by E. E. Knight
“I take it there’s metal in that stone,” Wistala said.
He swallowed a piece, and rolled an eye toward her as he sniffed over more shattered rock. “What is your name?”
“Wistala,” she said.
“We don’t know each other.”
“No,” she said. “May I have your name?”
“DharSii.” He swallowed another stone.
The name struck her ear funny. If the word were rendered in the simplest form of Parl, a human would have called him “Sureclaw.”
“Do you live here?” she asked.
He made a strange throat-clearing sound: Ha-hem. “As little as possible.” He kept eyeing her leather carry-harness and the blue emblem at the base of her throat.
“How is the metal?”
“Adequate, though you have to eat a good deal for it to do any good. Cleansing, though.”
He took another mouthful of water and spat it into the cracks in the rock face.
“I’ve come to find others of my—our kind.” He said nothing in reply. “The water helps break the stone up, I take it.”
“I doubt you’d understand.”
Wistala felt her fringe rise a little. “I suppose when your foua strikes the water it vaporizes into steam. The sudden expansion in the confined space of the crack, combined with the heat, shatters the rock.”
DharSii left off his mining and turned his head so he could fix her with both eyes. He seemed about to speak, his mouth opened anyway, shut again, and finally he said: “If your design is to meet the others, please follow.” Then he launched himself off the mountainside and flapped away on wings long and thin that reminded Wistala of knife blades.
She couldn’t say whether she’d been insulted or not, but she flew after him. He sailed off north, crossed the hills that Wistala noted held red, wide-horned, high-backed cattle, and was soon skimming the misty water of the vast lake. The lake was so wide, the trees upon the other side were an indistinct green smear; and so long to the south, the waters ate the horizon.
It felt distinctly warmer over the lake, and some of the mountains to the east smoldered from vents in their sides, adding to the overcast trapped between the mountains. The mist layer hanging above was tinged with green, gold, and even blue depending on the thickness of the murk and its nearness to the vents. Wistala saw more of the long-horned cattle with the mountainous humps projected up at the base of their necks. They grazed on the thick grass, stupidly oblivious of the dragons overhead.
Wistala caught up to DharSii, flying a little below—yes, he was scarred around the right pocket of his arm, and the outer toe was missing from his left saa. Not so scarred as Father, but not so old either. And his snout only showed the barest hints of white fangs—Father’s had seemed permanently on display.
He rolled an eye toward her, and she felt embarrassed to be watching him, so she fixed her gaze ahead.
She marked a white construct of some kind on the northern shore, well above and back from the lake. Or was it some trick of geology? A spur of the mountain came down and divided, and from the divide on down the mountain was scored with white, far too regularly for the marks to be snow or ice.
The lake here steamed, tendrils of moisture danced across the smooth, clear water before dissipating into the chill. She saw a head rise from the water, dripping, and a golden dragon made a leisurely climb to a mushroom head of volcanic rock, where he scratched his belly on the stone and stretched out neck and tail with a bit of a yawn as his snout turned to the fliers.
Wistala dropped back a little, not knowing if there would be a battle between the dragons. Her striped companion paid the wet dragon no more attention than he did the fork-tailed birds zipping around the masses of rock. The stones here looked shaped, but to dragon proportions rather than hominid, progressing down into the water like irregular, broken steps.
Her guide continued on his way toward the point between the divided spur.
Closer now, Wistala could see a “garden” of thick thorn trees—she thought of it as a garden because it was, precisely edged both inside and out and regularly shaped, a great crescent with the points running up the outer edges of the divided mountain spur, thinning somewhat as they climbed the thin-soiled heights. The thorn trees were thick and intertwined, so it wouldn’t be a matter of just cutting down trees, for they all supported and wound around each other; sever trunk from root and the rest would hang. She guessed a team of dwarves with axes could hack through it in a day or two—under a tasking leader—and it would be a remarkable thief who could negotiate that wall without becoming hopelessly lost or torn to pieces and waste much time backtracking out of blind alleys.
