The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,220

narrow opening or channel in the world … or rather out of it, the sides of which were scraping her raw. And yet the shape that was emerging seemed larger by far than what had contained it. It made no sense. Quare could not tell any longer what was real and what the product of his fever. The spores that had been falling like a gentle dusting of sand now pelted them like hailstones, forcing him to bury his head in the crook of his bandaged arm. Then he heard Tiamat snarl again as her body shuddered with the impact of more bolts than he could count. She gathered herself and, with a deafening roar, gave a mighty leap.

She did not come down.

Quare was in the grasp of claws larger than his body. They held him in a gentle but unbreakable grip, like the bars of an iron cage. On the other end of those claws was the dragon he had first seen in the vision he’d experienced at Lord Wichcote’s house. Tiamat, as she truly was: sleek, sinuous, serpentine, with scales as blue as the sky … so blue they seemed translucent. She was huge; he did not see how she could have squeezed herself into the body of the woman who had kissed him.

As before, the effect of her presence was immediate and intense. He had no sense that resistance was possible; it was not a matter of will or even desire but instead the plain working of some natural – or supernatural – law to which he was subject by virtue of being human. It had been no different inside the egg; there, too, he had yielded up his seed in reflexive paroxysms that were anything but pleasant. For a time, he was lost in it, swallowed up.

But at last there was nothing left. He was limp, wrung out, fever-stricken. Only then did Quare begin to take in his surroundings, though in a dreamy kind of way. Tiamat was flying with a peculiar wingless grace, seeming to swim through the air like a snake squirming through water; she did not glance down at him or seem to be aware of him at all other than by the fact that she did not drop him. There must have been a dozen or more crossbow bolts embedded in her body, but she seemed unaware of them as well. They were like thorns in the hide of an elephant.

Quare knew at once that he was back in the Otherwhere. Not so much by anything he saw – the desert landscape of reddish sand and rolling dunes far beneath them, over which Tiamat’s stark shadow glided, clinging to every indentation and swell, might have been the sands of some African or Asian desert undulating below the baleful, white-hot sun – as by the overwhelming impression he had that everything could change in an instant, that the underlying reality of the scene was very different from what his senses were equipped to perceive. He had felt the same way when Longinus had first taken him into the Otherwhere, and it had been much the same within the egg.

The egg that Aylesford was carrying to France.

At that, recalled to the urgency of things, Quare called to Tiamat, but his voice was too weak, his words borne away by the blast of the wind that was the sole indication of the dragon’s prodigious speed. Where was she taking him? And what would become of him when they got there? Much has been asked of you, she had told him. Little has been offered in return. That is about to change. But Quare had had enough change to last a lifetime. He didn’t want any more.

The desert stretched ahead without end. The sun might have been nailed to the sky.

Tiamat flew on. She did not slow, did not seem to tire. She did not once address a word to him, or glance in his direction. He wondered if she had forgotten about him. Racked by fever, he shivered and baked by turns.

It was in this state that he noticed a second shadow on the sand below. It was small, and at first he thought it was not a shadow at all but something physically present on the ground, a herd of horses, perhaps, or a caravan. But it grew, spreading like a black stain … or an angry cloud rising up to confront them. Or no, he realized dimly, with a certain distant interest, not