by Dragon Lance
When the last of the light was fading, Cynara came into the garden to bring me a plate of supper, and she sat on the stone bench to watch me eat. After a time she said, “Has Tarran hired you?”
“Yes.”
She heard that and stayed quiet for a while, a small woman on the white marble bench in the last light of the day. Her roses arched over her, trailed around her, and the scent of them was always the scent of her.
“Ryle, he’s going to lay a ghost,” she said, when night was almost fallen. “That’s what the dragon really is to him.”
I shrugged, and I said that if that’s what Tarran was going to do, it was his business. Mine was to keep him safe along the way, help him as he wished, and come home a rich man.
“Aren’t you afraid you might meet some ghost of your own, Ryle, there in the dark under the mountain?”
A chill touched me, a strange breath on a hot summer’s night. But I smiled, as though she were joking, and I said, “I’ve never seen a ghost in my life, Cynara. I don’t expect I’ll start seeing ’em now.”
I went and kissed her cheek – the skin as soft as a petal from one of her beloved roses – and wished her goodnight.
She took my hands in hers, and she wished me good luck.
*
In the morning, when Tarran and I went to take the ferry across the Whiterush, we found Reatha by the waterside fishing, her hair unbound and streaming gold, her skirts kilted up and tied out of her way. Rosy dawn light shone on her legs, and she kicked up a little spray like diamonds in her wake when she ran to fetch her father, the ferryman.
She watched me all the way across the river, and she knew I knew that. On the far bank I turned, and Reatha lifted her hand to wave.
“Friend of yours?” Tarran asked.
“Yes,” I said tightly.
“Ah.” He shook his head, understanding. “Too bad.”
We didn’t have much else to say to each other for the rest of the day.
*
Tarran sat watching the stars dazzling the summer night, the tiny lights swept together and shining their best in the absence of the preening moons, the red and the silver only lately set. We were two days out of Raven and camped just above the tree line near a high sloping rock face. Midway up the slope, dark against the stone, the entrance to the storied caverns gaped out into the night. We’d take that way in and down in the morning.
Cynara had sent us off with our packs filled with dried meat and fruit, and bundles of brands for torches. Inside the caves there’d be no forage and no light. Outside, we trusted my hunting skill for supper, and with the little bird-arrows I fetched us a brace of fat grouse. Tarran ate, watching the sky glitter, and when the eating was done, he left the stars to shine on their own and came close to the fire.
For a while he said nothing, and he sat looking at me across the fire as if he were trying to see deep in and down.
I took my sword and laid it across my knees, took a whetstone and honed the glittering blade. That deeplooking made me edgy, and I kept the steel between him and me, as though it could deflect his gaze.
He smiled – only faintly – as though he understood. Very softly, he said, “We were five who came here twenty years ago. Me and my brother, and three of our kin. In Thorbardin they say these caverns are filled with veins of silver and gold. But we didn’t come here for that. In Thorbardin we curse the dragon and mourn the loss of the silver and gold, but we leave it be and delve in other places. Me and the others... we were young fools out to find legend’s treasure.”
The golden firelight glinted from the knives he had stowed about him – a couple of straight-bladed dirks, three wavy-edged daggers, and one jewel-hilted long knife. One-armed, he had no use for a bow, none for a broadsword, little for any axe that wasn’t a throwing axe. One-armed, Tarran liked knives.
“There was treasure,” he said. Now his voice wasn’t soft, and it had a jagged edge to it. “It was so lovely that it made our wild dreams pale. And there was Claw. He’s well named, like a talon, long and swift, and very keen. He’s a copper, and he’s old and swollen with greed....”
His words trailed off into silent remembering, and he had such a shut-tight look on him that I wasn’t sure he’d finish the story. Down in the woods an owl hooted; another answered.
“We found the treasure,” Tarran said on a sigh. “And the dragon found us. Of course. I don’t have a brother now, only the memory of him dying. Yarden was his name, and our friends were Rowson, Wulf, and Oran. They were the sons of Lunn Hammerfell, and they were kin of mine. I will avenge them all.”
