Dark Lord of Derkholm (23 page)

There were thoughtful, wistful croonings from the geese. It was a nice idea. But people never let them do that. Blade didn't mean it. The noises grew harsher. There had to be a catch.

“Yes, there is a catch,” Blade told them. “The people have swords, and they'll try to hurt you back. You'll have to be really quick and cunning to hurt them without getting hurt yourselves. Come on. Who's clever enough to hurt humans? I want six volunteers.” He opened the gate of the pen. He dumped the hamper on its side just beyond and opened the lid with an inviting creak. “Anyone volunteering just step in this hamper.”

The geese thought about it, with sarcastic little nasal yodels. Blade could dimly see their white heads turning to one another, discussing it. Then one goose stepped forward.

“Blade!”
said Callette, at that crucial moment, almost invisible in the dark. The goose stopped dead. “What are you doing? I thought it was thieves.”

She made Blade give such a jump that he felt dizzy. He had forgotten how cat-quiet Callette could be. “Oh,
bother
you!” he wailed. “I need them for leathery-winged avians, and now I'll
never
get them into the hamper!”

Callette considered this. “Yes, you will,” she said. “You should have come and asked me instead of creeping about. You have to dare them. I always get them to do things by daring them to. Watch.” She leaned forward with her great head over Blade's shoulder. “Come on, geese. Scaredy old geese. Daren't sit in a hamper, then? Scared to climb in a big wicker box, are you?”

There was an instant rush for the hamper. Geese fought one another to get into it. Callette had certainly got it right, Blade thought, shutting the lid down on at least eight geese. Callette hit the gate of the pen smartly with her tail so that it shut and cut off the rest of the flock. “See?” she said above their yells of protest. “Want help carrying it?”

“I can manage,” Blade said, hoping this was true. “Thanks. That was brilliant.”

“You're welcome,” said Callette. “Dad's a lot better, by the way. He sent Lydda out with the clues.”

“You're joking!” Blade said, sitting himself astride the restlessly creaking hamper.

“No, I'm not,” said Callette as Blade departed.

It took him ten hops to get back to Finn. Partly he was wondering if it would take Lydda twenty years or only ten to fly round the continent; partly he was truly tired. The geese were highly annoyed at the jerky journey. Finn was not pleased either.

“What have you been doing?” he demanded.

“Getting you some avians,” Blade panted. He climbed off and bent down to the hamper. “I dare you,” he said to it, “to chase every human in sight at the top of this mountain. Then I dare you to come back to the hamper. Coming back will be worse, because I'll be very angry if you've hurt anyone.” He got behind the hamper, prudently, and took hold of the lid. “Stand beside me,” he said to Finn, “and make them look leathery as they come out.”

“I can do that perfectly well from here,” Finn said crossly.

“No, don't!” Blade implored him. “Come back here!”

It was too late. A goose head and neck had already forced its way past the edge of the lid. The hamper was thrown open, and the geese came out fighting. Finn never got a chance to make them look like anything. He ran. He ran away up the mountain with the blue light bobbing above him, his beard flying and his robes hauled up around his knees. The geese went after him like yelling white demons, some running, some flying, and all of them with their necks stretched straight and vicious. Finn screamed once or twice. When he and the geese were well out of sight, a lot more noise broke out, somewhere above in the rocks.

“Oh, well,” Blade said. He sat on the hamper and resigned himself to not seeing any Pilgrims tonight, and probably not any more of the geese either.

The noise stopped after a while. Blade went on sitting there, tired out. Shortly, to his surprise, the geese came marching back in a brisk huddle, uttering satisfied little noises as they came down the hillside. If they had had hands to dust together, Blade felt they would be dusting them. It was obvious even by moonlight.

“Had fun, did you?” he asked.

They made noises like laughter.

“Good,” said Blade. “Now I'm very angry, and I'm going to carry you off to a place full of murderers. I dare you to get in the hamper again and let me.” He held it invitingly open.

