Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) Read online

  “As for you, young man,” I said, turning to Khalid, who again at first acted as if he expected to be smacked, “that was very brave, and very foolish, for you to go into the Chapel Perilous like that. Don’t ever do anything like that again!”

  “I won’t, Tal. I promise!” He hugged me again. I was sure he meant what he said…until the next opportunity for brave foolishness arose.

  “The big boys in the group should perhaps also promise the same thing,” observed Nurse Florence, looking straight at me, though this time she passed on the opportunity for the obvious lecture.

  “At least everyone survived,” said a healed Sir Arian, who clearly had not expected such a good outcome, “and now our way is clear again. However, we lost much time in that misadventure, and the sun is near to setting. Perhaps we should make camp nearby.”

  “I suggest putting some distance between us and this spot first,” replied Nurse Florence. “If this was not an isolated incident, we might be in for at least one more attack. Tal, what do you think? Did anything happen inside that suggested that sorceress was not working alone?”

  “No,” I said slowly, “but it is hard to imagine that such an unusual event was just coincidence. I don’t know what Morgan could have offered that Hellawes might have wanted, but I would be willing to bet Morgan put her up to it.”

  “And risked killing you?” asked Nurse Florence.

  “If Morgan is behind all of this, I think she just intended for Hellawes to hold us here for a while. She may not have realized what a loose cannon Hellawes was. She does make even Morgan seem sane by comparison. Think of all the power she put into a structure that’s sole purpose is to trap and kill total strangers.”

  “Then you think Morgan herself is coming to collect us?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “In that case,” Sir Arian said, “perhaps it would be better to keep moving. We faeries can see in the dark, as. I think, can some of you as well.”

  “And I can sing us renewed strength, so we can go longer without sleep or rest,” I added.

  “Not the best long-term idea, but it might be all right for a day or so, just long enough to get us to Wales,” put in Nurse Florence.

  “All right then, let’s do it,” I replied confidently. The sooner we got Carla to safety, the happier I would be.

  We were getting back into our original marching order when one of the faeries shouted a warning.

  I looked west, and silhouetted against the misty redness of sunset, I could see a gigantic winged shape growing bigger by the second.

  “Is that what I think it is?” asked Stan shakily.

  “Yup,” I replied, my optimism of only a moment before evaporating. “That’s a dragon.”

  CHAPTER 9: ONE DRAGON CAN RUIN YOUR WHOLE DAY

  “Can you take us out of Annwn now?” I asked Nurse Florence quickly.

  “Unprepared, not fast enough. I have the image of Santa Brígida in my mind for the return trip, but it will take time to build up the necessary power.”

  “We will delay its advance,” announced Sir Arian as he and his men rose into the air. If my perception of the size of the dragon was accurate, they were probably flying to their deaths. Even as the original Taliesin, I had only encountered dragons a couple of times, but I had seen enough to know they were hard to kill and too powerful to fight without special preparation, which we had no time for now.

  The faeries rose to about the dragon’s eye level, then flew somewhat to the left of us and started shooting arrows at the advancing dragon, who veered in their direction, eyes narrowed to slits to make them harder targets. A dragon’s armor was hard enough to make it virtually impenetrable by most weapons, including faerie arrows, but its eyes were vulnerable. Unfortunately, this dragon was clearly smart enough to know that.

  I could feel the power building up as Nurse Florence prepared to open a way back to our world.

  “Are we just leaving them here?” asked Gordy, raising his head in the general direction of the faeries.

  “No choice,” said Nurse Florence brusquely. “With luck, they’ll be able to fly away once we’re gone.”

  Except that they had allowed the dragon to get too close. I doubted they could all escape now, and I felt the same unease Gordy did…but staying meant putting Carla at risk, putting everyone at risk. The smart move, repugnant as it was, was to get the hell out of Annwn as fast as possible.

  The dragon gave an eardrum-shattering roar and unleashed a stream of fire at one of the faeries, who expertly rolled out of the way. The faeries had now surrounded the dragon and were firing at it from all sides, which would buy them some time, but sooner or later the dragon would fly straight at one of the faeries, and that one would be toast.

  I looked at Nurse Florence plaintively. She knew what I wanted to do.

  “No, Tal, you can’t stay behind and help the faeries. It would be suicide. And do I have to remind you that you are the only one, aside from Morgan, with a chance to save Carla?” At that moment a shimmering gateway opened. At almost the same time, the dragon pivoted in midair, unleashed another earth-shaking roar, and dove straight at us.

  “Scatter!” I yelled, knowing we could not all possibly get through the gateway before the dragon reached us. In fact, probably no one could have gotten all the way through before a blast of white-hot flame destroyed the gateway. Had it not been a relatively narrow blast, some of us would have lost our lives right there. It occurred to me that dragons usually aimed for maximum destruction. What was restraining this one?

  There were limited places to flee at best, but everyone managed to get under the cover of trees on one side of the road or the other. However, the trees would not provide much protection against a full-scale blast of the dragon’s fiery breath, and now the dragon could eliminate the entire party rather easily by just blasting each side of the road with a large enough spray of fire, igniting the trees and trapping everyone.

