Guile of Dragons, A

by James Enge

  But he could rebel. The current of his blood might carry him toward evil, but he could fight it. Then he knew that Tyr was truly his father, as much as Merlin was. As the dwarf had fought to keep faith with a destiny beyond his blood, so Morlock would. He was Morlock Ambrosius: he would deny it no longer. But in his heart he was Morlock syr Theorn, and he swore he would keep faith with everything that meant or could mean. And then he knew what he must do—what he would do.

  He no longer felt inclined to move any of the Guardians, even Tyr, to safety. Had they sought safety for themselves? Besides, there was no time. Saijok Mahr’s angry light was already leavening the cavernous tunnel’s darkness. But he reached down, grabbed the flawed gem, and broke the pendant chain around Tyr’s neck.

  This emblem of shame and peril had hung about Tyr’s neck since Morlock had been a boy. Now perhaps it would be of some use. If he could break the unstable pattern at its core and release an endothermia, he might use it as a weapon against the dragon. His craft might yet slay the guile master.

  Leaving the captives, he hurled himself toward the row of spears. Seizing the longest, he ran on to the base of the golden hill. The cavern above it was already red-gold with reflected light. The roar of the dragon was like a barrage of thunder. Yet he had time to think, a little time. A moment, at most, to think and act.

  He summoned a vision and ascended into the lowest realm of rapture. In the undreaming state of vision he directly apprehended the ur-shapes he had blindly woven into the gem’s core long ago, precariously balancing the energies of that-which-utters-heat and that-which-devours-heat: a red dragon and a blue-black dragon devouring each other in the gem’s heart.

  He lifted the flawed stone with the black-and-white flames of his tal-hand, letting the hand of his fleshly body fall quiescent to his side. Then he slew the red dragon in the stone, releasing the blue shock of endothermic reaction.

  He fit the now-gaping flaw in the stone into the point of a silver spear and banished the vision.

  The spear was shuddering in his hands as if it were lodged in the heart of a wounded angry beast. He gripped it with both hands and waited in a haze of bitter blue air for the advent of his enemy.

  The light in the cave-mouth before him brightened unbearably; he could hear the beat of the storm-swift dragon’s wings; he could hear nothing else. Yet he watched and wondered, pointless thoughts oppressing him as he awaited the fate he had chosen. The dragon did not appear.

  Then he was there, but Morlock never saw him, only the blast of fire and venom that swept down from the tunnel mouth. He longed to raise the Ambrosian shield, to protect his eyes and mouth from the venom and the heat. But he could not do that and also achieve what he had set himself here to do. He felt the angle at which the flames struck him changing rapidly. Then the zone of flames was passing from him as he stood half-crouched under the onslaught.

  Desperately he straightened and leapt back into the sheath of flames, holding the spear and its zone of bitter frost between him and the dragon. He hurled the shaking spear with all his strength upward, seeking only to strike the heart of the fire, the source of the dark light blinding him. The flames and the frost passed from him as the dragon flew roaring overhead, and he fell to his knees in the smoke, blind for long moments from tears and poison.

  He heard the dragon land on the far side of the cave. He groped on the cave floor for some sort of weapon, but found none. As his eyesight returned and the bank of fumes over him slowly dispersed, he saw Saijok Mahr glaring at him menacingly with one eye. There was not even the mark of a spear on the dragon.

  Saijok Mahr roared. There were words in it, but Morlock could not make them out. He lurched defiantly to his feet. He thought of shouting in response, but could think of nothing to say. He contented himself with raising the Ambrosian shield high. Fire and venom had stained the black battered shield, but the silver falcon and thorns still glittered against the dark field.

  Maddeningly, his mind would not give up. He kept thinking of wild and unworkable expedients for the moment when the dragon struck to kill. It was pointless and it lacked dignity. If some of them had been more likely . . .

  The dragon’s throat exploded in a jet of fire and ice.

  The dragon spread its wings and began to fall forward through a cloud of flame and steam. Saijok continued to fall headfirst down to the hoard. The ground shook when he struck.

