by Rick Shelley
We stepped inside, past the fallen door. The empty cavity hit us with the echoes of the clanging door at our feet.
“Which way?” I asked, and my voice echoed just as strongly.
“The pull is weak,” the elf whispered. “So weak.”
“Which way?” I asked again, more urgently.
The elf’s eyes wandered independently. Neither one seemed to see me. Aaron took the cage from Timon and set it on the floor. He unhooked the snaps, lifted the top off, and set it aside. Aaron started chanting as he picked up the elf’s head. He stood and raised Wellivazey’s head above his own at full reach. Then he brought it down slowly—and Wellivazey slipped over Aaron’s head like a full Halloween mask. Nothing squirted out. Somehow, the elf’s skull, brains, and everything else fit right over Aaron. Stronger eyes looked out of Wellivazey’s face. They wavered a moment, then focused together. The elf’s mouth moved, and Aaron’s voice came through, subtly changed.
“It is above us, far above us,” he/they said.
Timon gagged, then vomited. One of the men from Beathe went pasty white and fainted, hitting his head disturbingly hard. I didn’t feel so good myself.
White face above black neck, no jagged fit—the line between the two skins seemed perfectly smooth. A black hand pointed toward the side of the shrine’s vault.
“There,” Aaron’s voice said through the elf’s lips.
Master Hopay looked around, his head jerking back and forth as if he were having spasms in his terror. Then he bolted through the doors, running back toward his boat.
“Let him go,” Aaron said, an instant before I could start after Hopay. “Follow me.”
Aaron started walking quickly across the center of the shrine at an angle, aiming for a point along the west wall. The rest of us followed close behind him. Aaron went straight to a door that looked like all of the other doors along that aisle and pulled it open—wrenching the knob off and twisting one of the hinges in the process. Aaron showed none of the hesitation and uncertainty that Wellivazey had shown in the first shrine. We went up one long flight of stairs, through two small, bare rooms, then along a hallway that paralleled the aisle below, and up another flight of stairs, much longer than the first. At the top, we turned back the way we had come, moving back along the side of the shrine, and finally we started up one more short flight of stairs.
Those stairs came up through the floor of a room that was about sixteen by twenty-four and twelve feet high. The walls and ceiling were totally crusted over with precious gemstones—diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and others I couldn’t identify by sight—and more were piled on the floor, in the corners, as if they had simply been swept aside and left. The stones were real, all of them. I knew that without scientific tests, a jeweler’s loupe, or anything else. I simply knew. It was a fortune in faceted and smooth jewels.
Aaron/Wellivazey scanned the walls. Aaron’s hand came up and pointed.
“That oval emerald, there.”
I went to the wall and touched a gem.
“This one?” I asked.
“That one,” Aaron’s voice assured me.
At first, I couldn’t get a grip on the emerald. Only half of it was away from the wall, and it was fixed firmly and bounded by other gemstones. I tried to find some purchase with my fingers, without luck, and I was just about ready to use Dragon’s Death to pry it loose when the emerald decided to pop off the wall on its own. It dropped right into my hand. The stone was warm, and it matched the ruby around my neck in size and shape.
I held the jewels next to each other, and the ruby slid out of its gold setting. When ruby and emerald touched, both started to glow.
“Not now,” Aaron said. “We have to get out of here quickly. The world is collapsing toward us.”
We ran down the stairs, through the midlevel corridor and rooms, down the last flight of stairs, and then we raced for the golden doors, slipping and sliding on the polished marble floor of the shrine.
Halfway across the huge central chamber we all skidded to a stop. A woman’s figure appeared—first a ghostly wraith, then a more substantial figure. She seemed to have been assembled from badly mismatched parts, though. Her head, neck, arms, and shoulders appeared normal—attractive face, slender neck and arms—but watermelon-sized breasts hung from her chest, covering a wasp waist that I might have been able to span with my hands, over hips and buttocks that would have had to squeeze to fit through a hula hoop. Bulky thighs supported that construction, but the legs below the knees seemed normal, about right for the head and arms. Maybe the feet were a little too big. A caricature, a gross parody.
“Who disturbs my shrine and steals my treasures?” The voice was regal, haughty, and seemed to be in stereo.
