Dragon in the Snow

by Forrest Dylan Bryant

  They reached the white tower and stepped through an undecorated portal to the interior.

  There was a sound that was not a sound: something none of them would ever be able to describe, but none would ever forget. To liken it to an angelic choir would be inadequate. It throbbed up from somewhere beneath the floor, up through their toes and all the way to their heads, where it burst in a symphony. Seventeen sympathetic vibrations washed over them in perfect harmony, expanding and contracting the very atoms of their bodies.

  The walls were alive, pulsing with visible energy that coursed through crystalline veins and capillaries, spilling into amplifying coils and exotic transformers forged from solid stone, glowing fiercely as it ran under the walkways to the next tower or plunged back down to some unseen chamber below them. It was truly a machine, great and terrifying.

  The floor began to descend, silently, and the indescribable stone circuits lining the walls became ever more complex, humming with power, glowing in a riotous spectrum of reds and greens, blues and purples that dazzled their eyes.

  They dropped for a minute or more, and finally found themselves at the heart of the Great Machine. It was a cavernous room, perfectly circular. The seventeen singing stones were lodged in niches along the outer wall, glowing furiously, singing their ethereal songs to each other as they spewed, stored or reflected their unknowable energies.

  In the center of the giant room there was a vast crystal bowl, fifty feet across and glowing a dull red. Six stone pylons pointed at its center.

  “Impressive,” said Doyle, quietly. He was awed by the spectacle. “But what does it do?”

  The Black Dragon grinned. “It conquers.”

  He gestured grandly at the colossal, impossible machinery all around them.

  “For years, I have sought to extend the power of Chenggi-Lai to the rest of the world. I first thought to project energy through the air, where it could rain down upon a city, or a warship, or an army. But I could not do it. The curvature of the earth, you see. It limited my range. So I decided to use that curvature to my advantage. Instead of projecting upward, I now tunnel downward, into the earth itself.”

  A chill ran through the room as the prisoners looked anew at the machine. Now they could see how it was all directed down, to this spot at the very bottom of the quarry.

  “Seventeen singing stones, together the greatest force ever harnessed by man. In Europe today there are men seeking to split the atom. But I have seventeen natural atom-splitters right here in this room. Their energies are attuned, amplified, purified, and returned down here. This lens, forged from every available scrap of red aspect stone, amplifies the energy further. It is forced downward, through the crust and into the molten mantle of the earth, where it can be directed to any spot on the globe. I can even use the earth’s iron core as a refracting mirror, for greater accuracy.”

  Professor Armbruster had turned pale. “And what happens to the target?”

  “The earth’s crust is impacted from below, struck by a magma wave of astonishing force. The crust is destabilized, liquefied and obliterated in a volcanic earthquake. The effect is quite breathtaking; I gave a demonstration to your government not twelve hours ago.” He saw the look of horror on Armbruster’s face. “A small island, nothing more. I have not taken your cities. Not yet. Now, let us return to the Great Hall, and decide what is to be done with you.”

  Chapter XXXIII

  THE ASPECT OF DESTRUCTION

  —

  AS THEY ASCENDED the tower elevator back towards the Great Hall, Bartholomew St. Cyr turned to address the Glorious Dragon. The fiend was savoring his moment, his grey eyes flashing with triumph. It was now or never.

  “This is all most impressive, your excellency. Truly extraordinary. You have accounted for nearly everything. All you’re missing is the amulet of Ando Chee.”

  “Indeed,” said the Black Dragon, raising one eyebrow slightly. “The amulet is presumed lost. But then, so was the golden stone which you have so kindly brought to me. You know something, perhaps?”

  “I am familiar with the legend. It is said...” — the old scholar was going for broke now — “It is said that the man who possesses the amulet can move objects using only his mind. That could be a very useful ability, could it not?”

  “Where is it?!” The Black Dragon’s face darkened like a storm cloud, a twisted mass of avaricious rage. “Do not presume to bargain with me, peasant! Your life became forfeit the moment you defied me, stone or no stone, amulet or no amulet!”

