The Lightstone

Chapter 41

We spent some time in gathering up the knights' horses and divesting them of their saddles and tack, which we piled up inside the cave. We dragged the dead knights inside, as well; it wouldn't do for the vultures or other animals to find them and so alert another patrol as to what had happened here. After driving off the horses – we hoped they would gallop off into the Wendrush and lose themselves on its endless grasslands – we made our final preparations for entering Argattha. Ymiru unpacked some torches, which he had anticipated needing as far back as Alundil. He also brought out and donned his disguise for making his way through the city. This was a great black, cowled robe that covered him from head to foot. A veil, built into the cowl, hid his face, while he had a huge pair of boots and black gloves to pull on over his furry feet and hands. Thus did the very tall Saryaks of Uskudar dress. Of course, the Saryaks were not quite so tall as the Ymanir, and not nearly so thick.

And their black skins were smooth, like jet. And so Ymiru's disguise would not bear close scrutiny. But this, we hoped, he was unlikely to endure since we had found a way of bypassing Argattha's gates.

'And if we are stopped,' Kane said, holding up one of the knights' medallions, 'these should win our way through.'

At his bidding, we each put on a medallion and hid away our own.

'I hate wearing such,' Liljana said, tapping her finger against her new medallion's gold dragon.

We all did. And we hated even more the idea of stripping the dead of their armor and surcoats and dressing as Morjin's knights, which Maram suggested. Thus we might simply walk into the Dragon's throne room, he said.

'No,' Kane told him, shaking his head, 'thus we might be stopped by Morjin's other knights, wondering why strangers are weanng the livery of their friends. Or asking us the name of our company. The risk here, I deem, is greater than the gain.'

We ail agreed that it was so. And so we would go forth into the city, dressed in our mail and tattered tunics, looking for all the world like vagabonds come to sell our swords, as the knights' captain had suggested.

Our final preparations having been completed, Ymiru heaved a few great boulders over the cut into the mountain that Maram had made so that any passersby might not notice it. And then, standing inside the cave with the bodies of the men we had slain, we lit the torches. Their acrid, oily smoke filled the black cavity around us. Their flickering yellow flames gave enough light to show the cave's curving roof and black walls – and the tunnel at its far end: black and rectangular and opening like a gate into hell.

Holding a torch in one hand and my father's shield in the other, I led the way into it.

Ymiru, whose people had once bored this channel through hard rock, was little help here. He had told us all that he knew about this secret passage: that it wound its way beneath Argattha's first level long since abandoned by Morjin and the city's other denizens. Ymiru thought that the tunnel might give out in the old throne room or onto stairs leading to it. It must give out somewhere on the first level, he said. And from there, we could make our way up to the second level where people lived, and so up to the higher levels until we came to Morjin's new throne room on the seventh and highest level of the city.

In the dark tunnel, it was cold and close. Although it had been cut high enough for Ymiru to walk without stooping – barely – it was so narrow that we had to walk in single file. I moved forward slowly, not knowing what my torch would show in the curving, black passage ahead of me. Its walls, of greasy-looking basalt, seemed to press upon me from either side and crush the breath from my chest. The air was stale and smelled bad, having pocketed here for perhaps a thousand years. In its cloying moistness were the scents of decay, suffering and death.

Ymiru paced along just behind me, awkward in his new boots. Maram kept dose to him, followed by Master Juwain, Liljana, Atara and finally Kane. Their dread of this dark place was like a scent of its own that I could no more avoid than the torches' oily smoke. I smelled Maram s nervous sweat and the rancidness of the kalvaas in his mustache and beard. Atara was fighting hard to keep her spirit from being crushed away in the chilling gloom. And I sensed some dark thing eating at Kane's insides that dwelled even deeper than his hate.

