In one particularly narrow hall both Mikah and I had a rare bout of all-consuming nincompoopery, and one of us tripped a plate that caused iron shutters to slam down before and behind us, sealing our quartet in a span of corridor little bigger than a rich merchant’s water closet. An aperture on the right-hand wall began to spew a haze at us, the stinging sulfur reek of which was familiar to me from a job I’d once pulled in the mines of Belphoria.
“Dragon’s breath,” said Brandgar.
“More like the mountain’s breath,” I cried, and with a creditable leap I braced myself like a bridge across the narrow space and jammed my own posterior firmly into the aperture. The thin cloud of foulness that had seeped into the hall made my eyes water, but was not yet enough to cause us real harm. Though once a few minutes passed and I could no longer maintain such an acrobatic posture, my well-placed buttocks would no longer avail us. “It’s what miners call the stink-damp, and it will dispatch us with unsporting speed if I can’t hold the seal, so please conjure an exit.”
“Fairly done, Crale!” Brandgar waved a hand before his face and coughed. “To save us, you’ve matched breach to breeches!”
“All men have cracks in their asses,” said Gudrun, “but only the boldest puts his ass in a crack.”
“Henceforth Crale the Cracksman will be celebrated as Crale the Corksman,” said Mikah.
I said many unkind things then, and they continued making grotesque puns which I shall not torture any living soul with, for apparently to ward off a stream of poisonous vapor with one’s own ass is to summon a powerful muse of low comedy. Eventually, moving with what I considered an unseemly attitude of leisure, Mikah tried and failed to find any mechanism they might manipulate. Then even the strength of Brandgar’s shoulder failed against the iron shutters, and our salvation fell to Gudrun, who broke a rune-etched bone across her knee and summoned what she called a spirit of rust.
“I had hoped to reserve it for some grander necessity,” said she. “Though I suppose this is a death eminently worth declining.”
In a few moments the spirit accomplished its task, and the sturdy iron shutters on either side were reduced to scatterings of flaked brown dust on the floor. I unbraced with shudders of relief in every part of my frame, and we hurried on our way, kicking up whorls of rust in our wake to mingle with the lethal haze of the broken trap. We moved warily at first, then with more confidence, for it seemed that we had at last cleared that span of the mountain in which Melodia Marus had expressed her creativity. I do hope that woman died in a terrible accident, or at least lost some toes.
The red lights the dragon had graciously provided before were not to be found here, however, so we climbed through the darkness by the silver gleam of Gudrun’s sorcery on our naked weapons. Eventually we could find no more doors or stairs, and so with painful contortions and much use of Mikah’s ropes we ventured up a rock chimney. I prayed for the duration of the ascent that we had discovered nothing so mundane as the dragon’s privy shaft.
Eventually we emerged into a cold-aired cavern with a floor of smooth black tiles. Scarlet light kindled upon a far wall, and formed letters in Kandric script (which I had learned to read as a boy, and which the Ajja had long adopted as their preference for matters of trade and accounting), spelling out the Helfalkyn Wormsong.
“As if we might have forgotten it,” muttered Mikah. At that instant, a burst of orange fire erupted from the rock chimney we had ascended and burned like a terrible flickering flower twice my height, sealing off our retreat. White-hot lines spilled forth from the ragged crest of this flame, like melted iron from a crucible, and this burning substance swiftly took the aspect of four vaguely human shapes, lean and graceful as dancers. Dance they did, whirling slowly at first but with ever-increasing speed, and toward us they came, gradually. Inexorably.
“Seek the song beneath the song,” rang a voice that touched my heart, a voice that echoed softly around the chamber, a voice blended of every fine thing, neither man’s nor woman’s but something preternaturally beautiful. To hear it once was to regret all the years of life one had spent not hearing it. Even now, merely telling of it, I can feel warmth at the corners of my eyes, and I am not ashamed. The four fire-dancers glided and spun, singing with voices that started as mere entrancement and became more painfully beautiful with every verse.
