Margaret Weis - The Seventh Gate

The woods were silent, strangely silent. It was as if every living being had gone away . . .

Marit halted, sick with realization, understanding.

“That’s why no one’s around,” she said aloud.

“What? Why? What are you talking about?” Hugh the Hand demanded, alarmed by her sudden stop.

Marit pointed to the ominous red glow in the sky. “They’ve all gone to the Final Gate. To join the fight against my people.”

“Good riddance, then,” said Hugh the Hand.

Marit shook her head.

“What’s wrong?” Hugh continued. “So they’ve left. Vasu said the Final Gate was a long way from here. Not even those tiger-men could reach it anytime soon.”

“You don’t understand,” Marit replied, overwhelmed by despair. “The Labyrinth could transport them there. It could move them in the blink of an eye, if it wanted. All our enemies, all the evil creatures of the Labyrinth . . . joined together, fighting against my people. How can we survive?”

She was ready to give up. Her task seemed futile. Even if she found Alfred alive, what good could he do? He was only one man, after all. A powerful mage, but only one.

Find Alfred! Haplo had told her. But he couldn’t know how great the odds were against them. And now Haplo was gone, perhaps dead. And Lord Xar was gone, too.

Her lord, her liege lord. Marit put her hand to her forehead. The sigil he had tattooed on her skin, the sigil that had been a sign of her love and trust, burned with a dull and aching pain. Xar had betrayed her. Worse, it seemed he had betrayed his people.

He was powerful enough to withstand the onslaught of evil beings. His presence would inspire his people, his magic and his cunning give them a chance for victory.

But Xar had turned his back on them . . .

Shaking the wet hair out of her eyes, Marit resolutely put everything out of her mind except the immediate problem. She’d forgotten an important lesson. Never look too far ahead. What you see could be a mirage. Keep your eyes on the trail on the ground.

And there it was. The sign.

Marit cursed herself. She’d been so preoccupied, she had almost missed what she’d been searching for. Kneeling down, she carefully picked up an object, held it out for Hugh the Hand to see.

It was a green, glittering scale. One of several scales—green and gold—lying on the ground.

Surrounding it were large dollops of fresh blood.

“According to Vasu, the last time he saw Alfred—the dragon Alfred—he was falling from the skies. Wounded, bleeding.” Marit turned the green scale over and over in her hand.

“There were lots of dragons fighting,” Hugh protested.

“But the Labyrinth dragons are red-scaled. Not green. No, this has to be Alfred.”

“Whatever you say, lady. I don’t believe it myself. A man changing himself into a dragon!” He snorted.

“The same man who brought you back from the dead,” Marit said crisply. “Let’s go.”

The trail of blood—pitiably easy to follow—led into the forest. Marit found glimmering drops on the grass and splattered on the leaves of the trees. Occasionally she and Hugh were forced to make a detour around some impassable tangle of bramble bushes or thick undergrowth, but they could always pick the trail up easily; too easily. The dragon had lost a lot of blood.

“If the dragon was Alfred, he was flying away from the city,” Hugh the Hand observed, crawling over a fallen log. “I wonder why? If he was hurt this badly, you’d think he would have come back to the city for help.”

“In the Labyrinth, a mother will often run away from safety to lure the enemy from her child. I think that’s what Alfred was doing. That’s why he didn’t fly toward the city. He was being pursued and so he deliberately led his enemy away from us. Careful. Don’t go near that!”

Marit caught hold of Hugh, stopped him from stepping into an innocent-looking tangle of green leaves. “That’s a choke vine. It’ll tighten around your ankle, cut right through the bone. You won’t have a foot left.”

“Nice place you’ve got here, lady,” Hugh muttered, falling back. “The damn weed is all over! There’s no way around it.”

“We’ll have to climb.” Marit pulled herself up into a tree, began crawling from branch to branch.

Hugh the Hand followed more clumsily and more slowly, his dangling feet barely clearing the choke vine. Its green leaves and tiny white blossoms stirred and rustled beneath him.

Marit pointed grimly to streaks of blood running down the tree trunk. Hugh grunted, said nothing.

Across the vine-patch, Marit slid back down to the ground. She scratched at her skin. The sigla had begun to itch and glow faintly, warning her of danger. Apparently, not all their enemies had rushed to do battle at the Final Gate. She pushed forward with greater urgency, greater caution.

Emerging from a dense thicket, she stepped suddenly and unexpectedly into a cleared space.

“Would you look at this!” Hugh the Hand gave a low whistle.

Marit stared, amazed.

A wide swath of destruction had been cut into the forest. Small trees lay broken on the ground. Their limbs, snapped and twisted, hung from scarred trunks. The undergrowth had been flattened into the mud. The ground was littered with twigs and leaves. Green and golden scales were scattered around, sparkling like jewels in the gray dawn.

Some enormous green-scaled body had fallen from the sky, crashed down among the trees. Alfred, without doubt.

Yet where was he now?

“Could something have carried—” Marit began.

“Hsst!” Hugh the Hand emphasized his warning with a crushing grip on her wrist, dragged her down into the underbrush.

Marit crouched, held perfectly still. She strained to hear whatever sound had caught the Hand’s attention.

The silence of the forest was broken now and again by the fall of a branch, but she heard nothing else. Quiet. Too damn quiet. She looked at Hugh questioningly.

“Voices!” He leaned over, whispered into her ear. “I swear I heard something that could have been a voice. It stopped talking when you spoke.”

Marit nodded. She hadn’t been talking all that loudly. Whatever it was must be close, with sharp hearing.

Patience. She counseled herself to keep still, wait for whatever was out there to reveal itself. Hardly breathing, she and Hugh waited and listened.

They heard the voice then. It spoke with a grating sound, horrible to hear, as if jagged edges of broken bones were grinding against each other. Marit shuddered and even Hugh the Hand blenched. His face twisted in revulsion.

“What the—”

“A dragon!” Marit whispered, cold with dread.

That was why Alfred hadn’t flown back to the city.

He was being pursued, probably attacked, by the most fearsome creature in the Labyrinth.

The runes on her body glowed. She fought the impulse to turn and flee.

One of the laws of the Labyrinth: never fight a red dragon unless it has you cornered and escape is impossible. Then you fight only to force the dragon to kill you swiftly.

“What’s it talking about?” Hugh asked. “Can you understand?”

Marit nodded, sickened.

The dragon was speaking the Patryn language. Marit translated for Hugh’s benefit.

“I don’t know what you are, man-wyrm,” the dragon was saying. “I’ve never seen anything like you. But I plan to find out. I must have leisure to study you. Take you apart.”

“Damn!” Hugh the Hand muttered. “The very sound of the thing makes me want to piss my pants. Is it talking to Alfred, do you think?”

Marit nodded. Her lips compressed to a thin line. She knew what she had to do; she only wanted the courage to do it. Rubbing her burning arm, the sigla flaring red and blue, she ignored their warning and began creeping forward toward the voice, using its rumbling as cover for her own movement through the brush. Hugh the Hand followed her.