Is there anything more wearying than shallow steps? Perhaps slippery shallow steps. Nevertheless, we ascended them, and as before, we stayed close to the inner wall and kept our ears perked for sounds of anyone coming our way. We heard the waves growing ever fainter behind us and the random plops of falling drips. Eventually, we reached the place where we intersected with the carved corridor. We halted there, listening, but heard nothing.

I was tired. I was sure we'd gone far past a time when we deserved a night's sleep. My head felt stuffed full of felt and buzzing flies. The Fool looked worse. We crossed the corridor and entered the stairwell. He followed me slowly up the narrow steps. The staircase wound as it climbed. As soon as its curve took us out of sight of the main corridor, I stopped him. 'You. Drink the rest of the brandy now. It will warm you and give you a bit of heart, perhaps. In any case, it will do you more good inside your belly than inside the flask.'

'Can I sit down?' he asked.

'No. I might not be able to get you up and moving again,' I replied heartlessly, but he had already sunk down onto the step. Again he took the brandy flask, opened it, and offered it to me. It

wasn't worth an argument. I wet my mouth with it, and then told him, 'You finish it.'

And he did, in a single deep swallow. He seemed to take a long time to cap the empty flask and put it away. 'This is hard,' he said, hut he did not seem to address his words to me. 'I'm too close to the end. I've had glimpses of this, but never clear ones. And now all I know is that I must go on, and that every step I take leads me closer to my death.' He met my eyes and said without shame, 'I'm terrified.'

I smiled. 'Welcome to human existence. Come. Let's go see this dragon you came so far to save.'

'Why? So I can tell him I've failed him?'

'Why not? Someone should tell him we tried.'

It was the Fool's turn to smile. 'He won't care. Dragons care nothing for good intentions or failed attempts. He'll only despise us. If he notices us at all.'

'Ah! And that will be such a new experience for both of us.'

Then he laughed, and I did, too, not loud, but in the way men laugh when they know it might be the last opportunity to share a joke with a friend. We were not drunk, at least, not on brandy. If the Fool was right, we were drinking the dregs of our lives. I think that whenever a man realizes that, he tries to find every last bit of pleasure in it.

Up we went. The stair wound narrow, and I wondered what madman had carved it. Had there once been a natural feature that someone had ordered into a stairway, or was all of this a sculptor's icy fancy? We went up. At one time, the walls had been decorated with bas-relief ice carvings, but they had been defaced, probably deliberately. All that was left were bits of legs or a hand in a fist, and once a woman's lips and chin. I grew to hate the unevenness of my gait, one foot booted and one in an ice-coated sock. When we stopped to rest, I let the Fool sit down. He leaned against the wall, and I thought that he dozed. When I saw the tears creeping down his cheeks, I roused him. 'There's no good in those. Get up. We're moving on now.'

My voice was kinder than my words. He nodded to them and hauled himself to his feet. We continued our climb.  Like an

unending nightmare, the winding steps went on and on. The pale globes could not light every corner of the twisting steps. Every shade of blue and white that could be expressed took a turn. It was a cold and wearying beauty that we traversed. We climbed more slowly, and then rested together, and went on. It seemed that eventually we must break out of the ice, that it could not go on much longer. Then we came to a level gallery carved in the ice. And the dragon.

A thick layer of ice remained between him and us. We saw him through the distortion and haze, yet even so, he was breathtaking. We walked slowly the length of the gallery, paralleling Icefyre. He was bigger than two ships. His wings were folded to his sides and his tail curled back around him. His head was turned back on his long neck, coiled away from us. We gazed at him in awe. The Fool's aching heart was in his eyes. The immense sense of the dragon's life almost overwhelmed my Wit. Never had I been so close to a natural living creature of such gteat size. Then we came to a crudely-bored tunnel that wormed through the ice toward the dragon's breast. I stooped and peered into it. It ended in the darkness of the black dragon. I took a breath. 'Lend me your Elderling lantern,' I asked the Fool.

'Are you going in there?'

I nodded slowly, unable to say why I must.

'I'll come with you, then.'

'There isn't room. Stay here and rest. I'll tell you what I find.'

He looked torn between weariness and curiosity. Then the Fool lowered his pack to the floor and opened it. As he gave me the lantern-box, he said, 'I have two more pieces of bread. Shall we eat them, now?1

'Go ahead. I'll have mine when I come back.' Even the mention of food made my mouth suddenly water. Thick came suddenly into my mind. Had he Skilled to Chade and Dutiful, or did he sit woefully awaiting our return? Had he remained safe on the sled, or had it, too, followed us down in the crush of snow? I pushed the useless questions away. The Fool handed me the little box and I opened it, releasing its peculiar green light.

'Don't be long,' he cautioned me as I entered the tunnel. 'I want to know what you find there.'

The tunnel was not tall enough to stand in. I crawled along it, pushing the box of light before me. The blue light of the gallery faded behind me and soon I travelled only in a pale green light that echoed weirdly in the mirroring ice. The reek of dragon slowly grew until I tasted him as much as smelled him. It strongly recalled the stink of garter snakes when as a curious boy I had captured and handled them. The tunnel became narrower as I went, as if whoever had dug it had been so intent on reaching the dragon that they could not be bothered to keep it a uniform size.

It ended in a wall of dragon, tiled with gleaming black scales, the smallest as large as my spread hand. A neat row of tools rested on a roll of leather on the floor ice before it. Various blades, mallets, drills and metal picks were there. Two tools, blades broken or blunted, had been discarded. I held the Elderling light closer to the dragon, my gorge rising as I confirmed my suspicion. Someone had crawled along this tunnel to the beast's side, and then attempted to burrow into his heart.

It looked as if his plated scales had defeated the attacks. Some of them were scored, but it looked as if none of the metal implements had managed to penetrate the flesh beneath. A sort of metal wedge was still in place, driven under the overlapping black scales to lift them and create a vulnerable place. I held the light closer. The lifted scales revealed a second layer of creamy scales beneath them, overlapping in a pattern perpendicular to the first layer. A pick like an ice pick had been shoved in under one creamy scale. It had penetrated the leathery hide beneath, but no blood or fluid flowed. I judged that it had been like driving a blade into a horse's hoof. Nonetheless, the sneaking cruelty of such an attack disgusted me.

The dragon lived. Someone had burrowed in here like a maggot, trying to hack a way into his heart while he was held immobile.

I appreciated the density of his natural armour when it took all my strength to pull the pick from his flesh. I had to hammer sideways at the wedge to get it out of him. The instant it fell free, the scales in that area rippled and writhed and closed up. For a moment, my Wit-sense of his life surged. Then, just as abruptly, it vanished. The scaled wall of flesh before me might have been something pieced together from metal. I hesitated, and then boldly