A Fate Worse Than Dragons Page 15

  “Very well. I’ll thank you to return my sewing bag, then you can explain how I may leave this mountain. You need not trouble yourself to accompany me, I will make my own way. I need hardly add that you are in a great deal of trouble, however allowance can be made for your cooperation from now on, so if . . .”

  “You are not going anywhere,” said her host. “I have a plan for you. You won’t like your part in it, I fear, but on the other hand the unpleasantness will be short-lived.”

  “Excuse me,” said Gloria. “But exactly what part of ‘I am a princess’ did you not understand? My father has a rather large and well-equipped army, and if you harm me you will draw the whole of it upon you.”

  “I have done my investigations, Princess. The king does not know where you are. His knights are searching the western half of Medulla for you. I don’t know why a princess should be in the Valley of Bornewald, but the trail, if you left one at all, ends at Count Bussard’s castle. If he let any of his men know what was going on, they’re hardly likely to report it to the authorities.” He looked Gloria up and down. “Very nice. Five and a half feet tall, curly blond hair, blue eyes, fair-skinned with a mole on your . . .”

  “That’s a beauty mark,” interrupted Gloria.

  “But nonetheless extremely attractive.”

  “Thank you, it’s kind of you to say so. Now if we are through with the exchange of compliments . . .”

  “But a princess of the Twenty Kingdoms is always beautiful, isn’t she? Always. Apparently there is something magical about a princess. Something in the blood, perhaps.”

  “Something in the blood?” repeated Gloria. She was quite sure she didn’t like the way he said that. Her brow furrowed, then her face cleared as she beamed at the sorcerer. “Ah, I see. I’m afraid you misunderstood me. You think I’m a princess. Not at all. I meant to say that my name is Princess. No, I’m not royalty at all. I know it’s a bit of an unusual name, but you see, my mother wanted a child and my father wanted a collie, so when I came along they named me . . .”

  “Blood,” said the Middle-Aged Man of the Mountains. “My gryphon needs a fair maiden to dine upon.” He said this with complete matter-of-factness. To Gloria, a gruesome statement said so easily meant she was dealing with a lunatic. “They prefer live prey,” he added.

  By this time it had become abundantly clear to Gloria that the middle-aged sorcerer was not about to let her walk away. She was not happy about the situation. To be rescued by a brave and daring knight had a certain romantic quality about it, but you didn’t want to make a habit of it. Even the most gallant knight might feel you were abusing your position. She turned toward the fire and warmed her hands again, but this was only so she could look around the room, checking the exits and windows, to see if she could make a run for it. “Of course,” she said, talking to keep the sorcerer distracted, and also to quell the fear in her stomach. “Live prey. A fair maiden and a virgin, too, no doubt. On the other hand, there are plenty of inexperienced boys around, and no shortage of plain women either, but you sorcerers never seem interested in them, which makes me suspect that you’re really just indulging some inner kink, rather than trying to meet a genuine magical specification.”

  “It’s a question of supply and demand, I think,” said the sorcerer. “Young men are expendable. They have no value. We send them into battle and slaughter them by the thousands. And old women? No one cares about them either. It’s kind of a relief when they’re gone. But when a pretty girl disappears, she is missed. She leaves a hole in people’s lives. That hole, I believe, is what fills with magic. Or perhaps the magic leaks out of the hole. I admit it’s still a bit of a mystery.”

  “Yes, well your pet out there was willing to chow down on Count Bussard, who was neither fair nor female, so I suppose a gryphon’s diet is not as restrictive as all that.”

  “That’s the male. He prefers horses, actually. The female is below. She’s not fully grown. She can’t fly yet, that one. She’s nothing but pinfeathers now. But you’re correct. The food supply is a problem. I’ve been trying to bring her to maturity, but I just can’t seem to find the right girls.”

  “What a shame.”

  “The girls want you to think they’re all purity and innocence, but the gryphons can tell. Rather interesting, that. Unicorns have the same ability. Anyway, it didn’t used to be a problem, but kids today don’t want to wait.”

  “Sure.”

