“Serenit!” he shrieked, and at that moment his left claw caught on a tiny projection, his right claw struck a minute horizontal crack in the wall, and his slide to destruction halted.
“Who are you!” a voice called from within the rock.
“Cribblon,” the Journeyman gasped, not stopping to weigh his words. “We’ve come to rescue you from ... whatever it is, up above.”
“Cribblon!” Serenit replied from within the fissure. “Good man! I wish I could help, but... well, you know?”
“Myrn is nearby,” coughed the gyrfalcon. “She just disappeared around the edge of the mountain. Wait!”
At risk of losing his grip, Cribblon twisted his neck and wrenched his shoulders around, seeking a sign of Myrn or Marbleheart. The Otter, too, had disappeared from sight, probably beyond the cloud of debris that had been shed from the mountainside.
“If I try to fly,” Cribblon said shakily, “I’ll fall to my death before I can get my wings to beating!”
“Listen to me!” came the First Citizen’s urgent voice. “Listen, old chap! How many words in the spell to make you a smaller, lighter bird?”
“Ah... five! No, four! Short ones,” Cribblon groaned. “No time!”
“Listen, young Cribblon! You’ve got to chance it, for your own sake as well as mine! Let go, say the spelling words as fast as you can, and when you transform into a wren or—”
“A desert sparrow,” gasped Cribblon. “I know that shape already!”
“Sparrow, then. At that size and weight, you can pull out of your dive in plenty of time.”
“I understood you’d lost all your Wizardry Powers,” Cribblon said hoarsely.
“Yes, but I haven’t lost my common sense,” replied the First Citizen. “Cribblon, my boy—do it, now!”
Chapter Seventeen
Half the Battle
As Douglas circled above the flat-topped formation under which he and the Dragon had spent the night, he studied the crest of Tallest Mountain.
Where in morning light it had been sharply clear against the deep blue of the sky, now it had become muzzy and distorted. A brownish smudge streaked with jet black had replaced the morning’s misty banner. When you watched it closely for a minute, Douglas realized, you became aware of movements in the cloud, of swirling, of... life of a sort.
Lesser suddenly appeared from the other side of the cloud of sand and dust, blowing puffs of hot, pink smoke and swishing his scaly tale to steer himself clear of the last of the falling boulders.
“How’re we doing?” he bellowed to the Pyromancer. “Got any idea what to do next?”
“Keep on making a fuss of any kind, whatever!” Douglas called to him. “Myrn and her friends are up there, quite close by now, and we want the Darkness Servant looking the other way.”
“Got a great idea!” exclaimed Lesser. “If you can keep him occupied for half a second...”
He flung his huge body down the east side of the roiling cloud of debris, past buried Walrus Shingle, and straight into the waves that broke there.
A great cloud of steam mushroomed up. As the Dragon swam back and forth, the hot mist rose in the air, a hundred feet high or more.
“Good old Dragon!” Douglas cheered.
“Watch yourself,” Lesser’s voice came back. “Something’s up!”
Douglas swung back to face Tallest Peak just as the hazy shadow near its summit launched a terrific bolt of purple lightning, aimed straight for Douglas’s bit of space.
“Oh-oh!” he gulped, and just had time to fling a grounding barrier around himself before the electric jolt hit not ten feet from where he floated.
“Time to strike back,” he cried aloud.
With a circling motion of his hands he gathered all the stray impulses from the Darkness’s own bolt and juggled them into a ball of brilliant, crackling, blue coruscation.
Rocketing higher into the air, he drew back his right arm, launched the coruscating fireball, and shot away around the side of the southern mountain at top speed.
When he looked back from a strip of sheltered beach a mile down the strand, the brown pall that englobed the tip of Tallest Peak had been blown to shreds. All about the peak lightnings leaped and thunder rolled, dust glowing and sparkling even in the bright sunshine.
Douglas watched long enough to be sure none of the Enemy’s fireball had fallen too close to where he’d last seen the eagle. Satisfied, he changed his position again, shooting along the narrow strip of wave-rounded pebbles into the shelter of ahead land.
