This time we chose the black-garbed Armiger and were taken before the Dragon of Zale.
He was charming. Full of humor and gaiety, sudden quips and outrageous jests. He invited us to eat with him, listened to Ganver’s fictitious tale of a Great Game to the north, and when the meal was done he invited us to walk with him upon the battlements.
There were men there, Divulgers and other torturers, busy with braziers of hot coals and devices to rend and tear. There was a chuffing of a little bellows and the shrill cry of a wheel on which knives were sharpened. I stopped short. Ganver stopped also.
And beside these horrors the Dragon of Zale turned toward us with a charming smile as he offered to cast lots with us to see which of the two of us would be tortured to death where we stood.
I could not believe the words coming from that smiling mouth. As he spoke, the Bell rang as it had the evening before. And his eyes did not hear it, neither the Bell of the dusk nor the Bell of the day, and I knew that in this one, too, some necessary part was missing.
“Why would you say such an outrageous thing?” asked Ganver. “We have no Game with you, nor was Game announced to us. You have treated us hospitably. Why would you now take one of our lives?”
“Oh, I will take both,” said the Dragon of Zale offhandedly, with a twinkling smile and a charming shrug. “One today and one on the morrow. As to why, it is a Game I play with my brother. He dislikes it very much, to see me at my play. He does all that he can to forestall me, but in the end I always win.” And the Dragon laughed, a high-pitched wail of amusement, like a wind-soul lost in chasms of dark. My skin crawled as though slimy things moved there, testing their barbed feet. Ganver was looking at me, urging me to do something, and I caught my lip between my teeth, thinking furiously. This was a lesson, and I had no idea what it was I should learn.
“I will die first, Master Sorcerer,” I said, surprising myself immensely.
“Ah, faithful one,” said Ganver in an odd tone. “I call upon the Rules of the Game, Dragon. I claim the Victim’s Interrogation.”
Well, I had forgotten. It isn’t often one is threatened with terminal torture—I should imagine once in a lifetime would be about the limit. However, the Rules of Play did allow the Victim’s Interrogation, the three questions that must be answered honestly. I wondered if the Dragon of Zale would allow it.
He merely smiled, without objection, and we stood there in the dusk on the battlement as his Divulgers and Invigilators readied the irons and the knives and I tried not to look at them. I did Inward Is Quiet very softly to myself in the passive mode, hoping it would help me understand what was happening. I concentrated, not helped by the sizzling noises behind me as the Invigilators spat upon hot irons.
“Dragon Zale,” intoned Ganver, “were there midwives at your brother’s birth?”
The Dragon stared at us with empty eyes. “There were.”
“And were there midwives at your birth?”
“There were not. You have one question more.”
Across the road, only a little way, I could see a knot of men assembled upon the battlements of Zyle Keep and knew the prophet of Zyle stood there, peering this way with his cold, empty face. Ganver was speaking again.
“Dragon of Zale, have there been times when your brother might have killed you but did not?”
He stared at us then with a bleak, unholy joy in his face. “Many times he might have killed me, traveler. And each time he withheld his hand. For love of me, he said. For hate of me, I think. And now to the rack, Exorcist, unless you would like to try to drive out the devil that dwells here.” He tapped himself upon the breast, smiling at me with lively malice.
“No,” said Ganver in a great, Eesty voice, whirling and whirling. “There is no devil there, Dragon. There is only yourself.” The world went still; I saw the Dragon’s face fall apart like shards of glass, the fortress crumble beneath him like a sand castle, built in an hour, washed away in moments. Ganver whirled while the world remained motionless and the castle melted beneath Ganver’s tide, finer and finer, to flow away in silver dust. Rain came to pock the dust with the world’s tears, and it was gone.
Across the way Zyle Keep still stood. “Look,” said Ganver, turning my head so that I saw the face of the Prophet. It stared at the place where Zale had been with hopeless intensity and a longing so great I had no name for it. “Come,” beckoned the Eesty, and we were gone.
“That was long ago,” I said when I was able to breathe once more. “Long ago, Ganver. Before the Daylight Bell was broken. Perhaps it was not even real.”
“I remember it,” Ganver said. “Lom remembers it. Now you remember it. Which makes it real enough.”
“Was it you destroyed the Dragon then, Ganver? Or did he go on and on?”
“He went on,” breathed the Eesty without expression, “for many years. Until the Prophet of Zyle died, and there was no reason to go on after that.”
“I am trying to understand the lesson,” I mused.
“Ah.”
“There were midwives at the Prophet Zyle’s birth, and they would not have let him live if his future had
