 "FOOLS AND THRALLS TALK OF GOOD AND EVIL. THEIR MASTERS THINK IN TERMS OF TIME AND PLACE." —Tighlia

The gold-shouldered griffaran, with two silver-winged companions soaring beside, flew to the far side of the water. The Copper rode, clenched in maimed talons, protecting his chest wound with his bad sii.

The Copper was more than a little surprised they didn't tear him to shreds, or eat him, or drop him to break and die against the rocks below.

The griffaran sailed into line and entered a tunnel. He heard wing tips brush the chiseled sides. He looked ahead and saw the tunnel's end, but the griffaran didn't slow. They dropped, picking up speed, as though to dash themselves against the wall.

They beat their wings powerfully, and turned up, and rose through a hole in the cave ceiling, and suddenly there was open air and light all around.

The Copper looked around in wonder, wishing both his eyes worked so he could take it all in properly.

He couldn't see much overhead, thanks to the commanding griffaran, just a vague sense of an oddly regular dome shape rising above, like a vast hollow mountain, and a glowing light source at the apex of the dome. Was that the sun? It was high in the sky and bright enough, but it hardly dazzled, and it seemed held in place with no blue about anywhere, so unlike the vague mind-pictures passed down from his parents that he decided it must be some imitation.

Below he saw a vast blue-green plain, with little rises of red rock, some needle-shaped, others leaning, a few formed like toadstools, and many more low hummocks scattered about. Mosses thrived in the wet crevices; ferns dripped from the edges of pools and streams.

At the center of the Lavadome stood a black carbuncle, like the pupil in the middle of an eye.

The fliers were making for the black rock.

As they flew closer and turned above it, he saw that the rock, unevenly shaped on all sides and resembling a kidney, had been sculpted, added to, cut and galleried and tunneled, enlarging what had been irregular holes scattered around the minimountain like the eyes of a potato he'd once seen a dwarf eating.

The fliers dropped toward a long garden filled with flower-covered vines set atop one of the rises in the rock. A sculpted river flowed through it, complete with waterfall. Statues of dragons—rampant, reclining, rearing, crossing necks, even dipping their noses into pools of water—surrounded the greenery. It smelled like earth and green growing things.

His captors swooped down and landed gently.

Hairy, broad-backed hominids dropped jugs and tools and scattered as the avians alighted. A rise of black rock overlooked the garden.

The griffaran fluffed their wings and let out loud calls.

A dragon—a real dragon, huge and silver with black tips at his griff and crest and tail-line—stirred from where he'd been resting atop a small rock.

"High Captain, what brings you to the Imperial Resort without invitation?"

"I have a wounded young drake. He was involved in an egg raid. I'll speak to the Tyr."

Dragon snouts emerged from the rock. A head or two rose from holes. The Copper saw golden, and red, and pink, and even purple eyes looking at him. He heard whispered dragon voices.

"The Tyr rests."

"Yark! He has always trusted my judgment in waking him."

The silver dragon inclined his head sideways—rather like Auron when puzzled—but there seemed to be lassitude to the gesture, and disappeared into the rise. The Copper noted that it was the tallest prominence on the black rock; even the garden was above much of the rest of the top.

The others looked and sniffed at him with interest, not contempt. The smell of dragons, the odd sense of the vast space around while still being underground, the faint throb of so many heartbeats and breathing bodies and shifting claws and scales—it overwhelmed him, and he felt his throat go thick and his good eye blur.

The Copper's eyes roved in wonder around the dome. What he'd taken to be the sun was just a glowing patch of light at the top of the dome. He suspected it was in fact sunlight being filtered through translucent material. But that wasn't the only glow. Jagged streaks of orange light, brightening and fading and pulsing, flowed down the sides, adding a red-orange cast to the brighter light above.

A smallish, wide-bodied dragon, with scales that seemed deep red or purple depending on how the light struck, carrying seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…twenty-one horn-tips atop his crest, emerged from the rock. The horns grew up, sideways, down, as though interested in what was happening all around the dragon's head. But for all the creature's evident pride in the number of horns, patches of bare skin showed around his eyes, mouth, and the edges of his crest where scale had fallen away.

A pair of wide-shouldered, stooped-over hominids wearing white loincloths trailed behind, with brushes, scoops, and a basket.

"It's you, Yarrick. They just said a griff captain or I would have hurried. It is the hour of white?"

Yarrick stepped in front of the Copper, cutting off his view of the Tyr.

"But one. We thought it best to let you sleep, Tyr," the silver dragon said.

"Oh, bash it. I like getting to work early. You should have roused me. But I'm forgetting our visitors. What news from the water ring, brave Yarrick?"

"Another egg raid, Tyr. Well organized. They distracted us, poisoned the nest guardians. Sixteen eggs this time—it would have been the worst loss we've ever suffered. And then there's this."

He sidestepped from the Copper. The Copper felt the gaze of two slightly cloudy eyes the color of aging gold coin. He stared back defiantly. If this dragon was going to watch his own kind torn to bits for nest raiding without singeing so much as a feather—

"Really? That's terrible," the Tyr said.

Yarrick fluffed his wings. "This drake—still with egg-wet behind the griff, if I'm still fit to judge dragons—almost lost his gizzard to the demen while rescuing our eggs. But there were guts to spare in that one."

Rescue?

It took the Copper a moment to get over the shock. He felt doubly fortunate that the fight with the demen turned out the way it did, even at the price of a stab in the firebladder. What if the griffaran had found him eating from a broken egg?

"What is he, some young relative of yours eager to prove himself, my Tyr? He shows the old FeHazathant spirit."

"NoSohoth," Tyr said, "is this some relative of mine? Why hasn't he been presented to me? Such old scars on a young drake, too. He's taken honors from three bitter fights, and I'm just looking at the front end of him."

The silver dragon with the black griff tips lowered his head and looked at the Copper closely. "He's no hatchling from the Imperial Resort, Tyr."

Tyr glowered. "Hmmmm. Yes. Why does that not surprise me?"

"Let us sing of glories proudly won," a golden drake said from one of the flower beds. The Copper saw a couple of bats flit under an overhanging rock behind him.

"Let's keep our fool's mouth shut for a change," NoSohoth muttered.

"Let the drake sing, old fellow," Tyr said. "At least he's got an appreciation for the old virtues and deeds."

"Sir, I've no time for songs," Yarrick said. "I'm here to see that justice gets done to this brave little fellow. He saved six eggs."

"Did he? Did I doze off and miss part of the story? Well, if you say so. What's your name, lad?"

The Copper opened his mouth, but couldn't find words.

"Perhaps he's in awe to be in the Imperial presence," NoSohoth said. "You've nothing to fear, drake. Glorious Tyr is grandsire to all of us, a part of our lifesong whatever our parentage. Just answer honestly and no harm will befall you."

"Nice to see daring young drakes plunging in among enemies instead of crying for help. Not enough about. Not enough," the Tyr said. He settled down over his sii and saa, perhaps to be less threatening.

"I…I've no name, sir. I'm…my sire and dam…dead."

"What? Who?" Tyr said. "NoSohoth, what's this? Are you keeping ill news from me again?"

"No, Tyr," NoSohoth said. He turned to the Copper. "There've been no attacks in the Lavadome in two generations. Are you from one of the Upper Provinces?"

"I'm not sure. Perhaps. I came down the river. I've been traveling for ages…ages, it seems." The Copper wished his voice hadn't sounded so squeaky. He wondered if he could even be heard over the surr-whooosh of the Tyr's breathing.

"Yarrick, where did you find him?"

The avian straightened up. "The lake circle."

"The lake circle, Tyr," NoSohoth corrected.

"Oh, never mind that," Tyr said. "We're old friends, and this is a friendly visit."

"Of course, Tyr," Yarrick said. "On the far bank, to the north. Downstream from the thrall crossing."

"Who were your parents?"

The Copper wondered if the truth would be a mistake. Something about the friendly stare of Tyr made him tell the truth. "AuRel and Irelia, sir."

The dragons looked at each other. "Irelia? That's no staion-name. AuRel…hmmm, what line?"

"I…I don't know."

"I don't know, Tyr," NoSohoth corrected again.

"I don't know, Tyr," the Copper repeated.

"He's lying. He's an outcast; I'll put my fringe on it," a hard-edged voice said. A beautiful green dragon joined the others in the garden. She was rather fleshless about the hips, more so than Mother at her hungriest, and had startling violet eyes.

The dragons and avians dipped their heads at her approach, save for the Tyr, who tickled her under the chin with his tail. The golden drake in the garden bowed especially low.

"Now, Tighlia, how could you know that?" the Tyr said. "Do you know his parentage?"

"No. If I had, I'd order them to have such a cripple drowned."

"Then do be quiet. I let you have your way with the drakka, don't I? Let me see to this drake."

He looked back at the Copper. "You found your way here through the Lower World? Down a river thick with dwarf trunks and demen boats?"

"Yes, Tyr."

"You're a drake of singular purpose," Tyr said. "What did you expect to find here? Safety?"

The Copper wanted to tell the Tyr all about his dreams of protecting his kind from lying, torturing assassins, but when surrounded by all these great dragons, it seemed a silly hatchling fantasy.

"Have you had anything to eat this morning, my love?" Tighlia asked.

"Hot watered fat and a fresh sow's head."

"And your kern?"

"Haruuummm…"

Her claws rattled the river-smoothed rocks in the walkway between the door and a garden pool. "I'll roast your cook. What you need is an elf, not that blighter."

"But he can braise an ox so that it melts—"

"You'd sleep better if you'd just listen. And there'd be less groaning at your eliminations."

"Tyr, I must get back to my command," Yarrick said. "I won't rest until I see the drake here settled here in the Imperial Resort."

"What? A half-starved, bedraggled stray here?" Tighlia said. "The bones of my grandsire will crumble."

The Copper wondered at her hostility. Did she know more of his deeds than she would admit? Why would she not tell the truth, if she knew it, as she was so clearly against him?

"Why, I think that's a fine idea. We could use some new blood on the Rock."

"Quite right, Grandsire," the golden drake said. He crinkled up the corners of his mouth at the Copper, who started, fearing a bite.

"Perhaps we could discuss it later, at feast," NoSohoth said.

"Delay, delay. You always counsel delay," the Tyr said. "No, I like the idea. I'll have him."

"CuRassathath over by Wind Tunnel and his mate are barren," Tighlia said. "He could go and live with them. They've a lovely hole."

"There was a time when brave deeds merited a place in the Imperial Resort," the Tyr said. "I'd like to restore the tradition."

"You're always cross and impulsive when you haven't eaten properly," Tighlia said.

"I've not been cross in years. Cry settled, for I've made a decision. NoSohoth, get it inscribed at once. This lad…Oh, dear, what was that name…?"

"I've no name, Tyr." His wound throbbed, but he did his best to stand straight, neck up and head alert.

"I told you. An outcast," Tighlia said. "And you wanted to settle him in the Black Rock."

"Now, lad, take heart. You're not as forlorn as you'd think; it's happened several times in my lifetime. Why, I could tell you stories—outcasts tend to be lucky, for a start, and I'll take a lucky dragon over the quickest tongue or the stoutest scale. You rate a name for your deeds this day, and a good one." He looked around. "What shall we call him?"

"Cripple," Tighlia said. "Half-wit. Both highly appropriate names. Look at that eye and tell me he wasn't cursed in the egg."

"How about MiKalmedes," the golden drake said. "He was a copper, wasn't he?"

"Insolence!" Tighlia spit. "You flakescale. My own grandsire and one of the founding—"

The golden drake scratched himself behind his griff. Loose skin and bits of scale-edge wafted toward Tighlia.

"Stop quarreling," the Tyr said, and the others fell silent in an instant. "He'll be Rugaard."

"Tyr, your own grandsire by the female?" NoSohoth objected.

"He was wounded at hatching, and he turned out all right. His jaw never grew quite right, of course. Not much in the way of wits, but a fierce fighter, and he gave the demen what-for. I think it suits him. How do you like that name, hatch—er, drake?"

The Copper's hearts swelled. Not just a name, but a name from an illustrious line! "Thank you, Tyr." He wanted nothing more that instant than to devote himself to this great dragon's will and prove himself worthy of the compliment.

"Grandsire, lad. Grandsire from now on. You're the Tyr's ward now. Be worthy of your new heritage."

"Grandsire," the Copper said. The golden drake was turning up the corners of his mouth at him again.

"See that he's given a lair," the Tyr said. "Not in the nursery, now—a battle-scarred dragon deserves a real chamber of his own. I know—have him join the Drakwatch. Give him a chance to prove himself to you doubters. Attend to it, won't you, NoSohoth?"

The female checked a loosened scale on the Tyr's haunch and shot a look at NoSohoth as he bowed to the Tyr.

"A fine addition to the family," the golden drake said, rolling so he came up with flower petals caught in his scales. "We won't want for entertainment as long as he's around. I can't wait to see him limp his way through a court dance."

NoSohoth led the Copper through what seemed a maze of tunnels, beautifully sculpted, with dragonscale patterns on the rises and drops to help the claws find purchase. The rock inside was shiny and black, with veins of white where it had been left natural, but in many places, like projections and corners, it had been coated with metals or ceramics in intricate designs. The floor wasn't quite smooth, the better to give dragonclaws places to grip, but it was polished. Splashes of water from drinking trickles looked like blood.

Turns, drops, and climbs were marked by burning fat-lamps.

"Don't you use moss?" the Copper asked.

"What is this, a mining camp? You're in the Imperial Resort. Besides, there are other advantages to lamps. Smell."

Some kind of substance had been thrown into the mix to give a pleasing, relaxing aroma.

"What's that burning, sir?" the Copper asked.

"You're a polite hatch—young drake. I haven't heard 'sir' from the Imperial lines in three sets of scale. You've never been in the Upper World?"

"No. I've seen shafts of sunlight; that's all."

"The smell's hardy pine. It has an oil that's useful in a variety of ways, a solvent for a start. We put it in the fat-lamps. Some mint and rosemary are added to the oil. Eucalyptus is even better, but hard to come by these days. Otherwise the dragon-smell can get thick in here. Drakes get aggressive, and the drakka play up too much, and dragons who should know better get to dueling. We dragons are thralls to none but our noses."

The Copper had no idea what "eucalyptus" was, but had more important questions on his mind. "I like the smell of dragons all around. I keep fearing I'll wake up and be alone again."

"I wouldn't mind a year or two alone, myself. Now, let's see, plenty of empty space on this level, as it doesn't have much in the way of egress. Everyone in the Black Rock thinks they're born deserving a gallery with its own trickle."

The Copper gave up counting passages and turns by the time they descended a third time.

"You'll learn your way around soon enough," NoSohoth said. "If you get lost, just remember always to go from smaller to larger. That'll get you to the Central Spiral."

"That big downshaft with the columns?"

"Yes, where we first descended. Just ask a thrall; they all speak Drakine. More or less. They'll put you right. If they don't, you're free to eat them."

The passage rose and then fell away to a wider, lower tunnel. There wasn't so much frill and decor along the passages now. Hominid skulls lined the wall here, grouped in threes and sixes and nines, grinning at him from beneath a coating of bronze or pewter.

"This is the old Drakwatch level. When I was your age, we had an elvish sorcerer who could make these skulls talk. The stories they told! Plenty of room here; there's just old NeStirrath and some orphans from the provinces adopted into the Rock. Here, this one's got its own passage, which is nice. Can't stand sleeping with air on more than two sides, myself. And room for growth."

"How might I learn more about this RuGaard, sir?"

NoSohoth stopped for a moment, raised his head up, and spit into a wrought cup connected to a larger pot. The flame lit the passage. The skull of a creature with four horns projecting from the temples and two shorter ones out of the jaw decorated the entrance.

"A young drake should look to his duties."

"Isn't my first duty to learn about the heritage I'm charged with defending?" He was rather proud of that little speech.

"Hmmm. That eye is deceiving. You have some wit about you."

The Copper thought it better not to reply beyond a "Thank you, sir."

"Listen to the storytellers, then. If you've a taste for the exotic, you could read some of those old scrolls and things the archivists keep. The Anklenes keep their traditions, as undragonish as they are. They live in the Marble Slope, just on the other side of the Gardens."

He led the Copper to a climbing wall. "There's a shelf on top. How do you like it? I hope that's not too difficult a climb."

The rock reflected just enough light for him to see the interior. Though the entrance was cramped, the cave opened up nicely. No air moved, and the dragons' thickening odor made him nervous. He felt very small among the echoes of their shifting scale.

"It's quiet. Is there a trickle?"

"There're downspouts with water in the common pool. Let me show you."

NoSohoth backed out into the passage, turned, and led him down another length or two to a graveled chamber. Four burning lamps illuminated a pool fed by a spiral of sculpture that reminded him of…of trees, yes, that was what they were.

His guide loosed a strange, whistling cry. "He must have the drakes out on a circuit." What the Copper guessed to be a a blighter and a human with one hand were cleaning the gravel with strange implements and a tub of water. They scrubbed harder.

"Ka! You there. Man!" NoSohoth said.

The man, a rather hairy and stooped-over specimen, looked at the blighter and came forward. Trembling, he held out his tool, a stick with what looked like straw bundled on it. The straw smelled rotten.

"Please? Need fix," the man said, in rather wretched Drakine. He shut his eyes as he spoke.

"Never mind that," NoSohoth said. "Thrall, you've just been promoted. You're this dragon's servant now."

The man opened his eyes and bobbed.

"Do you know the duties of a servant?" NoSohoth asked.

"Get food. Get water. Get ingot. Clean scale. Clean teeth. Very good, I clean the all," the man said. At least the gibberish seemed that way to the Copper.

"What's your name?" NoSohoth asked.

"Harf," the man said.

"He belongs to you now," NoSohoth told the Copper. He took a chain out of his ear and hung it around Harf's neck. A piece of dragonscale edged in bronze hung from it. The man examined it, openmouthed. "And, Harf, do something about those bats, will you? They keep getting in here."

Harf let the piece of scale go. "Clean bats. Yes."

"Vermin." NoSohoth snorted. "Good man. Young Rugaard, just obey NeStirrath and no harm will come to you. Understand? My apologies, of course you do. If you need anything, just ask your thrall."

"Thank you for Harf, sir."

"You'll get on together, I hope. Try to be forgiving with humans; they're intelligent enough, but terribly lazy."

"Why did you choose him instead of the…the blighter, sir?"

"You've both got a bad limb. Honor and glory, young Rugaard."

"Thank you, sir."

NoSohoth turned and stalked out, sniffing the air around a crevice concealing the bats. The blighter looked at Harf and made a chopping motion at his neck. Harf showed a mouthful of brown teeth and patted his belly.

"My prince want food?" Harf asked, holding up his neck marker so the Copper could see it.

"Yes. And be quick."

Harf disappeared in the lurching, two-legged run of his kind. The Copper wondered how he didn't fall over. Humans struck him as half-finished—and the completed half wasn't much to look at. Badly balanced, thin-skinned, just the odd patch of hair on their heads that seemed to do nothing but get in the way of their eyes, nostrils, ears, and mouths, and they smelled like wet bats. The Air Spirit must have had his mind on other things as he created them.

After a refreshing sleep he explored his new home caves. The wound over his firebladder wept a little clear fluid, and felt tender but not painful. A projection of rock, like a long limb, reached out from the wall and almost to the pool. It smelled strongly of male dragon.

A bat flitted past his eye. "The others be frightened, m'lord," said Uthaned, the active young bat. "They want to know where to go."

Harf made a move to swing at the bat with his scrubbing stick, but the Copper gave him a sharp, "No!" He sniffed at Uthaned; the bat smelled exhausted. "That cave with the big horned skull will do for now."

"Mamedi is ready to drop, and the three young aren't used to so much flying. Might we have a taste of generosity?"

