Jan stumbled, sluggish. The trail led endlessly down and down. Unlike the pliant heels of Oro and his fellows, his own fire-hardened hooves clanged and sparked against the ringing black rock. He marveled at these small unicorns’ deft maneuvering along the rocky steeps. They seemed more shaggy, curl-horned sheep than unicorns. He himself had to place each step with utmost care lest he plummet into crags the bottom of which he could not see but which sounded, from the echo of falling scree, interminably deep.
At last the trail leveled off. Before them lay a great cavern, vast in its expanse. Entering, Jan could not discern whence the dusky illumination came. Much of the dimly lit chamber was shrouded in darkness. Oro’s companions hurried to either side where, the prince of the Vale realized, a large assembly of other unicorns waited expectantly among the shadows. All faced inward, toward the chamber’s heart, and all, so far as Jan was able to discern in the murky light, resembled one another as closely as Oro and his band: small, dark, shaggy brindles, dapples, and roans with half-standing manes.
His maroon-colored guide was leading him forward, out onto the chamber’s wide floor, which, Jan saw, was littered with great pebbles, all roughly round, some smooth as riverstones, some faceted as bees’ eyes. Of many colors they gleamed—deep amber, darkest blue, violet so pure it was nearly black, swarthy gold—but reds predominated. Most, especially the larger stones, ranged in hue from dark crimson to wine red, from russet and ocher to vermilion and scarlet. They reminded Jan of the dim, smoldering coals of a fire long perished.
Among the stones lay crystalline pillars, smoothly irregular in shape, all fallen on their sides, some with bulbous knobs at either end. Other crystal forms resembled rotted treestumps, overturned. These squat, pearlescent masses were full of openings. A long trail of them wound snakelike across the chamber’s length, most nested one against another, others lying askew. Large, semitransparent leaves or shells lay everywhere, brittle as fanclams and more numerous than the jewels. They, too, were mostly red, looked almost like enormous fish scales. Blearily, Jan’s eyes swept the trove, unable to take it in.
“What place is this?” he mumbled, stumbling to a stop as Oro halted at the chamber’s heart.
Magnified, the echo of his voice leapt away from him on every side, less jarring than a shout, but just as penetrating. Jolted, Jan listened to the sudden sound’s reverberations, already dying. Leaning near, the maroon stallion scarcely breathed, though the prince of the Vale heard him distinctly as mothwings beating against a leaf.
“The queen’s vault,” he answered, “known as the Hall of Whispers. Peace, now. I must announce you.”
They stood among the jewels and shards and crystal boles, very near a massive oblong boulder. One end formed a great flattened dome. The other tapered to a ragged, broken point. Two smooth, symmetrical hollows gaped from the translucent dome, one on either side of the tapering cone. At dome’s crest, between the hollows, dipped an oval depression. It was filled with clear fluid, sparkling though absolutely still, its dark, reflective surface smooth as skin. Jan gazed longingly at the well-spring. His parched throat burned.
“Hail,” Oro beside him said, without so much as raising his voice. Nevertheless, his words filled the chamber. Those assembled at the chamber’s periphery responded, “Hail.”
Each must have spoken no louder than a murmur, yet the collective ring was strong and clear. Jan thought he detected other voices, too—deeper and more resonant than unicorns’—lost among the rest.
“I beg you forbear our latecoming,” the young maroon continued. “Rockfall day past delayed our climb. Then, just as my fellows and I reached Streaming Ledge hard by the veiled ingress to the netherpath, we met a stranger on the brink of dawn.”
Again the echoing murmur, curious, even excited now. The ranks ranging the vast hall’s edge shifted and stirred. This time Jan could not distinguish words, but once more he sensed, blended amongst the others, strangely timbred voices which were not of his own kind.
“By me he stands,” Oro announced, his timing and cadence clearly that of a singer, “an outlander called Firebrand, with the moon-marked brow. He comes from beyond, over Saltland and Plain, bearing news of lost Halla, our sovereign princess, and the wretched wyverns who wrested from her the Hallow Hills.”
