The Dragon's Tapestry

“The dragon torments the city of Rune-dar when he is not flying in the south inner lands. He thinks the people there must know something of the wizard. I asked Crob to bring the sick and young from there to this house, thinking they would be safe here.” Camlach’s face was pale. “My brother is coming south­ward from Duma with fresh fighting men and stronger weapons. I had hoped he would be here by now.”

They watched as the dragon’s shadow circled around them, rippling black over the slope. At the foot of the hill, Crob and the small group of villagers crouched.

The dragon blocked the sun like a black cloud, and Marwen saw it for the first time with her mortal eyes. She was mesmer­ized. Its wings were like veined sails on huge bones, full of bloody magic. Its neck arched in a dark ageless pride, and from its mouth it vomited a bright hot wind.

Camlach unsheathed his sword.

“What are you doing?” Marwen asked.

“Crob will die and the people with him. He was following my orders.” Marwen watched aghast as Camlach stood in the door­way taking several deep breaths and then ran with all his strength down the hill, shouting challenges and insults to the dragon as he went. Torbil cursed and followed at his heels. Perdoneg laughed, and a star of fire blazed from his mouth. The wind throbbed drumlike beneath the beast’s immense wings, and on the ground below, Marwen could see the dragon’s thin black shadow darken the faces of the villagers. There was a gleam of arrows in the sun, needlelike against the dark scaly hide of the dragon’s belly. Marwen stopped breathing as she saw the creature descend, roaring his anger and filling the sky with an ash-flaked heat. One man fell, engulfed in flames, twisting and writhing silently in fire. All around him the villagers screamed. Clutching their faces, falling on their children, they let the man die, the man Marwen knew was Crob.

 She ran from the house on to the crest of the hill.

“Perdoneg!” she cried. “I am Marwen, daughter of Nimroth. I have come.” Though her voice could not have carried, the dragon hovered, spun about and bucked, and began to fly toward her, forgetting his play with the terrified villagers and with Camlach.

Marwen ran back into the house, stood in the center of the room and clamped a hand over her mouth, quelling her nausea, swallowing her screams. Perdoneg’s tapestry was here. She could feel its potent magic. But she had covered it too well with her own spells, spells on top of Nimroth’s spells, layers of magic like dust, like fine ash.

She threw her arms into the air and then bent them over her head as if to protect it from descending flames. She felt a cooling sweat on her forehead. From a great distance away, it seemed, Marwen heard the dragon’s voice like wind in a canyon, “Come to me Marwen. You are mine.”

She looked up, trying to breathe normally, feeling the magic flood through her soul like music, a heavy horrible music, a strain remembered from a nightmare. “I need to know where the tapestry of Perdoneg is,” she whispered aloud into the deep­ening dimness of the house, for Perdoneg blocked the sun from the window. “What spell? What spell?”

But there was no answer, no spell, no answer. The greatrug was beneath her feet felt cool and silken, and her legs tingled weakly. Her head felt heavy on her neck. She sat on the rug, seeming to float gently down.

And so now all was lost. Perdoneg would take her to his king­dom of lost and unfinished souls, and then he would return and rule all of Ve. Sometimes light and truth prevailed, and some­times in the ages of man, dark and untruth prevailed. Her name would go down forever in the songs that survived as the last of the wizards, the wizard who failed before the magic of Perdoneg. And she would live the long night of death with the vision of good gentle Crob burning to bones before her eyes. In that moment she almost wished she were soulless.

“I am waiting, Marwen, daughter of Nimroth,” the dragon hissed with a voice like a hailstorm.

She groaned and lay on the greatrug, pressing her face into its dusty threads. Before her eyes, woven into the rug, was the image of a white wing.

She touched it. She brushed at it, pressed it with her hand.

She sat up quickly, her heart pressing against her breastbone. Wildly, roughly, she brushed the dust away and scraped with her fingernail at the hardened skin of bird droppings until a white wingwand appeared. More frantically she beat at the dust until it choked her. She could see some of the designs in the rug.

On her hands and knees, forgetting to breathe or speak, Marwen ran her hands over the rich pictures that some skilled hand had woven: the white wingwand circled in ice gozzys, the flower of death; the staff also circled in white ice gozzys; the symbols of the skull, bloodpetal and witchwafer.

She pushed the table aside. It toppled over.

“This is not a greatrug,” she cried aloud to no one. “This is Perdoneg’s tapestry!”