A deep, grinding rumble and the sound of uprushing smoke were the first things Murtagh was aware of.
Then pain, and a cold so intense it went to his marrow, and an immense weakness. He needed food and drink and time to recover. None of which he was about to get.
He opened his eyes. The domed ceiling was dark with smoke. It had thickened since he’d passed out.
Setting his teeth, he rolled onto his right side—where it hurt less—and pushed himself into a kneeling position.
He looked at what remained of Bachel: her lower half pinned beneath the crystalline rubble, her neck twisted at an unnatural angle, Ithring still embedded in her skull, honey eyes wide and lifeless. He felt nothing, thought nothing, only looked at what he had done. It was important.
From far above, he felt Thorn touch his mind, a distant yet urgent contact. As Murtagh’s strength ebbed, their thoughts merged, and for an instant, the differences between them dissolved, and he beheld the world as did Thorn:
The two-leg-nest turned below as he dipped his wings toward the fang-tooth-sunset-mountains. Many of the stone-wood-shells were broken and on hot-tongue-fire, and the flames cast flickering shadows on the surrounding hills. White-eye-crows screamed, and goats too, and a steady stream of bad-dream-two-legs fled on foot along
the banks of the clear-water, heading toward the Bay of Fundor. His wings hurt from many arrow-bite-holes, but the pain was of no matter.
Concern came from Thorn. The dragon gave him a plea and a command cojoined: Heal yourself!
I—
Another rumble shook Murtagh, and from the hole in the center of the cave came sounds as rock being crushed and broken. Apprehension gathered in him, and it occurred to him that haste might be called for.
Getting to his feet took a concentrated effort of mind and body, and he nearly fainted again as he rose. He stood for a moment, swaying, until his vision cleared and his balance steadied. He’d dropped his shield at some point. Picking it up seemed more trouble than it was worth.
The eleven Draumar lay on the other side of the hole, their bodies fallen like broken dolls amid the broad, oil-slick splay of blood. There too lay Alín, still motionless.
Murtagh! Thorn’s frustration was palpable. “Can’t. Alín. Have to…”
Pressing a hand against his wound, he stumbled over to the witch. He braced his left foot against her head and pulled on Ithring. The blade stuck, and he had to yank twice more.
Distaste and pity made Murtagh turn away from her remains. “May you dream forever,” he muttered.
More grinding sounded from beneath the hole, and another jet of black smoke shot up through the opening.
With halting steps, he made his way around to Alín. He let out a cry as he dropped to a knee next to her and the jolt sent pain through his side.
Blood matted the woman’s hair, but she still breathed.
Murtagh placed Ithring on the ground and pressed his palm against Alín’s head. “Waíse heill,” he whispered.
His vision flickered as the spell took effect. He swayed and fell sideways, barely catching himself before his head hit stone. His eyes drifted shut.
…
Air whistled past his head as he dove toward burnt-black-ground, legs tucked close to chest and belly. He landed with a crash of thunder. The horned-two-leg-no-sword turned to look at him, surprised, afraid.
Help.
Horned-two-leg understood and ran to him. Climbed onto his back. He wolf-ran toward foot of grey-rock-mountain.
…
Murtagh started as he came to, disoriented.
By his knees, Alín moaned, and her eyelids fluttered.
More sounds of crashing stone emanated from the hole, as if the mountain were gnawing itself to pieces, and there was a great grinding commotion painful to hear.
The ground shuddered beneath Murtagh as he grasped Ithring and forced himself to his feet. He coughed. Gobs of blood sprayed forth, wet and sticky.
He wanted to also heal himself, but he had not the strength. Not yet. But he knew that if he did not attend to his stab wound soon, he would lose the opportunity.
A violent tremor made him stagger. Throughout the cave, crystals cracked and shattered, crashing against the ground with bell-like notes: a cacophony of disjointed music.
Apprehension shaded into fear as Murtagh tried to imagine what could cause the mountains to shake. Bachel was dead, so…Was there some reality to the beliefs of the Draumar, something that went beyond the foul fumes that seeped from the rocks surrounding Nal Gorgoth?
He fixed his gaze on the hole. He had to know.
Ithring’s tip dragged against the stone as he started toward the gaping void. Every step cost him, and he felt increasing reluctance to look over the stony lip and see what lay below.
But still, he crept closer, his whole body taut with pain and dread.
The ground spasmed beneath him. He pushed Ithring away as he fell onto his side. Hot pain clamped about his limbs, and his vision went white and then black.
…
The mouth of grey-rock-mountain yawned before him. He hesitated. Inside lay pain and fear and cold-net-chains and close binding. But Rider-Murtagh was in danger, needed help.
He stepped forward, only to stop and whine. The fear was too great. His stomach felt sick-bad-food-burn.
“What do you wait for?” bellowed horned-two-leg.
He snarled and roared and then shook his head and spun away from the loathsome hole. Two bounding leaps, and he again took to the air and rose circling above the hard-gaping-mountainside.
And he hated himself for it.
…
Murtagh gasped. Where was he?
