Key of Living Fire (The Sword of the Dragon)

by Appleton, Scott

  The creature shrank away, shaking its head. “I cannot! The man placed the demons in me before; he would do so again.”

  “You are larger now, Arvidane. You have great strength and speed, not to mention experience with what he did to you before.”

  “Hear him.” Everett stepped close to the Megatrath and stroked its long snout.

  And the crowd echoed with exuberant shouts.

  Arvidane straightened his legs as the monks assisted the children off his back. He swiveled his face to look around at the people, then stared at Ilfedo. “I-If you will join me, I will do it.”

  The giant of a man stood on the steps to the city hall, the wicked green blade glowing in his hand. Smoke gathered around him as he looked upon the wounded men he had strewn over the steps. He directed his sword at the city hall’s doors, and green flames lapped at them until the wood darkened. Flames crackled along the doors, wrapped around the trim. The paint peeled, and thick smoke rose over the building’s face.

  Down the street Ilfedo came, purposeful strides bringing him nearer the possessed man. In the side streets the monks gathered the people in huddles. He took great comfort in the prayers they were offering.

  “Bromstead, hearken to me! What is this madness?” Ilfedo sheathed his sword and spread his arms. “You are in there still. Surely you have not been destroyed. You are a man of honor, so how did this spirit come to reside in you? How can you let him use you thus?”

  The man regarded him with an indifferent gaze as the building crackled and smoked, its windows turning deep gray. He descended the steps as Ilfedo drew within a dozen feet of him, then he stepped close, and, though Ilfedo moved quickly to draw his sword, the green blade smote him broadside on his knee.

  As Ilfedo fell, the man shook his head down at him. “A puzzle indeed. You bear the Living Fire, yet you haven’t the knowledge or means to properly wield it. Would that you knew its true potential, Warrior; then fear me you would not, and this city would be yours. Ah, but my defeat requires more than you have brought against me. Take me from this body, and I shall live in another.” Bromstead knelt and rested his knee on Ilfedo’s chest. “Thou hast proven yourself a capable warrior, a threat even. I am almost sorry to be the agent of your death.” He raised his green blade in both hands, pointing it at Ilfedo’s throat. He thrust downward—

  The dragon ring hissed a jet of steam and growled.

  Bromstead’s arm froze, the blade mere millimeters from Ilfedo’s jugular. His eyes narrowed as he looked at the little ring.

  The gold dragon’s neck tripled its length, and its body doubled in size. Its amethyst eyes swelled, and its metal claws drew blood droplets from Ilfedo’s finger. Ilfedo cried out, pain lancing his wrist with the intensity of a pot of scalding water.

  The young black Megatrath barreled out of a nearby street, yellow vapors wafting from its maw. Bromstead stood to meet it with a frown upon his face. “You could not keep this man restrained?”

  The creature swiped its claws toward Brunster’s sword, hooking its claws around the blade and throwing it end over end. Bromstead watched the blade depart until it stabbed into the thick beam along a porch front. A cry of jubilation sounded from the streets. People rushed from hiding. A man lifted a boy on his shoulders. The boy grasped the green sword—its flames dying—and pulled it down. The sword was handed through the crowd and vanished from sight, carried to only the crowd knew where.

  “No!” Bromstead charged Arvidane the Megatrath, and the creature smote him in the chest.

  But Ilfedo could watch no longer. The dragon ring grew ever larger. The band snapped off his finger, and the gold dragon stood on the ground. Its legs grew seven feet long and its body grew in proportion. The crowd gasped.

  A snarling dragon of pure shining gold rose twenty feet over Ilfedo. It had no wings, yet its gold scales sprayed the Dewobins’ glow in every direction. Its feet clinked against the ground as it stepped over him. With an effortless sweep of its hand, it grabbed Ilfedo by the torso. It pressed him against its belly, and a gold band hinged from its side and pinned him in place.

  Seivar attacked it, leaving not even a scratch for his efforts on the metal monster. The bird screeched, flying circles around the gold monstrosity as it lumbered into the main road. The gold dragon carried Ilfedo to the far west side of the city. The city guards struck it with their swords, without avail.

