The Phoenix Unchained (47 page)

“Waiting for us?” Harrier demanded, sounding outraged. “You couldn’t have known we’d be coming.”

The dragon sighed. “Harrier Gillain, we’ve known Tiercel would be coming since before he was born. Oh, I haven’t been here that long. Dragons are creatures of magic, but we need to eat, and there’s not much to hunt around here these days. Besides, I was promised, well, a very long time ago, that I’d never have to hunt for myself again. And I prefer not to. But I
have
been waiting long enough to get hungry. So we should go.”

“Go?” Tiercel asked, hearing his voice slide upward. “Where are we going?”

The dragon sighed again. “We’re going to the Elven Lands, which is where you wanted to go in the first place. It’s not that I don’t think that travel isn’t broadening for young minds, but Jermayan doesn’t think you’d reach your destination on foot—leaving
aside the matter that it would take you another year to get there. So we’ll take a faster route.”

“I, er, ah, um. Jermayan?” Tiercel asked.

“My Bonded. You know, you really can ask all these questions after I’ve had dinner.”

“We’re going to see the King of the Elves?” Tiercel couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. Maybe “Jermayan” was a common Elven name. He hoped so.

“Certainly not. We’re going to Karahelanderialigor.”

“Kara-Kara-hara-ha—” Harrier stuttered.

“You can learn how to pronounce it later,” the dragon said crisply. “Do come along.”

It raised itself to its feet—apparently it had been lying down before—and now it simply
loomed
. Tiercel had always known that dragons were big—“as large as the sky,” the old nursery-rhyme went—but stories couldn’t compare with seeing a dragon in the flesh. It was as big as one of Harrier’s full-rigged deep-water cargo ships.

“Please,” he said, a little breathlessly. “We can’t just call you ‘dragon.’ And you know both our names.”

“My name is Ancaladar,” the dragon said kindly.

“No it isn’t,” Harrier said instantly, and Tiercel groaned. But he felt a sinking feeling as well.
Jermayan-and-Ancaladar;Jermayan-and-Ancaladar
, his mind chanted.

This wasn’t just
any
black dragon. This was Star-Crowned Ancaladar, who had fought against the Endarkened, whose Bonded was Jermayan Dragon-rider, King of the Elves.

“Oh?” the dragon responded in offended tones. “Perhaps you know best, young Master Gillain.” Without another word, he turned himself gracefully around and began to walk off. There was a loud rasping sound as his scales slithered over the stone.

Tiercel aimed a kick at Harrier’s ankle. “
Do you know who that is?
” he hissed.

“He
can’t
be Ancaladar!” Harrier snarled back in a loud whisper. “He’d be a thousand years old!”

“
You
argue with him,” Tiercel snapped back, and stomped off after Ancaladar. This was impossible to believe—part of him was sure this was all still part of the cave-dream, and he’d never really woken up—but the one thing he was sure of was that when the Star-Crowned Ancaladar told you to do something, you did it.

The ball of MageLight he had created followed.

THEY walked for most of another hour deeper into the caves, into places that Tiercel suspected had never been explored even by the park guides. He’d been cold before, but he wasn’t now: Ancaladar’s body gave off heat as if it were a giant sun-warmed rock. He walked beside the dragon when he could, and behind him when the passage narrowed—but since the paths they took all had to be wide enough for Ancaladar, there were never any really narrow ones. He wasn’t really thinking. He was still too stunned. It would have been more reasonable—in his imagination—for the bronze statue of High Magistrate Cilarnen, who had founded the Law Courts that now ruled the Nine Cities, to get down from its pedestal in front of the Magistrate’s Palace and give him advice about his future than . . .

Than to meet someone who had known High Magistrate Cilarnen in the flesh.

Harrier trudged along several yards behind, radiating deep disapproval of the entire proceedings. At least he hadn’t opened his mouth again to say anything else irritating or stupid, because Tier-cel could tell that Harrier was still refusing to believe that Ancaladar was who he said he was, and Tiercel didn’t think that Ancaladar would take kindly to being doubted. Tiercel was pretty sure that Ancaladar wouldn’t simply whip his head around and
swallow Harrier up in one gulp, but he wasn’t
completely
sure. And Harrier could be really annoying when he wanted to prove a point, especially when he wasn’t quite sure what the point was.

Finally they stopped.

“We’re here,” Ancaladar said.

The cavern looked very much like the others they’d passed through, except for the fact that there was a pool in the middle of it. Tiercel stared at it, then blinked. He’d thought it was reflecting the light of the ball of MageLight that was traveling with them, but no—it was glowing all by itself. And he couldn’t actually see the surface of the water, just a thin fuzzy layer of mist laying over the surface of where water probably was. It sparkled faintly, and he wasn’t really sure whether that was the mist, or the water that might lay beneath. What he
was
sure of was that the faint queasy feeling he’d felt when he’d gotten near Ancaladar—it hadn’t gone away, but he’d gotten used to it—had gotten even stronger.

Harrier caught up to them and cleared his throat meaningfully. Ancaladar sighed.

“This is magic,” the dragon said, nodding toward the glowing pool. “A doorway that leads from the Caves of Imrathalion to a place near Karahelanderialigor. You need to step through.”

“Jump in, you mean,” Harrier said resentfully. “It looks wet.”

Tiercel bet that it wasn’t wet, and even if it was, there were probably dry clothes on the other side. In order to avoid listening to any more of Harrier’s grumbling, he stepped quickly to the edge of the pool and jumped in.

