Herbie Brennan - Faerie Lord

Lorquin frowned. ‘There is one other and something beyond, but they are strange smells. One keeps changing.’

‘Changing?’ Henry echoed, a little wildly.

‘If you don’t hurry up, the serpent will have eaten her,’ the charno remarked dourly.

Dour or not, the creature was right. Henry was fiddling about, acting the maggot, wasting time when Blue was probably in mortal danger. Pyrgus would have been better at this. Anybody would have been better at this. But there wasn’t anybody. This one was all down to Henry. An odd thought occurred to him, he was about to meet his draugr.

Without another word, he pushed past Lorquin and trotted down the passage, torch held high.

Somebody was playing an organ. It was stupid, but he could hear it, a sort of creepy, deep sonorous background note that rolled up the passageway towards him and chilled his blood. It put a sort of Phantom of the Opera picture in his head: a mad-looking masked man in evening dress pounding on a keyboard while he laughed insanely. Not that there was any laughter, or real music come to that, but the sound did it to you, made you see pictures in your head, made you feel very much afraid. He wanted to stop. He wanted to go back. He wanted to run and keep running until he emerged into the sunlight.

Henry pushed through his fear and kept going.

There was a light up ahead, a greenish, reddish glow that had the same feel as the organ note. It made you think of things that crawled through crypts or creatures from space that burst out of John Hurt’s chest when you least expected it. The light and the organ note intertwined with each other to increase his fear, but he ignored it and kept on going.

Henry stepped out of the passage into a cavern illuminated by the creepy greenish, reddish glow. The organ-note sound swelled to a crescendo.

There was a dragon in the cavern.

The creature was as tall as a double-decker bus, but considerably longer, snout to tail. It was silver in colour with overlapping armoured scales. It looked like every dragon he’d seen in the picture books of his childhood, but without the cutesy quality the artists always managed to introduce. There was nothing cutesy about this monster, nothing at all. It was rippling muscle and reptile smells and savage teeth, vast jaws and cold, bleak eyes. The great head turned towards him, snorting smoke, and breathed a tiny plume of flame. It was far and away the most terrifying thing he had seen in his life. It was mind-numbingly, petrifyingly fearsome.

For a long moment Henry stood immobile, aware he should be running for his life but utterly unable to move a muscle. Then his eyes drifted of their own accord and he saw Blue.

She was chained to a pillar of stone on a raised platform just behind the dragon. Her blouse was ripped to shreds and there was a look of panic in her eyes.

‘Henry, go back!’ Blue shrieked. ‘Run! Please run!’

Henry gaped at her. There was a narrow river of lava running round the platform, sending up shimmering waves of heat. There were beads of sweat on her forehead and the uppermost swell of her breasts. She twisted her body violently, jerking at her chains. ‘Henry, get out of here! It will kill you!’

He suspected she was right. One of his hands had tightened involuntarily around the flint blade Lorquin had given him, but even if he’d been carrying a bazooka, he knew he was no match for the dragon. The creature was a biological killing machine, a mass of sinew, muscle, bone and blood with a hide beyond penetration. In a moment it would race across the cave floor and engulf him in a single bite.

The scene was like a fantasy magazine cover. A lurid magazine cover. The colouring was lurid: a leprous green illumination intermingled with the red glow from the lava. The silver dragon was lurid – it actually breathed fire, for cripe’s sake! But most of all, Blue was lurid. Her clothing was ripped to give tantalising glimpses of her body. She was chained, abused, frightened, sweaty. She was heart-stoppingly beautiful and she was sexy. Everything inside the cavern looked… contrived.

Henry became suddenly aware there was someone by his side and glanced down to find Lorquin had joined him. The boy was staring at the dragon with a look of awed delight. ‘Kill it, En Ri,’ he hissed in a whisper, ‘I will back you up.’

And there it was, the moment where his entire life coalesced, the point of ultimate decision. Run or kill. Flee or fight. Save himself or save his love. Except that he could never save his love, not from that thing. There was no way he could kill it, no way he could even injure it.

But Lorquin thought he could.

‘Stay here!’ Henry snapped at Lorquin savagely, then ran towards the dragon.

She saw him the moment he stepped into the cavern. He looked ragged and thin and deeply tanned, rangy, toughened up beyond anything she remembered. But he was alive! That was the great thing, the wonderful thing, the marvellous thing. Wherever he’d been, whatever had happened to him, Henry was alive!

The dragon swung its head to look at him.

Even at this distance she could see the fear in Henry’s eyes, but there was determination too, so that perhaps the fear wasn’t really fear but only wariness. She prayed it was fear, because if he was afraid he would run away and that meant he would save himself. She desperately wanted him to save himself. If he stayed, the dragon would tear him limb from limb. She couldn’t bear to find that Henry was alive, then lose him to a dragon before… before she had time…

Before she had time to hold him.

Blue jerked violently at her chains. She’d no idea how she got here, chained to a pillar. Loki had done it, but she couldn’t remember how. One instant she’d been talking to him, the next she was on the platform, manacled, like some sacrificial offering to the monster. It had to be Loki’s magic, but it was a type of magic she had never seen before.

And Loki had disappeared.

She hadn’t seen him go. When Henry arrived he was simply… no longer there. She didn’t know what Loki wanted either, why he’d done what he did. It was as if he’d set up this situation, then walked away, leaving things to play out as they pleased. None of it made sense, but the danger was real.

‘Henry go back!’ Blue shrieked. ‘Run! Please run!’ She twisted her body violently, jerking at the chains, and thought she felt one of the pillar attachments shift slightly. Whatever magic he was using, Loki hadn’t done a very good job. If she struggled hard enough, she might be able to get free. But she wasn’t free yet and Henry was still staring at her gormlessly. ‘Henry, get out of here! It will kill you!’

A small blue-skinned boy emerged from the shadows to stand by Henry’s side. Blue had no idea who he was or where he had come from. She had never seen blue skin before, but she vaguely recalled the Arcond mentioning that there were races of that colour in the deep desert of Buthner. She wondered what the child was doing with Henry. Strangely enough, he didn’t seem at all frightened, even though he was looking at the dragon.

Something else loomed behind them both and for an instant Blue wondered what new monster Loki had conjured up. Then she recognised the charno. It must have followed Henry into the caverns, Henry and the strange blue boy.

Unless, a voice whispered in her mind, that’s Loki up to his shape-shifting tricks again. He fooled you into thinking he was the charno before. Blue jerked her chains again. Loki or the real charno – it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting Henry out of here, getting him to safety. The boy’s lips moved as he said something to Henry that Blue couldn’t hear. Blue opened her mouth to shout again. Flenry called, ‘Stay here!’ and, to her horror, ran towards the dragon.