The Forging of the Dragon (Wizard and Dragon Book 1) (23 page)

When the shutter had closed above them — days ago? weeks? — it had sealed itself slowly, a wound in the earth healing up. This stairway, however, showed no sign of its coming. They heard no rumbling in the rock, no groaning of boulders forcing themselves to split. There was darkness where Seagryn looked, then there was light, and a moment thereafter they smelled the frosty scent of new snow and felt a few flakes of dislodged powder drifting down to drop upon their cheeks. Winter sunlight streamed down from above, highlighting each carefully carved stair. They could go. Seagryn looked at Dark, and the boy bolted upward.

“The promise!” the megasin screamed from behind him, and Seagryn jumped, surprised by the ancient beast’s pitiful tone of voice. He started to turn around and look at her.

“Don’t look!” she pleaded, and hurried on. “Just give me the Power’s promise!”

The Power’s promise. Now he understood. As Seagryn watched Dark climb carefully up the last few steps and jump joyfully out into the freshly fallen snow, he leaned back again upon the force that shaped him, believing there were words he was meant to say. As he expected, as had happened so many times before in his experience, the words were there in his mind and he spoke them. “It’s not
my
promise at all, old megasin. But I can tell you the
Power’s
promise. You see the stairway, so you know the Power must be. And if you will seek that Power, you will find at last a deathless companion.” He started to go, but she stopped him again.

“Where?” she demanded.

The words came clearly again. “It’s not a where that you seek — it’s a who. Look inside yourself, old megasin. I must go.”

He thought he heard a whimper behind him — was the megasin mourning his leaving? Then he heard for certain the sealing of stone, and knew she’d walled herself off from this stairway and its light. As he climbed out of the megasin’s pit only one thought obscured Seagryn’s joy. He wondered if old Kerl had found fodder and shelter. For some reason, all living things seemed far more worthy of cherishing.

Chapter Twenty-one

HORN BASHING

FROM the black of the megasin’s endless catacomb Seagryn stepped into the dazzling brilliance of midday sunshine on powdery snow. He stood on the top step and closed his eyes, grinning in triumph as he waited for them to adjust. When he opened them again the gap in the earth had closed beneath him, and his feet were buried in an icy drift. Alarmed, he jumped free, tossing a fluffy plume up toward his face. He brushed the frozen powder from his cheeks and really noticed, for the first time, how very hairy his face had become in the weeks since he’d been driven out of Lamath. Weeks? Or had it been months, perhaps years? He glanced at Dark, ready to ask the boy’s opinion, and noticed that the young prophet huddled, shivering, against a snow-covered rock. He ran to him, dancing the last few steps when he realized he could make quicker progress that way. He knelt beside the boy and hugged him protectively. “Are you all right?”

“I’m freezing,” Dark chattered through clenched teeth.

“We’ve got to get you to some shelter,” Seagryn muttered, oblivious to the sharp wind that cut through his own robes as well.

“There is none,” Dark advised, speaking only with great effort.

“You
know
that? Your gift has returned!”

Dark shook his head. “I remember. From before. I saw this before.” He ducked his head and turned his face to the rock, wincing in pain.

Seagryn looked down at his own body with some confusion, then back at Dark. Was it really this cold? Why was he not feeling it? He stood up and walked several steps away from the rock, then turned to face the wind. He couldn’t understand it. To him this was just a fresh, bracing breeze after a stifling imprisonment. He glanced around at the soft white carpet that covered everything and felt the urge to dance in it. He didn’t understand. It made no sense.

“You’re a tugolith, remember?” the boy called out. “I understand they love the snow!”

“But then — why didn’t I feel this way before?” Seagryn called back, but Dark had again hid his face against the rock.

Seagryn looked down at himself and reached to finger the heavy gown the servants of Paumer had clothed him in before sending him northward. “In my tugolith skin I wouldn’t need this,” he muttered quietly, then shrugged out of it and began to doff the clothing beneath it as well. Nearly nude, he carried the pile of garments to Dark and began to wrap the boy in them. He’d never given much thought to the fact that his clothes did not change when he changed shape. That was simply the way things were, the way the magic worked. Although he did remember once when his garments had torn off of him, the day he had —

No, that had been a dream, a dream of his ruined wedding and Elaryl’s rejection of him. But his memory of the dream was as real as if it had been an actual event, and was no less disturbing. He shivered slightly, then glanced down at his human flesh and saw it was turning a strange shade of blue.

“You’d better change,” Dark murmured, his eyes aglow with appreciation for the added layers of cloth.

