by Tad Williams
“Look at the cover,” he said. The chipped remnants of what had once been gold paint read: ty of O avi M. T nker, Esq.
He felt a ripple of excitement so strong he shivered. “It’s really his-and we’ve got it. But we can’t tell anybody.”
Lucinda nodded, her eyes wide.
Outside, Zaza was waiting, perched on the top of Great-great-great-whatever Octavio’s picture, peering down at them as though not quite trusting that whatever came out of the retiring room was going to be the same as whatever went in. Lucinda stared at the painting.
“What’s that thing in his hand?” she asked. “I’ve never seen one of those before. Is it some musical thing?”
“I don’t know.” Tyler really looked at the golden thing for the first time. Besides the long, trumpetlike tubes, it was made up of an overlapping series of jagged-edged circles and points, as if old Octavio had just taken out the workings of some large clock and screwed them together in some random order. Then Tyler noticed that in his other hand Octavio held a black velvet bag, and suddenly he realized that it was meant to hold the shiny device.
“Like the picture was about that thing as much as about him,” he said quietly, but Lucinda heard him and nodded as if she had been thinking the same thought.
They were halfway back to the house when Zaza suddenly leaped off Tyler’s shoulder and flapped into the air, making strange, shrill noises more like a bird than a monkey-like the sound the jays made at home when something got too close to their nests.
The big black squirrel again, or another just like it, crouched silently on the branch of a tree. Zaza darted upward and flew at the squirrel, but it didn’t flinch, nor did the pale yellow eyes even blink. There was definitely something wrong about the creature, but except for its size and eye color Tyler couldn’t have said what. It watched calmly, unmoving, as Zaza flew at it, chittering loudly, once, twice, three times. Then the winged monkey gave up and flitted away between the trees. Tyler and Lucinda began walking toward the house again.
“What was that?” His sister’s voice was a harsh whisper.
“A squirrel,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. After all, only a baby would be afraid of a squirrel.
“Then why does it have eyes like a goat?” she demanded.
“Yellow, with that little sideways slot? Squirrels don’t have eyes like that.”
“ Tyler Jenkins! ” someone shouted.
He pulled up, looking around. “Who’s that?”
“It’s Mrs. Needle!”
“Maybe she needs you for something.”
“She’s calling you, Tyler!”
She was right, of course, but he wished she wasn’t. “Shoot,” he said. “Now what? Here, you take the book. Go. Hide it in your room.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s too big to go in my pocket, Lucinda, and I don’t want her to know we found it!”
She looked at him, ready to argue, then Mrs. Needle called again from somewhere just ahead. For someone so soft-spoken, the woman could sure put some edge in her voice.
Lucinda abruptly grabbed the book, hid it inside her pants, and then doubled back around the corner of the building. She vanished just as Mrs. Needle appeared from the other direction, dressed in black as usual, a look of irritation on her pale face.
“Tyler Jenkins, I’m very disappointed in you,” she said. “You should know better than to go exploring old buildings without permission. Some of them are dangerous.”
He did his best to look calm and innocent. “What do you mean?”
“The library, Tyler. It hasn’t been maintained for years.” Mrs. Needle took his wrist in her cold fingers and began to lead him back toward the house. “You should not be in there by yourself. Something could… fall on you. You could be badly hurt.” She didn’t sound like she’d regret it very much.
Tyler let himself be marched across a patch of open ground, relieved that at least his sister had gotten away with the book. But how had Mrs. Needle known they were in the library? He and Lucinda hadn’t turned on any lights!
He looked up. The black squirrel was perched on the edge of the roof, squat and black as a loaf of burned bread. Only the pale eyes had color, the unblinking stare that Lucinda had described so well.
Eyes like a goat.
Chapter 14
The Mother of All Mothers
F rom her window Lucinda saw Tyler walking past below, on his way to the henhouse with a bucket of soapy water, a brush, and an expression of extreme annoyance. Mrs. Needle had obviously put him to work and it didn’t look like he would be back any time soon. She felt that she ought to lock the door and start looking through the old mouse-chewed notebook they’d found, but it was too hot and stuffy-just the thought of it made her feel sleepy.