The thorn wall guarded a vast courtyard, almost as big as all of Mossbell’s cultivated grounds, between the two mountain arms. Instead of wild cabbages and berry bushes, this plaza was paved with broken and irregular bits of masonry. Even the odd statue fragment of a hominid arm or face showed here and there, placed to fit between an old fountain rim or some unknown chunk of temple wall.
Two pairs of blighters walked here and there and swept up some long thin leaves fallen from the thorn trees. Judging from the size of the courtyard, when they finished they’d have to start all over again where they’d began.
She forgot the blighters as soon as she saw the arch.
The stone of the mountain had been formed and carved into a great gallery leading into the darkness between the spurs of the mountain, going up an interlacing like a woven basket of round reeds, meeting like snakes hooking at the neck. The stone had been carved so it evoked bones, or tree roots, or dragon tails, anything but dull and lifeless rock. It was supported both from the courtyard and the mountain ridge by pillars, all shaped to match the whole and etched with scale patterns. At the outer rim of the stony lattice there were holes big enough for a dragon to climb through, but the spacing grew tighter and tighter as it approached what looked to be a cave mouth, though the most regular and finished Wistala had ever seen.
It was wide enough for a dragon to fly into it and pick a comfortable, well-lit landing spot before the cave. DharSii glided in, widening and then slowly folding his wings as he alighted. Wistala tried to imitate him and made a clumsier landing, not expecting the smoothness of the courtyard paving. It wasn’t a sprawl, but it could have been one if her tail didn’t catch on a fortunately placed crack.
“Welcome to Vesshall,” DharSii said, letting his griff give an elegant little flutter. “I will take you to the dragons within, but I shan’t stay.”
“Do you have enemies here?” she asked.
“You ask a lot of questions. Scabia will be delighted with you. Make your queries sound like praise, and you’ll share endless hours of chatter.”
A cave entrance, wide enough for two dragons to pass abreast, stood just above a ledge about the height of one human seated on another’s shoulders. A ring of stones, chiseled and filled in with a black material like glass forming unfamiliar glyphs like thorns crossed and arranged, decorated the entrance.
“I don’t know that script,” Wistala said.
“It’s the old iconography,” DharSii said, rearing up to climb into the tunnel mouth. His tail gave a little twitch; perhaps he was pleased at her ignorance. “It reads ‘Welcome is the dragon who alights in peace.’ ” They passed down a short passage, arched above to match the stone lattice outside, filled in with six-sided colored chips in all the colors of dragonhood, making patterns interlaced and winding above and beneath in such intricacy that Wistala wished she had an afternoon just to let her eyes travel the path.
But DharSii did not stop, but moved on into another cavern.
This one was vast and round, by far the biggest interior Wistala had ever been in. The far walls were so distant their old footfalls bounced back at them from the walls to join the fresh noises they made, waiting to take their turn to visit the other side of the cavern and return.
The convex ceiling curved high enough for Wistala to flap her wings and fly i
f she wished, and went up like an inverted bowl to a circular gap that admitted the outdoor light and aired the room. It wasn’t big enough to fly out, she’d have to fold her wings to pass through it. A shallow pool of water stood under the skylight, and the floor under the light was much edged with bands of green copper, one of which the edge of splash of dim sunlight rode even now.
Around the walls of the cavern—or chamber, rather, for while there was mountain muscle to be seen there was no rock that was not shaped by artistry—long blocks of basalt stuck out of the wall, narrowing and rising to a softened point like an inverted dragon claw. At the far end, two scaly forms reclined.
Wistala saw more blighters at work beneath the smaller, scrubbing the tiled floor.
DharSii struck off straight across the floor toward the pair and Wistala followed, hearts hammering. The place smelled of dragons, rainwater, and fresh air; she relished every breath, took it in through her nostrils and clamped them so the homey smell might never escape.
There were still dragons in the world, not skulking and hiding but living in grandeur and peace!
At their approach the blighters carried off their implements, flattened and squeezed themselves through a thin gap at the base of the wall like escaping mice before a prowling tom.
