52. How to lose a dragon
52
HOW TO LOSE A DRAGON
When he woke that time, Gwydinion realized he’d been making a mistake. Or rather, he’d been making an assumption.
He set aside what he’d learned about Eannis. It was too big, too vast. Every time he tried to look at the fullness of it, he felt sick.
No, he’d assumed the dragonstone had two functions: as a magical artifact to drive dragons rampant, and as a diary.
Both assumptions were almost correct.
The stone’s ability to induce rampancy was a side effect. She’d created the stone to better understand and explore the boundaries of magic. The stone funneled her excess magical “poison” into other dragons, which allowed her to stay functional enough to continue her research.
More importantly, the dragonstone was her grimoire.
Which meant that Gwydinion knew what he had to do to hide himself. It was all there in the dragonstone. He just had to learn it.
Gwydinion tried not to think about how long Neveranimas had taken to learn the skill. Years wouldn’t have surprised him. He didn’t have years. He had hours.
More realistically, he had minutes.
On his fifth attempt, he figured it out.
The problem was a translation error. Anytime Gwydinion entered the stone, he understood everything from Neveranimas’s perspective, but when he left again, his brain supplied him with translations of concepts that didn’t have an equivalent in any human tongue.
So it was with “soul-mark,” a concept that had nothing to do with souls, or with marking them. A “soul-mark” (he needed to find a better name at some point) was a way of fooling, well, the entire universe.
Every object in the universe had a “true name” (also a label whose meaning translated poorly) which represented them. The true name was them, funda mentally. So if one knew the true name (it was more like a sigil or glyph, really) for Gwydinion Doreyl, one might perform all sorts of magic and be certain it would only affect Gwydinion Doreyl.
Well and good, but the universe could be tricked. Labels could be switched, misfiled. A spell cast at Gwydinion Doreyl might fail, not from error, but because the universe thought a particular chair was also Gwydinion Doreyl, giving the spell a fifty-fifty chance of hitting the wrong target.
Yes, it was possible to make the universe think a door was a jar.
Combined with magical sympathies, this was devastating. He already knew that sympathy could track an item or person: that’s exactly what Naeron had done when he’d used Gwydinion’s blood relationship to Anahrod to track her. But if you could fake the sympathy (by switching the “label”) then it didn’t matter that the objects carried no actual connection.
One might “mislabel” an item into something that you possessed in some fashion, tell the universe to locate it—as well as anything else out there with the same label, existentially speaking—and the universe would point you right to it.
Neveranimas was too smart to use herself as the “original.” It worked both ways, after all. If the universe thought this dragonstone was Neveranimas, then someone could use it to divine her location and affect her magically.
Gwydinion mentally repeated what he’d just said to himself, but slower.
It was dark. Jungle noise filled the air, and the wind streamed by him as he lay on Overbite’s back. He was sure he’d have been eaten by wild animals already, if not for her.
It occurred to him it didn’t matter what Neveranimas had used as her “primary” for tracking.
All that mattered was that she had to have it with her.
Gwydinion could use the Rampant Stone to track Neveranimas, too.
He needed to be smart about this. Gwydinion pulled his inscribed light locket out of his shirt. He didn’t open it, not yet. Then he riffled through the satchel by touch until he located a neatly folded bundle of leaves. Gwydinion then huddled under his shirt, trying to keep any stray light from escaping.
If he ever compiled a list of his most bizarre experiences, the top spot would undoubtedly go to the time he was bound to a galloping titan drake, with his shirt covering his face, desperately trying to convince the universe that a jungle leaf was actually a dragonstone. He thought it was hilariously ironic that the only thing that made it possible—the dragonstone—was the same reason he was in this mess in the first place.
Once he was convinced he’d managed it (it was impossible to explain the itchy weird vibrating feeling behind his eyeballs) Gwydinion repeated it with a second jungle leaf.
