The Forging of the Dragon (Wizard and Dragon Book 1) (22 page)

He had to admit her appearance had improved over that first horrifying vision. Even so, he doubted if he would quickly grow accustomed to a dozen totally colorless eyes staring at him in the hungry way these did. He swallowed hard, hoping to push the contents of his stomach back down where they belonged. He then wished the light away, thinking as he did so that there were advantages to the darkness ...

“Now you know how I feel,” Dark grumbled.

“How you feel about what?” the megasin asked.

“Seagryn understands. Don’t you, Seagryn?”

“About what?”

“About Uda!”

Oh yes, Seagryn remembered. The boy had compared his experience with Uda to being in a megasin’s cave. “Who are you?” he asked the creature, hoping conversation might distract her from whatever horrible fate she was contemplating for them.

“Who am I?”

“Yes. What is your name?”

“Name ...” the megasin pondered, evidently trying to make sense of the idea.

“You don’t have a name?”

“I don’t know,” she answered warmly. “I can recall someone asking me that, but I can’t remember what we decided.”

“Someone ... who? Who have you known? Who have you talked to in the past?”

“My companions,” the megasin said rather sadly. “I’ve had a number of companions. But they all died. They were all humans, of course. Like you. You people die rather quickly, did you know that?” There seemed to be honest concern in the creature’s voice.

“I wonder how long you have lived?” When she didn’t answer immediately Seagryn realized she had no real way of reckoning time.

He was going to ask another question when she said, “More rock rumbles than you could ever count, magic user.”

“Rock rumbles?”

“When the earth grinds against itself and then shifts — or when the rock’s hot blood climbs up the cracks to spit at the sky.”

These images filled Seagryn with awe, and he contemplated them in the silence. In a moment Dark took it upon himself to explain, “She means earthquakes and volcanoes —”

“I know what she means.”

“I knew that,” Dark snapped back, but he sounded embarrassed.

“I’ve had many companions in that time,” the megasin offered, “many who’ve fallen into my — that is, who’ve stepped through my shutters. Some of them have been good companions. Of course,” she added, “some were not so good.” Her voice took on a wistful quality. “But all of them — all — eventually died. Their remains have been accepted into the rock all around you. You may have noticed that rock does as I ask.”

Seagryn had indeed noticed and was fascinated. He found her perspective and her history enthralling and thought he could spend an agreeable afternoon just listening to her. But he had a task to perform and a love to regain. From her description, becoming companion to a megasin was a rather permanent appointment. “Did any of these companions attempt to — escape?”

The megasin laughed so gaily Seagryn found himself smiling, despite his fears. “Why concern yourself with the trivial, when I have so much to tell you? Relax! Sit down! Aren’t you starving?” Strong hands pressed Seagryn backward and down, and he landed again in the soft dirt beside Dark.

“Sit here while I fetch you something to eat,” the megasin said warmly, and Seagryn listened carefully for the sounds of her moving away. After a moment he leaned toward Dark. “Just one question. Do we get out of here?”

“Yes,” the boy said firmly.

For a moment that was sufficient, and Seagryn sat gazing at the blackness in front of his face. But soon it wasn’t enough, and he leaned toward Dark again. “Make that two questions. How do we get out?”

Dark seemed to answer most unwillingly. “I — don’t know.”

Seagryn mulled that over for a moment. “You don’t know?”

“Right.”

“You honestly don’t know?” Seagryn tried to keep the panic out of his voice.

“It’s really very embarrassing,” said the boy prophet. “I mean, I’ve always known everything. But — as I’ve told you — I had prevented myself from looking into my own courtship — if you could call it that. And when that began to draw too near to avoid, so too did periods of darkness.”

“Darkness?”

“Times when I wouldn’t know what would happen — exactly.”

“Like right now.”

“Like right now,” the boy agreed. “Believe me, if you think you’re frustrated by it, imagine how I feel! It’s as if I can’t remember a thing!”

“For you,” the megasin said from behind them, and both Seagryn and Dark grunted in surprise.

Seagryn twisted around, and tried to stare in the female beast’s direction. “I thought you went the other way!”

