“You have to look closer,” the spirit explained. “They’re there, I know, and I can get through them.”
“It seems that our meeting was good fortune indeed,” the ranger said.
“Lead on,” Ardaz bade.
Del did just that, his form becoming two-dimensional, a most disturbing sight, and then slipping into the stone wall easily. He came back soon after, announcing that the particular crack was a dead end, but he tried again, and then again, and over and over, until finally, he did not return so quickly.
He had come to an inner chamber, a tunnel winding through the mountain. To his relief, and surprise, he found that he could see as readily in the dark as in the light. It made sense when he thought about it, for he wasn’t actually here, in this physical place, for he wasn’t actually corporeal at all. Darkness was an obstacle to physical eyes, but not to the entity that Del had become.
He considered the tunnel before him, its arching ceiling and fairly smooth walls. If he could only find a way for his friends to get in, it would be wide enough for them, he knew. But which way was out, and which deeper in?
On a mere guess, Del went left, floating swiftly along, until he came to a wall, again with cracks through which he could maneuver. He found that the wall was not so thick, only a foot or so, coming out of the mountain under an overhang of rock not so far from where he had left his friends. “Belexus could knock through that,” Del reasoned. “Or Ardaz certainly could.” The spirit smiled as he remembered the first time he had met the bumbling wizard, the time Ardaz had used a bolt of lightning to remove a huge rock from the meadow at Brisenballas. How the wizard had hopped about, his fingers burned by the stroke!
But the spirit reminded himself that Belexus was in rather a bit of a hurry, and he filed the memory away for another time. “Not yet,” he decided, and he went back through the crack, back into the tunnel. Before he brought Belexus and Ardaz to the spot and got their hopes up, he thought it wise to make sure that he was leading them correctly. And so he went the other way down the tunnel, past the spot where he had first entered, and farther on into the mountain. Down and down he traveled, the corridor widening and narrowing, sometimes with a low ceiling, and other times covered by long and high shafts, so that there was no ceiling visible. He came to one chamber filled by dark water, which he merely floated over, and was relieved to see that there was enough of a ledge for his friends to get by.
Then came a steep, descending slope, and down Del went. He sensed something different about this area, and in tuning his other senses, found that the air was warmer and that a subtle, rhythmic vibration was all about him.
As he neared the bottom of the slope, he understood the rhythm to be the breathing of a dragon-a huge, sleeping dragon.
Now he moved more cautiously, though he could rationally tell himself that this wyrm, however magnificent, could not hurt him. There was something in the air, beyond the warmth and the snores, some tangible aura, inciting terror. Del tried to tell himself that it was just his expectations of what a dragon might be that were making him tentative, but soon he came to understand that it was indeed something more than that, something very real.
He went through another few passageways, a veritable maze now, though the sound and the heat proved a ready guide. Then he turned a final corner and came into a chamber, and such a chamber as poor Del had never imagined! All those past legends of dragons flooded back to him now, ignited by the incredible scene: the wealth, the jewels, and mostly, the great wyrm itself, fifty feet long though it was curled in a ball. If Del had been a corporeal being, needing to draw breath, he knew that he would not be able to do so. If he had been a corporeal being, if he had made even the slightest sound, the dragon would have awakened and he would have been destroyed. It was that simple, that cut and dried. He would have been destroyed, with no other possibilities plausible.
Those thoughts propelling him, Del was back through the maze, back up the slope, and nearly back to the far end of the tunnel before he even registered that he was running away.
“You do not want to go in there,” was the first thing the spirit said to his companions when he rejoined them outside the mountain. “Trust my judgment on this.”
Belexus and Ardaz exchanged knowing glances. “So you saw the wyrm, eh?” the wizard asked.
The spirit nodded.
“Big wyrm?”
Again the nod.
“Mighty wyrm?”
Again the nod.
“Scared you?”
And once again, the nod.
“This must be the place,” Ardaz said dryly to Belexus.
“Did ye see any o’ its treasures?” the ranger asked of Del.
Again the nod.
“The sword I telled ye of?”
The spirit tried to recall the scene. He remembered the mounds of glittering treasures, but nothing in particular stood out to him, nothing except the great dragon.
“It was probably there,” he said at length. “But that is not reason enough to go in there!”
“Ye just show me the way,” the ranger demanded.
“No.”
“I’ll not be arguing with ye, ghost o’ DelGiudice!” Belexus growled sternly. “I come for one thing alone, and I’m meaning to have it, or meaning to die in trying to get it!” “You will.”
“That big?” Ardaz asked, scratching his beard.
“Bigger,” replied Del. “In all my wildest nightmares, I could not have imagined a creature so terrifying.”
“Everyone says that when first they see a wyrm, even a little one,” Ardaz explained. “A bit of dragon magic to flutter the heart. But no matter. We both have seen the likes of a dragon before, and know the terror and the danger. We came here expecting it, but came here anyway, since that sword which lies in the lair is most important-more important, I daresay, than all three of us put together. So be a good ghost and show us the way in, and let us be on with it.”
DelGiudice stared long and hard at Ardaz, and then even longer at Belexus, and seeing the unblinking resolution etched on their faces, he relented. “Get on Calamus,” he instructed, and when they were ready, he flew off to the ledge under the jag of rock, a treacherously narrow place where Calamus could not get a solid footing, and so Ardaz and Belexus had to leap off, while the pegasus circled away, a sleeping Desdemona comfortably sprawled across his back.
Ardaz called to the cat repeatedly. Then, with no response forthcoming, the wizard coaxed Calamus into circling close and stooping violently, shaking the cat free. Belexus caught her, and got a good swipe across the face for his efforts. Hoisting Desdemona by the scruff of her neck, he handed her over, none too gently, to Ardaz.
The ranger’s mood grew fouler indeed when Del explained that the passage was behind this wall of stone. “Well, yerself can go through a crack,” the ranger remarked.
“But it’s not so thick,” Del tried to explain.
“We’ll be waking the whole mountain, and all the dead things the dragon’s eaten, if we go to knocking through the stone!”
Ardaz was already at work on it. He tap-tapped gently with his staff, listening closely to find what was solid stone and what just a thin wall blocking an open passage. Then, the tunnel located, the wizard traced out a rough door with water. He stepped back, tucked his staff under an armpit and rubbed his hands together, then waggled his fingers. “Not so long ago, I could have just made it all go away, you know,” he explained. “Blast the fool Thalasi and all that he ruined!”
With a sigh he set back to work, bringing magic into the air about him, sending it in small, focused waves at the wet lines on the stone. He sent the water deeper into the rock, into the very essence of the rock, and soon the line that had been marked with water darkened and sharpened, now seeming more like a smooth crack in the mountain wall.
Ardaz sighed again and slumped, obviously weary. “The door,” he explained. “But do be careful not to make a racket when opening it.”