The bats had gotten him here, and food was on the way. "Oh, why not. But let's go somewhere private. Back to my cave."

The bats opened him up front and rear. He did a quick count: only eight left. He couldn't even remember how many had been with him when he jumped in the Nor'flow, but it was a lot more than eight. Of course, rodents were made for dying.

"Did y'be seeing those herds of cattle below?" Thernadad said as he sat on Mamedi, keeping her from a trickle of blood leaking from the Copper's armpit.

"M'smelling fresh air wafting up from below. We've got an entrance near," Enjor agreed. "Water, too."

"Faaaa!" Mamedi said, pushing her bulky mate off and getting a few quick tonguefuls of blood. "Dragon reek so bad in here, m'eyes be watering."

"W'be in the happy flapping land," another bat said.

"Sharply now," a deep voice from the outer passage echoed. "Krthonius, what can you say for yourself?"

Whoever Krthonius was, he didn't have anything to say right away, so the deep voice bellowed, "Aubalagrave?"

"Strange smell in the cave, your honor."

"That's more like it," the deep voice said. "Just because you're home doesn't mean you're safe. Remember that. Many's the wing-sore dragon who's lost because he returns to his cave already half-asleep."

"There haven't been assassins in the Lavadome in—" a rather lisping voice said.

"Thrall revolts. Leadership battles. Cave claim jumping. I've seen dragons die in all of them. Any of you lot able to identify the strange smell?"

"Ummm. Bat?"

"Yes."

"Here's a hamcart," the lisping voice said.

"Get up to the ceiling and hide yourselves," the Copper told the bats. With a mixture of burps and flaps, they took off for the deep shadows above.

The Copper climbed off his shelf and walked out into the light of the passage. He saw a vast, ruby-red twelve-horned dragon. The Red had been maimed, with nothing but a stumplike projection from each side of his spine where his wings should be. Three young drakes, one a dazzling white, the other two blacks, narrowed golden eyes at him.

"Excuse me, are you NeStirr—"

"Rough-and-tumble, lads. Here's our intruder. Give him what-for, but don't bleed him."

The drakes dragon-dashed forward. The attack came so suddenly the Copper's brain froze, and he could do nothing but hug the floor of the passage before they were on him, each bigger than he.

The white reached him first. The white had an ugly wound on one side of his face, exposing teeth and gum line. He head-butted the Copper in the snout, then threw himself across the Copper's neck, pinning his head. The others wedged their noses under his side and flipped him, exposing his belly. They scrabbled at his skin with sheathed sii claws.

The Copper smelled blood in his nostrils. The larger, heavier drakes squatted atop him; he was as helpless as a lamb in a dragon's jaws.

"That's the style," NeStirrath roared. "We'll teach this scat to poke his nose into our home cave. And the Imperial shelf. Bite a toe off, Krthonius. That'll be a memento."

"I was given that cave," the Copper squealed. He felt a hard squeeze on his left saa.

"Vent-drippings!" The old dragon snorted.

"NoSohoth told me!"

"Your honor, look at the hamcart," the white drake said. He lisped thanks to his words leaking out of the lipless side of his mouth.

"I don't have to look; I can smell it. Oh! Let him up, you fools. Let him up!"

"He's in the Imperial Family," one of the blacks said. The other spit out the Copper's severed toe.

"Cry settled! Cry settled!" the deep voice of NeStirrath shouted.

The pressure vanished, and the Copper rose and saw the black drakes backing away wearily. One had a bit of bloody flesh hanging out of his mouth. The Copper looked down and saw that a toe was missing. Oddly enough, it didn't really hurt; he just felt a warm, tingling sensation.

The Copper looked at the widening of the passage. Harf stood there beside a two-wheeled cart. Fragrant sides of meat swung from hooks on a wooden frame.

"Finally, something other than guts, hides, and hooves," one of the black drakes said.

Harf was doing his bobbing thing again, holding up the dragonscale on the chain around his neck.

"An Imperial Family thrall," NeStirrath said, as Harf waved his icon at the drakes, bobbing and bringing the cart forward a wheel spoke at a time. NeStirrath made a wretching noise: Grf grf.

"Well, we've landed in it, lads. What are you doing down in the Drakwatch caves, sir?"

"I was told I should learn from you. I've just arrived."

"That's a good way to get your guts spilled, showing up un-announced. We might have had a tragedy here."

"NoSohoth couldn't wait," the Copper said.

"Accept our apologies, sir," the white drake said.

The Copper bristled. His toe was starting to really hurt, and the drakes were lowering their heads and exchanging wary glances. But he was going to live here, and if he got too highhanded, what was stopping them from gutting him and going to NoSohoth with a tragic tale?

Besides, he didn't really know what being in the Imperial Family meant.

"No one's fault but NoSohoth's, I'd say. I came down the river from the north, and the griffaran found me. The Tyr gave me the name Rugaard and put me under your eye. Your honor, if I'm to join the Drakwatch, maybe we could all have a fast feast and begin afresh."

NeStirrath licked drool from his lips, and his wing stumps relaxed against his sides. "That's a kindness, sir, that is. Better put a mesh of cobwebbing on that toe, sir. I'll show you where you can find—"

"Rugaard will do, your honor. I can take care of it myself."

He rather enjoyed the generosity of the gesture. The dragons each tenderly lifted a joint off of the cart's hooks and tore into the meat. NeStirrath took the smallest of the joints and sucked at it for a long time, as though relishing the taste, before swallowing it. "Smoke and flame, lads, we'll be eating well with an Imperial scion among us. Tails up and heads down for Rugaard, newest member of the Drakwatch!"

The Copper learned his duties, and learned them well.

From the first, he learned that every drake of the Drakwatch wanted honor in his lifetime, and a glorious memory after death—a name proudly sung to a line of future hatchlings and would-be mates.

Word came down from the Tyr himself that the Copper was to be treated the same as any other member of the Drakwatch. With permission to unsheath his sii, so to speak, their leader saw to it that the Copper was treated as roughly as any of the others, in fact more roughly, for he was the junior, and so the others considered it their duty to pummel him for the slightest error. NeStirrath liked aggressive young drakes, and almost any question, from order of line at mealtimes to order of march out in the Lavadome, was settled by pairing off into duels or all-out brawls. Claws sheathed and teeth only for gripping, of course.

The Copper took his first blows learning that there were separate pools for drinking and bathing, and that his fellow drakes would knock him about the ears and griff if he forgot to use the right one.

Then he learned about the honorable, glorious history of the Drakwatch and how it was organized. There were perhaps six or seven claw-score of drakes in dragon watch—provided you were counting with a full set of twelve true-claws, that is. The Drakwatch was charged with patrolling the area of the Lavadome itself in search of hominid thieves and assassins. They could also be called on by the leaders of the various hills to present a show of force to troublesome thralls.

What the drakes of the Drakwatch liked best of all was the chance to compete against the Firemaidens. The young females performed similar duties to the males, if not quite so wide-ranging, placed at important posts to guard and inspect and supervise.

Some of the more aggressive of the Drakwatch, and a few wild-griffed and claw-loose Firemaidens, would explore far beyond the underground river that circled the Lavadome, looking for signs of dwarf, blighter, or demen activity. There was great honor to be found in that sort of territorial assertiveness. Only a victorious battle with the hominids themselves could bring more glory, and with it the chance of a fine cave, thralls, and flocks to supervise upon reaching dragonhood.

When they needed physical rest they got lectures. NeStirrath made them recite proverbs and learn about battles won and lost—but mostly won.

NoSohoth gave them a lecture that seemed to stretch on through the day and into the night about the importance of honor. One dragon being able to rely on another to keep his word was the solid ground into which the lasting cave of civilization was dug. He went on and on about this point, until the Copper wondered if he was simply rearranging the same words into every variation possible.

The Copper's favorite days and darks in the Drakwatch were spent wandering from horizon to horizon in the enormous Lavadome, looking in on the thrall hovels, or counting cattle and swineherds, or running sorties to check the alertness of the Firemaidens on watch at the various tunnel entrances. The Firemaidens had their own set of teachers and taskmasters in the form of the Firemaids, the unmated and oathed-never-to-mate dragonelle guardians of the Lavadome.

NeStirrath drove his drakes hard, delivered bites and bashes as they climbed or jumped or dashed or swam, lobbed bruising stones into mock battles at any dragon who lagged or paused too long in evolutions. They learned to ignore pain and blood until the objective was achieved, be it a bit of tattered banner on a sharp pile of lava rock or a pumpkin-headed scarecrow with a tin crown. If they could keep the drakes off the scarecrow-king for a set time, heavily padded blighters armed with hatchling tooth–studded clubs could win a cask of the malty beverage they adored, with a leg of beef thrown in for any who managed to draw drakeblood.

They learned to take turns volleying flame in groups as they advanced or retreated, though the Copper's stream came out thinner and more liquid than the others' and seemed to take forever to light properly. They hunted boars goaded to savagery by cruel wires twisted into them by blighter herders. To keep things fair NeStirrath applied similar painful wires to the hunting drake's sii or saa.

It was a toughter, tested bunch that passed out of the first-year caves.

There were losses. Sometimes adventuring drakes would simply disappear. Others were crippled permanently in duels or skirmishes. Fallen drakes would be replaced by younger drakes from NeStirrath's little enclave of "yearling" trainees in the Black Rock.

The Copper didn't quite feel the equal of the three other trainees. Though they bashed him and joked about it afterward, they seemed to think his joining their ranks was sort of a stunt, a bit of preening from a member of the Imperial line destined for a high cave in the resort. Though NeStirrath ordered him around and cajoled him much like the others, he never got water spit at him the way the others did around the pool, or received a playful nip as they hurried toward the hamcart at mealtimes, and while halfhearted duels were fought every other day between the other three over who should have the honor of leading the next patrol or running a message from one sissa of the Drakwatch to another, no one ever challenged him when he asked for a chance at the honor of leading an ore raid on the caves of the Firmaidens.

So once again, it seemed he wasn't to fit in, a stranger in his own cave.

It took a full season before the Copper could walk the inside of the Lavadome without standing and gaping upward.

When the sun was down and the shining oval at the peak was dark, it was at its most spectacular. Glowing rivers of fire rose or fell along its sides, sometimes brighter, sometimes darker.

"What holds the world up?" he asked NeStirrath as they rested on one of their "saa-hardeners": a pile of volcanic rock, the slag heap of an old tunnel leading down to the water ring.

"The Air Spirit must have made it," Krthonius said. "Some battle with the Earth Spirit."

"The Anklenes say it was a mighty scale that fell from the sun," NeStirrath said. "It plunged deep into the Lower World and expelled a ball of gas."

"The way you do when in the washing pool, Aubalagrave," Nivom, the white drake with the slashed-off lip, said.

"Give me a whole pig for dinner and I'll produce one as big as what made the Lavadome," Aubalagrave said.

"May you choke on your next mouthful of pig, boaster," Krthonius said, and he and Aubalagrave wrestled for a moment, scattering sharp lava rocks and ending it bleeding from a wound or two.

"Who are these Anklenes?"

They all looked at him.

"Half-a-drake strikes again," Nivom muttered to the others.

"Remember, he didn't hatch here," NeStirrath said. "The story goes that the Lavadome was found long ago by a wizard named Anklamere. He was a grasping, conniving sort of fellow, like most hominids, and had it in mind to control everyone and everything: dragon, hominid, beast, even the worms in the earth, I expect. NooMoahk, Black Glory of Legend and Eternal Guardian of the Sun-Shard, finally got rid of him, but not before he enthralled some dragons and set them up here. They're a spiritless sort of cringers, and they fiddle around with scrolls and books and whatnot. Always blending melting metals or heating stones or poking around in the bodies of dragons who should be decomposing honorably under a lava-stone cairn. The dragons of the lines of Wyrr and Skotl put them in their holes when we moved in."

The Copper knew little more about the lines of Wyrr or Skotl, but after asking about the Anklenes he decided not to press his ignorance. Besides, Krthonius was getting twitchy. He had the honor of leading this patrol and wanted to set a taxing pace.

They returned to the towering black overhang of the Imperial Rock sore of claw and thirsty. The others hung back, arguing and snapping, until the Copper drank, then jostled one another and splashed and slurped up their thirst. The Copper's good front limb felt as though it were going to fall off, and he dragged his tail on the way back to his shelf.

NeStirrath entered and took a nostrilful of air.

"Whew. Smells of bats in here. What, are you keeping them as pets, Rugaard?"

"Habit from my travels," the Copper said. "I…I used them to mask my odor. I got to kind of like having them around."

NeStirrath wrinkled his nostrils. "They call you 'Batty' when your crest is turned, you know."

"I've heard them," the Copper said. He knew NeStirrath thought him soft. "They're a good ward against starvation too. Food's hard to find when you're traveling underground."

"I'd have to be starving to eat a bat. But I wanted to have a talk with you, lad. You might be in charge of a whole sissa of young drakes someday. You need to scrap it up a bit. More of the rough-and-tumble, or they'll never accept you or respect you."

The Copper felt his stomach sink. "I don't like fighting. They're all older and bigger than me. I always seem to come out of one worse off. Like my toe."

The missing digit itched as though solid with scale mites, a sensation made all the more disagreeable by the fact that it wasn't there anymore and he couldn't scratch it.

"You've got to be willing to be the first to jump into a fight if you're to win respect from this lot. Even if you lose a tooth or two, stick up for yourself, lad. It's not the size of the drake that wins the fight; it's the size of the fight in the drake. Let your father know he hatched a dragon."

Mention of Father just made him miserable.

"Don't look glum," NeStirrath growled. "Doesn't matter where you came from, or what you know or don't know. You're in the Imperial line now. Cor, someday you could be the Tyr himself. Keep your thoughts behind your eyes; don't wear them on your face—and above all, let them know a set of dragon hearts beat behind your scale."

"Yes, your honor," the Copper said.

NeStirrath loved to pit his drakes against one another in contests and challenges and games, when they weren't having the weak points of ax-dwarves or fighting-shield demen pounded into their heads, that is.

He ran dragon dashes (the Copper came in last), jumping contests (the Copper fell short of the mark Krthonius set, even the time Krthonius stumbled before the vault mark), and tried to whack a barrel full of sand off a dragon's nose with his tail (the barrel easily avoided the Copper's stiff tail).

They looked at one another in triumph. He knew what was going through his fellow drakes' minds: Another rodentlike performance from Batty, lowest of the Imperial line. They probably sent him to the Drakwatch so they wouldn't have to look at his odd eye and listen to him limp about the upper chambers.

At each failure he shook off the dirt and dust and tried to keep his face from showing his disappointment. Krthonius found all the athletic events so easy, but he held his tongue and didn't bark out his triumph. Unlike Aubalagrave, who sometimes could outjump his black-scaled comrade and let the whole Lavadome know it when he did. Nivom also rarely won anything, and it put him in a foul mood.

It was after a particularly gruesome humiliation in which the drakes had to climb up a sheer wall with the drake behind gripping at the tail, a deadweight to be hauled (the Copper's twotoed saa gave way at the last and he and Nivom fell three full lengths to a mud pit) that Nivom pushed past the Copper on the way to the bathing pool.

Harf and a couple other thralls hurried to get hot water and pumice to scrub the dragonscales.

"Filthiest last, or you'll dirty the water for the rest of us," Nivom said.

The Copper, still smarting in his tail from Nivom's hatchling-sharp teeth, let out a squawk that everyone later said sounded more like a startled chicken than a drake's battle cry. He threw himself on Nivom and thumped him in the snout with the joint of his crippled arm.

Snarling and growling, the Copper thumped him again every time Nivom tried to shrug him off.

"Batty's tearing Nivom a new tailvent," Krthonius cried out to Aubalagrave.

"Rugaard!" the Copper snarled, griff rattling all on their own as though they wanted in on the contest. He left Nivom and dashed at Krthonius, head low and down so Krthonius couldn't get under his guard and flip him.

Some of the hominids shouted in excitement.

Krthonius turned sideways, as he always did in a brawl, so he could strike with head or tail, off-side up against a cave wall with a line of bronzed skulls just where a mature dragon's wings usually brushed the walls. The Copper split the distance and jumped up between tooth and tail-tip, pushed off the wall, and fell, rather awkwardly, on Krthonius's back. He wrapped his neck around Krthonius's and began to pull scales with his teeth.

"Yeow! Yeoow!" Krthonius shouted, bashing the Copper with his tail.

Aubalagrave joined the brawl, defending his friend's honor—and scales. The Copper found himself sandwiched between two larger drakes, and much beaten about the head and hindquarters. All he could do was try to make Krthonius or Aubalagrave miss, thus striking each other when they were trying to hit the Copper.

"Keep the claws in, you," he heard NeStirrath shout.

He didn't have much success. Aubalagrave gave him a saa swipe across the snout, and he saw brilliant fields of flowers.

"I'll finish it," Nivom shouted, forcing his way through the others.

The Copper wanted to flee, but instead he flung himself on Nivom again. They went up on their hind legs, boxing each other with sii and exchanging bites about the snout and griff. Nivom stood tall on his hindquarters and rattled his griff.

"Tail swipe," one of the thralls shouted. Despite the urging, the Copper's tail refused to reach. Krthonius yanked on it and he fell, belly-up, under Nivom.

"Cry settled!" Nivom urged.

The Copper got both saa under Nivom and launched him into the bathing pool. He could hardly see out of his good eye, thanks to the blood, but he could make out Krthonius well enough, and charged at him again.

He felt tail strikes and a weight above his saa—Aubalagrave was atop him, hammering him with kicks while he clung with his sii—but he still pushed forward for Krthonius and grappled. Krthonius easily pushed his nose into the bed of rocks lining the floor.

"Cry settled," Krthonius grunted.

The Copper managed to poke him under the chin with his crippled forelimb. Krthonius backed off, making retching sounds and coughing. Aubalagrave sank his teeth into both sides of his head behind the crest.

"Kah ettehld!" Aubalagrave said.

The Copper rolled, rolled again, at great pain to the tender skin at the back of his head, and managed to plunge both of them into the bathing pool. He got Aubalagrave's head underwater and pushed for all he was worth. Aubalagrave refused to yield and go limp.

Something hauled both of them out of the water—NeStirrath, trying to keep Aubalagrave from breathing too much water. The Copper gave him a tail strike for his interference and was dropped atop Nivom and Krthonius. Cheering from the thralls—or maybe the pained roaring of a tender-gummed old dragon—sounded in his ears.

They rolled, a three-colored mass of fury letting out battle cries in high-pitched drake voices. The Copper got his teeth into Nivom's shoulder and forced him down, pushing for all he was worth, keeping Krthonius's head pinned with his in the crook of his crippled limb.

Aubalagrave and Krthonius boxed him about the head, trying to get him to let go. He grabbed Aubalagrave at what felt like a sii digit, twisted.

"Cry settled! Cry settled! Cry—" the three chorused. But their voices seemed far away and receding. The smooth rocks of the flooring gave way to the soft, mossy pads of the river-lake, only there was no itchy slime or biting water mites this time….

He woke, his face wet. His eye rolled this way and that, but his vision was misty.

"Give him another," NeStirrath said.

Krthonius spit another cheekful of water on him. Thralls were huddled all around, and Harf was counting knocked-out hatchling teeth from hand to hand.

"Did I cry settled?" the Copper croaked.

"No, we did," Nivom said. "You'd gone dark and wouldn't let go of Aubalagrave's dragonhood."

"Hope his mate can fall sideways on the wedding flight," Krthonius said.

Aubalagrave sat with his hindquarters in the coolest part of the pool, his face contorted.

"Good fight, Rugaard," Aubalagrave said between quick breaths. "Good fight."

