Raphael (21 page)

“I release you from the debt,” Saara said formally.

The head twisted back along its own neck. “You cannot,” the dragon hissed. “It is MY debt. “Mine!”

Gaspare acceded with surprising grace to the scheme; perhaps it was because it was the dragon, rather than Saara, who explained it to him, saying that he should take the horse and explore farther along the road, while Saara and the dragon prowled the air.

Gaspare did not feel comfortable throwing temperaments in front of a ninety-foot-long steaming creature with teeth like scimitars. But he had enough boldness left in him to inquire how the dragon was to fly, lacking wings.

The great creature curled his tongue once around his muzzle before answering. “That is a reasonable question, little naturalist. I don't fly like a bird, you must understand. I swim. I ride the wind. And I can do this because I am hot.”

Gaspare frowned thoughtfully into the gaudy, metallic face. Having endured heat, cold, devils, and a shape-changing witch, there was little that one dragon, however well equipped, could do to overawe him. “Delstrego had a power of fire,” Gaspare remarked, “but I never saw him fly.”

Curiosity lit the amber eyes. “Delstrego? Delstrego you say? Who or what would that be?”

“Never mind,” Saara broke in. “If you stay around Gaspare, Dragon, you will hear a lot about Delstrego. But now is not the time. Let's go.” In another moment there was only a dun-colored dove on the cold stone path, its wings lifted for flight.

The dragon peered at it closely, as a man might focus on a flea. “More magic,” he breathed in tones of disgust, then added more politely, “I fear that in that shape I will fry you without even knowing it, woman of the north.

“Besides, you might have difficulty keeping up with me.”

Saara blinked back. “Then how?”

The dragon slid his chin along the ground. Scales rippled in the light of the setting sun. “Behind my head,” he hissed.

Using the corona of spikes for footholds, Saara hoisted herself up and looked. There, directly behind the last crimson starburst was a length of smooth neck which did not support a dorsal spine. It fitted Saara like the back of a very round horse. To her surprise she found two small raised scales with handholds cut into them. She fit her fingers with difficulty into them.

“You have been giving rides to… children?”

He raised his head off the ground. Saara, used as she was to flight, felt her stomach lurch. “No. Not a child. A small man. A man of India. A little ugly man with a face like a frog's.”

Coils scraped by Gaspare, not touching. The dragon oozed a short way down the mountain slope, head elevated. Saara was no more than one more spine on the spiny head. Suddenly the air wavered strongly. As the smell of hot metal reached Gaspare's nose, the beast was aloft.

It squirmed in the air, like the flecks of paper ash tumbling out of a chimney. Gaspare's heart was in his throat as the black tail sliced the sky over his head. The whip shape in the air loomed even closer, perhaps it was out of control and would crash with Saara, crushing himself and the dazed horse in the process.

But no, the writhing of the body continued, but the head of the beast was stable, erect…

Riding the wind.

Warm rushes of air bathed Gaspare as Saara and the dragon shrank into the blue sky.

“I never was close enough to see the portal itself,” spoke the beast. Saara felt the deep voice through her legs and seat. “Lucifer met me on the mountainside, whereupon I played the part of the credulous fool!

“It had been so long, you must understand, since any creature had dared attempt mischief upon me…”

“I can well believe that,” screamed Saara into the wind that buffeted her face. Her words swept behind her, but the dragon appeared to hear. “But didn't you sense that he was evil, not to be trusted?”

The beast snorted a gout of flame. “To which sense would I be indebted for this information, madam?

“Sight, possibly? I tell you he looked like a man of substance. Sound? His voice was good enough. Smell? All mammals—forgive me my bias—smell rather strongly to me.”

Saara only laughed. She was finding the sense of flight without work quite exhilarating, and the dragon's upwash made the air around her comfortably warm. “I mean the sense of your power— the magic sense.”

A shudder passed along the dragon's length and the scales under Saara roughened slightly. “I know nothing of such, and wish to know no more.”

“But you're a dragon!” the woman blurted.

