Birth of the Firebringer Page 15

  He saw her body begin to shift, the hindquarters bunching, and cavaled, nervously, aware that she was planning something but not quite sure what. Though the wall still crowded him, he was out of reach of her teeth now, even if she lunged. But he dared not take his eyes from hers. Her wounded head wailed shrilly. The others hissed and gargled.

  “The stings,” he heard Tek cry out suddenly. “Jan, the stings!”

  The wyvern twisted her lower half. He heard the sweep of scales across the floor, glimpsed the long tail lashing. There was no retreat, no room to run—the wall was at his back. He sprang hard forward, the only way she had left to him—and the sting-barbs whipped beneath his hooves.

  He closed his eyes, ducking his head. His knees and forehead collided with the wyrm. She shrieked. His brow burned in a thin arc of soreness where the firebowl had touched it. He did not realize at first that his fire-tempered horn had pierced the bone of the wyvern’s breast.

  The claws of the wyrm’s fingers raked his cheek. Jan struggled free; he stumbled back. The white wyrm reared up, up, looming above them all like a massive white tree—and then she toppled, pitching forward. The three of them shied and scattered. And as the dead wyvern came to earth, her third head struck the last egg, pashing it.

  Jan found himself standing panting by Dagg. The two of them stared at the fallen wyrm. It lay quivering, the necks twisting and twining still while the tail thrashed madly, like a murdered snake. Jan turned away. He shuddered. He felt battered, bruised to the bone. Beside him he saw Dagg champing his teeth as though they ached.

  “Are you hale?” he heard Tek asking them. Her voice was low. The chamber was very still, save for the slither of the wyrm.

  “Hale enough,” Jan murmured. The sweet flush of power had faded from him.

  Tek snorted. There was blood on her neck and shoulders where the wyvern had cuffed her. “We heard your voice coming up from the ground, and the white wyrm baiting you,” she said. “We followed it down.”

  “Aye,” said Jan, “I know it,” for he did know. He had seen it in the fire: companions searching for him, above ground, below. Tek glanced at him keenly, surprised. He turned to Dagg then, as he realized his friend had been eyeing him as well.

  “Why did you slip away?” Dagg asked. “Was it a spell she put on you?”

  “Yes—no,” said Jan. How to explain it? He himself scarcely understood. It had been half her spell, and half something within himself.

  Dagg’s eyes had grown more puzzled still. “If it wasn’t,” he whispered, “if it wasn’t that. . . .” He glanced at Tek uncertainly, then back to Jan. “You’d only to ask me, and I’d have gone, too.”

  Jan felt his throat tighten suddenly. He drew breath to speak, but Tek cut him off.

  “Hist, come,” she said. “Another time. Let’s be gone from here. The others must be halfway out of the hills by now, and who knows whether our noise may have wakened the wyrms?”

  Jan felt his blood quicken then. She had given Dagg’s shoulder a nip to turn him, and then sprang after him herself. Jan followed. Beside the wall the dead wrym lay twitching, its long necks and tail knotting and unknotting.

  “Mind the stings,” he heard Tek murmur. “They’re poison still.”

  Dagg gained the hall, disappearing through the natural doorway, then Tek. But just as Jan reached the threshold, he glanced back into the darkened chamber, at the white sunray and the trampled eggs, at the drowned altar and the writhing wyrm.

  And he felt a prick in his left hind heel—a nettle sting, no more. And looking down, he saw the longest, middle point of the wyvern’s tail just grazing his fetlock. He stared at it, uncomprehending. The white wyrm shuddered and at last was still.

  Jan’s legs had carried him through the doorway’s arch and out into the hall before he was aware—not a half pace behind the others. He could hear them just ahead, but his gaze was fixed over one shoulder at the chamber, a hollow of darkness behind.

  The stinging in his fetlock had begun to burn. Then panic surged in him, and disbelief. The wyrm was dead—how could she strike? How could a dead wrym’s sting be poison still? Perhaps—perhaps Tek had been mistaken, and there was nothing to fear. But it was useless, trying to game himself. For he had begun to feel, unmistakably, the warmth of poison spreading upward from the wound.

