by T. O. Munro
With a gasp, she glimpsed it. Right in the centre of the highpoint of the ceiling, a narrow opening, a chimney through the mountain of rock that sealed this underground tomb. It was a route out, the only route out. But its opening lay hundreds of feet above her. To reach it she would have to climb and crawl upside down across the rock roof. It was impossible. Impossible for her, still more so if she wanted to carry the semi-conscious Kaylan on her back.
The Ankh was falling, bringing its light down with it and she stepped to one side to catch it before it hit the stony floor. She wondered a moment at the healthy pinkness of her hands, flexed her fingers in awe at the power of the Goddess’s grace. Then quickly hung the ankh about her neck and scampered round the oval window to look once more on the jagged mountains of the dragon’s home plane.
She flinched as a dark shape shot across her vision of the scene. It was only a bird, but it served notice of how sudden the Dragon’s arrival would be. In despair she glanced around the chamber. All that the desperate efforts of Kaylan and Udecht had achieved was to make her a more mobile meal to be baked by a dragon in an underground oven. Still, at least she had destroyed the precise alignment of targets which had been so vital to Maelgrum’s plan to destroy the Helm.
The Helm.
Haselrig had said that the Dragon fire alone was not enough to destroy the Helm. The Helm is only vulnerable at the instant that it opens to admit a new soul.
She walked towards the plinth on which the Helm stood, the cursed item which had made her invulnerable to orcish blows and wizards’ spells. The cursed item that would take her to a realm of her forefathers and of a madman. The cursed item that could not be destroyed by dragon fire.
She picked it up, felt its weight and the eerie sense of steel as warm as flesh. This thought was madness, but what else was there?
A fleck of darkness caught her eye in the distant skies of Grithsank. A fleck that was growing with impossible speed.
She put on the Helm.
Part Five
Niarmit was seated on the gilded throne in the semi-circular audience hall of the Domain of the Helm. The same friezes of martial success decorated the walls, the same double ring of plain stone thrones surrounded the raised dais on which she sat. But there was no-one else there, no relic of the stench and the scorch marks of her torture at the mad wizard’s hands, no sign of the father who had risked Chirard’s ire to secure her escape.
She clamped one hand atop her head pressing the Helm firmly upon her skull and called out, “Santos, Steward Santos, where are you?”
A wave of nausea flooded through her at the disconcerting duality of existence that the Helm induced. Her mind and soul were in the hidden demi-plane while her body was in the underground cavern. The images of both places were overlaid on her retina, and it took an effort of will to shift the emphasis of concentration from the one world to the next.
In the material world she saw the dragon’s head break through the gate from Grithsank. Huge yellow eyes blinked slowly, a mouth opened to reveal row upon row of teeth, the greatest of them as tall as a man, all sharpened to a razor edge. A wave of sulphurous breath assaulted her nostrils, and she ducked to one side as the serpent slowly brought the rest of its massive body through the gate, wings folded inwards yet still brushing past the great window’s borders.
Niarmit darted towards Kaylan’s slumped form and dragged him against the edge of cavern wall. Then she crouched in front of the semi-conscious thief and faced the monstrous creature as the last twenty foot of tail snaked through from Grithsank. She had no weapon more formidable than a lock pick, so she knelt clenched fists by her side. Now was the time for the Vanquisher’s creation to live up to the heaped praises which Feyril the Elf had lavished on its power.
In the Domain of the Helm she screamed again, “Santos! Where are you?”
The dragon edged round the chamber, head swaying as it sniffed the air. It swung towards the stone block and the pedestal behind it, puzzled by their emptiness. Then it saw her. Great talons scraped across the rock as the huge beast spun round with surprising agility to face her. It bent its head low and stretched out a clawed foot far larger than a horse, the tip of its middle talon reaching with great delicacy for this tiny crouching human.
The claw descended towards her helmed head and then stopped with a spark that cracked like a whip. The dragon tapped again, more insistent. Each time its increasingly forceful blows were brought short with an electric crackle that seemed to surprise more than discomfort the great beast.
