Gray day shone on granite, sparking tiny lights like jewels. A dead end?
No, merely a right-angle turn. Saara crawled over something colder than stone. It was an enormous ring of iron, anchored into rock. A chain stretched from it, so heavy she could not budge one of the links which twisted down the tunnel, toward the light.
Sunlight and the smell of cinnamon, sandalwood, cedar: a dry, sharp smell.
The tunnel was not at an end, but here was a cleft in it, a break clean and cruel as though struck by a heavenly ax. One hundred feet away, on the far side of this splash of yellow, the foxhole continued, black and round. But in the middle of the sunlight sprawled the heavy-sighing wearer of the chain.
He was not coiled: not like withies are coiled to make a basket. His metallic length lay in a sort of G-clef pattern, and though in the sun he glinted in a rich array of red, green, and indigo, his color was black.
Black except his head, which was golden horned, his face framed by a whole series of scaly spiked collars, yellow, scarlet, and indigo,
giving him the appearance of a chrysanthemum with a long, bare stem.
He had four legs, no sign of wings, and a crest like little burnished flames which ran from neck to tail tip, some ninety feet in all. His eyes were enormous, gold, slitted like a cat’s, and staring down at Saara from great heights.
The greatest witch in the Italies had seen dragons and wyverns before, and would have recognized many fell beasts on sight, but she had never seen anything like this. She stood stock-still while she framed in her mind what might be the greatest power song of her life. Or the last one.
The creature pulled iron-black lips from teeth the blue-white of skimmed milk. Each of these was the size and shape of a scimitar, and his tongue between them was forked. The noise of forges increased. A movement began at the creature’s tail and traveled up the serpentine length of him, like the flood crest of a river when the dam has gone.
Yards of gold crest vanished, to be replaced by flat, lustrous belly scales. Four long legs curled up, their etiolated, thumbed paws exposing claws the size and shape of cow’s ribs. Last of all the ornate head flipped over and hit the stony ground, until it was gazing madly at Saara, upside down. The eyes were now at her level.
“Bonjour, madame,” he said very correctly. “Comment allez-vous aujourd’hui?”
She blinked. “I don’t speak Langue d’Ouil,” she answered in Italian, wondering if the beast’s purpose was to distract her, and feeling he had certainly succeeded. “I don’t speak any languages but Fennish and Italian.”
“Fennish and Italian!” The dragon (if he could be called a dragon) chuckled. “Many people speak Italian. No one speaks Fennish but a native of the Fenland,” he stated, speaking that tongue. “Therefore I presume you to be an émigrée of the Fens residing now in the Italies. The north Italies, if your accent is any indication.”
Hearing the clear, comfortable sounds of home from this huge bizarrity struck Saara nearly dumb. But her wit returned to her in time to allow her to reply, “Then you, too, must be a native of Fenland. The south, however, I would say by your accent.”
“Lappish is equally familiar to me,” the creature replied, shifting his voice more into the nose. His five-fingered paw scratched belly scales reflectively.
“But it would be ludicrous to attempt to convince you that I come from the land of ice and snow. I am merely an exception to the rule I myself stated.” Amber eyes hooded themselves complacently, and then the dragon rotated again, in the same direction, so that his jaw rested on the ground twenty feet from Saara’s feet, while his body rested quite comfortably with a half twist in it.
“There ARE dragons in the north,” stated Saara, taking the chance on his species.
Window-sized nostrils dilated and the creature emitted a huge snort. The dry, woody smell thickened. “Dragons, perhaps, but not such as I,” he stated, pique shading his voice. Suddenly the beast flipped to his feet and his neck arced above her, coiling like black smoke in the air (which had grown very hot). “Do I have a barrel like an ox’s, wings like a plucked chicken’s, breath like rotten eggs, and incrustations both dorsal and ventral?
“Furthermore, have I attacked you with inhospitable fury on the suspicion that you come to rob me of some possession—not that I have any, mind you?”
