“Yes, we do.” More agile, Sacagawea proved better at climbing the narrow space, finding footholds and handholds in the walls, and Meriwether did his best to follow her, though he nearly slipped trying to dig the toes of his boots into tiny stone hollows. He looked up to the growing light, watching her form climb higher, farther from him. If she should fall, she would tumble down and take him with her. But she didn’t fall.
He kept scrambling, but his hands were aching, his legs shaking. His sweaty fingers slipped again and he barely held on. Catching his breath, he saw that she had vanished! He no longer saw her silhouette overhead. Since he didn’t dare call out her name in the underground silence, he tried to climb faster, tearing his nails on the rough rock. Finally, he reached an unexpected side shaft, and knew where she had gone. Relieved to be moving horizontally again, he crawled along, trying to catch up with Sacagawea.
Ahead, he could see her working her way forward, and then stand up as the passage grew larger. She still walked crouched, but then straightened. He came up behind her, sore, dirty, and sensing that they had reached the end of their journey.
Together, without speaking, they walked forward, as quietly as possible. Around them, the caves and the chambers ahead were aglow with a mellow, honey-colored light, until suddenly the light intensified. Meriwether had to blink, shielding his eyes, and Sacagawea put a finger to her lips. They crept forward, feeling the air thrum with power.
In the Virginia woods, he had practiced moving with perfect silence, which helped him hunt, but mostly it was the game of a very lonely child. He had been able to approach any animal without startling it. Now the skill came back to him, and Sacagawea also moved as if she were silent and invisible.
They reached a broken opening in the wall, an uneven doorway through which light poured. Before entering, they approached cautiously, trying to see what lay beyond. In the glare, Meriwether could discern a large chamber with a naturally domed ceiling, in which a hole acted as a skylight for the bright glow to pour down.
The center of the chamber held the dragon.
But this was not the dragon sorcerer, not the manifestation of Raven, as they’d seen before in its attacks from the air or within Meriwether’s dreams. Rather than the stately dragons that had adorned the prows of European ships, the dragons that had been carved into the lintels of hundreds of cathedrals, or graced the storybooks of Welsh children, this creature was an amalgam of nightmares, a scaly assemblage of horror. The great beast had seven heads, and it was a chimera-creation, a single being formed from seven great river serpents that had grown together, and fused, their bodies twisted and distorted. The dragon sorcerer looked as wrong, as painful as the fire demons made of wood and dead bodies.
Meriwether could only stare, transfixed. He wondered what had happened. When Raven had melded his mind with the part-Welsh trapper in the wilderness, had he imagined the mythical conception of a great dragon from European legend, but the only bodies he could summon and control were the giant river serpents? However it was, he had seized the poor things and melded them, bound them together, forcing them into this strange contorted being as its new avatar.
He shuddered. Beside him, Sacagawea looked sickened. She didn’t need to explain: this dragon sorcerer, this creature had held her captive, had wanted to possess her unborn son, had held her husband Charbonneau in thrall.
The heads of the river serpents, monstrous enough in their normal form, seemed even worse now. All around the great beast’s body lay strewn half-charred, half eaten bodies of victims—humans, buffalo, other animals. And it still looked hungry. Perhaps that accounted for the sharp teeth in seven jaws, the maddened eyes, the look of rage.
No. Though he recoiled, he could sense the powerful evil here, the presence that had taunted him, fought him in his dreams. Despite its different appearance, this was the same dragon he had battled before in his own spirit dragon form. This was his nemesis.
As the thought sparked in his mind, all seven of the dragon’s heads turned toward them, though Meriwether and Sacagawea still remained unseen beyond the broken opening to the grotto. With a quick gesture, she pushed Meriwether backward and flattened both of them against the wall.
From within the sunlit grotto, a voice shuddered out, sounding like a thousand squeaking rats. “I know you are there. Come and be eaten.” A jet of fire scorched through of the crack in the rock wall and would have burned them to a crisp, but for the curvature of the passage. Meriwether felt his beard and eyebrows become singed.
“Water serpents aren’t supposed to breathe fire!” he muttered, as if the reality would change in response to his protest.
Sacagawea looked shaken. “We need to go in there and fight him, you and I, Captain Lewis.” She took a breath. “I am supposed to use my hair to tie each of those seven monster heads?”
It seemed utterly impossible. “That’s what Coyote said. He’s a trickster…maybe he wants us eaten.” He felt a chill. “Maybe he and Raven are still friends after all. And they mean to kill us.”
Sacagawea refused to believe it. “No, it is up to us to kill him—and we will have to use the power of our spirit forms. Your body will be safe here in the tunnel.” She glanced through the opening crack into the main grotto. “You have to release your spirit dragon.”
“I will,” he said, his lips so close to her ear that his whisper was barely more than a breath. “I will distract the great dragon, and you slip in, try to do what Coyote said.” He knew it was almost certain death, but he would do what he could to protect her. For the sake of all the peoples in the arcane territories, and all of sundered America, they had to stop this evil force.
For a moment, they were face to face. He could read her lips as she said, “Is your spirit dragon strong enough? You’ll get burned.”
“There is a good chance we’ll both get burned. But we can either stay safe, or save the world.”
For a moment her face looked blank, and then it crumpled. He thought she was going to cry. “I have not been safe for a very long time.” He wanted to reach out and hold her, but her features took on a stoic, impassive look. She nodded once.
Safely away from the door crack, Meriwether called upon the strange power and presence inside him, and he let his body fall to the floor of the passage. With his face pressed against the rough stone, smelling the stench of decay and fire from the dragon chamber, he willed his own dragon out from his body.
The desperation and the danger gave him more finesse, and as his form manifested, it became much too large to fit through the cracked opening. But as he took his secondary form in the air, he projected it beyond the rock wall into the cavern beyond, where it solidified in the much larger chamber.
Before his spirit dragon had sharpened into reality, he flapped his great wings and swept himself to the side as a jet of flame from one of the seven conjoined heads cut through where he had been.
“I see you’ve finally come to me in person, son of Wales,” said the voice like a thousand squeaking rats. “I have always wanted to know what dragon tasted like.”
The seven horrifically connected heads moved unnaturally, one twining around the other, as they breathed fire, one at a time, tracking Meriwether’s spirit dragon.
The grotto seemed even more enormous than he had imagined, or his spirit dragon had shifted its size. He swooped up, along the curved ceiling. He felt like a canary whose cage has been invaded by a cat. He was trapped, and he couldn’t fight the much larger predator.
He flew fast, erratically, hoping to distract the seven-headed dragon long enough for Sacagawea to do her part. He hoped she was in the chamber, moving forward—
“And my pretty bird, too,” the voice said, like broken glass in his head. “You, my darling, I will not eat. I shall keep you as my queen, to reign over my domain with me. And where is your tender baby?”
Meriwether circled overhead and saw that the dragon had seized Sacagawea in a stunted set of claws. She struggled, grasping a strand of hair, but she could not reach even one of the intertwined necks.