His unintentional lightheartedness actually aided the fortunate young priest, for the dragon backed away and looked all around its chamber, seeming unsure of itself for the first time.
“Thief!” Fyrentennimar bellowed, the power of the dragon’s voice blowing Cadderly back a step.
“No thief,” Cadderly assured the wyrm. “Just a humble—”
“Thief and liar!” Fyrentennimar roared. “Humble priests do not survive the breath of Fyrentennimar the Great! What treasures have you taken?”
“I come not for treasure,” Cadderly declared. “Nor to disturb the slumber of a most magnificent wyrm.”
Fyrentennimar started to retort, but seemed to reconsider, as though Cadderly’s “most magnificent” compliment had given him pause.
“A simple task, as I have said,” Cadderly went on, going with the momentum. “Simple for Fyrentennimar the Great, but quite beyond the abilities of any other in all the land. If you will perform—”
“Perform?” the dragon roared, and Cadderly, his hair blown back by the sheer force of the dragon’s hot breath, wondered if his hearing would be permanently damaged. “Fyrentennimar does not perform! I am not interested in your simple task, foolish priest.”
The dragon surveyed the area right in front of Cadderly, as if trying to discern what barrier had been enacted to keep it at bay.
Cadderly considered the few options that seemed open to him. He felt that his best chance was to continue to flatter the beast. He’d read many tales of heroic adventurers successfully playing to the ego of dragons, particularly of red dragons, which were reportedly the most vain of all dragonkind.
“Would that I might better see you!” he said dramatically. He snapped his fingers, as though a thought had just come to him, then whipped out his slender wand and uttered “Domin illu.” Instantly the wide chamber was bathed in a magical light, and all of Fyrentennimar’s magnificence was revealed to him. Silently congratulating himself, Cadderly replaced the wand under his cloak and continued his survey, noting for the first time the mound of treasure across the way, beyond the bulk of the blocking dragon.
“Would that you might better see me,” Fyrentennimar began suspiciously, “or see my treasure, humble thief?”
Cadderly blinked at the words and at his possible mistake. The murderous expression on Fyrentennimar’s face was not hard to decipher. Then Cadderly felt his light tube growing warm, uncomfortably so, and he had to drop it to the ground. His forearm brushed against his belt buckle, and he winced in pain as bare skin contacted the fast-heating metal. It took Cadderly just a moment to understand, a moment to remember that many dragons, too, could access the Weave of magical energies.
Cadderly had to act fast, had to humble the wyrm and make Old Fyren desire parley. He chanted, pointedly ignoring the wisps of smoke rising from his leather belt near the buckle.
A whirling ring of magical blades appeared in the air above Fyrentennimar’s head.
“They will cut!” Cadderly promised, and he willed the blades lower, dangerously close to the dragon’s head. He hoped to drive Old Fyren down so that the beast would not be in such a position of physical superiority, hoped that his display of power would make the wyrm consider that continuing to fight might not be so wise a choice.
“Let them!” Old Fyren bellowed, and his wings beat on, lifting his huge head higher, meeting the spell full force. Sparks flew as the blades chipped off the dragon’s armorlike scales. Tiny pieces of scale flecked away, and to Cadderly’s ultimate dismay, Fyrentennimar’s roar seemed one of glee.
The dragon’s tail whipped around, slamming Cadderly’s magical barrier, the waves of the concussion shaking the chamber and knocking Cadderly from his feet. The line of dragonbane held, though Cadderly feared that the chamber’s ceiling would not. He realized then how vulnerable he truly was, how pitiful he must seem to a wyrm that had lived for centuries and had feasted on the bones of hundreds of men more powerful than he.
He’d enacted protection from the fiery breath, had enacted a barrier that the beast couldn’t physically pass through, though neither, he feared, would hold out for long. But what defense could Cadderly offer against Fyrentennimar’s no doubt potent array of spells? He realized then that his defeat could be as simple a thing as Fyrentennimar tearing a hunk of stone from the wall and hurling it into him.