Seagryn nodded. He stepped a few feet away, then imagined himself once again in tugolith shape. But something was different when he took that form this time. For some reason he felt more alive within it than he ever had before — as if all the times in the past his tugolith body had been sick, but now had finally regained its health. And he had to wonder — was it the cold, or his renewed affiliation with the Power? He rolled his huge eyes at the drifts piled around him, and decided it didn’t matter. He had to dance!

And dance he did, around in circles, up onto his hind legs, on the tops of huge boulders, and between the boles of mighty trees that trembled when he brushed them and sent marvelous showers of saved-up snow down onto his broad gray back. Dark, after at first laughing, ran for his life and hid in a granite crevice. When Seagryn had thoroughly plowed up this once virgin meadow, rendering it a muddy mess, the prophet finally crawled out of his refuge and shouted, “Can we go now?”

There was certainly no more reason to stay. Seagryn stretched out his forelegs in a moderately clean patch of snow and Dark climbed up behind his horn. Then the boy and his tugolith started north.

“How long were we down there?” Seagryn rumbled, glancing down at the ground below his scaly lip.

“I don’t know,” Dark said. “Days, maybe. Perhaps a couple of weeks. Enough, I hope, to convince that woman I’m gone for good.”

“What woman?” Seagryn asked, plodding forward. He was thinking of the wonderful model Kerl had provided for him, and how ironic it was that he was now the carrier instead of the carried.

“Uda, of course,” Dark snorted. “What other woman would I be talking about!”

“Oh, her,” Seagryn muttered, nodding slightly and thereby bouncing the boy around upon his perch. “I don’t quite consider her a woman.”

“She considers herself one.” Dark gasped in obvious dismay. “I thought I’d never get out of her grasp!”

“Ridiculous.” Seagryn snorted, turning his head to rub his chin joyfully in a high drift. “You knew exactly when you would get away.”

“Well, yes, that’s true,” Dark agreed. “It’s just that I thought the time would never arrive! And you can’t imagine what I had to put up with before it finally did.”

“I thought you were rather enjoying it, there toward the end of my stay?”

Dark cleared his throat. “Well,” he muttered in obvious embarrassment, “such a heated relationship does have its stimulating moments. But it gets so boring after a while! I felt so stifled! I cannot understand why you’re so eager to complete this task and go back and get married. Women have only one purpose in mind, and that’s to insure you spend every waking moment paying attention to what they think. I can’t believe I purposely hid that whole encounter from myself for so long, thinking it would spoil something wonderful! Talk about your fate worse than death ...”

“Um-hmm,” Seagryn grunted, looking about at the scenery. He didn’t recognize where they were at all. The topography of this area matched nothing in his experience. The mountains they walked between appeared higher and sharper than any he’d ever seen, and the trees seemed to be shorter, tougher cousins of the evergreens in the Marwilds. “Do you know where we are?”

“In the north, of course,” Dark growled, then returned to the recitation of his miseries. “As you say, I knew I’d get free from her, but it seemed forever before the day arrived. They kept asking me if you’d be successful; of course, I told them yes —”

“I will?” Seagryn said, pricking up his huge ears.

“I’ve told you that before. So they —”

“No, you haven’t!”

“Yes I have. I just haven’t told you how you’ll do it. Anyway, they decided they would take the whole entourage up to Lamath to be there to welcome you back. On the way, they left me unwatched long enough for me to escape unnoticed. Of course, I knew exactly where you’d be and how you would come to my aid, so I started riding across country to you as fast as possible, with Uda and her guards right on my tail. She rode with them for several hours, and the things she called me and the threats she made! I’ll tell you this, my mother still doesn’t know I know those words! It took most of a morning to —”

“Where in the north, exactly?”

Dark sighed. “Are you not interested in this story?”

“I’m more interested in knowing where we are and how we got here. This looks nothing like the woods we were in when we fell through the megasin’s shutter.”

“It’s not. She moved us. Or you did.”

“I did?”

“Of course, with all your running away. She just opened the rock in front of you and you ran through it. And who knows how far she carried us while we slept or how long it took her to do it?”

“Then it could have been only a few days after all — we’ve come to the snow rather than the snow coming to us.”

“However or wherever, I’m just glad to get away from her. What a terrible experience!”

“She is a monster.” Seagryn nodded in agreement.

“And so was that megasin,” Dark murmured with conviction, which confused Seagryn at first. Then he understood.

“You mean Uda again,” he said, and Dark nodded. Seagryn frowned a tugolith frown, but said no more. He just kept plowing northward through the snow. Old Kerl had set a high standard ...

