Dream Magic Page 31

  The Great Tree stood motionless. If Oberon had not witnessed it walking, he would not have believed it possible. He would have declared anyone claiming to have seen the tree walking to be raving mad.

  They watched and milled about uncomfortably. Finally, the tree lost patience. It returned with ponderous steps, and they retreated before it.

  An amazing thing happened then. The tree bent forward, and limbs that had previously been hidden by the leafy growths that covered the monster reached down. They felt for the rope and the tree it was tied to.

  “Let us hack away its limbs!” shouted Oberon.

  “I shall burn the right flank,” said Gudrin, her hands running with flame again. “Oberon, keep your elves to the left.”

  Oberon nodded to Gudrin, then looked toward Morgana for approval. She gave him a short nod and the group charged, howling.

  Tomkin, for his part, stood upon the fallen log that was the tree’s anchor and began to pump his tiny fists in the air. A peal of thunder rang out, and everyone in the forest knew the Rainbow was marching here swiftly from whatever dark corner of the universe it was summoned.

  As they closed with it and began hacking and burning, the tree reacted like a blind giant. It thrashed at them with wild strokes of its lower branches. Often, these hammer blows fell on nothing but air, or occasionally scooped up earth and threw it in a dark mass. Once in a while an elf and his horse were caught and either crushed down, or swept up by a branch and thrown in a screaming, flying spin high into the air. When at last they crashed down, none of them moved again.

  The battle was strange and incoherent, but it did rage for a full minute before the Rainbow arrived. When at last the shimmering giant came close to the tree it had been called to war upon, the two regarded each other with surprise.

  As tall and imposing as the Rainbow was, it was like a child facing a towering man. For some reason, the tree seemed to be able to see the Rainbow, while the other smaller folk around it were invisible.

  The tree reached out with a dozen limbs and gripped the Rainbow’s glimmering flesh. The struggle was brief and horrible. The tree tore the Rainbow asunder, tossing gibbets of multi-hued gels and bubbling flesh this way and that. Limbs were torn loose and heaved in spinning, dripping masses.

  The Rainbow only had time to give one awful howl of death, before it was overcome and destroyed. Still, even in its short period of existence, it had scarred the tree. There were black spots where the lightning-filled hands had gripped it, and two branches had been plucked free and thrown to the ground. Each of these was as big around as a full-sized tree in the Haven.

  “NO MORE!” roared a voice.

  Every elf cringed and clutched their ears when they heard it. The sound was as deafening and full of malice as an avalanche coming down the side of Snowdon itself. None there had any doubt they’d heard Myrrdin’s voice, somehow amplified to a level suitable for his new body.

  The tree bent then and ripped at the log that held it. If the elf-rope was unbreakable, the fallen log was not. Huge chunks of white tree-flesh flew in every direction. Myrrdin beat his fists blindly on the log until it shattered and was utterly destroyed.

  Then he turned and ran. The coursers picked themselves up and stared for a shocked moment before giving chase.

  Hunting horns were lifted to white lips and given wind. The wailed and warbled, calling back those who had fled earlier. Soon, the entire party was in full gallop, following the rampaging monster.

  Oberon went with the rest, grinning ear-to-ear. He had no idea how they were going to bring down this titan, but he was game and willing to try.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Walking Tower

  Myrrdin soon found his stride and outdistanced his pursuers. He was only moving at a fast walk—but when one’s numerous legs are fifty-feet or more long, the pace is surprising. Like a strange, tall centipede the Great Tree scuttled over the forest floor. The only thing that slowed him down were other trees. At first, these were a problem. The largest trees in the Great Erm were as big as Myrrdin’s new body. But soon he left the biggest behind and was able to wade through the smaller growths like a man in a pond.

  His eyes were not at the crown, as a man’s should be. His human form, ensconced like a worm in a rotted hole, was in the mid-section of the trunk. When he finally broke free of the tallest growths, his vision was infinitely enhanced. Instead of seeing nothing but branches and leaves, he could see over the tops of the dark green canopy and his navigation became easier.