  “No need to take that tone, your excellency. I won’t hide it from you. It’s right here...” St. Cyr reached into his robe and withdrew the amulet, holding it aloft like a glowing trophy. “It doesn’t work outside of Chenggi-Lai. Believe me, I’ve tried. But here within the walls, well, that’s another matter.”

  It all happened in a blur. St. Cyr stared at a point in mid-air, just beyond the tower that contained the Great Hall. Something hovered there, golden and shining. The thing came flying towards them.

  The Black Dragon saw the singing stone swooping down and reacted with pure, lightning instinct. He whipped a metallic orb from the folds of his robe, and an arc of white-hot flame went roaring towards Bartholomew St. Cyr.

  But Djali, the valet, had prepared himself for such a terrible moment. As Wo Then-Liang unleashed the deadly fire, Djali leapt between the fiend and his employer, letting the flames meet him in mid-air. He vanished in an acrid swirl of dark smoke, his scream evaporating into a remote sigh.

  The golden cylinder came closer. St. Cyr reached for it, but too late. The Black Dragon fired again, and this time he did not miss. The amulet of Ando Chee clattered to the ground, followed an instant later by the heavy thump of the singing stone. Bartholomew St. Cyr was no more.

  Just then a new sound, deep and ominous, began to ring out from every direction as huge alarm gongs, unused for six centuries, echoed throughout the palace: the complex was under assault. The Black Dragon halted his advance upon the singing stone and ran to a nearby parapet, where he stood for a moment, stunned into silence. Below him was chaos. Blazes of white flame mingled with the flash of tempered steel as whole squadrons of Shadow Order mercenaries fell upon the Chenggi palace guard in a howling wave. Black suits and red robes collided in an orgy of destruction. And off in the distance a third faction, robed in green, began to attack both the others. The unthinkable had occurred. Open rebellion.

  Baron Franz de Rothburg had the singing stone by the time the Black Dragon turned back to face his prisoners. Their guards had all disappeared, running off to join — or perhaps to flee — the spreading battle. And for the first time in his adult life, since the day of his exile nearly ninety years earlier, Wo Then-Liang did not know what to do. His empire was suddenly crumbling below him, but here before him was a threat perhaps equally grave. He took up the nearer challenge.

  “No!” yelled the Baroness as the white flame came roaring once again, this time aimed at her father. Acting on reflex, Franz de Rothburg held the singing stone in front of his body like a shield, and the flame did not touch him. But it was not reflected back, either. The golden glow simply disappeared as the stone absorbed the blast, to be replaced by purest black: a strange, ineffable darkness, deep as eternity, seemed to swallow up all light around the cylinder and filled the Baron with a bizarre, nameless dread.

  The Black Dragon watched, wide-eyed, his jaw slackening: he too seemed consumed by fear. The Aspect of Destruction, he thought. It is real. But before he could make any response, something slammed into his side, moving fast and hitting hard, sending him staggering backwards and over the low wall to the battle-wracked plaza thirty feet below.

  “Sid!” screamed Rosie. What was he doing? What had he done? Without warning, Sid had jumped up from the spot where he cowered with the other prisoners, running at full speed onto the parapet with a wild fire in his eyes. He tackled the Black Dragon, who went toppling over the wall. But he could not check his own momentum. As Rosie wat
ched in horror, Sid Friedman too fell over the edge, locked in a death grip with his monstrous enemy.

  “No!” she breathed. “No, no, no...” And she was up and running for the stairway leading to the plaza, forgetting her own safety as she plunged headlong into the raging battle. Hank gave chase, clearing the way with his huge fists. By some miracle, they both reached Sid without serious injury, although Hank took an ugly slash to the left arm. Sid was not so lucky. He lay unconscious on the ground, one leg fractured in several places below the knee. The Black Dragon was nowhere to be seen.

  Hank did not need to keep the fighters away from Sid’s prone body; Rosie’s anger repelled the battle like a magnetic field as she fell to her knees and wept over her broken boyfriend. Her nursing instincts soon kicked in, and as she looked for a way to immobilize Sid’s head and leg, a tall, solemn figure stepped forward, surrounded by green-robed bodyguards.

