The magus left, surrounded by well-wishers, those wishing to have their fortunes told, and sufferers of disease or injury. AuRon craned his neck to look at the spring, where Hieba stood waiting her turn in a line of blighters for morning ablutions and cooking water. AuRon wanted to get her back to the cave. There were a few books he wanted and he needed Hieba’s help to fashion bags to carry them away. Blighters tossed some of the bony remains of last night’s dinner into a garbage pit outside the village walls, and AuRon slithered out to join the dogs in a hunt for leftover morsels, more out of competitive interest in stealing a choice tidbit from the hounds than real hunger. As he nosed among the bones, Staretz led his retinue out of the village on his hairy camel. The magus’s face wore a mask of magnificent indifference to the rebuff. Blighters accept victory with song, and act as if defeat had not happened.
AuRon was glad to have the distasteful camel smell out of his nose.
Screams of pain and confusion rose from the village.
AuRon raised his neck and looked over the stone-and-tree-trunk wall. Unrush was staggering up the steps to his house, hounded by blighters both of his village and the strangers. Korutz clung to his back, Unrush’s long hair in his teeth. A knife splashed red blood on the water-smoothed stones as Korutz stabbed Unrush up under the rib cage. Unrush threw off his assailant and lashed out, but Korutz rolled to his feet, torn-out hair gripped between his teeth.
“To me, to me, my people!” Unrush shouted from the door of his hut, spitting blood as he screamed. One of his fireblades put hand on hilt, but his mate gripped his arm.
AuRon read death in Unrush’s eyes as easily as the restraining female did.
Another blighter stepped forward and buried a spear in Unrush. AuRon’s friend turned and looked at the shaft in wonder, as if it were some limb that had sprouted mysteriously from his body. He gripped it in both hands and collapsed to his knees. Another blighter stabbed him in the neck, and Korutz kicked him over, where he lay wetting his doorstep with his own blood.
AuRon could not help Unrush, but he could avenge him. His fire bladder throbbed hot. He jumped onto the wall and bellowed a challenge of pure fury; he had no words for the rage he felt. He would make a pyre of this place—
The blighter Balazeh emerged from the huts, dragging Hieba by arm and hair. Others clustered around her, seeking safety in her presence. AuRon came off the wall and toward them; the crowd shrank toward Unrush’s great hut. Balazeh came to the forefront, holding a stabbing-spear tightly enough under Hieba’s chin for blood to flow down her bosom. The tattooed veins on his neck stood out with the effort to keep her in his grasp.
“Dragon!” Balazeh cried. “What’s done is done. We bear no ill will for you.”
“Stab and burn, you filth!” Hieba swore in the human tongue. “AuRon, tear this creature’s arms off!”
Balazeh showed no sign of understanding her. Everyone shouted and talked at once.
AuRon reared up and raised his neck until his head swam. “Let her go and I’ll hear your terms,” he said.
“Hear them now. The faint-hearted one is dead,” Korutz said, waving his bloody dagger at the corpse. “This is a matter for the Umazheh elders now, not for outsiders, however powerful.” As he spoke, Balazeh dragged Hieba toward the door of Unrush’s hut, where a number of the females had already disappeared. “You return to your cave, and she will be released to walk back to you. On the journey, she will be watched; if you appear in the skies or on the ground before she reaches your cave, we’ll loose an arrow through her.”
Balazeh turned at the door of Unrush’s hut.
“Perhaps an offering of cattle and sheep as well will satisfy? We can be friends again.”
AuRon lowered his head and took a step toward the crowd on the stairs. He snapped his teeth shut, and the clack echoed from the village walls.
At the sound, Unrush’s body twitched. The bloody body rolled over. Only AuRon saw the turn, every other pair of eyes was on him.
“I must think. . . . Cattle, eh?”
Unrush crawled to his door, pulling his body along with one arm, leaving a wet trail.
“Fat cattle, heavy with the summer’s feeding. And sheep,” Balazeh said, his eyes alight. He kept the blade of the stabbing-spear to Hieba’s throat, but he pulled its point from her chin. “You have my word.”
AuRon had to give Unrush his chance. “How many cattle?” he asked.
“A five counted five times, five over. Yearly.”
