The Lightstone

Chapter 42

'That was close!' Maram gasped as we gathered in the winding stairwell just below the corridor leading to the dragon's hall. When I peeked over the top stair into the corridor, I could see the dragon's golden eyes looking back at me through the doorway. 'Are you all right, Val?'

I was not quite all right The dragon's fire had burned holes clean through my armor.

This I now removed so that Master Juwain could tend the seared flesh along my back.

'A dragon!' Maram marveled, not quite daring to look into the corridor. 'I never really believed the old stories.'

He and Atara stood just beneath me on the steps. And beneath them were Kane and Ymiru, and then Liljana, who had her arms wrapped around the boy that we had found.

As Master Juwain held his crystal above my back, I looked down the stairs at the boy and asked him, 'Do you have a name?'

This time he answered me, looking me straight in the eyes as he said, 'I'm called Daj.'

'Just "Daj"?' I asked him.

His eyes burned with old hurts as if he didn't want to tell me anything more about his name. And so I asked him what land he hailed from. But this, too, it seemed, touched upon terrible memories.

'Well, Daj, please tell us how you came to be chained up there.'

'Lord Morjin put me there,' he said.

'But why?'

'Because I wouldn't do what he wanted me to.'

'And what was that?'

But Daj didn't want to answer this question either. A deep loathing fell over him as his little body began to shudder.

'Are you a slave?' Atara asked him, looking at his tattooed fore-head.

'Yes,' he said, pressing back into Liljana's bosom. 'That is, I was. But I escaped.'

The story he now told us was a terrible one. A couple of years before, after watching his family slaughtered by Morjin's men and being enslaved in some distant land that he wouldn't name, he had been brought in chains to Argattha And there – in the city above us -Morjin had taken this handsome boy as his body servant. For a slave, it had been a relatively easy life, tending to Morjin's needs in the luxury of the private rooms of his palace. But Daj had hated it. Somehow he had found a way to displease his master. And so Morjin had consigned him to the mines far below Argattha's first level. There, in tunnels so narrow that only young boys slight of body could squeeze through, Daj was given a pick and told to hack away at the veins of goldish ore running through the earth. His life became one of bleeding hands and gashed knees, of whips and curses and the terror of despair. He had slept with the corpses of the many other boys who had died around him; some of the other starved boys, he said, had been forced to eat from these bodies. And somehow, the brave and clever Daj had contrived a way to escape from this living hell.

'I found a way from the mines up to the first level,' he told us, pointing up toward the top of the stairs. 'That's where the dragon is kept. And so no one usually goes there.'

For some months, he told us, he had survived by wandering the first level's abandoned streets and alleys; he had captured rats for food and ripped them apart with his hands and teeth. When the dragon drew near, he hid beyond the doorways of ancient apart-ments or in crumbling store rooms or even in cracks in the earth.

But finally, his dread of the dragon – and his hunger – had grown too great. And so he had tried to steal up into the second level of the city.

'They captured me there,' he said. Then he pointed at his forehead. 'The mark gave me away – that's why all the slaves are tattooed. Lord Morjin himself came to see me taken back down to the first level and chained in the great hall. He gave me to the dragon. Just like he's given all the others.'

I thought of the pyramid of skulls in the hall above us and shud dered.

Maram, moved to great pity by Daj's story, began weeping uncon trollably. But he seemed to realize that his tears might only inflame the boy's grief. So instead he forced out a brave laughter as if trying to inspirit him. He said, 'Oh, you poor lad – how old are you?'

'Older than you.'

Maram looked at him as if he had fallen mad. 'How can you say that?'

'You laugh and cry like a little boy, but I haven't laughed for years, and I don't cry anymore. So you tell me, who is older?'

None of us knew what to say to this. So I turned to Daj and asked him, 'How long were you chained there, then?'

'I don't know – a long time.'

'But why did the dragon take so long in coming?'

'She did come, all the time,' he said. 'She brought me rats to eat. I think she wanted to fatten me up before she ate me.'

After Master Juwain had finished with his crystal, he rubbed an ointment into my cooked skin, and then I put my armor back on with much wincing and pain. And then I looked down the dim stairwell at Daj and asked him, 'How is it that the Lord of Lies and his men could have chained you without the dragon adding their skulls to his stack? Have they enslaved it, too?'

