A Dragon at Worlds' End (29 page)

Mot Pulk calculated that he could get in and out in a single night and take the youth with him. Lady Tschinn had apparently identified the youth as the Iudo Faex, which immediately made him very valuable, far beyond even his worth as a curiosity.

Ha! His spirit reveled in his triumph. Pessoba was such a no-hoper, forever doomed to struggle outside the Thousand. Compared to Mot Pulk, Pessoba was a donkey!

The materialization was finally complete. His body was no longer in his own house. Instead, he was free to move within the heart of Pessoba's domain. For a moment Mot Pulk considered all the possibilities. Then he shook his head. This would be enough for now. He stepped forward and brought out the crystal Mydroja, to which he murmured. In a moment a green light pulsed forth from it and bathed Relkin's face.

Relkin awoke with a startled grunt. He began to rise, but then his eyes filled with the bewitching radiance of Mydroja and he froze as completely as anyone first seeing a dragon and going into dragon freeze.

Mot Pulk beckoned with his hand. Relkin rose unsteadily to his feet and stepped forward as if he were in a dream. Mot Pulk halted him with a hand to the chest. Relkin stared, eyes glazed, his mind numbed by the power of Mydroja.

Mot Pulk permitted himself a soundless laugh. The guards were right outside the door, standing somnolent in the dark with hands on their spears. And inside the room they guarded, Mot Pulk stole away the treasure!

Mot Pulk laid a hand on Relkin's shoulder and began the spell that would dematerialize both of them. The jewel Mydroja flashed brilliant green as the power went forth. Once more the slow process of movement across the sub-world of chaos began. Slowly the vitality drained out of both figures, as they stood there frozen, unable to move.

And elsewhere, the first shimmer appeared in the pergola at Mot Pulk's lovely manse of Ferlaty.

It was like a dream, and again it was not a dream. The green light from the stone lit the elf lord's face from below. The one eye was frozen, staring back at him. Relkin felt a thrumming in his blood, a galloping in his temples, but the world was frozen still and he was unable to move a muscle.

Questions poured through his thoughts like syrup, slowed to a crawl. The greatest puzzle was how this interloper had gained entrance to the cell. The next was, what could he want? Relkin knew he was damaged goods now that he'd been labeled as the Iudo Faex. It was all so mad, so utterly crazy. He knew nothing of their Game, and yet they claimed he would destroy it. And now this one-eyed elf lord, whose name Relkin could not recall, had broken into Pessoba's fortified house and abducted him.

And what was happening now? Why was he frozen in place? What did it mean?

So slowly that the process was undetectable the elf lord's face in front of him lost focus and began to blur. The features grayed out, the face blanked. At the same time Relkin felt curiously lightheaded. Even the darkness of the room had changed, turning gray and vague.

And then there came the unutterably strange sensation of suddenly seeing another place; as if through the view of the gray darkness he could see another place. Shapes wild and disorganized surged in gray twilight. He was seeing two places at the same time. It was disturbing. Nausea racked him for a moment. A second later he felt something like a ring of fire draw across his left foot, and then across his right and travel slowly up his legs. It was as if he were being dipped in molten metal. He wanted to scream, but could not even open his mouth. The ring of fire traveled up his body to his waist, then his chest, and finally to his head. It wore across his mind like a searing flash of blue light that left him dizzy and nauseous again.

The riotous forms were taking shape and color. The darkness of the room was fading to nothing. The brilliant viridian of unimaginably lush vegetation had taken its place. The air bore a rich, spicy scent. Relkin understood that somehow or other he had left behind the room in Pessoba's house.

This was like nowhere he had ever seen before. A soft purple sky, streaked with pink clouds, looked down on a world of fantastic plant life. Enormous bull's-eye flowers loomed overhead on ten-foot stalks. Other, smaller blooms ran riot around the bases of these huge flowers, and a lawn of brilliant green filled the foreground. In the center of the lawn was a statue, a creature, vaguely humanoid. Beyond the lawn in one direction was empty space, and beyond it a waterfall that pitched off the gray rock and arced out and down into mysterious green darkness at the bottom of a canyon. In the other direction the ground rose in a series of hilly bumps, each covered in trees. Beyond the trees was the uncanny purple sky.

