The Lake of Souls (19 page)
“Poor Spits,” Harkat croaked. “That was awful.”
“He probably deserved it,” I sighed, “but I wish it could have happened some other way. If only he’d —”
A roar stopped the words dead in my throat. My head shot around and I spotted the male dragon, hovering in the air close above us, eyes gleaming. “Don’t worry,” Harkat said. “We’re close to the Lake. It can’t …” The words died on his lips and he stared at me, his green eyes filling with fear.
“The spell!” I moaned. “Spits said it would only last until a living person fell into the Lake! And he was still alive when …”
As we stood trembling, the dragon — no longer bound by the spell — opened his jaws wide and coughed a ball of fire straight at us — meaning to finish us off the same way he’d killed Spits!
I
REACTED QUICKER
to the flames than Harkat — I’d been badly burned many years earlier, and had no wish to suffer the same fate again. I hurled myself into the Little Person, knocked him clear of the blast and rolled after him. As the flames zipped past us, out over the water of the Lake — momentarily illuminating the faces of the dead trapped within — I reached for a globe and hurled it at the ground beneath the dragon. There was a large explosion and the dragon peeled away, roaring — this was his first exposure to our explosives.
“Hurry!” I shouted at Harkat. “Give me your globes, grab the net and fish your soul out!”
“I don’t know how … to fish!” Harkat howled.
“There’s no better time to learn!” I bellowed, then threw another globe as one of the females swooped upon us.
Harkat swiftly unloaded his globes and laid them on the ground by my feet. Then, grabbing Spits’s abandoned net, he pulled it out of the Lake, paused a moment to clear his thoughts, and slowly fed the net in. As he did, he muttered softly, “I seek my soul, spirits … of the dead. I seek my soul, spirits … of the dead. I seek my —”
“Don’t talk!” I yelled. “Fish!”
“Quiet!” Harkat hissed. “This is the way. I sense it. I must call upon my soul to … lure it into the net.”
I wanted to ask how he’d figured that out, but there was no time — the male and both females were attacking, the females from the left and right, the male floating out over the Lake, in front of us. Scaring off the females with two hastily thrown globes, I studied the dragon angling down toward the surface of the Lake. If I threw a globe at the Lake, it wouldn’t burst. That meant I’d have to aim for the dragon itself, and possibly kill him. It seemed a shame, but there were no other options.
I was getting a fix on the dragon when an idea struck me. Hurling the globe out onto the water in front of the approaching beast, I grabbed a nearby pebble, took careful aim, and sent it flying at the globe. It struck just as the dragon was nearing the globe, showering the creature’s face with a seething funnel of water.
The dragon pulled out of its attack and arced away into the air, screeching its frustration. The females almost sneaked in while I was dealing with the male, but I spotted them just in time and scattered them with another blast. While the dragons regrouped overhead, I did a quick globe count — eight remained, plus the vial.
I wanted to tell Harkat to hurry, but his face was knitted together fiercely as he bent over the net, whispering softly to the souls in the Lake, searching for the soul of the person he used to be. To disturb him would be to delay him.
The dragons attacked again, in the same formation as before, and once again I successfully repelled them, leaving myself with five lonely-looking globes. As I picked up three more, I considered aiming to kill — after these three, I’d be down to my final pair — but as I studied the dragons circling in the air, I was again struck by their awesome majesty. This was their world, not ours. We had no right to kill them. What if these were the only living dragons, and we wiped out an entire species just to save our own necks?
As the dragons attacked once more, I still wasn’t sure what I intended to do with the explosive globes. Clearing my mind, I allowed my self-defense mechanism to kick in and make the choice for me. When I found my hands pitching the globes short of the dragons, scaring them off but not killing them, I nodded grimly. “So be it,” I sighed, then called to Harkat, “I can’t kill them. After the next attack, we’re done for. Do you want to take the globes and —”
“I have it!” Harkat shouted, hauling ferociously on the net, the strings of which tightened and creaked alarmingly. “A few more seconds! Buy me just a … few more seconds!”
“I’ll do what I can.” I grimaced, then faced the dragons, which were homing in on us as before, patiently repeating their previous maneuver. For the final time I sent the females packing, then pulled out the vial, tossed it onto the surface of the Lake, and smashed it with a pebble. Some glass must have struck the male dragon when the vial exploded, because he roared with pain as he peeled away.