  The master dragon lay among the gold and jewels, writhing feebly. The explosion had nearly severed his neck in two; from the wide gaping wound, fire-bright blood flowed in a torrent. And something else gleamed there, red and silver, drenched in burning draconic blood.

  Morlock watched in weary triumph. The single eye of his enemy turned in the motionless head and fixed on him. The look of malice and suffering on the dragon’s face moved Morlock with unexpected pity. He did not avoid the eye as it focused to fire-bright clarity. This last futile effort exhausted the dragon. The eye went dark, and the jaws issued a final stream of black smoke into the dense cloudy air of the cave. For long moments Morlock continued to stare at the motionless dragon until even the blood ceased to flow. Saijok Mahr was dead. Morlock was rokhlan indeed, at last.

  He went to assure himself the dragon was dead and the endothermia quenched, as it seemed to be. He found what had been the wounded gemstone and the silver spear lodged in the wreckage of the dead dragon’s neck.

  The gem had healed through absorbing the dragon’s fire, finding at last enough heat to satiate its dark blue hunger. It hung, flawless—blood-dark and clear—in a filigreed basket of silvery metal: the remains of the bright silver spear that had carried it into the dragon’s gullet.

  As he carried Tyr and the Guardians, one by one, back up to the safety of the narrow corridor, his thoughts were somber. The terrible sense of guilt he had felt before the dragon’s death had not lessened, but it was different now. His fear of the dragon had died in pity—was it anything, after all, but an animal, unable to escape the destiny of its blood? This thought, though, led to others. If he had been born with Merlin’s guilt on him, so Merlin had been born with the bright poison of Ambrosian inheritance in his veins. That did not excuse Merlin; it did not change what he had done. But it did somehow change Morlock’s feelings about him.

  When he had deposited the last Guardian, a thain whose name he did not know, in the corridor, he took the cape from her shoulders to replace the smoldering rag of his own. Then he returned to Saijok Mahr’s corpse.

  Taking a heavy cup carved out of a single gemstone, he deliberately smashed three of the dragon’s teeth. Inside each one there was a reddish black fluid, within which embryonic forms were already taking shape: mandrakes, protodragons, Saijok’s children. Would they live or die, now that he had cracked their shells? He neither knew nor cared.

  He did not rest then, although he was tempted to. He had taken the full blast of the dragon’s venomous breath twice; his eyes and mouth and the slight hurts he had sustained all burned from the poison they had drunk. If he paused in what he was about to do he might never complete it, and it was the most important task of all.

  He found a knife in the hoard’s precious weaponry; the blade had a silvery gleam, yet was hard as steel. He took it and cut the Triple Collar from the throat of the dead master dragon. It was easy to do. Half the collar was burst asunder by the explosion that had killed Saijok. For the rest: the lead-colored metal was not as soft as lead, but the linkages of the collar were subtle and easy to break with the hard glittering edge of the knife. When he had severed each of the three plated bands he drew the collar from the dragon’s neck and dragged it toward the gate of the den. Reaching the threshold, he let the collar go and sat down for a moment. But when he felt himself losing consciousness he got up again and dragged the collar behind him as he went out to face the leaderless assembly of dragons.

  The long arms of the mountain lay on either side of him. The sky above was a dome of thick bluish clouds, lit from within by the silver radiance
of a cold afternoon. The valley before him was bright and blank with new-fallen snow, like a page on which the dark burning words of the dragons were written. In the dim wintry day their fires were almost invisible, but they sent up tall columns of smoke and steam from the clean snow.

  They said nothing as he approached them, laboring through the deep snow. They made no move but watched him closely. They knew what he carried; they knew what it implied.

  If they said nothing, neither did Morlock. Once he had stirred them with words; now he did not need to. He lurched to a halt some twenty paces from the edge of the assembly, where there was still a slope downward. Then he took the collar by its central band; with both hands he seized it and spun it around in a full circle. He swung it again, and a third time to build momentum. Then he let it go. It arced briefly in the air and went down, trailing severed bands. It fell downslope a little farther, flailing in the snow.

