This was the dragon’s home, and if a klgaosh was a personal servant, as I suspected, than the last one had been gone for some time. Mud had been tracked into the shed, several of the garlands were dangling down into the dirt, and there was a spiderweb curtaining part of the doorway. The only sign of recent habitation was the carcass of a deer near the doorway, which had been well picked over by the dragon, but not enough to discourage swarms of flies. I wrinkled my nose and wondered if I might be sick after all.
The dragon nudged me toward the carcass. I gave him a blank look. What in the name of the Triunity was I supposed to do with a deer carcass as big as I was?
Heaving a mighty sigh, the dragon led me over to a large pit at the back of the shed. Pungent lime had been sprinkled over the contents, which appeared to be more remains from his dinners. It burned my eyes, but at least the lime kept the flies away and made the meat decompose more quickly. It was just one more shocking difference to discover that these dragons didn’t cook their meat first.
Gritting my teeth while the dragon looked on impatiently, I grabbed the hind hooves of the deer and dragged it around the shed to the pit. I couldn’t really throw it in, and had to settle for pulling it to the edge and letting it roll down the slope. Then I grabbed a scoop of lime from the nearby barrel, one sleeve held over my nose and mouth, and sprinkled it liberally over the carcass.
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This satisfied the dragon, and he took me back to the front of his home, gestured around with a claw, and ordered me to clean it. Then he bunched his hind legs and sprang into the air, leaving me standing near the spiderweb, alone, sweaty, and frustrated.
With nothing better to do, I searched his house. I found a pallet at the back, and a few strings of beads and strips of cloth that had probably been my predecessor’s feast-day best. There was a cupboard that contained pots of uncooked rice and other food items, some of which had gone bad, and a broom and various cleaning tools. In the middle of the house was a huge pile of branches, leaves, and grasses that was the dragon’s bed. They were all dry and brittle, and mice scuttled out of my way when I kicked at it experimentally.
“Well, this is just disgusting,” I said to the mice.
There was a rake in the cupboard, and I took it out and attacked the dragon’s bed, hauling great rake-fulls of dried material outside. I made a pile to one side and determined to have the dragon burn it when he returned. The mice ran out, terrified, and I shook my fist at them as they left. They might look sweet, as Marta claimed, but I knew that they were disease-ridden little creatures that did not belong anywhere near a human habitation. I used the broom to sweep the floor, and knocked down the spiderweb and the spider in it.
I shook some ants out of the bucket, and wandered through the trees until I found a quick-running stream. I carried bucket after bucket into the barnlike dwelling and sluiced the floor clean, since there was nothing resembling a mop. I took the human-sized pallet outside and beat it until the sweetgrass stuffing threatened to burst out, then left it in the sun to air.
My arms ached, my lower back ached, and my eyes were stinging with dust. The forest was so thick that very little sunlight filtered down, and now that my sweat was drying I was cold.
Since my new master still had not returned, I decided to have a look around without the forest getting in my way. I selected a tree with sturdy, ladderlike branches and began to climb. Hagen and I had climbed trees together as children, though he had always been the more daring. But my time with dragons had cured me of fearing heights, and I made steady progress now, up through the canopy of trees and out into the sun, where I pushed aside the needlelike branches to look around.
Nothing. Nothing but trees and trees and more trees, where there were not mountains. Closer now than I had been before, I could see that beneath the trees that grew on them in patches the mountains were oddly regular in shape. They were conical, and black where there was no vegetation. In these spots there were holes or fissures, and smoke rose from them. I wondered if there were people or dragons living there after all, or if it really was poisonous gas like the Boiling Sea. It seemed remarkable that trees should grow so close to these vents of steam.
Other billows of smoke or steam could be seen rising out of the trees. It wasn’t woodsmoke, it was too white. And smoke from dragonfire had a bluish color. As I squinted, trying to discern what it was, a dragon rose out of the midst of a large column of it, circled once, and then flew off a ways to land in the trees to the south. Another dragon flew up from the cloud, circled, and went east. Then a dragon rose out of the trees a league or so from the smoke, with something large and brown in its claws. A deer? A human? I wasn’t sure at this distance. It circled the smoke once, then landed in it.