We marched on for perhaps an eighth of a mile, stepping over broken boulders and the occasional crack through the tunnel's floor. The rock here, I thought, seemed to hold shrieks and screams ages old. Moisture clung to the tunnel's walls as if blood had been sweated and tortured from them. The slick foor ran with a trickle of water and other liquids that must have seeped down from the levels of the city above us. In places it pooled inches deep: a foul-smelling effluvia of metallic sludges, rotting garbage and human waste. As Ymiru slogged along, he admitted that he was very glad for his boot – as were we all.

We came to a place where the tunnd divided. Each fork, the right and the left, looked equally ominous. I turned to Ymim and asked, 'Do both these lead to the old throne room.'

'I don't know,' he told me, shaking his head. He patted the pack on his back, where he had stowed his father's map. 'I wish the living clay showed earth forms so small as these.'

I called for Atara to come up, and he pressed himself flat against the tunnel's wall to allow her room to squeeze by. She stood next to me at the fork in the tunnel, looking right and looking left.

'Which way, Atara?' I asked her 'Can you see our way through?'

She brought out her scryer's crystal and held it before her. And then without hesitation, she said, 'Right.'

As we resumed our journey through the dark, I wondered if she had simply chosen this direction at random to reassure us. Soon we came to a sudden rent through the tunnel's rock it split the ceiling and the walls, and ran through the floor deep into the earth. I almost tripped into this black chasm. Maram suggested sounding its depths with a dropped stone, but quickly thought the better of such recklessness. As the chasm was some yards across, I needed a running jump to clear it, as did Ymiru and Maram. And Master Juwain needed more than this. When it came his turn to make the leap, he fell a little short and only Maram, grabbing onto Master Juwain's arm, kept him from falling back into the blackness.

'Thank you,' Master luwain told him, his cheeks puffing from exer tion. With Maram, he stood at the chasm's edge, not daring to look back at it.

'You'er welcome, sir,' Maram said. 'Don't worry – I wouldn't let you die.'

His smile told me that he was very proud to have saved Master Juwain's life, as Ymiru had saved his.

When the others had each crossed the chasm and we stood safely on the other side, we set out again. We walked as quietly as we could though the stifling darkness. We came to other branchings in the tunnel and other cracks through it. One of these was so wide that it had been spanned by a narrow stone bridge. This arch seemed so worn and old that I feared it might crumble at the first footfall. And yet it bore me up and then Ymiru's considerably greater weight. After Maram had crossed over it, too, he stood holding his hand out as if to feel the air.

'It's warm,' he said. 'Ah, it's almost hot.'

I crowded back close to him, letting this upwelling of hot air blow across my face.

In its searing jets, I thought I heard the sound of beating iron, cracking whips and men crying out in pain.

'What lies beneath here?' I asked Ymiru.

'Only the mines, I think-'

'And how many levels are there to these?'

'To the mines there be no levels,' he said. He told us that the mines beneath Argattha had been tunneled like the twistings of a man's bowels, leading far down into the earth.

'But how far, then?'

'I don't know, Val,' he said. 'There be seven levels to the city, and each of them five hundred feet thick. It be said that the mines ran twice as deep as all the levels were high, together. And that was more than two thousand years ago.'

How far, I wondered? How far had Morjin come toward finding the dark currents in the earth that he sought and freeing the Lord of Death known as Angra Mainyu?

'Come, Val,' Ymiru said as we stood at the edge of this pit. He rested his gloved hand on my shoulder.. 'Do not look down – look up. We've still far to go.'

I nodded my head, and then waited for the others to cross the bridge, too. And then I led off again, thrusting the blazing torch ahead of me as I pushed forward deeper into Argattha.

After a while, the foul smell began to work at me and bum like a poison in my blood; the distant drip of water beat at my head like a relentless hammer. In places, air shafts broke through the tunnel's floor or ceiling. But these brought no relief against the oppressive darkness, only more bad smells, muffled cries and the slow slip of muck and mire working its way down into the earth. Although my torch gave little enough light, it was enough to warn away the rats that jumped out of the darkness in their panic to flee from us. Some of these were nearly as big as cats; their glowing red eyes were like hot coals as they scurried along with their claws scraping against rock – and more than once across my boots. The rapaciousness of these trapped, maddened creatures made me shudder. I wondered what they had here for food, but I did not really want to know.