The weather was kinder to Dark than it might have been. The sun shone the rest of that day, keeping him moderately warm under his many layers. By the time they stopped for the night, they both were hungry, but they’d seen nothing in these frozen wastes that looked edible, so they bedded down together beneath a stand of scrubby trees and tried to ignore the noisy growling of their stomachs. “Tomorrow. We’ll eat tomorrow,” Dark announced.

“Your gift is back!” Seagryn said with an enormous grin.

“No, nothing new,” the boy answered, shaking his head. “It’s still just memories of previous visions.”

“At least the beast didn’t steal them from you.”

“She may have.” Dark shrugged, snuggling closer to Seagryn’s scale-covered but nevertheless warm skin. “Who can say what the old megasin knows now about our future — or where she might appear again?”

“Do you know that she will?” Seagryn asked.

“No. In fact,” Dark added before dropping off to sleep, “I know as little right now about what’s to come as at any time I can remember in my life. Strange — the feeling is really rather peaceful ...”

Seagryn was still mulling over the young prophet’s words when he heard the slow, heavy breathing of a lad asleep. It didn’t come so easily for him this night. He rolled his giant head back and gazed up at the stars in the refreshingly frozen sky. He was just too excited about finding out how he would accomplish his task to be able to rest ...

*

They woke to the noise of tree trunks being whacked together like twigs. Dark had been snuggled under Seagryn’s warm flank, and now he rolled free and kept on rolling through the snow until he was well away from the altered wizard’s enormous hooves. For Seagryn awoke leaping into the air. He landed squarely upon his feet, trained his cone-shaped ears in the direction of the noise, and started sniffing.

“What is it?” Dark asked anxiously.

“It smells like — me,” Seagryn answered.

“That bad?” the boy prophet wondered aloud, his forehead creased with concern. Seagryn rolled an eyeball around to look at him, but the lad seemed unaware of his own insult. Seagryn sniffed that odor again, and had to admit it.

“Yes,” he acknowledged. “That bad.”

Dark looked up at his huge companion. “Tugoliths, then. I guess we’ve found them.” At the moment he didn’t appear too thrilled by their discovery.

“You want me to go on alone?”

“No!” Dark shouted. “You’re not leaving me out here in these frozen wastes by myself! At least not while I remember so little about what’s to come!”

“Fine. Then let’s go,” Seagryn muttered, and he lowered his chin to the ground to let the prophet scale his cheeks. Moments later they stood on a glacial bluff, overlooking a vast valley that glistened with the purest white Seagryn had ever seen. But the drama unfolding directly below them stole his attention from the awesome setting. They witnessed a battle between titans.

Two tugoliths rushed together at full speed, and their horns clacked with the noise of one log smashing into another. Both animals were knocked backward by the force of the blow, but one seemed more stunned than the other. Noting his advantage, the more alert tugolith charged again, and this time his horn made a very different sound as it slid off the horn of his rival and stabbed deeply into that unfortunate animal’s flesh. The wounded tugolith screamed in pain and reeled backward to sit on its hindquarters. Fresh blood stained the white landscape crimson, spoiling forever this vista in Seagryn’s memory. He closed his eyes against the next blow, unwilling to see any creature so wantonly slaughtered.

But the blow didn’t come. Seagryn opened his eyes again.

“Go away,” the victorious tugolith ordered firmly, sounding exactly like a schoolboy commanding a bully to leave the playground. In the wake of the bloody beating just administered this almost polite request seemed a little ludicrous, and Seagryn rolled his eyes up to look up at Dark, expecting the boy to agree. Instead he saw the young prophet’s fascinated smile. Once more he forced himself to recall that Dark was little more than a schoolboy himself.

“Where?” the beaten tugolith whined.

“To your wheel, punt,” the victor instructed. “If it will take you ...”

“My wheel is dead,” the loser rumbled.

The winner turned to look back over his enormous shoulders, and Seagryn noticed then the circle of nine tugoliths that stood behind him, horns pointing outward. Looking back, the victor called out, ‘"We grieve for you. Now go away.”

With much grunting the defeated tugolith struggled onto his four legs again and turned to move off slowly. He walked sideways, however, glancing back at his conqueror as if half-expecting another sharp prick to the flanks from that wicked-tipped bone that had battered him to the ice.

Seagryn still watched his departure when Dark murmured a quiet, “Oh, dear.”

Seagryn glanced quickly back to the herd to find every horn on every forehead of the ten remaining tugoliths now pointed upward toward them. He looked down at the circle — for they still held to that formation — and muttered a strangled, “Hello?”