'In a way,' Daj told me. 'Lord Morjin said not all his chains are iron.'
'Of what be this particular chain made?' Ymiru asked him.
Daj looked up at Ymiru in obvious wonder at his great height; it seemed that he was trying to peer beneath Ymiru's cowled robe and get a better look at him.
'I heard Lord Morjin tell a priest something about the dragon,' Daj explained. 'He said that long ago, he brought the dragons here from somewhere else.'
'From where?' Kane asked him sharply.
'I don't know - somewhere.'
'You said dragons. How many were there?'
'Two of them, I think. A dragon king and his queen. But Lord Morjin poisoned the king; he took the eggs from the queen. A dragon queen lays only a single clutch of eggs, you know.'
He paused to let Liljana pick a few lice from his head before continuing. But I had already guessed what he would say.
'Lord Morjin keeps the eggs in his chambers,' he told us. 'They won't hatch if they're kept cold. And that's why the dragon won't touch Lord Morjin. Because if she does, she knows the eggs will be destroyed.'
Morjin, I suddenly knew, was keeping the dragon bound for his final war of conquest of the world.
Master Juwain rubbed his head as he smiled at Daj. He said, 'I see, I see. But you said that Morjin took the eggs long ago. They can't still be viable?'
'What does that mean?'
'Still alive and capable of hatching.'
'Oh, well, dragons live forever - like Lord Morjin,' he said. 'And so do their eggs.'
It was strange to think that the terrible, fire-spewing creature above us could so love her eggs that she was held in thrall by fear of their being destroyed. And what Daj told us next was stranger still.
'The dragon is making a pyramid of the skulls of all the men she's killed,' he said.
'Because of Lord Morjin, she hates all men. But she hates Lord Morjin most of all.
She's saving the very top place on the pyramid for his skull.'
We all fell quiet for a moment as we listened to the dragon thundering about the chamber above us. And then Master Juwain asked Daj, 'But how could you possibly know that?'
'Because I heard the dragon say this.'
'The dragon talks to you?'
'Not with words, not like you do,' Daj said. He pressed his finger into his ratty hair above his ear. 'But I heard her inside here.'
'Are you a mindspeaker then?'
'What's that?'
Master Juwain looked at Liljana, who continued stroking Daj's hair as she tried to explain something about her powers that her blue gelstei quickened and magnified.
'I don't know anything about that,' Daj said. 'The only one I ever heard speak that way was the dragon.'
'So it is with dragons,' Kane suddenly growled out. 'It's said that they have this power.'
I looked at him in amazement and asked, 'But what do you know about dragons?'
'Very little, I think. It's said that they're stronger in their minds than men and darker in their hearts.'
'But where did you hear that?' Master Juwain asked him. 'It's known that the ancient accounts of this matter were fabricated.'
Kane pointed up the steps and said to him, 'Was this beast fabricated then? She came from somewhere, as the boy said.'
'But where?' I asked.
Kane's eyes were hot pools as he looked me. 'It's said that dragons live on the world of Charoth and nowhere else.'
'But Charoth is a dark world, isn't it?'
'That it is,' Kane said. 'Morjin must have opened a gateway to it. So, he must be very close to opening a gate to Damoom and freeing the Dark One himself.'
I risked another peek above the top of the stairs. It seemed more important than ever that we get past the dragon and complete our quest.
'What do you see, Val?' Maram called to me.
The dragon, it seemed, had given up staring through the doorway into the corridor above the stairs. But I sensed that she was still waiting for us in the hall. And so, as lightly as I could, I stole along the corridor until I came to the doorway. I looked out of it to see the dragon coiled around her skull pyramid as if guarding a treasure. Her golden eyes were lit up and staring at the doorway; I thought that she was daring us to make a dash across the hall for the great portal that opened upon the abandoned streets of Argattha's first level.
'She's guarding the portal,' I said when I returned to the others. I looked down into the stairwell at Daj. 'Is there any other way out of the hall?'
'Only these stairs,' he told us.
'What will we find beyond the portal?'
