The Dragon Pool: The Dragon Pool

by Christopher Golden

  "Abe!" Hellboy roared.

  The engine of Redfield's chopper shrieked. The pilot managed to right it, but it fell too quickly. Smoke came from the engine. Something broke off, and the net came loose, but now it swept upward instead of down, tangling itself in the chopper's undercarriage. Fifty feet off of the ground, it seemed to pull up a moment, as Redfield saved himself from crashing.

  Electricity surged through the chopper, killing all of its operational systems. It crashed; then, glass shattering and metal screeching as it tore, but the main body of the helicopter remained intact. Redfield and whoever else was on board might still be alive if they were extremely lucky.

  In pain, the Dragon King writhed back and forth in the air above the lake for several seconds, as though the sky and the ground were one and the same to the creature, despite its lack of wings. Then the worm twisted in the air and dived back into the fiery water, slipped under the surface, and was gone, save for the flames that burned in places right on top of the water, and the waves splashed up by its dive.

  Hellboy ran for the water. Spindly fingers gripped his wrist and he turned, brows knitted in fury. His anger dissipated when he saw that it was his father who'd grabbed him.

  "What do you think you're doing?" Professor Bruttenholm demanded.

  Hellboy shook his hand off. "Going after Abe. He's still alive, but down there in the water, he might not be for much longer. You need to get some people over to the chopper, see if Redfield's alive, and whoever's with him--"

  "Wait," the old man said. His damp, aged eyes gleamed with the reflection of the fire on the water. "I'm the leader of this investigation. You're not going anywhere."

  "What are you talking about?" Anastasia demanded, whipping off her Yankees cap and marching up beside Hellboy to glare at the professor. "Abe's down there. You saw him fall. You can't imagine Hellboy's just going to stand here!"

  Professor Bruttenholm stared at her. "You're not a part of this team, Dr. Bransfield. I am responsible for Abe Sapien, just as I'm responsible for all of you. The water is his natural element--"

  "Not water like this!" Hellboy snapped.

  Beyond his father, Hellboy saw Professor Kyichu scrambling down the rocky slope. He'd been hiding somewhere, but with the Dragon King gone again, he'd reared his crazy head.

  "We've got to figure out how to destroy this creature before others die," Professor Bruttenholm said, his gaze shifting from Hellboy to Stasia and back again. He completely ignored the presence of Koh, Dwenjue, and Tenzin, and the quick approach of Lao and Kyichu. "Abe knows the risks of the mission. He will find his way out of the lake."

  "If his brains aren't scrambled from the fall," Hellboy said, glaring at his father. "Besides, we know how to destroy the damned worm." He reached down and clapped a hand on Dwenjue's back. "Meet the warrior monk. Professional dragon killer. Now I'm going to save my friend."

  He turned and started toward the water. Stasia stayed with him, walking down to the shore at his side, not trying to talk him out of it but just wanting to be with him every moment now, when the unimaginable could happen at any time. Hellboy knew his father would look after Redfield, and work with Dwenjue to figure out how to finish off the Dragon King. The professor was in charge, and he was good at it. That left Hellboy to do what had to be done. Abe would never have left him on his own. No way would he abandon his best friend.

  More shouting filled the night behind him; this time it wasn't in English. Then Tenzin called his name. Hellboy turned to see the guide running after him, with Koh and Dwenjue on either side of him. The dragon-man moved low to the ground, as though the more time he spent around the Dragon King, the more like a full-blooded dragon he became.

  "What's up?"

  "Dwenjue says there's a better way to do this," Tenzin told him.

  Hellboy stared into the warrior monk's yellow eyes. "Talk to me."

  Without translation, Dwenjue muttered something in reply and pointed to the water.

  "He says the lake did not always look like this," Tenzin explained. "Once, the temple was here."

  Anastasia put a hand on Hellboy's arm to steady herself. "I knew it."

  "Dwenjue says the temple is still here. He keeps saying there is an easier way to save your friend."

  "Well, tell him to get on with it, then."