  The gold dragon raced down the road, leaving the city’s inhabitants far behind. It stabbed its claws into the cavern wall and pulled itself up, hand over hand, with the speed of a leopard. Stone fell away as it tore upward a hundred feet, two hundred. The city became a child’s plaything far below. Then the gold thing stopped. Holding itself on the wall with three feet, it tore a hole in the rock with its free hand. Gold flaked from its claws, and sparks erupted as it viciously attacked the cavern wall.

  It dug a hole and lurched inside. Seivar flew on its heels. His wings flapped unseen in the blackness, and the gold dragon ground the stones into dust, burrowing a tunnel toward—Ilfedo knew it to be true—Resgeria. He could only hope that his efforts had been enough to give the people of Dresdyn the upper hand in their struggle against Brunster Thadius Oldwell. There was no way for him to return, not now when he was held to this thing’s metal underside, and there was no conceivable means for the people of Dresdyn to follow him. A thousand people could not scale that wall. At least, not before he was so far away that—

  As Seivar landed on the gold dragon’s back and cawed, the gold dragon’s tail lashed the ceiling and walls of its created tunnel. Staring behind at the dim pink light at the tunnel’s opening, Ilfedo’s throat tightened. The dragon’s tail crumbled the stones, and they rained from the ceiling, broke off the walls, avalanching into the tunnel. A shadow of dust and stones filled in the tunnel behind him.

  The gold dragon surged forward. It released him from its belly only to hold him in one of its hard hands. Its body crashed into the stone, and the stone did not deny it. Dust blanketed Ilfedo’s body as he reached for his sword and drew it from its sheath. By the Living Fire’s light, the gold dragon glared brilliantly, as if chiseled from a single enormous gold nugget.

  Ilfedo considered speaking to the creature. If he ordered it to turn back . . . but that would be futile. The creature’s amethyst eyes were unblinking as they stared into space. It was not a living thing to be convinced. It had a mission to bring him to Albino’s agent and reveal the agent to him. It had no other purpose.

  “Master, are you all right?” The bird’s silvery eyes flashed in the light of his armor, and its wings spread to balance it atop the metal beast.

  Ilfedo shouted back, “I will be. I suppose.”

  The gold dragon’s claws raked the stones. It balled a fist and crushed it forward. Inside of a few seconds the tunnel extended a few feet farther.

  “I see no way out of this, my friend.”

  “Nor do I, Master.”

  Ilfedo smote his blade against the gold dragon’s back, sending a shower of gold to the ground. “But I will return. The people of Dresdyn deserve that much.”

  For several hours the gold dragon tunneled. The tunnel collapsed behind it as it pressed forward. At last, its claws tore into brown stone that flaked into tiny bits and fell into an enormous cavern beyond.

  Light filled the cavern, a pure blue light that danced over the gold dragon and upon the terrain before it. The cavern was shaped like a teardrop and had a pillar of gray stone from its peaked ceiling to the bowl of a floor below. Ribbons of water trickled into the bowl, and from nearby twin rivers gushed out of the rocks, wending through the bowl and out its other end.

  The gold dragon raised its hand and pointed its sharp metal claw at a tunnel opening far on the cavern’s opposing wall just above the bowl. In that moment the dragon ceased to move. With the sudden loss in momentum, Ilfedo was thrown forward out of the dragon’s opened hand. He tumbled, slamming his shoulder on a boulder.

  Groaning, he stood, and the Nuvitor pe
rched on the boulder, flapping its wings. Ilfedo walked down the walls of the bowl. It was a gentle descent. When he had proceeded a hundred feet, he turned back and gazed upon the gold dragon. It was a statue now, frozen in the gaping mouth of its tunnel. The amethyst eyes seemed to accuse him, and the gold claw pointed across the rivers. “Go,” it seemed to order him. “Go before all that the white dragon has ordered falls into ruin.”

  The rivers’ rush was gentle on his ears as he walked to the bank and knelt, cupping his hand in the ice-cold water. He quenched his thirst and then stepped into the river. His legs prickled as if stuck with a thousand needles. Then the sword of the dragon warmed his blood. He stepped up the opposite embankment and sidestepped a curious cactus about four feet tall. The cactus had two branches that shot at right angles from the trunk, and several oblong orange fruits hung from them.