A fist-sized piece of crystal skittered across the ground near his head. He flinched. Using Ithring as a crutch, he pushed himself to his feet, holding his side. Thorn wasn’t coming. The thought was nearly as painful as his wound. He wished he could soothe the dragon’s distress, but there was a greater worry at hand. Still, the thought remained, a barbed needle in his mind.
He dragged himself forward, desperate, gasping.
A prismatic shimmer passed across Murtagh’s vision. For a moment, he felt he was elsewhere, elsewhen, on a withered plain scoured by endless wind
—
He shook his head. No. With the last of his strength, he staggered across the final few yards to the hole and collapsed on his knees before it.
He peered over the rim, wary.
Blackness yawned below, soft as dragon wings and with an impression of immense depth. At first his eyes could find no purchase in the void, but then he discerned motion, barely visible, as of a great, shadowy river flowing past.
Smoke pillared up in a roaring column.
Despite his best effort, the hot cloud enveloped him, stinging his eyes and clogging his nose and throat.
He fell back and struck the stone, and again his surroundings deserted him.
…
Horned-two-leg was shouting at him and beating against his shoulder. He paid the two-leg no mind as he kept his gaze fixed on the mouth in the mountain. Rider-Murtagh was hurting, and that made him hurt.
The two-leg shouted louder, and this time, he heard the words: “What manner of beast are you? Are you dragon or crawling worm?! Turn back! Go!”
His scales bristled, and he roared as outrage fired his anger. Then he tucked his wings, dove, and landed on break-bone-ground at the foot of the mountain.
Before his nerve could fail him, he ran forward into black-moist-egg-smell-hole.
Grey-stone-walls surrounded. Air thick, choked. The space was too small, not move, not think, too close. Like prison in Urû’baen. Dragonkiller bending over him, showing little teeth, hard-iron-rings, sting of whips…
He could not continue. He lashed stump-tail and whimpered.
Then horned-two-leg stroked the side of his neck and said, “Your Rider needs you, dragon. Think of him. Do for him, not yourself. For other we can be strong.”
The words sank into his mind, settled there. He clung to them with desperate strength. Rider-Murtagh needed help. And Rider-Murtagh had always helped him.
There was only one choice. It was the only choice there had ever really been, but he had feared to truly face it until that moment.
The first step was impossible. The second was nearly so.
The third was only horribly hard.
The fourth came quickly, and then he was crawling forward like four-legs-no-wings, scenting for prey. The cave-fear did not leave, still felt like hot-blood-heart would break, but he could move. He could fight. He could help.
He roared again.
…
Bitterness coated the back of Murtagh’s throat, sharp, acrid, poisonous. He came to, coughing and hacking, and each purging convulsion caused him agony through his chest.
He blinked back tears, barely able to focus. Thorn was on his way. The realization brought as much fear as pride and relief. If what was in the hole could hurt Thorn, Murtagh wouldn’t be able to protect him.
He rolled back onto his knees and again peered over the rim of the abyss, dreading what he might see. As before, he had a dim sense of ponderous motion within the murky, smoke-filled space beneath the mountain.
He reached out with his thoughts. No living thing lay below. And yet… He widened his search, opening his mind and spreading his consciousness as far as he could through the deepness. Wider and wider he went, until he was spread as thin as a film of soap, and he felt…
He felt a mind.
A mind as vast as the mountains themselves. A consciousness so far removed from his own, he might as well have been an ant clinging to the side of an unimaginably large beast. The thoughts of the mind were cold, slow-moving things—dark islands of ice drifting along a listless current. Pervading all was a sense of dire intent, an ancient, calculated malevolence that pulsed outward like the beat of a monstrous heart. From the mind he felt hunger, immense and endless, and a coiled rage that knew no bounds.
Shocks of freezing fear shot through Murtagh’s limbs.
At his touch, the mind stirred, and the tremors and rumbles beneath the cave intensified, and Murtagh felt the mind turning toward him, focusing the enormity of its consciousness upon the single point of his being. When it found him, when it had him within his grip, he knew he would be helpless.
He did not think. He did not wait. He drew upon what was left of his strength and cried out the spell he had used once before, on the windswept plains between Gil’ead and the Spine: “Vindr thrysta un líjothsa athaerum!”
The air above the glowing crystals rippled like glass, and in an instant, all the light in the cave bent into the hole and flash-formed a single bar of blinding, white-hot illumination: a fiery lance forged from the sun itself.
A blast of superheated air struck Murtagh with the force of a thousand hammers. It slammed him into the ground, and he felt his organs shift as the world exploded beneath him.
 |
He blinked.
Everything had gone cold and silent. Ash drifted down from the stone ceiling, soft grey flakes that fell like snow.
He pushed himself onto his forearms.
The hole in the center of the cave was twice as large as before, and the edges glowed a dull red. Through it and below…nothing was visible. No hints of movement beside the falling flakes. Empty.
A piece of rock dropped from the ceiling and bounced across the floor several feet from him. It made no sound he could hear.
