Zoltan's mind was a buzzing blank. "I'll try to think of something." And he went on to tell her something more of his own story.
The mermaid assured him that she believed his story; it was, after all, perhaps not so unbelievable as her own.
Not that she could remember very much. She had been somehow kidnapped from a fishing village-she seemed to remember it as a fishing village, along a river very much bigger than this one-at a very early age, and conscripted into the evil Master's service-she was very vague about the details of how all that had happened.
She hesitated suddenly, in mid-speech, staring past Zoltan as if she saw something there that frightened her. Before he could turn, the transformation, which until now he had not witnessed directly, happened before his eyes. There was a large puff and cloud of something like steam in the moonlight, close enough for him to feel it; and he caught one clear glimpse of a large, leaping fish before it splashed into the water.
Late next morning, Zoltan, still following the stream downhill, came upon a trail-he didn't know how to describe it except as a trail-that was unlike anything that he had ever seen before. A vast, shallow gouge in the hard, dry earth, wide as a wagon road, knee-deep in the center and shallowing toward both sides. Desert bushes and other small plants had been uprooted and rocks torn out of the earth and dragged. At least it was easy to see which way the trail led. It looked to Zoltan as if some cylindrical weight the size of a substantial house had been dragged in a gently curving path across the land.
The track went right across the river and away from it again on the other side. Zoltan was still sitting on the bank, around midday, frowning at it, when the mermaid emerged partially from the water to talk with him again.
This time she sat in the sandy shallows instead of climbing out. She frowned at the strange scar that wound across the earth, and announced at once: "It is the track of a great worm."
Zoltan stared at her for a long time before he spoke. "Oh" was all he said when he did answer. Deep inside him, somewhere between his stomach and his heart, a lump of ice had suddenly congealed.
Almost everyone had heard at some time of great worms, though neither he nor the mermaid had ever actually seen one of the creatures. Very few people in this part of the world had ever done so. They were the final phase in the life cycle of the dragon and a thousand times rarer even than the land walkers.
Immediately after the first shock of fear that Zoltan experienced, doubts began to arise. Certainly this was not what Zoltan had had in mind as the spoor of the dragon. He had been intent on finding gigantic footprints of some unknown shape-but in some vague way, reptilian-looking-showing the marks of great unretracted claws. But this-this looked, he thought, as if an army had passed by, dragging all their baggage on sledges, obliterating by this means all of their own footprints and hoof prints. Such an effort might have wiped out even the tracks of dragons, land walkers, Zoltan supposed, had there been any.
"Are you sure?" he asked the girl.
"Oh, yes. I am afraid so. I am afraid that this can scarcely be anything else."
He was silent, thinking. Was it possible that any army would march with a dragon, or several, in its train? Zoltan had been reading and listening to martial stories since he was old enough to read, and he had never heard of the creatures being used as war-animals. The beasts were said to be too stupid and uncontrollable for anyone to try to use them- though, now that he thought about it, Uncle Mark and Ben told tales of a dragon, constrained by magic, that had once been set to guard the treasure of the Blue Temple.
Suppose, Zoltan thought, someone could harness a land-walker, a big one, and make it pull a sledge. Maybe, conceivably, it would produce a trail something like this ... or maybe a gouge like this one would need a squadron of land walkers. Now, following the trail slowly as it curved away from the stream-there was no doubt of which way it led-he had come to a spot where even small trees were bent and broken. One of the tree trunks was almost as thick as a man's body.
Wide as a wagon road, yet without ruts, the broad concavity went curving gently across the rugged countryside.
If this was indeed the dragon's path, then Zoltan's duty was to follow it. To do so, he was going to have to leave the stream, perhaps for good, and with it abandon his alternate plan of getting back to Tasavalta that way. Also he would miss his sometime companion, but there didn't seem to be any choice. Of course, the wizard's actual instructions had been to stick to the river. But having found something this unusual, it was hard not to assume it was the trail he had been told to look for.
