And then, in another colossal explosion of power, it was gone, and she was bursting apart, rags and splinters of what had once been Maja, whirling away into the never-ending blackness.
And then…But there was no then. Not any more. Never.
Then there was now. Now was extremely strange. She had no sense of herself, Maja, existing in that nowness. There was sight, there was hearing, but nothing to tell her who or what was doing that seeing, that hearing. And even they were strange. The hearing was the sound of a heavy, windy thud or boom, repeated and repeated, strangely familiar, though only a few times heard by the Maja that once existed. The sight was of a dim, grayish something—more than just a gray light because there was texture in it, mottlings and grains, moving erratically around, uninterpretable.
For a moment the grayness moved away and she saw a dark, reddy-brown surface, slightly curved, moving upward, only to vanish as the grayness returned. It had something to do with the thud…Yes!—Rocky, flying toward the mountains—wing-thunder. But wrong color—not Rocky, Levanter.
The grayness vanished and for a moment she saw his vast neck stretching away from her, and then that swung aside and she saw sky, and then, for another moment, Saranja, hair streaming behind her, riding Rocky, golden-winged, glorious, and behind and beyond them white-winged Pogo with Benayu in the saddle craning backward and upward, and Sponge at their heels streaking along in the winged equivalent of his normal easy lope.
They too swung out of sight and everything was blanked out by something too huge and close to recognize which pressed itself briefly over her eyes as she heard a faint familiar noise such as two moist surfaces make when being gently pulled apart. (What was it? What was it? It was important.)
Everything wheeled around and briefly she could see the sky, hazy blue but with one strange black cloud, streaming toward them far faster than any wind could have carried it. She seemed to be seeing sky and cloud, everything in her restricted field of vision, through some kind of transparent mesh, but all that was blanked out as the cloud became blinding to her unclosable eyes and the thunder drowned her hearing.
Lightning! she thought. The Watchers came! This is the end.
It wasn’t the end. Sight returned, hearing more slowly, only to be lost again in thunder-bellows. Lightning poured around them, but eyesight remained since she wasn’t looking directly at it. She couldn’t see Benayu, but she guessed he was somehow warding it off. And Levanter flew steadily on, apparently not even noticing it. Amazing, considering how Rocky, prince among horses, had shied and bolted at the appearance of the airboat. Benayu must have thought of that too, and done something to the horses.
Lightning and thunder weakened and ceased. She had time to think, time to look properly at what she could see—frustratingly little since she couldn’t turn her head or even move her eyes in their sockets. At the lower edge of her field of vision she could discern a greenish gray expanse stretching away into the distance. They must be out over the sea.
Rocky and Saranja were moving out of her line of sight as Ribek edged Levanter closer to Benayu. His shout came faintly through the thunder-deafness.
“…only a lull. Like at Tarshu. Then more lightning, to distract you while they get the next thing ready. A dragon, Jex said. Simulacra, but if you can sort out which is which it’ll be one-to-one. Maybe it’ll sail straight in. But they must get it by now what they’re up against. My bet is it’ll feint and wait for you to respond so it can catch you off balance with a sucker kick.”
She couldn’t see or hear Benayu’s answer, but he must have gestured understanding or something because Ribek raised his hand and took Levanter back to Rocky’s other flank. They waited. It was strange not having a heart to pound, breath to come quicker, palms to break into sweat, at a moment like this.
Her mind wandered. She was still seeing everything as if through a transparent mesh. And why was her hearing so strangely woolly? It had been like that before the thunder, when all she’d been able to see was a moving grayness.
Oh, of course! That had been Ribek trying to clean and dry her with a bit of cloth after her immersion in the oyster pool. And then he’d lifted her up and round to loop her over his head and now she was dangling on his chest, but on the way…on the way…
That funny sucking noise had been his lips kissing her.
And she hadn’t even felt it.
It wasn’t fair!
More lightning streaming harmless round them as Benayu swept it away. In the middle of it a yell from Ribek, words lost in the rolling thunder but voice full of urgency and danger.
“Ribek! Can you hear me? Ribek!”
If he answered she couldn’t hear. No. He’d never have kissed her if he’d remembered she could see and hear. She’d never reminded him! She hadn’t had a chance. Desperately she tried again.
“What’s happening? I can’t see. I can’t move my eyes. Turn me round.”
The world wheeled and steadied, and she was looking back and to their flank. Saranja and Rocky were at the right-hand edge of her vision; Benayu had fallen back a little and had twisted round in his saddle to face the danger; Sponge was darting to and fro behind Pogo’s heels, snarling defiance.
Beyond and above them, dwarfing them, loomed the dragon, twice the size, at least, of the monster that had patrolled the valley above Tarshu, gnarled and scaly, dark-hued, mottled brown and green like lichened rock. Maja could see it clearly only in glimpses as the rhythm of Levanter’s flight brought her center of vision to bear on it. A huge round eye with a black vertical slit for a pupil, the rest of the eye glowing smoky-pale like a harvest moon, as if lit from within; the vicious spike that ended a rib of one of the vast leathery wings; a taloned foreleg tucked cozily for flight against a chest like the hull of a warship; a double puff of black smoke from the hummocked nostrils at the end of the long snout. The dragon hovered a long moment, half folded its wings and plunged.
Benayu was ready. He flung out both hands and a bolt of darkness, sudden and swift as the lightning, streamed from his fingertips. It wrapped itself round the dragon in a swirling cloud of absolute black that carried the beast backward and at the same time seemed to shrink and solidify as if it were about to squeeze it out of existence.
Another intense shaft of lightning, dazzling even in daylight, but aimed this time not at Benayu and his companions but at that sphere of midnight. With a bellow and a blast of flame it burst apart, and out of the dazzle emerged five separate but identical dragons, wings half folded, plunging down. No knowing which was the real one.
Benayu shouted and flung out an arm, and Sponge was climbing to meet the attack, double, four, eight times his real size, great black wings pumping him upward. All five dragons bellowed flame, but only one, fourth in the line, directly at him. The other four, constrained to do exactly what the master dragon did, blasted the unreal flame in lines parallel to the reality. By its own fire it had betrayed itself.
Immediately Sponge turned toward the single blast that engulfed him and now flew directly into it, relentless and untroubled as it streamed round him. The dragon had no other weapon. Sponge was almost muzzle to muzzle with the monster when he dived, rose, gripped the immense scaly gullet in his fangs and started to wrench and worry at it like one of the Woodbourne terriers worrying a rat. Black wings and gold buffeted the air as he wrestled for purchase and the dragon writhed and scrabbled at him with its puny forelegs. On either side of it four dragon simulacra towered, writhing and scrabbling at invisible Sponges. Above the individual struggles, seen and unseen, the agonized heads bellowed unavailing flame, and below it dangled the pale, vulnerable underbellies and the endless writhing tails.