Dragon Spear (11 page)
I had no other choice.
I
had been right about the thickness of the forest preventing pursuit: Darrym screamed his rage and even burned a few trees in my wake, but couldn’t come after me. I crashed my way through the underbrush and leaped over fallen logs. As I ran, I sent up a prayer of thanks that I was wearing trousers and boots.
Once I thought I had gotten far enough away, I slowed down and tried to be quieter. Slipping between the bushes rather than crashing through them I also cut down on the trail I left. I felt like I was going in the right direction, but I didn’t dare check by climbing a tree. At least, not yet.
Ullalal and her daughters had been right, I reflected, feeling the corners of my mouth turn up in a bitter smile. I had been a terrible choice for a
klgaosh
. If their dragon had chosen the youngest daughter instead of me, he and his friends would be sitting around their buckets of steaming
glark
, gossiping about how clever Darrym had been to capture Velika.
The thought wiped even a trace of a smile from my face, and I continued my grim march through the forest. I heard no noise of pursuit now, and I stopped and held my breath, straining for the sound of dragon claws, dragon wings, or dragon breath like a bellows. There was nothing, only the usual forest noises of birds and insects.
I found a good tree and began to climb, pausing just before I raised my head out of the forest canopy so that I could listen again. Again there was nothing, and I climbed up and out.
It was easy to find the column of smoke. It was closer now, and the air was very clear today, making it stand out starkly against the blue sky. Again I saw dragons making a single circle around it and then coming or going. There were more arriving, and with an intake of breath I recognized Darrym as one of them.
It was a place of importance; I knew it now for certain. Darrym had gone to report my presence, or to check on Velika, I could feel it to the soles of my feet. I ducked back down under the concealing leaves, and practically slid down the trunk of the tree in my haste. I needed to get to that spot as soon as possible, and it was still a good distance away.
I was fortunate enough to find some berries that I recognized along the way. With greedy delight I ate handfuls of them. Then I picked the rest and put them inside my tunic, using my sash to keep them in place.
Back home the berries would have long since been lost to frost if they hadn’t been harvested, but the seasons were different here, on the other side of the world. During the day it was warm and misty like springtime, something that I felt even more grateful for than I was for the berries. It would be cold at night, but I still didn’t have to worry about freezing to death, or leaving tracks in the snow as I escaped, and the smoke I was searching for would have been lost against a gray sky.
Well after dark, as I was staggering with exhaustion and thinking that I needed to stop soon, I saw the first sign that I was close. A squat stone pillar, carved with strange shapes that were menacingly unclear in the darkness, loomed before me. I shuddered, but kept on walking with renewed strength. There was another pillar, and another. And now there were strange, pinkish-flamed torches on poles, lighting a path through the forest.
I followed them, but not directly. Instead, I lurked in the trees and walked parallel to the path. Other paths met with the torch-lit one, the first of any paths I had seen in the forest. My heart beat as rapidly as it had earlier, when I had been running from Darrym.
My concentration was so completely on trying not to stumble over hidden roots while still keeping alongside the lighted path that I stepped into a clearing without realizing what I had done. The sudden glare of the pink torches combining with the moonlight made me blink stupidly; then I leaped backward into the concealing trees.
Peering out from the underbrush, I saw with relief that there had been no one to witness my sudden arrival and subsequent disappearance. But still I waited in the bushes, letting my eyes adjust to the difference between the darkness around me and the light before me.
What I saw as the clearing came into focus wasn’t anything that I had been expecting. There was no house of wood or stone, no cave, no structure at all. There was a clearing, encircled by the torches with their pinkish gold flames, and in the center was the pillar of smoke, as wide as a large dragon and so straight that it was hard to imagine it wasn’t solid. Dimly, where the smoke met the ground, I could see the ragged edge of a rift. The dragons were flying down into the earth, then. So that was where I would need to go as well. If Velika wasn’t down there, and I strongly believed that she was, then at the least the dragons responsible for her abduction were.
