Liar's Island: A Novel (24 page)

“Spellstealer,” the monk said, and Rodrick started. He'd only heard that name once before, when a druid speculated about Hrym's true origins. “There are one or two surviving examples of such ancient swords in Vudra,” the monk said. “We have lost the making of such things, if we ever knew it. Those swords are not intelligent, like Hrym is. They merely soak up magic from other objects, and from casters, temporarily gaining the properties of the spells they steal, though they are not without their dangers—some say they take a toll on a man's soul. How did Hrym come to be as he is?”

“Apparently a white dragon sat on him for a
very
long time, until Hrym soaked up not just the dragon's magic, but also something of its mind. The dragon's intelligence and love for gold, anyway—the rest of Hrym's personality, I think, just developed on its own. The effects seem to be permanent. At least, he's been like this for a very long time.”

“That is very interesting,” the monk said. “Worthy of study, too. But for now, we have a greater problem. This taint
will
grow, as you have seen already, until there is nothing left of the Hrym you know. I fear that may happen soon. If he truly has the powers you say, and he begins to lash out unceasingly…”

“He'd cover this whole island in ice,” Rodrick said. “I'm sure the mystics and arcanists in the capital would be able to stop him eventually, but … it would take a long, bad time. Fighting Hrym would be easier if he
were
a white dragon—those, at least, can be killed. How do you kill a magical sword?”

“There are ways.” The monk's voice was grim, and Rodrick grabbed his arm.

“No. No killing him. If you don't see a way to help Hrym, I'll take a ship out into the deep ocean, where one more ice floe won't do any harm, and stay with him until his mind seems entirely gone.” Rodrick knew that point might well come after it was impossible to escape Hrym's icy madness, or even after Rodrick had been killed by accident, but Rodrick only had one true friend in this world, and he intended to
remain
true, just this once.

The monk looked at Rodrick's hand on his arm, but Rodrick didn't release the grip. The monk nodded, then patted the hand in a friendly way. “All right. I think we might be able to heal him—or, at least, give him a chance. Much of the power for the healing will have to come from Hrym himself. Is he strong-willed?”

“He's the most stubborn creature I have ever met.” Rodrick released his grip. Also cantankerous and lazy, but those were less comforting adjectives, so he left them out.

“Good.” The master strode back to Hrym. “Friend sword! Do you wish to drive this taint from your body and mind?”

“Nothing would please me more. I don't like being unable to trust myself. Distrusting everyone else, that's fine, that's
natural
, but I prefer reliability in my own mind.”

“Then I will return in a moment.” The monk disappeared into his burrow, and returned shortly afterward carrying a black disk the size of a dinner plate. The monk sat down cross-legged, the disk in his lap. The thing was made of smooth stone, with a groove etched into it, swirling into the center.

“Is that some kind of magic?” Rodrick asked. “Can it cure Hrym?”

The monk grunted. “Magic, yes. Cure, no. But it might enable Hrym to cure himself.”

The old man picked up Hrym and placed him across his knees, the blade resting on the disk. Rodrick tried not to grimace. If Hrym had one of his fits now, the monk might be badly injured, and his magical plate broken too. “Rodrick, it's not necessary, but it's possible you could lend your psychic energy to help Hrym. The process is not without its dangers. Even struggles within the mind can have real consequences. Are you willing to try?”

“For Hrym? Anything.” That was at least two entirely honest statements in one day. Rodrick would have to be careful such things didn't become a habit.

“Then sit, and touch his hilt.”

Rodrick did as instructed.

“I'd like to help, too,” Lais said.

“It's very dangerous,” the monk began. “You could be hurt, or killed, or have your mind destroyed.”

Rodrick's mouth twisted. The monk hadn't gone into that much detail about the dangers when he'd mentioned them to
him
.

“My debt.” Lais shrugged, as if that said it all.

The monk shook his head, and Rodrick expected him to begin a speech that was some variation on “Young people today are foolish and disrespectful,” but instead he said, “As you wish. Take Rodrick's hand.”

She did, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

“What's going to happen?” Rodrick said.

“You're going to fight a demon,” the monk said. “And defeat it, if the gods are good.”