“How will you take revenge without killing the dragon?”
“Claw’s a miser,” he said. “In Thorbardin we say that a miser hoards to hide the one thing that is most dear to him. I know what the dragon loves. Take it from him, and he’ll feel the hurt all the days of his life. That long will have to be long enough.”
Flames leapt up from our fire, then fell, dragging the light away from Tarran’s face. He tilted his head back a little, looking past me, up to where – darker than the dark – the way into the caverns gaped. I couldn’t see his face; I couldn’t read him, or guess what he was thinking. After a moment he looked back to me, and he nodded shortly.
“Good night,” he said, and his voice had a haunted, hollow sound to it.
I sat up a long while, making my weapons fit. I bundled the bird arrows and replaced them in my quiver with steelheads. In my hands weapons always felt like comfort – good steel to raise against foes and fear. So it was that night.
As I worked, I fell to thinking about Reatha, her goldrunning hair, her sun-browned legs, the smooth calves rosy and plump in the morning light. With the Whiterush between us, she’d lifted a hand to wave me farewell. After all this time, there was still no one she looked to the way she looked to me.
My work soon done, I stretched out before the fire and fell at once to sleep. I wasn’t restless, and I slept well. But once, toward dawn, I woke with a chill, and across the sky, in the dark west, I saw the bright plumage of a shooting star sketch a falling arc, like a silver arrow coming to ground.
I piled some wood on the low fire, warming myself and waiting for Tarran to wake. I should have seen a warning in the falling star, the reminder of a fear I wouldn’t admit to, but I didn’t. I had too much invested in the pretense that I’d long ago vanquished the old guilty dread that someday, once again, my cowardice would cause a death.
*
We left the outworld just before sunrise, when the rock face was cool to touch and dewy damp. We had some climbing to do to get to the entrance, and Tarran made me go first up the stony wall.
“You don’t want a one-armed climber ahead of you. If I fall, I’ll take you down with me. Go.”
That made sense. I went scrambling up, finding good hand-and footholds. At the ledge I got a brand and set to with flint and striker. The flaring torch spilled light over the ledge, and by it I watched Tarran come up. Unlike me, he didn’t use handholds for pulling; he used them only for balance. He put all his faith in the footholds. When he was within arm’s reach, he accepted the hand I offered and let me hoist him onto the ledge. Thin as he was, he was an easy lift. Safely up, Tarran put his back to the rising sun and led me into the mountain, the landscape of his nightmares.
The light from without came trailing after us for longer than I’d thought it would, like a little pale dog at our heels, but soon it left us, and there was only the torchlight running on damp walls, the pale smoke drifting ahead of us to the call of some cavern breeze. We went along a narrow path, with the walls closing tighter each yard of the way, the ceiling dropping lower, until I had to stoop to pass where Tarran easily went. After a while walking, he held up a hand to halt.
“Listen!”
“To what?”
He stood perfectly still. Torchlight gleamed in his dark eyes as the pupils widened to take in the flickering fireglow. He turned his head a little, and his eyes – till then black – sudd
enly flashed reddish, like a wolf’s in the night. Dwarves have eyes like that, shifting and changing to adjust to whatever light is found.
“There,” he said. “Hear it?”
Now I heard breathing that wasn’t Tarran’s and wasn’t mine.
“This is what the dragon sounds like sleeping,” Tarran said. “Whether he’s sleeping just now, I don’t know. Things echo in here, and the echoes echo. “He eyed me closely, head cocked. “You all right?”
“Of course I am,” I said, a little coldly.
He raised an eyebrow, as at something strange. “No law says you can’t be afraid, boy.”
I told him I wasn’t afraid of an echo, and he laughed, a short dry bark. “Right, then. We’ve got some walking to do.”