But first I sat in the bushes and ate the rest of the berries I’d found earlier. The berries tasted strange, and I worried for a moment that they really weren’t yellowberries, as I had thought. But then I noticed that the smoke from the torches had a peculiar odor, which was affecting my sense of taste. It wasn’t the smell of dragonfire, or not quite, nor was it the smell of the Boiling Sea, back in Feravel. It was something else, something that smelled like rotting leaves and stone and rust at the same time. I hoped it wasn’t unsafe for a human to breathe. It certainly smelled like it might be.
It seemed as though the dragons were gone for the night, or perhaps they were below, sleeping. I could face that risk, but didn’t want to run into Darrym or any of his cronies as I was climbing down into the rift.
When the berries were gone and my eyelids were starting to droop, I slapped myself, got to my feet, and crossed the clearing. Standing at the edge, I looked down into the mouth of hell.
There were flecks and particles of ash in the smoke, and it stung my nose and nearly brought the berries I’d eaten back up. The rocky edges of the rift into the earth were hot and covered in powdery ash, which made the climb all the more treacherous. I told myself firmly that Velika was waiting for me at the bottom, and went down.
And down and down and down, and my legs were shaking and my arms were shaking, and I kept losing my grip and nearly falling. Looking around, I could see only more smoke and bright orange light that burned my eyes, and hear a roaring that rattled my teeth and was not made by man or dragon. I didn’t bother to look again, I just kept climbing.
The cliff wall curved away from the rift, and for a while I think I was nearly upside down. I definitely didn’t try to look around then, just offered prayer after prayer to the Triunity, and even a few blasphemous prayers to Tobin’s Moralienin ancestors and the First Fires, on which the dragons swore. Someone had to help me, I thought, growing hysterical. I was on a rescue mission, after all, and if I didn’t reach the ground soon my arms would give out and I would fall to my death. . . .
Just as the trembling in my arms reached the point where I could no longer hold on, my right foot hit solid ground. I collapsed like a rag doll onto a rough, porous rock floor and breathed in and out, in and out, savoring the feeling of not dying.
Then, as if it were being dragged from some poor creature’s throat by force, I heard my name.
“Creeeeeel?”
I flipped over onto my stomach and squinted through the smoke. I was at one side of a huge underground cavern, the rough, black walls lit by a river of orange fire that flowed through the center of the chamber. It was from this that the column of smoke rose up into the rift.
On the opposite side of the river, lying on a raised dais of wood padded with leaves and branches, lay Velika.
I
scrambled to my feet and ran toward her, an embarrassing rush of tears flooding down my cheeks. I had to stop at the edge of the river of molten rock, teetering and feeling the heat wash over me.
“Velika,” I said when I had composed myself, “are you all right?” My gaze went to her belly and I could almost count the eggs, they were so prominent.
“I . . . cannot . . .” Her words were drawn out, almost painfully so. “Drugged,” she said finally.
“Drugged?” I strained to look through the smoke that separated us, searching for something, some food, water, whatever it was they were giving her, but there was nothing there. Only smoke and rock and the bed she was lying on. My hands were shaking again, now from terror and not exhaustion. How long did they intend to keep her drugged? Would it hurt the eggs? How was I supposed to get her out of here if she was too weak to fly?
“Are the eggs all right?”
“Yeesss.” Her eyes kept closing, but I could tell that she was trying to listen to me as I paced along the edge of the river and dithered.
“How soon will you . . . lay . . . them?”
“Soon.”
This made me pace harder. How soon was soon? Tonight? Tomorrow night? Next week? We had to get her out of here. I’d have to climb back out immediately and find Shardas.
“Can you try not to take the potion or what-have-you? Can you pretend to swallow, then spit it out?”
“No, she can’t,” said Darrym.
I whirled around. He was coming out of a narrow tunnel in the far wall, one that I hadn’t even noticed through the haze. Without further warning he lunged forward and snatched me in his claws. Arrowing up and out of the rift above us, he didn’t even circle once, just dove back down again into another hole in the ground, dropped me on the rock floor, and left.
“That is the second time a dragon has done that to me,” I gasped, trying to get my wind back. “And I don’t like it!”
“Creel?”
It was muffled, but the voice was unmistakable.
