Dragon Wizard (18 page)

What would Queen Theora, ruler of the Summer Court of the elves, want with Elhared's scroll? When she talked to Dudley, it sounded as if she was much more keen on the coming war than Timoras—if we were to believe Robin's assessment of his uncle. She had said,
more or less, that using the scroll would preempt us from fulfilling the elf-king's ultimatum.

“How would . . .” Lucille trailed off and I knew she got my point.

So did Krys. “By her logic, Elhared is the one responsible for her son's death.”

Right. And if that's the case, forget any other logic, it's her definition that matters to Timoras, since it's her—or her followers—he needs to appease to prevent a war. We have to give him Elhared.

Krys passed that on, and Lucille responded with an impressive string of curses.

“That means we
have
to try and save the bastard,” Lucille said. “Only so we can give him back.” She rubbed her temple with the hand she still controlled. “I hate dealing with elves.”

Rabbit had gotten up from the bed and walked to the window.

“We don't know where he is,” Krys said.

“And at this point I don't think the elf-king would be too willing to let us come by for a visit.”

“Yeah.”

“So how does Frank think this will work? Does he have some sort of plan?”

“I don't kn— What is it?” Krys turned to look at Rabbit, who was gesturing wildly at the window. I heard Rabbit's mental voice,
You need to see this.

Lucille stood and looked over at Rabbit as Krys walked up next to her. Krys stared out the window with wide eyes.

What the . . .
I heard her young man's voice trail off blankly in my head.

I felt uneasy, remembering a few months ago looking out the window of a rented room, and seeing an angry dragon waiting for me. However, when Lucille walked up next to the other two, there was nothing outside the window but the cobbled street outside The
Talking Eye,
washed by a ruddy evening light.

“What are we looking at?” Lucille asked.

You don't see it?
Rabbit asked me.

See what?
I responded.

“Crap. I think you may need some tea,” Krys said.

Lucille had been initially reluctant to take the tea—no question I was as well—but Crumley's admonishment about possible side effects were somewhat ameliorated by the weight of Lothan's flask in our hand. So at Krys's and Rabbit's urging I picked up the cup and held it up to Lucille's face. I waited until she moved her lips to meet the cup before I tilted it. She took a mouthful of the tea and I took the cup away.

She swallowed and the power of Crumley's herb hit full force, like we'd been stripped naked and tossed screaming into a near-frozen lake. We took a deep breath and staggered back a moment. If anything, the absence of the other foul components from this blend made it worse. Maybe Brock had added the slime mold and fungus to tone things down.

Wow!
The dragon's voice exploded through my skull like a crossbow bolt through a rotten cabbage.

Don't yell!
I yelled back at her.

Our hands went to our temple to press at the throbbing pulse there. Our hands? My hands?

“Lucille?” I whispered, and my voice came out of our mouth.

Still here . . . that was a jolt.

I know.

I think you're in charge right now . . .

Am I?

I lifted our head and lowered one hand from my temples. The left one hesitated a moment, then lowered on its own accord.

Al
most in ch
arge . . .

That thought was in a weird echoey hybrid of my voice and the dragon's. I shuddered, and Lucille's arm hugged me. I imitated her, wrapping my own arm around, over hers.

“Are you all right?” Krys asked.

“Fine,” I whispered. “We just weren't expecting—”

I finally looked out the window so we could see what had captured the two girls' attention. The voice dried up in my throat.

Through the window to our room, I no longer saw the evening sky we'd been watching with half an eye ever since reading the inscription on Lothan's flask. Instead, I saw moon
and
sun near their zenith occupying the same too-purple sky, almost touching.

That
was the sky I had seen under the hill.

Inside my head I heard Lucille's voice echoing my own thoughts, but fortunately not exactly.

“It tears down the walls between your self and reality.”

Fell Green was a wizard town, it had been built between worlds, and it seemed as if it was closer to the land of the elves than any place in the world of men. The barriers between here and there were thinner, and under the herb's influence, we now all saw parts of elfland
bleeding through, nestled in the cracks between this city and itself.

