Alorria screamed, wordlessly at first, her voice mingling with the shrieks of the spriggans. Finally she cried, “What did you do to my husband?!”
Then the glow abruptly vanished, and Gresh found himself face-to-face with an angry dragon—a very large angry dragon, a good sixty feet from snout to tail-tip, and with a wingspan almost twice that, standing over the torn and shredded remnants of Tobas’s clothes.
Gresh had seen dragons at fairly close quarters before, but never unchained, uncaged, and this close, and so extremely large. He stepped back.
“Gresh!” the monster bellowed, spewing a cloud of sparks and black smoke.
“You can talk!” Gresh said, startled, brushing a spark from his sleeve. He had expected Tobas to lose his voice.
“Of course I can... Oh.” The dragon blinked his immense red eyes, and his voice dropped from a roar like a thunderstorm to a deep rumble. “So I can.”
“Tobas!” Alorria shrieked, clutching the baby to her breast. Alris promptly began to cry hysterically, adding to the cacophony. Dozens of spriggans were still squealing and screaming.
“I’m fine, Ali,” the dragon said, raising his head to look over Gresh at the women on the carpet.
“Fine? You call that fine?”
“Yes, Ali, I do,” the dragon replied. “I’ve been turned into a dragon, but I’m still me. I can talk, I’m healthy and strong. I’d call that fine, given some of the alternatives.” Then he looked down at Gresh again. “You, though, have no idea how dangerous that was! Casting a spell on an unwilling wizard—what did you think you were doing? You’re very, very lucky that you were right, and I turned into a dragon.”
“Well, what else could you have become?” Gresh asked. “What’s more powerful than a dragon?”
“I told you,” the dragon rumbled. “The Seething Death.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Gresh replied. “I never heard of it. It’s more powerful than a dragon?”
“It’s a pool of raw chaos that expands indefinitely, destroying and absorbing everything it touches. The Guild’s masters think it would destroy the entire World if left unchecked, and counterspells don’t work on it!”
Gresh frowned, remembering what Kaligir had said about Tobas’s uneven training. “You defeated it?”
“Yes. I did.” The dragon glared at him.
Gresh started to ask just how Tobas had defeated it, then thought better of it. “The Spell of the Revealed Power doesn’t seem to think so,” he pointed out.
“I should eat you. I really should,” Tobas growled. He ran an immense forked tongue over his lower lip, and Gresh took another involuntary step back.
“Tobas,” Karanissa called. “You’re starting to think like a dragon.”
The dragon looked at his elder wife, then down at Gresh again. He folded his wings. “I think she’s right,” he said. “I’ll need to watch that. But all the same, as I understand it, the Spell of the Revealed Power should have turned me into a bubbling mass of complete destruction instead of a dragon, and if it had, we might all be doomed. You were taking a huge risk, Gresh! You really should have heard me out and not cast the spell.”
“You may be right,” Gresh admitted. He was somewhat embarrassed by his actions. Earlier he had been thinking of Tobas as a dangerous fool for meddling with magic too powerful for him in circumstances where the results might be unpredictable, and here he had gone ahead and done much the same thing himself. It had never occurred to him that Tobas might have mastered anything more powerful than a dragon. He hadn’t really thought there was anything in physical form more powerful than a dragon. Even so, he really should have considered the possibility. “My apologies,” he said. “Apparently whatever guides the spell either considers the dragon more powerful than the Seething Death, or doesn’t think you defeated it.”
“I suspect,” Karanissa called from behind him, “that the spell doesn’t consider the Seething Death a thing at all, and doesn’t it turn the subject into the most powerful thing he’s mastered?”
The man and the dragon both turned to look at her.
“That’s probably it,” the dragon said. “Because I definitely defeated the Seething Death, and it’s definitely powerful enough to destroy the World—but its very nature is that it’s a contagious lack of thingness. Interesting.” He glared down at Gresh. “And very fortunate for us all.”
That made sense to Gresh; after all, it sounded as if this Seething Death was a spell, rather than an object or entity, and despite its name, the Spell of the Revealed Power never revealed anything intangible or evanescent, but only solid things.
But even if it had somehow turned Tobas into the Seething Death, that might not have been so very dreadful. “I still think Javan’s Restorative would have worked,” Gresh said.
“I don’t,” Tobas the dragon replied. “But it should turn me back from this shape readily enough.”
“When we’re safely done with the mirror, yes.”
“Oh. Yes. But you should get on with it. I suspect that the longer I stay in this form the more dragonlike I’ll become, and that could be unfortunate if it goes too far. I can feel it already, I think. You look more and more like food every minute.”
“Yes, of course, I’ll hurry, but if you don’t mind, I must ask—what does it feel like, being a dragon?”
Tobas snorted another shower of sparks. “Tell me, Gresh, have you ever asked a woman what it felt like to be female?”
In fact he had, more or less, and the answers had never been any use. He saw what Tobas meant about the impossibility of conveying such an experience. Still, he could not resist pointing out, “She had never not been female; you haven’t always been a dragon.”
“That’s true, but about all I can tell you is that I feel big and strong and impatient. I believe I can fly if I try, and breathe flame, but I can’t begin to explain how I would do it.”
Gresh grimaced. “Big—yes, indeed! I’ve never seen a dragon so large! I wasn’t expecting it, even after what Karanissa told me. I’d thought she was exaggerating.”
Tobas snorted a little smoke. “Never saw one so large? How many wild dragons have you seen, then?”
“Wild ones? Well, I...” Gresh hesitated, on the verge of giving away one of his trade secrets, then just said, “None, really.”
“Well, no one lets them get this large in captivity, of course.” The dragon looked down at himself, then turned his head to look over his wings and tail. He cocked his head to one side, trying to judge his own dimensions against the trees and flowers. “This does look about the size of the one I killed.”
“It could talk?”
“What? No, it couldn’t. It hadn’t had anyone around to teach it, I suppose, but I’ve always heard that big dragons can learn to talk.”
“Who taught you, then?”
“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Tobas roared. “My father did, of course. I may have the shape of the dragon I slew, but I’m still Tobas of Telven. Now, can we get the mirror?”
“Right, right,” Gresh said, taking a final look up at the dragon before turning his attention back to the cave. “If you can chase away the spriggans, Karanissa and I ought to be able to get the mirror out.” He started walking and called back over his shoulder, “Don’t touch the carpet, you might tear it.”
“Good point,” the dragon said, detouring around the carpet and Alorria and Alris as he followed Gresh. Karanissa, too, marched after Gresh, back toward the cave.
The spriggans had gradually quieted during Gresh’s conversation with the dragon, many of them fleeing the area, but now that the dragon was moving they began to squeal and babble.