I checked the set of the quiver on my hip, the heft of the sword at my side. My longbow, the weighty yew, lay unstrung in a holder across my back. Torch high, I followed Tarran through the narrow passage. All the while and all the way, the sound of the dragon’s breathing rose up from the floor under our feet, flowed down from the damp ceiling, seemed to roll off the very walls themselves.
I am here, I am here, I am here... whispered the echoes of the beast, the dragon deep down in his lair.
If I’d been wise enough to listen within, I’d have heard the deep-buried fear in me stirring awake.
I am here, I am here, I am here!
*
When we came out of the narrow shaft, Tarran halted again, and I held the torch up and out. Before us lay a new path, and we stood above a void so wide I couldn’t guess where the other side must be. Tarran kicked a stone over the edge of the drop. We waited to hear it hit bottom, and we waited, and we waited.
“Come on,” he said, when he was sure his point was made and taken.
The path wound down the side of the pit, spiraling around, and here the echo of the dragon’s breathing had company. Voices whispered, like ghosts rustling up from the blackness.
Someone, long years ago, whispered a secret. Another voice moaned in dread’s cold grasp, the sound like a chill finger on the back of my neck. A treasure-stalker spoke of hope and gold – and someone screamed, a hundred years ago, falling into the swallowing darkness.
In the next breath all the whispering ghosts, all the ancient echoes, fled to silence before a hollow, groaning roar. In the wavering torchlight, Tarran’s face showed waxy and white above his black beard. He shuddered, and the gems on the dragon brooch glinted, little darts of light in the blackness.
“That’s Claw,” he said, peering up at me as though he were watching for sign of the fear I professed not to have.
Cold in the belly, I said that I reckoned it was Claw, and then I said that we’d best be moving on. He went forward carefully and slowly, and I followed after.
The path was wide enough for Tarran and me to walk side by side with a man’s-length of room between us and the drop. We’d entered on a west-running path, but I soon lost any sense of our direction on the spiral way. The brand I’d lighted outside burned down to a stump, and I sparked a fresh one off the ember. When the third one was half burned, Tarran stopped and took the torch from me. He held it high and a little forward. Light spilled all down the rocky wall, like a firefall, a silent gold-shining river, and he stood like he was stone-carved.
Whispers from below rustled around us.
“What is it?” I asked.
He stepped back to let me see what lay ahead. At his feet was a break in the path, a gap almost twice as long as I am tall. I kicked at the slender ledge remaining; stones tumbled down into the chasm, pebbles clattering on the sides, the larger rocks silent in their fall.
“We’ll go back and find another path,” I said.
“There is no other path.” He went down on his heels, peering into the darkness and so close to the edge it made my belly clench to see him. Ghosty echoes sighed about gold and silver, about treasure and wealth. Keep on... hold on... we’ll find... more than you’ve ever... worth a man’s life to risk... Now, or then, the dragon rumbled and moaned.
I lifted the torch as high as I could reach and saw that here, as all along our way, the wall was studded with small outcroppings. Most didn’t look like good anchors, but one long knob looked as though it could easily bear weight.
“Are you afraid of heights, Tarran Ironwood?”
I said that in jest, and he laughed – not that short dry laughter, but a sudden gleeful amusement I’d not have thought him capable of.
“I’d like to meet the dwarf who is.”
I took a stout coil of rope from my pack, tied a swift noose, and tossed it high. The noose slipped over the knob and lodged there securely. I tied a stirrup in the end of the rope and asked Tarran if he wanted to go first. He gave me the torch, wound the rope once around his hand, gripping, and shoved off, leaning a little out toward the chasm and letting his weight swing him back to the path.
Safe aground, Tarran sent the rope back to me, and I tossed the torch across the gap to him. When the light was steady again, I settled my pack, took my place, and kicked off. I was but a few beats of the heart hanging there at the top of the arc. Almost still over the dark and the void, I looked down, into the pit, into the black. That endless emptiness made me feel light in the belly, like I could soar if only I let go of the rope.
A shrieking, wrathful roar blasted up from the unseen deep.
