toothless. The jaws had crumbled from the extractions, and their collapse gave the dragon’s face—at once wolflike and serpentine—a boneless empty look.
Now he understood why the dwarves had smashed the teeth of the dragon killed at Southgate. He understood, too, what the rebel master Saijok Mahr must have done to get the creature Morlock remembered, the creature floating dead in Saijok’s subterranean pool. The dragon had pulled one of his own teeth so that it would grow into a mandrake . . . perhaps to do work that needed hands. (Morlock thought of the carven pillars where Saijok’s den opened up in Haukrull valley.) Then Saijok had killed it. If the sowing of teeth was the way dragons gave birth to their young (the words of the Dead Cor recurred to him: “they gave birth only in death”) Saijok’s act showed signs of an ultimate unsparing ruthlessness.
Staring down at the fallen dragon, he recognized it. This was not Saijok Mahr: the scales gleamed gold in the red light, not greenish black. The Triple Collar was gone and the toothless face was distorted, but Morlock guessed this was Vild Kharum. Saijok had at last claimed his victory, then, and had gone out into Haukrull to establish his mastery over the guile of masters.
Morlock wondered what action the guile would take now, since all questions of leadership were finally resolved. He watched the red-gold gleams of light on the dead dragon’s broken wings. In his mind each separate gleam took the form of a dragon settling in fire into one of the thousand valleys of the north. By the time winter ended they would be prepared to invade the southern holds. Who or what would stop them? There was no hope; the thing was ended. He had seen the future, growing like a patch of mushrooms in the dark under the mountains.
In the release that came with despair he gained new knowledge. He saw the chain of events he had participated in, now that they had come to an end, as an outsider. He saw, at last, the essential pattern. As Saijok had meant him to carry the challenge to Vild, so he must also have let Earno and Old Father Tyr pass. In Haukrull, they had either defeated Vild or been defeated by him—or their combat, perhaps, had been interrupted. In any case, at the suitable moment, Saijok Mahr intervened, defeated Vild (if he was not already slain), and drew him underground to reap the spoils of victory. Even as Morlock mourned for Tyr a part of his mind frankly admired Saijok’s stratagem: it had the accidental irregular elegance of a candle flame; it was the opposite of Earno’s obsessive and useless insistence on a fruitless course of action.
The guile might be far from here. They might even have moved their place of assembly from Haukrull. If that was so, Morlock was perhaps the safest person in the north, in this dark stone womb under the mountains. Yet he had come here seeking vengeance or death in fine epic fashion. . . . The irony sickened him. He felt as if he could not move, as if he were turned to stone. All he saw and heard made as little impression on him as if he had been stone. Standing there he was only conscious of the shudder of the dead stone heart of the mountains.
The light came then, and the noise, like the fall of a red thunderbolt. Morlock saw his own shadow, outlined in bright red light, crooked on the face of the dead dragon. Then the dimness returned, amid the echoes of the roar, and Morlock knew the master dragon had not yet departed to plunder the north. The stone floor shook as Saijok Mahr leapt toward him.
Morlock spun about, dark meditations evaporating in the moment of action. He raised the sword he still carried in his hand. He saw the dragon pause, stretch out its lizardlike neck and inhale. Morlock held the shield of Ambrose in front of his face and ran forward with a defiant shout as the dragon expelled a fiery breath.
The force of the breath was not itself enough to knock him down. But the fire was intensely hot; the agony of its passage, though brief, threw echoes of pain up and down his nerves. Fumes and smoke swept around him, blotting out the bloodred light. On impulse he fell heavily to the ground, then rolled into a crouch beneath the cover of smoke.