Dragon Rigger (31 page)

Fire exploded around him, and he felt an intense flash of pain. The cavern and the abyss flashed dark and bright, and his vision went black for a terrifying moment, then returned to that strange, ghostly light of battle with the Watcher. He tried to ignore the pain as he fought against the net—until he realized that he was already through it—he had sliced an opening and was careening back toward the ceiling. The pain was gone.

The danger was not. A great blanket of blackness was swarming upward to meet him. It was not just something black that was stopping light; it was a being that was devouring light, and he could almost feel the coal-red glow of the abyss being swallowed by it.

He circled warily, watching the creature rise. How could he fight something that destroyed light itself?

He flitted from side to side, despair rising in his heart. How great was this thing's power? If he changed his form again, the Watcher would do likewise. Didn't it ever tire? He glanced across the cavern and saw his brother FullSky, forgotten by the Watcher, etched in a cold, hollow light, struggling to rise from the place where the Watcher's fire had chained him. Another image sprang into Windrush's mind.

As the black emptiness rose to meet him, Windrush became a fire-elemental. He felt himself burning into flame, like an iffling, sacrificing all bodily form. He struggled not to panic, not to think: The Watcher is already winning. Then the panic vanished as he felt strength rising in the heat of his flame, like the strength of a dragon who has just eaten of lumenis. This was the strength of pure fire, the strength of hope . . .

For an instant, he even believed that this was not just his strength alone, but someone else's combined with his. A power reaching to him through the underrealm . . . FullSky's? His father's?

The thought fled as the blackness rose and engulfed him. The cavern vanished, and his brother with it. His hope vanished, too, and as darkness swarmed around him, he felt the bone-biting cold of despair. The heat of his fire was gone. From the numbing silence of the blackness, he heard a harsh laughter, ringing in his consciousness. Then his consciousness began to fade.

Keep that which is
you!

The memory of FullSky's words brought him back from the abyss of utter, eternal darkness. Keep that which is you. He remembered how, moments ago, he had been burning with blazing fire, the light and heat of his strength, his hope. The blackness had swallowed the fire, made him forget it . . . distracted him . . . but had not quite extinguished it. He reached within, found a flickering spark within the darkness of his soul, and determinedly blew it back to life: a flicker of light, a tiny flame against the devouring darkness.

Laughter screeched again through his mind, deafening him and filling him with dread. The flame flickered and guttered.

Do not let it distract you.

NO. I burn with flame.

His spark shot up hot and bright against the darkness. He felt it lock in mortal combat with the darkness, the living darkness of the Watcher's malice. If there was to be a victory, it must be a victory of light against dark. Flame against darkness.

His flame blossomed.

The cold of the darkness fought back; it was a living breathing hating darkness, a knowing and raging darkness, and it was determined to strangle the flame, to kill it. The darkness had the power to imprison countless souls; it was the darkness of death. How could he possibly overcome death?

With a sudden intensity—as if someone had just passed the memory to him—he remembered Jael's fierce determination when she'd flown into the static realm to rescue Highwing. It was an impossible mission with no hope of success, with only death awaiting her and her friends. But she'd won nevertheless, she'd saved his father, allowed him to die bravely, allowed his spirit to pass to the Final Dream Mountain.
You
must outbelieve
it
. As Jael had outbelieved the odds.

No
, hissed the darkness.

Yes.

Windrush drew his strength from somewhere, and not from himself alone; he knew, unshakably, that his flame could burn brighter and hotter than the strength of any darkness. The flame of his kuutekka, of his garkkon-rakh, of the soul of his very being, welled up and burned with a fierce white heat. He felt the darkness recoil from it, felt it recognize a power that it suddenly realized it could not withstand. An image flashed in his mind, and he knew now that this was how more than one iffling had stood against the darkness. He burned hotter, brighter; he
believed
that his light would prevail. He knew he was no longer alone.

