Dragonslayer

by Wayland Drew

  “Yes, Tyrian.”

  “Imprisonment. In the dungeon. And then, if there is to be an extraordinary Lottery, perhaps our young sorcerer should accompany the Chosen into the Blight.” Tyrian was grinning with anticipation. “I myself would be most happy to see that he arrives safely there.”

  “And what,” Casiodorus suggested maliciously, caressing the amulet in his palm, “what if Vermithrax is really dead?”

  “Your Majesty, with the greatest respect, that is unthinkable.” Galen was surprised to see that Tyrian was shocked. He spoke with the same kind of hushed piety that Galen had heard before in Christians when they were not preaching. “You know, Your Majesty, the Codex Dracorum confirms that the dragons shall be immortal, that they shall live forever in Urland and in the lands beyond.”

  “And you know, Tyrian, that dragons are not immortal. Why, in your very lifetime two have been slain, one in Cantware and one in Anwick.”

  “There is anarchy in those places now. Chaos!”

  “Yes, but the point is that dragons die. Vermithrax can die. It may even now be dead.”

  Tyrian’s head shook almost imperceptibly on his thick neck. “Dragons perhaps, but with respect, Your Majesty, not the last dragon. That would make nonsense of the Codex.”

  Casiodorus regarded him balefully, envying the complacent simplicity of his reasoning. He wished that he himself could have such faith, such a blunt imagination that could not anticipate a transmutation of dragons back into the plasm from which they had emerged. He sighed. “In any case, Tyrian, I am certain now that Vermithrax is not dead.”

  Tyrian nodded. “You have had a sign, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I knew it would come.”

  “While we arrange the Lottery, lock this fellow up. Later we’ll decide what to do with him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not in the dungeon, though, Tyrian. He’ll get sick and die there. He is an . . . unusual boy. Keep him alive.”

  So Galen became a prisoner. He was not treated harshly; on the contrary, the room to which he was taken was more comfortable than his cell at Cragganmore. There was a chair with a back and arms, a washstand with a fresh jug of water, and a clever device by which some of that water could be warmed in a basin over a brazier. Here too was a tiny ground-level window into the courtyard.

  For three days Galen saw no one but a skulking turnkey who brought him gruel and refused to answer all questions. He left food and went away. Galen ate nothing and paced until he was exhausted. On the first night, just as sleep was claiming him, the bed trembled! He could not have sworn that the trembling was sensed by his real body and not by the body in his beginning dream; but if he had been startled awake that instant he would have said yes, the bedframe had moved enough to cause its rawhide thongs to creak, and beneath the bedframe the floor had trembled, and beneath the floor the castle walls . . .

  Several times that day it was repeated, each time more strongly, until, by dusk on the second night, the tremors had become sufficiently powerful to shake mortar from the crevasses of the walls.

  “Let me out!” Galen shouted pounding the door. “It’s an earthquake! Let me out!”

  He clamored at the door and the window until he was hoarse, but no one came. He pried at the window bars until his knuckles were raw. He even tried to recall the Charm of the Second Degree of Transposition which he had once seen Ulrich use to soar through the wall of his conjuring chamber and land safely beyond the moat; but nothing happened, and Galen cursed himself that he had not learned better what the old sorcerer had tried to teach him.

  With dusk, however, the tremors gradually subsided, and he drifted into a fitful sleep thai was permeated by the odor of dragon and shot through with visions so ghastly that he awoke in the cool dawn bathed in sweat. “Vermithrax!” he said.

  He leapt up and ran to the window just as a fresh tremor rocked the floor beneath him. He was about to shout out into the dawn when a remarkable sight stopped him. A girl clothed all in white had appeared in the garden. She was surrounded by white animals. Galen blinked. So still were they that he thought at first they were statues that for some bizarre ornamental reason had been placed there overnight, but then he noticed tiny movements—the flicking of a white donkey’s tail, the slow, subtle arching of a cat’s back, the turning, from the pear tree of a white bird’s head toward him. Galen blinked again, and squinted. “Gringe? Gringe!”

  The bird detached itself from the tree and in two lazy wing beats perched on the window ledge close enough that his wing brushed Galen’s outstretched hand. “Gringe! Gringe, you’ve got to help me find a way out. You’ve got to help me escape.”