He returned to the place where the trail crossed the river, and knelt to fill his leather water-bottle. The mermaid gazed at him sadly, and Zoltan tried to explain his difficulty to her. "I don't know if this is really a dragon's trail or not. But I suppose I have to follow it."
She was silent. Then he saw with vague but deep alarm that she was starting to weep.
"It is the trail of a dragon, as I have said," she told him presently. "But I wish that you would not follow it. I think that you are now my only friend, in all the world. And it will kill you."
The lump of ice was back, bigger than before. Other sensations, less definable but equally uncomfortable, accompanied it. Zoltan muttered something incoherent, and for some reason he could feel himself blushing.
As if with an effort of will, the mermaid ceased to weep. Brushing hair and tears out of her eyes, she predicted that the trail would loop back to the river again within a few kilometers because of the dragon's great need for water. "Unless of course it should be going to another river. Or some lake or pond."
"I do not think that there are any lakes or ponds near here."
But she was crying again and could not answer.
Zoltan finished refilling the waterskin that Mother Still had given him, and struck out away from the river, following the awestruck track, whatever it was, across country.
He came presently to a place where there were blurred hoof prints that he took to be those of several wild cattle, small convergent trails which terminated at the edge of the purported dragon's track. Here on the barren earth was a spurt of what might be dried blood, and here, nearby, was a fragment of a wild bull's leg, complete with hoof, some hide, and lower bones. But otherwise there were no bones or other debris to be seen in the area.
Zoltan pushed on. Presently he came to a place where there were droppings-what looked like a mound of dung, several days old and high as a man. Sharp fragments of large bones protruded from the mass. There were scales, too, and other products of digestion less identifiable.
He dismounted and poked at the mass with Dragonslicer, and swallowed. He had just felt, for the first time in his life, a stirring of power in a Sword.
Despite the mermaid's warnings, that gave him a shock. Of course there might be tiny, mouse-sized dragons burrowing in that compost heap. He knew it wasn't likely. That small, he thought, they should be living in a stream. Or ...
The trouble was that a single creature that could make a trail like this and leave a pile like this-that was an alternative that hardly bore thinking about. Zoltan didn't want to believe that something like that could really exist, that he might really have to face it.
He moved on.
Looking back at the titanic spoor, just before he rode out of sight of it, he still couldn't make himself believe that it was really what it looked like. Someone must have gathered together all the droppings of the animals of the whole army, and ... but why should anyone do anything like that?
No. No one creature could be that big. There wasn't any possibility of such a thing. Besides, how could such a monstrous creature catch anything to eat? Certainly not by stealth. It could of course consume vegetation, he supposed, whole thickets and trees. But there wasn't a lot of vegetation in this country. And in the pile back there, the bones, the evidences of carnivorism, had been plain.
Zoltan felt a little better when he saw that the trail was indeed leading him back to another l
oop of the river, about a kilometer away. He hurried ahead and found the mermaid already waiting for him there.
"I think you may have been right," he told her, and explained.
"Oh yes, I am right. It is the track of a great worm, Zoltan." She sounded sad, but resigned now, not tearful. "It is very much like an enormous snake. A great worm can move very fast for short distances. It can knock down anything you could put in its way. And I do not see how your uncle can fight it, even if the Sword that you are bringing him is magic as you say. How do you know where, in all that length, to find the heart?"
"How do you know so much about them?" The ice was still in his gut, and now his lips were going dry.
"That is something else that I cannot remember. Perhaps I saw a great worm once, when I was-when the evil people had power over me. Perhaps I saw-" Then the girl was silent, a pause that stretched on and on.
"Tell me more," Zoltan urged.
