Dragon Quest

by Anne McCaffrey

  N'ton looked up from the eyepiece, sighing with relief.

  "Cloud formations won't get us anywhere!"

  F'nor held his hand up for Grall. She came down obediently and when she started to hop to his shoulder, he forestalled her, gently stroking her head, smoothing her wings flat. He held her level with his eyes and, without stopping the gentle caresses, began to project the image of that fist, lazily forming over Nerat. He outlined color, grayish-red, and whitish where the top of the imagined fingers might be sun-struck. He visualized the fingers closing above the Neratian peninsula. Then he projected the image of Grall taking the long step between, to the Red Star, into that cloud fist.

  Terror, horror, a whirling many-faceted impression of heat, violent wind, burning breathlessness, sent him staggering against N'ton as Grall, with a fearful shriek, launched herself from his hand and disappeared.

  "What happened to her?" N'ton demanded, steadying the brown rider.

  "I asked her," and F'nor had to take a deep breath because her reaction had been rather shattering, "to go to the Red Star."

  "Well, that takes care of Brekke's idea!"

  "But why did she over react that way? Canth?"

  "She was afraid!" Canth replied didactically, although he sounded as surprised as F'nor. "You gave vivid coordinates."

  "I gave vivid coordinates?"

  "Yes."

  "What terrified Grall? You aren't reacting the way she did and you heard the coordinates."

  "She is young and silly." Canth paused, considering something. "She remembered something that scared her." The brown dragon sounded puzzled by that memory.

  "What does Canth say?" N'ton asked, unable to pick up the quick exchange.

  "He doesn't know what frightened her. Something she remembers, he says."

  "Remembers? She's only been hatched a few weeks."

  "A moment, N'ton." F'nor put his hand on the bronze rider's shoulder to silence him for a thought had suddenly struck him. "Canth," he said taking a deep breath, "You said the coordinates I gave her were vivid. Vivid enough, for you to take me to that fist I saw in the clouds?"

  "Yes, I can see where you want me to go," Canth replied so confidently that F'nor was taken aback. But this wasn't a time to think things out.

  He buckled his tunic tightly and jammed the gloves up under the wristbands.

  "You going back now?" N'ton asked.

  "Fun's over here for the night," F'nor replied with a nonchalance that astonished him. "Want to make sure Grall got back safely to Brekke. Otherwise I'll have to sneak in to Southern to the cove where she hatched."

  "Have a care then," N'ton advised. "At least we've solved one problem tonight. Meron can't make that fire lizard of his go to the Red Star ahead of us."

  F'nor had mounted Canth. He tightened the fighting straps until they threatened to cut off circulation. He waved to N'ton and the watchrider, suppressing his rising level of excitement until Canth had taken him high above the Weyr.

  Then he stretched flat along Canth's neck and looped the hand straps double around his wrists. Wouldn't do to fall off during this jump between.

  Canth beat steadily upward, directly toward the baleful Red Star, high in the dark heavens, almost as if the dragon proposed to fly there straight.

  Clouds were formed by water vapors, F'nor knew. At least they were on Pern. But it took air to support clouds. Air of some kind. Air could contain various gases. Over the plains of Igen where the noxious vapors rose from the yellow mountains you could suffocate with the odor and the stuff in your lungs. Different gases issued from the young fire mountains that had risen in the shallow western seas to spout flame and boiling rock into the water. The miners told of other gases, trapped in tunnel hollows. But a dragon was fast. A second or two in the most deadly gas the Red Star possessed couldn't hurt. Canth would jump them between to safety.

  They had only to get to that fist, close enough for Canth's long eyes to see to the surface, under the cloud cover. One look to settle the matter forever. One look that F'nor, not F'lar, would make.

  He began to reconstruct that ethereal fist, its alien fingers closing over the westering tip of grayness on the Red Star's enigmatic surface. "Tell Ramoth. She'll broadcast what we see to everyone, dragon, rider, fire lizard. We'll have to go slightly between time, too, to the moment on the Red Star when I saw that fist. Tell Brekke." And he suddenly realized that Brekke already knew, had known when she'd seduced him so unexpectedly. For that was why Lessa had confided in them, in Brekke. He couldn't be angry with Lessa. She'd had the courage to take just such a risk seven Turns ago, when she'd seen a way back through time to bring up the five missing Weyrs.