'Well, there's a big passage to a street, and then a lot of streets, like a maze almost -
they lead mostly east toward the old gates in the city. They're all closed now, so the dragon can't escape.'
'But you said that there is a way up to the second level?'
'Yes, that's right - there are some stairs about a mile from here. But they're too narrow for the dragon to use.'
'Could you find these stairs again?'
'I think so,' he said.
Maram looked at me in horror of what he knew I was planning. He said, 'You're not thinking of just running for these stairs, are you?'
'Not just running,' I said.
'But shouldn't we wait for the dragon to leave? Or, ah, to go away?'
Upon questioning Daj further, we determined that the dragon never slept. And as for waiting, it seemed, the dragon could wait much longer than we. We had very little food, less water and no time.
'The dragon,' Liljana unexpectedly announced, 'is waiting for some thing. I think the Red Priests are due to bring another here. What will they think when they find the boy gone and his shackles unlocked?'
'But how do you know that?' Kane asked her.
'I know,' she said, tapping her blue stone against her head, 'because the dragon is in my mind.'
'So,' Kane murmured as rubbed his bandaged ear.
Liljana's face suddenly contorted as she shook her head violently back and forth.
And she gasped out, 'She's trying ... to make a ghul of me!'
Kane waited for her to regain control of herself and then snarled out, 'So, perhaps you should try to go into her mind. And make a ghul of her.'
This suggested an elaboration on the desperate plan that I was considering: We would all rush out into the hall And then, while Liljana used her blue gelstei to engage the dragon's mind. Atara would shoot arrows into her eyes. This would allow me to steal in close and try once more to cut through the dragon's iron hide.
Master Juwain, his green crystal in hand, looked at me and said, 'I shouldn't be telling you how to kill anything, not even a dragon. But the place in the chest that you stabbed - that's not where her heart is, I'm sure. If my stone tells true, you'll find it beating three feet farther down, just where the scales darken, closer to the curve of her belly.'
Ymiru had his purple gelstei in hand as he listened to Master Juwain tell us this, and he slowly nodded his great head.
But Maram remained horrified by what we were about to do. He shot me a quick look and said, 'But what of the dragon's fire? Are you so eager to he burnt again?'
'What of your own fire?' I countered, looking at Maram's red crystal.
'Ah, what of it? There's no sun in this accursed city to light it.'
'But didn't you once tell me that you thought the firestone might be able to hold the sun's light and not just focus it?'
'Ah, perhaps, one bolt of flame, no more - if only I could find it.'
'Find it, then,' I said, smiling at him. Kane, standing below me on the stairs, caught my glance and said, 'This red jelly that bursts into flame - it's very much like the relb, eh?' I remembered the story of Morjin, posing as Kadar the Wise, painting the Long Wall with relb and watching as the rising sun set it aflame and melted a breach in the stone for Tulumar's armies to ravage Alonia. 'And the relb,' Kane went on, gripping his black stone, 'was a forerunner of the firestone
s, was it not?'
'That it was,' I said, smiling at him as well. The brightness of his black eyes gave me hope that we really might win the coming battle.
Atara, holding her gelstei in her hands, looked up from her stone as her haunted eyes found mine. Her face was white as she said, 'I see one terrible chance, Val.' I smiled at her, too, although it tore my heart open to do so. And said, 'Then one chance will have to be enough.'
I turned to take council with the others. And there, in the dim, curving confines of the stairwell, smelling of sweat and fear and the burning reek of relb, we decided that if we weren't to abandon the quest, we would have to fight the dragon.
'But what about the boy?' Maram asked, looking at Daj. 'We can't take him with us, can we?'
Of course we couldn't. But we couldn't not take him, either. I might lead him back through the labyrinth to the cave we had opened into the mountain. But what then?
Should he simply wait there for our return? And what if we didn't return? Then he would have to flee into the valley beyond Skartaru, where he would simply be captured all over again -either that or wander about Sakai facing starvation and death.
In the end, it was Daj who decided the question for us. Despite his words to Maram earlier, he was still only a boy. He gripped onto Liljana's tunic, pressing himself into her soft body. Then he said, 'Don't leave me here!'
