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“Thank you.”
“I warn you, she can smell out deception.”
“I thank you for the warning, but it’s not necessary.”
“You’ll lay your throat on that?”
AuRon wondered at the grim-sounding phrase. Well, he certainly intended no harm to the Queen of the Ghioz. “If that will set your mind at ease, yes, I lay my throat on it.”
“Let us rest before turning back south,” DharSii said. “I’ve been sleeping on sandbars, but this tangle would serve to guard us. Shall we take turns keeping an eye open?”
AuRon turned a circle, like a wolf, and settled down. “I will stay up first, while I consider how best to mourn my friend.”
“Know that she was resolute to the end.” Then more quietly: “Were that she hadn’t been!”
DharSii woke him before dawn and they hunted the game-trails. They found some scab-hided boar, and by each taking an end of a game-trail through the thickets, managed to burn one of the fattest, though their trap didn’t work as well as they would have liked, for the others shot off grunting through the roots. But dragon-roast pork made a fine breakfast, seasoned by a rosy smoke from the thorns.
The successful hunt mated his admiration of the dragon with enjoyment of the time spent in his company. He could be talkative when asked but preferred silent contemplation, division, and digestion of their meal. A word or two on the merits of game roasted in skin against gutting and tenderizing in a tree for a day or two satisfied both.
They halted once on the flight south, and AuRon prodded DharSii for details of the battle that cost him Wistala. As he relayed details, an awful suspicion grew—mountains to the southeast, a great cave, an old ruin, blighters . . .
It sounded as though the Queen of the Ghioz had made war on the blighters he’d once more or less presided over as an ally. But why had the Queen attacked the old ruins? Unless broken pottery and dust had suddenly become valuable, he couldn’t see the reason. A murder-raid would be better directed at the blighter villages on the southern slopes of the mountains there. For NooMoahk’s library? For that queer crystal the blighters worshiped?
He wondered how Wistala had fallen in with mercenary dragons, murdering blighters he knew to be about as peaceable as any hominids he’d met in all his travels. Wistala, seeking death and pillage? Of course, he’d changed much in coming to maturity. Perhaps she had also, and not for the better.
AuRon saw ships scattered along the river, and camps full of soldiers.
“Is there a war?” he asked, flying over men marching back and forth in an empty paddock and archers practicing on scarecrows.
“Soon,” DharSii said.
“She doesn’t need dragons for war?”
“Oh, she does. It’s the dragon who is tired of war in this case.”
They came to fertile lands and fields full of livestock. DharSii pointed out brickworks kilns and limestone quarries, docks and warehouses, roads, bridges, and neat little towns with wide streets. Each had a temple with a golden dome somewhere near the center; some domes were great, some, at quiet little crossroads, no bigger than a dragon egg.
AuRon asked about the domes.
“That’s the seat of power for the local titleor.”
“Titleor?” AuRon shouted back over the wind, not sure he had heard what was obviously a hominid term correctly.
“That’s the Ghioz word. It translates into Parl as overking, but that’s a little clumsy for me. I find it easier to pronounce Ghioz.”
“So they’re a kind of miniature king?”
“Oh, it confuses even me. Here, drift close for a moment. The Queen grants or sells titles, say to run a warehouse or unload ships or even govern a province, and in return the hominids pay a title-tithe. Those that run their affairs profitably get the chance to buy more titles. Titles are ranked by the coin used to pay—brass, silver, and gold. If you’re the owner of one or more golden titles you’re a very important Ghi man indeed. Those titleor that lose money so as not to pay the title-tithe, get their titles revoked. It’s possible for one successful dwarf, let’s say, to have a score or more titles. It gets horribly complex, especially since provincial governors get a chance to grant titles in their own province in the name of the Queen, sharing the proceeds with her. That’s why the Ghioz grow so. They’re always looking to start up a new province.”
How did hominids find time to make so many squalling whelps when they had to cope with such complexity every day? Strange schemes of the two-legged!
They turned off the river and followed a smaller branch into the mountains. AuRon guessed their destination from far off. He could see the cuts and shapes to one spur of mountain, flung far out and divided into claws, like a two-digit saa.
On the way there they encountered giant winged avians. AuRon recognized them. He’d seen a few, far off and high up, in his explorations of the southern jungles during his years as dragon-friend to the blighters of the Bissonian Scarps.
“Roc-riders,” DharSii said. “The Queen’s latest obsession. She’s breeding them as fast as she can. She learned some trick of taming them just out of the egg.”
AuRon suspected he knew the trick, but he said nothing.
