Dragon Ultimate (43 page)

The world outside was stupendously strange. A tiny green sun burned hot and small in a sky of red ocher. A plane of flat silver stretched away in front, dotted with black blocks of all different sizes, slipping smoothly across the silver surface in an elaborate dance.

"What are all those things? What are they doing?"

"Can't see them properly from here. It's like a dream of some sort."

The plane shimmered there under the intense light of the small green sun.

"If this a dream, then we be having the same dream."

They looked at each other. Relkin shrugged. "Can't stay in here. This is a way station of some kind. I know we have to go on."

"To that place we saw, and fight that thing?"

"I don't know how. Seemed pretty big. Maybe we can think of something."

"Dragonboy good at that."

"Yeah? Nice of you to say so after all these years. Come on."

Relkin stepped out; Bazil came after him. Within a few moments they felt a strange, chilling sensation pass through their bodies. The feeling of cold became very intense. Relkin felt his back arch. His lungs ached as he screamed, but he could hear nothing.

To their amazement and horror they saw their flesh and bones suddenly deform, melting like wax and shrinking. As they shrank they darkened and grew lustrous until they had completely reformed.

They had both become crystalline. Bazil had become a triangular solid about eight feet high. Relkin was now a cube, four feet on a side. The sensation of being very, very cold faded slowly and was replaced with a feeling as if the body was asleep. Relkin felt a moment of panic, he couldn't feel his legs or arms. He couldn't move a muscle!

But he could see and hear and think. A mad whirling dance was going on out there on the plane.

"What?" the dragon was speaking, Relkin swore he could hear him.

"I hear you. How?"

"You are the cube thing I see."

"You're a big black triangle."

They struggled to absorb this.

A blue flash shot past just overhead. It slowed, curved around, and hurtled back. It came a full stop just beside them and hung in the air at the height of a dragon's shoulder.

"Ecator!" it "said" to them in the same magical voice that spoke directly to the mind.

Bazil examined the blue flash. At its heart was a small figure, a creature like a tiny elf, bright blue and shining. It had small bright red eyes and a dark line for a mouth.

"Ecator!" it said again.

"Magic, very strange, this dragon not like this."

Bazil especially did not like the feeling of having no sword. If the sword had transformed itself into this small blue sprite, then he wondered how he was supposed to fight their enemy. Then again, he didn't even have arms!

"Very strange is right," Relkin felt like a disembodied eye, floating in the cube which seemed to be his "body."

"Maybe we've gone mad; the whole thing was too much for us."

"Sword is now a blue pixie. Not much use as a sword."

The "pixie" whirred around angrily, emitting a stream of indecipherable language which Relkin thought was best left untranslated. He wondered if he was simply losing his mind. All the dislocation and bizarre magical effects really had been too much for him.

Then he recalled the magical worlds of the elven lords. Created by the energies stolen from the mind mass of the Game board, those worlds had been so perfect that they seemed absolutely real. This might be something like that, an artificial construct, an incredibly full and complex illusion.

The voice from the maze was back, whispering inside his head.

"Apparently it's something we have to do. A sort of preparation for something else."

"Something else?"

"That's all I know. Don't ask me how I do, but I know it."

For a long moment they simply stood there, absorbing their strange surroundings. Relkin wondered who, or what, was talking to him. What were these messages? Why did he feel so little panic at all this?

He shrugged inwardly. He'd seen worse and survived, that's all. It would take more than this to frighten this dragonboy. The Lady had told them that it was vital that they went through with this. Relkin and Bazil of the fighting 109th weren't going to give up.

"What now?"

"We have to go out there, travel somewhere, somehow."

Bazil suddenly gave a hoot of surprise and his tall pyramidical form slid forward across the silver surface and slowly coasted to a stop.

"What happened?"

"Don't know."

The blue sprite flew around Bazil a couple of times and resumed its position. It seemed to have calmed down a bit.

