candle, the stone smoothed in long, vertical ripples. For a moment Simon’s light-stunned eyes opened wide in amazement; at the cavern’s far side a score of dark figures were kneeling before the shape of…a monstrous, flame-blazing dragon!

  An instant later he saw that it was not so; the huge shape crouched against the stone was a great furnace. The dark-clad figures were forking logs into its flaming maw.

  The foundry! The castle foundry!

  All around the cavern heavily dressed and scarf-masked men were smithying the tools of war. Massive buckets of glowing liquid iron were pulled from the flames on the ends of long poles. Molten metal jumped and hissed as it drizzled into plate-shaped molds, and above the groaning voice of the furnace reverberated the clang of hammer on anvil.

  Simon shrank back from the doorway. For a heartbeat he had felt himself about to leap forward and run to these men—for men they were, despite their strange dress. It had seemed in that instant that anything was better than the dark tunnel, and the voices—but he knew better. Did he think these foundrymen would help him to esc
ape? Doubtless they knew only one route from the blazing cavern: up and back into the clutches of Pryrates—if he had survived the inferno of Morgenes’ chambers—or the brutal justice of Elias.

  He sank down onto his haunches to think. The noise of the furnace and his own painful head made it difficult. He could not remember passing any cross-tunnels for some time. He could see what looked like a row of holes along the far wall of the foundry-cavern; it could be that they were nothing but storage chambers…

  Or dungeons…

  But it seemed just as likely that they were other routes in and out of the chamber. To retreat back up the tunnel seemed foolish…

  Coward! Scullion!

  Numb, battered, he balanced on the knife-edge of indecision. To go back, and wander through the same dark, spider-haunted tunnels, his only light nickering into extinction…or to make his way across the roaring inferno of the foundry floor—and from there, who could know? Which should it be?

  He will be King of Under-ground, Lord of the Weeping Shades!

  No, his people are gone, let him be!

  He smacked himself on the head, trying to dispel the chittering voices.

  If I’m going to die, he decided, wresting back the mastery of his speeding heart, at least let it be in the light.

  He bent over, head throbbing, to stare at the cupped gleam of the crystal sphere. Even as he looked, the light died, then throbbed back into tenuous life. He slipped it into his pocket.

  The furnace flame and the dark shapes that passed before them laid pulsing stripes of red, orange and black along the wall; he dropped down from the archway to huddle beside the downsloping ramp. The nearest hiding place was a shabby brick structure some fifteen or twenty ells from where he crouched, a disused kiln or oven that squatted on the chamber’s fringe. After a few deep breaths he bolted for it, half-running, half-crawling. His head ached from the motion, and when he reached the bulky kiln he had to lower his face between his knees until the black spots went away. The harsh roar of the feeding furnace rang like thunder inside his head, silencing even his voices with its painful clamor.

  He made his way from dark place to dark place, little islands of shadowed safety in the ocean of smoke and red noise. The foundrymen did not look up and see him; they barely communicated among themselves, limited in the crushing din to broad gestures, like armored men in the chaos of battle. Their eyes, points of reflected light above the masking cloth, seemed instead to stare at one thing only: the bright, compelling glow of hot iron. Like the red map-line that still snaked a wistful course through Simon’s memory, the radiant metal was everywhere and all the same, like a dragon’s magical blood. Here it splashed over the edge of a vat, spattering in gemlike drops; over there it wound serpentlike away across the rock to flow hissing into a pool of brackish water. Great tongues of incandescence sluiced down from buckets, coloring the bundled foundrymen in demonic scarlet.

  Creeping, scuttling, Simon made his slow way around the rim of the smelting-cave until he reached the nearest ramp leading out of the chamber. The oppressive, breathing heat and his own sickened spirit urged him to climb up, but the packed earth of the ramp showed a deep, crisscrossing scrawl of cartwheel tracks. This was a much-used doorway, he reasoned, thoughts blurry and slow. It was not a place he should try.

  At last he reached a mouth in the cavern wall that had no ramp. It was a difficult scrabble up the smooth—fire-melted? Dragonmelted?—rock, but his flagging strength held up long enough for him to pull himself over the lip and collapse full length in the sheltering shadows just inside, the unpocketed sphere glowing weakly in his hand like a trapped firefly.

  When he knew who he was once more, he was crawling.

  On your knees again, mooncalf?

  The blackness was virtually complete, and he was moving blindly downward. The tunnel floor was dry and sandy beneath his hands.

  He crawled for a long, long time; even the voices began to sound as if they felt sorry for him.

  Simon lost…Simon lost lost lost…

  Only the slowly diminishing heat behind convinced him he was actually moving—but toward what? Where? He crept like a wounded animal, through solid shadow, heading down, always down. Would he crawl downward to the very center of the world?

  Scuttling, leggy things beneath his fingers meant nothing now. The darkness was complete, inside and outside. He felt himself almost bodiless, a bundle of frightened thoughts bumping down into the cryptic earth.

