Lio!rt looked up at his feet. Small flakes of rock were dropping out of the roof around the ring pitons.
‘Let go, damn you.’ he screamed. ‘Or we’ll both die!’
Rincewind said nothing. He was concentrating on maintaining his grip and keeping his mind closed to the pressing images of his fate on the rocks below.
‘Shoot him!’ bellowed Lio!rt.
Out of the corner of his eye Rincewind saw several crossbows levelled at him. Lio!rt chose that moment to flail down with his free hand, and a fistful of rings stabbed into the wizard’s fingers.
He let go.
* * *
Twoflower grabbed the bars and pulled himself up.
‘See anything?’ said Hrun, from the region of his feet.
‘Just clouds.’
Hrun lifted him down again, and sat on the edge of one of the wooden beds that were the only furnishings in the cell. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
‘Don’t despair,’ said Twoflower.
‘I’m not despairing.’
‘I expect it’s all some sort of misunderstanding. I expect they’ll release us soon. They seem very civilised.’
Hrun stared at him from under bushy eyebrows. He started to say something, then appeared to think better of it. He sighed instead.
‘And when we get back we can say we’ve seen dragons!’ Twoflower continued. ‘What about that, eh?’
‘Dragons don’t exist,’ said Hrun flatly. ‘Codice of Chimeria killed the last one two hundred years ago. I don’t know what we’re seeing, but they aren’t dragons.’
‘But they carried us up in the air! In that hall there must have been hundreds—’
‘I expect it was just magic,’ said Hrun, dismissively.
‘Well, they looked like dragons,’ said Twoflower, an air of defiance about him. ‘I always wanted to see dragons, ever since I was a little lad. Dragons flying around in the sky, breathing flames …’
‘They just used to crawl around in swamps and stuff, and all they breathed was stink,’ said Hrun, lying down in the bunk. ‘They weren’t very big, either. They used to collect firewood.’
‘I heard they used to collect treasure,’ said Twoflower.
‘And firewood. Hey,’ Hrun added, brightening up, ‘did you notice all those rooms they brought us through? Pretty impressive, I thought. Lot of good stuff about, plus some of those tapestries have got to be worth a fortune.’ He scratched his chin thoughtfully, making a noise like a porcupine shouldering its way through gorse.
‘What happens next?’ asked Twoflower.
Hrun screwed a finger in his ear and inspected it absently.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I expect in a minute the door will be flung back and I’ll be dragged off to some sort of temple arena where I’ll fight maybe a couple of giant spiders and an eight-foot slave from the jungles of Klatch and then I’ll rescue some kind of a princess from the altar and then kill off a few guards or whatever and then this girl will show me the secret passage out of the place and we’ll liberate a couple of horses and escape with the treasure.’ Hrun leaned his head back on his hands and looked at the ceiling, whistling tunelessly.
‘All that?’ said Twoflower.
‘Usually.’
Twoflower sat down on his bunk and tried to think. This proved difficult, because his mind was awash with dragons.
Dragons!
Ever since he was two years old he had been captivated by the pictures of the fiery beasts in The Octarine Fairy Book.{31} His sister had told him they didn’t really exist, and he recalled the bitter disappointment. If the world didn’t contain those beautiful creatures, he’d decided, it wasn’t half the world it ought to be. And then later he had been bound apprentice to Ninereeds the Masteraccount, who in his grey-mindedness was everything that dragons were not, and there was no time for dreaming.
But there was something wrong with these dragons. They were too small and sleek, compared to the ones in his mind’s eye. Dragons ought to be big and green and clawed and exotic and firebreathing—big and green with long sharp …
Something moved at the edge of his vision, in the furthest, darkest corner of the dungeon. When he turned his head it vanished, although he thought he heard the faintest of noises that might have been made by claws scrabbling on stone.
‘Hrun?’ he said.
There was a snore from the other bunk.