“Santos, now would be a good time!”
“Majesty!” In the audience chamber where her soul resided, there was a flicker of movement. The Steward of the Helm bobbed before her other eyes, still clad in the purple trimmed white toga, his spare form unchanged by the months of separation. “Majesty, you have returned to us!”
In that other place, Niarmit tightened the grip of her hand, pressing the Helm against her head. “Where is he? Where is that bastard Chirard?”
“Er..” Santos shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. “Er… I don’t know his other Majesty’s whereabouts, your Majesty.”
“He’s coming isn’t he?” Niarmit growled, watching the hem of the Steward’s cloak flick with touch of a breeze. “The bastard’s coming.”
“His other Majesty would not like me to say, your Majesty.”
In the cavern of execution, Niarmit saw the Dragon draw back its head and open its jaws. A foul stench drifted from its gaping maw. The rushing air lifted those ends of her hair that the Helm had not constrained as the beast drew in a houseful of breath.
“Oh crap!” Niarmit heard herself say.
And then it came. A wave of swirling fire, glowed white and yellow as the eddies of flame and heat enveloped her. She had slunk back, spreading her arms to try and entirely shield Kaylan with her body. She could see the rocks in front of her feet blistering with the heat. She was drowning in an ocean of heat and yet the sensation was little more than the mild warmth of a comfortable bath.
The flame flickered out, the heat faded and she and the Dragon blinked at each other both equally surprised by the outcome.
Her spirit-self felt the rush of wind of a different texture, fingers of air tugging at her arms and feet. She saw the look of alarm on the Steward’s face. Santos’s mouth had dropped open and he raised his hand to stop the egress of any word of warning.
She jerked to one side, one hand still atop the Helm, the other chopping out and down, it connected with something bony beneath thick robes. Fingers, of flesh this time, skittered with a hiss of burning skin across the metal of the Helm. They slid in fruitless search for a grip as their owner stumbled into her field of view. She flicked out with her feet, a leg taking sweep from the left and a firm kick from the right, and the robed figure of Chirard the self-styled Magnificent, tumbled in an ungainly heap at the foot of the dais.
“Your Majesty!” Santos exclaimed in amazement, thought it was not clear which monarch he intended to address.
Chirard rose, seething. Niarmit had not seen the mad wizard’s face before. At their last meeting he had been seated on the throne wearing the Helm that he had seized from her. Only his thin chin and finely shaved beard and moustache had been visible. Now she saw revealed two dark eyes that were deep pools of malice in the centre of a pale white face framed by a sheen of slick black hair. Thin nostrils flared at the base of a sharp beaked nose as her insane ancestor railed at her impudence.
“How dare you, Thren-spawn!” He cried, rising and taking a step towards her.
She clamped both hands to the side of the Helm and made to raise it from her own head. That stopped him.
“Aye, Chirard, you have missed your chance to seize the Helm. Come a step nearer and I lift this from my head and I am gone from this realm and you will not call me back.”
A thin tongue flicked across the mad wizard’s lips. “Let us not be hasty, girl.”
“I wear the Helm now, I wear the Helm here
, and while I wear it you cannot harm me.”
“No,” he agreed. “Not while you wear it, girl. Only he, or she, who wears the Helm enjoys absolute protection within and from this Domain.”
He tilted his head to one side. “Are you planning to sit there like that for long?” He started to stroll to one side. “I could make myself busy elsewhere, but I may come back. Is it not tiring sitting with your arms raised? Even here one can feel the old fatigues of mortal life.”
“Stay where you are Chirard. Stay where I can see you, or I will take off this helm and never put it back on and you will not see the mortal plane again. I promise it.”
In the other place she saw the Dragon draw back for another breath. She hunkered down on the throne, clenching her eyes as another tsunami of incandescent flame washed over her.