The bats had their fill of blood for once, that night. Even Thernadad finally gave up, crawled a length or two away from the Copper, too swollen to fly, and went to sleep. Harf made to swat him with a waste scoop, but the Copper threw a protective sii over the bat.

The next day he could hardly see. He looked at himself in the polished black rock just beneath the lamp and a frightful, swollen face looked back out of the reflection-world, every scale out of place. He was excused all duties, given an extra ration of meat and ore, and as the other three had bites and bruises enough for a whole sissa of Drakwatch, NeStirrath called for a lesson day.

To NeStirrath's considerable vexation, the Tyr decided to pay a visit.

A pair of broad-shouldered blighter thralls led the way, with dragon-headed incense burners letting out of trails of rich-smelling smoke, equal parts spice and oil. The Copper smelled it a long way off and felt better disposed to the world and his aching body. He managed to climb off his shelf and join the others in the common room by the drinking and bathing pools.

NoSohoth led the way, and immediately went to NeStirrath's side and led him in a bow to the Tyr. The Imperial retinue flowed into the common room, and attendant thralls shrank into the corners.

NeStirrath pointed his charges into a line behind him.

"Always good to smell drakes again," the Tyr said. "There's too much drakka scent about the upper levels. I grow tired of the eternal bloom of females. Drakes and blood…well, what's this?"

Behind the Tyr the Copper saw a forest of legs. The sleek young golden drake was there, and another, sort of a reddish-purplish color that reminded the Copper of the radishes the thralls chewed to wash the dragon-smell out of their mouths at the end of a long day.

"And I thought it was just thralls making stories up, as usual," the Tyr said. "There was a fine old fight down here, wasn't there?"

The golden drake walked the perimeter of the Drakwatch caves, peering into the eyes of the skulls and fighting yawns all the way.

The Tyr shifted so he could make room for the dragon behind. "You should know what's going on in your own caves, SiDrakkon. I know you've got other titles, but as my mate's brother you're also in charge of the Drakwatch."

The radish-colored dragon just glowered.

"Simevolant, stop idling and come have a look at these drakes."

"Yes, Grandsire." Simevolant, the golden drake, approached the line of bruised and bashed drakes. "Impressive specimens. A credit to the Drakwatch. But glory does bring out the ugly, doesn't it?"

The Tyr looked sharply at NoSohoth. "I'd like a little more ferocity on the Rock; a dragon should fight with tooth and claw, not tongue. Too much of that. What's this, old friend? Is that a lump on your jaw? Don't tell me you were involved in the fracas." The old dragon chuckled.

"I was pulling them apart and your young ward there loosened my teeth for my trouble."

"Is that…er…" the Tyr said, looking at the Copper.

"You decided to call him Rugaard, Grandsire," the bright young Simevolant reminded the Tyr.

"Rugaard, yes. I'd hardly recognize you. You're beginning to fill out a little."

"It's the swelling, I think," Simevolant said. "Most hatchlings are ugly, but they get better proportioned as they age. I do believe you're getting worse, Rugaard. Someone should take some studies of you for posterity."

The Tyr ignored the byplay and tapped radish-colored SiDrakkon with his tail.

SiDrakkon sniffed all the drakes. "There's an opening for a messenger in Deep Tunnel. Which drake of these is your fastest?"

"Krthonius, with the big haunches, there," NeStirrath said.

"Good of the Empire, now, think for the good of the Empire," the Tyr muttered.

"Why won't you let me make a decision? It's my responsibility!" SiDrakkon sputtered.

"Imperial messengers do a lot more than just memorize reports and run," Tyr said.

"I should know. I was one," SiDrakkon said.

The Tyr's jaw tightened; then he relaxed. "And a fine one, too. So you know that sometimes they are asked for an independent opinion of the situation in some distant, tight corner, or even to assume command if there's been an unexpected death. That requires sound judgment."

"Nivom's very bright, Tyr," NeStirrath said. "Best memory of the bunch. Aubalagrave is strong and clever in a fight."

"Who's in charge of the Drakwatch?" SiDrakkon roared.

"Bearers, more oliban there; fire bladders are starting to throb," Simevolant said.

The thralls with the smoking dragon heads extracted some milky chips from pouches at their waist and dumped a small handful each into the dangling brazier. The rich, aromatic smell filled the cavern, and one of the blighter thralls sniffled.

"Honored friend," the Tyr said to NeStirrath. "Let's say we were at Three Tunnels again, with the blighters hip-deep all around and battle horns blowing. Which of the three would you want with us? Good of the Empire, mind."

"Little Rugaard, there. Kept his teeth dug in, even when he went unconscious. He's no duelist; he fights as though his neck were on the line."

"Does that help, SiDrakkon?" the Tyr asked.

"Why do you even drag me along if you're just going to have your way anyway?" SiDrakkon said.

"The decision is yours."

"I'll have Nivom. A mixed message can lose a battle."

Nivom straightened, and his pink eyes shone. The Copper felt his joy and gave a little prrum for him.

"As I said, the choice is yours," Tyr said. "I'm sure you've made a good one."

He turned to the bruised drakes. "Don't worry, you others; there'll be for you glory enough in your turn. It's always the ones that you'd never expect who become legends."

The Copper remained longer in NeStirrath's part of the Drakwatch caves than most. Krthonius joined an Upper World sissa who patrolled the plateau on the rocky slopes covering the Lavadome. Aubalagrave served on the river beneath the wings of the griffaran, as part of a new aquatic sissa protecting their nests from raiders.

Drakes came and went. They usually had only one or two others, and never more than six. Each time a review was held, SiDrakkon or one of the wingless Drakwatch leaders walked up and down in front of the drakes, and each time a drake left. Once, after a bloody battle with a company of elvish mercenaries that resulted in the destruction of a sissa before help from the griffaran could arrive, they took every drake out of the training caves—except for the Copper.

He practiced leadership of his drakes under NeStirrath's tutelage. He learned to praise in public and reprimand any first offense in private. He rewarded group efforts with group plea-sures: After particularly successful brawling raids on the ore bins of the Firemaidens, he'd let his drakes have a "sun day" on the water ring. Of course, the same went for punishments. When his drakes woke to find their own ore supply emptied in a stealthy Firemaiden raid in return, a taunting note reminding them that a drakka named Nilrasha had left a noisome present in the washing pool, he gave the Drakwatch thralls a rest day and set his drakes to work cleaning out the thrall pens, washing and airing bedding. His bats got their fill of bedbugs.

After the drake who'd fallen asleep on watch fished out the turd with his lips, of course.

The bats thrived, and grew to know Imperial Rock better than the Copper did, for they flew around the upper levels, hunting insects, or flitted out into the Lavadome in search of tied livestock.

The adult bats aged quickly, in the manner of rodents. Mamedi dropped eventually. Thernadad grew old, almost blind and deaf, but his appetite, and that of his brother's, never flagged.

The trio of young bats—the Copper called them Big Ear, Spike Hair, and Wide Nose for their most prominent features—grew into truly colossal bats, bigger than Thernadad and his brother put together. The Copper suspected they sneaked dragonblood when they could.

NeStirrath had him apply his energy to the drakes as a sort of assistant, saving the old dragon's saa wear on the longer hikes and expeditions.

The Copper made the best of his time, plaguing NeStirrath with questions about the Lavadome, draconic history, even how he came to lose his wings.

"It was in the civil wars, of course. Dragon family against dragon family, a terrible business. It was an aerial duel. A Skotl-clan dragon named AgMemdius tore into my back. Most dragons would be satisfied with just crippling a wing, but he wanted me to fall to my death. The Tyr himself pulled me out of my fall, and we splashed into a lake together. In the end we reconciled only when the blighters rose."

"How did the Tyr come to lead the dragons here?"

"Strange you should ask that. Rethothanna is creating something she calls a history—it's like a lifesong, only you sing it about someone else—and she's on me like a leech. Seems a waste. If you're so wretched you don't have any deeds to sing of, better to die trying for a few lines of your own than reciting someone else's laudi. Anklenes," he finished with a growl.

"What does she want from you?"

"The lines of my lifesong about the war between the Skotl and the Wyrr and the Anklenes. I hardly know her, and here I'm supposed to spew out my lifesong as though she were my poor Esthea? Just seems wrong."

NeStirrath always darkened at the mention of his mate. The Copper didn't know the circumstances, only that she was dead.

"Tell them to me, your honor. I'll go over there and deliver it for you, and bring back any questions. I've been curious about their hill; I'd be glad of the errand."

"Dragons set too much on appearances. Why not? You're practically a son to me. We'd have been proud to hatch you. You're a quality drake. I feel much better now, having one I can trust. Among dragons trust is more seldom shared than even gold."

The Copper gulped. Usually NeStirrath was finding fault with the sharpness of his saa, or telling him to always poke his head over a ridge's crestline and examine the other side closely before crossing, lest game be scared away or enemies forewarned, or barking at him to take brief naps when in the field and save real sleep for safe, well-guarded caves.

"I'm not much for wordplay—that's an Anklene pastime—but here are the parts:

 When CuTar's sons in battle met

 One perch but we nine who sought

 Two-score dragons fell to earth.

 In Rednight's reckoning fought

 Three lines at war for power's pride

 Black murder just a tool

 AgMemdius struck, my hatchlings died

 A bloody cave I found

 An anguished roar, a wish for death

 I sought my bloodstained foe

 And over Kog's hill, trading breath

 We perished, each aflame…

It went on for quite some time, about how the dragons fought to rule the great cave. Meanwhile an alliance of dwarves, demen, and blighter thralls took advantage and struck, attempting to recapture the Lavadome. But a dragon named FeHazathant rallied them, made peace between the lines, and organized the dragons according to their abilities.

Old RaHurath, unable to fly without first dropping from a height, called on his old friends the griffaran, who helped turn the tide when the dwarves attacked Imperial Rock. FeHazathant himself, hiding a grievous spear wound, flew from point to point, rallying dragons and convincing them to abandon their caves and treasures for a last stand atop Black Rock. A beautiful dragonelle named Tighlia went bravely into the blighter camp, ostensibly to negotiate, but instead sowed discord between the blighter army and their allies, so they quit the battle with cries of "betrayal" when they suffered a reverse. EmLar, a slender, scaled gray born an Anklene thrall and a grandsire of Nivom, was put in charge of the drakes. He had them bury themselves in the gravel of the lower passages. The drakes trapped the demen's storming column, collapsing a wall that trapped half the demen forces inside the rock, and took turns volleying flame at any others who tried to get in to reinforce them.

"They died in these chambers. That's where we got many of these skulls."

The Copper repeated back the song. NeStirrath corrected him, and he repeated it back again almost perfectly. The first few lines still intrigued him.

"You wanted to be Tyr?" he asked.

"I was young. I wouldn't take it now if it came with a river of gold. Dragons are always quarreling, and no matter how wisely the Tyr settles matters, both parties grumble and blame his judgment."

The Copper had never been in the strange, smooth hill of the Anklenes before. He and the Drakwatch had seen it from every angle on the ground, and once he'd looked down on it from the Imperial Resort on a botanical tour of the gardens, but he'd never walked past the twin statues of robed hominids, one holding a lamp and the other a quill and scroll, and up to its entrance.

He paused there and let Harf catch up.

Flat spaces yawned at the base of the statues. According to NeStirrath, there'd once been statues of dragons crouched beneath the figures on their pillars, but the dragons found the arrangement vaguely offensive—hominids towering above dragons? The statues were moved to more illustrious accommodations on the Imperial Resort. Now they looked down on the Anklene hill.

The base of the Anklene hill—if hill was the right word, for it was too regular to be a natural formation of the cavern and seemed too big for anyone to have constructed it—was exactly square. It sloped away from its base, at first very slowly, but then the angle increased until the four sides met at the peak. Viewed from the entrance, the peak seemed very high and far-off.

The hill was coated with pink-white stone, lined and divided like good plump meat. The Copper passed under the statues on their columns and approached the entrance, a portal that mimicked the peak shape of the entrance. He saw—and smelled—lights burning within.

A human hurried toward the entrance, adjusting his thrall-wrap. He had the potbelly of a thrall who wasn't worked hard enough, or who perhaps filched food. The Copper gave NeStirrath and Rethothanna's names, and the thrall led him inside.

The passages were low and wide within, carved out of a more natural-looking brown stone, reinforced in spots with steel or scale-chipped wood. They'd been smoothed and coated with a paste the color of a hatchling's belly to make the most of the lights. A similar sort of surface covered the floor, only tiny rounded pebbles had been thrown into the mix. Two dragons could just slip past each other, if they adjusted their stance and didn't lock wings. The place also had that disgusting wet-bat smell of humans.

The thrall led him on a zigzagging course like a snake's trail. It seemed there was only one main tunnel in here, winding upward in a series of turns, opening out on galleries and larger rooms that extended to the hillside. Greenish light filled the rooms that didn't have lamps in use, and the copper recognized baskets dripping with cave moss hanging from the ceilings. There were thralls, naked from the waist up, who did nothing but carry yokes and buckets of filthy-smelling water. They'd hook a ladder to some eyebolts in the ceiling and climb up, endlessly watering the thriving moss.

The thrall fell to his knees at a wide gallery. A female stood within, her heavy haunches to him. She examined a series of pieces of matched paper hanging on a line, with writing scrawled on them.

"Very well. Put the new page nine in," the dragon told another thrall. This one was elvish, a female with hair like dead cave moss.

The prostrate thrall glubbed something out into the set pebbles of the hallway pavement, raising dust.

"Who? I don't know a Rugaard-nester." She turned, showing eyes that struck him as bulging and a little oversize, though her nostrils had an elegant upward curve that reminded him a little of Mother.

"Rugaard. Sent by NeStirrath," the Copper said. "I have some lines from his lifesong—"

"You're too late," she said, settling down with forelimbs crossed. "That old fool. This is just like him, making difficulty just when I'd given up. My history's complete. It's to be presented tonight; the Tyr himself wants to hear it at the Imperial banquet."

"We could present the Tyr with a revised edition later," the elvish thrall said, in remarkably good Drakine. "You'll recite tonight personally, won't you? He'd like a few lines about NeStirrath; they are old friends."

The dragonelle ignored her. She swung her neck sideways, another unsettling gesture, for it reminded him of a snake, and looked at Harf and shut her nostrils. She returned her wide-eyed stare to the Copper. "What did you say your name was again?"

"Rugaard."

"I'm Rethothanna. Wait, you're the one who was adopted into the line three years ago?"

"Yes." The Copper wasn't sure if she deserved some sort of honorific or not. He started to recite the poem while it was still fresh in his head.

She interrupted him after six lines. "Look at your scale. What's that servant of yours been doing with his time, the one-handed hominid pastime? The banquet's in three hours!"

"I'm…I don't know about a banquet."

Rethothanna's overlarge eyes widened, and the Copper wondered if they'd pop out. "You're of the line. It's an Imperial banquet. You must be at your place."

"Er…"

"Don't pollute your locution! Say something worthwhile or be silent."

The Copper settled on silence, so fixed was he on the vast whites of her eyes as she looked him over.

"But not looking like that. Yam, go get every scale polisher and claw shaper in the hill. Open your mouth, drake. Well! Those teeth aren't bad. There's many a drake who'd be proud of a set like that. A little oil and they'll gleam admirably; maybe they'll divert attention from that eye. Eyegrit, are those bat bites? Where do you live?" He heard Harf take a few steps back. The shifting head turned on him. "Yes, you, thrall, you'd better cower. I've half a mind to eat you. Who taught you to use scouring salt on a dragon's scale?"

"All scale clean! All them clean!" Harf said, covering his head with his forelimbs.

"Yam, have you died and rooted?"

The elf hurried off into the passage.

"Now, let's have what passes for poetry from NeStirrath again. While they're getting you cleaned up I'll see if I can't make something of his word butchery. His stanzas might be ranked enemies, the way he scatters them…."

Rethothanna kept Yam busy filling gaps in her scale with similarly colored green scales, which required much working with wire, attaching them to their neighbors so they'd stay in place.

The Copper had a thrall at each quarter, and one rather young, small, deft-handed female human working his face and teeth. First she trimmed the edged of his face scale with shears, then a file; then she went to work with a brush and something that smelled a little like paint. She poured dust though a straw into the crevices in his scale, then dusted his face with a glittery mixture that smelled of metals.

"Don't skimp on the oliban and bay leaf," Rethothanna said as a thrall painted the trailing corners of her nostrils, making them look even longer and more elegant. Red powder around her eyes set the deep green of her face off admirably, and gave her eyes life and fire.

The girl nodded and bent for a long, heavy wooden box topped by a broad handle. She came up with a pair of silver bottles with golden tops, and applied fragrant oils to his crest.

"Dragon-ward behind his griff. If he rattles them, I want the dragons to know it."

The girl nodded and dabbed something into the folds of the skin behind his griff. It smelled like hot iron and blood to the Copper.

"His teeth now," Rethothanna said.

The girl smeared a clear oil on his teeth. The Copper didn't like the taste and pulled back his lips a little to keep it from getting in his mouth.

"Exactly," Rethothanna said. He'd never heard her use such a satisfied tone before. "Your mother taught you well, girl."

The girl tipped her head down a little.

"Bring a mirror-plate. Our young drake finally looks worthy of the Imperial line."

Two thralls held up a polished sheet of bronze. He looked into it. The odd sense of depth to the reflection gave him a moment of dizziness, soon overcome as he adjusted to the idea of his reflection. It was like seeing your image in the water, but tinted with the colors of a coal fire.

His scale had a depth and polish and glitter. She'd shaped the displaced scale at the gouged side of his face so as to minimize the scarring, and added a pewter-colored powder to the crevices in his crest that emphasized the strong, smooth ridges.

So it was a proud young drake who followed Rethothanna over to the Black Rock and up to the Tyr's Gardens.

The Copper had never seen such a gathering, or imagined there could be anything so splendid. It must have been dark outside, for the peak of the dome was a plate of midnight. This, however, made the fiery streams of lava running along the exterior of the dome all the brighter and more colorful.

Female dragons with fringes painted and smooth ribbons wound about their necks in fascinating knotwork, males with vivid red or blue lines painted on their wings—Rethothanna said it was a form of display of laudi, recognized by the Tyr himself and worn for all to see—drakes and drakka playing and singing and mirroring.

At the middle of the Gardens an open oval free of plants served as the center of the party. A little lower than much of the terraced garden, it was paved with shields and helmets and breastplates, trophies taken in battle and presented to the Tyr. At the center of the open area was a long masonry trench shaped like a drawn bow. At the notch of the bow lay the Tyr and his mate, on a low rise of wood and cushioning that gave them a commanding view. Where bow would give way to string, stairways led down to the kitchens. The most splendid of the dragons reclined at the bow. The string was reserved for the younger drakes and drakka.

For a moment the Copper's eyes were tricked, and he thought platters of food slid by magic from dragon to dragon. He spotted thralls bearing vast platters on their heads. They rose heavy-laden from the stairs and circulated, always in the same direction to avoid collisions in the narrow trench. The roast chunks of meat went around the circuit, and emptied as the dragons reached down with jaws and plucked the tidbits. Sometimes instead of platters they bore a long pole in a sort of harness-and-cup, and from cross-braces at the top of the pole dangled whole roasted joints from hooks. These seldom even made it to the drakes and drakka.

At the very center of the dining plaza was a sandy pit. According to Rethothanna, new hatchlings of the Imperial line would be exhibited there so all could see them, but there were none at the moment.

"Any guests the Tyr wishes to particularly honor get seated to his left, so they have first choice of the dishes," Rethothanna explained.

Rethothanna didn't mix—she wasn't of the Imperial line—but instead waited to be called by NoSohoth, in his usual role of organizer. His gleaming silver shone especially bright tonight.

A scream and a clatter. The Copper's attention went to the far end of the bow, near where the thralls entered and exited the kitchen.

