Dragonslayer: A Novel (6 page)

"I know," Ulrich replied. "It is a dragon's claw."

There was a long silence. At last Valerian cleared his throat. "Will you help us, sir?"

"I have not decided."

"You are the only one who can."

"So you say."

Again Valerian coughed discreetly. "The old scrolls relate that dragons and sorcerers go back a long way together."

Ulrich fingered the great claw. "That is true," he said.

"In fact, according to some accounts it is said—forgive me, sir-but it is said that dragons are the creatures of sorcerers, the results of their unbridled lust for power, and of incantations gone awry."

Ulrich looked sharply at the youth. "So it has been alleged," he said.

"It is said further that all of those who accept the power of sorcery also accept responsibility for the alleviation of great suffering."

"Some do and some don't," Ulrich replied. He was still looking intently at Valerian.

"Please," said Greil softly, "you are our only hope." The others added their murmured requests.

Ulrich's hand still rested almost affectionately upon the claw. His gaze had drifted above their heads, and beyond—far beyond— the boundaries of Cragganmore and time. At last he inhaled deeply. "I shall have to think," he said. "Summon mead . . ." He had almost reached the stairway to his conjuring room when he turned back absentmindedly and pointed with the great claw. "Galen," he said, waving the thing, "you'd better come with me."

He began to labor up the stairs, using the right foot to climb each step and drawing the left painfully up behind it. "Supplicants! Petitioners! My life has been filled with them. Always wanting something that they think they can't do for themselves."

"But this isn't a little request, is it, Ulrich? This is different, isn't it?"

The old man laughed abruptly. "Oh yes," he said, leaning against the door of the conjuring room, "this is indeed different!" Inside, he began to poke and point with the claw among great stacks of scrolls and folded parchments. "Now then, Galen, I shall need your help. Bring that one out. And that. And that one up there."

He soon had a mound of documents spread on the table. All were very old, so old that some began to crumble even as he unfolded them, becoming indistinguishable from the dust with which they were covered. On many, the ink was scarcely discernible, so faded had it become, or so blended with ancient water stains. Galen saw quickly, however, that all dealt with dragon lore. Here were various enormities, horned and smooth, two- and four-legged, tailed and tailless. "Each is different," Ulrich was saying, tracing details with a palsied finger. "All mortal, thank goodness, and most dead. The question is, which of them remains?"

Galen looked with horror at the drawings as Ulrich discarded them. He had never seen anything so loathsome. He could not imagine that nature had produced such creatures, or that the natural world, otherwise so sensibly ordered, had room to contain them. "Sir . . ."

The old man was lost deep in the drawings, his thumb gingerly running across the serrated edge of the claw.

"Ulrich?"

"Hm?"

"That boy, Valerian, said that. .

"Hm? Well, what?"

"Well, he said that sorcerers
created
dragons."

"He is not the first to say so," Ulrich replied, peering close at a very old and frail document.

"But
sorcerers,
Ulrich! Making monsters? That's not possible. Is it?"

"Bring me my glass," the old man said.

Galen stood still. There was a terrible emptiness in his stomach. "Tell me, Ulrich. It's not possible, is it? Not sorcerers."

Ulrich straightened very slowly, and his hand found Galen's shoulder, although he did not look at him. "It
is
possible," he said.

"But . . ."

"Earth and air, fire and water. Of all men, only the sorcerer controls the elements; of all creatures, only the dragon. Sorcerers are human. They have made mistakes. They will make others." He looked at Galen.
"You
will make others."

"But you, Ulrich.
You
would not do such a thing."

The old man sighed heavily, and his arm encircled Galen's shoulders. "I have made mistakes," he said. "Spells have gone awry. But more powerful magic than mine made dragons. The question is whether mine is sufficient to confront this dragon, perhaps the last."

"The last? Do you know it, Ulrich?"