The tunnel wound mostly toward the south, across more chasms, into the middle of the mountain. After about a mile, we came to another forking where the tunnel curved off toward the right and the left as if cut along the lines of a perfect circle. I was reluctant to go forward in either direction. Even Atara, when she came forward, seemed unable to decide which way to go.

'I don't know,' she said to me at last, shaking her head. 'You choose.'

'Very well, then,' I said. 'We'll go right.'

And so we did. But after a hundred yards, we came to another node and another choice of directions. Again, I led toward the right and we moved off, circling that way.

And so it went, the nodes coming one after another, the tunnel turning sharply west and then north, and then curving back south again. Thrice we came to dead ends and had to retrace our steps. We circled east for a way before the tunnel bent yet again, taking us back toward the north, the opposite of the way that we needed to go. Soon it became apparent that we had entered a labyrinth – and that we were lost within it.

'This is too much,' Maram said as we gathered in the space of one of the nodes. A hungry rat bolder than many, lunged at him, trying to bite a chunk out of his leg. He kicked it squealing away from him and muttered, 'Ah, this is like hell.'

Liljana, who was having a hard time breathing in the fetid air, turned to Ymiru and said, 'You didn't tell us we'd find a labyrinth here.'

'I didn't know,' Ymiru said. 'Morjin must have had it built to confound assassins or anyone pursuing him out of the city.'

'Well, it's certainly confounding us,' she said. 'How are we to find our way through it?'

But he didn't have an answer for her, nor did I or anyone else. Finally, Kane, who had tired of standing still, shook his torch at the corridor off to the left and said,

'Let's walk then, eh? What else is there to do?'

And so we walked,, as he had said. For a long time we wandered through the labyrinth's curves, which ate through the bare rock like dark, twisting worms. After a while we grew very tired. Liljana's torch, its oil all burned, was the first to sputter out. We used the sooty end of it to mark the wall where we stood, in the hope of orienting ourselves should we come upon this part of the labyrinth again. But the black char seemed lost against the blackness of the rock here. Soon, I thought, all of our torches would die, and then we wouldn't be able to see any marks upon the walls

– or even the walls themselves.

'It's cold down here,' Maram grumbled. 'My feet are wet and sore. And I'm tired.

And I'm hungry, too.'

We were all hungry, and so we paused to sit down on a dry patch of the cold stone floor and eat a quick meal. We shared some hard cheese and battle biscuits with each other, trying to ignore the pervasive stench in the air as we swallowed these rough foods. We tried to swallow back our belly-churning fear, too, which was growing with the darkness all our torches flickered out one by one.

After a while, after we stood yet again and resumed our wanderings, only two torches remained afire. I took one of these to lead the way while Kane, in the rear, took the other. Ymiru, Maram, Master Juwain, Liljana and Atara walked in the darkness between these two sickly yellow lights.

At last we came to a large, circular chamber at what I guessed to be the labyrinth's very center. There our last torch died, and much of our hope with it as we huddled together in the utter blackness. 'Ah, this is the end,' Maram muttered, 'surely the end.'

Master Juwain, whose tenacity seemed to grow with the severity of our plight, said to him, 'Surely this is not the end. Surely we've come to the center of this maze, and that must be counted as progress.'

'I think not, sir,' Maram said. 'Didn't you notice that there was only one way into this chamber? And so only one way out. Now we'll just have to go back and get lost all over again.'

His logic drove Master Juwain to silence. For a moment, we all stood there in the dark listening to the sound of our breathing and the scurrying of the rats around us.

One of these tried to bite Maram again, and he shook it off with a desperate curse and shuddering frenzy.