From the splash of flame at his mouth, it appeared the creature had cleared his throat. “I am a natural being,” he replied with forced control, “possessing (I have it on good authority) the imperishable essence of truth.

“Magic, on the other hand, is illusion. Delusion.”

Saara, feeling an argument in the making, kept her mouth shut, and as they floated up beside the nameless peak of rock, and the dragon continued his story.

“He said he could direct me to Signor Alighieri—the man whose teaching I sought—but that it was necessary for me to delve a tunnel through a certain rock.

“Sages have asked their devotees for stranger things, so…”

“So you created that hole in the mountain?” Saara was impressed.

“Such as it is, yes. With no attempt at aesthetics, and not with the idea I was to live in it for twenty years, but I did cut it.”

Suddenly a wave of breath-stealing heat washed over Saara. “I cut it and then, when the trickster betrayed me, I cut it in two, letting in the sun. But I could not break the delusion that held me there.”

And then the dragon laughed, causing Saara's body to tremble on its hard seat. “Trapped in delusion. Such an old story!”

It was intoxicating for both the long-prisoned dragon and his rider: swooping at the gray tooth of rock, swirling great loops in the thin freezing air. But Saara did not forget to watch, either for a tall window in the surface of the peak or for some sign of its deadly householder.

“Perhaps it would be better,” she spoke into what she hoped was the dragon's ear, “if we landed and worked from the rock itself. We would not be as easily seen.”

“Crawling over stone like a lizard?” the dragon drawled. He wrapped his tongue around his muzzle once again. “All very well if you're not in a hurry.” And he continued his sailing progress.

At the top of the peak there was no fissure of any kind in the rock. They worked their way down in great circles.

The sunlight failed and the flat blue sky deepened with that immense suggestion of distance that stars give. Instead of darkening, the peak went white.

Saara felt a touch of dizziness, for though she was used to flying, she was not used to being carried. The long whip-body swung lower and lower, faster and faster. They were almost back to the road.

Suddenly Saara felt it; something bad was below. Something cold and bad. She leaned out over the dragon's neck, hoping she was not about to be sick.

“I see it,” replied the great creature, though Saara had not had time to speak. “A bar of light. And more.”

Now Saara was horribly dizzy: dizzy as a mote spinning on the end of a string. She felt around her a touch of invisible, filthy fingers.

“It is he. The Liar,” she whispered through her nausea.

Beneath Saara the black dragon was like so much steel cable. He said nothing more, but sank swirling down upon the road, not fifty feet from the soft-lit window in the rock. Elegantly, insouciantly, Lucifer stood at the lip of his tall window and watched the dragon's arrival.

They had found him. Or had he found them? Saara knew a moment of worry on that subject.

The Devil had chosen to dress himself in white—white velvet— and his gold hair shone like coins. With both arms crossed over his slender chest, he leaned against the bald rock of the mountain peak and looked the dragon up and down.

“So. The watchdog has slipped its chain.” Then, stepping forward on his small (oddly small) feet, he added, “And it hadn't even the wit to run away.”

When the dragon opened a long mouth, dim red light suffused the stones. “Base delusion!” he hissed, words muffled by fire. “How fitting that you dress in death's color. You spawn of chaos by error! Begone!”

Then Lucifer laughed outright, supporting his chin in one hand and that elbow against the palm of the other hand.

“This is no watchdog at all, but a parrot!”

Perhaps this was a miscalculation on Lucifer's part, or perhaps it was part of some long and subtle plan of his. Perhaps he wanted to induce the dragon to cover his head of gold curls and his clothing of white velvet in a deluge of liquid flame. But whether foresight or folly, the Devil vanished beneath a molten spew that burned the air and melted rock beneath him.

He vanished and reappeared, rising phoenixlike in a shape that mirrored the black dragon in length, shape, and deadly armament. But whereas the dragon was black, Satan was white: a stainless, powdery white, tipped with gold at every claw and spine.

These two beasts flexed metallic crowns as they stared at one another. The black dragon reared, rising as effortlessly as a bubble in water. So did the white. Together they lifted slowly: two marionettes on a single wire, two heads balanced on serpentine necks which rocked back and forth in time, keeping even the distance between them.

