House of Shadows (41 page)

The man glanced down at her. He asked her quietly, as though
she were someone who might know, “Is there nothing we can do to help him?”

“No—” Nemienne said uncertainly, and glanced over at Leilis’s sorcerer. The Kalchesene was now sitting on the stone floor of the cavern, leaning back against Leilis. His eyes were still closed, his face tight and strained. He let notes fall one at a time into the air, left each lingering as long as possible before playing the next. Nemienne looked up at Leilis and asked, “There isn’t, is there?”

“Should I know?” said the woman, but then she leaned down and said softly in the sorcerer’s ear, “They have almost won back. You have held the way almost long enough.”

There was no sign on the young man’s face that he’d heard her. But he drew a shuddering breath and began a series of long, sweeping phrases: one note after another that blurred into another, higher pitched, that gave way in turn to another that rose higher still. Like waves running against a gentle shore, Nemienne thought. No. Like the tide coming in, where it rose higher and higher and drowned the sand… in the bone flute, she thought she could hear the sea.

And, following the strong pull of the flute’s melody, the king heaved himself through the clustering shadows and strode at last out of the paths of shadow and light and back into the dragon’s chamber.

CHAPTER 15

R
ightly was Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes called the Dragon of Lirionne, Taudde thought. The king’s brief, profound journey had pared him down beyond mortal flesh to essential will, and indeed, though white and profoundly exhausted, he now seemed very dragonlike.

Once he had broken through the paths of the dead and back into the world of the living, the king turned and stared back through the dark moving shadows among which Taudde had laid his path. Taudde was no longer playing, but there was no longer any need. The king merely put out a hand and, with the force of his own stark resolve, pulled his son and the young keiso out after him.

Prince Tepres, though not as worn as his father, also had a strange look about him. He had gone farther along the path of death than the others, and this showed in a lingering remoteness, a darkness that still inhabited his eyes. The prince glanced around the cavern. His gaze paused on Taudde’s face, unreadable, and at last met his father’s. The prince’s expression, from vague, became guarded.

The little keiso’s response was different. She came out into the cold moist air of the caverns, gasped, laughed, burst into violent tears, and fled across the cavern to her sister, who embraced her. The two girls clung together in mutual comfort and anxious inquiry:
Are you all right? Yes, but are
you
all right?
They looked very young.

Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes, in those first moments, had
attention only for his son. His face, pale and set, showed very little: long experience of court diplomacy had no doubt taught the Dragon of Lirionne parsimony of expression. But he reached out, oddly tentative, and took his son by the shoulders. Prince Tepres stood passively at first, merely allowing this near embrace without returning it. But at last he lifted his eyes to his father’s face and slowly brought his own hands up to grip his father’s arms. The two of them stood that way for a long moment, neither of them speaking. They looked very like, the Dragon and his heir, both worn with fright and exhaustion and the dawning awareness of reprieve.

While they were caught up in the moment, Ankennes acted. The mage, balked at every turn at the very cusp of success and blazingly furious, disregarded the blade at his throat and smashed one hand down on the stone where he knelt.

Thirty feet away, by the edge of the black pool, his staff exploded.

The force of that explosion slammed through the caverns, cracking stone and smashing delicate formations. A thousand bells, of iron and brass and crystal, shattering all at once, might have sounded like that.

Taudde was not on his feet, so unlike the rest, he didn’t fall. He rolled to put himself between the girls and the jagged fragments of rock that crashed down all around. Except he had lost the bone flute and truly could not protect anyone. A piece of stone larger than his head hit the floor not an arm’s length away, sending sharp missiles in every direction. Beside him, one of the girls, he thought Nemienne, cried out and he knew she’d been cut.

Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes flung out his left hand, the rubies of his black iron ring blazing up like sparks of fire. He might have meant—Taudde thought he meant—to draw on the dark power of the mountain. Even so, he was smashed back against the wall of the cavern and pinned there. And Prince Tepres, also flung back and down, slammed into stone with such force that Taudde could hear the impact of body and bone against unyielding rock even through the other clamor of destruction.

Ankennes alone had gained his feet amid the devastation he had wrought. He reclaimed his staff, which somehow was once more whole and undamaged in his hand, and spun around to fling that staff straight as a spear at the stone dragon.

Beside Taudde, Nemienne snatched at the beads wound through her sister’s hair, leaped to her feet, and threw three beads one after another in a high arc toward the dragon. Somehow there seemed plenty of time to watch them fly and fall. They caught the pale light and fell like sparks of darkness through the air: a glass bead, and one of hematite, and a black pearl. They fell into the pool, one after another, but not with the sound of beads falling into water. Each one struck with a clean, clear, chiming sound, three notes that spanned a chord, as though three harp strings had been plucked. The notes were amazingly pure and sustained, audible through everything.

At almost that same instant, the mage’s staff struck the dragon. Its blow gave rise to a low, powerful note that answered the chiming of the fallen drops of darkness-infused beads. The carved stone shattered beneath that blow, but the three notes of the beads rose up under the sound of breaking stone, and Taudde saw that beneath the stone lay something else, something that was not stone and had not broken.

In the cavern at the heart of darkness, a dark eye slitted open.

Everywhere through the caverns, stone flowed and smoothed out damaged areas. Water that was not water—none of it was precisely
water
, Taudde thought now—trickled and dripped and gathered into streams that were made of shadows. Or of a strange kind of light. Amid that light and those shadows, the Dragon of Lonne lifted its head.