The dragon whipped its armored head to and fro, challenging the enchanted blades, mocking Cadderly’s spell. Foreclaws dug ridges into the chamber’s stone floor and the great tail whipped around, shattering rock and cracking apart the walls.
Cadderly couldn’t hold out for long, was certain that he had nothing in all his arsenal that could begin to wound the monster.
He had only one alternative, and he feared it almost as much as he feared Fyrentennimar. The song of Deneir had taught him that the magical energies of the universe could be accessed from many different angles, and the way that one accessed those energies determined the grouping, the magical sphere, of the spells found within. Cadderly, for instance, had approached the universal energies differently for enacting his line of magical dragonbane than he had when entering the sphere of elemental fire to create the protective barrier against Fyrentennimar’s flames.
Deneir was a deity of art, of poetry and soaring spirits, praising and accepting of a myriad of thoughtful accomplishments. Deneir’s song rang out across the heavens, thrumming with the powers of many such energies, and thus a priest attuned to his song could find access, could find many various angles, to bend divine energies in countless directions.
There was one particular bent of those energies, though, that ran contrary to the harmony of Deneirrath thinking, where no notes rang clear and no harmony could be maintained. It was the sphere of chaos, a place of discord and illogic, but this was where young Cadderly had to go.
“It’s a five-dwarf drop!” Ivan protested, holding fast to Danica’s wrist. Danica couldn’t even see the floor beneath the vertical chute and had to trust in the estimate of Ivan’s keen dwarf vision. That estimate, “five-dwarf drop,” twenty feet, was not so promising. But Danica had heard the thunder strike of Cadderly’s dragon-awakening clap, knew in her heart that her love was in dire need. She pulled free of Ivan’s grasp, scrambled the rest of the way down the narrow chute, and without hesitation dropped into the darkness.
She prayed that she could react quickly enough when at last she reached the end of the drop, hoped that the dim light of the torch Shayleigh held up in the chute would show her the floor before she slammed against it.
She saw the gray stone floor and turned her ankles to the side as she hit, launching herself into a sidelong roll, half twisting as she went. Her roll took her over backward, so that she came squarely back to her feet. Never slowing, having not absorbed enough of the fall’s energy, Danica sprang into the air, turning a backward somersault. She landed on her feet and jumped again, spinning forward. She came up in a roll and hit the ground running, the rest of her momentum played out in long, swift strides.
“Well, I’ll be a wine-drinking faerie,” Ivan muttered in disbelief, watching the spectacle from above. For all his complaints, the dwarf couldn’t let his friends endure any danger without him, and he knew that any hesitation would force Danica to face the coming trials alone.
“Don’t ye try to catch me, girl!” he warned as he let go. Ivan’s landing technique was not so different than Danica’s. But while Danica rolled and leaped, somersaulting gracefully and changing direction with subtle, stressless twists, Ivan just bounced.
He was up quickly, though. He adjusted his deer-antlered helmet and caught Danica by her flowing cloak as she ran back the other way, following the continuing sounds to the east.
Vander dropped down next, the tight chute posing more trouble for the firbolg than the not-so-high—for a giant—drop. Then Shayleigh dropped into his waiting arms, virtually springing from him in quick flight after Ivan and Danica.
Pikel came last, and Vander caught him,
as well. The firbolg eyed the nestled dwarf curiously for a moment, noting that something seemed to be missing.
“Your club?” Vander asked, but he understood a heartbeat later, when Pikel’s club, tumbling down behind the dwarf, bounced off his skull.
“Oops,” the green-bearded dwarf apologized, and in looking at Vander’s scowl, seemed happy that they had no time to stand around and discuss the matter.
Danica would have outdistanced Ivan in no time—except that the dwarf had a firm grip on her trailing cloak and wouldn’t let go. They heard the rumble of Fyrentennimar’s distant voice by then, and though they couldn’t make out any words, it guided them easily. Ivan was glad when he noted that Shayleigh, still holding her torch, was gaining on them.
