Highland Dragon Master

by Isabel Cooper

  She swore and looked down at her own hands, then to Erik’s face. She couldn’t see any dark patches forming, but clothing covered a great deal, and stripping there and then would be foolish.

  Nothing moved in the dead forest to either side of them. No birds called. The moving branches creaked slightly, and the stream flowed in the distance, but that was all. Toinette could hear each of her breaths and most of Erik’s. “Do you know any spell to protect us?” she asked.

  “I don’t even know what I’d be protecting us against,” he replied. “That is, this”—a quick wave of his hand took in forest and dead squirrel alike—“but I don’t know what sent it. Our best defense is most likely speed.”

  It wasn’t the answer Toinette had hoped for, but it was one she’d more or less expected. “The plague didn’t touch our kind,” she said. “I’ll hope that’s a sign.”

  * * *

  Trees thinned and died, their trunks collapsing into sharp angles in the forest. Toinette’s and Erik’s footsteps crunched on dry dirt. It sounded like ash, and floated the same way when disturbed, but the smell was cold, wet, and bitter.

  Erik spotted more small corpses by the side of the road. Most were desiccated; a few were only bones, stripped by weather if nothing else. There was air in the darkness. It was frigid and stale, but it served its purpose.

  A few yards before the temple, the last of the trees vanished. They approached the great steps through a gray wasteland, a wide ring where nothing grew and not even the dead remained. Erik would have felt exposed, with such sparse cover, but he couldn’t imagine any would-be attacker coming from his surroundings. He and Toinette felt as unlikely and as much out of place as fish in the desert.

  The temple was as gray as the dirt. Each step was surely a full foot in height, and there were at least fifty of them. Above, pillars four times the height of a man stretched up to end in shapes Erik was glad he couldn’t make out clearly, then supported a vast conical roof. It seemed to cast a shadow in the darkness, and the shapes from the pillars danced within that deeper blackness.

  Toinette’s breath hissed through her teeth. “This…” she said, craning her head up and then shaking it in disbelief. “This doesn’t work. We should have seen it when we were flying over the island the first time. The trees aren’t that tall.”

  Erik wanted badly to argue. The trees might have been on a hill, he would have liked to say, and the temple in a valley, or they might have been distracted and missed the temple, or the sun had been in their eyes. It hadn’t been. They’d been looking carefully. And their wanderings over the island had left him in no doubt that the temple was more or less on a level with the forest around it. “No,” he said and clenched his throat against a wave of nausea.

  “No,” said Toinette. She took the pine needles from her hair and smelled them again, prompting Erik to imitate her. It helped, but only slightly.

  He reached for her free hand. Briefly she was still, surprised, but then she twined her fingers through his. Toinette’s hand was cold, but still warmer than the air around them, her fingers callused and strong. “Best we don’t get separated, anyway,” she said. A smile like a guttering candle crossed her face. “And if it comes to a fight, I can always use you as a shield, no?”

  Erik managed a laugh: brittle, but it counted. They met each other’s eyes once, and then began to climb.

  * * *

  Each step was a heartbeat. Their feet lifted and came down in unison on the next block of stone, sending echoes down the steps and through the starved land. Before they’d gone more than a quarter of the way up, Toinette’s mind was blank of words. There was only the count: twenty-five, and then the strain of leg and thigh as she stepped upward, twenty-six.

  For the most part, she kept her eyes fixed ahead of her. She glanced from side to side on occasion, alert for possible attackers though she doubted there’d be any, and she listened for any sounds other than footsteps, but she didn’t look down. She’d never been afraid of heights. She couldn’t be afraid of heights: she flew, for Christ’s sweet sake.

  But she didn’t want to look down.

  The top of the staircase came as a surprise, not because she’d reached it quicker than she expected—Toinette doubted she could tell quick from slow any longer—but simply because she had reached it, and the stairs hadn’t gone on forever. Catching her breath, she also made her vision expand out of the tunnel it had fallen into as she climbed.

  She and Erik stood in the entrance to a courtyard like the ones she’d seen in Roman ruins. People had walked through those, set up market stalls along the edges, fought and courted and lived in the sunlight. There was no sunlight here, and no people save her and Erik: only ancient gray emptiness.

  Erik squeezed her hand, and Toinette wasn’t sure he knew he was doing it. They stood together in the shadow of the pillars like Adam and Eve just outside the gates of Eden. What lay behind them had been no Paradise, but ahead would be far worse.

  “Won’t get better for waiting, I fear,” Toinette finally said. Speaking took more effort than she’d been expecting. Her throat felt rusty.

  “Ah,” said Erik, “and here I’d been hoping.”

  The courtyard was darker than the forest, which hurt to think about. Toinette couldn’t see more than a foot or two in any direction. Judging from what vision she did have, that was no great loss. She saw only the flat, featureless rock to either side, gray and blank. If they’d gotten turned around, she wouldn’t have known what direction they were heading.

  A shorter walk than climbing the stairs brought them to a pair of tall doors. Despite the lack of light, they had a metallic gleam, but in a green-purple shade that belonged to no metal Toinette had ever seen. A black handle on each jutted out and back in again, forming angles sharp enough to injure any who encountered them with force.