In that sky burned a small sun, too bright to look at even for a moment, a sun not much bigger than a star.

Relkin knew in his heart that something very strange had happened. Either the world had changed or he was no longer on the world he knew. This madly verdant place was alien in every way. This thought brought on the grim realization that he had no idea how to get home.

He felt a warm wind blow across his face. The smell of the place was strangely sweet. The elf lord stood beside him, in the same position as before. Neither of them could move a muscle. The wind soughed in the round-leaved trees.

Time passed with infinite slowness. The pink clouds were blown slowly across the sky, a process that seemed to take hours. All the while Relkin was immobilized, as frozen as someone with the worst case of dragon freeze.

And then, when despair had begun to grip Relkin with the thought that perhaps he would be like this, a living statue, forever, he found he could swivel his eyeballs. To his right he could see a wooden wall, a vine-covered roof above it. To his left there was more lawn, and beyond, more flowers, in deep blues and purples. His lips opened and he took a breath.

At once he felt his body come to life. Feeling surged through him.

He turned at once to the elf lord.

"Where is this? What do you want?"

But the elf lord made no answer; instead, the figure suddenly softened and lost definition. In a matter of seconds all facial feature was gone and then so was the rest of it. Relkin was alone.

He took a careful look around himself. Suddenly he was breathing hard, as if he'd run a mile at full stretch. His eyes watered. There was nothing to see but jungle, and these huge flowers, and the wooden pergola, roofed in vines. Around the pergola the lawns were smooth, well tended. It was beautiful, overwhelmingly so.

There was something alarming about the scent in the air. A hint of a spice that was just a little maddening. Enticing but also frightening, for some unknown reason. The pergola appeared to be the only structure around. To one side the ground broke down steeply into the grotto, or canyon, into which arched the waterfall from the far side. To the other the clumps of trees thickened into wild, fantastic forest.

Relkin took several deep breaths and tried to get a grip on himself. He took stock. He had no weapons, wore only the bedclothes given him by Pessoba, his feet were bare.

He looked around in the immediate undergrowth until he found a fallen branch that he could trim until he had a four-foot length of wood that gave him a crude club. He felt absurdly better for this armament, although he was aware that it was completely inadequate if there were pujish in this fabulous forest. The thought of pujish worried him into seeking out a climbable tree.

Fortunately, there was a massive, thick-boled tree, configured like an ancient oak but with almost circular leaves, that stood right outside the pergola in the midst of thick-grassed lawn. It was easily climbed and offered a better view of the surroundings. This confirmed his initial suspicions. There was no sign of any other structures or people or anything except verdant forest.

In the tree, equipped with his crude club, he felt more secure. If there was even a chance of pujish in this forest he didn't want to be on the ground with them.

Darkness fell, and then began the procession of the three moons. One after the other they rose above the horizon and threw their silvery glimmer across the forest. Each was subtly different in tone from the others. The first was a pale ocher, the next was umber, almost pink, and the last had a green-gray shade to it. On the faces of the moons were a few marks and visible craters, dark places and lines connecting them. The moons rose at different rates and so their arrangement slowly changed as they swung around each other through the sky.

When all three moons had risen, new life began to stir in the magical forest. On soft wings, moths of mythic size flitted through the dark. One particularly large one came to rest on a nearby leaf. Relkin estimated it was the size of his hand. Then he noticed with a start that when it folded its wings the pattern produced across its back was unmistakably the face of the elf lord with the eye patch.

At last the name came back to him—Mot Pulk, that was what Pessoba had called him. An ambitious elf lord, in trouble, his ranking dropping in the Game they were all so obsessed with. He recalled that mocking voice, as it had questioned him while the spear point hovered by his throat.

What did Mot Pulk want with him? Was it anything to do with his being named the Iudo Faex?

The night wore on. The air remained soft and warm, and the moons swung around each other as they rose to the zenith. Nothing disturbed the night but the soft breeze and the fluttering of enormous moths.