'The rats seem to like you,' Atara said to him. 'Maybe they smell all that disgusting kalvaas you've spilled on yourself.'

'Ah, these accursed rats,' Maram said, shuddering more violently. 'I think they're worse than anything we found in the Vardaloon.'

He paused to do a breathing exercise that Master Juwain had taught him. Then he gave up and said, 'And this accursed place is worse than the Black Bog.'

Now it was my turn to shudder; I stood there in the black bowels of the earth wondering how we would ever escape from its endless twistings, especially if we could not see our way out of them. I was afraid that if we didn't escape from this city of dreadful night soon, I would begin to hate myself for leading us into it and more, hate the whole world for calling such dark creatures as Morjin into life.

And then, at last, I drew my sword. It glowed with a soft, silver light. It was not enough to fill the chamber and illumine its dark walls, but it brightened our spirits all the same.

When I pointed my sword upward, its sheen deepened, slightly. It was strange to think that the Lightstone might be so close, somewhere above us through half a mile of rock in Morjin's throne room. Morjin, I thought was near there, too. I could almost feel our hearts beating with the same poisoned blood and sense his mind seeking mine. This connection that he had made between us with a bit of kirax suddenly darkened my soul. For a single moment, I allowed my dread of him to take hold of me. As if I had drunk the foul waters running through the cold rock here, my belly filled with doubt. It quickly worked at me and split me open. And through this dark crack in my being, beasts and demons came for me. At first I was so shocked by this sudden attack that I didn't realize that it was an illusion. Black, birdlike things with razor talons and the faces of those I had slain fell at me out of the air.

I cut at them with my sword, and its touch caused them to burst into flame and scream so pitifully that I thought I was screaming myself. And then a huge shape lunged through the chamber's doorway. It had great, golden eyes, scales as red as rust and hooked claws that sought to tear me open. Through its slashing white teeth, it breathed fire at me, as the dragons of old were said to do. I swung my sword against tts writhing neck, and watched in horror as its bright blade shattered into a hundred glittering shards. And then the fire caught me up in its incredible heat and began burning through my mail, melting the steel into a glowing lava that ate into my heart, burning and burning and…

'Val!' someone called to me.

A sudden shimmering radiance poured out into the chamber. It was Flick, I saw, spinning about in swirls of silver and iridescent blue. Once again, he had returned to us. And beneath his reassuring form, Master luwain stood in front of me with his varistei pointing at my chest It flared a deep and bright green. I felt its healing touch, like cool waters, quench the evil fire inside me. And then my mind cleared as I slowly shook my head.

Kane, his sword drawn, stood next to him looking at me intently. I remembered that in my madness, I had swung my sword at him – and at my other friends. Only Kane's great skill in parrying my wild slashes, it seemed, had saved them from being hacked in half.

'Val, what happened?' Master luwain asked me.

'That… is hard to say, sir,' I told him. I looked at Alkaladur's bright blade. 'When my sword first flared, there was a moment of hope. And I saw it leading us to the Lightstone. But there the Red Dragon waited, too – always watching and waiting.

And my hope turned into despair.'

Master Juwain nodded his head gravely and said, 'There is a great danger for you here – and for all of us. Danger beyond death or even capture and torment. This turning that you have told of: it seems that the Lord of Lies has a great talent for poisoning even the strongest of trees and twisting good into evil.'

He went on to ask me if I had been practicing the exercises he had taught me, particularly the light meditations.

'Yes, sir, all the time,' I told him. 'And my sword has helped me. The silustria has. It has shielded me all through the Nagarshath, And so I began to think that the battle against the Dragon's lies had been won.'

'That battle can never be won,' Master Juwain told me. 'And it is lost most surely the moment we think that it is won.'

Kane tapped his sword against mine, and its steel rang throughout the semi-lit chamber. 'So, even the best of shields is useless if it's lowered, eh?'

I nodded my head that this was so. 'Thank you for reminding me.'

