“You cannot judge me,” said Glorious. “My loneliness increases with each year. Time has become my curse. If my loneliness is unbearable after thirty centuries, imagine the agony of another hundred, or thousand, or ten thousand. I do not possess the courage to face eternity; no being could. The cycles and patterns of life I observe once delighted me; now they bore me. There is nothing new under the sun. Thirty centuries is enough. I am done.”
“What will happen when you die?” asked Aurora. “Who’s right? Will the sun carry on without you guiding it? Will it meander as it once did? Or will it be extinguished?”
“What does this matter to me?” he asked. “It was never my intention to give birth to the world you know. Should I care if my choices now end it?”
“Yes!” Aurora said. “You can’t condemn a world to death just because you’re bored and lonely.”
“I believe I can,” said Glorious. “And I believe I will.”
As he spoke, he uncurled his body. He was a being made of pure light, but the pearl of the sun began to rock and bob as he spread his limbs, disrupting its internal balance. His body passed though the glassy surface and he stretched his golden wings to span the horizon.
Slor Tonn wheeled unexpectedly. I clung tightly to Aurora as she struggled to keep her balance.
“What’s happening?” I cried.
“That gloomy idiot has spooked my whale,” Aurora shouted, as Slor Tonn fled toward the darker waters we’d come from. I glanced back, to see Glorious rising ever higher above the pearl. The waters beneath us were churning as the sun’s orb bounced and twisted, moved by the dragon’s struggle to free himself. I looked up, toward the distant globe of the physical world, and wondered what the sky must look like at this moment.
We were putting quite a bit of distance between us and Glorious. I shouted, “Slor Tonn can really move.”
“It won’t matter,” Aurora shouted back. “Glorious will overtake us in the blink of an eye once he gets underway. The only thing we have going for us is that this is the first time he’s been outside the sun in three thousand years. Maybe we have a minute or two while he catches his bearings.”
“Then that’s a minute or two for us to find Hush.”
“Agreed,” said Aurora. “We can stop Purity and Judge Stern. We can save Glorious whether he wants to be saved or not. Then we can talk him back into the sun... I hope.”
“I’ll handle the talking,” I said. “I won’t be much help in a fight.”
“That was true in life as well.”
She said this humorously, but I sensed an undercurrent of resentment that her only ally in saving the world was a legless, one-handed ghost. I sucked the bear gland nestled in my cheek and said nothing. My brain raced as I struggled to find an argument that might convince Glorious to carry on. I doubted there was anything I might say that would ease his loneliness.
But maybe I was focusing on convincing the wrong dragon. Glorious wouldn’t listen to me. Would Hush?
CHAPTER TWENTY
TOO LATE
T
HE WAVES BELOW
churned into white caps. Glorious was causing the pearl of the sun to bob and spin violently as he continued to rise, shaking his spirit free of its shell. His radiance cast Slor Tonn’s shadow on the waters before us, like a long dark arrow. I cannot guess our speed, but at least several minutes passed while the waters beneath us grew ever darker. At last, Glorious was merely a glow on the horizon, and sparkling ice floes once more speckled the velvet black waters of the Great Sea Above.
The turbulent waves from the thrashing sun reached the ice floes, causing some to bob, and others to shoot into the air and hurtle towards the material world, high above. Many a night had I gazed into the dark sky and contemplated shooting stars. Had this always been their origin? Great blocks of ice breaking free from the celestial ocean to fall toward earth? It seemed so unlikely.
But I had little time to contemplate heavenly mechanics before Aurora shouted, “There!” Her arm was outstretched toward the largest iceberg I’d ever seen.
Only it wasn’t an iceberg. It was Hush, walking along the surface of the ocean, which froze into thick ice sheets to support her weight. Waves crashed against the advancing ice wall, and bobbing atop these waves was a tiny boat. It stayed barely a hundred yards ahead of Hush’s advance, by virtue of the furious rowing of the enslaved ice-maidens. Purity stood at the bow, her wings spread for balance. Even from this distance, I could tell by the tilt of her head she had spotted Slor Tonn. She thrust the harpoon in our direction. A pale blue beam filled the frozen air with bright sparkles as it crackled toward us. Slor Tonn banked hard to the left to avoid the attack.