Startled, I clenched. My hand slipped on the rope; the rough hemp burned the skin. I felt the sickening drop – then caught myself.
The echo of the dragon echoed, and Tarran cried out as the arc of my flight wobbled.
Ryle!... Ryle!... Ryle!
I couldn’t feel my grip on the rope, and I seemed to feel the drag and pull of falling again as Tarran flung the torch away and reached out as far as he dared – farther than he should have – and caught hold of my pack, trying to correct the swing. Below, the torch was a little falling star, shooting down into the eternal blackness.
I hung, but whether over emptiness or the ledge, I didn’t know.
“Let go the rope!” Tarran shouted. “Now!”
In leaping echo, the cavern pleaded, Let go now!... Go now!
Blindly, in utter darkness, I trusted. I let go of the rope and fell hard against the rock wall. Sick to my stomach, my knees gone suddenly watery, I stumbled, clutched at Tarran’s shoulder.
“Stand still, boy! You’ll spill us both over the edge!”
The terror that had been like ice in my belly now bled all through me, like a poison. I staggered when he moved back and away from me. Tarran grabbed my arm to hold me still, gripped so hard I knew there’d be bruises later.
“Stay right there,” he said. “Stay right there. I’m going to light a torch.”
Shaking, belly-sick, I clung to the stone while he got a brand from my pack. He struck his steel against the rock wall. A spark leapt and fell. Another. The third caught, and Tarran praised his dwarf god, his red Reorx, for the grace of light. He held the new torch high, and for the first time I saw some color come into his face, a flush of relief.
“You all right?”
Sweat ran cold on me, down my neck, down my ribs, like death’s icy touch. I said, “Of course I am,” and I was pretty sure I looked like I was.
Yet, like an accusation of the truth, the afterimage of the falling torch, the shooting star, lingered in my mind. Panicked, I’d come dose to rumbling us both off the ledge. I might have caused Tarran’s death. So it had been, once before, when – panicked – I could not draw the bow, loose the bolt, and kill the boar that was bearing down on my father.
Tarran put his hand on my arm, and I tensed under his grip.
“Easy now. You’re back to the wall, and feet on the ground again.”
But it wasn’t height-fear that had me, not the fear of falling. It was worse, and he must have sensed it, for now I heard a new note in his voice. Beneath the reassurance I heard doubt, a thin qualm.
“Let’s go,” I said gruffly, taking the torch fr
om him.
Narrow-eyed, he nodded and set out. I could feel it as you feel a storm coming – Tarran was wondering if he’d made a mistake to hire me. He said nothing to me about it, and I was cold and surly – asking no questions of him and permitting none from him. I was not minded to talk about the fear he suspected.
And there was this, to keep us both quiet: Tarran had been twenty years at learning not to scream in his sleep, twenty years waiting till he could tame his terror and take his revenge. He’d take the chance that he’d not gone wrong in hiring me. And I’d been ten years at the work of building an honestly earned reputation behind which to hide the one naked dread I must let no one see – that my fear would once again kill someone who trusted me. If I went back now, I’d go back shamed, a coward for old men to point at, for women to cluck over, and children to laugh at. A coward for Reatha to turn from in pity. Tarran and I, we had to go on.
*
We left the spiral path after only a little while more of walking. We’d not come to the bottom of the chasm – Tarran said we’d not gone even a tenth of the distance down – but there was a fork in the winding road, and the left-hand way led us off the rounding path and into a tunnel, a small shaft. As we walked, me stooping again, the lesser echoes from the chasm faded and fell behind. Claw’s breathing, his long ago groans and cries, followed. The sound of the beast was with us still as we stepped from the shaft onto a great wide plain of stone.
A stream of water in a stony-edged channel ran through that plain, an underground brook that seemed to spring from the rock itself and wander away into the dark.
“Where does it come from, Tarran?”
He shrugged. “There are layers and layers under the world. The water comes from under here, just like any sudden wellspring in the outworld.”
