Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan

  “But you see,” Caiy now said to me, “I didn’t have to.”

  This, of course, he hadn’t said in the hall. No. He had told the village the normal things, the lucky lunge and the brain pierced, and the death-throes, which we’d all heard plainly enough. If anyone noticed his sword had no blood on it, well, it had trailed in the pond, had it not?

  “You see,” Caiy went on, “it was lying there comatose one minute, and then it began to writhe about, and to go into a kind of spasm. Something got dislodged off the hoard-pile—a piece of cracked-up armor, I think, gilded—and knocked me silly again. And when I came round, the dragon was all sprawled about, and dead as yesterday’s roast mutton.”

  “Hn,” I said. “Hnn.”

  “The point being,” said Caiy, watching the forest and not me, “I must have done something to it with the first blow, outside. Dislocated some bone or other. You told me their bones have no marrow. So to do that might be conceivable. A fortunate stroke. But it took a while for the damage to kill it.”

  “Hnn.”

  “Because,” said Caiy, softly, “you do believe I killed it, don’t you?”

  “In the legends,” I said, “they always do.”

  “But you said before that in reality, a man can’t kill a dragon.”

  “One did,” I said.

  “Something I managed outside then. Brittle bones. That first blow to its skull.”

  “Very likely.”

  Another silence. Then he said:

  “Do you have any gods, Apothecary?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Will you swear me an oath by them, and then call me ‘dragon-slayer’? Put it another way. You’ve been a help. I don’t like to turn on my friends. Unless I have to.”

  His hand was nowhere near that honed sword of his, but the sword was in his eyes and his quiet, oh-so-easy voice. He had his reputation to consider, did Caiy. But I’ve no reputation at all. So I swore my oath and I called him dragon-slayer, and when our roads parted my hide was intact. He went off to glory somewhere I’d never want to go.

  Well, I’ve seen a dragon, and I do have gods. But I told them, when I swore that oath, I’d almost certainly break it, and my gods are accustomed to me. They don’t expect honor and chivalry. And there you are.

  Caiy never killed the dragon. It was Niemeh, poor lovely loving gentle Niemeh who killed it. In my line of work, you learn about your simples. Which cure, which bring sleep, which bring the long sleep without awakening. There are some miseries in this blessed world can only end in death, and the quicker death the better. I told you I was a hard man. I couldn’t save her, I gave you reasons why. But there were all those others who would have followed her. Other Niemehs. Other Caiys, for that matter. I gave her enough in the cup to put out the life of fifty strong men. It didn’t pain her, and she didn’t show she was dead before she had to be. The dragon devoured her, and with her the drug I’d dosed her with. And so Caiy earned the name of dragon-slayer.

  And it wasn’t a riddle.

  And no, I haven’t considered making a profession of it. Once is enough with any twice-terrible thing. Heroes and knights need their impossible challenges. I’m not meant for any bard’s romantic song, a look will tell you that. You won’t ever find me in the Northern hills calling “Draco! Draco!”

  The Dragon on the Bookshelf

  Harlan Ellison®

  and Robert Silverberg

  Harlan Ellison was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1934. He moved to New York in 1955 to become a writer and published his first story in 1956. Within a year he had published over a hundred fiction and non-fiction pieces, under his own name and under a variety of commercially-required pennames. He served in the Army between 1957–59, moved to Chicago to edit Rogue magazine and created Regency Books in 1961. Ellison then moved to Los Angeles in 1962, and quickly established himself writing screenplays for popular television shows, including The Twilight Zone (1985) and, most famously, the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” and The Outer Limits’ “Demon With a Glass Hand.”

  He has authored or edited 76 books. Ellison’s most famous stories include “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”, “The Deathbird”, “Paladin of the Lost Hour”, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”, and “Jeffty is Five”. His stories remain in print in numerous collections, most recently in Slippage, Troublemakers, Mind Fields, Mefisto in Onyx, and The Essential Ellison: A Fifty Year Retrospective. His work has been awarded the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker Award, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, British Science Fiction, and Locus awards. His career awards include the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement, the International Horror Guild Living Legend, and the World Horror Grandmaster. In 2006 the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America named him their Grand Master laureate; and in 2009 the film documentary of his life and work, Dreams With Sharp Teeth, twenty-one years in the making, opened at Lincoln Center, and has since won worldwide acclaim and awards.

