then?'
'I don't know – a long time.'
'But why did the dragon take so long in coming?'
'She did come, all the time,' he said. 'She brought me rats to eat. I think she wanted to fatten me up before she ate me.'
After Master Juwain had finished with his crystal, he rubbed an ointment into my cooked skin, and then I put my armor back on with much wincing and pain. And then I looked down the dim stairwell at Daj and asked him, 'How is it that the Lord of Lies and his men could have chained you without the dragon adding their skulls to his stack? Have they enslaved it, too?'
'In a way,' Daj told me. 'Lord Morjin said not all his chains are iron.'
'Of what be this particular chain made?' Ymiru asked him.
Daj looked up at Ymiru in obvious wonder at his great height; it seemed that he was trying to peer beneath Ymiru's cowled robe and get a better look at him.
'I heard Lord Morjin tell a priest something about the dragon,' Daj explained. 'He said that long ago, he brought the dragons here from somewhere else.'
'From where?' Kane asked him sharply.
'I don't know – somewhere.'
'You said dragons. How many were there?'
'Two of them, I think. A dragon king and his queen. But Lord Morjin poisoned the king; he took the eggs from the queen. A dragon queen lays only a single clutch of eggs, you know.'
He paused to let Liljana pick a few lice from his head before continuing. But I had already guessed what he would say.
'Lord Morjin keeps the eggs in his chambers,' he told us. 'They won't hatch if they're kept cold. And that's why the dragon won't touch Lord Morjin. Because if she does, she knows the eggs will be destroyed.'
Morjin, I suddenly knew, was keeping the dragon bound for his final war of conquest of the world.
Master Juwain rubbed his head as he smiled at Daj. He said, 'I see, I see. But you said that Morjin took the eggs long ago. They can't still be viable?'
'What does that mean?'
'Still alive and capable of hatching.'
'Oh, well, dragons live forever – like Lord Morjin,' he said. 'And so do their eggs.'
It was strange to think that the terrible, fire-spewing creature above us could so love her eggs that she was held in thrall by fear of their being destroyed. And what Daj told us next was stranger still.
'The dragon is making a pyramid of the skulls of all the men she's killed,' he said.
'Because of Lord Morjin, she hates all men. But she hates Lord Morjin most of all.
She's saving the very top place on the pyramid for his skull.'
We all fell quiet for a moment as we listened to the dragon thundering about the chamber above us. And then Master Juwain asked Daj, 'But how could you possibly know that?'
'Because I heard the dragon say this.'
'The dragon talks to you?'
'Not with words, not like you do,' Daj said. He pressed his finger into his ratty hair above his ear. 'But I heard her inside here.'
'Are you a mindspeaker then?'
'What's that?'
Master Juwain looked at Liljana, who continued stroking Daj's hair as she tried to explain something about her powers that her blue gelstei quickened and magnified.
'I don't know anything about that,' Daj said. 'The only one I ever heard speak that way was the dragon.'
'So it is with dragons,' Kane suddenly growled out. 'It's said that they have this power.'
I looked at him in amazement and asked, 'But what do you know about dragons?'
'Very little, I think. It's said that they're stronger in their minds than men and darker in their hearts.'
'But where did you hear that?' Master Juwain asked him. 'It's known that the ancient accounts of this matter were fabricated.'
Kane pointed up the steps and said to him, 'Was this beast fabricated then? She came from somewhere, as the boy said.'
'But where?' I asked.
Kane's eyes were hot pools as he looked me. 'It's said that dragons live on the world of Charoth and nowhere else.'
'But Charoth is a dark world, isn't it?'
'That it is,' Kane said. 'Morjin must have opened a gateway to it. So, he must be very close to opening a gate to Damoom and freeing the Dark One himself.'
I risked another peek above the top of the stairs. It seemed more important than ever that we get past the dragon and complete our quest.
'What do you see, Val?' Maram called to me.
The dragon, it seemed, had given up staring through the doorway into the corridor above the stairs. But I sensed that she was still waiting for us in the hall. And so, as lightly as I could, I stole along the corridor until I came to the doorway. I looked out of it to see the dragon coiled around her skull pyramid as if guarding a treasure. Her golden eyes were lit up and staring at the doorway; I thought that she was daring us to make a dash across the hall for the great portal that opened upon the abandoned streets of Argattha's first level.
'She's guarding the portal,' I said when I returned to the others. I looked down into the stairwell at Daj. 'Is there any other way out of the hall?'
'Only these stairs,' he told us.
'What will we find beyond the portal?'
'Well, there's a big passage to a street, and then a lot of streets, like a maze almost – they lead mostly east toward the old gates in the city. They're all closed now, so the dragon can't escape.'
'But you said that there is a way up to the second level?'
'Yes, that's right – there are some stairs about a mile from here. But they're too narrow for the dragon to use.'
'Could you find these stairs again?'
'I think so,' he said.
Maram looked at me in horror of what he knew I was planning. He said, 'You're not thinking of just running for these stairs, are you?'
'Not just running,' I said.
'But shouldn't we wait for the dragon to leave? Or, ah, to go away?'
Upon questioning Daj further, we determined that the dragon never slept. And as for waiting, it seemed, the dragon could wait much longer than we. We had very little food, less water and no time.
'The dragon,' Liljana unexpectedly announced, 'is waiting for some thing. I think the Red Priests are due to bring another here. What will they think when they find the boy gone and his shackles unlocked?'
'But how do you know that?' Kane asked her.
'I know,' she said, tapping her blue stone against her head, 'because the dragon is in my mind.'
'So,' Kane murmured as rubbed his bandaged ear.
Liljana's face suddenly contorted as she shook her head violently back and forth.
And she gasped out, 'She's trying… to make a ghul of me!'
Kane waited for her to regain control of herself and then snarled out, 'So, perhaps you should try to go into her mind. And make a ghul of her.'
This suggested an elaboration on the desperate plan that I was considering: We would all rush out into the hall And then, while Liljana used her blue gelstei to engage the dragon's mind. Atara would shoot arrows into her eyes. This would allow me to steal in close and try once more to cut through the dragon's iron hide.
Master Juwain, his green crystal in hand, looked at me and said, 'I shouldn't be telling you how to kill anything, not even a dragon. But the place in the chest that you stabbed – that's not where her heart is, I'm sure. If my stone tells true, you'll find it beating three feet farther down, just where the scales darken, closer to the curve
