2018-01-08
438
Atop the mountain lay a caldera, a flat-bottomed cauldron of rock wider than a longbow shot, and the stars were such brilliant figures of fire overhead that we could have seen well by them had it been necessary. But it was not, for here was the treasure of the dragon Glimraug, and the dragon was clearly much taken with the sight.
Arched pavilions of wood and stone ringed the caldera, each multiply tiered and grand as any temple ever set by human hands. A thousand glass lanterns of the subtlest beauty had been hung from the beams and gables of these structures, shedding warm gold and silver light that scintillated on piles of riches too vast to comprehend, even as we stood there gaping at them. Here were copper coins in drifts twenty feet high and silver spilling like the waters of an undammed river; gold nuggets, gold bars, gold discs, gold dust in ivory-inset barrels. Here were the stolen coins of ten centuries, plunder from Sendaria, the Crescent Cities, Far Olan, and the Sunken Lands. Here were the cold dead faces of monarchs unknown to us, the mottos stamped in languages we couldn’t guess, a thousand currencies molded as circles, squares, octagons, and far less practical shapes. There were caskets beyond counting, rich varnished woodcrafts that were treasures in themselves, and each held overflowing piles of pearls, amethysts, citrines, emeralds, diamonds, and sapphires. To account it all in meanest summary would double the length of my telling. Here were gilded thrones and icon-tables, gleaming statues of all the gods from all the times and places the human race has set foot, crowns and chalices and toques and periapts and rings. Here were weapons crusted with gems or gleaming enchantments, here were bolts of silk and ceramic jars as tall as myself, full of gauds and baubles, drinking horns and precious mechanisms. All the mountaintop was awash in treasure, tides of it, hillocks of it the size of houses.
There was nothing pithy to say. Even getting it down would become the work of years, I calculated. Years, and hundreds or thousands of people, and engineers and machinery, and ships—if we could indeed force the dragon to part with this grand achievement, Helfalkyn would have to double in size just to service the logistics of plunder. I would need galleons to carry a tenth part of my rightful share, and then vaults, and an army to guard the vaults. These riches loosed upon the world would shake it for generations. My great-great-great-great-grandchildren would relieve themselves in solid gold chamber pots!
“Gudrun,” said Brandgar, “is all here as we see it? Is this a glamour?”
The mere thought broke me from the hypnotic joy of my contemplation. Gudrun cast a set of carved bones on the ground. We all watched anxiously, but after consulting her signs only briefly she giggled like a giddy child. “No, lord. What’s gold is gold, as far as we can see. And what’s silver is silver, and what’s onyx is onyx, and thuswise.”
“This is the greatest trap of all,” I said. “We shall all die of old age before we can carry it anywhere useful.”
“We are missing only one thing,” said Brandgar. “And that is our host, who will doubtless prefer to see us die of other causes before we take any of it. But I am content to let it come when it will; to walk amidst such splendor is a gift. Let us stay on our guard but avail ourselves of the courtesy.”
And so we wandered Glimraug’s garden of imponderable wealth, running our hands over statues and gemstones and shields, caught up in our private entrancements. So often had I won through to a rumored treasure in some dusty tower or rank sewer or mountain cave, only to discover empty, rusting boxes and profitless junk. It was hard to credit that the most ridiculous legend of wealth in all the world had turned out to be the most accurate.
Plumes of smoke and mist drifted from vents in the rock beyond the treasure pavilions, and my eyes were drawn to another such plume rising gently from a pile of silver. From there my attention was snared by a scattering of dark stones upon the surface of the metal coins. I approached, and saw that these were rubies, hundreds of them, ranging in color from that of fresh pumping blood to that of faded carnations. I have always been a particular admirer of red stones, and I shook a few into my hands, relishing the clink and glimmer of the facets.
The silver coins shifted, and from within them came a blue shape, a yard wide and as long as I was tall. So gently did it rise, so familiar did it seem that I stared at it for a heartbeat before I realized that it was a hand, a scaled hand, and the dark things glistening at the near ends of its digits were talons longer than my daggers. Delight transmuted to horror, and I was rooted with fear as the still-gentle hand closed on mine from beneath, trapping me with painless but inescapable pressure. The difference in scale? Imagine I had elected to shake hands with a cat, then refused to let go.
