In a moment of utter madness, Henry took one more step forward.
The torch in his hand flared fiercely, sending up a wave of heat that singed his hair. There were two faces only inches from his own, one looking down on him, the other looking up.
‘Yipes!’ Henry shrieked and jerked backwards. His heel caught on something and he fell, dropping the torch. It rolled across the rocky floor for a few feet, then stopped, but still burned brightly. In the flickering light he could see he had left his passageway and was lying on a broad ledge that overlooked another cavern. There were two things staring down at him. In utter panic, he tried to scramble away, scattering pebbles underneath his heels. Then he realised what the things were.
‘What are you doing here?’ shouted Henry furiously.
‘I am your Companion, En Ri,’ Lorquin said.
The charno, towering over him, nodded and said, ‘That’s right. He is your Companion.’
Henry scrambled to his feet. He’d skinned one elbow and his bottom hurt, ‘I told you to go home!’ he hissed at Lorquin. ‘I thought you had gone home. This is dangerous. This is very dangerous.’
‘That is why I must stay with you,’ Lorquin said.
He wanted to strangle the kid. He wanted to hug the kid. What did you do with somebody like Lorquin? He simply didn’t recognise the normal rules. In his frustration, Henry rounded on the charno. ‘What are you doing here? I thought you would wait outside.’
The charno shrugged. ‘Somebody has to carry your supplies.’
Henry knew when he was beaten. He picked up the torch. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘what now?’
They looked at him expectantly.
‘You’re the leader,’ Lorquin said.
Ninety
Henry led from the middle, carrying his torch. The charno plodded after him, surprisingly quietly for a beast of its size, although the clicking of its claws on the rock floor was a bit of a distraction. Lorquin went ahead of them both, sniffing the air in an irritating manner.
‘What are you doing that for?’ Henry asked eventually.
‘Smelling the trail, En Ri,’ Lorquin explained.
Henry frowned. ‘You never did that before.’ Lorquin had taken him all over the desert, but it was all eyesight work: he had followed subtle signs.
‘It is not possible in the open,’ Lorquin said. ‘The wind carries off the scent, the sun burns it up. But inside is different. Scent lingers.’
Henry stopped. This was an interesting development and might be an important one. ‘What can you tell?’
Lorquin gave a small but eloquent shrug. ‘Several people have passed this way before. Two men together, but that was some time ago. And with them something strange I have not smelled before. Then -’
‘What sort of something strange?’ Henry interrupted. ‘An animal?’
‘Perhaps,’ Lorquin said, ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Go on,’ Henry urged. ‘What else?’
‘Yes, what else?’ said the charno, leaning over Henry’s shoulder.
‘More recently a woman; a young woman. She -’
Blue! It had to be Blue! How many more young women would you get wandering down here? ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ Henry exploded.
‘You asked me of other things, En Ri,’ Lorquin said mildly.
‘I want you to follow the woman’s scent,’ Henry said firmly in his leadership capacity. ‘That’s the one I want you to follow. You can forget about the others.’
‘That was the one I have been following,’ Lorquin said, ‘I thought it might be Blue, the woman you seek.’
‘Did she meet up with the others?’ the charno asked. Which was a very sensible question and Henry wished he’d thought of asking it.
Lorquin shook his head. ‘The trails are overlaid. If they met together, I have not found the place yet.’
‘Keep going,’ Henry told him.
Several minutes later, Henry said suddenly, ‘We’re going back the way we came.’
‘As did she,’ Lorquin said, ‘I can follow the scent only where it takes me.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Henry muttered.
‘He can follow the scent only where it takes him,’ echoed the charno.
‘Shut up, said Henry. The truth of it was he was feeling hugely uncomfortable. He wasn’t cut out for this. Lorquin, for all he was so young, was better equipped as a hero than Henry. He could follow trails, survive in the desert, find food when it was needed, kill draugrs… Even the charno would make a better hero than Henry. At least it could lift the hammer. But Henry was the one who was supposed to rescue Blue. And from what? He really had no idea what he was getting into. The Midgard Serpent business sounded like nonsense. Some sort of tribal superstition. How could Blue have gotten herself involved with a giant snake? Except that everybody else seemed to take the idea seriously. An idea occurred to him and he said quickly, ‘Lorquin. I don’t suppose you can smell this Midgard thing?’