“Can the harpoon hurt you?” I shouted to Aurora.
Aurora nodded. “Ordinary cold doesn’t bother ogres, but the Jagged Heart isn’t ordinary cold.”
Slor Tonn turned back toward the boat. From our vantage point, I spotted two long bundles in the floor of the boat, one with platinum blonde hair. “I think I see Infidel.”
“Good,” said Aurora. “She can help even the odds once we capsize their boat.”
“Infidel’s lost her powers,” I said. “Capsizing the boat might kill her!”
“Doing nothing means that she dies along with everyone else.”
I nodded; she was right.
A second beam shot toward us. Again Slor Tonn banked to avoid it, then turned his nose straight down. Aurora said, “Hold on tight. Things are about to get rough.”
“I’m ready,” I said, chewing the bear gland in my cheek furiously as we plunged toward the black water.
I wasn’t ready. Even with Slor Tonn taking the brunt of our impact with the waves, the cold that washed over me numbed both body and mind. In the frozen darkness, I struggled to remember where I was or even who I was. My arms went slack and I lost my grip on Aurora.
Fortunately, she had the coolness of thought to keep hold of me. We exploded from the water a moment later, with Purity’s walrus-hide boat caught in Slor Tonn’s mighty jaws. With a loud crunch, he bit off the front end where Purity had stood. Fear instantly wiped away my cold-induced lethargy as I thought of Infidel getting chewed by the whale’s attack.
My fear was short-lived as the back half of the boat tore away and fell to the ice, sliding to a halt before Hush. Infidel was there amid the tangle of stunned ice-maidens, as well as Sorrow and Judge Stern. I could see this all plainly by the light of the Gloryhammer, which danced across the ice, free from anyone’s grip.
From the corner of my vision, I saw Judge Stern rise and gaze toward the hammer. I couldn’t let him get hold of it. But how could I stop him? Did I dare touch the Gloryhammer again? Before, I had been overwhelmed by the bottomless loneliness of Glorious. Now, in theory, he’d severed his connection with the sun.
“I need to get the Gloryhammer! Throw me!” I shouted. I didn’t have time to weigh the pros and cons of the plan.
Aurora needed no further prompting. She grabbed me by my left elbow and flung me toward the weapon. My spinning flight, as you can imagine, was rather disorienting. I hit the ice with force enough to shatter what remained of my ribs. I was going to need a lot more bear gland to deal with my pain when all this was over. I skittered across the ice toward the hammer, my good arm outstretched, just as Judge Stern broke into a sprint for the same target.
I reached it first.
To my great relief, the overwhelming loneliness that had threatened my naked spirit earlier was gone as my fingers closed around the shaft. The surge of power Infidel had described as being filled with pure sunlight swept through me. With half my body torn away, I saw the full effect vividly. It was as if the hammer understood where the true outlines of my body should be, and filled this shell with radiant energy. I rose on legs of light. I flexed my severed left hand, now composed of fingers of dazzling luminance.
Judge Stern skittered on the ice as he tried to stop before he collided with me. He wound up with his feet out from under him, hitting the ice butt first. He waved his fist at me as he shouted, “Devil! You defile a sacred weapon! Surrender it at once!”
“Finders, keepers,” I argued. I was surprised a legal scholar such as himself had been unaware of this fine point of the law.
Stern rose to his knees, then lunged with what might have been an impressive tackle at my shins if they’d been actual shins. He passed right through my limbs of light, crashing chin first onto the ice. I waited a few seconds, but he didn’t get up. I was finally ready for some action, and my first opponent goes and knocks himself out. Typical.
With Purity swallowed by Slor Tonn and Judge Stern unconscious, my top priority was to speak to Hush.