  “Should we change, do you think?” she asked, then added, “After we open the doors.” Her talons would be too large and clumsy for gripping the handles. Teeth might have worked, but the notion of putting her mouth on that sharp, dark substance made Toinette clamp her jaws together.

  “N-oo,” Erik said slowly. He was looking at the doors carefully. “It’d likely be too small inside for us to move well, and we dinna’ know what we might have to avoid, and quickly.”

  “Right you are.”

  One last time, Toinette clasped Erik’s hand tightly, then reluctantly let go. Comfort, as always, took second place to necessity.

  The handle was so cold that her fingers stuck to it at first. Toinette swore, let go before the pain could become more than a brief sting, and shrugged one hand up into her sleeve. She wished she’d brought cloth with her, or that she had more of her skirt left to sacrifice. Keeping her arm bent bled off some of her strength, and the door was heavy enough as it was. She had to put her other hand to the handle, keeping it over the first, and set her hips to get leverage before it would budge.

  Metal scraped across stone with a scream damnably close to human. As the door only moved slowly, the scream kept going, while the cold of the door handle crept through the cloth and up Toinette’s arms. That probably did her muscles good. If Toinette lived to see another sunrise, it would be an immensely painful one, but for the moment cold and fright kept soreness at bay.

  Erik’s door shrieked in earsplitting harmony with hers. Their breathing, quick and ragged, made up the percussion. Toinette stared at the green-purple sheen in front of her and tried to ignore all of it, until at last they’d opened a passage wide enough to fit through, though they’d have to go in single file.

  Beyond was more light than Toinette had expected: a cloudy, half-green storm light that would have had her furling the sails and tying down the cargo had she seen it on the Hawk—but at least it was light, and she could see. She was thankful. Her near future, she suspected, would involve often being thankful for extremely small blessings—

/>   —and that would be her future if she was fortunate.

  Thirty-Four

  Stone surrounded them. Erik thought it was stone, at any rate. It was solid gray, thick, and had no metallic shine to it. He could see no joinings or chisel marks, though, nor even any distinct blocks. By his feet, flat wall merged seamlessly into smooth floor. He imagined the same was true at the ceiling, though that was just too high for him to see well.

  “No human hand made this,” he said.

  Toinette shrugged. “Well. Demons, you said.”

  “Aye, but I’d pictured them laying stones and all. Doing as humans do, but on a grander scale, and getting the rock from elsewhere if it came to that. Not that I had much reason to think I knew one way or another,” he admitted, not too unsettled to be embarrassed when he said it. Erik gestured around them. “This, where it’s all of a piece, it’s as though it grew.”

  “Like a tree?”

  “Or a creature.”

  By her grimace, Erik knew Toinette was thinking along the lines he’d started to, of bowels and throats, and that she liked it no more than he did. “Thank you for that,” she said dryly. “How did Jonah end up faring, do you remember? It’s been a while since I heard that story at mass.”

  “Repented and was delivered,” Erik said.

  They continued walking while they spoke; inside the temple, ambush seemed less likely. Their footsteps echoed enough to make Erik sure they’d hear any oncoming attackers, and the light, gloomy as it was, let them see a good distance ahead. The walls to either side were sturdy too, whatever they were—or they looked that way. Erik kicked one of them gingerly, not wanting to touch the stone with his bare hands.

  It felt like real stone against his toe. The wall didn’t scream either, which was some reassurance, until he reflected on the possibility that they were wandering inside a living creature that didn’t feel pain when a large man with dragon blood kicked the inside of its organs.

  He was very glad when Toinette spoke again. “Odds are I’ve committed a few hundred sins in my day, and I can’t say that I’ve been absolved for all of them. You know.” Erik did. Most priests wouldn’t believe in the dragon-blooded without riot-causing proof, and a fair number of those who were convinced would likely think them irrevocably damned to begin with. Outside of Loch Arach and a few other places, sins committed in dragon form went unconfessed by necessity. “But,” she continued, “I somehow doubt repenting is going to get us out of this.”

  “Aye, well,” said Erik, “we’re not prophets.”

  “That’s one reason, I’m sure.”

  The hallway went on, stretched out like melted tallow. Erik thought it shrank as they walked, but if so, it was never enough to make him certain, only to keep him looking at the ceiling and the walls, trying to measure the distance with no marks to serve as guidance.

  A sound crept in around their footsteps. Not quite a slurp, nor yet entirely breathing, it was a wet inhalation that at first put Erik in mind of a man sucking on a bad tooth: shluuuuh, shluuuh. Every little while they heard it, drifting through the hallway from no direction that either of them could tell.

  “On the Hawk,” said Toinette, the third or fourth time, “that sort of thing would mean a leak, and a damned bad one. Not quite the same noise, but—close.”

  “I’ve heard men breathe nearly that way when stuck through the lungs. Not quite, as you say, but very like.”

  “Not quite, but very like. That’s the whole problem with this place,” Toinette said.

