They had almost reached it, and the first jets of flame were beginning to blast out of their mouths when it happened again. This time the dragon died almost instantly. Maja felt the jolt as its magical being blinked out of existence. Its wings crumpled and it plummeted down, tumbling over and over into the fires below. The other dragons had already vanished.
“There was only one of them,” said Benayu, in an awe-hushed voice. “The others were simulacra, decoys, to give it more chance of reaching the airboat. Fantastic power it must take to do that with a dragon.”
Fantastic power, yes, Maja thought. And still it churned up out of the city. But in all the swirling chaos of magic Maja could detect no impulse of any answering magic from the Sheep-faces’ side. All their weapons—the astounding airboat, the missiles they poured down on the city, the stream of fiery projectiles with which they had destroyed the dragon—were devised out of the materials of the natural world, like Ribek’s mill, back in the Valley.
“Well, this is what we’ve come for, isn’t it?” said Ribek. “Let’s get on with it. And then we clear out, quick as we can. Back down the lane, through the mill and up into the woods. Right, Benayu?”
“I suppose so,” Benayu answered.
He sounded listless, dazed, suddenly overwhelmed now that he was confronted by the sheer unmasterable power of the thing that he had vowed to destroy. Maja could sense the upward surge of the returning terror that he had been struggling to suppress ever since the episode in the way station. She put her arm round his shoulders and tried to steady him as a fresh outpouring of magic gathered itself overhead
The cloud layer split. A shaft of lightning, wider and more intense than any natural bolt, lanced down. But it never reached the airboat. Somehow the mast above the bag attracted it and then passed it on down the glittering filaments to the ground below. They blazed for a moment, blinding bright, and then, though the thunder roll had barely begun, the lightning was gone and the airboat floated on undamaged. Again, Maja could sense no magical impulse in the Sheep-faces’ response. It was simply a device that they had invented, like the engines that drove the propellers.
She felt the lightning-magic gather anew, but there was something odd about it this time, almost as if its heart wasn’t in it, as if whoever was doing it wasn’t really concentrating, was thinking about something else. But the bolt flashed down undiminished, and the mast caught it and sped it on its way to earth.
And yet again.
But now Maja picked up something different, something really huge, gathering itself not in the cloud layer above, but ahead of her, out to sea. She sensed a mighty stirring, a vast whirling mass drawing steadily nearer, growing in power as it came.
“Get ready,” she said. “Something’s happening. It’s bigger than the lightning or the dragons. I think the Watchers are just keeping the Sheep-faces too busy to notice till it’s too late. What do you want us to do, Benayu?”
“Do?” he muttered in a dazed voice. “Anything…anything.”
They looked at each other. Saranja took charge.
“All right,” she said. “Ribek, you manage the horses. Better take them a bit back down the lane. Maja, hold Jex and when the time comes—you’ll have to tell me when—put your hand in mine, with him between us, like we did with the fear stone…. I think I’m beginning to hear it—sounds like the father and mother of storms…Cedars and snows! Look at that!”
For an instant another bolt from the clouds lit the whole scene, far out to sea. By its momentary glare they saw the coming monster, a dark, whirling, tubular cloud-shape reaching up from sea to sky and rushing toward the shore, shrieking and roaring as it came, and sucking the water around its base into a foaming tumble of mountainous waves. The sky overhead was black as pitch. Huge drops of salt-tasting rain poured suddenly down. The Sheep-faces on the airboat must have seen the danger, but too late, for even as the great bag, now dwarfed by the onrushing tower of storm, swung itself round and began to rise, the whirling giant engulfed it and tore it apart.
“Now!” cried Maja.
She waited a moment for Saranja to unwind the Ropemaker’s hair from the quills of the roc feathers, then grasped her hand, with the stone lizard nestling in between their two palms.
With her free hand Saranja raised the feathers high above her head.
“Ramdatta!” she cried above the clamor of the storm.
Before the world went black Maja felt the granite pendant she held stir and become live flesh.
A stone voice spoke in the darkness.
“We must go at once. The dragon guarding the valley is aware of us.”
Still she couldn’t stir, but someone else must have heard that voice, for now as she swam up into consciousness Maja felt herself to be lying face down and half bent over something that jolted unsteadily into her stomach, and with something that held her fast when she tried to stir…. Yes, lashed onto a saddle—they were already hurrying away….
“Awake?” said Ribek’s voice. “Hold it a moment—we’re in a hurry. Jex…”
“I heard him too.”
The lashings eased. Ribek steadied her as she sat up. They were already well into the sunk lane. The others were a little way ahead.
“Great you’ve come to,” said Ribek, panting as they hurried to catch up. “We’re going to need you to tell us where the brute’s got to. Something’s happened to Benayu. He’s pretty well passed out on his feet.”
Maja managed to pull herself together. The magic-storm over Tarshu seemed to have lessened with the destruction of the airboat. She felt for her amulet.
It had changed. The cord was there, but strung through only four or five beads, and those chipped and sharp-cornered. Dimly she remembered a series of snaps and crackles close above her wrist as the amulet had fought to withstand the immense impulse of Jex’s return. She pushed what was left up her arm. Nothing happened. It wasn’t working. But, but…
“I am shielding you. Is it enough?”
“Less! Less!…There!”
Laid open now to more and more of the tangled magical flow around, reaching out through it with all her soul-energy, she picked out the single strand that came from the guardian dragon.
It was still some distance to the south, but racing toward them. There was a change in it. When they’d watched it from the woods above the mill its power had seemed somehow diffuse, because its attention had been spread over the whole valley. Now it was concentrated, aimed at a single target…
“Hurry!” she yelled. “It’s coming! It knows where we are!”
They stumbled on down the track. It was dangerous going, trenched as it was by the axle-deep ruts. Saranja was dragging Benayu by the elbow. The only hope Maja could see was the shelter of the thick stone walls of the mill, but they weren’t going to make it, nothing like. Pogo had vanished. Rocky was on the verge of bolting, just as he’d been at Woodbourne when he’d seen the airboat. Maja slid herself down just in time, and he was away, with Levanter behind.
The dragon…
“Get against the wall!” she yelled. “It’s almost here!”
They huddled against the chalk wall and stared up. The pelting rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The fringes of the whirling storm that had destroyed the airboat were screaming overhead, shredding the cloud-layer into racing tatters, suddenly hidden behind a glare of blazing orange, lighting the whole lane. Desperately Maja flung herself down into the great rut at her feet and huddled there as the dragon’s blazing breath blasted against the far chalk wall. She felt her hair beginning to frizzle in the roasting air, and then it was over.