  The nearest dragons did not move toward it, did not even seem to see it. But they saw it. For a moment everything was still, except the dragons’ eyes. To Morlock it seemed as if there was no sound in the world but for the irregularly rhythmic sound of their massed breathing; he could not even hear his own.

  He turned his back on the dragons and walked away, following the trail of his own footsteps back to the dead master’s den.

  After passing the threshold and entering the dim smoky cavern, his legs went out from under him. He never knew if he had simply misstepped in the hoard or whether his legs were truly too weak to support him. There was a roaring in his ears; he could not tell if it came from within or without. He tried to clamber across the hoard on his hands and knees. The roaring grew louder. The ground seemed to shake. He was not sure whether these things were happening within the cave of his failing mind or in the world outside. He struggled on and up as far as he could.

  Deor was a condemned criminal, and he supposed he had no right to speak. But it was not as if any of his companions were dwarves, or even northerners. Besides, it was cold in the everlasting blizzard. Maybe shouting a few words would take his mind off it. Perhaps that was why these towering madpeople were content to stand here and talk and talk and talk.

  “Look here!” he said in their speech, interrupting a long rambling monologue (with gestures!) by the tall fair-haired one they called Jordel.

  They obeyed literally. Jordel fell silent, and all the Guardians looked to Deor.

  “Guardians of the south!” he said. “I was sent with you as guide by the Eldest of the Seven Clans. Perhaps you did not know he considered it a sentence of death.”

  They did not speak, but waited for him to continue.

  “Instead of accepting my guidance you chose to follow the black unicorn that appeared to us in the Helgrind Gate. Very well. We have followed it over the mountains, through two days of storm. We have not slept; we have met, fought, and killed dragons. Now the unicorn has disappeared, and you wonder what we are to do. At the beginning of our journey you did not listen to me. But now we are comrades: we are rokhleni together, eh? Perhaps you will listen to me now.”

  “I will listen, at least,” said Illion. “Have we gone wrong, Deor?”

  “You are about to do so,” Deor said frankly. “You chose to follow the unicorn. So you did. It’s too late to change your minds about that. If the unicorn’s intent was to betray us to the guile, it has already done so and we have only to meet our doom. But if it has not, then it had some other purpose. It brought us here to show us something, or have us do something. We should look to that, Guardians. Since we have already given our trust to the unicorn we should not withdraw it now.”

  “Champion Deor!” cried Thain Aloê. He did not exactly understand her, but he gathered she approved.

  “What are your thoughts, Deor?” asked the vocate Noreê.

  Deor pointed north. “We are on the verge of Haukrull vale. Look! That shadow against the snow is the Pilgrims’ Gate of the Runhaiar.” He turned south. “Yonder somewhere is the entrance to the den of Saijok Mahr, the renegade master, as Morlock described it to Earno, Earno to Old Father Tyr, and Tyr to me. Now, every dragon we have met came up from the south and east, from this very direction.”

  Naevros nodded, dimly visible through the haze of wind-driven snow. “So the rivalry between the two masters has been settled,” he guessed, “and the dragons we have met are refugees, adherents of the defeated master.”

  “It’s likely,” Deor said. “More likely than a unicorn shilling for dragons!”

  Deor thought of the dragon he had killed. (He was a rokhlan now. It was strange.) He had spotted it in a ravine high among the Haukr. It was transporting a pile of gold and jewels up the ravine, bit by bit. Deor watched it return to the pile under the wall of the ravine again and again. Then he placed himself over the pile and, when the dragon returned, toppled over a pinnacle of rock, striking the dragon unconscious. Then he snuck down and stabbed it in the brain until it was dead.

  It had been a sordid death. Such was not how legends were born. And the victory had given him no elation. There was a senselessness to the dragon’s actions that spoke of a mind broken by panic. In fact, none of the dragons they had met had displayed the terrifying subtlety that was their legendary hallmark.

  Deor expected more talk from the Guardians, but there was none. Their consensus was unanimous, immediate, silent. They moved together to negotiate the slope down into the valley. Deor led the way south from there.