Twoflower padded over to the corner, poking gingerly at the stones in case there was a secret panel. At that moment the door was flung back, thumping against the wall. Half a dozen guards hurtled through it, spread out and flung themselves down on one knee. Their weapons were aimed exclusively at Hrun. When he thought about this later, Twoflower felt quite offended.
Hrun snored.
A woman strode into the room. Not many women can stride convincingly, but she managed it. She glanced briefly at Twoflower, as one might look at a piece of furniture, then glared down at the man on the bed.
She was wearing the same sort of leather harness that the dragonriders had been wearing, but in her case it was much briefer. That, and the magnificent mane of chestnut-red hair that fell to her waist, was her only concession to what even on the discworld passed for decency. She was also wearing a thoughtful expression.
Hrun made a glubbing noise, turned over, and slept on.
With a careful movement, as though handling some instrument of rare delicacy, the woman drew a slim black dagger from her belt and stabbed downward.
Before it was halfway through its arc Hrun’s right hand moved so fast that it appeared to travel between two points in space without at any time occupying the intervening air. It closed around the woman’s wrist with a dull smack. His other hand groped feverishly for a sword that wasn’t there …
Hrun awoke.
‘Gngh?’ he said, looking up at the woman with a puzzled frown. Then he caught sight of the bowmen.
‘Let go,’ said the woman, in a voice that was calm and quiet and edged with diamonds. Hrun released his grip slowly.
She stepped back, massaging her wrist and looking at Hrun in much the same way that a cat watches a mousehole.
‘So,’ she said at last. ‘You pass the first test. What is your name, barbarian?’
‘Who are you calling a barbarian?’ snarled Hrun.
‘That is what I want to know.’
Hrun counted the bowmen slowly and made a brief calculation. His shoulders relaxed.
‘I am Hrun of Chimeria. And you?’
‘Liessa Dragonlady.’
‘You are the lord of this place?’
‘That remains to be seen. You have the look about you of a hired sword, Hrun of Chimeria. I could use you—if you pass the tests, of course. There are three of them. You have passed the first.’
‘What are the other—’ Hrun paused, his lips moved soundlessly and then he hazarded, ‘two?’
‘Perilous.’
‘And the fee?’
‘Valuable.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Twoflower.
‘And if I fail these tests?’ said Hrun, ignoring him. The air between Hrun and Liessa crackled with small explosions of charisma as their gazes sought for a hold.
‘If you had failed the first test you would now be dead. This may be considered a typical penalty.’
‘Um, look,’ began Twoflower. Liessa spared him a brief glance, and appeared actually to notice him for the first time.
‘Take that away,’ she said calmly, and turned back to Hrun. Two of the guards shouldered their bows, grasped Twoflower by the elbows and lifted him off the ground. Then they trotted smartly through the doorway.
‘Hey,’ said Twoflower, as they hurried down the corridor outside, ‘where’ [24] ‘is my’ [25] ‘Luggage?’ He landed in a heap of what might once have been straw. The door banged shut, its echoes punctuated by the sound of bolts being slammed home.
In the other cell Hrun had barely blinked.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘what is the second test?’
‘You must kill my two brothers.’ Hrun considered this.
‘Both at the same time, or one after the other?’ he said.
‘Consecutively or concurrently,’ she assured him.
‘What?’
‘Just kill them,’ she said sharply.
‘Good fighters, are they?’
‘Renowned.’
‘So in return for all this …?’
‘You will wed me and become Lord of the Wyrmberg.’
There was a long pause. Hrun’s eyebrows twisted themselves in unaccustomed calculation.
‘I get you and this mountain?’ he said at last.
‘Yes.’ She looked him squarely in the eye, and her lips twitched. ‘The fee is worthwhile, I assure you.’
Hrun dropped his gaze to the rings on her hand. The stones were large, being the incredibly rare blue milk diamonds from the clay basins of Mithos. When he managed to turn his eyes from them he saw Liessa glaring down at him in fury.
‘So calculating?’ she rasped. ‘Hrun the Barbarian, who would boldly walk into the jaws of Death Himself?’
