Key of Living Fire (The Sword of the Dragon)

by Appleton, Scott

  The ground shook and sank in front of him. Unseen claws imprinted the soil and a seven-toed footprint appeared. Specter gasped. The creature’s foot was even larger than the dragon’s. If only he could see it, perhaps then its proportions would be revealed to him. If only to uncover the mystery of Ulion.

  At that moment a child ran up to him, a blond-haired boy, bare feet sailing over the grass. He bowed to Specter and laughed. “Master, you forgot this.” His little arms struggled under the burden of a folded gray cloak. As Specter took it with a smile, the child ran to the footprint and gazed skyward, wrapping his arms around the creature’s invisible leg. A purr rumbled from Ulion. Yellow, orange, and blue crocuses sprang from the ground into full bloom.

  Specter slipped the folded cloak around his shoulders. If anything could reveal this creature to him it would be the gift of Albino and Patient. As it settled around his bare shoulders, he pulled the hood over his head and half-closed his eyes, willing it to make him invisible. His arms shimmered and vanished, then his cloaked torso disappeared, and he gazed toward Ulion and the child.

  A sun-golden image coalesced over the green grass. It shimmered, and some sort of creature wavered in and out of his perception, as if he viewed it through a mottled and blurry pane of glass. He strained his eyes, hoping to make out at least how many legs it had. But it flashed like morning sunlight over the horizon, and he stumbled back, shielding his face with his hands. Around him the grass glowed too. The flowers glinted dangerous shades of yellow-white. He took another step back and felt the ground tremble. The child laughed again, and he heard it dance into the forest.

  “You would stoop so low, oh Warrior?” Ulion growled, and massive fingers closed around Specter’s body. He cried out but was raised ten feet off the ground. “For daring to intrude on my privacy and giving in to the temptation of seeking my mystery, for this your privileges with me I now revoke. You will depart my mountains. Seek no return visit, for it will not be granted. Should you return, I will consider you as I would any other trespasser.

  “Go now, Specter. Let peace grow in your heart, and may the fire of righteous judgment burn therein so that you can do nothing but follow your warrior desire. You will find the one you seek to the north and east. Run with all thy might before my lands reap vengeance upon you.”

  The creature relinquished its grasp. Specter fell to the ground, every joint in his body screaming pain. Great fear filled his heart, such as he had not felt in a very, very long time. He stood and ran northeast. Through the laughter-filled woodland and mountains he fled Ulion’s presence, all the while feeling the prophet’s cold breath down his back.

  His feet trod air as he ran. He rose as a mighty, carnivorous roar pummeled the forested mountain slopes. Something swished through the air beneath him, and invisible claws screeched back into the creature’s hands. But his feet landed inches above the ground and he stumbled, grabbing at a smooth surface with his hand. A gentle ramp, transparent, as if made of glass, stretched skyward, vanishing in a puffy cloud. He stumbled upward and ran, legs burning, hoping and praying that a certain friend would greet him atop it.

  “You cannot flee, Warrior!” Ulion said, and a great weight bent the ramp downward. “For invasion of my secret, oh, your soul is revealed to me. You must be kept from ever returning. I am sorry, Specter, but your life is forfeit!”

  Something sliced his back, and the cut burned as if with fire. Specter screamed and ran on, the creature’s breaths belting his back. And he stumbled onward until at last the ramp reached the white cloud. Specter stepped into the fluffy white moisture, sinking in its veiling wisps. Then he pulled his cloak tighter and willed it to render him invisible to the vengeful prophet’s eyes. His body faded into the cloud, and he stepped deeper into the rolling mists.

  “Mighty prophet, what hast thou done?” the voice of Patient said.

  Ulion roared, and the cloud faded to gray, then deep purple. “An honest man this one is not! I received him with charity, and he repaid me with treachery. For gazing upon me, he must now die.”

  “So ready you are, at all times, to render judgment, my friend. Yet this man is under my protection now. His life is in my hands. Take it at your own peril. The world needs him as your children need you, and I need him. Let God be judge this day, for had the Creator desired you to take this man’s life, you would have succeeded. Yet, here you stand, and I between you and he. For will not the wrath of God rise above either of us if we abuse the gifts he has bestowed on us?”

