A Guile of Dragons

by James Enge

  The Pilgrims’ Way to Haukrull, which he had intended to take, was plainly impassable now. He took the next right-hand turn—south and downward. This led him closer to Saijok’s den, which he had hoped to avoid. But he had never really believed he would be able to avoid it.

  When he felt he could go no farther that day he sat down in the tunnel and ate some bread, moistened by mouthfuls of water from his bottle. He unbelted the sword he had brought with him and laid it near at hand. Then he lay down by the wall, using the Ambrosian shield as a pillow, and went to sleep.

  Awaking some hours later, he continued his journey. His second day in the Runhaiar resembled the first. Whenever he tried to turn east he was blocked by fallen stone. It was as if the tunnels leading toward Haukrull had been deliberately destroyed. The second night he ate less but slept longer—or so it seemed. He awoke to find the air dense and warm.

  He felt he was somewhere near the Drowned Arches, but he was unsure. He went into a tunnel entrance to read the signs there. But as he lay his hands on the wall, he was overcome by a sense of blindness and a choking feeling of being closed in, trapped. The patterns of heat and cool were gone; the whole wall was warm as blood, blindingly warm.

  Desperation came over him. He returned to his pack and struck a light. Holding the wavering flame over his head, he felt himself relax. He also felt the foolishness of his action, as he saw one stone-gray tunnel at a junction with another; both began and ended in darkness. The light showed him nothing but himself, and what he had brought with him. For a moment he had thought—he didn’t know what he had thought. He put out the light and repacked his firebox, thinking calmly.

  His food would not last more than a few days; he had not anticipated a long journey. He had to acknowledge the possibility that he might never find an eastward tunnel; they might all have been destroyed . . . so that travellers would have to take the unprotected route overland, of course. That, perhaps, was why the unicorn had warned him against entering here—if that was what it had done.

  Morlock shook his head. The air was warm and heavy, but not totally motionless. Somewhere ahead of him was the exit he sought. But if he did not find it in another day’s walk he would turn back and try the overland crossing.

  He strapped the pack across his shoulders, slung the shield atop it, then stood up and walked on.

  In the dark midday, he stumbled on a dragon’s tail. It lay across the exit from a tunnel. As Morlock sprawled on the rocky ground, he saw the darkness was merely a red dimness in this open cavern between tunnels. The dragon’s form was clearly visible, outlined in red light. He heard sounds of breathing in the gigantic echoing chamber.

  Had he caught the dragon asleep? Rising slowly to his feet, he drew his sword and slipped the Ambrosian shield onto his left arm. He advanced stealthily along the side of the dragon. But he had not taken many steps before he saw that the dragon was not sleeping; it was dead. Its snakelike sides were breached and the body gutted. The dim red light and the sounds of breathing were coming from farther away in the cave. He turned now toward them.

  Along the walls of the great cavern he found a double row of creatures standing, waist-deep, in the stone floor, for all the world like a rows of carrots waiting to be pulled. They were gray in color, with heavy platelike scales. Their common form was manlike, except for the blunt animal snouts that blotted out what would have been their faces. Their eyes were bright as blood, and when their mouths opened smoke and flame issued lazily into the echoing air. They moved strangely, with the plantlike undersea motions of sleeping animals. Their size varied, from a hand’s-breadth to two or three feet in height, the tallest ones being in the middle with the shortest on either end of the parallel rows.

  They were smaller, still-living images of the dead creature he had found floating in Saijok Mahr’s subterranean pool. There was something else familiar in them, too. . . . They were greenish gray; the forms were sharp and jagged, but the rows they formed were regular. Like a saw-edge. Saw-toothed.

  Teeth.

  Morlock turned and walked back to the fallen dragon. Even in the dim light it was easy to see that the dragon was toothless. The jaws had crumbled from the extractions, and their collapse gave the dragon’s face—at once wolflike and serpentine—a boneless empty look.

