A Guile of Dragons (39 page)

And, in fact, he still felt that Tyr had deceived him. He should have been trusted; he should have been told. He could not help but forgive his
harven
father; all he wanted was his father's forgiveness in turn. Since that was impossible, he would go under the mountains to seek vengeance or death, like a dwarf, or a dragon.

He said, “I am going under the mountains.”

The unicorn simply turned its head and walked out of the tunnel. It headed north, swiftly but apparently without hurrying. Morlock was conscious of some disappointment. Had he been expecting the unicorn to try to talk him out of it? Morlock smiled ruefully, looking after the unicorn for a moment.

But his path lay clear before him. He shrugged and walked forward into the darkness. The mountains of light had long since disappeared. He walked forward anyway.

The air was strange in the Runhaiar. Morlock noted it immediately, but found it hard to put his finger on the change. The air was neither warmer nor moister than usual; it was not tainted with venom or smoke. But when he had walked for some hundreds of paces he realized that there was still a freshness to it; the air moved more freely than it had in the past. Morlock guessed this meant that the Runhaiar had been broken open, probably at more than one point.

He was still pondering what this might mean when he came across a collapsed tunnel.

The break was sudden; he literally walked into a wall where none should have been. Feeling it with his fingertips, he sensed the rough unworked surface of broken stone. It made him slightly ill, like touching a broken, exposed bone. It was not a mere qualm, though—he became suddenly conscious of the vast killing weight of the mountain above him. Violence was breaking loose in the Runhaiar; death, if not vengeance, would be easy to find.

The Pilgrims' Way to Haukrull, which he had intended to take, was plainly impassable now. He took the next right-hand turn—south and downward. This led him closer to Saijok's den, which he had hoped to avoid. But he had never really believed he would be able to avoid it.

When he felt he could go no farther that day he sat down in the tunnel and ate some bread, moistened by mouthfuls of water from his bottle. He unbelted the sword he had brought with him and laid it near at hand. Then he lay down by the wall, using the Ambrosian shield as a pillow, and went to sleep.

Awaking some hours later, he continued his journey. His second day in the Runhaiar resembled the first. Whenever he tried to turn east he was blocked by fallen stone. It was as if the tunnels leading toward Haukrull had been deliberately destroyed. The second night he ate less but slept longer—or so it seemed. He awoke to find the air dense and warm.

He felt he was somewhere near the Drowned Arches, but he was unsure. He went into a tunnel entrance to read the signs there. But as he lay his hands on the wall, he was overcome by a sense of blindness and a choking feeling of being closed in, trapped. The patterns of heat and cool were gone; the whole wall was warm as blood, blindingly warm.

Desperation came over him. He returned to his pack and struck a light. Holding the wavering flame over his head, he felt himself relax. He also felt the foolishness of his action, as he saw one stone-gray tunnel at a junction with another; both began and ended in darkness. The light showed him nothing but himself, and what he had brought with him. For a moment he had thought—he didn't know what he had thought. He put out the light and repacked his firebox, thinking calmly.

His food would not last more than a few days; he had not anticipated a long journey. He had to acknowledge the possibility that he might never find an eastward tunnel; they might all have been destroyed . . . so that travellers would have to take the unprotected route overland, of course. That, perhaps, was why the unicorn had warned him against entering here—if that was what it had done.

Morlock shook his head. The air was warm and heavy, but not totally motionless. Somewhere ahead of him was the exit he sought. But if he did not find it in another day's walk he would turn back and try the overland crossing.

He strapped the pack across his shoulders, slung the shield atop it, then stood up and walked on.

In the dark midday, he stumbled on a dragon's tail. It lay across the exit from a tunnel. As Morlock sprawled on the rocky ground, he saw the darkness was merely a red dimness in this open cavern between tunnels. The dragon's form was clearly visible, outlined in red light. He heard sounds of breathing in the gigantic echoing chamber.

Had he caught the dragon asleep? Rising slowly to his feet, he drew his sword and slipped the Ambrosian shield onto his left arm. He advanced stealthily along the side of the dragon. But he had not taken many steps before he saw that the dragon was not sleeping; it was dead. Its snakelike sides were breached and the body gutted. The dim red light and the sounds of breathing were coming from farther away in the cave. He turned now toward them.

Along the walls of the great cavern he found a double row of creatures standing, waist-deep, in the stone floor, for all the world like a rows of carrots waiting to be pulled. They were gray in color, with heavy platelike scales. Their common form was manlike, except for the blunt animal snouts that blotted out what would have been their faces. Their eyes were bright as blood, and when their mouths opened smoke and flame issued lazily into the echoing air. They moved strangely, with the plantlike undersea motions of sleeping animals. Their size varied, from a hand's-breadth to two or three feet in height, the tallest ones being in the middle with the shortest on either end of the parallel rows.

They were smaller, still-living images of the dead creature he had found floating in Saijok Mahr's subterranean pool. There was something else familiar in them, too. . . . They were greenish gray; the forms were sharp and jagged, but the rows they formed were regular. Like a saw-edge. Saw-toothed.

Teeth.

Morlock turned and walked back to the fallen dragon. Even in the dim light it was easy to see that the dragon was toothless. The jaws had crumbled from the extractions, and their collapse gave the dragon's face—at once wolflike and serpentine—a boneless empty look.