‘The whole place reeks of it,’ said Lorquin. He gave Henry a curious little smile. ‘But we have not found the way to reach it yet.’
They set off again and, to Henry’s intense irritation, the charno began to hum a little tune.
The scent trail led them to several dead ends where they were forced to backtrack. ‘She could go no further,’ Lorquin explained. But one blank passage proved different from the others. ‘She went through here,’ Lorquin said, frowning.
‘She can’t have – it’s a dead end,’ Henry said unnecessarily.
‘Nonetheless, she went through here,’ Lorquin said again. He moved forward to examine the rock face.
Henry moved forward with him. ‘You mean there’s been a rock fall or something?’ It didn’t look like a rock fall.
‘There was no rock fall,’ Lorquin confirmed. ‘Yet she is in a cavern beyond this passage and she reached it through here.’
‘How do you know -?’ Henry began, then stopped himself. It didn’t matter. If Lorquin said that’s where Blue was, Henry believed it. He ran one hand over the cold surface of the rock. ‘How do we reach her?’ he asked instead.
‘We have to find another way,’ said Lorquin calmly and made off back down the passage.
It took him the better part of an hour, during which they searched through tunnels, passages, galleries, caves and caverns. Eventually he took several steps into a high-roofed, open passageway, then stopped and announced, ‘This will take us to the cavern where they hold the girl.’ He looked at Henry expectantly.
Lorquin expected him to tell them what to do and Henry didn’t know. His heart was beating too fast and though it was cold here underground, beads of sweat had broken on his forehead. He licked his lips with a tongue that had suddenly gone dry. ‘What happens if this passage is closed off at the end like the others?’ he asked hoarsely.
‘It isn’t,’ Lorquin said. ‘The scents are too strong.’
‘Scents?’ Henry asked. ‘There are more than one?’
For the first time since they met, Lorquin looked fleetingly impatient. ‘The serpent and the girl you seek and – ’ He hesitated.
‘And…?’ Henry echoed.
Lorquin frowned. ‘There is one other and something beyond, but they are strange smells. One keeps changing.’
‘Changing?’ Henry echoed, a little wildly.
‘If you don’t hurry up, the serpent will have eaten her,’ the charno remarked dourly.
Dour or not, the creature was right. Henry was fiddling about, acting the maggot, wasting time when Blue was probably in mortal danger. Pyrgus would have been better at this. Anybody would have been better at this. But there wasn’t anybody. This one was all down to Henry. An odd thought occurred to him, he was about to meet his draugr.
Without another word, he pushed past Lorquin and trotted down the passage, torch held high.
Ninety-One
Somebody was playing an organ. It was stupid, but he could hear it, a sort of creepy, deep sonorous background note that rolled up the
passageway towards him and chilled his blood. It put a sort of Phantom of the Opera picture in his head: a mad-looking masked man in evening dress pounding on a keyboard while he laughed insanely. Not that there was any laughter, or real music come to that, but the sound did it to you, made you see pictures in your head, made you feel very much afraid. He wanted to stop. He wanted to go back. He wanted to run and keep running until he emerged into the sunlight.
Henry pushed through his fear and kept going.
There was a light up ahead, a greenish, reddish glow that had the same feel as the organ note. It made you think of things that crawled through crypts or creatures from space that burst out of John Hurt’s chest when you least expected it. The light and the organ note intertwined with each other to increase his fear, but he ignored it and kept on going.
Henry stepped out of the passage into a cavern illuminated by the creepy greenish, reddish glow. The organ-note sound swelled to a crescendo.
There was a dragon in the cavern.
