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The blighters had kept one wide lane clear running back to where the cave narrowed, and then down, somewhat in the manner of a dragon throat. It was easy to imagine the dwellings as teeth.
“The greatest of cities—once,” said her guide, who proudly named himself the sixteenth son of Unrush Uthvhe-Rinsrick. He spoke Parl tolerably well. “When commerce was to be had between the worlds of sun and dark. Before the demen. Before the promises of Anklamere that turned to death.”
Wistala, who sought secrets and histories the way some dragons chased the purest refined gold or hominid females or rare wines, listened to the mishmash of legend and folklore as they passed through the tumbledown piles of mud-brick. Anklamere was a sort of devil to several cultures; once he’d ruled the world from the kingdoms of the east to the city of Hypat at the mouth of the Falnges River on the Inland Ocean. They said his rule had once stretched just as far in the Lower World, too. She’d much rather hear of NooMoahk, but the blighter said that he’d died when he was still upon mother’s teat, and the name had an evil reputation, for he’d often forgotten old promises and stolen cattle or taken lives in his dotage.
Scores of warrior blighters now guarded the tunnel entrances, the mouth of the cavern, and a great yawning sink they had to traverse under hanging pots of bubbling, torch-heated fat. They greeted the sight of a dragon with a mix of babbling consternation and kneeling reverence.
The guide told her these were the sacred Fireblades. They’d won victories under AuRon and replenished their aged and injured from the tallest and strongest of the clans. Now they dwelled near the holy dragon cave.
The warriors slaughtered bullocks right and left, and their leaders told stories of the splendid hunting in the jungles to the south. Their enemies to the south and west, the Ghioz, feared dragons—all she would have to do would be to appear in the sky and they’d turn back. In return the blighters would hammer heavy cups and urns and fill them with the blood and sweetbreads of game—or their enemies.
A number of the Fireblades bore recent scars, closed up with pins of bird-bone. Helms and shields glinted with fresh strikes and digs, still gleaming bright against the more weathered metal, but whatever had happened they did not boast of it.
She probed the pit with ear and eye. “Do enemies come up that hole?”
“It was once a great well-pool, but the demen diverted the flow and NooMoahk did not put it back in order.”
Demen? She knew something of them through the dwarves. Odd, carapaced hominids who scuttled around in the dark places of the world and prayed to mysterious shining gods. Gods who demanded sacrifices.
“The Fireblades had a hard battle with Ghioz men, the Stone-builders,” her guide said. “They sought the sun-shard.”
“What’s that?” The name tugged at Wistala’s memory, but she couldn’t quite place it.
“You see in a moment. It is the living heart of our old empire. Stolen long ago. NooMoahk restored it to us after Anklamere’s fall.”
More tough-looking blighters idled here, eating and dueling. Heavy axes propping up mountains of muscle and studded hide of those on watch.
“The Fireblades,” her guide said. “Guardians of the sun-shard.”
They stirred and gaped at her as she passed. “The witch doctors were right! A new guardian comes!”
“The ancient dragon-cave,” the well-spoken blighter said. “Here NooMoahk placed the sun-shard, taken from the tower of Anklamere. Here AuRon advised our king to build rather than fight. Here in its light my tutor taught me the tongues of the subject races. It is a wonder of the two worlds. You could be its keeper, mayhap.”
An arch of clear light shone at the center of a circular, fanged dais. This was no prism reflecting torchlight. The reflections shifted and danced, as though it lived.
She would have to give an account of this to the librarians at Thallia. A relic of Anklamere might be of enough interest for them to send scholars to study it, if the blighters could be persuaded to have “subject races” tread on holy ground.
Perhaps she could come to terms with them.
“I will refresh myself. I can repay your hospitality with more than just words of gratitude.”
The peoples in the east had given her coins just for breathing in their presence while they made prayers. She had quite a collection sewn into the trim harness that carried her notes and maps and records of her travels that she would bequeath to the Great Library at Thallia.
Wistala sniffed around—dragon odor lingered long, and a scent remained, the tang and taste of male dragon, but whether it was Au—
Her head locked and her eyes widened. Off in a corner, bathed in the glow of crystals like the ones she’d seen in Yari-Tab’s tumbledown, only much brighter, stood stone-and-wood shelves lined with books, and scroll cases, and boxes.
She left the sun-shard and made straight for the shelves.
Heaps of paper lay rotting on the floor, or scattered around in wads. She opened a crumpled page.
“Strange lost tongues, but the pictures interest, mayhap,” her guide said.
The paper bore a smear, obscuring faint ink. The blighters had been wiping themselves with pages torn out from ancient texts.
She took down a leather-bound volume, not even feeling the twinge in her shoulder as she reached, opened a book, and looked at the first leaf. A strange design of three equilateral triangles overlaid on a thicker fourth—her savior and mentor Rainfall had taught her some geometry—the memory of him dried her throat. She unrolled a scroll. Someone had added the same icon to the top of the scroll in ink of a more recent vintage than the faded writing.
Someone had gone to great trouble to collect and mark these volumes.