  They galloped up the curving corridor. Light wells cast wan illuminations in the gloom. The crystal resin underfoot muffled the clatter of their hooves. Jan’s heel felt hot and weak, the smoke of rosehips in his blood balmy and cool. The corridor stretched on before him, and he realized they had already passed the sloping side alley down which he had come. Tek and Dagg must have found their way in by another path.

  Jan found himself hard-pressed to keep abreast of Tek. Their pace made it impossible for him to limp. Hot pain crept upward into his thigh muscle. The cooling smoke in his blood seemed to mingle with the venom, easing it a little. Jan shook his head and tried desperately not to think of it. There was nothing to be done for it now.

  The pathway over which they ran had leveled some. Fewer light wells illumined the gloom. Dagg’s form was a paleness in the dimness ahead. The fire had reached Jan’s hip joint now. Each stride was agony. All around them was stillness and the dark. The harshness of their breath, the muffled tatting of their hooves only deepened the quiet.

  Jan champed his teeth, too weak now to keep up with Tek. He fell back, his nostrils straining. His breath was coming very short. The venom burned slowly along his back toward the shoulder blades. His back legs were stumbling. Up ahead, Dagg came abruptly to a halt. Tek did the same. They moved forward cautiously then, heads lifted, nostrils wide. Jan stumbled after them.

  They entered a great hall, with archways to many side chambers opening along the far walls to left and right, but few light wells pierced the high, dim ceiling. Their footfalls echoed in the vast, deserted dark. Jan felt the immense weight of earth pressing down from above, and his skin tremored and twitched. After a moment, he realized the subtle smell of rotting flowers had grown much stronger here. His eyes grew more accustomed to the gloom.

  And he saw the wyverns then, vague glimpses through the dark doorways opening into the hall. They lay in heaps, dozing, sharing their warmth. Coded into weird shapes, pale pearl in color, they barely seemed to breathe. The hall rustled with their soft sighing. Jan felt the poison in his breast dripping against his heart, working down his forelimbs, inching up his neck.

  He stumbled into Tek and gasped in surprise. She shushed him. They had entered a narrow exit tunnel. The floor here rose, veering, the slope growing steep. Jan stumbled again, the sound of it loud in his own ears. Leaning against Tek, he staggered upward along the rising tunnel.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Jan heaved himself over another shallow ripple in the floor and struggled on. He saw Dagg glancing back.

  “I’ve been stung,” Jan panted, looking at neither of them. The panic had left him, and the disbelief. He felt only despair. “The wyvern stung me on the heel.”

  He heard Dagg’s quick drawn breath, felt Tek’s teeth closing over the nape of his neck. His knees were giving way.

  “Dagg, help me,” he heard Tek hissing through a mouthful of his mane.

  The two of them supported him between their shoulders, kept him from leaning, sinking. Jan sagged, but still he fought to gather his legs and make them obey. The poison had reached his head. His thoughts were made of water now, shifting and spangling. He could not keep his head up, gazed dully at the ground. His eyes felt glazed.

  The tunnel canted upward, up, tipping crazily. More and more light poured into the passage. It hurt his eyes; he had to squint. He heard Tek and Dagg laboring to breathe, felt their sides pressing against his own. The tunnel’s entrance passed overhead. He felt a sudden rush of light and air—it seemed to beat about him like wings. They were outside, and the daylight was blinding.

  He felt Tek beside him shying suddenly, and felt her sharp hiss of
surprise. Dagg sidled, whickering. Jan dragged his head up and peered through the blaze before him. The sky was a vault of blue flame all around. The edge of the milkwood grove twenty paces distant looked smoky and cool.

  A figure stood before them at the wood’s edge, looking shadow-colored against the bright glare of the sky. Very graceful and long of limb—Jan knew this unicorn. It was . . . it was . . . the poison eating up his mind had burned the name away.

  The figure was coming toward him now. He wanted to go to it, but his limbs were made of shifting earth, of wind, and refused to bear his weight. He realized he was falling, slowly, and could not feel the ground beneath him, so that even as he came to rest upon his side, it felt as though he were falling still. The blood in his body danced with heat, and he gazed with one eye at the fire-white sun, floating above him on a blue lake of sky.

