by Wayland Drew
THE
SORCERER’S
APPRENTICE
Vermithrax, the last of dragonkind, swooped down over the kingdom of Urland, let loose a torrent of flames, and reduced everything to smoldering ash. Then, finding the newly blackened wasteland much to its liking, it settled in for a long stay.
Desperate, the villagers finally sought the help of Ulrich, the last living sorcerer. But Ulrich was too old, too feeble. That left only Galen to go against the might and terror of the deadly dragon. Of the use of weapons he knew nothing. He was merely a sorcerer’s apprentice, and of the Old Magic he knew very little.
THE DRAGON AND
THE HERO
With the throbbing lance telling him that the dragon was very close. Galen spoke the name imperiously. “Vermithrax!”
The dragon rose.
Galen could not be sure where Vermithrax came from, only that one moment he was looking into the flames of the lake, and the next he was gazing into the eyes of the dragos. So shocking was the suddenness of the beast’s appearance that he did not have time to react before he had been fixed by its mesmerizing star. Only the lance leaped and surged; the lance sang in his hand.
Galen himself was lost by what he saw in the dragon’s eyes. Immobilized, he watched those eyes. Slowly Vermithrax’s head tipped back, slowly its mouth opened.
In the last second before the flame poured forth, Galen raised his shield.
Paramount Pictures Corporation and
Walt Disney Productions
Present
A Barwood–Robbins Production
Executive Producer Howard W. Koch
Music by Alex North
Written by Hal Barwood &
Matthew Robbins
Produced by Hal Barwood
Directed by Matthew Robbins
Copyright © MCMLXXXI Paramount Pictures
Corporation and Walt Disney Productions.
All Rights Reserved.
A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books
© Copyright MCMLXXXI Paramount Pictures Corporation and Walt Disney Productions. All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, Canada.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 80-70658
ISBN: 0-345-29694-X
Printed in the United States of America
Dragonslayer is a trademark of Paramount Pictures Corporation
First Edition: June 1981
CONTENTS
DRAGONSLAYER
CHAPTER ONE: Cragganmore
CHAPTER TWO: Journeys
CHAPTER THREE: The Blight
CHAPTER FOUR: The Pyre
CHAPTER FIVE: The Chosen
CHAPTER SIX: The Forest Pool
CHAPTER SEVEN: Swanscombe
CHAPTER EIGHT: Morgenthorme
CHAPTER NINE: Sicarius
CHAPTER TEN: Battle
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Heronsford
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Lake of Fire
CHAPTER ONE
The tower was square and thick. It squatted defiantly on its hill-top, its narrow windows and arrow-slots facing north and south, east and west, like elongated and blinded eyes. Once the keep of a proud fortress, it was surrounded now by rubble and by ruins, and it itself was crumbling inexorably. Centuries of rain and frost had nibbled its masonry. Parts of its roof had collapsed. Its sills and timbers were soft with rot.
A windless hush surrounded the tower, and filled the vast bowl of land around its knoll. The last sunlight lay on the broken roof, but the valley below was blanketed by heavy dusk, and the quick-silver river had darkened and vanished behind its screen of trees.
The sun set reluctantly. It touched the horizon, bulged, began to move beneath.
It was the eve of the spring equinox; the following day would be given half to light and half to darkness.
Motionless, clinging upside down on the coarse bark of an oak, a small brown bat watched the setting of many suns. All were in the composite eye of a fat beetle, two inches away. The beetle was smug and drowsy, watching the sun; it did not know it was about to die.
It had been careless. So still had the bat been, so perfectly did the bat’s color blend with the brown and mossy hue of the bark, that the beetle had not seen it.
Both hung motionless, insect and predator. Then, as the sun shrank finally to a mere bead, the bat’s left wing unfolded with only the slightest silken whisper, moved over the drowsing beetle, enfolded it. The insect screamed, a sound heard only by the bat. It struggled briefly under the membrane, before it was crushed against the bark. When the bat’s keen mandibles closed upon it, it was still twitching, although it was quite dead.
The bat was ravenous. It had eaten nothing for two days and two nights. During the days it had slept, exhausted, but during the nights it had traveled, launched on a lone flight across the darkened land.
It did not know why it had left home. Nor had it any reason to recall what it had seen on its long flight. But some things it did recall. The tiny dots of sun in the eye of the unfortunate beetle, for example, had recalled other dots—the fires of lonely villages and encampments flickering in the vast darkness of the undulating land. Some had been larger than others, villages aflame. And the beetle’s dying screams had recalled other sounds as well, the screams of torn animals, and men’s cries for help from the borders of random fields, and sometimes the shrieks of women. And the beetle’s mangled corpse had recalled other corpses, both fresh and blackened, littering the battlefields over which the bat’s silent and inquisitive wings had borne it. Looking down now through the deepening dusk at a silver band of river, the bat recalled other rivers, some with weird shapes moving on and in them; some quite empty.