She knew Tyler would be furious with her if she didn’t at least hide the notebook, though, so she lifted her mattress and slid it in on top of the lumpy boxspring, then went downstairs.
She peered into the kitchen. Sarah and Pema were cleaning the counters.
“Come in,” the cook said when she saw Lucinda. “Have some lemonade.” Sarah took a pitcher out of the refrigerator while Lucinda got herself a glass. “I hear you are going to eine Feier!” she said as Lucinda drank.
“What’s that? A fire?”
“ Eine Feier -a celebration. Tomorrow. You have invited been. It is a Fourth of July celebration at the other farm, with the children.”
Which sounded okay if it was the kids they’d met in the diner, the Carrillos. At least they were more or less the same age as Tyler and her.
Lucinda rinsed out her glass and put the lemonade back, then wandered out to the front of the house. The porch was empty, the gravel-covered drive spreading in front of her. What she really wanted to do was go see some animals-the unicorns, maybe, although they frightened her more than a little. She couldn’t forget that horn flashing past her face like the breathless swish of a sword blade. And they were so wild! She could imagine them leaping over any fence they wanted to, no matter how high, as free and uncaged as clouds.
Lucinda ambled over to the henhouse. Tyler was in a foul mood.
“Did you hide the… the thing?” He opened his hands like he was playing charades. Book.
She rolled her eyes. “Of course.” She looked at him for a moment, pushing soapy water back and forth across the disgusting floor of the henhouse. The smell of the place was revolting. To her astonishment, though, she heard herself ask, “Do you want some help?”
He stopped scrubbing long enough to stare, as if some alien being had taken his sister’s place. “Nah, I can’t. I have to do it myself-the Wicked Witch told me. She’s mad at me for exploring.” He smiled. “But thanks.”
She was on her way back from the henhouse when she saw Colin Needle in the distance, crouching by the door of the Sick Barn, examining the door latch.
“Hello, Colin,” she said. He jumped up like he’d been burned.
“Oh! Hello, Lucinda. Nice to see you.” He waved his hands-at nothing, as far as she could tell. “Can’t stop to chat just now-loads to do. Sorry!” He hurried past her, back toward the house, his stiff strides much more rapid than usual, like a man on stilts hurrying to find a bathroom.
Lucinda reached out. The door to the Sick Barn was open. She wondered why he’d been examining it so carefully. She cautiously stuck her head in. “Hello?” When she heard no answer, she stepped inside.
At first she thought there was no one else in the great high-ceilinged barn except her and the vast, unmoving bulk of the dragon, stretched in its long pen like a ship docked for repairs. The idea of being alone with such a monster was enough to make her back toward the door.
“Miss?” The farmhand Haneb was coming toward her from the other end of the barn, bulky from the neck down in a baggy gray safety suit. His lanky black hair hung in his face and he held his head at an odd angle to hide his scars.
“Do you come for the boy Colin, miss?” he as
ked her. “He has gone. Or for the master Walkwell or the master Ragnar? They are both gone also, to fetch more medicine.”
“Medicine?” She let the door fall shut behind her. As it banged closed a deep rumble came up from the pen in response, a sound that made Lucinda’s insides vibrate beneath her ribs. “Is she still sick? I thought she was all right.”
“Meseret?” He shook his head sadly, still carefully keeping the scarred side away from her. “We do not know. Perhaps it is just the sadness of her egg… that it dies…” He shrugged, struggling to find words. “To learn more, next week we give her… give her
… ” He frowned. “Sleeping medicine. Then we take away egg, so Mr. Walkwell and Mr. Gideon can study it.”
It was by far the most she had ever heard Haneb say.
Lucinda stared at the pen, trying to look braver than she felt. Just the size of the dragon, its back corrugated with scales like an alligator’s but wide as a bus, made it hard for Lucinda to get her breath. Being this near to something so big and alive was terrifying beyond explanation. If Meseret made a sudden movement, Lucinda knew, she would turn and run out of the barn, no matter how embarrassed she would be about it later.