  His stomach rumbled, and he smiled as he picked a fruit off the cactus and broke it upon a stone. The fruit’s flesh was cream in color, and as he took a bite he relished the pear-like flavor. But the aftertaste of overcooked beef—

  He swallowed before his taste buds could fully object. “It isn’t as good as it looks, Seivar.” He moved aside as the bird waddled toward the fruit and slashed it with its beak. Its eyes closed as it swallowed, then it dug into the fruit with a vengeance. Before long it cleaned out the skin and flew across the second river, perching on a boulder along the way toward the exit tunnel.

  Ilfedo splashed into the river. The water came to his chest and he half-swam the twenty feet to the other side. As he sloshed out of the water, the sword of the dragon steamed his clothes dry. Something splashed behind, and he looked back at the river. A fat black fish swam against the river current. Its large round eyes gleamed with blue light, so bright that he glanced away.

  He walked up the bowl and the Nuvitor leaped off its boulder to circle him. The bird landed gently on his shoulder and cooed in his ear. He continued toward the tunnel, glancing back once again at the white-gold dragon. In the blue light of this cavern it turned almost silver. “It will probably remain there forever, Seivar. Forever, that is, until the end of this world . . .” Ilfedo flexed the fingers of his right hand. His pointer finger was now freed of the nasty ring. Yet would the ring’s loss prevent him from finding the dragon’s agent? No sense in mulling over that which was already done.

  Holding his sword before his face, he set off into the tunnel. Great claw marks had carved the tunnel walls, and they angled steeply upward so that he was forced to his knees. He pulled himself up the tunnel, knowing that, at last, he would be among friends and allies.

  15

  WHIMLY JANVEL

  The ground trembled and a roar rent the air. Oganna started from her sleep and looked about. The roar sounded as if it had come from the volcano, not from some beast.

  “The volcano is very violent,” Ombre said as he sat beside her in the tent’s doorway. “More violent than anyone told me it could be.”

  She raised herself on her elbows. She’d been sleeping on her stomach. “You’ve been up for a while?” The viper slithered through the grass and coiled around her arm until its head rested on her shoulder.

  He nodded. “I had trouble sleeping last night.”

  Again the ground shook; the volcano rumbled. Caritha stirred and groggily inquired what was happening. “No need to worry,” Ombre told her. “The volcano is having a bad day.”

  The air was rent with a sound equivalent to that of a bolt of lightning cracking a large tree—only this was a million times more powerful, and it was not a tree. The volcano’s crest cracked, and an ocean of fresh red-yellow lava spilled out. The ground quaked—then all grew silent.

  They waited in hushed uncertainty. “Well,” Ombre said when a few minutes had passed, “that was strong—and disturbing—”

  He stood, but never finished his sentence. The land to the south divided. A crack in the ground cut through the western forests. The low ground ahead of them sank, taking a forest of trees out of sight into the opened chasm.

  The horses whinnied.

  “Whoa!” Ombre began gathering their things, packing them back into their bags. “Let’s not stick around this place. Shall we, ladies?”

  Caritha closed the tent’s flap. “Let me change first.”

  “There might not be time,” Ombre warned.

  But his words were lost on her, for she emerged shortly and smiled at him.

  Together they gathered the rest of their things, packed their gear, and saddled the Evenshadows. Then, vaulting onto the horses’ backs, they raced from that place. But they were too late to escape. The ground beneath them twisted, rose, and broke up. Horses and all tumbled toward the swamp as the higher ground of the western forests slid away toward the volcano.

  Oganna regained her balance as the quake ended. She looked back, and her jaw dropped wide open in astonishment, for she could see that a very large portion of the forest was buried. A broad and deep canyon sliced into the fertile ground, and swamp water was sloshing in its lowest depressions, though she and her companions had landed a good distance away from the canyon.

  The viper stretched out its neck and swallowed hard. “Psst! Mistresss, this isss not good.”