  Dreams

  17

  The grassy ground where he had fallen felt hard and some-how distant. Jan closed his eye to the brightness of the sun and the shadows of unicorns standing above him. Darkness and fire, then, and for a while he knew nothing but that his blood was burning and he was growing weaker, very weak, like a newborn foal.

  At last he began to see again, as through a haze, and hear muffled sounds; but still, there was a distance. A red mare—Jan recognized her somehow, but could not say from where. It was she, he realized, who had stood at the wood’s edge. Her coat was deep rose, the color of milkwood flowers. Her eyes, like Tek’s, were green.

  Jan sensed the fear and tension in her. Her shoulder blades were tight with it, her mouth gone dry. He had entered into her somehow, as in a dream, and could feel her every sensation as if it were his own. She had left the others now and was descending into the wyverns’ dens, through the hall of sleepers, through the tunnels and turns. She moved deliberately, as if she knew the way.

  Jan felt himself returning to his companions then. Tek was standing over something that lay near the cave’s entrance, shadowing it from the sun. She was trembling—strange, for the day was warm—and her teeth were clenched. Dagg returned to her with a branch of rosebuds from the grove. He and she chewed them urgently and crushed them beneath their heels. The taste upon their tongues was pungent sweet.

  The red mare rejoined them. Something huge and loose and pale shimmered as it trailed on the ground behind her. She held a fold of it in her teeth: the skin of the three-headed wyvern. Upon it lay a golden bowl. Jan felt the wyrm’s blood sting the red mare’s skin, her own sweat smarting in her eyes. They were dragging the skin behind them now, all three of them. It had become very heavy for some reason. They sweated and struggled. Wyrm’s blood tasted bitter in their mouths.

  Then he glimpsed himself upon the wyrmskin, lying beside the golden bowl, and realized it was he they bore through the milkwood grove. Even as they worked, he was aware of an image of himself in their minds, dying. That puzzled him. He had forgotten all about the wyvern’s sting.

  The heat of his blood rose, and he wished he could be cool again. His mind seemed to be floating still, a few paces above his own body. The eyes of the dark colt below him rolled and fluttered beneath their lids. His breath came short. His limbs twitched now and again as though he dreamed.

  Jan felt his awareness lifted away then, from his body, from the milkwood grove. He glimpsed the rest of the pilgrim band at the edge of the Hallow Hills, Korr arguing once more with Teki, then with others. He watched the prince turn back toward the hills, the others going on reluctantly, to wait a little distance out on the Plain.

  The grasslands fanned out before him in their vastness, and Jan felt himself skimming, as from a great height, like a bird, southward toward the Summer Sea. The unicorn valley loomed suddenly before him, and he saw his mother, heavy in foal, trotting restlessly about the verges of the birthing grove. Later, he saw the unicorns in a great Circle, wailing, “He is dead, he is dead!” and dancing the funeral dance used only for those of the prince’s line.

  His thoughts shifted then, altering entirely. For a moment, he became a gryphon, two gryphons, slipping into the Pan Woods under cover of cloud. Then a pan crouched two-footed among the shadows, with others of his kind. A band of ufpútlak, four-foots, was filing by—unicorns, by the scent of them. The pan fingered his fire-hardened stake. Trespassers. Then a banded pard sprang from the grass upon the Plain. A blue mare shied and kicked her in the ribs. Jan watched, merging into them, sometimes the mare and sometimes the pard.

  Jan’s blood grew hotter then, writhing hot, and he felt his distant body twitch and moan. Thirst burned in him. He saw a swirl of many beasts, dust-blue herons enacting their courting rites beside the Summer Sea. He saw creatures with stiff paddles for limbs and broad, flat tails, blow-holes on their brows, and unicorns’ horns growing from their mouths.

  He saw the sinuous red dragons tunneling their Smoking Hills; gryphons flocked on broken mountainsides, screaming to drive out the hated unicorns. He saw the wyvern king drowsing deep in his own chamber, guarding a flickering torch and brooding subtle, seven-stranded thoughts.