“Tarkaster Crale,” rumbled a voice that was like a bolt of the finest velvet smoldering in a furnace. “The rubies are most appropriate for contemplation. Red for all the blood that lies beneath this treasure. The million mortals who died in vaults and towers and ships and armies so that we could take these proud things into our care.”
The pile of silver shuddered, then parted and slid to the ground in every direction, displaced by the rising of the creature that had lain inside it, marked only by steaming breath curling up from nostrils as wide as my head. The arms rose, each a Brandgar-weight of scaled strength. I gaped at the lithe body the color of dark sapphire, its back ridges like the thorns of some malevolent flower, its impossibly delicate wings with membranes that glistened like a steel framework hung with nothing more than moonlight. Atop the sinuous neck was a head somehow vulpine and serpentine at once, with sharp flat ears that rang from their piercings, dozens of silver rings that would have encircled my neck. The dragon had a mane, a shock of blue-white strands that vibrated with the stiffness of crystal rather than the suppleness of hair or fur. The creature’s eyes were black as the sky, split only by slashes of pulsing silver, and I could not meet them; even catching a glance made my vision flash as though I had stared at the sun. I could not move as the dragon’s other hand reached out and closed around my waist, again with perfect care and unassailable strength. I was lifted like a doll.
“I…I can put the stones back,” I burbled. “I’m sorry!”
“Oh, that is not true,” said the dragon. Its breath smelled like burning copper. “And if it were, you would not be the sort of mortal to which we would speak. No, you are not sorry. You are terrified.”
“Hail, Glimraug the Fair!” shouted Brandgar. “Hail, Sky Tyrant, Shipbreaker, and Night-Scathe!”
“Hail, King-on-the-Waves, Son of Erika and Orthild, Landless Champion, Remover of Others’ Nuisances,” said Glimraug, setting me down and nudging me to run along as if I were a pet. I gladly retreated to stand with my companions, judging it prudent to toss the rubies back onto the dragon-tossed pile of silver first. “Hail, companions to the king! You have endured every courtesy provided for our visitors, and glimpsed what no mortal has for many years. Have you been dispatched here to avenge some Ajja prince? Did we break a tower or two in passing? Did we devour someone’s sheep?”
“We have come for our own sakes,” said Brandgar. “And for yours, and for your treasure as a last resort. We have heard the Helfalkyn Wormsong.”
I had no idea what Brandgar meant by any of that, but the dragon snorted and bared its teeth.
“That is not the usual order in which our visitors lay their priorities,” it said. “But all who come here have heard the song. What is your meaning?”
“There are songs, and there are songs beneath songs, are there not?” Brandgar removed the leather wrappings of his unused spear. Ash-hafted, the weapon had the lethal simplicity of a boar spear, with a pyramidal striking tip forged of some dark steel with a faint mottle, like flowing water. “Others heard the song of gold, but we have heard the song of the gold-taker, the song of your plan, the song of your hope. We have brought ending and eyes.”
“Have you?” whispered the dragon, and it was wondrous to see for an instant, just an instant, a break in its inhuman self-regard. It caught its breath, and the noise was like a bellows priming to set a furnace alight, which might have been closer to the truth than I preferred. “Are you in earnest, o king, o companions? Are we in sympathy? For if this is mere presumption, we will give you a death that will take five lifetimes to unravel in your flesh, and while you rot screaming in the darkness we will pile the corpses of Ajja children in a red mound higher than any tower. Your kinfolk will gray and dwindle knowing that their posterity has been ground into meat for the flies! This we swear by every day of every year of our age, and we have known ten thousand.”
“Hear this. For long months we sought and strove,” said Brandgar, “in Merikos, where the dragon Elusiel fell, where the wizards were said to keep one last jar of the burning blood that had seeped from her wounds.”
“We lost many companions,” added Gudrun. “The wizards lost everything, including the blood.”
“For another year we dispensed with a fortune in Sulagar,” said Mikah, “engaging the greatest of the old masters there in the crafting of black-folded steel.”