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most important writers in the history of science fiction and fantasy. He published his first story in 1954 and first novel, Revolt on Alpha C, in 1955, quickly establishing what has become one of the most successful and sustained careers in science fiction. He wrote prolifically for SF and other pulp markets during the ’50s, focussed on nonfiction and other work in the early-’60s, then returned to SF with greater ambition, publishing stories and novels that pushed genre boundaries and were often dark in tone as they explored themes of human isolation and the quest for transcendence.

  Works from the years 1967–1976, still considered Silverberg’s most influential period, include Hugo winner “Nightwings”, The Masks of Time, Tower of Glass, Nebula winner A Time of Changes, Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, and Nebula winners “Good News from the Vatican” and “Born with the Dead”, among many others. Silverberg retired in the late ’70s before returning with popular SF/fantasy Lord Valentine’s Castle, first in his continuing Majipoor series, and more novels and stories throughout the ’80s and ’90s, including Nebula winner “Sailing to Byzantium”, Hugo winners “Gilgamesh in the Outback” and “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another”, and many others. His most recent books are the autobiography Other Spaces, Other Times, and the collection Something Wild is Loose. Upcoming are a new short novel The Last Song of Orpheus and a new collection The Palace at Midnight. He was acknowledged as a Grand Master by SFWA in 2004.

  He was small; petite, actually. Perhaps an inch shorter—resting back on his glimmering haunches—than any of the mass-market paperbacks racked on either side of him. He was green, of course. Blue-green, down his front, underchin to bellybottom, greenish yellow-ochre all over the rest. Large, luminous pastel-blue eyes that would have made Shirley Temple seethe with envy. And he was licking his front right paw as he blew soft gray smoke rings through his heroically long nostrils.

  To his left, a well-thumbed Ballantine paperback edition of C. Wright Mills’s THE CAUSES OF WORLD WAR III; to his right, a battered copy, sans dust jacket, of THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE by Sinclair Lewis. He licked each of his four paw-fingers in turn.

  Margaret, sitting across the room from the teak Danish Modern bookcase where he lived, occasionally looked up from the theme papers she was cor-recting spread out across the card table, to smile at him and make a ticking sound of affection. “Good doughnuts?” she asked. An empty miniature Do-Nettes box lay on the carpet. The dragon rolled his eyes and continued licking confectioners’ sugar from under his silver claws. “Good doughnuts,” she said, and went back to her classwork.

  Idly, she brushed auburn hair away from her face with the back of a slim hand. Completing his toilette, the little dragon stared raptly at her graceful movement, folded his front paws, sighed deeply, and closed his great, liquid eyes.

  The smoke rings came at longer intervals now.

  Outside, the afreet and djinn continued to battl
e, the sounds of their exploding souls making a terrible clank and clangor in the dew-misty streets of dark San Francisco.

  So it was to be another of those days. They came all too frequently now that the gateway had been prised open: harsh days, smoldering days, danger-ous nights. This was no place to be a dragon, no time to be in the tidal flow of harm’s way. There were new manifestations every day now. Last Tuesday the watchthings fiercely clicking their ugly fangs and flatulating at the en-trance to the Transamerica Pyramid. On Wednesday a shoal of blind ban-shees materialized above Coit Tower and covered the structure to the ground with lemony ooze that continued to wail days later. Thursday the resur-rected Mongol hordes breaking through west of Van Ness, the air redolent of monosodium glutamate. Friday was silent. No less dangerous; merely silent. Saturday the gullgull incursion, the burnings at the Vaillancourt Fountain. And Sunday— oh, Sunday, bloody Sunday!

  Small, large-eyed dragons in love had to walk carefully these days: perils were plentiful, sanctuaries few.

