The waters seethed, boiling into white foam shot through with cold green phosphorescence. A dragon erupted from the lake. The long, sinuous body seemed to flow endlessly upwards, water streaming from its glowing scales. Its underside was pale as the lightest jade, its sides dark as deepest agate. A crest of emerald spines snapped erect along its backbone, running up its snakelike neck to crown its long head with a diadem of lethal spikes. It spread vast wings, greater than any ship’s sails, leathery membranes translucent in the sunlight. It rose higher, long tail finally leaving the lake, water streaming from the viciously barbed tip. The dragon soared up and circled the lake, coiling around itself in defiance of the empty air and the pull of the ground below. It opened its long, predatory jaw and screamed out a challenge, its glittering white teeth as long and as sharp as swords. With the last echoes of the ear-splitting shriek still reverberating around the hills, it folded its wings with a clap like thunder and dived back into the water. A cascade of spray exploded from the lake, falling to vanish into the thirsty ground. Velindre couldn’t help but tremble, standing with her hands clasped to her face.
‘Did you feel the power? You should have done. Air and water are so often partners in magic. That’s why you were so open to me before.’ Azazir was at her shoulder, pressing his cold body against hers. ‘Did you feel the power? That’s why Hadrumal doesn’t want its wizards knowing how to summon dragons: because that dragon’s aura has a more powerful resonance for the likes of me than the highest, mightiest waterfall in the world. You could do more with the merest touch of a cloud dragon’s aura than with all the storms of a winter brought together. A fire mage wouldn’t know such power if he stood on the lip of a flaming mountain’s crater. There’s no place in the darkest depths of the earth that would hold such power even for the likes of Planir. That’s why Hadrumal doesn’t want us knowing about dragons.’
‘I felt power, yes . . Velindre stared at the water. ‘Pure power. I could have worked water magics far beyond my own affinity—’
‘It’s barely a hint of the power surrounding real dragons.’ Azazir squatted to sweep a hand across the undulating edge of the lake. Out in the deeps, emerald radiance rose lazily to the surface. The dragon broached with barely a ripple, lolling in the crystal waters, wings folded close to its long, lithe body. ‘That looks like a real dragon to me,’ Velindre observed, motionless.
‘Look at it,’ commanded Azazir.
‘I am looking,’ Velindre retorted.
‘Look at it like a wizard,’ he ordered with some irritation. Not like a gawping peasant.’
Velindre narrowed her eyes and studied the dragon idling in the water. She could see the beast in all its savage glory, coiling this way and that to send countless little swells hurrying to the shore. More pertinently, she could half-see, half-sense the magic that pervaded it. She realised that elemental power was as much a part of the creature as the scales and sinew, bone and blood that a peasant would see, in that instant before he soiled his breeches and fled. What was there for a wizard to see? She focused on that roiling nimbus of elemental power, tracing the pulses, the ebb and flow. ‘There’s a void.’ She frowned. ‘Where its heart should be.’
‘Well done,’ approved Azazir. ‘It’s a simulacrum, not a true dragon. For which you should be very grateful; a true dragon would know you for a mage and see you as a rival to be slain. It would bite your head off before you could think of escape.’
Velindre strove for understanding. You mean this is an illusion?’
‘Does it look like an illusion to you?’ Azazir snapped. Would I give up so much of myself, the power that I have amassed over a lifetime, to make an illusion?’
Belatedly, Velindre noticed how the mage’s appearance had changed. He was still naked, but the shimmering patina of fishlike scales had faded, leaving his ancient skin wrinkled and scarred, mottled with age, his ribs visible. His hair and beard were a sodden mess, stray strands clinging to his hollow cheeks. His eyes, deep set and shadowed, no longer glowed with that unearthly light, for all they were still as green as emeralds.
Discomfited at seeing the old man thus revealed, she turned back to the frolicking dragon now blithely lashing the lake with its tail and snapping at the resulting spray. ‘So this is something between an illusion and a true dragon?’
‘And it’s an innocent. It knows nothing of a true dragon’s magic or cunning.’ Azazir cackled suddenly, startling Velindre horribly. ‘It’s a mighty beast all the same and real enough to bite the head off anyone coming up here to bother me. Do the hunters and trappers still whisper about me, wondering what riches the mad wizard is hoarding?’ He laughed again, sounding quite insane enough to deserve the title. ‘They don’t get past the dragon even if they force their way through my other spells. It’s tied to me, you see, because I’m the one who made it.’
‘It’ll do your bidding?’ asked Velindre, incredulous.
‘Does that look like a lapdog?’ mocked the ancient wizard. No, but if I look on something and know it for an enemy, the dragon feels it, too. Dragons kill their enemies. They’re creatures of unfettered power and untamed instinct, even such fleeting ones as this.’
‘You told me not to move, in case it ate me.’ Velindre tried to pick out the crucial questions from the clamouring maelstrom inside her head. But I’m no enemy to you,’ she insisted, emphatic, in case the old wizard let slip any doubts to the distant dragon.
No, but you could be food.’ Azazir gazed happily on his creation. ‘I told you, I don’t control it. It’ll go off to hunt soon enough and there’s no man or beast in this forest that will escape it.’
Velindre turned her thoughts resolutely from what Hadrumal’s Council would say or do if they knew Azazir was wont to set a dragon eating fur hunters. You called it fleeting. What did you mean by that?’
‘You don’t think I would reduce myself to this for long?’ Azazir studied his withered hands. ‘You saw the void at its centre. It has no heart, nothing to hold its power together or to hold the other elements at bay. It will fade, in time.’
‘How much time?’ Velindre asked immediately.
‘That depends,’ said Azazir with a sly smile, ‘on how much power went into its making.’
‘How do you make something like that?’ Velindre wondered aloud.
‘Simple.’ Azazir waved an airy hand. ‘And quite the most difficult thing you’ll ever attempt. The first step is like creating an illusion; I assume Otrick taught you that much? Summon all the elemental power you can, bring it together and use that to fabricate the creature. You’ll probably still fail,’ he predicted gleefully.
‘You said it wasn’t an illusion.’ Velindre swept her hair back off her face again, irritated.
‘It isn’t,’ said Azazir with biting precision, suddenly angry. ‘Once you have the shape of it in the midst of your magic, you summon still more power, if you’re capable, which I doubt. Force enough elemental power in on itself, letting none escape—none at all—and it will reach an intensity where the magic grows out of its own substance, doubling and redoubling. Once you’ve achieved that, the creature will live, for as long as the magic remains. While the magic remains, its aura is a source of purer power than you can possibly imagine . . .’ His voice trailed off, his expression avid. ‘Of course, the more you draw on it, the sooner the magic is gone. When the element exhausts itself, the dragon fades.’ The passion in his eyes dwindled to be replaced by something akin to weariness.
‘Simple, as you say,’ Velindre murmured sceptically. ‘How do you guard against being consumed by the magic you’re summoning?’
‘Like some mageborn taken unawares by their manifesting affinity?’ Azazir looked at her, sardonic. ‘That, my dear, is your problem. As is finding sufficient power. My element is all around me here. You couldn’t give yourself over to the air, even for a little while. What makes you think you can attempt such a spell?’