The dragon lay with her egg between her forelegs like an exhausted puppy with a favorite toy. The rest of her immense body was stretched, belly down, to the far end of the pen, her great hind legs all but invisible under the swell of her pale, shiny belly. The egg was startlingly small, no bigger around at its base than a basketball, although its narrow, oblong shape made it almost twice that big. It was bizarre to think something so big as Meseret could start out smaller than a sleeping bag. Then, as Lucinda saw the mother dragon’s sagging, yellowed eye, she remembered again that this egg wouldn’t be growing up to be anything.
“Poor thing,” she said, almost to herself, stepping closer. Haneb carefully moved to Lucinda’s left side as they stood at the railing. “She seems so exhausted. Like she’s just given up.” She looked at Meseret’s eye, mostly closed but still fascinating, inescapable. “Is everyone sure the egg isn’t alive?”
“Yes,” said Haneb, then hesitated. “If you want, I show you Mr. Gideon’s magic, same I showed Master Colin.”
When she nodded, he pulled a fireproof hood with a plastic face shield over his head, then shyly took Lucinda’s arm with his thickly gloved hand and led her along the edge of the dragon pen to an old metal desk and a laptop computer. The dragon didn’t move, but her huge, half-lidded eye shifted slightly to watch Lucinda-yes, to watch her, not Haneb, she felt oddly sure. Was it just because she was unfamiliar? Lucinda stood on her tiptoes and leaned over the rail. The fire-colored eye widened, just a little, but it was enough for Lucinda to feel quite boneless in her legs. She let herself back down again-slowly.
Meseret’s head was the size of a small sports car, a great wedge of bone and scale and teeth with backswept fins growing from just behind the orbits around her eyes. Her neck was long and muscular, but quickly spread out into the shoulders and the huge, folded membranes of her wings, which grew in a batlike flare (as far as Lucinda could tell-it was hard to make out many details with the dragon lying down) between the uppermost toes of her forelegs and the top of her hips. The bottom two toes on each side, scarcely thicker than Lucinda’s arms but long as tree branches, provided the struts on which the wing skin stretched, like paper over the balsa-wood bones of a kite. For a moment Lucinda longed to touch the near wing-it seemed so delicate, a translucent banner of flesh next to the castle of craggy hide.
Haneb clumped past her in his strange suit. With his hood on he looked like a robot out of an ancient science-fiction movie. He held some kind of plastic wand in one hand, attached by a curly cord to a plastic box about the size and shape of a briefcase. He looked so strange and moved so slowly, she almost expected him to vault over the walls of the pen like an astronaut in reduced gravity, but instead he fumbled open the gate with his free hand and trudged inside.
Meseret rumbled again. Lucinda felt the sound from the soles of her feet upward, but when it finished a curious vibration remained in her skull, as though her brain was still bouncing from the dragon’s low growl. She realized after a few moments that the hair on her neck and arms was standing up, her skin tingling.
She couldn’t believe how small Haneb was compared to the bulk of the dragon-Meseret had raised her head a little and the top of his hood barely reached the bottom of her rolling eye! “Oh, be careful!” she said, but she doubted he could hear her.
Haneb knelt beside the egg. The dragon’s rumble went up in pitch, but Haneb did not slow or stop. He extended the wand toward the egg until it was only a few inches away, then moved it even more slowly forward until it touched the waxy shell.
Lucinda suddenly realized what he was doing-it was one of those ultrasound things, like they used on pregnant women-and turned toward the desk and the computer screen. The black-and-white image was moving and changing, a murky, confusing mess that only gradually resolved itself into something like a huge wad of chewed gum wrapped in cellophane-the baby with its wings folded around it, she guessed. The picture was completely still. When Haneb stopped moving the wand there was no other movement: the thing in the egg might have been stone.
“Oh!” she said, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes. How terrible! The tiny baby dragon, dead in its egg that way, never to see light or feel the air. “Oh, no. The poor little thing!”