  Following the path he’d taken when he’d first taken flight from the elf village wasn’t difficult. The Erm was fast-growing, but the trail of damage was still there to be seen. The sea of green had been disturbed in a noticeable pattern—a nearly straight path leading south.

  He followed the path and marched as swiftly as he was able. At first, the stinging sensations of his pursuers plagued him. A dozen tiny cuts, burns and stabbing needles goaded his flailing roots. He longed to turn at bay and sweep them away with great scoops of his branches—but he didn’t dare try it yet.

  His control of the tree was far from perfect. It was like riding a young horse that had yet to be broken to the saddle. It bucked and twitched, making random movements that shook the branches and rattled the leaves. Worse, the structure of the tree itself was not sound. It was too young for this and the bark had already fractured in a dozen places. Like a sapling cut and used as hardwood, the wood was green and liable to snap if he pushed it too far. Just running from his pursuers put undue stress on the monster he’d so lovingly grown. Thinking about that caused a tear to roll down his dirty face, as he loved this tree as he did nothing else in the universe—save for Vaul itself.

  At last, however, after an hour had passed, he no longer felt the sting of the lash from behind. His hunters had been left in the distance. He was certain they were still pursuing him, of course. They could hardly lose their way, as he was cutting a swathe as wide as a river through the forest.

  But Myrrdin had a burning hope. His hope was a dark thing, a fantasy that should not be harbored in the mind of any sane man: He hoped the elves had left their children behind. He hoped the weakest, the sick, the injured and the helpless were still in the village. Upon them he would exact revenge. At least they could not flee, nor could they drive him off. He would do what he could to exterminate a generation of Oberon’s folk.

  When he reached the village at last, he did not bother to attempt stealth—it would have been impossible in any case. His body was so large, so thunderously loud, only a stone would not know of its coming.

  Since subtlety was impossible, he did the next best thing: he charged. His roots churned at an increased pace. He could feel the worn bark peeling away, revealing the white wood beneath, but he did not care. He lusted for a trickle of elfblood on his outstretched branches.

  He slammed into the outer wall of the village, smelling the stink of burning flesh as he did so. This last surprised him. Was that pork and burnt fur? Disgusting. How the elves had changed. They’d become degenerates. Well, he’d soon fix the matter.

  The wall went down like a fence of dry, woven sticks. It snapped and was ground down into the mud as the fantastic weight of the tree passed over it.

  With maniacal glee, Myrrdin trod upon the fresh-grown mushroom huts. He stomped each, popping it like a balloon. There was nothing left standing within a minute of his arrival.

  With the easy work finished, he paused and tried to listen. He knew there must be survivors—there must be! There were always a few that crawled from the wreckage and sought to save their miserable skins. The key to this phase of his rampage was to listen for them—to hear their cries and tiny, pleading voices. This would bring joy to him and swift destruction to those that begged for mercy.

  The tree didn’t have ears of carved wood, of course. And his own ears were too far from the ground to hear a squeaking voice at his feet. But when growing the Great Tree, he’d taken these things into account. It wou
ldn’t do to be deaf as well as blind to smaller beings. He’d laid hollow tubers from the bottom of the trunk up to the center, up to his chamber from which he drove it. The ends of these tubers flared and worked as speaking tubes. By scuttling around inside the trunk and listening closely to each of the tubers in turn, he was able to hear quite clearly what was going on at his feet.

  He did this now, crawling from tube to tube. There were eleven in all, and this took some time. But after two circuits, listening for half a minute at each, he lost patience. There were no cries. No screams, no desperate pleas for mercy and deliverance.

  Myrrdin grew sour. What was the meaning of this? Had he been cheated of his due? Were there truly no elf dead at his feet?

  He caused the tree to bend and reach low with its lowest limbs. The branches scratched up a dozen crushed mushrooms and other debris. Warily, he lifted these up to his loopholes and examined the wreckage carefully.

  Vast disappointment soon filled him. He’d destroyed an empty village. Not a soul remained. Could Oberon have been so insightful as to foresee this possibility? Although he was loath to admit it, the facts were plain. The enemy had escaped him.