I know that doesn't make much sense, but I can't really describe it accurately to anyone who isn't under the influence of a magical hallucinogenic herb. What had before been a normal static city-scape, seemed to breathe or pulse, expanding without changing size or position, to reveal glimpses of a shining other place just around a corner that otherwise didn't seem to exist.

Sometimes the universe hands you an answer so obvious that you just have to take advantage of it, no matter how insane it might be.

•   •   •

Of course we had to test the theory.

We brewed a batch of the powerful herbs and poured it into a waterskin that Rabbit had been carrying. Then we left The Talking Eye and walked into the shifting almost-there landscape. We had barely gone a dozen paces before it became obvious that we all saw the same thing, not just a close approximation due to a shared hallucination. We saw something that was actually there in the real world.

Of course, “real world” had become a somewhat fuzzy concept by then.

As we approached a wall that had been a row of shops across the street from the inn, it seemed to fold inward until we stood at the mouth of an alley that had not existed when we stood across the street. Rabbit walked into the alley, where there should have been only a blank wall.

We followed.

Yes, it's very strange.

Lucille was obviously responding to someone. Since Krys had been responding to mental conversation aloud, I guessed she was talking to Rabbit. Apparently the tradeoff for the tea giving me control of the body—most of it, anyway—was the loss of my ability to “hear” anyone aside from Lucille. I suppose there was some sort of logic to it, but I found it annoying.

We walked through a space that seemed to pass between two buildings that seemed almost there, and through another that almost wasn't. The buildings we passed between were made from the elaborate white crystal I had seen the last time I'd passed under the hill.

When we reached the other end of the alley, it folded out into a city that was
not
Fell Green. On this side of the passage, it seemed the wizard town was the one that pulsed and tried to push itself through the cracks in this world.

“Welcome to elfland,” Krys said quietly.

I don't believe it either,
Lucille responded to the unheard Rabbit.

“Now we just need to find Elhared,” I said.

When I say it like that . . .

. . . It sounds so simple.

“What's the plan?” Krys asked both of us.

I felt Lucille's hand go to the pendant around our neck. I glanced down and she turned the pendant so we both could see it. The sand was visibly moving faster. The side trip with Dudley had cost us; it looked as if we'd lost almost half the sand we'd had left when we'd visited the Wizard Crumley.

That confirms it. We're here, and
running out of time.
I involuntarily finished her thought. It left uneasy echoes in our skull.

We were running out of time in more than one sense. Maybe four hours in the glass, much less than that in our own head.

Plan. I was supposed to have a plan, wasn't I?

Below us, in the city that was almost here, I saw elves almost moving. I looked at them and said, improvising aloud, “We need to find Elhared, wherever he is.”

“Yes,” Krys said. Her tone reminded me that I was stating the obvious.

Are you making this up as you go along?

It's worked so far.

No it hasn't.

“Let me think.” I paused, staring down into what might have been a city square, although there was nothing square about it. The roads below were laid out in a geometry that I think might have inspired a severe headache if I had thought about it too much. I could almost feel the accelerating sand in the hourglass through the surface of the pendant Lucille still gripped in our hand.

“Frank?” Krys asked.

“The trial,” I said, thinking about the last time I had been here.

“What?” Krys said.

“The arena . . .” I remembered the place of the trial where the elves had convicted Lucille in her dragon skin, and the dragon in his Elhared skin. It had been hollowed into a mound on the outskirts of this city; a mound
that—I realized now—the Goddess Lysea had shown me in a vision.

If that had really been the goddess.

Dream-Lysea's identity aside, anyone who wanted to write that dream off as coincidence had never dealt with prophetic visions before. “We need to find the arena where they held the trial for me, Lucille, and the dragon.”

Is going there a good idea?

Is going anywhere here a “good idea”?
I thought at Lucille.
But what
choice do we have?

I shuddered when she answered for me, even though I was certain it had been my thought.

Deep down, I understood that she felt exactly the same way. And that was the problem, wasn't it?