The geese climbed in, making scathing noises.

“Well, I warned you,” Blade said. He sat on the lid and took himself and the geese back to the camp.

Shona and Don were back already, and Shona was getting worried. She had returned first and early, because the wizard she met had simply seized the armful of kites from her and marched angrily off with them. Don's wizard had not been able to animate his kites. “He didn't even do as well as Kit did,” Don said. “And he was furious. He made me swoop over the Pilgrim Party in the dark instead, and it wasn't fun. They shot arrows at me. We ought to have thought of the geese before.”

“I'll go and fetch the rest of them tomorrow,” Blade promised. “But oh, gods! I
wish
you could have seen Finn legging it up that mountain!”

They settled down to sleep, chuckling. The soldiers, when Blade thought about it afterward, were oddly quiet. He saw why when he woke in the dew-cold back end of night to bedlam and horror.

What seemed to have happened was that someone among the soldiers had worked out that the magics holding the walls of their dome to the ground were only skin-deep, and particularly weak where Kit had amateurishly sealed the opening. They must have spent all the previous day making plans. When they were sure that the comings and goings with the kites were over for the night and everyone was truly asleep, they started walking up the wall opposite the opening. It must have taken hours. But with six hundred strong men persistently stepping on one side of it, the dome gave way in the end. When Blade woke, the camp was a misty egg shape, filled with dark, scrambling people at the end where the bulge was. The other end was rising into the air. The dark shapes of soldiers were ducking under that end and rushing out.

It was the geese who gave the alarm. Someone fell over their hamper, just beside Blade's sleeping bag, and the geese came out fighting again. At the noise Pretty instantly took off into the dark sky, screaming, followed by Beauty. That roused the dogs, who began rushing around barking and yelping like the Wild Hunt itself, followed by Friendly Cows, bellowing distressfully.

Blade sprang up. The geese had driven off the soldiers who had been making for him, but while he was shaking himself loose from the sleeping bag, he saw a seething dark crowd around Shona and realized that the soldiers had caught Don and were using Don to catch Kit. Two soldiers were standing on each of Don's wings. Don was screaming and slashing and pecking, but quite unable to fight them off, and Kit was making thundering dives from the graying sky, trying to help. Every time he dived, a cluster of soldiers around Don hacked at him with swords. Kit was so angry he was roaring. Blade could hardly believe the noise was Kit. He had never heard Kit make a noise like that in his life. He hovered, wondering whom to help. Then Shona screamed. Blade realized he just had to trust to Kit's size and strength and ran toward Shona.

There were so many people around Shona that Blade could not even see which she was. He did the only thing he could think of and turned the carnivorous sheep in among them. It was very faintly light by then. The sheep were easy to see in their white huddle, and even easier to hear. They were yelling to be allowed to join in. Blade fumbled them loose from the magic reins around them and drove them fiercely toward the seething soldiers around Shona. He followed them in himself with the large stake the reins had been tied to. He banged heads and whacked arms and backs with it, and he seemed to make no difference at all. And all the time more soldiers were getting out from under the dome of magic. Don was being hurt, from his screams, and Kit's great roars went on and on. Blade felt helpless and hopeless, but he went on banging away.

Then all at once there was a roaring so much louder and deeper than Kit's that it seemed to come up from the earth and down from the sky at the same time. It came from all around, as if the whole world were roaring. Something massive and dark passed over Blade's head in a surge of hot air and hit the tipped-up dome of magic.
SLAP
. The dome fell back into place with a wallop that shook the turf under Blade's feet, tumbling yelling soldiers in a heap down the wall with it. The massive shape wheeled above the dome and swooped down upon Kit and Don. The great roaring became words.

“GET BACK INTO THAT DOME, SCUM!” Flames flickered as if the words were on fire.

The soldiers around Don looked up, saw the gigantic dragon powering down on them, and ran.

