Emily Rodda - Sister Of The South

Grey, barren land. The skeletons of trees. A grey river, sluggish water thick as mud, with huge grey fish lying dead on the wrinkled surface … Monstrous creatures shrieking in the sky …

Not the Shadowlands, but Deltora. He knew that now.

This was a monster they could not fight. The grey tide would continue to spread. It would swallow rivers, forests and plains. It would cover towns and villages and farms. It would fill the valleys and smooth out the hills.

Nothing in its path would be spared. Death would come equally to the ferocious Sand Beasts and to the gentle Kin, to the flesh-eating Grippers and to the wondrous Lilies of Life.

Some of the grey would age and set hard, turning rivers to sludge, encasing houses, beasts, crops, trees and people alike in a shell of stone. The rest would move on.

The people who could outrun it would be driven to the coast, to fight over boats or mill helplessly at the water’s edge like the rats on the river bank. Or they would climb mountains and wait, freezing on the peaks, as the grey climbed, climbed …

And at last, Deltora, all its variety and strangeness lost forever, would be one great, cold, grey plain.

This was what the Shadow Lord’s malice and desire for vengeance had decreed must be, if the king who had been foretold did arise, restore the Belt of Deltora and rid the land of tyranny.

I never have just one plan …

The Shadow Lord knew that this new king would certainly attempt to destroy the magic crystal which was Deltora’s last link to the Shadowlands. He knew that, aided by the Belt, the king would be powerful enough to do it at last.

So the crystal was set to reveal the plot of the Four Sisters as it died. Then the king who had dared to defy the Shadow Lord would learn why his land was starving.

He would learn of the Four Sisters.

And, of course, he would set out to destroy them.

Lief gritted his teeth as one by one the pieces of the plan fell into place.

He had taken the bait offered to him without a second thought. The Enemy had set a trap for him, then dared him, forced him, to walk into it.

Looking back, Lief could hardly believe he had been so easily tricked.

Not once had he wondered why the map showing where the Sisters were had not been destroyed, but had been torn into four parts. Not once had he wondered why each fragment had been hidden with a Sister, to be easily found if that Sister and its guardian were destroyed.

Not once had he considered that the verse placed on the map might have a double meaning.

And not once had he wondered why the stone protecting the last Sister had not been a sober warning, but an insulting dare, almost guaranteed to make him take the last, fatal step.

But now, too late, he saw the reasons for all these things. And he saw that, from the beginning, the Shadow Lord had arranged things so that Deltora would be his, whatever happened.

Anger rose in him—a helpless, white-hot anger.

‘It has been the Enemy’s pleasure to make us choose unknowingly which way the land would die,’ he muttered. ‘If we failed in our quest, the land would die slowly. If we succeeded, death would come swiftly. Either way, the Shadow Lord would win.’

And as the last words left his lips, the first dead fish floated to the wrinkled surface of the dying river, and with weird, howling cries, the seven Ak-Baba came swooping in from the north.

19 - Dragon Night

Rage dissolving into numb horror, Lief saw the opal dragon swing to face the shrieking beasts hurtling over the horizon. He felt the muscles of the dragon of the topaz jerk violently beneath him. Then the dragon’s neck twisted, and the terrible head turned. Lief was caught and held by the fathomless gaze of a flat, golden eye.

‘The Enemy has sensed our attacks on the grey tide, no doubt,’ the dragon hissed. ‘He has sent his killing creatures to protect it. He must be using powerful sorcery indeed to defy the power of the Belt of Deltora.’

It glanced down at the seared section of river bank below, and snorted. ‘There is little enough damage. But the Enemy fears dragons, it seems. Even two are too many for him. I must set you and your companions down, king of Deltora. When the pack has finished with the dragon of the opal, it will come for me.’

‘No!’ Lief exclaimed. ‘There is still time for you to get away from here. Turn and—’

The golden eye flickered. ‘I would rather die fighting than fleeing,’ the dragon said. ‘And I am sick of hiding.’

‘As the grey tide spreads, there will be nowhere left to hide, in any case!’ shouted Jasmine, as Kree screeched wildly, wheeling in the sky above her. ‘You must keep us with you, dragon! The Belt will aid you—and we can fight!’

‘Indeed we can,’ growled Barda, drawing his sword.

‘No!’ Lief cried frantically again. ‘Barda, Jasmine—’

He felt Jasmine’s hand close on his, and saw the gleam of Barda’s savage grin.

‘We know full well that you will not leave the dragon now, Lief,’ Jasmine shouted. ‘And we will not leave you. We were together at the beginning of this, and so we will be at the end.’

‘And if you will take a soldier’s advice, dragon, you will not wait to be attacked,’ roared Barda. ‘You will go forward and fight beside your brother!’

‘That opal beast is no brother of mine,’ the dragon snarled.

‘It is more your brother than the seven Ak-Baba!’ Jasmine screamed furiously. ‘Will you leave it to be torn apart, while you wait your turn?’

The dragon bared its terrible fangs. Its black tongue flickered. Then its eyes seemed to glow.

‘Very well,’ it growled. ‘Together we will fight beside the dragon of the opal, and together we will die. This battle will be our last. But while we live, we will do the Enemy what damage we can, for the sake of our doomed land, and for our ancestors, and for our young, who now will never be.’

It flung itself forward, streaking over the sea of grey, towards the Ak-Baba.

And as Lief drew his sword and screwed his stinging eyes shut, he saw behind his lids words from The Belt of Deltora —words that had always filled him with dread and now had a new and terrible meaning for him.

… the Enemy is clever and sly … to its anger and envy a thousand years is like the blink of an eye …

The book called the Enemy ‘it’. The unknown writer had understood something that Lief himself had never quite accepted until this moment.

However he had begun, the Shadow Lord was now far more—or perhaps far less—than a cruel tyrant who was a master of sorcery.

Long ago, perhaps, he had been a merely a sorcerer, with a cloak of shadows and a boat with a grey sail marked in red. He had felt fear, suffered a bitter defeat, and sailed east across a silver sea to find new lands to conquer.

But if he was human then, he was human no longer. Envy, hatred and malice had consumed his humanity long ago, burned it away to dust. All that remained were memories.

‘He’ had become ‘it’—a force for evil that fed on power, that destroyed and corrupted everything it touched. A force that would never die.

I have many plans … Plans within plans …

How did I ever think that I could defeat the Shadow Lord? Lief thought bitterly. For a thousand years he has worked towards his goal. And we—we have struggled in his web, blindly, stupidly, repeating the mistakes of our ancestors. In his time, Doran the Dragonlover was called mad. In our time, Josef was insulted and avoided. Over and over again we have ignored the lessons of history …

Learn the lessons of history … Despair is the enemy. Do not let it defeat you …

The roars of the dragons were like thunder. The blood-curdling shrieks of the seven Ak-Baba split the air. Jasmine and Barda were shouting. Kree was screeching. They were battered by wind thick with smoke and the bitter smell of burning hair, dust and rotting flesh that was the odour of the seven Ak-Baba.