The mild warmth of filtered dragon fire again enveloped her, even within the Domain of the Helm. Santos and Chirard marked it too, exchanging glances of inquiry.
“What is happening, your Majesty?” the steward wailed.
“Where in the Mortal plane are you, girl?” Chirard demanded.
“Sit on a throne, Kinslayer, and see for yourself!” Niarmit barked, with a jerk of her chin towards the row of stone thrones each subordinate to the gilded seat upon which she sat.
The mad wizard’s eyebrows flicked upwards, his mouth twisted in distaste at being commanded by anyone, least of all her. He looked about him at the two concentric semicircles of thrones, pausing in some mild indecision as to which of the identical seats to grace with his arse. In the end he settled on one near the end of the first row, far to the left so Niarmit had to crane her neck round to keep him in view. He took his seat with the fussiness of a cat, shuffling his backside and wriggling his shoulders before relaxing into the chair’s embrace. His hands rested on the armrests and he shut his eyes and Niarmit knew he was seeing, through the Helm’s eye, exactly what faced her in the cavern of imprisonment.
“A dragon!” he exclaimed with a note more of admiration than fear, as though Niarmit had just pulled off a particularly spectacular trick for his amusement.
“A dragon!” Santos squealed, leaping in dismay from the simple chair through which he too was able to share the Helm-wearer’s sensations.
“Fascinating,” Chirard decided.
The dragon was prowling around the chamber, as far as its bulk would allow it, circling the central gate through which the world of Grithsank could be dimly perceived now plunged into a starlit darkness.
“One of the titles you gave yourself was Dragon Slayer, Chirard? Was that just another idle boast or was there some truth in it.”
“I have been to Grithsank,” Chirard admitted. “And Dragons did die, but I had more resources then. It is not easy for one person to kill a beast such as this.” The dragon was taking a run at them now. Both Niarmit and Chirard were pressing themselves back in their seats. Santos dared not resume his. “And this one is of an uncommon size!”
The dragon crashed to a halt crumpling into a heap as though it had run into the cavern wall. The ground shook with the force of the collision, fragments of rock fell from the domed ceiling. The thrones on which they sat trembled as the serpentine earth quake echoed along the bridge between the planes.
“So you can’t kill it?”
The dragon gave a great flap of its wings. A difficult manoeuvre in the cramped space by a creature not made for hovering. Still it tried to gain the height and breathed fire from a different angle on the stubborn irritation. Niarmit leant her body back, determined to still shield Kaylan from the flames. The walls of the cavern around them were beginning to glow a dull red as the dragon’s breath brought the rocks themselves to a boil.
The rising temperature had roused the thief from his slumber, his body waking his brain to the perils of a heat that was already singeing his clothes. “My Lady,” he mumbled then cried out as he saw the dragon’s gaping mouth. Niarmit bent over him to shield him from another blast of heat.
“We have to get out of here, Chirard! Now!” Niarmit commanded.
“There is time, girl. We are safe in the Domain of the Helm.”
“Kaylan is not, he will burn, even if the flame never touches him.”
Chirard shrugged. “And?”
“If Kaylan dies, then I raise the Helm from my head and at the next breath I die with him and you are trapped here forever.”
The mad wizard shrugged again. “I could try to tunnel our way out of here girl, but that would take months. Your friend does not have that long.”
“Have you a spell of climbing? There is a vent hole in the roof the cavern. Can you get us to climb up to it?”
“Let me use your hands girl, your other hands, let me see it.”
It was a strange sensation, to feel again another taking over her body, commanding her hands, but this time it was different. She had control. Niarmit let him spin her fingers in an invocation, but then to satisfy herself she willed her hand to bend the other way mid-move breaking the web of mage-weaving that Chirard had been undertaking.
He clucked his irritation at her interference. “Come bitch, let me do my work.”