  The raven gave no sign that he had heard, except for a slight inclination of the head.

  “Gringe, please! Can you get me out? Can you . . . steal a key?”

  The raven slowly shook his head. Something very much like a child’s laugh sounded in his throat.

  “Well, can you get that lady to help me? Please, Gringe!”

  The raven considered. Galen held his breath and then released it in a sigh of relief as the raven left the ledge and drifted back across the courtyard. In a moment, Elspeth stood and came toward the window of Galen’s room. She was strikingly beautiful, tall and slim, moving with a sinuous grace. Her hair was pale blonde, swaying with the movement of her body, her white gown luminous. She kept her eyes cast down until she had knelt beside the window; when she looked up, he saw that her eyes were not the Saxon blue he had expected, but were brown, a strange, softer brown than any eyes he had ever seen, so soft that he thought she might have been blinded in a way that allowed anyone to look straight into the simplicity of her soul.

  “I am Elspeth,” she said.

  “I am Galen. Are you . . . do you live here?”

  She nodded. “I am Casiodorus’s daughter.” Again she waited, and there was a long moment during which they regarded one another placidly, like calm animals. And then another tremor came.

  “Elspeth, your father put me here. Can you let me out? It’s important. The dragon . . .”

  “They hate my father,” she said, frowning.

  “Wh . . . who?”

  “Everyone. All Urlanders. His subjects. Do you hate him?”

  Galen shook his head. “No. I don’t know him . . . And I’m not an Urlander. But Tyrian . . .”

  “Tyrian!” Her eyes hardened. “Tyrian’s different!”

  “Yes. Well, anyway, he did have Tyrian lock me up.”

  “Why?” It was a child’s innocent inquiry.

  “Because I caused a landslide in the Blight. I blocked Vermithrax’s cave. I . . . I thought I killed it.”

  “Did you? Did you kill it?”

  Galen stared at her. Had she not felt the trembling? “I . . . I don’t think so,” he said.

  “It would be wonderful if you did. It would end the Lottery. It would end all that grief and fear.”

  “You know about the Lottery?”

  For the first time a spark of real life came into Elspeth’s face. “Of course! How could I not know? We all suffer through them, all the women of my age.”

  Galen laughed doubtfully.

  “What do you mean by that?” she asked.

  “You? You’re the princess. You’re the king’s daughter.”

  “Yes.” She waited innocently.

  “Well, why should you take part in the Lottery?”

  The flush began at her throat and rose to the roots of her resplendent hair. “My father,” she said, after a long pause during which the flush vanished and her face took on a chalky pallor, “would not do anything like that.”

  “Privilege is privilege,” Galen said, shrugging.

  “He would not protect me and pretend otherwise. He would not.”

  Galen said nothing.

  “And I think you’re beastly to suggest it.”

  “Elspeth,” he said after a moment, “forgive me. I’m not an Urlander. I don’t know your ways. I don
’t really know your father, either. But I’ve lived in Urland all summer. I’ve listened to Urlanders speak. They don’t believe the Lottery is equal for all. They don’t believe that the daughters of nobles take their chances together with the commoners. They say that the preparation of the lots is always secret, always supervised by Tyrian and Horsrick, and that lots bearing some names are kept out.”

  Gradually the color returned to her cheeks. “Thank you,” she said. She stood quite still. Behind her, the bevy of white animals was growing restive. She seemed, even as Galen watched her, to have become more regal. “I thank you,” she said again, and she was gone.

  Casiodorus, meanwhile, having dispatched couriers with news of the extraordinary Lottery, had spent the intervening two days cloistered with the amulet. It fascinated him. He found that he could not look at it directly. Whenever he tried, it stared back like a malevolent, unfocused eye. Frightened, the king had turned the stone over and contented himself with examining its intricate silver setting. The thing possessed enormous power—he could feel its radiance even while it lay on the table. Then, impulsively at dawn on the third day, he summoned Knurl, his minter, and ordered him to cart in from the midden chunks of lead pipe, drainage tiles abandoned since the Roman occupation, now almost lost under accumulated garbage. In fact, the first few pieces Knurl brought were dripping with offal. “Oh for goodness sakes, wash them off, man! Wash them off!” Soon there was a small pile of perhaps fifty pounds of wet lead in the center of the throne room floor.