  “I blame the parents. They’re so busy with their careers they don’t have time to teach their children good morals.”

  “Oh yes, the double standards are not what they used to be. I can tell you’re a very moral person yourself, so that must really bother you.”

  “Well, it’s not like I do this all the time. Two gryphons, that’s all I want. A breeding pair.”

  Gloria sneaked a glance out the window. She couldn’t see the gryphon, but she would never forget what it looked like. The thought that someone would actually want to breed these ghastly creatures was revolting.

  She didn’t say this. She said, “How nice. I’m sure they make a lovely couple. I can understand how you must be looking forward to the pitter-patter of little claws around the place—this place—whatever this place is, but—think carefully before you answer—have you considered getting a puppy instead?”

  “I don’t give a damn whether they produce young,” said the Middle-Aged Man of the Mountains. He clasped his hands, as though he was about to rub his palms together, but caught himself in time and made a steeple of his fingers. “As long as they build a nest. It’s the gold I want.”

  “Say again?” Gloria took a step back.

  “Gold! Don’t you understand gold! They line their nests with gold! They search the mountains for it and they find it—I don’t know how—and they tear it out of the rocks with their claws, and they build nests in the crags and it’s all gold! Pounds of it. Hundreds of pounds of it. Tons of it, even.”

  “Oh great. Great. That’s just great. Of all the lunatic lunacies to be loony about, I have to get kidnapped by a guy with gold fever. Other girls get kidnapped by twisted psychopaths with deep, dark desires. At least they get to go down in history as the victim of some unusually grotesque murder, but me? Noooo. Of all the trivial, mundane, run-of-the-mill obsessions, gold fever has to be the most inane.” Gloria was working herself into a fury now. She was kidnapped, wet, chilled, hungry, frightened and to top it off, she felt that she had been deeply insulted. “Gold. It’s a useless yellow metal that’s only good for pierced earrings. You can’t even make a decent frying pan out of it. Yet the world is full of people who spend their lives fighting for it, scheming for it, hoarding it, and drooling over it. Tons of gold, eh? You moron.”

  “It’s true!”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it is. Gold fever. I know your type. Always on the lookout for the next big strike. You spent your youth diving for sunken treasure, didn’t you? And sometime in your past you went prospecting in the mountains, right? Probably you had a partner, someone you eventually dry-gulched over some trivial vein of ore. I’ll bet you’ve got a box of gold coins hidden somewhere. Every now and then you pour them on your bed and roll around on them and sleep with them. Or maybe you keep them under the floor, stashed beneath the hearthstone.” Gloria kicked angrily at the hearth and, to her own surprise, felt a loose stone shift.

  “Stay away from that!” The Middle-Aged Man of the Mountains was on his feet. Gloria could see that he was wearing sandals with socks. He grabbed her arm and yanked her away from the fireplace. “For over a decade I’ve been working on this. I had to offer huge rewards for the gryphon eggs. I brought myself to the edge of bankruptcy. Scores of men gave up their lives attempting to steal the agate eggs and collect those payments. I kept them warm and turned them and hatched them in secret. I raised the young myself, and you will never, never, have any idea how much newspaper you have to put down under a gryphon. Now my plans are coming to fruition and you, my dear, are part of the finish.” />
  “Let go of me!” Gloria got an arm free and slapped the sorcerer in the face. He hardly seemed to feel it. He merely smacked her right back, a blow that made her head snap to one side. Then he threw her down in the middle of the floor and waved his hands.

  In front of her eyes the parquet tiles folded down to reveal a trapdoor. She wondered if he did this magically, or if he had rigged it up with wires and pulleys and activated it with a hidden switch. An acrid smell wafted out, the smell of dung and urine, that told her some beast was living below. Raising herself to her knees, she cautiously moved her head until she could see over the edge of the hole. She saw only darkness.

  “I think they’re like mosquitoes,” said the Middle-Aged Man of the Mountains conversationally.

  Gloria looked up. “What?”