The circling meant something. It was a signal, or a ritual of some kind. There was something special there, where that great billow of smoke rose out of the trees. Something like a “lesser temple,” I hoped.
I leaned out of my tree, fixing the angle of that column of smoke in my mind. It was a straight shot from the back left corner of my dragon’s house. I thought that I could walk it in a day, if nothing impeded me. My only concern was that the thick trees might cause me to veer off course without realizing it. But I could always climb another tree and check my bearing.
Thinking about this, I didn’t notice the sound of wings coming up behind me until my dragon swooped around and stared me in the eye.
“What are you doing?”
Not being able to answer, I only smiled and began to climb down.
On the ground I found another dead deer, and watched in disgust as the dragon ate it raw. He offered me a haunch, and I shook my head vehemently.
“You must eat,” he said.
I mimed skinning it, although it made my stomach churn, and then roasting it with dragonfire. He looked mystified, but not because he couldn’t understand. They had had cooking fires in the village, but apparently his personal servants had to make do with whatever scraps he threw them.
But not this klgaosh, by Jylla’s golden braid! I pointed imperiously at the haunch, lying on the hard-packed earth between us, and mimed fire again.
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Looking disgruntled, he ripped the skin off with one careless claw and charred the meat with a lick of flame. I gathered some large leaves off a strange plant to use as plates, laid them out, then shifted the meat to it and scraped off the charred part as best I could. The flesh underneath was barely cooked, but it was good enough, considering my ravenous hunger and the lack of anything better.
When I was done I gathered up the whole mess and threw it into the refuse pit along with the remains of the dragon’s dinner. I tossed lime over it, and washed up in the stream. The entire time, the dragon watched me with half-lidded eyes, as though he had never seen a human behave this way before.
Judging by all the bowing at the village, and the disgusting state of his home, he probably never had. A human who yelled at him, who climbed trees, and who wanted things to be clean? No, I was a different type of klgaosh for certain.
I slept that night on the still-musty pallet, only a few paces from the dragon. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at all if I hadn’t been so exhausted. I had slept near dragons before, but those had been dragons I knew: Shardas, Feniul, Velika. Dragons that I had felt were watching over me, keeping me safe in the night.
This dragon was a different matter. How long would he keep me here? Until I died of old age or from eating bad food? I could try to sneak out, but where would I go? Toward the column of smoke, I supposed, but there was no telling what I would find there. Besides which, he was lying across the length of the house, blocking the only door. I was caught, and didn’t know what to do next.
Pine-Needle Tea
My dragon had a visitor the next day.
Another dragon, like enough to Darrym to give me a brief start, appeared in the clearing ea
rly the next morning. I was just blearily rubbing my eyes and wishing my mouth didn’t taste so horrible when we heard the sound of wings and a roar of greeting.
“Bring glark,” my dragon ordered, and went out to meet his guest.
I followed him. “What?”
Both dragons looked at me in surprise and irritation. I made a confused face and did the best I could to say glark, which had to be said with a huff of air and a sort of growl at the end.
My dragon’s sigh steamed the bark right off a nearby tree. He turned to his guest and said something too rapid for me to really follow, but the gist of it was that I was hopeless as a klgaosh. Then he led me into the house and showed me a large pot, a sieve, and a canister of what looked like pine needles.
“Make glark,” he ordered again.
I hauled everything outside while the dragons watched. There was a fire pit in the clearing, and I found some lengths of chopped wood stacked against a tree nearby. I prepared the fire; then my dragon ignited it. I shook pine needles into the pot until the dragons nodded at me, before filling it with water. Since dragonfire is hotter than regular fire, the wood burned quickly and I had to scramble to keep adding wood. But the water boiled faster, too, and soon I was using the sieve to strain out the needles and running back inside for two large buckets for them to drink out of.