“The fall of dice in gambling den
The sporting bets of honest men
Will bring them round again, again
To their fairest friend, distraction…”
It was not the words that were beautiful, for as I recite them here I see none of you crying or falling over. But the voices, the voices! Every hair on my neck stood as though a winter wind had caught me, and I felt the sorcery, sure as I could feel the stones beneath my feet. There was a compulsion weighing on us. The voices drew us on, all of us, cow-eyed, yearning to embrace the gorgeous burning shapes that called with such piercing loveliness. And that was the horror of it, friends, for I knew with some small part of my mind that if I touched one of those things, my skin would go like candle wax in a bonfire. Still, I couldn’t help myself. None of us could. With every moment they sang, the pull of the fire-dancers grew, and our resolve withered.
“When beauties into mirrors gaze
Nor look aside for all their days
Until they lose all chance for praise
They wake too late from distraction…”
I groaned and forced myself backwards, step by step, though it felt like hooks had been set in my heart and it was ten hells to pull against them. I saw Mikah, reeling dizzily, seize Brandgar by the collar.
“Forgive me, lord!” Mikah cuffed their king hard, first across one cheek then the other. Terrible fury flared for an instant beneath Brandgar’s countenance, then he seemed to remember himself. He clutched at his King-Shadow like a man being pulled away from a pier by a riptide.
“Gudrun,” yelled Brandgar, “give us strength against this sorcery, or we are all about to consummate very painful love affairs!”
Our sorceress, too, had steeled her will. She swung the strange drums from her back, gasping as though she’d just run a great distance, and began to beat a weak, hesitant counter rhythm in the casual Ajja style:
“Heart be stone and eyes be clear
Gudrun sees the puppeteer—
Fire sings eights, Gudrun sevens
This spell your power leavens…”
I felt the rhythm of Gudrun’s drumming like the hoofbeats of cavalry horses, rushing closer to bring aid, and for a moment it seemed the terrible lure of the fire-dancers was fading. Then they spun faster, and glowed fiercely white, and ribbons of smoke curled from their feet as they pirouetted across the tiles. Their voices rose, more lovely than ever, and I choked back a sob, balanced on the edge of madness. Why wasn’t I embracing them? What sort of damned fool wouldn’t want to hurl himself into that fire?
“The fly with hateful flit and bite
The swordsman’s feint that wins the fight
The thief enshrouded in the night
The world’s true king is distraction…”
Mikah knelt and punched the tiles, hard, screaming as their knuckles turned red. “I can’t think,” they cried, “I can’t think—what’s the song beneath the song?”
“The lasting truths poets compose
The lowly tavern juggling shows
Friends over card games come to blows
You’re chained like dogs to distraction…”
“Fire!” bellowed Brandgar, who was stumbling with the eerie movements of a sleepwalker toward his destined fire-dancer, which was a scant few yards away. “Fire is beneath the song! No, stone! Stone is below the dancers! No, the mountain! The mountain is below us all! Gudrun!”
None of Brandgar’s guesses loosened the coils of desire that crushed my chest and my loins and my mind. Gudrun shifted tempo again, and beat desperately at her drums in the stave rhythm of formal Ajja skaldry:
“No
w to sixes singing,
Ajja Gudrun knows well:
Hellfire dancer’s contest
Can be met with no spell.
Grimly laughs the king-worm,
Mortal toys must burn soon;
Fly now spear of Wave-King,
Breaking stones before ruin!”
With that, Gudrun fixed herself like a slinger on a battlefield and pitched her rune-stitched drums straight at Brandgar’s head. Their impact, or the repeated shock of such treatment at the hands of his companions, brought him round to himself one final, crucial time.
“The wall,” shouted Gudrun, falling to her knees. “The song of distraction is the distraction! The song beneath the song…is beneath the song on the wall!”
