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Chapter Seven

The night was warm. The six guards on duty at the villa's front entrance were outside, under a torch. At that distance the sounds of their dice game would not disturb the chieftains quartered within the building. When the guards heard the approaching horses, they swept up the dice and checked their weapons. A messenger was more likely than a sudden attack, but—it was cheap enough to be ready, that was all.

Mael reined up in the circle of torchlight and dismounted, He began to unstrap the reliquary. "We've got to see Arthur," he said. "At once."

Two of the guards laughed. None of them answered.

Mael pulled the last tie loose and turned in fury with the casket in his hands. "Look, ye cunt-brains," he snarled, a little of his Erse lilt quivering through the anger in his voice, "it's five hundred miles your Arthur has sent me to fetch this back—with my friend's life the forfeit if I failed. I'll have Arthur awake now to see it, do you hear?"

Hands hovered near weapon hilts. The guard officer said, "No, I recognize him. He's the one we escorted off to Ireland. Godas, knock on the Leader's door and see if he wants to talk to this one now."

Doubtful but obedient, the named guardsman slipped into the villa. A moment later the door reopened. First through it was the guard. To Mael's amazement, the second man was Arthur himself. The king must have been asleep, but even so he had slid into his boots and pulled his coat of mail on over his bare shoulders before coming to the door. The links would be uncomfortable without padding beneath them, but they were less uncomfortable than a spear thrust through naked skin. Kings had died before through neglecting to arm themselves as they rushed out into the night. Behind Arthur was his seneschal Cei, a short, stocky man who was also in armor. He carried a drawn sword in one hand, in the other a lantern. Cei blinked in its radiance, looking as logy as a denned bear and as ill-tempered.

There was soft motion from the darkness to Mael's right as well. Mael turned and squinted. Unsummoned but not unexpected, Merlin stepped into the converging spheres of torch and lantern light. The wizard was barefoot and wearing the same simple tunic as before. His fingers toyed with another willow switch. Merlin's eyes searched Mael and the casket eagerly. Then his peripheral glance at Veleda penetrated and he froze. He glared at the woman. She stared back at him, overtly as calm as a stone.

"What's she doing with you?" Merlin demanded of Mael.

The Irishman's eyebrows rose with his temper. "Bringing a bloody lizard skull back." Mael turned to Arthur. "Where's Starkad?"

Arthur shrugged the question away. "He's here, he's fine. Did you bring the skull?"

"Where the hell is 'here'?" Mael shouted. "If anything happened to Starkad, I'll—" He remembered where he was and let the rest of the threat go unvoiced.

The king smiled and said very precisely, "Recruit, every one of the instructors placed over your friend has requested the Dane be discharged as unfit—too undisciplined to teach and too dangerous to have around. He hasn't gone anywhere, however. You'll find them, perfectly healthy, in his billet. As soon as you can give me the skull."

Mael pressed the latch of the casket and opened it. Merlin and the king crowded around. Cei and the other Companions hung back, curious but more afraid. The wizard traced around the small eyesockets with his left index finger, then ran down the line of the snout. "Yes. . . ." he said. "Tonight we can begin the work."

"Tonight?" Cei blurted.

"Can we start sooner?" Merlin sneered. He looked at Arthur. "I'll need a man to read the responses," he said. "One who won't run if something goes—"

"All right, I'll come myself," said the king with a nod. Arthur's attention was on the reliquary.

Impatience and the nearness of triumph drove Merlin to retort unthinkingly, "Come and read responses? Read? Read?"

Arthur went white. Maul, hearing the grating sound of drawn steel, looked up swiftly to see which guard would strike the blow. But the king took a deep breath and said, "Of course. I'll send for Lancelot, then. He can read."

"Mael will read your responses," said Veleda unexpectedly from behind the Irishman. Even Merlin had forgotten her after the casket was opened.

Mael twisted around to look at her, trying to discern in Veleda's placid expression what she meant to accomplish. There was nothing to be seen. Mael chuckled, acting on instinct. "I'll bet your Lancelot still has trouble talking through the teeth I broke for him before I left," he said. "I'll take care of your responses."

Merlin's gaze flickered from Veleda to Mael and back again. The wizard frowned. "You think I'd be afraid, don't you?" he asked the woman. "You don't think I'd dare display my powers in front of a—" his wand stroked—"a pawn of yours? We'll see." Merlin's eyes shifted back to Mael. "And you think you'd be able to read Latin letters, Irishman?"

