Dragon Ultimate (44 page)

"Oh praise be to Los, you are here in time. But hurry. You must hurry."

Another voice broke in; for some reason Relkin thought of it as female in gender.

"They are here, they are finally here…"

And another voice, this time male.

"Hurry, for the love of Los, hurry."

"Which way do we go?"

"This way," called the voices in his mind, and Relkin turned and pointed out toward a range of crystal hills, standing tall amidst roiling clouds of yellow dust.

Through the yellow-crystal hills they came, striding forward on their huge and unfamiliar bodies. Bazil's mass shifted forward with each step on legs of stupendous girth and musculature. His feet tended to leave tracks in the bare rock as if it were mud.

This world was oppressive in every way imaginable. The view was of bare rock, deformed by the heat and pressure. Here and there heat-resistant crystals had formed ridges and cliffs. These caught the hot blue light of the sun and flashed and flickered with unbearable brightness.

"Look at it this way; we're real close to getting a crack at him again."

"That is good. Been hoping for a rematch ever since. That one is evil. Needs to be snuffed out."

Relkin was actually getting the hang of his huge new body. His legs were metal tubes, joined at the knee by a sleeve of something that was both resistant and flexible. His arms ended in huge hands that were like nothing he had ever seen.

Bazil was more true to his own nature, closer to his own form and shape. But he, too, had had to struggle with the madness of his position.

"We find that damned wizard and we cut him down."

Relkin heard the anger in the dragons' words. Bazil rarely expressed such hate for his foes, but they had both seen the work of Waakzaam, all too much of it.

Relkin discovered that his body, huge as it was, could be made to move quickly across the strange landscape. There was a springiness to the stride, he "felt" great strength in his metal limbs. He experimented, learned that he could even make leaps of more than his own body length, then started scouting, climbing up the slopes of the crystalline hills that surrounded them.

The crystals were pale yellow, and their facets were often six feet across, stacked up in hexagonal columns that formed stepping-stones up the slope.

It was on one of these forays that he first caught a distant glimpse of the thing they pursued. Far off across the shimmering, heat-struck plains strode a manshape the size of a mountain. Wreathed in pink clouds, its head was lost in the haze, but the huge body was visible, legs like pillars, slab-sided trunk like cliffs. Then it moved into the clouds and disappeared. Relkin turned back to report.

Their opponent was enormous, far larger than they. Even Baz would only be two-thirds as tall as the golemoid Intruder.

The dragon's response was simple.

"Need to get close, make first strike without warning."

Now they stalked along through the valleys of soft rock, Bazil keeping his head below the level of the crystalline ridges. Every so often Relkin climbed to take a reading of the position of their foe.

The huge Intruder continued to stride relentlessly along, heading toward a range of much higher hills. These were cast with long, slab-sided faces that reflected the sunlight in blinding blasts. In places these huge crystals fell straight to the plain below from a high col, single enormous facets hundreds of feet long. When they caught the fierce blue light they coruscated in rainbow flashes.

On his next foray to the top of the nearest elevated point, Relkin saw a line of dark triangular shapes, huddled at the base of the distant hills. He studied them, knowing at once what they were—the pyramids of the Sinni. They moved slowly, almost imperceptibly it seemed at this distance, but were definitely crowding into a narrow canyon opening in the face of the crystal cliff.

But they were moving far too slowly to escape the Intruder, which was already in sight and bearing down on them. It would catch up long before they had all managed to float slowly into the canyon. And there was no real safety in the crystal canyon, for it could follow them in and smash them one by one from behind.

Then a new voice broke into his thoughts.

"So, Relkin of Quosh, you see our predicament. He will catch us here and smash us, one by one, and extinguish the Sinni, the keepers of the lamps of Los. And that will bring down the darkness on all the worlds."

"I see it. But I do not understand how I can see it, how I can be here? How can anything survive in this place?"

"It isn't easy, let us say that much. Nor is there time for me to begin to explain. Later, there may be an opportunity for all of that. For now, the question that we ask ourselves is simple. Can you stop that thing?"

"I don't know. It's enormous." Relkin hesitated, sensing a vast disappointment out there. "But, if we don't, he will destroy you, right?"

"Yes."

"Then we will."

A scene bathed in golden light filled his thoughts, a memory dredged from the past. The great Los was among them, filling them with his glory. An immortal, one of the children of Los, was giving up his life. The white-marble floor was bathed in the light. The sky was a purple masterpiece. There was a golden vessel standing on a tripod in the light.

It was gone leaving him grasping at straws. Where had it come from?

"You have heard of the Great One, Zizma Bos, who was prime among the children of Los?"

"His statue once stood over the city of Mirchaz. The Game Lords revered him. I think it's been pulled down since I was there."

"The withdrawal to Mirchaz was not the finest moment of Zizma Bos's life. Earlier he had predicted this would happen, that Waakzaam would come to destroy us here in our hiding place. We, who had thought ourselves immune because of the sheer difficulty of surviving here, would find ourselves trapped."

"You move too slowly."

