If it couldn't hurt me, then I could leave. I climbed to my feet and saw its eyes narrow. It snorted, a hot
huff
of smoky air, but it did not move. I took a long step back, and a growl began in the monster's throat.
I am not done with you
.
I shook my head and took another long, slow step away. "
I have no quarrel with you.
"
Oh, but you do
, the dragon said, and it rolled slowly to its feet. I glanced back, then eased one leg down over the ledge's edge. I found a foothold on the steeper slope below, braced a hand against the trunk of a tree, and lowered my weight down to the hillside.
You will not escape, human
.
I watched it. The beast did not want me to go. I could feel the certainty of that in my own head. It wanted desperately to kill me. But something stayed its hand. Hope danced to life, deep inside my heart, and I felt an answering rage from the dragon. I bottled it away and turned my back and started down the forest slope.
I heard the dragon bellow again behind me. It was a force of nature, a timeless power that had apparently survived an assault by half a hundred wizards of various degrees of training—including two full Masters among them—and had absorbed the full fury of a fiercely-powerful apprentice and stretched him dead upon the ground. Even with my mental defenses in place, I felt a healthy fear of the beast I had left behind me.
But it could not kill me. I swallowed once, reached deep for courage, and pressed my way down the steep hillside. I had to struggle to keep my balance, mostly falling from the support of one tree to another. And then a thought crossed my mind. The dragon could not rip or tear me, but could it harm me indirectly? It had thrown me to the earth hard enough to steal my breath. What was to stop it tumbling boulders down upon me from above? As I half-fell down the mountainside, I couldn't help wondering if the dragon could just snatch me up drop me to my death.
I made it another ten paces down the hill before I heard the thunder of its wings. And then talons strong enough to score stone closed around my shoulders with an astonishing care. I felt the barest pressure beneath my collarbone and then my feet lifted away from the earth. With a touch gentler even than the band of air Archus had used to lift me the dragon rose high into the night.
Dizzyingly high. I saw the full expanse of the Sorcerer's Stand laid out in a single inky blot beneath me, the mountain a charcoal blotch in its heart. I imagined I could see the Tower of the Masters on the Academy grounds off to the east, and I really did see the pencil-thin trail of the Brennes curling across the landscape north and east, and where it pooled into a long, low lake I knew the flowered gardens of Gath-upon-Brennes graced its shores.
I should have felt terror from the heights, but it seemed natural. Right. I flashed through the exercises Antinus had taught me and fought a sudden grin at the sight that flooded me. Deep in a sea of elemental air, I swam within a world of whisper-light magic, and though some part of my mind screamed with a fear that the dragon meant to drop me I shook my head. In my mind's eyes I could already imagine a net of empty air, catching me as I fell and lowering me gently down.
I felt the dragon's answering rage, and it swung out in a wide circle that showed me all of the Ardain, from east to west. And in the distance I saw the great sea. Some perverse curiosity rose up in my heart, the same voice that had made me question the dragon's limitations, and I wondered what I would do if it tried to drop me to the sea. I could slow my fall. Perhaps. I
thought
I could.
But that was a simple working.
Seeing
wasn't enough to work the kind of magic the Masters used. I had no clue how to weave a traveling. If the beast dropped me far enough offshore, simple exhaustion would drag me under the waves, magic or no.
I felt the dragon's flash of satisfaction, and its lazy circle turned into a beeline for the coast. My calm shattered. The magic sight fled me. Fear bubbled up in my heart, and even my mental defenses failed. I felt my own fear wash away in the dragon's flush of victory.
"
Don't
," I cried. "
Why? Why are you so determined to kill me?
"
You are man
, the dragon said.
I am serpent. The question needs no more reason than that
.
"
I don't want to die!
" There was no nobility in the words, no hint of courage or dignity. I was beyond such things. Terror reigned inside me, but I had barely thought the words before my own fear was subsumed by the dragon's deep, satisfied laughter.