'In a way,' Daj told me. 'Lord Morjin said not all his chains are iron.'

'Of what be this particular chain made?' Ymiru asked him.

Daj looked up at Ymiru in obvious wonder at his great height; it seemed that he was trying to peer beneath Ymiru's cowled robe and get a better look at him.

'I heard Lord Morjin tell a priest something about the dragon,' Daj explained. 'He said that long ago, he brought the dragons here from somewhere else.'

'From where?' Kane asked him sharply.

'I don't know – somewhere.'

'You said dragons. How many were there?'

'Two of them, I think. A dragon king and his queen. But Lord Morjin poisoned the king; he took the eggs from the queen. A dragon queen lays only a single clutch of eggs, you know.'

He paused to let Liljana pick a few lice from his head before continuing. But I had already guessed what he would say.

'Lord Morjin keeps the eggs in his chambers,' he told us. 'They won't hatch if they're kept cold. And that's why the dragon won't touch Lord Morjin. Because if she does, she knows the eggs will be destroyed.'

Morjin, I suddenly knew, was keeping the dragon bound for his final war of conquest of the world.

Master Juwain rubbed his head as he smiled at Daj. He said, 'I see, I see. But you said that Morjin took the eggs long ago. They can't still be viable?'

'What does that mean?'

'Still alive and capable of hatching.'

'Oh, well, dragons live forever – like Lord Morjin,' he said. 'And so do their eggs.'

It was strange to think that the terrible, fire-spewing creature above us could so love her eggs that she was held in thrall by fear of their being destroyed. And what Daj told us next was stranger still.

'The dragon is making a pyramid of the skulls of all the men she's killed,' he said.

'Because of Lord Morjin, she hates all men. But she hates Lord Morjin most of all.

She's saving the very top place on the pyramid for his skull.'

We all fell quiet for a moment as we listened to the dragon thundering about the chamber above us. And then Master Juwain asked Daj, 'But how could you possibly know that?'

'Because I heard the dragon say this.'

'The dragon talks to you?'

'Not with words, not like you do,' Daj said. He pressed his finger into his ratty hair above his ear. 'But I heard her inside here.'

'Are you a mindspeaker then?'

'What's that?'

Master Juwain looked at Liljana, who continued stroking Daj's hair as she tried to explain something about her powers that her blue gelstei quickened and magnified.

'I don't know anything about that,' Daj said. 'The only one I ever heard speak that way was the dragon.'

'So it is with dragons,' Kane suddenly growled out. 'It's said that they have this power.'

I looked at him in amazement and asked, 'But what do you know about dragons?'

'Very little, I think. It's said that they're stronger in their minds than men and darker in their hearts.'

'But where did you hear that?' Master Juwain asked him. 'It's known that the ancient accounts of this matter were fabricated.'

Kane pointed up the steps and said to him, 'Was this beast fabricated then? She came from somewhere, as the boy said.'

'But where?' I asked.

Kane's eyes were hot pools as he looked me. 'It's said that dragons live on the world of Charoth and nowhere else.'

'But Charoth is a dark world, isn't it?'

'That it is,' Kane said. 'Morjin must have opened a gateway to it. So, he must be very close to opening a gate to Damoom and freeing the Dark One himself.'

I risked another peek above the top of the stairs. It seemed more important than ever that we get past the dragon and complete our quest.

'What do you see, Val?' Maram called to me.

The dragon, it seemed, had given up staring through the doorway into the corridor above the stairs. But I sensed that she was still waiting for us in the hall. And so, as lightly as I could, I stole along the corridor until I came to the doorway. I looked out of it to see the dragon coiled around her skull pyramid as if guarding a treasure. Her golden eyes were lit up and staring at the doorway; I thought that she was daring us to make a dash across the hall for the great portal that opened upon the abandoned streets of Argattha's first level.

'She's guarding the portal,' I said when I returned to the others. I looked down into the stairwell at Daj. 'Is there any other way out of the hall?'

'Only these stairs,' he told us.

'What will we find beyond the portal?'

'Well, there's a big passage to a street, and then a lot of streets, like a maze almost – they lead mostly east toward the old gates in the city. They're all closed now, so the dragon can't escape.'

'But you said that there is a way up to the second level?'

'Yes, that's right – there are some stairs about a mile from here. But they're too narrow for the dragon to use.'

'Could you find these stairs again?'

'I think so,' he said.