They caught her eye only because of the motion. The two dragons on the jutting lofts of rock had her attention.
Both were dragonelles, one rather undersize, her green scales pale and almost translucent, well formed of limb though in a delicate way that suggested little in the way of gorge or exertion.
The other was a white dragonelle, formidably huge and perhaps a bit more massive than DharSii. Wistala had the odd sensation of knowing her without having ever been introduced, probably some vague echo of a mind-picture from Mother. But there was, yes, a half-familiar shape to her short, proudly curved snout, the challenging arc of her eye ridge . . . Her scales had thinned a bit around her jawline and above her eyes, the flesh sagged in a little where her saa met her spine; she was a dragonelle of long years but still formidable.
“I bring a visitor, Damesister.” It took Wistala a moment to work out the relationship; she’d only heard the word once before from her Father in one of his battle-stories . . . a man or a dwarf would have said aunt. “I humbly present Wistala, a dragonelle out of the south, who seeks ha-hem succor and solace.”
I never said that, Wistala thought.
The striped dragon turned to her. “Wistala, this is Scabia, Archelle of the Sadda-Vale, and her daughter Aethleethia, my ha-hem beautiful uzhin.”
Both dragonelles fluttered their griffs at Wistala with that same bird-wing delicacy. Wistala thought she should fit in and tried to imitate it, but her griff rattled off her scale, and the dragonelles glanced at each other.
The white dragon extended her nose just a little and sniffed the air in Wistala’s direction, her pink eyes as cold as the glaciers Wistala had passed over.
“Will you not make her welcome?” DharSii said, and Wistala liked him a little better.
“Who were your sire and dame?” Scabia asked.
“AuRel of the line of AuNor and his mate Irelia.” Wistala decided to make her introduction formal, and spoke as Mother taught: “I was first daughter and fourth out of the five eggs.”
“Ah,” Scabia said. “I thought I recognized your wing-points. I knew your mother somewhat. You are how long out of the egg?”
“These thirteen winters.”
“And already wide-winged! I’m amazed.”
Aethleethia extended her long neck and scratched herself under the chin with the claw tip on her loft, and DharSii turned away to inspect a piece of iconography etched on the floor in a manner similar to that ringing the entrance. He brushed away some dust with his tail so that the black glass might shine.
A shadow darkened the splash of outside light and the golden dragon dropped through with wings folded. He opened them again with dramatic suddenness and alighted. “Ah-ha! A visitor!” he trumpeted, folding his wings.
“Ha-hem,” DharSii said, his eyes and nostrils half-closed. “Wistala, you meet the dragonlord of Vesshall, NaStirath.” A certain airiness highlighted the words, but what he meant to imply, if anything, Wistala couldn’t guess, not knowing him well.
“My daughter’s mate,” Scabia added.
NaStirath loosed a short but loud prrum in the general direction of Aethleethia’s place. The lord of Vesshall was a finely formed fellow, long and well fed, not a scar on him or a scale out of place, and he smelled of steam and hot scale, being fresh out of the lake.
He spoke: “Just like you, DharSii, to guide a female over me without an introduction. Don’t tell me you’re finally courting a mate.”
“I hope not!” DharSii said. “Too wide of wing, and her tail is so much longer than her neck.”
The arrogant, two-colored—
“My dear uzhin always gives an honest opinion,” Aethleethia put in. “It startles those who are not much used to him.”
“Ha-hem. I’ll be about my business,” DharSii said. He fluttered his griff, but when Wistala met his eyes, fire bladder pulsing, he looked away. He turned and made for the entrance.
The tap of his claws played off the walls as he crossed the chamber.
“Two visits to the Vesshall from DharSii in one winter,” NaStirath said. “I feel so honored, I’m having a hard time not yawning.”
“Tell us your troubles, dragonelle of AuNor, so that we may comfort you,” Scabia suggested.
“I’m the last of my family,” Wistala said. Was that quite true? The copper still lives, for all you know. “Dwarves of the Wheel of Fire slaughtered them and took from their bodies as trophies. Elves and men were also involved, but I cannot say which for certain. One called the Dragonblade was almost certainly aiding them in the assassination.”
