Spellbreakers (38 page)

He drew the pack between his knees, and they both
crouched low as the dragon circled directly above them. Flames swept overhead,
missing their hiding place by a few feet. Ljung opened his pack, and after some
rummaging, he extracted the casket that Rutger had given him.

“Look,” he said, “we know the other gifts he gave us
were intended for the hound and the unicorn. This
must
be for the
dragon.”

Leal nodded. It made sense. “Open it!”

Ljung opened the two ornate bronze clasps that held
the casket shut. He lifted the curved, rounded lid to reveal a mass of soft
lamb-wool, faded with age. He exchanged a perplexed glance with Leal and moved
the wool aside gingerly. At the center of the protective nest was a large,
rounded blue egg, the same pale turquoise color as a blackbird’s egg, but
flecked all over with swirls of silvery-white.

 
“Are we
supposed to pelt that monster with rotten eggs?” asked Leal confused, but Ljung
was holding the casket in both ends reverently, blinking.

“Look at it, girl. It is too big to be a bird’s egg. I
don’t think—”

In that the moment the dragon swooped overhead once
more. The wind of his wings made snow and ice crystals fly in the air around
them, and flames licked the top of their flimsy snowy shelter.

Ljung cried out as the hood of his cloak sizzled and
began to burn. Leal gasped and spluttered as a splash of molten snow drenched
her face. Ljung reached up hastily to swat at the sizzling furry edge of his
hood, and the casket spilled out of his lap and fell on the ice.

“No!” cried Leal and Ljung together. They scrambled in
the snow to get the egg, and the dragon screeched triumphantly overhead.

“Stay down! Do not move! Whatever happens, stay down!”
cried Ljung. Leal dived in the snow again.

“What do we do with it?” she asked urgently, because
the dragon, having spotted them, was now landing for the kill no more than
fifty yards from them. It did not land gracefully; the ground shook under her
as the enormous beast alighted, skittering on the ice and screeching. The slide
took it some distance from them. When the dragon could get his feet under him,
it turned and started to advance ponderously towards them.

Leal watched it in fascinated horror. It was not
designed to walk, really. It advanced in an awkward four-legged fashion, on his
clawed back feet and on the elbows of his enormous, leathery, folded wings.
Even so, with his immense limbs, it advanced fast. Despite its awkwardness, it
looked even scarier and more formidable on the ground, perhaps because its
sheer weight, size, and force were so emphasized by the effects of gravity.

“What do we do with it?” asked Leal again.

Ljung stood in front of the advancing dragon as if
lost in thought. The dragon screamed and spit fire. Ljung stood still a moment
longer, holding the blue egg in both hands. He brought the egg to his lips and
breathed on it once or twice. Then he crouched down, and gently sent the egg
bowling over the ice towards the dragon.

Nothing happened.

The egg came to a gentle halt in a patch of soft snow.
It was such a small thing that the dragon did not even see it. It moved another
enormous step. Leal, lying flat in the snow, could barely see the egg.

“What’s happening?” she asked, as Ljung crawled close
to her, gathering his back pack and bow.

“It’s breaking.
 
From the inside.
It’s ... hatching.”

Leal lifted her head a bit higher, her eyes just over
the snowy ridge where she was hiding. The egg rocked slightly from side to
side. The dragon advanced. A few more steps and it would be right on top of it,
crushing its pale blue shell under its enormous weight.

The eggshell fell apart
on its own,
however, and a blue-white shape no larger than a merlin hawk uncoiled from the
heap of shell fragments. It was a tiny, shivering, serpent-like shape, coiled
in a tight spiral. The light glinted strangely on and through it.

“It’s made of ice!” said Leal.

“Yes. No. Well, yes,” said Ljung. He was staring in
wonder. “It is a lindworm! I thought they were nothing but a legend!” He
laughed aloud. “A water dragon,” he added seeing Leal’s uncomprehending
expression. “Only, it’s too cold for him. He’s frozen!”