'As you've reminded us,' he said, smiling fiercely. 'From the first, you've had more fire in you for finding the Lightstone than any of us, and we wouldn't have come this far without it.'

His deep eyes searched in mine for faith, and Master Juwain, Atara and the others looked at me in this way, too. They looked to me to find a way out of this seemingly endless labyrinth and see our way toward the Lightstone.

And suddenly I knew that there was a way out. In my connection to the dark corridors of Morjin's mind, I became aware of a twisted logic that ordered its turnings. It was the logic of his life and all the works of his hand, this labyrinth among them. For hours upon hours, I had wandered through part of it. Its curved passages and nodes were recorded inside me as if my blood were a liquid, living day. And now, as I gazed at the bright, silver crystal of my sword and my mind opened, in a flash of light, I saw the whole of the labyrinth from this chamber at its very center.

'Come,' I said, leading forth toward the doorway. 'We've only a little farther to go.'

We lined up as before, with Ymiru just behind me. He shuffled along the winding corridors, keeping his eyes fixed on my glowing sword. Of all my companions save Liljana, he was the only one unable to see Flick and thus was blinded to this strange being's dancing lights. But the others perceived him well enough, and marveled that he had now fallen into a steady, flaming spiral just above my head. His presence gave them to move with more confidence through the turnings of the labyrinth.

At last, after circling east and north and then abruptly reversing our direction through a black tube of rock, we came to a break in the curving wall that opened upon a new passage. As this led straight toward the south, I knew that we had finally found our way out of the labyrinth's south end.

'Are you sure this way be south?' Ymiru asked me. 'I admit I've been turned around for quite a while.'

'Val has a sense of direction,' Maram said from behind him. 'He never gets turned around.'

'Not never,' I thought remembering the disappearing moon of the Black Bog. But now, it seemed, I had led us true. For after a hundred yards, the tunnel suddenly gave out onto a set of stairs.

'Saved!' Maram cried out. 'These must be the stairs to the first level!'

'Quiet now!' Kane hissed back at him. 'We don't know what we'll find there!'

The stairs wound up through the rock, spiraling left, like those in my father's castle.

Ymiru had said that the distance between the levels of Argattha was five hundred feet. But Morjin had built his escape tunnel just beneath the first level, it seemed, and so we did not have to climb nearly so far. After a few minutes, the stairs gave out onto a short corridor that led through an open doorway into a huge hall.

I was the first to step into it, and I saw at once that it was dimly lit by the few ancient glowstones still set into its steeply rising walls. Great columns of rock, many now broken into the cracked wheels of basalt that littered the hall's hard floor, supported the curving ceiling three hundred feet above us. The sheer vastness of this place, carved from the heart of the mountain, struck me with awe. There was terror there, too – and not only mine. For just as Ymiru and the others joined me a few feet beyond the doorway, I saw that we were not alone. At the south end of the hall, off to the left, a small, ragged figure was struggling mightily against the chain and shackle locked around his ankle.

'Look!' Atara said to me. 'It's a child'

I started straight for him, but Kane suddenly laid his hand on my shoulder and said,

'Be careful – this might be a trap!'

The child, if that he really was, saw us almost immediately. And now he lunged against his chain as his eyes leaped with terror.

'It's all right,' I whispered, 'we won't hurt you!'

Again, I started across the rubble-strewn floor, fighting the child's scent of fear and the overpowering foulness of the air. This stank of cinnamon and sweat, of burning pitch and heated rock and evil as old as the mountain itself.

'Who are you?' I said to him, crossing the distance between us cautiously. 'Who chained you here?'

I saw that he was indeed a child, a boy, about nine years old. creasy rags barely covered his skinny body. His hair was black and hung about his dirty face in tangles.

He had the dark skin and almond eyes of the Sung – and yet he clearly belonged to Morjin. For upon his forehead was tattooed the sign of his slavery: a red dragon coiled as if burned deep into his flesh.