They passed through a few chambers, down several narrow corridors, and one wide passage. The mounting heat alone assured them that they approached the dragon’s chamber, and made them fear that Fyrentennimar had already loosed his killing breath.
Shayleigh passed Ivan, seeming as desperate as Danica, and the dwarf promptly reached out and grabbed a hold on her cloak, too. He understood their urgency, understood that both of them were fostering images of a deep-fried Cadderly, but Ivan remained pragmatic. If the dwarf had anything to say about it, they would not run helter-skelter into Old Fyren’s waiting jaws.
Shayleigh’s torch showed that they neared yet another wide chamber. They saw light up ahead, a residual glow, it seemed, and that led them to one inescapable conclusion.
For all of his earlier protests and stubbornness, Ivan Bouldershoulder showed his true loyalties at that point. Thinking that the dreadful Fyrentennimar waited just ahead, the tough dwarf yanked back on both cloaks, springing past Danica and Shayleigh and leading the way into the chamber before he’d even had time to draw out his double-bladed battle-axe.
A flicking tongue hit him two steps inside the door—hit him, wrapped him, and pulled him sideways. Danica and Shayleigh skidded in behind, to find the chamber filled with very anxious, giant red toads. They spotted Ivan—spotted his boots at least, sticking out from the mouth of a contented-looking toad to the right. Danica started for it but was intercepted by a mini-fireball, then another, as two more toads took up the attack.
Shayleigh hurled her torch out in front of her, had her bow up in an instant, and put it to deadly work.
Ivan didn’t know what had hit him, but he understood that he was quite uncomfortable, and that he couldn’t get his arms around to retrieve the axe strapped to his back. Never the one to listen to his own many complaints, Ivan followed the only course open to him and began thrashing around, trying to bite, trying to find something to grasp and twist. The deer rack atop his helmet snagged on something up above and again Ivan didn’t question his misfortune, just snapped his head up as forcefully as he could.
A toad leaped long and high at her, but Shayleigh’s three arrows, fired in rapid succession, broke the thing’s momentum in midflight and dropped it dead to the ground. Two more toads came flying at the elf simultaneously, and though she hit them both with perfect shots, she couldn’t deflect their flight. One clipped her shoulder, the other crashed against her shins, and back she flew.
She would have hit the cavern floor hard, but Vander, coming in from the corridor, caught her gently in one giant hand and kept her on her feet. The firbolg was beyond her in an instant, his great sword slashing back and forth, slicing the two attacking toads in half.
A third monster came flying in from the side, but Pikel skidded in between it and Shayleigh, holding his tree-trunk club tight over one shoulder, both his hands grasping the weapon’s narrow end. With a whoop of delight, the green-bearded dwarf batted the flying toad aside. It dropped, stunned, and Pikel stood over it, squishing it with repeated strikes.
Danica fell to her back and rolled around frantically to avoid the fiery blasts. She tucked her feet in close, hoping to roll back to a standing position, and grabbed at her boots, drawing two daggers, one golden-hilted and sculpted into the image of a tiger, the other a silvery dragon.
She came up throwing, scoring two hits on the nearest toad. It closed its eyes and squatted down low to the floor, and Danica couldn’t tell if she’d killed it or not.
Nor could she pause to find out. Another toad was near her, flicking its sticky tongue.
Danica leaped straight up, a mongoose against a striking snake, and tucked her legs tight. She leaped again as soon as her feet touched stone, forward and high, before the toad could flick its tongue again. Danica came down hard on the creature’s head. One foot planted firmly, she spun fiercely, her face passing close to her ankle, her other foot flying high, straight above her. As she completed the circuit, her momentum cresting, she tightened the muscles in her sailing foot and drove it right through the toad’s bulbous eye.
The weight of the blow forced Danica down from the dead thing, and she spun around, searching out the next target.
At first she thought the toad she saw to the side to be among the most curious of crossbred creatures. But then Danica realized that its antlers were not its own, but rather belonged to the indigestible dwarf it had foolishly pulled in.
