Dragonslayer: A Novel (28 page)

The dragon rose.

Events then happened so fast that Galen could not be sure of their sequence. In fact, he could not even be sure where Vermithrax came from, only that one moment he was looking into the flames of the lake, and the next he was gazing into the eyes of the dragon. So shocking was the suddenness of the beast's appearance that he did not have time to react before he had been fixed by its mesmerizing stare. Only the lance leaped and surged; the lance sang in his hand. Galen himself was lost by what he saw in the dragon's eyes and, immobilized, he watched those eyes. Slowly Vermithrax's head tipped back, slowly its mouth opened. In the very last second before flame poured forth, Galen raised his shield.

The blast sent him reeling backwards. Flames cascaded around and over the edges of the shield, scorching his right hand, his lower legs, his hair. He shrieked with pain and terror, and the sound of his cry mingled with the high-pitched clamoring of the flames on the shield. Inside, the limewood handle smoldered against its boss. His knuckles burned on the scaled plating. He was driven helplessly back up the corridor, and still Vermithrax had not moved, had merely exhaled. Now it moved. Now it came toward him while he was still stunned and suffocated by the first assault, stepping with obscene precision on the flat stones along the edge of the lake. Galen watched horrified, watched too long, for another fiery blast engulfed him and sent him cowering behind the blessed shield, a helpless, quivering jelly of terror. Only the lance protruded. Only Sicarius took the full blast of the dragon's fire and shone white hot in it, as if that fire had given the final tempering. The blast was shorter this time. Vermithrax stepped, stepped again. Its head now hovered within twenty feet of its victim. A long inhalation hissed through the slits of its jowls; there would now, Galen knew, be an awful swallowing, and then the flash of fire.

He turned and ran. He ran as fast as his singed legs could carry him, around the corner and up the corridor, just out of range of the wash of fire, and up, up past the place where he had slain the dragonets, up past the corpse of Elspeth. All the way, the lance protested.

Vermithrax was not far behind. When it had recovered its breath, the dragon moved with remarkable speed, its snout projecting, its long neck stretched far forward to counterbalance the spade-tipped tail, wings fluttering, it ran on its claws and surprisingly nimble feet. It ran on familiar surfaces. But it ran for only a short distance before slowing, moving more cautiously around the corners. The human thing might be hurt, but it was not dead, and it was carrying a stick that had sung for Vermithrax's blood. The dragon had heard and felt that singing. The dragon had blown fire as much at the blade as at the cringing man and it had seen the lance glow white with the welcome heat.

So it moved more cautiously now that the man had scampered up the corridor and vanished. The important thing was to destroy not the man—for unarmed, the man was powerless—but the lance. Vermithrax slowed; its wings folded back, its plated feet slid, grating along the passage. Ahead was something unmoving—Vermithrax exhaled a squirt of flame to illuminate the corridor—something white, and around it, familiar shapes. The crusted neck stretched forward; the snout waved, sensing alarming odors on the cool evening breezes that drifted down from outside.

So it was that it came upon the corpses of its young. One by one it found them, and one by one it sniffed and nuzzled them. There was no replying shriek, no squirming, no small keen teeth to close on its nose or jaws. The bodies were stiff and motionless. They smelled of blood and other spilled liquids. With great care Vermithrax went from one to the other, Galen temporarily forgotten, leaning across Elspeth's mutilated body as it did so. And then, when it had satisfied itself that there was no life here, it did a curious and—to Galen, who was hiding, poised in a niche not fifteen feet away—a bewildering thing. It blew fire across the bodies. It was not the white-hot, incinerating fire that it had directed earlier at Galen, at Swanscombe, and at assorted challengers and earthworks over the centuries, but rather a pale shimmering bluish flame like the flickering of sheet lightning on a hot summer evening, like the pale fire Galen had watched shimmering among the battlements of Cragganmore one night long ago. It was as if Vermithrax had drawn from within itself the fragile essence of its life, pure dragon-spirit, and sought to breathe that back into the pitiful, hopelessly mutilated bodies. The blue fire flickered over them, a benediction, and faded.