Heat stabbed the unprotected skin of my face like a thousand darting needles. Smoke curled now from the sleeves and lapels of my jacket; I breathed the scent of my own burning as my fire-dancer leaned in, looming above me at arm’s reach, and I had never known anything more beautiful, and I had never ached for anything more powerfully, and I knew that I was dead.
In the corner of my vision, I glimpsed Brandgar steady on his feet, and with the most desperate rage I ever saw, he charged howling past his grasping fire-dancer and drove the point of Cold-Thorn into the center of the Helfalkyn Wormsong that glowed upon the chamber wall. Rock and dust exploded past him, and revealed there beneath the fall of shattered stone were lines of words glowing coldly blue. Quickly, clumsily, but with true feeling Brandgar sang:
“From the death here, all be turning
Still the song, forsake the burning
Chance at mountaintop our earning
Though golden gain is distraction!”
Instantly the blazing heat roiling the air before my face vanished; the deadly whites and oranges of the fire-dancers became the cool blue of the new song on the wall. An easement washed over me, as though I had plunged my whole body into a cold, clear river. I fell over, exhausted, groaning with pleasure and disbelief at being alive, and I was not alone. We all lay there gasping like idiots for some time, chests heaving like the near drowned, laughing and sobbing to ourselves as we came to terms with our memories of the fire-song’s seduction. The memory did not fade, and has not faded, and to be free of it will be both a wonder and a sorrow until the day I die.
“Well sung, son of Erika and Orthild,” said one of the gentled fire-dancers in a voice nothing like that which had nearly conquered us with delight. “Well played, daughter of the sky. The gift you leave us is an honor. Your diminishment is an honor.”
The blue shapes faded into thin air, leaving only the orange pillar of fire which still poured from the rock chimney; it seemed our host was done with offering chances to escape. Then I saw that Brandgar was on his feet, staring motionless at a pair of objects, one held in each hand.
The two halves of the broken spear Cold-Thorn.
“Oh, my king,” sighed Gudrun, wincing as she stood and retrieved her drums. “Forgive me.”
Brandgar stared down at his sundered weapon without answering for some time, then sighed. “There is nothing to forgive, sorceress. My guesses were all bad, and your answer was true.”
Slowly, reverently, he set the two parts of Cold-Thorn on the floor.
“Nine-and-twenty years, and it has never failed me. I lay it here as a brother on a battlefield. I give it to the stories to come.”
Then he hefted his second spear over his shoulder, though he still refused to unbind the leather from its point, and his old grin appeared like an actor taking a curtain call.
“Bide no more; the night is not forever, and we must climb. With every step, I more desire conversation with the dragon. Come!”
FOURTH, HOW WE PASSED FROM THE BRITTLE BONES OF THE MOUNTAIN TO THE SNOW OF DEATH
Shaken but giddy, we wandered on into many-pillared galleries, backlit by troughs and fountains of incandescent lava that flowed like sluggish water. The heat of it was such that to approach made us mindful of the burning we had only narrowly escaped, and by unspoken agreement we stayed well clear of the stuff. It made soft sounds as it ran, belching and bubbling in the main, but also an unnerving glassy crackling where it touched the edges of its containers, and there darkened to silvery black.
“A strangeness, even for this place,” said Gudrun, brushing her fingers across one of the stone pillars. “There’s a resting power here. Not merely in the drawing up of the mountain’s boiling blood, which is not wholly natural. There are forces bound and balanced in these pillars, as if they might be set loose by design.”
“A new trap?” said Brandgar.
“If so, it’s meant to catch half the Dragon’s Anvil when it goes,” said Gudrun. “Crale won’t be shielding us from that with his bottom.”
“Is it a present danger to us?” I asked.
“Most likely,” said Gudrun.
“I welcome every new course at this feast,” said Brandgar. “Come! We were meant to be climbing!”