"Drop him, Simevolant," the Tyr said across the sandpit.

The golden drake ceased dragging a thrall up out of the trench. "But his platter was empty and I'm hungry."

"An empty platter's not his fault. A thrall's a thrall, but you can't eat them for no reason at all. Let him go, now."

Simevolant released the man. The thrall was so frightened he scuttled for the exit without picking up his platter. The other food bearers continued circling. He noticed they quickened their step at Simevolant's end, sometimes bumping into one another.

"That's done it, worm," Tighlia said, looking pointedly at Simevolant. "Their tiny brains can't hold more than one thought, and now they're more concerned with being eaten than keeping step."

"Let's have some drumming," the Tyr said. "Where are those clever blighters with the kettledrums?"

NoSohoth extended a black-tipped wing toward a grove, and a trio of blighters came forward, two bearing pairs of vast, leather-topped drums and a third with a hollow polished log. They went to work on their instruments, filling the gardens with rhythmic pounding. The Copper liked the sound so much he couldn't help swaying and stamping his feet.

"Mind the step, now, fellows; no one's been eaten," the Tyr said to the thralls passing under his nose. "That's more like it. Steady on and I'll order a barrel of sweet ferments up for you after the meal."

SiDrakkon, sitting to his sister's right, hardly ate at all, and worked at the edge of an embedded shield with his claws, prying up the rim.

"SiDrakkon looks unhappy," the Copper said to Rethothanna.

"He's always in a temper. Pay him no mind. Stuck between the ambitions of his sister and the directions of her mate. He's the Tyr's eyes and voice in the Lavadome, and he's not an energetic dragon. Doesn't like parties, either. Speaking of which, how is your first Imperial banquet?"

The Copper looked around. "It's the most splendid thing I've ever seen."

"It occurs to me that I'll have to hear your lifesong at some point. You're the first outsider to seek the Lavadome in…oh, a generation's time. Of course, we don't advertise our presence. Even with such allies as we have on the surface, we have to keep our home secret."

The Copper would have liked to hear more from her, for he was curious about the Upper World and its dangers, but the drummers had exhausted themselves, and NoSohoth waved her over.

"My turn. May the Air Spirit carry my voice well," she said. She stepped forward, and all eyes turned in their direction as NoSohoth announced: "Cry hear and hear, for we'll have poetry now. A new work on the late feuds of the founders of the Lavadome by Imperial memoriam. Hear Rethothanna."

Simevolant scanned the crowd, found the Copper. "I say, cousin, what are you doing there, lurking in the blade-bushes? Come and find your place at the banquet."

The Copper stepped forward, and Simevolant made room for him, nudging a drakka aside.

"Hear me, Spirits; hear me, Ages; hear me, dragons great and small, for I tell a tale of the founding of a new Silverhigh…."

Simevolant ignored her preamble and snatched a plump sausage linked into the shape of a curly-tailed dog off a platter. "Now, how are things in the lower levels? I so seldom get down your way. Is the strength of the Drakwatch still keeping the Imperial Resort from falling?"

The drakka around Simevolant fluttered their eyelids and griff at his joke.

"Little has changed since your last visit," the Copper said. He'd rather listen to Rethothanna than chatter and joke.

"I've traveled with the Drakwatch. Muddy, tiring business. Wars and body pieces. Have you made it out of the training caverns yet?"

"No," the Copper said.

"You won't lack for learning. But nothing teaches like experience. Even up here, you'd be amazed at what a young drake can experience." He tapped the drakka next to him on the nose.

The Copper tried to close an ear to his yammering, but Simevolant kept asking questions. How many thralls were being brought across the river, the size of the herds driven underground from the surface provinces, improvements to dwelling space in the Skotl Hill…

The Copper caught only bits of Rethothanna's performance. It dealt with the Tyr's vision for a new Silverhigh here in this deep fastness, and told how he rose to preeminence after a series of duels and feuds between Skotl, Anklene, and Wyrr lines that divided the dragons of the Lavadome, uniting them through a rigid hierarchy where even the lowest dragons at least commanded numerous thralls. Thus, "Each dragon a lord, each dragonelle a queen."

The Copper wondered what it was like to be one of even the lesser lords around the banquet, so important that your deeds were sung by others. They must be proud dragons indeed. And what dragonelle would not be pleased to be a queen?

But there were queens and there were Queens. Rethothanna dropped in a few lines of praise for Tighlia's beauty, "a flower of the Skotl line, plucked and placed as high as any Wyrr for all to admire."

Simevolant brought up a fragrant quantity of gas at that, loudly enough that Rethothanna had to pause until he was finished.

"I do beg your pardon," Simevolant said. "Go on. I'm a dragon turned to stone by the power of your words."

During kern, a thick, yellowish paste full of smashed vegetables that aided the digestion, Rethothanna finished with FeHazathant's victory at the duel of Black Rock, after which the "iron-willed, steel-limbed" dragon assumed the old Anklene title of Tyr, borne by the dragon who ruled and commanded his fellows in the old, half-forgotten Age of the Sorcerer, when Anklemere ruled.

"They wallow too much in the past, that generation," Simevolant said. "Refighting old wars. What's going to come after the Tyr dies? That's what concerns me. I've no ambition whatsoever, but there are plenty who do. Dragons can be ruthless in getting what they want."

The dragons spat torf-sized gobs of flame into the water troughs placed here and there among them, and Rethothanna bowed to the crackle and hiss of water turned instantly to steam.

"Excellent," Tyr said, casting flame into the sandpit at the center of the banquet. "So polished, and all the grim business of bodies and broken eggs left out. I don't like brave deeds tarnished, you know. Come, Rethothanna, take first position there and eat your fill."

A dragon, wings thick with red laudi, moved over, and with some shoving and squashing the dragons rearranged themselves around the banquet.

The Tyr thumped his tail. "Now I have an announcement. Our Uphold in Bant has suffered some serious reverses of late. The humans and blighter tribes there are set upon and need our assistance. I'm sending a dragon up to set things right."

"Bant. Oh, how tiresome," Simevolant said. "Humans. They can't stand to see the moon change without starting some new feud."

The Copper would have liked to ask what the moon was, but he kept his tongue.

"I don't need to tell anyone at this table how important Bant is to our food supply. I've decided that SiDrakkon shall go and help our Upholder in Bant, ummm—"

"NiThonius," Tighlia supplied.

SiDrakkon glowered, going even more purple about the cheeks. He reared his head back, but the Copper saw his sister quickly put her head across his neck and whisper something in his ear.

"He's not even of the Imperial line, Tyr," Tighlia said. "My brother is only to 'help' him?"

"NiThonius is a wise dragon. The Bant are a raucous crowd, argumentative as crows and headstrong as boars. He knows how to handle them."

"I wonder who is handling whom. Two more like him in the Upholds and we'll be skeletons down here. Food is short enough."

The Copper wondered at that, with thralls sweating and groaning under the weight of the platters that flowed around the banquet. But perhaps exceptions were made for banquets.

"I want full powers," SiDrakkon said. "As the Tyr's representative. Three good, battle-tested dragons. And three sissa of the Drakwatch to support."

"I don't want another surface war," Tyr said. "The hominids lose ten thousand and we lose ten, and they have a fresh ten thousand before ten eggs are even laid."

"Let me manage things or find another dragon," SiDrakkon roared. The whole table went quiet.

Tyr stood.

Thralls hurried to throw more sticks of incense in the braziers, and a thick, sweet odor fell over the banquet.

The Tyr glared at his mate's brother. "Fair enough," he said in a steady voice. "Best to speak softly, with a fearsome host behind the words. You pick the dragons. As to the Drakwatch, I want Nivom leading the three siisa. He's impressed me. I understand he's quite driven the demen away from the caves bordering the far shores."

Tighlia looked sharply at her mate as soon as he mentioned Nivom.

The Tyr got a faraway look in his eyes. "I'll give him a stripe for that when he gets his wings. Blue will look well against that white of his."

He blinked, and looked around the banquet table. "We'll need an Imperial messenger to report progress. Simevolant, you haven't been off Black Rock these three years."

Simevolant tucked his head against his shoulder for a moment. "Tyr, I'm touched, really, with this expression of the Imperial confidence. But I've got a notion—send Rugaard, here. He's never even been to the Upholds. The experience will do him good."

"Rugaard?" Tyr said, looking at the Copper as though he'd never seen him before. "Wasn't he killed at…Oh, yes, of course. The egg saver."

Simevolant offered one of those smiles that made the Copper's scale bristle. "Yes, the eternally budding flower of the Drakwatch training caves. Is he not a marvelous young drake? Stand, Rugaard, for you are looking fine tonight, and let the assembly see the future of the Imperial line, adopted by the Tyr himself. I don't believe he's attended a banquet before, and he needs an introduction anyway."

The Copper rose, shifted uncomfortably, and did his best to open his bad eye. He didn't want to be exhibited thus, but Simevolant had such a musical way of putting things, you followed his words this way and that the way you did a good blood trail.

"The Drakwatch calls him 'Batty,' I understand," SiDrakkon said. "He keeps bats as pets."

The drakka twitched their noses and fluttered their eyelids. They were laughing at him. No matter how polished his scale, or even his edging—

"Burn it, Sime; you're always wriggling out of things," the Tyr said. "You chatter your way through life like a drakka. I won't have it."

"Stand up for yourself, cousin," Simevolant said out of the side of his mouth. "You want to stay in those drippy holes forever?"

The Copper found his voice. "I'd be grateful for the opportunity, Tyr."

"That's a norther's vocalization if I've ever heard one," a dragon opposite the Copper at the banquet said. "How did he ever come to the dome?"

Tyr's tail tapped in thought. "Never been to the Upper World?"

"No, Tyr."

"Well, Bant's as good a place as any to get sunstruck. NoSohoth, get his shoulder line painted, won't you?"

"Congratulations, Rugaard," Simevolant said. "Keep out of the way of most of the arrows. Remember to put a little dwarf's-beard on your wounds."

The rest of the banquet passed in a blur. He met the dragons and dragonelles, drakes and drakka of the Imperial line. A trio of drakka, who he later found out were directly grand-daughtered to Tyr, twitched their noses as they greeted him and perfunctorily laid their necks across his, pressed on by their mother, a rather pinched-looking, tight-scaled creature named Ibidio. Two were sleek, beautiful specimens, the third rather thin and sickly, but they were polite enough under the urging of their mother. Her mate, AgGriffopse, the champion of the Tyr's first—and only—clutch before he lost his first mate, had been badly wounded fighting dwarves and died of his injuries within a year. Many sad tales were sung of AgGriffopse, and the Copper was glad of a chance to meet some of his titular relations at last. AgGriffopse and Ibidio's daughters were gracious enough to greet him as a brother, and his hearts beat hard at their touch as they crossed necks.

The only one of the three who really spoke to him was the sickly one, Halaflora, conversing between tiny mouthfuls of food. Perhaps that was why she was sickly. She was interested in details of life in the Drakwatch. Ayafeeia and her sister Imfamnia spent most of their time discussing how they would have organized the banquet.

"No, no. Make the dishes stationary. That way the society has to circulate," Ayafeeia said.

"Look at Tighlia up there, queen of all she surveys. How I envy her," Imfamnia said.

"Envy's nothing to brag of, daughter," Ibidio said, raised scale in her voice.

Tighlia's relations of the Skotl line, on the other hand, didn't mix much with those from the Tyr's Wyrr side. They didn't have quite the decor of scale and elegance of manner the Tyr's side possessed. He spoke with only one, a grim, battle-scarred dragon with still-healing wounds on his uncased wings—SiDrakkon's son, SiBayereth. He glistened, a deep red oily color, like blood spilled in shadow, but was polite enough to tip his head as he congratulated the Copper.

"Heartstrong of you to jump forward, cousin. Don't let them frighten you about the Upper World," he said in the growling accent of his Skotl clan. "Our family's just so used to being guarded down here, they swoon at the thought of risk."

The Copper swelled with pride, willing to hurl himself against a wave of spears at such praise. A guard! And of these splendid, noble, glamorous, glittering dragons—his…his family.

The Copper walked around the caverns of the Drakwatch trainees one last time. The rather brackish pool, the loose skull that one of the thralls had jammed back into place upside down, the boiled kern and fatty joints, the smoky smell of the fat-lamps and drakes—each bore a memory.

He limped around saying good-bye to his trainee companions. He knew they told jokes behind his back, because of his age. But they didn't dare snicker when his eye was on them. He towered over them, thanks to years of Imperial hams and chucks.

"You'll need a good travel thrall," NeStirrath said. He looked into the Copper's cave, where Harf scrubbed the decorated archway in his usual halfhearted manner. "Strong and road-wise. That fool can feed your bats until you come back." Harf scratched his paunch and edged out of the way. "I'll give you one of mine, Fourfang. He's mostly blighter, strong as a dragon, for his size."

"I've come to wish the drake honor and glory as well," a dragonelle's voice called. Rethothanna didn't bother to announce herself as a stranger to the Drakwatch caves or wait for an invitation, but the drakes would hesitate to attack a full-grown female.

She closed her nostrils. "Fee-fie-foe-foul, when was the last time these holes were washed out?"

"There's a sluice from the upper levels that backs up," NeStirrath said. "But do not tell the Imperial Family that their waste stinks; they'd never believe it. What are you doing bringing your refined nostrils to these caves, female?"

"As I said, to wish young Rugaard safe horizons. I give him a gift, as well."

The girl thrall who'd worked his face stood just behind, a heavy quilted coat around her and a woven basket tied to her back.

NeStirrath dug around behind his griff and extracted some loose scale. "For an egg-dripping drake you make the journey, but you couldn't be bothered to come wait on me for your blasted song?"

"Even the oldest of trees needs to bend now and then. I wanted the advantage of home ground to hear your song, lest my hearts melt and I lose all my concentration in your glory."

"Don't jest with me."

"You old, stump-winged fool. I've wanted you beside me for years. You're the best dragon in the dome, and yes, I include the Tyr himself in that assessment. But we can talk later. It's youth that needs the benefit of our years now." She swung her oxeyed head around to the Copper. "To glory bid, eh, drake? I've brought you a gift. Come forward, Rhea."

The girl stepped up to the base of the dragonelle's neck, her flat face hidden behind her straw-colored hair. Harf put down his brush and made an ooking noise.

"You remember Rhea; she arranged you for the banquet. You need a proper body thrall, and she needs some time in the sun, or she'll grow up all bent and spindly, no matter how many fish she eats. Bant's sunny enough."

Rhea shivered despite her quilted coat.

"She's worried about Black Rock. Thralls get eaten in here," Rethothanna said.

"Not in my caves," NeStirrath said. He pointed his tail toward Harf. "That idle-fingers is still intact, as you can see."

"Can she make a journey?" the Copper asked. The slight girl didn't seem up to a climb to the gardens.

"She's young. She'll harden to the road," Rethothanna said.

NeStirrath brought Fourfang over. The blighter had shoulders fully as broad as the girl was high, and legs like a dragon. He offered a long list of instructions, both to Fourfang and the Copper, as Rethothanna inspected the skulls decorating the passages. "Above all, remember your lessons and keep a dragon's virtues. You can't go far wrong."

The Copper thought it funny that the same advice went to a blighter as well as a dragon. What would a blighter do with learning? It would pass through him like water, clear going in and smelly and tainted coming out.

"And keep off that poor girl," he finished.

That must have been directed at the blighter. Fourfang grinned, showing his sharpened teeth.

"What can you tell me about Bant?" the Copper asked Rethothanna.

She fluttered a griff at NeStirrath. "You mean what kind of food is to be had?"

"No. Our allies in the Uphold. What are they like? How do we keep the peace with them? What's the nature of this problem SiDrakkon needs to solve? But if there's some delicacy to be had…well, I'd hate to miss a new feast."

"He is a promising young thing," she said to NeStirrath. "Interested in the essentials. Very well. I'll give you the essential for Bant: water. Bant's either dry or rainy, depending on the time of year; the rainy season starts right around the summer solstice, usually a little before. It's made up of rocky, rather dry plains that go lush during the rains and tinder-dry the rest of the year. There are three rivers, all flowing west to the Ocean of the Summer Sun, and it's control of the rivers that's everything, for there are rich forests full of trade goods and spices along the rivers. Very good land for herding on the plains, as long as the herds can get to water holes or the rivers in the dry season.

"The elves lived there first, along the rivers, but tribes of blighters came and dispersed them, though they didn't quite get rid of them. A few still live on in the deeper woods or around the better-watered rock piles. A dwarf or two pass through, usually engaged in trade or craft with the ivory and hardwoods. Some tribes of men as well, distant relations to the Ironriders of the north, I believe, as fierce as the blighters when fighting on horseback."

"So it's hard to keep the peace between the groups?" the Copper asked.

"Well, yes, they'll go to the dragon to settle disputes, when neither side thinks it can gain an advantage. But this case is difficult. The Ghi-men, the stone shapers, are pushing south and taking over the rivers, from what I understand of the messages the Tyr has shared with me. They're well organized—their armies will put up a fight against even dragons in the field—but their real skill is in digging and roofing and wall building. When they're behind their battlements they're as tough as a scale digger."

NeStirrath's wing stubs dipped. "If SiDrakkon thinks he'll throw his main strength against one of their fortress towns, we'll be singing laments from Imperial Resort again."

"You do travel light," SiDrakkon said three days later, as they assembled at the northeast riverbank. "Only two thralls?"

"You said it was a six-day journey."

"Barring delays."

"I've gone hungry before."

"That's why I bring extra thralls. Once you've consumed the baggage, there's no need for baggage carriers."

Nivom had two sissa of Drakwatch and a sissa of Firemaidens. He wore a golden ring in his ear, a mark of a Drakwatch full commander, a rare honor for a wingless drake. Beside the Tyr's brother-by-mate and and Nivom, the Copper also noted three battle-scarred dragons, two blacks and a red, with purplish tones shading their coloring.

"The worst of the Skotl clan," Nivom said quietly. "Duelists."

The Copper hadn't seen a duel yet, though his bats had witnessed one while hunting. The Tyr discouraged the custom for the dragons in the Imperial Resort, and absolutely forbade it among the Imperial line. But on some of the other hills, dragons settled their differences in combat. For the wealthier dragons who didn't want to risk losing an eye or something even more vital, challenges could be settled by means of a duel-by-proxy.

"What do you have against duelists?" the Copper asked.

"A rich dragon can hire professionals, and then start a squabble with a poor one to take what little he has." His griff rattled, though he kept them sheathed.

The three-score drakes and drakka under Nivom snorted and whispered: "They've finally let Batty out; Spirits help us."

SiDrakkon walked back up the line of dragons, flocks, baggage, and thralls at the northeast tunnel mouth. They'd go down for a short distance, to the water ring, then start the underground journey to Bant. He paused again by the Copper and took a long sniff at Rhea.

"She's just maturing. Ahh, but that's a smell," SiDrakkon said.

The Copper found her aroma pleasing, rather soft and mammalian, but not nearly as interesting as forge-fresh steel or a fat joint sputtering in an iron pan. But there was no point in being disagreeable.

"Yes," he said. "The blighter could use a daily wash, as she does."

SiDrakkon glanced back at the distant wart of Black Rock. "I'd have a garden of such women, rather than the Tyr's wretched ferns and darkblooms, if I had my way. But duty calls. Which reminds me—Nivom, where's that old courier ring of yours?"

Nivom nosed around in his baggage, and approached with a bronzed token on a chain.

SiDrakkon took it in his sii and held it up. "Your first laudi." It was a pair of equal-sized bronzed bones, joined and wired at the center so crossed as a dragon might cross his sii before settling down to sleep.

