The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  Rudy cursed as Che's packs got hung up for the umpteenth time in the thick mazes of blackberry brambles. He pulled the little ax free and began chopping at the thick vines. There was ivy twined with the brambles, and the ax head became entangled as well. Rudy's hands and face were bleeding with scratches by the time he'd unraveled the mess. Turning to go on, he found the trail ahead of him entirely gone.

  "Ingold!" he called out "Ingold, hang on a minute I Where are you?"

  But only the silence of the black trees pressed upon him. Thorn and bramble surrounded him like a net, vicious and impenetrable. He could see no trail, either forward or back.

  "Motherloving trees—INGOLD!" he yelled again. Somewhere in the woods there was a furtive, greedy rustling, but it was not in the direction Ingold had gone, nor anywhere near. Fighting panic, Rudy called on all his powers for a clearing-spell to break him out of what felt like a closing tangle of barbed wire, but the spells on the woods sapped his power like a leech on a vein, and the dark trees whispered in a sound very much like laughter.

  For nearly an hour he called, his voice cracking with strain and terror, sweat running down his face and soaking his clothes. He began to wonder if something had happened to Ingold and the old man was never coming back for him. He remembered the rats. "INGOLD!" he yelled, and this time he could hear the panic edging his voice.

  Gritting his teeth, he repeated the spells of clearing, to open a path, some path, any path. So gripped was he by the suffocating sense of panic that he might have thrown himself at random against the thorns and tried to claw his way out. But a whisper of the leaves behind him sent him swinging around in terror—and a path was there. It was a fairly broad trail, and he thought he could glimpse faint glimmers of sunlight on the leaves far down its winding curves. He wrapped his hand tighter around Che's lead rope…

  … and stopped.

  Sunlight? It's been raining for days.

  Stay put, Ingold had said. It's the oldest trick in the book.

  Rudy stayed put, like a lost child, calling Ingold's name.

  Finally he heard a muffled reply, a hoarse, cracked voice calling, "Rudy?"

  "I'm over here!"

  There was a trampling noise and a great shaking among the dark branches. Rudy had a momentary panic-stricken scenario of some incredible, slavering monster seeking him out by calling with Ingold's voice, but a few minutes later the wizard appeared from a thinning among the trees, his face and hands scratched all over and thorns and twigs lodged in his cloak and hair. He looked white and strained, exhausted by the game of wits with shadows. Without a word, he caught Rudy by the arm, took the ax from the pack, and began methodically hacking a path through the wall of briars. The woods yielded grudgingly, snaring the ax, tearing their clothes, reaching clawed, greedy hands to rip at their faces or snatch at their eyes. Both of them were stumbling with weariness when they finally broke through the last of the dark trees, to find themselves on the rim of jagged boulders that overhung a deep canyon— forty feet of sheer-sided cliffs falling below them to a jumble of water-torn rocks and splintery trees.

  Ingold slumped quietly down against a boulder and shut his eyes. He looked dead and dug up, Rudy thought, sitting wordlessly beside him. Even the cold of the overcast day was welcome after the hushed, hot darkness of the haunted woods. Rudy also closed his eyes, glad to rest, to have a few minutes wherein he was not afraid of what was going to happen next. Wind snuffled down the canyon below them and set all the trees of the woods at their backs to whispering their angry curses. Spits of cold rain kissed his face, but he hadn't the heart to send the rain-clouds elsewhere. The veering of the wind brought another smell to him, bitter and metallic, one that he had scented before.

  He opened his eyes and looked down the gorge before them. The rocks along the stream, he saw now, were stained black, and the brush and paloverde along the stream were charred and rotted in long spoors, as if filthy and corrosive streams had trickled down from farther up the canyon. That stinging smell breathed up at them again, poisonous and overpowering. He coughed and glanced over at his companion.

  Ingold had also opened his eyes. The sweat was drying in his hair, the blood caking in little rivulets on his scratched hands. He was staring out into space, and his eyes held a look of infinite weariness and a kind of tired despair.

  "Ingold?"

  Only his eyes moved, but they seemed to lighten and smile.

  "What is it?" Rudy asked.