Now that there was nothing else to do, I hurried to Harkat and grabbed hold of the net. “It’s heavy!” I grunted, feeling the resistance as we tugged.
“A whopper!” Harkat agreed, grinning crazily.
“Are you OK?” I roared.
“I don’t know!” he shouted. “I’m excited but terrified! I’ve waited so long … for this moment, and I still … don’t know what to expect.”
We couldn’t see the face of the figure caught in the strands of the net — it was turned away from us — but it was a man, light of build, with what looked to be dirty blond hair. As we pulled the spirit out of the Lake, its form glittered, then became solid, a bit at a time, first a hand, then an arm, followed by its other hand, its head, chest …
We had the rescued soul almost all the way out when I caught sight of the male dragon zooming toward us, his snout bleeding, pain and fury in his large yellow eyes. “Harkat!” I screamed. “We’re out of time!”
Glancing up, Harkat spotted the dragon and grunted harshly. He gave the net one last desperate tug. The body in the net shot forward, its left foot solidifying and clearing the water with a pop similar to a gun’s retort. As the dragon swooped down on us, its mouth closed, nostrils flaring, working on a fireball, Harkat spun the body over onto its back, revealing a pale, confused, horrified face.
“What the—?” I gasped.
“It can’t be!” Harkat croaked as the man in the net — impossibly familiar—stared at us with terror-filled eyes.
“Harkat!” I roared. “That can’t be who you were!” My gaze flicked to the Little Person. “Can it?”
“I don’t know,” Harkat said, bewildered. He stared at the dragon — now almost upon us—then down at the man lying shivering on the shore. “Yes!” he shouted suddenly. “That’s me! I’m him! I know who I was! I …”
As the dragon opened its mouth and blew fire at us with all the force it could muster, Harkat threw his head back and bellowed at the top of his voice, “I was the vampire traitor —
Kurda Smahlt
!”
Then the dragon’s fire washed over us and the world turned red.
I
FELL TO THE GROUND
, clamping my lips and eyes shut. Clambering to my knees, I tried to crawl out of the ball of fire before I was consumed to the bone —
— then paused when I realized that although I was surrounded by the dragon’s flames, there wasn’t any heat! I opened my left eyelid a fraction, ready to shut it again quick. What I saw caused both my eyes to snap open and my jaw to drop with astonishment.
The world around me had stopped. The dragon hung frozen over the Lake, a long line of fire extending from its mouth. The fire covered not just me, but Harkat and the naked man …
Kurda Smahlt!
— on the ground. But none of us was burned. The static flames hadn’t harmed us.
“What’s going on?” Harkat asked, his words echoing hollowly.
“I haven’t a clue,” I said, running a hand through the frozen fire around me — it felt like warm fog.
“Over … there!” the man on the ground croaked, pointing to his left.
Harkat and I followed the direction of the finger and saw a short, plump man striding toward us, beaming broadly, playing with a heart-shaped watch.
“Mr. Tiny!”
we shouted together, then cut through the harmless flames — Harkat grabbed Kurda under the arms and dragged him out — and hurried to meet the mysterious little man.
“Tight timing, boys!” Mr. Tiny boomed as we came within earshot. “I didn’t expect it to go that close to the wire. A thrilling finale! Most satisfying.”
I stopped and stared at Mr. Tiny. “You didn’t know how it would turn out?” I asked.
“Of course not,” he smirked. “That’s what made it so much fun. A few more seconds and you’d have been toast!”
Mr. Tiny stepped past me and held out a cloak to Harkat and his naked companion. “Cover the poor soul,” Mr. Tiny punned.
Harkat took the cloak and draped it around Kurda’s shoulders. Kurda said nothing, just stared at the three of us, his blue eyes wide with suspicion and fear, trembling like a newborn baby.
“What’s going on?” I snapped at Mr. Tiny. “Harkat can’t have been Kurda — he was around long before Kurda died!”
“What do you think, Harkat?” Mr. Tiny asked the Little Person.
“It’s me,” Harkat whispered, studying Kurda intensely. “I don’t know how … but it is.”
“But it can’t —” I began, only for Mr. Tiny to interrupt curtly.