Maram looked at me in horror of what he knew I was planning. He said, 'You're not thinking of just running for these stairs, are you?'

'Not just running,' I said.

'But shouldn't we wait for the dragon to leave? Or, ah, to go away?'

Upon questioning Daj further, we determined that the dragon never slept. And as for waiting, it seemed, the dragon could wait much longer than we. We had very little food, less water and no time.

'The dragon,' Liljana unexpectedly announced, 'is waiting for some thing. I think the Red Priests are due to bring another here. What will they think when they find the boy gone and his shackles unlocked?'

'But how do you know that?' Kane asked her.

'I know,' she said, tapping her blue stone against her head, 'because the dragon is in my mind.'

'So,' Kane murmured as rubbed his bandaged ear.

Liljana's face suddenly contorted as she shook her head violently back and forth.

And she gasped out, 'She's trying… to make a ghul of me!'

Kane waited for her to regain control of herself and then snarled out, 'So, perhaps you should try to go into her mind. And make a ghul of her.'

This suggested an elaboration on the desperate plan that I was considering: We would all rush out into the hall And then, while Liljana used her blue gelstei to engage the dragon's mind. Atara would shoot arrows into her eyes. This would allow me to steal in close and try once more to cut through the dragon's iron hide.

Master Juwain, his green crystal in hand, looked at me and said, 'I shouldn't be telling you how to kill anything, not even a dragon. But the place in the chest that you stabbed – that's not where her heart is, I'm sure. If my stone tells true, you'll find it beating three feet farther down, just where the scales darken, closer to the curve of her belly.'

Ymiru had his purple gelstei in hand as he listened to Master Juwain tell us this, and he slowly nodded his great head.

But Maram remained horrified by what we were about to do. He shot me a quick look and said, 'But what of the dragon's fire? Are you so eager to he burnt again?'

'What of your own fire?' I countered, looking at Maram's red crystal.

'Ah, what of it? There's no sun in this accursed city to light it.'

'But didn't you once tell me that you thought the firestone might be able to hold the sun's light and not just focus it?'

'Ah, perhaps, one bolt of flame, no more – if only I could find it.'

'Find it, then,' I said, smiling at him. Kane, standing below me on the stairs, caught my glance and said, 'This red jelly that bursts into flame – it's very much like the relb, eh?' I remembered the story of Morjin, posing as Kadar the Wise, painting the Long Wall with relb and watching as the rising sun set it aflame and melted a breach in the stone for Tulumar's armies to ravage Alonia. 'And the relb,' Kane went on, gripping his black stone, 'was a forerunner of the firestones, was it not?'

'That it was,' I said, smiling at him as well. The brightness of his black eyes gave me hope that we really might win the coming battle.

Atara, holding her gelstei in her hands, looked up from her stone as her haunted eyes found mine. Her face was white as she said, 'I see one terrible chance, Val.' I smiled at her, too, although it tore my heart open to do so. And said, 'Then one chance will have to be enough.'

I turned to take council with the others. And there, in the dim, curving confines of the stairwell, smelling of sweat and fear and the burning reek of relb, we decided that if we weren't to abandon the quest, we would have to fight the dragon.

'But what about the boy?' Maram asked, looking at Daj. 'We can't take him with us, can we?'

Of course we couldn't. But we couldn't not take him, either. I might lead him back through the labyrinth to the cave we had opened into the mountain. But what then?

Should he simply wait there for our return? And what if we didn't return? Then he would have to flee into the valley beyond Skartaru, where he would simply be captured all over again -either that or wander about Sakai facing starvation and death.

In the end, it was Daj who decided the question for us. Despite his words to Maram earlier, he was still only a boy. He gripped onto Liljana's tunic, pressing himself into her soft body. Then he said, 'Don't leave me here!'

Either we left him here, I thought, or we must abandon the quest to take him back to our homelands. Or else we must take him with us to the upper levels of Argattha.

'Please,' he pleaded, 'let me go with you!'

I sensed that his fear of Morjin and reentering the inhabited parts of the city was less than his dread of being left alone. There was terrible risk for him, it seemed, no matter what path we chose.

Unless, I thought, we do flee back to Mesh.

But this, I knew, we couldn't do, not even to save this poor child. How many more children, I wondered, would Morjin enslave and murder if he weren't defeated? And how would anyone ever accomplish this miracle so long as the Lightstone remained in Argattha?