With a song of seven words Saara created a forty-foot wall of blue ice between the dragon and herself. It was an arduous spell, though quickly done, and her heart was left pounding.
The dragon watched, then casually he leaned over the wall and laced his fingers together. “Really, now, madam. Can you claim that any of the graceless creatures who inhabit their charred holes on the steppes have more than the slightest resemblance… I do not mean to sound egotistical, but I am no more like your European dragons than you are like the Emperor’s monkey!”
That glittering head full of glittering teeth was now only a few feet from Saara’s. She refused to be intimidated by it, and felt some display on her part was called for. “Get back,” she snapped, raising a very small hand beneath the dragon’s nose. “Get back, animal, or I’ll freeze you, crop and craw, into black ice.” The sunlight which poured through the cleft rocks trembled and shivered, as hot air met the magic of the north.
The amber eyes grew impossibly wide, protruding like those of a lapdog. “Ugh! Magic,” he snorted, turning his head away as though he smelled something foul. The dragon retreated five steps, and then the sight of Saara’s set face set him into peals of echoing laughter. Rocks tumbled in the distance.
“Is it my breath, little lady? Or is it the length of my eyeteeth that has swept your manners away like this? I assure you that had I any intention of doing you harm, I would not have waited to address you first.”
As the creature backed, so did Saara, from sunlight into obscurity, until she stood at the turn in the passage wall. Suddenly she was around it and running in the darkness.
“Wait,” came a bellow behind her. The walls vibrated. Then there was a sharper crashing, as forty feet of ice smashed like glass, followed by the sound of heavy chain being flung about.
“Wait, madam,” the dragon called from behind her in the tunnel. “You take my witticism too much to heart!” Then the air rang and crashed as though an iron tower had fallen at Saara’s feet. The dragon had reached the end of his chain.
But his voice rose once more. “I really WOULD like to speak with someone. I am a long way from home, and it has been years…” he said, before the echoes died away.
Ahead was a speck of light. Gaspare was waiting there for her with Festilligambe, if the racket hadn’t spooked the horse. Or Gaspare.
But Saara’s bare feet slowed, and then stopped. She was half-embarrassed to have run from a creature that had offered no direct threat.
And then the way the beast had spoken. “… it has been years…”
Saara was not without sensibilities.
But dragons were sly, and talking dragons slyest of all. And THIS beast was in the service of the Liar himself, wasn’t it? It was chained there, at least.
Chained. The Lapps chained neither their deer nor their dogs. Saara thought all chains despicable. She turned her face around. “Dragon,” she called.
The reply was immediate. “Yes! I’m here.” Then he added, “Of course I’m here; what a silly thing for me to say.”
Was there a touch of bitterness in his words, of self-pity perhaps? But the Liar dealt in bitterness and self-pity quite frequently.
“Who chained you, dragon?” Saara shouted down the passage.
She heard a gusty, whistling sigh. “It was a nasty fellow with the very inappropriate name of Morning Star.” Once again the creature seemed to have regained his composure, as well as his natural loquacity, for he added, “You see, madam, I was seeking after a book: a book which received high praise in certain circles. It is called La Commedia Divina, and it was written by an Italian. Perhaps you …”
“Never heard of it,�
�� replied Saara. “But then, I can’t read.”
“Ah. Well. I heard rumor of it as far away as Hunan Province, where news of events outside of Cathay hardly ever reaches. By report it contained great wisdom and excellent poetry, and… Well, I collect wisdom, you see…”
“You collect wisdom?” Saara murmured, but decided not to interrupt. The dragon continued.
“The book was divided into three sections, I believe. The first being Il Inferno; the second, Il Purgatorio; and the third, Il Paradisio.” Another sigh-gale wrung through the darkness.
“I think I would have done better to seek after the third section first.”
“No doubt.” Saara had no idea what the creature was talking about She wondered if dragons, too, grew senile.
“Why don’t you break the chain?” she asked shortly.