  He loosed a howl of rage. He caused the tree to rotate slowly around, looking for something—anything he could do to discomfit Oberon.

  He crept to the very edge of his gloomy domain and peered down at the village from every possible angle. There was nothing worthy of note. Destroyed mushrooms—so what? They could grow new ones in a fortnight. The elves cared little for possessions in any regard. They were nomadic, and would simply build a new home in some other quiet vale Myrrdin would never find.

  It was enough to drive him mad. He’d almost given up and wandered off, knowing the hunting party might not be far behind, when he saw something notable and paused.

  Was that a small, young tree? Just there, to the west of the village proper. It was unlike anything else in view, as it wasn’t oversized. Saplings did grow in the Erm, of course. But they were unusual and generally cropped up in groves. This was a lone, young tree. A poplar tree, by the look of it.

  Myrrdin strode toward the growth and took hold of it by the crown. He grinned as he did so. Here, at least, was something the elves had planted and hopefully held dear.

  He pulled then, and the tree came up like a carrot ripped from the earth. It popped as it came up—he heard the sound clearly in his listening-tubes.

  Myrrdin frowned. A tree should not pop when one pulled it loose. It might crack, or rattle—but not pop.

  He thoughtfully lifted the tree, handing it from one branch to another all the way up his trunk. Dirt dribbled from the roots and showered his body with sand and twigs, but he ignored this.

  When at last he had the tree up to his eye level, he crept forth to his slits to examine it.

  The top of the tree was nothing unusual. It was like a thousand others along the bank of the Berrywine. But the roots…

  There was something there, at the base of the trunk, something that dangled like a bladder. In fact, it was dribbling liquid as he watched.

  He lifted the tree higher and examined its snaggled nest of roots. There, in the middle of the mass, was a pod of sorts.

  For a long moment, Myrrdin frowned at the pod. Then, suddenly, he knew. This was a prison like the one he’d been kept in for so, so long. At specially-grown bladder of some sort.

  It was translucent, and he thought he could see something squirming inside. Curious and filled with an unusual daring, Myrrdin used his own body to creep closer still. He extended a hand with a blade gripped in his bony fingers. With eyes gleaming, he cut open the bladder that hung from the uprooted poplar.

  A shower of dark burgundy liquid gushed out. A putrid odor met his nose, causing him to retreat.

  “What sorcery is this?” he muttered.

  Inside the bladder, as the liquid drained away and fell to shower the dead village at the base of the Great Tree, a figure squirmed.

  Myrrdin almost caused the branches to drop the tree. It would have been an easy thing to do. The entire affair was disgusting, and possibly dangerous. It was even conceivable that his sire had left this thing here to intrigue him and spring some kind of trap upon him—but that did seem unlikely.

  At last, he reached out and gripped a hand he saw hanging from the empty bladder. He tugged, and it slid free.

  To his surprise, Trev lay at his feet. He had to drag the boy farther into the bole lest he fall to his death.

  Myrrdin stood over the youth with his hands on his hips. His lips worked and squirmed with indecision. Trev appeared to be unconscious. It would have been an easy thing to kick him out of the tree; to let him fall to a quiet death with his kin. That might have been a final message to Oberon.

  But he paused. It was not pity, exactly, that stayed his hand. True, the boy had suffered the same fate as Myrrdin himself had. He’d doubtlessly been tricked and abused by Oberon. Myrrdin urged himself to be hard of heart. Nephew or not, he wasn’t a comrade, merely a tool to be used.

  After standing over Trev for a full minute, he grunted in annoyance and pulled him deeper into the gloom of the central chamber.

  Perhaps the boy knew something. He’d sent him to Oberon with orders to return with a report, and he would hear that report, by damn! Even if he had to revive the youth and nurse him back to health, he wanted to know what his spy had learned.

  * * *

  Several days later Ivor rode a dragon in the skies, soaring over Castle Rabing.