Either we left him here, I thought, or we must abandon the quest to take him back to our homelands. Or else we must take him with us to the upper levels of Argattha.
'Please,' he pleaded, 'let me go with you!'
I sensed that his fear of Morjin and reentering the inhabited parts of the city was less than his dread of being left alone. There was terrible risk for him, it seemed, no matter what path we chose.
Unless, I thought, we do flee back to Mesh.
But this, I knew, we couldn't do, not even to save this poor child. How many more children, I wondered, would Morjin enslave and murder if he weren't defeated? And how would anyone ever accomplish this miracle so long as the Lightstone remained in Argattha?
'His fate is tied to ours now,' Atara said to me softly. 'The moment you turned the key in the lock, it was so.'
'Have you seen this?' I asked her.
'Yes, Val,' she said, squeezing her crystal sphere, 'I have.'
'All right,' I said, bowing my head to Daj, 'you can come with us, then. But you must be brave, as we know you can be. Very, very brave.'
And with that, I turned to lead the way into the corridor. Very quietly, we walked in file through it to the doorway of the hall. As I had feared, the dragon remained coiled around her skulls, watching us - watching us break into a run as we made for the portal across the hall. She sprang up from the skulls with a frightening speed. She bounded straight toward us, clearly intending to cut us off. Her great hind claws tore at the floor as she thundered closer. So quick were her bunching, explosive motions that I knew we had no hope of outrunning her.
Her first fire fell upon my shield just as Ymiru broke from our formation to grab up a great slab of fallen rock. He used this as a shield of his own, holding the immense weight in front of him in order to work in close to the dragon. The dragon turned her fire upon him. The flaming relb blasted against the slab and began burning the stone into lava. And then Atara pulled back the string of her bow and loosed an arrow at the dragon's eye.
As before, however, she sensed her intention just as the bowstring twanged. She turned her head at the last instant, and the arrow skittered off her iron scales. I knew that she was ready to leap at us, to rend us with her great teeth and claws, to stomp us into a bloody pulp. But just then Liljana, holding her blue whale against her head, managed to engage the dragon's mind. I felt the light of her golden eyes burning into Liljana as she froze in her tracks.
And in that moment, I dashed forward. So did Ymiru, who cast down his rock shield. I ran straight in beneath the dragon's long, twisting neck, where her huge chest gave way to her belly. I saw the place on the curve of her heaving body where the scales darkened, even as Master Juwain had said. And there I thrust my sword.
This time it penetrated to a distance of perhaps two inches. The dragon roared out her pain and wrath, and kicked her claws into my shield, sending me flying. I hit the floor backward; the force of the fall bruised my back and knocked the breath from me. I lay there gasping for air, watching in puzzlement and horror as Ymiru worked in still closer to the dragon with his gelstei in hand.
'Ymiru - what are you doing?' Kane called to him.
As Atara fired off another arrow, to no effect, Ymiru brought his flaring purple crystal up to the place on the dragon's belly where I had stabbed her. The scale there seemed to darken to a pitted, reddish black. And then Liljana, still staring at the dragon, cried out in pain. I could almost feel her connection with the dragon's mind break like snapped wood. The dragon, finally and completely unbound, quickly turned about in a snarling, spitting rage and bit out at Ymiru. Her jaws closed about Ymiru's arm, and she tore it clean off, swallowing it whole. A fount of blood sprayed the air. Ymiru cried out as he gripped his gelstei in his remaining hand and tried to move backward, away from the dragon. But the dragon was too quick and Ymiru was in too much pain. Again the dragon's jaws opened. I was sure that she was about to rend Ymiru into meat or burn him. And then Atara shot off still another arrow.
This time it drove straight into the dragon's mouth. But not quite straight enough: the shaft stuck out from between two of the dragon's teeth like a long, feathered toothpick. The dragon, turning her attention from the quickly retreating Ymiru, shook her head furiously in futile effort to dislodge it. Blood as red as Ymiru's leaked from her wounded gums. And she gazed hatefully at Atara as she opened her jaws again to spit fire at her.