  Tenzin translated for Dwenjue, and the dwarf smiled for the first time since they had woken him from his centuries of sleep. He held the sword in both hands, blade pointed up at the night. The rain hissed as it touched the metal. It pattered the ground all around them and plinked at the surface of the steaming lake.

  Dwenjue began to chant, and the sword glowed the same yellow as his eyes.

  The ground rumbled beneath their feet. Hellboy grabbed hold of Stasia. Several of the commandos shouted, but already Professor Bruttenholm had four of them racing along the lakeshore toward the downed helicopter. The ground shook harder, and Tenzin went on one knee. Hellboy saw his father grab one of the missile launchers to keep himself upright.

  A crack like the loudest thunder boomed across Lake Tashi. The water seemed to surge upward a moment, the mist of steam beginning to clear, then all went still.

  Only the rain and the gleam of that mystic blade remained.

  But, staring at the edge of the lake only a few feet away, Hellboy felt sure that what he saw was no hallucination.

  The water had begun to recede.

  The lake began to churn around Abe. It tugged at his limbs with such force that at first he thought the ghost children of Lake Tashi were pulling at him, attempting to drag him in a dozen different directions. But the ghosts--the lost spirits of those beautiful children--only swayed in the water like reeds, watching him.

  Powerful currents plucked at Abe and yanked him back and forth, spun him around. A whirlpool formed, and he twisted into a funnel that sucked him down, down, into the depths of the lake. The ghost children darted through the water, unaffected by the pull of the currents.

  Abe's mind swirled as though with the tug of the water. Already disoriented, he tried to pull his thoughts together, to build understanding from fragments of the moment. What was happening to him? To the lake? The water churned, but this couldn't be only the motion of the Dragon King passing under the surface. This was far more than that.

  Draining.

  The suction of the currents that pulled at him meant the water in the lake had to be flowing somewhere else, and it could only be into deep trenches and crevices, into freshly opened hollows in the earth beneath the mountain plateau--beneath the water. Lake Tashi was draining away.

  Calm.

  Abe tried to find a calm place within himself, the way he entered a meditative state sometimes when he had first been discovered and awoken in the custody of the BPRD, floating in a glass tube, a subject of scientific study. He'd gone into himself to combat the boredom and the invasive inquisitiveness of his doctors.

  The water rushed around him so quickly that his gills could barely breathe. He closed his eyes to fight the vertigo and pulled his arms and legs tight to his body to lessen his body's drag on the water--reducing the speed with which the whirlpool spun him down and down.

  The ghost children were little more than blurs at the edges of his vision. Whatever soothing effect their presence had had upon him vanished, and the water seared his flesh, the taint of it seeping in through his gills. Abe felt himself on the verge of losing consciousness again as a terrible nausea tore at his guts.

  Through the membrane that covered his eyes he saw a bright flash. Abe opened them and saw a pillar of fire erupting from below, coming up from the soft lake bottom. He beat his arms and legs against the terrible current, trying to slow himself enough that he could see the bottom clearly.

  It, too, was spilling away. The loose soil, he understood at last, had not been soil at all. Only one substance shifted so easily, even more fluid than sand. The entire bottom of the lake was comprised of ash--the burned remnants of ancient peoples, ancient cities,
ancient terrain. Somehow the Dragon King had turned the whole lake bottom into a nest of ashes.

  The ash drained away with the water.

  Another powerful current tore at him and Abe was pulled deeper. He glanced around and realized that he could no longer see the ghost children of the sacrifices to the Dragon King. They had helped him, given him succor and spirit when he needed it most, and now they had withdrawn, leaving him indebted. Someone had to get vengeance for those children.

  Fighting the maelstrom exhausted him. Abe felt his strength diminishing with every passing second. Jets of fire erupted below him at odd intervals, but the water did not seem to grow any hotter. Or perhaps his seared flesh had grown numb.

  Got to stop, he thought. Soon, he would lose consciousness completely, and the thought of waking up in some subterranean cavern--if he woke at all--did not appeal to him. He would never be able to break the grip of the twisting currents by swimming upward or trying to slip from the whirlpool. Abe's only choice was to submit. He swam downward, spinning with the draining lake water. If he could just find an outcropping of rock or anything to grab hold of or wedge himself against, he could rest. He could fight the inexorable pull of the water.

