Key of Living Fire (The Sword of the Dragon) (19 page)

He pulled the scythe from the floor and stuck his ice hand to the wall, pulling his hood up. The cloak shimmered and his body vanished.

The creature warbled, padded closer, and gurgled as if amused. Its arrow-shaped white head snaked into the tunnel, held high on its long neck. It padded on four fin feet toward his tunnel intersection. Its large nostrils, set above round green eyes, rattled another warble as it swiveled its long neck to glance over its bulbous body and short, fat tail. Other shadows snaked along the tunnel’s wall, and three others padded after the first creature. Each of them had to weigh more than a full-grown elephant.

The lead skeel hunkered close to the ice, warbled long and loud, then raised its head and padded to the intersection and sped up the tunnel from which Specter had come. The others followed, climbing the iced path with amazing agility and speed. One snapped at its companion with needle teeth six inches long, and together they warbled, sending their song ringing through the tunnels.

He let out a slow breath as the last one disappeared up the tunnel. He allowed his cloak to render him visible. He had found them. He’d found the water skeels. One thing occupied his mind as he entered the small tunnel one careful step at a time. Auron had picked interesting allies. Specter could handle a few of these creatures, but he wouldn’t want to try facing a group of them. Yet one thing nagged him: why did the great white dragon fear them? Planting his ice hand on the wall to keep from sliding, he rendered himself invisible.

It took at least an hour to navigate the gently winding tunnel. Rounding a bend, he stepped into another cavern, this one
laced
with rainbow-swathed ice. Each glowing swath contrasted with the pure white ice composing the walls. A frozen world of frolicking water skeels swept before him. Over a hundred of them lounged on the ice or slid headfirst into a number of deep-blue pools. Salt scented the air. The creatures warbled to one another, speeding their bulky bodies along the ice with agility and grace, cutting into the saltwater pools and disappearing into the deep underwater shadows.

The ice beneath his feet rose ahead of him as a highway that branched in several directions, twisting around the edges and through the midst of the cavern. He leaned out of the tunnel, holding the ice wall with his new hand, and gazed over the highway’s edge, which curved downward a hundred feet to yet more ice. Large carven holes punctured the highway’s base, and slicks of bluish ice formed roads through the holes, traversing the belly of the cavern.

A warm glow emanated from the far end of the cavern from beneath a shelf of ice, and he distinguished a deeper warble as it rose and fell . . . then rose again. The frolicking skeels skidded to a stop. One of them rose from a pool with a very large fish hanging from its teeth, but its green eyes pivoted in the direction of the ice shelf and froze there. The deep warble danced along the cavern walls, changing pitch to a piercing wail. He cringed and covered his ears with his free arm until it stopped.

The skeel with the fish threw its catch on the ice. The skeel stabbed its head into the water, flipping into the depths with a splash. Another creature snared the fish in its teeth and shuffled onto the blue ice. Using its flippers, it pushed itself in a fast slide that sped it toward the shelf of ice. It warbled high and quick, disappearing around a highway wall.

Specter walked along the ice highways, following them toward the distant shelf of ice. Something resided beyond, hidden beneath it, he felt certain.

As he passed the largest saltwater pool, he hesitated long enough to gaze at it. Was this somehow connected to an ocean? The Sea of Serpents lay to the west, or was it southward? He shook his head. With all the twisting and turning about of the ice tunnels, he had no way of guessing.

From the dark depths of the water, several water skeels rose with fish in their mouths. Yet they jerked their long necks around, gazed into the depths, and bolted for the water’s surface. They almost flew out of the pool, then slid along the ice at frantic speed as some enormous object rose in the pool. Specter knelt and strained to see through the watery shadows. It was a whale almost as large as the albino dragon, though not a live one. The creature’s body draped over something pushing it upward, and suddenly enormous green eyes blazed back at him.

With a gasp he leaned hard on his scythe.

The head of a water skeel pushed the whale out of the water, threw it on the ice, and the skeel’s neck followed. It warbled, and the now-little skeels slid into hiding. Dripping water from its smooth white face, the water skeel heaved itself into the cavern and spat water from the nasal holes above its face. Long tendrils hung from its chin, and the veins along its neck and fat body strained against its polished skin. Powerful muscles stretched along its back and up its neck, and each of its four flippers could have covered a house.

Though Specter remained a hundred feet above the cavern floor on the highway, this creature’s head rose above him. At last he knew why the dragon would not venture here. Those first members he’d seen of this species were little more than children. But was this one of the adults, or the very skeel about which he’d been warned?

As the water skeel’s flippers pulled it toward the ice shelf, it whipped its neck around, latching its teeth in the whale. It pulled the whale into the air and moved off. In its wake another skeel speared out of the pool; though smaller than the first, it was still larger than even the great white dragon. Soon another skeel followed, then another, and two more. The creatures warbled as they followed the larger one.