'Atara!' I cried as I sprang to my feet. 'Atara!'
I raced across the few feet separating us just in time to take the full blast of the dragon's fury upon my shield. It was a great gout of flaming relb that the dragon spewed at me. It melted huge holes in the steel of the shield and burned straight through to the leather straps covering my forearm. I had to take it off and cast it from me lest I lose an arm as had Ymiru. Once again - and for the last time - my father's shield had saved my life.
But now there was nothing except air between me and the dragon. She glared at me with her ancient glowing eyes in her promise to burn me. I had hoped that Kane might keep me from this fate. All this time, he had stood with his black gelstei in hand trying in vain to steal the dragon's fire. And so, to my astonishment, it was Maram who saved me - and Daj. Quick as a bounding rat, the agile boy broke from behind Liljana and dashed across the room. He scooped up a large stone and hurled it at the pyramid of skulls, knocking a couple of them from the top. This drew the dragon's attention and all her wrath toward him. And in that moment, Maram moved.
He suddenly stood away from the others and pointed his firestone at the dragon. A tremendous blast of flame, like a lightning bolt, leaped out from the crystal even as Maram let out a great cry of agony. I saw the firestone crack in his seared hands.
And the flame drove straight into the dragon's neck, wounding her terribly. She let out a great roar of anguish. In a few quick bounds, she sprang toward the part of the room where Daj had been chained. There she backed into the corner, roaring and stinking of burnt blood, dropping her huge head low to the floor as she shook and glowered and waited for me.
'Val, no!' Atara said, laying her hand upon my shoulder as I started forward. 'She'll burn you!'
I shook off her hand, wondering how I could get at the dragon's belly, now pressed down against the hall's hard floor. The dragon, I sensed, was shocked and very weak.
'I've seen you dead here!' she said to me.
She grasped my hand and pulled at it even as Kane bellowed out, 'Run, damn it! All of you run for the portal!'
At the opposite end of the room, Daj heaved a last stone into the stack of skulls, shattering one of them. And then he bolted f
or the portal. So did Atara, Kane, Maram and I. Liljana and Master Juwain, who had just finished wrapping a cord around Ymiru's severed arm, followed quickly after us.
We raced through it and out into a corridor leading to a dimly lit street. This great tunnel - fifty feet wide and thirty feet high – opened through the black rock ahead of us. Once, perhaps, there had been stalls here selling food and water, silks and jewels. But now it was empty save for a few broken rocks, dead rats and heaps of steaming dragon dung. We made our way east past the rotted-out doorways of ancient rooms and apartments. Smaller streets, every sixty yards or so, gave out onto what I took to be one of this level's great boulevards. Just after the place where it bent sharply toward the north, Daj led us to the left onto one of these side streets. We hurried as quickly as we could, but Ymiru could not run very fast missing one arm and clutching his great war club in his remaining hand.
'Here,' Master Juwain said, calling for a halt. He gathered us up close to a dark doorway in the side of the street. 'Ymiru. please let me see your arm.'
Master Juwain pulled aside Ymiru's robe to look at his wounded arm, bitten off at the elbow. The cord tied above it had stopped the spurting, but a good deal of blood still leaked from the raw, red stump. Master Juwain brought out his emerald crystal then. He summoned from it a bright green fire that cauterized the wound without burning and set the exposed and ragged flesh to healing. The sweet flame filled Ymiru like an elixir and took away his pain and shock. This gave Maram hope that someday he might be whole again.
'The arm will grow back, won't it?' Maram asked.
'No, I'm afraid not,' Master Juwain said. 'The varistei hasn't that power.'
As Kane rubbed the bandage over his missing ear, Ymiru looked at him sadly as if to find confirmation of his gloomy view of the world. But he had no pity for himself. He looked down as Master Juwain bandaged the stump and arranged the torn robe over it. Then he said, 'The dragon took my arm from me, but at least he didn't take this.'
He opened his other hand to show us his purple gelstei. 'And if the dragon comes for us again, this might prove her death.'
The Lightstone Page 94