Amber and Iron - Margaret Weis [55]
Mina walked through the door and was pleasantly surprised to find herself emerging safely on the other side. She was less pleasantly surprised to hear the door revolve and slam shut behind her. There were no runes on this side of the door. Apparently, once you got in, you were supposed to know the secret of how to get back out.
Shrugging, Mina turned away. She’d deal with that problem when the time came. Now she had her task before her. An amazing task. She stood before what looked to be an enormous fish bowl.
Mina and the other children in the orphanage had kept fish in glass bowls filled with water. The children were taught to feed the fish and care for them. They observed their habits and marveled at how the creatures breathed water as easily as people breathed air. This globe was similar to those fish bowls, except it was much, much larger—as big in circumference as the Tower itself. The glass walls were covered with runes etched into the glass. Shafts of sunlight illuminated the globe and the creatures swimming inside.
“It is beautiful,” Mina said softly, awed. “Beautiful and deadly.”
The graceful jellyfish, drifting along at the mercy of the swirling currents, killed their prey by stinging it with a venom that paralyzed the victim and prevented it from escaping. These jellyfish were enormous, several times Mina’s size, with tentacles long enough to ensnare a full-grown man.
A gigantic squid, large enough to drag a ship beneath the waves, lay sprawled across the floor, its arms trembling as it slept. Stingrays slithered up the crystal sides of the globe. Monstrous bull sharks swam about, their jaws, filled with the rows of razor-sharp teeth, opening and closing. The floor was covered with fire coral, pretty to look at, burning to the touch.
Inside the center of the globe, surrounded by its lethal guards, was the Solio Febalas.
Mina stared, astonished. The Hall was not at all what she expected.
The structure resembled a child’s sand castle. It was simple in design with four walls, a tower at each corner, and crenellations on the battlements. There were no windows. She could see, from this angle, what appeared to be a door, but she could not make out any details. What was truly amazing was that the Hall of Sacrilege, supposedly containing any number of sacred artifacts, was only about four feet tall and four feet wide.
“It must be an illusion, a trick of the water,” Mina said to herself.
She ran her hand over the rune-etched surface of the crystal wall that blocked her way.
“The question is: how do I reach it? I stand outside an impenetrable wall of crystal encompassing water in which are swimming hundreds of deadly creatures. I have no idea how to get inside the globe, and if I manage that, I cannot breathe water, and even if I could, I would have to battle sharks and men-of-war and—”
She caught her breath. A large coral reef that formed a hillock inside the crystal globe gave a lurch, displacing thousands of fish, which swam away from it in flashing-scaled panic. A head emerged from beneath the coral reef, now revealed to be a huge shell, like that of a tortoise.
Gleaming yellow eyes fixed on Mina. She had found the guardian—a sea dragon.
More to the point, the sea dragon had found Mina.
The guardian of the Hall of Sacrilege was a sea dragon known as Midori. Reclusive, bad-tempered, and irritable, Midori was the oldest dragon on Krynn, which made her the oldest living creature in the world.
She numbered her years not by decades but by centuries. She was not sure exactly how old she was. She’d lost count around the ten-century mark. The passage of time meant little to her. Midori marked her life by momentous events and then only those events that had affected her directly.
One of these was the Cataclysm, for it had been a distinct annoyance. The fiery mountain that had struck the world, killing thousands and destroying a city, had also collapsed a wall of her sea cave, rudely waking