'His fate is tied to ours now,' Atara said to me softly. 'The moment you turned the key in the lock, it was so.'

'Have you seen this?' I asked her.

'Yes, Val,' she said, squeezing her crystal sphere, 'I have.'

'All right,' I said, bowing my head to Daj, 'you can come with us, then. But you must be brave, as we know you can be. Very, very brave.'

And with that, I turned to lead the way into the corridor. Very quietly, we walked in file through it to the doorway of the hall. As I had feared, the dragon remained coiled around her skulls, watching us – watching us break into a run as we made for the portal across the hall. She sprang up from the skulls with a frightening speed. She bounded straight toward us, clearly intending to cut us off. Her great hind claws tore at the floor as she thundered closer. So quick were her bunching, explosive motions that I knew we had no hope of outrunning her.

Her first fire fell upon my shield just as Ymiru broke from our formation to grab up a great slab of fallen rock. He used this as a shield of his own, holding the immense weight in front of him in order to work in close to the dragon. The dragon turned her fire upon him. The flaming relb blasted against the slab and began burning the stone into lava. And then Atara pulled back the string of her bow and loosed an arrow at the dragon's eye.

As before, however, she sensed her intention just as the bowstring twanged. She turned her head at the last instant, and the arrow skittered off her iron scales. I knew that she was ready to leap at us, to rend us with her great teeth and claws, to stomp us into a bloody pulp. But just then Liljana, holding her blue whale against her head, managed to engage the dragon's mind. I felt the light of her golden eyes burning into Liljana as she froze in her tracks.

And in that moment, I dashed forward. So did Ymiru, who cast down his rock shield. I ran straight in beneath the dragon's long, twisting neck, where her huge chest gave way to her belly. I saw the place on the curve of her heaving body where the scales darkened, even as Master Juwain had said. And there I thrust my sword.

This time it penetrated to a distance of perhaps two inches. The dragon roared out her pain and wrath, and kicked her claws into my shield, sending me flying. I hit the floor backward; the force of the fall bruised my back and knocked the breath from me. I lay there gasping for air, watching in puzzlement and horror as Ymiru worked in still closer to the dragon with his gelstei in hand.

'Ymiru – what are you doing?' Kane called to him.

As Atara fired off another arrow, to no effect, Ymiru brought his flaring purple crystal up to the place on the dragon's belly where I had stabbed her. The scale there seemed to darken to a pitted, reddish black. And then Liljana, still staring at the dragon, cried out in pain. I could almost feel her connection with the dragon's mind break like snapped wood. The dragon, finally and completely unbound, quickly turned about in a snarling, spitting rage and bit out at Ymiru. Her jaws closed about Ymiru's arm, and she tore it clean off, swallowing it whole. A fount of blood sprayed the air. Ymiru cried out as he gripped his gelstei in his remaining hand and tried to move backward, away from the dragon. But the dragon was too quick and Ymiru was in too much pain. Again the dragon's jaws opened. I was sure that she was about to rend Ymiru into meat or burn him. And then Atara shot off still another arrow.

This time it drove straight into the dragon's mouth. But not quite straight enough: the shaft stuck out from between two of the dragon's teeth like a long, feathered toothpick. The dragon, turning her attention from the quickly retreating Ymiru, shook her head furiously in futile effort to dislodge it. Blood as red as Ymiru's leaked from her wounded gums. And she gazed hatefully at Atara as she opened her jaws again to spit fire at her.

'Atara!' I cried as I sprang to my feet. 'Atara!'

I raced across the few feet separating us just in time to take the full blast of the dragon's fury upon my shield. It was a great gout of flaming relb that the dragon spewed at me. It melted huge holes in the steel of the shield and burned straight through to the leather straps covering my forearm. I had to take it off and cast it from me lest I lose an arm as had Ymiru. Once again – and for the last time – my father's shield had saved my life.

But now there was nothing except air between me and the dragon. She glared at me with her ancient glowing eyes in her promise to burn me. I had hoped that Kane might keep me from this fate. All this time, he had stood with his black gelstei in hand trying in vain to steal the dragon's fire. And so, to my astonishment, it was Maram who saved me – and Daj. Quick as a bounding rat, the agile boy broke from behind Liljana and dashed across the room. He scooped up a large stone and hurled it at the pyramid of skulls, knocking a couple of them from the top. This drew the dragon's attention and all her wrath toward him. And in that moment, Maram moved.