“Well, I say, that tops it all. We have a water
dragon, whatever that may be, and it’s frozen? That won’t help us much! What
can we do?”

Oblivious to the little creature just hatched in front
of its feet, the black dragon took another step forward. He was abreast with
the minuscule blue lindworm. The air shimmered with heat all around the
towering chest of the dragon. Its whole underside glowed dully, like embers
under a cover of ashes.
 
In that moment a
white screeching figure fell from the sky like a shooting star and flapped in
front of the dragon’s snout before wheeling and flying off at the speed of the
wind. The dragon shook his head as if a mosquito had been bothering it, then it
spit a tongue of fire, and the snow around it exploded in a wall of steam.
Ljung grabbed Leal by the arm and dragged her up and away.

“I think that might just do it,” he said, as they ran
out of range of the flames. When they turned to look, the beast was standing in
a pool of melting, steaming snow. “What a bird, what a bird! She dived on a
dragon! On a dragon! Did you see that?”

“I did, I did. But that poor lindworm is tiny, how can
it...”

“Look!”

All the liquid water around the dragon was flowing.
But strangely it was not flowing
away
, down the slope, but towards it,
and then
upward
. Leal could just make out a tiny blue core at the center
of the bubbling, quickening, converging streams, and then there was only a
rushing spout of mounting waters, gathering weight and mass and bursting up
like a geyser. The water splashed and rose and suddenly took the shape of a
long, wingless dragon emerging from the slush as if from a lake of deep water.
First it was a foam-maned, rearing head with dripping jaws gaping on a deep blue
maw, then a long snake-like neck, aquamarine green and pale turquoise blue,
crested with white windswept spindrift, then a broader back rippling with
undercurrents of fluid muscle, and finally, in a spray of rainbow drops, a
sweeping tail, glittering with hoar-frost on the edge of every shivering scale.
When the black dragon screamed, the lindworm answered with a faint but
immeasurably deep, far-away roar, like an echo of breaking surf.

“It is still too small,” said Leal staring at the
extraordinary creature as it stood and swayed in front of the black dragon.

“There is not enough water yet. And it’s too cold,”
said Ljung.

The blue lindworm and the black dragon stood face to
face. “I must help it. Tuula did the right thing,” said Ljung, pulling an arrow
out of his quiver.

“Don’t be absurd!” cried Leal, grabbing his arm as he
moved a step forward. “You cannot kill a dragon with an arrow! That only
happens in nursery tales.”

“No, I can’t kill it. But I sure can make it angry.”

Leal watched in shock as Ljung, crouching low, ran
towards the dueling creatures, keeping the lindworm between himself and the
dragon’s line of sight.
It cannot work,
she thought, aghast, sick with
love and fear.
The dragon will blast him to ashes the moment he gets out of
cover. Stupid, stupid brave boy!

As
Ljung came up to the lindworm’s swishing
tail, struggling to nock an arrow while running on the ice and melting snow,
she jumped up and shouted, waving her arms and calling.

“Hey you!
Black
snout! Look at me will you? Look at me! Ah! Ah!”

The black dragon awoke from the trance he had fallen
in when the lindworm had risen out of the snow in front of it. It screamed and
reared on its back legs, spreading his wings. For a moment Leal was terrified
that it would take to the air again, but it was just a display of rage. It
plunged ponderously forward, towards
her
, and in that moment Ljung shot
an arrow towards its glowing chest.

It was nothing but a brief grey blur. It stuck for a
moment in the dragon’s hide, raising an ember-bright bruise on its scaly skin,
then
burnt clean off in the blazing heat. But the beast went
in a frenzy of rage. It spurted an enormous lance of white-hot flame, shaking
his head from side to side. The lindworm reared and roared in a spout of fine
spray. The air boiled. Snow and ice melted and sizzled all around.

