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Father blew his nostrils out at the condor. “Only thing that’ll change the mind of a dragonelle of Irelia’s line is herself, Bartleghaff,” Father said.
“You know that old buzzard?”
Bartleghaff squawked: “Condor!”
“Know him?” Father snorted. “He’s my oldest friend.”
“Friend? You were waiting to eat him!” Wistala said to the condor.
“Of course he was,” Father said. “I wouldn’t want some stranger getting the best bits. Who better than an old skymate to serve the dragon-wake.”
“What a feast!” Bartleghaff said. “And my son’s got a hatchling of his own now, first year in the sky. Such a gobble we’d have, we’d all be too fat to fly for a week. You’d have been remembered fondly at every cliff-sit for a hundred years. We were gathering to see you off properly.” He fluffed his feathers again. “Till she came along.”
“For someone who dines on lips and vents, you offer complaints a plenty,” Father said. “That legendary politeness of your kind—if it ever existed—is on the wane as your years advance.”
“Tell me about the dwarves, Father. Why do you say they betrayed you?”
“They broke a bargain they struck with your mother. Strange, for of all the hominids, dwarves are the only ones who can be trusted to keep their word without crabbing. Serves us right for believing legends. Perhaps dwarvish honor, like so many of the other old truths, has been brought down by poisoned arrows.” He sent a significant glare Bartleghaff’s way.
“What was the bargain?” Wistala asked.
“It came from our need for a decent cave. Your mother and I had already seen our share of tragedy. For our first clutch, we were too high in the mountains and in too shallow a cavern. A bitter freeze took the eggs. Your poor mother. The next cavern had a seep of bad air, odorless, clinging to the floor. Again, no hatchlings stirring after the first weeks. I was inconsolable at that and gave up hope—all those years of searching wasted. While flying the southern reaches of these mountains, we came across a band of blighters, half of them hurt, and made an easy meal of them. While I chased the survivors off south, your mother nosed through their belongings for digestible metals.
“Up popped a dwarf. Your mother thought him well scarred from battle and a stout, strong sort, even for a dwarf. Now had I been there, I would have made an end to him, but your mother knew we were strangers to the mountains this far from the sea, and she conversed with him. He gave his name as Gobold of the Wheel of Fire clan.
“ ‘You’re unusually bold for a dwarf abovegrounds,’ your mother said.
“ ‘I’m in your debt,’ Gobold said, pouring out the contents of a small purse he carried. There was a goodly mouthful of silver for each of us to be had. Just the thing we needed to put the sparkle back in our scales after the long flight.
“ ‘Silver and salivation, what service have we done you?’
“Gobold replied: ‘You’ve finished a battle commenced days ago. The blighters outran us. Yea, they even outdug us.’
“Your mother let him talk, and he spoke of the decay of the human empire that once circled the Inland Ocean the way cave moss circles a pool. They’d given up their outposts in the southern mountains, and blighters filled some of their old caves and tumbles. The blighters were plaguing the dwarves’ trade routes and taking over mines.
“When he spoke of how the blighters filled several caves at the end of the southern mountains, closed them off from the dwarvish tunnels and roads in the Lower World so that the dwarves couldn’t get at them, your mother began to hatch an idea of her own. She told the dwarves that in return for six chests of gold and twelve of silver, we’d drive the blighters from those caverns and see that they never returned.
“ ‘Such a deed would long be sung at our Memorials, Queen of Dragons,’ Gobold said.
“ ‘I must consult with my husband before formally pledging tooth and claw to bargain. Perhaps you should seek the agreement of your clan?’
“ ‘That will not be difficult,’ Gobold said with a chuckle.
“In the end, the bargain was formally struck with many words and an etching on a silver war-shield. She had the dwarves pay us half in small sums as we brought back heads for counting. When it came to dealing with hominids, your mother was fond of the old dragon-saying: Trust, but keep an eye open.
“So we fought the dwarves’ war for them. I would have just forced my way into the cave and set fire to all within, but your mother demanded a more patient war that allowed us to build our strength even as we weakened theirs.
“We attacked their herds and their flocks, burned their Upper World crops, and took such blighter parties as were easily consumed by two dragons hunting by day or night. Such feasting we had—”
“Oh, yes . . . ,” sighed Bartleghaff.
“And when they sent out hunting parties or tried to trick and trap us, we got away without too much difficulty, and sometimes got a chance for our own tricks and traps, for your Mother has—had—a fine mind for that sort of thing. Many of the blighters left in despair, but a hard few stayed within their cave, scratching a living from the Lower World. Soon we made them afraid to cast a shadow outside their cave.”
“Did you destroy the battlements around the cave, then?” Wistala asked.
“Oh no, daughter, time is fiercer even than dragons. Hatchlings think the world began when their egg cracked—eh, Bartleghaff? Those old works date from the Age of Wheels, when the blighters first ruled the world before dragons tamed their appetites.”
“You must have gone in the caves eventually.”
