Mage Ankennes gave a grunt of satisfaction, hefted his staff, and turned toward the quiescent dragon, striding rapidly through the shallow black water of the pool toward its head.
Karah gave another sharp little cry and ran suddenly into the dark, following the prince down the slantwise path that led through darkness and into death.
Nemienne cried out. She had meant her sister to hold the prince and draw him back to life, not lose her hold and then run after him toward death. She could still see Karah, but only faintly. The kitten was with them, Nemienne reminded herself—there was still hope, because if anybody could walk the pathways between the ephemeral world and the eternal dark, it was the cats.
The sorcerer continued to play. Nemienne hesitated for one moment longer and then ran for the path that led into the darkness. If she could follow that path herself—if she could only bring Karah back—if Karah could reach ahead and bring the prince back as well—then Ankennes wouldn’t be able to use the prince’s death to bring death against the true dragon the prince symbolized and everything would still be all right. But the path eluded her. When she tried to put her foot on it, it wasn’t there after all, but somewhere else, somewhere slantwise of any place Nemienne could enter. She screamed in frustration and tried again while her sister faded from her view, but with no greater success, and then ran instead to the edge of the black pool and stared in terror across it toward Mage Ankennes.
Ankennes had paused for a moment at the dragon’s head, gazing up at it with—what, satisfaction? A last moment of reluctant awe for the thing he was about to destroy? The top of its head, resting on one great clawed foot, was many feet higher than the mage’s own head; each of its long curved talons was as long as his leg, and its closed eye as large as his chest. Enkea had somehow crossed the pool with no one seeing her, at least without Nemienne seeing her, and was sitting upright and still beside the dragon’s foot. She seemed impossibly tiny beside those huge stone talons.
If Ankennes saw the cat, he didn’t find her presence reason to hesitate. He turned down to stride along that huge head toward its neck, beginning to lift his staff as though he meant to swing it like a sword. He called out in a deep, rolling tone, “The dragon is departed! The dragon is dead! The dragon is destroyed!” Then he whirled his staff over his head and brought it down toward the relatively slender area where the dragon’s head joined its long neck.
Nemienne almost expected Enkea to do something to prevent that blow, but of course the cat could do nothing. No more than Nemienne herself. Flinching from the blow as though it was aimed at her, Nemienne fell to her knees at the edge of the pool. The water lapped over her fingers, not like water but like embodied shadow, with green light glimmering at its heart. She gasped and pulled her hands back.
The staff struck—
Above them, everywhere around them, there was a vast, terrible noise as the mountain trembled. Some of the more delicate stalactites and needles shattered with a terrible crystalline chiming like breaking bells, and great cracks ran through the smooth curtains and walls of the cavern. One crack ran with a grinding sound across the smooth stone of the floor from the far side of the cavern nearly to where Nemienne knelt. In the pool before her, ripples disturbed the surface of the water. The pale greenish light natural to the caverns wavered and flickered, like the light of a lantern somebody was shaking. But, though this seemed impossible, the dragon itself remained undisturbed. Not the faintest crack disfigured its neck where the mage had struck it.
Ankennes, looking nonplussed, stepped back and leaned on his staff, studying the stone dragon. Enkea had not moved. Her green eyes rested on the mage, not tame at all. She blinked, once. Above her head, a drop of water made its way down the curve of the dragon’s wing and fell, gleaming faintly green, into the waiting pool: plink. Nemienne stared down into the water after it. The mage also turned his head at the sound, but then he turned slowly back to stare at the gray cat. One of his eyebrows lifted.
Around them, the melody the Kalchesene sorcerer was playing suddenly altered. Everyone, Ankennes included, jerked around to stare at him.
The sorcerer was standing with his legs braced and his flute to his mouth, playing a rippling melody so delicate that it was barely audible—but he had switched the bone flute Ankennes had given him for a plain wooden flute of his own. The bone flute lay discarded at his feet. The sound of the wooden one, if one listened closely, was purer. Cleaner, somehow. Leilis stood with her hands gripping the foreigner’s arm, but she stood like one lending support, not one being supported.