  The creature blasted the cloud with its breath, and lightning zipped across the heavens, snaking past the cloud. When it passed, the air smelled of flowers, and the wrinkled shepherd stepped up to him, frowning. “Come, Specter. It seems you will now return to Emperia . . . for Ulion has barred you from his mountains.”

  Letting the shroud of invisibility fall from his body, Specter stepped forward. Other clouds flitted through the darkening blue sky, and a large bird screamed as it glided between them. His back pained him, and his fingers yearned to clutch his scythe. He would need a weapon in the task he now chose for himself. Indeed, the one Ulion had ordered him to follow.

  The mountains of Ulion receded far beneath him as he left them for a new destination. A vast sea spread beneath him, and in the distant east sunlight shattered upon jagged, shining peaks of ice. The mountains of ice!

  He turned his head and glowered at the distant mountains as they sped by. Somewhere, hidden among them, was Auron. “You will pay, my apprentice. The wrath I will bring upon you will reach Letrias’s ears, and even he, though deep in the Valley of Death, will tremble for fear of God’s justice reaped through His servants.”

  The shepherd’s hand clamped on his shoulder, and the old prophet walked around to stand face-to-face with brow furrowed and eyes unblinking. For what seemed to Specter an eternity, the shepherd gazed back into his eyes. The clear blue eyes of the old man seemed to reflect energy and vitality that contradicted his aged form.

  “Forgive me, my master.” Specter knelt in the rolling moisture and gazed at his feet with his arm stub resting on his knee. “I did not mean to speak those things aloud.”

  “Is it vengeance you seek, Specter? Or justice?”

  Specter glanced up into the prophet’s sober face. “I desire retribution, my master.”

  “For thyself—”

  “No!” He stood, clenching his fist and thrusting it toward the ice mountains. “For Kesla, for Prunesia’s lost prince, for Oganna, and for the many others that Auron has raised his hands against. He was given a chance, a final chance to repent. I hoped for a short while that his heart was ready. Maybe, even if only in the slightest, his heart yearned to come home. But now his path is set away from repentance, and he will follow his dark master’s legacy, and in so doing bring further shame upon me for releasing him.”

  The shepherd stepped back, and a tear rolled from his eye. “Your use to the prophets has come to an end, Specter. For now, while you feel such bitterness in your heart, you must walk your own path.” He knelt and raised a scythe from the billowing moisture. “To replace that which you lost,” he said, holding it forth.

  Specter reached out with both hands, then remembered he had but one. He closed his fingers around the black shaft of the weapon and raised the silvery blade to eye level.

  “Listen to me, Specter, and listen closely.” The shepherd raised his eyes heavenward and spread his arms. “A prophecy I would deliver to thee, for the journey you now undertake will lead you away from this place and into another. A thousand men rise who rose before, and their master awakens from his long slumber, though he did not sleep. The world you know and the worlds of the universe merge in the instant death falls, and the child you knew, the child you safeguarded, and the world you knew shall be lost to you—at least for a time. But in death’s fall, victory is assured for those you loved, and the hero who has not yet come will be armed in the glory you preserved.”

  The shepherd lowered his gaze to Specter and
leaned on his staff with a sigh. “You go now where neither I nor Albino can follow—into the very pit of the enemy’s home. And you will go alone, as it must be.” The shepherd struck Specter’s back with the staff. Tears sprang from Specter’s eyes as his cuts protested. But his skin cooled, and as the shepherd stepped back, Specter stretched to find that the wounds Ulion had inflicted had been healed. “Farewell, Xavion, master of warriors,” the prophet said, “and may the God of the heavens shine a light of blessing on your path.”

  The shepherd stepped off the cloud into oblivion, and the mists swirled beneath Specter’s boots. A sharp wind bit his cheek, and a shiver ran the length of his spine. The cloud vaporized into nothing, and a white world of sharp ice-encrusted mountains rose around him. He squinted as Yimshi’s rays turned the snow into a blinding sheet. They bounced off the ice cliffs, in all the mountain crags and valleys, along the sparkling dagger peaks. He skidded down the mountain slope toward a sudden drop-off.

