Dragon Wizard (25 page)

I unbuckled the straps of our armor as I backed away. I dropped the leather to lighten my load, to the relief of
our boobs. I reached the end of the ledge farthest from Elhared, then I sprinted right toward him.

This is insane!

Got a better plan?

I was fast. My legs had much more strength than my upper body. I was under no illusions of my chances in clearing the distance. But I figured I could get close enough for the dagger to count. As for after . . .

Like I said, we had survived slamming into the palace. This fall was about ten times greater, but the same principle should hold.

I hoped.

I sprang up from the ledge, leaping with all the strength my legs could muster. I lined up my aim and, at the top of my arc, I let fly with the dagger. It sailed true, right toward the wizard's head.

I glanced down at the thousand feet of nothing below my feet.

YOUR PLANS ARE STUPID!
Lucille screamed in my head as we began falling.

A huge, scaly black hand plucked us out of the air with a neck-straining jerk. It pulled us back from the drop and up onto our ledge, suspending us over the space between our ledge and Elhared's.

I was deeply disappointed when I saw the wizard standing there, blotting a bloody cheek with the sleeve of his robe. “Sebastian, you dolt! After what happened last time, you didn't restrain her while I worked?”

“I wasn't expecting her to jump.”

“Just hold her.”

“If you—” I started to say.

“Hold her, cover her mouth, and make damn sure her arms aren't free to throw anything else.” He pressed his sleeve to his cheek and winced, muttering, “At least this time I wasn't in the middle of the spell.”

He wasn't?
Lucille thought at me as the dragon's massive fingers covered our face and arms. Then Sebastian brought up his other hand and wrapped it around us as well. Held so tightly, the only parts of our body I could move were our eyebrows and the toe of our left boot.

Elhared sighed and resumed scratching runes into the stone.

I guess he's writing down the spell, not casting it.

Maybe you caused him to misspell something.

I can hope.

“I'm sorry about—”
Sebastian began saying.

“Please. Just be quiet until I'm done here.”

I heard a massive sigh rumble behind us.

That was a stupid risk.

I know. But I think I ran out of smart risks.

Like stalling them till moonrise?

I have to work with what we have.

What about the others?

If Elhared pulls this off, it might be better if those plans don't work out.
I'd been planning on reinforcements, but if Elhared was in the princess's body, I didn't want to think about how many complications that would cause, especially if he and Sebastian planned to impersonate me and Lucille.

And one thing made the potential so much worse: were-dragon.

Elhared in a dragon's body, even temporarily, was a thought to give anyone pause.

Maybe he'll take so long the moon will come up.

Yeah. That's a good thought.

But too soon, Elhared stopped writing and began chanting.

Elhared chanted words that were not designed for a human throat. The incantations that drifted from his position on the ledge sounded as if some demonic imp with a lisp had attempted to gargle with hot coals while being repeatedly kneed in the groin: strangled, high-pitched, and as painful as a cinder in the eye. I couldn't move this time so I could do nothing but watch the wizard and hope for something to go wrong.

He held up the jewel on its chain, and stared at it as he chanted. By his feet the runes he had scratched in the stone began to glow. They pulsed red in time to the kind-of-words he spoke to the Tear of Nâtlac. The glow intensified as all the light around him, and around us, seemed to darken. It wasn't just the setting sun. Something in what Elhared was doing, calling on the Dark Lord's magic, using the jewel, prompting the fiery glow from the twisted runes around him, it banished more healthy light. The darkness crept into the world, pushing away everything but Elhared, the jewel, and the glowing runes.

I felt the presence of the Dark Lord Nâtlac. I felt it as a thousand tiny insects crawling across my skin. I felt it in a thousand tiny splinters biting the flesh of my eyes, carving painful sigils that echoed the glowing alien script.
I felt it as needles in my ears, and a feeling that I breathed air filled with broken glass.

Frank! It hurts! It hurts . . .

I couldn't move, but I felt a rushing sensation, as if I flew away at great speed. My eyes involuntarily focused on the gem dangling from Elhared's hand. In it I saw the burning sigils reflected, twisted, inverted in a million different facets as it became the whole of my field of vision, then the whole of my universe.

“Oh crap!”

I no longer felt Sebastian's grip holding me. I could talk, and move, for all the good it did me. I floated in space, Nâtlac's hellish script reflected and refracted through an infinite number of facets surrounding me.

“Lucille!”

I no longer heard her voice.

I looked down and I could see myself; my old self, my original, long-dead self. I no longer wore the body of a virgin princess. My heart sank as I knew—not guessed,
knew
—that I no longer inhabited that body.

I could feel Nâtlac's laughter like a knife slicing into my soul. A knife coated with acid, salt, and children's screams.

I was back in Nâtlac's realm, bodiless. I knew it by how the heavy warm air carried the smell of decay, and how the omnipresent red light never carried far enough to illuminate a wall or ceiling. Through the sigil reflections I could see pillars, and below a plain made from living cobblestones, cobblestones that stared, that screamed, that wriggled tongues and fingers at me.

And I understood.

The gem, the Tear of Nâtlac, was created, according to legend, by a soul escaping from Nâtlac's grasp. This one in particular had apparently been formed in the wake of my own escape from the Dark Lord's clutches. The gem had properties, when worn, to swap souls between two bodies.

Again, legend had it that death would end such a transfer.

But legend was somewhat vague as to how.

“Oh you bastard!” I shouted into the ruddy darkness. “You unholy evil bucket of ogre spit!”

