…blinking, trying to push herself up, with pebbles under her hands. She blinked again, at something huge and pale. She tried to turn her face away from it before she realized it was the moon, bigger than she had ever seen a moon in the mountains, just above the horizon — which rippled.
Pryn pushed back, pebbles under her hip, dragging her feet beneath her. Pebbles rolled down the slope. She looked up at a tall rock, with trees beyond it. She looked behind her. Another rocky finger prodded crookedly at the night, but shorter.
Both rocks were chalky white.
Pryn pushed to sitting, dragging her heels back, and locked her arms about her knees, resting her chin on them, in a lucidity that seemed near sickness, though if she didn’t move, she might be all right. She bit her inner lip and looked across rippling fog.
At the moon…
Cawing, and she looked up — to see leaves fall and what seemed a flurry of leaves; only it was the bird itself, momentarily at the proper angle for her to catch the wing’s green before ivory light leached all color. In a chatter of little stones and leaves, Pryn suddenly pushed to her feet. She stepped to the ledge.
Below rolled fog; below that, water. Pryn blinked. Wave rolled over wave. Taking a great breath, which made her stomach ill and her balance shaky, she shouted as loud as she could: ‘I am Pryn, and I have come to warn the Worm of the Sea of the Blue Heron’s…!’ She did not know where the words came from, nor their proper conclusion. But a sudden gout, breaking silver above the mist, made her push the heel of her hand up hard against her mouth and step back.
Through the ripplings at the slope’s foot something else…rippled. Now catching light and glimmering, it looked like water. Dark and heaving, it seemed a solider fog.
Out there…?
Something splashed and she looked off at it.
Somewhere else, a splash — Pryn looked over there. There was another, below her. She looked down: water broke like a metallic flower, falling open and dropping shattered petals into mist, beautiful and burning in the chill.
The ground’s shaking was almost too slight to feel. Then a whisper only as loud as the slightest breeze by her ear grew to a tremble, a roar.
She thought to sit again, lest she be thrown. But she saw, at three places, fog break from something solid and dark as power.
Not fog.
Stone.
Dripping and streaming, stone poured water into fog. The towers rose, two taller, one smaller, a bridge between the three, spurting out windows, spilling through newels.
Sea foamed. Buildings shrugged water into it. There and there were other roofs, a broken wall, more walls standing, two buildings: one nearly whole supported one nearly collapsed.
Driven from the sea, fog hung above her, before her, about her. She stood in an emptiness she knew was permeated with mist she could not see. Frothing, the water mixed jade and ivory. Enough buildings had risen to see streets. Where two crossed, water whirled, swirled, rushed out by the walls.
A wall fell…?
No, a mud bank broke from stone, to slosh off between the ruins.
Pryn saw them first as a row of regular eruptions in the rush.
Six, seven, eight, nine carvings cleared the flood, which, as the water lowered, were the capitals of nine columns, one of the line — the sixth or seventh — missing.
The columns rose. Weeds strung away. Water lowered more. Weeds dropped on algae-filmed stone. The column fallen across its base rose above the ripples. Some of the muddy streets were paved with patterned blue flags. Other buildings had broken columns before them…
That was when she saw it, glittering.
The earth rumbled; the water raged. Muddied and weed-streaked, it still gleamed, so much of it as had washed free of mud and refuse. Whatever desires she’d pushed away to give it up surged back, like foam, like wind. She didn’t want to take any — only to see it from closer…only perhaps a few coins.
There was so much of it!
It filled alleys. Glimmering, it spilled into wider avenues. There, that must have been a whole house, or even several small houses, piled over with it.
Half running, half falling down the embankment, Pryn only managed to get her feet under her when they plunged shin-deep in mud. She staggered on, arms wheeling, till she reached the first pavement. Weeds in windows hung on wet stone. Mud clung to the wall beside her. Fallen masonry, broken shells, and soaked branches made her progress by the dripping pillars as slow as it had been in the silt. Dirty-footed, wet-handed, scratches on her shoulders and legs, Pryn edged between cold rocks, pushed away a cool branch of driftwood, moved close along a broken wall, its carvings veiled in moss.
She could see gold at that alley’s end!
But the tiny street was too blocked and clotted with some half-fallen building to get through. Did it move…? In the heaps of nuggets, trinkets, coins, did some tremor in the risen seafloor cause that momentary cascade of wet metal?
That’s when she remembered the dragon.
Pryn looked up. Beyond the broken cornice, yellow fogs drifted, luminous before a moon she could no longer see. But I only want to see it…Pryn took hold of her astrolabe, as cold as if it, too, had lain in the waters. She moved to the building corner, looked around it…
Six wagon-loads…? Only six? More like six hundred…! Heaping the far side of the yard, most of it was yellow, but a lot was iron dark with tarnish or silver-green with algae. What part of the ruins were under that sloping glimmer?
The heaped treasure was mountainous!
Pryn looked the other way at the half-crumbled cistern, beyond which were more free-standing columns — and started! But the gleaming head, demonic, half on its side, was also gold…
Then the mountains moved!
A ripple passed over the glimmering slope — not the shimmer from high to low of tumbling coins, but sideways, over the whole of it; then another ripple, bottom to top. Gold unfolded over gold.
The building corner struck Pryn, buttock and shoulder blade. (She hadn’t realized she’d been backing away.) Rising, gold articulated along some glittering numismatic pleat, then along another fanning from it, then yet along another. Between, the loose and flashing folds billowed and rose, a wing scaled with coins, taut, spined, darkening a fifth the sky, dragged its shadow over the yard, opaque to all moonlight with its auric load, yet still glittering within its black, become beast, become Gauine herself.
Beyond the columns, the golden head rolled upright and — looked at her!
Mouth open, Pryn crouched, back against uneven stone. Somewhere, distant in the ruins, another gold wing rose above roofs.
The head slid. Some half-standing wall fell before the huge muzzle rose. Black puddles in pits of crumpled foil, the eyes, now one, now the other, lowered slow, brazen lids and lifted them. Hovering above the columns, above the smashed cistern, above Pryn, the long, ragged lip, clotted with gems, lifted from teeth not gold but stained bone, some whole, some split, all hiked in coral gum.
Pryn pushed back, slipped, almost went sprawling, but got her feet under her. Standing, she looked up. The great wings, first one, then the other, moved.
She heard wind.
She heard water.
She took another breath and called, loud enough to hurt her throat: ‘Oh great Gauine, I have come to give my treasure…!’ She stopped.
Because the golden head, staring down, that rose and rose above her, now descended!
Fear? Terror? What she felt was not terror, because the beast above her was terror itself, and to gaze up at it — all jaws and eyes — was to watch, as jaws opened and eyes blinked, terror’s articulations entirely from without. She felt herself in some reckless state where ecstasy and obliviousness, daring and distraction, were one.