  Darkness fell swiftly in the unrelenting storm. Before it was completely dark the company spotted a dark red glow on the southern horizon. Before long they heard the roaring of dragons in combat. They climbed a snowy hill, dense with red reflected shadow, and on the height they found themselves looking down on a blasted landscape.

  There were dragons, dead and dying, scattered through the narrow valley that led up to the mountain Gramer. Melted snow and torn earth had formed a mire in which bleeding dragons burned dimly, like the separate coals of a scattered fire. At the high end of the valley there was a gigantic double-pillared gateway, which could only be the entrance to Saijok Mahr’s den. Before the threshold two dying dragons thrashed in combat, their jaws locked around each other’s throats. After a long somber look at the swathe of hell the company descended back under the shadow of the slope.

  Illion spoke. “The guile of masters is destroyed. But the danger to the Realm is not yet ended. Not all the dragons can have been killed here. We met many refugees; there will be others. How many there are, where they have gone, and how the guile was broken: these are the things we must discover.”

  There was no dissent. They decided to divide into four parties: Jordel and Baran to go back to the ruins of Haukrull town and the site of Vild Kharum’s assembly; Naevros and Aloê would stay on the dragons’ battlefield; Noreê and Thea would go to explore the Runhaiar, via the cave that led into the Drowned Arches. As for Saijok Mahr’s den, Deor claimed that for himself, and Illion smilingly agreed to accompany him. They all agreed to meet or send word to the Pilgrims’ Gate in two days, and parted.

  It was an easy thing for Illion and Deor to make their way past the fighting dragons; these were concerned only with each other. Inside the den they found a chaos of dead dragons and half-melted treasure, layered over with dark venomous air. Deor took a coldlight from his pack and lit it. The light wore a dim blue halo; the air was denser than fog, warmer than summer.

  Ominous sounds came from the cavernous dark tunnel entrance on their left. They glanced at each other, guessing that sooner or later they would have to go that way. But they decided to search the den as best they could first. Illion turned to the left, and Deor turned right; they both set out on a circuit of the cave.

  They had almost met on the far side when Deor cried out some words in the Dwarvish language. Illion was not thirty paces away and he glanced around but saw nothing. He made his way to Deor and asked what he’d seen.

  “Old Father Tyr,” said Deor. “I saw his face through one of those crack
s in the wall.”

  Illion looked where Tyr was pointing. There were many cracks, most of them no doubt opened by the heat and shocks of the dragons’ conflict.

  “Which one?” he asked.

  Deor gestured again, impatiently. It was an opening like any of the others. Illion could see nothing. But that, perhaps, meant nothing.

  They climbed up to the opening. Within, indeed, they found Tyr leaning against the wall, unable to speak. Beyond him lay a corridor along which lay a row of Guardians, still as effigies of the dead.

  Deor immediately began to speak to Tyr in the Dwarvish tongue, but Illion put him firmly aside.

  “Your Eldest had been poisoned, at least, and almost certainly spellbound. If he could have spoken, he would have called to you.”

  “Can you help him?”

  “Yes. Bring me a cup of dragon’s blood, Deor, and I promise you will see your Eldest preside again over the feast of Cymbals.”

  Deor asked no more but jumped down the steep slope and plunged into the hoard. When he returned, with a half-melted cup brimming with black tarry blood, Illion was examining the Guardians.

  “Are they all in danger?” Deor asked.

  “No,” said Illion, returning to him. “I was very concerned at first. But most of them responded to the dragonspell by going into a trance of Withdrawal. This has protected their minds and kept the poison from working into their flesh. The trance is very deep by now, and it will take time to draw them from it. But there is no danger.”

  As he was speaking he tore three strips from his red cape and soaked them in the black tarry liquid Deor had brought back. Then he drew a knife from his belt and nicked a vein on Tyr’s neck and one on each wrist. Then he bound the soaked strips of cloth around the Eldest’s neck and wrists. Tyr’s eyes were open, but he watched the acts without apparent comprehension.

  “The blood will draw the venom out,” Illion explained, when he had finished. Then he picked up the cup and inspected its contents. “There is enough,” he said, cryptically. “Come.”