DAVE MIGHT WELL have died in the first blast of the flames if we hadn’t been thoroughly drenched in the split second before they hit. As it was, he was protected just long enough for me to reach out from the place in my heart where a matching fire burned and draw the flames into myself.
It wasn’t something I’d ever tried before—though I’d seen Sparx do similar things—and it made my whole body feel like a wool sock into which someone had stuffed a burning log, terrifyingly hot and heavy, and horribly stretched out. I knew it would rip me apart within seconds if I tried to hold it all. I simply couldn’t contain that much fire. But I had no way to release it.
Not in that shape anyway.
This time when I became the dragon, it was an act of desperation, with no conscious thought or preparation. I cast no spells and I set no wards. My body and my magic simply did what they had to do for me to survive by taking the form of something that could hold the expanded fires within, a form that had written itself into my bones back on that night at the rail yard.
One moment I was plain old Kalvan Monroe, ready to burst from a surfeit of my own element. The next, with a wrench and a twist in the fabric of reality, I became a firedrake, huge and angry, armored in scales, and far more alien than Dave’s new hand could ever be. A shape given strength by the mighty flames I had drawn within myself rather than the meager candle of my own human magic. Because of that, the transformation was deeper this time, and I, Kalvan, faded into dragon other.
Dragon’s eyes saw things Kalvan’s would have missed, like the place where magic swirled through the wall from repeated openings and closings. Flames could not touch such a gate, and Kalvan’s newfound human connections to stone were still too weak for the firedrake to use. But one smashing strike of his snakelike head made an opening big enough for a body grown long and sinuous, and he slithered through an instant later.
The passage beyond was ten feet across and five tall, barely big enough to allow him passage, and he was forced to go slow. Vaguely, in the tiny part of his brain that was still Kalvan, he registered the other human boy following him and felt that it was good. But the dragon’s desires did not flow in the same channels as Kalvan’s. So, when he came to a forking of the way, he sniffed the air and turned in the direction where he scented a greater concentration of his delver enemies instead of following the path that smelled of outside air.
He wanted … no, needed, to rend/burn/devour the ones who had tried to cage him. They would pay with their lives for such effrontery, fuel for the living furnace that burned at his core. He would gobble them down, and in so doing, he would complete his transformation, just as some mortal travelers who wandered into fairyland committed themselves forever to its boundaries by eating of fairy food.
A deep sniff brought the scent of fresh delver blood from around the next bend. The rich and complex smell carried a bonanza of information for one with a dragon’s senses. There was the message of numbers—ten delvers made up this group, warriors all, armed with stone, driven by anger and reeking of self-righteous arrogance. The dragon surged forward, pressing against narrow walls that dragged at wings and hampered the free movement of his shoulders.
THERE!
Eyes that provided their own light fixed on a small group of the badgerlike enemy, pinning them with a lantern gaze. He smelled their surprise and sudden fear as they froze in place, and he savored it. They carried spears and axes with stone blades and razor edges, weapons that would turn and break on the armor of his scales as he would break those who wielded them.
Their leader was thickset, stronger and taller than most of his fellows, and the dragon recognized him … no, I recognized him. Cetius! The delver who had served the dragon’s stepf … no. No. No!
Oscar. Not the dragon’s anything. Oscar was my stepfather. My own personal monster. The man who had controlled my mother with his magic. The man who had tried to do the same to me. His stink was all over Cetius—aftershave and soap and a dozen other smells that I recognized from the bathroom of my own house.
For one brief instant, the pure rage I felt at the man who had done so much harm to me and mine drove the dragon out of the head we shared. But I could feel it fighting to assert itself again, to use my present shape to push me aside and resume control, and I knew if I let that happen, I would never truly be Kalvan again. I had only this one brief moment to act.
Opening my mouth wide, I let the flames that I had taken into myself pour forth to engulf the delvers. My conscience twinged as I watched them run burning down the tunnel away from me or plunge deep into the stone to put out the flames, and I was glad when one last breath sucked deep into a dragon’s lungs brought no stench of death. They were hurt, many of them badly, but the children of the earth are as tough as the stones they come from, and I did not think any of them would die.
Then, with the fires that powered my transformation exhausted, I fell back into myself, and darkness filled the deep places under the earth once again. I didn’t pass out. Not quite, though my knees buckled and smacked into the stone floor hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. The smell of burning delver—which had been so sweet to dragon senses—hung heavy in the air. I probably would have thrown up if I’d had anything at all in my stomach, but it had been a very long time since I had eaten or drunk.
“Kalvan?” Dave’s voice came from somewhere behind me, quiet and cautious. “Are you, you again? Is that why the lights went out?”
“Yeah.” I forced myself back to my feet with an effort that left me blinking spots out of my eyes. “I—oh hell, Sparx!” It was only in that moment I remembered the predicament of my familiar. “Dave, do you have any idea where he went?!?”
A reaching hand touched my back, quickly sliding up to squeeze my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Kalvan. Truly. But no.”