Her human lungs drew in a deep breath. "There is only one way I can think of by which it might be killed. A creature like this must seek some kind of shade, under trees, and lie still through most of the day. Otherwise the heat of the sun will kill it-it cannot find enough water here to lie in. Or it may be that the Master has given it the protection of his magic, too. Then even the magic of your Sword will do you no good at all. And if that is not enough, there is one more danger. The worm can hypnotize large animals and even sometimes people, and force them to march right into its jaws."
"But I must follow it." He could do that much. That was all he had to think about now, following it. If and when he actually came in sight of it-then he would decide what had to be done next.
Pushing on again, following the trail, Zoltan came to more droppings, and more bones. He found himself thanking Ardneh that the trail was still old. He estimated several days old, from the condition of the uprooted plants.
A thing this size could even gobble a land walker. Especially if one came along that was not too large.
How do you know where, in all that length, to find the heart?
CHAPTER 17
AGAIN the moon was almost full. Baron Amintor, riding alone, observed the off-round shape of it just beginning to materialize in the eastern sky at dusk as he began to jockey his riding-beast uphill around a minor waterfall, which occupied most of the width of a small canyon. The Baron, after a month of lonely travel, was still wearing his two Swords, one at each side.
He had been traveling almost steadily since trading Swords with Prince Mark, and he had come a long way on a winding route. The Baron's goal, a prearranged meeting place, was very near now. It lay just upstream along the river he had now reached. Amintor had never seen this river, the Sanzu, before, but he knew that its headquarters were somewhere deep in the rocky hills of Tasavalta, a good many kilometers to the east and north of here.
It was not the Baron's habit to hurry unnecessarily, but now he was peering somewhat anxiously ahead of him through the dusk, and when his riding-beast began to demonstrate an increasing reluctance to go forward, he kicked it in the ribs to urge it on. Amintor did not want to risk being late for the impending meeting. The appointment he was trying to keep had cost him a great deal of time and energy to set up, and it was of inestimable importance to his future.
The past month had not been unpleasant. As a rule he actually preferred traveling alone. No member of that band who had been with him before he'd taken the Sword of Mercy would have been a suitable companion for the grander enterprise upon which he was now entering; and by now the Baron felt almost grateful to Prince Mark for helping him to be rid of them all. Under the new conditions they might well have proved something of an embarrassment.
Amintor had expected, when he sent messengers to propose this meeting, that he'd be coming to it with Farslayer and Woundhealer at his belt-but as matters now actually stood, he thought he was in a substantially stronger position even than that.
Here, as on the even higher reaches of the Sanzu, none of the individual falls and rapids were very high, but there were a great many of them, which made progress difficult for anyone on foot or mounted who sought to follow the stream closely. When he had attained the next level spot where there was room, the Baron paused to let his mount breathe while he gazed up at the next splashing fall above and muttered to himself-it was a habit that had begun to grow on him during the past few weeks of solitude.
"No sign as yet he's here at all. And I'll not find him at all should he not want to be found. But I'm still convinced he's here and wants to talk to me."
Impatiently he cut short the pause for rest and pressed on. And, rounding the next rugged bend in the stream, the Baron had good evidence that his conviction was correct. Not that he saw the eminent wizard he had come here to meet; but what he did see awaiting him in the dusk appeared to be something even more unusual.
It lay like a fallen log across the earth and made a gently sagging bridge across the stream. And it was a roughly cylindrical, horizontal shape. But it was too thick and far too long-even had it not been disposed across the canyon in great snakelike curves-to be any fallen log that Amintor had ever seen.
At first glance he thought it might be some peculiar earthen bank, showing where the river had once followed a slightly different course. But here in the canyon that would be impossible, and anyway the configuration of the object was all wrong for that. Here and there it rose above the earth.
And then, even as the Baron studied it, the thing, the formation, whatever it was, moved. Shuddering longitudinally in a majestic, large-scale ripple, it shook off the fallen leaves that had begun to drift upon its top, and started up small animals which had been huddling next to it. The thought crossed Amintor's mind that the thing must have been lying immobile for quite some time if small animals had started to regard it as part of the landscape.
