The Winter Oak

by James A. Hetley

  Another opening, and she found a bed, tall-posted with a canopy and hangings, with hand-loomed linens and a light woolen blanket. Wardrobe with wooden hinges and latch, it looked as old as the stone beside it. A terra-cotta lamp that could be a refugee from Pompeii, filled with olive oil and wick ready for the flint and steel and tinder that lay next to it on the smooth flowstone shelf. She stared at the flint and steel -- the steel had been set in a bone handle, as if whoever used it felt uncomfortable touching cold iron. Old Blood. Maureen shivered. Then she sniffed at the oil. It smelled sweet, not rancid.

  "Someone lives here."

  {No one has walked these stones for over a thousand years. The Tree would know. You stand beneath his roots.}

  "But the food, the bed, the oil . . ."

  {This is a land of magic.}

  It felt safe here. She doubted if an enemy could ever find the entrance, could even get close to it through her forest. The stones enfolded her and guarded her. Unlike the keep, they welcomed her.

  Home.

  She'd never had a home, not in the sense of a safe center to her life. Damn sure the castle didn't make the grade. Father Oak came closest, but sleeping in a snowbank really sucked. That was another thing Daddy had stolen from her. Stolen from both her and Jo. Safety was anywhere but "home."

  Maureen shivered with a sudden fierce joy, and she drank the warm musk of the cave deep into her lungs. This was home. It felt right. It even smelled right, just like Brian.

  A thousand years. Maureen squinted, suddenly suspicious. "Who lived here?"

  {Some legends called her Nimue. Even the forest never knew her true name.}

  "Great. Just fucking great. Am I going to find Merlin sleeping off a drunk in some back pantry?" She remembered things Brian had said about Merlin, and shuddered.

  {The Tree says that Merlin never came here. The cave lies empty and waiting for you. It is safe.}

  Brian and safety. She remembered the reason why he'd been searching the cellars. "Are there other exits?"

  The vixen grinned up at her. {I am a fox, woman. My definition of "safe" includes at least three ways out of my den. These caves have four.}

  Brian.

  Would the definition of "home" ever include him? The warmth faded from Maureen's stomach. She kept forgetting that he'd left her. Her brain knew it, but her heart didn't want to.

  If she ever saw that man again, she'd better get some serious pair-bond work going. Damn fast. Persuade him that staying could be a good idea. Fun, even.

  {The dark witch comes. We must meet her.}

  The fox turned and trotted toward another passage.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Illusions and traps.

  David shook his head. A witch's cottage? That was Jo's territory, or Maureen's. They carried the Old Blood. They could use magic. Maureen had been inside Fiona's lair once already and got out alive. Rescued Brian in the process. Why the hell were they sending him?

  Whitewashed stone, thatched roof, deep-set casement windows, it looked like a tourist-bureau postcard of an Irish country cottage. But Maureen had told him that Fiona lived in a labyrinth of smoke and mirrors, deadly truth hidden under layers of innocent appearance. The fields were fake, an alarm system and defenses, not real pasture. He'd seen what the hedge was like, and he was happy as hell that the swarming bees buzzed their frustration around the dragon's head, unable to sting through all that armor.

  However, apparently Fiona had left some gaps in her programming. He smelled the bitter poison mingled with the sweet sap from torn roses and hawthorns, but that poison hadn't bothered Khe'sha. Wrong species. And she hadn't designed the hedge to stand forever against an animated bulldozer, either. An angry bulldozer, smart and persistent.

  David shivered, remembering that thrashing rage and the deep booming growls of hatred. The sheer noise of it had driven him to his knees, and some of those ragged chunks of brush had flown a hundred feet and more. Fears of that rage had haunted his nightmares, ever since he'd faced and killed the dragon's mate. And now Khe'sha was his friend?

  Anyway, the rage and awesome strength explained why the fox had sent Khe'sha. But what did the forest want David to do, want a human to do? Compose a song? That was his only talent in this land.

  The forest had sent him. The forest had learned chess from Maureen, and David felt like one of its pawns in a surreal game of masters. The forest knew him, knew too damn much about him from that eternity when he was the forest, his soul spreading through every leaf and rootlet and sinking into the living soil and flowing in its waters. It knew his fears.