  Now he understood why the dwarves had smashed the teeth of the dragon killed at Southgate. He understood, too, what the rebel master Saijok Mahr must have done to get the creature Morlock remembered, the creature floating dead in Saijok’s subterranean pool. The dragon had pulled one of his own teeth so that it would grow into a mandrake . . . perhaps to do work that needed hands. (Morlock thought of the carven pillars where Saijok’s den opened up in Haukrull valley.) Then Saijok had killed it. If the sowing of teeth was the way dragons gave birth to their young (the words of the Dead Cor recurred to him: “they gave birth only in death”) Saijok’s act showed signs of an ultimate unsparing ruthlessness.

  Staring down at the fallen dragon, he recognized it. This was not Saijok Mahr: the scales gleamed gold in the red light, not greenish black. The Triple Collar was gone and the toothless face was distorted, but Morlock guessed this was Vild Kharum. Saijok had at last claimed his victory, then, and had gone out into Haukrull to establish his mastery over the guile of masters.

  Morlock wondered what action the guile would take now, since all questions of leadership were finally resolved. He watched the red-gold gleams of light on the dead dragon’s broken wings. In his mind each separate gleam took the form of a dragon settling in fire into one of the thousand valleys of the north. By the time winter ended they would be prepared to invade the southern holds. Who or what would stop them? There was no hope; the thing was ended. He had seen the future, growing like a patch of mushrooms in the dark under the mountains.

  In the release that came with despair he gained new knowledge. He saw the chain of events he had participated in, now that they had come to an end, as an outsider. He saw, at last, the essential pattern. As Saijok had meant him to carry the challenge to Vild, so he must also have let Earno and Old Father Tyr pass. In Haukrull, they had either defeated Vild or been defeated by him—or their combat, perhaps, had been interrupted. In any case, at the suitable moment, Saijok Mahr intervened, defeated Vild (if he was not already slain), and drew him underground to reap the spoils of victory. Even as Morlock mourned for Tyr a part of his mind frankly admired Saijok’s stratagem: it had the accidental irregular elegance of a candle flame; it was the opposite of Earno’s obsessive and useless insistence on a fruitless course of action.

  The guile might be far from here. They might even have moved their place of assembly from Haukrull. If that was so, Morlock was perhaps the safest person in the north, in this dark stone womb under the mountains. Yet he had come here seeking vengeance or death in fine epic fashion. . . . The irony sickened him. He felt as if he could not move, as if he were turned to stone. All he saw and heard made as little impression on him as if he had been stone. Standing there he was only conscious of the shudder of the dead stone heart of the mountains.

  The light came then, and the noise, like the fall of a red thunderbolt. Morlock saw his own shadow, outlined in bright red light, crooked on the face of the dead dragon. Then the dimness returned, amid the echoes of the roar, and Morlock knew the master dragon had not yet departed to plunder the north. The stone floor shook as Saijok Mahr leapt toward him.

  Morlock spun about, dark meditations evaporating in the moment of action. He raised the sword he still carried in his hand. He saw the dragon pause, stretch out its lizardlike neck and inhale. Morlock held the shield of Ambrose in front of his face and ran forward with a defiant shout as the dragon expelled a fiery breath.

  The force of the breath was not itself enough to knock him down. But the fire was intensely hot; the agony of its passage, though brief, threw echoes of pain up and down his nerves. Fumes and smoke swept around him, blotting out the bloodred light. On impulse he fell heavily to the ground, then rolled i
nto a crouch beneath the cover of smoke. His clothes were smoldering.

  Almost immediately Morlock saw the glare of Saijok’s fiery eyes sweeping back and forth, looking for the flaming corpse it supposed Morlock to be. They focused quickly on the smoke rising from Morlock’s clothing, rising straight up from the heavy venom-laden fumes. The eyes stabbed forward. Morlock waited for agonizingly long instants until he could actually see the dragon’s hungry yawning jaws through the thinning curtain of smoke. Then he leapt up and drove his sword home into Saijok’s left eye, desperately hoping the dwarf-forged sword was long enough to reach the dragon’s brain.

  A chaos of fire and smoke erupted about him. He was struck away by the dragon’s head and struck spinning in a new direction by one of the dragon’s forelegs as it convulsed in agony.

  But not death-agony. As Morlock finally landed on his side, he saw the dragon shake the sword out of the dark gleaming wreckage of its left eye. Then it began to search the gigantic smoke-filled cavern with its single eye, moving its head in swift birdlike glances.

