Dragon Stones (52 page)

"Prehn?"  Her voice came out a croak; or maybe it didn't come out at all, and she only thought she had spoken.  After a moment, though, the wide-eyed child peeked around the corner of Diasa's bed.

"Prehn, you must tell me … what did I say?"

At first she thought the girl would not answer, but then she did, in the barest whisper:  "Thunder."

"I said something about thunder?"

Prehn nodded.

"Did I say anything—"  She broke off as a rumble rattled the shutters on the window, making the floor quiver and the straw menagerie dance across the tabletop.  Tolaria felt the vibration deep in her gut.  She stumbled to the window, yanked the shutters open, poked her head out into the alley.  Over the rooftops, she saw a large plume of smoke rising above the castle, curling, bulbous on top like a spreading fungus.  Within the roiling cloud, tiny crystalline flecks glittered blue and red in the slanting rays of the sun.

What was it?  Was it the dragon?

Behind her, Prehn said:  "Boom."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Qalor's laboratory had exploded; his noxious deviltry and T'Sian's fire had proven a destructive mix, the blast leveling the southern quarter of the keep.  The shockwave hit her as she swooped toward the men and their flying mounts.  The dragon pulled up sharply, folding her wings inward to protect them, hanging motionless for a heartbeat.  Heat rippled upward, pushing smoke and fire into a gigantic bloom.  The eagles squawked and screeched as their riders fought for control; one of the men, improperly secured no doubt, fell from his seat and plummeted to the rocks below.  The bird turned and flew back toward its aviary like a riderless horse returning to the stable.

Many of the defenders had been killed or stunned by the blast, but others had begun hauling devices onto the ramparts.  These were clearly projectile weapons, enormous versions of the crossbows that they carried; they looked powerful enough to actually harm her should their aim be true.  T'Sian spread her wings to catch the hot, rising air.  She could see slivers of crystal floating amid the smoke and cinders, glimmering, dropping back into the castle as the updraft weakened.  She gave a few beats, lifting herself higher, then wheeled around, dove, and laid a blanket of fire across the castle walls, setting man and machine ablaze.  She heard small explosions from the area as she glided away.

She began a sharp vertical climb, knowing as earthbound men did not that altitude was an advantage in an aerial battle.  The remaining riders had regrouped, and pursued her as she rose higher above the castle.  Did they think they could harm her with their puny arrows?  Did they think she would allow them to drop their little bombs on her head?  Foolish amateurs.

T'Sian pierced the low-hanging shroud of mist that hung over the castle, passing quickly through the cold, clinging vapor into a layer of crisp, clear air above.  She stopped there, holding herself steady, waiting for her pursuers to appear so that she could burn them.

But before that happened, something collapsed over her back and hindquarters, fouling her wings.  Startled, she began to fall, thrashing, trying to get free, but her struggles only tangled her more deeply.  She twisted her long neck this way and that, spotting a rapidly retreating formation of eagle-riders.  They had dropped a huge, weighted net on her, snaring her, turning her from a glider into a stone.

She lost sight of them as she plunged into the wispy clouds; but she heard them cheering, thinking she would be dashed to death against the jagged rocks below.

Foolish, foolish men.

After the explosion, Tolaria couldn't stay inside any longer.  Hoping there would be too much commotion for anyone to pay attention to her, she took Prehn's hand and headed downstairs.  As she expected, the common room had emptied into the street.  She led Prehn out to the square, where villagers had gathered in small groups, staring at the roiling plume over the keep.  They pointed, they whispered, they gasped and exclaimed when the sound of minor explosions reached their ears; overall, they seemed to find it a grand entertainment.

Tolaria headed north toward the castle, thinking she might get a better view from the main street.  Along the way she passed a tavern whose sign depicted an eagle, its claws outstretched, its hooked beak open in a screech.  One of the windows had a broken shutter.  This must be where they had found Qalor.  Diasa had killed a guard here, hadn't she?  He had been helpless, unconscious, and she had stabbed him.  Was he still inside?