  Fear. I've lived in terror of the dragon, only to find strength and honor and friendship where I least expected them. Shouldn't that give me courage?

  It didn't. He stared at the worn green paint around the door lever, wondering if it concealed death. He stepped into the shadow of the covered porch and felt it as a chill. Sweat beaded on his brow, and his muscles tightened.

  This is Brian's job, not mine. He's the designated Hero in this Adventure. I'm the Poet, in charge of singing for our evening's beer at the Wayside Inn. I don't even own a sword.

  He touched the lever, and twisted it, and the latch clicked. He lived. His fingers didn't catch fire, or turn putrid and fall off in rotting chunks. He didn't even stick to the metal, bound forever at the whim of the Wicked Witch. The door swung in an inch and waited for him, brooding. He nudged it further with his toe, ready to dodge the pounce of a miniature dinosaur witch-bound as a guard dog.

  It's normal to be afraid. Brian told me so. He said he was afraid, every time he went into battle. Fear is healthy. It keeps you alive. But I've been a hero once already. Isn't that enough?

  He stepped into a small chamber with benches on each side, a place to sit and pull off mucky boots when you came in from the fields. Stone flooring, looked like slate worn smooth by centuries of feet. The granite threshold had cracked clear through, more of Maureen's magic. He felt the chill of her curse in the air around him.

  Fiona hadn't broken it. Perhaps she hadn't cared, or hadn't even noticed.

  He studied the kitchen beyond, wall and base cabinets painted yellow and marble countertop and a slate sink with a hand pump. Electric refrigerator and microwave, but a wood cook stove and hanging kerosene lamp. Herbs dried overhead, hanging in bundles from dark roof-beams, perfuming the air. She'd cooked a batch of onion soup recently, and toasted whole-wheat bread -- both aromas lingered, teasing him, and his mouth watered. He'd skipped lunch, worrying about Jo. Could he trust the food here? He doubted that.

  But he couldn't see any teeth in the room, either literal or figurative. No sign of the hatchling dragon.

  {You must not let her bite you. She will try, and the young of our kind are fast. Be very careful.}

  Some kind of poison in the bite. He'd never thought about how a small dragon could kill prey. With the big ones, the answer was obvious. But he'd never visualized baby dragons. They always showed up in the fairytale full-grown.

  Gritting his teeth, he stepped into the kitchen and started checking cupboards, opening each door as if it had one of those coiled up spring snakes inside, ready to pop out at him and bite. And he kept finding just what you'd expect to find in any kitchen, a lot of pots and pans and flour bins and china and glassware. Even cornflakes in an incongruous supermarket box.

  No traps, no dragons. Khe'sha had told him Shen would be about as long as one of David's legs, a fair-sized black iguana with razor teeth, so she could be hidden almost anywhere. Smells teased his nose, garlic and onions and ginger and the herbs, and something else. Something chemical, like hospital disinfectant. It was faint and diffuse, as if it permeated the space rather than centered on a single leaking bottle.

  He shook his head, and moved on. Dining room, a table and chairs and sideboard full of silver and crystal, the kind of high-rent stuff Maureen had inherited with her castle. Oriental rug, probably worth more than Jo's whole apartment, on a polished oak floor. Fireplace, with two gr
aceful silver bud vases holding red roses on the mantel, and a cracked hearthstone.

  Still no traps or dragons, though. The normalcy of it all felt doubly creepy.

  A stair led up from beside the dining room, and he put that off for later. The last room was a study, old oak roll-top desk and a couple of matching four-drawer files, an oak table with a laptop computer and stacked manila folders waiting. The file drawers weren't even locked. And they didn't hold any poisonous iguanas.

  This lady doesn't expect random visitors, that's for sure. Either that, or her twisty little mind leaves obvious stuff lying around as camouflage for what she's really hiding.

  He paused and shuffled through the files lying on the table. The first held a stapled sheaf of something typed in Cyrillic, he couldn't tell if it was Russian or Serbian or whatever, with a big red rubber stamp across the top. Another, in hand-written dancing calligraphy that might be Arabic, with stamps and marginal notes in the same script. Another in Chinese or Japanese or Korean, all those ideograms looked the same to him. The constant feature seemed to be bold rubber stamps across the heads.