To a British warrior, the question would have been no insult. The wizard might not even have meant it for one. Mael's head snapped back as if his face had been slapped. The Ard Ri's Guard had been an assemblage of scholars as surely as of athletes, ever since it was founded two centuries before by the great Cormac mac Airt. Mael reacted in much the same way as he would have to a suggestion that he could not out-wrestle an old woman. "My ancestors were kings in Miletos, Briton, when wolves chased your scampering forebears into the trees," he said. "I can read Ogam or Greek letters or Latin. If you British were civilized enough to have a script of your own, I would have learned to read that as well in the High King's school."

Cei grunted and started to raise his sword. Merlin laid his omnipresent willow switch across the seneschal's wrist without taking his eyes off Mael. The angry Briton froze with a surprised look on his face. Merlin gave Mael an ugly grin. "You think you're a bold man, do you, Irishman?" he said. "You'll have had need to be before this night is out." He turned to Arthur. "We can finish this within the hour if you'll get us horses. I already have everything prepared at the cave in the bluff west of here."

"The old corral?" Arthur queried.

"That's right. And I intend to use it as a corral again—though for a very different sort of cattle."

The king shrugged and called to his guard officer. "Three horses. At once."

Merlin led, riding faster than the overcast night made safe, in Mael's opinion. The road was well defined but showed few signs of use in the recent past. Cei was stumbling directly behind the wizard, trying to light his king's path with the inadequate lantern. Mael checked to be sure Veleda rode comfortably. She grinned back at him, amused that he even thought she might be having trouble. Mael pressed his horse forward a little to put him alongside Arthur.

"Where is it we're going?" he asked.

Arthur's mouth quirked at the suggestion of equality in the question. "There's a row of limestone hills half a mile from the main building," he answered mildly enough. "One of them has a cave in it, a small entrance but a belly the size of a church. It used to be a stable."

"Umm. Then why don't you use it?"

The king's smile grew a little broader. "I said," he repeated, "there's one small entrance. I don't want my people to get in the habit of stabling their mounts in places they can't get out of fast. They only have to do that one night on patrol and I've lost a whole sector of border." He glanced back over his shoulder. "Did you really think you had to bring your whore along?" he asked.

Mael laughed. "Didn't ask her to come," he said, "but I'm glad of her company." He dropped back and rode the rest of the short distance beside Veleda. Neither of them spoke, but Mael knew that he had not lied to Arthur about the companionship.

The cave was in a long bulk of stone, an outcrop thirty feet high rather than a water-carven bluff. It was not sheer, but its one-to-one slope was too sharp for a man to climb it easily without using his hands. The cave mouth was at ground level, an egg-shaped hole squared off by the addition of door posts and a great iron-strapped gate of hardwood. Merlin dismounted at some distance from the opening. He tied his horse to one of a small copse of poplars. "We'll leave our horses here," he said, explaining, "they don't like to feel—power being used."

Mael's chest tightened. He did not speak or look at Veleda.

They all trudged toward the gate in file. Merlin paused and took the reliquary from Mael before he entered the cave. The wizard's eyes met those of the witch woman. "You don't come inside," he snapped. "I know the kind of trouble you'd cause."

Veleda's hair twitched like the mane of a beast. "Be assured," she said. "that god watches you whether I do or not."

"God!" Merlin sneered. "God! You don't know—you can't imagine—what I'm about to do!"

"I suspect that you can't imagine the evil you're about to do," the woman said. "A little knowledge . . . but what will be, will be. Go raise your ravening monster, little man."

The wizard's eyes clouded. He passed his willow wand between himself and Veleda three times. Without a word he touched the center of her tunic with the leafy end of the branch. Veleda laughed and reached up with her right hand. She broke the tip between her fingers, gripped the center of the wand and snapped it, too, and reached for Merlin's hand. He snatched himself away with a curse and flung the wand out into the darkness.

Still scowling, he took the lantern from Cei. "You," he said. "You stand out here and see that we aren't disturbed."

The seneschal stiffened at the tone. He looked doubtfully at Mael, even more doubtfully at the wizard himself. "Leader," he said, "I don't think you ought to go in there alone with—"

"Do as the man says, Cei," Arthur snapped. "Merlin's doing what I told him to do, and I can handle the Irishman—needs must." The king and Mael eyed each other appraisingly. Then, ducking their heads under the low lintel, they followed Merlin into the cave.

