He was staring over Jim's shoulder. Jim turned and saw the approaching forms of Dafydd and Danielle, followed by two dragon shapes a little farther down the causeway.
"Well, well—Master Bowman!" said Brian, heartily, as Dafydd came up. "And Mistress Danielle! Good morning!"
"A morrow it is, but whether good or not, I'd not wish to guess," said Dafydd. He looked around. "Where is the wolf, Sir knight?"
A cloud crossed Brian's face.
"You haven't seen him?" Jim asked. "You must have passed him. Some ordinary-sized sandmirks and one particularly large one caught us, and he stayed behind to fight the large one. You must have passed the place where we left them fighting."
"Left them?" cried Danielle.
"It was the wolf demanded it," said Brian, grimly. "We wouldn't have left, otherwise—as I think you might know, mistress!"
"We saw neither him, nor any sign of sandmirks or battle," said Dafydd.
Jim stood silent. It was like absorbing a hard blow to the stomach to hear this, for all that he thought he had faced the fact the day before that he might never see Aragh alive again.
"Just because he asked you," Danielle said, fiercely, "you didn't have to leave him alone to face—"
"Danielle," Carolinus interrupted. She turned to face him.
"Mage!" she said. "You here? But you were a hundred years old even when I was little. You shouldn't be here!"
"I am where I must be," said Carolinus. "As was your wolf; as are Sir James and Sir Brian. Accuse them not. It was the task of Aragh to stay and fight alone, so that these two could come to this place at this time. That's all, and there's no more to be said!"
His old eyes were steady on her. Her own became unhappy, and she turned away from him.
"I'll go look for him…" said Jim, half to himself. "As soon as this is all over, I'll go and find him."
"Perhaps," said Carolinus, dryly. He looked past Jim once more. "Good morrow, dragons!"
"Secoh!" Brian exclaimed. "And—who's this?"
"Smrgol, george!" huffed the older dragon. He was approaching with a pronounced limp and with his left wing draped on the back of the mere-dragon. His left eyelid was now drooped almost shut. "Give me a minute to catch my wind! Not as young as I used to be; but I'll be all right in a moment. Look here who I've brought with me!"
"I—I wasn't too keen on coming," stammered Secoh to Jim. "But as your wor—I mean, as you know, your grand-uncle can be pretty persuasive."
"That's right," boomed Smrgol, evidently having recovered the larger share of his breath in the moment of pause while the mere-dragon spoke. "Don't you go calling anybody 'your worship.' Never heard of such stuff!"
Then he turned to Jim, himself.
"And letting a george go in where he didn't dare go, himself! 'Boy,' I said to him, 'don't give me this nonsense about being only a mere-dragon! Mere's got nothing to do with what kind of dragon you are. What kind of world would it be if we all went around talking like that?'"
Smrgol tried to mimic someone talking in a high voice, but succeeded in lifting his tones only into the middle-bass level.
" 'Oh, I'm just a plowland-and-pasture dragon. You'll have to excuse me.—I'm just a halfway-up-the-hill dragon…' 'BOY!' I said to him, 'you're a DRAGON! Get that straight, once and for all time! And a dragon ACTS like a dragon, or he doesn't act at all!'"
"Hear, hear!" said Brian.
"Did you hear that, boy?" Smrgol demanded of the smaller dragon. "Even the george understands that fact of life!"
He turned to Brian.
"Don't believe I've met you, george."
"Brian Neville-Smythe," said Brian, "knight bachelor."
"Smrgol. Dragon," said Gorbash's grand-uncle. He ran an approving eye over Neville-Smythe's armor and weapons. "Good harness! Wager you carry your shield somewhat high when fighting on foot."
"Matter of fact, I do. But how did you know?"
"Shiny place there on your rerebrace where the elbow cop's been rubbing back against it. Good shield tactics against another george, but I wouldn't advise you to try it on me. I'd have my tail between your legs and you off your feet in a second."
"Is that a fact?" said Brian, plainly impressed. "Remarkably sporting of you to tell me so! I'll remember that. But aren't you making it rather hard on the next dragon I fight, if it isn't you?"
