The dragon came out of the cloud already falling.
It was red over every scale, with black bone spurs ridged along the spine and standing up off the skull in a crown, and it hit the rock crust above the lava at a speed that made the impact a single sound rather than a series of them. The crust held for perhaps half a second. Then most of the animal went through it and under, and the magma closed over the hole and did nothing whatsoever to what it had swallowed. The thing had been born in that heat. It had grown to forty metres in it.
It came back up through the broken plates with lava sheeting off its flanks, got its forelimbs onto solid stone, and dragged the rest of itself clear.
Then it lifted its head to the sky it had just been thrown out of and roared, and kept roaring, and when the roar ran out it spat instead. A column of dragonfire went straight up, wide as a house, and where it reached the cloud cover the cloud turned black and red and began rolling outward from the puncture in slow rings.
A thread of black smoke came down through the middle of it.
The dragon's head tracked across and the fire followed. The smoke folded sideways, coiled, banked, slid through the space beside the flame the way a snake moves through water, and the fire stayed one length behind it the whole way down and touched nothing at all.
The smoke dropped the last thirty metres and resolved standing.
Abel came out of it with the vapour still turning around his shoulders and the wand already up, and the light left the tip before his boots had properly settled. Red, crossing the gap in a flat line, into the dragon's eyes.
The Conjunctivitis Curse landed on both at once.
The world went dark for the animal, and then went dark. Full of shapes that were not there. What had been a fight it was losing became a fight it could not see, and it lost its head entirely. Claws came down through rock that had nothing under them. The tail swept a hundred and eighty degrees and cleared two ridges of stone that were no threat to anything. Fire came out of it in bursts, aimed at memory.
Abel stood still and let it spend itself.
The breathing came up loud inside a minute. The bursts came shorter, and then cooler, orange where they had been white. The limbs began arriving late to the places they were sent, and the great head started dropping between movements because holding it up had become a decision rather than a fact.
He raised the wand and looked at it for a moment instead of at the dragon.
The silver wire was holding. The second crack, the fine one running with the grain that the Cruciatus had opened in San Venganza, had not spread. He had put four cuts through the throat with this wand in the past two minutes and a fifth into its eyes, and every one had discharged clean.
There was going to be a sixth. He had known that when he agreed to this, and he had come anyway, because the alternative was buying dragon heart from somebody else's kill and trusting a stranger about how it had died.
He went back to smoke and crossed the distance.
The throat came up in front of him at close range, and the seam he had been working was plain to read: five cuts, six, laid across one another at slight angles until they had stopped being separate wounds and become one trench in the scale, black at the edges and weeping something that burned as it ran.
He had asked her for this after San Venganza, standing in the drained plaza with the scalpel still in his hand. Somewhere with dragons still in it, and help killing one worth the trip.
He had expected Wales, or Romania, or a warded valley in Mongolia. What the Ancient One had done was open a gateway onto Muspelheim, the fire realm, Surtur's own house, and inside a day she had found him a dragon that ranked near the top of the local order, broken it open herself in an exchange he had watched from four hundred metres and learned a great deal from, and then stepped back and left the rest to him.
The stretch of sky and rock around them she had sealed off entirely. That part she had not explained and had not needed to. If the master of this realm noticed what was being done to one of his own in one of his own valleys, the afternoon stopped being a hunt.
Abel set his feet, brought the wand up over his shoulder, and swung it the way a man swings a sword.
Sectumsempra opened the trench the rest of the way through. The head came off the neck, went up and over, and came down twenty metres away trailing blood that was still burning when it landed. The body stayed standing for a moment on nothing but the arrangement of its own legs, and then folded down onto the rock in stages.
He was moving before it finished.
The chest took real work. Magic went into the breastbone and split it, and it cost him more than he wanted to spend, and the wand ran hot in his hand in a way he did not like at all. He reached in past the ribs, took the heart out in both arms, and it was the size of a wine barrel and it was still contracting.
Blood next, into three flasks, drawn from the neck where the pressure was doing the work for him.
Scale, spur, tendon, eye, liver, the long bones of the wings — all of it worth more than most of what was in his workshop, and all of it staying exactly where it lay. Something was coming toward them under the ground. He could feel it arriving through the soles of his boots, a heat that came up through rock rather than across air, and it was getting closer at a rate that closed the argument.
He got the heart and the flasks into the bag and shouldered it.
"Anient One. We can go."
The Ancient One came down out of the air vertically, took his shoulder without breaking her descent, and opened the portal in the same movement.
She was the Sorcerer Supreme, and her gateways ran on different terms than anyone else's. When she wanted it she stepped between Midgard and Muspelheim as though the two were rooms on one corridor, no cost she showed. Abel had privately concluded that the only reason she did not treat Asgard the same way was Odin.
They crossed.
Behind them a hand came up out of the lava.
It broke the rock crust apart on the way through, spread wide enough to take both of them and the carcass together, and closed on the exact volume of air where they had been standing. The portal had already contracted to a bright point and gone out. The fingers shut on nothing, and the roar that followed came up out of the valley and went out across the whole of Muspelheim, and it was furious, and it had arrived about two seconds late.
Neither of them heard the end of it.
Abel let out the breath he had been holding since the chest cavity. "That was closer than I'd like. Thank you for being quick."
The Ancient One looked precisely as untroubled as she had looked all afternoon. "We were too loud. Surtur noticed. It's his realm, and staying out of his way is worth a great deal more than finding out what he does about trespass."
"Thank you for the whole of it. I know what I asked for."
"It cost me little." She adjusted her sleeve. "Dragons on Earth are effectively extinct in this age, or I would never have taken you somewhere like that. Surtur was maimed in the war against Odin and his brothers and stripped of most of what he held, and he is still strong enough that I would rather not meet him face to face."
They talked a while longer about nothing much, and then went their separate ways.
Something had changed at Kamar-Taj since the night he used the Cruciatus Curse in front of thirty of them.
Nobody said anything to his face. It came through in the length of a glance in a corridor, in conversations that finished as he arrived, in how far along a bench people sat. Those closest to Mordo managed it most clearly of all, and one or two of them had stopped using his title.
Abel could not summon the interest to take it up with any of them. Kaecilius still argued with him about wand theory over tea. Daniel still clapped his shoulder on the way past without saying anything. Wong still handed him books he had not asked for and expected them back in the state they left in. That covered everyone at Kamar-Taj whose opinion he had any use for, and the rest of the compound was welcome to its arithmetic.
He took a gateway back to the New York Sanctum and stepped out into the cold.
Then he did not go home.
Theresa would be on the line at the restaurant until nine, ten, whenever the last table cleared, and she would come through the door smelling of stock and heat and ask him how his day had been, and there was no version of the evening in which a burning dragon's heart the size of a barrel sat on her kitchen table while she did it. The pegasus feather had been a different matter. A feather could be a feather. This thing was still contracting inside the bag and it had started to warm the canvas.
He walked north instead, toward Stark Tower.
He needed a room that could hold something that hot, on a bench that was not made of wood, in a building where nobody would ask what it was.
And while he had all of that, he intended to make a start on the second wand.
END CHAPTER 67