  An alarm sounded and every guard was called to man the walls. A dragon had not been sighted in the skies over the Haven in a century or more, and nothing struck fear into the hearts of brave men like a puff of flame dribbled from the jaws of such a predator.

  When the beast came lower and thus closer to the eye, the impressions were mixed. The beast was not large, but it did have an ogre riding on its back. An ogre! What a shock that was!

  Brand called out his guardsmen and had them wind back the javelins in their ballista. Nothing else could reach so high and bring such monsters down.

  The garrison had been on high alert in any case, frightened by whispers on the marches that armies were brewing in the Deepwood and beyond. No one knew how Morgana would attack, but this visitation from above looked like it could be nothing else.

  “Take careful aim!” roared Brand to his gunners. “When it dives, you’ll only get off a shot or two before it burns us. If you miss when it makes its run, hide below. The dragon looks young and probably doesn’t have enough flame in its belly to fill the entire tower.”

  The men looked terrified, but determined. Among them all, only Brand had ever seen a dragon, much less faced one in battle. He wasn’t running, so they would not shame themselves before him.

  In the end, it was one of the Wee Folk who saved the day, preventing a dreadful misunderstanding. When the dragon dropped lower over the castle, approaching cautiously from above, Brand was about to order the ballistae to fire, but a messenger bounded up the ramparts to the walls, screeching his name.

  “Lord Rabing! Brand! Wait!”

  In annoyance, Brand turned to see who called to him. It was not Tomkin, but another of his kind who he barely recognized. After a moment he knew who it was: Sophie, one of the Wee Folk who’d long ago been the midwife to his twin girls. He hadn’t realized she was in living in the wooded corner of his castle lands.

  On his back, the Axe stirred restlessly. It smelled battle and wanted to be part of it. He knew that if he took the weapon into his hands, he’d surely order the dragon to be shot down—and he might even split this Wee One in twain as well, just for spite.

  “Hold your fire,” he called out to the crew, “the dragon is coming down slowly enough. What are you saying, Sophie? Speak quickly, or hold your peace.”

  “A fine greeting for an old friend,” she complained.

  “I know you, and Telyn and I still love you, but this is battle. Tell me why I should allow this threat to come closer.”
>
  “Glad to see you recognize me at least. You must not shoot the dragon, Brand. Ivor rides the thing’s back. Kaavi sent me to beg you to hold your fire.”

  “Ivor?” Brand said, squinting up into the sky. “My eyes are keen enough, and I can see a shape rides the monster’s back. But how can you be so sure that’s Ivor himself? Doesn’t one ogre look like another?”

  “Not to its auntie, milord,” Sophie said, laughing. “And I might remind you that many among the Shining Folk have better eyesight than any human yet born.”

  “Hmmm,” Brand muttered. “Tell me what you see then. Is that Ivor up there?”

  Sophie squinted up into the blue sky. “I could not swear to it, but I would believe Kaavi.”

  Brand heaved a sigh and ordered his men to stand down. They grumbled and cranked their weapons to half-draw. With stern eyes and unsmiling faces, they watched as the ogre landed his dragon at the border of the wooded corner and dismounted. He gave the folk who surrounded him in a wide circle a cheery wave.

  “That does look like Ivor,” Brand muttered.

  He called for a horse and cantered swiftly toward the spot. Sophie bounded along beside him, keeping up easily enough.

  “I’m going to give that ogre a thrashing,” Brand complained. “He’s a fool, and a public menace. It was only by the grace of a Wee One’s swift feet he didn’t die today.”

  “Don’t go hard on the lad, Lord Rabing,” Sophie said. “His heart is in the right place, even if his brain is like a stone in a leather sack.”

  Brand chuckled at that, and soon they were close to the two monsters. The dragon turned him a malevolent eye. Brand was stricken immediately by the intellect he saw there. Dragons always disquieted men. They were entirely unlike our own race, but had excellent minds. The combination was very disturbing to meet in person.

  “Name yourself, dragon!” Brand cried.

  “I am Fafna, daughter of Fafnir,” said the dragon. Many of the men present gasped to hear the monster speak and as well to hear its lineage.