Servant of the Dragon (45 page)

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Sharina had been staring for some minutes at the images frescoed onto the tomb walls before her mind encompassed what her eyes were seeing. "Dalar," she said, "this is a story. They're not just pictures."

Stone scraped above her. The ghouls had moved a block enough to chip a bit of rock from its edge. The pebble clicked on the floor, then bounced into the pit in the center of the enclosure. It finally hit the bottom with a glutinous splash.

Sharina looked at the walls again. She'd glanced upward instinctively, screening her eyes with her fingers against falling debris. She'd thought, she'd feared....

"They have not made much headway," the bird said quietly. "When the fragment fell, I thought perhaps they were breaking in."

"Me too," said Sharina. She still wasn't in shape to squeeze into—and hopefully through—the snake's tunnel, though she supposed she'd rather do that than battle a pack of ghouls.

She took a deep breath and pointed with the Pewle knife. The tomb was painted in columns reading downward from the top, each with four registers. The snake's scales had rubbed away all the bottom row except for portions in the corners; seeping water had flaked off great chunks of plaster and stained much of what remained. Despite the damage, Sharina could follow the story reasonably well.

"The Rokonar do not use pictures the way your people do," Dalar said. He cocked his head as if to bring the frescoes into better focus, then clucked despair. "Our art is of colors shading into one another to induce an emotion. All I see on these walls are daubs cruder than the youngest chick of my people could present."

Above them, several ghouls whooped together on a note of rising triumph. A stone block groaned, then clunked twice as it rolled from the tomb. Sharina and Dalar tensed.

The roof seemed as solid as it ever had been. There was a crunch. A ghoul shrieked with pain and continued shrieking until its voice faded into a whimper.

"Somebody got in the way of more stone than he could carry," Sharina said with a faint smile. "They're not very bright—"

Blocks at the corner of the roof finally sagged inward, doubling the amount of wan daylight entering the enclosure.

"But they're strong," she concluded. "And I suppose they're bright enough."

"We have time still," said Dalar. "Read me the pictures, mistress."

He clucked his laughter. "I have decided to hold my death lay for another time, you see," he added. "I do not believe this audience would appreciate the intricacies of the meter."

Smiling, Sharina pointed again. "That figure is a wizard," she said. "He comes to the city—which must be Valhocca—walking on the waves in a circle of red light."

"The spiky things are waves?" Dalar said. "Amazing. I was thirty days
in
the waves and I never saw anything that looked the least like that."

"It's a convention," Sharina said, feeling a little defensive. She burst out laughing. "My friend Liane would be a better one to discuss it with you. I'm sure she was taught Art Appreciation at Mistress Gudea's Academy for Girls. My father was only concerned with literature."

"I will look forward to meeting your friend," the bird said solemnly. Blocks scraped, then slammed back together and loosed a shower of dirt and pebbles. It didn't bother Sharina now.

"The wizard does a variety of things in Valhocca," she continued, dipping her blade to indicate each panel in turn. "Some of them are pretty unpleasant. The others are mostly worse."

The frescoes were executed in bright primary colors on a white ground. They had no subtlety whatever, but scenes of children being boiled alive in a cauldron didn't call for subtlety.

"A mob," Sharina said, moving to the wall to the right of the first one, "chased the wizard through the streets and captured him. I don't know how he was discovered; that must have been on one of the parts we can't see. He was tried before a tribunal—no, the man in the center must be the Sea Lord of Cordin. The women to either side are allegorical figures for the islands of Shengy and Tisamur which Valhocca ruled at the time."

"Those are women?" asked the bird. "And if they
are
women, how can they be islands as well?"

"In the mind of the painter, they were both," Sharina said. That wasn't an explanation, but it was the truth. "And to the people seeing it, too, even if they couldn't read."

"But who would have been meant to see it, mistress?" Dalar asked. "There was no way in."

A slab gave a high-pitched squeal as ghouls slid it across several of its fellows. The sound cut off abruptly with a
clack
of stone against stone. A further sliver of light crept in from above.

"I think it was meant to warn people who broke in," Sharina said as she examined the next range of frescoes. "Looking for treasure, perhaps."

The ghouls had much simpler desires, and the paintings would mean as little to them as they did to Dalar.

"The wizard was beheaded on a pier in the harbor so that as many people as possible could watch," Sharina said. "His body was quartered, put in a weighted chest, and then dumped in the sea. One—this is a moon, but I don't know if it means one night or one month—one something later, the wizard walked back up from the harbor. His body parts had rejoined, but... not the way they should have been together."

She moved to the next column. The light didn't fall as clearly on this wall as on the first, but it was more than clear enough. "He killed the people he met and absorbed them, merged with them. Soldiers attacked him, attacked the
creature
it was by now. Their weapons tore its body, but the body flowed back together and kept growing as the thing absorbed the soldiers also."

The next wall was very badly water damaged. Sharina paused, trying to make out the meaning of the remnant.

A ghoul reached through an opening directly above her. Its clawed fist clenched, nowhere close to its would-be victim. Dalar's arm shot out, curving a weight up in an arc that just cleared the back wall. It smashed the ghoul's wrist with a quick crunch. The creature's scream echoed painfully in the tomb as it jerked its flopping hand away.

"The thing grew much bigger," Sharina said. "A hundred feet tall, unless this is just a convention for great size. It looked like a jellyfish with tentacles around its upper mantle to grasp with. Everyone fled the city. The thing didn't follow them far; it stayed and pulled down the buildings."

More blocks shifted above them. Quite a lot of sky was visible, but the tomb's interior was getting darker because the sun was so low on the horizon. "Perhaps we should leave now, mistress," Dalar said.

