Sleet also seemed more than uneasy about the journey; Asenhart appeared troubled; Carabella spent much time peering moodily to sea, as if expecting a dragon to breach the water just beneath the Lady Thiin’s hull. But Valentine, although he had known the fury of the sea dragon at first hand himself, having been not merely shipwrecked by one but indeed swept into its cavernous gut in the most bizarre of the adventures of his years of exile, would not hear of it. It was essential to continue, he insisted. He must confer with the Lady; he must inspect blight-stricken Zimroel; to return to Alhanroel, he felt, was to abdicate all responsibility. And what reason was there, anyway, to think that these strayed sea dragons meant any harm to the fleet? They seemed bound with great swiftness and intentness upon their mysterious route, and paid no heed to any of the ships that passed by them.
Yet a third group of dragons appeared, a week after the second. These were some fifty in number, with three giants among them. “It seems the entire year’s migration must be going north,” Pandelume said. There were, she explained, about a dozen separate dragon populations, that traveled at widely separated intervals about the world. No one knew exactly how long it took for each herd to complete the circumnavigation, but it could perhaps be decades. Each of these populations broke up, as it went, into smaller herds, but all moved in the same general way; and this entire population, evidently, had diverted itself to the new northward path.
Drawing Deliamber aside, Valentine asked the Vroon whether his perceptions brought him any understanding of these movements of the sea dragons. The little being’s many tentacles coiled intricately in the gesture that Valentine had long since come to interpret as a sign of distress; but all he would say was, “I feel the strength of them, and it is a very strong strength indeed. You know that they are not stupid animals.”
“I understand that a body of such size might well have a brain to match.”
“Such is the case. I reach forth and I feel their presence, and I sense great determination, great discipline. But what course it is that they are bound upon, my lord, I cannot tell you this day.”
Valentine attempted to make light of the danger. “Sing me the ballad of Lord Malibor,” he told Carabella one evening as they all sat at table. She looked at him oddly, but he smiled and persisted, and at last she took up her pocket harp and struck up the roistering old tune:
Lord Malibor was fine and bold
And loved the heaving sea,
Lord Malibor came off the Mount,
A hunter for to be.
Lord Malibor prepared his ship,
A gallant sight was she,
With sails all of beaten gold,
And masts of ivory.
And Valentine, recalling the words now, joined in:
Lord Malibor stood at the helm
And faced the heaving wave,
And sailed in quest of the dragon free,
The dragon fierce and brave.
Lord Malibor a challenge called,
His voice did boom and ring,
“I wish to meet, I wish to fight,”
Quoth he, “the dragon king.”
Tunigorn shifted about uncomfortably and swirled the wine in his bowl. “This song, I think, is unlucky, my lord,” he muttered.
“Fear nothing,” said Valentine. “Come, sing with us!”
“I hear, my lord,” the dragon cried,
And came across the sea
Twelve miles long and three miles wide
And two miles deep was he.
Lord Malibor stood on the deck
And fought both hard and well.
Thick was the blood that flowed that day
And great the blows that fell.
The pilot Pandelume entered the mess-hall now, and approached the Coronal’s table, halting with a look of some bewilderment on her thick-furred face as she heard the song. Valentine signaled her to join in, but her expression grew more gloomy, and she stood apart, scowling.
But dragon kings are old and sly,
And rarely are they beaten.
Lord Malibor, for all his strength
Eventually was eaten.
All sailors bold, who dragons hunt,
Of this grim tale take heed!
Despite all luck and skill, you may
End up as dragon feed.
“What is it, Pandelume?” Valentine asked, as the last raucous verse died away.
“Dragons, my lord, approaching out of the south.”
“Many?”
“A great many, my lord.”
“You see?” Tunigorn burst out. “We have summoned them, with this foolish song!”
“Then we will sing them on their way,” said Valentine, “with another round of it.” And he began again:
Lord Malibor was fine and bold
And loved the heaving sea—
The new herd was several hundred strong—a vast assemblage of sea dragons, a swarm so huge it passed all belief, with nine great kings at the center of the herd. Valentine, remaining outwardly calm, nevertheless felt a powerful sense of menace and danger, so strong it was almost tangible, emanating from the creatures. But they went by, none coming within three miles of the fleet, and disappeared rapidly to the north, swimming with a weird intensity of purpose.
In the depths of the night, as Valentine lay sleeping with his mind as ever open to the guidance that only dreams can bring, a strange vision imposed itself upon his soul. In the midst of a broad plain studded with angular rocks and odd pockmarked stiff-armed leafless plants a great multitude of people moves with an easy floating gait toward a distant sea. He finds himself among them, clad as they are in flowing robes of some gauzy white fabric that billows of its own accord, there being no breeze whatsoever. None of the faces about him is a familiar one, and yet he does not think of himself as being among strangers: he knows he is closely bound to these people, that they have been his fellow pilgrims on some trek that had lasted for many months, possibly even for years. And now the trek is arriving at its destination.
There lies the sea, many-hued, sparkling, its surface shifting as if roiled by the movements of titanic creatures far below, or perhaps in response to the tug of the swollen amber moon that rests heavily upon the sky. At the shore mighty waves rise up like bright curving crystalline claws, and fall back in utter silence, flailing the shining beaches weightlessly, as though they are not waves but merely the ghosts of waves.
And farther out, beyond all turbulence, a dark ponderous shape looms in the water.
It is a sea dragon; it is the dragon called Lord Kinniken’s dragon, that is said to be the largest of all its kind, the king of the sea dragons, which no hunter’s harpoon has ever touched. From its great humped bony-ridged back there streams an irresistible radiance, a mysterious shimmering amethystine glow that fills the sky and stains the water a deep violet. And there is the sound of bells, huge and deep, ringing out a steady solemn peal, a dark clangor that threatens to split the world in two at the core.