“Crap. Crap. Crap. You’re sure?”
“Honestly, I’m terrified of where I might have sent him, and I was hoping you’d be able to tell me something on that front. I’d have asked sooner, but you were a dragon.”
“Sorry. It’s the only way I could keep the explosion from killing us.”
“Oh.” Dave sounded nonplussed. “Good to know. Why’d you change back?”
“There were delvers—Cetius, and some of his lot. They smelled of Oscar and I…” I drew in a breath full of the stink of burned fur and flesh—hurts I had caused—and shook my head though Dave couldn’t see it. “I—I really can’t talk about it right now. I don’t even want to think about it. Let’s just say, Lisa’s warning that taking a shape defines you didn’t tell half of it, and leave it there. Okay?”
“Sure.” There was a long pause. “I don’t suppose you know the way out?”
“Not exactly. But I know this isn’t it. Man, but I wish I knew if Sparx was all right.”
“I’m really sorry, Kalvan. Isn’t there anything you can do? I thought you had some sort of deep magical connection, what with him being your familiar.”
“I, uh … huh. You might have something.” I thought back to my first meetings with the fire hare. “Could you plug your ears for a second?”
“Sure, why?”
“I’m going to try to summon him, and I need to use his real name.”
“Oh.” Dave put a world of hurt into one syllable.
“It’s not like that. I trust you completely, but I promised Sparx I’d never tell anyone, and I can’t bear the thought of breaking my word to him. Especially if he’s…”
“Oh! Yeah, absolutely. I’m doing it right now. There.”
I took a deep breath and spoke clearly and carefully in the tongue of fire. “I conjure and abjure thee, *sprths*al*erarha. By fire and smoke, by ash and oak, by the flame in the darkness and the powers it awoke. Come to me now, no matter where you are. Ash and char, sun and star, wind and smoke, ash and oak!”
Nothing happened. Well, nothing physical, at least, but I had a sudden sense of sharp connection. I could feel the hare in my heart, like a sliver, and I turned in the direction it pointed. He was to the left and down from where I currently stood. He was terribly far away, thousands of miles at the least, but I could tell he was already on his way back. I felt something loosen in my throat, like I’d had a big piece of ice caught there and only noticed it in the moment it melted away.
I reached out to find Dave, and tugged his hands away from his ears. “Sparx is a long way off, but all right. We need to get out of here before any more delvers show up.”
“Sounds good to me, but how do we manage it? Now that you’re no longer the world’s biggest night-light, I can’t see anything. I’m not even sure which way is which.”
“I think I can manage a bit of light on my own behalf.” I reached into my heart and drew on the fires there. Bright flames blossomed from the upturned fingers of my left hand … and then immediately went out. “Hang on a tick.” I tried again, and failed again. Sigh. “One more time.” There!
Dave blinked in the ruddy light. “Okay. That’s the creepiest thing I’ve seen you do yet. It looks like something from a bad horror film—one of those hand-of-glory things.”
I chose not to point out he was a fine one to talk about disturbing hands. “Would you rather try to find our way out of here in the dark?”
“Not so much.”
“Then zip it and let’s get moving.”
It was easy enough to figure out which direction was back the way we’d come, given the charring on the walls ahead. A few minutes of brisk walking brought us to the forking of the way where dragon me had smelled fresh air, and we turned into it. Not long after that, things started to get complicated when we came to another junction with three possible routes.
“Well?” asked Dave after several long seconds of staring down each of the paths in turn. “Which one is it?”
“I don’t know. The dragon smelled a way out in this direction, but I have no idea how far it is or which one.”
Dave grimaced. “It looks to me like the right path trends downward, so that’s probably not it. Your turn.”
I sniffed the air, but I was no dragon, and I couldn’t smell any difference. I hesitated to guess, but the only other idea I had for making a distinction—using my new connection with the element of earth—scared me more than getting lost did. Finally, I just pointed left and started walking.
Maybe fifteen minutes passed before we came to another junction. This time, there was a spiral stair leading down, a path that angled slightly left, and another that turned steeply to the right—almost doubling back along the side of the one we’d taken to get there. Again, with the exception of not going down, there was no obvious choice. Dave pointed left and left we went, but we hadn’t gone far before we found another multiple forking of the way. The yawning emptiness in my stomach transformed itself into a feeling of churning doom.
“We’re lost.” I pitched my voice as low as I could in case there were listeners nearby. “I really don’t like the fact we’re getting more and more branches. That seems like something you’d expect as you got closer to a delver village, not farther out toward the edges.”
Dave looked troubled as well. “Yeah,” he whispered, “about the only thing I’m sure of is the way back to our cell, and that’s no good.”
I was about to answer, when I heard a faint scuffing noise from somewhere behind us. I nodded toward the nearest passage and we both hurried that way. But it quickly narrowed so that we had to go single file, and then narrowed again, forcing us to edge along sideways until we finally hit a place where the walls came too close together for any further progress. I swore bitterly but quietly.