"Nothing is certain, but I believe so. Hurry, now. Bring me my glass and we shall see. Ah, yes," he said, when Galen had found and brought the big magnifier, "Do you see here? Do you see this? These claws with the undersides like teeth?" He tapped the drawing, which flaked at his touch. "Vermithrax! The Worm of Thrace! Who would have thought that it had found its way this far, across the seas and mountains? Vermithrax, the very worst of them! Ah, my boy." The old man's eyes gleamed. "What a history of death has washed across
that
claw."

"Will you go, sir? Can you kill it?"

"That I do not know. It is very old, but very dangerous. It has more than made up in cunning, stealth, and venom for whatever the years may have taken from it. Perhaps it is barely possible that I could master it. But I am not anxious to meet with Vermithrax. Indeed, I am not anxious. Yet. . ."

Galen felt his heart leap. He had a sudden inspiration; perhaps, after all, he would not need to travel far for his adventure. "Let
me
go," he said. "Let me do it!"

"You, my boy? Why, you alone would not last two minutes with this dragon. No. I must do it. I alone. Come, let us go below and tell them."

"You accept the challenge," said Greil as the Urlanders rose to greet them.

Ulrich regarded him. "I accept the responsibility," he said quietly. "It is a case of need: a sick land, a sick king, a hurt people. I will go." So saying, he summoned Hodge to join him, and placed his other arm around the old man's shoulders.

"We are ready when you are," Valerian said.

"So be it. We shall depart within this half hour." As the Urlanders rejoiced, he drew both Hodge and Galen very close to him. "And so we shall take an unexpected journey together, my old friends. We shall have one more adventure." He glanced brightly at each in turn.

Galen was about to respond, but at that moment there was a pounding on the oaken door of the hall, an imperious pounding that silenced the Urlanders' jubilation. Then immediately it came again, louder, and Galen heard curt voices and raucous laughter in the courtyard.

"Vandals!" exclaimed Hodge, lurching toward his rusted armor. "In broad daylight! I should have raised the bridge!"

"Shhh." Ulrich held him and shook him with gentle reproof. "Don't blame yourself, old friend. It is perhaps a blessing in disguise. Open the door."

Grudgingly, Hodge shuffled across the room and obeyed. The door echoed his complaints, creaking open. Silhouetted by the rising sun was a formidable figure. The man filled the doorway. He was clad in light armor, including helmet, and his chain mail with its leather underpadding accentuated his massive physique. He had to stoop and turn slightly to enter. He came in, one hand on the hilt of a great sword.

"Tyrian!" Valerian exclaimed.

The man was clad in charcoal black, except for the crimson coils of a winged serpent emblazoned on his chest. Black too were his beard and his extraordinary, bushy eyebrows. A small silver dragon's head rode the crest of his helmet. He moved with feline grace. "I don't wish to intrude," he said, his smile fixed and watchful.

"You have intruded," Ulrich said.

"So it seems. In that case, permit me to introduce myself. I am Lord Tyrian, Centurion to His Majesty Casiodorus, King of Ur-land."

"And no friend of the maidens of Urland," Valerian said. The youth's face had lost its color, and he was trembling. "No friend to Urland! What do you want, Tyrian?"

"Nay, young master Valerian." Tyrian chuckled softly. "The question is more what do
you
want. Why have you come to this . . . this
magician?
What seek you?"

"That is none of your affair!"

"But indeed it is my affair. The peace of the realm is my affair, my responsibility." His brow darkened ominously. "I sense that this peace is threatened."

"Do you call it peace, what reigns in Urland now? A dragon in our midst?"

"A pacified dragon. Yes."

"Pacified by the sacrifices you
supervise,
the lotteries
you
arrange! Hateful!" Valerian's voice broke strangely.

