As he tried to swerve aside, Quare’s feet shot out from under him and he went down, hearing, even as he fell, something whistle past his head. He hit hard and slid on one hip through the mushrooms, still moving in the direction of his attacker – who, he was certain, would have gathered the cincture back by now and made ready to cast it anew. But when he had slowed sufficiently to look up again, holding his bloody, rag -wrapped stump out before him as if to deflect the blow by a mute appeal to the loss he had already suffered, he saw, instead of the iron clasp descending towards his skull, his attacker falling backwards, clawing at a crossbow bolt buried in his throat. Had Quare not slipped when he had, the bolt would have struck him between the shoulder blades.
The stone circle was close now: no more than fifteen or twenty yards away. Suddenly he remembered where he had seen those shapes before. They were the same as the symbols on the hunter. And, like those symbols, the more he tried to focus upon them, the shakier they became, like living things intent on eluding his grasp, even if it were only visual. The stones, he realized, were moving, vibrating, spinning so fast that they appeared to be standing still.
He tried to pick himself up and go on, but he had landed badly, twisting his ankle, and it would not support him. Nor, he found, did he have the strength to crawl. He felt weak as a newborn babe. He lay on his back, gazing up at the ceiling of the cavern, which was lost in the sunny glow of the mushrooms growing there and in the steady downward drift of spores. There was something restful about it, like lying at the bottom of a huge hourglass as warm golden sand trickled down to cover him.
Then he was being lifted in strong arms. It was Tiamat. She did not speak, but swept him up and ran for the stone circle, shielding him with her body. Quare felt the jolt of crossbow bolts hitting home – once, twice, three times – and each time she was struck, Tiamat grunted in pain … but it was a sound that did not have much that was human about it, not at first and even less each subsequent time he heard it, as if she were casting her humanity aside like a hindering cloak, shrugging out of it as she ran. And indeed the arms that held him seemed to be changing, becoming larger, fingers lengthening into claws, the grey costume of Grimalkin toughening into leathery skin.
But was Tiamat shedding some fleshly disguise, or, instead, was the stone circle stripping it from her, skinning her alive? For the closer they drew to it, the more the air resisted them, as if the spinning stones had conjured a wind, a gale that pushed back unrelentingly. Tiamat snarled and pressed on. It seemed to Quare that she was trying to force herself through a space too small to admit her, a narrow opening or channel in the world … or rather out of it, the sides of which were scraping her raw. And yet the shape that was emerging seemed larger by far than what had contained it. It made no sense. Quare could not tell any longer what was real and what the product of his fever. The spores that had been falling like a gentle dusting of sand now pelted them like hailstones, forcing him to bury his head in the crook of his bandaged arm. Then he heard Tiamat snarl again as her body shuddered with the impact of more bolts than he could count. She gathered herself and, with a deafening roar, gave a mighty leap.
She did not come down.
Quare was in the grasp of claws larger than his body. They held him in a gentle but unbreakable grip, like the bars of an iron cage. On the other end of those claws was the dragon he had first seen in the vision he’d experienced at Lord Wichcote’s house. Tiamat, as she truly was: sleek, sinuous, serpentine, with scales as blue as the sky … so blue they seemed translucent. She was huge; he did not see how she could have squeezed herself into the body of the woman who had kissed him.
As before, the effect of her presence was immediate and intense. He had no sense that resistance was possible; it was not a matter of will or even desire but instead the plain working of some natural – or supernatural – law to which he was subject by virtue of being human. It had been no different inside the egg; there, too, he had yielded up his seed in reflexive paroxysms that were anything but pleasant. For a time, he was lost in it, swallowed up.
But at last there was nothing left. He was limp, wrung out, fever-stricken. Only then did Quare begin to take in his surroundings, though in a dreamy kind of way. Tiamat was flying with a peculiar wingless grace, seeming to swim through the air like a snake squirming through water; she did not glance down at him or seem to be aware of him at all other than by the fact that she did not drop him. There must have been a dozen or more crossbow bolts embedded in her body, but she seemed unaware of them as well. They were like thorns in the hide of an elephant.
Quare knew at once that he was back in the Otherwhere. Not so much by anything he saw – the desert landscape of reddish sand and rolling dunes far beneath them, over which Tiamat’s stark shadow glided, clinging to every indentation and swell, might have been the sands of some African or Asian desert undulating below the baleful, white-hot sun – as by the overwhelming impression he had that everything could change in an instant, that the underlying reality of the scene was very different from what his senses were equipped to perceive. He had felt the same way when Longinus had first taken him into the Otherwhere, and it had been much the same within the egg.
The egg that Aylesford was carrying to France.
At that, recalled to the urgency of things, Quare called to Tiamat, but his voice was too weak, his words borne away by the blast of the wind that was the sole indication of the dragon’s prodigious speed. Where was she taking him? And what would become of him when they got there? Much has been asked of you , she had told him. Little has been offered in return. That is about to change . But Quare had had enough change to last a lifetime. He didn’t want any more.
The desert stretched ahead without end. The sun might have been nailed to the sky.
Tiamat flew on. She did not slow, did not seem to tire. She did not once address a word to him, or glance in his direction. He wondered if she had forgotten about him. Racked by fever, he shivered and baked by turns.
It was in this state that he noticed a second shadow on the sand below. It was small, and at first he thought it was not a shadow at all but something physically present on the ground, a herd of horses, perhaps, or a caravan. But it grew, spreading like a black stain … or an angry cloud rising up to confront them. Or no, he realized dimly, with a certain distant interest, not rising but rather falling …
Tiamat swerved as something big came roaring past. At once, all was confusion. Buffeted within the cage of the dragon’s claws, Quare saw flashes of ground and sky and what might have been a living shadow, night poured into flesh. The air rang with shrieks and bellows until he thought his eardrums must burst.
Then Tiamat stopped dead in the air and hung there, her body eeling slowly, the movement somehow keeping her aloft. Streaks of a silvery liquid trickled down her blue scales. An angry hiss escaped her massive jaws.
Hovering a hundred feet away or less was a black dragon even bigger than she was. It exuded age and power. Silver ichor dripped from its claws. Its head was like a sun-blasted mountainside scored with fissures and ravines. One eye was a pearlescent orb whose surface rippled like the placid mirror of a lake disturbed by the movement of some hidden swimmer. Where the pair of that eye should have been was a dark, gaping pit into which Quare thought he might fall for ever without touching bottom. To gaze into its abyssal depths was to already be falling into them, or so it seemed. He felt himself stiffening despite his terror; then he was coming again, burning with humiliation at his helplessness, hating his human frailty, this flesh that responded without his leave, slave to masters he did not know.