The Dragon Book (38 page)

Ros hove the strand beast to, but didn’t immediately dismount. The web was an obstacle, indeed, but unlike any he had encountered before. If he tried to walk through it, it might stretch and snap like an ordinary web. Or its apparent fragility might be a disguise for something more sinister—poison, perhaps, soaked into razor-sharp threads; or a net that would fall on him the moment he entered it.

One thing Ros had learned about the Divide was to trust appearances not at all. Better to stop and think for a moment before barging into a trap.

From his elevated vantage point, he searched for signs of malevolence. The web crossed the canyon at the waist of a slight hour-glass. On his side of the hour-glass was a pool of water, brackish and dark. A patch of orange rock marred the ubiquitous yellow expanse of the far cliff. There was, as always, no sign of other human travellers, but none of crabblers or insects, either. Just the wind, bowing the web towards him like a sail.

The sun vanished behind the cloud. It was getting late in the day. Rather than acting precipitously, Ros urged the strand beast into motion again and parked it beneath a bouldery outcrop, then climbed free. He had no tent, just a bedroll and simple cooking utensils. Fire had always been his preferred medium, summoned raw and dangerous in his youth and mastered in stages through his training, but he didn’t light one now for fear of attracting undue attention. Dipping his can into the pool and cautiously tasting the water within, he found it to be too oily and bitter to drink. No matter. He had enough in watertight pouches to survive until he reached the next source, as well as the store of dried meat that sustained him on lean days.

Settling back on his bedroll, with his feet pointing downhill towards the web, he drew a series of charms in the sand around him, to sound the alarm if anything sneaked too close during the night. Then he folded his hands behind his head and lay back to watch the sunset. Reds and yellows painted the sky from side to side, with a hint of green just before the day properly ended. Ros nodded off as the first stars came into view, and dreamed of Adi calling his name with a soft, questioning voice. He was reluctant to answer for reasons he could not fathom. Hadn’t he been waiting for this moment all his apprenticeship? Although he had done nothing specific to earn her disapproval, the shame and guilt were knife-sharp. Inaction could be as hurtful as action.

He jerked awake at midnight, disturbed by something he couldn’t immediately identify.

The moon rode high and bright directly above him, casting a silver patina over the forbidding realm of the Divide. His charms were undisturbed. Ros sat and peered around him, taking in details that now looked strikingly different than before. The strand beast was a clash of angular shadows nearby, all pleasing symmetry lost. The pool of brackish water gaped like a bottomless hole in the earth, and he wondered if its depths hid something living: a fish that had improbably splashed, or a hardy frog, perhaps. Pock-marks in the cliff walls now resembled eyes or mouths, gaping madly at him. The web—

His sharp intake of breath was followed by the scuffling of his feet. Upright, he took a dozen steps forward to see better, shading his eyes from the moon’s glare in order to make certain he was not dreaming.

The web glowed in the bright moonlight. He could see all of it now, stretching up and away from him like the world’s most insubstantial banner. And on that banner was no natural pattern, no radiating bull’s-eye as most spiders fashioned between trees and rock-faces. Nor was it a random striation of lines and shapes, without meaning or language. Depicted in the gleaming threads was a creature so vast that its wing-tips touched either side of the canyon.

A dragon, Ros marvelled. A dragon caught in a web.

Never trust appearances, he reminded himself as he came closer to the base of the web. Foreshortened, the dragon seemed even more preternatural. It had four clawed feet and a beaked nose and mouth, like a bird. Captured in mid-flight, its lines were so perfect, so convincingly realised, that Ros was surprised to see stars twinkling where flesh and skin should have been. Those long, outstretched wings should have blocked out half the sky.

Ros came within touching distance of the web. The dragon was sufficiently foreshortened that it could barely be discerned as such. One flattened foot, as broad as he was long, reached out as though to grasp and crush him, magically, into stardust. He watched that foot closely, but it showed no sign of self-direction.

The threads were so fine that they had a tendency to disappear no matter how determinedly he stared at them. Hardly daring to breathe, he knelt to examine one in particular, noting how the thread touched the ground as lightly as a real spider’s web. There was no weight, no visible glue, no stake holding it in place. Perhaps, he thought, the strand was thicker higher up, where the heft of the entire web pulled most insistently. Perhaps the strands at the bottom only prevented the base from drifting free.

Still, Ros didn’t touch it. Instead he stood up and checked four more threads and the ground near by. The bottom of the Divide might be effectively sterile, but birds did occasionally fly along it. If the web had killed any, by whatever means, it had left no bones or feathers in the sand at its base. There wasn’t so much as a dead moth.

To all appearances bar one, then, it was just a web. That one crucial appearance, of a dragon in flight, made him hesitate, but he couldn’t hesitate all night. Come morning, the dragon might be invisible again, and he couldn’t take a chance on that. He had learned to mistrust disappearances, too.

Some kind of action, immediate and decisive, was required.