Tolaria kept going.  There was no reason for her to go look; she could do nothing to help a dead man.  Besides, she had Prehn with her, and Prehn didn't need to see something like that.  She stopped near the fountain, not far from the avenue that led out of town, up the the hillside, and across the stone bridge to the castle gate.  She'd passed this way when riding in Dunshandrin's carriage, and again, on foot, when she had fled the castle in disguise.  She noticed a nearby vendor, a purveyor of cloth and hats, who seemed to be closing up his booth.  A few others were doing the same, but most seemed to take the milling crowd as an opportunity to hawk their wares even more loudly than usual.  She went to the milliner's tent and asked, "What's going on?"

The man didn't look up; he was busily stuffing bolts of blue and red and orange fabric into a large sack behind the counter, perhaps getting ready to flee with his most expensive stock.  "There was a fire at the castle, and then a dragon," he said.

"A dragon?"  T'Sian had come out in her true form, then; and if she had fired the castle, she must have found the crystals.  Tolaria searched the sky, but did not see the great beast.  "Where did she go?"

"I'm not mad!" he cried, evidently thinking she doubted him.  "It burned the castle, then flew up into the clouds!"  He stood, hefting the sack over his shoulder like a runaway who had been unable to decide what to take and what to leave.  "If you're wise, you'll flee, instead of staying here and watching like these other fools."

She mumbled thanks and led Prehn away from the man's booth, moving a short distance toward the castle.  It loomed on its promontory, belching smoke from the side and along the battlements.  Eagles flitted nervously about the towers.  They reminded her of flies around a rotten piece of meat.

Where was T'Sian?

Suddenly a gasp went up from the people assembled in the square.  What had they seen?  It had to be the dragon, but where?  She turned in a circle, scanning the sky, looking for T'Sian, but Prehn spotted her first.  She raised her arm, pointed with a chubby finger.  "Falling," she said.

"Oh, no," Tolaria whispered, as T'Sian, hopelessly entangled in a massive net, plunged toward rocky spires near the castle.

Diasa looked up as a shadow passed overhead, hoping the dragon was returning; but no, it was just one of the monstrous eagles, vanishing over the castle wall.  Was it fleeing the battle, or moving to attack the dragon from a different direction?  Or perhaps it was looking for other intruders.

She nudged Adaran.  "We can't stay here," she said.  "The twins have eagles in the air.  We'll be spotted soon, if we haven't been already."

Adaran sighed.  "Maybe I can steal one and fly away."

"That may have worked once, but I doubt you'll be so lucky a second time."  She looked at the sky as shouts went up from the castle, wondering what the rampaging dragon had done now.  "We're too exposed."

"What are you planning to do?"

"Go back into the cesspool."

"You want to go back inside?  Are you mad?"

"No, but neither do I want to sit here waiting to be shot."

"Go if you want to," Adaran said.  "I'll stay here, if it's all the same to you."

"Fine.  Stay there.  But don't expect me to rush to your aid when an eagle is feasting on your liver."

"I'll expect nothing from you whatsoever."

Diasa grunted and crawled back into the chute.  A strong, acrid, smoky odor lay over the smell of human waste, as if someone had set fire to a field of manure and then tried to douse it with sulfur.  She soon emerged into the cesspool, finding that chunks of wood and masonry and broken pipe now littered the basin.  Most of the debris had come from the ceiling, which must have cracked in the blast; she also found pieces of the door and the battered remains of the lantern, still feebly burning.

She paused, listening, but the chamber was silent now.  Most of the smoke had cleared, escaped through cracks and the massive hole blown in the castle; if anything, the air was somewhat less noisome than it had been the first time she had come through.  A cool blue glow suffused the chamber, neither torch nor gas light; indeed, it was like no illumination she had ever seen before.  Diasa didn't know what this meant, but it could hardly be anything good.