Hrun shrugged. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘the only reason for walking into the jaws of Death is so’s you can steal His gold teeth.’ He brought one arm around expansively, and the wooden bunk was at the end of it. It cannoned into the bowmen and Hrun followed it joyously, felling one man with a blow and snatching the weapon from another. A moment later it was all over.
Liessa had not moved.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘Well what?’ said Hrun, from the carnage
‘Do you intend to kill me?’
‘What? Oh no. No, this is just, you know, kind of a habit. Just keeping in practice. So where are these brothers?’ He grinned.
* * *
Twoflower sat on his straw and stared into the darkness. He wondered how long he had been there. Hours, at least. Days, probably. He speculated that perhaps it had been years, and he had simply forgotten.
No, that sort of thinking wouldn’t do. He tried to think of something else—grass, trees, fresh air, dragons. Dragons …
There was the faintest of scrabblings in the darkness. Twoflower felt the sweat prickle on his forehead.
Something was in the cell with him. Something that made small noises, but even in the pitch blackness gave the impression of hugeness. He felt the air move.
When he lifted his arm there was the greasy feel and faint shower of sparks that betokened a localised magical field. Twoflower found himself fervently wishing for light.
A gout of flame rolled past his head and struck the far wall. As the rocks flashed into furnace heat he looked up at the dragon that now occupied more than half the cell.
I obey, lord said a voice in his head.
By the glow of the crackling, spitting stone Twoflower looked into his own reflection in two enormous green eyes. Beyond them the dragon was as multi-hued, horned, spiked and lithe as the one in his memory—a real dragon. Its folded wings were nevertheless still wide enough to scrape the wall on both sides of the room. It lay with him between its talons.
‘Obey?’ he said, his voice vibrating with terror and delight.
Of course, lord.
The glow faded away. Twoflower pointed a trembling finger at where he remembered the door to be and said, ‘Open it!’
The dragon raised its huge head. Again the ball of flame rolled out but this time, as the dragon’s neck muscles contracted, its colour faded from orange to yellow, from yellow to white, and finally to the faintest of blues. By that time the flame was also very thin, and where it touched the wall the molten rock spat and ran. When it reached the door the metal exploded into a shower of hot droplets.
Black shadows arced and jiggered over the walls. The metal bubbled for an eye-aching moment, and then the door fell in two pieces in the passage beyond. The flame winked out with a suddenness that was almost as startling as its arrival.
Twoflower stepped gingerly over the cooling door and looked up and down the corridor. It was empty.
The dragon followed. The heavy door frame caused it some minor difficulty, which it overcame with a swing of its shoulders that tore the timber out and tossed it to one side. The creature looked expectantly at Twoflower, its skin rippling and twitching as it sought to open its wings in the confines of the passage.
‘How did you get in there?’ said Twoflower.
You summoned me, master.
‘I don’t remember doing that.’
In your mind. You called me up, in your mind, thought the dragon, patiently.
‘You mean I just thought of you and there you were?’
Yes.
‘It was magic?’
Yes.
‘But I’ve thought about dragons all my life!’
In this place the frontier between thought and reality is probably a little confused. All I know is that once I was not, and then you thought of me, and then I was. Therefore, of course, I am yours to command.
‘Good grief!’
Half a dozen guards chose that moment to turn the bend in the corridor. They stopped, open-mouthed. Then one remembered himself sufficiently to raise his crossbow and fire.
The dragon’s chest heaved. The quarrel exploded into flaming fragments in mid-air. The guards scurried out of sight. A fraction of a second later a wash of flame played over the stones where they had been standing.
Twoflower looked up in admiration
‘Can you fly too?’ he said.
Of course.
Twoflower glanced up and down the corridor, and decided against following the guards. Since he knew himself to be totally lost already, any direction was probably an improvement. He edged past the dragon and hurried away, the huge beast turning with difficulty to follow him.