“Hagen?”
“Creel!” His voice was louder, and the frantic scraping sound that accompanied it made my teeth hurt.
A chunk of rock low down on the wall broke free and skittered across the floor. Through the hole it left I could see a human hand, dusty and scraped. It withdrew, and was replaced by Hagen’s face, also dusty and scraped, peering up at me.
I crouched down and touched his face. “What are you doing here?”
“We were looking for you, of course,” he said, looking not the least bit nonplussed by our situation. “What happened to you? Shardas and Luka are frantic; they said you just disappeared.”
“I got captured by some ‘hoarded humans,’ ” I told him, rushing to get my words out. We needed to work on an escape plan. “They took me to their village, and then their dragon made me his personal servant. But Darrym came to visit and recognized me. So I ran off and found this place, and saw Velika. Then Darrym caught me and dropped me down here.” I paused for breath. “You said ‘we.’ Who’s with you?”
“Leontes.” Hagen’s head disappeared, and then I saw one of Leontes’s green eyes peering at me.
“Hello, young Creel,” he rumbled.
“Hello, Leontes,” I said. “Can you fly out of your cave?”
“No, there’s an iron grill over the opening. We are trying to dig through to your chamber, instead. I don’t know if you saw, but there is a whole row of caves here, apparently for this very purpose, but the wall seems thinnest between our two chambers.”
“Can I do anything?”
“Just stand clear. Now that we’ve broken through, it shouldn’t take long.”
And with that he curled a long foreclaw around the edge of the hole and began to tug. More pieces of rock broke off, and I could hear the horrible scraping again as he used his other claws to weaken the wall around it.
In a few minutes he had made a hole large enough for Hagen to climb through, and my brother gave me a rib-cracking hug. Then he handed me a jagged chunk of rock and showed me where to chip away at the wall. Side by side we went at it, while in the other cave Leontes did his part with rather more success.
Every so often, a shadow would pass across the cave entrances far above us. Hagen would leap back to Leontes and we would all feign sleep until the sentry went away again. We were lucky in that they hardly glanced at us, so certain were they that we would not be able to get out.
Until Darrym came.
This time Hagen had crouched in the ever-widening hole between our caves when a dragon’s shadow passed over us. At my low signal, he went all the way back to Leontes, who let out a disgruntled huff at being interrupted yet again. Darrym crouched at the mouth of the cave and peered down at me.
“We needed the queen,” he said, but there was no hint of apology in his tone.
“Why couldn’t you just tell her about your people?” I had to shout to be heard; it was like being at the bottom of a well. “She and Shardas would have come to visit you! Why did you need to steal her?”
“We are the true people,” he said, haughty. “We require the queen’s presence. Those other dragons, with whom you have made
friends
”—he said the word as though it disgusted him to contemplate—“are blasphemers and fools. She should not be in such company.”
“So she should be kept imprisoned?”
“Until she sees the true way,” Darrym said easily.
“And if she doesn’t?”
“Her eggs will be laid soon.”
I could only gape at this. Did he honestly think Velika—and Shardas!—would let them keep even one of the eggs? They would die first! But perhaps that was the plan . . . if Velika did not see “the true way.” And what did
that
mean? Keeping people as servants? Living in squalor?
“She belongs here with us, but a human could never understand,” Darrym said, his voice dismissive.
“Try to explain it,” I said with gritted teeth.
At the same time, though, I wanted him to go away so that we could keep digging a Leontes- sized hole in the wall. We had to get out of here, to escape and save Velika, but Darrym’s horrifyingly matter-of-fact tone mesmerized me. What was the reasoning behind this madness?
Darrym settled himself firmly on the edge of the pit and drew a deep breath, preparatory to explaining. Beside me, in the hole, I heard Hagen give a little moan of impatience, but out of the corner of my eye I could see Leontes straining to listen to Darrym, an expression of deep interest in his eyes.
“We are the chosen ones, those who followed the true queen many generations ago,” Darrym said. “It grieves us to come to this, stealing away one who descended from the false queen, but a female of lesser royal blood is better than none at all.”