“Twenty spears they made for me,” resumed Brandgar. “Twenty I tested and found wanting. The twenty-first I quenched in the blood of Elusiel, and carried north to Helfalkyn, and have carried here to be used but once. Its makers called it Adresh, the All-Piercing, but I am the one who gave it purpose, and I have named it Glory-Kindler.”
Glimraug threw back its head and roared. We all staggered, clutching our ears, even Brandgar. The sound rattled the very air in our lungs, and I did not merely imagine that the mountain shook beneath us, for I could see the lanterns bobbing and the treasure piles shaking. Lightning flashed at the rim of the caldera, bolt after bolt, splitting the darkness and painting everything in flashes of golden white, and the thunder that followed boomed like mangonel stones shattering walls.
“Perhaps it is you,” said the dragon, when the terrific noises of this display had faded. “Perhaps it is you! But know that we are not so base as to tip the scales. Achieve us! Hold nothing back, for nothing shall be held in turn.”
“This is an excellent doom,” said Brandgar, “and we shall not take it lightly.”
The dragon flared its wings, and for an instant their translucence hung like an aura in the night. Then, with a fresh roar of exultation, Glimraug hurled itself into the air, raising a wind that lashed us with dust and shook lanterns from their perches. I felt something close to seasickness, for in the manner of my profession I had blithely presumed we would make some effort to trick, circumvent, weaken, or even negotiate with our foe rather than honorably baring our asses and inviting a kick.
“Brandgar,” I yelled, “what in all the hells are we supposed to be doing here?”
“Something beautiful. Your only task is to survive.” He gave me a powerful squeeze on the shoulder, then pushed me away. “Run, Crale! Keep your wits loose in the scabbard. Think only of living!”
Then Glimraug crashed back down, and treasure fountained in a fifty-yard radius. Brandgar, Gudrun, and Mikah evaded the snapping jaws and the buffet of the wings, and now they commenced to fight with everything they had.
Gudrun chanted and scattered glass vials from her collection of strange accoutrements, breaking them against the stone, loosing the powers and spirits bound therein. She held nothing back for any more rainy days—seething white mists rose at Glimraug’s feet, and in their miasmic tatters I saw the faces of hungry things eager to wreak harm. The dragon reared, raised high its arms, and uttered darkly hissing words in a language that made me want to loose my bowels. I ran for one of the treasure pavilions, hid behind a stout wooden pillar, and peered around the side to watch the battle unfold.
Brandgar struck for Glimraug’s flank but the sapphire-scaled worm flicked its tail like a whip, knocking Brandgar and his vaunted new spear well away. Mikah fared better, dashing under the dragon’s forelimbs and heaving themselves into a wing joint, and from there to the ridges of its back. The whorls of Gudrun’s spirit-mist became a column, bone-white, wailing as it surged against Glimraug’s face and body. It seemed as if the dragon were attempting to climb a leafless winter tree, and failing—but only for a moment.
With a sound like a river rushing swollen in spring’s first melt, Glimraug opened wide its maw and sucked Gudrun’s ghost-substance into its throat as a man might draw deeply from a pipe. Then it reared again, and blasted the stuff high into the air, trailing flickers of blue-and-white fire. The spirit-mist rose like smoke and quickly faded from sight against the stars, whatever power it had contained either stolen or destroyed. Then the dragon lunged with foreclaws for Gudrun, but with a flash of silver she was safe by twenty yards, and hurling her fire gimmicks without dismay. Orange fire erupted at Glimraug’s feet, to little effect.
Now Gudrun sung further spell-songs, and hurled from a leather bag a thousand grasping strands of spun flax, which sought the dragon’s limbs and wove themselves into bindings. Glimraug snapped them in a trice, as you or I might break a single rotten thread, and the golden fibers floated to the ground. Then the dragon’s dignity broke, for Mikah had made their way up into its gleaming mane, and from there stabbed at one of its eyes. The blade met that terrible lens, I swear, but either luck wasn’t with the thief or the weapon was too commonplace to give more than a scratch. Still, neither you nor I would appreciate a scratch against an eye, and the dragon writhed, trying to fling Mikah off. They kept their perch, but only just, and could do little else but hold fast.