  "Fill your lungs," Canth advised him and F'nor felt the dragon sucking air down his throat.

  He didn't have time to consider Lessa's tactics because the cold of between enveloped them. He felt nothing, not the soft hide of the dragon against his cheek, nor the straps scoring his flesh. Only the cold. Black between had never existed so long.

  Then they burst out of between into a heat that was suffocating. They dropped through the closing tunnel of cloud fingers toward the gray mass which suddenly was as close to them as Nerat's tip on a high-level Thread pass.

  Canth started to open his wings and screamed in agony as they were wrenched back. The snapping of his strong forelimbs went unheard in the incredible roar of the furnace-hot tornadic winds that seized them from the relative calm of the downdraft. There was air enveloping the Red Star, a burning hot air, whipped to flame-heat by brutal turbulences. The helpless dragon and rider were like a feather, dropped hundreds of lengths only to be slammed upward end over end, with hideous force. As they tumbled, their minds paralysed by the holocaust they had entered, F'nor had a nightmare glimpse of the gray surfaces toward and away from which they were alternately thrown and removed, the Neratian tip was a wet, slick gray that writhed and bubbled and oozed. Then they were thrown into the reddish clouds that were shot with nauseating grays and whites, here and there torn by massive orange rivers of lightning. A thousand hot points burned the unprotected skin of F'nor's face, pitted Canth's hide, penetrating each lid over the dragon's eyes. The overwhelming, multileveled sound of the cyclonic atmosphere battered their minds ruthlessly to unconsciousness.

  Then they were hurled into the awesome calm of a funnel of burning, sand-filled heat and fell toward the surface, crippled and impotent.

  Painridden, F'nor had only one thought as his senses failed him. The Weyr! The Weyr must be warned!

  Grall returned to Brekke, crying piteously, burrowing into Brekke's arm. She was trembling with fear but her thoughts made such chaotic nonsense that Brekke was unable to isolate the cause of her terror.

  She stroked and soothed the little queen, tempting her with morsels of meat to no effect. The little lizard refused to be quieted. Then Berd caught Grall's anxiety and when Brekke scolded him, Grall's excitement and anguish intensified.

  Suddenly Mirrim's two greens came swooping into the weyr, twittering and fluttering, also affected by the irrational behavior of the little queen. Mirrim came running in then, escorted by her bronze, bugling and fanning his gossamer wings into a blur.

  "Whatever is the matter? Are you all right, Brekke?"

  "I'm perfectly all right," Brekke assured her, pushing away the hand Mirrim extended to her forehead. "They're just excited that's all. It's the middle of the night. Go back to bed."

  "Just excited?" Mirrim pursed her lips the way Lessa did when she knew someone was evading her. "Where's Canth? Why ever did they leave you alone?"

  "Mirrim!" Brekke's tone brought the girl up sharp. She flushed, looking down at her feet, hunching her shoulders in the self-effacing way Brekke deplored. Brekke closed her eyes fighting to be calm although the distress of the five fire lizards was insidious. "Please get me some strong klah."

  Brekke rose and began to dress in riding clothes. The five lizards started to keen now, flitting around the room, swooping in wild dives as if th
ey wanted to escape some unseen danger.

  "Get me some klah," she repeated, because Mirrim stood watching her like a numbwit.

  Her trio of fire lizards had followed her out before Brekke realized her error. They'd probably rouse the lower Caverns with their distress. She called but Mirrim didn't hear her. Cold chills made her fingers awkward.

  Canth wouldn't go if he felt it would endanger F'nor. Canth has sense, Brekke told herself trying to convince herself. He knows what he can and can't do. Canth is the biggest, fastest, strongest brown dragon on Pern. He's almost as large as Mnementh and nearly as smart.

  Brekke heard Ramoth's brassy bugle of alarm just as she received the incredible message from Canth.

  Going to the Red Star? On the coordinates of a cloud? She staggered against the table, her legs trembling. She managed to sit but her hands shook so, she couldn't pour the wine. Using both hands, she got the bottle to her lips and swallowed some that way. It helped.

  She'd somehow not believed they'd see a way to go. Was that what had frightened Grall so?

  Ramoth kept up her alarm and Brekke now heard the other dragons bellowing with worry.