The edge of its hunger blunted, the bat uttered cries, the plaintive cries of a creature searching for another of its kind. There came no answer, and the bat’s flickering ears received only the hum of myriad evening insects. The bat yawned. Its claws clenched in the oak bark and its back arched catlike. Its wings unfolded and stretched with a sound like the rippling of soft silk. Then, in an indolent movement, it released its grip and glided down and out through the oak leaves and into the evening air. Ahead rose the stone tower where, the bat’s instincts told it, there would be fine fare—worms lifting pale snouts in the stagnant moat, fat and witless fireflies, thick salamanders nudging through dank masonry.
Nor was the bat mistaken. As it neared the tower it was stricken by the splendid odor of decay, an odor so delectably rich that the bat swooned, clasping its skin wings across its abdomen and gliding along a little updraft. It was an odor that caressed an ancient memory in the base of its medulla, an odor of the death of creatures that the bat’s kind had not seen for generations. Hungrily the bat glided down, heading for a dark area in the expanse of wall that it knew to be an opening. Beyond that opening the succulent grubs would be moving in rotting beams.
The bat grinned in anticipation.
But suddenly it veered out, terrified. The gray beauty of the evening had been shattered by a flash of light so brilliant that it hurt the bat’s eyes. Like lightning, it was accompanied by a thunderous crack, but instead of jabbing talons of fire at earth, or flickering in a liquid wash through distant valleys, this lightning had shot out from the window of the castle. Its shape was ghastly. It was like the bat itself but with drooping tail, and elongated neck, and yawning, awful jaws. In the bat’s sudden desperate efforts to avoid those phantom jaws, it uttered a string of cries like the shrieks of the beetle which now lay torn within it. The next instant, however, the vision vanished. The iridescent wings and arching neck dwindling down into
the starlight gleaming on the membranes of the bat itself, in terrified zigzag flight down the valley, away from the castle.
A paler and steadier light replaced the lightninglike flash. It came from a charcoal brazier just inside the second-story window of the tower, a brazier whose magical flaring up had so frightened the bat.
Had the bat flown into the room it would not have found what it expected. Here and there in the remotest corners, dripping water had leached lime from the ancient stones and formed grotesque and bulbous stalactites; but for the most part the room was dry, darkened by the smoke of countless fires. From the ceiling hung not only candelabra but also the mummified cadavers of small animals, and strange instruments which could have been the tools of torture or sorcery. Books and scrolls bearing arcane symbols lay open on elevated reading desks, and shelves of other scrolls lined a wall. Passageways and staircases, ascending and descending, led off from the room at odd angles; in fact, this was less a room than the heart of a labyrinth, which could be reached in many ways.
In the center stood an old man. His feet were braced apart under a fawn robe of coarse cloth. His eyes and his outstretched hands flickered with lambent fire. If the chimera of the dragon had not frightened the bat, the man would have done so, for power emanated from him. He was Ulrich, the master of Cragganmore, most powerful of sorcerers. It was he who had ignited the brazier with such force as to send a dragon’s fiery image hurtling into the night. The specter had startled him; he saw in it a premonition, and he had paused before lighting the other fixtures in the room.
Now he turned. “Omnia in duos. Duo in unum. Unus in nihil. Haec nec quattor, nec omnia, nec duo, nec unus, nec nihil sunt.” He laughed, his old voice like stone on rusted metal. His bent fingers flicked infinitesimally, and, as they did so, ensconced candles on both walls flared and hot wax rippled down to thicken the stalactites beneath. The flames lit strange bulges and concavities about the room and stirred odd occupants to life. On its oaken pedestal, a gyrfalcon raised its head and gazed intently at the window, sensing the bat’s passage. On a ledge above, three pigeons stirred uneasily, watching the man, but did not take flight. To one side, so still that it could have been a statue, a stately heron slept, balanced on one splayed foot. A raven, stark white, crouched motionless on one of the chandeliers. “Ulrich,” it said quietly, “Ill wrought.” Its voice was like a timeless and exotic stringed instrument.
The old man ignored it. He turned to a circular table in the center of the room, already occupied by a stone bowl that sat upon it. He moved with difficulty, turning in a series of small cautious steps in the way of old men, supporting himself on a gnarled cane. Although a sinewy power still showed in the movement of his shoulders, he was clearly very old, and weariness hung upon him like the folds of the gown itself, weighing heavily on his neck and his shoulders, and drawing them down and forward. His gait was constricted and shuffling, as if he had been hobbled. Furthermore, it was obvious that with the lonely passing of the years he had grown careless of his appearance; indeed, he had abandoned personal attentions almost completely, and now when he bent to gaze into the stone bowl of still liquid he was startled by the reflection of a grizzled and repugnant old man, looming toward him as if out of his very past. He appeared like someone from his own childhood, one of the countless wanderers who traveled the forest paths in those days, grim, dogged and limping, men who had long since forgotten the object of their quest and for whom mere movement had become the reason for being. Was he like one of these? Yes, like the senile celebrants he had once chanced upon in the alder thickets, in a spot once sacred, practicing among their dolmens rites made obscene by forgetfulness, he was old. His was now such a face as he remembered—the hair gone, the eyes liquid oysters in pouches of flesh, the mouth dribbling into a caked and yellow beard, the skin pocked and blemished. Was this indeed him? Yes. The thing in the bowl had nodded, yes. And this fact was all the more astonishing because at that very moment he glimpsed behind this specter a beautiful vision, a fleeting vision now in white robe, now in trousers and jerkin, a beautiful young girl who, before she had vanished in the shadows of the bowl, had turned for a last long look. Could it be, really, that she was there no longer, that she had passed beyond the power of even his recall?