“We’ll discuss it later,” he said. “The dragons won’t stay like this indefinitely. Let’s not be here when they unfreeze. I can control them normally, but they’re in quite an agitated state and it would be safer not to press our luck. They couldn’t harm me, but it would be a shame to lose all of you to their fury at this late stage.”
I am anxious for answers, but the thought of facing the dragons again enabled me to hold my tongue and follow quietly as Mr. Tiny led us out of the valley, whistling chirpily, away from the lost remains of Spits Abrams and the other dead spirits held captive in the Lake of Souls.
Night. Sitting by a crackling fire, finishing off a meal which two of Mr. Tiny’s Little People had prepared. We were no more than half a mile from the valley, out in the open, but Mr. Tiny assured us that we wouldn’t be disturbed by dragons. On the far side of the fire stood a tall, arched doorway, like the one we’d entered this world by. I longed to throw myself through it, but there were questions which needed to be answered first.
My eyes returned to Kurda Smahlt, as they had so often since we’d pulled him out of the Lake. He was extremely pale and thin, his hair untidy, his eyes dark with fear and pain. But otherwise he looked exactly as he had the last time I saw him, when I’d foiled his plans to betray the vampires to the vampaneze. He’d been executed shortly afterward, dropped into a pit of stakes until he was dead, then cut into pieces and cremated.
Kurda felt my eyes upon him and glanced up shamefully. He no longer shook, though he still looked very uncertain. Laying aside his plate, he wiped around his mouth with a scrap of cloth, then asked softly, “How much time has passed since I was put to death?”
“Eight years or so,” I answered.
“Is that all?” He frowned. “It seems much longer.”
“Do you remember everything that happened?” I asked.
He nodded bleakly. “My memory’s as sharp as ever, though I wish it wasn’t — that drop into the pit of stakes is something I’d rather never think about again.” He sighed. “I’m sorry for what I did, killing Gavner and betraying the clan. But I believed it was for the good of our people — I was trying to prevent a war with the vampaneze.”
“I know,” I said softly. “We’ve been at war since you died, and the Vampaneze Lord has revealed himself. He …” I gulped deeply. “He killed Mr. Crepsley. Many others have died as well.”
“I’m sorry,” Kurda said again. “Perhaps if I’d succeeded, they’d still be alive.” He grimaced as soon as he said that, and shook his head. “No. It’s too easy to say ‘what if’ and paint a picture of a perfect world. There would have been death and misery even if you hadn’t exposed me. That was unavoidable.”
Harkat hadn’t said much since we’d sat down — he’d been studying Kurda like a baby watching its mother. Now his eyes roamed to Mr. Tiny and he said quietly, “I know I was Kurda. But
how
? I was created years before … Kurda died.”
“Time is relative.” Mr. Tiny chuckled, roasting something that looked suspiciously like a human eyeball on a stick over the fire. “From the present, I can move backward into the past, or forward into any of the possible futures.”
“You can travel through time?” I asked skeptically.
Mr. Tiny nodded. “That’s my one great thrill in life. By playing with time, I can subtly influence the course of future events, keeping the world on a chaotic keel — it’s more interesting that way. I can help or hinder humans, vampires and vampaneze, as I see fit. There are limits to what I can do, but I work broadly and actively within them.
“For reasons of my own, I decided to help young Master Shan,” he continued, addressing his words to Harkat. “I’ve laid many plans around that young man, but I saw, years ago, that he was doomed for an early grave. Without, someone to step in at vital moments — for instance, when he fought with the bear on his way to Vampire Mountain, and later with the wild boars during his Trials of Initiation — he would have perished long ago.
“So I created Harkat Mulds,” he said, this time speaking to me. He swallowed the eyeball he’d been cooking and belched merrily. “I could have used any of my Little People, but I needed someone who’d cared about you when he was alive, who’d do that little bit extra to protect you. So I went into a possible future, searched among the souls of the tormented dead, and found our old friend Kurda Smahlt.”
Mr. Tiny slapped Kurda’s knee. The one-time General flinched. “Kurda was a soul in agony,” Mr. Tiny said cheerfully. “He was unable to forgive himself for betraying his people, and was desperate to make amends. By becoming Harkat Mulds and protecting you, he provided the vampires with the possibility of victory in the War of the Scars. Without Harkat, you would have died long ago, and there would have been no hunt for the Lord of the Vampaneze — he would simply have led his forces to victory over the vampires.”