Once I offered them the drinks, they looked at me pointedly until I took the hint and left.
Around the back of the house I looked into the forest in the direction of that tempting column of smoke. The trees were very thick, but I found it reassuring. No dragon would be able to follow me on foot through that, nor would they be able to espy me from above.
I was close to fleeing. It was better than catering to the needs of this demanding, seriously unkempt dragon. But I had not eaten since the day before, and had no idea what plants around me were edible, so instead I planned.
I would need food: I wondered if I could take some meat and dry it to preserve it. How long did that take? If that wasn’t possible, I should at least make sure my next meal was well cooked, and wrap what I didn’t eat in leaves and hide it. I wouldn’t need water; there were plenty of streams running through the forest. The dragon didn’t seem to care about the canister of rice, so that had probably been intended for human food. I could take that, but it would have to be cooked. Unless I ground it into flour and made some little cakes with it, which would keep well and be lighter to carry. I mulled this over for a time. It was cool at night, but there was nothing like a blanket or cloak to be found here, so I would have to grit my teeth and bear the cold.
It did occur to me that I should head back to shore and let my friends know that I was all right. But I was closer to that column of smoke, and it wouldn’t hurt to investigate first, in case that was the lesser temple we were looking for. I made up my mind to grind the rice and make the cakes immediately, and see about having my next haunch of venison overcooked, and got to my feet.
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As I brushed the dirt off my rear, I heard another dragon land in the clearing behind me, and let loose with a sigh of my own. Time to make more glark, I supposed. At least I would have an excuse to keep the fire built up. There was a mortar and pestle in the house; if I took care of the rice quickly, I could have the cakes ready and baked by this evening.
But when I stepped back into the clearing, I froze.
The new visitor was Darrym.
“Creel!”
Despite my dyed hair and skin, he recognized me at once. He roared with rage, coming toward me, and I fought down my own anger at seeing the traitor who had kidnapped Velika. But facing an angry dragon is never wise, so instead I turned and ran toward the column of smoke, food or no food.
I had no other choice.
A Column of Smoke
Ihad been right about the thickness of the forest preventing pursuit: Darrym screamed his rage and even burned a few trees in my wake, but couldn’t come after me. I crashed my way through the underbrush and leaped over fallen logs. As I ran, I sent up a prayer of thanks that I was wearing trousers and boots.
Once I thought I had gotten far enough away, I slowed down and tried to be quieter. Slipping between the bushes rather than crashing through them I also cut down on the trail I left. I felt like I was going in the right direction, but I didn’t dare check by climbing a tree. At least, not yet.
Ullalal and her daughters had been right, I reflected, feeling the corners of my mouth turn up in a bitter smile. I had been a terrible choice for a klgaosh. If their dragon had chosen the youngest daughter instead of me, he and his friends would be sitting around their buckets of steaming glark, gossiping about how clever Darrym had been to capture Velika.
The thought wiped even a trace of a smile from my face, and I continued my grim march through the forest. I heard no noise of pursuit now, and I stopped and held my breath, straining for the sound of dragon claws, dragon wings, or dragon breath like a bellows. There was nothing, only the usual forest noises of birds and insects.
I found a good tree and began to climb, pausing just before I raised my head out of the forest canopy so that I could listen again. Again there was nothing, and I climbed up and out.
It was easy to find the column of smoke. It was closer now, and the air was very clear today, making it stand out starkly against the blue sky. Again I saw dragons making a single circle around it and then coming or going. There were more arriving, and with an intake of breath I recognized Darrym as one of them.
It was a place of importance; I knew it now for certain. Darrym had gone to report my presence, or to check on Velika, I could feel it to the soles of my feet. I ducked back down under the concealing leaves, and practically slid down the trunk of the tree in my haste. I needed to get to that spot as soon as possible, and it was still a good distance away.