Taking two steps back, he picked up a flat stone. With its blunt edge, he drew a new set of symbols into the sand at his feet and encircled them with a double line. The night adopted a sharper tone as the charm took effect, and he warned himself not to become complacent.
Protection draws attention,
his master had taught him. Perhaps that was why the web showed no signs at all of the Change. The thing it contained—if such it was, and not an illusion—must only be visible by particular light at particular angles; otherwise, someone would surely have seen it before him. It hadn’t needed charms to defend itself.

Until now.

Aiming carefully, every muscle ready to flee, Ros tossed the stone one-handed at the nearest thread.

It bounced off with a twang and sent a series of tiny shock waves shimmering across the face of the web. The dragon’s claw seemed to clench, then the whole thing was shaking. Ros stared and listened with growing surprise. Instead of fading into silence, the twang became a hum, sustained by the on-going vibration of the web’s individual strands. And out of the vibrations, out of the hum, a voice spoke.

“Why,” it asked him, “are you here?”

“THERE’S a dragon,” Master Pukje had told him on the day Ros began the quest that would release him from his apprenticeship. “There’s a dragon living in the Divide. I want you to find it for me.”

Ros had thought he was getting off lightly. “Is that all?”

“Don’t be so sure of yourself, boy. It’ll be hidden as I am, but by different means, and cunning with it. Your task is threefold: first you have to find it; then you have to kill it; finally, you must prove to me that you have done as I instructed.”

“You want me to bring you its head?”

Master Pukje’s smile had been slyly amused. “If it has one, yes. That would definitely do the trick.”

THINKING back to that smile, Ros now wondered if his master had known all along what he would find.

“Why shouldn’t I be here?” he replied, but the hum had faded, and the dragon was silent again.

There were several stones within reach from the inside of his protective circle. Ros grabbed the largest and tossed it with greater force at the web.

“I am harming no one,” came the breathless whisper, proving that he hadn’t imagined it. “Why don’t you leave well enough alone?”

“You’re a dragon.”

“And you’re a human.”

“Neither of us can help what we are.”

“But are we slaves to our nature? That’s the question.”

“I have no doubt that you would harm me if you could.”

“You should doubt, a little. I have no such desire in me at the moment. If I did, you would know about it.”

Ros was running low on stones. “So you claim not to be a captive, and that this isn’t a trap?”

“Why do you ask when it’s clear you won’t believe the answer?”

“To test my theory that all dragons are liars.”

“Whether I am lying or not, it would be unwise to judge from my example alone.”

“Ah, you see, you’re not the only dragon I know.”

In reply, he received an empty hum, as though the dragon was thinking. When that faded, Ros had no more stones left to toss.

A gust of wind sprang up, tugging at the threads and sending sand skittering around him. For the first time, Ros noticed the deep, desert cold biting at his skin. Do something, he told himself. You can’t stay hidden in the circle all night.

Do what you have to do, Ros, then come find me in return.

Lifting his left foot, he swept the sole of his shoe over the symbols he had drawn. The world instantly returned to its usual flavour: he could smell the stagnant water of the pool and detected a far-away rattle of crabblers moving about their nocturnal affairs. Distantly, he noted that the moon wasn’t as bright as it had been. It had drifted behind a cloud and came and went uneasily above him.

Ros stepped from the remains of his circle. Nothing attacked him, physically or through the Change. His was the only will making itself felt at the moment.

With great care, Ros reached out and plucked the nearest strand of the web.

“See?” said the dragon. “I mean you no harm.”

“This proves nothing.”

“What proof do you require?”

Ros thought of the third of Master Pukje’s conditions.

“Tell me why you’re hiding here, and maybe I’ll believe you.”

“Then will you leave?”

“I can’t promise you anything.”

“Without making a liar of yourself, I suppose.”

“Something like that.”

“Exactly that, I think. We haven’t said a true word to each other since you woke me. We have danced around the truth, guarding our secrets as though they were jewels. You talk about
proof
and
lies
and
promises
as though they somehow stand between you and what you want, but I tell you this: no amount of talk will satisfy you. What do you desire so badly that you have come to me in the dead of night and woken me from my slumber?”

Ros thought this time of Adi, and of freedom, and of his promise to Master Pukje. “If you’re trapped,” he said, “then maybe I am, too.”

“Trapped in a web of words,” the dragon scoffed, “as I am trapped in this web of spider’s silk.”

“Yours is easier to break, I think.”

“You might indeed think so. Try it and find out.”

Ros’s index finger tensed to put the dragon’s suggestion into practice, but stayed on the verge of doing so. The wind bowed the silent dragon over him, as though urging him on.

He couldn’t do it. Not without knowing more—and that, he intuitively understood, meant giving more.

“I’ve been sent here,” he told the dragon, “to kill you. What do you say to that?”

“I say this: who sent you?”

“What difference does that make?”

“All the difference in the world. You are not my enemy; you are just the instrument of my enemy. That’s the person I need to talk to, and I can only do it through you.”

“He didn’t send me to have a conversation.”

“Yet here we are. Why not do the deed and be done with it? Commit your murder; get on with your life. You still haven’t told me what it is you desire.”

“I want to know why you deserve to die.”

“Did the one who sent you not tell you? That was remiss of him.”

“He tells me what I need to know.”

“Do you trust him?”

“He is—was—my teacher, my master.”

“Then you should certainly trust him.”