"Well, I'll tell you," rumbled Smrgol, clearing his throat. "Pardon me—I've been thinking, for some time, that maybe you georges and us dragons could stop fighting and get together. We're really a lot alike in many ways—"
"If you don't mind, Smrgol," cut in Carolinus sourly. "We're not exactly oversupplied with time to chat. It'll be noon in—"
He was interrupted, in his turn, by a cry from Danielle. The rest turned to see her running down the causeway. Limping slowly toward them on three legs was the figure of Aragh.
Danielle reached him and dropped on her knees beside the wolf, hugging him. Sticking out a long tongue, he tried to lick her left ear, which was the closest part of her he could reach, held as he was. After a moment, however, he pulled from her grasp and walked on up to the rest of them, in spite of her efforts to make him lie down and let her examine the broken leg. Only when he had joined the group did he lie down and give in to her.
"… You ought to know better than to walk on this!" she was saving.
"I didn't walk on it," said Aragh. His jaws grinned evilly at them all. "I walked off it."
"You know what I'm saying!" Danielle flashed. "You know better than to travel on it."
"What else could I do?" he snarled. "I killed the Mother, but the kits are all around us. They want your meat after those in the tower get through with you. They want lots of meat to start feeding up a new mother. None of you can handle them but me. With me beside you here, they'll stay their distance."
"We thought you dead," said Brian, somberly.
"Dead, Sir knight?" Aragh glared at him. "Never count an English wolf dead until you see his bones well bleached by the sun."
"Enough chitchat!" Carolinus snapped. "Time moves, and both Chance and History change. As I was saying, it'll be noon in—When will it be noon, you?"
"Four hours, thirty-seven minutes, twelve seconds, at the second gong," replied the invisible voice Jim had heard before. There was a momentary pause; and then a mellow, chimed note sounded on the air. "Chime, I mean," the voice corrected itself.
Carolinus muttered something under his breath. Then he addressed them all.
"Come on, now," he ordered. "Stay together. And stay behind me!"
He pulled the staff from the ground; and they all moved off in the direction of the tower, Brian now back in Blanchard's saddle since the horse seemed to have ceased his objections to going forward.
With their first steps, however, the day which had dawned as bright, clear and ordinary as any day anywhere, began to cloud and darken and its air to thicken as it had the day before. Swiftly, this time, the mist closed in on the sea side and on the waters to either side of the causeway. The clouds became a solid bank, lowering until they touched the top of the tower, to hang literally no more than a hundred feet over the challengers' heads. The dreary, drab dullness of the day before settled down on the group and added its weight once more to Jim's spirits.
He looked around him.
Surprisingly, none of this strangely assorted bag of individuals who were his Companions appeared to show any sign of being affected by the fresh demonstration of the power of whatever lived in the Loathly Tower. Aragh was limping along on three legs, grumpily assuring Danielle he would lie down, and stay lying down, in a moment so that she could set and splint the broken leg. Carolinus, leading them all, looked as if he was merely out for a brisk walk and his wand was no more than a staff to help him along. Dafydd was carefully untying the cords binding what looked like a plastic tube that had encased the string of his bow against the overnight dampness. After a second's puzzling, Jim suddenly realized that it must be a length of animal gut—p
robably pig or sheep—which had been carefully cleaned, dried and put to that purpose.
Smrgol marched along quite stoutly, his bad wing and some of his weight bearing on the mere-dragon beside him. On the other side of the old dragon rode Brian, and the two of them were now in earnest conversation.
"… About this business of people and dragons getting together," said Brian. "It sounds interesting—I must say that. But hardly practical, d'you think? We'd be bound to run into a lot of rock-hard prejudice against, on both sides."
"Got to make a start sometime, george," said Smrgol. "There's times when it'd pay to work together—like now, for instance. Not that you're not right, of course. For example, you'll notice I couldn't get any more of the dragons from our cave to join me here."
"Ah, yes," said Brian, nodding.