After a moment the dragon's pyramid moved again, sliding off a few feet while it spun slowly around before coming to rest.

"This dragon understand."

Relkin had to admit that Bazil had always been a quickwitted wyvern.

"What is it?"

"Try to walk," said Bazil's voice in his brain.

Relkin tried to move his legs and his cube suddenly wobbled forward across the gleaming silver surface and slowly spun around. He stopped it by trying to crouch and get both feet down on the ground. He couldn't feel the ground, but he came to a stop anyway.

The shaft of realization ran through his mind.

He tried to lift a foot for a full stride and the cube moved more quickly, slicing across the plane. He tried to stop by putting a foot down and the cube slid to a sudden stop.

There was no sensation of acceleration or deceleration. Questions flooded into Relkin's mind.

There also came a suggestion, which bubbled up from somewhere, that they move out and make good time. They had to travel to the Orb. It was a long way to the Orb. There they would pass on for the next translation.

"Where is Orb?"

"I don't know how I know, but I know that it lies in the opposite direction from the sun."

"Sun is green!"

"You noticed."

"Very strange. This dragon not care for it."

"Yeah, right."

The blue sprite spun off Bazil's pyramid and darted off away from the sun. "Ecator lead!" it said in their minds. With these brief communications there always came a kind of steely sensation, cold and crisp.

"Well, I guess…" Relkin started taking imaginary steps and slid forward. Bazil slid forward, too, and soon caught up, then went ahead.

"Dragon have to go slow on this world, otherwise leave dragonboy behind."

Relkin concentrated on his stepping and caught up. They slid along straight into the whirling dance of other things, all solids like themselves, heading in every imaginable direction, passing each other at great speed, never intersecting, or at least not as far as Relkin could see. The little blue figurine of Ecator flew ahead, glowing furiously, just a few feet in advance of them.

They picked up speed and moved swiftly away in the direction opposite to the small green sun. As far as Relkin could see there was no curve to the horizon. The silver plane went off in all directions forever. It was uncomfortable to contemplate such immensity.

Still the motion was enjoyable for a while. They slid along at great speed without doing much more than walking fast. Small things, brown-and-black cubes slid past in front of them harmlessly.

And then a huge shape hurtled past, just a few feet in front of them, traveling at tremendous speed. It had seemed to come out of nowhere, an enormous pale brown tetrahedron that whirled close and then sped away. If it had come a split second later, it would have smashed into them.

Then another huge shape zoomed past, this time directly across their course, missing them by ten feet and speeding on into the distance to become a dot in an instant.

These were unsettling events and left them apprehensive.

Other near collisions followed; one time a swarm of things the size of a man's fist came whipping through at high speed. Several passed between Bazil and Relkin, but none so much as grazed them.

Thus it continued for an unknown length of time, several hours, it seemed to Relkin. They just kept trying to move the legs they could no longer feel or see and they sped along on the silver surface.

Eventually, though, Relkin noticed a small change.

Ahead there was a sort of thickening in the line at the horizon. As they sped on the thick part darkened and deepened. Slowly a shape became apparent, a dark sphere humping up from the plane. Now with increasing swiftness the sphere grew in size and soon became mountainous, standing high above the plane, dominating it for a vast distance in every direction. Yet Relkin had seen no sign of it when they had first set out.

He shivered a little at the strange alien scale of the place. Close to the enormous sphere of the orb there was a great crowd of smaller objects. Many were large, towering above them. Others were the size of mice, hurtling past on the surface at the same sort of speeds that Ecator's blue figurine was capable of in the air above it.

As they moved into this dense belt that surrounded the Orb a beam of golden light flashed down from the Orb and fell full square upon them. They had barely the time to register this before they felt themselves lifted off the surface.

"We are flying," said Bazil in astonishment.

"Oh, my," said Relkin, as they rose up toward the dark surface of the enormous Orb.

