by Dragon Lance
Stalactites, like stony icicles, dripped down from the roof. Groves of stalagmites rose from the floor, some as high as trees. Just past the tunnel’s mouth, in two places, pairs of each kind of formation joined, making floor-to-roof columns like a formal entrance. Tarran said that here would be a good place to stop and rest, and he told me we’d been underground for most of the day.
“Outside,” he said, “the moons are rising.”
I ached for the sight of that, and the sound of crickets, and the dazzle of stars on the black, black sky.
*
Tarran ate walking, pacing round the wide cavern, touching the walls, stroking a pile of stone, and always coming back to the three columns. We’d wedged a torch between some rocks and near the brook for the water’s reflection, but even so it gave little light. I sat close to the brand, watching Tarran and seeing him as only a black shadow.
“I used to be a stone-wright,” he said, his hand on a glistening column. He had a look about him as if he were touching a living thing. “I’d take a hammer and chisel to a reach like this and call any shape you wanted from it.” Softly, almost tenderly, he whispered, “It isn’t magic, but it used to feel like that.”
He turned, moved abruptly away from what he could now only dream about.
“That’s how I know Cynara,” he said. “Not all the good stone is in Thorbardin. I used to come out of the cities from time to time, looking. She was a little girl when I first saw her, out behind the tavern and planting thorny rose bushes. It was I who made the bench in the garden, for her wedding gift.” He stopped, smiling ruefully. “For her first wedding gift. There was another wedding planned, after she’d been a widow for a while. But her man died. Ach, you probably know more about that than me, being from Raven. Any case, Cynara’s been a friend for a long time. How do you know her?”
I leaned away from the light, scooped up icy water and drank. I was a while swallowing, keeping the water in my mouth to warm. It was that cold, like snowmelt, and swallowed too fast that stuff can cramp the belly.
Finally, I said, “It was my father she was going to marry, that second time. He died in a hunting accident.”
All around us the dragon-echo sighed, and if Tarran heard anything but the thin fact in my answer he gave no sign.
“I’m sorry,” he said, awkward and caught unaware in the act of trespassing on another’s pain.
“Me, too.”
Tarran walked away from the stone. He sat down near the torch, and the light glinted on the hilts of his knives, darted from the ruby-eyed dragon brooch where his right arm used to be. He had a tentative look on him, as though he wasn’t sure he should say something. But he said it, sure or not.
“Feeling better?” He glanced away, then back. “From before, I mean.”
“I’ve got the solid ground under me again,” I said flatly. “I feel fine.”
His thin lips were a grim line, pressed tight, while he sat there thinking. In the stony channel, the icy water rippled over rocks, murmuring softly.
“You’re not afraid of heights, Ryle, are you?”
“No more than you are.” And that was the truth. I laughed, for show. “But I was afraid I wouldn’t grow wings fast enough.”
The torch spat embers. Tiny bits of light arced over the brook and fell into the breathing darkness. Tarran watched me intently, never blinking, his black eyes never moving.
“Ryle, listen.”
The dragon breathed in echoes, like the sea lapping at the shore. Tarran reached and touched my chest. He had a dark and strange look on him now, like a man seeing visions – as though he could know everything in my heart just from touching me. I wanted to move away, but I kept still, afraid to seem afraid.
“They say you’re fearless, Ryle Sworder. But surely they say wrong – no one is fearless. Listen to yourself, Ryle, and search for your worst fear, your most dire dread. Listen!”
He stood up, head cocked, eyes black as the chasm as the pupils widened, adjusting to the greater darkness.
“Claw feeds at night, in the forest where no one goes. If we’re very lucky, and very careful, we won’t see him. I’ll get my revenge, and we’ll get out of here with our pockets and packs filled with enough treasure to keep you like a king.
“But if our luck misses,” Tarran said, “if we once come in sight of Claw, he’ll know how to look at you and see your worst fear, the terror that cripples you. He’ll use that fear, and he’ll kill you with it just as if it were a sword to cut you apart.”
The torch guttered, spat sparks into the darkness, arcing bits of light. Then the darkness fell; the stumpy little ember couldn’t stand long against it.
