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“Tell Rayg—poisoned,” he managed, as the alarmed griffaran fluttered above, before blackness swallowed him.
Chapter 4
The Copper woke, looked around at the rich tapestries and mats covering the cavern walls. Gold and silver thread multiplied the lamplight. The soothing aroma of oliban made itself at home in his nostrils. He welcomed its aromatic visit.
In the shadows of the ceiling, two pairs of red eyes glinted and blinked.
“Nilrasha?” he rasped, feeling for her mind.
“She’s holding court in the gardens,” a human voice said. “Would you like some water?”
The Copper blinked the mist out of his eyes and saw Rayg Sablecloak. Despite his hominid birth, Rayg had as fine a mind as any of the Anklenes. Six years ago Rayg had married his body-servant, a lively but almost silent girl named Rhea. The Sablecloak family lived in the sunlight near the Southexit, and the Copper gave him leave to be with them whenever Rayg could be spared from his projects—a rare occurrence.
The Copper kept meaning to free him entirely, but it seemed there was always one more task that only Rayg could accomplish.
Rayg desired seeing his family settled out of the Lavadome in wealth and comfort. Now that his children were old enough to be helpful, one of them usually attended him in his workshop beneath the griffaran nesting areas, which employed a few skilled blighters and a strange dwarf who kept his beard and skull shaved. When the Copper had inquired, Rayg explained that the dwarf had suffered some irredeemable disgrace and labored so that he might still send a decent income home in the form of dragonscale.
“How did I get back here?”
“You were in a delirium. You don’t remember, then?”
The Copper searched his memory. He remembered viewing the demen, then bringing his breakfast up. Then there was some dream about a trek across Bant with lions watching him the whole way, and swimming, swimming in water that alternated hot and cold.
He heard dragon-voices out beyond the beading that separated his sleeping-chamber from the rest of his chambers—the hygiene annex with its trickle and paired pools and his private gallery looking out on the Lavadome and the little trophy alley that led up to the formal court hall. They were cramped quarters, probably not even filling the egg shelf in the cave he’d been born into, but it was easier to relax with comforting stone close around and tight corners where enemies could not mass and might be surprised.
“How long have I been with fever?”
“Three lightings,” Rayg said, referring to the glow of refracted sunlight or moonlight through the apex of the Lavadome. Probably about a day and a night in the Upper World. While dragons in the Upper World adapted to a sun-based schedule easily enough, in the Lavadome they alternated long-sleep, long-active, short-sleep, short-active, mixing according to humor and necessity. The Anklenes kept to a system based on the changing of the griffaran guard every twelve dwarf-hours.
“Send NoSohoth in,” the Copper said, lifting his head. He felt tired, but remarkably clearheaded. “I believe I hear him in the trophy-hall.”
NoSohoth, on entering, sprinkled another sii of quartz-like oliban on the brazier and tested the aroma with his nose. With a satisfied snort he bowed his way into the sleeping chamber.
“My Tyr—”
“Is awake,” the Copper said, forestalling expressions of joy at his recovery. He sensed a tension in NoSohoth, even with the relaxing aroma so thick in the air you could almost see it. “What’s the matter? Is Nilrasha ill?”
“No, my Tyr. But many are.”
“A plague?”
“Food poisoning,” Rayg said. “It’s this year’s new kern.”
Kern was the most beneficial when it was freshest, so most dragon larders and storehouses sent the older stuff off to be cattle-feed or thrall-gruel when a new batch came in. Mothers of hatchlings mixed it up with blood, or rolled organmeats in ground kern and flamed the mash so that their progeny might grow long and strong.
“Bad kern?” Careless of that CuPinnatax. He’d appointed him Upholder of Anaea because he seemed an intelligent—though idle—dragon. CuPinnatax’s grandsire FeLissarath had been the Upholder there for many years under the old Tyr. The Copper had served there before events in the Lavadome changed the entire course of his life.
“Not to smell or taste or sight, my Tyr,” NoSohoth said, but then he’d put CuPinnatax forward for the Upholdership.
“I put it under a dwarf-lens,” Rayg said. For a human who could speak Drakine credibly, he cared little for courtly niceties. “There’s some kind of blight on it, a brownish spore-like organism. It doesn’t appear to make the kern itself less wholesome, or interfere with it in any way I could detect, but once introduced into the digestion, it thrives and putrates. Cattle and sheep and pigs it affects hardly at all; they grow gassy and distended, but that seems to pass in a day. It sickens and slays chickens, and with dragons it appears to be taking the young and infirm.”
“Take?” the Copper said. “How many?”
NoSohoth seemed unaccountably impressed with a new tapestry in the sleeping chamber. The Copper saw him deftly add more oliban to the brazier with his far saa.
“It is bad, Tyr,” Rayg said. Even a dragon could read his expression.
The Copper’s brain felt divided, flying in two directions. One part of him rushed backwards, trying to remember absolutely everything FeLissarath had taught him about kern. It was a crop dependent only on ample sunshine and rain as it ripened. Anaea, with its rich soil and high-altitude climate, was ideal in both, though once in a while a bad year or too much rain left the kern either undersized or rotting. FeLissarath had never mentioned any kind of blight that sickened dragons.
