Fire Dragon - Katharine Kerr [182]
“Human soul? And when have I ever had one?”
“Forever, Rhodry, maybe forever. That's what you don't understand. I think me you don't understand any of this.”
“Oh, but I think I do—well enough.” Rhodry flung the dagger into the blue flux of the etheric light. “I'll take the gamble.”
Spinning and tumbling it flew straight up, flashed at the top of its arc, then disappeared. As if at a signal Evandar flung both his arms out to the side and screamed a wordless command. Mist, meadow, river, rock—every scrap and remnant of his lands began to break and swirl, began to spin, to flow, turned to a vast and silvery vortex, centered upon Rhodry, the raw etheric stuff to build his new form. Round and round him it spun, but instead of catching him up and whirling him away it shrank, grew thick as water, poured into him, solidified as it shrank, so that for one moment he seemed trapped at the apex of a vast cone of quicksilver, as if he stood upon a sea and a waterspout towered over him.
Light flashed, blinding. Dallandra heard berserker laughter, then mad demon laughter, or so it sounded to her, but she knew the voice was Evandar's. The light died away. The Lands were gone. Riding serene on the billowing blue light hovered a pair of dragons. One had a tiny cut, a mere nick, on his flank under one wing.
“Naught but a scratch,” Evandar said, laughing. “To a dragon.”
In a roar of joined minds the dragons leapt and flew, swooping away on a spread of wings, seeking out the physical world far below and beyond. As they flew, and in the echoes of that roar, Dallandra heard a voice still human and felt the touch of human gratitude. For a long time she stared at the silvery wake they left behind, until even that disappeared in the constant ebb and ripples of the Light. Yet she could imagine—or was she scrying them out?—at any rate she could see them in her mind, the pair of dragons, the one greenish-black, the other dark silver touched here and there with shadows of blue, flying fast and steadily through the night sky, heading for their home at the Roof of the World.
“Evandar, Evandar!” Dallandra felt half-sick with grief. “What have you done?”
“Time will answer that riddle, for I cannot.”
His voice was so spent and broken that she turned fast to look at him. Instead of his solid elven shape he seemed only a flicker of pale light, a boy, really, slender and frail, his arms still flung out from his sides, as if imploring the gods as he hung upon a shaft of silver light.
“I've spent it all, Dalla, all my power, all my strength. Don't you see? I'm going to be born. I'm going to follow my people down, because at last I can. I'm empty and weak and spent, and I shall have the life you promised me.”
The silver brightened into white. The current flexed and rolled. Walking on its brilliant wave came a figure, an old man with dark skin, who was carrying an apple in one hand. Even though his astral form looked nothing like the man she once had loved, she recognized him instantly.
“Aderyn!”
“I am. You were right and I was wrong, my love, all those years ago. The Guardians were always part of my Wyrd.”
He threw back his head and laughed, then held out his free hand to the child Evandar had become. The child reached out and clasped it just as a flash of golden light broke over them and swept them away. For a moment Dalla saw or thought she saw figures, great beings made of light who were coming to meet the child and the old man in a pouring of the Light that seemed to flow from the very heart of the universe. On one last ripple of laughter they all vanished, though the Light remained.
“It is over!” Dallandra cried out. “It is beginning!”
In answer came three great knocks, solemn, slow, pounding and rolling over her like waves, tossing her, tumbling her, sending her swooping down and down.
She woke to find herself stiff and aching, still lying on the plaza with Niffa still at her post nearby, though dawn was rising in the east. Jahdo was pacing back and forth nearby.
“Did you see them?” Dalla's voice