Glimraug whirled and leapt away from Gudrun with the easy facility of a cat, once more scattering delicate objects far and wide with the shock of its landing. It struck at a pile of silver coins, jaws gaping, and took what must have been tons of the metal into its mouth as a greedy man might slurp his stew. Then it breathed deep, hissing breaths through its nostrils, and its neck bulged with every passage of air. A glow lit the gaps of the scales in the dragon’s chest, faint red at first but swiftly brightening and shifting to blue, then white. Mikah cried out and leapt from the dragon’s mane, trailing smoke. Their boots and gloves were on fire.
The dragon charged back toward Gudrun, mighty claws hammering the stones. The sorceress chanted, and a barrier of blue ice took shape before her, thick and overhanging like the crest of a wave. Glimraug drew in another long breath, then expelled it, and for an instant the blazing light of its internal fire was visible. Then the dragon breathed forth a stream of molten silver, all that it had consumed and melted, like the great burst of a geyser, wreathed in crackling white flame. The wave of burning death blasted Gudrun’s ice shield to steam and enveloped her in an instant. Then came eruption after eruption of green-and-orange fire as the things she had carried met their fate. I recoiled from the terrible heat and the terrible sight, but to the last she had not even flinched.
I was forced to run to another pavilion as rivulets of crackling metal flowed toward me. Glimraug chuckled deep in its throat, orange-hot streams still dripping from between its fangs and cooling silver-black beneath its chin, forming a crust of added scales. Mikah howled furiously. They had quenched the flames, and however much pain they must have been bracing against, they did not reveal it by slowing down. Glimraug’s claws came down twice, and Mikah was there to receive the blow neither time. Once more the thief leapt for the dragon’s smoking back, but now they rebounded cannily and clung to the leading edge of the dragon’s left wing. Before the dragon was able to flick them away, Mikah pulled out one of their blades and bore down on it with both arms, driving it into the gossamer substance of the dragon’s wing membrane. This yielded where the eye had not. Mikah slid down as the stuff parted like silk, then fell to the ground when they ran out of membrane, leaving a flapping rent above them.
Glimraug instantly folded the hurt wing sharply to its side, as an unwary cat might pull back a paw that has touched hot fireplace stones. Then, heaving itself forward, it whirled tail and claw alike at the Ajja thief, whip-smack, whip-smack. Nearly too late I realized that the next stroke would demolish my place of safety. I fled and rolled as Glimraug’s tail splintered the pavilion; a hard-flung wave of baubles and jewelry knocked me farther than I’d intended. I slid to a halt one handspan from the edge of a cooling silver stream, and hundreds of coins rolled and rattled past me.
I looked up just in time to see Mikah’s fabled luck run its course. Stumbling over scattered treasure, at last showing signs of injury, they tried to be elsewhere for the next swipe of a claw but finally kept the unfortunate rendezvous. Glimraug seized them eagerly and hauled them up before its eyes, kicking and stabbing to the last.
“Like for like,” rumbled the dragon, and with two digits of its free hand it encircled Mikah’s left arm, then tore it straight out of the socket. Blood gushed and ran down the dragon’s scales; Mikah screamed, but somehow raised their remaining blade for one last futile blow. The dragon cast Mikah into a distant treasure pavilion like a discarded toy. The impact was bone-shattering; the greatest thief I have ever known was slain and buried in an explosion of blood-streaked gold coins.
“One died in silver, one died in gold,” said Glimraug, turning and stalking toward me.
“Tarkaster Crale won’t live to be old,” I whispered.
Up went the bloodstained claw. I heaved myself to my knees, wondering where I intended to dodge to, and the claw came down.
Well short of me, clutched in pain.
Brandgar had recovered himself, and buried the spear Glory-Kindler to the full length of its steel tip in the joint of Glimraug’s right wing. The blood that spilled from the wound steamed, and the stones burst into flames where it fell on them. Brandgar withdrew the smoking spear and darted back as the dragon turned, but it did not attack. It shuddered, and stared at the gash in its hide.
“The venom of Elusiel, kin of our kin,” said the dragon with something like wonder. “A thousand wounds have bent our scales, but never have we felt the like.”
Brandgar spun Glory-Kindler over his head, pointed it at the dragon in salute, and then braced himself in a pikeman’s stance. “Never have you faced the like,” he shouted. “Let it be here and now!”