  The dragon opened his eyes and stared raptly at the human woman. There sat his problem. Lovely, there she sat. The little dragon knew his responsibility. The only refuge lay within. The noise of the warfare outside was terrifying; and the little dragon was the cause. Coiling on his axis, the dragon diminished his extension along the sril-curve and let himself slip away. Margaret gasped softly, a little cry of alarm and dismay. “But you said you wouldn’t—”

  Too late. A twirling, twinkling scintillance. The bookshelf was empty of anything but books, not one of which mentioned dragons.

  “Oh,” she murmured, alone in the silent pre-dawn apartment.

  “Master, what am I to do?” said Urnikh,• the little dragon that had been sitting in the tiny San Francisco apartment only moments before. “I have made matters so much worse. You should have selected better, Master…I never knew enough, was not powerful enough. I’ve made it terrible for them, and they don’t even know it’s happening. They are more limited than you let me understand, Master. And I…”

  The little dragon looked up helplessly.

  He spoke softly. “I love her, the human woman in the place where I came into their world. I love the human woman, and I did not pursue my mission. I love her, and my inaction made matters worse, my love for her helped open the gateway.

  • Pronounced “Oower-neesh.”

  “I can’t help myself. Help me to rectify, Master. I have fallen in love with her. I’m stricken. With the movement of her limbs, with the sound of her voice, the way her perfume rises off her, the gleam of her eyes; did I say the way her limbs move? The things she thinks and says? She is a wonderment, indeed. But what, what am I to do?”

  The Master looked down at the dragon from the high niche in the dark-ness. “There is desperation in your voice, Urnikh.”

  “It is because I am so desperate!”

  “You were sent to the Earth, to mortaltime, to save them. And instead you indulge yourself; and by so doing you have only made things worse for them. Why else does the gateway continue to remain open, and in-deed grow wider and wider from hour to hour, if not on account of your negligence?”

  Urnikh extended his head on its serpentine neck, let it sag, laid his chin on the darkness. “I am ashamed, Master. But I tell you again, I can’t help myself. She fills me, the sight of her fills my every waking moment.”

  “Have you tried sleeping?”

  “When I sleep, I dream. And when I dream, I am slave to her all the more.”

  The Master heaved a sigh very much like the sigh the little dragon had heaved in Margaret’s apartment. “How does she bind you to her?”

  “By not binding me at all. She is simply there; and I can’t bear to be away from her. Help me, Master. I love her so; but I want to be the good force that you want me to be.”

  The Master slowly and carefully uncoiled to its full extension. For a long while it studied the contrite eyes of the little dragon in silence.

  Then it said, “Time grows short, Urnikh. Matters grow more desperate. The djinn, the afreet, the watchthings, the gullgull, all of them rampage and destroy. No one will win. Earth will be left a desert. Mortaltime will end. You must return; and you must fight this love with all the magic of which you are possessed. Give her up. Give her up, Urnikh.”

  “It is impossible. I will fail.”

  “You are young. Merely a thousand years have passed you. Fight it, I tell you. Remember who and what you are. Return, and save them. They are poor little creatures and they have no idea what dangers surround them. Save them, Urnikh, and you will save her…and yourself as well.”

  The little dragon raised his head. “Yes, Master.”

  “Go, now. Will you go and do your best?”

  “I will try very hard, Master.”

  “You are a good force, Urnikh. I have faith in you.”

  The little dragon was silent.

  “Does she know what you are?” the Master asked, after a time.

  “Not a bit. She thinks I am a cunningly made toy. An artificial life-form created for the amusement of humans.”

  “A cunningly made toy. Indeed. Intended to amuse.” The Master’s tone was frosty. “Well, go to her, then. Amuse her, Urnikh. But this must not go on very much longer, do you understand?”

  The little dragon sighed again and let himself slip away on the sril-curve. The Master, sitting back on its furry haunches, turned itself inward to see if there was any hope.

  It was too dim inside. There were no answers.

  The dragon materialized within a pale amber glow that spanned the third and fourth shelves of the bookcase. Evidently many hours had passed: the lost day’s shafts of sunlight no longer came spearing through the window; time flowed at different velocities on the sril-curve and in mortaltime; it was night but tendrils of troubling fog shrouded everything except the summit of Telegraph Hill.

