FOR A LONG while nothing happened. The cold-drake seemed to have gone deaf, or else it no longer cared for any hope or promise that a gnat might offer. Maybe, now it was freed of its bonds, it would sink back down into its deep caverns, far away from the torment of light.
The wind faltered. The queen’s fleet struggled. Black ships rode up over one after another of her slower and more crippled ships. And the fire kept falling.
The earth drew a vast breath. For a long moment everything was still: air, sea, even the clash of ships.
The great worm rose. Gereint’s cry was more a yelp than the battlefield bellow he had intended. The queen’s mages raised the power they had been keeping in reserve, filling every sail and driving every hull away from the black ships.
The sea yawned. From the queen’s ship Gereint could see nothing with the eyes of his body, but his conjoined magic rode high above it all. The three of them together looked down from the height of heaven into the gulf of hell.
The depths of it were immeasurable, rimmed with teeth like spines of jagged rock. There was a shape around it, a vast blind head with buds of ears and hollows where eyes should be. It was pitted and scarred with eons of battles in the deep realms; its scales glistened darkly, as sharp as glass forged in the earth’s own fire.
Even now the king’s armies made no sound. The worm swallowed them, flesh and timber and steel, even the fire that fed the arrows it had rained upon the ships of Prydain.
It was larger than Gereint had thought. Much, much larger. It swallowed half a thousand ships and then more, the remnants of the queen’s fleet that had been too broken to escape.
Gereint quailed at the thought of speaking again to so enormous a creature, but it had listened to him before. It had to listen to him now.
“Enough,” he said. It took all the strength he had, with Peredur and Averil at his back, to say that single word—as always, not to compel, only to ask.
The cold-drake gulped seawater and ships and morsels of living flesh. Mages flung spells at it even from the depths of its gullet; it shook them off.
“There,” said Gereint, opening his mind until it could see the three round-bellied ships that still clung to the open sea. He felt Averil inside him, coldly implacable; the words were hers, though his voice spoke them. “Those are your prey. Take them.”
The worm lashed sidewise. The sea roared into the emptiness it had left. It lunged toward the three ships.
Bolts of power smote it again and again. It never slowed. It surged upward, an unimaginable bulk, streaming water and fragments of ships and bits of weed and flotsam and broken bodies. It hung in air above the tossing masts.
Still suspended like an eye in heaven, Gereint saw tiny figures swarming mindlessly beneath the jaws of their destruction. The cold-drake dropped with all the weight of earth, full upon the king’s ships.
GEREINT REELED TO the deck of the queen’s ship. It pitched drunkenly in a sea gone mad. Water and air, air and water mingled in the howling dark.
The light Gereint had seen by, the light of his magic, had winked out. He was as blind as the cold-drake.
It had other senses than sight. So, as his body was tossed helplessly in the maelstrom, did he. He felt the great worm rise one last time to the darkened sky, jaws gaping as if to devour the stars.
The cold-drake bellowed, a sound so deep and broad and high that it filled the whole world and everything in it. It carried the beast down and down, out of air into water and out of water into earth, back to the darkness from which it had come.