He tasted rain and recognized that dark.
Twelve
Thayne Ysse saw himself reflected in the dragon’s eye. The eye itself was enormous, a pool of liquid gold circled by dry, rough ridges of scale and skin. A very thin, pointed oval of dark slit the gold from top to bottom; paler streaks of gold rayed away from it. Thayne was a splinter of something human within the dark.
He did not dare move. His horse had thrown him and bolted, halfway across the plain, when the dragon had opened its maw and a tongue of fire uncoiled out of it, licking the ground into a frozen shimmer of glass. Thayne, desperately picking himself up as the dust and scorched air roiled over him, stood in the full glare of the dragon’s eyes when the fire died away. It had not reached him, though he felt scoured and drained in the aftermath. The sun, a second watching eye, wended a leisurely path down a slope and paused, forever it seemed, wedged in the cleft between two hills. Thayne, motionless and sweating, waited for night.
The sun shifted slightly, after what seemed hours, and loosed a scarlet ray across the wasteland. On the plain, long shadows stretched away from odd things littering the ground. Some of them he recognized. A horned skull. A dead horse, its skin dried to parchment and sagging between its ribs. The wheel of a cart. A shield stripped of its emblem. What looked like a wooden rake, which seemed wildly improbable in that wasteland. A complex mingling of bones, human and horse, pieces of armor, swords, shields, shredded silk, and jewels, lying on earth too parched to give them any kind of burial. A human skull, which had somehow rolled itself away from the confusion, gazed, upside down, at Thayne. The sun slid another fraction of an inch. The dragon, with Thayne trapped in its eye, did not move. Neither did Thayne.
Finally, the cracked, barren ground grew less raw. The shadows faded. A little smoke trickled out of the dragon’s nostrils, which were as broad and black as cauldrons. A translucent eyelid rolled down over its staring eye. Thayne stayed still. A moment later, the eyelid slid back up; the dark slit of its pupil widened so abruptly that Thayne nearly jumped. He swallowed, his body rigid, his throat so dry that he might have kindled his own flame out of it. The dragon sighed languidly, blowing dust all over Thayne. It swung its head, coiled its neck more securely about itself. Its baleful eye closed. Thayne, gritting his teeth, his hands and face clenched, imploded with a sneeze.
He took a step sometime later, then another. Above him, a beast with a million eyes opened them one by one, stared down at him. He tried to walk on air. The dragon rumbled, and he melted breathlessly into the motionless night. But it only shifted a little, turning its head more tightly into itself. Thayne waited, watching the humps and hillocks of dragon around the tower. The stars and the risen moon, hanging like a scythe blade above the hills, gave the ground a faint, silvery sheen. Thayne, moving silently around the tower, away from the dragon’s eyes, could see no door anywhere.
There had been none in the drawing, either, unless it was hidden behind the dragon. It seemed to be sleeping deeply now, its rumbling soft and regular, as if it were snoring. The tower, with its thick red rings of stones glowing faintly in the moonlight, looked formidable, forbidding and impregnable. It seemed to have no opening anywhere; he could not find even a single window. Baffled, he wondered if the dragon dropped its gold down the open top of the tower like rain dropping down a chimney.
He felt a sudden, intense impatience with himself and this mysterious tower. He had journeyed so far, found the plain that seemed to exist only on a page in a book; he had outfaced the dragon. Here in front of him was treasure to save the North Islands. And he could not claw his way into the tower, nor climb its steep walls, nor burrow under it: the foundation stones, visible under an arch of dragon’s tail, looked as if they ran down into the center of the earth. Weary, at last, of ringing the tower with footprints for the knight to find, he slipped recklessly under the dragon’s tail to reach the tower wall. If the massive loop of tail shifted, he could be crushed between stone and dragon; he was too frayed with tension and exasperation to care. He slumped a moment against the wall, rested. The stones were still warm from the merciless light of day, or maybe from the dragon’s seething inner fires. He felt a heartbeat of utter astonishment as the stones closed about him like water and drew him in.
He found himself in the dragon’s heart.
So it seemed, to his stunned eyes. The inner stones of the tower glowed a rich, warm gold, as if the heaps and scatterings of coin, the jeweled cups and patterned bowls, the plates, the scabbards of beaten gold, all kindled their own light. Here was the treasure promised in his father’s book, that would fall across the North Islanders like rain, feed them and their animals, mend their broken walls and leaky roofs, arm them, bring back the power they once possessed, and set a ruler’s throne again in the House of Ysse. There were crowns in that crazed mass of wealth, one or two still attached to skulls; gold-hilted swords in their bright scabbards clung to thighbones. Dazed, he waded ankle-deep through coin stamped with faces he did not recognize. The dragon had carried away even princes from distant places, dressed in cloth-of-gold, crowned and ringed with gold. One tried to grasp at Thayne’s foot, it seemed; he tripped in its hold. Fingerbones and rings went flying everywhere. Looking at the severed wrist, the neckbone snapped where it had fallen, Thayne felt his stomach lurch, his skin grow suddenly cold. The place was oddly full of ghosts.
He looked around for something to fill with gold, for he did not want to leave with nothing. Thoughts, confused and unfinished, collided in his head. He had to find his horse. He either had to slay the dragon or figure out how to speak its language of fire and gold. He had to watch for the knight of Gloinmere, who would try to kill the dragon, being ignorant of magic, and believing that gold had more value. He found a golden helm and dragged it like a cup through a pile of coin, filling it to its neckpiece. Perhaps, in Skye, he could find someone to teach him… Stumbling a little on the slippery piles, hugging his unwieldy burden, he searched for the place in the wall where he had entered. He found it, exactly opposite a crowned skeleton sitting on top of a gold breastplate. He stopped, before he left, to cast an incredulous glance back at the riches that turned the air itself gold. He stepped into the wall.
Stone stopped him.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And then he felt the horror still trapped in the bones scattered around him on the floor.
The tower was the door leading into itself. The drawing in his father’s book had told him plainly: there was no way out.
Sitting on a pile of gold, he waited.
For what, he was not exactly sure. It came stealing mouselike out of a crowned skull; he glimpsed it in the corner of his eye as it slipped into the hollow of a gold cup and turned to shadow. Something small, ignominious, and silent kept intruding into his thoughts, teasing his vision, as maybe time passed, and maybe it didn’t in that changeless, soundless place. If he listened, he heard his heartbeat; if he moved, he heard coins shift. Beyond that nothing, not even a spider moved. In that silence he could have heard the sound of one thread dropping onto another as it built its web.
He had spent some time trying to shift every stone he could reach, more time moving mountains of gold across the floor to find some hidden passageway beneath them. He wore his hands bloody trying to pry through stone. The stones bent gold, snapped blades, even broke a gold-handled mace. Later, he began beating on the walls with swords, flinging shields and plates across the room, shouting until his voice was raw, trying to get the dragon’s attention. If he annoyed it, he thought, it might push its head through the stones to silence him. Perhaps he could follow it out, if it didn’t eat him first. He felt it shift once. Coins jumped and rang on the floor; shields clanged; bones knocked hollowly against the stones. He reached for a sword and waited. But it went back to sleep, apparently, as if all his raging among the gold made no more noise than the whirl of seed off a dandelion stem.