  He tried a fourth and finally struck English. And the stamp said "Most Secret."

  He was reading the first page, the "executive summary," but there wasn't any letterhead or organization given, not even an author's name. And words jumped out at him, scattered in the text, words like "anthrax" and "smallpox" and "influenza" and "plague." Discussions of vectors and virulence, morbidity and mortality, incubation periods and projected course of infection.

  He shuddered. He wasn't sure why, but some kinds of mass-produced death seemed uglier than others. Why was poison gas a worse way to die than napalm? What made anthrax worse than land mines? Each could kill the unwary for generations after. Still, he wanted to wash his hands after touching the papers.

  But he was looking for a baby dragon. He crossed the study off his list and climbed a twisting stair to the cottage loft. Bedroom, still prosaic, just a bed and dresser under sloping ceilings and a large mirror, mirror on the wall that offered no advice and a couple of walk-in closets with a prevailing theme of gray. Gray slacks, gray stylish suits, gray sweaters and blouses folded neatly on the shelves. The labels were worth their weight in gold, but Fiona didn't seem to give her designers much leeway on the colors. Even the damned underwear in her dresser was gray silk.

  A smaller bedroom sat on the other side of the stairway, air stale, bed stripped down to mattress cover, obviously unused. He checked it anyway. No dragon. And that was that, the whole cottage.

  No lab, either. Maureen said Fiona had bragged about her lab, about having Brian's sperm frozen in liquid nitrogen in her lab. Part of her kinky Arthurian bit of having her brother's baby. She did genetics research and biochemistry as a sideline to her trade in poisoned apples.

  David froze, staring out the bedroom's dormer window at nothing. Genetics research. Lab. Those creepy papers on the study table. Stealing a baby dragon, with a bite that wasn't really poison, the way Khe'sha described it. More like infectious, if it took days to kill.

  And the fox had warned of an evil that was dangerous to all that suckled young. To all mammals.

  He twisted his way back down the winding stairs, eyes unfocused, thinking, running his fingers along the cold rough plaster to steer his body back to the kitchen. A microwave oven, a refrigerator, a freezer out in the pantry, all of them shiny new Energy Star high-efficiency models. A few compact fluorescent lights, that laptop computer.

  He found his way out the back door, by the pantry, and studied the scene. Three long bays of photocells soaked up power from the sun. He'd been to a Show-and-Tell at the electric company's "Energy House." They ran a whole suburban family's electric toys off a single bank of cells that size. Fiona's shed held racks full of clear-sided lead-acid batteries, deep-cycle stuff, with an inverter that probably cost as much as a new Mercedes.

  This woman uses a lot of electricity.

  Where?

  He pulled the main switch, and an alarm started to ring in the cottage. Apparently Fiona wanted to know if the power went out. Something out of sight needed continuous power.

  "My friend, how good are you at digging?"

  * * *

  Dragons were very good at digging. David had watched a woodchuck remodeling its burrow, once. Dirt flew in a steady cloud, loosened and thrown back by a blur of front paws. Enlarge that by a factor of ten thousand, and you had the dragon at work.

  And yet that frenzy had control. Khe'sha followed the underground electric cable from the shed to the cottage's foundation without damaging it. He left it hanging along the stone wall as he burrowed deeper, leaving mounds of loam and gravel and small rocks thrown back between his hind legs.

  He exposed a wall, deeper than David's height, dark with clinging dirt but apparently of the same stone masonry as the whitewashed plane that showed above the grade. Pipes entered it and drained from it in several places, twisting away underground to unknown destinations.

  There's a lot more to this simple Irish cottage than meets the eye. But that wasn't news. Smoke and mirrors, illusions and traps.

  The dragon pulled back, his bulk crushing rosebushes and knocking a sundial spinning across the grass. The hedge retreated from his tail, a really weird sight that David's eyes almost refused to pass along to his brain.

  {I smell Shen beyond that wall. I hear her thoughts. It would be best if you stood back.}

  David blinked and retreated. If a dragon asks you to move, you move. Ask how far while you're already en-route.