“Hush,” said Dave. “Whatever made that noise might not be following us. If they aren’t and they know the tunnels, they probably didn’t head into this dead end. Let’s not give anyone an excuse to come looking. Better put the light out, too.”
He had a point. I closed my fist, snuffing the flames, but I doubted the noise had been a coincidence. That doubt was reinforced a few moments later by the sounds of claws clicking on stone somewhere in the dark behind us.
“Back up,” I hissed. “If we have to face delvers, we’ll need room to fight.”
We started toward the junction, moving as quickly and quietly as possible. We’d gotten to a point where the passage widened enough to accommodate my shoulders, when a series of sharp, animal-like sniffs sounded in the darkness ahead. It was hard to judge in the echoey confines of the stone tunnel, but if the noise had come from more than fifteen feet away, I’d have been shocked. I ran into Dave as he stopped moving.
There was no more point in hiding, so I raised my left hand high and relit the fires on my fingers. This time I fed them more fuel from my heart, intending to blind as much as illuminate. With a sudden flash, the passage filled with light, and I saw …
“Lisa? Is that you?”
A huge coyote stood blinking in the sudden brightness just this side of a slight bend in the tunnel.
A moment later, Morgan came into view as well, though she didn’t seem nearly as dazzled by the light. “It’s about time!”
“I … uh, what?”
Morgan shook her head disappointedly. “We can’t stop here. There’s too much chance of the delvers finding us. Let’s talk and walk.”
“Great idea,” said Dave. “Do you know the way out?”
“Not really, but Lisa can backtrack our trail, and that should get us to the place we came in.”
The big coyote nodded and slipped past Morgan to take the lead. Dave quickly followed, but Morgan waited for me to come up beside her before she started walking. If she had any thoughts on Dave’s dress, she didn’t share.
As we fell in behind Dave and Lisa, Morgan started talking. “You know Lisa’s been keeping an eye out for you, right? Ever since that day at the conservatory.”
I nodded. “Sure, but why…”
“Because I … uh, we owe you one, obviously. Who’s been teaching you about magic?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Principle of reciprocation. It’s a bit like the principle of sympathy, but at a larger scale. When one practitioner owes another a debt that involves magic, it can create an imbalance in the debtor’s harmonic resonance.”
I blinked at her rather stupidly—even by my own estimation. “Say what now?”
Morgan’s lips pinched tightly together, but then she took a deep breath. “You saved my life in a magical situation when you didn’t have to and when we didn’t have any other form of connection. That means my magic is going to be out of balance until I repay the debt and I’d prefer to manage it sooner rather than later.”
“But you saved my life right back by blowing that delver bolt off course,” I protested.
Morgan shook her head. “Doesn’t count because it was part of the initial event. That was just me helping you to save all of us.”
“Are you sure?”
“Very. I can still feel that the forces are out of balance. I’d hoped busting you loose from the delvers would put us back to even, but by the time we got here, all there was to find was an empty cell and a lot of burned badger hair. We can still even things a little by leading you out, but that’s hardly enough to balance the scales.” She sounded positively grumpy about it.
“How did you even know we were in trouble or where to find us?” Dave asked over his shoulder.
Again, Morgan looked annoyed. “When the two of you didn’t come back out of Dave’s basement in a reasonable amount of time, Lisa slipped in through the window you left open and sniffed around. Your trail went into the storeroom, but it didn’t come back out. That was weird enough to make her check with me.”
“To say nothing of the giant hole in the floor,” Dave added.
“What hole?” Morgan sounded genuinely confused. “All there was in the storeroom was a pair of crumpled jeans and the cleanest basement floor I’ve ever seen.”
I was momentarily startled, but then I remembered what delvers could do with stone, and realized that might hold true for concrete, too. “Was there any red paint on the floor? Or wax?”
Morgan shook her head. “No, nothing. It pretty much looked like someone had poured fresh concrete in that one room.”
“That still doesn’t explain how you knew where to look for us,” I said as we turned into a bigger tunnel, moving back along the track Dave and I had followed.
There was a pause, and I noticed Morgan’s jaw briefly tense before she shook her head and said rather acidly, “We didn’t know for sure till we got down here, but barring your vanishing completely, delvers seemed the obvious answer.”
Dave chuckled but didn’t say anything. In response, I glared at the back of his head. I’m sure it hurt him deeply.
“Well, yes, but there are lots of places the delvers could have parked us, aren’t there?”
Morgan sighed. “Kalvan?”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to explain this with one word because it’s clear you need things explained simply. Now, your current behavior suggests you might not be aware of it, but there’s this thing called ‘magic’ and it involves lots of secrets that practitioners only share with their students or closest friends.”
Ouch! I could feel myself turning bright red. “I … uh, but—”
She held up a hand. “Magic. Period. Full stop. That’s how we found you. Nothing more nor less and it’s all you get. Magic. Magic. Magic.”