HE didn’t know what he’d expected when he jumped into the cave-pool, but what Tiercel got was a terrifying sense of
falling
. He felt as if every experience of light and warmth that he’d ever had
had been suddenly stolen from him: this was more than cold, more than darkness, and he had the terrifying certainty that it was going to last, not just for the rest of his life, but forever.

Then it was over.

He staggered forward a step or two, tripped, and fell flat on his face, because though he’d jumped feet-first into a pool, he exited from a standing archway. He was given no time at all to register his surroundings, because the first sound he heard was Harrier’s stunned roar of shock as he exited the same portal, and the first thing he was sure he felt wherever he was, was Harrier landing right on top of him.

Harrier rolled away, growling and panting—and muttering something about “bloodsucking spawn of the Endarkened”—and Tiercel opened his eyes just in time to see Ancaladar step, daintily and sinuously, through the doorway and over both of them. Tier-cel sat up. He wasn’t wet—not jumping-into-a-pool-of-water wet—but the grass was very damp and he was lying on it. It was early morning here, and his mind spun dizzily at the thought. Had they been underground that long? Or had they simply traveled that far East?

There was too much to look at all at once, though he tried to look at all of it. There was Ancaladar himself. Now Tiercel could see the dragon clearly for the first time. He didn’t look quite like the drawings and paintings of dragons that Tiercel had seen, and certainly nothing like the creatures in the Flowering Day plays. His neck was much longer, and his forelegs were much shorter—though still quite long enough that Tiercel was certain that Ancaladar could canter like a horse if he had to, but why run if you could fly? Both front and hind feet had long hooked claws—like a bear’s—that gleamed as black as the glittering black iridescent scales that covered most of the rest of his body.

He had the huge ribbed wings that were in all the drawings, but
none of the drawings had ever shown the way that they caught the light and gleamed like rainbows. Or that his head wasn’t covered with scales like the rest of him, but with huge flat smooth plates of—maybe—bone. Or that the long whiplike tail that ended in a flat arrow-shaped barb was easily as long as head and neck and body put together.

Ancaladar blinked his enormous golden eyes, amused by Tier-cel’s scrutiny, and Tiercel looked back the way he’d come.

There was an archway standing upright in the grass behind him—large enough for Ancaladar to pass through comfortably; thinking back, Tiercel realized that the cave-pool must have been a very tight fit for him. The archway was made of something white and faintly glistening, and was as ornate as one of his sister Hevnade’s carved hairclips, and the interior of the semicircle enclosed by the elaborately-carved material was filled with sparkling, shifting blue-green fire. He stared at it, half-hypnotized.

“Don’t walk back through that, unless you want to go back to Imrathalion again,” Ancaladar said. “You could come back here again, of course—the doorway is always open—but apparently humans find the trip distressing.”

There was a heartfelt groan from the ground beside Tiercel, where Harrier lay.

“Is the pool a spell of the High Magick?” Tiercel asked.

Ancaladar snorted in amusement. “That, Master Rolfort, would be most unlikely, since you are the first High Mage to cast a spell of the High Magick in nearly a thousand years. No, this is Elven Magery, merely the product of the labors of several centuries of spells of a dozen Elven Mages. An improvement over the last Doorway Spell I saw cast, which was the Master Spell of a dying Elven Mage, and which didn’t last very long at that.”

“Oh,” Tiercel said.

Harrier sat up with a last fervent groan.

“You did that on purpose!” he said to Ancaladar accusingly.

It was just like Harrier, Tiercel thought, to try to pick a fight with a dragon.

“I don’t think Ancaladar knows what going through the doorway feels like to humans,” Tiercel said conciliatingly.

“Of course I know,” Ancaladar said reprovingly. “Humans described the sensation quite vividly the last time they experienced it, and none of you care for it. But it’s unpleasant, nothing more.”

“And now we’re in the Elven Lands, and our troubles are over,” Harrier said sarcastically. He drew breath to add a further comment, then fell silent as he took a first good look at where he was.

Since it seemed as if Tiercel would be spared from having to referee a fight between Harrier and Ancaladar, he looked around too—beyond Ancaladar and the Doorway—and abruptly understood why Harrier had fallen so unexpectedly silent.

The portal stood in the middle of a lush green meadow filled with wildflowers he couldn’t name. The broad flat expanse of wild-grass was ringed with trees; a forest in full summer leaf. At its very edge, Tiercel could see a herd of red deer, their morning’s feeding over, making their leisurely way back into the forest for a day’s sleep. At the back of the party of does, a young buck stopped and gazed at him, head raised; not frightened by these interlopers in his domain, merely curious.

Between Armethalieh and Ysterialpoerin Tiercel and Harrier had seen plenty of trees, forests, meadows, and flowers, but nothing like this. Everything here, as far as the eye could see, was perfect. The grass still glistened with early-morning dew, and there were no withered blades of grass, no misshapen flowers—there weren’t even any flowers in clashing colors growing next to each other. And while it was a wild meadow, and not one that had been trimmed or landscaped in any way, seeing it, Tiercel could not escape the idea that someone had come along and
arranged
each blade of grass and every flower, removing every imperfection.

Because it was perfect. Tiercel thought he could sit there on the
ground forever, just staring at it. Harrier smacked him on the shoulder. Hard.

“Ow,” Tiercel said. “What was that for?”

“I’m wet and I’m hungry, and we’re in the middle of nowhere, and—in case you haven’t noticed—everything we own is back in Ysterialpoerin, including our dry clothes.”