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AuRon recognized the face beneath the droopy hat, mostly because it wore an eyepatch. Hair like winter birchtwigs supported the brim of the hat. It was the elf, Hazeleye, both his capturer and his rescuer. Happily, she’d collected the debt for freeing him long ago, which had resulted in the overthrow of the dragon-riders of the Isle of Ice and his mating with Natasatch. The wizard who’d organized and purposed their race war against the other hominids had once told him that elves were like tree bark on poplars—peel back one layer of plotting and a new one appeared underneath.
“Wistala. Her name’s Wistala.”
“I know that. She’s a good friend to this place and we all long for her return.”
“Why is that?” AuRon asked.>Cries and shrieking voices like birdspeech broke out all around. The sounds were kind of a pidgin Drakine mixed with clucks and hoots and croaks, a jamboree of mismatched winged creatures.
She recognized the dragon-name NooMoahk.
“Mizz! Anklamere’s grook cracker works bakka still, ptuck! Dragon-dropper, yak?”
“Yak! Cluck-glug! We braaak NooMoahk! Chukku-na.”
“Nip! Nip! Dulg mak NooMoahk, got us dragon-she!”
“Nie-hruss, ventwipe.”
The motion resolved into dancing forms seen through eyes incapable of focus, but she felt rather easy about it. Something fixed about her snout. She smelled a hot melted-metal scent. She recalled stories of killing dragons by pouring hot lead in their nostrils and other horrible hominid tricks, but she felt oddly complacent about the idea of it happening to her.
One eye focused and she saw a heavy leather band, studded and reinforced with hot rivets, stuck about her nose.
A bent-over shape, almost folded over on itself with an assortment of strange plates and spines and bits of creepily soft-looking flesh showing beneath and violet eyes brighter than any wildflower she’d ever seen stepped forward. It supported itself on a curved stick studded with what looked like hatchling teeth.
She heard a clattering above and rolled one eye up. Some cave above, with false cave-wall broken away . . .
A trap. She’d stuck her head right in.
Other hominids, vague in the dark, not quite so curled up but still bent, with legs that stuck out sideways and up more like spiders than men, rushed here and there with lines and chains.
“Ye speak to Paskinix, dragon,” the creature said. For a moment she couldn’t say which language it spoke.
“I’ve lived four generations, dragon, four!” it continued to her in competent but unaccented Drakine, tearing off a piece of raw and bloody goat-haunch with teeth like broken rocks, “waiting for another crack at NooMoahk. Didn’t expect that greased projection and the undermined crack when ye climbed down the shaft, did ye? Well, thy recklessness cost ye a wing. Thy Tyr thought he’d sneak in the back door after bashing in the front, eh?”
Wistala couldn’t have responded if she’d wanted, since the band was fixed too firmly about her snout. She wondered which one of DharSii’s dragons called themselves Tyr—an old title from the tales of Silverhigh, wasn’t it? His Drakine was odd. Either he didn’t know proper word order and emphasis or he’d picked up some dialect or archaic form.
The thing, which Wistala decided must be a deman—it was definitely a hominid, if a bizarre-looking one, and certainly no dwarf—straightened, supported by its toothy prop.
“Aye, ye’ve driven me out of my gardens and streams to this forgotten corner of the higher darks.” It grew animated and splattered her with goat-blood as it gestured. “Trading bits of glass for a goat-meal when once I dined on tender young griffaran. Ney more sulfur-soaks for Paskinix, thanks on thy cursed sisterhood. And yon Tyr, acting all lofty and demanding I come call him and negotiate,” Paskinix said. “Well, I’ll let him know I’ve my own token in play this game, ye can be sure.”
He looked up and down her uninjured wing as other demen fixed lines to it. Another did something abominable about her hindquarters and hiccupped out a few words.
“Ney eggs coming, eh? Well, bad for us,” Paskinix said.
Wistala found the strength to swallow the drool accumulating in her mouth and began to feel a little better in body—but much, much worse in spirit. Taken by some deman with a grudge against dragons that she knew nothing of—
She heard a grating sound and a sort of sculpture of metal and wheels like a cart—but all backwards, for the wheels were at the top, spinning as uselessly as an overturned turtle’s legs—was dragged up next to her by the demen. A deman clad in greasy-smelling leather and thick gloves thrust a sort of bright two-headed spear at her and . . .
Kzzzzzt!
Her whole body jumped within the restraints even now being secured without her willing it, and consciousness faded—rather pleasantly—to the sound of the old deman cackling.
Chapter 6
If it weren’t for the bridge, AuRon would have never found the place.
He traveled at night, resting at rocky, inaccessible coves on the Inland Ocean. He hoped he’d find that inn before too long. The fall winds were kicking up and storms would soon come out of the northwest, cold furies of wind and sleet, coming ashore as though angry for having to pass over all that water.
At first he flew up the wrong river. When he reached a fork in the river without the bridge appearing and explored both branches just to come upon an old ruin he’d once camped under with a now-dead dwarf friend, he knew he’d gone wrong.