"The crossed man-bones of the Tyr. This shows you to be a courier of the Imperial Resort." He opened the length of chain, and the Copper bowed so he might slip it down his neck.

The links rattled down his scale and finally stopped.

"Of course. It doesn't fit. You're wide across the neck base, drake. We'll have to find some smithy and get it adjusted." SiDrakkon smelled hot and angry, like Father.

"My…my line was thwick-bodied," the Copper said.

"Watch that lisp. What's wrong with you? You sound like a hatchling. Nivom there speaks better, and half his lip is torn off."

The Copper averted his eyes and swallowed.

"Well?" SiDrakkon growled.

Some of the Firemaidens were whispering among themselves.

"Sow—sorry."

"Be careful with that necklace in battle," Nivom said. "It gives foemen a good aiming point."

The lounging drakes chuckled, and even SiDrakkon deflated a little. "Confound it, we were supposed to have more baskets of chickens. Where are they now?" He swung around and stalked back up the line.

Nivom edged closer. "What do you mean, your line was thick-bodied? You still live, so your line does."

"Bad wing. I'll never be able to mate." At least the words came out with a dragonly inflection. He felt comfortable around Nivom.

"Nobody cares about those back-mountain rituals anymore. Well, almost nobody."

SiDrakkon, satisfied at last with the preparations, set the column in motion. They left the Lavadome, with the tunnel guardians of the Drakwatch and the Firemaids raising their necks and trumpeting.

The families of the thralls in the baggage train who'd made the trip to the assembly camp added their own wails. Bits of wood and bone on string were passed from fathers to sons, or between mates. The Copper had been told a dragon could spend a lifetime describing the different good-luck charms and fetishes of the hominid races.

SiDrakkon placed him behind the thralls of the column, with the rear duelist dragon and the sissa of the Drakwatch. They came to the encircling river and he again took in the wonder of the high-walled cavern, with sunlight falling through the cracks and landing in golden slivers upon the fetid water. A group of hatchlings sunbathed under the watchful eyes of their mother, and two young dragons swam. Probably newly mated, the Copper thought with a pang.

There were boats drawn up for the thralls and provisions. The dragons all swam.

"You'll need to ride in a boat, I expect," SiDrakkon said as he watched the thralls load the last boat.

"No, sir. I'm a strong swimmer," the Copper said, plunging into the water.

"Don't come crying halfway across. Maybe one of the bodyguards will let you ride on their back, but I won't carry you."

"Of cowse not sir."

"And stop that flapping lisping!"

"Y-yes."

The Copper clasped limbs to body and swam off after the sissa.

At the other side of river—two bonfires marked the wade-out—the Copper was able to lose his shame again in the fascinating activity of loading and manning the rut-carts.

Here by the river ample cave moss lit the scene. A wide tunnel, with two shining bands of metal running off into its darkening length, left sun-shafted beachfront and disappeared back into the depths of the Lower World. The Copper was so used to the pool of yellow light coming down from the top of the Lavadome or the orange flicker of fat-lamps that the faint green glow of the moss seemed strange again.

Wheeled contraptions rested on the bands of metal. Some had sides; some were just flat platforms, but all ran on four or, rarely, six wheels. The wheels were small things, with lips along the inside that kept them in place on the iron bars. Specialized thralls, barefoot with thick leather belts and wrist braces, minded the oily-smelling joints and laid out and checked pulling lines.

They were dwarvish contraptions, of course.

"I've seen these lines in tunnels before," the Copper said to Nivom.

"They're rut-carts. Have you ever seen a road?"

"No."

Nivom never minded showing off his knowledge. "In the Upper World hominids use these chariots and wheeled carts and such, and they eventually dig furrows in the ground. This is the same principle, only instead of furrows the wheels sit in the iron furrows. They're a little noisy, but you can pull a heavy load quite easily. The dwarves use them for mining, or for transport when there's no underground canal about."

The Copper blinked for a moment as he tried to absorb what Nivom had said. Nivom was a clever drake, but didn't make allowance for those not as bright as he.

"So the cart…floats on the rails. Like the dwarf boats on a river."

"Yes, you'll see."

The thralls went to ropes attached to one end of the carts. SiDrakkon barked out an order, and Nivom distributed his drakes to the heads of the lines, putting their necks through harnesses made for draft animals.

Some of the drakes grumbled at doing beast work.

The Copper put Rhea on one of the flat carts with some of the other female thralls, who cooked or toasted a grainy paste on metal bracking rods for the males.

"Exercise won't do any of you harm," SiDrakkon said. "Toughen you up before you get to the Upper World."

The Copper, though frightened enough of SiDrakkon to keep well out of his way lest he be barked at again, had to grant him this: He kept the column working and moving. The thralls didn't have time to worry about being eaten, and the drakes were so busy they couldn't get into squabbles.

"I'll take a line," the Copper said.

"You're a courier. You needn't—"

The Copper stiffened, extending his neck as though getting ready to issue a challenge.

"If you want the fatigue, have it. I'm riding in a cart, as befits a commander."

The men went to knotted lines and threw loops across their shoulders, padding them with bunched clothing. The Copper let the sweat-stained leather ring—it smelled deliciously of equine—fall about his shoulders. It fit better than the Tyr's emblem.

"Set…step…off!" SiDrakkon shouted.

"Take the strain. The start's the worst," Nivom shouted.

The carts set up a chorus of metallic screeching, and the chickens clucked in alarm and the sheep hurried out of the way, but the procession lurched into motion.

"Sorry, lads, it's mostly uphill to Bant," SiDrakkon said as he lowered his head to watch the wheels on their iron ruts.

The Copper liked the challenge of the pull; you could lose yourself in the effort. He did most of the work with his saa, just hopping forward on his bad leg during a strain.

When a thrall slipped and fell so that he lay dangerously facedown across the rail, the Copper quickly hooked him under the arm with his tail and helped lift him to his feet again before the grinding wheels could take off a leg. The thrall looked at him wide-eyed from behind his shaggy hair.

Fourfang clapped the thrall upon the back and grunted out a few hominid words, pointing at the Copper. The Copper had earned little enough honor among Drakwatch and Firemaidens, but even the respect of his thralls counted for something.

They took their first rest at a cave spring. The thralls instantly fouled the tunnel with their waste; the grains and roots they ate resulted in enormous quantities of excrement that rivaled bat guano in its unwholesomeness.

Nivom came to check on him.

"Ride for the next quarter."

"I'm well enough."

"I don't want the Tyr's courier dropping of heart seizure. Water or blood?"

"Blood." He thirsted for the salty taste. Fourfang made a nuisance of himself, pulling up his saa and applying some kind of ointment that smelled like sheep fat.

"There's a pan. SiDrakkon's already shared a pair of sheep with his duelists. Better hurry, or your fellow line drakes will have had it all."

He walked while the pullers were changed, but as soon as they took another break, went back to the traces.

"No. Drake ride. Fourfang pull," Fourfang protested.

"I like it," the Copper said, settling into the collar.

"Only unimportant drake pull," Fourfang said. "Unimportant drake have unimportant thrall."

"Is that so?" the Copper said. It hadn't occurred to him that the thralls had some kind of clan system of their own.

"Pride of place."

"Oh, all right. I'll walk beside. If you get tired, let me know."

The blighter planted his short, bandy legs. The column squealed into motion again.

"These carts need tinkering," Nivom said, looking at the wheels of a particularly noisy contraption in front of the Copper. "If only dwarves didn't starve themselves so quickly when enthralled. Get some fat drippings over here. That helps."

At a widening of the tunnel SiDrakkon had found a rock pile to rest upon and watch the column as it passed. "That's it, Rugaard. Work 'em hard and they're too tired to make trouble. True for scales as well as hair."

They had to leave the carts on the fourth "day"—as measured by sleep periods—and go on foot.

They lost only two thralls on the trip to Bant, one to sickness and one to a badly broken leg when he fell under a cart and seemed unlikely to recover. In both cases they had their heads quickly bitten off by the big duelist dragons as they slept. The others accepted the deaths fatalistically, though they turned their backs when the bodies were shared out and eaten, except for some of the younger thralls, who watched the process with a sort of dread fascination.

At last they saw golden light at the tunnel mouth again. A female dragon, with dust caked thickly in her scales turning her almost white, guarded the entrance from a pallet of wood and straw.

SiDrakkon had them rest in the cave until the sun had lowered so they wouldn't emerge into full daylight.

The Copper took his first step into the Upper World at sunset, blinded and blinking for a full hundred heartbeats. When he finally looked about, squinting, he saw a dizzyingly vast landscape, bronze-colored and dotted here and there by taller green lacework that Nivom identified as trees. An orange sun, so perfectly round it seemed an eerie visitor as strange to the landscape as dragons, rested on the horizon, illuminating a distant rise.

"That's the Sunshard Plateau," Nivom said, pointing with his nose to the distant break in the horizon. "The Lavadome lies beneath. We've come all this way. It fills the sky when you're nearer."

The mouth of the cave had bones scattered all around the looser gravel below the cave gap. "My warning to trespassers." The Firemaid chuckled.

SiDrakkon flew into a rage when he saw the tiny, tired collection of animals gathered at the watering hole at the base of the mouth-mount, watched by a few sandled herders in thin white robes who threw themselves on their bellies when they saw the dragons.

"Courier! Come here!"

The Copper approached, trembling.

SiDrakkon had turned quite purple. Or maybe it was the color-shifting light of the setting sun. "Your first duty is to hurry back with a message for the glorious Tyr. Tell him I'm relieving that fool NiThonius, friend of his or no. We'll come to the Mud City half-starved, thanks to him. Eat one of these pathetic, scrawny sheep and go!"

It appeared his visit to the Upper World would be as brief as it was dazzling.

As it turned out, the Copper didn't return to the Lavadome that day. Nivom hurried up to SiDrakkon and convinced him that ill news would be better received by the Tyr if it were mixed with good.

SiDrakkon sputtered some more, but when Nivom pointed out that the Tyr might just appoint SiDrakkon as replacement governor of the Uphold, and SiDrakkon would spend a goodly stretch of years in Bant, the dragon finally retracted his griff and f claws and cried settled.

The next morning the Copper looked more closely at the Bant hominids as they washed. Their skin was a similar tone to his own scale, though a good deal less shiny, and he decided it made them look healthier and more intelligent than the paler thralls from the Lavadome.

Two tiresome marches later, guided by another dusty dragonelle who could easily converse with the locals, they came to the Mud City.

The Copper got a chance to study a depiction of the lands on an animal skin, with inked squiggles representing rivers, ranges of hills, stone outcroppings, and water holes. Once one got used to maps they made sense. The Mud City was a collection of dwellings and workshops and markets on the southernmost of Bant's three great rivers. Downstream the riverbanks teemed with life, according to SiDrakkon, with the assorted kinds of trees growing so tall above they blocked the sun, rendering the Upper World much like the Lower, though better lit, at least in daytime.

The Copper discovered that while dirty, the Upper World had its compensations. For one thing, all the light sharpened his eyesight. He picked up detail at a distance. In the muted light of the Lower World colors faded and shadows muddied edges. Up here the Spirits' wonders and labors in shaping all between blue sky and black earth stood under brilliant light as though it were a statue on display in the Anklene hill.

The Mud City stood on both banks of the river, surrounded by green, well-watered hills and walls of various age. The buildings were all a white or sandy color, sprouting wood supports or a plot of gardening here and there. The dwellings looked cracked and dry, like Fourfang's sunburned skin.

He expected to see flocks and herds on the surrounding hills, but there were few animals on the heights grazing, and what there were kept close to town.

The dragons camped in a vale between two hills overlooking the town, with good cliffs to one side and a steep slope on the other.

"The Ghi men's horsemen have not yet raided south of the river," their Firemaid guide said.

"I don't put anything past men. They always show up where you don't expect 'em," SiDrakkon said.

"And don't let your thralls cut wood from these trees; these belong to the local chieftain. Wood pilfering will create a grudge."

"Of course."

The Firemaid departed, and SiDrakkon immediately ordered the thralls to gather wood for cooking fires—but only dead branches and deadfalls.

Rhea spent weary hours cleaning dust out of the Copper's scale, while Fourfang made some kind of gruel in a pot as he was toasting a spitted lamb. Fourfang and Rhea licked the spit clean of grease when the Copper was through eating.

The Copper hoped the provisioning would improve soon; already the thralls were pushing and shoving over food allotments.

The next morning NiThonius arrived, and the whole camp stirred at the news.

He was an odd-looking dragon, rather bony and the color of a rusty shield, and had strips of cloth running from his crest and twelve horns, all tied to an ivory tusk piercing his nostrils, creating a sort of fabric shield for his eyes and nose.

Alongside him rode a fine figure of a man with a long, forked beard wrapped in gold cording. More gold cording held a sun cloth to his head, and his robes had glittering strands woven into the lapels.

SiDrakkon lined up the drakes and Firemaidens to meet him, with his bodyguard just behind him. "Let's wait downwind; we'll be able to hear better," Nivom said.

"Eminent of the Bant Uphold, I bring you the Tyr's greetings," SiDrakkon said.

"Mate-brother to the Tyr, I long regret the Tyr's absence from my hearth and hoard. Will you cry ally?"

"I do cry ally."

They both made a perfunctory clucking noise at the sky.

"I welcome your coming," NiThonius said. "Let me introduce King Onato of the Rains and Winds and the Three River Savanna. You met his father, I believe."

"A great warrior and friend to the Lavadome," SiDrakkon said. He gurgled out a few words in a tongue the Copper did not understand.

"Did you catch that?" the Copper asked.

"I can't make snout nor tail of their yammering. But I expect I'll learn if we're here long."

Some of the king's retainers unrolled white material and tied it between the branches of two spreading trees. The king sat beneath atop a folding wooden sort of post-seat, and NiThonius settled down beside. SiDrakkon dismissed the welcoming party and joined the repose, calling Nivom forward. The Copper followed behind.

"A Drakwatch commander and an Imperial Courier. I'm impressed you've come so well arrayed," NiThonius said.

"I was not impressed with your welcoming banquet when we emerged from the Lower World."

NiThonius pulled back his head a little. "I did not expect so many. I'd asked my old friend the Tyr for a cunning dragon or two to help me cope with the Ghi."

"And what could be accomplished against fortresses by a dragon or two?"

"I would rather attack them where they are vulnerable, rather than behind scale or stone."

"Where are they vulnerable?"

"Where their archers can't stand behind battlements and their war machines throw javelin, rock, and fire. I'm a little old to be flitting about, laying waste to flocks and herds. The men of Ghi, the Stonemen, would probably be induced to quit most of the lands they've grabbed if we make the lands unprofitable. They are keen calculators, not prideful. Also, they have some salt mines and clayworks and lumber camps. Burn them and kill the workers, swim up under their trade boats, scatter their herds, and burn their crops in the night. A war of stealth and surprise will weary them before too many years pass. That's why I asked for an active young dragon or two. And that is what our allies gathered provision for."

SiDrakkon tore up the ground with his claws, and the king and his retainers scooted back on their hindquarters, perhaps fearing their new ally would lash out. "I've no patience for that kind of warfare. The Lavadome needs Bant's herds, not tales of a burned crop or shepherd's lodge."

"A salt mine is no shepherd's cot. Without salt, men do not last here."

"A war of many small cuts doesn't answer our need."

"It is the only kind of warfare left to us, at least in Bant."

"How is that?"

NiThonius said a few words to his human ally. "The king has lost many of his finest warriors in fruitless assaults. Those who remain are discouraged and scattered."

"You say that as though the fault lay at another's sii."

"Perhaps I delayed too long. The northern half of the country was under the protection of my clutchwinner. After he and his mate were killed, the collapse came so quickly—now the Stonemen build a new strongpoint at a watering spring just north of the Green Dancer that flows below."

"Build?" SiDrakkon said. "It's unfinished?"

"They have a stout wooden palisade. The stoneworks rise day by day."

"There is where we'll strike, then. They won't expect a hard blow after having won so much, and I wish to move before word of our arrival may spread. Nivom, tell your sissa, rouse the Firemaidens—we fly at once! We'll give them a taste of dragon fury that'll put hearts back into these spiritless whelps."

After the longest, hardest march of his life, the Copper stayed far to the rear of the attack, watching events from the top of a rock pile.

He didn't feel the least bit tired, not with the night full of the fire of battle. If it weren't for SiDrakkon's forcibly expressed orders…

The plains beyond the rivers had these rocky, windswept piles of stones like river-smoothed rocks grown to dragon proportion and heaped. The Copper had become almost as acquainted with the wildlife of the rocks as he had with the grasslands. The rock piles were thick with hopping, naked tailed rodents that the Firemaidens flushed with a quick blast of flame. As he watched the battle, he probed his gum line with his tongue for the remains of the rat he'd just eaten.

He watched carefully as SiDrakkon's orders were executed, remembering details for a report to the Tyr.

His orders had the virtue of simplicity. First the Firemaidens, the most skilled huntresses of their number at the fore, would attack whatever sentries stood on the outskirts of the water hole. One had been killed on the rock pile where the Copper now stood, and his blood still scented the air.

When Nivom gave the signal that the sentries and outwatchers had been cleared, the Drakwatch went forward.

Then SiDrakkon swooped overhead, low enough to smell the bubbling fire bladders (the dragons chewed an irritating pepper called green fury to fill their bladders), his three duelists in line behind to lessen the chance of their being spotted.

The aerial dragons struck and struck hard, setting alight the nests of wooden spikes that warded off horsemen, then picking the flaming bundles up in their saa or knocking them around with their tails.

The men rallied to the circle of stone, firing their bows and setting their spears against a descent when the Drakwatch struck, all loosing their flame at a roar from Nivom. The Drakwatch swarmed over the unfinished ramparts, scale glittering in the firelight, and the Copper wished more than anything to be with them.

The Stonemen broke and fled for their lives, and the Firemaidens had much sport hunting down stragglers in the grass.

At last a Firemaiden called to the Copper and told him that SiDrakkon bade that he join in the feast and survey the night's work.

One of the Drakwatch had been killed in the fighting. Apart from bloodless arrow wounds to the wing tissue, SiDrakkon and the duelists had not been scratched.

They devoured some of the beasts of burden killed in the action and made presents of the rest to King Onato of the Rains and Wind and other titles. Such heads as didn't disappear down dragon or drake gullets were lined up on the unfinished ramparts as a warning to the Ghi.

"That's how you do it, Rugaard. A fast, heavy blow. Smash 'em up, and they'll break and scatter," SiDrakkon said. "When these human and blighter tribesmen see this work, they'll rally to the king's banner again. Especially if the banner's carried by a victorious dragon."

"Four victorious dragons," one of the bodyguards said with a belch, as he nosed up a silver-hilted knife from the dirt, broke off the blade, and swallowed it.

"Forget not the drakes!" a pair from Nivom's first sissa chorused, where they rooted among the burned bodies for coin to eat.

"The Firemaidens took their share of honors," a dazzling, golden-eyed drakka said as another licked the wounds about her sii and griff.

SiDrakkon stood and roared a victorious bellow that no doubt sent the rock-racks digging even deeper into the sand. "Now, Rugaard, now you may return to the Lavadome. Tell the mighty Tyr what has been accomplished in his name this night. But hurry back, for the feasting will be even greater when we strike their fortress from the depths of the very river they so arrogantly claim!"

No one but the departing Copper noticed NiThonius, who'd stayed back from the attack as well. He remained at the edge of the celebration, using his nose to help the Bant tribesmen gather spent arrows and dropped swords. He simply sighed quietly.

SiDrakkon roared after him: "Give your report to the Tyr, and tell my sister to keep her advice. Her snout's in too many caves as it is."

The road back to the Lavadome was wearisome in several respects.