“Ljung!” shouted Leal, but she could not see him among
the hissing clouds and all the splashing. The lindworm swelled as water flowed
into it. The dragon spit more flames, but the green-blue water only flowed
faster and higher. In the heat of the flames, the lindworm was quickly becoming
a towering aquamarine leviathan. It reared up the whole length of his neck and
body, impossibly high. It was a swaying, rocking column of upwards racing
waters. Leal could see swirls and currents spiraling inside and along the
length of its body, as more and more water and power mounted to its foaming,
roaring head.

She wondered what a lindworm could become in its
native element, in an ocean of free flowing waters. It did not bear thinking
of. Yet, even in all the fear and anguish, the sea-joy sang in Leal’s veins
once more, the whistling joy of the surging waves, and the spindrift, and the
homeless albatross, and the receding blue horizon crowned with thundering
clouds.

She whooped and cheered the lindworm on with a
throat-rending shout. And before the black dragon could attack again, the
lindworm flung itself down on it, the whole prodigious mass of soaring water
smashing wildly down like a plunging cataract, with the deafening tumbling roar
of a flooding, broken dam. The black dragon was thrown off its feet and washed
away backwards, smothered by jade green foam, in a tangle of swishing tail,
floundering claws and flailing wings. Before it could right itself, the waters flowed
back and gathered again, sinuous streams resolving themselves in a flowing,
arching, crested neck, the curve of a swelling back, a curled, lashing tail
ready to strike. The black dragon coughed a cloud of sparks and steam. Its
furnace was doused for the time being.

Leal, composed and quiet once more, ran.

The darker, sprawled spot in the snow at the margin of
the flattened, trampled slush field where the dragons had first
clashed,
could only be Ljung, washed right away by the
flood-wave. She grabbed the hood of his parka and the strap of his quiver,
pulled him out of the slush and turned him face up.

“Ljung!
Ljung!”

He looked grey and dead.

She slapped his face. “Don’t you dare be
dead!
Oh you stupid, brave, stupid, stupid hero!”

His dark hair was plastered to his colorless face. His
beautiful lips were purple-blue.
Is this how
he
will look, sleeping
under the ice?
asked
a ghostly voice in her head.

“Don’t you dare!” she screamed again, pounding his
chest with a fist, and slapping him again.

He came to at the third slap, coughing and shaking.
“Whoa, whoa!
I am fine, I am fine!” He sat up, coughing
again. “I thought you were supposed to kiss the hero, not whack his face,
miscreant!” he said, laughing. He tried to kneel, and fell on all fours. Still,
he glanced around quickly, taking in the flattened ice, and the two fighting
dragons.

“He can’t blow fire anymore!” he said, getting up and
then falling down again. The tumble had obviously left him half-stunned. “Go!
Go now. You’ll get past him now. The lindworm will keep him busy!”

“Will you be all right?”

“Just run, girl, this is it, it’s your one chance!
I’ll be right behind you!”

Leal ran towards the looming ice palace, or at least
she tried. In fact the terrain and
her own
tiredness
made it difficult to do anything more than stagger, sometimes wading in drifts
of snow, sometimes stumbling and stomping on hard ice. She gave a wide berth to
the fighting dragons, which still clashed in clouds of steaming waters, but
more feebly now. They were both weakening. The old black dragon rose more
slowly after each clash, and hardly any flame came out of its throat any more,
but without the warming fire of its opponent, the lindworm was losing bulk at
every splashing clash, as its strewn waters froze back to the ground.

Leal moved on doggedly.

The ice palace was no more than half a mile ahead.

All around it was a ghastly, wintry topiary garden.

There were white figures scattered all around.
Nieves
penitentes
, they called them, in the south, in the Andalouan of the
mountains.
Mournful bent snow figures made by the wind and
dew.
But these were a different sort of penitents.
Bears
and wolves, elks and eagles, dragons and hounds, all standing as if on watch,
but all sad and bent in sorrow.
And far more horrible things, elver
warriors and human peasants, goblins and giants, all kneeling, standing or
bowing in postures of fatal regret.