The Seeress of Kell

shoulders surging, sought to find and cut the barrel-like windpipe. Despite the concerted efforts of Garion and his friends, there had been little more than pain before. Toth's single-minded attack, however, threatened the dragon's very life. Were he to succeed in severing or even broaching the thick gristle of that windpipe, the dragon would die, choking for lack of breath or drowning in her own blood. She clawed her way back onto her forelegs and reared high over the huge mute.
    "Toth!" Durnik shouted. "Get out of there! She's going to strike!"
    But it was not the fanged mouth that struck. Dimly, within the bleeding body of the dragon, Garion saw the indistinct shape of Mordja desperately raise Cthrek Goru, the sword of shadows. Then the Demon Lord thrust out with the sword. The blade, as if insubstantial, emerged from the dragon's chest and, as smoothly, plunged into Toth to emerge from his back. The mute stiffened, then slid limply off the sword, unable even in death to cry out.
    "No!" Durnik roared in a voice filled with indescribable loss.
    Garion's mind went absolutely cold. "Keep her teeth off me," he told Zakath in a flat, unemotional tone. Then he dashed forward, reversing his sword once again in preparation for a thrust such as he had never delivered before. He aimed that thrust not at the wound Toth had opened but at the dragon's broad chest instead.
    Cthrek Goru flickered out to ward him off, but Garion parried that desperate defensive stroke, then set his shoulder against the massive crosspiece of his sword's hilt. He fixed the now-shrinking demon with a look of pure hatred and then he drove his sword into the dragon's chest with all his strength, and the great surge as the Orb unleashed its power almost staggered him.
    The sword of the Rivan King slid smoothly into the dragon's heart, like a stick into water.
    The awful bellowing from both the dragon and the Demon Lord broke off suddenly in a kind of gurgling sigh.
    Grimly, Garion wrenched his sword free and stepped clear of the convulsing beast. Then, like a burning house collapsing in on itself, the dragon crumpled to the ground, twitched a few times, and was still.
    Garion wearily turned.
    Toth's face was calm, but blind Cyradis knelt on one side of his body and Durnik on the other. They were both weeping openly.
    High overhead, the albatross cried out once, a cry of pain and loss.
    Cyradis was weeping, her blindfold wet with her tears.
    The smoky-looking orange sky roiled and tumbled overhead, and inky black patches lay in the folds of the clouds, shifting, coiling, and undulating as the clouds, still stained on their undersides by the new-risen sun, writhed in the sky above and flinched and shuddered as they begot drunken-appearing lightning that staggered down through the murky air to strike savagely at the altar of the One-Eyed God on the pinnacle above.
    Cyradis was weeping.
    The sharply regular stones that floored the amphitheater were still darkly wet from the clinging fog that had enveloped the reef before dawn and the downpour of yesterday. The white speckles in that iron-hard stone glittered like stars under their sheen of moisture.
    Cyradis was weeping.
    Garion drew in a deep breath and looked around the amphitheater. It was not as large perhaps as he had first imagined certainly not large enough to contain what had happened here but then, all the world would probably not have been large enough to contain that. The faces of his companions, bathed in the fiery light from the sky and periodically glowing dead white in the intense flashes of the stuttering lightning, seemed awed by the enormity of what had just happened. The amphitheater was littered with dead Grolims, shrunken black patches lying on the stones or sprawled in boneless-looking clumps on the stairs. Garion heard a peculiar, voiceless rumble that died off into something almost like a sigh. He looked incuriously at the dragon. Its tongue protruded from its gaping mouth, and its reptilian eyes stared blankly at Him. The sound he had heard had come from that vast carcass. The beast's entrails, still unaware that they, like the rest of the dragon, were dead, continued their methodical work of digestion. Zandramas stood frozen in shock. The beast she had raised and the demon she had sent to possess it were both dead, and her desperate effort to evade the necessity of standing powerless and defenseless in the place of the Choice had crumbled and fallen as a child's castle of sand