“Answer my question!” commanded the dragon. “What shall I feed you upon?”
“We can forage for ourselves if you will let us get to the mountains ahead,” said Orvet.
The dragon cocked its head and considered. “Very well,” it said at last. “You needn’t think you can elude me. That one, An-Shai, has summoned me and I shall always be able to find him and through him, the rest of you.”
“You aren’t going to eat our children,” said Karel, pugnaciously.
“Are you female?” said the dragon, snaking its head to stare him interestedly in the eye. “If not, have a care. I have extra males. I already know that those two are males, and if there are only two females, one male would surely be enough. When can I expect the first litter of young?” “Humans only have one child at a time,” said Adelinda.
“Disappointing,” trumpeted the dragon. It turned its attention to Len. “This one is sick. I’ll put it out of its misery.” “No!” said Adelinda, drawing her sword and leaping between the dragon’s head and Len’s recumbent form.
“Do you dare to threaten me, human?” the dragon blared, baring its fangs in reptilian menace.
“You’d better not hurt me. I’m female.”
The dragon withdrew its head a few feet. “Ah, I see. And the sick one must be your child. Very well, female, I shall expect offspring from you immediately.” Without warning or leave-taking, the dragon stretched its translucent wings and leaped into the sky, where it circled on the updrafts like some unthinkably huge vulture.
Karel drew his sword and turned to An-Shai, just pulling himself painfully to his feet. “You summoned that thing? Why?”
An-Shai ignored him. He turned, wavering with exhaustion, to Adelinda, who was still standing protectively in front of Len. “I was wrong,” he said harshly. “I have no right to protect you and your people, and less than no right to force my protection on you.”
Slowly Adelinda returned her sword to its scabbard and stood studying his ravaged face. He met her gaze squarely. “I would arrange for you and your folk to return to your homes, if I could. Unfortunately, in pride and anger I summoned the dragon. I thought it better that we all be destroyed than that you escape me. I was wrong in that, too.” Still Adelinda stood waiting. An-Shai’s gaze fell to Len’s recumbent body. “I was wrong to have hurt him, too. I wouldn’t have done those things to him.”
Adelinda broke her silence. “He believed you. So did Li-Mun. And I certainly believed you.”
An-Shai smiled wryly. “We were still enough in touch in the overmind for me to enforce a feeling on you. Neither his fear nor yours were any more real than Addie’s feelings of love and gratitude when Shai saved them from their uncle. Nor any more real than the determination to harm Len you read in me when you reached out through the overmind.” Adelinda looked at him skeptically. “The cut was real enough.”
“Yes. But not serious. With proper care it would have healed in a week. The infection, the fever, the refusal to heal—all were the result of your determination to get away from me.” He bent his proud head humbly. “Still, I was wrong to have done it or even to have threatened as I did. I don’t understand myself why I felt driven to do those things, nor why I summoned the dragon. I never wished you or your folk harm. 1 only wanted to take care of you, and for you to be grateful to me for taking care of you.” He made a gesture of bitter despair. “How can I expect you to understand? You’ve never harmed anyone inadvertently when all you meant was good.”
It was Adeiinda’s turn to wince and avert her gaze. Unknowingly, he had struck her a keen blow! An-Shai, sensitive to Adeiinda’s reactions as he had never been sensitive to anyone before, saw and wondered, and Karel, scowling, took a step toward the hierarch. “What will you do now? Your servant there will kill me if you order him to,” An-Shai said, watching her keenly.
“Karel doesn’t kill people because 1 order him to.”
“No, but,occasionally I kill people who need killing,” said Karel.
“Go right ahead and kill him,” said Li-Mun, “if you want to spend the rest of your days breeding up babies for yonder snake to snack on.”
All eyes swiveled to him. “What do you mean?” said Karel.
“An-Shai summoned the creature against its will. Only he can send it away.”
An-Shai shook his head. “I already tried. It wouldn’t go.” “I know of a charm used by the shamans of the Far Archipelago to send dragons away,” said Orvet. “I’ll admit that the breed of dragon they have there is smaller and less intelligent than this one, being a sort of overgrown sea snake. But it might work.”