"The lotteries in which you participate.
All of you!"
Tyrian flung his hand away from his sword hilt to include the entire group of Urlanders, and Galen glimpsed terrible fires at the heart of his sudden rage. "What hypocrites you are! What fools! To maintain for all these years a compromise that works, and then, now, to sneak off in the night to seek the aid of this old man." He dismissed Ulrich with a flick of his hand. "Whose weak magic will do nothing more than aggravate the dragon and loose the wrath of Vermithrax on all of Urland. Fools!"

"Perhaps," said Ulrich softly in the silence that followed. His voice was thin, like the call of a distant bird. Outside, horses stamped and whinnied, and warriors laughed among themselves. "But there are many kinds of power, and some that do not fade with age."

"Or perhaps even with death?" Tyrian asked, openly sneering now.

"Perhaps."

"In that case, let us put it to the test, for I see no power here, but a pitiful old man." He drew a dagger from the sheath at his hip.

With a hoarse cry, Hodge lunged toward the sword which he had stood in a corner, and Galen and Valerian both seized stout clubs of firewood. Instantly, other armed figures darkened the doorway at Tyrian's whistle; but what might have been a massacre never developed, for Ulrich had begun to laugh, and they were all frozen by his laughter, which was shrill and whistling, like a hawk's cry far away.

"Death?" he said. "Death is the
only
test you can devise? How you reveal your fears, my friend! Had you asked me to change your sword to gold, or to heal some illness of mind or body, or to relieve the suffering of the poor and luckless in your land, then I might have been afraid, and wavered, and so compromised the charm. But of death I have no fear at all. Strike away!"

"No, Ulrich!"

"Nor should you be afraid, Galen. For shame, after all I have taught you?
Ad lacunam igneam,
there I shall be always, where opposites are resolved. As for you, sir . . ." He turned again to Tyrian and moved slowly, arms spread as if to embrace him, through the few paces that separated them. "I will give you the test you wish, and the results you wish, although you yourself will not see them all, for you will long since have been lost in a labyrinth of your own contriving, deeper, and darker, and more convoluted than any dragon's lair. Strike. You cannot hurt me. Not ever. Strike!" And again he began to laugh softly. Galen was also smiling. After his initial alarm he understood that Ulrich had some wonderful trick prepared, something that would make a fool of this bully Tyrian. Perhaps the dagger would go limp. Perhaps it would glance olf the invisible shield Ulrich had drawn around himself. Galen was amused too at Gringe, who launched himself squawking at Tyrian's inflamed face, causing the man to fling up a protective arm and brush the bird away.

But then, suddenly, Galen stopped laughing. In one lethal movement Tyrian had his dagger and plunged it into Ulrich's heart.

For a moment it seemed that some magic more powerful than the dagger had indeed prevailed, for Ulrich did not flinch or cry out, and it appeared that he might turn back to them and continue talking as calmly as if the violence had never occurred. But then his knees sagged with awful slowness, the hem of his garment touched the flagstones, and the old sorcerer crumpled silently to the floor. Tyrian's dagger pulled free, streaming blood.

"Old fool!" Tyrian nudged the body with his toe. "And
this,"
he said, addressing the horrified Urlanders,
"this
was the man that you would send forth as your champion? A dottard who could not defend even himself against my steel? A senile dolt who was not afraid, even of death? Think what Vermithrax would have done to you had it been pricked by the trifling magic of this dabbler. Think! And admit that you were wrong! Admit it!"

The Urlanders shuffled in fear and dismay. Greil and Malkin nodded, as did Xenophobius the muleteer. "Never wanted to come anyway," Xenophobius muttered.

Only Valerian shook his head, although he was very pale. "No. No. Some good will come of this."

"No good will come of it! Nothing will come of it! Now, get on your way home and be quick! My men and I have other business here in the village, and when we have finished, we shall overtake you. See to it that by then you are far down the road to Urland!"

He glowered at them all, then spun on his heel and left as abruptly as he had come. They were left with Ulrich's corpse and the rumbling of hoofbeats falling on the drawbridge, fading along the path from Cragganmore.