The single lantern could not illuminate the cavity within. From the opening it expanded so suddenly that Mael suspected parts of the hill face must be eaten almost through. It had been hollowed by water, not the hand of man; wherever the light shone, from the ceiling down the walls to shoulder height, the surface gleamed with the soft pearl of flow rock. Lower down, the dissolved and redeposited calcium carbonate had been worn away or fouled by the beasts stabled in the cave in past times. The air had a still, musty odor. Ancient dung covered the floor, trampled and compacted until it had become almost as dense as the limestone beneath. The cave was over twenty feet wide and its walls stretched back further than the light could follow, but there was no breeze to hint at a second opening to this bubble in the rock.

As Merlin had said, his paraphernalia was already ordered within. The wizard stepped first to a seven-branched lampstand and began to light the separate wicks with a spill of papyrus. Mael had first assumed the stand was Jewish. As it better illuminated itself, it became obvious that the object was not Jewish at all—not even as Judaism was misunderstood and libeled by gentile sources. Mael had seen worse things than that stand, but it did not mean that he cared for the lovingly crafted abomination.

The seven lamps displayed the rest of Merlin's gear clearly. Most striking was a brazier resting on a tripod and already laid with sticks of charcoal. A grill was mounted above the fire pan on narrow arms; it was raised more than a foot above the surface of the coals. The metal was black and without decoration, apparently wrought iron.

Two cases of sturdy wood stood nearby. One was a cylinder whose lid was askew to display a number of scrolls resting endwise within. The winding rods were tagged, but Mael could not read the titles without making an obvious effort to do so. He kept a rein on his curiosity. Scrolls of both papyrus and vellum were represented. One of the latter had a gilt fore-edge and a pattern of tiny agates set into the knobs of the winding rods.

The other case was of less common pattern. It was full of chemicals, each in a separate jar in one of the scores of pigeonholes into which the narrow chest was divided. The containers were generally pottery, but a few were stone and one was of glass so clear that a king would have been proud to sip his wine from it. A sliding lid could close the chest, but that had already been untied and leaned against the wall Across the top of the chest was a silver scriber, an arthame, some two feet long. Mael at first mistook the instrument for the weapon it resembled. Then he noticed that the edges of the blade were blunt and that its rippled pattern was only a depiction of a flattened serpent's body. The tail tip, polished with wear, was the point. The head and neck straightened to form a guardless hilt.

Merlin set the lantern on the floor. His hands twitched absentmindedly. When he realized that they were playing with his missing wand, he cursed under his breath. The wizard plucked a shred of willow bark from under a thumbnail. Shooting a vicious glance at the Irishman, Merlin turned his face to the far end of the cave and muttered an incantation. The lamps cast on the wall the capering shadow of what Mael was blocked from seeing by the wizard's body. When Merlin faced around again, he was holding another willow switch. This one was thin and only a yard long. "The wood has eternal life," the wizard muttered to his audience in fuzzy explanation. He became more alert and looked again at Mael. Then he ran the tip of the wand across the sticks of charcoal in the brazier. Where the willow touched, the black turned white with ash. The brazier itself began to glow and stink of hot iron.

Mael grinned. His stomach was turning over with the memory of other magic he had watched. "You must be a delight on a winter bivouac," he said.

Merlin reached into the case of scrolls and took out one of the parchments. "Read this over," he directed Mael. "Not aloud! I have to ready the—rest of this." The wizard set his wand on the box of chemicals and picked up the arthame. Ignoring both men—he had not paid the king any attention since they entered the cave—Merlin began drawing lines and symbols in the lumpy floor. The design was centered on the lighted brazier.

Mael unrolled the first column-width of the scroll. He began to read. At first he thought there was something wrong with the letters. But no, they were plain enough. It was just that the words they formed made no sense at all. . . . "This isn't in Latin," the Irishman said aloud, thinking Merlin had given him the wrong scroll.

The wizard looked up from the pentacle he was scribing. He smirked. "I didn't say it was. The letters are Latin; the language itself is a good deal older than Rome, Irishman. Or Miletos."

Mael frowned but concentrated on the manuscript again. Its format puzzled him until he realized that what he held was a list of long antistrophes, each of them ten or more lines in length. Instead of copying out the strophes as well, the scribe had merely indicated the first speaker with the Greek letter "delta" wherever Mael's portion ended. None of the words made any sense, but Mael felt a compulsion to begin speaking them aloud. His frown deepened.

