Something was odd about her voice. Wuller glanced at her face, which was set in a rigid calm, and realized that his aunt Illuré, who had faced down a runaway boar with nothing but a turnspit, was terrified.
Even as he looked, her calm broke; her eyes went wide, her mouth started to open.
Wuller whirled back in time to see the dragon rising from its perch, its immense wings spread wide to catch the wind. It rose, wheeled about once, and then swept down toward the village, claws outstretched, like a hawk diving on its prey.
For a moment Wuller thought it was diving directly at him, and he covered his face with his hands, as if he were still a child.
Then he remembered how high that mountaintop was, and his mind adjusted the scale of what he had just seen—the dragon was larger and farther than he had assumed. Ashamed of his terror, he dropped his hands and looked up again.
The dragon was hovering over the village, directly over his own head. Wuller felt a tugging at one arm, and realized that Illuré was trying to pull him out from under the great beast.
He yielded, and a moment later the creature settled to the ground in the village common, the wind from its wings stirring up a cloud of grey dust and flattening the thin grass. The scent of its hot, sulphurous breath filled the town.
A swirl of dust reached Wuller, and he sneezed.
The dragon's long neck dipped down, and its monstrous head swung around to look Wuller directly in the eye from a mere six or seven feet away.
He stared back, frozen with fear.
Then the head swung away again, the neck lifted it up, and the mighty jaws opened.
The dragon spoke.
“Who speaks for this village?” it said, in a voice like an avalanche.
“It talks!” someone said, in tones of awe and wonder.
The dragon's head swept down to confront the speaker, and it spoke again.
“Yes, I talk,” it rumbled. “Do you?”
Wuller looked to see who it was addressing, and saw a young man in blue—his cousin Pergren, just a few years older than himself, who had only recently started his own flock.
Pergren stammered, unable to answer coherently, and the dragon's jaws crept nearer and nearer to him. Wuller saw that they were beginning to open—not to speak, this time, but to bite.
Then a man stepped forward—Adar, the village smith, Wuller's father's cousin.
“I'll speak for the village, dragon,” he called. “Leave that boy alone and say what you want of us.”
Wuller had always admired Adar's strength and skill; now he found himself admiring the smith's courage, as well.
The dragon reared up slightly, and Wuller thought it looked slightly amused. “Well!” it said. “One among you with manners enough to speak when spoken to—though hardly in a civil tone!”
“Get on with it,” Adar said.
“All right, if you're as impatient as all that,” the dragon said. “I had intended to make a few polite introductions before getting down to business, but have it your way. I have chosen this village as my home. I have chosen you people as my servants. And I have come down here today to set the terms of your service. Is that clear and direct enough to suit you, man?”
Wuller tried to judge the dragon's tone, to judge whether it was speaking sarcastically, but the voice was simply too different from human for him to tell.
“We are not servants,” Adar announced. “We are free people.”
“Not any more,” the dragon said.
2
Wuller shuddered again at the memory of Adar's death, then turned his attention back to the meeting that huddled about the single lantern in his father's house.
“We can't go on like this,” his father was saying. “At a sheep a day, even allowing for a better lambing season next spring than the one we just had, we'll have nothing left at all after three years, not even a breeding pair to start anew!”
“What would you have us do, then?” old Kirna snapped at him. “You heard what it said after it ate Adar. One sheep a day, or one person, and it doesn't care which!”
“We need to kill it,” Wuller's father said.
“Go right ahead, Wulran,” someone called from the darkness. “We won't mind a bit if you kill it!”
“I can't kill it, any more than you can,” Wuller's father retorted, “but surely someone must be able to! Centuries ago, during the war, dragons were used in battle by both sides, and both sides killed great numbers of them. It can be done, and I'm sure the knowledge isn't lost...”
"I'm not sure of that!” Kirna interrupted.
“All right, then,” Wulran shouted, “maybe it is lost! But look at us here! The whole lot of us packed together in the dark because we don't dare light a proper council fire, for fear of that beast! Our livestock are taken one by one, day after day, and when the sheep run out it will start on us—it's said as much! Already we're left with no smith but a half-trained apprentice boy because of that thing that lurks on the mountain. We're dying slowly, the whole lot of us—would it be that much worse to risk dying quickly?”
An embarrassed silence was the only reply.
“All right, Wulran,” someone muttered at last, “what do you want us to do?"
Wuller looked at his father expectantly, and was disappointed to see the slumped shoulders and hear the admission, “I don't know.”
“Maybe if we all attacked it...” Wuller suggested.
“Attacked it with what?" Pergren demanded. “Our bare hands?”
Wuller almost shouted back, “Yes,” but he caught himself at the last moment and stayed silent.
“Is there any magic we could use?” little Salla, who was barely old enough to attend the meeting, asked hesitantly. “In the stories, the heroes who go to fight dragons always have magic swords, or enchanted armor.”
“We have no magic swords,” Illuré said.
“Wait a minute,” Alasha the Fair said. “We don't have a sword, but we have magic, of a sort.” Wuller could not be certain in the darkness, but thought she was looking at her sister Kirna as she spoke.
