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“Thank you.”
“The chain is special, Auron. A piece of my people’s magic. It’s a dwarsaw. Pull any part of it tight, and it will cut even an iron collar if scraped back and forth across it, should anyone succeed in putting you in chains again. Keep it as a memento of the first favor I did you.”
Auron tried pulling the links tight, and tiny serrated crystal blades like teeth appeared from their shell-like housings.
“You honor me with it.”
“By my shining beard, Auron, this’ll be a tale no one will believe in a century. A dwarf and a dragon, brought together by chance and bonded by friendship.”
Auron reared up, took the dwarf’s hand in his sii and shook it, dwarf-fashion. He flicked out his tongue, smelling Djer and his pipe tobacco into his memory. “That’s the best thing about friendship. It is a gift that cannot be lost. Only thrown away.”
Chapter 15
Hungry, thirsty, and cold, Auron asked himself for the eighteenth time, in as many days, what drove him from friendship and comfort into a waste. When he had first thought of finding NooMoahk, it had been a vague wish, an effort to find a new foundation for his life, and to discover the truth behind Hazeleye’s story about discovering a weakness in dragons.
But he hadn’t counted on the power of the wasteland. It was vaster than the dwarf maps indicated.
The dwarves prepared him for the desert as best as they could. Dry meat, especially sausages, and bladders of water filled the two saddlebags adapted for drakeback. Auron found when he emptied the water he could eat the skin, the tough leather gave his stomach something to work on through the cold nights. For this was no desert out of legend, a hot expanse of rock and sand—at least at this time of year—but a cold, dry waste of rattling pebbles and windblown rolling weeds bouncing off larger rocks.
Auron saw his tail and midsection thin perceptibly over the journey, as even one set of leather saddlebags disappeared into his hungry gullet, and he feared his fire bladder was reabsorbing the liquid fat contained within. He did his best to trot along as the wolves did, hardening his heart and muscles to the unnatural gait. He went steadily south, every night the object of the Bowing Dragon’s homage sunk a bit further toward the horizon. Sometimes, if he was lucky, at twilight or dawn he could catch hopping little rodents who sought bugs beneath the stones. Their hairy little bodies made him even more thirsty. He caught several, and in stands of brush found termite nests that he opened by using the dwarsaw to open their fortresslike towers, so he could shift them and dig out the nests underneath.
The blue smudge on the horizon that appeared on the twentieth day without water gave him hope. It must be the Bissonian Scarps of the old dwarf maps as rendered from the tongue of the people of Tindariuss, and somewhere within the dragon’s home. Auron could no longer jog along, but he could walk. He stalked the mountains as if they were prey, planting alternate feet front-and-rear with dried-out muscles and joints that creaked as he walked.
Something floated above, on wide wings with feathers that spread like fingers. Auron walked on, ignoring it, and it came lower in a half-hour’s worth of lazy circles. Its shadow passed over him, and a cold tail-tip of dread ran up his spine.
“You should have been picked over a week ago, if you came out of the north, dying one,” it called down to him, in bird speech. “Why did you choose my desert to kill yourself, hatchling?”
As though inaccurate old maps were my fault.
“I’m no hatchling, I’ve breathed my first fire, feather-wings,” Auron croaked.
“You should rest more. You’ll pant your life out in cramp and pain otherwise. I’ve seen a dozen kinds of desert death, and can foretell yours easily. You still didn’t answer my question.”
“Thank you for the advice.” Auron rather hoped the vulture would come within leaping distance. He waited for it to wheel around again before continuing the conversation. “I seek a relative, a black dragon named NooMoahk. If you aid me, you’ll find me grateful.”
“I’ll find you stretched out beneath the sun, with your last breath long since blown east. I’d like to know what favor you can do me.”
Auron had to wait again for another circle; he didn’t feel up to shouting. “NooMoahk doesn’t eat sand. There must be hunting to be had in those hills. I’ll keep the four-leggeds off my kills until you get your chance to pick the bones.”
“Dragons are notorious bone-eaters, so I wonder. Let me turn the question on its back and try poking at the belly. What can I, the genteelest of hunters, do to aid you?”
“Genteelest?”
“I don’t do my prey the discourtesy of killing it, but politely wait for it to die. What flesh-eater can say more?”
Some flesh-eaters are too ill-bred to wait and dine on the lips and tailvents, Auron thought. “Take me to the nearest water.”
“There are springs in the mountains, though you must first pass up and over the dry hills. It’s high summer and dry.”
“Nothing in the desert?”
“There is a waste-elf oasis, but they’ll have you turning on a spit.”
“What are waste-elves?”
“Outcasts, mostly. There are more than usual at their oasis. They’ve just struck some caravan that lost many of its guards in a far-off land—we vultures are great observers of all that goes on beneath our eyes—and they’re despoiling the wine and women taken. There would be good eating, if they would ever finish the job and move on.”>“They build a temple to him in the middle of the steppe?”
“The work of the son who ended up being assassinated. It was at the site of his father’s greatest triumph. Can’t imagine why anyone ever felt the need to fight a battle there. It looks just like any other part of the steppe. It was a well before. The only one for a distance, so perhaps there was a reason for the battle after all. That’s why we shall stop there. Our casks grow empty.”