Then Vermithrax slowly raised its head. And the flame it breathed was not benevolent, but a raw jet of liquid hatred that struck the earth and burst into spinning globules only a few feet from where Galen was concealed. The exhalation was accompanied by a sound that ran like ice along the inside of Galen's thighs and up his backbone, a keen and unrelenting whine of agony that could come only from a creature for whom sound was foreign, almost beyond its capacity. It was as if, for that one brief cry, Vermithrax had brought sound into being, and had poured into it a millennia of loss and losing. It was a cry for all that might have been and now would never be.

It was mercifully short. When it had died away, Vermithrax advanced with more grim determination than ever; in its haste, it passed unseeing by the niche where Galen stood frozen, Sicarius poised throbbing above his head. Galen watched the tip of the dragon's snout appear, the encrusted nostril surmounted by its fanglike horn, then the red eye couched in its membranous folds and pouches, and the great scabrous ridge that swept back and up into reptilian antlers. Behind the skull came the neck, the long, sinewy neck with its armored top and sides, with its thin, pulsing, and vulnerable scales. "Now!" Galen said to himself as he watched this neck glide by, knowing that in the next moment the heavily plated shoulder would heave into sight. "Strike now!" And with the roar of the pent-up warrior leaping at last from his ambush, he loosed Sicarius.

He was certain the lance would have gone to its destination with no guidance from himself. In fact, it might have been better had he hurled it, or simply released it; perhaps in gripping the hilt he deflected it from its predestined course, for it missed the throat and lodged deep between large scales on the upper neck.

The effect was cataclysmic. The dragon's neck writhed as if it were a separate creature, and its head lunged upward, horns raking the ceiling, sending showers of stalactites and broken rock cascading on its writhing back. Its claws gouged at the scree and slime, scouring out tons of debris. Its jaws yawned in pain; its intestines convulsed, loosing horrid effluvia into the already fetid air. Its tail lashed like an armored club.

Gripping Sicarius, Galen was lifted off his feet and flung against the walls of the enclosure; but he hung on, elated by the feel of the lance probing deep and deeper, searching for the mortal place. And then he fell. The dragon reared free above, the blade protruding from its neck. The oaken shaft had snapped.

Gripping the broken piece, Galen scrambled into his little cave, as deep as he could go, gasping as the dragon lunged backwards so that it could twist and peer into Galen's hole. It was far from dead. The red eye peered in. The cracked mouth emitted a preliminary wisp of flame that curled around the entrance and slipped up almost as far as Galen's feet. And then, as the head pivoted to deliver the
coup de grace,
the fire that would scour the chamber like a crucible and reduce its contents to white ash, Galen felt a breath of fresh air on his neck and, groping upward, discovered a chimney scarcely bigger than his body. The next instant he had scrambled up into it and the dragon's breath was roaring like a fiery sea beneath his feet. He hitched himself higher, gulping for the oxygen flowing down from above. Again Vermithrax sent gouts of flame searching the cavity, but Galen was well clear. Another minute and he hauled himself into open air.

Below, the earth trembled as Vermithrax twisted around and retreated, hurt but far from slain, back to the lake of fire. . . .

Galen lay still for a long time. Never was an evening more beautiful. It was cool and windless, and somewhere nearby a nightbird sang. There was a full sky of stars, and above the eastern horizon hung the cradle of a moon. He had emerged into a lit-tie grassy area at the very edge of the Blight, and now he licked at the dew and felt it ease his parched lips and throat.

He lacked the strength to sit up. Despite the pain, he rolled over, gazed up at the stars that shone brilliantly through drifting clouds, and fell asleep.

So it was that Valerian found him.

She had stayed with Simon and the other Urlanders at the edge of the Blight, awed by the titanic struggle she could feel beneath her feet. She had stayed through the evening, long after the others had given up and had turned back in little groups towards their homes. She had resisted even the appeals of Simon and, as the night fell, she had gone into the Blight to search, calling Galen's name into the very mouth of the cave and then searching doggedly in ever-widening circles, right into the edge of the greensward where, she knew, small tunnels opened. At last her eye had been caught by something shining in the starlight—a length of oak staff. So she had found Galen. She did not waken him immediately. She did not want him to see that she had been crying, or that she was crying then. After a while, when she had got control of herself, she touched his face. His eyes opened. "Hello," she said.

