Marcus Stoneguard's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The dragon's shadow slid down the vines and kept sliding. Marcus watched a black finger of it peel off the wall's base and drift into the grass below. The village lay under that grass, half a mile of thatch roofs where sleepers had no idea a wall was failing above them. If the shadow reached the first house, no order of gargoyles would matter. Marcus put one hand on the parapet and made himself see the problem clearly. The smoke drifted. The stone-thing rode inside it. Kill the drift, strand the rider. Pebble Groutstone was already at his boot. "You can't chase smoke down a wall," the small stone said. "You'd fall." "I'm not chasing it. I'm cutting it." Marcus turned to the vines. The wall wore them like a coat, thick brown ropes crawling from base to crown. "The shadow slides on the vines. It grips them." "Then pull the vines." "Pull them where the shadow is thinnest." Marcus pointed to a patch two courses down where the smoke had stretched itself narrow to reach the ground. Glimmer Shellsworth stirred on his shoulder. Her light was gone, but she lifted her small head. "I can find the thin place again. Not with light. With the bugs." She rolled off his pauldron onto the stone and tapped a seam. Pill bugs poured out and streamed downward in a dark line, faster than Marcus expected. They stopped at the narrow patch and clung there. "That's the throat of it," Pebble said. Marcus called the two steadiest gargoyles by post number. "Third course. Grip the vines below the bugs. On my count, tear them off the wall." They climbed down headfirst, claws in the stone. Marcus went with them. The vines were warm where the shadow ran through them, cold two feet above. He set his hands on the cold part and waited. "Now." They pulled. A sheet of vine as wide as a cart ripped free and fell away from the wall in one long green wave. The shadow tore with it. Marcus heard something inside the smoke make a sound like a stone cracking underwater. The drift below the wall thinned, curled, and pulled back up toward the main body of the dragon as if yanked on a string. The finger reaching for the village broke off in the grass and went out. A small pink butterfly lifted from the flowers at the wall's foot, untouched, and drifted away. Marcus climbed back up. Below, the dragon itself was still there, whole and clinging, its true body now exposed on bare stone with nowhere for its shadow to hide. It turned its head up the wall and looked at him directly for the first time. Its eyes were the color of a hot coin. The village was safe for