“Good.” Detaching the child’s wiry clench from round his neck, Lance sat him down in a niche in the rock. He took off his cloak and bundled him into it. “Stay here, boy. Do you hear me? We’re going to find your sister.”
A large promise, given more in courage than hope. The chasm yawned beneath them—to infinity, for all Lance or Arthur knew. They picked their way down a rocky scree that threatened to crumble beneath them at every step. “Guy will send people after us,” Art said confidently, and Lance held fast to the assurance. He didn’t share Art’s fear of the dark, but he had no wish to be entombed down here. Carefully, slowly, down they went, trying to balance out caution against the life left in the torches.
Then the ground beneath them shook. The voice of the worm they had conquered rose up through the dark, huge as the night sky, shaking the marrow of their bones. Her green light shone up at them like midwinter dawn, or like the spectral glow that sometimes touched the face of the dark moon. And underneath the terrible voice was a human one—a child’s, a girl’s, screaming as if her heart was being ripped from her breast.
Lance fell. In the flashing green-lit dark he felt Art near him: the helpless grab he’d made to pull Lance back, then a thud against his shoulder as Art too lost his grip. Lance grabbed at a handhold: let it go along with the torch, the price of a rescue. The rock turned to glass and ran out, and he dropped for a heartbeat through empty air.
He hit wet sand. The girl’s shrieks entered him like blades, and he flipped onto his front, then his hands and knees. He’d landed in a high-roofed cavern. By the weird light filling it, he saw Art pushing up onto his backside, intact but clutching one ankle. Lance crawled over to him. “Are you all right?”
“What in unholy damnation doyouthink?”
“Don’t worry. Stay here.”
“Lance, no! That… That’s the worm.”
“I know.”
“You can’t fight it alone. Anyway, it’s my task. I killed the mother.”
“Redress it some other time. I have to go.” Reluctantly Lance pulled free of Art’s grasp, the circle of human warmth enclosing his arm. He didn’t want to run alone into the alien light, toward that terrible screaming. If he didn’t do it instantly, his blood would curdle cold in his veins. “Wait for me here, love! Don’t be afraid. Guy will be down soon.”
Chapter Eighteen
Lance ran through curving chambers and passages of rock. With every flying step, his fears blew off him like cobwebs. He should have known: alwayshadknown, in some recess of his heart’s memory, that the core of Din Guardi was hollow. Din Guardi was the dragon’s home. He couldn’t become lost down here. The tunnels were a spiral, a labyrinth: one route in, one route out, the journey from life into death and back, which he could make in safety if he were only willing. The dragon’s roar became a song, and the child’s screams blended with it and turned to music too.
Lance rounded the last curve, and there they were—the dragon, twice the size of the creature he’d encountered on the Spindlestone crags, and a thin little girl, no more than ten years old, standing serenely before her. He had reached the centre.
No need for him to be afraid, not when the child was waiting so calmly, looking up into the dragon’s face. He didn’t even need his sword. He sheathed it, and the girl said calmly, “You see, my lady. I have brought him to you, as you wished.”
Lance approached in silence. The girl was surrounded by a coil of the creature’s tail, which he had to step over to reach her. He did it without hesitation, even when a bony spike brushed his knee. He lifted the child into his arms. She smiled, but hardly seemed to notice him. “Raise me higher,” she said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I want to give my lady the dragon a kiss.”
“Won’t she eat you?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Well, if she does, she’ll no doubt swallow me too. So neither of us will have long to worry about it.” He did as the child had bidden him, hoisting her up by the armpits.
She put up her arms in a gesture of yearning and welcome. And the beast bowed its abysmal face, that great skeletal shape as big as a horse, down and down until the child could touch it. Lance watched as she put her two hands on its muzzle, brushed them over the gaping nostrils. He remembered the fire, and he shuddered. But more and more it seemed to him that he was looking at a mask. The great eyes with their cold light that filled the chamber were only lanterns in a window now, a sea-widow’s last hope.
A terrible sadness took hold of Lance. Dragon to worm to harmless snake—all this he’d seen, but Excalibur had only changed the beast, not slain her. She had been able to change back. This would be the end of it—this, when he followed the movement the child was showing him, and put his own hand on the dragon, and leaning forward, pressed his lips to her face.
He set the child down, and lifted the mask away. It was light as dried bone now, easy as taking the shield from the corpse of a fallen foe. When he put it aside, it crumbled to powdery dust.
A woman was kneeling where the dragon had been. She was curled up so tight that her brow was pressed to the wet sand of the chamber floor, her hands locked behind her skull as if expecting the roof to fall in. Her skin and her black hair were soaked, gleaming with the same weird liquid that had painted the track of the dragon all over King Coel’s lands. Her bony spine, like a dragon’s crests, looked ready to burst through her scant flesh. Her raw newborn nakedness was terrible to Lance. When she unclasped her hands and slowly raised her head, he stepped back from her as he had not done from the beast. But the green glow swiftly faded, and she looked at him with brown eyes like his own.
Just like his own. He stared at her. What transmuting mirror, polished Roman copper or ancient obsidian, could show him his own face thus transformed? “Who… Who are you?”
“I am the white wave,” she said, and he realised he’d asked in his own language. She had replied with the same—a sweet, strange voice, rough with newness, reaching awkwardly for each syllable—and it sounded likeguen yvre. “Your kind call me so, who’ve seen me dancing the rock crests, or rolling in the breakers to the shore.”
“My kind… Aren’tyoumy kind?”
She knelt up a little. He wanted to cry out in warning: the raw bones were retracting somehow under the surface of her skin, which looked more like silk than like scales now, stripped of its power to break spears and swords. How would she live? She lifted her hands and examined them. “It seems that I am. Has it happened? Is it time?”
Lance had no idea. It didn’t matter. A great calm descended on him, a silence as deep as the earth. Fear and wonder left him. There were no more choices to be made. No more fighting, no more burned villages, no scared children, no man or woman riven through the heart of their own nature by the sun god, by the Son of God, who carved flesh away from spirit, life from death, creator from created. He would touch her, raise her to her feet. The two halves of their separated worlds would join, and all would be well.