  The old man shook his head. "Only that we'll have to go up the gorge. We can't go back through the woods. There is worse evil in them than I thought, and I won't risk being trapped there until nightfall."

  "Ingold, I don't like this," Rudy said. "Who's doing this? What's happening? Did Lohiro really set up all this?" Ingold made a tired little motion with his hand, "No. Not Lohiro alone. I set up some of it myself when I was at Quo. In fact, many of the spells on the woods were mine, though they've been changed now and made—much worse. All the members of the Council have put their powers into the maze, and the maze changes, the traps and illusions shifting with each new mind that goes into it. It has never been this—this difficult. It has never been this perilous. But Lobiro and the Council intended to wall themselves in. Only one of the makers of the maze can shift it now."

  Rudy sighed. He wondered what would have become of him if the Dark Ones had really made off with Ingold in the desert. Could he have found his way to the heart of the maze?

  No way, he decided. I'd have poked around the feet of the mountains till I died.

  "You're the Great White Scout," he said after a moment. "But I'm here to tell you I do not like that gorge."

  Ingold chuckled briefly. "Most astute." He got stiffly to his feet, collected his staff and Che's lead, and started down the narrow trail into the gully.

  At the bottom of the ravine, the hot metallic smell was stronger, the fumes of it burning the nostrils. Pools of fouled black water gleamed greasily in the wan daylight, fringed with charred, stinking vegetation. Even close to the canyon walls, the weeds had shriveled in the noxious air, like flowers in Rudy's native California smog. Farther along, the head-high thickets of tule and bullrush that had masked the stream could be seen to be colorless, rotting in the pollution of that narrow place. From the canyon rim above them, the dark trees of the haunted woods frowned down; before them, on the distant shoulders of the mountain, Rudy thought he could glimpse the pass.

  They followed the windings of the canyon for some distance, through a wasteland of fetid puddles and crippled, dying trees. A final turning brought them within sight of the end—desolate, stinking, a dark cave mouth amid broken slopes of shale and boulders. The sand around the cave was cut by filthy runnels of black and violent yellow slime. An oily suggestion of a putrid, greenish mist hung low over the ground. Beyond, on the higher slopes above the cave, the trees grew clean. But the woods were silent, unstirred by so much as a bird song, and Rudy heard the intaken hiss of Ingold's breath.

  "What is it?" he asked softly, and the wizard touched his lips for silence.

  In a voice indistinguishable from the flicker of wind in grass, he cautioned, "They have excellent hearing."

  Apprehensively, Rudy dropped his voice to a subvocal whisper. "What do?"

  The old man had already begun to retreat soundlessly behind the rocks. He replied in a murmur of breath. "Dragons."

  "There's no chance he's out hunting?" Rudy whispered hopefully.

  lie and Ingold stood side by side in the black shadow of a massive boulder of splintered granite that shielded them from the cave beyond. They had scouted the walls of the canyon back for miles, but the only trail leading out of it was the one they had come down from the haunted woods.

  "Of course not," the wizard replied in a soft, almost inaudible breath. "Can't you hear his scales sliding on the rocks of the cave?"

  Rudy was silent, listening, casting his senses into the dark pit that loomed before them. In all the world there seemed no other noises but
the hrssh of wind through Che's dusty pelt and the nervous jitter of his little hooves on the rocks. Then he heard the dry grating of incalculable weight and the thick drag of fetid breath.

  "How big is that thing?" he whispered, aghast.

  Ingold drew himself back from the edge of the boulders. "Forty feet at least. I'm told the old bulls can get to almost twice that."

  "Eighty feet!" Rudy wailed soundlessly. He calculated the distance from their rock to the boulders that flanked the cave—it looked like miles, with or without Godzilla lurking in between.

  "It may be sleeping," the wizard continued softly, "but I doubt it. Judging by the amount of discoloration on the trees, it's laired here for a little over two months. Probably it was trapped here when the mazes surrounding Quo were shifted and strengthened. But there's little game in these mountains, and certainly nothing large enough to interest a dragon. You can see for yourself that there are no bones near the mouth of the cave."

