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The Copper repeated back the song. NeStirrath corrected him, and he repeated it back again almost perfectly. The first few lines still intrigued him.
“You wanted to be Tyr?” he asked.
“I was young. I wouldn’t take it now if it came with a river of gold. Dragons are always quarreling, and no matter how wisely the Tyr settles matters, both parties grumble and blame his judgment.”
The Copper had never been in the strange, smooth hill of the Anklenes before. He and the Drakwatch had seen it from every angle on the ground, and once he’d looked down on it from the Imperial Resort on a botanical tour of the gardens, but he’d never walked past the twin statues of robed hominids, one holding a lamp and the other a quill and scroll, and up to its entrance.
He paused there and let Harf catch up.
Flat spaces yawned at the base of the statues. According to NeStirrath, there’d once been statues of dragons crouched beneath the figures on their pillars, but the dragons found the arrangement vaguely offensive—hominids towering above dragons? The statues were moved to more illustrious accommodations on the Imperial Resort. Now they looked down on the Anklene hill.
The base of the Anklene hill—if hill was the right word, for it was too regular to be a natural formation of the cavern and seemed too big for anyone to have constructed it—was exactly square. It sloped away from its base, at first very slowly, but then the angle increased until the four sides met at the peak. Viewed from the entrance, the peak seemed very high and far-off.
The hill was coated with pink-white stone, lined and divided like good plump meat. The Copper passed under the statues on their columns and approached the entrance, a portal that mimicked the peak shape of the entrance. He saw—and smelled—lights burning within.
A human hurried toward the entrance, adjusting his thrall-wrap. He had the potbelly of a thrall who wasn’t worked hard enough, or who perhaps filched food. The Copper gave NeStirrath and Rethothanna’s names, and the thrall led him inside.
The passages were low and wide within, carved out of a more natural-looking brown stone, reinforced in spots with steel or scale-chipped wood. They’d been smoothed and coated with a paste the color of a hatchling’s belly to make the most of the lights. A similar sort of surface covered the floor, only tiny rounded pebbles had been thrown into the mix. Two dragons could just slip past each other, if they adjusted their stance and didn’t lock wings. The place also had that disgusting wet-bat smell of humans.
The thrall led him on a zigzagging course like a snake’s trail. It seemed there was only one main tunnel in here, winding upward in a series of turns, opening out on galleries and larger rooms that extended to the hillside. Greenish light filled the rooms that didn’t have lamps in use, and the copper recognized baskets dripping with cave moss hanging from the ceilings. There were thralls, naked from the waist up, who did nothing but carry yokes and buckets of filthy-smelling water. They’d hook a ladder to some eyebolts in the ceiling and climb up, endlessly watering the thriving moss.
The thrall fell to his knees at a wide gallery. A female stood within, her heavy haunches to him. She examined a series of pieces of matched paper hanging on a line, with writing scrawled on them.
“Very well. Put the new page nine in,” the dragon told another thrall. This one was elvish, a female with hair like dead cave moss.
The prostrate thrall glubbed something out into the set pebbles of the hallway pavement, raising dust.
“Who? I don’t know a Rugaard-nester.” She turned, showing eyes that struck him as bulging and a little oversize, though her nostrils had an elegant upward curve that reminded him a little of Mother.
“Rugaard. Sent by NeStirrath,” the Copper said. “I have some lines from his lifesong—”
“You’re too late,” she said, settling down with forelimbs crossed. “That old fool. This is just like him, making difficulty just when I’d given up. My history’s complete. It’s to be presented tonight; the Tyr himself wants to hear it at the Imperial banquet.”
“We could present the Tyr with a revised edition later,” the elvish thrall said, in remarkably good Drakine. “You’ll recite tonight personally, won’t you? He’d like a few lines about NeStirrath; they are old friends.”
The dragonelle ignored her. She swung her neck sideways, another unsettling gesture, for it reminded him of a snake, and looked at Harf and shut her nostrils. She returned her wide-eyed stare to the Copper. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Rugaard.”
“I’m Rethothanna. Wait, you’re the one who was adopted into the line three years ago?”
“Yes.” The Copper wasn’t sure if she deserved some sort of honorific or not. He started to recite the poem while it was still fresh in his head.
She interrupted him after six lines. “Look at your scale. What’s that servant of yours been doing with his time, the one-handed hominid pastime? The banquet’s in three hours!”
“I’m…I don’t know about a banquet.”
Rethothanna’s overlarge eyes widened, and the Copper wondered if they’d pop out. “You’re of the line. It’s an Imperial banquet. You must be at your place.”
“Er…”
“Don’t pollute your locution! Say something worthwhile or be silent.”
The Copper settled on silence, so fixed was he on the vast whites of her eyes as she looked him over.
“But not looking like that. Yam, go get every scale polisher and claw shaper in the hill. Open your mouth, drake. Well! Those teeth aren’t bad. There’s many a drake who’d be proud of a set like that. A little oil and they’ll gleam admirably; maybe they’ll divert attention from that eye. Eyegrit, are those bat bites? Where do you live?” He heard Harf take a few steps back. The shifting head turned on him. “Yes, you, thrall, you’d better cower. I’ve half a mind to eat you. Who taught you to use scouring salt on a dragon’s scale?”
“All scale clean! All them clean!” Harf said, covering his head with his forelimbs.
