Oleg pushed his back angrily with both hands. “Quick, you fool! Quick!”
Thomas rounded the stone tomb clumsily, felt a strange blow of warm air from it.
Oleg clung to the stone for a moment. “Svyatogor! Svyatogor!”
Thomas glanced back from the other end of the cave. He rather imagined than heard a heavy sigh, as though uttered by a mountain. The cave seemed small at once. “Muromets?.. You?..”
“Oleg the Wise! Any old arms here, Svyatogor?”
Thomas strained his ears. That time he heard it distinctly: a mighty low voice that filled the cave and seemed to move its close walls apart. “Oleg the Wise?.. I was preparing to become a hermit like you… Only holy books here…”
Thomas heard nothing more but a loud clatter of the wonderer’s boots. The tunnel made an abrupt turn, they ran across a small cave. Their feet raised colored dust. There were rows of narrow-necked vessels in the corners, a huge metal mirror on the wall, two giant chests beneath it, heaps of woman’s dresses everywhere.
Thomas cast a searching look around, but Oleg hit him between the iron shoulder blades. “The room of Sinegorka! Svyatogor’s wife… No cup here!”
They ran out, gasping for air. Thomas was the first to hear heavy footfall, so he slowed down his pace, twisted his head round, and stopped. The wall-shaking steps were coming from ahead, approaching.
Thomas drew his sword, almost with relief, leaned against the wall. His breast was heaving, his eyes poured over with sweat, his breath burst out as though from a rusty trumpet. Oleg stopped, with his breath rattling, his face exhausted and aged.
Heavy footsteps stopped. On the threshold of the cave, blocking the way out, there stood a colossal — twice as tall as a man — heavy beast: a scary ancient lizard covered with thick horny shield plates so tight that there were no slits at all. His sharp wide-set eyes looked coldly from a slit in his thick skull. For no moment they would let the wonderer out of sight. The beast stood on his hind legs, resting also on his thick tail studded with spikes and horny excruciations on bony plates. The dragon’s chest had a metal glitter, and his forepaws, short and apparently weak, were twice as thick as Thomas’s arms.
“Goodness!..” Thomas babbled. He took a firmer grip of his sword, clenched his jaws, ready to strike and crush until he falls dead in the glorious battle.
The wonderer sounded unusually strained. “Thomas, wait… Is it you, Sardan? Don’t conceal, I can see you in any guise!”
The dragon made a heavy step forward, his jaws flung open suddenly. His roar stunned Thomas: the knight squatted, as though hammered on his helmet, barely kept his sword. His head was ringing, he felt helpless, his own voice came out as thin as a gnat’s chirp. The wonderer yelled back, the dragon roared again, then, through pounding in Thomas’s ears, came a harsh, enraged voice. “Adept of Ancient Arts?.. Magic of transformation into a beast?”
The wonderer’s counters began to tremble — so it seemed to startled Thomas — then got blurred. The pilgrim’s pure appearance showed out some beastliness, more dreadful than a dragon’s, his face started to lengthen into a scary snout, but the next moment Thomas heard his voice, hoarse with hatred. “No, the adept of subhuman… I’m the Wise, I look in the future!.. You took what man had been, I take what he will be!”
There were bright bloody-red flashes about the cave, then it was flooded by a rich color of fresh blood. The wonderer’s rags flared up, fell down in burning pieces. He stepped over the fire and smoke, bare and red-hot, his strained muscle seemed metal to Thomas. There were no more than five steps between the foes, both stared at each other in a duel of eyes: a huge beast and a man unarmed but strangely dangerous.
With a roar, the dragon rushed on the man. Thomas shrunk back to the wall, raised his sword overhead. The dragon’s terrible claws, shiny like diamonds, went into the wonderer’s bare back. Red blood spurted out. Thomas bustled along the wall, escaping the rolling rock of bones and claws by miracle. Several times he raised the sword but dared not to strike: the beast and the wonderer had grappled each other so tightly that the one atop changed at every moment.
The beast roared with triumph malice, his mouth breathed fire, his teeth looked like white-hot knives. He had no chance to use his teeth to end the battle: the wonderer’s fingers were breaking his jaw off, the dragon bellowed fervently, tried to crush the man in his forepaws. Once the beast got used to pressure coming from one side, Oleg yanked the jaw suddenly into another. There was a crack, a crunch of joints, the dragon choked with own roar. His jaw dropped, as though suspended on a cloth, a trickle of blood ran down his narrow snake tongue, black and forked. With a hoarse roar, the dragon thrust the man overhead, all but reached the vault, going to smash him on the stone floor.