An-Shai looked startled. “Who is this servant of yours who possesses the lore of a hierarch?”
“He belongs to an order whose purpose is the control and eradication of the supernatural. We have almost no supernatural beings left in the Kingdom, and the Order of Exorcists is why.” Adelinda thought it wiser not to mention that Orvet was a renegade member of that order.
The dragon made its presence known again. It swooped suddenly upon them, barking at them without bothering to land, “Why are you delaying? Proceed to the mountains and commence to breed at once!” It banked sharply, one wing tip brushing the sand, and flapped to gain altitude. It could be seen to be watching them carefully as it circled.
“We had best do as it says,” said Li-Mun. “His Grace is spent and will not be able to make the attempt to control the thing for a day or two. As we travel, Orvet can tell us about this charm he knows of.”
“It seems wisest,” agreed Adelinda. “Put your sword away, Karel. Bloodshed won’t help anything. I think maybe we can count on An-Shai to make what reparation he can.” She held out a hand to the bishop. “Cry truce, Your Grace?” He took her hand in his own. “Truce, yes. Or even armistice.”
Chapter 15
Here in the foothills of the unnamed mountain range it was even colder than on the desert’s windswept floor. The eight travelers huddled about the crackling fire they had built at sundown; at least here there was plenty of wood, resinous, burning quick and hot, from the aromatic low-growing junipers that covered the hills. Among the trees, the bleached grass was belly high to a horse, and much of it still bore dry seed heads; the horses were tearing ravenously at this bounty.
“The shamans always formed a group—they called it a web—before they worked the spell,” explained Orvet. “They told me that the spell was too powerful to be handled by one shaman working alone. But they were not able to explain to me how they combined iheir powers.”
“That’s easy enough; they must have linked through the overmind,” commented An-Shai. “I don’t understand how they could have controlled the sea-dragons without knowing their names, though. It seems to me that the power of their spells must have dissipated harmlessly without a specific object to center upon.”
“I don’t think the sea-dragons have names,” said Orvet. “They have no speech. And I have seen the spell work on a whole pack of the creatures.”
“Are you sure they were supernatural beings?” asked Adelinda. “They sound more like some overgrown sea creature to me.”
“In many ways they are, but when you see them cast their net of rainbow light to drive a school of fish or a pod of pilot whales into the jaws of their companions, or hear them sing up a terrible storm, you realize that they aren’t just ordinary sea snakes.”
“Adelinda and Len and I can link through the overmind easily enough, and I know the name of this dragon. But I know of no spell effective in sending dragons away for more than a few hours,” said An-Shai. “Tell us about the spell they used.”
“There are three parts to it,” responded Orvet. “There’s the web, and the weaving, and the casting. The web is the group of shamans and the linkages between them. The weaving is the dance and the song of the ritual. The casting I hardly know how to describe; the dance and the song completed, the shamans seem to sink into unconsciousness, and the sea-dragons just to float on the waves, but the atmosphere s
eethes with power. Then, for no reason the watchers can see, the dragons fall into a frenzy, churning the sea into white foam, and swim away.”
“Dance? Song?” said An-shai. The mental picture of the cool and dignified bishop dancing and singing was too much for Adelinda; she tried to muffle a chuckle behind a cough, but An-Shai was too sensitive to her feelings to be fooled and gave her a haughty glance. Then, perhaps catching a glimpse of her mental image, he smiled. None of them had ever seen him smile in genuine amusement; the effect was startling, as if a statue carved in ice had suddenly flushed with the warm tones of living flesh. Unnoticed and unlamented, the Erinys gave a final weak flicker and vanished. “I’ve never danced or sung before, but I suppose I can learn. I expect the shamans used the ritual to put themselves into a trance and enter the overmind.”
“Can we do that?” asked Adelinda.
“We shall have to, if we’re to form a linkage. I haven’t any of the drug used to induce a trance. It shouldn’t be difficult, since the three of us are still in contact.”