  “From here on,” Ombre said as he pulled Caritha from the mud, “the horses would be of little use. We will set them loose here, and they will find their way home.” He pulled a pack off his mount’s saddle and began picking a few items from the other bag still remaining on the saddle. “Unless you want to feel like you’re carrying lead, take only the essentials.”

  They unpacked their things, then slapped the Evenshadows’ haunches and bade them speed home. Oganna watched them go with reservation. She relied on Avernardi, and on his back she always felt secure. Avernardi stopped to glance back when he reached the high ground. Wind whipped his silver mane to billow behind his neck. He snorted before wheeling about and disappearing into the trees.

  “Well,” she said, “that’s that.”

  “Indeed.” Ombre collected a few scattered items and added them to his pack.

  Caritha had gotten the worst of the swamp’s muck, for she’d landed in the thick of it. She wiped her slime-covered face with her soaked sleeve and shook her shoulders in disgust. “Yuck!”

  Ombre chuckled, and Oganna’s aunt turned on him with a bit of fire in her gaze.

  “What?”

  He raised both hands as if to defend himself. “Now, I don’t want you to stab me, or do anything else—painful.” He laughed. “Consider that I have been the perfect gentleman—”

  Caritha’s face broke into the hint of a smile. One of her gentle hands pinched his chin, then squeezed his cheeks.

  Into her hand Ombre chuckled again. “It’s okay. I know that it was important for you to freshen up. And you looked, well—” His voice grew suddenly serious. “You looked beautiful.”

  Her face flushed and she withdrew her hand.

  Oganna faced the swamp and surveyed its murky waters and dark terrain. The clouds of ash rising from the volcano almost hid the rising sun from view so that the mountain and the swamp around it were still shrouded in relative darkness. She could pick out streams and pools of water intersecting around tufts of tall grass. Narrow and muddy land covered most of the area, and gnarled trees pushed up to interlace in a dense canopy overhead. If habitable land lay in this direction, it was beyond that volcano.

  “Once we enter that swamp, we will probably have great difficulty making it to the other side. But if we keep a straight path to the mountain’s base, then we should be able to skirt around it to the opposite side.” Ombre headed into the swamp and cut the swamp vines out of the way with his sword while they followed.

  Before long all that connected them to the world outside the swamp was a tunnellike path cut out behind them. The swamp waters’ depths were impossible to calculate, so they did not set foot in them. Instead, they walked along tree roots and the occasional boulders that pierced the water’s surface. The
foliage thinned out somewhat. Creating a path through the foliage became less of a problem than finding the nearest tree roots to step on.

  Several hours of this treacherous hike brought them to the base of a large elm tree. A raised bit of grassy land surrounded the tree, and its roots stuck through it into the swamp. Oganna swatted at a swarm of mosquitoes. The insects grew peskier the farther into the swamp they went.

  Ombre and Caritha sprinted ahead of her to a dry grassy spot of ground. They rolled the packs off each other’s backs and knelt, fishing out bread rolls and jam. Not particularly appetizing to her, but they would suffice.

  Another mosquito stung her arm and she swatted it, then brushed the dead insect off as she leaned against a massive log beside the water. But the log slid into the water. She grabbed a hanging vine just in time to keep from falling into the murky swamp, and the log twisted its end out of the water to look at her with beady green eyes. It looked like some kind of alligator. Instinct told her to reach for Avenger in case the reptile turned on her, then she thought the better of it. There was no telling what other sorts of predators roamed this place, and the flashing of a glowing sword could bring their attention right to her. Better to remain inconspicuous.

  Regaining her balance, she ran to join her companions. As she sat in the soft, dry grass, she swatted another mosquito and bit into a roll that Caritha handed her. “Uncle Ombre?”

  He looked at her, his cheeks stuffed with bread.

  “How much longer must we endure this?” she said.

  He harrumphed and thumbed over his shoulder to the swamp ahead of them. Partitions of thick green foliage hung from the trees that hid the sunlight. The swamp waters formed pools that melded into one another as far as she could see in the dimness. “We haven’t made much headway. I’d say we are less than halfway to the mountain.” He finished his roll and held his hand over his mouth as he burped. “Sorry, ladies.”