He tried to stand, but his arms and legs would not hold his weight.
He tried to reach out with his mind, but that too was beyond him. His throat was tight, and he felt as if he were choking. Darkness feathered the edges of his vision.
He tried.
He tried to try….
He couldn’t…
As awareness slipped away like water between fingers, the stone beneath him shook with the hurried tread of something huge and heavy approaching….
His last thought was one of regret. If only…
|
Glittering redness moved above him, and white jags that resolved into claws and teeth.
Thorn. He tried to rise but had not the strength.
Then the horned shape of Uvek was kneeling next to him. The Urgal muttered in his guttural tongue and pressed the cold hardness of the blackstone against Murtagh’s brow.
Welcome relief as the pain in his ribs faded, but his breathing felt no easier, and he remained as weak and helpless as before.
The Urgal’s voice sounded as if muffled by woolen batting: “He has too much blood in lungs, not enough in body. You must take him to one of your healers, dragon. And quickly too.”
There was jostling and shifting then, and the shapes of the chamber tilted as the Urgal picked him up and climbed onto Thorn’s back.
Murtagh struggled against the Urgal’s hold, wanting to speak, but the words would not form. Frustrated, he groaned, for there was something that needed saying, something important.
The world rose beneath him as Thorn stood, and his eyes rolled back.
|
The familiar pounding rhythm of Thorn’s trotting jarred Murtagh to wakefulness.
A dark stone ceiling swept past overhead, faster than a man could run. Deep booms echoed through the tunnel—as if from an enormous drum— and alarmingly loud cracks, and the mountain shook about them.
Flakes of stone fell as thick as snow.
“Faster!” growled Uvek as stones clattered about his head and horns.
|
Flames billowed out before them as Thorn swept the interior of a cave toothed with stalactites and stalagmites. Fingerrats in their hundreds squealed as the fire seared them. The vomitous stench of burnt hair filled the cave.
More of the grotesque creatures swarmed up Thorn’s sides. Uvek swung at them with a hammer-like fist, and they fell broken to the beslimed ground.
Thorn snapped and tore, and then he was moving forward again.
Amid the shrieking of the fingerrats, Murtagh remembered what needed saying. “Alín,” he murmured, but no one seemed to hear or care.
|
Time had little meaning. He was awake, but reality faded in and out around him: a series of disjointed impressions that gave him no sense of place or progress, as if he had been and would forever be caught upon Thorn’s back, subject to events without reason or explanation.
He felt as if he were choking. Every breath was a struggle, and when he failed the struggle, darkness would encroach, and another island of reality would wink out.
In his brief moments of awareness, he kept trying to talk to Thorn, but he could not seem to catch the dragon’s attention, and the failure was greatly distressing.
He saw caves and tunnels without end. Vaulted chambers filled with rotting mushrooms. Shadow spiders darting about the creviced stone, avoiding Thorn’s seeking fire. Pillars of crystal and walls of strange carvings that looked older than even the dwarves’ ancient works.
The paths Thorn followed were different from those Murtagh had, and he did not recognize their surroundings.
The mountain continued to shake. Twice he heard huge falls of stone, and Uvek shouting, “Turn, turn!” And always Thorn’s rasping breath, as if the dragon himself were struggling to breathe.
|
The faintest light appeared above them, orange and sooty, as a bonfire high upon a hill. Murtagh squinted, tried to raise his head.
A line of rough-hewn steps ascended the stone face before Thorn, rising toward the ruddy mouth of the cave. Salvation. Freedom.
Uvek bellowed something, and Thorn raced forward, grunting as he scrambled up out of the depths of the mountain. Hollow booms echoed throughout the widening cavern, louder than ever before—deafening crashes of thunder that vibrated through Murtagh’s bones.
He gasped and coughed. Clotted blood stopped his throat; he couldn’t cast it clear, couldn’t get the air he needed.
Steps shattered underneath Thorn’s weight. The cavern shuddered, and boulders plummeted from the raw ceiling and cracked and bounded around them. A piece of stone as large as a cart glanced off Thorn’s left shoulder, knocking the dragon to one side. He lurched, and Murtagh’s head whipped around at the impact.
Stars spangled Murtagh’s vision as black gauze wrapped close around the edges.
The whole cave seemed to be collapsing. Entire sheets of stone fractured free and tipped downward until they disintegrated into a shower of splinters and tumbling rubble. The sound was numbing, staggering, impossible to comprehend.
“Faster, dragon!” Uvek shouted.
The clots in Murtagh’s throat slipped the wrong way, and he inhaled them. The breath stopped in his chest. He couldn’t cough, couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t…
His head snapped back as Thorn leaped forward again. The mouth of the cave was shrinking as the ceiling collapsed, the orange light of freedom diminishing.
A particularly large boulder crashed down in front of them, and Thorn slipped and fell forward onto his chest.
The impact was brutal. Murtagh’s vision went white, his chest seized, and he felt himself sinking into oblivion even as thunder descended around them.
No! he thought.
The world ceased to be.
