David Zindell - The Lightstone

'Come,' I said, leading forth toward the doorway. 'We've only a little farther to go.'

We lined up as before, with Ymiru just behind me. He shuffled along the winding corridors, keeping his eyes fixed on my glowing sword. Of all my companions save Liljana, he was the only one unable to see Flick and thus was blinded to this strange being's dancing lights. But the others perceived him well enough, and marveled that he had now fallen into a steady, flaming spiral just above my head. His presence gave them to move with more confidence through the turnings of the labyrinth.

At last, after circling east and north and then abruptly reversing our direction through a black tube of rock, we came to a break in the curving wall that opened upon a new passage. As this led straight toward the south, I knew that we had finally found our way out of the labyrinth's south end.

'Are you sure this way be south?' Ymiru asked me. 'I admit I've been turned around for quite a while.'

'Val has a sense of direction,' Maram said from behind him. 'He never gets turned around.'

'Not never,' I thought remembering the disappearing moon of the Black Bog. But now, it seemed, I had led us true. For after a hundred yards, the tunnel suddenly gave out onto a set of stairs.

'Saved!' Maram cried out. 'These must be the stairs to the first level!'

'Quiet now!' Kane hissed back at him. 'We don't know what we'll find there!'

The stairs wound up through the rock, spiraling left, like those in my father's castle.

Ymiru had said that the distance between the levels of Argattha was five hundred feet. But Morjin had built his escape tunnel just beneath the first level, it seemed, and so we did not have to climb nearly so far. After a few minutes, the stairs gave out onto a short corridor that led through an open doorway into a huge hall.

I was the first to step into it, and I saw at once that it was dimly lit by the few ancient glowstones still set into its steeply rising walls. Great columns of rock, many now broken into the cracked wheels of basalt that littered the hall's hard floor, supported the curving ceiling three hundred feet above us. The sheer vastness of this place, carved from the heart of the mountain, struck me with awe. There was terror there, too – and not only mine. For just as Ymiru and the others joined me a few feet beyond the doorway, I saw that we were not alone. At the south end of the hall, off to the left, a small, ragged figure was struggling mightily against the chain and shackle locked around his ankle.

'Look!' Atara said to me. 'It's a child'

I started straight for him, but Kane suddenly laid his hand on my shoulder and said,

'Be careful – this might be a trap!'

The child, if that he really was, saw us almost immediately. And now he lunged against his chain as his eyes leaped with terror.

'It's all right,' I whispered, 'we won't hurt you!'

Again, I started across the rubble-strewn floor, fighting the child's scent of fear and the overpowering foulness of the air. This stank of cinnamon and sweat, of burning pitch and heated rock and evil as old as the mountain itself.

'Who are you?' I said to him, crossing the distance between us cautiously. 'Who chained you here?'

I saw that he was indeed a child, a boy, about nine years old. creasy rags barely covered his skinny body. His hair was black and hung about his dirty face in tangles.

He had the dark skin and almond eyes of the Sung – and yet he clearly belonged to Morjin. For upon his forehead was tattooed the sign of his slavery: a red dragon coiled as if burned deep into his flesh.

'Look!' Kane said to me as he came running up to my side. He pointed at the far end of the room toward the north. There, between two great pillars, stood a pyramid of skulls perhaps twenty feet high. Their curving bones and empty eye hollows gleamed a ghastly yellow in the glows tones' dim light.

'Oh, I don't like this place!' Maram said. 'Let's get out of here.'

He looked toward a great, open portal along the west wall opposite the stairs by which we had entered the hall. The doors of both of these openings, I saw, had long since been torn off their hinges. What use, I wondered, did Morjin now make of this foul chamber? A dungeon for the torture and execution of his enemies? But how could a child be anyone's enemy, even Morjin's?

'What is your name?' I said to the terrified boy, laying my hand on his head. 'Where is your mother? Your father?'

He jumped at my touch. He knocked my hand away and looked frantically toward the portal, where once a great iron gate had been.

'He's coming!' he said to me in a sweet voice made bitter by bondage. 'He's coming!'

'Who is coming?' I asked him.

I looked down at the boy's bare leg. So hard had he lunged against the shackle there that its iron had torn him bloody. There were bite marks about the ankle, as well. I did not want to admit what I knew to be true: that this poor boy, like a trapped animal, had tried to gnaw off his own leg.

'Who is it?' I asked him again.

He looked at me as if trying to decide who I might be. And then, with a deep courage pushing away some of his fear, he said, 'It's the Dragon.'

'Morjin, here?' Kane snarled, shaking his sword at the air.

The boy pulled to the limit of the chain attached to a bolt in the floor. He fell to his knee and crunched down upon some bones there. All about him, I saw, were piles of rat skulls and their skeletons. His torn tunic was stained with the guts and gore of rats, which it seemed he had eaten.

'It's the Dragon,' the boy said again. 'Can't you hear him?'

The vast hall rumbled with distant sounds of the other farts of the city. Water trickled and iron beat against stone; the stone itself seemed to beat like a great, black heart with rhythms as old as time.

'Listen, Rat Boy,' Maram said, coming up close to him. You've been here too long and must be hearing things that aren't-'

'No, it's the Dragon! We've got to get out of here!'

Now he stretched out his thin hand as if beckoning toward the rat leavings littered across the floor. And there, among these gnawed white bones, just beyond his reach, lay a black, iron key.

'Every abomination,' Kane muttered as I bent to pick up the key. 'Every degradation of the spirit.'

I turned to see if the key would indeed fit the locked shackle. And as I bent low, Atara stroked the boy's trembling head and asked him, 'Was it the Dragon who locked you here?'

'No, it was Morjin. Lord Morjin.'

'And you think he's coming back here?'

'No! I told you – it's the Dragon who's coming!'

Now Liljana and Master Juwain both drew out their gelstei. Liljana was fingering her blue whale, clearly contemplating entering the boy's mind to see where it had cracked. And Master Juwain wanted only to heal him of his delusions and terror.

I pushed the key through the hole in the lock. It slipped in with a loud click. The boy's heart was now beating eyen more rapidly than my own: doom, doom, doom.

'Quick!' the boy said to me, 'we've got to run!'

Now the smells of cinnamon and burning pitch suddenly grew overpowering as a blast of hot air blew into the room. From the dark corridor beyond the hall's open portal came a loud, rhythmic, thumping sound: Doom, Doom, Doom.

'Quick, Val!' Maram called to me. 'Back to the stairs! Something is coming.'

I turned the key, screeching metal against metal, right and then left. I jiggled it in the lock as the boy pulled with all his might against the chain. The sweaty cinnamon smell grew much stronger. And now the thunder of shaken stone filled the hall: DOOM! DOOM! DOOM!

The shackle's lock suddenly snapped open just as Atara sighted an arrow on the opening of the portal. And then there, in that dark, huge octangular space, a great shape appeared. It stood fifteen feet high and was perhaps thrice that long. Scales, red like rusted iron, covered the whole length of its long, sinuous body nearly down to the knotted tip of its tail. At the end of its great hind legs, claws as sharp as steel cut grooves into the rock of the floor. Its leathery wings were folded back along its sides like a cat's ears before a battle. Its great, golden eyes fixed on the boy with a malign intelligence. As I pulled the shackle from his leg they fixed on me.