She let him, watched passively as he flung a spell upwards and glanced along its wake to see the whole roof of the chamber illuminated in a star burst of light which cast jagged arrows of shadow across the rough rock. And in the midst of the high point of the chamber was the opening she had seen by the light of the flying ankh. It was the end of a bore hole two yards wide and stretching beyond the limit of the spell’s light. The dragon blinked upwards at the unexpected light and then turned its baleful gaze back to the stubbornly unsinged woman at the cavern’s edge.
“Can you help us climb up there, me and Kaylan?” Niarmit demanded in the Domain of the Helm.
The dragon was roaring now, bathing the walls around them in flame until the rocks were bubbling with the heat. Kaylan’s voice, hoarse but urgent in her ear. “Flee my Lady, while you can.”
“Where to, Kaylan? And never without you.”
“Why climb,” Chirard laughed tugging for control of her fingers. She let him take them. “Why climb, when you can fly!”
“Grab hold of me, Kaylan!” She just had time to shout and the gently smoking thief flung his arms around her neck, and then they were airborne, ten, twenty feet above the ground in an instant.
The dragon was as surprised as Niarmit to see a human fly. He gave a powerful downbeat of his wings and yet stayed stuck obstinately to the ground as the fleeing pair shot even faster upwards, closing on the open shaft like an arrow.
“The trick of flight!” Niarmit gasped. “You have the trick of flight!”
“Of course, bitch. A trivial puzzle for a greatness such as mine,” Chirard conceded with the slightest of preens.
There was a howl from the dragon and a tongue of flame licked up after them, chasing them up the narrow shaft. The miracle of flight seemed to need no action beyond the mad wizard’s will, and Niarmit’s physical hands and arms were free to clasp Kaylan close holding him against her as they soared up the chimney in the rock.
“Forgive me, my Lady,” Kaylan muttered into Niarmit’s chest.
“Only if you hold tighter,” she told him. “Hundreds of feet up in the air is no place to go all decorous on me.” She crushed him closer against her in a bear hug, feeling the fast beat of his heart through the thin layers of clothing that their captors had left them with.
And then they were free, shooting through the opening of the shaft into the cold winter air. Niarmit glanced down at the dizzying sprawl of Morwencairn beneath her. The shaft had emerged in the side of the granite crag on which the citadel had been built, a point inaccessible, indeed invisible from either the fortress above or the plain below. When she looked away and then back, she found she could not find their escape hole again.
The days and nights had been blurred in her period of pain and captivity and it took a moment to see that the Sun was low in the Western sky setting to
wards the distant peaks of the Gramorcs. It was dusk and they had a night to make their escape.
“Set us down,” she told Chirard. “There by the river.” There was a point beyond the bridge that she remembered, a cove where she and Tordil had been safely hidden until the stumbling but fortuitous arrival of Thom.
“Why?” The mad wizard demanded.
“Because I say so.”
It was a bold statement from someone soaring hundreds of feet above the ground, suspended by the thread of a psychopath’s magical ingenuity. The boldness struck Niarmit immediately the words left her mouth and was confirmed a spilt second later when she and Kaylan began tumbling in dizzying free-fall towards the ground. As the pit of her stomach rose towards her throat, and a scream came unbidden from her throat at the fast approaching ground, she still saw in that other place the shadow of Chirard rising from his throne and stepping towards the dais.
“No Chirard!” She shouted, lifting the Helm fractionally free of her scalp. “No closer!”
“You would destroy yourselves!” he cried fingers reaching out, itching to seize the Helm.
She lifted it higher, feeling the solidity of the link with the Domain of the Helm loosen and assume a dreamlike quality, but enough to see Chirard flinging himself back in his seat and clamping his hands to the armrests. She let the Helm settle again on her head, felt the power of Chirard’s control as he caught their falling bodies in his spell and they soared again higher than the spire of the Temple of Morwena.
“Chirard, I said to put us down by the river.”
“No. We stay aloft,” he growled. “While we are airborne you need me. While we fly you cannot raise the Helm and leave this Domain without destroying yourself, you and your little friend. While we fly, your spirit must also stay here, in my realm.”