"When we came here we grew these 'structs to protect ourselves. They were never intended to move very much. Our physical lives are restrained within their confines, but our real work is spread across the continuum, on all the worlds of the Sphereboard of Destiny. The 'structs might move a short distance, if the surrounding terrain shifted or became unsuitable, but that would only involve perhaps a mile or so at most. Now we have fled fifty leagues, crawling on the fingernails of our minds, bearing these 'structs. Nor do we have the time to grow new 'structs that might allow us greater speed."

"I understand. Why do I feel that I know you?" Relkin asked.

"You did. Your spirit came from one of us, child. You are mortal now, but once you were immortal."

Relkin was staggered. This was the answer to the question that had haunted him for years. He had always been sensitive to the magic, and at Mirchaz he had been a vessel for it on an awesome scale.

Awake! It had cried to him.

"And what then, is Bazil?" His question was automatic, spoken even as he thought it.

"The dragon is a great and noble wyvern, beasts that are the measure of men in the universe dictated by Waakzaam's treachery. The Broketail wyvern is simply the work of the Mother's Hand."

"You say the reverence for the Mother! Does that mean the witches are right? Are the Old Gods dead?"

"What is regarded as the Hand of the Mother can also be seen as the Hand of the Father. They are one and the same thing and an expression of the will of the All. But trouble yourself not with such concerns, for if we cannot stop the Intruder, then all will end in the triumph of Waakzaam and endless darkness and great evil."

Relkin floated for a moment as he tried to absorb this. Relkin of Quosh, another Bluestone orphan, left for the dragonhouse. And he came from these beings?

The memory! That golden vessel, standing on the tripod in the brilliant sunlight. The marble was white. Death was painless. Everything had been foretold long before.

He came to himself with a snap.

"Right. We're coming."

"There, at the end of ridge, we can catch it, if we hurry." The dragon pointed with a huge hand, and Relkin followed it to see the place where the ridgeline, a brown mass streaked with red from rusting iron deposits, snaked down to the plane. It petered out just a mile or so from the crystal cliffs. The two were crouched at the top of the low crystalline ridge. Shattered yellow crystals littered the plain below. The Intruder was tramping steadily toward the cliffs where the Sinni crowded together.

"He won't be able to see us until we go past that pinnacle near the end."

"This dragon move as fast as it can, we kill that thing."

"Kill!" screamed a tiny voice from somewhere.

Ecator glowed on the dragonform's shoulder. Relkin shivered at the determination he detected in the dragon's thought and the crazy hate in the sword.

"Let's go."

He pushed his tremendous body into increasing its speed. Relkin had to struggle at times with the scale of this new body, but a strange understanding of the pseudomusculature had grown up. The legs and arms took longer to respond; there was a moment's disconnect between his thought and the resulting action which had almost tripped him up a few times at the beginning, but now he was getting the hang of it. You thought something, and then it happened, just a moment later.

They scrambled down the long, slow incline, Relkin's jumps carrying his huge torso five hundred feet at a time. The dragon was bounding along, the ground shaking under his feet. Relkin wondered how anything could possibly not sense that something was coming.

But the Intruder was intent only on his prey.

Bazil reached the row of pinnacles. The crystal cliffs loomed quite closely now, and the glare from the enormous facets was overwhelming.

They passed the last pinnacle. Their quarry was clearly in view, striding across the plain, a man on the scale of a mountain. The huge steel hammer rested on its shoulder, carried in much the same way that dragons would carry their swords when they were out of their sheaths. And still the enormous thing had taken no notice of their presence.

They stepped into plain sight of it; still it marched on, intent only on the huddled pyramids clustered at the mouth of the narrow canyon.

"Now!" came a roar of exultation from the Intruder that broke into every mind attuned to those of the Sinni all across the universe. Everywhere the forces of the light quailed, their stride faltering. The forces of darkness, on the other hand, were heartened and took up their weapons with renewed ardor.

"Now I have you! At last you shall pay! You, who broke the ancient oath, shall feel the wrath of Waakzaam the Great, whom you have wronged most willfully."

After a long moment there came a calm and measured response.

"You have gone insane, great one."

"I shall smash your shells and let the cleansing blue light in to do its work. You will fry and broil at the same time."

There was another silence. Then the same calm voice.

"Can you not hear the madness in your own thought! Why do you talk always of killing and destroying? Why is it so hard for you to leave the creatures of the new worlds to develop their own cultures? Why must you arrange these things for them?"

"They cannot be trusted to do anything properly. They must be guided."

"But when you guide them they always end up being annihilated."

"It was necessary. Great work requires revisions!"

"What about the Gimmi, Great One?"

"They bred like flies, the Gimmi. They would have buried their world in their own flesh. Something had to be done."

"And what of the Eleem, or the Ixin, or any of the other peoples that you have destroyed in your long career of insanities, Great One?"

"The Eleem were actively rebellious! They raised their hands against me. But I brought them low, I showed them the power of the sword! I showed them that they were wrong not to pay me homage."

Bazil and Relkin had gained ground and were close behind now, and Bazil was contemplating just how he would lay the sword into the taller monster's legs from behind. Relkin took up position as he would have in combat under more normal conditions. It looked as if they might strike undetected.