“Oh, I did. And I came back this way. I told you before, magic user, the rock does whatever I ask.”

“Then you — you make corridors, and close them behind you?”

“Exactly! Oh, how quick you are! Probably because you’re a magic user. I’ve never had a magic user for a companion before!” She seemed genuinely enthusiastic. Seagryn felt much less so. “Here’s your food,” the megasin offered, and she placed in their hands something warm that smelled tempting. “Eat! Eat!” she trilled. “You’ll find it wonderful!”

Seagryn was about to wonder aloud exactly what had been placed before them when Dark muttered, “Seagryn — don’t ask.” He didn’t. He just started eating. But he wondered as he chewed if Dark’s warning hadn’t been worse than knowing. With each new bite his imagination made the source of this food more hideous ...

Chapter Twenty

POWER’S PROMISE

WHEN Seagryn awoke in the blackness he knew exactly where he was. He also knew with great certainty that many days had passed, and that, through them all, he’d not dreamed once. He jumped to his feet and filled this black hole with light. He’d been imprisoned in a bubble hollowed out of the rock — a cage of stone. He scanned the seamless wall, turning in a slow circle. He saw no apparent exit, nor any ventilation. And yet he breathed —

He looked down at his feet in time to see Dark sit up, rub his eyes, and look around. “I suppose that explains my periods of darkness,” the boy said flatly.

“What does.”

“Did you dream?”

Seagryn grunted. “No.”

“Nor did I. And I always dream.”

“That food,” Seagryn said. “The megasin poisoned us, then shut us up inside this tomb. She’ll keep us here until she’s ready to consume us.” He said this matter-of-factly, without passion. He dared not loose the feelings of terror that suddenly seemed to claw at his back and neck. He had no idea what he might do then.

“Perhaps that’s it.” Dark nodded. “Then again, maybe she already has.”

“Has what?”

“Oh, I just doubt if she’ll consume us in the same way we ate her drugged stew.”

“What other way is there?”

Dark shrugged. Was he unwilling to confront his own fears? Seagryn wondered. Or had he already seen some terrible future reality and now tried to shield Seagryn from it? “Speak up, Dark. You meant something by that.”

Dark hung his head, then shrugged again and explained, “She could eat us emotionally ...”

“How would she do that?” Seagryn asked harshly. He had some suspicions himself, but found those thoughts far too horrible to voice.

“I think she’s stolen our dreams,” Dark said. “Seagryn, I always dream! I don’t know how she’s done it, but I’m afraid she’s touched our sleeping minds and experienced our dreams for herself. And that’s especially frightening for me —”

“Why should it be any worse for you, lad?” Seagryn shuddered. “The thought of someone prying into my —”

“Because my dreams foretell the future.”

“Oh.” Understanding Dark’s deeper concern now, Seagryn pondered a moment. “Do you think she knows that?”

Dark squinted his eyes in concentration. When his eyelids fluttered open again, Seagryn no longer saw the confident prophet of legend, but a frightened boy. In exercising his gift, Dark had carried burdens no other mortal could even comprehend. But never before had he felt the simple terror of the unknown.

“I — I thought I’d just hidden this all from myself,” the distraught prophet whispered. “But — I truly don’t know!” Dark’s eyes pleaded. “Seagryn! How can you people endure not knowing!”

An interesting question, Seagryn thought, but not one he had time to pursue. They needed to get out of this place. Evidently that responsibility was his. “You’ve told me already I’d get my Elaryl back.”

“I — I did?” Dark pleaded, grabbing Seagryn’s sleeve.

“Self-doubt,” the wizard said. He could recognize that easily enough, for he’d felt it often. “Yes, you did. Which means we do get out of here. The question is when. Do you remember that?”

“I — don’t remember anything!”

“Relax, Dark,” Seagryn said with a calmness he didn’t feel. “It will all come back to you.” Or so he hoped —

No. He
believed
, and the implications of that belief struck him now like a blow to the forehead. For regardless of how he accounted for his own magical abilities, he had always considered Dark’s prophetic gift to be exactly that — a gift. And if it was a gift, then there had to be a giver, and who could bestow such ability other than the Power, that One they never named, to whom he’d committed all his adult life?