  She fumbled with the last closing of her tunic and forced herself to her feet, to walk to the ledge. The fire lizards kept darting and diving around her, keening wildly; a steady, nerve-jangling double trill of pure terror.

  She halted at the top of the stairs, stunned by the confusion in the crepuscular gloom of the Weyr Bowl. There were dragons on ledges, fanning their wings with agitation. Other beasts were circling around at dangerous speeds. Some had riders, most were flying free. Ramoth and Mnementh were on the Stones, their wings outstretched, their tongues flicking angrily, their eyes bright orange as they bugled to their Weyrmates. Riders and weyrfolk were running back and forth yelling, calling to their beasts, questioning each other for the source of this inexplicable demonstration.

  Brekke futilely clapped her hands to her ears, searching the confusion for a sight of Lessa or F'lar. Suddenly they both appeared at the steps and came running up to her. F'lar reached Brekke first, for Lessa hung back, one hand steadying herself against the wall.

  "Do you know what Canth and F'nor are doing?" the Weyrleader cried. "Every beast in the Weyr is shrieking at the top of voice and mind!" He covered his own ears, glaring furiously at her, expecting an answer.

  Brekke looked toward Lessa, saw the fear and the guilt in the Weyrwoman's eyes.

  "Canth and F'nor are on their way to the Red Star."

  F'lar stiffened and his eyes turned as orange as Mnementh's. He stared at her with a compound of fear and loathing that sent Brekke reeling back. As if her movement released him, F'lar looked toward the bronze dragon roaring stentoriously on the heights.

  His shoulders jerked back and his hands clenched into fists so tight the bones showed yellow through the skin.

  At that instant, every noise ceased in the Weyr as every mind felt the impact of the warning the fire lizards had been trying inchoately to project.

  Turbulence, savage, ruthless, destructive; a pressure inexorable and deadly. Churning masses of slick, sickly gray surfaces that heaved and dipped. Heat as massive as a tidal wave. Fear! Terror! An inarticulate longing!

  A scream was torn from a single throat, a scream like a knife upon raw nerves!

  "Don't leave me alone!" The cry came from cords lacerated by the extreme of anguish; a command, an entreaty that seemed echoed by the black mouths of the weyrs, by dragon minds and human hearts.

  Ramoth sprang aloft. Mnementh was instantly beside her. Then every dragon in the Weyr was a-wing, the fire lizards, too; the air groaned with the effort to support the migration.

  Brekke could not see. Her eyes were filled with blood from vessels burst by the force of her cry. But she knew there was a speck in the sky, tumbling downward with a speed that increased with every length; a plunge as fatal as the one which Canth had tried to stop over the stony heights of the High Reaches range.

  And there was no consciousness in that plummeting speck, no echo, however faint, to her despairing inquiry. The arrow of dragons ascended, great wings pumping. The arrow thickened, once, twice, three times as other dragons arrived, making a broad path in the sky, steadily striving for that falling mote.

  It was as if the dragons became a ramp that received the unconscious body of their Weyrmate, received and braked its fatal momentum with their own bodies, until the last segment of overlapping wings eased the broken-winged ball of the bloody brown dragon to the floor of the Weyr.

  Half-blinded as she was, Brekke was the first person to reach Canth's bleeding body, F'nor still strapped to his burned neck. Her hands found F'nor's throat, her fingers the tendon where his pulse should beat. His flesh was cold and sticky to the touch and ice would be less hard.

  "He isn't breathing," someone cried. "His lips are blue!"

  "He's alive, he's alive," Brekke chanted. There, one faint shallow flutter against her seeking fingers. No, she didn't imagine it. Another.

  "There wasn't any air on the Red Star. The blueness. He suffocated."

  Some half-forgotten memory prompted Brekke to wrench F'nor's jaws apart. She covered his mouth with hers and exhaled deeply into his throat. She blew air into his lungs and sucked it out.

  "That's right, Brekke," someone cried. That may work. Slow and steady! Breathe for yourself or you'll pass out."

  Someone grabbed her painfully around the waist. She clung to F'nor's limp body until she realized that they were both being lifted from the dragon's neck.

  She heard someone talking urgently, encouragingly to Canth.

  "Canth! Stay!"