Merlin finished scratching on the floor. He set the arthame down and picked up the willow again. "Well," he demanded, "do you think you're ready, Irishman?"

Mael nodded, refusing to acknowledge either the challenge or the hostility in the wizard's tone. "Yes," he said.

"Believe me," Merlin went on, "this is no joke. If you start, you have to finish. If you panic, you'll be in worse danger than you can imagine."

Mael thought of violet serpents lighting the shadowed deck. "I can imagine a lot," he said. "And I don't panic."

"Then stand over there," Merlin directed, pointing to one of the reentrant angles of the pentacle, "but don't scuff the line. Don't even lean over it after we start."

Mael obeyed. Heat thrown off by the brazier brushed his legs below the trousers.

The wizard carefully took the lough monster's skull out of the reliquary. Barehanded he set the yellowed bones on top of the grill. Then he bent over again and took a pinch of something from one of the opened jars of chemicals. When Merlin tossed the powder on the charcoal, orange smoke bloomed up and briefly hid the whole apparatus. The wizard coughed and swore under his breath. He took a pinch of white chemical from another jar. Nothing happened when he cast that as well into the fire. Nodding approval, the wizard plucked another scroll from the case. Finally he took up his position at the peak of the pentagram across the brazier from where Mael stood. He gave the Irishman a grin that was almost a rictus beneath his glazed eyes. Then he began to intone the spell.

Waiting made Mael nervous despite himself. The wizard's voice was higher than normal when he chanted. The timbre was not so much feminine as bestial, that of a small dog yapping something close to words. Mael shot a glance behind him at the king. Arthur was hunched against the wall of the cave. He had drawn his sword and was resting it point down in the gritty flooring. The king's hands lay on the cross guard and his long fingers were twined around the hilt. Arthur's face was as hard as the steel blade.

Merlin broke off at the end of the strophe. He dipped his wand at Mael like a choirmaster's baton. Mael gulped his throat clear and began to sound the unfamiliar syllables. At first the Irishman spoke slowly, afraid to misaccent or stumble over the gibberish. When he had begun, though, Mael found his mouth was shaping naturally to the words. They rolled out with a rightness not affected by the fact that they were still unintelligible. Even that was changing subtly. Though the words had no meaning, they left behind them an aura of purpose. When the passage ended, Mael stopped. He was breathing hard and listening with new ears to Merlin taking up the chant. It was only then that Mael realized that the last of the words he had "read" were on the next column of his scroll. He had not unrolled it. His fingers fumbled as he did so.

Merlin threw something more on the fire as the Irishman began his second passage. A thin, green tendril wound upward toward the ceiling. The smoke trembled like a lutestring at the impact of the readers' voices. The cave was getting colder. Mael thought for a time that the chill was in his imagination, but he noticed puffs of vapor from Merlin's mouth as he read.

The litany caromed back and forth between the speakers, proceeding toward the end of each scroll. Merlin dusted the fire with further chemicals without any significant effect on the flames or on the chill that utterly permeated the cave. Finally the wizard completed his last invocation and, beating the strokes with his wand, shouted the response aloud with Mael: "Sodaque! Sodaque! SODAQUE!"

The skull above the coals wavered and collapsed inward. The air was full of the stink of fresh blood. On the grill in place of the dead bones pranced a pigeon-sized creature with strong hams and a pair of wings instead of forelegs. The beast was covered all over with scales, black and with the suggestion of translucent depth that a block of smoky quartz gives. Its head and neck were serpentine. A long tail, thrust out stiffly to balance the weight of the forequarters, was the length of neck and torso together.

The creature's eyes were small and cruel and a red so intense that it seemed luminous. "My wyvern!" Merlin cried out joyfully. He dropped the scroll and began to dance with his hands clasped above his head. The wyvern launched itself from the grill and sailed around it in a tight circle. One of the scale-jeweled wings spread into the air above a sideline of the pentacle. The beast glanced away as though it had struck a solid wall. Shrieking with high-pitched anger, the wyvern opened its mouth and spurted a needle of azure flame as long as its whole body.

Mael looked at the capering wizard, then back at the dragon. He stepped away from the pentacle and began to laugh full-throatedly, clutching his sides. It was as much the anticlimax to his fear as the actual ludicrousness of the tiny monster that was working on the Irishman.