“Len can’t. He’s too weak,” said Adelinda, firmly. They all looked at him. His wasted form was propped against a pile of saddles. They had been camped among the junipers for three days now, while Karel and Tobin hunted and the impatient dragon alternately perched on the rocky ridge that
sheltered them from the desert’s eternal wind and nagged at them to begin producing young at once. Rest and the broth Ina and Orvet made from the game the hunters brought in had done much to restore the invalid, but he was still terribly weak.
“I can if I have to,” Len said spiritedly, but his brave words were belied by the pinched white face protruding from the blankets that wrapped him around.
“I’m afraid he must,” said Li-Mun. “The dragon told me today that if we didn’t start breeding soon, it would begin eating the males. Fortunately, it can’t tell the difference between individuals yet, much less their sex. It’s all that has kept it from weeding us out before now.”
“Can the two of us handle the dragon?” Adelinda challenged An-Shai.
“Possibly. We can only try. Orvet, show us the dance and the song and the rest of the ritual and we will see what may be done.” Automatically, An-Shai assumed command, placing himself at the center as the exorcist disposed the members of the party according to the ritual. The song was a simple one,' a few repeated phrases, easy to learn even in a strange language. The dance was more elaborate, involving a complicated series of relationships among all the members of the group, and even as they practiced the smooth gliding steps and stately turns, they could fee! the atmosphere charging itself with power, not the sullen greenish stuff that An-Shai’s anger had summoned, but a paler glow giving off golden sparks that snapped and crackled in random arcs between the dancers.
Ready to begin, they paused for an instant, An-Shai and Adelinda gathering their courage before plunging into the deadly confrontation. “If we don’t succeed in driving the dragon away,” said An-Shai, looking about him at the members of the party, “it will doubtless destroy us all. Dragon lore is very specific on that point. They are vindictive creatures.” The yellowish glow of the invoked power played on his gaunt features and made his eyes glitter.
“It’ll have a fight on its hands—or claws,” said Karel, cocking his crossbow and setting his heaviest bolt in the groove. Tobin silently picked up his lance and set the butt of it against the packed earth.
“Let’s get on with it,” said Adelinda tightly. Her hair crackled with static and sparkled with little flashes of light.
Uncertainly at first, the chorus began, and then steadied as the singers found their notes. The steps of the dancers followed the precise pattern evoked by the music. The sparks of energy began to leap only toward the center around which Adelinda and An-Shai revolved, thickening in the space between them, dancing to the rhythm of the song like a concatenation of fireflies caught in a whirlpool. The dragon suddenly shrieked like a thousand discordant trumpets and stretched its wings into the dark sky, obscuring the stars.
Instinctively, An-Shai and Adelinda turned toward each other, gathering the energy more and more tightly between their outstretched arms and bodies. Adeiinda’s face was rapt, her eyes open but unseeing; An-Shai’s face was grim with terrible concentration. A last few sparks leaped from the faltering dancers to the pair in the center, and the inward flow of energy died, leaving a pulsing heart of raw power like a captive sun. Tobin sagged against the shaft of his lance; Karel’s crippled leg buckled under him and he sank to the earth. But none of the fascinated watchers took their eyes from the two who struggled to contain and control the energy between them. Then, suddenly, the light died, the energy vanished soundlessly, and the insensate bodies of the two flopped bonelessly to the ground. Adelinda and An-Shai were gone, taking the power they had gathered with them. The dragon leaped into the sky with a thunder of wings and vanished.
They found themselves in the overmind, soaring on powerful wings, their long serpentine neck recurved in the habitual attitude of flight of the dragon kind. Their vast wings were edged with golden fire; their scales dripped raw energy from serrated edges. They opened their mouth and trumpeted a mighty challenge to the darker-colored specimen of their breed they could see struggling to gain altitude. To the entity they had become, the dragon that had held them in such contemptuous captivity seemed delicate and easily broken. They tilted their wings and stooped upon it as the falcon stoops upon its prey, casually knocking it tumbling through the sky of this place that was only sky. Spread wings cupped the air again, and they soared, watching as the dragon fluttered frantically to regain its equilibrium.