The uproar that greeted these words was deafening: shouts of surprise, exclamations, disbelief, calls for Oro to explain. Jan flattened his ears, overwhelmed by the rolling waves of sound. Beside him, the young maroon stood calmly, undismayed—perhaps even a little pleased—by the upheaval his news had occasioned. An instant later, the tumult vanished as voices infinitely fuller and stronger than any unicorn’s spoke, extinguishing all other clamor.
“Welcome,” the first of these new, resonant voices said, and others echoed it. “Welcome. Welcome…”
The words seemed to come from all directions. Casting his gaze, the dark unicorn strove to locate their source.
“Welcome to Dragonsholm, Firebrand.” A fourth voice spoke. Others chorused, “Firebrand. Firebrand…”
Their pure, even tones filled the hall like the calling of oncs or the belling of hounds, richly pleasurable to harken. Jan felt no fear of these unseen speakers, wherever they might be. All were female, he sensed. The timbre of their voices, so much more powerful than those of his own folk, somehow told him so. He sensed, too, that regardless of how near they sounded, in reality they lay many leagues distant, the black rock carrying their words to him and his to them.
“Hail, red dragons,” he answered, “holders of the Smoking Hills, hosts to the Scouts of Halla, my people’s long-lost kin.”
Around him, the hushed unicorns stirred, ears up-pricked, listening. Oro stood no longer at his side, Jan realized. He glimpsed him just joining the edge of the crowd. The prince of the Vale stood alone by the great crystalline boulder with the pool in its crown.
“You are called Firebrand,” a dragon voice said.
Another, speaking just on the heels of the first, asked, “ Are you the one?”
“The one of whom the Scouts have spoken,” still another voice continued, “destined to lead them back to their Hallow Hills?”
“You have traveled far,” still others added. “You must be weary.”
“I am Aljan,” the dark unicorn answered, and indeed, he felt nearly mazed with weariness, unsure how many hours or days he had gone without water and food. “My folk call me Firebringer, and Moonbrow.” But not prince. He would not tell them the folk of the Vale called him prince. “It is they I mean to lead in retaking the Hallow Hills. As for the Scouts of Halla, I cannot say.”
“Tell us this tale,” the dragon voices responded.
“The tale of you.”
“The tale of your journey.”
“All season lies before us.”
“It must be a wondrous tale.”
Jan felt his knees growing weak. The dark room spun. He heard murmurs of concern from those in the shadows, saw Oro start toward him.
“But sip first,” the voices of dragons invited. The maroon stallion halted, hesitated. The dragons lilted on.
“Sip.”
“Sip of the queen’s pool beside you.”
Turning, Jan tried to focus on the natural basin of water in the huge white boulder’s crown. Oddly, though its surface lay perfectly still, it seemed to bend and shift somehow, as though currents beneath its surface created eddies. As he bent to drink, the depression’s shallow bottom appeared to recede from him. He caught glimpses of comets and suns, of unicorns hurtling across a field of stars—or was it a starlit Plain?
Jan shook his head. He closed his eyes, sure that fatigue was causing him to dream. His mouth touched the water, and he was surprised to find it warm, not cool. As the water filled his mouth, the fantastic notion came to him that he was drinking stars. He swallowed once. The pleasantly tepid fluid seemed slightly thicker than water, its taste mildly acerbic, yet at the same time like balm. He had prepared to draw in long drafts, but stra
ngely, after the first sip, he felt entirely satisfied.
He had been speaking, he knew, for a very long time. Jan felt wholly detached, free of hunger, thirst, and fatigue. Time seemed suspended. The sea of figures before him shifted and changed, Oro’s the only one he was able to distinguish with certainty. His own voice, filling the vast, dimly lit chamber, sounded unlike himself, like the voice of another, a singer’s cant from the one with whom he had traveled upon the Plain, the one with the star-flung coat. What had been his name? Summer Stars.
The dark unicorn had no idea how long he had spoken, telling the unseen dragons and the shadowy Scouts before him everything about his people’s history, how lying wyrms had defeated Halla four hundred summers gone, driven her and her small surviving band from the Hallow Hills. How they had come upon the Vale after long wanderings and taken refuge, there to grow strong and numerous again, in preparation for recapturing the Hallow Hills.