The blackness screamed in anguish and shrank away. The Watcher's soul was in the blackness; it had never imagined that its power of terror could fail. Windrush pursued it, growing even brighter. He knew that he alone could not be burning so brightly; and if the help was coming from his brother, or from his father in the soulfires of the Dream Mountain, or from the ifflings, he didn't know or care. The light was blinding now, filling every corner of the cavern.

The underweb burned with the strength of his light. The Watcher, locked into its blackness, coiled inward upon itself. It flickered madly. With a last convulsion, it shrank and vanished before the light.

Windrush's power faded in intensity. With considerable effort, he drew himself painfully back into the ordinary form of his kuutekka. The ghostly light that the Watcher had cast over the scene of the battle was gone.

The darkness was gone. The lines of fire that had encircled his brother were gone. But FullSky was still etched in light, glowing against the far side of the cavern.
My
brother, thank
you,
whispered the dragon of light. He no longer seemed paralyzed or crippled, not here in the underrealm at least.

FullSky rose from the stone floor and floated toward Windrush. The far wall was visible through him.
I
can join you now in the battle.

Can you escape?
Windrush asked, barely able to speak.

Not
in
the outer
world
.
My
body will never leave Tar-skel's dungeon
.
But
here
in
the
underrealm
,
I
will
fight as I can.
You may not see me
again
,
but
we
will
be
struggling
together
,
and
we will be together again
in
the Final Dream
Mountain
. The glowing being that was his brother seemed to breathe upon him then, to touch him with its light.

Windrush shivered as a thousand images cascaded into his thoughts from FullSky's mind, then disappeared into his unconscious like a basket of stones dropped into a pool. He shivered, unable to make any sense of the images; but he knew he would need them before this struggle was over. He felt FullSky draw away.

You
must
flee now.

Windrush struggled for breath.
FullSky, wait!

There is no time. You must flee, before you are found.
The dragon of light that was his brother drew back across the abyss and gazed at him just once more, before fading away through the cavern wall. The cavern suddenly seemed very empty, except for the glowering abyss of spirits. And from that chasm, Windrush heard a rising murmur, like a rushing of wings, the sounds of spirits freed, flying away through the underrealm to whatever Final Dream Mountain awaited them. He suddenly realized that he had prevailed not just for his brother, but for all of those others, whoever they were. He had a feeling that they were about to erupt before him like flames from a forest fire.

You must flee now.

A deep thrumming sound was growing to fill the cavern, a rumbling from some distant place. A hot wind seemed to be rising, blowing in his face. Something or someone was coming to investigate the source of the disturbance in the underrealm.

Windrush departed with the speed of thought, his kuutekka shrinking to a tiny spark of light, bright but fleeting in the gloom of the passageway as he fled from that place forever.

Again she heard someone calling her name . . .

Jayyyl . . . Jayyylllll . . . Jayyyllll . . .

There was something very familiar about that voice, but she couldn't quite awaken enough to make the connection. She was in an ocean, swimming, struggling toward the surface . . .

Jayyll, awwwk
—
are you there? Wake up, Jayl!

The dancing-mirror surface drew near, at last. She strained, kicked, lungs burning bursting struggling not to expire, reaching up, arms and fingers stretching . . .She touched the surface and it shattered in liquid silence. The boundary opened then, and a cacophony of sound exploded. A parrot was screaming, hurling itself back and forth in a damaged rigger-net, trying to bite and claw its way out. Ed . . . Ed . . . its name was Ed.

She suddenly remembered . . .

The web . . . ship out of control . . . had to regain . . . impossible . . . ! She remembered now the slamming force of the thing that had launched them, ejected them across space and time, and she'd thought she was dying.

Even now she wasn't certain that she had not died.

She could not seem to move or talk.

Is
this
what death feels like?

Ar—was Ar alive? Or was he with her . . . in death?