But the dragon was far from beaten; it was a canny creature, and as they stooped on it again it flipped over and struck at them with its extended claws. It had won its aerial battles, both in the material world and in the overmind, and they had been earthbound creatures two minutes ago.
All that saved them from being gutted like a cod was the cloak of lambent energy they had been gifted with by their companions. A spitting arc of fire knocked the dragon aside, squawking with outrage. Then it had the height advantage of them and was stooping on them with a rush of air. But they had learned caution; they spilled the air from their saillike wings, beat the air once, twice, and finding themselves again above their adversary, struck, missing with claws but battering with wings and, with a bolt of golden fire, flung with an awful will to blast and damage. The dragon tumbled, veered, and straggled to right itself. Then it fled. Another dragon it could face with a will, and even the two bold and determined wills that opposed it. But not the sorcerous fire.
Once they had been two, but only vestiges of separateness remained. Now they were one, a single savage, greedy purpose, all will and cruelty. When the dragon managed to steady its flight and began flapping its wings desperately to gain escape speed, they stooped upon it again and exulted in its terror as it fell.
Again it regained its balance and raced for escape. They hovered above it, preparing for the final blow, talons ready to grasp and rend, fangs keening with eagerness for blood. But deep within their savage heart, they hesitated and debated with themselves. —Let it go, urged the part that had been An-Shai. —Such mistakes are easy to make. It will not bother the travelers further. —Very well, send it away, agreed the part that had been Adelinda.
They opened their vast maw and roared at the scuttling dragon. “Flee!” they trumpeted. “Nor bother humankind again. Fly, little insect!” They set the overmind resounding with cruel dragonish laughter as the dragon, heartened by the knowledge that it was not to be blasted into tatters, stretched out its neck and flapped its wings even harder. It dwindled into the perspectiveless distance of the overmind and was gone.
Power dripping from their wings like golden rain, they banked and soared, rejoicing in the freedom of flight and in the end of loneliness. How could they ever be lonely again? They who had been two were one. Together they had the power to break out of the overmind into the materi
al world, to soar in sun-drenched skies, to stoop upon the helpless prey, crunching bones and drinking warm red blood. No hierarch or initiate could stop them, they exulted, for their name, Anadeshailinda, did not have the fourteen syllables that were traditional for dragon names and could never be discovered by the methods used by the clergy of the Quadrate God. They wheeled around the immaterial sky, mustered their wills, and broke out of the overmind, transported with dragonish glee and greed. Poet or peasant or bishop in his palace, all would be fodder for their consuming. Coruscating with yellow fire, they swooped and dived, stalled and pulled out of their stall. Below them smouldered the dim fire of the camp, a mere spark in comparison to their radiance. They could see white amazed faces turned up to them and steadied their flight to strike.
—Wait a minute, we aren’t really a dragon. —We could be a real dragon. —Our duty is to protect, not to destroy. —We would be worse than any real dragon. —Our friends are counting on us.
The argument within themselves nearly brought them out of the sky, the rhythm of flight lost in their confused wrangling, part of them arguing now for dragonish pleasures, now for duty and honor against the other part and then switching sides again until neither part knew what the other part wanted. At last the part that had been An-Shai said sadly, in a voice like quiet flutes, “If we go back to our own bodies we’ll be alone again. I never knew how much I hated being lonely.”
“We can’t ever be completely alone again. I’m partly you and you’re partly me.” Adelinda laughed a little, a sound like a distant fanfare. “Perhaps it’s just as well Len didn’t come with us; it’s confusing enough being two people.”
“I’m here,” said Len. “I came to show you the way back. But you were too busy flying around and thinking gruesome thoughts to notice. Come on, your bodies are this way.” As they abandoned it, the vast dragon figure thinned into the immaterial wind and faded with a final shower of liquid golden fire.
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