  "Wonderful," Rudy said shakily. "Our friend should be just tickled pink to see us." He edged his way around the boulders and surveyed the ground before the cave.

  Here at the ends of the canyon, the stink of the beast was overwhelming. The deep bed of river sand was littered with fallen or rotting trees, eucalyptus, cottonwood, or oak, whose roots had been eaten away by the poisonous fluids that dribbled from the mouth of the cave. Violently discolored tangles of weeds and distorted brush flanked the cave itself and grew halfway up the boulders on either side. Rudy felt a light touch on his shoulder as Ingold came around beside him.

  "You bear left up the rocks there; I'll take Che and climb the talus slope to the right of the cave. Go as swiftly as you can in silence. If it does come out and attack you, dive for shelter—any kind of shelter—and I'll try to draw it off. On the whole, it's more likely to attack me, since I'll have the burro. If that happens, you've got to go in and do the axwork. Cut it behind the forelegs or through the belly or up behind the neck, if you can get that close. And stay away from its tail. It can club you senseless before you realize what's hit you."

  Ingold started to move forward, and Rudy caught his sleeve. "It doesn't—it can't fly, can it?" he whispered anxiously.

  The wizard appeared startled by the question. "Good heavens, no."

  "Or breathe fire?"

  "No, although its slime and spittle can be corrosive in wounds, and its blood will burn you. No—the deadliness of the dragon lies in its speed, its strength—and its magic."

  Rudy whispered in horror, "Magic?"

  One white eyebrow lifted. "After your experience with the Dark, you surely cannot believe that the seed of magic is limited to humankind,. Dragons do not have human intelligence; their magic is a beast's magic, the magic that lures the prey to the hunter—a magic of illusion and invisibility, for the most part. No cloaking-spell will work against a dragon; no illusion will turn it aside. Remember that." His hand closed around Che's headstall, and he stepped out into the pale daylight, beyond the shelter of the rocks. Rudy gathered up his staff, preparing to make a run for the canyon's left-hand wall. Ingold's whisper stopped him. "And one more thing. Whatever you do— don't look into the dragon's eyes."

  At a quick, steady walk, Ingold started for the talus spill that formed a steep gray slope up the mountain to the right of the cave. Che braced his feet and shook his short mane, unwilling to walk toward the chemical stench of the dragon's lair, but Ingold, Rudy knew, was a lot stronger than he looked.

  Rudy moved in the opposite direction, skirting the discolored pools and the rotting stands of dying trees along the foot of the cliff, uncomfortably aware of the possibility of rattlesnakes in the rocks he'd have to climb. His hands felt tied up with the staff he carried. Across the seventy feet or so of sand that separated the canyon walls, Ingold and Che glided in an almost invisible medley of brown.

  Ahead of him, Rudy heard the slithering noise of tons of slipping iron. Something round and gold and glassy flashed in the darkness of the cave, and he stopped in his tracks, paralyzed by something closer to fascination than by horror. A preliminary hiss came from the darkness, with a rolling breath of oily stench and fumes that stung his eyes. Rudy blinked, blinded, wiped at the burning tears…

  And there it was.

  He had never imagined anything so hideous or so gaudy. He had been expecting something green and vaguely crocodilian, like the dragons in picture books, not the product of an unnatural mating between a dinosaur and a calliope. It was enameled Chinese red and flaming gold, flickering with bands of green and black and white that mottled the lean-ribbed sides like a beadwork on a pair of slippers. The head was massive, horned, mailed, and bristling with flared scales of purple, black, and gold, which gave it a curiously beribboned effect; from the tufted whorls of streamers, spikes, and fins on that snake-like nape, a long ridge ran backward, up over the towering fulcrum of the mighty hind legs and down the counterpoised bulk of the spined, deadly tail. Green slime dripped from the armored chin as it champed and swallowed. The huge head turned, not with the slow, saurian deliberation of a movie monster's, but as quick as a bird's. Rudy found himself looking into round, golden eyes.