He suddenly stood away from the others and pointed his firestone at the dragon. A tremendous blast of flame, like a lightning bolt, leaped out from the crystal even as Maram let out a great cry of agony. I saw the firestone crack in his seared hands.

And the flame drove straight into the dragon's neck, wounding her terribly. She let out a great roar of anguish. In a few quick bounds, she sprang toward the part of the room where Daj had been chained. There she backed into the corner, roaring and stinking of burnt blood, dropping her huge head low to the floor as she shook and glowered and waited for me.

'Val, no!' Atara said, laying her hand upon my shoulder as I started forward. 'She'll burn you!'

I shook off her hand, wondering how I could get at the dragon's belly, now pressed down against the hall's hard floor. The dragon, I sensed, was shocked and very weak.

'I've seen you dead here!' she said to me.

She grasped my hand and pulled at it even as Kane bellowed out, 'Run, damn it! All of you run for the portal!'

At the opposite end of the room, Daj heaved a last stone into the stack of skulls, shattering one of them. And then he bolted for the portal. So did Atara, Kane, Maram and I. Liljana and Master Juwain, who had just finished wrapping a cord around Ymiru's severed arm, followed quickly after us.

We raced through it and out into a corridor leading to a dimly lit street. This great tunnel – fifty feet wide and thirty feet high – opened through the black rock ahead of us. Once, perhaps, there had been stalls here selling food and water, silks and jewels. But now it was empty save for a few broken rocks, dead rats and heaps of steaming dragon dung. We made our way east past the rotted-out doorways of ancient rooms and apartments. Smaller streets, every sixty yards or so, gave out onto what I took to be one of this level's great boulevards. Just after the place where it bent sharply toward the north, Daj led us to the left onto one of these side streets. We hurried as quickly as we could, but Ymiru could not run very fast missing one arm and clutching his great war club in his remaining hand.

'Here,' Master Juwain said, calling for a halt. He gathered us up close to a dark doorway in the side of the street. 'Ymiru. please let me see your arm.'

Master Juwain pulled aside Ymiru's robe to look at his wounded arm, bitten off at the elbow. The cord tied above it had stopped the spurting, but a good deal of blood still leaked from the raw, red stump. Master Juwain brought out his emerald crystal then. He summoned from it a bright green fire that cauterized the wound without burning and set the exposed and ragged flesh to healing. The sweet flame filled Ymiru like an elixir and took away his pain and shock. This gave Maram hope that someday he might be whole again.

'The arm will grow back, won't it?' Maram asked.

'No, I'm afraid not,' Master Juwain said. 'The varistei hasn't that power.'

As Kane rubbed the bandage over his missing ear, Ymiru looked at him sadly as if to find confirmation of his gloomy view of the world. But he had no pity for himself. He looked down as Master Juwain bandaged the stump and arranged the torn robe over it. Then he said, 'The dragon took my arm from me, but at least he didn't take this.'

He opened his other hand to show us his purple gelstei. 'And if the dragon comes for us again, this might prove her death.'

'Will the dragon follow us?' Maram asked.

Daj, who was growing more impatient by the moment, pulled at my hand as he said, 'The dragon is very strong. She'll come soon -let's go!'

Liljana looked at me as she nodded her head. 'Shell come,' she said with certainty.

I knew she would. And so I turned to Daj and said, 'Take us out of here, then.'

Daj led forth just ahead of me; Maram puffed and panted behind me followed by Liljana, Kane, Master Juwain and Ymiru. Atara insisted on bringing up the rear. If the dragon caught us here on the open streets, she said, she still might be able to turn and stop her with a few well-placed arrows.

And so we made our way through dark tunnels of rock that twisted througth the earth. We passed by scoops in the mountain's basalt where once people had burrowed like moles. Daj led us through a snarl of streets almost as complex as the labyrinth. I had hoped that if the dragon did pursue us, we might lose her in this maze. But the dragon, I sensed, could track us by the scent of our sweat no less than of our minds. And since she had been imprisoned here untold years, perhaps no one or nothing knew the streets of Argattha's first level so well.

It was just as we had turned onto a narrow street that we heard a deep drumming of the dragon's footfalls behind us: Doom, doom, doom. Daj took a quick look behind him and then called out, 'Run! Faster now! The stairs are close!'