He spoke of his own life, how he had been reared by the king of the unicorns and, in his youth, faced a wyvern queen in her den. His hooves now struck sparks, his horn, hardened by wyvern sorcery, grown keen and hard enough to pierce even the toughest wyvern bone. He had dwelt half a year with two-footed firekeepers, learning the secret of their flame. His folk all hailed him Firebringer. Forging alliances with gryphons and pans, he had made his herd proof against wyvern stings. This coming spring, they would leave the Vale and march into wyvern-held Hallow Hills to retake them in Alma’s name.
He spoke of the king of the Vale run mad and of pursuing him across the Plain. He spoke of his mate, pied Tek the warrior mare, a singer, wondrously fair, firstborn child to the late king who, serpent-stung to death upon the Waste, left the Vale in his daughter’s charge. Queen of the unicorns she reigned, though she did not yet know it. Mother to twin heirs, a filly and foal. The only thing he did not reveal was his own parentage, never naming himself Son-of-Korr or prince. Despite his oddly calm, loosened-tongued state, he could not bring himself even now to face the horror spat at him by dying Korr, that he and his mate shared a single sire.
The voices of dragons spoke no more. The Scouts of Halla listened rapt. When he spoke of Tek, they cheered. Jan had no awareness of the passage of time, speaking on as in a dream. Neither night nor day penetrated the depths of Queen Mélintélinas’s Hall. Figures among the crowd came and went as he spoke. He felt no need for food or drink or sleep. At times, he realized, he had ceased to speak, and the Scouts of Halla spoke, or sang, or chanted their own history: the journey of their four ancestors over the Plain, across the Salt Waste to the Smoking Hills.
Here, from Queen Mélintélinas, they had learned the wyverns’ secret past: that wyrms had stolen dragonsfire, seeking to seize these dark steeps for their own, only to be driven off at last by the red firedrakes who once had sheltered them. The wyrms had wandered then, surviving the Salt Waste and the wide grass Plain until they slithered into the Hallow Hills and lied their way into a truce with the unicorns who dwelt there—all the while planning to betray them and seize their lands as once they had striven to seize the red dragons’.
The voices of Oro and his fellows sounded through the cavern in long, resonant notes. While one singer chanted a melody, four or six others droned a background chord which changed as the song progressed. These airs—some solemn, but many lively—filled the chamber’s vast expanse. Jan marveled how the great hall enhanced sound and channeled it, so it seemed, to all the depth and breadth of the Smoking Hills. He imagined his words and those of the singers reaching out along all the netherpaths to wash against the ears of dragons slumbering, or perhaps listening, far underground.
At last he became aware that all voices had ceased, his own and those of Oro and the rest. A silence pervaded the dusky chamber that was neither cold nor ominous. Jan felt suspended still, untouched by thirst, hunger, or fatigue. Once more Oro stood beside him near the great crystalline boulder. The shaggy throng of mountain unicorns that once had kept their distance had moved closer now. A new voice spoke, one the dark Unicorn had not heard before: a dragon’s voice.
“Well sung,” she sighed, and the echoes whispered, “Sung. Sung…”
A murmur passed through the crowd. Jan heard gasps of “The queen! The queen!”
“Aye,” she answered. “You have wakened me, and the song your words have woven has entered my dreams.”
The dark unicorn heard Oro’s delighted, breathless laughter, saw playful nips and gleeful chivvying exchanged among many around him, though all seemed mindful of decorum, at pains to maintain a respectful hush.
“Of one singer I would hear more,” said the dragon queen, her strange voice penetrating yet mellifluous, “the outlander who calls himself Aljan. Oro, who escorted him on the netherpath, guide him, I pray you, to my chamber below.”
Jan sensed a sudden change in the hall. The unicorns around him froze, caught in their breath with expressions of uncertainty, even alarm. He himself felt nothing, neither terror nor joy. Beside him, Oro tensed.
“Great queen,” he began, as if straining for calm.
“Peace,” she bade him, almost gently. “Has he not drunk the dragonsup? Would I send for him if to do so would bring him harm?”
Her words seemed to calm the Scouts, though glances still darted among the company. The young maroon swallowed.
“And I, great queen?” he asked, nearly choking as he glanced at the shallow, fluid-filled depression in the dome of the huge crystalline boulder beside which he and the dark prince stood. “Am I, too, to sup?”
