On her hands and knees, forgetting to breathe or speak, Marwen ran her hands over the rich pictures that some skilled hand had woven: the white wingwand circled in ice gozzys, the flower of death; the staff also circled in white ice gozzys; the symbols of the skull, bloodpetal and witchwafer.
She pushed the table aside. It toppled over.
“This is not a greatrug,” she cried aloud to no one. “This is Perdoneg’s tapestry!”
Perdoneg was waiting, hunkered on the hill, when she walked out the door of the shack. At the bottom of the hill, the wingwands, laden with frightened people, flew into the air like light soundless birds, fleeing. Camlach and Torbil were creeping up the hillside, and Marwen lifted her left hand to stop them. The heavy tapestry, draped over her shoulders, trailed behind her in the dust. In the dragon’s shadow, the house shrank into twilight, and before his dark beauty, Marwen was a pale phantom. In her right hand, the hourglass gleamed with a dull silver light.
Perdoneg’s yellow eyes met hers lustfully. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, his great tooth-filled jaw went slack.
Marwen’s voice sounded small and weak in the face of the dragon, but she could not raise it. “Yes. You are not mistaken, Perdoneg. This is your tapestry.”
His body quivered and a foul smoke began to seep from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. Claws huge and curved slid in and out of their thick sheaths. His tongue shone like charcoal and lolled in a black mouth.
“So, it has not been destroyed,” Perdoneg said. His neck and back rippled and arched in triumph, and within his belly Marwen could hear the bubble and belch of tar and smoke.
“You know your tapestry cannot be destroyed by anything save your own dragonfire,” Marwen said, and she pulled the tapestry closer about her body.
“I can kill you still,” he hissed. “I need not burn you. Long have I awaited this moment.” The pupils in his deep yellow eyes spun black and hideous, and Marwen looked beneath them and into his hot mouth.
“It is my gift to interpret the tapestry, Perdoneg. Before you kill me, I will do this for you,” she said in a still quiet voice. Perdoneg answered nothing.
“At your birth you were promised in your tapestry that you would kill a wizard and his heir, and rule over a new age in which the dragons would once again prevail. Failing this, you must continue to dwell in the prison to which Morda-hon sent you in ages past.”
“I will not fail,” the dragon hissed, and a thread of blue flame licked dose to Marwen. “I will kill you with claw and tail, and then I will seek your cowardly father, and he, too, will die. Evil must have its time and its place in the world or that which is good dies, too.” The scaly hide over his haunches trembled and twitched in anticipation.
Marwen nodded slowly. “But your time is not now, Perdoneg. You have come in body and pursued me with fire, but your magic you cannot use. Your tapestry is unfulfilled, and so your magic remains trapped in the lost lands. Furthermore, your tapestry will not be fulfilled.”
She held up the hourglass so that the gold base faced the dragon, mirroring his leering face full of aged yellow teeth. She made a spell for seeing, a long-worded difficult spell that sapped the magic from her as with a great sucking mouth. She could taste the saltiness of her own sweat on her lips. Perdoneg’s fires burned quiet.
Slowly an image moved in the gold, vague at first, then more clear, until, reflected in Perdoneg’s huge black pupils that dilated and contracted unceasingly, she could see the image of a man walking. His head was bent and bearded with days, and his feet moved with a dogged painful plodding toward a land shrouded in mists and twilight. The land of the dead. The man bore a staff, and on the crook of the staff were runes spelling a name: Nimroth.
“Seventeen years ago,” Marwen whispered dryly, “Nimroth left his house and traveled by foot across the empty hills until he came to the town of Marmawell where lived a young and fair maiden named Srill. She knew she bore the wizard’s heir, but her secret died with her. While the child was yet a babe in arms, Nimroth crossed the border of the land he was seeking, the land of death. He walked into that land with eyes open, knowing well the way, as all wizards do.” She dropped the hourglass suddenly, as if it had taken all her strength to hold it up to that point. She forced her spine to straighten.
“You will not kill Nimroth, Perdoneg, for he is already dead. Your tapestry remains unfulfilled. Go back to your prison.”
There was a silence as before the crack of lightening and then a scream like wind in fire vibrated the ground beneath her feet. “A trick!” he screeched. “It is a trick.” His head writhed backward, and in his chest Marwen could hear a roar like wind in a chimney. Fire vomited from his mouth with blinding brightness until the sky darkened with smoke, and Marwen coughed and cowered in the doorway.
“You know it is no trick, Perdoneg,” Marwen cried. Her voice was trembling so that she scarcely recognized it. She swallowed hard. “But if you need further proof, I have it. See.” Without thinking, with shaking fingers, she took the richly woven tapestry pouch off her shoulder. Out of it she drew Nimroth’s tapestry, her father’s tapestry, and laid it, narrow and old, upon the ground before the dragon. She stared at the wondrous beautiful tapestry, the tapestry that spoke of foiling evil and defeating dragons and of walking open-eyed into death. She did not look up. In a moment the colors of the tapestry dimmed, and the threads loosened and filmed over with dust. In another moment it began to darken and shrink.
“You know this is Nimroth’s tapestry, don’t you, dragon. See, see how it blackens and shrivels and dissolves to dust before your eyes, as Crob’s body on the hill is black and shriveled and returns to dust. As Nimroth is dead, so has his tapestry passed away.”
By the time she was finished speaking, only the lifethread remained among the dust, warped and wrinkled as a worm. She stood and lifted her arm high, standing almost on tiptoe. She was elated, stunned, shaking with her own power. “Go, dragon, back to your prison,” she commanded in the language of creation, not knowing she knew the words. Perdoneg’s body thrashed, and his tail thudded upon the ground again and again and again, until Marwen’s teeth seemed to loosen in her jaw, and she shrank under the protection of his tapestry. Finally his violence eased, and he brought his head close to hers, a great head full of teeth and tongue and mucous-filled eyes and nostrils crusted with carbon. Marwen choked in the burning stench and shrank back.
“Yes, I, too, am ruled by the law of the tapestry,” Perdoneg hissed, “but my magic is great and cannot wholly be ruled by either tapestry or wizard. Before I return to my prison, a spell I cast upon you unto death, one slow and sure so that you may see the Taker coming from afar, remembering that you have no tapestry. And when you come to me in my kingdom, your sufferings will not end.”
In one wind-filled beat, Perdoneg lifted his weight on great wings and rose into the air.
In three wingbeats he was gone.
Chapter Sixteen
“Could it then be possible that the taker is not a taker at all but a bringer, and a guide—a guide to an existence for which this life is but a preparation and a proving?”
Marwen immediately began to weave a spell of strengthening on the hold of Perdoneg’s prison. She had been in the dragon’s mind once, and so she knew the way by which he had escaped. When she was finished her spellworking, Camlach led her into the wizard’s house.