We ran as fast as we could. My boots slapped against dark, dirty stone as Maram wheezed along behind me. Farther back, Master Juwain was working very hard to keep up, while Ymiru's breath broke upon the fetid air in great gasps. His strength amazed me. He seemed to have shaken off the shock of his terrible wound. As had the dragon.

She was drawing closer now, gaining upon us with a frightening speed. Her great body, no doubt filling most of the narrow tunnel, seemed to push the air ahead of her. Her thick cinnamon scent carried to us and stirred up a thrill of fear. And the sound of her clawed feet echoed down the twisting tube of rock: Doom, doom, dooml

'Quick!' Daj shouted to us as his feet flew across the rock. 'We're almost there!'

He led us onto a long, winding street that seemed not to intersect any others or have any outlet. If we were caught here, I thought, it would be the end. And then, to the drumming of the dragon's feet and the growing stink of relb, as I had begun to fear that Daj had forgotten the way toward the stairs, he ran down the street's final turning and through a portal into an immense open space. This, it seemed, had once been a great hall or perhaps an open square where people had gathered -in Argattha there was really no difference. Long ago, it seemed, the mountain had moved, opening a huge rent through the rock here. A chasm thirty feet wide ran almost straight through the center of this cavernous square. It would have blocked our way if not for the narrow stone bridge that led across it.

'Come on!' Daj shouted to us as he made for the bridge.

On the other side of it was a huge shelf of rock about as large as the dragon's hall.

And at the far end of the chamber, two hundred yards away, loomed a large portal.

'Val!' Maram shouted, 'she's coming!'

Even as he said this, the chamber shook with a terrible sound: DOOM, DOOM, DOOM. 'Run!' I called.

Daj was the first across the crumbling old bridge, followed by me, Maram and Liljana. But just as Kane set foot upon it, Atara's bowstring cracked, and I turned to see the dragon thunder into the chamber. She drove her great, scaled body bounding toward us as she hissed and growled. Her golden eyes were as full of hate as her throat was of the poisonous relb. There was no time, I saw, for anyone else after Kane to cross the bridge. And so I turned and pointed at a crack that ran deep into the chamber's side wall. To Master Juwain, I shouted, 'Hide!'

Master Juwain, trapped on the rock shelf on the other side of the chasm, jumped toward the crack and fairly pulled Atara into it. Ymiru followed them a moment later.

I was afraid that the dragon, striking sparks with her great claws, might thrust her head into the crack and burn them with her fire. But the dragon's eyes were fixed upon Maram, who was running behind Daj toward the portal. It was he who had wounded the dragon with his fire. And so it would be he, I sensed, whom the dragon would bum first before rending him with her terrible teeth. DOOM! DOOM!DOOM!

But there was no way that he, or any of us, could now escape the dragon by running. With great, heaving bounds, she leapt toward us. Her wings beat out just as her huge hind feet struck down upon the center of the bridge. There was a loud cracking of stone and a flurry of driven air. The dragon descended upon the other side of the chasm just as the bridge swayed and shuddered and broke into great pieces in its plummet into the earth's dark and fathomless deeps.

'Val!' Atara called to me from the other side of the chasm. She had stepped out of the crack and had her hands up to her mouth. 'Don't attack yet! If you move, you die!'

Behind me, Daj and Maram were still running for the portal. But Kane stood on the huge rock shelf by my right side and Liljana on my left. My sword was drawn, and I had determined that I must charge the dragon to give them time to flee.

The dragon, in her fury of driving feet and beating wings, thundered closer. Liljana waited calmly next to me, staring into her great eyes. Kane had his black stone in hand as his black eyes fixed upon the dragon's snarling face.

'Val,' Atara called again. 'Wait until she rises! There will be a moment – you will see the moment!'

Now the dragon, closing quickly upon me from some yards away opened her jaws. I wondered if I could endure the burning of her fire long enough to put my sword into her before I died.

Doom, doom, doom. I felt my heart beating out the moments of my life: doom, doom, doom.

The dragon's throat suddenly contracted and tightened even as mine did. And I heard Kane growling at my side, 'So. so.'

The relb spurted at me in a great red jet of jelly. But just then, Kane finally found his way into the depths of his black crystal. The gelstei damped the fires of the relb and kept it from igniting. It splattered upon me like gore hacked out of an enemy's body.