The chirping wyvern had had yet a third effect on the king. Arthur's face lost its death-mask placidity. He gaped. Then his expression began to contort with fury. "That?" he shouted. "That will lay the Saxons at my feet?" The king stepped around the pentagram with his sword raised. His eyes were fixed on Merlin.

The wizard was too caught up in his triumph even to hear the king's words, but the oil lamps threw multiple images of the sword past him to the cave wall. Merlin turned, suddenly sober. "Wait!" he cried. "Leader—it will grow!"

Mael had backed against the wall. He held his left arm across his body where the tunic sleeve hid his other hand's grip on his dagger hilt. Arthur had paused an instant before striking. Merlin half crouched. His wand was raised, but the fear in his eyes was certain. Whatever the power was he had used to block Cei's hand, the wizard did not care to chance it against his king in a murderous rage. "Leader, this is what I meant to do," he said. He stretched out his left hand in supplication. "Other people have tried to raise dragons full grown. That's dangerous, suicide—nobody but a god, perhaps, can control something that big from the first."

Arthur did not relax his stance or gaze, but he began to lower his long sword to an on-guard position. The wizard straightened, letting his wand tip fall in turn. "This one—" he used his elbow to indicate the wyvern so as not to break the lock his eyes had gained on Arthur's—"is small and I can control it. It's going to get bigger—very much bigger, you needn't fear. But I'll still have power over it, because the power will increase, too. You'll have your weapon in a few weeks, and you'll have a weapon you can really direct instead of being something all-devouring and masterless. A less able student might have raised a real monster in his ignorance."

The tension was gone. The wyvern squawked again and perched on the grill. It was apparently oblivious to the heat. Mael said, "You know, I've heard a notion like that before. One of the lordlings in—where I grew up. He decided he'd start lifting a newborn bull calf once a day, so in a year he'd be strong enough to lift a grown bull." Mael grinned at Arthur. "It wasn't near that long before he'd broken his back trying, of course. But it was an interesting notion."

"You can read, Irishman," Merlin snarled, "but don't think you can teach me sorcery because of that! You know nothing. Nothing!" To Arthur the wizard added quickly, "Leader, in a few weeks you'll march beneath a power that no prince has ever equaled."

Arthur sheathed his sword. For a moment he watched first Mael, then the wyvern, askance. Then he said, "Explain the dragon to me, wizard. If I have to feed it to full size, I'll need to make plans."

"Oh, it won't need to eat at all," Merlin said, with a return of his giggly good humor. He began bustling about his paraphernalia, readying it to leave. "Not in this world at least. You see, what you think is a dragon, what looks like a dragon, is really thousands and thousands and uncounted thousands of dragons. Each of them for—well, not even an eyeblink. It's nowhere near that long a time. When the dragon seems to move—" he pointed with his wand. The wyvern reacted by screeching and throwing itself forward, to rebound again from the invisible wall—"it is really a series of dragons. A whole row of them moving each for an instant into this universe from one in which wyverns can exist."

"One exists right there," Arthur said irritably, pointing at the tiny creature. It was again swooping about its prison.

"But only because of my magic," Merlin replied, "and only for the briefest moment. Then it's back in the cosmos I drew it from and another—from a wholly separate existence—is there in its place for another hairsbreadth of time. Now, that's what others have done as well, yes, the ones who knew the path, the essence of power. But I—instead of having the same wyvern repeat itself from myriads of identical universes—I added a time gradient as well. This way each of the creatures is a little older, a little larger than the one before. And so on, forever, as long as I wish."

"As I wish, wizard," the king reminded him in no pleasant voice.

"As you wish, Leader," Merlin agreed obsequiously.

"If that's true," Mael interjected, "and I won't say that it can't be, I'm no sorcerer as you say . . . but why does the beast snap at you here in this world? You say it's only the moment's wraith from a world in which you aren't there to snap at."

"Yes, that's right," Merlin said, bobbing his head with enthusiasm at having an intelligent audience to display himself before. "But something's there, don't you see? There isn't any end of worlds, worlds with wyverns leaping and squalling and spitting flame. It's my control that chooses which world is plucked of which wyvern . . . that and a sort of . . ." The wizard frowned and sobered for the first time since Arthur had lowered his sword. "Well, a sort of inertia that the process itself gives it. I can't be ordering the creature to breathe or telling it which muscles to tense so that it can take a step. That sort of thing just—" he shrugged—"goes on. And with nothing else appearing, the . . . simulacrum . . . made from thousands of wyverns . . . will act by itself as though it were one real wyvern, here and now."