"Not that they're fearful, you understand, george. I don't think that for a minute. But when you live for a couple of hundred years—with luck, that is—you hardly feel like risking everything on the first chance that comes along. I'm not excusing it, you understand; it's just the way we are. Knight-erranting may make sense for you georges. Dragon-erranting would make no sense, at all, to us."
"Well, then, where's the hope?"
"The hope's in us—you and me, george—and of course Gorbash here, the Mage, young Secoh alongside me here, that bowman and the female george with him, the wolf, mage and all. If we can pull this off—defeat the Dark Powers, that is, and win a victory—it'll be a tale to tell for five hundred years. Now, I don't know about you georges, but we dragons love tales. That's what we do in the caves, you know, for months on end, lie around telling each other tales."
"Months? Really?" said Brian. "I'd hardly think—months?"
"Months, george! Give a dragon a few pieces of gold and jewels to play with, a good cask of wine to drink and a good story to listen to—and he's happy. Why, if I could count the times I told the story of how I slew the ogre of Gormely Keep, all those years ago—Oh, of course the younger dragons all groan and moan when I mention it; but they curl up, fill their flagons and listen all the same, for all they've heard it time and again."
"Hmm," murmured Brian. "Now that I think of it, we humans do a bit of sitting around and listening to old stories ourselves. Particularly in winter, you know, when it's hard to get about and there's not much to do if you could. By St. Denis, I cut my teeth on some of those old tales—they were one of the things that made me want to be a knight."
"Exactly!" said Smrgol. "Exactly the same with us dragons! Every dragon hearing the tale of how we defeat the Dark Powers here at the tower will want to go out himself and team up with some georges and maybe a wolf or some such, and have a like adventure of his own. From that, it's only a step to working together…"
"Tell me something," Jim said to Carolinus, abandoning the knight-dragon conversation to catch up with the magician and walk a half-pace behind him, "what's the price that has to be paid for the magic you used to drive away the darkness yesterday?"
"It's already paid," replied Carolinus. "The first to invoke magic incurs the debit. Counter-magic only balances the ledger. Not so with this—"
He lifted the staff and shook it slightly in the air before Jim's eyes.
"I had to go a long way to get this," he explained. "And I had to mortgage a lifetime of credit with the Auditing Department to make the journey. If we should lose here, I'm destroyed as a mage. But then, if we lose, we're all destroyed, anyway."
"I see," said Jim, soberly. He thought for a minute. "What is it, exactly, that lives in the Loathly Tower?"
"What lives there just now, I don't know yet—any more than you do. What is there—neither alive nor dead, but just in presence on that spot—is the manifestation of Evil, itself. There's nothing we or anyone else can do to get rid of that. You can't destroy Evil, any more than the creatures of Evil can destroy Good. All you can do is contain one or the other, if you're strong enough, and render it momentarily ineffective in your own situation."
"Then how can we do anything about the Dark Powers… ?"
"We can't—as I just said. But we can destroy the creatures, the tools by which Evil is currently working its will. Just as its creatures, for its purpose, will be trying to destroy us."
Jim felt a cold lump in his throat. He swallowed.
"You must have some idea," he said, "of what kind of creatures they'll be, the ones who'll be trying to destroy us."
"We already know who some of them are," Carolinus answered. "Sir Hugh and his men, for example. Also, the sandmirks. In addition—"
He stopped speaking and walking as abruptly as if he were an automaton that had been turned off. Jim checked himself, too, staring at the tower. From the windows just below its ruined battlements, figures had come boiling out—several dozen at least of great-winged, heavy-headed shapes that dipped and swung in the air about the top of the tower, screaming.
For a second they swarmed there, like a cloud of giant gnats. Then one of them swooped down toward the Companions—
And plummeted from the air like a body flung from the top of a cliff, a slim shaft impaling its body. It struck heavily, dead upon the causeway at Jim's feet, its woman's face frozen in a silent, maniacal scream.
Jim turned to see Dafydd standing with a fresh arrow already drawn to his bow. The screaming had cut off, completely and suddenly. Jim looked up and saw that the tower had no longer any swarm about it.