  To my surprise, the dragon did not do that. Instead, he circled a couple of times and then landed on the road, effectively blocking it.

  The dragon was as huge as he had looked from a distance. I had always been bothered by the artworks that portrayed the victory of Saint George over an unrealistically small dragon, seldom bigger than his horse, but mostly smaller, and on one or two occasions looking about the size of someone’s stray dog. If only adult dragons really were that size! This one looked as if it had roughly five times the length of the Chapel Perilous, not exactly a small structure to begin with.

  Its body was covered with ruby-red scales, and its eyes were black as tar pits. Each claw was at least as large as a great sword and could no doubt be lethal even against a heavily armored opponent. Its wing were scarlet but otherwise bat-like, and when fully extended would have been wider across than its body was long. Here and there arrows protruded from the spaces between the dragon’s scales, but it was clear that these small wounds bothered him little.

  Indeed, the fact that he had landed in the first place suggested he did not regard any of us as much of a threat. Nor were we, for that matter. The special effects on our weapons, particularly my fire attack, would be useless, and though our faerie-forged blades would eventually do some damage, creating a wound of any consequence would require the dragon to sit still for a long time, a highly unlikely scenario—unless he wanted to commit suicide. As for magic, dragons were pretty resistant to it most of the time, and though Nurse Florence and I might be able to create some magical defenses, probably none would be powerful enough to block either the dragon’s breath or its ponderous claws.

  “Hear me!” thundered the dragon. I could hardly have been more shocked if the creature had started tap-dancing in the middle of the road. Yeah, I had known dragons could talk before, but this was the first time that I had ever heard of a dragon bothering to talk to humans. I signaled the faeries to pause in their attack, not that it would have mattered much one way or the other.

  “Hear me!” he roared a
gain. “Most of you are none of my concern. I require but two of you, and the rest may go in peace.”

  “Which two?” I yelled back, my voice sounding like the faintest of echoes compared to the dragon’s mighty bellow.

  “The one who is called Taliesin Weaver and the one who is called Alcina.”

  I had no idea how Morgan had managed to recruit a dragon to her cause, but there could be no other explanation for the creature wanting me and Carla, but nobody else.

  “For what purpose do you want them?”

  “My purposes are my own, and no concern of yours.”

  Now I realized why the dragon had been so conservative with his fire. He had no idea what Carla or I looked like, though he might know that Carla was unconscious. He could hardly start an indiscriminate blaze without risking both of us. Knowing his inhibitions might give me a little advantage, at least in terms of keeping everyone alive, but the best I could do with that knowledge would be to create an impasse. He obviously couldn’t burn the forest in an effort to find us, but we couldn’t kill him or get around him.

  “Is there anything we can do?” asked Carlos, who was standing right next to me.

  “If I think of anything, you will be the first to know,” I replied.

  Actually, at this point there was only one thing to do. Nurse Florence would doubtless scold me for it later, but this time I was not just being impulsive. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I began chanting in Welsh, summoning up my power as I walked to the border between the road and the forest.

  “Here I am, dragon!” I yelled, stepping out into the middle of the road. “Come and get me!” With that, I rose into the air and flew as fast as I could toward the west. I could hear the dragon sputtering with rage, but he could be as outraged as he wanted; it would still take him time to unfurl his wings and pursue me.

  I was not really that well practiced with flying, so it felt awkward, and I feared I had less chance of outrunning him than any of the faeries had. The one advantage I possessed was that I knew the dragon would not kill me, so this maneuver would be less risky for me than for anyone else, and, if it worked, it would draw him away from the rest—and at least I didn’t have to worry about running into power lines or other modern obstacles in Annwn.

  Of course, the dragon could have stayed in the roadway, demanding that Carla be brought to him and perhaps succeeding in getting her. Morgan would have known that capturing Carla would force my hand, but I had to count on Morgan’s not bothering to school the dragon in everything she knew about me. Sure enough, though I dared not turn to look, I could feel the dragon’s presence behind me, I could hear the flap of his great wings. I also heard the sound of arrows whistling at him, but as long as he kept his eyes guarded pretty well, he could safely ignore the archers and concentrate on me.

  I could feel the heat of the dragon’s fiery breath as he shot a warning blast over my head.

  “Land immediately, or die!” the dragon threatened, but I knew better. Even so, I shuddered, because I could tell he was getting closer. Pretty soon he could grab me with one great swing of his claw, and once captured that way, I would be helpless.

  I kept coming back to something Sir Arian had said earlier about being careful how I used White Hilt’s fire so as not to offend the forest. What would happen, I wondered, if the dragon offended the forest? Even the original Taliesin had not been in Annwn enough to know the answer to that question, but I had a pretty good idea what the answer might be.

  Now for the part that Nurse Florence would later be right to scold me about. I spun around to face the dragon, though doing so enabled him to get closer, and then proceeded to fly backward, making myself feel even more awkward.

  “Foolish beast!” I taunted. “I lied. The real Taliesin has escaped while you have been chasing me, and he has taken Alcina with him.” The dragon’s eyes widened in shock and outrage, and at that moment my strategy paid an unexpected dividend: the faerie archers managed to plant arrows in both eyes. The creature was too massive to be blinded that way, but he was in pain, and his pain made his next shot of fire at me clumsy—a good thing, considering he no longer thought he needed to keep me alive.