He glimpsed the blue figurine zooming past and looked out below at the vast silvery surface flecked with specks in a multitude so vast they were like grains of sand at the seashore.

Then he looked up in time to see the surface of the Orb, black and glistening, approaching fast. He braced for the impact, expecting to hit a solid wall, but it never came. Instead they passed through the surface with a sensation of diving into warm water and reemerged in the next moment in a place filled with light and thus into the interior of the Orb.

At once they were dazzled in blinding golden light. The light became everything and they felt themselves filled with amazing warmth. A great tingling passed through them and they were consumed by the light, their bodies giving up their energy and being infused with new energy, cycling through the blinding light of Los.

Relkin had no understanding of the duration of time in this state. He merely accepted the blissful feeling of warmth in his bones. It was like coming in from a night on the palisade at Fort Kenor with the winter wind cutting to the bone and standing by the big brazier that was always kept hot in the dragonhouse. It was enormously pleasurable.

There was a sensation of turning in space. Their bodies, if they had bodies, were rotating, and there was a sudden feeling of compression, as if they had been suddenly placed in deep water. Pressure was squeezing down upon their bodies. The compression grew very tight, almost unbearable.

There was time for a panicky thought that he was drowning, then they were out of the golden light and deposited quite abruptly on a rough rock surface. Crystalline cliffs of amber and gold glinted a short distance away, illuminated by the blue light that poured down from above.

Relkin unwound his body and raised his upper torso. The motion took much longer than he was used to. He stared around him. The silver plane had been a strange landscape, but it had been calm and peaceful compared to this.

The light source was a searingly bright dot only occasionally glimpsed above the cloud layers that were stacked up in the enormous sky.

At the bottom, small, dense clouds of pinkish gray slithered swiftly by above their heads, fishlike in their motions. Above them was a layer of yellow haze. Above that there were white clouds, layer upon layer of them ascending upward toward the ferocious blue circle. Intense lightning blasts slammed and boomed through the thick air.

The surface was both rough and slightly plastic to the touch.

The ground shuddered. In the distance a volcano was erupting. Dark clouds were billowing up above the horizon.

Then Relkin got his first real shock. He looked down long, brass-colored arms to his hands. They were not human. They were of metal, and he was sure they were enormous. The arms were not human either, and yet he knew they were his.

What was he? What had he become? What had happened to him?

He heard a movement, a kind of throbbing rumble behind him. He turned his head, noticing as he did so that it seemed to rotate very smoothly. A huge dragonform creature was coming toward him.

It towered over him as he stood up to his full 250 feet, and he estimated it was perhaps six times his own height, built on a massive scale.

Ecator had become a sword once more, only now on the same heroic scale. The blade stretched five hundred feet in length and gave off gleams of blue fire.

"Crazy place. Don't understand, but this dragon pretty damned big."

Relkin had noticed that the searing heat and pressure of this place was perfectly normal for this thing that he now inhabited. He had his senses, and could see and hear, smell and touch, but the heavy sour odor of smoke and hot gas seemed completely neutral to him. The blinding blue light was the normal level of radiance, and the intense heat was merely a nice warmth.

Relkin had a feeling that this place was real, a world like Ryetelth, not a construct like the silver plane.

It was disconcerting to have the surface sticky and soft in many places, not because it was wet, but because it was semimolten.

"Pretty damn big," the dragon repeated while pressing one foot down into a soft patch of ground.

The dragon was bipedal, simplified. The tail was straight, tapering to a whip. The head was squared off, like a hammerhead. He had huge shoulders, was plated with armor like some vintage brasshide, and bore Ecator in a shoulder scabbard.

Relkin was equipped with a sword and a knife, both built on the same scale as his metallic form, both shimmering with energy. Like Bazil he had armor plate added to his metal frame.

He moved his arms, wondering at the transformation. How had they done this? And then they were no longer alone.

"You have arrived!" said a voice in their thoughts, the same voice that Relkin had heard before, but now audible to both of them and crystal clear.