Meseret’s vast eye turned to Lucinda again, a red-gold ball with a thin black slit that went all the way from the top to the bottom. The buzzing in Lucinda’s head intensified, as though whatever was stuck in there had just discovered there was no way out and was beginning to get angry. Lucinda tried to look away, but the eye seemed to glow in the dark room so that even the great bulk of the dragon itself began to fade into shadow and the glowing golden orb was all she could see, burning like a coal, like a tiny sun.
Something pushed at her thoughts again, a feeling of anger and despair so powerful and so alien that it seemed like an electrical storm inside her-Lucinda could almost feel lightning crackling and sputtering in her skull. Everything went swimmy behind her eyes-red, black, red, black, whirling and whirling.
Why was the ceiling suddenly sideways? Why was she standing pressed against a wall, held by some kind of flesh magnetism? Why was Haneb floating on his side before her, his face full of alarm?
“Miss, miss, you okay? Have you hurt?”
She groaned and closed her eyes. She couldn’t push herself off the wall, but with her eyes closed, it felt less like a wall and more like the ground. She opened her eyes again. Now it made sense. She was lying on her back. Haneb was bending over her.
“What happened?”
“You fell. Have you ill, miss?”
“Oh, God, do I have what the dragon has? Am I going to die?”
Haneb actually smiled. The flash of white, extending to both sides of his ruined face and creasing the scarred side in a surprising way, allowed her for the first time to see him without seeing his wounds first. “No, miss. You not going to die. Not from dragon illness-people don’t get it. I think just it is very hot for you today.”
Before Lucinda could reply, Meseret let out another deep, grumbling noise. For some reason this one seemed less despairing, more like… a warning.
“Oh,” Lucinda said, staring at the dragon. “Look!”
Meseret was up, swaying unevenly as if she had not stood in a while, but still up on her stout legs. The crest of her back, which had only stretched a yard or two above Lucinda’s head when the beast was lying down, now arched high above like a suspension bridge. Meseret lifted her head, her huge nostrils sucking air. The dragon bumped hard against the bars of the pen, making them rattle and creak, then opened her mouth and growled. Lucinda stumbled back with her hands over her ears, doing her best not to scream. It’s just like King Kong, she thought, terrified. “She’s trying to get out!”
Haneb clutched her arm. “She doesn’t get out. She is t
ied and the pen keeps her wings close. And she is not angry at us.” He tugged Lucinda toward the door.
“So why are we running away?”
“We are not running from her.” Haneb’s smile was long gone, but his teeth were still showing like the snarl of a frightened dog. “Alamu comes. Her mate.”
Meseret threw back her head and belched out an immense, rolling cloud of flame and black smoke that rippled through the metal struts on the ceiling. Even from two or three dozen yards away, Lucinda could feel the heat like an oven door suddenly swung open.
“But why is she angry?” Lucinda squealed. It was true-she could feel the dragon’s fury coiling like a hot wire in her thoughts.
“Because he will take the egg if he can,” said Haneb, fumbling at the door. “He will eat it. Hurry now.”
“But he can’t get in, can he?”
“Look up.” He pointed toward the ceiling with his padded glove. There were two huge skylight windows among the struts. “Alamu is smaller than her. If he gets onto the roof he will come through easy.”
Lucinda helped Haneb wrestle open the heavy door. It felt like a nightmare, one of those dreams where you run but can’t escape. “We must quickly let Mr. Gideon know,” Haneb said as they stumbled outside. He yanked off his hood. His black hair was damp and his scarred face shiny with sweat. The two of them began to run away from the Sick Barn, headed back toward the main house. The air outside the barn had a strange smell-acidic and prickly.
“What can Gideon… ” she began, then fell silent as a nightmarish shape came around the nearest corner of the house.
Alamu was not even half Meseret’s size, but terrifyingly faster in his movements than the female dragon. He was covered with copper and black scales that gleamed like a rattlesnake’s back in the clear morning light, and as he reared up to more than twice Lucinda’s height, the dragon flashed curving claws like bunches of ivory bananas. He turned his wedge-shaped head sideways, examining them, then dropped back down suddenly and stretched his head forward, squinting in exactly their direction. Haneb jerked Lucinda to a halt. “Quiet,” he hissed. “ And do not move! ”
