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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.”