“Not yours,” I said, taking one cautious step closer to her. Obviously this was, or was supposed to represent, the Great Earth Mother. The devotional figures of her I had seen were all similarly distorted.
She studied me. “Vara, have you returned at last?” There was doubt, or maybe just wistfulness, in her voice, shattered when she shook her head and said, “No, you’re not the one. You’re just a thief. I will destroy you!”
“You’ll have to stand in line, my lady,” I said.
“She’s just a mirage,” Aaron said. “There is no substance. Hurry, to the boat.”
We went past the mirage and reached the doors without catastrophe striking. But when we got out onto the marble walk that surrounded the building we had to stop again. The men I had left with Beathe had come up to the shrine, and they were cowering against the outer wall. Halfway across the beach, Master Hopay lay dead, his skull crushed by a boulder that was eight feet in diameter. His arms and legs were bent at unnatural angles, also obviously broken, though those injuries could scarcely matter to him now.
That wasn’t the worst. Stones—everything from golf ball to basketball in size—were picking themselves up off the beach and smashing into our boat. There were already gaping holes in the sides of Beathe, and more appeared every moment. The stones hit with the velocity of artillery shells. Some went straight through, in one side and out the other. We weren’t going to sail back to Varay in Beathe, not without a lot of time for repairs.
And time was one thing we didn’t have.
“Look!” Lesh shouted. He was pointing at the sky.
There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of dragons of every size and description stretching off to the horizon in every direction I could see. And they were all converging on the shrine.
“Shit!” I said. I looked around at my companions, ending with Aaron/Wellivazey. “What the hell do we do now?”
“You have the balls of the Great Earth Mother.” It was strictly the elf’s voice that I heard this time.
“What do I do with them?” I held them up, both cupped in the palm of my left hand.
“Swallow them.”
“That’s impossible!” I mean, they were each the size of a pecan, shell and all, and there was no way I could get even one of them down without choking to death.
“Swallow them!” the elf’s voice repeated, more insistently. “This is what you must do to complete your mission.”
I looked at the two jewels. “Lesh, you remember the Heimlich maneuver I taught you?”
“Aye, lord, I remember.”
“Be ready to use it on me if you have to.”
“Aye, lord.” He shifted his grip on his battle-axe.
On the beach, all of the rocks that hadn’t hurled themselves at the boat were changing shape. It was something like Claymation. The rocks grew and turned into armed soldiers, and there seemed to be as many soldiers as there were dragons in the sky. The soldiers appeared as a cross section of human history. I saw stone-axe-carrying cavemen, Roman legionnaires, knights in mail and plate, red-suited musketeers, even a couple of olive-green uniforms topped by the flat helmets our soldiers used in the First World War and at the beginning of the Second.
And they were all coming toward us.
&
nbsp; I popped both jewels in my mouth and swallowed.
It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt! I could feel them sinking, and I imagine it would have felt about the same if someone had crammed a baseball bat down my throat and pushed it all the way down to my stomach. The agony was beyond anything I could ever have imagined. The world around me seemed to dim, go faint. I was on the verge of passing out but didn’t. I would have welcomed that end to my pain.
The burning went down my throat and straight on down through my gut. There was no twisting and turning of the stones following my digestive system. They burned straight down, like glowing embers sinking through butter.
Maniacal laughter echoed in my head. I knew that it was Wellivazey laughing, but there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t move, couldn’t contemplate movement, and speech … I didn’t think that I would ever be able to speak again.
Fire and pain, a clear track, a straight drop, an endless agony—until the jewels came to rest. The burning and pain faded slowly. When I could finally bear to move, I had to reach down the front of my pants to check the damage. There was a very tender track down my abdomen, and an ache in my scrotum, a weight. I felt around cautiously, past the vibrating threads of pain, and counted—all the way to four. I pulled my hand out of my pants and looked at Wellivazey’s face on Aaron’s shoulders.
“You’ve sealed your doom now, Hero!” Wellivazey’s voice said, but those were his final words. Aaron reached up and pulled the elf’s head off of his own, then held it off to the side for someone to take.
Harkane took the head and tucked it under his arm.