Up, then, via spiral staircases wide enough for an Ajja longship to slide down, assuming its sails were properly furled. Into more silent galleries we passed, with molten rock to light our way, until we emerged at last beneath a high ceiling set with shiny black panes of glass. Elsewhere they might have been windows lighting a glorious temple or a rich villa, but here they were just a deadness in the stones. A cool breeze blew through this place, and Mikah sniffed the air.
“We’re close now,” they said. “Perhaps not yet at the summit, but that’s the scent of the outside.”
This chamber was fifty yards long and half as wide, with a small door on the far side. Curiously enough, there was no obvious passage I could see suited for a dragon. Before the door stood a polished obsidian statue just taller than Brandgar. The manlike figure bore the head of an owl, with its eyes closed, and in place of folded wings it had a fan of arms, five per side, jutting from its upper back. This is a common shape for a barrow-vardr, a tomb guardian the Ajja like to carve on those intermittent occasions when they manage to retrieve enough of a dead hero for a burial ceremony. I was not surprised when the lids of its eyes slowly rose, and it regarded us with orbs like fractured rubies.
“Here have I stood since the coming of the master,” spoke the statue, “waiting to put you in your grave then stand as its ornament, King-on-the-Waves.”
“The latter would be a courtesy but the former will never happen,” said Brandgar, cheerfully setting his wrapped spear down. “Let us fight if we must though I will lose my temper if you have another song to sing us.”
“Black, my skin will turn all harm,” said the statue. “Silver skin forfeits the charm.”
“Verse is nearly as bad,” growled Brandgar. He sprinted at the statue and hurled himself at its midsection, in the manner of a wrestler. I sighed inwardly at this, but you have seen that Brandgar was one part forethought steeped in a thousand parts hasty action, and he was never happier than when he was testing the strength of a foe by offering it his skull for crushing. The ten arms of the barrow-vardr spread in an instant, and the two opponents grappled only briefly before Brandgar was hurled twenty feet backwards, narrowly missing Gudrun. He landed very loudly.
Mikah moved to the attack then with short curved blades, and I swallowed my misgivings and backed them with my own daggers. Sparks flew from every touch of Mikah’s knives against the thing’s skin, and the air was filled with a mad whirl of obsidian arms and dodging thieves. Mikah were faster than I, so I let them stay closer and keep the thing’s attention. I lunged at it from behind, again and again, until one of the arms slapped me so hard I saw constellations of stars dancing across my vision. I stumbled away with more speed than grace, and a moment later Mikah broke off the fight as well, vaulting clear. Past them charged Brandgar, shouting something brave and unintelligible. A few seconds later he was flying across the chamber again.
Gudrun took over then, chanting and waving her hands. She threw vials and wooden tubes at the barrow-vardr, and green fire erupted
on its arms and head. Then came a series of silver flashes, and a great ear-stinging boom, and the thing vanished in an eruption of smoke and force that cracked the stones beneath its feet and sent chips of rock singing through the air, cutting my face. Coughing, wincing, I peered into the smoke and was gravely disappointed, though perhaps not surprised, to see the thing still standing there quite unaltered. Gudrun swore. Then Brandgar found his feet again and ran headlong into the smoke. There was a ringing metallic thump. He exited the haze on his customary trajectory.
“I believe we might take this thing at its word that we can do nothing against it while its substance is black,” said Mikah. “How do we turn its skin silver?”
“Perhaps we could splash it with quicksilver,” said Gudrun. “If we only had some. Or coat it with hot running iron and polish it to a gleam, given a suitable furnace, five blacksmiths, and most of a day to work.”
“I packed none of those things,” muttered Mikah. Little intelligent discourse took place for the next few minutes, as the invulnerable statue chased us in turns around the chamber, occasionally enduring some fresh fire or explosion conjured by Gudrun without missing a step. She also tried to infuse it with the silvery light by which we had made our way up the darker parts of the mountain, but the substance of the barrow-vardr drank even this spell without effect. Soon we were all scorched and cut and thinking of simpler times, when all we’d had to worry about was burning to death in dancing fires.
The Book of Swords Page 36