  The dragon's pain was like a cruel knot in Brekke's skull. She breathed in and out. Out and in. For F'nor, for herself, for Canth. She was conscious as never before of the simple mechanics of breathing; conscious of the muscles of her abdomen expanding and contracting around a column of air which she forced up and out, in and out.

  "Brekke! Brekke!"

  Hard hands pulled at her. She clutched the wher-hide tunic beneath her.

  "Brekke! He's breathing for himself now. Brekke!"

  They forced her away from him. She tried to resist but everything was a bloody blur. She staggered, her hand touching dragon hide.

  "Brekke." The pain-soaked tone was faint, as if from an incalculable distance, but it was Canth. "Brekke?"

  "I am not alone!" And Brekke fainted, mind and body overtaxed by an effort which had saved two lives.

  Spun out by ceaseless violence, the spores fell from the turbulent raw atmosphere of the thawing planet toward Pern, pushed and pulled by the gravitic forces of a triple conjunction of the system's other planets.

  The spores dropped through the atmospheric envelope of Pern. Attenuated by the friction of entry, they fell in a rain of hot filaments on the surface of the planet.

  Dragons rose, destroying them with flaming breath. What Thread eluded the airborne beasts was efficiently seared into harmless motes by ground crews, or burrowed after by sand-worm and fire lizard.

  Except on the eastern slope of a northern mountain plantation of hardwood trees. There men had carefully drawn back from the leading edge of the Fall. They watched, one with intent horror, as the silver rain scorched leaf and fell hissing into the soil. When the leading Edge had passed over the crest of the mountain, the men approached the points of impact cautiously, the nozzles of the flames throwers they carried a half-turn away from spouting flame.

  The still smoldering hole of the nearest Thread entry was prodded with a metal rod. A brown fire lizard darted from the shoulder of one man and, chirping to himself, waddled over to the hole. He poked an inquisitive half-inch of nose into the ground. Then he rose in a dizzying movement and resumed his perch on the specially padded shoulder of his handler and began to preen himself fastidiously.

  His master grinned at the other men.

  "No Thread, F'lar. No Thread, Corman!"

  The Benden Weyrleader returned Asgenar's smile, hooki
ng his thumbs in his broad riding belt.

  "And this is the fourth Fall with no burrows and no protection, Lord Asgenar?"

  The Lord of Lemos Hold nodded, his eyes sparkling. "No burrows on the entire slope." He turned in triumph to the one man who seemed dubious and said, "Can you doubt the evidence of your eyes, Lord Groghe?"

  The ruddy-faced Lord of Fort Hold shook his head slowly.

  "C'mon, man," said the white-haired man with the prominent, hooked nose. "What more proof do you need? You've seen the same thing on lower Keroon, you've seen it in Telgar Valley. Even that idiot Vincent of Nerat Hold has capitulated."

  Groghe of Fort Hold shrugged, indicating a low opinion of Vincent, Lord Holder of Nerat.

  "I just can't put any trust in a handful of squirming insects. Relying on dragons makes sense."

  "But you've seen grubs devour Thread!" F'lar persisted. His patience with the man was wearing thin.

  "It isn't right for a man," and Groghe drew himself up, "to be grateful to grubs!"

  "I don't recall your being over-grateful to Dragonkind either," Asgenar reminded him with pointed malice.

  "I don't trust grubs!" Groghe repeated, jutting his chin out at a belligerent angle. The golden fire lizard on his shoulder crooned softly and rubbed her down-soft head against his cheek. The man's expression softened slightly. Then he recalled himself and glared at F'lar. "Spent my whole life trusting Dragonkind. I'm too old to change. But you're running the planet now. Do as you will. You will anyhow!"

  He stalked away, toward the waiting brown dragon who was Fort Hold's resident messenger. Groghe's fire lizard extended her golden wings, crooning as she balanced herself against his jolting strides.

  Lord Corman of Keroon fingered his large nose and blew it out briskly. He had a disconcerting habit of unblocking his ears that way. "Old fool. He'll use grubs. He'll use them. Just can't get used to the idea that it's no good wanting to go to the Red star and blasting Thread on its home ground. Groghe's a fighter. Doesn't sit well with him to barricade his Hold, as it were, and wait out the siege. He likes to charge into things, straighten them out his way."