For a start, the king awarded them, through SiDrakkon, a rather broken-down and dismal donkey, who complained, in the simple words of the beast tongue, that he would be eaten as soon as the Copper grew hungry. For a while Rhea rode him, but he staggered and bellowed, so they left him with just carrying grain and dragon-smoked meat.

Rhea performed her scale-cleaning duties until her fingers bled from beneath her nails. She slept rather close to him. Fourfang, however, continually disappeared while they passed back south through Bant, especially when the Copper smelled tribal blighters around. He'd slip off quietly in the night, and come back smelling of scented oil.

"Where do you go nights, Fourfang?" the Copper asked one morning.

In response, the blighter made a motion of such obvious obscenity that the Copper almost scorched him from the waist down. The Copper wondered how many prominently toothed blighter litters would be born next season.

On their last day of travel the rains began. Blue-bottomed clouds boiled up out of the east and gathered, and water fell from the sky, first in a drizzle and then in such torrents it was pointless to seek shelter, so they simply squelched on through the mud to the next soggy camp.

The donkey complained that not only was he to be eaten, but he was going to be eaten wet and uncomfortable.

"The rains, at last," the Firemaid guarding the underground entrance said. "You leave us so soon?" The rain had washed and brightened her scale.

"I'll return with messages, I expect. I'll offer you a gift of this donkey to remember me. I suggest you eat him; it's the only way you'll ever have any peace and quiet."

The Firemaids kept a goodly supply of meat, gained hunting on the plains, and there was even a little fish pulled out of a stream that morning, for with the rain the fish were hurrying to mate and lay their eggs. The Copper ate the fish as soon as it was offered. If his time in the Lavadome lacked anything, it was a good piece of fish now and again.

The trek down the tunnel was long—fortunately there were few places one could get lost, and when in doubt the Copper simply smelled for the leavings of the flocks driven downtunnel. Once they met up with the dwarvish iron ruts it was simply a matter of following the lines down. Their trek had little to remember, save that Fourfang slept soundly each night with his head pillowed upon the Copper's rump, and Rhea, lacking the warm sty provided by her fellow thralls, huddled against his leathery stomach. So they came again to the Lavadome with little doubt or danger. The deman boatman who carried them across was a gruesome specimen, and fondled Rhea's sun-colored hair as they climbed in.

"Enough, you," the Copper growled. The demen were useful enough in keeping order among the thralls, but he still found them loathsome. "Keep to your end of the boat."

The deman and Fourfang exchanged looks. Fourfang licked his lips and showed his teeth.

The deman's spines rose. "No brawling," the Copper said, placing his tail between them.

The pens and dragon-holes of the Lavadome's hills felt shrunken in scale now, after the horizon-stretching space and light of the Upper World. They had to rest only once, crossing easily on common paths, and instead of blue infinity overhead, they enjoyed the intricate beauty of the fire-streaked dome. He left Fourfang and Rhea on the lower entrance to the Imperial Resort. He would have liked to see how things were getting on in the training caves—though he'd been gone only two-score and five days it felt like years—but Tyr would need to hear about events in Bant.

He hurried up one of the steep, narrow back step-passages used by the thralls. He was still small enough to fit, and he could avoid some of the transverses leading to the garden level.

Thralls worked the Tyr's Gardens, diverting trickles from the central pool and splashing water on the ferns and vines. One had a dirty joint shoved in his waistband, probably cast aside during a banquet and found in the underbrush, and guiltily dropped it.

Well, let him enjoy his find. "I'd boil it well if I were you. A joint can go a long way, made into soups," he said. The thrall just blinked. "Go on; pick it up. You found it; you enjoy it."

He met NoSohoth in the plaza before the Tyr's outer entrance, eating a dish made of meat shredded into thin, stringlike strips and swimming in gravy, as a thrall poked around behind his crest, cleaning dirt and dead skin with a rag-wrapped stick. Saliva flooded the Copper's mouth at the smell of the dragon's breakfast.

"I'll say this for you, Rugaard: You're easy to identify at a distance. Your hop-walk is distinctive."

"I bring news for the Tyr."

NoSohoth took another tongueful of gravy. "I'd be surprised if you didn't. SiDrakkon calls for three more dragons, I suppose."

"My mate is sleeping," Tighlia said, emerging from the Tyr's cave. She moved rather stiffly.

Thralls exploded out of the corners of the plaza like a flight of startled birds, converging on the Tyr's mate.

"Yes, some breakfast, just a little kern," she said, looking from thrall to thrall. "No, no bath. Just some ointment for my joints. My shoulders again. Leafdrip's formula and none other, now. Oh, leave off; the scale's still lined from sleeping. It'll smooth on its own."

She shrugged off her attendants and took a long drink from Tyr's trickle basin.

"Restless night again, glorious Queen?"

"Not a good turn to be had, NoSohoth." She looked at the Copper. "What on earth are you doing here?"

"Our newest courier has returned with news from Bant," NoSohoth said.

"My mate's lame little indulgence. Well, out with it."

"I bring news for the Tyr himself," the Copper said.

"Be off with all of you," she said to the thralls. "You too, NoSohoth. See what's keeping my kern." She sidestepped toward the trickle spilling into the basin.

The Copper regretted to see the shredded meat in gravy go, but the hard eye of Tighlia made him forget his appetite.

"We can talk here, you. No one will overhear. Come closer; I've never bitten a drake in my life and I won't start this morning. What news?"

"I'm the Tyr's courier," the Copper protested. He wondered if he should relay her brother's exact words.

"Don't question me; it's not your place. FeHazathant needs twice the sleep that he gets. I'm eager to hear every detail of my brother, and you have my promise that the Tyr will hear your report."

"I'm under instructions—"

She interrupted in a quiet voice. "You would be wise to obey me. I've given my word: Tyr will hear your message. Will you offer insult to me by disbelief? There is no shortage of champions who will duel to defend my honor."

"Yes, great Queen. Our journey—"

"Stomp the journey. How go things in Bant?"

"They are hard-pressed by the Ghi men. Two of their river valleys are lost. Their forces have been defeated, scattered, and discouraged."

"What has my brother done to retrieve the situation, or is the Uphold lost?"

"SiDrakkon won a victory against the Ghi men. He destroyed a fortification before it could be completed, with small loss."

"Ninny! You should have been shouting that from the moment you passed into the dome. A victory! FeHazathant must hear of this." She rounded on a kitchen thrall hurrying up with a steaming bowl of milky, yellow kern. "You there! Let's have a skewer of steaks for the Tyr's breakfast, and if they're not still sputtering from the fire you'll be turning on the next spit."

Within a dwarf-hour the court was roused and the Tyr came into the plaza to hear the story. When the Copper repeated his news and told of the battle, all the Imperial line began to twitter.

"Well, that is good news," NoSohoth said when Tighlia nudged him. "A roar for SiDrakkon."

The dragons roared, but to the Copper it sounded half-lunged.

The Tyr nodded. "Well, if it's begun, at least it's begun well. But open war…the Ghi men are strong and numerous and craft-wise. What's the spirit of the warriors in Bant?"

The Copper chose his words carefully. "NiThonius says they're in poor spirits. They've been broken by defeats. SiDrakkon believes this victory will bring them round."

"What do you think?"

"I, Tyr?"

"Yes, you've been up there recently and I haven't. What do you think? Can Bant win a war?"

The Copper remained silent for a moment. "I…I can't form an opinion. I haven't even seen them fight."

The dragons chuckled at that. "Don't overtax my poor cousin's abilities, Grandfather," Simevolant called.

"SiDrakkon seems confident they can win," the Copper said.

"And why not?" Tighlia said. "Hominids are always braver behind a dragon than in front."

The Tyr stared off to the northeast, as though trying to pierce crystal, lava, and rock with his eyes. "Rest for three days, Rugaard: You look worn. Then return to SiDrakkon and give him my congratulations. Tell him that if there is to be a war, let it be a short one, and seek concessions from the Ghi men rather than battles. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Tyr."

As it turned out, he didn't return to his familiar shelf in the training caves. NoSohoth arranged a cave midrock in the better-lit south quarter, among some of the wealthier dragons who stored their hoards in the Imperial Resort and wanted caves near their coin. He even had a nice crack in the wall where he could look out and take the air—though he suspected his head would be too large to fit out the hole anymore as his horns began to come in—and was near a cascade of only occasionally tainted water.

Tyr sent him a gift of a small bag of coins. He ate just a few and stuck the rest on a little shelf by a corner the bats were exploring for grips. He was a growing dragon and should think about establishing a hoard.

Harf, Rhea, and Fourfang even had their own room just off his, with a thick curtain so it was warm and cozy. Naturally they set to squabbling when Harf started pawing at Rhea and trying to mate with her. The Copper sent Rhea to see about some fresh clothing for herself and Fourfang, for the journey had tattered their simple tunics, and put Harf to work scrubbing a noisome corner the previous tenant had left. Why couldn't dragons be bothered to use the waste pits?

"Fourfang, you know about these things. If she's not ready to mate, she shouldn't, right?"

Fourfang probed his ears, perhaps prodding his brains into activity. "Not know humans of many. Not want babies for sell?"

"I'm not sure she's even mature enough for that. Don't they get those suckle points when they're ready for children? Bigger is better, no?"

Fourfang thought that funny.

"Well, if he starts pawing at her again, stop him. Or tell her she can sleep in here, but there's a draft from that crack, I'm afraid."

The bats were happy to probe his scales for juicy ticks and fleas that had come along for the journey, and they told him of what they saw and heard while he was gone. Uninteresting bat gossip, mostly involving the movement of herds or sickly, deep-sleeping dragons. Old Thernadad, blinder than ever but still with some hearing, relayed some details of a good fight in the Drakwatch caves. The Copper decided that when he returned to the surface he'd take a few bats along, just to keep the vermin out of his hide.

The bats stirred at some motion in the outer passage. The Copper smelled rich perfumed oils.

"So you do keep bats," Tighlia said, thrusting her head in.

The bats flapped back up into their holes.

She sniffed at the bat crack and clamped her nostrils. "I thought it was just gossip. Scale and tail, as my granddam used to say, it's cramped in here, and the bats are making my eyes water. I want to talk to you, Rugaard. I don't believe I can fit without squashing you. Perhaps you'd better come out into the passage."

The coins rolling around in his innards had left him in a contented mood, and he followed her fleshless hips out into the tunnel. She looked around, and though there was nothing but a sleeping thrall on a mat in front of a passage, waiting for her dragon to return, Tighlia still followed the sound of falling water to the cascade. She made a pretense of wetting her face.

"Now, my ill-favored little adoptive granddrake, I thought we should have a talk before you returned to Bant."

"Yes, Granddam. I'm honored by—"

"Of course. That's the only thing I can stand about you. You're polite rather than wheedling or sycophantic or challenging. For all your faults, it seems you have a good memory. I want you to send my compliments to my brother. Can you manage that?"

"Yes, Granddam."

"With one piece of advice. This is imperative. If he's going to win a war in Bant, he needs to inspire the hominids. They're not thralls; he can't just threaten and bluster and drive to get what he wants. He has to handle them. Make them want the war."

She paused, so the Copper guessed she expected a reply. "Handle them so they want the war."

"Yes. Aren't you wondering how?"

"Doesn't he know?"

"You've no intellectual curiosity at all, have you? Don't answer; you're tiresome enough when silent. My brother's much the same. The trick to getting hominids worked up for a war is to fixate them."

"Fixate them, Granddam?" the Copper said.

"Yes. Find some old wrong the Ghi men have done to them and get them talking of nothing else. Make sure it's something long enough ago so the memory's clouded about exactly what happened. Then tell them all their difficulties spring from that source, like a salted well slowly poisoning the land around. Fixate! If their sheep are dying, it's because of the Ghi men. If the rain causes a mudslide, it's because the Ghi men cut down their trees. That kind of thing. Their brains can't hold more than three ideas at once, and my brother must make sure at least one of the ideas is useful to him."

If the hominids are so dull, why must we hide from them in the Lower World?

"Fixate them so they blame the Ghi men for everything. Yes."

"He should call an assembly of their king and shamans or witch doctors or whatever they have and put the idea into their heads."

"Thank you, Granddam."

"For what?"

"For bending your thoughts to the crisis. The Lavadome is lucky to have such wisdom."

She let out what in another dragon might have been a prrum, but it was strangled deep in her throat and emerged as just a sort of gargle. "You're almost a credit to my mate's wisdom, Rugaard. Now get back to my brother, before he flings his dragons against towers and war machines. The Bant think it's their country; they should be the ones dying for it."

As it turned out, he didn't return to SiDrakkon in time. After reluctantly pressing Harf into service as a food carrier, he, the bats riding in a two-layer basket, and his thralls made the surface two days sooner than it had taken on the trip with the main force, thanks to a quick passage on the rails. The Copper drove the cart day and night, sleeping uncomfortably on the noisy rails when he wasn't pulling.

The rains had turned the countryside green in the interval, and there were herds everywhere, following the water and growth. Dry washes now ran with water, and armies of frogs had appeared as though by magic.

The bats had good hunting at night, for the waters had awakened all manner of insect life as well.

Harf disappeared one rain-filled night, and Fourfang guessed he'd run away. The Copper toyed with the idea of sending the bats to find him, but was in fact relieved to be rid of him, and wished him well. Fourfang prophesied: "Day and day at most before lions eat him."

They reached the Mud City, and the Copper simply waited in an open square, watching some half-grown humans practice throwing spears, until NiThonius showed up. He'd taken the laundry off his horns with the rains, but he still looked haggard.

"I'm relieved to find you here," the Copper said. "I really must learn a few words of this tongue. I can't even ask those children playing there where to find you."

"Children playing? That's part of the king's guard, now. Every family in Bant has had to send a fresh warrior, and rather than give up strong men they're sending the old and the young."

SiDrakkon had taken his war, and what of the king's forces he could scrape together, all the way to the Black River. Nithonius gave him three blighter guides, who took him across the savanna, hunting as they traveled. They also taught him several words for the local flora and fauna, though he made little progress with the language beyond that.

So within two-score days' time of leaving the Lavadome he found himself on a bluff overlooking a green river valley, and a battle being lost.

It was a strange transition. One moment the Copper was walking up a long, grassy slope still wet with morning dew. A spotty-hided feline watched them from a dead tree limb, the silence so perfect he heard each grass-parting footstep from the guides in front and Fourfang and Rhea behind.

Then they crossed the hillcrest into chaos.

The river broke into pieces here, lined with sandbars, some with trees up past their roots in floodwaters. On the far bank stood a fortress of the Ghi men: a rounded hill, crowded with stone housing and surrounded by a wide, stout wall and marshy ground. The fortress stood next to taller hills cut open and butchered for the stone they contained.

A dead dragon lay on the riverbank, below a raised path that led up to the fortress gate. The path itself was littered with what looked like colorful bundles, and it was only after a moment's reflection that he realized they were bodies.

Another of the duelists lay, apparently unconscious, panting, bleeding, while a couple of blighters pulled gingerly at spear shafts sticking out of his underside. The Copper left Fourfang and Rhea with some gibbets of drying game and dead Ghi men and approached the wounded dragon. It was HeBellereth, the red.

The Copper looked downriver and saw confused motion at the bank of some eddies in the river. Bant men and blighters were riding or wading across the thigh-deep water, retreating from the far bank.

"One more flight, NoTannadon. Just one more flight," SiDrakkon was saying. "You must keep them off the Drakwatch and what's left of the blighters. Otherwise they'll never get back across the river. They're out of range of the war machines now."

The duelist dug in his throat with his saa and extracted a piece of an arrow. "And end up like HeBellereth, or the corpse across the river? Go yourself."

Several deep thwack noises rose even to the hilltop, and the Copper saw the arms of war machines whipping up from thick hedges of concealing brush. They threw masses of stones high in the air, dark clouds that dispersed as they fell on the river crossing. Warriors threw cowhide shields up over their heads for protection, but they had no more effect than a mist. Blighters fell by the score.

"Curse them!" SiDrakkon roared, and flapped into the air. He swooped down over the river crossing and loosed his flame upon the bushes and war machines.

He turned a tight circle over the river valley and plunged among the burning machines, throwing men and their constructs this way and that in his fury.

The Copper saw a group of Drakwatch clustered around Nivom—he was easy to see at a distance, a white vesper with head rising again and again to call to the drakes. Nivom loosed his flame into a mass of rock and washed-up timber on the riverbank, and was rewarded by the sight of tin-helmeted Ghi men running, throwing aside their weapons. Nivom dashed through the inferno and came back with something in his mouth. He dropped it long enough to call to the last few Drakwatch on the north bank of the river, and as they plunged into the current he retrieved his prize and followed.

The blighters staggered back up the hill, some throwing themselves into the first piece of cover to pant or tend one another's wounds. The proud Drakwatch had an easier climb, being four-legged, save for the wounded. Nivom stalked right past his injured drakes and started up the hill.

The Copper looked from blighter to drake and back again. Dragons were a superior species in every physical respect. Their scale kept out arrows that felled the blighters, their crests could deflect a fall of stones such as rained down on the blighters at the ford, and their fire terrified even if it did not kill.

But the blighters would not abandon an injured fellow warrior to his fate.

Nivom threw down his captured weapon, a contraption of wood and metal, in some respects similar to a bow. "Curse them. They're using dwarvish crossbows."

A bleeding drake just made it to the top of the hill and collapsed. The Copper approached to see to his wounds, but the drake just snarled a warning: "Keep off!"

The wounded drake curled into a ball.

SiDrakkon flapped across the river and landed on the hilltop, somewhat bloodied about the griff and gums. A blighter ran up and tugged at an arrow projecting from his saa, and the dragon growled and struck him down.

On the other side of the river, the Ghi men sallied out of their fortress, teams of spearmen hunting about the riverbank. They flushed a wounded drake and put an end to him. Wounded blighters they beheaded, digging into the ground the warriors' short stabbing spears and setting the taken heads atop, grisly flowers lining the road leading to the Ghi men's fortress.

"Come, NoTannadon," SiDrakkon said. If he noticed that the Copper had returned he gave no sign of it. "We'll return to the Lavadome and there ask for more dragons to redeem this. Nivom, go back to the Mud City as best as you can. I'll return with two-score dragons ready for war!"

With that he flapped into the air, the remaining duelist trailing behind.

"Rest a moment," Nivom said to some of the Drakwatch who rose to begin the long journey south. "The Ghi men aren't crossing the river just yet. Might as well eat the hanging meat; Spirits know when we'll have full bellies again."

He looked at the receding dots of the dragons flying south. The wounded duelist gave a groan.

"Two-score dragons," Nivom said. "Three will come over footsore and give up before they're out of the Lower World. Two will get into a duel, killing one and leaving the other too wounded to go on. Six will see all the game on the savanna here and decide to spend the season hunting instead of in warfare. One will see a village in the distance, immediately attack, and it will turn out that he just burned out some headman of the king's and will have to be sent back in disgrace. Four will argue with SiDrakkon about the orders he gives, and return to the Lavadome rather than serve under one they consider inferior to themselves. Two more will quit the first time an arrow goes home; for having shed blood honorably, they will consider their bit in the war over. Of the half-score remaining one will always be too ill to fight, another too cowardly, and a third will fly into a rage and die atop the first tower he sees. Leaving SiDrakkon with three reliable dragons again."

"You should have a mouthful yourself," the Copper said. He'd never heard Nivom so discouraged. "Just as many lengths for you as the rest."

"What I'd like is some wine. Have you ever had wine, Rugaard?"

"What about HeBellereth? And the wounded on the hillside?" the Copper asked.

"You think this is a training march? I won't bleed victorious dragons looking after losers."

"The blighters don't feel that way."

"Blighters!"

The Copper stared off across the river. Trails of smoke rose from the town.