“Clown!” drawled the snowy dragon. “Wind kite!”

The beast of black iron showed its teeth. Saara crouched behind the dragon's multicolored head shield, gripping the pierced scales with all her strength.

She was no more than a flea in a battle of armed and armored knights; invisible, powerless, ignored by both contestants. She suspected that the Devil did not even know she was there.

But she was not forgotten: not by the armored knight who carried her. For as the two dragons rose and the white spewed fire, the black dragon arched his head back, sparing his rider the force of the flaming blow.

At the same time his whiplike tail lashed forward, slicing at the ermine belly of his opponent. The Devil howled and struck again.

Saara closed her eyes, for the heavens were wheeling above her too closely. Her feet slipped from the dragon's metallic sides and there was nothing holding her on except the grip of her fingers.

Whirling, twisting like two strands in a rope, the dragons rose. The sharp peak of granite fell away beside them. The air was lurid.

But though the black dragon was huge and ancient, he was a creature of the earth, with terrestrial limits. He bent back before the limitless onslaught of Lucifer's flame. He threw back his head for a breath of air uncontaminated by his enemy's reek, and at that moment the white beast struck, slashing with scimitar teeth at the iridescent black neck. The black dragon hissed pain and fury.

The floating rope of two strands bent, became a wheel: black-hubbed with a rim of shining silver. The white serpent emitted a blistering laugh and slashed again, using flame and tooth together.

Saara, though she could not see, could guess the deadly situation. “You can't get close enough to use your own fire! Because of me,” she shouted thinly into the furnace-crackling air.

“No matter,” replied her mount quite calmly, though his mouth spattered flame as he spoke. “There are other weapons at hand.” And once more he slashed out at Lucifer, not with his tail alone, but with his whole length, from the base of the neck.

The air cracked like thunder as seventy-five feet of edged violence snapped through it. It caught Lucifer at the crease where his near hind leg joined the body, leaving a sharp pink line which darkened to red. Then as the white dragon pulled back, guarding the wound, the black released his bottled fires.

Blazing acids, not sulfurous but smelling of iron, spattered and stuck to the snowy scales. Wherever they touched, the stainless surface bloomed into whorls of color: red, green, and blue like oil spilled on rock. Then, as the flame went out, the circles darkened.

“Ho, Demon,” boomed the black dragon. “You have smudged your funeral whites.”

Lucifer coiled and faced his enemy. All was still for a moment, with the two beasts circling each other like twin moons. Then the Devil whispered, “I needn't bother to dress well for YOUR funeral, brute.”

Snakelike, Lucifer struck. The black dragon twitched back with the same speed, but as he did so he felt the grip of his hidden rider loosening. He slipped back under her but in that moment the claws and jaws of the white dragon found their hold, and the two were locked in awful embrace in the skies.

Saara heard the armor of her champion crack and shatter. She saw moonlight on a tooth as long as her body, before it sank into the black neck not five feet from her leg. She smelled blood.

And the massive head of the black dragon lashed left and right, ineffectually, unable to catch any part of the enemy which was grinding into his windpipe below.

Saara cursed. She released her hold and slid down the shining black scales until the white muzzle (now stained red) was near beside her. She stood, propping herself against the first of the black dragon's dorsal spines.

“Yey! Liar! You fly-blown pisspot! Look here!”

And the white dragon's blue eyes searched up and down, left and right, before he focused on the mite before his nose.

“No matter how long you wash, you still smell like a sick dog, you know,” commented the little witch. Then she added, “And though you fancy yourself a trickster, I have found you the easiest dolt in the world to deceive.” She let go her hold on the spine and flung herself into space.

Lucifer twisted his jaws around and spared one claw to catch the plummeting human. But no sooner did the black dragon feel his enemy's grip slipping than he himself struck, with a fury of contained hate. Not only did the Devil miss Saara, but he lost his killing squeeze on the black throat, and in another moment his clutching claw was pierced by teeth as sharp as slivered glass.