  Morlock struggled to his feet and shrugged the smoldering pack from his shoulders. The motion did not go unnoticed. The dark dragon’s bright eye fastened on him immediately. Yet Saijok made no other move, standing almost amazed.

  “Ambrosius!” Morlock shouted suddenly. It was explanation, defiance, and battle cry. He raised the black battered shield, with its white device of hawk and thorns. “Ambrose!” he shouted again, then paused. He felt as if he had uttered a blasphemy, or a slander—or a confession.

  Then he realized he stood alone, unarmed, before a vindictive enemy he had terribly (but not mortally) wounded. If he sought vengeance or death . . . he need only stand and wait to die.

  He decided he preferred vengeance. In the instant before the dragon moved, he turned and ran like a thief.

  The dragon was after him before he could take three steps. But his fourth stride hurtled him over the threshold of a tunnel too narrow for the dragon to follow him. When Saijok reached the tunnel entrance a moment later he made the mistake of thrusting his head into it. He realized his mistake before he wasted more time throwing fire down the tunnel. But before he was able to withdraw his snout and reach blindly up the passage Morlock had fled beyond the reach of his claws.

  Morlock heard them clash against the ceiling, walls, and floor of the corridor behind him. Then, without further display, the dragon was gone. Morlock ran on through the absolute darkness that reigns under the mountains. Visions were born in his blind eyes, as if his mind were struggling to blot out the dark with lies. He paid them no heed but ran on. Somewhere ahead, somewhere above, there was light and free air.

  There was a cool draft in the passageway. He kept his face against it, moving upward. This led him on a fairly straight path through the tangling passages. Many of those off to his left seemed to have been ruined; he could tell they were closed by the echoes that rebounded to him as he passed, by the dead pockets of air within their entrances. But mostly he ran without thinking: there was no need for it.

  Cries came from the mouths of various passages as he ran by them, the echoes of the master dragon roaring in pain and rage. Morlock never doubted that the other knew by heart what seemed to be his only route for escape and was hurtling toward the exit by those tunnels that were large enough to let him pass. But there were few such in the Runhaiar, Morlock knew, and those seemed to be carrying his enemy south and downward as Morlock ran north and east and upward. Then for a long time there was silence, except for himself and the sphere of echoes surrounding him in the dark.

  Presently he saw a crooked line of light before him: grayish gold leavening the darkness at the end of the tunnel. He had been running for so long, he found he could not increase his speed. But he did not permit it to lessen as he entered the zone of shadows at the tunnel’s end.

  He jumped through the jagged mouth of the tunnel, and open space and light and cold air swirled about him. He landed on a hillside of gold pieces gleaming with expelled venom. His feet went out from under him and he fell.

  Rising to his feet he knew he must be in the den of the master dragon. Of course: Saijok had moved the hoard from Vild’s seat in the valley to his own cave. Morlock ran a cold eye over the hoard. It was not paltry, but it was nothing to content a dragon. Haukrull was fairly wealthy, as the oldest settlement of Other Ilk in the north. But its accumulated wealth (added to much that must have been stolen in Ranga í Rayal) did not compare with the fame of Thrymhaiam. And Morlock knew that the fame of Thrymhaiam fell short of the facts.

  The thought nagged at him, when he wished to think of nothing. Across the echoing treasure-filled cave was a blindingly bright hole: the gate of the dragon’s den, which he had seen from the outside. To his right, as he faced the gate, was the dark mouth of a vast tunnel, from which a fountain of cool steam was rising. With the steam, troubling echoes rose into the light. They grew slightly louder as he listened. Saijok Mahr was approaching.

  Without willing it, he backed away from the cavernous tunnel. He tripped over something and fell on a pile of jewels, as sharp as humbler stones. He rolled over and saw what had caused him to fall.

  It was a body. It was Tyr’s body. It was not dead. And it was not alone.

