Page 38 of Raven’s Fight

Which tells me something in itself. If the weakening was made rather than suffered, it was made to look exactly like nature taking its course to every dragon alive to watch it happen. Whoever did it understood us well enough to counterfeit our own slow changes. Which means he had been studying us a long while before he ever lifted a hand.

I make a note and go back down.

The name Amadeus surfaces in the forty-seventh layer.

Not as an actor. As a mention. It comes in the account of a dragon elder who went to a mage council during the worst of the alarm about the failing bloodlines. He wanted expertise. Among the mages who answered him was one called Amadeus, set down in this account as a specialist in binding and preservation — a man whose particular study was holding great power in one place for a very long time.

I read the passage three times.

The elder describes him as helpful. Learned. Deeply interested in how a dragon's body actually works. He asked questions, the elder notes, that were thorough and exact — not the questions of a clever man trying to understand a problem, but the questions of a man who already understood it and was checking his own work.

Then the account ends. The elder asked, received his answer — ordinary drift, nothing to be done, patience and time — and went home content.

I sit back from the table.

Ordinary drift. Nothing to be done. An expert soothing a worried old dragon who did not know enough to hear that the expert had his own reasons for asking.

And underneath that, the thing the elder could not have known and I do. By the time he sat across from the man calling himself Amadeus, Amadeus had been dead for centuries.

I go deeper.

What waits down there is worse.

Not more surprising — by the sixtieth layer I have stopped being surprised by anything. Worse in that it is more complete, and more detailed, and harder to hold once you have it.

The binding is older than I am, and it did not start as a prison. It started as a question. More than a thousand years ago the first working was built to hold and study great power in a place where it could be watched — to answer what becomes of a mighty thing when its might is given nowhere to go for a very long time. What gathers. What changes. Whether holding a thing still makes it into something more concentrated than it was.

I know the answer to that question. I was the answer to it for a thousand and twenty years.

The one who built the working gave his own life to fuel it. That much is ordinary for a working of that size. You cannot hold something as strong as an old dragon for an age on borrowed strength alone. It needs a source inside itself, and the practitioner's life becomes the fire.

But the sixty-third layer — the account of a dragon who sat on the mage council's oversight body in the years just after — has in it something the written histories never recorded.

The one who built the binding did not simply die. He built the working so that what he was — his self, his knowing, everything he had gathered — would be kept inside the binding rather than snuffed out with the body. Spread through the whole net of cursed eggs instead of ending. Able to remain. Able to watch. Able to act through any host with enough mage-blood in him, for as long as the net held.

For as long as the eggs exist.

They have been broken one by one down the centuries. Some by the mates of the ones inside them. Some by other means. But there are always more, and there are always more because as long as he remains in the net he can have new ones made. He cannot make them himself, having no hands. But mage-blooded men can be steered. And a thing that has lain spread across that net for more than a thousand years has had time enough to learn how to steer them.

Amadeus is not dead.

Amadeus has never been dead. He is the binding. He is the net. He is in every place an egg exists and every place a mage-blooded creature carries his influence, and he has been building this quietly for more than a thousand years, because patience is the one thing a creature with no body and nothing left to lose has in unlimited supply.

I sit a long while with that.

The autumn wind moves through Blackhaven above me and the mountain settles the way it does, that particular creak of something very old making its adjustments to a change of season. I know the sound now. I have been here a year and I know this mountain's vocabulary, the way I knew the vocabulary of the southern continent before they put me in the dark. You live somewhere long enough and it stops being background. It becomes the quiet you think inside of.

I let the mountain's quiet do its work. Then I pick up my pen.

✦ ✦ ✦

The report takes two hours.

I write it for Raven, which means I write it exactly and completely and soften nothing. She has told me plainly, more than once, that she decides better with the whole shape of a thing than with a tidied version of it. I believe her. I also believe some things are heavy enough that the reader wants her feet under her first, and this is one of those.

I put in all of it. How the old blood is read, so she can weigh how far to trust it. Which layers I drew from, where they agree and where they don't. The elder who asked Amadeus for help and was given an answer built to keep him calm rather than to tell him anything true. What the sixty-third layer says about how the binding was actually made. And what follows from that: as long as one cursed egg exists anywhere, so does he.

I write that last line and hold the pen above it a moment.