  “Now then,” said Casiodorus, picking up the amulet.

  “Sir . . .” Knurl was shrinking back.

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “With all due respect, Your Majesty, it’s just that, well, many of these sorcerer’s charms are known to have great power.”

  “Yes. Of course. Why do you think I have asked you to assemble all this lead? We are going to turn it into gold, Knurl. Do you have some objection to gold?”

  “Well, no, sir . . .”

  “I should think not.” Casiodorus raised the amulet.

  “Sir, he is right.” Tyrian had joined them, unnoticed. “Some of these talismans—mind you, I’m not saying I believe it, only that it is said among the people—have not only power; but power that twists back upon those who abuse them, or who direct them toward ends for which they were not consecrated.”

  Casiodorus turned his rheumy gaze full on his centurion. “This is strange stuff from you, Tyrian.”

  “Yes, sir. I know, sir.”

  “Are you afraid of this stone?”

  Tyrian stood silent. Never in his life had he admitted fear, not of pain, not of humiliation, not of battle, not even of Vermithrax. He had encountered all challenges with the fixed grin of the born warrior. He was afraid frequently, although he had never admitted it. Fear enraged him. But now he found himself nodding. “I have told you,” he said, “that I killed the old man, Ulrich.”

  “Yes, yes. Go on. What are you suggesting?”

  “Only that I am not sure I was truly the agent of his death. If this amulet was indeed his, I would advise you, sir, to treat it with the utmost respect.”

  “Not to get gold?”

  Tyrian shook his head.

  “Then we disagree.”

  Tyrian raised his chin. “With your permission, Your Highness, I will see to the horses.”

  “Go! Go! Get out.” Casiodorus lifted the amulet as the centurion departed.

  What happened next occurred so swiftly that Knurl was unsure of the sequence; but he believed that Casiodorus extended his arm toward the pile of lead, spoke in Latin, and was instantly enshrouded in a shimmering blue haze like ambient summer lightning. With a cry, the king dropped the amulet and fell back, his arm still extended. The talisman fell free, skittering across the flagstone floor. For a moment Casiodorus lay stiff, arm straight up, lips opened to utter another cry which never came. Edging close, gaping, Knurl feared that the king had been stricken dead.

  But then the eyes flickered.

  “Your Majesty?”

  “Up. Help me up, Knurl!”

  With the old man’s assistance, the king tottered to his feet, only to sink into a chair immediately.

  “What . . . what happened, sir?”

  “The stone stung! It felt like a score of bees.”

  “Leave it alone, sir! Destroy it!” Knurl stared apprehensively at the amulet. It had fallen under the table. It seemed inert, innocuous.

  “Bring it to me.”

  Knurl found a stick and gingerly touched the thing. When there was no reaction, he tapped it out from underneath the table.

  “It won’t hurt you, Knurl. It won’t do anything unless I give it an order. Then it will either comply or refuse. Give it to me.”

  Knurl picked it up with his fingertips and quickly dropped it into Casiodorus’s outstretched hand.

  “Now then,” the king said, “we’ll try one small piece of lead at a time. That one, Knurl! Pull it away from the rest!”

  It was then, when Casiodorus was preparing to utter another command to the amulet, a command that Knurl was sure the thing would refuse with equal vehemence, that two things happened at once. First, a tremor shook the throne room; not a quake, but a gentle shudder sufficient to rattle the fragments of lead, and to send one tumbling onto the floor. Second, Elspeth entered.

  “Father.”

  “Yes, my dear.”

  Again the tremor came. Elspeth stopped walking. “Father, why is the room trembling?”

  “Because the dragon is not dead, my dear.” Casiodorus sighed heavily. “The dragon has been slumbering only, and is now awakening, and is angered to find the stone at the cave’s mouth. Very soon it will burst out through the rock our young conjurer put in front of it. Very soon it will be rampant again, wreaking vengeance for his affront.”

  “And then,” Elspeth said after a moment, her head raised and her eyes curiously bright, “there will be an Extraordinary Lottery.”

