Samah raised his hands to draw the runes in the air. He began to move his feet in the dance that would paint the runes with his body. He lifted his voice to sing the runes to the wind and the water. But his voice sounded flat and raucous. His hands were like claws, tearing the air. His feet moved in opposing directions. Samah stumbled, clumsy, inept. The magic washed away.
Orla tried to come to her husband’s aid, but her body unaccountably failed her. She wandered across the shore, her feet reacting to a will that was no longer under her control. The remaining members of the Council staggered along the shore or tumbled into the water, like drunken revelers.
Samah crouched in the sand, battling fear. He faced, he guessed, a terrible death.
“Where did you come from?” he cried in bitter frustration, watching the dragons surge into shore. “Who created you?”
“You did,” came the reply.
The horrible images faded, leaving Alfred weak and shaken. And he had only been a witness. He could not imagine what it must have been like to have lived through the incident.
“But the dragon-snakes did not kill us that day, as you may have surmised,” Samah concluded dryly.
He had related his tale calmly enough, but the usually firm, confident smile was thin and tight. The hand that rested upon the marble table shook slightly. Orla had gone extremely pale. Several of the other Council members shuddered, one let his head sink into his hands.
“There came a time when we longed for death,” Samah continued, his voice soft, as if he spoke to himself. “The dragons made sport of us, drove us up and down the beach until we were faint and exhausted. When one of us fell, the great toothless mouth closed over the body, dragged the person to his feet. Terror alone put life in our bodies. And, at last, when we could run no more, when our hearts seemed as if they must burst and our limbs would no longer support us, we lay in the wet sand and waited to die. The dragons left us, then.”
“But they came back, in greater numbers,” Orla said. Her hands rubbed the marble table, as if she would smooth out its already smooth surface. “They attacked the city, their huge bodies battering into walls, killing and torturing and maiming any living thing they found. Our magic worked against them and we held them off for a long time. But we could see that the magic was starting to crumble, just as did the rune-covered walls surrounding our city.”
“But why?” Alfred gazed from one to the other in shocked perplexity. “What power do these dragons have over our magic?”
“None. They can fight it, certainly, and they resist it better than any other living beings we have faced, but it was not, we soon discovered, the power of the dragons that left us helpless and defenseless on the beach. It was the seawater.”
Alfred gaped, astonished. The dog lifted its head, its ears pricked. It had fallen asleep, nose on paws, during the recital of the battle with the dragons. Now it sat up, looked interested.
“But you created the seawater,” said Alfred.
“As we—supposedly—created these dragon-snakes?” Samah gave a bitter laugh. He eyed Alfred shrewdly. “You have not come across anything like them in other worlds?”
“N-no. Dragons, yes, certainly, but they could always be controlled by magic, by mensch magic even. Or seemed to be,” he added suddenly, thoughtfully.
“The water of the sea, this ocean that we named ‘Goodsea’ “—Samah spoke the word with irony—”has the effect of completely destroying our magic. We don’t know how or why. All we know is that one drop of the seawater on our skin begins a cycle that breaks down the rune structure, until we are helpless—more helpless, in fact—than mensch.
“And that is why, in the end, we ordered the mensch out into the Goodsea. The seasun was drifting away. We lacked the magical energy to stop it; all our power had to be conserved to fight the dragons. We sent the mensch to follow the seasun, to find other seamoons, where they could live. The creatures of the deep, whales and dolphins and others the mensch had befriended, went with them, to help guard and defend them from the dragons.