  Something flashed in the light of dragon fire, off to his right. For a moment, Abe thought that the ghost children had returned. As he spun, he fought the current a moment to get a better look, and what he saw made him surrender completely for a moment.

  A row of short spires atop a curved, sloping roof, windows and carved columns and level upon level of those stone-tiled roofs--the most enormous temple he had ever laid eyes upon, too large for human occupation. The windows alone were a dozen feet high. The ashes that had made up the false bottom of the lake were sifting away from the temple, revealing it by inches, falling through into the subterranean hollows like sand through an hourglass. The lake water rushed down, the level dropping with every passing moment, and then Abe knew that the temple of the Dragon King--for surely that was what it was, what Anastasia had been searching for--might be his only hope.

  With all the strength left in him, he struck out from the maelstrom, fighting it, and it swept him around, away from the temple. But the whirlpool kept spinning, and he rode it until it carried him closer than ever to those spires and that curved tile roof.

  Abe kicked out, pulling toward it, knifing through the water. He reached out both arms to grab hold of one of those short, thick spires. The current slammed him into the spire, and he felt bones in his chest crack, but he held on. His arms and legs wrapped around the spire, tiles under him, and he latched himself there, refusing to let go. It felt as though that scalding water might scour the flesh from his bones, but Abe held on past the point of any conscious effort. If he'd died in that moment, they'd never have been able to unwrap his arms from that perch.

  The water drained, rushing around him, and within minutes, the heat and drag of it lessened; then it dropped below the level of the roof. The cool night air swept over him. Gasping for breath, allowing his lungs to fill, feeling like he was coming awake from a dreadful slumber, Abe stared down at the temple of the Dragon King.

  The sprawling, gigantic structure had been built on a slab of bedrock in the midst of the lake. The water seemed to be settling now at a level just below that bedrock, and he imagined that this was the original depth of the lake, back in those ancient times when the Dragon King had reigned.

  On the bedrock island around the base of the temple, the yellow-and-red serpentine body of the Dragon King lay coiled. Fire jetted from its nostrils like twin furnaces.

  Yet there were other flames as well, guttering like torchlight from the glassless windows of the temple. Things shifted and lumbered inside the structure beneath him. Abe felt their presence, felt the stones of the temple--for it had been built entirely of stone--settling and groaning with the motion of whatever monsters slithered in and out of the great halls of that place of worship.

  First one, then two others, emerged from within, gliding out of the windows and through the air as though water still surrounded the temple. One had a small beard scruff like a billy goat, and the other two had small sets of antlers. The color of their scales differed, with two varying shades of red and orange and one almost black. The largest couldn't have been longer than fifteen feet, the smallest less than ten.

  Hatchling dragons, the worshippers of the Dragon King. One of these things had bred with a human woman, and the half-breeds of Nakchu village had been the result.

  They had been dead for hundreds upon hundreds of years. They had rotting holes where their eyes should have been, and their scaly hides were dry and cracked when they flew through the air or slid in through a window of the temple.

  Undead dragon hatchlings. They had returned at last to a world lost to them. Their king slumbered, perhaps injured or simply resting, at the base of his temple. Soon, Abe felt sure, they would emerge from that island in what was left of Lake Tashi. They would want to create living dragons, to begin again the Dragon King's reign of fire. The mountains would be scoured of life, but they wouldn't stop there. He felt confident of that. Lhasa was not so far away, after all. There were many children there, and many people to give the Dragon King the fear and obedience he required.

  With an awful whistle, a missile tore down into the sunken lake and struck the sleeping Dragon King. It woke and raised its head, growling deep in its chest. Abe stared into the eyes of the dragon, even as more of his dead hatchlings stirred, sliding like worms from the temple windows. One of them took flight, whipping back and forth in the air, small eagle talons clutching at the sky. It banked around, prowling; and then it turned toward Abe.