  With a grunt, he stabbed his scythe into the ice, pulling to a stop at the expense of his good arm. Every muscle burned, every tendon stretched to its utmost—but he held fast, closing his eyes for a moment and choking on the frigid air. When he glanced down the slope, he found his feet hanging over a cliff’s edge. He gritted his teeth and smiled. At last, once again, he was on the trail of the traitor.

  The wind howled through the mountains, such a potent force of nature. It spun drifting snow back up the ice slopes, whirling around spiking daggers of ice a hundred feet long. These shoots of ice protruded skyward from every mountainside for as far as he could see. The mountains rose on all sides and to every distant corner of the deepening blue sky.

  Yimshi slid behind a mountain’s sharp peak at that moment, and where brilliant light had reigned, now a velvet star-peppered sky twinkled down at him. The day had gone. Night had come.

  His arm screamed with pain, and the scythe’s blade creaked, then scraped, along the ice as his body dragged it after him over the cliff face. He closed his eyes. No one could survive a fall this far, not onto ice. After a few hundred feet of this weightless fall, the impact would kill him.

  Suddenly his legs hit ground and his knees buckled. He rolled for a short distance, then stood on shaky legs. His ribs burned as if on fire. He wrapped his arm stub around them and leaned his weight on his scythe. He had landed on a sort of gravel ledge cut into the mountain slope. Not eight feet in front of him the slope dipped sharply downward, descending into the dark heart of the mountain valleys. Ice covered everything. Not a tree, not a single boulder, stood anywhere. Yet he kicked the gravel and looked over his shoulder.

  Before him, cut into the mountain’s slope, the gravel landing descended to a gate unlike any he had ever seen. Snow wisped past and he blinked. The gate stood a hundred feet high, and its width was even greater. The gate itself was composed of rods of translucent ice—smooth as glass and ramrod straight, spaced evenly every couple of feet—and a tunnel of ice, behind the bars, bored into the mountain’s depths.

  Civilization? He gazed around at the forbidding mountains. In this part of the world? He gritted his teeth and stumbled up to the gate, shivering before its chilly columns. Here he was, at the enemy’s doorstep. How he yearned to feel the great white dragon’s breath down his neck. But this time he must take the journey alone.

  Pulling his hood over his head, he wrapped his cloak tightly around his torso and pressed his body sideways to the bars and slipped through. Once through, his feet slipped from under him. With a whoosh of air he slid bodily into the gaping tunnel. Its descent angled steeper, and he clawed at the ice but could not decelerate. The dimming blue-gray walls of ice curved high above him. With a desperate roar, he jabbed the scythe at the ice. The blade sparked and bounced off the ice. He tensed his arm and swung it with all his might. The floor sloped steeper. The walls blurred in motion as the scythe blade stabbed toward the ice. The blade that had never failed to pierce his enemies now stubbed against the ice. Its tip bent, and sparks showered from the point of contact, yet he slid faster.

  For the first time in a long time he felt helpless. He rotated onto his back, bent his neck to gaze between his feet at the vast, endless tunnel rushing toward him. He pounded his arm stub against the ice, then relaxed his neck, his head cushioned in his hood.

  Long ago he’d been the invincible. He frowned. A thousand years ago he could have marshaled an army of five hundred choice warriors. They would have set off in pursuit of Auron, slain him long before now, and marched across Subterran in search of the Valley of Death. A sigh escaped his lips. It would take an army even mightier than that to bring down Letrias, an army of thousands instead of hundreds, for the dark apprentice had learned Hermenuedis’s teachings all too well. The memories of long-ago battles entered his thoughts, and he smiled at the courage of those he’d known and loved.

  The ice tunnel pulled him ever deeper, twisting in large curves, then dipped and gently rose.

  Not knowing how long he’d slept, Specter blinked open his eyes. The ice walls streamed past. He pressed his head against the smooth, slipping floor and gazed behind. The ice tunnel ran arrow-straight until it bent out of sight.