Again the grim head nodded: “Yes!”
“What solace, then?”
Hearing his voice, the birds mewed in response and moved restlessly on their perches. A breeze whispered through the darkening corridors. Power.
Ulrich smiled and shook his head ruefully. Ah, if it were only that simple. If only the mere acquisition of power could compensate for the loss of that which made men human. For some, he knew, it did; but not for him. He required more. All his life he had required more. And now, as the visions began to form and dissolve in the viscous liquid of the stone bowl, he acknowledged again that it was not power that had seduced him all those years ago but knowledge. It was the incessant, insatiable itch of curiosity that had drawn him into the solitude of Cragganmore.
What solace? The bleak comfort that the world was not as most men perceived it to be, but that it was still, after the long and lonely decades of inquiry, an utter mystery.
Sighing, he leaned his cane against the table, straightened himself as far as possible, and prepared to conjure over the bowl. It was the eve of the vernal equinox. Twice a year, at the equinoxes, he probed forward and backward into the mysterious regions of the stone bowl farther than at any other time. Strange and unpredictable things happened in the liquid of the bowl. Time there was not what human beings imagined it to be, and often Ulrich would launch himself on what he believed to be a voyage into the future only to find that he had entered a time before he had been born—indeed, before the world itself was born. He always began, however, by requesting some vision of the present and the bowl responded by giving him a key, by showing him how—at least until the following equinox—past, present and future would be one.
So now he commanded, “The Present!” and made the adept and requisite gesture above the bowl. The bowl responded. It shuddered slightly and its liquid at first darkened, as if it were drawing in upon itself, and then quickly lightened, presenting a clear scene. The room in the vision was similar to the one in which Ulrich stood, but much smaller and without attendant birds. The oaken table in the vision was like the one before which he stood, and the stone bowl was identical to that in which Ulrich’s vision was occurring. The boy leaning over that bowl, however, was having no success in conjuring a vision of his own. Under a disheveled shock of flaxen hair his brow was creased in exasperation, and as Ulrich watched, he attempted twice more, clumsily and futilely, the gesture that Ulrich the Master had performed so smoothly, each time afterwards peering into the unresponsive bowl. At last he brought his fist down hard on the table, and although the old man could not hear what he was saying, it was clear that his adolescent patience was exhausted.
“Oh Galen, Galen.” The old man shook his head. “My dear boy. My poor muddled apprentice. That is not the way. I’ve told you a hundred times!”
“Ill wrought,” said the white raven, who had fluttered to the old man’s shoulder. “No luck. Never rich.”
“Get away, Gringe.” Absentmindedly, Ulrich shrugged his shoulder and the raven glided off, muttering. The other birds stirred and shifted on their perches. The falcon had turned toward the window, alert to high sounds passing—an owl’s shriek, the shrill hunting cries of bats, and an unidentifiable sound that was either enormous and distant or infinitesimal, vibrating like a minute insect against the falcon’s tympanum. The bird crouched immobile, listening. But the sound was gone, crowded out by the old man’s voice.
“Rerum gestarum memoria . . .” Ulrich was saying, and then, after a momentary hesitation, “The history of Galen.”
“History, mystery,” said the white raven, shuffling in the shadows beyond ancient stacks of books and manuscripts, “Galen may learn . . .”
“The lad may learn,” Ulrich was say
ing, but the words merely echoed in the memory of the old man, and it was a younger self who was actually speaking them in the depths of the bowl, the Ulrich of fifteen years before, his scalp richly tonsured with white hair, his beard glistening, his stride vigorous. He was speaking to himself as much as to the fretting father and mother who accompanied him, and he was musing over the child Galen who had just created, by exuberantly shaking his fists, a bevy of monsters, strange and furry mammals that panted affectionately toward him, tongues lolling, some ambling on eight legs, some on six, some undulating serpentlike.
The mother shrank from them in genuine fear.
“Do you see, sir?” the father asked. “He does it whenever he wants to.”
“I can see that,” Ulrich said, nodding. “He has the Talent.”
“But it’s not a talent, it’s a curse!” The mother wrung her hands, beginning to weep. “How can it be a talent to create monsters? He does it even at night. He dreams them!”
The father nodded blankly. “And then they just wander away. Out. Into the world. Who knows where? How do they survive?”
“Dreams,” Ulrich said. “Other people dream that they are fed.”
“Awful!” The mother shuddered and the father embraced her comfortingly. “Why has this happened to us? Why? The other children are all normal.”
Ulrich regarded the parents silently and with profound pity. He had no answer to that question, “Why me?”, although he himself had asked it countless times. He leaned forward and took the child’s tousled head between his hands. “Such talent!” he said. “If only . . .” He did not finish the sentence, but fell into a reverie from which he was finally drawn only by the mother’s broken sobbing and the father’s plaintive question, “Can you . . . can you cure him?”