Raphael (15 page)

Saara chuckled ruefully. “The edge of the world hit us, Gaspare. For me it was the second time, though it is easier when one is a bird.

“But be glad. It means we are on the right path.”

Gaspare ignored all this, for Saara was capable of talking as crazily as Delstrego in his prime. He stood up and stared at a welter of broken points of rock. “It doesn't look the same from down here,” he said, and then he shivered.

“From up here,” Saara corrected him. “And it shouldn't, for we've come a very long way, I think.”

After a short cold night's sleep they were on their way again. Saara took bird form and made a sweep of the bare windy peaks, while Gaspare led Festilligambe along the only path they had.

It was a poor path and the beast was very hungry.

By the time the dove fluttered down again the horse had refused to move. Gaspare, weary of fighting and mistrusting his own temper, was seated on a bare stone. His back was turned toward Festilligambe, while his gaze rested along a gore of the mountains, facing south. There the Alps tumbled away to a low, mauve horizon. He started as Saara spoke.

“There is a tunnel ahead, boy: not natural, I think. The path descends into it.”

“Not natural!” Gaspare swiveled to find Saara seated on the horse's back, sidesaddle. “You mean it was made by… You mean we have found the doorway into hell?”

“I do not think so, for the hall I entered was high above ground in all its windows. Yet it is significant, I am sure.”

Gaspare proceeded on tiptoe, though with Festilligambe's castanet hooves behind him he might have saved himself the trouble. Saara's little bare toes made no sound at all as they gripped rock and gravel.

“Odd,” whispered the redhead, “that we've seen no one at all for days. We're not THAT far north, are we?”

His hissing voice echoed along the pass, amplified by some trick of sound. The noise continued long after he'd stopped talking.

“I have no idea where we are,” answered the witch equably. “Not since we fell sideways off the rock. But I know it's where we want to go.” Now the sound in the air mimicked high wind, though no breath ruffled Festilligambe's mane. Then suddenly it was cut short, and the subsequent silence was even more ominous.

Saara slipped down from the horse, sniffing delicately. “What do you smell, Gaspare?”

The youth snorted obediently, and then again through curiosity. “I don't know, my lady. Sandalwood, perhaps?

“Or, no: What's wrong with my nose to say that? I think it's a stable.”

Saara did not laugh at these conjectures. Instead she wrinkled her brow. “More like fresh cut wood than horse dung, I think. But there's something animal in it, also.”

They passed between a tower of granite and a sloping drop of some hundred feet, and there before them was white stone with a round black hole cut into it, and it was from this source that came both the odd wind noise and the smell.

Festilligambe balked. So did Gaspare. “We cannot go in there, Saara. It is altogether dark, and may pitch us down a cliff!”

The witch bit her lower Up and studied the entrance. It was regular and very smooth, but round as a foxhole. The rim of it was rounded and full of hardened bubbles, as though the rock were mere dried mud. “Not altogether dark. Unless it is very long, there will be some daylight in it. Give my eyes time and I will see what I need to see.

“You wait here,” she said grandly, and she stepped under the arch.

Instantly Gaspare's refusal to continue warred with a contradictory anger at being left behind. He watched her glimmering slim figure fade into the depths. “Gaspare of San Gabriele,” he growled aloud, “you ought to be ashamed. Really ashamed of yourself.

“And you too,” he added spitefully to the trembling horse.

Dark, dark. Daylight faded much more quickly than Saara had expected. The witch had never studied bat form (not foreseeing that she would one day find herself in the velvet blackness at the heart of a mountain far above the plains of the earth), but she had studied the high art of making do, and she used every one of her human senses to test her progress.

The floor was smooth as a well-made roadbed and round as the sides of a barrel. The walls, scarcely fifteen feet apart, ran smooth. Saara was tempted to give up a slow hands-and-feet approach, trusting the passage to remain level and intact. But Gaspare was right:

there might be holes. If this tunnel had been built by the Liar (surely it was built by craft), there would likely be surprises of some nature.

Within, the smell was stronger: musky (like a stable, Gaspare had said) yet tinged with a dry perfume like that of no beast of her knowledge. The hissing wind came louder, and in regular gusts.