“I was the first one Claw spotted,” Tarran said, whispering. “The first one he came for. He hurt me, and he left me bleeding halfway between him and my friends.”
His words were like heavy stones, one then another, and I felt the weight of them on my chest, like a barrow being built too soon over me.
“Claw used me for bait, and they took it. First Yarden... then the others. I couldn’t do anything to stop it happening. Between the dragon and them... I was helpless.”
Even in the dark people shouldn’t talk about such dread. I said, “Stop, Tarran. I don’t want to hear it.”
I spoke roughly, as to a coward baring his worst craven deed. I had no right to speak like that, and I hated the silence my words caused. But I couldn’t apologize, though I knew I should. His talk of worst fears was like one more crack in a weakening dam.
“It’s all right to be afraid, Ryle. Here, you’d better be.”
I closed my eyes, coldly quiet.
“All right, then. I’ll say no more but this: if you don’t know what your worst fear is, you’d better spend the night reckoning it out. You don’t want Claw to be the one to show it to you.”
I didn’t answer him, nor did I speak again for the rest of the night. In the morning, Tarran asked if I’d slept well, and I told him that I had. He shook his head as you would over a stubborn fool. Once, when he thought I wasn’t looking, he glanced back toward the tunnel that led to the chasm and the spiral path, the way back.
But he said nothing about not going forward. He’d come too far. So had I.
*
We went all the day through a series of chambers, caverns small and large, narrow and wide, and Tarran Ironwood remembered his path.
“I came in this way, and I went out this way.” He smiled bitterly. “The last somewhat more slowly than the first.”
He’d had his right arm on the way out; the bone had still hung to the shoulder. In two places the meat of the arm had been laid open, the muscles naked to his sight. He told me that, and he said that a man should never have to see what the inside of himself looks like. He’d bound the wound and done his best to keep it clean, but the arm already had the gangrenous stink about it by the time he got out and got found. He knew before anyone had to tell him that he’d be one-armed for the rest of his life.
I followed him closely, and he never took a wrong turn, never stopped for more than a moment to reckon a direction. I marked time passing by the count of the torches, and so I knew we’d walked a full day by the time we came to a low narrow tunnel like the one that led off the spiral road along the side of the chasm. This tunnel was much longer than that first, and as low. All the muscles in my back and shoulders were cramped with stooping by the time we came out of it and onto a wide ledge, like the gallery rounding a king’s great hall.
The whole place stank of dragon, the dry, dusty reptile smell, the scent of endless age, and Tarran’s breathing got rough and choppy, like he was trying not to gag. I looked up to the edge of light around the hole in the ceiling. The silver moon and the red sat together in a quarter of the sky, their light pouring down through the opening. By that shining I saw bones littering the stony gallery, the large rib cages of cattle and horses, the smaller bones of deer and elk. I saw a bear’s skull, and what had to be the skeleton of a minotaur, the horned skul
l larger than that of any bull you’d ever hope to see. Old blood painted the ledge, rusty brown, dripping over the edge, streaking the walls of the beast-hall below. Here was where Claw brought his night kills. Here, on this wide ledge, was where the dragon dined. Below us – almost sixty feet down – lay the beast’s lair, empty, as Tarran knew it would be. Claw was a night hunter. Above – so high I had to crane my neck to see – yawned the dragon’s way out, and the dragon’s way in.
“There’s a way down,” Tarran said, his voice hushed, hardly heard. He pointed to the left, and I raised the torch, saw gouges in the stone, like stairs.
“They’re not as regular as stairs,” the dwarf said. “Some are a longer step than others. But they’ll do.”
“Who built them?”
“Claw. The dragon’s got a way of changing his breath and spit into acid when it suits him. You knew that, didn’t you?”
I didn’t before then. “Why’d he build steps in here?”
“You’ll see.”
He didn’t say anything more, and now he was all pulled into himself, as he’d been when I first saw him in Cynara’s rose bower. I strung my bow and slung it over my shoulder, then checked to see that the steel-heads were close to hand. I took my sword from the sheath. These were good weapons and strong, and they’d always been my comfort. Not this time, and all the hair rose, prickling on my arms and neck as I followed Tarran Ironwood down into the dragon’s lair.