  But the last beasts he saw were not wyverns, nor dragons, nor gryphons, nor pards. They stood upon two legs like goatlings, but their lower limbs were straighter and less shaggy. Among them moved many unicorns, but solid-hoofed and without horns. The two-foots bound them with cords and set them to dragging great loads on wooden discs that rolled like eyes.

  He caught sight of one of the hornless ones, a red roan mare, very long-limbed and clean-moving: a young beauty. Her dark mane stood upright along her neck. Her body was draped and tangled with cords. She balked, snorting. The two-foots rushed and struck at her, shouting, dragging at the cords until she reared up screaming and flailing.

  The glimpse melted away. The whole world had begun to fill his eye. He merged into forests, and the wind riffled his branches. Trees rose and died; new seedlings grew. Then he was grassland, rolling and measureless. Kites wheeled above him, circling a dead Renegade.

  He was sea, suddenly—green, surging, and salt—a river of ocean that girdled the world. And then he was earth, massive and still, underlying the forests, the grasslands, even the sea. He was fire, liquid stone, moving under the earth and forcing the crack. Its heat felt like his own blood, simmering.

  Then he was air, a turbulent sky, heavy with clouds that blotted the sun. Great stormcells roiled toward the upper thinness, and then, blanching cold, spilled their moisture in torrents of wind-whipped rain. A band of tiny, single-horned creatures fled before him.

  Jan felt himself spinning, stretching down from the clouds. He whirled, skimming the Plain, slinging up great gouts of earth and joying in the destruction. I, too, he heard the storm thunder. I, too, am part of the dance.

  Storm faded, dissipated. The sky cleared. The sun sank and stars appeared. Jan felt himself among the stars, high over the earth. And the stars were moving, all things about him in the velvety blackness moving. And someone was beside him. Though he could see nothing of it, he was aware of a presence stretching away from him on all sides. It surrounded the stars, and was within the stars, and was the stars.

  “What are you?” he heard himself asking. He was not afraid. “Who are you?”

  “Your guide,” the presence answered, and her voice was so familiar to him, Jan felt unexpectedly weak with relief. But he could not say from where or when he knew her.

  “Where are you?” he asked. “What are you called?”

  A pause in which the whole universe seemed to wait.

  “You name me.” The answer came from everywhere, within him and without.

  “Alma,” he breathed.

  “Aye,” the presence answered. “Come. I will show you a thing.”

  At her words, he felt himself buoyed farther from the world, lifted higher among the stars. The air about him thinned and vanished, but he felt it go without distress—though were it not for the venom in his blood, he would have frozen. He gazed down and saw white mist enveloping the world.

  “Tell
me now,” the presence said, “what do you see?”

  “I see the world,” Jan told her, “bright as seafire. It is round, a swirl of colors, turning upon itself like someone dancing.”

  “And?”

  “And,” answered Jan, “I see the pitted moon before it, ghost-lit, dancing above the world.”

  “And?” With a smooth, windless motion, they drew back even farther from the planet and its moon.

  “I see the world and the moon,” said Jan, “dancing around a pain-bright sun, with other worlds and moons of amber, mauve, and lichen-green, both larger and smaller, some nearer and some farther away.”

  “And now?”

  They pulled back rapidly. The sun grew very small, a yellow glint among the other, whiter stars. The gulf between the pricks of light was black as nothing. The burning stars floated like firefish in the void.

  “I see the sun, small as a star among other stars, some blue-white, some rosy, some red-yellow.”

  “Your sun is a star,” the presence told him. “And?”

  They moved back now in a headlong rush.

  “I see,” said Jan, softly, “the stars in a great swirl, slowly turning like some vast, spiral flower; and in the distance, I see more starflowers, some blue, some red—many of them, and all turning.”

  “So,” the presence told him, “now you have seen more than any living creature from your world has ever seen.”

  Jan gazed at the fiery pinwheels arrayed around him, all leisurely spinning. He watched what seemed a long time, saying nothing, until at last he felt himself beginning to descend. The swirls of stars below grew greater, brighter, enveloping him. He struggled, uselessly.

  “But,” he cried out, “is there not more?”

  The presence was still beside him, had never left him. “Infinitely more, Aljan,” she told him. “And you shall see it all, one day. But now our time is short.”