Surprises of some nature.

Saara resisted the temptation to change shape. What was the use in becoming a bear before one knew bear qualities were needed? It was hard to think, when one was a bear, and if she were forced to confront the Liar himself, it would be wiser (if anything about confronting the Liar could be wise) to do so in her true image.

On. It was unnaturally dark, though Saara could smell no sorcery around her. (No human sorcery, she qualified, for the deceits of the Liar were subtle.) There was only the musky sandalwood smell, and that grew no thicker, never approaching rankness.

Either her eyes adjusted between one moment and the next, or there was light ahead.

Air eddied roughly in the passage, like streams of water which smash against a stone wall. Saara turned to look over her shoulder at the still blackness she had crossed. Had she had the luck of passing through the tunnel without encountering its heavy-breathing occupant? How, when her witch sense hadn't hinted of any side passage?

Gray day shone on granite, sparking tiny lights like jewels. A dead end?

No, merely a right-angle turn. Saara crawled over something colder than stone. It was an enormous ring of iron, anchored into rock. A chain stretched from it, so heavy she could not budge one of the links which twisted down the tunnel, toward the light.

Sunlight and the smell of cinnamon, sandalwood, cedar: a dry, sharp smell.

The tunnel was not at an end, but here was a cleft in it, a break clean and cruel as though struck by a heavenly ax. One hundred feet away, on the far side of this splash of yellow, the foxhole continued, black and round. But in the middle of the sunlight sprawled the heavy-sighing wearer of the chain.

He was not coiled: not like withies are coiled to make a basket. His metallic length lay in a sort of G-clef pattern, and though in the sun he glinted in a rich array of red, green, and indigo, his color was black.

Black except his head, which was golden horned, his face framed by a whole series of scaly spiked collars, yellow, scarlet, and indigo,

giving him the appearance of a chrysanthemum with a long, bare stem.

He had four legs, no sign of wings, and a crest like little burnished flames which ran from neck to tail tip, some ninety feet in all. His eyes were enormous, gold, slitted like a cat's, and staring down at Saara from great heights.

The greatest witch in the Italies had seen dragons and wyverns before, and would have recognized many fell beasts on sight, but she had never seen anything like this. She stood stock-still while she framed in her mind what might be the greatest power song of her life. Or the last one.

The creature pulled iron-black lips from teeth the blue-white of skimmed milk. Each of these was the size and shape of a scimitar, and his tongue between them was forked. The noise of forges increased. A movement began at the creature's tail and traveled up the serpentine length of him, like the flood crest of a river when the dam has gone.

Yards of gold crest vanished, to be replaced by flat, lustrous belly scales. Four long legs curled up, their etiolated, thumbed paws exposing claws the size and shape of cow's ribs. Last of all the ornate head flipped over and hit the stony ground, until it was gazing madly at Saara, upside down. The eyes were now at her level.

“Bonjour, madame,”
he said very correctly.
“Comment allez-vous aujourd'hui?”

She blinked. “I don't speak Langue d'Ouil,” she answered in Italian, wondering if the beast's purpose was to distract her, and feeling he had certainly succeeded. “I don't speak any languages but Fennish and Italian.”

“Fennish and Italian!” The dragon (if he could be called a dragon) chuckled. “Many people speak Italian. No one speaks Fennish but a native of the Fenland,” he stated, speaking that tongue. “Therefore I presume you to be an émigrée of the Fens residing now in the Italies. The north Italies, if your accent is any indication.”

Hearing the clear, comfortable sounds of home from this huge bizarrity struck Saara nearly dumb. But her wit returned to her in time to allow her to reply, “Then you, too, must be a native of Fenland. The south, however, I would say by your accent.”

“Lappish is equally familiar to me,” the creature replied, shifting his voice more into the nose. His five-fingered paw scratched belly scales reflectively.

“But it would be ludicrous to attempt to convince you that I come from the land of ice and snow. I am merely an exception to the rule I myself stated.” Amber eyes hooded themselves complacently, and then the dragon rotated again, in the same direction, so that his jaw rested on the ground twenty feet from Saara's feet, while his body rested quite comfortably with a half twist in it.