  The amber quicksilver of those twin mirrors drank his soul. He did not understand the vision that he saw in them, distant and clear, striking resonances of certainty within his heart. He saw the far-off image of his own chained hands silhouetted against the freezing arch of winter stars. An echo of bitter cold and blinding despair pierced him from what he knew, as surely as he knew his name, was his own future. Mesmerized, he could neither have moved nor looked away, had he willed it. He had to see, to understand…

  He had never thought that anything that huge could move so fast. The dragon lunged like a lizard. Waking from his trance, Rudy could scarcely have moved if he had been ready. But instead of ripping, eight-inch fangs, all that struck him was a whiplash of kicked sand, for the dragon turned in mid-spring with a metallic hiss of rage and pain. Rudy threw himself aside to avoid the lashing hind foot, then raised his head from the ground in time to see Ingold leap away from the steaming deluge of blood that burst from the monster's slashed flank. From the end of that long neck, the armored head struck like a snake, Ingold sprang clear of it, his sword striking sparks from the mailed nose.

  The dragon reared itself back on the massive fulcrum of its long hind legs, its belly gleaming like stained ivory in the sick gray light. It strode forward and lunged down again, snapping, then half-turned to slash with twenty-five feet of spined tail whose force could easily have broken a man's back. Ingold moved out of range, but a moment later his sword whined in again, cleaving through air rotten with the choking fumes of the dragon's breath, to strike at the slashing teeth and iron mouth.

  Don't go for the head, dammit, Rudy thought cloudily. There's nothing but armor there. Then, as the wizard ducked back from the lash of the tail again, he realized what Ingold was doing. He was opening the dragon up, distracting its attention, so that Rudy could go in for the kill.

  The fanning mane of its protective bone shield guarded the dragon's neck from the front, making it impossible for its victim to get in any kind of killing blow. But every time the monster brought its head down to snap at Ingold, the whole of its neck brushed the ground. From where he lay belly-down in the sand, Rudy could see how delicate were the beaded scales covering the pumping arteries of the throat. A single blow would do it—provided, of course, a man was willing to run in under that heaving crimson wall of angry flesh.

  His knees weak at the thought, Rudy scanned that mountain of scarlet iron for another target.

  He could see none. His scanty knowledge of anatomy didn't cover dragons. He had no idea where they kept their hearts; and anyway, he doubted his sword would pierce the polychrome mail of its side.

  The spiked club of the tail cut the air like a whip, its barbs skimming Ingold's shoulder as he dodged it, with a force that spun him, bleeding, into the sand. The claws raked at him like swords; Ingold cut at them desperately fro
m where he lay. Rudy knew that if the dragon pinned the old man, it would be all over for them both. He gathered his feet under him and drew his sword, watching for his chance. The wizard rolled to his feet somehow, staggering, but kept drawing the attack backward and in his direction, never letting Rudy get within the creature's line of sight. Absurdly, Rudy heard the old man saying far back along the trail, "I have even actually slain a dragon— rather, I acted as decoy and Lohiro did the sword work…"

  If Lohiro could do it, Rudy thought grimly, so can I. Anyway, it was a curious comfort to. know that the Archmage had been relegated to the butcher position, rather than the infinitely trickier post as decoy.

  The dragon struck out with its claws again, and Ingold went down, his bloodied sword gleaming as he slashed at the snatching mouth. The huge shadow spread over him in the drenched and smoking sand. Rudy was on his feet as the massive head reached down. Ingold saw him coming, cut, and rolled, the great head swinging to follow, green drool splattering from the chisel teeth. Rudy's sword cleaved the air as if he were chopping wood. It split the jugular vein, and he barely ducked aside in time to avoid the firehose of blood that exploded outward, steaming in the air as it roared thickly against the rock of the canyon wall, some forty feet away. The dragon screamed, flinging up its head, its huge tail lashing as it clawed at the streaming wound.

  Rudy plunged in under the writhing shadow to drag Ingold to his feet, hauling him toward the talus slope as the ground all around them was drenched in a burning rain of splattering blood. His hands felt scorched by it; his lungs were seared by the fumes. The lashing tail struck the ground so near that it covered them in a wave of thrown sand. Stumbling on the base of the slope, Rudy looked back, staring upward in horror at that huge, gaudy body swaying against the pallid sky.