  “Bring him, miss. We can help him.” Rosie looked up and saw the face of Nenn Si-Lum: his nose was bloodied, his robe torn, but he stood proud and defiant. Hank hefted Sid onto his broad shoulders as Nenn led the way back indoors, heading for the healing machines Sonny had described earlier.

  * * *

  “They’ve followed him in; those fellows in green must be on our side,” reported Doyle, watching over the edge of the parapet. “I think it was our friend Nenn Si-Lum!”

  “He’ll protect them,” said the Baroness. “And Sid’s taken care of the Black Dragon, at least for the moment. Now the rest of us have to do our part.”

  The remaining adventurers split into two groups. The Baroness and Sonny set off across the courtyard to find a means of escape. Sonny had spied a landing field of some sort during their march from the prison, and he was confident his drivers’ intuition could guide him back to it. He carried the Black Dragon’s flamethrower for protection, and his employer wore the amulet of Ando Chee, just in case.

  Baron Franz, Captain Doyle and Professor Armbruster had accepted the grim mission of attempting to destroy the Great Machine. The Baron still held the singing stone, which retained its mesmerizing black aspect, so terrible to behold. It was a perfect, abysmal black. The surface of the stone reflected no light whatsoever, obscuring all detail. It was like a cylindrical hole in the universe. And perhaps most unnerving of all, the object’s celestial song had ceased; it was replaced by a deep, steady tone that made the Baron’s arms tingle and his head throb.

  The three men returned to the quarry, to the ring of white towers that marked the upper reaches of the Great Machine, and they descended.

  The vast circular chamber at the bottom of the pit looked completely different to them now. Before it had been a room of amazement and wonder. Now it seemed to bear down on them, threatening to crush their very souls. The melodious singing of the seventeen singing stones along the wall had become cruel, mocking laughter. What can you do to me? they heard the machine taunting, You are nothing. I am Death.

  “Think!” shouted Armbruster. “We are scientists; we can do this. It is a machine, nothing more. It is built upon physics and circuitry, however exotic. How do we disable it?”

  “We short-circuit it,” said Doyle. “The singing stones are like electric components: resistors, batteries, transformers, vacuum tubes. The machine works only because they are in perfect balance. So we upset the balance.”

  He walked, tentatively, up to one of the stones. It was of green aspect. Its carved monsters leered at him as he approached, its alien inscriptions teasing and deriding him. He wrapped his robe around his hands, reached out and tried to tug the stone loose from its niche. This was a mistake. There was a loud crackling ‘boom’ like a thunderclap, and Doyle was hurled across the room, landing awkwardly on the lip of the huge red focusing lens. The engineer was dazed and shaken; his robes were blackened and smoking. The stone had not budged.

  Armbruster was next to try. He identified a rocky pedestal near the six pylons that fed energy into the lens. It looked like a control panel, inlaid with banks of colored crystals. A large stone tablet sat upright beside the pedestal, delicately carved with a detailed world map. Fine lines of glowing, crystalline liquid coursed over the map from several different directions, converging on a spot in the South Pacific. Armbruster and the Baron scrutinized the control panel for a few moments, but could make little of it. One large red crystal on the right looked disturbingly like a trigger mechanism, but there was no obvious shutdown switch. The Professor took his best guess, and lightly touched one of the glowing stone controls on the side opposite the trigger. The lines on the map quivered and shifted instantly, diverging from the Pacific island, flowing over the map’s stone surface like quicksilver and reconnecting at another, pre-selected point, far from their original target. Franz de Rothburg stared. His eyes grew wide.

  “Touch nothing else, Professor!” he said. “According to the map, we have just aimed this monstrosity at New York City.”

  Both men took a step back from the control panel.

  Doyle stood up and joined the others, but he was groggy. He shot a bleary-eyed glance at the map and panicked.

  “Put it back! Put it back!” Doyle slurred. He grabbed at the pedestal, but clumsily. His hand slipped; he hit the large red control. And all at once the Great Machine surged to life.