When the moons reached their highest point, Relkin noticed with a thrill of unease that they were aligned, with the pink and the yellow ones uppermost and the green-gray below. The features on the moons now formed the face of Mot Pulk, as if it had been carved in portions on all three.

Relkin swallowed hard. These signs were clear marks of creation. This, then, was a magic world of some sort, completely dedicated to Mot Pulk. These elf lords were like the gods of old. They could create entire worlds, using the power of the slave mind mass that drove the Great Game. This was powerful magic indeed.

What could this elf lord want with him? He was tainted, cursed as the Iudo Faex. That would surely hamper a sale. Or was there to be a reward for him, and Mot Pulk hoped to collect it?

Relkin thought that it seemed an unholy amount of attention to pay to a dragonboy from Quosh. By the hand, he thought, it would have been better for all of them if Katun had never brought him to Mirchaz.

For a little while he fell into despair again and thought of his dragon, lost and no doubt in agony of despair. He felt enormous guilt. No dragonboy should ever lose his dragon, it was the absolute rule of the craft of tending to a wyvern battledragon. Boy and dragon were inseparable and were meant to be that way. Relkin had done a pretty bad job of it if this was anything to go by. He was no longer even on the same world as his dragon. Sick at heart, he stared sullenly at the whirling moons which rotated further and obliterated Mot Pulk's features.

After a while the moons began to sink down the far side of the sky. Relkin was no longer watching, however, for he was sound asleep, his head resting against the side of the entrance to the pergola.

After perhaps a quarter hour, as Relkin gently snored, a short, eldritch figure detached itself from a nearby tree and approached. A thing with the head of an insect and the body of a skinny monkey, it examined Relkin briefly and then returned to the tree. From the darkness at its base it hauled out a large black sack. What was in the sack was almost too much for the monkey mantis to carry, but it staggered across the lawn and laid the sack close to Relkin's feet. Then it extended a razor-sharp claw and slit the bag open to reveal a glistening, pale purple pod the size of a large melon. After a moment's gaze upon the pod, the creature tiptoed back into cover.

Relkin slept on, oblivious. After a while the pod began to swell. It grew enormously, and its surface began to writhe. Sinuous shapes surged across the smooth, plump purple skin. Clefts appeared, then deepened and darkened and eventually formed separation of limbs and head, until it became visibly a woman rolled up tightly in a fetal ball. The ribs rose and fell; she breathed.

Now the pale tissue lost its purple tone and became pink. Hair grew out on the top of her head, dark and lustrous, and continued to grow until it was long enough to reach her shoulders. At last she broke out of the fetal ball, slowly straightening, then sitting up, then getting to her knees, and then standing with her arms outstretched to the three moons. She was a beautiful girl, as ripe and lush as the verdant landscape that had produced her. There was a birthmark on her hip that looked very much like the face of Mot Pulk.

She implored the moons to stay; she gave thanks to the lord who had allowed her to be born. Firm-breasted, wide-hipped, long-legged, she was the voluptuous fruit of Mot Pulk's imagination and she was happy to exist.

She knelt beside Relkin and studied him in the shifting light of the three moons for a while. At one point she raised a hand, and it seemed as if she might touch him on the mouth, but then she thought better of it and stood back and moved away into the garden.

When Relkin awoke a few hours later, she had pulled flaxen anthers from some of the giant blooms and made herself a simple but sensuous skirt. Still her breasts were bare and when she saw Relkin, she smiled in a way that was both simply happy and openly seductive.

Relkin could scarcely believe his eyes. Out of nowhere he had been graced with the company of the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen. A dark-haired beauty with green eyes, smooth skin, and generous breasts. Relkin felt his pulse quicken, just looking at her. Where the hell had she come from? And she wore nothing but a grass skirt, and that barely covered her to the knees. Relkin was aroused despite all the questions pounding in his brain.

"Who are you?" he said, and thought how stupid he was to think she would understand Verio.

But she nodded that she understood and she replied in that amazing elf tongue, Intharion, which all could understand.

"I am Ferla," she said.