“Well, the
good
gods are good,” Rodrick said. “But there are evil gods, too, like this god of betrayal Lais mentioned, and they're
evil
…” He trailed off, not just because no one was paying attention, but because the monk was humming. It was a low hum, just a hair too variable to be called toneless, and it was rhythmic, a single deep repeating syllable. An answering sound emerged from beneath Hrym, as if the disk itself were singing, or vibrating, or resonating along with the monk's hum. As Rodrick listened—he couldn't stop listening, any more than he could stop his fingernails or hair from growing—his own heartbeat and breathing seemed to slow until they sounded in sync with the hum. His surroundings became hazy, the hills around him and the jungle beyond on one side and the sea beyond on the other turning to watercolor paintings of themselves.

Rodrick felt a sense of lightness and disconnection, but rather than rising out of his body, as astral travelers were said to do, he seemed to be sinking
into
himself, down to unimagined depths, to the interior of some vast subterranean inner space. The only things in the world that seemed real as that warm and welcoming darkness engulfed him were Lais's fingers clutching his one hand, and Hrym's hilt in his other. That, and the sound, the hum, the heartbeat of the world—

Then he was somewhere else.

*   *   *

The three of them—Rodrick, Lais, and Hrym—stood on a vast field of snow. Everything was icy white, except in the distance, where the jagged broken peak of a red stone mountain loomed, smoke boiling into the sky, rivers of molten rock running down its sides, a brighter shade of red. “Volcano,” Rodrick murmured. Were volcanoes supposed to be blood red like that? He'd heard of them, but never thought to see one. Was he seeing one now? The monk had said Rodrick could lend Hrym his “psychic” energy, which suggested this was a mindscape, or some kind of waking dream. The monk had also said it was dangerous, which meant Rodrick should tread more carefully than he normally would in a dream.

Lais squeezed his hand, and he stopped looking at the volcano to look at her. Not a dream, no, because she was still entirely clothed—and was she
taller
than before? He was sure she was. She'd been quite short, to begin with, head barely to his chest, and now she could very nearly look him in the eye.

“Look what Hrym has become,” she said.

Rodrick was still holding Hrym's hilt, though it felt strange now, smooth and curved, and when he looked, he saw why.

Hrym wasn't a sword anymore. At least, not here. Here, Hrym was an immense white dragon, easily twenty-five feet long from snout to tail, and Rodrick was holding one of the talons of the dragon's foreleg. Rodrick waited a moment for panic, or bowel-loosening terror, or overwhelming wonder, but there was nothing like that. He didn't even feel surprise—it wasn't like he'd failed to
notice
he was standing next to a dragon, holding its dagger-sized claw. He just hadn't thought much about it. The dragon was just
Hrym
.

Even sitting on his hindquarters, Hrym still towered over them, and he turned his serpentine neck to regard them. His head was covered in slender horns, oddly frilled or webbed. “Ha,” he said. “This is more like it. I'm fully ambulatory. I believe I could even fly. I could get used to this.” He looked around the field. “No gold here, though. Can't say I entirely approve of that.”

“That volcano,” Lais said.

“The taint,” Rodrick said. “That's where the demon is. I think we're inside your mind, Hrym.”

As they watched, the volcano shuddered … and
grew
, rising another ten feet, cracking the ice all around it. Hrym
roared
, a full-throated dragon's fury. “It wants to melt me,” he growled. “We'll see about that. You two. Climb on.” Hrym crouched down low so they could reach his back.

Rodrick had never, even once, dreamed of riding a dragon, but Lais scrambled up onto Hrym's back like she did it every day. Rodrick followed, surprised to find that Hrym's scales were neither cold nor hot, and that they were easily rough enough for him to climb his way—slower than Lais had—to a place behind Hrym's neck. They got themselves settled, Lais holding on to the dragon's neck, and Rodrick behind, holding on to Lais. It would have been nicer to have her pressed against
his
back, but this probably wasn't the time to think of such things.