She picked her way through the rubble to the ladder and climbed out of the pit.  There was the girl Ponn had tried to save; her body lay on the far side of the basin, wedged up against the wall.  The explosion must have flung her there.  Her ragged clothes had been burned off her back, exposing skin, once pale but now scorched by the flames; her long hair had burned to the roots, leaving her head charred and naked.

Diasa turned away, feeling a pang of guilt that she couldn't quite suppress.  Perhaps if she had not hurried him so, Ponn could have convinced her to escape with them.  She shook her head, reminded herself that the foolish girl had insisted on staying behind.  She had been doomed by her own inaction; she hadn't
wanted
to be rescued.  And if they had stayed much longer trying to persuade her, the blast would have caught them as well.

All true.  But still, a girl who seemed blameless was dead, while Diasa had helped a common criminal get to safety.  Unexpectedly troubled by this, she moved to the open doorway, where she stopped, staring into the antechamber.  Here was the source of the blue glow:  A mass of crystals had grown down the stairs from the laboratory, like a jagged, spiny glacier crawling along a mountain valley.  The stuff had already spread halfway across the room, covering most of the side wall and encroaching on the ceiling and floor.  Her ears detected a faint, glassy crackle, as if the walls whispered in shocked dismay; she realized that the sound came from the dragon stones as they crept across the surface, as the facets jousted with each other to see which could grow tallest.

If this was what Qalor had meant when he'd said the crystals would become unstable if not kept cool, then he'd been right.  Spectacularly.

She backed away from the door, not liking the feeling the crystals engendered on her skin, a sensation of prickly heat like the beginning of a sunburn.  The crystals shed energy the way a ditch-digger shed sweat in the summertime, and Qalor had told her that too much exposure could be dangerous.  How much was too much?  A minute?  An hour?

In any case, she couldn't get through here.  The ceiling had partially collapsed, blocking the door to the dungeon stairs; and she wasn't about to crawl over the blue crystals in an attempt to get to the dead-end laboratory.  She returned to the cesspool instead, climbed back down the ladder, and made her way back to the ledge.  Adaran was still there, lying in the shadow of the wall like a laborer who had decided to take a break.  Seeing her, he said:  "What happened?  I thought you were going to sneak into the castle and conquer it from within."

"Something else is doing that already," she said.

T'Sian quickly examined the net:  Thick rope, weighted at the corners, studded with metal barbs to dig in and keep it in place.  The hooks did not even scratch her armor plating, but some had found purchase at her joints, against her wings, in the grooves between her scales.  Her initial surprised thrashing had only entangled her more, let the hooks dig deeper; and the material was remarkably tough, as if it had been impregnated with the very essence of the stone on which the castle stood.  More of the alchemist's work, no doubt.

But this net had not really been meant to hold the likes of her; it was made of rope and leather, and it would burn.  She let loose a spray of fire over her back and wings, enough to ignite a small stand of trees; to her astonishment, this proved insufficient.  The rope, blackened and smoldering, remained tight across her body; the metal hooks glowed dull red but kept their shape and their bite.

Unnerved now, T'Sian opened her mouth and drenched herself with fire, holding nothing back this time.  She felt the heat of the stones inside her, a raging burn like nothing she had ever experienced before; the fire ate at her skin, so intense that it was actually
painful
.
 But it worked:  The net loosened, then disintegrated; bits of molten metal dropped away, red-hot and steaming, falling to the ground like burning rain.  Her wings broke free; she spread them wide, felt them catch the air.  The great muscles across her back pulled taut against her spine and ribs, threatening to tear free of the bone; she was pulling too hard, she was going to injure herself.  She banked downward, toward the village and the lake, then angled up, moving toward level instead of trying to reverse course.  The surface of the water skimmed by beneath her, gleaming in the waning sunlight.  The air felt icy on her wounded skin and her breast felt as if she had swallowed the sun; Qalor's altered stones burned so hot and so bright, not even
she
was proof against them.