"It's that cursed wall that did it," Nivom said. "See how the causeway runs along it? They could fire down on us, throw rocks. Rothor and NiHerrstrath tried climbing it, but they were picked off from the towers."

Some of the Ghi men had ventured out beyond the broken gate and were crowded around the corpse of the dragon, cutting trophies of their victory.

The Copper suddenly noticed something about the wounded and the survivors. "What happened to the Firemaidens?"

"SiDrakkon grew desperate. After the first rush against the gate was thrown back, he sent the Firemaidens to lead the blighters. Some fell under the towers. I think that's Agania there, being lifted by those rats."

The Copper approached HeBellereth. The blighters had managed to get the horrible, hooked spear out, and the dragon lay on his side, panting. He rolled an anguished eye at the Copper.

Nivom shut his nostrils and walked over to the hanging meat.

"Can you walk, sir?" the Copper asked.

The dragon managed to right himself. He got his hindquarters up, but managed only a short, shaky rise on his sii before collapsing again. "No. I'm vanquished."

"I've been vanquished too," the Copper said.

"Yet…" the dragon said, "you wear laudi."

The Copper inflated his lungs, looked down at the wounded drakes struggling up the slope. He couldn't say who was talking or where the words were coming from, only that he was angry about the sacrifice of the Firemaidens, and the wretched humans across the river, pulling teeth and claws from the corpse of the dead dragon. "Not yet! Drakwatch of the Lavadome, you're hurt but you're not dead. Not yet!"

A drake pulled himself out from the rocks at the bank of the river.

"Up. Up, drakes," the Copper said, rearing onto his hind legs, a strange clarity in his mind. "Climb. On three legs if you have to." He waved his shriveled limb to emphasize his point.

One drake made it only a few paces before collapsing.

The Copper scrambled down the hill. The drake, a coppery color not much different from his own, was bled out, his gums and eye sockets almost white.

"Vanquished," the drake said. "Cry vanquished for me. To what little glory I've earned I depart this—"

"Not yet! Climb on my back. I'll get you up the hill. You'll heal and get another chance at them."

Six or seven blighter warriors were gathered nearby, resting and chewing on some kind of leaf. Some no longer had their spears or shields.

"Up the hill," the Copper said.

They looked at him blankly as the drake climbed on his back. Luckily he was slender-framed. The Copper gestured with his snout. "To the top. Top."

The Copper appreciated the hill's difficulty more on the way up than on the trip down. Especially with the weight of a drake supported by only three limbs. The Ghi men would have a hard time coming up it, at least from the riverside.

The wounded drake's claws relaxed and he slipped off. The drake's tongue hung out as he breathed.

"Can you grip my tail?"

The drake didn't answer; he just closed his teeth around the Copper's tail, then shut his eyes. The climb was harder, not to mention painful, with the deadweight of the drake pulling at his tail, but he made it to the others.

The wounded drake breathed no more. The Copper pried the jaws loose.

He thought furiously. The drakes would lose heart, staring at that cooling body.

"I don't know this drake. What was his name?"

"Nirolf," another said.

"This is Nirolf's hill, then. Let's put him in those rocks, there, where he'll have a good view of the fight."

"Why name a hill after one who was vanquished?" a drake asked.

The Copper didn't have an answer, so he just snarled and rattled his griff until the drake backed away.

Nivom returned to him, chewing, negotiating a course through the wounded drakes as though wishing to avoid droppings.

"What's this about you remaining behind?" he asked.

"I'm not so sure this battle is over."

"I am. I felt the rocks fall. I felt a dragon crash to the ground. Those stone houses of the Ghi men do not burn like some blighter village."

"There's still a fight in these drakes. The Ghi men will learn that if they try to come up this hill."

"Your honor," a drake said. "If there're still fighting claws dug into this ground, I don't want to leave it." He sniffed at one of his wounded fellows with a scabby snout missing a few scales.

Nivom looked around. Enough of the unbled drakes had crept up to listen to the conversation, while still keeping their distance from the wounded, so he had an audience in two rings. The duelist dragon licking at the wound in his chest formed a little hill all his own.

"How do you propose this battle be fought? No wings, no mobility, and no hominid levees."

The Copper lowered his head. "I'll follow any order you wish to give, Commander. As long as it doesn't involve my leaving this hill and the wounded."

"You mean the vanquished."

HeBellereth lifted his massive scarred head. "Not yet, drake."

The Copper felt a thought break loose in his mind. "Yes! That's the spirit. Not yet. That will be our battle cry. Not yet."

Nivom took a deep breath. "It'll be dark soon. We'll post wind sentries on the adjoining hills. If we get everyone out of sight they might think we've left. Then I'll slip back with a siisa to the ford…."

The Copper could almost feel the heat from the gathered and the filling fire bladders. He looked across the river. "Not yet, you milksops. Not yet."

A scent Nivom called "jasmine" hung in the night air. The flowing moonlit waters beckoned below, seeming to tickle the base of the hill with silver fingers. Night birds warbled amid the flooded trees, their soft calls denying the existence of blood-caked spears and war machines that sent rocks hurtling from the skies.

Even the fortress town on the opposite bank slumbered in peace, a few slivers of light showing from shuttered windows.

The night passed quietly. The remaining blighters, no more than a few score, clustered nervously behind the wounded HeBellereth. The Copper suspected they were too frightened to venture anywhere else.

A rather long-haired blighter with unusually large eyes closed the wound in HeBellereth, using bits of sharp wooden peg and leather to close the gash.

As the sun went down the Copper asked Fourfang to go among the blighters and see if they'd be willing to send messengers to seek help from the nearby tribes. He'd seen enough burned villages while following the guides to the river to suspect that the local blighters would be more willing to fight the Ghi men than would those from farther south. He dispatched his own guides back to the king to report that there'd been fighting but it was "inconclusive," and that they were camped within sight of the Ghi men's walls.

Then he loosed his trio of bats on HeBellereth to do what they could to soothe his wounds. HeBellereth protested. Being tended to by savage, unenthralled blighters was bad enough, but he didn't want "vermin" nosing about his wound—until the first licks and the numbing tingle the bat saliva brought made his eyes widen in amazement.

"Those are the biggest bats I've ever seen. They're like hunting dogs," Nivom said.

"They were raised on dragonblood," the Copper said. "Almost from birth. It appears to agree with them."

"They'll get their fill this night."

Nivom told him what had transpired between his trip back to the Lavadome and his return. SiDrakkon sent NiThonius to the Mud City to press on the king the need for more forces—men or blighter—then he and his dragons caught a large force of Ghi cavalry in the open and scattered them. SiDrakkon concluded that with their main strength gone, it was time to strike at their largest settlement in Bant, the quarry city on the Black River.

But the Ghi men had prepared against the coming of the dragons. Poor iron spears, tin axes, and cowhide shields were met by steel broadswords, chain armor, and far-flying dwarvish crossbow bolts. As for the dragons, the war machines of the men struck as the dragons turned and dived, and every issue of flame was fought by bucketfuls of sand.

Leading to the debacle the Copper had partly witnessed.

"They'll come in the morning to finish the wounded off," Nivom predicted.

"They'll have to cross the river to do that," the Copper said. "Humans can't swim like drakes. Not with their false-scale."

"My father told me once that the best place to strike an upright is in the crotch, when they take a long step forward."

"Wise dragon. Does he still live?"

"No. A Wyrr was he, like the Tyr himself, and distantly related. He lost his hill and his life to a Skotl-clan duelist. My mother, an Anklene, took her own in her despair."

The Copper thought it best to switch subjects, as Nivom could become gloomy, and he wanted his old cavemate alert and active. Every time talk turned to clan friction it left him nonplussed. Had not dragons enemies enough? "So that's where you get your cleverness. The Anklenes."

"I shouldn't be surprised if you had some Anklene blood in you too. Your eye ridge is like theirs, though that odd eye spoils the effect. You spout strange ideas. Why all the concern over a vanquished drake?"

"I'm not sure I can put it into words. How are you with mind-pictures?"

"Baby stories? I'm a drake, and you're not my mother. Or some dragonelle angling to be flattered."

"In my travels I came across the bodies of two demen sitting back-to-back in a cave, as though they were guarding each other as they died of their wounds. When I smelled the bodies, it was just two more bodies; I'd seen plenty before. But that…that…comradeship…"

"Did you just say comradeship? That's a queer word. I think it's taken from a hominid tongue."

"Dragons could use a little of that, instead of always working out who's above whom and adding to their own store of glory and gold."

"You're not one of these foamers who wants everyone to have the same rank and offer up metals to those who can't be bothered to get it on their own, are you?"

"What do you mean?"

"We've had a sun-struck dragon or two before. Do your dreaming while you're asleep."

The Copper thought it best to change the course of the conversation. "So what do you propose to do about catching them in the crotch?"

"I'll take a sissa of the healthy drakes to the river. Can you handle matters here on the hillside, with the better of the wounded?"

"Yes. I was thinking that trick they played, with their war machines hiding in the brush, could be played on them too. You grab them at the crotch and I'll bite their arms off."

"By the Earth Spirit, yes! Rugaard, I'd be proud to cry havoc with you at my side."

"I was thinking. Some cooperation from the blighters might help. How are you with their tongue?"

"I know a little."

The Copper thought. "I have a thrall who has a way of making himself agreeable. Maybe he can fill in the gaps."

A very unlikely reinforcement arrived after a short rain squall—the weather at this time of year seemed to mandate a rain in the early afternoon and a second in the long hours of the night before dawn—a bashed and mud-splattered Firemaiden named Nilrasha.

According to Fourfang, the blighters now named her Ora, a word that in their tongue referred to some hunting season festival or other, during which one of every kind of game animal was sacrificed to their capricious deities. But the blighter shaman always chose one sacrifice at random—the Ora—to be released back into the wild to let the rest of the game know that though the herds might be thinned and a few jaguars brought down, enough would be left to ensure future hunting. According to Fourfang, Ora either meant lucky or redeemed, as the rather fatalistic dragon-tongue didn't have many words for those blessed and guarded by the gods.

The Copper found her sucking rainwater off of leaves and eating some of the hung meat, and told her Fourfang's tale. While he did this a pair of blighters toasted meat on sticks and gave the bits to her.

"So that's why every muddy blighter on this hill's been patting me," Nilrasha said.

She had a lot of mud on her, and blades of grass caught in her scale. Drakka who joined the Firemaidens didn't shirk from dirt and muck, but they were usually cleaner than the drakes. This one either didn't give a flame for her appearance or was too tired to care for herself. "What happened at the gate?"

"It was so quick. I just remember a hail of projectiles: Some were stones; some were those infernal crossbow bolts. Mivonia in front of me, four struck her, two in the neck, or I wouldn't be speaking to you now. There was flame, and some of the blighters rushed into this sort of open space at the center of town. Then one of the dragons overhead was hit; I didn't see it, but I heard his cry as he fell. Everything went wrong after that."

"The blighters didn't run, then?"

"No. Not the ones with us, by my maidenoath, though I can't speak for those behind. But the dragons overhead vanished and the men lost their fear. They poured down their walls and out of their towers.

"Some of the Firemaidens loosed their flame to drive the humans away with heat and smoke, and I chased some through a burning building. Then a wall or a roof fell on me, and I was senseless for a time, though—this is very odd—I heard my mother singing. I distinctly remember it. When the singing stopped it was night, and I moved and some rubble shifted, and then I found myself in their town. I sneaked out through a drain hole that goes under the wall. I think there was meant to be water in it all the time, for the walls and ceiling were covered with dead shell creatures, but something must have gone wrong with the flow, for it was dry everywhere but the floor. It let out by the river, so I just swam across and smelled my way back to the hill. And so you see me."

"We're going to see if we can't avenge your dead sisters tomorrow," the Copper said.

Nilrasha looked across the river. "I should like that. By my maidenoath, I should like that very much."

"You've had enough honors. Stay back with HeBellereth, please. That route into the Ghi men's town may prove useful. I'd like your head to stay on your neck."

She rose, and some bits of hardened mud rained off.

"Who are you to give orders, Batt—Rugaard? You're just a courier."

"I'm also the Tyr's eyes and ears wherever I go. I can be his voice as well, if griff meet teeth. But I'd much rather ask than order. So I ask again, please stay back behind HeBellereth. If matters go as badly as they did yesterday, I expect you'll have another chance to fight."

The blighters lit a few cooking fires, but just a few, on the hillside, allowing them to go out as the warm night passed. HeBellereth agreed to act as bait, and morning found him stretched out on the hill, head lolling, looking like one of those savanna rock piles of red scale.

The Ghi men were no fools, however. They marched their archers to the ford in the river and sent scouts across. The blighters threw spears, hiding from the archers behind the trees with their roots in the floodwaters. The blighters ran as soon as the men in glimmering armor went forward, arms linked at the elbows as they fought the current, crossing like some fantastic serpent.

The blighters got into the spirit of the game, gathering here and there on the hillside to scream insults at the men, sometimes tossing a rock that would go bouncing down the hill and land well short of their foes. Each rock was answered by a hail of arrows once the archers came across and the blighters retreated uphill.

The Ghi-men scouts, clad only in light tunics and sandals with a brace of javelins across their backs, hurried to high vantage points and blew signal horns. The archers crossed from behind. Men with long spears and tall shields had come across, and a group of heavily armored men with great helms and wide blades tied across their backs began to venture into the current.

The Copper watched all this from thick grass halfway up the hill, with strips of thick green sod dripping with ants and beetles laid across this back, his scale rubbed with dirt—Rhea had misunderstood his orders at first, and braided some flowering bramble around his crest and tucked flowers into his spinal ridge. Once she understood that he wanted to be grubbed up, she put a thick paste of mud on every scale.

The Ghi-men scouts found the body of Nirolf lain atop a pile of rocks sticking up above the grasses of the hill, and went to work with their knives.

The drake near him, who'd wormed his way into the center of a thick succulent-leafed bush, growled.

"Still," the Copper ordered. But he liked the sound of their anger; it meant they'd got their spirit back.

More scouts hurried up toward HeBellereth. One pointed to the spot on his belly where partially digested coins could be found, and two set down their javelins and drew blades while a third kept watch, signal horn in one hand, javelin in the other.

The spearmen came up the hill in a rather ragged line, some falling behind thanks to rougher terrain, others forgetting themselves and hurrying toward the fallen dragon, eager for a chance at a trophy.

"Still," the Copper said again as the spearmen approached, but kept his good roving eye on HeBellereth. The duelist had unusually steady nerves to let a pair of men approach his leathery belly. Or had he slipped into unconsciousness?

HeBellereth suddenly rolled, putting the two men under his massive weight.

The third scout's mouth dropped open, and he reached for his horn, brought it up toward his lips—

A flash of green scale exploded out of the hillside as Nilrasha leaped on the scout. The Copper's brain made sense of it only once it was over, so improbable was her sudden appearance, as though she were conjured up out of the blades of grass that could never conceal a creature of her size. The precision of her leap matched her stealth. She struck high, wrapping herself around her foe like a constricting snake, digging in with her claws, and the struggling pair toppled into the grass. The horn spun in the air and fell.

Why didn't Nivom start the contest? What was he waiting for? The lines of spearmen were almost to the dead tree that marked the widely spaced hiding holes of the wounded drakes….

A warning horn on the hillside sounded. A scout, somewhere he couldn't see, must have seen HeBellereth move. The spearmen looked to their companions and stepped sideways to close….

"Cry havoc!" the Copper roared—well, trumpeted—and if some sentry far down the river valley thought he heard a goose being strangled, it was because the Copper didn't have much of a roar yet.

Showers of dirt flew in the air as the drakes rose. Bright gouts of flame erupted on the hillside, spreading and falling as it rained on the warriors. Screams of pain competed with the signal horns and bellows of the Ghi-men chieftains.

The Copper dragon-dashed forward, threw himself on a hastily upflung shield, and brought both shield and man down. He gouged, kicked out a saaful of belly organs as he'd done on practice bullocks, and moved on to the next target, a warrior running forward, spear set to skewer him.

His head whipped up and back and his chest muscles tightened. He spit—what was this? A thin stream of liquid hit the man across the shield and shoulders, but no flame. The warrior danced for a second as though he were on fire, and then the Copper and the man locked eyes as they each realized what had happened. The Ghi man raised his spear for a throw, but a green flash flew over the Copper's head.

"What are you waiting for?" Nilrasha said, spitting out a mouthful of tendon and blood vessel from the warrior's gaping neck. "They're running!"

So they were. What was left of the spearmen hurried down the hill, using their spears as a third leg, holding their shields across their backs against further flame.

The Copper marked oily smoke rising from the riverside foliage. A body of swordsmen in a rough triangular formation let the archers pass through and take shelter behind their blades and shields. Little puffs flew from the formation into the trees on either side of the ford. The Copper realized he was seeing the bright feathering on the archers' arrows rather than the arrows themselves.

A drake dashed forward, hurled himself onto the swords and shields, and disappeared into the mass of men. A cheer rose from the Ghi men.

"HeBellereth," the Copper called. "We need a shield wall broken. Can you move?"

"Out of my way, drakes!" HeBellereth roared. "I've hot blood to cool in that river. Try to take my gold-gizzard now, you dogs!"

The dragon pushed off with his back legs and began to slide down the hillside on his belly. He tore through brush, snapped and flattened small trees, and a wounded drake only just limped out of the way before he pushed past, tail swinging as he tried to keep balance.

And failed. He hit a steeper slope as he neared the river and one of his back legs slipped under his hindquarters. The great red dragon upended and fell sideways, rolling down the hill like a felled tree.

But he was too close for it to make a difference. What the men thought in those last heartbeats could only be imagined. Some of the archers fired, but the arrows had all the effect of pebbles hurled into floodwaters. The triangle dissolved, spreading to each side.

HeBellereth righted himself in the center of the warriors, biting and thrashing. The battle turned into a rout. Pieces of armor and pieces of swordsmen flew in all directions.

What was left of the swordsmen nearest the river ran for the ford. Spearmen, finding their line of retreat blocked by the raging red-scale, waded into the trees, only to be pulled under by drakes—or a crocodile or two that smelled blood in the river and decided to take an easy meal courtesy of warfare.

The Copper spotted men and beasts pulling war machines that looked like oversize crossbows toward the bank of the river and hurried toward HeBellereth. But Nivom anticipated him and called for his drakes, and the mighty dragon, to take cover behind the trees at the riverbank. HeBellereth, his blood flaming in the heat of battle, even found the strength to fly a few dragonlengths to reach a thicker section of trees.

The catapults on the other side of the river sent a rain of stones, but they fell somewhat short of the bank. A drake or two waded into the river to roar defiance at the retreating men.

"We gutted them," a drake said, looking at the bodies scattered on the hillside.

"This is news our Tyr will wish to hear," Nivom said. Blood ran from both nostrils, but his eyes were bright with triumph.

"We've just given them a shock," the Copper said. "Now it's time to complete the victory and burn that city. Our good Firemaiden Nilrasha knows a way in—"

"Ghioz is strong. They'll send armies to avenge their dead."

Nilrasha appeared at his side with her usual stealth. "The bigger the army the better," she said. "More mouths to feed. Let them sit behind their burned-out walls and starve; we'll cut off their flocks and take their wagons."

The Copper half expected Nivom to roar and snap, for some captains didn't like arguments. Nivom just said, "We've traded blood for blood; it's time to send in the king's headmen and arrange a peace. They may be inclined to agree to stay on the north side of the river from now on."

"Our Tyr won't like the sound of that. A fight, a win, and a peace will please him," Nilrasha said. "Honors all around."

Nivom, for all his brains, had little experience with hominids. The Copper knew what bargaining with hominids brought. They designed deals only to get what they wanted for a moment, and the instant their need was met, the deal was forgotten. They had to be made to shake in fear of ever giving offense to dragonhood, and tuck their squalling broods in at night with tales of fiery vengeance falling from the skies if the scaled gods were offended.