“It's Scales!” Blade said. “Oh, thank goodness!”

Scales somehow backpedaled in mid-dive and whirled about. Hot fumes, grass, and clods of earth blew every which way in the wind of it. Kit was thrown out of the air and landed on his back with a grunt, a few yards from Don.

“You! Little black cat-bird!” Scales bellowed at him. “Get up and go and guard the entrance to that dome!”

Kit picked himself up without a word and limped hurriedly over there. Don gathered himself into a heap, where he crouched, whimpering. Scales glided forward to land, lightly as a wren, beside the brawling group of men and sheep around Shona. The sheep instantly struggled out from among the men and fled in bleating panic. The men had not yet noticed anything was wrong. Scales stretched out his monstrous head above them.

“I said get back into that dome, scum!” he growled.

Their faces turned up to him. It was now light enough for Blade to see individual expressions on those faces: fear, anger, bravado, horror, but mostly annoyance at being interrupted.

“It's only one of their illusions,” one said.

Scales bent forward, picked up the nearest black-clad body in his jaws, and crunched. The man jerked and let out the most horrible sound Blade had ever heard. It was not even a scream. It was the noise of something in more pain than it could stand. Scales tossed what remained of the man down on the turf. “In the dome or get eaten,” he boomed. “Your choice.”

The rest of the soldiers untangled themselves with incredible speed and set off at a run for the dome. Kit opened the entrance there to let them in. A goose that had accidentally got shut inside the dome blasted out in a cloud of white feathers just before Kit sealed it again. After that she was forced to stand with her back to everything, preening her dignity back, too irritated even to notice the rest of the geese, who stood at a tactful distance, hooting respectfully.

Blade was kneeling by Shona. Shona's hair was over her face, and her clothes were torn. She had blood on one arm, but Blade thought that was from someone else's sheep bite. “Don't touch me!” she said.

“Are you all right?” Blade asked.

“Just don't
touch
me!” Shona said.

Blade looked doubtfully up at Scales.

“Leave her be. Go and help the black cat-bird,” Scales rumbled. “I want you to hold the opening shut against the ones inside, while the cat-bird lets in the ones I bring back.”

It was now white dawn, light enough to see that the distance in every direction was full of frantic cows and black-clad men running away as hard as they could. Scales took off again, in another blast of hot air and flying grass. He flew low in a huge, sweeping circle, at the limits of where a man could run to in the time. Every so often there would be a billow of fire and some roaring in the distance, and Scales would come sweeping inward, driving a panting huddle of men toward the dome, where Kit struggled to let them in, while Blade tried to stop the ones inside from getting out.

“No,
no!
” Scales said irritably as he arrived behind the third huddle. “Balance your magics against one another. Brace them, and then sway just a bit to make the opening. Don't people do arm wrestling anymore these days?”

“Oh, I
see
!” Blade and Kit both exclaimed. “Like that!”

“Yes. Like that,” Scales growled, and swung around into the distance again.

By the time Scales drove in the last panting, exhausted crowd of soldiers, Blade and Kit had become quite good at the arm-wrestling style of magic. They were congratulating one another and feeling nearly cheerful again until Scales rumbled, “Don't just stand there grinning, cat-bird, boy! You've work to do. You need to be on the march by sunup.”

They stared at him disbelievingly. “We do?” said Kit.

“I'm worn out,” Blade protested. “We hardly got any sleep—”

“Got to keep these murderers busy,” Scales explained, “or lose grip on them. They've no food here, they're angry, and they nearly got you once. Understand? And it's no good me trying to round up all your horses and your cows. They just panic.”

“But Don's hurt,” Blade objected, “and Shona's—”

“I'll see to them now,” said Scales. His wings folded with a leathery, slithering, final-sounding slap. He turned and stepped delicately across the trampled grass toward Don. Kit and Blade watched his spiked green tail slide around in front of them and then followed it mournfully. You did not disagree with dragons.