Now he understood why the dwarves had smashed the teeth of the dragon killed at Southgate. He understood, too, what the rebel master Saijok Mahr must have done to get the creature Morlock remembered, the creature floating dead in Saijok's subterranean pool. The dragon had pulled one of his own teeth so that it would grow into a mandrake . . . perhaps to do work that needed hands. (Morlock thought of the carven pillars where Saijok's den opened up in Haukrull valley.) Then Saijok had killed it. If the sowing of teeth was the way dragons gave birth to their young (the words of the Dead Cor recurred to him: “they gave birth only in death”) Saijok's act showed signs of an ultimate unsparing ruthlessness.

Staring down at the fallen dragon, he recognized it. This was not Saijok Mahr: the scales gleamed gold in the red light, not greenish black. The Triple Collar was gone and the toothless face was distorted, but Morlock guessed this was Vild Kharum. Saijok had at last claimed his victory, then, and had gone out into Haukrull to establish his mastery over the guile of masters.

Morlock wondered what action the guile would take now, since all questions of leadership were finally resolved. He watched the red-gold gleams of light on the dead dragon's broken wings. In his mind each separate gleam took the form of a dragon settling in fire into one of the thousand valleys of the north. By the time winter ended they would be prepared to invade the southern holds. Who or what would stop them? There was no hope; the thing was ended. He had seen the future, growing like a patch of mushrooms in the dark under the mountains.

In the release that came with despair he gained new knowledge. He saw the chain of events he had participated in, now that they had come to an end, as an outsider. He saw, at last, the essential pattern. As Saijok had meant him to carry the challenge to Vild, so he must also have let Earno and Old Father Tyr pass. In Haukrull, they had either defeated Vild or been defeated by him—or their combat, perhaps, had been interrupted. In any case, at the suitable moment, Saijok Mahr intervened, defeated Vild (if he was not already slain), and drew him underground to reap the spoils of victory. Even as Morlock mourned for Tyr a part of his mind frankly admired Saijok's stratagem: it had the accidental irregular elegance of a candle flame; it was the opposite of Earno's obsessive and useless insistence on a fruitless course of action.

The guile might be far from here. They might even have moved their place of assembly from Haukrull. If that was so, Morlock was perhaps the safest person in the north, in this dark stone womb under the mountains. Yet he had come here seeking vengeance or death in fine epic fashion. . . . The irony sickened him. He felt as if he could not move, as if he were turned to stone. All he saw and heard made as little impression on him as if he had been stone. Standing there he was only conscious of the shudder of the dead stone heart of the mountains.

The light came then, and the noise, like the fall of a red thunderbolt. Morlock saw his own shadow, outlined in bright red light, crooked on the face of the dead dragon. Then the dimness returned, amid the echoes of the roar, and Morlock knew the master dragon had not yet departed to plunder the north. The stone floor shook as Saijok Mahr leapt toward him.

Morlock spun about, dark meditations evaporating in the moment of action. He raised the sword he still carried in his hand. He saw the dragon pause, stretch out its lizardlike neck and inhale. Morlock held the shield of Ambrose in front of his face and ran forward with a defiant shout as the dragon expelled a fiery breath.

The force of the breath was not itself enough to knock him down. But the fire was intensely hot; the agony of its passage, though brief, threw echoes of pain up and down his nerves. Fumes and smoke swept around him, blotting out the bloodred light. On impulse he fell heavily to the ground, then rolled into a crouch beneath the cover of smoke. His clothes were smoldering.

Almost immediately Morlock saw the glare of Saijok's fiery eyes sweeping back and forth, looking for the flaming corpse it supposed Morlock to be. They focused quickly on the smoke rising from Morlock's clothing, rising straight up from the heavy venom-laden fumes. The eyes stabbed forward. Morlock waited for agonizingly long instants until he could actually see the dragon's hungry yawning jaws through the thinning curtain of smoke. Then he leapt up and drove his sword home into Saijok's left eye, desperately hoping the dwarf-forged sword was long enough to reach the dragon's brain.

A chaos of fire and smoke erupted about him. He was struck away by the dragon's head and struck spinning in a new direction by one of the dragon's forelegs as it convulsed in agony.

But not death-agony. As Morlock finally landed on his side, he saw the dragon shake the sword out of the dark gleaming wreckage of its left eye. Then it began to search the gigantic smoke-filled cavern with its single eye, moving its head in swift birdlike glances.

Morlock struggled to his feet and shrugged the smoldering pack from his shoulders. The motion did not go unnoticed. The dark dragon's bright eye fastened on him immediately. Yet Saijok made no other move, standing almost amazed.

“Ambrosius!” Morlock shouted suddenly. It was explanation, defiance, and battle cry. He raised the black battered shield, with its white device of hawk and thorns. “Ambrose!” he shouted again, then paused. He felt as if he had uttered a blasphemy, or a slander—or a confession.

Then he realized he stood alone, unarmed, before a vindictive enemy he had terribly (but not mortally) wounded. If he sought vengeance or death . . . he need only stand and wait to die.

He decided he preferred vengeance. In the instant before the dragon moved, he turned and ran like a thief.