Barbara Hambly - 02 The Walls of Air

Rudy sighed. He wondered what would have become of him if the Dark Ones had really made off with Ingold in the desert. Could he have found his way to the heart of the maze?

No wav, he decided. I'd have poked around the feet of the mountains till I died.

'You're the Great White Scout,' he said after a moment. 'But I'm here to tell you I do not like that gorge.'

Ingold chuckled briefly. 'Most astute.' He got stiffly to his feet, collected his staff and Che's lead, and started down the narrow trail into the gully.

At the bottom of the ravine, the hot metallic smell was stronger, the fumes of it burning the nostrils. Pools of fouled black water gleamed greasily in the wan daylight, fringed with charred, stinking vegetation. Even close to the canyon walls, the weeds had shrivelled in the noxious air, like flowers in Rudy's native California smog. Farther along, the head-high thickets of tule and bullrush that had masked the stream could be seen to be colourless, rotting in the pollution of that narrow place. From the canyon rim above them, the dark trees of the haunted woods frowned down; before them, on the distant shoulders of the mountain, Rudy thought he could glimpse the pass.

They followed the windings of the canyon for some distance, through a wasteland of fetid puddles and crippled, dying trees. A final turning brought them within sight of the end - desolate, stinking, a dark cave mouth amid broken slopes of shale and boulders. The sand around the cave was cut by filthy runnels of black and violent yellow slime. An oily suggestion of a putrid, greenish mist hung low over the ground. Beyond, on the higher slopes above the cave, the trees grew clean. But the woods were silent, unstirred by so much as a bird song, and Rudy heard the intaken hiss of

Ingold's breath.

'What is it?' he asked softly, and the wizard touched his lips for silence.

In a voice indistinguishable from the flicker of wind in grass, he cautioned, They have excellent hearing.'

Apprehensively, Rudy dropped his voice to a subvocal whisper. 'What do?'

The old man had already begun to retreat soundlessly behind the rocks. He replied in a murmur of breath. 'Dragons.'

'There's no chance he's out hunting?' Rudy whispered hopefully.

He and Ingold stood side by side in the black shadow of a massive boulder of splintered granite that shielded them from the cave beyond. They had scouted the walls of the canyon back for miles, but the only trail leading out of it was the one they had come down from the haunted woods.

'Of course not,' the wizard replied in a soft, almost inaudible breath. 'Can't you hear his scales sliding on the rocks of the cave?'

Rudy was silent, listening, casting his senses into the dark pit that loomed before them. In all the world there seemed no other noises but the hrssh of wind through Che's dusty pelt and the nervous jitter of his little hooves on the rocks. Then he heard the dry grating of incalculable weight and the thick drag of fetid breath. 'How big is that thing?' he whispered, aghast. Ingold drew himself back from the edge of the boulders. 'Forty feet at least. I'm told the old bulls can get to almost twice that.'

'Eighty feet!' Rudy wailed soundlessly. He calculated the distance from their rock to the boulders that flanked the cave - it looked like miles, with or without Godzilla lurking in between.

'It may be sleeping,' the wizard continued softly, 'but I doubt it. Judging by the amount of discolouration on the trees, it's laired here for a little over two months. Probably it was trapped here when the mazes surrounding Quo were shifted and strengthened. But there's little game in these mountains, and certainly nothing large enough to interest a dragon. You can see for yourself that there are no bones near the mouth of the cave.'

'Wonderful,' Rudy said shakily. 'Our friend should be just tickled pink to see us.' He edged his way around the boulders and surveyed the ground before the cave.

Here at the ends of the canyon, the stink of the beast was overwhelming. The deep bed of river sand was littered with fallen or rotting trees, eucalyptus, cottonwood, or oak, whose roots had been eaten away by the poisonous fluids that dribbled from the mouth of the cave. Violently discoloured tangles of weeds and distorted brush flanked the cave itself and grew halfway up the boulders on either side. Rudy felt a light touch on his shoulder as Ingold came around beside him.

'You bear left up the rocks there; I'll take Che and climb the talus slope to the right of the cave. Go as swiftly as you can in silence. If it does come out and attack you, dive for shelter - any kind of shelter - and I'll try to draw it off. On the whole,

it's more likely to attack me, since I'll have the burro. If that happens, you've got to go in and do the axe-work. Cut it behind the forelegs or through the belly or up behind the neck, if you can get that close. And stay away from its tail. It can club you senseless before you realize what's hit you.'

Ingold started to move forward, and Rudy caught his sleeve. 'It doesn't - it can't fly, can it?* he whispered anxiously.

The wizard appeared startled by the question. 'Good heavens, no.'

'Or breathe fire?'

'No, although its slime and spittle can be corrosive in wounds, and its blood will burn you. No - the deadliness of the dragon lies in its speed, its strength - and its magic,'

Rudy whispered in horror, 'Magic?'

One white eyebrow lifted. 'After your experience with the Dark, you surely cannot believe that the seed of magic is limited to humankind. Dragons do not have human intelligence; their magic is a beast's magic, the magic that lures the prey to the hunter - a magic of illusion and invisibility, for the most part. No cloaking-spell will work against a dragon; no illusion will turn it aside. Remember that.' His hand closed around Che's headstall, and he stepped out into the pale daylight, beyond the shelter of the rocks. Rudy gathered up his staff, preparing to make a run for the canyon's left-hand wall. Ingold's whisper stopped him. 'And one more thing. Whatever you do -don't look into the dragon's eyes.'

At a quick, steady walk, Ingold started for the talus spill that formed a steep grey slope up the mountain to the right of the cave. Che braced his feet and shook his short mane, unwilling to walk toward the chemical stench of the dragon's lair, but Ingold, Rudy knew, was a lot stronger than he looked.

Rudy moved in the opposite direction, skirting the discoloured pools and the rotting stands of dying trees along the foot of the cliff, uncomfortably aware of the possibility of rattlesnakes in the rocks he'd have to climb. His hands felt tied up with the staff he carried. Across the seventy feet or so of sand that separated the canyon walls, Ingold and Che glided in an almost invisible medley of brown.

Ahead of him, Rudy heard the slithering noise of tons of slipping iron. Something round and gold and glassy flashed in the darkness of the cave, and he stopped in his tracks, paralyzed by something closer to fascination than by horror. A preliminary hiss came from the darkness, with a rolling breath of oily stench and fumes that stung his eyes. Rudy blinked, blinded, wiped at the burning tears...

And there it was.

He had never imagined anything so hideous or so gaudy. He had been expecting something green and vaguely crocodilian, like the dragons in picture books, not the product of an unnatural mating between a dinosaur and a calliope. It was enamelled Chinese red and flaming gold, flickering with bands of green and black and white that mottled the lean-ribbed sides like a beadwork on a pair of slippers. The head was

massive, horned, mailed, and bristling with flared scales of purple, black, and gold, which gave it a curiously beribboned effect; from the tufted whorls of streamers, spikes, and fins on that snake-like nape, a long ridge ran backward, up over the towering fulcrum of the mighty hind legs and down the counterpoised bulk of the spined, deadly tail. Green slime dripped from the armoured chin as it champed and swallowed. The huge head turned, not with the slow, saurian deliberation of a movie monster's, but as quick as a bird's. Rudy found himself looking into round, golden eyes.