“Oh, now, wait a minute...” Kirna began.
“What's she talking about, Kirna?” Pergren demanded.
“Kirna?” Illuré asked, puzzled.
Kirna glanced at the faces that were visible in the lantern's glow, and at the dozens beyond, and gave in.
“All right,” she said, “but it won't do any good. I'm not even sure it still works.”
“Not sure what still works?” someone asked.
“The oracle,” Kirna replied.
"What oracle?” someone demanded, exasperated.
“I'll show you,” she answered, rising. “It's at my house; I'll go fetch it.”
“No,” Wulran said, with authority, “we'll come with you. All of us. We'll move the meeting there.”
Kirna started to protest, then glanced about and thought better of it.
“All right,” she said.
3
The thing gleamed in the lantern-light, and Wuller stared, fascinated. He had never seen anything magical before.
The oracle was a block of polished white stone—or polished something, anyway; it wasn't any stone that Wuller was familiar with. A shallow dish of the smoothest, finest glass he had ever seen was set into the top of the stone, glass with only a faint tinge of green to it and without a single bubble or flaw.
Kirna handled it with extreme delicacy, holding it only by the sides of the block and placing it gently onto the waiting pile of furs.
“It's been in my family since the Great War,” she said quietly. “One of my ancestors took it from the tent of a northern sorcerer when the Northern Empire fell and the victorious Ethsharites swept through these lands, driving the enemy before them.”
“What is it?” someone whispered.
“It's an oracle,” Kirna said. “A sorcerer's oracle.”
“Do we need a sorcerer to work it, then?”
“No,” Kirna said, staring at the glass
dish and gently brushing her fingers down one side of the block. “My mother taught me how.”
She stopped and looked up.
“And it's very old, and very delicate, and very precious, and we don't know how many more questions it can answer, if it can still answer any at all, so don't get your hopes up! We've been saving it for more than a hundred years!”
“Keeping it for yourselves, you mean!”
“And why not?” Alasha demanded, coming to her sister's defense. “It was our family's legacy, not the village's! We've brought it out now, when it's needed, haven't we?”
Nobody argued with that.
“Go on, Kirna,” Wulran said quietly. “Ask it.”
“Ask it what, exactly?” she replied.
“Ask it who will save us from the dragon,” Pergren said. “None of us know how to kill it; ask it who can rid us of it.”
Kirna looked around and saw several people nod. “All right,” she said. She turned to the oracle, placed her hands firmly on either side of the block, and stared intently down into the glass dish.
Wuller was close enough to look over her left shoulder, while Illuré looked over her right, and Alasha and Wulran faced them on the other side of the oracle. All five watched the gleaming disk, while the rest of the crowd stood back, clearly more than a little nervous before this strange device. Wuller's mother Mereth, in particular, was pressed back against the wall of the room, busily fiddling with the fancywork on her blouse to work off her nervousness.
"Pau'ron," Kirna said. "Yz'raksis nyuyz'r, lai brinan allasis!"
The glass dish suddenly began to glow with a pale, eerie light. Wuller heard someone gasp.
“It's ready,” Kirna said, looking up.
“Ask it,” Wulran told her.
Kirna looked about, shifted her knees to a more comfortable position, then stared into the dish again.
“We are beset by a dragon,” she said loudly. “Who can rid us of it?”
Wuller held his breath and stared as faint bluish shapes appeared in the dish, shifting shapes like clouds on a windy day, or the smoke from a blown-out candle. Some of them seemed to form runes, but these broke apart before he could read them.
“I can't make it out,” Kirna shouted. “Show us more clearly!”
The shapes suddenly coalesced into a single image, a pale oval set with two eyes and a mouth. Details emerged, until a face looked up out of the dish at them, the face of a young woman, not much older than Wuller himself, a delicate face surrounded by billows of soft brown hair. Her eyes were a rich green, as green as the moss that grew on the mountainside.
Wuller thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful.
Then the image vanished, the glow vanished, and the glass dish shattered into a dozen jagged fragments.
Kirna let out a long wail of grief at the oracle's destruction, while Illuré called, “Find me paper! I must draw the face before we forget it!”
4
Wuller stared at the portrait. Illuré had come very close, he thought, but she had not quite captured the true beauty of the face he had seen in the glass.
“Who is she?” Pergren asked. “It's no one in the village, certainly, nor anyone I ever saw before.”
“Whoever she is, how can she possibly kill a hundred-foot dragon?” Pergren's brother Gennar demanded.
“Maybe she's a magician,” Pergren suggested.
“There must be more powerful magicians in the World than her, though,” Gennar objected. “If it just takes magic, why didn't the oracle say so? Why not show us some famous powerful wizard?”
“Maybe she won't kill it,” Alasha said. “Kirna asked who could rid us of the dragon, not who could slay it.”
Gennar snorted. “You think she'll talk it into going away?”
“Maybe,” Alasha said. “Or maybe there's another way.”
Pergren and Gennar turned to stare at her. Wuller was still looking at the picture.
Illuré certainly had a talent for drawing, he thought; the charcoal really looked like shadows and soft hair.