Nothing seemed quite right here. Ed was flying around violently, trying to reach her. She could almost touch him. They were so close now . . . and yet she could not. The rigger-net seemed to be torn somehow, keeping them apart. She could not see Ar, or hear him, or tell if he was alive.

JAYL
 . . .
?

Jayl . . . ?

Jayl . . . ?

The parrot's cries echoed down through several layers of separation in the net. As she probed, she finally heard the parrot's voice directly.
Jayyyl!

Ed!
she croaked.

The parrot screamed and flew straight toward her, growing larger and larger and finally imploding into her vision.
(Jayl!)
he cried, within her mind.
(Ed!)
she whispered joyfully. She felt his thoughts swarming around hers, felt him looking out through her eyes.

She blinked, suddenly aware that there was an outside reality. Where were they?

She focused her eyes on a mountain landscape. The ship had come to rest on a steep slope, nestled against a crag of some sort. They were motionless, except for vibrations from the wind. She could not be sure, but it certainly looked like the mountains of the dragon realm. As she craned her neck to look around, she half expected dragons to appear out of the clouds. But she saw nothing moving except snow, swirling in the wind.

She remembered Ar's reaction the first time they had arrived in the realm together and been dumped on a snowy slope not too unlike this one. He wasn't going to be much happier now. But where
was
he? Had he left the net?

She couldn't tell with any certainty, but there was a
weightiness
to the net that made her think he was still here with them. The net felt fragmented, in a way she had never experienced before. It occurred to her that perhaps she should withdraw and regroup with her shipmates outside the net. But first she wanted to learn all she could.

She took a deep breath and called:
AR?

There was no answer.

She felt Ed, still trapped inside her mind, frantic with joy that she was alive—and in terror over what was happening. Having gotten into her head, he seemed unable to get back out. Perhaps if she withdrew from the net, he would be freed—and she could begin to make sense of things.

Her first effort to withdraw told her at once that something was wrong. The net quivered, but did not yield. The way out was blocked somehow. She tried again, and the net trembled but did not yield. She couldn't see what the problem was, but it frightened her. This shouldn't be happening.
Ar?
she whispered.
AR? Rarberticandornan?

The only sound was a low rumble in the background, a neural interference that suggested something wrong in the physical projection of the net itself. She couldn't identify its source, but she sensed that she might not be able to exit the net until it was corrected. She fought back a fresh surge of fear. What if they were all trapped here? Stop it! she thought sternly. There were many possibilities—and one was that Ar was already on the outside, trying to help her.

(Ed, can you hear me?)
she whispered.

She felt the parrot fluttering in her thoughts.
(Awwk,)
he croaked, in a voice taut with fright. She glimpsed images of his fear—memories rushing up of a time when he had been trapped in the wild, imprisoned in a cage, drained into a data nodule. His fear resounded like the tapping of a snare drum.
(Awwwk-k-k. What hap-p-pened? Jayl?)

(I don't know,)
she murmured. She found the situation nearly incomprehensible. But she remembered that Ed had bridged some sort of barrier in coming to her. Maybe he could do that again.
(Ed? I need your help.)

(Aw-w-w-wk.
Y-yes-s-s.)

(Look for Ar for me. I can't see him—but he may be in the net somewhere,
trying
to
reach us. Can you move around at all? Can you reach outside of where I can see—and tell me if you hear him, or see him?)

(C-c-can't, Jayl.)

She shuddered at his feeling
of helplessness.
(Try, Ed—please? We're hurt. I don't know how badly, yet. But I can't see Ar, and maybe you can reach into areas where I can't. Please!)

(Urk-k.)

She sensed the parrot cocking his gaze about uneasily, trying to spot openings that his human riggermate could not. It all looked rather foreboding. But now there was a shadow, way off to one side. Could that be Ar, in another part of the net? She felt Ed moving his thoughts that way; then she felt a sudden, fluttering release. Ed had found a way to stretch beyond the limits of her thoughts. Good! She decided to let him do what she'd asked, while she looked elsewhere.