"We'll leave soon!" said Sharina, lost in the description of an ancient tragedy. In a calmer voice she continued, "The thing stayed in the ruins. There wasn't anyone for it to eat, to absorb, any more. It shrank, but it didn't die. Finally a band of men caught it in nets and dropped it into a well—no, a natural hole in the limestone. And they built this building, this tomb, over it so that it could never eat enough to grow and escape again."

The ghouls gave a howl. A block bounced away on the outside. Two more sagged into the tomb, then jammed one another by the corners. The whole corbeled roof was in danger of collapse.

"Mistress!" Dalar cried. "We must go!"

Sharina ran the fingers of her left hand through her hair, combing out debris from the room. "I'll lead," she said to Dalar. She wormed into the snake's tunnel with her arms outstretched before her. The knife was in her right hand.

The stones scraped Sharina's shoulders on her way past them, but the compacted earth beyond was smooth and damp enough to feel slick. She kicked out, getting her hips through the opening, and used her elbows to squirm forward.

Sharina couldn't breathe. She thought she was panicking at the tight space and twisted, pushing up from the edge of the tomb wall with her toes.

She
couldn't
breathe. Neither will nor intelligence could override a terror squeezing her brain at the level of the first creatures to develop spinal cords.

"Dalar!" Sharina said as she braced to elbow herself backward. Her voice was a muffled grunt. "The tunnel's blocked! This isn't a way out af—"

Something touched Sharina's hands. She jerked her head, thumping on the dirt ceiling hard enough to stun the scream that would have followed.
A snake crawled on me!

But it wasn't a snake. It was the snake's tongue. The tomb's present inhabitant was coming home.

Sharina got her legs into the open air and kicked violently to help wring her body out of the opening. The darkening sky showed through a dozen places in the tomb roof; the whole structure was moments from collapse. Dalar had hopped to the other side when Sharina thrashed back into the enclosure.

"There's a snake," she gasped. "It's coming through!"

Sharina looked at the roof, trying to estimate whether the whole thing would fall in before the ghouls made a hole big enough for them to enter. Their huge figures capered. Perhaps if Dalar looped his chain around a stone roofbeam, he and she could pull themselves up before the ghouls reacted. A slim hope, but the best one on offer.

"Dalar—" she said.

The bird stood transfixed with terror, a stuffed caricature of the active, graceful, person Sharina had known. He was staring at the tunnel opening.

The snake's tongue flicked the air of the tomb; then the wedge-shaped head, as large as Sharina's chest, slid inside. Rosettes mottled the snake's skin, though Sharina couldn't tell what the colors were in this dim light.

The snake focused on Dalar. Six feet of neck and body followed in an S-curve that kept the head at the same point in the air. The snake was gathering to strike.

Sharina brought the Pewle knife down with the strength of both arms, severing the snake's spine and most of the musculature that supported the head. The lower jaw dropped open. The snake writhed into the tomb in a series of convulsions, threatening to fill the enclosure like a flood of water.

A touch slammed Sharina against a wall. She sat down hard in a cloud of plaster dust from the frescoes. Coils of the serpent's body rolled over her. The reptile was huge, over a hundred feet long in reality and seemingly endless as Sharina watched it thrash liquidly from the wall.

For a moment Sharina thought she would be crushed, suffocated by the snake she'd killed. She couldn't see Dalar; he'd probably been trapped in the corner opposite hers. She'd have laughed at the irony of the snake's revenge if she could have gotten her breath.

The mass of scaly flesh suddenly began to diminish. The snake's dangling head had flopped into the central pit; now the rest of the body followed. Gravity was doing what no human strength could have accomplished, dragging the serpent off Sharina.

The snake's tail—a surprisingly sharp termination for a body which was the same diameter for most of its massive length—waved for an instant, then vanished. Sharina still held the Pewle knife, but she was too weak to lift it. She couldn't get to her feet, and she wasn't even sure that she could crawl. The tunnel was clear, but it was too late....

Two blocks tumbled away from the roof; three more fell inward, one of them missing Sharina's sprawled leg by less than a finger's breadth. A ghoul howled and dropped through the opening.

Dalar had gotten one foot under him. He cocked his weights back for a quick, slashing blow—useless at this short distance.

A creature glowing with red wizardlight rose from the central pit. It sizzled like the ground near where lightning has just struck. Its translucent mantle pulsed out and back as if it were a jellyfish swimming.

The ghoul lashed the creature with the hand that had been reaching for Dalar. Its claws tore three deep wounds in the glowing flesh. Tentacles—or cilia—swept from beneath the mantle, enfolding the ghoul and drawing it inward.

The ghoul convulsed at the first touch, its muscles knotting. The beginning of a scream choked in its throat.

Another ghoul jumped down. Cilia caught it in the air. Again the ghoul twisted into a tetanic arc as the strong muscles of its back tried to pull its head and feet together. The first ghoul was melting into the flesh of the monster from the pit.

The creature rose further. Its mantle—the purplish lump on top couldn't really be described as a head—touched the sagging remnants of the roof.

The central column on which it balanced swelled, flinging tons of rock aside the way toadstools lift paving stones after the autumn rains. Cilia swept out, snatching several more ghouls as the pack howled in surprise.

Sharina stood frozen; kitty-corner from her, Dalar knelt like a statue. Only his eyes moved; there was no fear in them now.

The creature braced its mantle on the tomb's walls and sucked the central tube up, climbing the rest of the way out of the pit. Its slug-like foot slid up the side of the wall, then down the tumble of stones that had been the tomb's roof.

Two of the ghouls had dissolved almost completely into the creature's shimmering flesh, and the others were melting like snow on an oven. Wobbling among the treetops like a cloud of distant fire, the creature disappeared into the forest.

Sharina let out her breath. She was trembling, but her strength was coming back.