"And wyverns have nasty tempers," Mael concluded aloud. As if in response, the little creature sent another jet of flame toward the men. Mael's skin prickled even at a distance. He noticed that the fire crossed the wall of the pentagram easily, though the wyvern itself could not.

Arthur walked closer and stared at the details of the beast that leaped and scrabbled vainly to get at him. The king prodded at it with his sheathed sword, chuckling at the fury with which the wyvern's fangs and tiny claws attacked. Merlin tensed. The king tugged back his sword, stripping the dragon from it at the inscribed line. Still chuckling, Arthur twisted the scabbard on the baldric from which it hung. He saw the leather shredded where the beast had clawed it.

Then the king stopped laughing. With a muffled curse, he dropped the sheath and slid the blade free to examine it. The yellow light gleamed on deep scorings in the steel itself. Arthur grunted and shot the sword home again. "Stronger than I had thought," he said to Merlin in a neutral voice.

"They're not at all like things of this world," the wizard agreed. "They couldn't even breathe if they were here, if they had to stay. Things weigh much more in their worlds and the air is much thicker, besides being different. That's how they can fly, even though they're huge when they grow. They're like whales in the waves of our seas. And they're very strong, yes. . . ."

Merlin closed and thonged shut the case of scrolls. He fastened the chest of chemicals as well. Taking the books and his wand under his left arm, the wizard walked toward the cave mouth. Pausing to transfer the arthame to his free hand, he scribed a single line between the gateposts. He added symbols on the outer side of the line while he muttered the same half-sensed sounds he had used when drawing the pentacle. Finished, Merlin swung the door open. Cei, standing close beyond it, turned around with hope and concern limned on his face by the lamps still burning inside.

"Leader," Merlin directed, "if you'll pick up the lantern—the stand can stay here, I think."

Arthur nodded and obeyed. Mael picked up the chest of chemicals without being asked and started to follow the king toward the gate.

"Don't touch the line or the words," Merlin warned. "Just step over them." To Mael he added, as if an afterthought, "Oh, Irishman—would you just smudge a side of the pentacle before we leave? There's no problem with the barrier drawn here."

Mael frowned. From the darkness behind the waiting seneschal came Veleda's shout of warning: "Mael! Use the silver!"

Mael reacted before rage had time to flush across the wizard's face, darting his hand out to pluck the arthame from the older man. Warrior and sorcerer stared at each other without speaking or needing to. Beyond stood Arthur, amused the way a certain type of dog owner can be as he watches a pair of his animals about to mix lethally. Cei's sword was drawn. The seneschal stood ready to slaughter both men if his Leader allowed him to. Cei did not understand the silent quarrel, but he abominated both participants.

Mael flipped the arthame so that he held it by the grip. He spat deliberately on the ground between him and Merlin; then he walked back to the pentacle. Under his left arm the Irishman still carried the box of chemicals. The angry wyvern watched his approach and redoubled its efforts to claw through the barrier. Mael slashed the air in front of it with the arthame. Screeching, the beast threw itself backwards. It rolled over as it tangled its tail and legs in its haste.

Mael knelt, eyeing the little monster. He drew the tip of the arthame through the inscribed pentagram. The wyvern spat fire in his direction but remained at a distance, curling and hunching itself. Mael straightened and backed away with quick, fluid steps. When the Irishman was halfway between the gate and the marred pentacle, the wyvern launched itself at his face like a bolt from a ballista.

The box of chemicals Mael held saved his left arm, for it was pure reflex that threw it up to block the sudden attack. The dragon's speed was beyond anything its swoops and caracoles within the pentagram had led Mael to expect. As it clung to the sturdy box, the wyvern lanced blue fire which danced over the edges of the wood. It seared Mael's forearm. The Irishman cut blindly with the arthame, the instantaneous sweeping reaction of a man who has felt a spider leap to the back of his neck.