“What do you mean?” Pergren asked Alasha.
“I mean, that in some of the old stories, there are tales of sacrifices to dragons, where when a beautiful virgin willingly gave herself to the monster the beast was overcome by her purity, and either died or fled after devouring her.”
Pergren glanced at the picture. “You think that's what she's to do, then? Sacrifice herself to the dragon?”
Gennar snorted. “That's silly,” he said.
“No, it's magic,” Alasha retorted.
“Why don't you sacrifice yourself, then, if you think it'll work?” Gennar demanded.
“I said a virgin," Alasha pointed out.
“She said beautiful, too,” Pergren said, grinning. Alasha tossed a pebble at him.
“We have a couple of virgins here,” Gennar said. “At least, I think we do.”
“Virgins or not,” Pergren said, “the oracle said that she would rid us of the dragon.” He pointed to the picture Wuller held.
“No,” said Alasha, “it said she could rid us of the dragon, not would."
That sobered all of them.
“So how do we find her?” Pergren asked. “Do we just sit here and wait for her to walk into the village, while that monster eats a sheep a day?”
“I'll go look for her,” Wuller said.
The other three turned to him, startled.
“You?” Gennar asked.
“Why not?” Wuller replied. “I'm small enough to slip away without the dragon noticing me, and I'm not doing anything important around here anyway.”
“How do you expect to find her, though?” Pergren asked. “It's a big world out there.”
Wuller shrugged. “I don't know, for sure,” he admitted, “but if we had that oracle here, then surely there will be ways to find her in the cities of the south.”
Gennar squinted at him. “Are you sure you aren't just planning to slip away and forget all about us, once you're safely away?”
Wuller didn't bother to answer that; he just swung for Gennar's nose.
Gennar ducked aside, and Wuller's fist grazed his cheek harmlessly.
“All right, all right!” Gennar said, raising his hands, “I apologize!”
Wuller glared at him for a moment, then turned back to the portrait.
“I think Wuller's right,” Pergren said. "Somebody has to go find her, and I've heard enough tales about the wizards of Ethshar to think that he's right, finding a magician is the way to do it.”
“Why him, though?” Gennar demanded.
“Because he volunteered first,” Pergren said. “Besides, he's right, he is small and sneaky. Remember when he stole your laces, and hid in that bush, and you walked right past him, looking for him, half a dozen times?”
Gennar conceded the point with a wave of his hand.
“It's not up to us, though,” he said. “It's up to the elders. You think old Wulran's going to let his only son go off by himself?”
Alasha whispered, looking at Wuller, “He just might.”
5
In fact, Wulran was not enthusiastic about the idea when it was brought up at the meeting that night, and started to object.
His wife leaned over and whispered in his ear, cutting him off short.
He stopped, startled, and listened to her; then he looked at Wuller's face and read the solid determination there.
He shut his mouth and sat, silent and unhappy, as the others thrashed the matter out, and the next morning he embraced Wuller, then watched as the boy vanished among the trees.
It was really much easier than Wuller had expected; the dragon never gave any sign of noticing his departure at all. He just walked away, not even hiding—though he did stay under the trees, hidden from the sky.
At first, he simply walked, marking a tree-branch with his knife every few yards and heading southwest—south, because that was where all the cities were, and west to get down out of the mountains. He di
dn't worry about a particular destination, or what he was going to do for food, water, or shelter. He knew that the supplies he carried with him would only last for two or three days, and that it would probably take much longer than that to find a magician, but he just couldn't bring himself to think about that in his excitement over actually leaving the village and the dragon behind.
He took the charcoal sketch out of his pack, unrolled it, and studied it as he ambled onward beneath the pines.
Whoever the girl was, she was certainly beautiful, he thought. He wondered how long it would take him to find her.
He never doubted that he would find her eventually; after all, he had the portrait, and magic was said to be capable of almost anything. If one ancient sorcerous device could provide her image, surely modern wizardry, or some other sort of magic, would be able to locate her!
An hour or so from home he stopped for a rest, sitting down on the thick carpet of pine needles between two big roots and leaning back against the trunk of the tree he had just marked.
He had worked up an appetite already, but he resisted the temptation to eat anything. He hadn't brought that much food, and would need to conserve it.
Of course, he would get some of his food from the countryside, or at least that was what he had planned. Perhaps he could find something right here where he sat.
Glancing around he saw a small patch of mushrooms, and he leaned over for a closer look—he knew most of the local varieties, and some of them were quite tasty, even raw.
This variety he recognized immediately, and he shuddered and didn't touch them. They might be tasty, but nobody had ever lived long enough to say after eating them. Illuré had told him that this particular sort, with the thin white stem and the little cup at the bottom, held the most powerful poison known to humanity.
He decided he wasn't quite so hungry after all, and instead he took a drink from his water flask; surely, finding drinking water would be easy enough! If he kept on heading downhill, sooner or later he would find a stream.
Far more important than food or water, he thought, was deciding where to go. He had talked about going all the way to Ethshar, but that was hundreds of miles away; no one from the village had ever been to Ethshar. Surely he wouldn't really need to go that far!
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