I looked at Aaron. He had changed. The elf had left a little of himself behind, a jagged streak of his pale white skin, running from a point at Aaron’s left temple down the side of his face to the jawbone, where it came to another point. Along the cheek, the streak was maybe an inch wide. I took the head from Harkane and held it up to look. The corresponding section of the elf’s face was black. Then—because I couldn’t help myself—I turned the head over. There was no hole large enough for another head in there. I saw the end of the elf’s spinal cord, the flesh and blood vessels, the bone of his skull, the dead gray of the bottom of his brain even.
I closed my eyes while I righted the head and looked at it again. It was not just the patch of skin that was different. At the top of the streaks, the two had also exchanged a small patch of hair—kinky black on the elf, smooth platinum blond on the wizard.
“It wasn’t a perfect spell,” Aaron said—his own voice back. “I held it far too long.”
I reached out and touched his face, hesitantly. I couldn’t hold back, though. There was no real break between white and black. The skin was smooth, unbroken, across the patch.
“We’re still in danger,” Aaron said, sadness in his eyes.
I looked at the sky in time to see the start of the rain of dragons. Suddenly, they were all falling, and many of them were changing into other creatures—chickens mostly, but I also saw cats and dogs, horses and fish fall onto the beach, into the sea, and onto our damaged boat. A huge bull elephant crashed through the bow of Beathe, permanently grounding it.
“No way home,” I said, taking one step toward the boat.
“A moment,” Aaron said. He held out a hand to stop me. Then he turned to face the horde of soldiers that had been created from the rocks. Their ranks had been greatly thinned by the falling animals, but there were still a couple of hundred of them. Aaron started chanting. After a moment, he went silent and opened his mouth as wide as it would go.
I still don’t believe that I saw what I saw next. Impossible things happen almost routinely in the seven kingdoms and in Fairy, but this went so far beyond the usual impossibilities that I still can’t convince myself that it actually happened.
Aaron exhaled in an incredibly long puff, but that wasn’t what was so remarkable. That sea serpent emerged from a mouth two or three inches wide. As near to Aaron’s lips as my eyes could place the beast, though, it was full-size—several times as tall as Aaron—and he just propelled it out onto the beach, where it started wriggling around eating the massed soldiery charging toward us. In a grossly magnified way, it was like one of those party noisemakers that you blow into and a paper tube expands and unrolls with a razzing sound.
This time, I think that all of us with Aaron vomited.
The serpent coiled back and forth across the beach, eating soldiers and the fallen metamorphosed dragons.
Before the tail emerged from Aaron’s mouth, the island started to tremble and shake. Earthquake. I had never experienced one before, but I didn’t need experience to know what it was, a powerful earthquake.
As soon as the last of the serpent was out of Aaron’s mouth, I started dragging Aaron back, away from it.
“We’ve got to get out in the open, away from the building,” I shouted at the others. There was a lot of noise, from the dining serpent, from the screaming soldiers, and from the rumbling ground.
Aaron gagged and coughed, and spit up blood.
“No!” he managed finally. “Inside the shrine. Quickly, inside.”
“The building might fall on us,” I protested.
“We have to take the chance,” Aaron said. “We can’t stay out here or that beast will eat us too, without any ‘might’ about it.”
That settled it. Maybe the shrine would fall on us, but that didn’t sound nearly as horrifying as the prospect of that sea serpent eating us the way it was slurping down all those soldiers and dead other things. We went back through the double doors. Lesh and I nearly had to carry Aaron. His guts were still convulsing. More blood came out of his mouth. Not all magic is painless, I guess.
“Find a single door that will open,” Aaron said when he could, and then he went back to spitting and retching.
We had to try a half-dozen doors before we found one that opened without trouble.
Aaron straightened up, started chanting, and put his hands on the doorjamb—one on either side—in a gesture I couldn’t mistake. There was no silver tracing around the doorway, but I knew what Aaron was doing. I wasn’t nearly surprised when a familiar setting opened beyond the doorway.
“Get through, everyone,” Aaron said, and the words seemed to be quite an effort.
I waited until all of the others were through—including Harkane, who had the head of our elf.
“Get through,” Aaron told me. I obeyed, but I grabbed his arm and pulled him through into Arrowroot behind me, as the shrine of the Great Earth Mother started to collapse on itself.