Ponderously the dragon turned to face him; some of its customary ease was gone, but it was still a towering foe, still possessed of fearsome power. With its wings folded tight and burning blood streaming from one flank, it spread its taloned arms and pounced. Brandgar met it screaming in triumph. Spear pierced dragon breast, and an instant later the down sweep of Glimraug’s talons shattered the haft of Glory-Kindler and tore through Brandgar’s kingly coat-of-plate. The man fell moaning, and the dragon toppled beside him, raising a last cloud of ashen dust. Disbelieving, I stumbled up and ran to them.
“O king,” the dragon murmured, wheezing, and with every breath spilling more fiery ichor on the ground, “in all our ten thousand years, we have had but four friends, and we have only met them this night.”
“Crale, you look awful.” Brandgar smiled up at me, blood streaming down his face. I saw at once that his wound was mortal; under smashed ribs and torn flesh I could see the soft pulse of a beating heart, and a man once opened like that won’t long keep hold of his spirit. “Don’t mourn. Rejoice, and remember.”
“You really didn’t want the damned treasure,” I said, kneeling beside him. “You crazy Ajja! ‘Bring ending and eyes,’ meaning, find a way to kill a dragon…and bring a witness when you do it.”
“You’ve been a great help, my friend.” Brandgar coughed, and winced as it shook his chest. “I was never made to retire quietly from valor and wait for the years to catch me. None of us were.”
“It comes,” said Glimraug. Shaking, bleeding fire, the dragon hauled itself up, then lifted Brandgar gently, almost reverently in its cupped hands. “We can feel the venom tightening around our heart. The long-awaited wonder comes! True death-friend, let our pyre be shared, let us build it now! To take is not to keep.”
“To take is not to keep,” answered Brandgar. His voice was weakening. “Yes, I see. It’s perfect. Will you do it while I can see?”
“With gladness, we loose our holds and wards on the fires bound within the mountain.” Glimraug closed its eyes and muttered something, and the stone shifted below my feet in a manner more ominous than before. I gaped as one of the more distant treasure pavilions seemed to sink into the caldera floor, and a cloud of smoke and sparks rose from where it had gone down.
Then another pavilion sank, then another. With rumbling, cracking, sundering noises, the dragon’s treasure was being spilled into reservoirs of lava. Flames roared from the cracks in the ground as wood, cloth, and other precious things tumbled to their destruction.
“What by all the gods are you doing?” I cried.
“This is the greatest of all the dragon-hoards that was ever built,” said Brandgar. “A third of all the treasures our race has dug from the ground, Crale. The plunder of a million lives. But there’s no true glory in the holding. All that must come in the taking…and the letting go.”
“You’re crazier than the Ajja!” I yelled at Glimraug, entirely forgetting myself. “You engineered this place to be destroyed?”
“Not so much as a shaving of scented wood shall leave with you, Tarkaster Crale.” Glimraug carefully shifted Brandgar into one palm, then reached out and set a scimitar-sized talon on my shoulder. Spatters of dragon blood smoked on my leather jacket. “Though you leave with our blessing. Our arts can bear you to a place of safety.”
“Wonderful, but what the hell is the point?”
Cold pain lashed across my face, and I gasped. Glimraug had flicked its talon upward, a casual gesture—and all of you can still see the result here on my cheek. The wound bled for days and the scar has never faded.
“The point is that it has never been done before,” said Glimraug. Another treasure pavilion was swallowed by fire nearby. “And it shall never be done again. All things in this world are made to go into the fire, Tarkaster Crale. All things raise smoke. The smoke of incense is sweet. The smoke of wood is dull haze. But don’t you see? The smoke of gold…is glory.”
I wiped blood from my face, and might have said more, but Glimraug made a gesture, and I found that I could not move. The world began to grow dim around me, and the last I saw of the caldera was Brandgar weakly raising a hand in farewell, and the dragon holding him with a tenderness and regard that was not imagined.
“Take the story, Crale!” called Brandgar. “Take it to the world!”
After a moment of dizzy blackness, I found myself back at the foot of the Dragon’s Anvil, on the gentle path that led up to it from Helfalkyn. The sky was alight with the orange fire of a false dawn; no sooner did I glance back up at the mountaintop than it erupted in an all-out conflagration, orange flames blasting taller than the masts of ships, smoke roiling in a column that blotted out the moons as it rose.