It was warm, wet and sticky, but it burned no worse than blood.

The dragon, catching sight of this miracle with her intelligent eyes, dug her claws into the rock as she reared back and rose up above me. Her long neck drew back like a snake's so that she could strike out at me with her jaws and teeth.

'Val!' Ymiru's huge voice rang out. He stood next to Atara on the other side of the chasm, pointing his purple crystal at the dragon. 'Can you see the scale?'

I saw the scale, the one just above the dragon's belly that was now darker than all the others. Ymiru had given his arm so that he could work the magic of his gelstei against this stone-hard scale and soften it.

Doom, doom, doom.

The dragon's eyes stared down at me like searing suns. Her spicy, overpowering stench sickened me as she wetched and waited like a giant cobra. I knew that she would never allow me to get close to her exposed belly.

'ANGRABODA!'

With all the power of her stout body, Liljana suddenly shouted out this name that she had wrested from the dragon's mind. It was the dragon's true name, the breath of her soul, and for a moment it chilled her soul and froze her motionless. And in that moment I struck.

I rushed in forward, Alkaladur held high. Its bright blade flared with a silver light. It warded off the last, desperate, paralyzing poison of the dragon's mind. And then I thrust it straight through the softened scale, deep into her heart. And a terrible fire, like blood bursting into flames, leapt along the length of my sword, into my blood – straight into my heart. If Atara hadn't cried out for me to move, I would have fallen beneath the dragon even as she fell to the chambers floor with a tremendous roar of anguish and a crash that shook the mountain's stone.

It took me a long time to return from the dark world to which the dragon's death had sent me. Only my sword's shining silustria, quick ened by Flick's twinkling lights, called me back to life. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself lying on the cold stone floor of a cavern deep in the earth. The dragon lay dead ten feet away from me. And Liljana, Kane, Maram and Daj all knelt above me rubbing my cold limbs.

'Come on,' Daj said, pulling at my hand. He pointed at the portal at the far end of the chamber. 'We're almost at the stairs.' I sat up slowly, gripping the diamond-studded hilt of my sword. Strength flowed into me even as the dragon's heart emptied the last of her blood into the great pool of crimson gathering upon the floor. I wanted to weep because I had killed a great, if malignant, being. But instead I stood up and walked over to the lip of the chasm.

'Val – are you all right?' Atara called to me.

She stood with Ymiru and Master Juwain on the other side, thirty feet away. It might as well have been thirty miles. There was nothing left of the stone bridge that had spanned it only a few minutes before.

'Daj,' I said, looking at the boy, 'how can they get over to us?'

'I don't know,' he said, 'that was the only way.'

He pointed behind us at the portal and added, 'That corridor leads right to the stairs to the second level. There's nowhere else we can go,'

'No other streets join the corridor?'

'No.' 'But are there any other stairs on this level that lead up to the next?'

As it happened, there was another set of stairs, back through the first level two miles beyond the dragon's hall. Daj told Master Juwain, Ymiru and Atara how to reach them.

'Then where,' I asked Daj, 'can we meet on the second level?'

'I don't know,' Daj said. 'I don't know that level at all.'

'But you know the seventh level, don't you?'

'As well as I know this one.'

'Is there a place we can meet there?' I asked.

'Yes, there's a fountain near Lord Morjin's palace. It's called the Red Fountain.

Everyone knows where it is.'

We held quick council then, shouting back and forth across the chasm. We decided that it would be foolish to try to wander about the city's second level hoping to run into each other somewhere in its twisting streets. And so we resolved to find the fountain that Daj had told of and meet there before stealing into Morjin's throne room.

'But we've never been separated before,' Maram said, looking back at Master Juwain.

'I don't like this at all.' None of us did But if we were to complete our quest we had no choice. And so we stood facing our friends across a dark crack in the earth and said goodbye to them.

'If something should happen and we don't reach the fountain, don't wait for us,' I called to Atara. 'Find your own way into the throne room. Find the cup and take it out of this place, if you can.'

'All right,' she called back. 'And you, too.'

With a last look that cut deep into me, she turned to lead Master Juwain and Ymiru out of the chamber the way that they had come. And then, with Daj pulling at my hand, we turned the other way toward the portal and the dark corridor that pointed toward the stairs to Argattha's upper levels.