David Zindell - The Lightstone

But there was no way that he, or any of us, could now escape the dragon by running. With great, heaving bounds, she leapt toward us. Her wings beat out just as her huge hind feet struck down upon the center of the bridge. There was a loud cracking of stone and a flurry of driven air. The dragon descended upon the other side of the chasm just as the bridge swayed and shuddered and broke into great pieces in its plummet into the earth's dark and fathomless deeps.

'Val!' Atara called to me from the other side of the chasm. She had stepped out of the crack and had her hands up to her mouth. 'Don't attack yet! If you move, you die!'

Behind me, Daj and Maram were still running for the portal. But Kane stood on the huge rock shelf by my right side and Liljana on my left. My sword was drawn, and I had determined that I must charge the dragon to give them time to flee.

The dragon, in her fury of driving feet and beating wings, thundered closer. Liljana waited calmly next to me, staring into her great eyes. Kane had his black stone in hand as his black eyes fixed upon the dragon's snarling face.

'Val,' Atara called again. 'Wait until she rises! There will be a moment – you will see the moment!'

Now the dragon, closing quickly upon me from some yards away opened her jaws. I wondered if I could endure the burning of her fire long enough to put my sword into her before I died.

Doom, doom, doom. I felt my heart beating out the moments of my life: doom, doom, doom.

The dragon's throat suddenly contracted and tightened even as mine did. And I heard Kane growling at my side, 'So. so.'

The relb spurted at me in a great red jet of jelly. But just then, Kane finally found his way into the depths of his black crystal. The gelstei damped the fires of the relb and kept it from igniting. It splattered upon me like gore hacked out of an enemy's body.

It was warm, wet and sticky, but it burned no worse than blood.

The dragon, catching sight of this miracle with her intelligent eyes, dug her claws into the rock as she reared back and rose up above me. Her long neck drew back like a snake's so that she could strike out at me with her jaws and teeth.

'Val!' Ymiru's huge voice rang out. He stood next to Atara on the other side of the chasm, pointing his purple crystal at the dragon. 'Can you see the scale?'

I saw the scale, the one just above the dragon's belly that was now darker than all the others. Ymiru had given his arm so that he could work the magic of his gelstei against this stone-hard scale and soften it.

Doom, doom, doom.

The dragon's eyes stared down at me like searing suns. Her spicy, overpowering stench sickened me as she wetched and waited like a giant cobra. I knew that she would never allow me to get close to her exposed belly.

'ANGRABODA!'

With all the power of her stout body, Liljana suddenly shouted out this name that she had wrested from the dragon's mind. It was the dragon's true name, the breath of her soul, and for a moment it chilled her soul and froze her motionless. And in that moment I struck.

I rushed in forward, Alkaladur held high. Its bright blade flared with a silver light. It warded off the last, desperate, paralyzing poison of the dragon's mind. And then I thrust it straight through the softened scale, deep into her heart. And a terrible fire, like blood bursting into flames, leapt along the length of my sword, into my blood – straight into my heart. If Atara hadn't cried out for me to move, I would have fallen beneath the dragon even as she fell to the chambers floor with a tremendous roar of anguish and a crash that shook the mountain's stone.

It took me a long time to return from the dark world to which the dragon's death had sent me. Only my sword's shining silustria, quick ened by Flick's twinkling lights, called me back to life. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself lying on the cold stone floor of a cavern deep in the earth. The dragon lay dead ten feet away from me. And Liljana, Kane, Maram and Daj all knelt above me rubbing my cold limbs.

'Come on,' Daj said, pulling at my hand. He pointed at the portal at the far end of the chamber. 'We're almost at the stairs.' I sat up slowly, gripping the diamond-studded hilt of my sword. Strength flowed into me even as the dragon's heart emptied the last of her blood into the great pool of crimson gathering upon the floor. I wanted to weep because I had killed a great, if malignant, being. But instead I stood up and walked over to the lip of the chasm.

'Val – are you all right?' Atara called to me.

She stood with Ymiru and Master Juwain on the other side, thirty feet away. It might as well have been thirty miles. There was nothing left of the stone bridge that had spanned it only a few minutes before.

'Daj,' I said, looking at the boy, 'how can they get over to us?'

'I don't know,' he said, 'that was the only way.'

He pointed behind us at the portal and added, 'That corridor leads right to the stairs to the second level. There's nowhere else we can go,'

'No other streets join the corridor?'

'No.' 'But are there any other stairs on this level that lead up to the next?'

As it happened, there was another set of stairs, back through the first level two miles beyond the dragon's hall. Daj told Master Juwain, Ymiru and Atara how to reach them.

'Then where,' I asked Daj, 'can we meet on the second level?'

'I don't know,' Daj said. 'I don't know that level at all.'

'But you know the seventh level, don't you?'

'As well as I know this one.'

'Is there a place we can meet there?' I asked.

'Yes, there's a fountain near Lord Morjin's palace. It's called the Red Fountain.

Everyone knows where it is.'

We held quick council then, shouting back and forth across the chasm. We decided that it would be foolish to try to wander about the city's second level hoping to run into each other somewhere in its twisting streets. And so we resolved to find the fountain that Daj had told of and meet there before stealing into Morjin's throne room.

'But we've never been separated before,' Maram said, looking back at Master Juwain.

'I don't like this at all.' None of us did But if we were to complete our quest we had no choice. And so we stood facing our friends across a dark crack in the earth and said goodbye to them.

'If something should happen and we don't reach the fountain, don't wait for us,' I called to Atara. 'Find your own way into the throne room. Find the cup and take it out of this place, if you can.'

'All right,' she called back. 'And you, too.'

With a last look that cut deep into me, she turned to lead Master Juwain and Ymiru out of the chamber the way that they had come. And then, with Daj pulling at my hand, we turned the other way toward the portal and the dark corridor that pointed toward the stairs to Argattha's upper levels.

The opening to the stairway proved quite narrow. There was no way, I saw, that the dragon could ever have forced her body into it. Daj informed us that there was a much larger passage from the first level to the second: a great road that wound up through the layers of rock and into the next level, where an enormous iron gate, kept closed, blocked the dragon from escaping into the inhabited parts of Argattha.

It was into these parts, with great wariness, that we finally made our way. As in ascending a castle's high tower, we climbed five hundred feet up the winding stairs.

In this turning tube of rock, it was cold and dark, with only my sword and Flick's lights providing any illumination. Few ever used this stairway, Daj told us. The Red Priests, torches in hand, might bear a struggling offering for the dragon down the stairs, but no one else would ever think of daring its domain. Likewise, none looked for anyone to emerge from the stairway into the second level. We found that the stairs gave out into a deserted corridor leading to a quiet street in the western district of the city. No one was about the street as we debouched onto it. The doors of the apartments along this tunnel of rock were closed. I wondered if it was night; in the twistings of the labyrinth and our fight with the dragon, we had utterly lost the thread of time.