Dragonsight Read Online Free PDF Page A

Daretor assumed this was their prison cell, but the guards pushed inside with them and closed the door. One of the guards tugged on a rope which again caused a bell of a different tone to sound.
    Without warning the room lurched then dropped downwards, as if it were falling into a hole in the ground. Jelindel and Daretor clutched each other as the primitive elevator descended.
    The guards laughed at the fright on their faces. One explained how the elevator worked: a series of ropes and pulleys, operated by slaves in the depths of the castle. They winched the hanging cabin up and down the vertical tunnel, as required.
    ‘It is a wonder,’ Jelindel said sincerely.
    The cage stopped and they were ushered into a chamber with a deep fissure in the floor. Jelindel suspected that lava flowed inside it. The air was oppressively hot, wafting up and carrying the reek of brimstone.
    The sweating guards led Jelindel and Daretor towards a dark shapeless mound sitting on a kind of rocky island where the magma fissure split in two before rejoining again. The prisoners crossed a small stone bridge to the island.
    Rakeem appeared from the other side, his face expressionless. He crossed another bridge and gestured for the prisoners to kneel. An intensity behind his eyes caused Jelindel to frown.
    ‘You are in the presence of the Sacred One,’ Rakeem softly intoned, as if he were in the holiest of churches. ‘Here you will speak the truth, for nought else can be heard in this place.’
    The dark mound stirred. A huge sinuous shape uncoiled and lifted a gaunt serpentine head to gaze at them with a yellow cat’s eye the size of a dinner plate. The other eye socket hung limp and shrouded by loose skin. It was an ancient and withered dragon. Bat-like leathery skin hung from his frame like a quilt. Where once scales would have shone in myriad colours, they now hung dark and dank as their surroundings.
    ‘Who comes?’ asked a deep sibilant voice. The dragon took a deep breath, struggling for the strength to speak. ‘Who comes to trouble me?’
    ‘It is I, Sacred One,’ said Rakeem. The dragon’s eye narrowed, peering at the vizier. Rakeem took an involuntary step back as if the weight of this gaze was too much to bear. ‘It is Rakeem – the king’s adviser.’
    The ancient dragon pondered the statement and a slow chuckle rumbled from his heaving stomach. ‘That is nothing to me,’ he wheezed. ‘The king of men is still a man and he and all his descendants will be dust before I breathe my last. Why do you disturb my slumber?’
    Rakeem seemed affronted by the speech, but betrayed not an ounce of verbal disapproval. ‘Sacred One, we have need of the truthsense. We believe these prisoners stole the dragonsight.’
    The dragon’s head swivelled and the piercing yellow eye stared into Jelindel and Daretor. The creature’s breath rattled, a long juddering sound that reminded Jelindel of a lowering drawbridge.
    Although Jelindel had time to cast a stronger barrier between herself and the dragon, the beast’s gaze bored straight through it. She felt a profound lethargy come over her.
    ‘Did you take the dragonsight?’ the old dragon asked.
    They both answered that they did not. ‘Know you who did?’ Again they answered in the negative. The dragon considered this, or maybe – as Jelindel came to believe – it used the moment to probe deeper into their beings.
    The dragon’s breath grew laboured. ‘Have you experience of finding that which is lost?’ the Sacred One asked.
    ‘We have,’ Jelindel said. Daretor nodded in agreement. Jelindel later said that she sensed a deep sadness behind the dragon’s words.
    ‘Then I bid you find the dragonsight and restore it to its … proper place. Go now. Let me return to my Dreaming.’
    The ancient dragon’s head sagged; the eye closed, extinguishing the remarkable lantern. Jelindel and Daretor jerked as if waking from a dream. They looked at the dragon in wonder. The only sign of life