*
I thought I saw the empty-eyed skulls scattered on the floor before Tarran did. Maybe that’s so, but he knew they were there.
They were four, the bone-naked remains of dwarves by the size of them. The skulls weren’t bleached white, for they’d not lain out in the sun and the wind and the rain. They were brown, old and shiny things with gaping jaws and staring eye sockets. One of the skulls was split right down the middle, and the three whole ones were cracked, the cracks like dark lace.
“Rowson,” Tarran said, pointing to one of the three whole skulls. “And there’s Wulf. Oran’s over there.”
He went and knelt beside the broken skull, the one that lay in two pieces away from all the others. I raised up the torch. Tarran knelt right in the middle of a dark stain on the floor, a wide sweeping streak of rusty brown. There he’d lain, bleeding and begging his kinsmen to flee. They hadn’t done that. One by one they challenged the dragon for him, biting the bait every time, until they were all dead and Tarran lay alone in his gore, the broken bodies of his kin scattered around him. Their dying screams framed his nightmares for twenty years.
Tarran touched the broken skull, very gently, as if he were touching living flesh. Here was his brother, and the stain on the floor was the shadow of their blood.
“It was a hard way to kill them,” Tarran said. He got to his feet, and he came to stand by me. “It was a cruel, hard way to do it.”
He wasn’t looking at the blood mark as he spoke, or at me. He was checking the release of every one of those knives of his, making sure each would come swiftly from its sheath when needed. He kept the jewel-hilted long knife to hand.
“Are you ready, Ryle?”
Dry-mouthed, I said that I was.
“Put the torch out.”
I hesitated, wanting to cling to all the light I could.
“Do it.”
I did, and when my vision settled, there was more light to see by than I’d reckoned could be so. The great opening in the ceiling channeled the starlight and moonlight downward in a slanting, milky column. And now, with the light evenly spread, I saw more than blood and the browned skulls of Tarran’s luckless kinsmen. Now I saw the dragon’s hoard rising like a mountain of moonlit rainbows under the ground.
“It’s a fine hoard,” Tarran said, his voice low. “Raw gems from the mountains of Karthay, golden torques from Istar, rings from Palanthas... chalices and plate from the towers of wizards, from the halls of knights, from the tables of the elf lords in Silvanost. There,” he said, pointing to a sword. The blade was rust-pitted, age-dulled; the grip was a ruby, one solid stone shaped for a slender hand. “That belonged to an elven queen, and it’s said that she forged it herself, so long ago that these days her people hardly remember her name. All this Claw has stolen to hide the single thing he holds dearest.”
Whispering, like a worshiper, I said, “What could the beast hold dearer than this hoard?”
“I saw it,” he said, answering me only glancingly. Now he sounded like a dreaming man. “When I was lying for bait, I saw what the beast guarded, what he always tried to hide with every turn, every spread of his wings.”
We went wide around the bloodstain, wide around the skulls. Tarran was white in the moonlight, like a ghost walking. We went past piles of uncut topaz, and that was like walking past frozen fire. In the shadow of the mound, behind the hoard, we found another skull. It was a dragon’s, and it paled every treasure Claw had in his hoard.
Long as me, and half as long again, this skull was – like the others – browned with age. Its fangs were gilded, its eye sockets dressed in silver and filled each with a ruby the size of my two fists together. Seven bony spines, the start of a crest that must have run down the length of the dragon’s back, wore sheaths of silver and were hung with nets of slender gold strands from which diamonds and blue, blue sapphires dangled.
I touched one of those nets, and the jewels chimed gently against each other, a delicate tinkling.
“Tarran, what is this?”
He sighed, a whispered groan. “What the miser hoards to hide. Who would look past that mountain of trinkets to see this, aye?”
This skull, dressed in gold and silver and gems, was Claw’s treasure. Tarran had seen that. When his kinsmen were dying, one by one murdered, Tarran had seen the shape of his revenge behind the shining mass of stolen treasure.