The silver arthame caught the wyvern squarely and slapped the beast away. The creature bounced on the cave floor, knocking the lampstand over. The oil burst up in a flood of yellow light and a rush of heat. The dragon sat in the middle of the conflagration and yowled angrily. A long, red streak swelled where silver had touched the ebon scales. The wyvern bent and licked at the wound, oblivious of the pool of blazing oil surrounding it. Mael took two sliding steps and leaped the barrier drawn at the gate. The other three men gave back swiftly at his movement. The dragon, catching a peripheral glimpse of the motion, threw itself suddenly after Mael. The beast was an instant too slow, rebounding from the line just after the Irishman had crossed it. The creature sent a spiteful stylus of flame out into the night behind its intended victim.

Arthur still held the lantern. Mael turned the chest of chemicals to the light. The wood was blackened in a circle the size of a dinner plate. In the center, the panel was pierced by a hole large enough to pass a man's thumb. The ceramic jar of copper salts within had shattered. The fumes stank of hellfire. The flame had sprayed Mael's forearm with half-burned splinters blasted from the box and raised several blisters. Mael dropped the chemicals without a word. The chest jounced, breaking several of the containers from the sound it made when it hit. The Irishman flung the arthame to the ground at Merlin's feet. Its point sank several inches into the soil, making the metal ring with the shock. "Your beast has bad manners," Mael said. "It could be that I should've fed him the poker sideways, I am thinking. Or fed it to you, wizard."

If Merlin intended a retort, he swallowed it. From his other side, Veleda spoke. Her hair slithered as if in harmony with her words. "You're a man who rolls a rock down a mountainside and expects to run with it, Merlin. You can't control a landslide just because you had the power to begin it. There are no fools in the world so great as the ones who think themselves knowing."

Merlin snarled with the same frustrated rage that wracked the thing he had summoned. He turned and stalked to his horse, still holding the container of books. Arthur laughed. "You know, Irishman," he said, "I'm beginning to think you could be a credit to my Companions—if you lived long enough."

Mael still shook with anger and the shock of his near death at the wyvern's claws. "Maybe I don't shit well enough on command," he spat.

"Neither do my Huns," Arthur replied mildly. "Sometimes . . . but I think we've seen and done all we care to, here tonight. Yes . . . You'd better get to your billet. Tomorrow's a day of training, you know."

Mael laughed. He bowed to the king, then followed Veleda to the horses. Behind him he could faintly hear the dragon hiss and squall.

* * *

Mael and Veleda slid from their mounts and unsaddled in front of the recruit lines. They lashed the beasts to the rail placed there, even though the recruits had not yet been issued horses. At the door to his and Starkad's dwelling, Mael paused and said to the woman, "Just a second. My friend sleeps light, and he tends to—react when he's suddenly—" Mael broke off because the door flew open. Starkad's huge right hand caught the Irishman by the throat.

"Wait a minute!" Mael gurgled, choked as much by his laughter as by the Dane's fingers. Starkad broke his grip and the two men began to hug and pummel each other's backs.

"Figured a dumb turd like you'd get back when any decent man'd be asleep!" the Dane thundered, while Mael was shouting, "You know, I met somebody even bigger than you in Ireland? And may the Dagda club me dead if he wasn't stupider, too!"

"Hey, quiet the hell down!" grumbled a voice in Gothic German from the billet beside them.

Starkad's face smoothed, his mouth dropping into a half grin. He loosed Mael and walked to the door of the other room. He was barefoot and wore only a tunic that fell midway on his hairy thighs. The Dane kicked flatfooted, his right heel catching the hinge side of the door and flinging the whole panel into the room. "Come on out," he invited pleasantly. No one stirred inside. Starkad walked back to Mael and Veleda. "And they say that Goths are tough," he muttered.

"Look," said Mael, "much as I'd like to help you mop up this whole army, I'm just about dead on my feet. I was, even before you started pounding on me. Suppose you can let me rack out and keep the damned cadre away when they come around in the morning?"

"Later in the morning," the Dane corrected him. "Yes, I think I can do that thing."

"Oh," Mael said. "Ah . . . this is Veleda." Starkad's expression changed, not exactly in the fashion Mael had expected. The Irishman misinterpreted the look of appraisal, none the less. He licked his lips and said, "Ah, Starkad, I know . . .Look, tomorrow they can issue me another room—"

"No problem," the Dane said, bursting into a smile again. "We've shared by threes and fours before. And you needn't worry, I like my women with a little more meat on their bones, you know." He clapped Mael on the shoulder. "Come on, get some sleep so you can wake up and tell me what's been going on."

 

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Framed