The creature was as tall as a double-decker bus, but considerably longer, snout to tail. It was silver in colour with overlapping armoured scales. It looked like every dragon he’d seen in the picture books of his childhood, but without the cutesy quality the artists always managed to introduce. There was nothing cutesy about this monster, nothing at all. It was rippling muscle and reptile smells and savage teeth, vast jaws and cold, bleak eyes. The great head turned towards him, snorting smoke, and breathed a tiny plume of flame. It was far and away the most terrifying thing he had seen in his life. It was mind-numbingly, petrifyingly fearsome.
For a long moment Henry stood immobile, aware he should be running for his life but utterly unable to move a muscle. Then his eyes drifted of their own accord and he saw Blue.
She was chained to a pillar of stone on a raised platform just behind the dragon. Her blouse was ripped to shreds and there was a look of panic in her eyes.
‘Henry, go back!’ Blue shrieked. ‘Run! Please run!’
Henry gaped at her. There was a narrow river of lava running round the platform, sending up shimmering waves of heat. There were beads of sweat on her forehead and the uppermost swell of her breasts. She twisted her body violently, jerking at her chains. ‘Henry, get out of here! It will kill you!’
He suspected she was right. One of his hands had tightened involuntarily around the flint blade Lorquin had given him, but even if he’d been carrying a bazooka, he knew he was no match for the dragon. The creature was a biological killing machine, a mass of sinew, muscle, bone and blood with a hide beyond penetration. In a moment it would race across the cave floor and engulf him in a single bite.
The scene was like a fantasy magazine cover. A lurid magazine cover. The colouring was lurid: a leprous green illumination intermingled with the red glow from the lava. The silver dragon was lurid – it actually breathed fire, for cripe’s sake! But most of all, Blue was lurid. Her clothing was ripped to give tantalising glimpses of her body. She was chained, abused, frightened, sweaty. She was heart-stoppingly beautiful and she was sexy. Everything inside the cavern looked… contrived.
Henry became suddenly aware there was someone by his side and glanced down to find Lorquin had joined him. The boy was staring at the dragon with a look of awed delight. ‘Kill it, En Ri,’ he hissed in a whisper, ‘I will back you up.’
And there it was, the moment where his entire life coalesced, the point of ultimate decision. Run or kill. Flee or fight. Save himself or save his love. Except that he could never save his love, not from that thing. There was no way he could kill it, no way he could even injure it.
But Lorquin thought he could.
‘Stay here!’ Henry snapped at Lorquin savagely, then ran towards the dragon.
Ninety-Two
She saw him the moment he stepped into the cavern. He looked ragged and thin and deeply tanned, rangy, toughened up beyond anything she remembered. But he was alive! That was the great thing, the wonderful thing, the marvellous thing. Wherever he’d been, whatever had happened to him, Henry was alive!
The dragon swung its head to look at him.
Even at this distance she could see the fear in Henry’s eyes, but there was determination too, so that perhaps the fear wasn’t really fear but only wariness. She prayed it was fear, because if he was afraid he would run away and that meant he would save himself. She desperately wanted him to save himself. If he stayed, the dragon would tear him limb from limb. She couldn’t bear to find that Henry was alive, then lose him to a dragon before… before she had time…
Before she had time to hold him.
Blue jerked violently at her chains. She’d no idea how she got here, chained to a pillar. Loki had done it, but she couldn’t remember how. One instant she’d been talking to him, the next she was on the platform, manacled, like some sacrificial offering to the monster. It had to be Loki’s magic, but it was a type of magic she had never seen before.
And Loki had disappeared.
She hadn’t seen him go. When Henry arrived he was simply… no longer there. She didn’t know what Loki wanted either, why he’d done what he did. It was as if he’d set up this situation, then walked away, leaving things to play out as they pleased. None of it made sense, but the danger was real.