In that One he believed. He couldn’t help it. He simply did. Was that belief itself a gift? “I’ve been viewing it lately as almost a curse,” he muttered.

“What?” Dark implored, and Seagryn looked down at the boy with an enormous sense of compassion.

“Don’t worry, lad,” he comforted. “We’re going to get out of this.”

Dark nodded, and his anxious expression seemed to soften. “When?” he asked.

“That I don’t know.”

“I’m hungry,” Dark muttered. As if in answer the rock around them began to rumble.

“She heard you,” Seagryn whispered. A moment later one wall of the stone prison disappeared.

“Awk!” the megasin shouted. “Light again! Put it out! Put it
out
!”

“Why?” Seagryn asked. “We people like light.”

The monster closed up the wall again, but evidently with only a thin layer of rock, for they could easily hear her voice through it. “You people also like to breathe, I understand?”

The air in the cave had suddenly grown quite stale, and Dark looked at Seagryn with deep concern. “Ah — you think you should put out the fire?”

Seagryn panted, and glanced up at his magical fireball. “Might as well — it’s already sputtering.” The light blinked out, and Seagryn called, “You can come back now, if you wish. The light is gone.”

“Very good,” the beguiling voice said from behind him. Her enticing scent permeated the cave, and he felt her hands — all sixteen or so of them — resting upon his shoulders. He didn’t shrug them off, nor try to struggle out of her grasp this time. He just let the light blossom above them again.

“No!” the megasin screamed, and once more they found themselves entombed with her outside. “Don’t do that!” the creature roared. “Put it out — and leave it out — or I shall have to punish you!”

Seagryn watched Dark’s eyes. The boy looked up at him. “Ah — Seagryn?”

“What will you do to us?” the wizard called out. He smiled at his partner reassuringly.

“You — can’t guess?” Dark asked, already beginning to choke.

“I think you know,” the creature threatened.

“Suppose you suffocate us. Who then will be your companions?” Seagryn still smiled at Dark, who watched him intently. They heard nothing for several minutes, but it did seem that the air quality had improved slightly. Seagryn felt proud of himself.

When next the megasin spoke she had traded her seductive soprano for the flint-hard sound of metal sawing rock. “You think you may tease me, magic user?” The sound alone was enough to drive both of them quivering onto their faces. When Seagryn didn’t respond, the monster wailed, “Answer me!” in the voice of a howling wind, and the cage of stone trembled at her wrath.

“Better talk or she’ll crush us for sure!” Dark shouted.

“It’s gone! The light’s gone! It’s all gone!” Seagryn cried as he plunged them again into darkness. The tremor stopped. The rock surrounding them fell silent.

Then somewhere above them they heard girlish laughter, and the megasin said, “This is fun!”

Fun? Seagryn marveled to himself, but he dared not speak his thought aloud.

He didn’t need to. Dark did so for him. “What do you mean?” the boy prophet asked, his voice quavering.

“Few challenges remain for one as old as myself. But the two of you certainly challenge me!” The megasin laughed and crowed, “One who uses magic and the other who dreams tomorrow. Who could want companions more interesting than these?”

“She knows,” Seagryn quietly said to Dark.

“She does,” the boy answered in the blackness. “Trouble is — I don’t.”

“Yet we know we escape the woman eventually.”

“I’ll have to depend upon you for that, Seagryn. Power knows, I can no longer depend on me.”

*

They refused all food, and struggled together to resist all sleep as well. There were lapses — times they both slumped against the wall, unable any longer to keep their eyes open in the dark — and they woke from each of these to the sounds of wicked laughter that seemed to gush from the rock like spring water. They naturally grew weaker as time fled. Gradually, deprived as they were of sleep and rest and deprived of their dreams when they did sleep, they began losing track of who they were and how they’d come to be here, wandering the bizarre passageways of delirium. At last they had to eat again, and they slept —

“Who is the Power?” the megasin demanded, and Seagryn woke. Disoriented in the pitch-black room, he seemed to float momentarily on the granite.

“What?”

“The Power,” the megasin said. “Who is it?”

“How —” Seagryn began, faltered, then rubbed his throbbing head and tried again. “How do you know about the Power?”