  The rotting, withered dragon thing flew toward him. Abe clung to the roof of the temple and wished he were anywhere else.

  Hellboy stood at the edge of what had once been the lakeshore. The water level had dropped by a hundred feet or more. Beside him, Anastasia clung to one arm, weak with her astonishment.

  "It's beautiful," she said.

  "Aside from the zombie dragons on fire, you mean?"

  She ignored the sarcasm. "It's like nothing I've ever seen before. I'd only imagined how huge it must have been. It never occurred to me that the temple might have been the true home of the dragons, that it wouldn't be part of the city itself."

  Dwenjue lowered his sword, and the yellow glow of the blade cooled. The warrior monk's eyes retained their color. Rain sprinkled his bald pate, drizzling upon them all, now. The fire from Koh's eyes seemed to dance around, trying to avoid the droplets. Tenzin had his rifle in his hands, as if he might be thinking about taking some potshots at the sleeping Dragon King or his undead clan.

  "Nice trick," Hellboy told Dwenjue.

  The dwarf looked up, confused, until Tenzin translated. Dwenjue replied, and the guide smiled and glanced at Hellboy.

  "He says it isn't a trick. It's the purity of his spirit that allows him to touch the world."

  Hellboy nodded. "Clean living. I keep meaning to take that up."

  His father had taken some of Lao's commandos along the shore to see if Redfield and his passenger were still alive. The other black-garbed soldiers had been shaken from their aggression by surprise and perhaps a bit of awe. Even Mr. Lao stared, unsure what to do. Their weapons were not going to solve this problem.

  Corriveau and Gibson had found the ocher paint Professor Bruttenholm had used to dab wards on the faces of the others and were trying to copy the sigils. It wouldn't do a damn bit of good, since they didn't know the incantation involved, but Hellboy didn't bother to tell them that. They'd only panic more.

  Professor Kyichu ignored them. He pushed his way between two commandos and staggered to the edge of the steep drop-off down to the water, where the temple stood upon an island in the midst of what had once been called the Dragon King Pool.

  "So many," Han Kyichu whispered.

  Hellboy turned to look at him. He could feel his mouth twisting into a sneer and could not help it.

 
"Guess you wish you'd left with your daughter, now."

  The white-haired man stared at the rotting, burning dragons that kept spilling out of the temple as if he hadn't heard a word.

  "So many," he whispered again.

  "Stasia," Hellboy said, turning to her. "Get him out of here."

  She frowned, a storm brewing in her eyes. "I'm bloody well coming down there with you. I've been up against monsters before, and I'm a better shot than you by half."

  "More than half," he replied, one corner of his mouth lifting. Hellboy reached out and touched a lock of hair that had escaped both her ponytail and her baseball cap and tucked it behind her ear. "You're a way better shot than I am. But we've been through this. Take a look down there, Stasia. The odds aren't great. Lao's people, they're soldiers. You're not. Me? I'm damn hard to kill. I'm thinking Dwenjue's pretty durable as well, living as long as he has. Koh may be easily breakable, but he's not--"

  Hellboy closed his mouth so hard his teeth clacked.

  Neither of them needed to hear him say the next word that would have come from his lips. Once again, here it was. Anastasia might be intelligent and courageous, but she had the fatal flaw of being human. Hellboy didn't have that problem, no matter how much effort he spent pretending to himself that that wasn't the case.

  Fiercely, almost as if she were striking him, Stasia reached up and grabbed his head with both hands, pulling him down to kiss him hard. Hellboy liked it. It hurt his heart how much he liked it.

  "Go get Abe," she said. When she released his face, she practically pushed him away. In a whisper so low he could not hear it, she added something else. Three words. If he'd been any good at reading lips, he thought maybe it would have been almost impossible for him to walk away from her.

  "Tenzin," Hellboy said, "you're staying here. Tell Koh and Dwenjue we're just gonna have to go without communication from this point."

  The guide translated quickly, his disappointment over not joining them obvious in his tone. Hellboy admired him for that. While Tenzin spoke, Dwenjue and Koh nodded. The warrior monk laid his mystic blade across his shoulder again, ready to attack.