There was a rustle. “My dear lady! I have been stuck in this inelegant place for a good number of years now. Don’t you think I would have, if I could? It has some sort of disgusting…” the voice faded with embarrassment “… spell on it.”
Saara lowered herself onto the smooth floor of the tunnel, facing toward the great voice and the smell of sandalwood. She sat, thought some, and picked her toenails. “It’s not so big a chain,” she ventured. “And I have some ability with spells. I think I could break it, if I spent a little time at it.”
The rustling stopped. “Well, madam.” She heard a self-conscious rustling.
“I swear to you it will not damage my pride at all to have you succeed where I have failed. Please try.”
“What will you do if I let you go free?”
This time the silence was longer. “What will I do? Almost anything you should ask. Anything that does not conflict with any previous oath or commitment, of course.”
The witch’s feet were sore from too much stumbling against rock. She squeezed them as she considered.
Time had taught Saara to have little trust in elementals, let alone monsters. But she had to get by the creature.
And she was definitely not without sensibilities.
“How many years have you been here, again?”
He groaned. “Twenty-two.”
“And what have you been eating or drinking in that time?”
“There is a small stream in the passage beyond. As for food—the last thing that passed my lips was a pig, roasted Hunan-style.”
“Twenty years without eating?” There was incredulity in her voice. “How is it you are still alive?”
The beast gave a huge metallic shrug. “I am not a frantic mammal, you must understand. And I sleep a lot.
“But I tell you, madam, that twenty years without conversation has been a harder trial.”
Saara rocked back and forth thoughtfully. “Well, I’m not one for long conversations at the best of times, dragon, and I don’t know whether I believe a word you’re saying.”
A hollow thump through the darkness indicated it had dropped its long chin on the ground. “Why should you? The world is full of illusion,” it agreed somberly.
Saara approached the creature, stepping from darkness into half-light. It lay extended on its side and held one paw—hand, really, with four spidery fingers and a thumb—in the other, flexing it gingerly. From a dull iron manacle on its wrist stretched the heavy chain.
“One would think,” it said to Saara waspishly, “that twenty years would teach me the limits of this thing.”
“One would think,” she agreed. The dragon massaged its wrist.
Saara, standing beside a circlet of iron as large as a hip bath, cleared her throat. “How do I know, dragon, that you won’t turn around and eat me as soon as I release you?”
The gold eyes shone with more light than the reflected sun on the stone of the passage seemed to allow. They regarded her with a shade of amusement. “You don’t, of course. Just as I have no security that you won’t get it into your head to freeze me into a lump of ice. But if words carry any weight with your people (and I seem to remember they do), then it is enough that I say I will not. What is more, I tell you I have not eaten a human creature for approximately five hundred years.”
Saara found this statement very interesting, as possibly the dragon intended that she would. It implied that the beast was more than five hundred, of course. (Unless it was a way of saying it had never eaten a human, but then why not just say so?) It also implied some sort of monumental change in the dragon’s habit. It positively invited questions.
But Saara refused to ask them. “But perhaps you haven’t been this hungry for five hundred years.”
The great beast yawned. “I was hungrier ten years ago then I am now. But let’s adopt a pleasanter subject, shall we?
“Such as yourself, madam: What necessity brings you to this dreadful, boring place, and how might I be of use to you?”
Saara sat on a chain link. “You be of use to me? I thought it was the other way around.”
The dragon’s glorious face was turned to Saara, and between the light of his eyes and the heat of his breath, it was like sitting under a desert sun. “Nothing runs in one direction only except water, and that (I’m told) only in its lesser beds.
“I am the Black Dragon,” the creature announced, with a strange sort of dignity. “And though you see me at my disadvantage, I assure you that there is little bora of earth which is older, or which is my equal in strength.” And with that the dragon turned its head to the darkness and gave a short, hollow laugh.
Saara raised one eyebrow. “Well, dragon, I am fairly old and fairly strong and not tied up at all.” And then, with a sudden impulse of trust, she added, “And I’m on my way to the Liar’s Hall of Four Windows, to find and rescue the Chief of Eagles, who has been imprisoned by the wicked one.”