'Look!' Kane said to me as he came running up to my side. He pointed at the far end of the room toward the north. There, between two great pillars, stood a pyramid of skulls perhaps twenty feet high. Their curving bones and empty eye hollows gleamed a ghastly yellow in the glows tones' dim light.

'Oh, I don't like this place!' Maram said. 'Let's get out of here.'

He looked toward a great, open portal along the west wall opposite the stairs by which we had entered the hall. The doors of both of these openings, I saw, had long since been torn off their hinges. What use, I wondered, did Morjin now make of this foul chamber? A dungeon for the torture and execution of his enemies? But how could a child be anyone's enemy, even Morjin's?

'What is your name?' I said to the terrified boy, laying my hand on his head. 'Where is your mother? Your father?'

He jumped at my touch. He knocked my hand away and looked frantically toward the portal, where once a great iron gate had been.

'He's coming!' he said to me in a sweet voice made bitter by bondage. 'He's coming!'

'Who is coming?' I asked him.

I looked down at the boy's bare leg. So hard had he lunged against the shackle there that its iron had torn him bloody. There were bite marks about the ankle, as well. I did not want to admit what I knew to be true: that this poor boy, like a trapped animal, had tried to gnaw off his own leg.

'Who is it?' I asked him again.

He looked at me as if trying to decide who I might be. And then, with a deep courage pushing away some of his fear, he said, 'It's the Dragon.'

'Morjin, here?' Kane snarled, shaking his sword at the air.

The boy pulled to the limit of the chain attached to a bolt in the floor. He fell to his knee and crunched down upon some bones there. All about him, I saw, were piles of rat skulls and their skeletons. His torn tunic was stained with the guts and gore of rats, which it seemed he had eaten.

'It's the Dragon,' the boy said again. 'Can't you hear him?'

The vast hall rumbled with distant sounds of the other farts of the city. Water trickled and iron beat against stone; the stone itself seemed to beat like a great, black heart with rhythms as old as time.

'Listen, Rat Boy,' Maram said, coming up close to him. You've been here too long and must be hearing things that aren't-'

'No, it's the Dragon! We've got to get out of here!'

Now he stretched out his thin hand as if beckoning toward the rat leavings littered across the floor. And there, among these gnawed white bones, just beyond his reach, lay a black, iron key.

'Every abomination,' Kane muttered as I bent to pick up the key. 'Every degradation of the spirit.'

I turned to see if the key would indeed fit the locked shackle. And as I bent low, Atara stroked the boy's trembling head and asked him, 'Was it the Dragon who locked you here?'

'No, it was Morjin. Lord Morjin.'

'And you think he's coming back here?'

'No! I told you – it's the Dragon who's coming!'

Now Liljana and Master Juwain both drew out their gelstei. Liljana was fingering her blue whale, clearly contemplating entering the boy's mind to see where it had cracked. And Master Juwain wanted only to heal him of his delusions and terror.

I pushed the key through the hole in the lock. It slipped in with a loud click. The boy's heart was now beating eyen more rapidly than my own: doom, doom, doom.

'Quick!' the boy said to me, 'we've got to run!'

Now the smells of cinnamon and burning pitch suddenly grew overpowering as a blast of hot air blew into the room. From the dark corridor beyond the hall's open portal came a loud, rhythmic, thumping sound: Doom, Doom, Doom.

'Quick, Val!' Maram called to me. 'Back to the stairs! Something is coming.'

I turned the key, screeching metal against metal, right and then left. I jiggled it in the lock as the boy pulled with all his might against the chain. The sweaty cinnamon smell grew much stronger. And now the thunder of shaken stone filled the hall: DOOM! DOOM! DOOM!

