Hugh Cook: The wizards and the warriors

He looked down.

Beneath his feet the sky dropped away to the barren land: rolling country stretching south for thirty leagues to where the Barley Hills smudged the horizon. Sun flashed on water; Estar, with its peat soils and heavy winter rains, was a country of tarns, pools, brooks, streams and swamps. He could see the Salt Road running on a north-south line to the west of Maf; he could see the Central Ocean leagues beyond, and the charred remains of burnt trees, looking no larger from this height than little black beard bristles.

If he had slipped, his body would have crunched to a bloody skinful of offal when it hit the rocks. Spasms shook his body as memories assailed him. Hejcnew he could never climb down. He closed his eyes.

– Open your eyes. The time is now.

It was time to die. The sayings had it that a man facing a dragon was as an infant confronted by the strength of an armed and armoured adult, like a leaf in the face of a forest fire. Hearst did not doubt it. He unshipped the spear from his back. A short spear, not man-high but child-high. No weapon for a warrior: but what else could he have carried up that face of terror? His sword, of course: but Comedo had his sword.

His stomach was empty, his mouth dry; he had carried nothing to eat or drink. At least he would not be spattered like bird-dung on the rocks. At least men would know that he had met his end as a warrior. There would be no jokes: only speculation, bad dreams and dread.

He advanced, breathing heavily though the air stank. What was that sound, like the sea yet unlike? What was that sound, like the sighing in a shell, yet louder? That must be breathing.

His eyes adjusted to the gloom. He saw it.

'Ah,' he said. 'Ah…' – So that's a dragon. That's a dragon. By the purple flames and the singing knives of the fourth hell, the songs don't do the fire-spawn justice. I thought the fear of heights to be my worst, but if I had any water in me I'd be losing it now. I'd say it was big as a longship, except it's bigger. I'd say its talons were like scythes, except they're longer.

– But it is asleep, it is asleep, and you have a chance, Morgan Hearst, son of Avor the Hawk, warrior of Rovac, song-singer, sword-master, leader of men. You have a chance.

He slipped through the gloom. The dragon bulked in mountains above him. Darkness rendered all its colours in grey. Discarded scales the size of dinner plates slithered underfoot as his feet disturbed them. The sound of breathing crowded his ears.

He approached the head. It was hot, it was hot. The vast lips were slightly parted, as if in a snarl, revealing fractions of the razor teeth. Through chinks between the teeth he could see the glow of inner fires, red as a bed of hot coals. One casual belch from that mouth would send him reeling back in a blaze of burning hair and flaming clothing, crisped like bacon.

He looked up. Above and out of reach, gathering light from the shadows, glowed another red light: the huge ruby that filled the empty eye socket. He looked for the other eye. The right eye. There. Only small, weak scales covered the flexible eyelid.

Now.

He took the spear. He sighted. He cast. The spear smashed into the eye. There was a pause. There was the regular sound of breathing. Then the spear was driven back out. It fell on the ground. A torrent of black pus vomited from the hole. Hearst dodged to one side.

The flow eased to a trickle, then to a dribble, then to nothing. Then from the sunken black sac of that decayed eye came a white worm thick as a man's arm. It quested blindly in the air, then retreated to the death it was feeding on, the body days dead, the stinking corpse which lay there with its mouth full of dying fire. And still there was the sound of breathing.

The wide world turns. For the continent of Argan, it is late afternoon: in fact, the eastern edge of the continent already lies in darkness. Soon that darkness will cover the entire continent; while Hearst rests in the dragon's lair high in the mountain of Maf, a fang of rock in Estar, the cities of the Argan prepare for sleep.

On the road, travellers – Galish merchants, hunters, pilgrims, wandering musicians, questing heroes, vagrants, lepers and similar riff-raff – are making camp. The wizards Phyphor, Garash and Miphon are half-way between Delve and Maf.

In Selzirk, pride of the Harvest Plains, the kingmaker Farfalla attends to the day's last rituals; in Veda, the Masters of the sages practice Silence. Still further south, Landguard patrols prepare for night and sleep; elsewhere, Southsearchers dream on for a little longer before waking for the night.

The world knows nothing of the ordeal which has tested Morgan Hearst, yet he allows himself the thought that in time he will be known to the whole world that worked its way through these hours of daylight, not knowing they were different to any others.

Hearst grunted, and toppled the ruby into the gulf of evening air. It fell, glimmered briefly, then dropped from sight. Men would know him as a hero now, to be spoken of in the same breath as the dragon Zenphos, the wizard Paklish and the sage Ammamman. The generations would rank him with the heroes of the Long War – or above them. That was some comfort, but not enough to reconcile him with death. Not nearly enough. He could not climb down, but he was not finished yet.

He stretched. His joints ached. He had wintered by the fireside, safe from the cold. He hoped the day of exposure to the wind and chill would not make his joints stiffen. He would be lost if his bones locked up, as they had on occasion in the Cold West. He turned back into the cave, navigating by the sullen glow still smouldering between the jaws of the dead dragon.

Behind the corpse were tunnels through which the air channelled, creating that sighing sea-shell sound of breathing. He would explore methodically, taking every left turn when the tunnel forked. One wrong step might drop him to the bottom of a hidden chasm, so he went shuffle by stoop into the worm-blind darkness, feeling his way.

– Don't fight the dark, seduce it.

The gut-twisted tunnels knotted themselves through the dark. They rose, fell, and corkscrewed sideways. He climbed at least as often as he descended; every down he found turned up. Dehydrated, exhausted, ravenous with hunger, he began to hallucinate, to hear voices, to see lights. He paused to rest, sucking on a small stone to ease his thirst. Then lectured himself onwards.

– On your feet, son of Avor, on your feet.

A derelict wind chanted through his skull. In the wind, he heard the voices of ghosts. He clapped his hands to drive them away. Up ahead, he imagined he saw a star.

– Go away, star. Another step, another star.

Then a dozen. A hundred. A thousand. The tunnel widened until his arms could not span it. Hearst stepped out under the night sky.

– So we're out.

– We've made it.

– Hast, my half-brother, my brother in blood, we are to be reunited.

But where were the rocks? The trees? Where, for that matter, was the horizon?

Belatedly, he realised that he was not, after all, at the foot of Maf: he was on the summit. He swayed with exhaustion. Stars lay in water in small pools on the mountain top; Hearst, his mouth as dry as ashes, knelt and drank deep. Then, from the edge of a cliffdrop, he surveyed the darkness, which was featureless except where, somewhere, a fire burnt.

Hearst, taking bearings on the stars, judged the fire to lie in the direction of the temple, from which Prince Comedo had withdrawn the traditional protection of his guards after the temple priests, declaring they would kill the dragon, had instead aroused its fury and sent it raging up and down the Salt Road. Was the temple burning? What did he care?

– Sleep, Morgan, sleep. Sleep, and see what the sun has to say. No more walking in the darkness until we have seen the face of the sun at least once more. That will be enough, to see the face of the sun. That will be enough.