  Casiodorus nodded. “Tyrian has orders to begin.” He laid the amulet on the table.

  Another, more violent tremor shook the room. Elspeth stood quite still while Knurl scuttled away; then she moved closer to her father. Her walk was stiff, her gaze fixed upon him. When she was quite close, she asked, “Father, this time may I put my own lot into the bowl for the Choosing?”

  Casiodorus looked up quickly. “Horsrick would never permit that,” he said. “Nor would I. It would violate the Codex. Horsrick’s men bring all the tiles to the bowl, in the collecting sacks. You know that.”

  “Then may I put my own lot into one of the sacks?”

  The king shifted uneasily in his chair. “There’s no need of that, my child. I have always done that for you.”

  She touched the side of his face and raised his head so that his gaze met hers. “Have you, Father?”

  Casiodorus turned very pale. “What are you suggesting, Elspeth?”

  She smiled sadly. “Only that you love me . . .”

  “Yes, very much.”

  “And that you have protected me, as you protected my mother, from everything unseemly and threatening . . .”

  Casiodorus said nothing. Very slowly, his head dropped forward; as it did so, the room trembled again, so violently that it seemed for a moment the wall of Morgenthorme might collapse. For a crazed instant, Casiodorus saw that event as appropriate, mirroring the collapse of all safety that for eighteen careful years he had built around her. He laughed abruptly. Then he wept.

  Again the dragon shook them.

  Elspeth crossed to her father and held his head against her breast. Her hair fell forward like a curtain around his face. “Dear Father,” she said. “If I am not first a woman and prepared to take my place in this, this most important event in all our Urland, how can I be a princess?”

  When Casiodorus had returned from the journey he had taken as his tears fell, a journey during which he had drifted over his daughter’s years as a bird drifts over a green land, where
it may never light again, she was gone. He was alone with the grotesquely twisted chunks of lead, with the alien and weirdly shimmering stone, and with a kingdom that had begun to crumble under him. For the first time in all the years of his reign he envied his dead brother, who had never sought to appease the dragon, but who had taken his lance and his best stallion and gone to battle it. Better to have died like that, in a hot white light, than to have lived all of one’s life in shadows and uncertainties. He gripped the amulet once again and felt in it now a receptive and forgiving warmth into which he sank with profound gratitude.

  When she left her father, Elspeth went straight to the room where Galen had been put and drew back the heavy bolt. The door creaked open, hitting the wall with a soft thud. “You were right,” she said. The room shook as she spoke. “My father has been protecting me. I want to repay my debt, beginning now. Please go. Behind the arras at the end of the hall you will find a secret stair. It leads to the stables and the courtyard. Take a fast horse! Flee! Quickly, before Tyrian returns. He is certain to take vengeance on you. Go, for your life!”

  Without waiting for an answer she hurried down the hall to her own apartment and then out into the courtyard. The spasms of the dragon’s rage had become more violent, and chunks of masonry were now tumbling from the walls. The white animals cowered around her feet, wide-eyed with terror. Those that were tethered strained at their restraints. “Go,” she said, freeing them one by one. “We must all find our own ways, now. There are no more protectors.” She spoke with a cool decisiveness that the animals had not heard in her voice before, and it further bewildered them. In all their secluded lives, she had never sent them from her. They clustered pitifully closer. “Go. You are free. You must make your own way. Go now. Go!” She waved her arms and prodded them with her toe, and one by one they left her, fleeing through the crumbling walls or lifting above them toward an unknown wilderness. Gringe, the last to come to her, was also the last to leave; unlike the others, he did not fly to the safety of trees and crags, but continued to circle over Morgenthorme.

  Galen, meanwhile, lost no time in making his escape. The hidden stairway was steep, narrow, smelly, and dark. Stumbling and falling, banging his head on the low ceiling, he emerged into the stable just as a particularly severe shock collapsed the archway and engulfed him in a cloud of dust. The corralled horses broke into snorting frenzy. Before he regained his feet, several of them had shattered their stalls and were leaping toward the door that had been knocked open by the tremor. Choking and gagging, Galen found his feet and flattened himself into an indentation in the wall while all but two thundered past; then, while those two were whinnying indecisively in their stalls, he staggered to the door and looked out.