The dragon started upright. Great writhing coils slammed against the roof of the passage. Its jaw hung open.
The creature hissed like a boiler giving way. “You are what?”
Saara repeated, condensing a long story as best she could. As she spoke the light of the dragon’s eyes flickered, and amber rays moved like fish over the walls of stone. The beast itself did not move a muscle.
But when she was finished, it spoke. “This Chief of Eagles, then, is the same the Hebrews call Rafayl, and the Latins Raphael? He is a teacher?”
“Of music,” stipulated Saara.
The dragon yawned. “There is only one Teaching.
“I have heard of this person, Raphael.”
Then the dragon drummed his fingers against the stone floor, making thunder. He looked neither at Saara nor at anything else in the long gray tunnel, and the light of his eyes faded. At last he said, very calmly, “To hoard or conceal the Teaching is a great crime. Perhaps the greatest.”
“To keep a person’s spirit imprisoned is greater,” she said boldly.
“One and the same.”
“Then you will let us go by?”
The long head drew very close to Saara’s and the yellow eyes kindled again. “Free me.”
Saara felt the beast’s will beating down on hers, but there was no magic in it, nor any compulsion she could not resist. Her desire to break the dragon’s chain was her own, sprung of pity and nursed by her hatred for confinement of all sorts. She spared one moment’s thought to Gaspare, helpless and unaware at the cavern’s mouth, and then she put her hands to the cold iron.
But Saara had underestimated the Piedmontese. Gaspare was at that moment inching forward on his hands and knees through what was to him unbroken blackness, cursing as he went. He had heard voices, and he had heard hissing, and he had felt shocks in the earth itself.
He was coming after Saara.
“Too late,” muttered the youth as he went. “Too little and too late, may San Gabriele boot me in the behind, but I am coming. No man, woman, or devil may call Gaspare the Lutenist a coward.”
That no one save Gaspare the Lutenist had called Gaspare a coward did not occur to the redhead. He comforted himself with the knowledge that he ha
d shown greater bravery than that of the horse, which had bolted at the first ominous crash from within. Carrying all belongings with it. All save the lute, of course, which Gaspare now bore slung under his belly. It banged his hipbone lightly with every jar.
No doubt it was the Devil himself ahead, ensconced amid the quenchless coals. No doubt Saara was long since reduced to a cinder. No doubt Gaspare’s own defiance would last as long as it took for a moth to char itself in a candle.
Too little and too late.
Gaspare thought to himself of what it meant to live, and to die. Slowly he stood. He unwrapped his instrument. He walked forward, playing as he went. It was what Delstrego would have done.
From time to time he bounced off the passage walls.
The dragon froze at the sound. He (Saara had ascertained it was a he) lifted his ornamented head. “What IS that?” “That is Gaspare,” replied the witch calmly. “Playing the lute.”
He rumbled deep in his long throat. “I have never heard the like.” Saara sighed. “He is very progressive.”
Gaspare thought his eyes were acting up when the faint amber swirls started to play over the passage walls. But he put one hand out and what appeared to be the wall WAS the wall, so he blinked and walked on.
In the center of the yellow light was a shadow, a shadow that grew and came on, with a vague metallic rustling. The shadow grew to be that of the Lady Saara, surrounded by a halo of gold light.
Lute strings faded to silence. “My lady,” whispered Gaspare. “Are you in heaven or hell?”
At that moment the halo lifted above the woman, and Gaspare looked up into a shining, awful face.
“Christ!” he gasped, and then his tongue swelled to fill his mouth. His right hand slipped over his open strings with gentle dissonance.
Chapter 6
The street hawkers, heard faintly in the distance, called their wares in two languages, or three, if the patois of the Muwalladun was considered. All the flies of Granada droned, and the Sierra Nevada made a jagged rip in the horizon. Hakiim led his customer along a street baked hard as tiles by the sun.
The Damiano Series Page 64