With a startling upsurge of water the Beachmaster suddenly popped out of the shallows nearby.
“Ho! Sir? A word, if there’s time!”
“Quickly, then,” Douglas called. “Wherever I happen to be is liable to get very dangerous all of a sudden. Take your ladies and babies well out to Sea, sir! It’s dangerous here close inshore.”
Beachmaster nodded and slid backward into the shallows.
“Can we help? I just realized what’s going on here, m’boy! I’ve been around enough to recognize Good Wizardry versus Evil Sorcery. What can we do to help?”
“Stay clear,” Douglas shouted after him. “And, oh, make lots of loud noises. Distract the Enemy up top, there.”
“We Walruses are very good at loudness,” he heard the Beachmaster say with a laugh as he sank under the waves. “Noise it is!”
The unexpected return of his first volley had startled the Darkness Servant. For several moments everything was quiet atop the mountain and along the beach as both sides gathered their forces and planned new moves.
****
Ripping his claws from their anchors in the wall near Serenit’s narrow window, Cribblon dropped like a stone toward the jumbled rocks so close below, screaming at the top of his gyrfalcon’s voice.
“Cribblon!” Myrn, just then rounding the mountain, screamed. She tried to work her talons enough to form a magic gesture to stop her companion’s fall, but an eagle’s claws are too stiff and unbending for such fine work.
Thirteen feet from the nearest razor-edged, uptilted blade of blue-black flint, the gyrfalcon suddenly disappeared and in its place the desert sparrow shot out, away from the wall, narrowly missing the jumbled rocks.
The sudden switch of considerable falling weight to lateral movement, as Augurian later explained it, was released as a sharp thunderclap, which in turn shook loose the pile of sharp-edged stones and sent them tumbling and sliding over the cliff’s edge to plunge into the foaming shallows at the foot of Tallest Mountain.
When the Servant glanced that way, it missed the tiny sparrow fluttering back up the wall (toward Serenit’s prison window. It assumed that the explosion and the resulting slide of tons of loose rock into the water had been another attack by the Pyromancer.
With a roar louder than the winds that lashed the peaks of the Darkest Mountains in wintertime, he flung an even larger bolt of lightning at the flat-topped hill over what had once been Walrus Strand.
When the acrid smoke cleared, the great rock was reduced to a great pile of clean white sand.
Douglas had, moments before, transferred himself to a shallow Sea cave beneath the foot of the next peak southward. The backwash from Cribblon’s slate slide caught him unprepared, but he managed to reach higher than the waves and clung for a moment to a narrow ledge, out of sight of his attacker.
He paused to catch his breath and consider his next move.
From his vantage he could just watch the sparrow fling himself into the crack that served Serenit as a window to his prison. A moment later the eagle arrived and hovered painfully outside the First Citizen’s cell, beating her wings back and forth to remain in place.
“Marbleheart!” Douglas gasped.
A monkey once again, Marbleheart was scaling the three-hundred-foot cliff to the spot where Cribblon had disappeared. He and Myrn exchanged a few quick words, it seemed to Douglas, and the great bird swung out and away, keeping the bulk of the mountain between herself and the sear
ching Darkness above.
The monkey squeezed through the narrow slit and disappeared after the sparrow.
“Give us a good, loud diversion, my dearest,” came Myrn’s voice from a point just over his safe roost. “Keep the Being busy!”
Douglas waved at the eagle almost gaily.
He spoke a terse sentence to the Feather Pin on his breast, shot out of the seaside cavern, and angled high into the air at blinding speed. A thunderous explosion off to the north showed the Dark Servant still considered his enemy to be hiding behind the sandy pile there. A towering cloud of sand and stone shards was flung into the air.
Adding to the uproar came then the sound of fifty or more Walruses of all sizes and both sexes, plus nearly as many seals and sea lions who lived along the rugged coast, shouting and rumbling and singing at the top of their collective voices, although not necessarily in tune with each other:
“By the Sea E-bon-y...
By our beee-u-ti-ful Sea! You and meee...
You and meeee ...
Oh, how happy we’ll beeee!”
