When he touched it the doors swung open instantly and with a disconcerting noiselessness.
Instantly sparks crackled in Twoflower’s hair and there was a sudden gust of hot dry wind that didn’t disturb the dust in the way that ordinary wind should but, instead, whipped it up momentarily into unpleasantly half-living shapes before it settled again. In Twoflower’s ears came the strange shrill twittering of the Things locked in the distant dungeon Dimensions, out beyond the fragile lattice of time and space. Shadows appeared where there was nothing to cause them. The air buzzed like a hive.
In short, there was a vast discharge of magic going on around him.
The chamber beyond the door was lit by a pale green glow. Stacked around the walls, each on its own marble shelf, were tier upon tier of coffins. In the centre of the room was a stone chair on a raised dais, and it contained a slumped figure which did not move but said, in a brittle old voice, “Come in, young man.”
Twoflower stepped forward. The figure in the seat was human, as far as he could make out in the murky light, but there was something about the awkward way it was sprawled in the chair that made him glad he couldn’t see it any clearer.
“I’m dead, you know,” came a voice from what Twoflower fervently hoped was a head, in conversational tones. “I expect you can tell.”
“Um,” said Twoflower. “Yes.” He began to back away.
“Obvious, isn’t it?” agreed the voice. “You’d be Twoflower, wouldn’t you? Or is that later?”
“Later?” said Twoflower. “Later than what?” He stopped.
“Well,” said the voice. “You see, one of the disadvantages of being dead is that one is released as it were from the bonds of time and therefore I can see everything that has happened or will happen, all at the same time except that of course I now know that Time does not, for all practical purposes, exist.”
“That doesn’t sound like a disadvantage,” said Twoflower.
“You don’t think so? Imagine every moment being at one and the same time a distant memory and a nasty surprise and you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, I now recall what it was I am about to tell you. Or have I already done so? That’s a fine looking dragon, by the way. Or don’t I say that, yet?”
“It is rather good. It just turned up,” said Twoflower.
o;Um, look,” began Twoflower. Liessa spared him a brief glance, and appeared actually to notice him for the first time.
“Take that away,” she said calmly, and turned back to Hrun. Two of the guards shouldered their bows, grasped Twoflower by the elbows and lifted him off the ground. Then they trotted smartly through the doorway.
“Hey,” said Twoflower, as they hurried down the corridor outside, “where” (as they stopped in front of another door) “is my” (as they dragged the door open) “Luggage?” He landed in a heap of what might once have been straw. The door banged shut, its echoes punctuated by the sound of bolts being slammed home.
In the other cell Hrun had barely blinked.
“Okay,” he said, “what is the second test?”
“You must kill my two brothers.” Hrun considered this.
“Both at the same time, or one after the other?” he said.
“Consecutively or concurrently,” she assured him
“What?”
“Just kill them,” she said sharply
“Good fighters, are they?”
“Renowned.”
“So in return for all this…?”
“You will wed me and become Lord of the Wyrmberg.”
There was a long pause. Hrun’s eyebrows twisted themselves in unaccustomed calculation.
“I get you and this mountain?” he said at last.
“Yes.” She looked him squarely in the eye, and her lips twitched. “The fee is worthwhile, I assure you.”