I hefted the flask and glanced up at the elvish sky, sun and moon in the same sky, almost touching. That should count per Lothan's instructions.

Wouldn't it?

Wait, Frank.

Why?

We should take care of Elhared first. We don't know if that “cure” will have any side effects.

I almost thought, “Like what?” But I knew better. The only certainty with this kind of magic, especially the kind with a god involved, was that something unexpected would happen. I didn't know what, but given that Lothan was known for deception, trickery, and an unfortunate sense of humor, I accepted that Lucille was probably right. We should wait until solving our personal problem wouldn't interfere with solving the larger issues. We probably had a little time before the “cure” became urgent.

Rushing into things was always my biggest fault.

So instead of testing Lothan's flask, we rushed into the depths of the elf city.

•   •   •

Finding the arena wasn't quite as easy as it sounded. We were navigating a city whose geography was flexible in the best of times, and we did so while suspended halfway between it and Fell Green. Moment to moment the relationship between the two cities seemed to renegotiate itself, stretching, rotating, squeezing itself between the mortal structures that seemed to surround and engulf the elf city one moment, and be surrounded and engulfed in turn the next moment.

I knew it to be on the outskirts, so we moved in the direction of Fell Green's city wall, assuming some form of congruence between one world and the other. However, I think logic may have had less to do with us finding the place than our intent. The land of the elves worked like that.

Either way, while we found the place, a distressing amount of sand passed through the elf-king's pendant in the process.

The road became a twisting path of gold set in silver sand that glittered in the combined light of sun and moon. The tall spun-sugar towers of the elves peeled away from us as we climbed a hill that, somehow, occupied the same spot as the main gate of Fell Green.

As we approached, the signs of the mortal city seemed to fold away into the spaces between everything else.

“Is it always this empty?” Krys asked as we climbed the hill.

“I don't know,” I whispered. We had been avoiding the natives as much as possible. The inhabitants of both places seemed insubstantial and ghostly. The elves moved way too slowly, the natives of Fell Green moved way too fast—all statues and blurs. Even so, there seemed too few elves for the size of their city, and the height of their towers.

I didn't like that.

However, that was just one item on a lengthening list.

Another thing I didn't like was the low resonating sound that filled the air as we closed on the arena. It was a rumble so low that it was more a rattle in the teeth and a humming in the bowels than a sound. I literally could not imagine a scenario where that would have been a good thing.

I didn't like the dark wood coming into view on the other side of the hill. Last time I'd been here, I had focused on the city and I had been facing away from the twisted forest that formed a brutal echo of the delicate city towers on the opposing side of the arena.

Mostly, I didn't like the sudden limp I had developed. I wasn't in control of my left foot anymore.
Lucille?

I know, I'm trying to keep our balance.

It's progressing . . .

Elhared. We need him.

Elhared. We need him.
I agreed at the same time.

Not just the foot, but the whole leg. I had the strange sensation of being stitched to someone else down the center of my body. I still felt sensations, heard and saw, but it was someone else's touch I felt, someone else's ear I heard through, and my eyes couldn't focus right. The
left one didn't quite match what the right looked at, throwing the world into a painful blur.

Lucille must have realized that at the same time I did, because my left eye screwed itself shut. The right shot back into focus.

Being here . . .

. . . is accelerating the effects of the tea.

“Frank?” Krys said, stopping and looking back at us. Rabbit faced us as well. Distantly I could sense her too-adult voice.

Are you all right?

“Go on,” I shouted at them, waving them ahead with Lucille's hand. My voice came out slurred. Lucille had tried to say the same thing at the same time, but she wasn't quite matched in tempo or volume. However, she managed a mental shout that, from the wincing, I saw everyone heard.

Move! We can't stop now.

We managed a limping run up the remainder of the hillside so we reached the edge of the bowl-like arena just a moment after Krys and Rabbit. They had stopped at the edge overlooking the arena, and when we saw what they saw, we drew to a stop as well.

We saw now the source of that low resonant sound, a vibration so intense that it felt as if our teeth were shaking loose.

It was the sound of tens of thousands of elves cheering.