Douglas hung poised in midair, a hundred yards to the south of the very top of Tallest Peak.
“Here am I, Douglas Brightglade, Master Pyromancer, student of Master Pyromancer Flarman Firemaster, your old, old enemy from Last Battle! I warn you, Servant of Darkness, yield to me! Give way! Yield, Creature of Night! The time has come to surrender or flee!”
The whole top quarter of Tallest Peak shivered and shook, quivering like Blue Teakettle’s famous Lemon Surprise gelatin. A great, whirling, ovate blob of blackest night appeared above the mountaintop.
As Douglas watched, it elongated east to west, and then snapped end over end with a shrill keening of fury.
Douglas performed a quick snap roll, over and back and down and then to one side.
A white-hot flash of something like lightning, but colder, harder, straighter, lanced through the very spot where he had been only fractions of a second before, curved up and over, and crashed headlong into a large, fluffy white cloud that had quietly floated up with the southerly breeze.
The cloud shook (Douglas later insisted that it hiccupped!) and absorbed the tremendous shock. Watching walruses and seals told later that the cloud turned brilliant purple, faded to palest pink, flattened out at the bottom and began to rain, a torrent of huge drops that churned the surface of the Ebony into greenish froth.
Fifteen thousand shore birds, any number of ocean fliers, and the vast herd of walruses, seals, and a passing school of bottlenose dolphins, attracted by the commotion and the singing, swirled happily in the rain and the foam.
****
“Don’t look!” cried Myrn, circling closer to the First Citizen’s narrow window. Marbleheart, having resumed his own shape, had poked his nose out to see what was going on.
“There’s no other way out,” he shouted to her. “The entrance to the cell is from the very blackest heart of the mountain, Myrn!”
“Take shelter deep inside there!” the Journeyman Aquamancer screamed over the sound of the first volley aimed at her husband. She didn’t dare turn to look where Douglas had gone, if indeed he’d escaped the terrible blast. “I intend to blow your hole wide open!”
“Yes, ma’am!” was all the Otter squeaked before his face disappeared from the window.
“On the count of five!” screamed Myrn.
In the silence following the Servant’s greatest blast so far she heard retreating footsteps on hard stone, three pairs, within the mountain.
Then a greater silence.
“One ... two ... three ....,” she began to count out loud.
From above came a scream of insane fury. The Darkness Servant was plunging rapidly down from the peak, heading for Serenit’s cell.
Myrn clapped her wingtips together with a loud pop!
The eagle disappeared and in her place hung, for a terrifyingly long time, the young Aquamancer, unsupported by wings or spell.
“... four... five!” the three in the tiny cell, huddling as far from the window wall as possible, heard her shout.
Douglas timed a splendid explosion of his own and the spear-point top of Tallest Peak glowed red, then white, and began to melt.
The Darkness Servant screamed in surprise and pain, as much for the clear, bright light as the heat, and flung itself away to the north, leaving a long, thick black-smoke trail behind itself.
Myrn, just beginning to fall toward the shallow surge at the foot of Tallest Peak, sent a white globe of superheated steam smashing against the mountainside just below Serenit’s prison window.
Then she disappeared!
The steam ball, the golden color of the sunlit shallows off Waterand Island, struck the rock face and burst with a pleasant plop and a long-drawn hiss The steam condensed at once into boiling water which began to run down the cliff. Where it darkened the rock face, the very stone foamed and bubbled furiously. The wall began to crumble away, like a sugar cube in hot tea.
The high, twisted summit shook, rolled to one side, and collapsed slowly with a tremendous and growing roar that made every noise that had come before seem soft in comparison.
At the last moment, just as the section containing the window to Serenit’s cell sloughed off, smoking and bubbling, three small birds shot from the crevice, out into the clear air and well beyond.
A pair of fork-tailed swifts and a rather scruffy-looking black raven cawed in fear, but in exultation, too: Marbleheart, Cribblon, and the First Citizen of New Land were free!
A few yards away they were met by a white dove. Together the four flew swiftly away to the west, across the high mountain pass.