"Indeed, it will be no trouble if they are all of that size and swiftness," said Dafydd, coming forward to reclaim his arrow from the slain harpy. "A child could not miss at such a distance!"
"Don't mislead yourself, Master Bowman," said Carolinus over his shoulder as he began to walk forward once more. "It won't be anything like that easy with the others—"
He had turned his head west again as he spoke, and once more he broke off, stopping sharply. He stared down at a patch of grass in which, apparently, something lay hidden. Above the long beard his old face grew bony and grim. Jim stepped forward to see what had caused the magician's reaction.
With a shuddering wave of nausea, he twisted his head away again, just as the others came up to look. Lying in the grass before them was what had once been a man in armor.
Jim heard Brian's deep intake of breath as he sat on Blanchard.
"A most foul death," said the knight, softly, "most foul… most foul…"
Getting down from Blanchard, the knight went down on his armored knees beside the dead body in the grass, joining his steel gauntlets in prayer. The dragons were silent. Dafydd and Danielle stood with Aragh, none of them saying anything.
Only Carolinus, among the humans, bent his fierce old eyes on the scene before them with something besides horror. The magician poked with his staff at a wide trail of slime that led around and over the body and back in the direction of the tower. It was the sort of trail a garden slug leaves; only, to leave such a trail the slug would have had to be two feet wide where it touched the ground.
"A worm…" said Carolinus to himself. "But it was no worm that killed this man so. Worms are mindless. Something with great strength and patience plucked and crushed, in that slow fashion—"
He stared at Smrgol suddenly; and Smrgol bobbed his massive head in an oddly embarrassed gesture.
"I didn't say it, Mage," the old dragon protested.
"It'll be best none of us says it until we're sure," retorted the magician. "Come along!"
Brian rose from beside the corpse; made a small, helpless gesture over it, as if he wished to straighten out the limbs but saw the utter futility of bringing anything like decent order to what remained; and climbed back on Blanchard. The group went on up the causeway to perhaps a hundred yards from the tower; and here Carolinus stopped, driving his wand once more into the earth so that it stood upright.
Aragh dropped, panting, into a lying position and Danielle, getting to her knees beside him, began to set and splint his leg, using some dry, fallen limbs from a stunted tree nearby and a slee
ve of her doublet cut into strips.
"Now," said Carolinus; and the word tolled on Jim's ear like the sound of a bell.
The mist had closed in on them. Whiteness was on all sides and close overhead. Only the tiny plain where they stood below the tumbled boulders of the tower hill, the boulders themselves and the tower were clear of it. Or was it quite clear? Tendrils of mist drifted above it below the clouds, and something about the air and the light filtering through the clouds themselves baffled the eyes and made it hard to focus on any one thing.
"As long as my wand and I stand," said Carolinus, "no power of theirs can completely take from us light, breath or strength of will. But stay within the space the wand keeps clear, or it and I may not be able to protect you. Let our enemies come to us here."
"Where are they?" asked Jim, glancing around.
"Patience," said Carolinus, sardonically, "they'll come soon enough; and not in such form as you may expect."
Jim looked around himself at the causeway's end: the boulders and the tower. No breeze stirred from out of the mist. The air was heavy and still. No, it was not exactly still; it seemed to shiver faintly, with a quivering unnaturalness, like that of an atmosphere dancing to heat waves. Only, here it was all dim, wintry and chill. As Jim noted this trembling of the air, there came to his ears—from where, he did not know—a high-pitched, dizzy singing like that which sometimes accompanies delirium or high fever.
When he looked again at the tower, it seemed to him that the appearance of the structure itself was distorted by these happenings. Although it had seemed only an ancient, ruined shell of a building, between one heartbeat and the next it had appeared to change.
Almost, but not quite, he thought he caught glimpses of it unbroken and. alive, thronged about with half-seen figures. His heart thudded more strongly; and the causeway and the tower upon it seemed to shake with every contraction of his chest, seemed to go in and out of focus, in and out, in and out…