This gem wasn't a gift, or a reward. It was a trap.

This thing had been sitting around waiting for me to die, just so it could suck up my soul like a goblin shucking an oyster. Even if I never used it, I suspected—no, again I
knew
—the moment that something other than the gem itself separated my soul from my body, I would have ended up here.

I didn't think I had much chance negotiating with the Dark Lord this time. I didn't have another Queen Fiona to negotiate with.

I felt despair descend over me, a fatal realization that it was over.

Wasn't it?

Something itched in the back of my brain, and it wasn't just the ambiance of the Dark Lord's domain.

He'd never been shy about terrorizing me every time I set foot anywhere near his realm. Why wasn't he already facing me, expounding upon my eternal doom? It seemed like something he'd do.

Why was I still floating between the reflected sigils of
Elhared's spell? What exactly was the droning rumble that seemed to slowly oscillate as the alien runes dimmed and brightened? It wasn't the unnerving insect-like buzzing I associated with this place.

It reminded me of the elves, partly frozen around us, but not really frozen. They'd just been moving very slowly.

Because time ran differently there.

Time ran differently
here
.

Under the hill time seemed so slow, minutes there could be hours or days in the realm of mortals.

Here, where the Dark Lord dwelled—wherever the gods dwelled, in fact—hours could be mere seconds in the mortal realm.

It
wasn't
over. Elhared still chanted. That was the drone I heard. It was why I still saw the flickering sigils of his spell. The spell was still proceeding. I floated somewhere between the mortal realm on that mountainside, and the realm of the Dark Lord. I still had a chance to do something.

Yeah, just like when I was trapped in Lucille's skull.

Even if I had another dagger, or a broken sword hilt, I didn't have anywhere to throw it. Elhared's rumbling chant was everywhere around me. I also wore my old body, and the real physical body of Frank Blackthorne was buried and rotted to bones by now.

I remembered the dream I had, Elhared—or the Dragon Sebastian-as-Elhared—digging up my skull, Frank Blackthorne's skull.

“The gang's all here.”

Yes, they were.

“Digging up a wedding present.”

Not an anniversary present, a
wedding
present. The gem, the Tear of Nâtlac, had been a “wedding” present from the Dark Lord.

Why was I thinking of this?

“I don't think this is going to work,” as he tosses me the skull,
“I think it's broken.”

Why does that seem relevant?

My dreams had seemed odd for a while, at least the vivid ones. More like visions. The one about Timoras and the shattered mirror had inspired my plans with Robin, our half-elven camp follower. Not just to lead my people to escape the mountainside, and not just to lead Sir Forsythe to
Dracheslayer.

When I had made my deal with Timoras for Lucille's freedom, I had also extracted a promise from Timoras. A promise and a mirror.

I think I had understood that dream.

Could the dream about faux-Elhared digging up my skull, could that have been about this? The “wedding present” that would not work? Because I was dead? Because Elhared was dead?

Because we both were?

The idea clicked in my mind as the consequence of a series of unsupported and tenuous assumptions that had solidified in my mind as unambiguous fact. Either I had tapped into a stream of deeper understanding, or I had just declared the world of the Dark Lord my home and as my first step in making myself comfortable, I had gone insane.

But if I was right that the Tear of Nâtlac was a trap for
souls that had escaped the Dark Lord's clutches, then it had to be as much a trap for Elhared as it was for me—more so, since Elhared had been unquestionably deceased, dead, and gone, absent from the mortal coil for over a year. As far as I could tell, my own person never counted as actually dead, or if so, my current trapped situation was as close as I'd come.

So if I'd shown up here—in this faceted prison wrapped by the burning sigils of Elhared's spell—then it was only a matter of time before—

Several things happened.

The rumble of Elhared's slow-motion chanting ceased.

The reflection of the burning runes all around me flared red, obscuring the details of the disturbing alien lines until all was just a flat red glow.

All except a white crack that formed between some of the facets just ahead of me.

The white expanded, pushing the glowing red facets aside until it seemed the mouth of a tunnel.

A shadow, human-size, floated in the tunnel drifting toward me and picking up speed.

I had nothing to push against, as if I floated in an endless ocean that buoyed me but gave no purchase with which to swim. I spread my arms. Despite the knowledge that the body I wore wasn't physical, I hoped that it might still act as if it was a physical body in a physical world. I prayed to every god aside from the Dark Lord Nâtlac that the newcomer's path would intersect the point where I floated.

The newcomer kept accelerating, as if he fell toward me from a great height. His body language began
showing the distress from falling, flailing arms and legs, cloak flapping in winds I didn't feel. At the speed he fell, I only had a moment to read his expression. For only the briefest fraction of a second, he was close enough for me to see his face in detail.

I saw wide-eyed confusion.

I grabbed for his arm as he passed me. That pulled me backward, but also started us spinning around the point where I had grabbed him.

His back struck the faceted wall opposite the white tunnel. I let go of his arm and slammed both feet into his chest, springing off of his body—

Okay,
not
his body.

His
body
still stood on a mountain ledge back in the mortal world.

Where
I
was, my soul, cloaked in the form of the one and only original Frank Blackthorne, placed both booted feet into the apparent chest of Elhared's spirit hard enough to crack nonexistent ribs and send his undoubtedly spiritual form into a wall of nonphysical semiprecious stone only symbolically solid enough to stop his imaginary descent and break his nonliteral neck while I rebounded into the whiteness from which he'd come.

My last sight of him was as a tiny ragged form lit by a fading ruby light as I fell upward, away, into the light.