Below us the edge of the earth flashed away, deep blue waters churning far, far away. The dragon soared on, until even at that altitude I could barely see the shore far away. I tried to twist within its grasp, scrabbling desperately for some grip on its talons. If I could hold on, if I could climb up its leg and find a better grip—
Stop that
, the dragon grumbled in my mind, and I felt its will bear down upon me. The strength faded from my arms, from my grabbing fingertips. I did as Antinus had taught me, sought my self-control, and gradually regained dominion of my body. I forced my hand up higher, gripping the sharp-edged talon, and my other hand went higher still and found the hard plates like armor that covered much of the dragon's hide. If I could just reach those I could find a grip secure enough the dragon couldn't shake me off.
Stop that!
it said again, and I felt a wash of the dragon's impatience and frustration. I felt its will battering at the back of my mind, but my grip on the talon only tightened. If I just remembered my training the beast could not overpower me. If I kept control of my thoughts, I could survive this. I set my jaw and reached higher still.
And then I felt my stomach lunge up into my throat. I was weightless. I felt the air rushing around me. The dragon's grip was gone, and I fell from nearly half a mile above the sea.
I screamed in terror, and in the back of my head I felt an echo of satisfaction from the dragon. I could see it, in my second sight, a deep and perfect emptiness within the night sky. I watched the winds wash against it, around it, and felt below me the ancient, patient, crushing powers of the waters that wear mountains down to sand. I could feel the energy flooding through me, too, the power of my own will, but it was miniscule and fragile against the water and the wind.
Despite the dragon's satisfaction at my scream I could feel a lingering irritation. I had driven it to act sooner than it intended. I found little confidence from that, even as terror clawed at the edges of my vision. I scrabbled desperately to grab at the strands of air around me, but magic didn't work like that. The threads I saw in my second sight were pure power, chaos energy, outside the reach of a wizard's will. I could bend their effects to make a working, but I could not use them directly.
To do a working I had to form a separate reality, and invest it with confidence and will. And focus. But I gained speed as I fell, far too fast toward the earth. My second sight receded, fading with my control, and I flew again through my exercises, and again, until I held some measure of control. And then I began building a reality. I thought of the net I'd imagined earlier. It had seemed so simple a thing. But as I fell faster and faster, the jagged edges of my working rattled apart and it disintegrated. I started over again.
Above me, the dragon swung around and passed back to the east, watching my fall. As I stared at it I saw something new pulsing through that abyss of black nothing. I saw a single weaving, pulsing thread of crimson that danced in a fragile maze throughout the dragon's form. It was mystifying and enticing and, for reasons I could not possibly explain, the sight of it gave me strength.
I needed to survive. I closed my eyes and saw a pillow of air around me, a cocoon soft and slow, a bubble that could absorb the crushing force of my landing and drop me lightly into the waters. The thought snapped into perfect clarity in my mind, and I poured all my will into it. I spoke to give it shape, "Wind, catch me," and I felt a gentle pressure against my back. I slowed, slowed—
And then I struck the water's surface with enough force to shatter bones and crush my body like a flower underfoot. I had taken too long. Far above me I felt the pale pang of deep emotion—satisfaction or regret I could not say—and that thin stream of red danced within the darkness off to the east, and out of sight.
And then the sea swallowed me, and I was gone.
I woke to the sound of waves against the shore. Sunlight seared at me, bright and burning red even behind closed eyes. In one great gulp pain enveloped me. No tears came, no cries or even whimpers from a body too broken to complain. Instead I waited in horror as the agony built and built. A shiver dragged a groan from me, and I begged my body to suppress a second one, but it chased down my spine like living fire. I lay there in the sand, pinned down by the burning light of dawn and floundering in pain that lapped against me with the waves.
