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Of course, to a blighter any big flying creature might seem a dragon. Still, all the detail he’d worked out, with tunnels and a whole hidden society of dragons dug in like rabbits in a warren inside a mountain. Perhaps he’d found that his stories enhanced his prestige among the others.
Wistala had learned long ago to clean her own scale and suck up and spit out river-sand to scrub her teeth. But she did let Harf set up bed and tenting on her doorstep, with orders to keep blighters from defiling any more texts.
An entourage of tribal elders visited her, paying obeisance to the crystal and asking what she’d seen on her hunting flights. They seemed most worried about the river to the west, their informal border with a province of the Ghioz. The Ghioz had crossed the river and were “digging holes” in some of the Pine Hills, a green serration on the horizon visible from the mouth of the great cave-ruin.
Ghioz riders had even explored some of the foothills of the blighter mountain range. They’d been chased off with a hail of flung spears and arrows and slingstones, but the Fireblades who’d seen action in the old Southling war under AuRon feared they’d be back.
A chastened enemy might return. A one-eyed Fireblade insisted that not even the ghosts of destroyed enemies ever troubled him again.
Wistala could understand their worry. She’d grown up in the human lands of the old Hypatian Empire. The Ghioz on the other side of the mountains had grown from minor trading partner on the Sunstruck Sea to rival. Geography, a few good thanes in the mountain passes, and the traditional friendship of elves and dwarves in their own lands who’d shared in Hypatia’s ancient glories kept their terrible queen on her side of the mountains.
But, still, her wondering turned to worry. Wistala supposed that the choice cuts of meat and tasty organmeat sausages were inducements to stay. They even presented her with bits of old chain and nail and cooking iron along with raw gold and silver ores, gritty but satisfying in the slime that came to her mouth to aid it in its downward slide. NooMoahk’s tribute, the blighters styled it.
She’d seen one war; one war was enough for her temperament. But the idea of all these irreplaceable old books being torn up and used to start campfires or finish a bowel evacuation pained her. She could almost hear Rainfall weeping when she thought of its destruction by ignorant blighters or a heedless invading army.
That night, she fell asleep among them, counting old scrolls the way some dragons counted tasty, jumping sheep.
A deputation of the Fireblades with Vank at its head roused her the next morning with a snarling drum that made her think of desert snakes and their rattle-tails. Irritated, she was tempted to knock the whole lot of them down with her tail.
“Greenscale goddess,” Vank said, as she smacked her lips to bring moisture to her dry mouth. “The Ghioz have crossed the river. They cut down trees for a stockade in our western woods, rich with wild boar and redmonkey.”
She wasn’t surprised that he named her two favorite blighter preparations. Vank was full of himself, not stupid. He’d acquired a new belt of gold and silver rings.
“I hope you don’t want me to fight them.”
“No, keeper, no. Horblikklak, the Fireblades’ Marchchief, intends only to make a show of force and ask them to talk.”
Wistala dredged her memory. The Fireblades had a three-headed leadership. Their Marchchief saw to the day-to-day organization and training of the warriors. The Battlechief, a bent oldster who used a captured battle-standard for a staff, would direct them in fighting. The Youngchief picked likely male blighters, saw to their supply, and learned from the other two. It was an old system from the ancient blighter glory, when a Battlechief might command tens of thousands represented as bits of skulls on three-dimensional maps in boxes of dried sugared sand instead of the few hundreds squatting in their storied ruins.
Horblikklak, whose name meant “Mountain Lightning” in the blighter tongue, stepped forward, quick and flashy as a warty mountain toad—which is to say not at all.
“Tell the dragon—” he began.
“I’ve improved my understanding of your tongue,” Wistala said. The language had come fast, as though she’d learned it in the egg. “You may speak to me directly.”
Some of the blighters made coughing sounds at her pronunciation, but she’d made herself understood.
“We talk to Stone-men, to Ghioz,” Horblikklak said. “You fly in distance, watching. When we signal with banner, you fly to us and circle, so they see we speak truth about presence of dragon.”
“Will you speak truth about willingness of the dragon to go into battle?”
“Some truths best left unsaid, mayhap,” Vank said, digging in his oily ear as he examined her cavern’s ceiling.
“Just don’t start a fight and expect me to rescue you. I’ve no quarrel with these men.”
Vank made a digging motion with one long arm, but the gesture was lost on Wistala. “The sight of a dragon will make them wary. The runaway, Harf, said the Ghioz fear dragons. Dragons knock down stone cities.”
Scales and tales! Evidently the blighters here liked a good liar. Well, she could do with a little exercise. For eye as well as wing, she’d been reading too much.
“I agree. Show me the signal and so on.”
It took a few days to set up the meeting with the Ghioz, then a spring storm delayed it still further. The two sides arranged for it to be held at an old rockpile that the blighters claimed was a quarry from Krag’s old glory. The Ghioz insisted it was an old stoneworks of theirs, and even dug up old tools bearing Ghioz marks that old Horblikklak thought suspiciously free of rust and rot.
Vank told her the history of meetings with the Ghioz. Their first meeting generations ago had been deep in the woods beyond the great river that, if her maps were correct, flowed all the way to Hypatia and the Inland Ocean. In those days the woods were the halfway point between the blighters and the Ghioz. At that time they arranged to take lumber from the forests across the river. After a bloody incident between human woodsmen and blighter hunters, they held a second peace council on the “Ghioz” riverbank, the new border, two generations ago. The next one after that was on the blighter side, once the Ghioz claimed rights to use the river to float their lumber down to their province on the east side of the Red Mountains. When that had happened, most of the Fireblades were running naked chasing beetles. Now it seemed the Ghioz claimed a vast swath of territory on this side of the river, and the new “halfway” point was practically on the doorstep of Great Krag.
She saw the Fireblades’ banner, a tall wooden construct that reminded her of a small boatmast. It took four blighters to carry it from base point to base point, plus two more to roll the heavy wheel base it rested in when traveling. Assorted skulls, broken shields and sword hilts, black dragonscale etched with chalky pictographs, and long strings of vertebrae like Rainfall’s old Winter Solstice decorations of whitebell blossoms rattled against each other or chimed in the wind. It had lines to the top where the blighters could run up signal flags for those too far away to hear orders. Vank pointed out a bronzed bit of dragonclaw, some sheath AuRon must have shed and given to them, when they told the story (again!) of their great victory when they burned the war machines in the southern jungles.
Wistala’s throat tightened as she touched the bronzed memento of her brother.
