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He marked fleeing forms of humans in various states of nightdress.
A pair of guards charged in, spears at the ready. AuRon roared at them, and they charged out with the same enthusiasm as they had entered with.
“What is this insult?” a commanding voice called.
AuRon saw the Red Queen standing in a stairway. She wore a mask that looked as though it was made of carefully pressed paper.
“You owe me a ransom of gold,” AuRon said. “I am here to collect.”
“You did a poor job of delivering my message. We keep our bargains. We will give you a quantity of silver, and we may part in peace.”
“Give me what I have earned, or die.”
“That is an easy choice. Kill me. It will save us a chest full of coin, that we may then find a better use for.”
“I do not desire your gold,” AuRon said. “You may satisfy my demand by paying me in flesh.”
“Naf and his men have failed, you know. All your clever planning simply put him and those men of his in our hands with less trouble than it would have taken to hunt him out of those mountains.”
AuRon bristled.
“What did you want in the citadel, I wonder?” the Red Queen said, walking out into the center of the nexus of stairs.
“If you give up Hieba and her child, I will forget your betrayal,” AuRon said, listening to cries and arguments of the servants.
“Is this some exotic appetite of dragons? We have heard rumors of such compulsions.”
“Let us go in peace.”
“So you can return them to that—traitor? Young Desthenae is being raised to lead her people under the title of governor. She promises to be beautiful enough to keep poets and songwriters inspired for generations to come. We would not like to let such grooming go to waste.”
“Then pay me the ransom promised or die.”
AuRon loosed his flame and the Red Queen vanished in a brief scream. Was she insane?
A burst of bluish light darted from the conflagration. It danced before his eyes like a lost firefly. Then it whirled up the stairs.
AuRon followed it, up and around turns, through the palace. Servants stared, not at the jumping light but at AuRon pounding up behind. Even as he panted from the chase, AuRon suspected that, like some hues of cave moss glow, the light could not be seen by human eyes.
They burst through the double doors at the back of the mountain’s head. The light raced up the ridge of the mountain to the tiny temple high on the mountainside.
He took off, circled the giant sculpture and looked down into the city. Perhaps he imagined it, or it was some trick of rain and wind, but it seemed that wings glided over the citadel.
He raced to the temple, burning its image into his eyes as the light faded.
Upon alighting, he listened, but only the mountain wind entered his ears.
He descended through graceful elvish sculpture built on stout dwarvish foundations, went down a wide, curving stair, and then squeezed through a crude blighter passage.
And so he came to the chamber.
The roots of the world itself held up its ceiling, or so it seemed.
AuRon had the strange feeling the mountain had grown up around this place. The rocks felt old, as if even they were tired and worn down by the ages.
A tree stood at the center, though it was an odd sort of tree, like two sets of roots joined at the trunk. One set of roots gripped the ceiling, the other the ground.
In places the roots bulged like diseased skin. Some of the perturbations were small, red, apple-like, others were as swollen as a bloated pig.