‘Henry go back!’ Blue shrieked. ‘Run! Please run!’ She twisted her body violently, jerking at the chains, and thought she felt one of the pillar attachments shift slightly. Whatever magic he was using, Loki hadn’t done a very good job. If she struggled hard enough, she might be able to get free. But she wasn’t free yet and Henry was still staring at her gormlessly. ‘Henry, get out of here! It will kill you!’
A small blue-skinned boy emerged from the shadows to stand by Henry’s side. Blue had no idea who he was or where he had come from. She had never seen blue skin before, but she vaguely recalled the Arcond mentioning that there were races of that colour in the deep desert of Buthner. She wondered what the child was doing with Henry. Strangely enough, he didn’t seem at all frightened, even though he was looking at the dragon.
Something else loomed behind them both and for an instant Blue wondered what new monster Loki had conjured up. Then she recognised the charno. It must have followed Henry into the caverns, Henry and the strange blue boy.
Unless, a voice whispered in her mind, that’s Loki up to his shape-shifting tricks again. He fooled you into thinking he was the charno before. Blue jerked her chains again. Loki or the real charno – it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting Henry out of here, getting him to safety. The boy’s lips moved as he said something to Henry that Blue couldn’t hear. Blue opened her mouth to shout again. Flenry called, ‘Stay here!’ and, to her horror, ran towards the dragon.
The dragon roared.
Ninety-Three
The dragon roared and lunged towards him. Henry dodged to one side and brandished the flint blade Lorquin had given him. He had no hope of killing the beast with such a weapon, but he thought he might distract it long enough to give Blue a chance to break free. He might even be able to frighten it a little, the way wasps frightened people by stinging them when they came too close to the nest. Lorquin’s flint knife might sting the dragon, make it think twice about attacking.
He dodged under the dragon’s head and stabbed at its front leg. Lorquin’s knife struck a scale and snapped off in Henry’s hand.
From the corner of his eye, Henry saw a flash of blue as Lorquin ran into the cavern. Henry’s heart sank. Was there no way to make the boy do what he was told? He was only a child, whatever he thought about himself, but he seemed prepared to tackle anything. Anything! Anything for his Companion… Henry felt a lump in his throat. He doubted he could live with himself if anything happened to Lorquin. But then again, he might not have to. Short of a miracle, they would all be dead in minutes: Lorquin, Blue, Henry himself.
He threw away the useless piece of knife and dodged again as the dragon struck out with a viciously clawed front foot. The brute was enormous, s
tronger and more powerful than any wild animal he’d ever seen in his own world, but like many huge beasts, it was slow. No, not slow: thinking of it as slow might be a fatal mistake. But it was awkward in certain of its movements. Clearly it was not used to fighting tiny, darting enemies like himself. Maybe that was something he could turn to his advantage.
The claws missed and the dragon’s momentum carried it right over Henry, its silver-grey bulk looming above him like a passing jumbo jet. Next moment he was out from under and watching the dragon charge at something he could not see. Then he heard a familiar voice and realised Lorquin was taunting the beast, diverting it.
Henry felt a pang of guilt, but there was nothing he could do to help the boy. Better to accept his courage and try to take advantage of his action. Perhaps while the dragon’s attention was elsewhere, Henry could reach Blue and get her free. He spun round, ran for the platform, then pulled up short at the lava stream.
It flowed around the platform like a moat. It wasn’t particularly wide. He could probably have jumped it if there were a space for him to land on the other side. But there was no space, just the steep side of the stone platform, and the platform itself was just a little too high to be reached in a running leap. Blue could jump down and clear the lava stream, but Henry could never jump up.
‘Blue!’ he called helplessly.
She was jerking at her chains like a mad thing and now, close up, he could see their fittings to the pillar seemed to be working loose. Small puffs of dust rose every time she pulled. There was a sound behind him and the whole floor beneath his feet vibrated. Blue stopped struggling, turned, then pointed. Henry spun round to find the dragon bearing down on him again like some monstrous express train.
For a heartbeat he assumed Blue was pointing at the beast; then he saw the Halek knife. The crystal blade was lying only yards away from him, its surface swimming with trapped energies.
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