  “I’d not say the whole problem,” Erik said, trying to joke. “Surely dark magic and deadliness count a wee bit too.”

  He knew what she meant, though. Had the sound been exactly one either of them remembered, it might have meant trouble, but it wouldn’t have nibbled away at the edges of the mind, drawing attention to what might make it and what was wrong with that comparison. Hearing it was like looking at the temple and comparing its size to the landscape of the island from the air, or watching the elk-creatures move.

  The power in the temple blurred edges, even where edges shouldn’t be. That was as close as Erik could come to describing it.

  * * *

  Eventually, they did come to the end of the hallway: a blank gray wall, and a door to each side wide enough for a single man to pass through at a time. Both doors looked exactly alike, miniature versions of the ones that had led into the temple. Toinette looked from one to the other, then back to Erik, and shrugged. “Have you any preference?”

  “No.” He frowned and slowly added, “We could try to see magically, but we’ve not the supplies for a complicated and guarded ritual. And as the less formal sort hasn’t worked elsewhere on the island…”

  Toinette shook her head quickly. “If it does work here, what you see is as likely to drive you mad as to be useful.” She didn’t know that for certain. Still, the place was quite bad enough to merely mortal eyes. “Rather not take the risk to save us a little walking.”

  “Aye. Right-hand door first, then. And be ready.”

  With Erik in front of her, and the doorway small, a sword wouldn’t be much use. Toinette shifted her weight and drew her knife, prepared to throw it if need be, and staying alert for sounds from either the left-hand door or the passage behind them. None of that made her feel truly ready. She suspected that even a troop of armed and mounted knights wouldn’t have done that.

  The inner door opened as readily as any in the normal world. Erik, anticipating otherwise, yanked it hard enough that it slammed backward into the hall with a thunderous boom. Toinette winced, gripped her knife harder, and flung a glance over her shoulder to see what might have responded.

  Nothing stirred. Save for the dying echoes, the hall was quiet. Gradually Toinette let out her breath and followed Erik across the threshold, where they stopped and stared.

  They were in a church.

  Arcades stretched to either side of them, arches opening onto more blank stone. A path led down the middle to an altar as finely made as any Toinette had seen in her travels, made of dark wood and inlaid with the green-purple metal of the doors. Windows flanked it to either side, with stained glass cut in intricate patterns—but the light through them was that which had flashed through the forest.

  Above the altar hung no cross, but rather a spiky, twisting shape that seemed to change as Toinette looked at it.

  She remembered some of the stories about the Templars, and her throat went dry.

  “I don’t smell blood,” Erik said, clearly thinking along the same lines she was, “not even old blood. But I’d not touch that.”

  He gestured to the font near them, where a slick substance glimmered in a stone basin. As Toinette looked down, she saw her face reflected there. It was pallid white, which she could easily believe after her time in the forest, but the features were stretched far too long for it to be human.

  She put a hand up and quickly felt her jaw and nose, making sure they were where they should be. “Damned shoddy mirror, whatever it is,” she said, trying to sound only irritated.

  Erik clasped her shoulder. “Shoddy indeed. You’re only a wee bit dirty—still you.”

  She quickly smiled her thanks, then returned to practical matters. “I don’t see a door out, but we might not from here.”

  Real churches often had doors in the arcades, or behind the altar so that the priest could get to and from his chambers more easily. If the room they were standing in was a real church, Toinette doubted it was to any god she wanted to know about; still, they had to go further in.

  Each took one side, stepping under the arches and traveling up the long stone floor. Walking so far apart, they still fell into rhythm with each other. Toinette thought her part of that might have been because she was listening to Erik’s footsteps, trying not to hear the steady, wet noise that continued around them. Hearing that was like having a slug crawl up
her back.

  There were no doors on Toinette’s side, nor did Erik stop and shout a discovery. Even the places where tapestries would have hung in a normal church were bare—but they flickered as Toinette looked at them, gray stone giving way to black void and then returning again in the blink of an eye.

  “Saints defend us,” she muttered, equal parts prayer and curse. She’d never thought either would truly be heard before, or at least not answered, no matter what the priests said. Now, after the words had left her mouth, she feared what might listen to them.

  * * *

  They met again before the altar.

  “Nothing,” said Erik, and watched Toinette shake her head in answer. They stood facing each other, a pose that called to mind the mass after a wedding—though any such joining in this church would certainly be cursed from the start, and the progeny likely monsters from the worst of the old tales.

  The similarity only reminded him of the difference and made him long for the true version with a strength that took him utterly off guard. He might have spoken then, had Toinette not already been making for the lectern and the immense book open on it, which likely had nothing to do with any scripture he’d ever heard.

  “Too much to hope that they kept records, I—faugh!”

  She leaned back abruptly from the book, upper lip curling and one hand instinctively raised in defense. As Erik rounded the corner, he could see why.

  One page of the book was covered with writing in a small crawling hand. On another yawned a face, one with gaping black holes for eyes above an otherwise featureless dark maw. As Erik watched, the eyes drooped and the mouth opened wider, laughing or screaming, or both.

  “Close it,” he said, but Toinette shook her head.