Twoflower stepped gingerly over the cooling door and looked up and down the corridor. It was empty.
The dragon followed. The heavy door frame caused it some minor difficulty, which it overcame with a swing of its shoulders that tore the timber out and tossed it to one side. The creature looked expectantly at Twoflower, its skin rippling and twitching as it sought to open its wings in the confines of the passage.
“How did you get in there?” said Twoflower.
You summoned me, master.
“I don’t remember doing that.”
In your mind. You called me up, in, your mind thought the dragon, patiently.
“You mean I just thought of you and there You were?”
Yes.
“It was magic?”
Yes.
“But I’ve thought about dragons all my life.”
In this place the frontier between thought and reality is probably a little confused. All I know is that once I was not, and then you thought of me, and then I was. Therefore, of course, I am yours to command.
“Good grief”
Half a dozen guards chose that moment to turn the bend in the corridor. They stopped, openmouthed. Then one remembered himself sufficiently to raise his crossbow and fire.
The dragon’s chest heaved. The quarrel exploded into flaming fragments in mid-air. The guards scurried out of sight. A fraction of a second later a wash of flame played over the stones where they had been standing.
Twoflower looked up in admiration “Can you fly too?” he said.
Of course.
Twoflower glanced up and down the corridor, and decided against following the guards. Since he knew himself to be totally lost already, any direction was probably an improvement. He edged past the dragon and hurried away, the huge beast turning with difficulty to follow him.
They padded down a series of passages that crisscrossed like a maze. At one point Twoflower thought he heard shouts, a long way behind them but they soon faded away. Sometimes the dark arch of a crumbling doorway loomed past them in the gloom. Light filtered through dimly from various shafts and, here and there, bounced off big mirrors that had been mortared into angles of the passage. Sometimes there was a brighter glow from a distant light-well.
What was odd, thought Twoflower as he strolled down a wide flight of stairs and kicked up billowing clouds of silver dust motes, was that the tunnels here were much wider. And better constructed, too. There were statues in niches set in the walls, and here and there faded but interesting tapestries had been hung. They mainly showed dragons -dragons by the hundreds in flight or hanging from their perch rings, dragons with men on their backs hunting down deer and, sometimes other men. Twoflower touched one tapestry gingerly. The fabric crumbled instantly in the hot dry air, leaving only a dangling mesh where some threads had been plaited with fine gold wire.
“I wonder why they left all this?” he said.
I don’t know said a polite voice in his head.
He turned and looked up into the scaley horse face above him.
“What is your name, dragon?” said Twoflower.
I don’t know.
“I think I shall call you Ninereeds.”
That is my name, then.
They waded through the all-encroaching dust in a series of huge, dark-pillared halls which had been delved out of the solid rock. With some cunning too, from floor to ceiling the walls were a mass of statues, gargoyles, bas-reliefs and fluted columns that cast weirdly-moving shadows when the dragon gave an obliging illumination at Twoflower’s request. They crossed the lengthy galleries and vast carven amphitheatres, all awash with deep soft dust and completely uninhabited. No-one had come to these dead caverns in centuries.
Then he saw the path, leading away into yet another dark tunnel mouth. Someone had been using it regularly, and recently. It was a deep narrow trail in the grey blanket.
Twoflower followed it. It led through still more lofty halls and winding corridors quite big enough for a dragon (and dragons had come this way once, it seemed; there was a room full of rotting harness, dragon-sized, and another room containing plate and chain mail big enough for elephants). They ended in a pair of green bronze doors, each so high that they disappeared into the gloom. In front of Twoflower, at chest height, was a small handle shaped like a brass dragon.