  Khe'sha cocked his head back and forth, weaving his neck like a snake. He nodded. {Her thoughts are strongest in that far corner.}

  And then he struck, both forepaws with his weight and the coiled strength of his whole bulk behind them. Stones flew in a cloud of mortar dust, leaving a gap in the near corner of the foundation wall. The dragon struck again and again, blind frenzy if it hadn't been so focused. The ground shook, and a blaze of purple light blinded David. Khe'sha screamed.

  David blinked the fire out of his eyes, stunned. He sat up. Smoke rose from the corner of the cottage, black rising out of wisps of white steam that hugged the bottom of the trench. Heavy. Looked like cryogenics, the liquid oxygen boiling off while NASA fueled a rocket launch. Something brownish mixed streaks through the white, looking noxious. He shook his head again, clearing it. He couldn't hear anything.

  The dragon lay still. It looked like Fiona had her own version of a "Top Secret" stamp, a trap protecting whatever hid in that cellar. A trap powerful enough to kill a dragon in an instant -- David remembered the other one, thrashing and screaming and knocking him across the forest clearing and burying him in shattered trees.

  But he saw a hole into darkness. Was the trap drained? He staggered to his feet. His sight blurred, tears for his fallen friend, but he owed Khe'sha. David had to try that hole, see if Shen survived.

  {When this song is chanted, it will be told as a cautionary tale for hatchlings. "How Khe'sha lost his temper and two claws."} The dragon opened one great yellow eye, blinked several times as if he had to clear his head, and then lifted his right forepaw, displaying the seared gap where the title digits once had been.

  David shuddered. "Thank God. I thought you were dead."

  {I believe that I am larger than the enemies the witch expected. Or perhaps she dared not use a stronger spell, without destroying her whole house and whatever lairs under it.}

  Khe'sha struggled to his feet, twitching and groggy. He sniffed at the vapors and the hole, and sneezed. {I smell death and poison inside. We must burn this place. Shen still lives.}

  The hole was large enough for a man. The entire cellar wasn't large enough for the dragon. Dammit, you pass one test, they just throw another one at you. I don't want to go in there.

  But he had no choice. That's what it always came down to. He'd followed Jo, he'd killed the other dragon, he'd done everything in this insane saga because he had no choice. Just like the forest had herded
him and Khe'sha to this place. The chess-master moved his pieces without asking their permission.

  No choice. He couldn't retreat, so he went forward.

  He climbed down into the hole. He'd expected darkness in the cellar, but pale light glowed through the vapor, and his brain started building hoodoos of lurking witchcraft or hideous bioluminescent monsters or radioactive isotopes stolen from Los Alamos. Chill dampness touched him, and he shivered. It stank, that disinfectant he'd noticed in the kitchen and a whiff of rotting meat and the sharp tang of ozone from a lot of electronics. Smoke, curls of smoke from charred beams and the fried meat of Khe'sha's paw.

  Apparently his hearing was coming back, because leaking pipes hissed gently from each side. The glow firmed and focused into emergency lights, simple battery units hanging on the walls, cutting beams of yellow through the shifting murk. He sighed with relief, then coughed as the air bit his throat. Dust, or poison? Move, dammit. You don't know what that vapor is.

  He found a cage, surrounded by dead electronics and lab equipment. Black fury lunged across the metal, claws and teeth screeching on stainless steel bars.

  {Shen hungry!}

  His brain fuzzed. Even if that gas is nitrogen or CO2 or Freon, it can kill you. No air. Suffocate.

  Cage, carrying cage, hatchling-sized, with guarded handles. How could he lure the dragon into it? Refrigerator. Cold steam boiling out, glass vials, nothing there. Another. Meat. Plastic-wrapped meat, still with the supermarket price labels and foam trays. Sirloin steaks, better than he'd eaten in years.

  Feed her. That will slow her down. Was that his thought, or Khe'sha's?

  He dropped the first package. Fumbled for a second, ripped it open with clumsy fingers. Brain going. How long can you hold your breath?

  Knocked over a rolling cart, crashing glass. Baited the cage. Latched it to the larger cage. Blinked at a complicated double gate, interlocks, no way that little monster was going to get out by mistake.

  This lever and that one, arm's length apart, can't release both at once without having everything out of the way. Sort of like a stamping press.