“Because you know this Power,” the monster replied. Her remarks seemed strangely subdued.

“Not anymore,” Seagryn grumbled quietly, wanting to fall back again into sleep. “Why don’t you ask young Dark there. He’s more in touch than I.”

“Yet it’s you who come to be shaped by it,” the megasin told him, and now Seagryn awoke fully and sat up to look toward the voice.

“Shaped by it?”

“That’s what you will call it,” the monster said petulantly, and Seagryn didn’t know what to say.

“And — how do you know?” he asked finally.

“Your young friend’s dreams. They tell me. I’ve seen much — but I can’t control it. His sleeping thoughts seem to bounce from time to time, until I lose myself in a labyrinth of will-be some-days. But in one of these futures, I hear you claim to be shaped by a Power, and it’s then that you give me your promise.”

“What promise?”

“You think I would tell you your own mind?” the megasin snarled. Then she departed and apparently left them alone. When, despite his struggle against it, sleep claimed Seagryn again, he dreamed that he married Elaryl. When he awoke this time he felt refreshed. He also came awake knowing exactly what he had to do and how to do it.

And yet it wasn’t easy. He’d done it all his life — all the life that he could remember — but it had never been easy in the best of times. And now the necessary spiritual muscles were atrophied by disuse. Weeds of doubt had overgrown the familiar tracks in his mind and spirit; an icy wall of anger had blocked all contact. Worst of all, he felt himself buried under a dunghill of shame, a pile he knew he would have to tunnel through alone before experiencing any sense at all of the Power’s shaping presence.

Then there was this place — this black gloom so thick with ancient evil it clung like a sticky residue to every granite surface. The megasin had been here a very long time, Seagryn felt absolutely certain. Within these galleries she had trapped thousands of generations of suffering people, for no greater sin than that they’d stumbled through her shutter when she was companionless. Her loneliness made that no less cruel, and her reverence for their dead remains did not ennoble her to him at all — it only made her appear more pitiful. That pattern of injustice would likely continue, whether he and Dark made their way back up to the bright world above or not. He found no hope in this darkness, only thousands of years of constant, helpless despair. How could he think something he might do would change it?

“Simple,” he growled up into the blackness that crushed downward into his open eyes. “I don’t do it.” And Seagryn let go.

Although he lay flat on his back on a very solid surface, Seagryn felt that at that moment he was falling. He seemed to drop backward into an infinite pit, falling forever as the factions of fear and faith warred for control of his psyche. He had started it now; he was adrift, and recalled anew the oddness of the sensation, remembering the many times he’d done this before and how strange it was to watch that battle so dispassionately. With that awareness came the anchoring force, the net of certainty which reminded him that he did indeed believe, that there was indeed a Power. With that, he fell once more into that Power’s presence.

Why did he always forget how quickly shame metamorphosed into elation? Awe seized his spirit by the throat and sought to throttle it, but warmth and acceptance and the sense of belonging quickly diluted that killing awe into love. He had tried all his life to express the nature of this moment, but had never found words potent enough to carry the images. Yet, as he relived it once again, he felt such clarity of vision he was astonished all over again that anyone could fail to understand. “So obvious! So evident! So clear!” he thought he cried out, though he never could be certain while in this state if the words actually formed upon his lips. It didn’t matter. He spoke only to himself. Eternity filled this moment and linked it to all the other times he’d fallen at last to this sweet weakness. Then he was awake, aware, and very much a being shaped by the Power, somewhere in a cavern in the earth. He was aware, too, of the megasin’s presence.

“What’s happening?” the feminine voice demanded.

“I’m being shaped,” Seagryn answered. “By the Power.”

“And who or what is this Power that dares invade my darkness and enthrall my companion!”

“Could the rock that melts or freezes at your will describe you to a curious stone from Lamath or a wandering gem from Pleclypsa? I am shaped by the Power. It’s wonderful. And now that Power will open up a stairway to the surface, and Dark and I will climb it and be gone. Dark?”

“I’m here,” the boy answered alertly. Had his gift returned? There would be time soon to talk and find out. But first there was to be a miracle. Seagryn tilted his head back and looked up.