  “They need the blood to breed. Like mosquitoes.” Gloria still looked blank. “Or I could be wrong,” he continued cheerily. The sudden mood swing gave Gloria more evidence that the sorcerer was off his rocker. “Maybe they just get a craving for an innocent girl. Like pregnant women who crave pickles. But I don’t think anyone has ever fed a princess to a gryphon. Dragons, yes, but not a gryphon. We might see spectacular results. I could write a paper on this.”

  Gloria looked at the door she had entered through. That door, she knew, led into a courtyard, and that courtyard was guarded by a gryphon. There was no escape that way. There was another door that led inside. She didn’t know where it went, but she’d have to risk it. The sorcerer stood in her way. She would have to rush past him. She tensed her muscles to spring.

  The Middle-Aged Man of the Mountains saw her. “None of that,” he said, and jumped at her. He reached her in a split second and landed a kick in her side that made her curl up in pain. Then he placed his sandal firmly against her back and pushed her over the edge of the hole.

  Under normal circumstances, he would have followed this with a short period of standing over the opening, hands on hips, looking down in fiendish triumph, a sadistic smile playing across his evil countenance, and that sort of thing, but this particular act of malice was accompanied by a vigorous display of jumping up and down and scuffling around the edge of the hole while screeching, “Ow, ow. Let go of my foot!”

  Gloria had managed to grab his ankle with one hand. Her fingernails were digging into his skin, while her other hand was flailing around, trying to get a grip on the smooth wood floor. She got an arm over the edge of the hole and pulled herself up until her head emerged. The sorcerer kicked her in the head and stomped on her fingers. Gloria slipped back down. He used his free foot to stamp on her arm, until finally her grip broke and she fell. As she tumbled downward, a long, drawn-out scream of terror, “Aaaiiiieeeeeeee,” emerged from the lightless shaft and gradually faded away.

  The Middle-Aged Man of the Mountains looked down into the pit. “Now what was that all about?” he said irritably. “That was only a twelve-foot drop.”

  “Excuse me.” Gloria’s voice drifted upward. “I’m the victim here. I’ll scream how I like, thank you very much.”

  From the darkness she heard a scraping sound. She pressed her back against the wall, trying to make herself as flat as possible, listening as hard as she could. The scraping noise sounded again, a little closer. This time she identified it as the sound of claws on stone, and large claws at that. “What is that?”

  “The other gryphon,” said the sorcerer above her. He pulled down his sock and searched his ankle for broken skin. Two large welts were beginning to form. “The female.”

  “Yes, I assumed it was the other gryphon,” said Gloria. She closed her eyes and opened them again, hoping they would adjust to the darkness more quickly. “It was a rhetorical question. Did you give it a name? I’ll bet you did.” She peered into the gloom. She could hear it moving, but she couldn’t see a thing. Talking kept her courage up. “I’ll bet you talk to it, don’t you? I’ll bet you stand at its cage and throw it raw meat and say things like, ‘Who’s a pretty girl, hmmm? Who’s a pretty girl? You are. Yes, you are.’ ”

  That was almost exactly what the Middle-Aged Man of the Mountains did, but he wasn’t going to admit that now. He tried desperately to think of an original and clever name for a gryphon so he could make a snappy reply. “Griff” was definitely out, and he thought about “Agatha” because the gryphon was hatched from an agate egg, but he didn’t really like that name. He was still thinking about it as Gloria’s voice grew higher and louder. “And you know what else? I’ll bet you look like a total idiot when you’re talking baby talk to your gryphon.” The Middle-Aged Man of the Mountains looked around for something to drop on her. He was about to settle on an ashtray when he saw the piece of lace on the hearth.

  He grabbed it and flung it into the hole. “Here. Make a funeral veil. Something appropriate to wear while you’re waiting to die.”

  Gloria voice was faint. “I was saving this for the Autumn Ball.”

  “Hah. Well, you can just—” He was interrupted. Gloria gave a short, sharp scream.

  Then there was nothing but silence.

  The Middle-Aged Man of the Mountains looked thoughtful. He stared at the hole for several minutes before he waved his hands again. The trapdoor closed. The floor sealed up as though the Princess Gloria had never been there.