The antlers jerked this way and that, and Ivan’s slime-covered head popped through. The dwarf grunted and contorted weirdly, twisting all the way around so that he was looking at his own heels protruding from the toad’s mouth, and at Danica staring in disbelief.
“Ye think ye might be helping me outta here?” the dwarf asked, and Danica saw the dead toad’s eyes hump up then go back to normal as Ivan shrugged.
The familiar song played in Cadderly’s mind, but he didn’t fall into its harmonic flow. He sang it backward instead, sang it sideways, randomly, forcing out whatever notes seemed to be the most discordant. Shivers ran through the marrow of his bones, and he felt as if he would break apart under the magical assault. He was exactly where a priest of Deneir should not be, mocking the harmony of the universe, perverting the notes of the timeless song so that they twanged painfully in his mind, slamming doors in the pathways of the revelations the song had shown to him.
Cadderly’s voice sounded guttural, croaking, and his throat was filled with phlegm. His head ached, and the intensity of the shivering waves along his spine stung him repeatedly.
He thought he would go insane, had gone insane, had fallen into a place where every logical course seemed to meander aimlessly, where one and one added up to three, or ten. Cadderly’s emotions similarly fluctuated. He was angry, furious at … what? He didn’t know, knew only that he was filled with despair. Then suddenly he felt invulnerable, as if he could walk past his magical barriers and snap his fingers under puny Fyrentennimar’s smoking nostrils.
Still he croaked against the harmonious flow of the beautiful song, still he denied the universal truths the song had shown to him. Suddenly, Cadderly realized that he’d unleashed something terrible within his own mind, that he couldn’t stop the flashing images and the shivering pains.
His mind darted randomly, a gamesman’s wheel, flitting through the divine energy with no basis. He was falling, falling, dropping into an endless pit from which there could be no escape. He would eat the dragon, or the dragon would eat him, but either way, Cadderly felt that it didn’t matter. He’d broken himself—the only logical thought he could hold onto for more than a fleeting moment was that he’d overstepped his bounds, had rushed in his desperation into ultimate, unending chaos.
Still he croaked the discordant notes, played the random ranting of half-truths and untruths in his mind. One and one equaled seventeen.
One and one.
Whatever else assaulted Cadderly’s mind, he continued to call upon the simple mathematics of adding one and one. A hundred different answers came to him in rapid succession, were generated randomly in his mind, wherein no rules held true.
A thousand different answers, generated without pattern, without guidance, shot past him. And Cadderly let them go away with the rest of his fleeting thoughts, knowing
them to be lies.
One and one equaled two.
Cadderly grabbed on to that thought, that hope. The simple equation, the simple, logical truth ringing as a single note of harmony in the discord.
One and one equaled two!
A thin line of Deneir’s song played in Cadderly’s mind simultaneously, but separately, from the discord. It came as a lifeline to the young priest, and he clutched it eagerly, not intending it to pull him from the discord, but to help him hold his mental footing within that sphere’s slippery chaos.
Cadderly searched the dangerous sphere, found a region of emotional tumult, of inverted ethics, and hurled it with all his mental strength at Fyrentennimar.
The dragon’s rage continued to play, and Cadderly understood that he had not penetrated the innate magical resistance of the beast. Cadderly realized that he was sitting then, that sometime during his mental journey, the earthquake of Fyrentennimar’s thrashing had knocked him from his feet.
Again Cadderly searched out the particular region of chaos that he needed—it was in a different place—and again he hurled it at the wyrm. Then a third time, and a fourth. His head ached as he continued to demand the enchantment, continued to assault the stubborn dragon with false emotions and false beliefs.
The chamber was deathly quiet, except for some scrambling that Cadderly heard emanating from somewhere down the tunnel behind him, back in the toad room, perhaps.
He slowly opened his eyes, to see Old Fyren sitting quietly, regarding him.
“My welcome, humble priest,” the dragon said in calm, controlled tones. “Do forgive my outburst. I do not know what brought about such a tirade.” The dragon blinked his reptilian eyes and glanced around curiously. “Now, about this small task that you wish me to perform….”