Using a sii claw, AuRon drew a circle in the dirt and filled it with a stick-figure of a man, arms and legs outstretched. “This sign will hold your vow.”
Balazeh trembled as he looked at the sign. “The Wyrmmaster’s power praised be.”
Every movement wrote further pain on Unrush’s face, but the crippled figure still crept along the wall of his hut. He reached to his waist and found what he sought.
Unrush opened his mouth and sank his teeth into Balazeh’s ankle. His ceremonial dagger flashed up, held in his good arm, and cut across the back of the assassin’s knee. Balazeh shrieked, and Hieba broke from his grasp.
AuRon sprang. The blue sky turned red, the yellow sun into an angry orange eye.
The blighters fell under his fury like wheat caught in the crook of a scythe. He crushed Balazeh’s skull in his claw before backarming Korutz so hard that he flew over the village wall. He loosed his fire bladder upon hut and pen, and a frightened wail rose like a storm’s wind. He caught up a screaming blighter in his jaws and bit down until he felt his teeth join inside its belly. He swept his tail across the village square—where only a few hours ago, celebrants had danced—and dashed a trio of blighters against a hut wall. Nothing lived within his reach, save Hieba.
Hieba was the only figure who ran toward him. The rest fled. She jumped onto his back; his head whipped back, and he almost bit her, so mindless was his anger in the fight. He lifted his head and spat fire into a grain pit.
“AuRon, it’s over. It’s over now,” Hieba said.
The red color faded. Colors took on their normal hue.
He touched Unrush with his nose, but the blighter showed no sign of life. Unrush’s teeth still held pieces of tendon from Balazeh in a death grip, but the wrinkled eyes were vacant. AuRon ran his tongue across the Umazheh’s face, shutting the staring gaze.
An arrow whistled under his chin.
“AuRon, enough, let’s go,” she urged.
AuRon remembered the burning poison the blighter darts bore and raised his wings. He launched himself into the sky, leaving wind-driven flame and raised dust behind.
Chapter 20
AuRon fought headwinds all the way west. The landscape crawled beneath them, belying their speed toward the falling sun. They left the mountains and crossed the tributary of the Falnges far above where it joined the larger river. Beneath them, on the banks above the blighter settlement, a warlike camp stood on the peninsula of a pear-shaped bend in the river under hilltop watch-towers. Warrior blighters built walls and boats from the ample timber, ready to transport a great army downriver.
An hour’s flight downstream, they came to the town of the river-men. The settlement had grown since AuRon had last seen it. Mines of some kind scarred the hills around it, and men waded into the current to gather the lumber floated down the river from the loggers. They were in Dairuss.
They found a secluded field, and AuRon landed. Hieba climbed off his neck, hardly able to move after a full day’s flight. “How far have we come?” she groaned.
“We’re across into the headwaters of the Falnges.”
“You’ve left your cave, your library, everything. Just because I asked.”
That was not quite true. AuRon still had a few books, Djer’s ring, and the dwarsaw, secreted in the pouch of skin that held his armored fans.
“After what happened back there, it will be a brave blighter that goes in my cave for a few years. Nothing there matters. I would like to talk to Naf, and there’s a dwarf to whom I owe much that I haven’t seen in years.”
“Dairuss is not a rich land, AuRon. There are terrible tragedies happening on the other side of the mountains, around the Inland Ocean. Naf knows about it more than I; I just know that our land has more and more people coming through the passes every month. They sicken, they starve. The Silver Guard turns away many more, and none can say what happens to them.”
“What do they flee? War? Starvation? Disease?”
“It is dragons, AuRon, a plague of dragons. Naf can tell you more. He’s spoken to many of the elves and dwarves.”
“Dragons? If it is so, I cannot blame them. My kind are hunted wherever they live, from the deepest cave to the highest peak. If you expect me to fight against my own kin, just trying to protect home and clutch—”
“AuRon, I don’t think it’s like that. These dragons are slaves of men, who ride them into battle as the Ironriders do horses. The dragons do the bidding of another, and his orders are harsh.”
“Does he have an signet?”
Hieba rubbed her thighs, thinking. “Yes, I’ve heard tale of a golden circle, with an open-armed man within. Do you know aught of it?”