Thomas slashed the beast’s leg, holding sword with both hands. It was like slashing stone: the blade bounced off with such a force that made his arms numb up to the shoulders, yellow sparks flew sideways. Then the sword was thrown down, its point produced some sparks out of the floor too… Suddenly the dragon uttered a terrible roar of fear and pain: the knight’s sword reached his foot and cut three clawed toes off. Within the cut, there was a brief glitter of big bones, then dark blood gushed out at once over the floor. The chopped toes twitched, scratched with claws.
The dragon lowered his head, his blazing eyes searched for Thomas. The wonderer thrust his fingers with force into the red of them, Thomas heard a distinct crunch, then the dragon bellowed even louder. Feeling himself fainting, Thomas slashed with his last strength on another foot, the same vulnerable spot on it. At once he was yanked up and flung across the cave. He hit against the floor, rolled with a thunder of steel. For a moment it was dark before his eyes, he felt blood in his mouth, all of his bones aching. With great effort, he struggled up his feet, the way he had risen, even more exhausted, for the seventh storm of the Tower of David.
In three score steps there was a creepy ball rolling with roar, crunch, crackle, rattling breath. Thomas hurried there, oblivious of himself leaning on the sword as though it were a staff and dragging his right leg.
The roar was getting muffled until it turned a hiss. The monstrous ball unrolled, the beast’s head fell on the floor with a heavy bony thud. He lay on his back, his forepaws gripping his blooded mug, his hind paws twitching convulsively, scratching the floor. There were two deep wounds in the dragon’s throat. The wonderer, if that man really was him, sat on the dragon’s chest. He was blood-stained all over.
Thomas turned away hastily. The beast’s belly is torn apart, like a rotten cloth, two ribs protruding through the broad cut. The slime is gurgling in it, the liver, as huge as a boulder, twitching, craving for life, but the head does not move as though glued to the floor. Thomas kept his sword ready for a strike, just in case, came closer and saw the sharp cervical vertebrae broken and smashed mercilessly, jutting out through the broken skin. The head, as large as a rock, was only kept by sinews.
Oleg stood up, ferocious, bathed in the dragon’s blood, and Thomas freeze all over — the wonderer seemed more dreadful than the dead beast. “Oleg,” he said in a shaky voice, “is it what man will be?”
The wonderer’s face, twisted in the beastly convulsion, smoothed down slowly, like high storm waves when a barrel of oil is poured over them. His furious eyes were still blazing like two blooded stars, but his creepy bulging muscle subsided and smoothed out. He spoke in a scary inhuman voice, “He may be that…”
He jumped off the huge corpse. His mouth was dripping with blood, he wiped it off his lips disgustfully with the back of his hand. His chest made one more mighty raise and fall, his eyes lost their bloody glitter. He spoke in his usual but dead tired voice. “People can be different… but they will be what we’ll make them.”
In a dark side passage Oleg slowed down his pace. “To the left!.. Two guards there. Sir Thomas, we need no knightly tricks, such as a challenge for jousting…”
“I see,” Thomas interrupted. “Your company had made me a Scyth, even a Rus. I must kill them without noise, yes? As common men?”
“As villains,” Oleg grunted.
Thomas could hardly see Oleg’s figure: it was almost pitch-dark, with only a torch lit far beyond the turn, casting a faint gleam on the granite crystals. Beneath the torch, two guards sat straight on the floor, their backs leaned against the wall. They held bare swords between their laps and seemed drowsy.
Thomas tried to step as silently in his armor as the wonderer did barefoot and naked, but the corridor got filled with crashing, clanging, ringing sounds — those could be made by the beast if he’d crushed them and were coming back. The guards stood up hastily. One asked loudly, apparently briskly, to demonstrate they had been wide awake, “Your Might? Are the outlaws captured?”
“Only one,” Thomas replied in a rude voice, nodded at Oleg. “The other is hiding.”
“We’ll find him!” the guard promised with servility. “All entrances are sealed. No way out for gnat, nor for