I was fortunate enough to find some berries that I recognized along the way. With greedy delight I ate handfuls of them. Then I picked the rest and put them inside my tunic, using my sash to keep them in place.
Back home the berries would have long since been lost to frost if they hadn’t been harvested, but the seasons were different here, on the other side of the world. During the day it was warm and misty like springtime, something that I felt even more grateful for than I was for the berries. It would be cold at night, but I still didn’t have to worry about freezing to death, or leaving tracks in the snow as I escaped, and the smoke I was searching for would have been lost against a gray sky.
Well after dark, as I was staggering with exhaustion and thinking that I needed to stop soon, I saw the first sign that I was close. A squat stone pillar, carved with strange shapes that were menacingly unclear in the darkness, loomed before me. I shuddered, but kept on walking with renewed strength. There was another pillar, and another. And now there were strange, pinkish-flamed torches on poles, lighting a path through the forest.
I followed them, but not directly. Instead, I lurked in the trees and walked parallel to the path. Other paths met with the torch-lit one, the first of any paths I had seen in the forest. My heart beat as rapidly as it had earlier, when I had been running from Darrym.
My concentration was so completely on trying not to stumble over hidden roots while still keeping alongside the lighted path that I stepped into a clearing without realizing what I had done. The sudden glare of the pink torches combining with the moonlight made me blink stupidly; then I leaped backward into the concealing trees.
Peering out from the underbrush, I saw with relief that there had been no one to witness my sudden arrival and subsequent disappearance. But still I waited in the bushes, letting my eyes adjust to the difference between the darkness around me and the light before me.
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What I saw as the clearing came into focus wasn’t anything that I had been expecting. There was no house of wood or stone, no cave, no structure at all. Ther
e was a clearing, encircled by the torches with their pinkish gold flames, and in the center was the pillar of smoke, as wide as a large dragon and so straight that it was hard to imagine it wasn’t solid. Dimly, where the smoke met the ground, I could see the ragged edge of a rift. The dragons were flying down into the earth, then. So that was where I would need to go as well. If Velika wasn’t down there, and I strongly believed that she was, then at the least the dragons responsible for her abduction were.
But first I sat in the bushes and ate the rest of the berries I’d found earlier. The berries tasted strange, and I worried for a moment that they really weren’t yellowberries, as I had thought. But then I noticed that the smoke from the torches had a peculiar odor, which was affecting my sense of taste. It wasn’t the smell of dragonfire, or not quite, nor was it the smell of the Boiling Sea, back in Feravel. It was something else, something that smelled like rotting leaves and stone and rust at the same time. I hoped it wasn’t unsafe for a human to breathe. It certainly smelled like it might be.
It seemed as though the dragons were gone for the night, or perhaps they were below, sleeping. I could face that risk, but didn’t want to run into Darrym or any of his cronies as I was climbing down into the rift.
When the berries were gone and my eyelids were starting to droop, I slapped myself, got to my feet, and crossed the clearing. Standing at the edge, I looked down into the mouth of hell.
There were flecks and particles of ash in the smoke, and it stung my nose and nearly brought the berries I’d eaten back up. The rocky edges of the rift into the earth were hot and covered in powdery ash, which made the climb all the more treacherous. I told myself firmly that Velika was waiting for me at the bottom, and went down.
And down and down and down, and my legs were shaking and my arms were shaking, and I kept losing my grip and nearly falling. Looking around, I could see only more smoke and bright orange light that burned my eyes, and hear a roaring that rattled my teeth and was not made by man or dragon. I didn’t bother to look again, I just kept climbing.
The cliff wall curved away from the rift, and for a while I think I was nearly upside down. I definitely didn’t try to look around then, just offered prayer after prayer to the Triunity, and even a few blasphemous prayers to Tobin’s Moralienin ancestors and the First Fires, on which the dragons swore. Someone had to help me, I thought, growing hysterical. I was on a rescue mission, after all, and if I didn’t reach the ground soon my arms would give out and I would fall to my death. . . .
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