Now he moved a little, as if to reach to touch the skull. But he didn’t reach, and he didn’t touch. He let his hand fall, barely raised.
“This is why Claw built the steps in his lair,” he said. “A gemsmith, or more than one, had to come in to do this work. It’s dwarf-craft. Claw made a bargain with someone out of Thorbardin, a long time ago.”
He lifted his long knife, eyeing it as though he’d never seen it before now. He turned it this way and that, the jeweled hilt and blued steel glittering in the moons’ light. Then, suddenly, he reversed his grip and made a shining hammer of the hilt. Groaning, aching right to his soul, he struck the dragon skull. Under this first of revenge’s blows, a silver-sheathed spine fell from the bony crest and shattered at my feet. A golden net of sapphires rattled, slithered, and clattered to the floor. I reached for it, and Tarran turned on me, his eyes like dark fire.
“Not till I’ve powdered this damn skull!”
He broke another spine from the crest, and he shouted a curse, the cry a longed-for release from old, old pain. He pried a rubied eye from one of the sockets, and his cursing now sounded like the cries of a blood-lusty soldier sacking a foeman’s hall.
This wasn’t my vengeance; it wasn’t for me to do this breaking. I stepped away, out into the moonlight, tight and tense and doing the job I was hired for – warding the vengeance-taking. Eyes on the great opening above, I walked past the hill of treasure, out into the middle of the lair. I stepped wide around the skulls of Tarran’s kinsmen, wide around the old blood mark on the stony floor.
Tarran kicked a tooth from the dragon’s skull. Now his cursing sounded like sobbing. I didn’t turn to look at him. Revenge is a private thing, and if a man wants to sob over it, he should be able to do it in privacy.
I walked round the lair, pacing, watching the sky – and, not watching the floor, I tripped on something. I flinched back, thinking it was an ancient bony relic of some unfortunate death, and saw that it wasn’t. In the shadows, I couldn’t tell more than that, and I toed it out into the center of the lair, into the light of the two moons. It was a shard of an old, leathery eggshell. Once a she-dragon had lived in this lair. With a sudde
n chill, I turned to see Tarran kicking another tooth from the skull that a gemsmith out of Thorbardin had dressed like a queen in jewels and gold.
The wind outside moaned like grief. The sound shivered down my spine. Tarran never seemed to notice. He kicked another tooth out of the dragon skull, and the wind’s moaning rose in pitch. The hair on the back of my neck and arms bristled.
“Tarran!”
A shadow, a wide pool of darkness, slid across the floor, and I saw the dragon, the beast framed in the opening. Broad black wings were just tucking in, his copper body gleamed, a long shining streak of red across the blackness, a bright star loose from the sky and running between the moons.
“Tarran!”
The lair filled with thick blood-reek – and the bone-crunch sound of two heavy bodies hitting the stone of the ledge, an elk and a cow. Supper. I grabbed Tarran’s arm, yanked him away from the skull.
“Come on! This isn’t worth dying for!”
His dark eyes wild, Tarran pulled away from me, but he was one-armed – and I had that arm in a tight grip. He couldn’t help but go where I dragged him.
I didn’t drag him far, only behind the jeweled skull. There, I went to my knees and pulled him down with me, so that we had Claw’s precious heirloom between us and the beast. For good measure, I shifted my grip on Tarran and clamped a hand over his mouth and nose. He couldn’t breathe behind my hand, and so he was forced to calm down. When I was sure he’d come all the way back from rage, I let him go. I pointed upward, then put a finger to my lips for silence. I could only hope that Claw’s hearing wasn’t so good that he’d catch the sound of my heart thundering.
We heard the beast eating, we heard the ripping of flesh, the crunching of bones. We heard the copper dragon lapping up steaming blood before it could all run off the ledge. I buried my face in my arms to hide from the reek, to keep from retching.
As Claw ate, groaning, a glutton over a feast, Tarran leaned close and by gestures let me know that the dragon would leave as soon as he’d fed, wanting water. I settled to wait, my hands shaking so hard I had to clasp them together, a fist against fear.