“Not yet,” she answered. Jan sensed amusement just beneath her tone, saw Oro heave a soundless sigh of relief. “Do but lead him as far as safely you may, then instruct him the way to journey’s end.”
The words rang briefly in the still chamber. A moment of silence followed. Then quickly, quietly, the crowd began to disperse. The scores, perhaps even hundreds of small, shaggy unicorns moved near silently, melting back into the shadows to exit the great hall, through what egress the dark unicorn could not see. Soon he discerned from an almost indistinguishable change in the soft echoes in the chamber that he and Oro now stood alone.
“We must depart,” the maroon beside him breathed. “First we must climb a little, and then descend a very long way for you to reach the queen.”
The roan stallion led Jan to the far side of the immense chamber. The dark prince spied an inclined path leading up the wall toward a tunnel above. Oro started up. Jan followed, pausing in the tunnel’s entry to gaze back down at the vast chamber below. The scattering of huge jewels, the pale, pillar-like shapes all lying fallen, the great, reddish scales, and the enormous oblong, irregular boulder with the fluid-filled depression in its crown all altered suddenly in the dark unicorn’s view.
They no longer appeared to lie in random, orderless scatter. They were, he realized, the scales and bones of some great animal, its flesh long gone, its spine forming a winding trail across the floor. Bones of four great limbs splayed to either side. Toppled ribs lay in between, among the jewels and scales which must have adorned the creature’s hide. Its skull, Jan perceived with a start, was the oblong boulder, resting jaw downward, empty eye sockets the symmetrical, gaping hollows. The little pool gleamed darkly in the—apparently natural—depression upon its brow. Jan could not guess the source of the liquid forming there. Gasping, he gazed at the huge reptilian skeleton below.
“What is that?” he managed. “Whose bones?”
His guide glanced at him quizzically. “The bones of Mélintélinas, late queen of the red dragons. Did I not tell you this be her lair?”
“Late…?” Jan shook his head, trying to clear it. He felt stunned, stupid still. “But is not Mélintélinas the queen who has summoned me?”
Oro shook his head, turning to travel on. “Nay. That be her daughter, the new queen, Wyzásukitán.”
14.
The Dragon Queen
The Hall of Whispers served as the old queen’s audience hall,” Oro panted, champing
to moisten his mouth in the hot, dry air. “It be sacred to the dragons, but we have always stood welcome there. Our hosts tell us our Congeries honors the memory of the queen they mourn still.”
“Mélintélinas,” Jan murmured. “To whom Halla sent envoys four hundred autumns past?”
The other nodded. “The same.”
“When did she die?” the dark unicorn asked. “I thought firedrakes lived centuries.”
0ro nodded. “Queen Mélintélinas reigned twelve hundred year and passed into eternity scarcely a hundred winter past. Her successor, Wyzásukitán, be young—as yet unpaired—but very skilled in dragonlore…”
The walls of the tunnels through which they descended grew warmer, their dull golden glow becoming brighter. Wafts of steam curled by, passing in gentle gusts. Jan was aware of the heat, but it did not truly reach him. He felt no flush beneath the skin, no prick of sweat. His heart did not pound, nor his breath labor. It seemed to him he could embody the very heat of the sun and suffer no ill.
Beside him, Oro’s thick roan coat ran with sweat. His ribs heaved. His speech came short. Sometimes he stumbled. At last he halted, staring ahead down the sloping path. Jan halted beside him. The fog had dissipated. Below them lay a lake of fire. Air shimmered above it. Beneath, liquid spurts of yellowish white mingled with sluggish swirls of sunset orange and molten red. A series of small, black islands, very closely spaced, formed a kind of path across—if one were very sure of foot.
“I can fare no farther,” Oro gasped. “Heat fells me. You, though, be shielded by the dragonsup. Forge on across the cinder isles. The hold of Wyzásukitán lies beyond the brimstone sea.”
Jan bowed to his host, seeking words of thanks, but found himself unexpectedly tongue-tied.
“Farewell for the present, Scout,” he heard himself say at last. “I trust to rejoin you shortly.”
Oro also bowed, very low. “Fare you well, Firebrand,” he answered gravely. “I and my folk await your return.”
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