He could not smile. He could not move. He could not even lift his hand to touch her hair when she bent to kiss him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mcronsford

"I
am the Resurrection
and the Life, saith the Lord."

A bell tolled.

"Whosoever believeth in Me shall not perish . . ."

Again the bell.

". . . but have everlasting Life."

The bell tolled and tolled. To Galen, it seemed that it was inside his very ear, and inside every one of his throbbing wounds. He pushed his hurt palms against his ears, but the bell penetrated with malignant insistence, and there were more guttural, earnest words as well. He rolled over, groaning, and with a great effort, opened his eyes. He was once again in Simon's loft, although he did not know how he had come there. He recalled the horror of the dragonfire beneath his feet, and for a moment he believed he was still in its midst, for the sun was streaming through chinks in the walls and spilling in undulating patterns on the golden hay.

The bell ceased its tolling. Voices now rolled up from below. He recognized Simon's and then another, the one that had been proclaiming, but he could not put a name to it until Simon did.

"Greil! Why, what's happened to you? What's all this about resurrection and everlasting life?"

"I saw him die, Simon!"

"Who?"

"Why, who else has sacrificed himself for Urland? Jacopus, of course."

"Yes," Simon said. "I saw that too. Awful!"

"Not awful! Marvelous!"

"Well, it all depends on your point of view."

"Marvelous! The man martyred himself! To save us!"

"Looked like suicide to me."

"Martyred himself! Such courage! Such selflessness! Didn't you

see the way he climbed the hill? Didn't you see how he challenged the dragon?"

"I saw the way he died," Simon said. "Foolishly."

"No! No, not foolishly!" Greil's bell rattled discordantly as he waved his arms. "Magnificently! When you confront Evil it cannot be foolish, even if you perish. He is a martyr, Simon, another of those who has shown us the way."

"Greil . . ."

"Please, please. I know we have been friends all our lives, but please, now that I have been reborn, call me Gregorius."

"But. . . how do you know?"

"Know? I just do, Simon. It's a matter of faith."

"But as a man of reason. . . ."

"Reason?" Greil laughed, not unkindly. "Surely you do not believe that we are any of us, in any of the important things, reasonable men. Was it a reasonable man who walked those miles across the mountains to Cragganmore, with Harald Wartooth and Xenophobius the muleteer and the others, in hopes that we would find a magician to save us? Was it reasonable to have such blind hope? Such faith? And for your part, Simon, was it the action of a reasonable man to think that he could preserve his daughter by making her into a
boy?"
There was a peculiarly bitter emphasis on this last word that for Galen recalled Valerian's near chopping blow to Greil's knife-arm and her kick to the stomach that had sent him sprawling.
Boy . . .

"No, not forever," Simon said, "only for a little while."

"Or," Greil continued, the bitterness vanished, "will you tell me that it was a reasonable man who all those years ago fashioned Sicarius—oh yes, I know all about that, and included in its tempering the spell from old Ulrich? Tell me, Simon, my old friend, was that the action of a reasonable man? Or of a man with
faith?"

There was a long pause. "Perhaps," Simon said, "they are the same thing, after all."

"Perhaps. Yes," said Greil. "Think about it, my old friend, think about it. Come to see me." The bell began to ring again, rhythmically summoning converts from amidst the ruins, and Greil's voice faded as he proceeded along the road.

Painfully, Galen inched himself to the edge of the loft and descended the ladder. From the hearth came the dehcious scent of cooking—soup and vegetables and seed-porridge—and it was obvious that Valerian was at work there. But he did not go in that direction; instead, he turned toward the forge where the voices had come from and where he knew he would find Simon. The big blacksmith was leaning against his doorpost in the sun, lost in thought. He was watching Greil's retreating back, and he was fingering the broken shaft of Sicarius. Galen stood at the entrance to the forge for several moments before Simon became aware of him; and then, when the older man turned toward him, Galen thought for a terrible moment that Simon was going to cry. "I'm sorry, lad," he said, slapping the broken stick against his thigh. "I really am."