  The three men watched as the stones grew brighter, one by one. First the greens flared, then the blues, and so on until finally the red stones poured forth their light. Armbruster stabbed wildly at the control panel, but it was no use. The thing was armed and about to fire. The six overhead pylons began to glow red, ready to shoot their beams of directed energy into the center of the focusing lens.

  There was nothing any of them could do. Except...

  Baron Franz heaved the terrifying black stone at the massive lens in desperation. But it was too heavy. It clunked down a good fifteen feet short of the center. The Baron climbed onto the lens after it.

  “Stop!” yelled Armbruster. “What in blazes are you doing?!” Baron Franz de Rothburg paused and looked at the two scientists with a calm, steady gaze.

  “I’m upsetting the balance,” he said. He picked up the black stone and walked into the center of the focusing lens. He turned back, and now there were tears running down his cheeks.

  “Tell my daughter...” Six beams of crackling red light enveloped the Baron, and he was gone.

  The black stone remained suspended in mid-air as the six beams of light emptied into it, disappearing into the endless blackness before they could reach the lens. The stone’s aspect did not change. But the humming sound it made grew steadily louder, its pitch rising. The air began to shimmer as waves of rippling darkness issued from its cylindrical form.

  “Run,” whispered Armbruster, and then he screamed it at the top of his lungs. “RUN!” He clutched at Doyle and dragged him out of the chamber, back to the elevator platform.

  The seconds passed interminably as the floor rose along the white tower towards the surface of the mesa. The black stone was loud enough now to be heard all the way to the top, and the dark shimmering of the air soon followed. At last they reached the apex. The scientists tumbled out of the tower and onto the elevated walkway.

  Armbruster looked down into the pit and beheld the gates of hell. The entire floor of the quarry was engulfed, blacker than the darkest night, with the high-pitched screaming of the stone clawing at his eardrums. So loud, so piercing was the din that he did not hear the eerie scraping sound of living stone wings approaching just over his head.

  The flying dragon dropped down directly in front of the scientists, making them fall backwards in alarm. It hovered there, its impossible stone wings beating the rippling air, its terrifying eyes and mouth flaming right in Armbruster’s face. He raised his arms in surrender.

  A door opened in the dragon’s back, between the wings. And out popped the head of Sonny Hampton.

  “Come on, you two! We’re getting out of here!”

  That was good enough for them. Armbruster and
Doyle scrambled over the dragon’s head and into the flying craft, mere seconds before the walkway crumbled and fell. As the dragon lifted out of the quarry and away, the towers themselves fractured and toppled, one by one, to be devoured by the waiting blackness.

  The Baroness was waiting in the flying ship’s cabin, bouncing her leg anxiously. But when she saw two men come aboard instead of three, the nervous motion stopped. Her face clouded over with the recognition of what had happened.

  “I... I don’t know what to say,” mumbled Professor Armbruster. “He saved us all. He saved the world.”

  Angelica was silent for several moments, as a whirl of conflicting emotions flew across her face, finally settling into a remote calm. “Then it’s okay,” she said at last.

  “I already lost him once, and I thought it was all for nothing. But he came back. He came back, you see, so his death could mean something.” Her expression wavered, and she began to sob, the words coming in shorter bursts. “I love my father... He’s the greatest... bravest man who ever lived. And I’m... I’m so proud of him.” She hugged the Professor and let it all out. She cried on his shoulder for a long, long time. He did not interrupt.

  The dragon’s pilot, an elderly Chenggi with a steady hand, circled the palace twice, looking for Nenn Si-Lum. He found the rebel leader on the second pass, with Sid, Rosie and Hank in tow, all apparently in excellent condition. Sid scrambled aboard under his own power and on both legs, and Hank’s arm no longer bled. The dragon lifted off again and circled out, angling away from the mesa. As they turned away from the scene a flash seared the air like lightning, and moments later a tremendous concussion of air slapped the flying ship like an airborne tidal wave. The passengers looked back to see the quarry explode with ash and steam, hurling chunks of rock skyward like a volcano. The outer reaches of the palace survived, but on their next pass, the adventurers saw that the quarry in the center had become a steaming caldera, the Great Machine gone, the black mass gone, all replaced by a bubbling, cooling lake of molten lava.