Glimraug the Sky Tyrant was dead, and with it my friends Brandgar, Gudrun, and Mikah. And I, having lost my purse somewhere in the confusion, was now even poorer than I had been before I successfully reached the largest pile of assorted valuables in the history of the whole damn world.
I don’t know how I made my way down the path without breaking my neck. My feet seemed to move of their own accord. I could perhaps believe that I was alive, or that I had witnessed the events of the night, but I could not quite manage to believe them both at the same time. A crowd came up from Helfalkyn then, armed and yammering, bearing lanterns and an unwise number of wine bottles, and from their exclamations I gathered that I looked as though I had been rolled in dung and baked in an oven.
They demanded to know what had happened atop the Anvil; most of Helfalkyn had roused itself when the thunder and lightning rolled, and by the time the flames were visible there wasn’t anyone left in bed. My occasionally dodgy instinct for survival sputtered to life then; I realized that the denizens of a town entirely dedicated to coveting a dragon’s treasure might not handle me kindly if I told them I had gone up with my friends and somehow gotten the treasure blasted out of existence. The solution was obvious—I told them I had seen everything, that I was the sole survivor, and that I would give the full and complete story only after I had received passage back to the Crescent Cities and safely disembarked from my ship.
Thus I made my first arrangement for compensation as a professional storyteller.
That, then, is how it all transpired. I heard that various scroungers from Helfalkyn sifted the shattered Anvil for years, but the dragon had its way—every last scrap of anything valuable had been dropped into the molten heart of the mountain, either burned or sunk from mortal reach forever. I retired from adventuring directly and took up the craft of sitting on my backside at the best place by the fire, telling glib confabulations to strangers for generally reasonable prices.
But one night a year, I don’t tell a single lie. I tell a true story about kindred spirits who chose a doom I didn’t understand at all when I walked away from it. And one night a year, I turn my bowl over, because the last thing I want to see for my troubles is a little pile of coins reminding me that I am an old, old man, and I sure as hell understand it now.
⬩ ⬩ ⬩
Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and Edmonton, Alberta, and worked in a small Spanish town outside Seville. He now lives in Grande Prairie, Alberta, in Canada. He won the 2014 Dell Award and the 2012 Rannu Prize for Writers of Speculative Fiction. In 2011 his cyberpunk novel Devolution was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His short work appears or is forthcoming in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Interzone, Lightspeed, DSF, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, AE, and many others, including the anthologies Upgraded, Futuredaze, and War Stories. Find him online at richwlarson.tumblr.com
In the tense and atmospheric story that follows, he takes us along to the gritty industrial city of Colgrid in company with two rogues seeking to unlock the secret of a fabulous treasure, and who find that the situation gets stranger and the knots they have to unravel more and more complicated with every step they take.
⬩ ⬩ ⬩
The channel was skinned with dark ice that squealed and crackled away under the ship’s prow; apart from that they entered Colgrid in silence.
For Crane, it was uncharacteristic. He sat spider-like on an overturned crate, elbows resting on bony knees, wide mouth hidden under a thick-knit scarf. His watery blue eyes narrowed to slits as he watched Colgrid’s sprawling factories slide closer. Gilchrist stood, sinewy arms folded, breath escaping as a tendril of steam. He was comfortable in silence, but his dark eyes, normally always scanning, always measuring, looked off to nowhere.
On the deck between them sat the strongbox. It was a dull gray cube resting on four small clawed feet, one of which had been cracked in the escape. The sides were filigreed with a carefully crafted pattern of whorls and ripples. The top was ringed with concentric grooves, and in the deepest of them, where Crane’s scrubbing hadn’t reached, there was still a crust of dried-black blood.
As the ship moved deeper into the city, the smells of oil and machinery spiked through the cold air. Half the factories still churned, belching smog that hung over the city like an inky cloak, blotting out the stars overhead.
“Acrid as ever,” Crane finally said. He adjusted his scarf with one long, pale hand. “But from what I’ve heard of this lock breaker, I surmise our stay will be brief. We should leave with only partially devastated lungs.”