“There ARE dragons in the north,” stated Saara, taking the chance on his species.

Window-sized nostrils dilated and the creature emitted a huge snort. The dry, woody smell thickened. “Dragons, perhaps, but not such as I,” he stated, pique shading his voice. Suddenly the beast flipped to his feet and his neck arced above her, coiling like black smoke in the air (which had grown very hot). “Do I have a barrel like an ox's, wings like a plucked chicken's, breath like rotten eggs, and incrustations both dorsal and ventral?

“Furthermore, have I attacked you with inhospitable fury on the suspicion that you come to rob me of some possession—not that I have any, mind you?”

With a song of seven words Saara created a forty-foot wall of blue ice between the dragon and herself. It was an arduous spell, though quickly done, and her heart was left pounding.

The dragon watched, then casually he leaned over the wall and laced his fingers together. “Really, now, madam. Can you claim that any of the graceless creatures who inhabit their charred holes on the steppes have more than the slightest resemblance… I do not mean to sound egotistical, but I am no more like your European dragons than you are like the Emperor's monkey!”

That glittering head full of glittering teeth was now only a few feet from Saara's. She refused to be intimidated by it, and felt some display on her part was called for. “Get back,” she snapped, raising a very small hand beneath the dragon's nose. “Get back, animal, or I'll freeze you, crop and craw, into black ice.” The sunlight which poured through the cleft rocks trembled and shivered, as hot air met the magic of the north.

The amber eyes grew impossibly wide, protruding like those of a lapdog. “Ugh! Magic,” he snorted, turning his head away as though he smelled something foul. The dragon retreated five steps, and then the sight of Saara's set face set him into peals of echoing laughter. Rocks tumbled in the distance.

“Is it my breath, little lady? Or is it the length of my eyeteeth that has swept your manners away like this? I assure you that had I any intention of doing you harm, I would not have waited to address you first.”

As the creature backed, so did Saara, from sunlight into obscurity, until she stood at the turn in the passage wall. Suddenly she was around it and running in the darkness.

“Wait,” came a bellow behind her. The walls vibrated. Then there was a sharper crashing, as forty feet of ice smashed like glass, followed by the sound of heavy chain being flung about.

“Wait, madam,” the dragon called from behind her in the tunnel. “You take my witticism too much to heart!” Then the air rang and crashed as though an iron tower had fallen at Saara's feet. The dragon had reached the end of his chain.

But his voice rose once more. “I really WOULD like to speak with someone. I am a long way from home, and it has been years…” he said, before the echoes died away.

Ahead was a speck of light. Gaspare was waiting there for her with Festilligambe, if the racket hadn't spooked the horse. Or Gaspare.

But Saara's bare feet slowed, and then stopped. She was half-embarrassed to have run from a creature that had offered no direct threat.

And then the way the beast had spoken. “… it has been years…”

Saara was not without sensibilities.

But dragons were sly, and talking dragons slyest of all. And THIS beast was in the service of the Liar himself, wasn't it? It was chained there, at least.

Chained. The Lapps chained neither their deer nor their dogs. Saara thought all chains despicable. She turned her face around. “Dragon,” she called.

The reply was immediate. “Yes! I'm here.” Then he added, “Of course I'm here; what a silly thing for me to say.”

Was there a touch of bitterness in his words, of self-pity perhaps? But the Liar dealt in bitterness and self-pity quite frequently.

“Who chained you, dragon?” Saara shouted down the passage.

She heard a gusty, whistling sigh. “It was a nasty fellow with the very inappropriate name of Morning Star.” Once again the creature seemed to have regained his composure, as well as his natural loquacity, for he added, “You see, madam, I was seeking after a book: a book which received high praise in certain circles. It is called
La Commedia Divina,
and it was written by an Italian. Perhaps you …”

“Never heard of it,” replied Saara. “But then, I can't read.”

“Ah. Well. I heard rumor of it as far away as Hunan Province, where news of events outside of Cathay hardly ever reaches. By report it contained great wisdom and excellent poetry, and… Well, I collect wisdom, you see…”