by Dragon Lance
In a sudden silence, I heard the tapping of blood where it dripped over the ledge and down to the floor of the lair. And then Claw rose up on massive hind legs, thundering pleasure, sated. Moonlight ran on blood-dripping fangs, and talons still clotted with gobbets of flesh. The light raced down the beast’s crested neck, glinting from spine to spine, spinning down the copper scales. Claw stretched black wings, leathery and broad, then thrust them suddenly downward while leaping upward.
In the wake of his leaving, wind roiled the stench of his leftovers, blood and bone and the undigested contents of the creatures’ stomachs.
Tarran and I scrambled out from behind the dragon skull and ran for the blood-wet stairs and the way out. We bolted past the heaped treasure as if it were no more worthy of a glance than the leavings of a gravel pit.
Claw must have seen something as he wheeled, turning, above the lair – the wink of starlight on my sword, the sudden shine of moonlight on Tarran’s long knife, our shadows where none should be. The dragon screamed down on the opening to the lair, confusing the light.
Acid fell like rain, the dragon’s deadly slaver hissing on stone. Things melted – golden rings and torques, a silver chalice, the rusty blade of the elf-queen’s ruby sword. One single drop of acid hit my own sword. I only dropped it in time to save my hand. Claw screamed again, and I heard no dumb bestial roaring now, but one raging word.
Thief!
The sound of it rang through the cavern, echoing in the very bones of me as I fitted arrow to bowstring with clumsy, shaking hands. And then the dragon saw what we’d really been doing.
He howled, lunging at Tarran.
Desecrator!
All my carefully honed instincts took over. I was like a vessel for some cooler intent. I turned, drew, and let fly a steel-headed arrow. I missed the beast’s eye by a hand’s width, and the bolt caught up under a plate-scale. Howling curses, Tarran sent a dirk flying after my arrow, and that blade caught the beast in the unsealed place right under his left eye. Tarran shouted, “I’ll blind you, you bastard!” and he threw another dirk just as I let loose another arrow.
But our target wasn’t there. Thrusting down with leathery wings, Claw rose up to the opening in the ceiling.
The dragon was gone, and I hadn’t clenched when most needed! I shouted gratitude to whatever god was listening.
“Too early for that,” Tarran said. “He’s just getting room for another dive. Come on!”
His warning was like a spur. Forgetting gratitude, and anything else that didn’t have to do with survival, we ran for the stairs, scrambling around acid-hewn pits still hissing at the edges. But inside me, gleeful, a voice celebrated victory with laughter. I’d not clenched, nor frozen with fear!
The lair grew dark as the dragon came between us and the moons’ light. The stairs were in reach.
Suddenly it wasn’t we running – it was me scrabbling up the first few steps. Tarran slipped in blood, staggered, and fell as the beast came raging down again.
I turned on the stairs, arrow nocked to bow, and sent a steel-headed bolt right into the beast’s gaping jaws. In the same instant, Tarran raised up on his knees – now his howling was for pain, his curses for helplessness – and let fly the jewel-hilted long knife and pierced the beast’s tongue.
Claw bled, and he shrieked in fury and pain. He sheered away and thrust upward, out of the lair again. Tarran tried to get up, but he fell back. He’d broken an ankle.
“Go,” he groaned. His face shone white in the moonlight; his eyes glittered dark as polished jet. Dread etched deep lines into the flesh of his face. “Now, Ryle. Go!”
I wouldn’t, and I took a step toward him, down one bloody stair. Then I stopped, sweat running on me, cold as terror.
Something touched me. Not a hand on the shoulder, not a breeze wafting by, not anything like that. It was the dragon’s thought, him perched on the lip of the opening in the roof of his lair and looking down like some enormous, brooding vulture.
Claw raised wings and beat up a wind so strong it flung me against the stone wall and held me there, a foul-smelling fist. The beast looked at me, a helpless thing, a useless thief come padding, a wretch on two legs. Him seeing me was like something cold and hard and sharp piercing the inside of me, where the heart is, and all the things I know and remember and hope and dread. In that moment, I stood more naked than the old brown bones scattered around the dragon’s lair, and the beast hovered on the edge of the opening, moonlight darting from talons and teeth.
Aren’t you going to help your friend, Ryle?
Tarran groaned. We knew it, both of us – he was bait again.
Are you afraid? Are you afraid you won’t be fast enough? Or brave enough? Are you frozen there, Ryle Sworder?
My belly churned with the fear he accused me of; my hands shook so that the arrow I tried to nock rattled against the bow.
I’ll give you the chance you didn’t have the courage to take for your father. Claw laughed as he wove two nightmares into one. Run for the dwarf, Ryle Sworder – I’ll give you a count.
“Ryle! Don’t!” cried Tarran, cried the bait. “Don’t!”
I tried to place the arrow again, and cut my hand on the steel head. Blood ran down my arm. I’d sent one arrow into the beast’s mouth, another to wound him near the eye. He was hurt, but he was a long way from dying. This futile arrow of mine couldn’t harm the beast.
With the voice of winter, Claw hissed: The man’s got no more courage than the boy, does he? The boar killed your father while you stood quaking, Ryle Sworder. Things don’t seem much different all these years later.
In Tarran’s glittering eyes, in his hollow pallor, I saw sudden understanding and swift despair.