But his main, overwhelming impression was of sheer awesome size.
Now another part of the vast length, thirty or forty meters from where Amintor sat his mount, rose up from the earth. Something that had to be a head, though it looked to Amintor as big as a small chariot, reared up at that distance, topping the small trees. Yes, those two bright plates in the dusk were eyes. Impossibly huge, round and green as fishbowls, with such a span of shadow in between them that the Baron found he had some difficulty in drawing his next breath.
He looked to right and left along the rugged canyon floor, trying to see where the curves of the titanic body ended. What with the trees, and the shadows of the oncoming night, he couldn't tell. One thing was certain: there appeared to be no way for him to get around the creature, not in the confines of this gorge. Yet his instructions had been plain in the answer his messenger had brought back; this was certainly the way he had to pass if he was going to follow those instructions. And he was sure that this obstruction was not accidental.
The Baron's mount, faithful enough to jump off a cliff upon command, was growing restive in the presence of this monstrous creature, and he had to struggle for control to keep the riding-beast from bolting. He knew what to call the thing that blocked his way-a great worm-though in all his travels he had never actually seen one until now.
It was the terminal phase in the life cycle of the dragon; and not one in a million of those beasts ever reached it.
His two Swords in their metal sheaths clattered with the motion of the terrified riding-beast under him. Neither Farslayer nor Shieldbreaker was of the least good to him now. The one Sword that might possibly be able to help a man against such a creature was one Amintor did not have.
As he struggled with his mount, wondering meanwhile what to do next, a man's voice called to him from beyond the dragon. "Come on, then! Climb over!"
It was an authoritative voice, and though it was completely unfamiliar to the Baron, he had no doubt of who its owner was. Very well, then, he would climb over the waiting dragon.
If he was going to do so, there was no choice for him but to dismount and leave his mount where it was; to his
relief the riding-beast quieted as soon as he got off its back-it grew peaceful with magical suddenness indeed, he thought wryly-and let itself be tethered.
Then he approached the scaly wall of the worm's side, trying to look as if this was something he did every day, or once a year at least. As he did so Amintor thought that there were smaller eyes, eyes on a human scale, regarding him from a high ledge of rock beyond the beast. But he ignored that gaze for the time being.
The thickness of the creature's enormous, snaky body was approximately equal to Amintor's height. He gained a small advantage from stepping on a handy stone on the near side, stepped once more upon a roughly projecting scale-the beast took no more notice of his weight than would a castle wall-and vaulted to the top and over, dropping down nimbly enough on the other side.
"Up here, Amintor."
On a ledge of rock beside the next small cataract-a shelf of stone overgrown with vegetation and several meters above the worm-a figure waited. It was that of one who could only be the wizard Burslem.
Amintor had never seen the magician before, but one who gave orders here could hardly be anyone else. The Baron chose a route and clambered up to where the other man sat regally awaiting his arrival. The other arose from the fine chair he had been sitting in, as if belatedly deciding to offer that much courtesy; and the two men stood in the moonlight sizing each other up.
Burslem was quite a young man in appearance, though Amintor did not allow himself to be deceived by that. Indeed, the magician had the look of a somewhat bookish youth, wearing a soft robe that like his chair would have looked more appropriate in a library than on this desolate hillside surrounded by splintered rocks, grotesquely growing trees, and rushing water.
But the strangest things in the immediate environment were not those, perhaps not even the great worm. Amintor could sense living things whirring and rustling in the dusky air above the wizard's head, but they were almost impossible to see, and Burslem never looked up at them at all. The limb of a tall, dead tree projected through that space, and above the tree, a higher ledge. And, perched on that ledge, where the shadows of several taller trees congealed together, was a solid form, that of something that might have been a reptile-unless it was some kind of creature even less savory. Something in the Baron recoiled from that presence. He did not know what it was, and quickly decided that he did not want to know.
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