When the adults were a long way off, the youngsters slid out of hiding, warbling to one another as they formed a circle around the pool. More youngsters raced out of the tunnels behind him. The creatures joined their companions, and when the ring had been filled, another massive head rose from the pool. The youngsters’ warbles softened, then faded into silence as the adult swiveled its head to gaze upon them all. Its many tendrils swung in a thick beard from its jutting chin. It smiled with an arsenal of needle teeth that could halve an elephant.

It raised its fin out of the water, and a green mermaid thrashed thereon. Specter blinked. It could not be. Yes, he’d seen the wee mermaids of the Eiderveis River, but this was totally different. The mermaid raised her webbed hands as the skeel chomped its teeth. She gurgled, and a golden tear rolled down her cheek.

And Specter closed his eyes as the skeel opened its mouth.
I don’t need to see this
. He hurried down the highway, striking his scythe on the ice every few steps in frustration. He could do nothing for that poor creature. If only he could—

The highway snaked toward the far end of the cavern, descending beneath the ice shelf.

The shelf of ice seemed more like a vast natural roof as Specter stepped off the slick path onto the moist, sticky ice around it. At last he walked without fear of losing his footing and cracking his head on some hard surface. Beneath the ice shelf gaped an oval chamber with mist rising from its floor and startlingly warm air. The warmth saturated his body. Though he knew the air still remained around the freezing point, the change from the frigid temperature in the ice tunnels was a welcome relief.

He entered a strange world of green grass shoots so large he could have wrapped his arms around them, and so tall they might have passed for trees deprived of their branches. The shoots had grown through the misting ice. They did not populate the chamber as a forest; rather, they were few and far between, and a path curved through their midst over a rise in the ice.

Mighty warbling echoed from the depths of the chamber as he ascended the rise to look beyond, and glowing diamond crystals dripped from the ceiling, shattering around him into ribbons of light and color. Standing atop the rise, he beheld the heart of the chamber. The path sloped away from him into thicker rolling mist that swirled between arches of ice. A transparent column rose from the center of the chamber all the way to the ceiling, and water fell through it in a sparkling fall. The sound of the waterfall muted the warbles of the water skeels.

The large creatures moved from one ice arch to another and less imposing, shorter-necked skeels raised themselves to greet them with a fluting sound. At the far side of the chamber the largest skeel whipped its head into its companions, and they lowered their necks, spun around, and slid toward the exit. Specter hid behind a grass shoot. Somehow his cloak gave him little comfort in these beasts’ presence. But upon the creatures’ departure, he stood again atop the rise.

The largest skeel rose before another ice arch, and a peach-skinned skeel raised its head from the mist. Entwining their necks, the mates cooed. Then, withdrawing itself a short distance, the large one waited. Two other peach skeels slid from beneath their arches to the large one’s mate and dug into the mist with their fore flippers.

A tiny water skeel rose through the mist, cradled in their flippers. Its neck looked many times too long for its small body and its head too big. Yet the large skeel warbled with delight and slicked out its flat tongue to lick the tiny creature. Pulling up its head, it warbled in various tones as if instructing the peach ones as they lowered the little one back beneath the mist. The mate raised its head and entwined its neck with the large one’s. Then it pulled back into the mist out of sight.

The water skeel spun and appeared to glide over the ice as it made its way out of the chamber. Specter stepped behind a grass shoot as the creature loomed out of the belly of the chamber. It rested on the hump. Its flippers twitched, and its green eyes glowed for an instant, then it slid in the direction of the exit. He tried to run after it, but it outdistanced him with ease and disappeared around the corner.

11

THE DEWOBIN CAVERN

F
ully two days after Ilfedo’s departure, the tunnel in which he walked finally leveled out. For a brief moment he leaned forward, holding his knees and flexing his legs to repel the stiffness. “Well, Seivar, have we arrived in the Megatrath realm?” He glanced at the large frightened bird on his shoulder. It hadn’t said a word in almost a day.

“Have courage, my companion. I think our destination is close now. Just look at the scratches on these walls. The tunnel is larger, too—large enough even for Vectra and her kind.” He scraped his blade along a slash in the arching tunnel’s stone. “This is a claw mark, and I dare say a Megatrath’s. We are getting close.”

As he walked, boulders jutted through the tunnel walls. Boulders of every size and shape loomed out of the shadows. His path widened between them, and the tunnel was higher and broader than before. The light of his sword seemed to push back the walls until they receded into utter darkness. When the walls were out of sight, Ilfedo stood still, feeling that he’d lost his way. He must have been standing in a large chamber, and the floor was flat in all directions.

Guessing which direction to go, he proceeded another hundred yards and turned in a tight circle, playing his glowing aura over the stone path until he saw it drop into utter darkness.

Seivar shivered.