Ankennes stood mute and amazed.

Geriodde Seriantes got slowly to his feet… slowly, like a man of waning strength trying to make the failure of his body seem merely like considered dignity. He wore a stern, ungiving expression as he turned with slow reluctance toward his son, dreading, Taudde understood, to see too clearly the ruin Ankennes had made
of blood and bone. But pale light and strange shadows flowed like water across the prince as well, and around him, and under that influence the prince’s body was visibly repairing itself, just as the caverns were. The king’s attention was fixed on this. He began to step toward his son, then caught at a stone pillar to support himself and stayed where he was.

But Prince Tepres rose to his feet, levering himself away from stone stained with his own blood, and came over to his father on his own accord. This time, it was the prince who reached out first, his gesture constrained and almost shy, to touch his father’s hand.

The king’s expressionless mask cracked like stone, and his hands closed around his son’s arms with the force of mountains shifting. It was a profoundly intimate moment. Taudde looked away, ashamed to have witnessed it. Deeply ashamed, now, that he had tried to strike against the king in the person of his son. He looked at the dragon instead, and then found himself unable to look anywhere else.

The stone opened to free the dragon and closed behind it once it was loosed. Subtle colors washed across it as it emerged from the wall of the cavern. Pale green and silvery blue and delicate lavender ran down its neck, the colors deepening to brilliant jewel tones as moments passed. Its elegant head was lapis and amethyst, with shadings of garnet around its nostrils and at the corners of its long mouth. Its antennae, flexing and extending above and around its head, were a deep sapphire that shaded to aquamarine and then to emerald. The emerald ran down its long sinuous neck in a wash of color that shifted as the dragon moved, to sapphire and then amethyst and then back to emerald. Its nearest wing, sapphire traced with gold, opened a little and then relaxed. Its eyes were black, containing all the darkness that lived beneath the mountain.

“What did you do?” Taudde whispered to Nemienne.

The girl, her gaze wide with wonder, shook her head a little. “Glass for the ephemeral,” she whispered, but almost more to herself than to him. “Iron for the eternal, and pearl for the immanent… I wasn’t sure it was right…”

But the girl had evidently guessed exactly right. The dragon turned its huge head and studied each of them in turn. Taudde experienced its gaze as pressure and heat, or perhaps as a noiseless clap of thunder and cold. He wanted to look away, to lift his hands to block that terrible gaze. But he couldn’t move. When the dragon looked away, dismissing him, the shift of its attention was like being released from physical bonds.

Last of all, the dragon turned its attention to Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes and his son. The prince still stood with his father. They looked much the same, for each wore the same stern mask. They both gazed at the dragon, and there was something in their eyes that was akin to what Taudde had seen in its gaze.

The dragon’s nearest foot shifted across the cavern floor. Its talons, each longer than a man was tall, tore gouges across the stone. But the stone flowed in again afterward and was left unmarked.

Then the dragon spoke. Its voice was dark and slow as a dirge, powerful and somber as the tolling of iron bells. “
Blood and magic you have spilled into the deep shadows, O king. Glass and iron and pearl you have cast in tribute into the darkness. Is it then time to bring down the heights and let in the great sea?
”

Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes gazed speechlessly at the dragon.

The dragon shifted restlessly, opening its wings to the farthest extent allowed by the caverns, which suddenly seemed small. “
Is it time?
” it repeated.

The king closed his eyes for a moment, visibly gathered his strength, and stood up straight with an effort almost painful to witness. He put back his shoulders, lifted his chin, and said in a tone that just missed matter-of-fact confidence by a hair, “This disturbance was a… a mischance, O Ekorraodde, Dragon of Lonne. No one meant to disturb you. It is not time.”

“
No one?
” said the dragon. “
Would one reach through the ephemeral shadows and the eternal darkness to wake me… by mischance? Do you say so, O king?
”

The powerful, rolling tones of the dragon’s voice were
completely unfamiliar to Taudde, and yet he knew it spoke with irony. Or perhaps with threat. Or possibly with humor. Its black gaze rested on the king, and yet he was certain that its attention was on Ankennes. And, Taudde felt, on himself as well. He stayed very still.

Mage Ankennes, blank with well-deserved dismay, was staring at the dragon.

“
It was a mage’s hand that woke me
,” the dragon said to Ankennes. “
Yours? What do you desire, O mage?
”

“The destruction of the darkness that underlies and corrupts Lonne,” Ankennes answered, with a directness and courage Taudde couldn’t help but admire. The mage gripped his staff, once more returned to him, with both hands. But if he tried to work any magery, Taudde perceived no signs of it.

“
And is it in pursuit of this desire you have worn your heart so thin?
” asked the dragon. Its tone held a strange kind of indifferent condemnation. “
You are mistaken, O mage. It is by the existence of shadows that men recognize light. Darkness does not corrupt. All corruption exists within the hearts of men.
”

Mage Ankennes began to speak.

“
For example, your heart
,” added the dragon, and reached across the pool of shadows to hook the mage’s heart out of his chest with one long talon. The heart was made of a sliver of black obsidian so fine and translucent that the greenish light of the caverns shone through it. The Dragon held it between the tips of two talons and observed, “
Hard and cold is the heart of the Mage of Lonne. There is nothing left of it but stone.
”