  To reach the crag that held the sorcerer’s head-quarters required no special climbing ability. A paved carriage road, narrow but well maintained, switchbacked up the side and went right to the top. Unfortunately, Terry reached it just as the last rays of the sun were retiring behind the mountains. He drew his horse up at the base and inspected the road. In the murky twilight, he could see that it climbed steeply, with one side against a wall of bare rock and the other against a sheer drop. Still, it was wide enough for men on horseback. Mist swirled around the peak. High above, he thought he could see a single light glowing in a window. But it might have been sunlight reflecting off the clouds. By the time Roland arrived, the sky was black. Alison, lagging a little behind, showed up a few minutes later.

  “It’s too dark to ride,” Terry told them. “One missed step could send us right over the edge.”

  “Shall we walk, then?”

  “I’ll walk ahead with a lantern. You two will follow and lead the horses. It’s a steep hike, so we’ll use them to pack the weapons. I want to save my strength for battle.”

  “No hurry,” said Roland. “You can rest for a bit. We have all night.”

  Even Alison, if he could have seen her in the darkness, looked shocked at Roland’s callousness. Terry glared at him. “We don’t have time to spare. We don’t know what he’s doing to Gloria. Every minute counts.”

  “Terry,” said Roland patiently. “You will be of no use to the princess if you’re dead. Do you honestly think you can fight this animal in the dark?”

  There was the type of pause that is often described as pregnant. Roland waited. “No,” Terry finally said. “But I’m not waiting for dawn.”

  “The moon will be up in a few hours,” said Roland. He pointed skyward, to a spot where the faint glow of the Milky Way penetrated through a gap in the cloud cover. “The sky looks like it is clearing. When the moon comes up, we might even have enough light to ride.”

  Terry hated to delay when Gloria was in danger. But Roland had a point. “All right, Roland. I’ll wait two hours. If it hasn’t cleared up by then, we’ll walk.”

  “Right,” said Roland. Alison concurred.

  They withdrew half a mile, where the road that led into the mountains crossed a road that skirted the valley, and a pub sat where the roads crossed. The windows were shuttered, but a thin tendril of pale smoke streamed from the chimney, dispersed by the cold wind. Terry sent Roland and Alison inside while he pumped water for the horses. The pub was a tiny place, with a bar the width of the room and two small tables by the door, but the barkeeper was able to supply them with bread, cheese, and smoked sausage to go with their hot cider. Roland took one of the tables. Terry came inside and pu
lled a chair over, but told Roland he was going to look at the horses again. It was obvious to Roland that the knight was simply too wound up to sit.

  Alison took a chair across from Roland and untied her scarf, then took a brush from her handbag and ran it through her hair. He took a moment to look her over. She looked very good, considering the hardships of the day and the hours in the saddle. The evening gown, which seemed so delicate, had held up surprisingly well. Roland guessed that was a result of quality material and good workmanship. Her eyes were in shadow, but the candlelight threw highlights on her cheekbones. She put the brush down and pushed back the her jacket, letting her soft hair fall around her shoulders. When the cider came, she put her hands around the mug to warm them and gave Roland a tentative smile.

  Roland sternly reminded himself that everyone looks good by candlelight.

  Roland still wore the silk and silver he had put on that morning, but he had traded his dress jacket for a gabardine traveling coat. It was double-breasted, with deep outside pockets. From one of them he removed a book he had taken from the Count’s library—De Natura Animalium by Aelian. He asked the barkeeper for an extra candle, and opened the book to a page he had marked earlier. “It says here,” he told Alison, “that gryphons are inimical to both horses and men, but they will not fight with the elephant.”

  “Very wise,” said Alison. “I never fight with elephants myself.”

  “It confirms that they dig gold and gemstones out of the mountains for their nests. But it doesn’t say anything about their diet.”

  “Maybe you’d better let Sir Terry do the fighting.”

  “Impossible.” Roland turned the pages of the book. “He won’t be fighting only a monster. He’ll be fighting both a monster and an evil sorcerer. That’s more than any one man can handle. Damn, I should have hired those two soldiers to go with us. I didn’t think of it.”