  Somewhere, sometime later, the darkened sphere he had clutched for so long that it seemed a pan of him began to glow again, this time with a strange azure light. From a core of pulsing blue the light expanded until he had to hold the sphere away from him, squinting. He climbed slowly to his feet and stood panting, his hands and knees tingling where they no longer touched sand.

  The tunnel walls were covered in fibrous black growths, tangled as uncombed wool, but through the twining strands gleamed shining patches, reflecting the new-flowered light. Simon hobbled closer to investigate, drawing his hand back with a thin wheeze of disgust as he touched the greasy black moss. Some of his self had come back with the light, and as he stood swaying he thought about what he had crawled through, and trembled.

  The wall beneath the moss was covered in some kind of tile, chipped and scored in many places, missing in others so that the dull earth showed through. Behind him the tunnel sloped upward, the rut of his passage stopping where he now stood. Before him the darkness led on. He would try walking on two legs for a while.

  The passage soon widened. The arched entrances of scores of other corridors joined the one he traveled, most of them filled with soil and stone. Soon there were also flagstones beneath his shambling feet, uneven, fractured stone that nonetheless caught the light of the lantern-sphere with strange opalescence. The ceiling gradually angled away above him, out of reach of the blue light; the corridor continued downward into the earth. Something that might have been the beat of leathery wings fluttered in the emptiness above.

  Where am I now? How could Hayholt run so deep? Doctor said castles under castles, down into the world’s bones. Castles under castles…under castles…

  He had stopped without knowing it, and had turned to stand before one of the cross-passages. In some part of his head he could see himself and how he must look—tattered, dirt-smeared, head wagging from side to side like a half-wit. A strand of spittle dangled from his lower lip.

  The doorway before him was unblocked; a strange scented air like dried flowers hung in the black arch. He stepped forward, dragging an arm that felt like heavy, useless meat across his mouth, holding aloft the crystal sphere in his other hand…

  Beautiful! Beautiful place…!

  It was a chamber, perfect in the blue glow, as perfect as if someone had left it only a moment before. The ceiling was high-vaulted, covered in a tracery of delicate painted lines, a pattern suggesting thorn bushes, or flowering vines, or the meandering of a thousand meadow streams. The rounded windows were choked with rubble, and dirt had poured down from them to silt the tiled floor beneath, but all else was untouched. There was a bed—a miracle of subtle, curving wood—and a chair as fine as the bones of a bird. In the room’s center stood a fountain of polished stone that looked as if it might fill with singing water at any moment.

  A home for me. A home beneath the ground. A bed to sleep in, sleep and sleep until Pryrates and the king and the soldiers have all gone away…

  A few dragging steps forward and he stood beside the bed, the pallet as clean and unsmirched as the sails of the blessed. There was a face staring down at him from a niche above it, a splendid, clever woman’s face—a statue. Something about it was wrong, though: the lines were too angular, the eyes too deep and wide, the cheekbones high and sharp. Still it was a face of great beauty, captured in translucent stone, forever frozen in a sad, knowing smile.

  As he reached out to gently touch the sculpted cheek his shin nudged the bedframe, a touch delicate as a spider’s step. The bed
crumbled into powder. A moment later, as he stared in horror, the bust in the niche dissolved into fine ash beneath his fingertips, the woman’s features melting away in an instant. He took a stumbling step back and the light of the sphere glared and then waned to a dim glow. The thump of his foot on the floor leveled the chair and delicate fountain, and a moment later the ceiling itself began to sift down, the twining branches moldering into soft dust. The sphere flickered as he lurched for the door, and as he plunged back out into the corridor the blue light guttered out.

  Standing in the darkness again, he heard someone crying. After a long minute he reeled forward, down into the never-ending shadows, wondering who it was that could still have tears left to shed.

  The passage of time had become a thing only of fits and starts. Somewhere behind him he had dropped the spent crystal to lie forever in darkness, a pearl in the blackest trenches of the secret sea. In a last, sane part of his wandering thought, thoughts now unbounded by the hedge of light, he knew that he was moving still further downward.

  Going down. Into the pit. Going down.

  Going where? To what?

  From shadow to shadow, as a scullion always travels.

  Dead mooncalf. Ghost mooncalf…

  Drifting, drifting…Simon thought of Morgenes with his wispy beard curling in flame, thought of the shining comet glaring redly down on the Hayholt…thought of himself, descending—mounting?—through the black nothing spaces like a small, cold star. Drifting.

  The emptiness was complete. The darkness, at first just an absence of light and life, began to assume qualities of its own: narrow, choking dark when the tunnels narrowed, Simon clambering over drifts of rubble and tangling roots, or the lofty, airy darkness of invisible chambers, full of the parchment scrape of bat wings. Feeling his way through these vast, underground galleries, hearing his own muffled footfalls and the hissing patter of dirt shaken loose from the walls, any remaining sense of direction fell away. He might be walking straight up the walls, for all he could tell, or staggering across the ceilings like a maddened fly. There was no left or right; when his fingers found solid walls again, and doors leading to other tunnels, he groped mindlessly on through more constricted passageways and into other bat-squeaking, measureless catacombs.