Hrym beat his vast wings and they rose into the air, skimming low over the ice, the volcano approaching at a shocking speed, growing larger and larger. There was no sound but the buffeting wind, and Lais's delighted laughter—all right, it
was
fun to fly on dragonback, though the imminent clash with a demonic taint rather spoiled Rodrick's enjoyment—and, in the background, that low, rhythmic, chanting hum the monk had used to send them or guide them to this place.

Hrym landed on the slopes of the volcano, and where his claws touched, ice spread out, covering the red rock, with great hisses of steam rising up everywhere. Hrym roared again, and unleashed a blast of freezing breath, a wave of cold so thick and dense and frigid that it made his usual attacks seem like flurries compared to a blizzard. Everywhere his breath struck, the red rock turned to white ice, and Hrym threw back his great head and laughed. “Is
this
all it takes? Freeze the taint? This will be easy, then.”

Rodrick groaned. “Hrym!” he shouted. “
Never
say ‘this will be easy!' I'm convinced there are whole legions of gods who lie in wait just to hear variations on that phrase, so they can teach us the folly of thinking things might work out for the best!”

“Ha!” Hrym said. “You worry too much, Rodrick. You always have. This is
my
mind, after all. I think I know it a little better than you do.”

MY MIND
a voice boomed, seeming to come from the volcano, but also possibly from everywhere else too.

That voice. It had to be the voice of Kholerus, the demon lord whose prison Hrym had been pressed up against for all those long months. The demon had never spoken while Rodrick tried to free Hrym, perhaps because its prison made communication impossible, but he had no doubt the monster was speaking
now
—or whatever fragment of the demon's identity Hrym had absorbed into himself, along with its taint of chaos. It was a voice of hissing fire and cracking stone.

THIS SWORD WILL BE THE VESSEL OF MY COMING
, it boomed.
MY TAINT WILL CONSUME HIM, AND CORRUPTION WILL SPREAD TO ALL WHO WIELD HIM, PASS FROM THEM TO ALL THEY TOUCH, UNTIL I AM MULTIPLIED ACROSS THE LAND
.

“That sounds … bad,” Rodrick said.

“We'd better kill it, then,” Lais said.

“How do you fight a volcano?”

“You don't,” she said. “You fight the thing that
lives
in the volcano.”

She pointed as something came crawling out of the volcano's opening. The creature was, thankfully, a great deal smaller than the imprisoned demon lord Rodrick had glimpsed—which meant it was only twice the size of the dragon Hrym, instead of a hundred times as large. The wormlike thing slithered out, its eyes black, bulging, and multifaceted, like clusters of fish eggs. The demon's mouth was full of grinding mandibles and oozing sores, drooling a flood of pus and spit that struck the molten rivers of rock and sent up foul-smelling clouds of smoke. The demon's long, segmented body followed, endless red-and-black coils that were part serpent, part eel, and part millipede, with hundreds of twitching legs underneath, each tipped by a trio of daggerlike claws.

“Fine,” Rodrick said. “Then how do we fight
that
? It looks no easier to kill than a volcano would be.”

“I find that going for the eyes is a good approach.” Lais leapt from Hrym's back.

Rodrick slid down to the ground, unsure whether he planned to join her or stop her, but Hrym rushed ahead of either of them, spraying ice in torrents and roaring, and attacked the demon head-on. The two of them rolled and fought, Hrym slashing and clawing as he exhaled ice, the demon scrabbling with its countless limbs. Rodrick stared, then noticed Lais running toward the creature's rear end, where a stinger curled lethally, tall as a small tree. When she reached the monster, Lais seized one of its legs—nearly as tall as the woman herself—and
twisted
. To Rodrick's astonishment, she tore the leg free, tossed it aside, and moved on to the next. If the demon lord noticed, the pain didn't seem to count when compared to its ferocious battle with Hrym, but she at least was
doing
something.

But what could Rodrick do? He wasn't a master of unarmed combat, and he didn't even have a
sword
—

Suddenly, he had a sword, a duplicate of the longsword Hrym had been disguised to look like. He blinked. Well, fine, but
armor
—

He slumped under the weight of a full suit of plate mail, of the sort he'd only worn twice, and those times as part of complicated scams, not battles—