The dragon laughed, seeing into both hearts. Tarran Ironwood! Old friend! Do you suppose he’ll be calling this latest cowardice a ‘hunting accident,’ too?
Tarran got to one knee, tried to get his good leg under him to rise. When he couldn’t, he crawled, elbow and knee, elbow and knee again, an agonizing progress. He didn’t get but a yard before he fell.
That dragon had the cold soul of a cat; he liked to play with prey. Laughing, he spread his wings, fanning the air. The stench of his feast filled the air with death-reek. Shadows skittered all over the lair and some magic – or guilty terror – changed every patch of darkness into the ghost of my father. And the bones littering the ledge were his, the blood staining the lair, even Tarran’s panting groans as he tried to get to the stairs.
It was sweat or tears running on my face now. It felt like blood. It was going to happen again. As my father had died, so would Tarran die, killed by my fear. Or, as Tarran’s kinsmen had, I would be killed taking the bait the dragon offered, the chance of saving Tarran’s life.
You are helpless, Ryle. You have always been. Now Claw’s voice was hollow, like a ghost’s. Helpless, useless, and it wouldn’t have mattered if you had seen the boar in time. No puny arrow from your bow would have stopped it. Helpless!
Utterly. Then, as now. And my puny arrows, the honed steel tips, wouldn’t hurt Claw, but he could snatch Tarran up and dash him to death before ever I could reach him. There was no way to win this cruel game, as there had been no way to stop the boar fifteen years ago.
Fear drained away from me in one sudden rush. Shadows were shadows again, and no ghost was here to haunt me. Forgiveness is that achingly swift and final.
I turned to change my aim. Claw stopped laughing. In the silence I heard Tarran’s labored breathing. I sighted down the sure, straight shaft, dead center on the dragon skull glittering in its jeweled garb. Swift, I caught the edge of the beast’s unguarded thought.
Flame!
So had his mate been named, the copper she-dragon who’d shone like a blaze, like flash and glare and, in the light of the moons, like shimmering golden fire. And if my aim was true, my arrow would strike the brittle relic and turn it into a pile of gems and bone slivers. Claw and I both knew that.
“Tarran,�
�� I said, like a soldier snapping an order. “Come here.”
Elbow and knee, he crawled again, and it seemed like forever till he touched the first step with his hand. Claw rumbled. Fat drops of acid spilled down into the lair, hissing. But that was an empty threat, a useless gesture. If once that corroding slaver came so close as to splash near Tarran, I would loose my arrow. Claw knew that, and the knowledge was like an iron shackle on him as he watched Tarran make a painful way up, one blood-wet step at a time, bracing on one hand, dragging one leg, sweat running on him as if he were a man in a rainstorm.
When Tarran passed me on the stairs I couldn’t watch him anymore, only hear him. A step at a time, I went up behind him. I never took my eyes off the dragon skull, and that wonder-dressed relic was like a lodestone locking my arrow’s aim. Tarran got onto the ledge, the rounding gallery strewn with gore and bones and offal. He got into the shadow of the opening. His groaning sigh told me that he’d got as far as he could on his own.
Claw knew it, too, and he turned, his long neck snaking toward the gallery and the shadowed opening where Tarran lay.
The beast was just starting to laugh when I loosed my arrow, sent it whistling low through the lair. Moonlight winked on the steel head. The treasure-dressed skull, the relic of his beloved Flame, shattered like ice, shards flying everywhere.
Claw screamed as if he were dying, and I bent and lifted Tarran in my arms. He made no sound but one, a groaning like a man waking from nightmares. Or maybe that was me.
We were not hunted through the caverns, but the sound of Claw’s grief, of Tarran’s revenge, followed us all the way.
*
We came back to Raven at the end of the summer. It was no easy thing getting out of the caverns, and once out I wouldn’t leave Tarran alone. I nursed him carefully, as if he were my kin. Once he said that he owed me a fee, for we’d not taken the smallest trinket from Claw’s hoard. He said he’d make it good if I would wait till we got to Thorbardin, for he wasn’t a poor man among those mountain folk. But I told him that I’d not be going to Thorbardin with him, though I admitted it would be a rare thing to see, the seven great cities under the mountain. I told him I’d tend him until he was well and able to make his way.
“Then I’m bound home,” I said. “Back to Raven.”
He smiled, that lean smile of his, and said he supposed he’d go with me to see his old friend Cynara. Later that day, he asked if I thought the ferryman’s daughter would know me when we met again.
“Why not?” I asked, surprised into laughing.
“You’re not the same boy who went out from there, Ryle. Take a look at yourself some time.”
I did, in a still pool one morning while the mist was still rising, and I looked about the same as I always did. A little thinner in the face maybe, but about the same.
Still, Tarran was right about me not being the same as I used to be. When we came to the Whiterush, it was Reatha who brought the ferry across. She greeted Tarran gravely, but she lighted up to see me. Quietly, she asked if I was well. As quietly, I told her that I was. Smiling, golden at the end of the day, she knew the truth when she saw it, and she believed me.
We were married in the rose bower soon after. Tarran stood by me, and Cynara stood at Reatha’s side. There was no jewel to be had for dressing my bride, only a thin gold band for her finger. And there was not a ghost in sight to stand between us.
(Continued in Volume 5)