Chapter Eighteen
On the Trail
Douglas allowed himself to settle to the shattered dune gently, like a leaf dropping from a maple in fall. He looked weary but satisfied, smeared with black soot and wet with perspiration.
“What I need,” he groaned to Lesser Dragon, who flew in from the open ocean to meet him, “is a cup of strong tea and a hot bath!”
“There’s time for both,” Lesser assured him.
The Dragon produced a large, battered tin teapot from somewhere about his scaled person, and filled it from a streaming spring that had erupted all of a sudden on the torn and haggled side of Tallest Peak. He blew his blowtorch breath on the pot-bottom, so that almost at once it began to boil cheerfully.
He produced from the same mysterious hidden pouch a pair of big, thick, white china mugs, filled them expertly, and handed one to Douglas. The companions sat wearily on a shattered stone shelf overlooking the Ebony and sipped hot tea.
The chaotic battleground was settling back into quiet. Out to sea a huge flock of birds made a distant racket as each bird exchanged impressions of the morning’s battle with his neighbors.
“What a fight! And what a fright!” called a new voice, and Marbleheart came galumphing up the beach in a manner that fairly oozed triumphant pleasure and pride.
“Myrn?” the Pyromancer asked quickly.
“Escorting Serenit the Jackdaw back to Harroun’s hollow fortress,” Marbleheart explained, plumping down on the hot sand and breathing a deep sigh of content.
“Have a cup of Dragon tea and tell us everything you know,” invited the Dragon. “We haven’t been introduced, although I know who you are, Wizard’s Familiar. I am Lesser Dragon, great-great-great-grandnephew of—”
“Great Golden Dragon, at a wild guess,” cut in the Otter, laughing and eagerly accepting a steaming cup.
“Myrn will soon return,” said Douglas, sipping from his cup. “Serenit was rescued in good shape? Wonderful! Good morning’s work, I’d say.”
“Best yet,” Marbleheart insisted. “In the meantime, it’s noonish. What’s for lunch, Master?”
“Always thinking of his stomach!” groaned Douglas to the Dragon. “Well, come to think of it, I’m hungry, too. I don’t recall getting any breakfast this morning.”
“Let me order,” begged the Sea Otter. “How abo
ut...”
In less than ten minutes the three companions sat down to a delightful luncheon of chunky tuna salad on dark, pungent rye bread, sliced cucumbers and spring onions in balsamic vinegar, and five huge four-layer yellow cakes with dark fudge frosting.
“All I like best!” enthused the Sea Otter, passing the cucumbers-and-onions to the Dragon.
“No, no thanks! Cucumbers give me gas. And you don’t want to be around when a Dragon belches!” Lesser said, shaking his vast head with regret. “Although, to tell you truly, I dearly love cucumbers.”
“We’ll take our chances, then,” Marbleheart insisted.
A delegation of sea and shore birds, followed more slowly by Beachmaster, looking quite proud of himself, and a party of eared seals and the pride-mother of the local sea lions, climbed up the shore to pay their respects to the Pyromancer and to find out what, actually, had happened that morning.
“Well, good friends,” Douglas began, chewing his second tuna salad sandwich, “things should be peaceful again around here now, but the cause of all the trouble, a Servant of Darkness, is still at large and will cause us trouble sooner or later, I’m positive. My friends and I will be leaving shortly to finish the job. Did anyone note where and how far he—it—went?”
“Over the northern horizon, Fire Wizard,” said Beachmaster in a low rumble. “Out of our sight, from here at sea level.”
Several high-flying terns confirmed the walrus’s words. They’d had a better viewpoint from aloft.
“What lies away to the north, I wonder?” asked Marbleheart. “None of us has ever been there, you see.”
“Nor have most of us,” replied Beachmaster. “Let me ask around. Somebody here must have visited those parts.”
He slid ponderously down the beach and into the surf, making a great, celebratory splash.
When they’d finished their picnic by watching the Dragon devour four of the cakes in short order, and Douglas was sending the dishes back to Wizards’ High with sure gestures and a magic phrase, the walrus labored back across the pebble strand to report.
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