Then he changed the Rampant Stone to something else . This was harder, because it turned out the object fought you if someone with a really strong will (a dragon wizard, for instance) had already messed with it. Fortunately, possession was nine-tenths of magical law, and since he was touching the object, his will won out. The universe became convinced that the Rampant Stone was a piece of chena.
He was working with what he had.
At that point, Gwydinion settled down to track Neveranimas using a jungle leaf.
At first, Gwydinion thought he’d made a mistake, that the leaf was just pointing out the location of the nearest tree of the same type.
Except Overbite still cantered along at a fast clip, while the “tree” was gaining on them.
His heartbeat sped up to riotous levels and his hands turned clammy. The magic had worked perfectly; he was detecting Neveranimas.
It’s just that she was only a few hundred yards behind him, closing in fast.
Gwydinion didn’t know how long Neveranimas had been back there, trailing him from above the tree canopy. Overbite hadn’t sensed her, but she could hide herself using magic.
An ice dragon was not the best suited for punching through Deep jungle canopy. Neveranimas could do it, but it would be loud and violent and would allow Gwydinion a chance to escape.
Whereas, if she waited for Gwydinion to cross a break in the canopy, because of river or meadow or just an unfortunate lightning strike from the last storm, Neveranimas could leisurely snatch him up with no trouble at all.
And since dragons saw in the dark and humans didn’t, she had a better idea of when that would happen than he did.
He reached out for a night flyer. He found an entire flock of them, but one was all he needed. He held up the jungle leaf and asked for a favor. The little raptor plucked the leaf out of his hand and flew off with it.
He threw the second leaf away since he didn’t have enough time to call some other animal. That left one fake dragonstone lying on the jungle floor and a second fake dragonstone flying away.
And him, on a titan drake, carrying a strangely large piece of chena.
[Turn here, Overbite.] He had no idea where he was going, but he’d given up his only means of tracking Neveranimas, so, “away from where the fake dragonstones were” seemed the wisest course.
A horrible sound echoed behind him. Snapping branches, breaking wood, entire trees being overturned and uprooted. Through it all, a strange cracking, creaking sound roared, one so foreign to the Deep that it took Gwydinion a moment to place it.
His father had taken him to the northern mountains once, to a glacier. This sounded like the thawing line of ice, terrible and loud as it broke away and tumbled to the bottom. He felt the chill behind him.
Neveranimas had clawed her way down to one of the fake stone copies, freezing and destroying trees as she went.
[There’s a dragon behind us,] Gwydinion told Overbite.
She didn’t need to be told to run.
By the time Overbite slowed down to a walk, too tired by that point to travel faster, Gwydinion still heard the calls of panicking animals, but no sign of a dragon.
That was scant comfort, given that Neveranimas wouldn’t give him any warning.
He wished he’d been able to memorize the dragonstone’s tracking signature, but he wasn’t good enough for something like that.
Gwydinion thought he had done a great job under the circumstances. Varriguhl would give him top marks.
Or Varriguhl would give him top marks if everything he’d done that night hadn’t been heretical and illegal.
It didn’t seem fair. Humans were in a better position to figure out this stuff than dragons. No rampancy.
Maybe that was because the dragons didn’t want them doing it.
He was tired, though. Bone-achingly, sleep-for-a-week tired. He didn’t know whether the magic had drained him or it was the stress and strain of a week of extraordinary, ugly close calls with death and dragons. Possibly a combination.
He let Overbite lie down for a few hours. He didn’t dare sleep himself, but he also didn’t know if he’d have a choice. Pinching himself didn’t seem to be cutting it anymore.
He just possibly fell asleep. He couldn’t be certain. All he knew was that he’d closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, Overbite was lumbering to her feet in a daylit jungle.
As a dragon hadn’t eaten him, he took the win and kept going.
He used one of the remaining leaves to sketch out the inscription pattern Kaibren had taught him—the one that let him know which direction was north.
That done, he turned Overbite to the west and told her to move until she hit cliffs and water.