“We’ve heard this before,” NaStirath said, in a bored tone as if to indicate he was not much troubled at the news.
“We are sorry for your loss,” Scabia said, though she was the only dragon in the room that much looked it, for nothing remained of DharSii unless he lurked still in the shadows of the entrance passage. “You may claim a loft here for as long as you like; there are ample to spare.”
“I heard they got CuSanat and his mate, Virtuthia, in their cave as well,” NaStirath said, stretching. “Such a shame we won’t be seeing them again, even if they weren’t exactly uzhin. The Red Mountains are being quite cleared of dragons. Is it bullock again for dinner, or fish?”
Wistala wasn’t sure she was hearing right. Did these fools not realize—?
“We must take vengeance on these assassins!” Wistala blurted.
“I’ve no dead to avenge,” NaStirath said. He climbed into a loft on the other side of Scabia. Odd that he didn’t sit to the side of his mate—
“Be quiet, NaStirath,” Scabia said, pronouncing his name in a way that labeled him still a wingless juvenile. “And have some feeling for our guest’s sorrow.”
“I shall achieve both through a nap, where I will dream awful, sorrowful dreams,” NaStirath said, closing his eyes. “I rejoice in your survival and arrival, Wistala of the line of AuNor.” He twitched his griff as he turned on his side.
Wistala remembered how Father had once caught Auron sleeping on his side, and though her brother was scaleless, punished him with a series of roars that left the hatchling quivering.
“Rest your wings,” Scabia said. “Pick any loft, and wait for your nostrils to waken you.”
Wistala crossed the room to be away from the others and climbed into one of the giant projections. One could arrange one’s body so the head and tail were at almost any height for comfort. She hated Vesshall a little less, and slept.
Her nostrils did wake her, as the blighters brought out huge platters of pan-fried fish and dumped them before the three dragons, with much falling to the knees and arm-waving with palms held toward the dragons. Only the faintest light came down from the circle in the center o
f the ceiling.
Wistala felt horribly stiff from the troll fight even as she wondered why DharSii didn’t join his relatives for dinner. Not that she cared to see him, of course, only that his absence struck her as odd.
She crossed over to the others.
More platters of fish arrived and Scabia pointed with her tail toward Wistala, shook it three times, and they made a mountain of cooked, blackened fish before her.
“It’s quite safe,” Scabia said. “The blighters look to us for protection from the trolls, and of course the other races of the world who have superceded them.”
Wistala ate, but the charm of prepared food was nothing like that of Mossbell, with lively conversation and the friendly banter with Widow Lessup about the cooking. She felt like a pig at a trough.
“How many trolls have you killed, lord?” Wistala asked NaStirath.
“Hmmmmm. Killed? I set one aflame once and he made quite a spectacle rolling back to the mountains, but I don’t care to close and kill. Awful, the stench of trolls. I’m not sure that burning improves the odor.”
“I know DharSii has killed several,” Aethleethia said. “Every time he does it, the blighters talk of nothing else for moons.”
“Keen on sports, my good uzhin is,” NaStirath said with a belch. “Shall we have molasses elixir tonight, to celebrate our happy arrival?”
“No,” said Scabia firmly.
“Why do you care so little for the fates of other dragons?” Wistala asked.
The other three stared at her.
“Now see and hear, thirteen winters,” Scabia said. “You’re a guest, and welcome as long as you will be accommodating, but I don’t want challenges or lectures and twaddle about what we must and must not do, or you’ll find me a terrible enemy who’ll drive you from this home cave with fire and tooth and claw. This vale is safe and distant, and those wise enough to stay here do well. As to other dragons’ affairs, we keep out. It was a lesson dearly learned. My father? Dead. My brother? Dead. My mate? Dead. My sons? All dead. DharSii only just survived out there, was even a captive once, and it seems every time he crosses the mountain ring or goes down the river, he comes back with a new scar.