What he could not prevent, or did not try to prevent, was this: they were followed. The godstruck and the godhaters, silent warriors and singing excantors, every Gray One who saw them seemed to join the parade.
They came at last to the temple, stark in the moonslight.
“I will not go in with you,” Danadhar said quietly. “The hate I feel for the avatar is dangerous for my soul.”
Morlock grabbed him by the arm, released him. They nodded at each other. Morlock vaulted up the steps of the temple and the other three travelers followed more slowly.
“I’ve never met a god before,” Deor whispered to Kelat. “What’s it like?”
“I don’t remember it very well,” said the Vraid.
The interior of the temple was a study in gold and red. Gold coins and objects covered the floor of the many-pillared temple, and the whole was lit only by the fiery eyes of the dragon who lay across this immense hoard.
It was a dragon . . . and it was a device. Cables ran into the dragon’s fiery eyes and into his ears. They attached him to a crystalline machine anchored to the gold-heaped floor. The machine, the dragon’s eyes, and the gigantic jewel imprisoned in his metallic right foreleg, all radiated a fiery flickering light.
Angular elements moved within the crystalline device; images seemed to come and go. Deor itched to take the thing apart and see how it worked, but he put his hands under his arms and tried to quell the feeling. He avoided looking the dragon in the eye. He’d had one case of dragonspell a long time ago and hadn’t enjoyed it much.
Of course, I knew you were coming, said the dragon.
Morlock grunted. “Eh. Here we are, anyway.”
Then the Graith will consider my proposal?
“No.”
Perhaps you yourselves will make the trade that I proposed—will guide me to a fresh world in return for what I have learned?
“No.”
Will you aid me against the godhaters who would enter this temple and slay me?
“No.”
Then why have you come?
“To learn what you know of the dying sun.”
You ask everything; you offer nothing. We will reach no agreement on these terms, Ambrosius.
“We’ll save the world, if we can. If you are in the world, that’s not nothing.”
If the world could have been saved, I would have saved it. I am not called the God here for no reason.
“But you are not, in fact, God,” Morlock pointed out. “We may be able to do what you can’t.”
Doubtful.
“We destroyed the Two Powers.”
They are worshipped still in Vakhnhal and through the Anhikh Kômos. Their missionaries walk west and south and north. For all I know, their apostles sail to Qajqapca.
“You see through countless eyes. Have you seen the Two Powers since they nailed you here?”
The dragon’s tail moved restlessly across his hoard. No, he admitted at last.
“Then?”
No! Nothing for nothing! That’s my law, Ambrosius.
“If the world dies, you will die and all your knowledge will be lost.”
You can’t save the world. Old Ambrosius could not. I cannot. No one can.
“Convince us.”
Nothing for nothing.
Outside the temple, Danadhar was speaking to the crowd. They could hear no words, but they did hear the thunder of the crowd’s response; it shook the pillars of the temple.
“I think your time here is done, Rulgân Silverfoot,” Morlock said. “Where will you spend the last days of the dying world?”
The dragon snarled.
Morlock waited.
Deor almost spoke, but Ambrosia caught his eye and shook her head.
Nothing for nothing! the dragon said. If I tell you what you want to know, will you help me escape from here?
Morlock considered briefly. “Yes,” he said.
The dragon submerged his snout in gold and grumbled a bit. Then he raised up his face and said, Agreed. I will self-bind to tell you what I know. You will self-bind to assist me to escape, if there is any trouble. There is going to be trouble, from what I see out in the town square.
“No binding magics,” Morlock said. “You’ll have to trust me.”
The dragon glared and lashed his tail, sending gold coins skittering around the temple chamber. Morlock looked Rulgân in the eye and waited.
Agreed! the dragon rumbled at last.
“Then.”
The dragon spoke.
Ambrosius, when last you saw me I was very new in my godhood. I could use the temple of the mandrakes to see through their eyes and ears, but I could not control their wills. Nor can I always do so now. I must lure a mandrake into surrendering its will to mine, a long, tedious business sometimes. The first was Skellar, who you may remember as god-speaker here on your last visit. He walked abroad, servile to my will, unable to live as a mandrake or be reborn as a dragon.
It amused me to send him to places he hated to go. For instance, he feared water, so I made him swim across the Sea of Stones. He feared the Little Cousins, so I sent him as my emissary to the Endless Empire under the Blackthorns. And he feared the cold, so I sent him north to the end of the world.
His eyes were my eyes, and his ears were my ears, but his pain was not my pain. I left him will enough to seek his own survival when threatened, but not enough to resist my commands. He spent some time in the city of werewolves, Wuruyaaria; you would be amused to hear his adventures there, perhaps. But the geas I placed on him drove him ever further north, through the grim, bright rind of the world where beasts become strange, until he stood at the furthest point north where a beast with two feet may walk; beyond was only sky, blue emptiness like Merlin’s eyes.
There is a bridgehead there, where the world ends, and the bridge runs through the sky into another world. Standing on the bridge was a thing that had neither hands nor feet nor body nor anything that could be seen. But it was there: Skellar felt the imprint of its angular intelligence on his own.
He stood there for a long time, void of purpose. I had told him to go north but had not said what he should do when there.
The presence on the bridge spun a mouth made of ice in the middle air. It used the mouth to say, “Why are you here?”
“I was sent,” Skellar answered.
“Who sent you?”
“God.”
“Which god?”
“The God.”
“Was it one of the Two Powers?”
Skellar hesitated. “No.”
“The-one-you-would-call-I,” said the thing on the bridgehead, “senses an association. Is the God who sent you the Balancer?”
Skellar thought. It was difficult for him because I had not allowed him to do much of this since I took him over. “I don’t know,” he said after a time—a great deal of time, it seemed to me, when I assimilated his memories.
“Is your God akin to the Two Powers?”