The shackle's lock suddenly snapped open just as Atara sighted an arrow on the opening of the portal. And then there, in that dark, huge octangular space, a great shape appeared. It stood fifteen feet high and was perhaps thrice that long. Scales, red like rusted iron, covered the whole length of its long, sinuous body nearly down to the knotted tip of its tail. At the end of its great hind legs, claws as sharp as steel cut grooves into the rock of the floor. Its leathery wings were folded back along its sides like a cat's ears before a battle. Its great, golden eyes fixed on the boy with a malign intelligence. As I pulled the shackle from his leg they fixed on me.

Oh, Lord!' Maram said, fumbling for his firestone. 'Oh, my Lord!' It was, as the boy had tried to tell us, a dragon – and a female at that. And she was clearly angry that we had just robbed her of her feast. 'Liljana! Master Juwain!' I shouted. Take the boy back to the stairs!' Liljana grabbed the boy's hand and started running toward the stairs with Master Juwain close behind him. And then, just as the dragon sprang forward, Atara loosed her arrow at one of the dragon's eyes. But the dragon turned her head just in time so that the arrow glanced off her scales along her great jaws.

These now opened to show sharp white teeth as long as knives. I sensed that the dragon longed to charge Atara and bite her in two. And so I stepped forward, pointing my sword at the dragon as I raised up my shield. It was good for me that I still had my father's shield.

'Val, the fire!' Maram called to me. I thought, for a moment, that he must be speaking of his gelstei. 'The fire, beware!'

Suddenly, as the dragon seemed to quiver and cough, all at once, a-great breath of flame shot from her mouth. It fell in an orange stream against my shield, burning the silver swan embossed there as black as the curving black steel around it. Some of the flame spilled over my shield's rim and scorched my face. I rushed forward then to strike the dragon dead before she could draw breath and summon her fire again.

As did Ymiru and Kane. Kane dosed in toward the dragon's side and thrust his sword at the dragon's belly. It struck sparks against the scales there, and glanced off her, as did the second arrow that Atara fired at the dragon's eyes. Ymiru had greater success swinging his borkor at the dragon's still-open mouth. With tremendous force, it cracked into the jaw, breaking off two huge teeth and shaking the dragon to her bones. But then the dragon used her great, knotty head like a club of her own, swinging it sideways into Ymiru's chest, cracking ribs and knocking him off his feet Her tail suddenly lashed out at Kane; if he hadn't been quick to duck beneath its terrible sweep, the mace-like spikes at the tip would have taken off his head.

The dragon having been distracted, I worked in dose to her huge, heaving body. I thrust my sword straight at her chest. But Alkaladur's gleaming silustria, which had split open even plate armor, foiled to pierce the dragon deeply. It drove between two of the thick scales to a distance of perhaps an inch. It was enough only to wound the dragon – as a bloodbird might peck at me. 'Val, she's too strong!' Atara called to me.

'Back to the stairs!' Maram wasted no time in heeding her call to retreat. Gripping his gelstei which had failed to produce the slightest spark, he turned to run back toward the narrow opening to the east. While Kane helped Ymiru regain his feet, I stood before them, covering them with my shield. The dragon, dripping blood from her battered mouth, rgarded Ymiru with wariness and hate. Then she suddenly opened her jaws again to burn us.

This time I saw that her breath was not really of fire. Rather, as she coughed and heaved, she spit straight at us a stream of a reddish and jellylike substance.. Upon touching the air, it burst into flame. It clung to my shield with all the stickiness of honey. It burned into the steel there, etching it as might a blazing acid.

'Retreat, Val!' Kane shouted at me.

He and Ymiru, following Atara, had already started toward the stairs. I backed away from the dragon as quickly as I could. Once more, the dragon aimed a fiery blast at us. I caught it again on my shield, and then turned to run back toward the stairs before the dragon could summon up more of this evil red liquid. I reached the doorway and bounded down the stairs just as another stream of fire poured through.

Some drops of the jelly stuck to my mail and burned into my back. But at least my friends and I were safe. There was no way the dragon could force her huge body through the narrow doorway.

But there was no way either that we could go forward. It seemed that we west trapped in the deeps of Argattha.