They padded down a series of passages that criss-crossed like a maze. At one point Twoflower thought he heard shouts, a long way behind them, but they soon faded away. Sometimes the dark arch of a crumbling doorway loomed past them in the gloom. Light filtered through dimly from various shafts and, here and there, bounced off big mirrors that had been mortared into angles of the passage. Sometimes there was a brighter glow from a distant light-well.
What was odd, thought Twoflower as he strolled down a wide flight of stairs and kicked up billowing clouds of silver dust motes, was that the tunnels here were much wider. And better constructed, too. There were statues in niches set in the walls, and here and there faded but interesting tapestries had been hung. They mainly showed dragons—dragons by the hundred, in flight or hanging from their perch rings, dragons with men on their backs hunting down deer and, sometimes, other men. Twoflower touched one tapestry gingerly. The fabric crumbled instantly in the hot dry air, leaving only a dangling mesh where some threads had been plaited with fine gold wire.
‘I wonder why they left all this?’ he said.
I don’t know, said a polite voice in his head.
He turned and looked up into the scaley horse face above him.
‘What is your name, dragon?’ said Twoflower.
I don’t know.
‘I think I shall call you Ninereeds.’
That is my name, then.
They waded through the all-encroaching dust in a series of huge, dark-pillared halls which had been carved out of the solid rock. With some cunning too; from floor to ceiling the walls were a mass of statues, gargoyles, bas-reliefs and fluted columns that cast weirdly-moving shadows when the dragon gave an obliging illumination at Twoflower’s request. They crossed the lengthy galleries and vast carven amphitheatres, all awash with deep soft dust and completely uninhabited. No-one had come to these dead caverns in centuries.
Then he saw the path, leading away into yet another dark tunnel mouth. Someone had been using it regularly, and recently. It was a deep narrow trail in the grey blanket.
Twoflower followed it. It led through still more lofty halls and winding corridors quite big enough for a dragon [26]. They ended in a pair of green bronze doors, eac
h so high that they disappeared into the gloom. In front of Twoflower, at chest height, was a small handle shaped like a brass dragon.
When he touched it the doors swung open instantly and with a disconcerting noiselessness.
Instantly sparks crackled in Twoflower’s hair and there was a sudden gust of hot dry wind that didn’t disturb the dust in the way that ordinary wind should but, instead, whipped it up momentarily into unpleasantly half-living shapes before it settled again. In Twoflower’s ears came the strange shrill twittering of the Things locked in the distant dungeon Dimensions, out beyond the fragile lattice of time and space. Shadows appeared where there was nothing to cause them. The air buzzed like a hive.
In short, there was a vast discharge of magic going on around him.
The chamber beyond the door was lit by a pale green glow. Stacked around the walls, each on its own marble shelf, were tier upon tier of coffins. In the centre of the room was a stone chair on a raised dais, and it contained a slumped figure which did not move but said, in a brittle old voice, ‘Come in, young man.’
Twoflower stepped forward. The figure in the seat was human, as far as he could make out in the murky light, but there was something about the awkward way it was sprawled in the chair that made him glad he couldn’t see it any clearer.
‘I’m dead, you know,’ came a voice from what Twoflower fervently hoped was a head, in conversational tones. ‘I expect you can tell.’
‘Um,’ said Twoflower. ‘Yes.’ He began to back away.
‘Obvious, isn’t it?’ agreed the voice. ‘You’d be Twoflower, wouldn’t you? Or is that later?’
‘Later?’ said Twoflower. ‘Later than what?’ He stopped.
‘Well,’ said the voice. ‘You see, one of the advantages of being dead is that one is released as it were from the bonds of time and therefore I can see everything that has happened or will happen, all at the same time except that of course I now know that Time does not, for all practical purposes, exist.’
‘That doesn’t sound like a disadvantage,’ said Twoflower.
‘You don’t think so? Imagine every moment being at one and the same time a distant memory and a nasty surprise and you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, I now recall what it was I am about to tell you. Or have I already done so? That’s a fine looking dragon, by the way. Or don’t I say that, yet?’
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