Unfortunately, when I gazed at the lumbering dragon, I saw that she was about to crush the frozen bodies of Infidel and Sorrow beneath her giant claw. Conversation would have to wait. I swung my hammer toward the women, willed myself to fly, and flashed toward them as Hush’s massive talon fell. I didn’t know if my light hand could grab the women, so I willingly crashed into the ice, sliding into Sorrow’s frosty form, using it as a cue ball in a game of body-billiards. She caromed into Infidel and they both skipped across the frozen sea. I closed my eyes as the gap between Hush’s claw and the ice quickly vanished, but opened my eyes a moment later when the impact didn’t come. Behind me was a thunderous sound. I’d cleared the dragon’s footfall, although if I’d had physical legs I’m certain that wouldn’t have been the case.
I spun around, searching for Infidel. I saw her splayed on the ice, limp, her body free of the frozen shell that had enwreathed her. My pool shot had shattered her icy cage. Was she even still alive?
As I flew toward her, she stirred, raising her hand instinctively to shield her eyes. In my panic, I’d stoked the Gloryhammer to high-noon intensity. I thrust the weapon into her grasp. My face was inches from hers as her eyes snapped open, glowing as the energy of the hammer surged through her.
“Stagger!” she exclaimed, before grabbing me by the back of my neck and pulling me to her for a powerful kiss. The kiss proved briefer than I would have liked. Perhaps she was aware of the urgency of our situation, though her haste might also be explained by the bear-piss aroma filling my mouth.
Using the power of the hammer, she spiraled up into the air. I clung to her shoulders to keep from falling. Apparently, the hammer’s energy could only flow into one of us; my limbs of light were gone. She looked down and turned pale.
“Oh, Stagger,” she said, sadly.
“I’ve been in better shape,” I admitted.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “But Aurora has fixed me up.”
“Aurora?” She looked around, and spotted her old friend perched on Slor Tonn’s back.
I took a deep breath. “We’re in the Great Sea Above. Slor Tonn’s eaten Purity, I’ve knocked out Judge Stern, but any second Glorious is going to come over the horizon intent on suicide. We have to stop Hush before she kills him and ends life as we know it.”
Infidel closed her eyes and rubbed them with her free hand as we drifted higher into the sky. She shook her head and whispered, “Can’t I have one freaking day when I wake up not having to prevent the imminent destruction of the world?”
“There’s always tomorrow, baby,” I said. “Unless, you know, there isn’t. We should get to work on that.”
We were now a good quarter-mile above the battlefield, not that there was much battling left going on. Sorrow had bounced back with remarkable speed and had dispatched most of the survivors from the spilled boat with a gruesome efficiency. I watched as she leapt onto an ogress who was rising to her feet. Sorrow placed her bare hand upon the ogress as she rose. Instantly dark red veins of infection spread across the ogress’s skin. In seconds, her victim collapsed, coughing up blood.
Sorrow moved on to the next person rising to her feet, one of the ice-maidens, her armor cracked and missing along her left shoulder. Despite the fact that the woman had been mentally enslaved, Sorrow showed no mercy, dispatching her with the same cold efficiency.
“I wonder if she can kill Hush,” said Infidel. Her voice sounded doubtful, a doubt, I suspect, both about Sorrow’s offensive capacity and Infidel’s own. Hush was an imposing figure as she crawled beneath us, freezing the ocean half a mile before her with each step forward. In scale, we were like fleas contemplating an attack upon a dog. No doubt we’d draw blood, but would Hush even notice?
“Fly down!” I shouted. “Get in front of her face!”
Infidel obeyed. In seconds, we were hovering before the dragon’s left eye. I could see our reflection in the dark iris. I was surprised to discover that Hush had green eyes, the shade of fir boughs. Save for her pink tongue, it was the only thing about her not snowy white.
But I’d not come here to contemplate the pigments necessary to complete her portrait. Aware that time was running out, I shouted, “Hush! Please stop and listen! You don’t need to kill Glorious! He’s lonely! He knows he was foolish to reject you! You have a second chance at winning his heart!”
Hush didn’t even pause as she marched forward. Infidel kept us flying one step ahead.
“Stop, please!” I shouted. But I couldn’t tell if Hush was even focused on us. Sometimes, a gnat inches from ones face is more difficult to see than one a yard away. I don’t know if she even heard us.