  They lay in a ragged row, like a rack of silver spears he saw beyond them in the imperfectly ordered hoard. He knew them all. Beyond Tyr, who wore the gray cape of a thain, was Earno. Next to him was Lernaion, like a gray-etched ebony statue in that place, pregnant with violence. Beyond Lernaion was a member of his faction: Rild of the Third Stone, a vocate from Easthold. Beyond him were more vocates, and a line of thains beyond them. He did not need to lift the lids of any of their eyes to know they were in dragonspell: he could see the blood-bright circles of their enchanted eyes through the thin translucent skin of their eyelids. This was the fate Almeijn had died to escape.

  From the cave behind him, Morlock heard the sudden full-throated roar of Saijok Mahr.

  Plunging into action, Morlock seized Earno and Tyr by their collars and began to haul them toward the bright gate. It stood with its threshold slightly above his line of sight. When he had dragged the two bodies up the glittering slope that led to the gate, he stood still for a moment to catch his breath.

  As he paused, he heard something. He heard it not above the other sounds around him—the rattle of coins falling back down the slope, the repeated roar of the approaching dragon, the sound of his own labored breathing in the venom-laden air—but below these, on the level of the wind that hissed by the gateposts outside. The sound was directionless, dim, irregular in rhythm. He had heard it only once before, but that made it all the more impossible to mistake.

  Beyond the curtain of light, there were dragons breathing.

  Morlock retreated hastily down the slope, drawing the bodies of Tyr and Earno behind him. Of course: when the hoard had been moved to the new master’s den, the guile must have followed it. They were in attendance outside. Plainly they would not hesitate to destroy anyone who stumbled into their midst, attempting to make off with any part of the hoard.

  He wondered whether he should drag the spellbound captives into the tunnel from which he had come. Saijok would not be able to reach them there (though how they would ultimately escape Morlock could not imagine). But he had no sooner thought this when he knew it was impossible. He could hear Saijok approaching, like a storm rising out of the earth. He would be here in moments. Morlock could save two of the captives, perhaps, and himself.

  Lernaion and Earno should be saved, he supposed. But, given this miraculous opportunity, he had no intention of leaving Tyr to die while saving the summoners. The safety of the Wardlands and his loyalty as a Guardian dictated that he sacrifice his ruthen blood, but there were deeper loyalties—and, besides, would the realm really be safer with Earno in charge of its defense? He had been willful and strange, lately. Lernaion, too, had been tested against the dragons and failed. And father Tyr was wise: he knew the enemy from within.


  This thought, bearing the knowledge of the dwarf’s kinship with dragons, threw a shadow of repugnance. Why save any of them? he wondered, looking down at them sleeping like lizards on a sunsweep of gold coins. In that instant, if he could have saved them all by lifting a finger they all would have died, each one. Except Tyr.

  Morlock wondered a little that he still revered his harven father, when he knew every dwarf’s blood was as poisonous as his own. Dwarves too had betrayed, murdered, rebelled. It was odd to look on Eldest Tyr, the authority he had admired all his life, and know him for a rebel, the desperate and crafty leader of an ancient rebellion. No wonder they called it the Longest War! It would never be over.

  As he stood over the singed and torn sleepers, his hands stained with the dragon’s venom and his own blood, his heart ached to be at peace with itself. He hated the shame that burned him, worse than fire, the guilt he suffered that was not his own. He wished he could be free of it, be washed clean of it. But there was nothing in the world that could free him of it: he was who he was. Whether he called himself Ambrosius or syr Theorn he was still Morlock. The guilt was not his, yet somehow he shared the burden.

  But he could rebel. The current of his blood might carry him toward evil, but he could fight it. Then he knew that Tyr was truly his father, as much as Merlin was. As the dwarf had fought to keep faith with a destiny beyond his blood, so Morlock would. He was Morlock Ambrosius: he would deny it no longer. But in his heart he was Morlock syr Theorn, and he swore he would keep faith with everything that meant or could mean. And then he knew what he must do—what he would do.

  He no longer felt inclined to move any of the Guardians, even Tyr, to safety. Had they sought safety for themselves? Besides, there was no time. Saijok Mahr’s angry light was already leavening the cavernous tunnel’s darkness. But he reached down, grabbed the flawed gem, and broke the pendant chain around Tyr’s neck.