  The apartment was empty. Margaret was gone.

  The dragon shivered, trembled, blew a fretful snort. Margaret: gone! And without any awareness of the perils that lurked on every side, out there on the battlefield that was San Francisco. It appalled him whenever she went outside; but, of course, she had no knowledge of the risks.

  Where has she gone? he wondered. Perhaps she was visiting the male-one on Clement Street; perhaps she was strolling the chilly slopes of Lincoln Park; perhaps doing her volunteer work at the U of C Clinic on Mt. Parnassus; perhaps dreamily peering into the windows of the downtown shops. And all the while, wherever she was, in terrible danger. Unaware of the demonic alarums and conflicts that swirled through every corner of the embattled city.

  I will go forth in search of her, Urnikh decided; and immediately came a sensation of horror that sent green ripples undulating down his slender back. Go out into that madness? Risk the success of the mission, risk existence itself, wander fogbound streets where chimeras and were-pythons and hun-gry jack-o’-lanterns lay in waiting, all for the sake of searching for her?

  But Margaret was in danger, and what could matter to him more than that?

  “You won’t listen to me, ever, will you?” he imagined himself telling her. “There’s a gateway open and the whole city has become a parade-ground for monsters, and when I tell you this you laugh, you say, ‘How cute, how cute, ’ and you pay no attention. Don’t you have any regard for your own safety?”

  Of course she had regard for her own safety.

  What she didn’t have was the slightest reason to take him seriously. He was cuddly; he was darling; he was a pocket-sized bookcase-model dragon; a cunning artifact; cleverly made with infinitesimal clockwork animatronic parts sealed cunningly inside a shell-case without seam or seal; and nothing more.

  But he was more than that. He was a sentinel; he was an emissary; he was a force.

  Yes. I am a sentinel, he told himself, even as he was slipping through the door, even as he found himself setting out to look for Margaret. I am a sentinel… why am I so frightened?

  Darkness of a sinister q
uality had smothered the city now. Under the hard flannel of fog no stars could be seen, no moon, the gleam of no eye. But from every rooftop, every lamp post, every parked car, glowed the de-mon-light of some denizen of the nether realms, clinging fiercely to the terri-tory that it had chewed out, defying all others to displace it.

  The dragon shuddered. This was his doing. The gateway that had been the merest pinprick in the membrane that separated the continuums now was a gaping chasm, through which all manner of horrendous beings poured into San Francisco without cease; and it was all because he, who had been sent here to repair the original minuscule rift, had lingered, had dallied, had let himself become obsessed with a creature of this pallid and inconse-quential world.

  Well, so be it. What was done—was done. His obsession was no less potent for the guilt he felt. And even now, now that the forces of destruction infested every corner of this city and soon would be spreading out beyond its bounds, his concern was still only for Margaret, Margaret, Margaret, Margaret.

  His beloved Margaret.

  Where was she?

  He built a globe of zabil-force about himself, just in time to fend off the attack of some hairy-beaked thing that had come swooping down out of the neon sign of the Pizza Hut on the corner, and cast the wuzud-spell to seek out Margaret.

  His mental emanations spiraled up, up, through the heavy chill fog, scan-ning the city. South to Market Street, westward to Van Ness: no Margaret. Wherever his mind roved, he encountered only diabolical blackness: gibber-ing shaitans, glassy-eyed horrid ghazulim, swarms of furious buzzing hospodeen, a hundred hundred sorts of angry menacing creatures of the dire plasmatic void that separates mortaltime from the nightmare worlds.

  Margaret? Margaret!

  Urnikh cast his reach farther and farther, probing here, there, everywhere with the shaft of crystalline wuzud-force. The swarming demons could do nothing to interfere with the soaring curve of his interrogatory thrust. Let them stamp and hiss, let them leap and prance, let them spit rivers of venom, let them do whatever they pleased: he would take no mind of it. He was looking for his beloved and that was all that mattered.