I turned back to the exercises that had nearly saved me. I reached for self-control, for some manner of distance and calm, but each new burst of stabbing pain shattered my concentration. Where I could not control my mind I struggled to control my body. I tried to move—to lift a hand to shade my face or just to bend a finger—and I cried without tears when my body refused to respond.
Methodically, painfully, I tried to move each part of my body. Starting with my toes, I reversed a swordsman's exercise and tried to tense muscles as I moved up, but I felt no response from any of them. Frustration and pain warred within me, and I longed for black oblivion. It would not come, so I forged on. I struggled with all my strength to twitch a toe, to bend a knee. Perhaps some of my efforts met success, but I felt nothing and dared not open my eyes against the piercing sun. I was too broken to move. My legs didn't work, I knew that for certain. Nor did my arms. And every time I tried to take a deep breath, I felt a sharp pain in my side and chest.
At last I reached the muscles in my neck and head. My jaw dropped open at my command, and then I gave a gasp of surprise that turned into a groan. For several minutes I just lay there, opening and closing my mouth. I felt some thrill of victory that bubbled over into manic delirium, and then a little curling wave jostled my leg, and pain exploded across my mind. I whimpered when I tried to scream and fell into black hopelessness. What good was that small amount of control against the paralysis that held me? What had happened to bring me here? I felt a dizzy wonder that I had survived the crushing depths, but to what end? I was broken and alone. I settled into another methodical investigation then, working through the ways that I might die.
Thirst would get me long before starvation. Exposure might get me faster. Perhaps internal bleeding—or external bleeding, for that matter. I couldn't raise my head enough to check. Or perhaps the dragon would come back to finish the job. It could drop a boulder on me and end things then and there. I closed my eyes and hoped for that. And then another frothy wave exploded pain across my brain.
Consciousness faded away and then returned like some cruel, hateful tide. The sun was higher, then. Hotter. Brighter. I baked in its rays and fought to catch my magic, if only to drag myself up out of the cursed waves. It was no use. My mind skittered like a foal on winter ice, and every working I imagined fractured still half-formed.
I drew a deep breath, and pain lanced in my side. The air escaped me in a rush, and for some time I could only pant and pray. I tried again, cautiously, filling my lungs slowly. It almost worked, but in the end I took too much, and pain flashed again. The sharp stab of it drew a cough that was worse than anything before. And then, thank mercy, I blacked out.
I don't know how long it took, how many tries, but finally I filled my lungs and screamed with all my might. I used up my air and my strength, and for ten minutes or an hour I lay there, panting and trying to fill my lungs once more. When I did, I shouted again, and my voice echoed out across the waters. It shimmered among the frothy waves and drowned beneath the pounding surf and blew away upon the ocean breeze. It took me four tries, and I think a fifth would have killed me, but finally I heard an answering shout that I first guessed was my imagination, and then hallucination.
Then a hand jostled my shoulder, and the pain destroyed my mind.
I woke up in blissful darkness. Agony still clattered against my mind—noisy and constant—but I pushed it away just as I had done the dragon's anger and fought to get my breathing level. I tried to rub at my face, but my arms didn't move. I blinked my eyes open and saw a thin gray light within what felt like a small room. Streaks of orange light stabbed down in front of me, narrow and irregular, and their edges blurred into the mottled darkness.
Fear knotted in my gut at that, but it was just another complaint among the many. I closed my eyes to shut out my damaged sight and focused on the other senses. I heard a dull roar that I thought might bode as badly for my hearing, but after a moment I pushed that new panic away, too, and recognized it as the thunder of the pounding surf. I was in some manner of shelter within a stone's throw of the seashore.
The scent upon the air confirmed it. Dead fish. There was no smell of rot, or open refuse, but even a fastidious fisherman finds himself eventually clothed in the pungent odor of the things. I opened my eyes again, considered the irregular lines of sunlight against the inner darkness, and guessed I was in some poor fisherman's hut, seeing daylight through gaps in a crudely-fashioned wall.