  He rose over a hump, slid up the side of the wall, and shot downward. But a small bump in the ice jarred his spine. Pain ripped through his back, but the bump struck the back of his head—and everything faded to gray, then white, then total black.

  9

  BENEATH THE DESERT

  The fierceness of the desert sun was eclipsed by the ferocity of the sandstorm that slashed Ilfedo’s face and threw Seivar off his shoulder and into the forest. Ilfedo took a step forward and another, yet the storm pressed against his entire body with the strength of a dozen men. He stumbled backward and sneezed, yellow sand lashing his face and filling his clothes.

  As he blindly stumbled into an oak tree and groped it, the bark broke off with ease. The howling wind drove sand against the tree’s exposed flesh, drying and cutting it apart.

  Farther into the sheltering forest, he ran. The air cleared, and the scent of moist leaves replaced the dryness. He coughed and looked at the forest around him. The Nuvitor waddled from behind a tree. “Master, it is true what you say. This land is dying.”

  “Come, Seivar. I will keep you close to my chest and wrap my own face with a shirt to keep out the sand. The Megatraths are somewhere beyond that storm, and so I must go through it.”

  “But—Master?”

  Ilfedo picked up the bird, stuffed it under his shirt, and donned a second one. Then he wrapped another around his face, leaving a slit through which to see, and marched back into the storm. He cringed after proceeding fifty feet. He could see no farther than a few yards ahead of him, and the sand bit through the slit in his turban. It was nigh impossible to keep his eyes open.

  He blinked back the sand and shouldered his way forward. He might as well have plowed through drifting snow. It pressed against his knees and thighs, blasting around him in a yellow blur. The world or some force had set itself against him. He said a prayer under his breath and pushed against the sandstorm.

  For what seemed like miles, he trudged forward. His body burned, and he choked on the sand. A more powerful gust swept his breath away. His knee buckled, and he collapsed to his hands and knees. The Nuvitor’s chest heaved against his own as he crawled his way forward. He drew the sword of the dragon, but the armor of light and fire crushed the bird tucked against his chest. He hastily sheathed the weapon and fought to a standing position with both arms shielding his face. However, after a hundred feet or so—he could not determine because of the blasting sand—he dropped to his hands and knees again. He crawled ahead, praying for a break in nature’s fury.

  For a couple of hours or more he fought in this manner, until the desert floor gave way under his hands. He rolled underground, instantly feeling relief as the sands whipped harmlessly above his head. He gazed upward. The sandstorm slashed north. There was not a single break in the yellow sandstorm, nor did
the wind sound likely to let up any day soon.

  Pulling Seivar from underneath his shirt, Ilfedo waited until the bird situated itself on his shoulder. Then, drawing the sword of the dragon, he waited as the Living Fire illuminated the small subterranean chamber in which he stood. He had fallen about twenty feet onto a pile of soft sand. All around him the chamber’s walls curved inward from the floor to the roof. There were no footholds or any other means of ascending to the desert floor. But a tunnel opened ahead of him, and it was high enough to enter without stooping.

  Taking his compass from the pack, Ilfedo waited for the floating red arrow to settle. When it did he smiled, tucked the compass back in the pack, and stroked the Nuvitor’s chest as he slid down the sand heap. The tunnel headed south, the direction of Vectra’s subterranean home. He walked inside and followed it for a while. It continued southward in a direct line.

  The tunnel steepened, leading deeper and deeper beneath the desert floor. The howling sandstorm faded behind him like a monstrous mouth yearning to be fed.

  Eventually trickling water sounded from somewhere ahead. The light of his armor and sword revealed every crack in the stone that formed the tunnel. The stone was sandy yellow at first, but as he descended it turned red. He spat on the reddish dirt and wadded it into a ball. It held together, proving that high concentrations of clay were interspersed with the solid rock. But not much farther along gray and black washed out the red. He had dropped under the dirt and clay. Here he traveled in a new world made of stone and sand.

  For a long while he followed the straight passage. Always it headed south, true as a compass, but it also maintained a steepening descent, as if the world had vowed to drop him into its dark heart. Seivar cawed and huddled against his master. The bird’s call bounced into the unseen reaches of the tunnel before them.