Robert Hughes - The Power and the Prophet

But how was all of this to turn the tide against the prophet?

He happened to glance up in time to see his answer flash by overhead. He grunted involuntarily and froze against the wall. The shadow quickly passed, and he shuddered. He shook his head and chuckled in terrified amazement. Now he understood. A howl only thirty yards behind him made him jump, and sped him quickly on his way. In moments he reached the tugolith pit.

The giant beasts were restless. The chaotic night had affected them, too. Even monsters could get frightened, especially when they knew enough to recognize fear in people, but not enough to realize why the people were afraid. Thuganlitha was taking his anxiety out on an unfortunate peer when the fat little form above him caught his enormous eye.

“You here again?” he snarled. This was actually a major mental feat for Thug. He’d made the connection between this round little man and the one who’d been watching them for days.

Pezi summoned his courage. This particular tugolith could be nasty, and Pezi didn’t relish the thought of traveling with

him. But it was time to seize the beast by the horn—metaphorically, of course—and set his plan into action. With luck, Flayh’s nighttime attack could provide just the cover needed to sneak a pack of six-ton beasts out of the city. Besides, Pezi doubted any dog could get at him if he rode astride one of Thuganlitha’s more accommodating comrades. Pezi cleared his throat. “Indeed, I am here again, Thuganlitha. I’m pleased that you remember me.”

“I remember something else,” Thug rumbled menacingly. “Oh?” Pezi chuckled nervously. “What’s that?”

He was afraid he knew.

“I said I would horn you.”

Pezi remembered. “Ah, yes. Well, perhaps we can delay that until Dolna’s instructions have been followed.”

“Dolna?” a sleepy voice right below him asked. “Where’s Dolna?”

Pezi was relieved to see the peaceable Chimolitha joining the conversation. This tugolith had sense.

“Dolna’s been delayed—by the fires, you know. But he’s sent me to gather you beasties together and lead you out—”

“He called me a beastie!” Thuganlitha trumpeted, enraged. He suddenly began making every effort to get out of the pit and at Pezi. Sudden terror gave the fat merchant’s skin the color and texture of a toadstool.

“Man? You shouldn’t call us that,” Chimolitha complained. “I—I’m—profoundly sorry! I apologize! I really do! Sincerely!”

“He apologizes, Thuganlitha,” Chimolitha drawled. “… called me a beastie, called me a beastie…”

“Thuganlitha!” Chimolitha trumpeted into Thug’s ear. “He apologized.”

Thuganlitha stopped horning up the dirt and looked back at Chimolitha balefully. “Why do they always apologize?” he

mourned.

Chim shrugged. “Because you scare them.”

“Why can’t they wait until after I’ve horned them?”

“Because they’d be dead!” Chimolitha sighed, exasperated. “I know.” Thuganlitha grinned wickedly and rolled his huge

eyes back up to fix on Pezi.

“Ahem,” the merchant went on, seeking to muddle through.

“The fact remains that Dolna has sent me to lead you out of the city to safety.”

“Dolna?” said Chimolitha. “Where is Dolna?”

Smiling politely, Pezi patiently repeated himself. He figured

he’d be doing a lot of that in the days to come.

Herded by the howling to the vast city square, the mob stood outside Erri’s window and clamored for a miracle. At one point the prophet stepped out and watched as a line of blue-clad initiates struggled to hold the people back. Suddenly there was a shout, and the sea of faces turned skyward. Knowing what he would see, Erri turned his own unwilling gaze above, as someone shouted, “The dragon! Lord Dragon is upon us!”

Gliding across the city’s center flew Vicia-Heinox, scaly wings flung wide and both throats screaming.

Apparition or not, the dragon certainly looked real, its scales casting back a polished copper reflection of the thousand blazes that flamed throughout the city.

“Lord Dragon has reclaimed us!” someone in the crowd screeched. In moments it became a chant.

“All right,” Erri said to himself and to the Power; he turned on his heel and went inside. Moments later when his grim-faced initiates burst into his cell to spirit him away, they found him already packed. The book was tucked under one arm; over the other shoulder he’d slung an ancient seabag, containing among other things the precious pyramid. He smiled sadly. “Shall we go?”

“Where, Prophet?” someone pleaded anxiously.

“Why, where else?” the old sailor barked. “To a ship, man! To a ship!”

Pelmen felt the net the moment he crossed the last line of pines and soared out over Ngandib-Mar.

There was that odd, prickly feeling he’d experienced so many times before, like cold fingers rubbing the down of his underbelly the wrong way, or spiderwebs breaking around his beak. Alert to the danger, he plummeted a thousand feet toward the grass of the parks and burrowed there among the bushes like a quail. The sensation passed. He’d escaped a magical net and he trembled with relief. Nevertheless, the shaper who had cast it was now warned. It would be woven again in moments, and Pelmen slapped the brush with his widespread wings and skimmed the grass tops in an evasive loop to the southeast.

He didn’t think. He simply flew. After an hour of weaving through the crystal-berry bushes, he changed direction again and shot once more into the heavens. He was gambling that he had eluded the net and for the moment, at least, he was right.

He still had a long way to go across a large chunk of Ngandib-Mar. He had no doubt that Dorlyth had rallied his supporters in the glade of mod Carl. But where were they now? If they were covered—and surely they must be—they could be anywhere in the Mar and yet remain completely hidden. He might have flown over them already, or even among them, blinded by the covering spell into seeing men as crystal-berry shrubs. But he reasoned that the glade was a convenient location to wait until battle started, and it was obvious that the Mar was not yet fully mobilized. Dorlyth picked his battlefields carefully.

Pelmen hoped his warrior friend had lingered.

Naturally, the covering shaper would have hidden the glade.

Although he’d been there many times and had often cloaked it himself, Pelmen knew he would have to study the surrounding forest carefully or he’d miss it. If he couldn’t find it from the air, he’d be forced to take to the ground and his human form and waste time and energy in the magical activity termed “piercing the cloak.” That would be dangerous as well as time-consuming, if this rival shaper was still trying to net him. Expecting the search to be arduous, he paused for a moment atop the Rock of Tombs and rested.

The Rock of Tombs was nearly cylindrical, looking from the distance bke a blanched, broken bone pointing jagged splinters at the sky. It towered over a gentle wood that formed the deceptively innocent northern edge of the Great South Fir. The spire’s sheer faces were scored with vertical crevices; at the bottom of nearly every crack was jammed the coffin of an ancient Man great. As a tower of tombs it was old—older by far than the dragon. In those distant days, wedge-shaped sarcophagi of white marble had been hoisted to the heights. When all the words were spoken and the last song sung, each wedge had been loosed above a fissure. It had fallen, then, like a snowy-white axe head, to lodge thunderously in the mountain’s cleft—and in the people’s history. Pelmen had visited the place frequently, for there were powers on this Rock, and sometimes they’d proved helpful. Their presence here formed a kind of fog of force, and he hoped to hide himself within it. He needed some respite from the threat of that net.