  I rolled over and dove straight at the ground, then changed direction so that the dragon blasted flames into the trees. I managed to repeat this maneuver two or three times; I probably couldn’t have gotten away with that, except that the dragon’s eye injuries were slowing his ability to aim. By now there was a sizable forest fire below us, and the rising smoke would have choked me if I had not kept going, even had the dragon not been determined to fry me.

  Unfortunately, while flying came naturally to faeries, it did not come naturally to me. I had to expend magical energy just to stay in the air, let alone to keep ahead of a frighteningly fast-moving dragon. Already the exertion was making my head throb and my muscles ache. Pretty soon I would need to stop, and then the dragon would have me.

  The only thing that kept me going now, aside from primitive survival instinct, was the feeling of power building below us. This forest was alive, and not just in the biological sense true of forests back home. This forest was sentient, and the enormous blaze the dragon had started had, just as Sir Arian suggested, awakened the forest’s wrath. I could tell the faeries felt it, too, but the dragon was still oblivious to it. Unfortunately, it was not oblivious to me and was clearly still intent on killing me—and its attacks were getting closer and closer.

  I could see flocks of birds rising into the air, and at first I thought they were fleeing the fire, but they continued to climb, forming massive feathered clouds, and I knew this was no ordinary flight response.

  Flames sprayed past me, almost close enough to singe my hair, and I zigzagged, trying to pull the dragon closer to the massing flocks without drawing its attention to them. The dragon gave another ear-splitting roar and dove after me, coming closer and closer to the ground in the process. The faeries, who were nothing if not goal oriented, were still on the dragon and still showering it with arrows, forcing it to keep its injured eyes slitted and its field of vision restricted.

  Just when I felt my strength would not hold out, the first flock (if such a mixed group of birds could be called a flock) launched its attack, flying at the dragon’s left eye, beaks and claws ready to do damage. Granted, no one bird could do that much, but there were dozens of them, and the dragon was forced to close the eye to avoid their attacks. In less than a minute, another group of birds forced a similar closure of the right eye. The dragon was now effectively blind and needed to fly upward to avoid crashing.

  Normally, the dragon could have easily outrun the birds, but now, supercharged by the power of the forest, they kept up with the dragon, menacing its eyes each time it tried to open them. Their location meant that they could not be attacked by fire, and they managed to evade the dragon’s attempts to swat them away with its claws. Looking carefully, I could see the aura of forest power that surrounded them, as all the trees and animals for hundreds of miles focused their strength into their small, winged brethren.

  I must have been more tired than I thought, because for a few seconds I missed the fact that I was surrounded by faeries. I had a hard time figuring out why they had broken off pursuit.

  “The forest will take care of the dragon,” said Sir Arian, answering my unasked question. “Even such a creature as that will tire eventually, and anywhere it lands, the forest will attack it. There will be much destruction, but the forest will prevail in the end. It always does.” I wished for a moment that the forests on Earth were as capable of defending themselves. Perhaps the polluters would think twice then—or perhaps, like the dragon, they would bring about their own destruction.

  “As for you,” Sir Arian continued, “let us help you back. You did well to lead the beast away from the others, but your strength is spent.”

  My male ego wanted to protest, but I knew I could never fly back on my own without resting, and we really couldn’t afford that time, so I let two
of the faeries take my arms, and though I kept up enough magic to float, I let them provide the motion and the steering.

  As we flew back, I was astounded at how many miles we had flown—and at the scale of the devastation the dragon had left in its wake. I felt more than a little twinge of guilt as I looked down at what must be several acres of burning forest.

  “Do not worry,” said Sir Arian. “The forest will heal here much faster than it does in your world. Visit in a few months, and you will hardly be able to tell that there ever was a fire. His assurance made me feel a little better, though I wished I could have thought of another way to get rid of the dragon.

  The flight back seemed longer than covering the same distance earlier had, perhaps because the faeries could not carry me as fast as I had been able to fly, at least during the first stages of my mad dash away from the dragon. However, we did eventually reach our party again, though by this time darkness had descended. The guys were surprised by the faint glow around each of the faeries, and though I had seen it before, I was still moved by its unearthly beauty.

  Nurse Florence was upon me almost before my feet touched the ground. “Tal, are you all right?”

  “Very tired,” I replied quietly, “but otherwise unscathed.”

  “You know you took a terrible chance—”

  “Taliesin did what he had to do,” interjected Sir Arian. I was so used to having to defend my own—admittedly sometimes impulsive—actions that it was a rare treat to have someone else defend them. “Had the dragon remained here, some of you would almost certainly have died, and at the very least, you would have been trapped here until the dragon’s master arrived. Taliesin’s decision to lead the dragon away was both necessary and brave. Now there is a chance for all of us to get out of here alive.”

  “The dragon’s master?” asked Dan.

  “Yes, dragons have their own domains and do not normally invade the territory of Gwynn or any other ruler in Annwn without very good reason. Someone must be responsible for this incursion.”