"You won't get a lasting peace unless you're negotiating from a position of strength," the Copper said. Nilrasha chirped agreement, sniffing him now that his blood was up.

"'Settle terms only once your claws are pressing their neck to the ground,'" Nilrasha quoted, using one of NoSohoth's briefer maxims.

"The Upholder would just as soon end this war quickly," Nivom said. "In his Uphold, NiThonius speaks with the Tyr's voice."

The Copper tried to count the warriors left in the towers, his blood cooling and the wisdom of Nivom's words settling his scale. "A few days behind those stone walls and they'll mourn their dead and get over their fear. They'd give in fast enough if there were nothing between them and the blighter tribes but a pile of rubble. If only we could bring them down somehow."

"Yes, the walls are an enemy as strong as the Ghi men. But I saw fire slide off the stones like rain," Nilrasha said.

"War machines would help," the Copper said. "Couldn't the blighters build some?"

Nivom sighed. "Not to match the Ghi men's. They're cleverer when it comes to such contraptions, and they have better steel and wood than the bleached-out timber under this sun around here. Their projectiles can always fly higher and farther….

Nivom gave a little choke, and the Copper wondered if he was having an attack of some kind. Had a poisoned arrow pierced him somewhere unsuspected?

"Air Spirit, Rugaard! I think we can do it. Yes, I'm sure we can!"

Over the next day the two sides gathered, each on their own bank of the river. According to the blighters some of the smaller farming settlements and posts had been abandoned as Ghi men sought safety for their families behind the thick stone walls of the town. Boats soon crowded the riverside below the town, and herds sheltered at night beneath the city walls.

The blighters gathered too, but some of them, seeing no fight at the moment, little food, and no plunder, grew bored and wandered away. Even the king himself came, with NiThonius and such forces as could be spared from guarding the river crossings, which set the blighters all to groveling and celebrating as they heaped the few remaining captured weapons at his feet.

Meanwhile, Nivom worked with HeBellereth. The dragon recovered from his wounds quickly, eating rainy-season-fat Bant cattle and gazelles, though he sometimes winced when he had to walk far. The king watched HeBellereth's endless flights and practice drops with the stones, and then ordered his people to assist the dragons with their strong backs.

Each day the Copper took Rhea to the riverbank for water and bathing. He liked to check on the men's boats in any case, to see if it looked as though any had been loaded. There were two-score or more small, narrow vessels and they could get a substantial force over the river if they so desired. Once satisfied that another day had passed with the two armies glowering at each other from their opposite points, they went to an island-sheltered bank and he'd let Rhea bathe him, and herself. He ventured out into the pool first to check for crocodiles; then she went in and scrubbed him over with rushes. Sometimes he would roll over and she'd tickle his belly.

Fourfang didn't think much of bathing, but he took a captured Ghi-man spear into knee-deep water and came back with a fish or two, sucker-mouthed bottom-feeders that he would fry on an old shield, bathed in herbs.

While they dried, Rhea would sometimes skip stones at Fourfang and spoil his fishing. She took perverse pleasure in making the blighter splash around and curse her. At times she laughed, and the Copper found the sound so pleasing that he prevented Fourfang from thrashing her with cattail stalks.

Nivom joined them one evening.

"I wonder if this will work after all," Nivom said. "Should we even attempt it if it might fail? Another failure before their walls will just encourage the Ghi men. The king sent a messenger across, letting the Ghi men know he was present, but they sent forth no emissary to plead for peace."

"Is he having trouble dropping the stones?"

"If he releases them too high, he misses the target marker. If he releases them low enough so they're sure to hit, he'll pass over the town belly-down. Their war machines will get a chance at him then, and it will probably take many stones to collapse the wall. He still wants to try. It's a terrible thing to have a vision and not be able to see it through."

The Copper didn't know what to say. If Nivom wasn't smart enough to figure out how the walls might be brought down, the Copper certainly couldn't improve on his plans and practices.

Out in the pool Fourfang speared a fish and bent over to retrieve it. The Copper nosed a river-smoothed rock toward Rhea.

She cackled and picked up the stone, then flung it with her arm out sideways so it skipped across the water and hit Fourfang square in that odd assortment of reproductive apparatus male mammals displayed.

Fourfang howled as he clutched his fish and his loincloth.

Nivom took a startled breath. "Of course! Of course! Why didn't it occur to me? Speed—speed's the thing, and he can get all he wants far from the walls. That's it, Rugaard; your little human did it!"

He hurried off up the hill without any more explanation.

SiDrakkon returned before Nivom's attempt against the walls could be put into effect. He seemed rather surprised to find the drakes and HeBellereth still camped on that hilltop, with some of the signs of an intact army at war: herds of cattle and goats, blighters making charcoal, members of the Drakwatch on the adjoining hills and keeping watch from stone piles on the savanna.

With him were two young dragons with wings freshly uncased, and another veteran duelist, a one-eyed, rather fat dragon who collapsed to the ground as soon as they alighted and roared for food to be brought to him.

"Cursed ill luck," SiDrakkon said, looking south at the rolling cloud banks portending the afternoon's rain. "I set out from the Lavadome with a full score, but everyone had to get a turn of hunting in when they weren't arguing. I've brought what I can; the rest will catch up or deal with my wrath on their return."

Nivom and the Copper exchanged a soft snort.

SiDrakkon looked from the working blighters, using drag ropes to bring a boulder up the hill, to Nilrasha teaching some of the Drakwatch how to stalk in tall grass, to the temporary huts and corrals that had been built for the Bant king and his retinue.

"What transpires here?" SiDrakkon asked.

"We're preparing for an attack on the walls," Nivom said.

"With what forces?"

"HeBellereth."

"He lives? Good. But one dragon would be wasted. Now, with all five of us, we've got a good chance of clearing those towers of war machines."

"They've built more, many more, on every rooftop in the town," Nivom said. "You can see them from our hilltop."

"Delay always allows the enemy time to prepare," SiDrakkon said. "Still, enough fire should make them abandon their machines. It may take several days, but I've seen it done."

"Your honor, Nivom has a plan to bring down the walls," the Copper said.

"Sacrifice every blighter here to the Earth Spirit; it still won't bring an earthquake."

"No, sir. With rocks. Dropped by HeBellereth."

"Ahh, youth," SiDrakkon said, softening his tone a little. "Always thinking they can reinvent warfare. It's been tried in other places. Never works—not one stone out of scores of scores goes true. No, I've got the experience."

"You don't understand," Nivom said. "It's a matter of force and momentum. He's been knocking down trees for days now—"

SiDrakkon's griff dropped and rattled. "Trees don't shoot back. No, we'll start this very night. No, not another word out of either of you! It seems I got here just in time before you all got yourselves killed. Fire and terror are the way to go with humans; believe me. They're not dwarves, after all. Fire and terror, drakes. Fire and terror. Now, we've got to hurry. According to the griffaran there's an army of Ghi men on the march, big enough to sweep this collection and two more besides off these hills."

SiDrakkon's second assault on the city walls was an improvement on the first only in its brevity. His duelist, enraged by javelins fired into his wings and belly, plunged into the city, and managed to make a good deal of noise roaring and smashing before he was silenced. The two young dragons, fast friends since their days in the Drakwatch, according to Nivom, died together when one was brought down in front of the gate tower and the other flew to fight beside him.

HeBellereth had the sense to empty his fire bladder in one long pass over the city and returned, setting the blighters to work fastening shut the holes in his wings with bits of leather and wooden pegs.

"They're ready for dragons, all right," HeBellereth said, wincing as a bone needle passed through his wing skin.

SiDrakkon alighted and the blighters ran from his growlings. He knocked over a tree with his tail and tore apart a meat-smoking hut.

"With four more dragons I could have done it," he raged. "Three to go in and draw fire, and the rest to attack the war machines before they could be reloaded. Only four more!"

Nivom had a few words with HeBellereth and approached SiDrakkon. "Your honor, we can still try the rocks. HeBellereth is willing, and he wasn't injured."

"I should think not, the way he dropped his flame and flapped away. Yes. Send him back over there. I'd like to see that."

Nivom set the blighters to work at the rock pile. There was a good deal of cheering and horn blowing from the other side of the river, and the men ventured from their gates to swarm over the corpses of the young dragons like hungry ants on a bit of dropped fruit.

HeBellereth waddled over to the steepest part of the hill, and the blighters, who'd rolled a more or less round boulder into position at the edge of the cliff, jostled for positions to watch.

"No. He'll never get off the ground with that. It's too big," SiDrakkon said.

HeBellereth clutched the boulder against his chest, wrapping his front limbs about it, spread his wings, and launched himself off the cliff.

SiDrakkon, who hadn't seen the stunt, stood with mouth agape as HeBellereth picked up speed down the steep hill. Then he leveled off, shooting down the river.

"He's going downstream," SiDrakkon said.

"Just watch, your honor," Nivom said. "He just needs a long, straight run. We're going to try for that ramp leading up to the main gate."

HeBellereth shrank to a hard-to-see shadow against the night sky, banked, then rose a little using his momentum, and for a moment the Copper could see him framed against the low-hanging moon.

The dragon adjusted his course, rose with a few strong flaps, and then extended his wings as wide as he could and began a long glide toward the city.

"His idea, the glide," Nivom said. "Oh, I can't wait until I get my wings, can you, Rugaard?"

The Copper didn't say anything. There was a chance, he supposed, that his wings would come in properly. The injury from that foul human seemed so long ago now.

Then HeBellereth was over the ground. Several arrow-flights away from the city walls, he released his boulder and soared off across the river, skimming the surface low enough that his wing tips broke the surface as they beat.

His stone bounced twice up the causeway. The first time its trajectory was almost flat; the second it must have caught on some projection, because it flew almost straight up. It struck hard just over the gate.

"Well, that didn't seem to do much."

"The angle was wrong," Nivom said, sounding a little doubtful. "It took a bad bounce."

HeBellereth came up and rested for a few minutes. Nivom helped the blighters select another stone and roll it into position.

"You're wasting your time, I think. But if it amuses you…"

"Not an arrow struck home," HeBellereth said. "Attacking a town is hatchling play if you can keep your scale to the wretches."

"I found a rounder one," Nivom said, returning with the blighters rolling the stone to the edge of the bluff. "If only we had some dwarvish stonecutters. Rounded stones would fly truer."

HeBellereth repeated his performance, falling, then turning downstream and banking once again for the drop. Nivom held his breath as the stone was loosed. The Copper noticed Fourfang and Rhea crouching in the underbrush, clear of SiDrakkon's eye, watching as well.

This time the boulder stayed low as it bounced. It hit the tower next to the gate, and they heard a series of shouts and crashes from the buildings in town.

"Did it! Did it!" Nivom said. "It punched straight through; did you hear?"

SiDrakkon resettled his wings. "So you made a peephole in the wall. Much good it does us."

"Let me take that big, diamond-shaped one," HeBellereth said, panting a little. "Just let me rest for a moment. They're shooting at me as I pass the wall, not as I approach. I think I can release it closer."

"If you think you can do it," Nivom said.

This boulder was a little larger than the others, and the watchers heard tree limbs snap as HeBellereth passed over them. On this flight, rather than releasing it low over the causeway, he altered his wings so he rose, and released the boulder on the upswing. HeBellereth executed an elegant turn, keeping his belly away from the city walls.

The boulder transcribed a short arc and struck the wall with a crack the Copper felt all the way across the river. The gate tower shuddered, then toppled backward with a long, groaning crash, sending up a cloud of dust.

"I'll be gutted," SiDrakkon said.

The gate crumbled next; then a piece of wall where the tower had been attached fell away. A huge, crescent-shaped gap opened up.

The Copper roused Fourfang with a poke of his tail and sent the blighter to give a message to the king.

HeBellereth returned, a big chunk of his wing flapping as he landed. "Stitchers!" he roared. "They punched a hole in me with a rock of their own," he said as the blighters went to work.

"You've done enough for now. Rest," Nivom said.

"I'm getting the wind under me now," HeBellereth said. "I'll bring down another section of wall before you can recite Ryu-Var's Tally of Drakine Virtues—if I can get this wing fixed."

"Can you teach me how to do this, Nivom?" SiDrakkon asked.

"It takes practice. Some days of work," HeBellereth said.

"The cheering and horn blowing have stopped over there, I notice," the Copper said.

HeBellereth put in a long night, making two-score or more runs. Some simply missed, or the boulder bounced wrong, or it did no apparent damage. But by the time dawn came up the town looked very different. The smooth stone wall had been opened in three wide sections, the entire gate area lay in ruins, and the southernmost tower had collapsed, leaving a whole quarter of the city undefended.

The humans were frantically arranging the rubble to form an improvised wall.

But the real blow to the Ghi men came at dawn. The sun came up to reveal the king's army camped south of the city, the hillsides thick with squatting blighters that made them look like vast melon fields. The tribes howled and clashed their spears against their leather shields, setting up a steady, doom-laden thrumming that echoed from bluff to bluff in the river valley. The Copper wondered if any human in those closely packed streets counted on still drawing breath by the next sunset.

Rhea stood and watched through the night, trembling and crying, and refused any food or comfort.

In the end, the king sent forth a messenger once again, announcing his presence and leaving it to the Ghi men to decide. They met on a hilltop thick with fuzzy fruit the blighters called "sweetdrops," and the Peace of the Sweetdrop was announced.

The Copper, though cynical about such arrangements, had to admit that the terms were very advantageous to Bant. NiThonius himself advised the king on the whys and wherefores.

No Ghi man would come south of the Black River without seeking the king's permission.

The Ghi men would keep their mines and saltworks, but pay over the worth of one burden out of ten extracted from Bant in the form of coin, goods, or thralls. Value of goods or thralls would be determined by the king's representatives at the mines. New mines and works would be opened only with Bant's permission.

As a sop to the Ghi men, the Black River would be considered open to commercial traffic to the sea, and trading posts would be kept, along with sufficient garrisons to defend them from bandits.

The Copper wasn't sure that there could be a permanent peace with hominids—either abject submission into thralldom or the peace of a corpse was the only practical alternative—but even the historian Rethothanna chuckled when he said so on his return to the Lavadome. Though she knew the evidence flanking his arguments better than any, she said, "We must make do with fortune when it favors us."

The mighty—and now newly victorious, thanks to the events in Bant—Tyr heard the report in the shadowy gardens of the Imperial Resort atop Black Rock, with accompanying songs and stories of the returned Drakwatch, the lone Firemaiden Nilrasha (whom the blighters, even in the Lower World, forever after called Ora), and his mate-brother.

The march back had been one of the most pleasant experiences of the Copper's life. The blighters sacrificed bullocks to the dragons all along the way, and held bonfires in their honor, where the tribal youths and maidens danced until they dropped in exhaustion. The king's praise-singers wore out even their iron throats describing the victory, and the Firemaids at the entrance to the lower world bowed at head and tail as their contingent passed.

Even SiDrakkon was in a good mood for once. He let Rhea, easily the most comely of all the thralls in their party, ride on a strapped-down cushion at the high ridge of his back and wave at the garland-throwing crowds.

Though the Copper asked several dragons, none could tell him anything about his strange failure of flame. He could bring up tiny wads from his fire bladder, which when spit would flare after a moment. As an experiment he brought up every drop he could squeeze out. It just splattered and gave off a sulfurous, oily smell.

He finally realized he had one more crippling injury to add to the others. At least this one wasn't visible. No dragonelle would flutter her eyes in amusement.

Even wise old NeStirrath could only guess that it had something to do with the injury to his fire bladder, from the fight with the demen over the griffaran eggs. NeStirrath had a thrall touch a torch to his spew, and it burned brightly enough, but wouldn't ignite on its own if he brought it up in any quantity.

To celebrate the victory in Bant, the Tyr commanded a garden-filling banquet, inviting not only the dragons of the Imperial line but the chief dragons of the other hills of the Lavadome.

The Copper made no effort to color his scale; he just had Rhea make it as clean and even as possible. She tried covering his bad eye with a bit of red silk she'd taken off one of the Ghi-men bodies, but the result made him look like he was flaunting an injury, so he told her to keep it.

This banquet was more splendid than the last. The great dragons brought their own thralls to help attend them, and offered up whole bullocks and hogs and bone-crusted river fish as long as a drake and wine aged in artisan glass to the Tyr to add to the gorging and merriment.

The Copper kept to the edges of the banquet this time, in no mood for gorging himself as Simevolant made jokes about the walls of a Ghi-men city being brought down by HeBellereth's tailventings rather than stones.

Fools! Just because they happen to be safe and well fed now, that does not mean things will always be so comfortable. The bones of four dragons are being nibbled at by those tasty fish of the Black River, and all they can do is laugh over jokes about bodily functions.

He passed the time with Rethothanna. She questioned him closely about conditions in Bant, and especially about the weight and composition of the stones.

"They were reddish, some sparkle to them. I can't say more," he answered. "The Ghi men made use of them in building their walls, homes, and the ford, by the look of it. There were cuts in the hillsides to extract it."

"Iron balls would be better. I've heard of the dwarves using them in warfare against dragons. They attach them to harpoons and then bring the dragons down with their weight."

NoSohoth approached and gave the briefest of bows to Rethothanna. "Famed historian, beloved of the Tyr for her wisdom. May I tear Rugaard from you for a moment? A small question has come up regarding events in Bant."

Rethothanna bowed deeply, not so much to NoSohoth but to the command of the Tyr. "Off you go then, Rugaard. Though personally I'd rather be dropped into a dueling pit."

The Copper approached the great dragons, perched on benches above the banquet pit, braziers all around burning oliban. The Tyr and his mate, with SiDrakkon on one side and Nivom on his other, clustered about with the three granddaughters of the Tyr. The Copper limped up and made a greeting bow.

The Tyr looked from one wingside to the other. "Ahh, er, Rugaard, we've run into something of a question that I was hoping you'd help us with."

"Of course, Tyr."

"I won't have lies spread about my brother, whatever the source," Tighlia said. "This half-wit can't tell vermin from griffaran."

The Copper felt a quick flush. How good it would be to attend a banquet like this with Zara. Her eyes would burn like the sun, as Tighlia's did, when others made jokes. He didn't care what Tighlia thought of him; he rather admired her for her defense of her brother.

The silence, threatening from SiDrakkon, cautious from Nivom, put Rugaard on edge.

"Please be quiet, my love," Tyr said. "Rugaard. It seems negotiations were made possible only by a good deal of damage to the walls of that stone city on the Black River. Can you enlighten us as to how that came about?"

The Copper wondered if he could be challenged to a duel over his answer. "I believe so. HeBellereth knocked them down by dropping stones."

"Bravely done, yes," the Tyr said. "But how did all that come about?"

"The idea was Nivom's. He and HeBellereth worked on it for days, practicing, and he put the blighters to work finding the right kinds of boulders and gathering them. The night of the battle SiDrakkon ordered the actual attack, and of course he was in command at the time."

"Ha! See, the victory is mine," SiDrakkon thundered.

The Tyr flapped a wing. "Quiet now; don't intimidate this drake. Now, Rugaard, correct me if I'm wrong, but the stones were used only after an attack had failed. An attack that cost the lives of three dragons. Am I wrong in any detail?"

"The last thing I'd wish to do is correct my grandsire," the Copper said.

The Tyr snorted. "Yes or no, do I have it right?"

"Yes, great Tyr."

Nivom seemed to swell. SiDrakkon's tail knocked over two braziers, and thralls rushed forward to right them and pour water on the smoldering coals and incense.

"Is that all, Grandsire?" the Copper asked.

"Tyr, this fool had a thrall run away on him, I believe," SiDrakkon said. "Escaped into Bant. A man named, er, Harb."

"Harf," the Copper corrected, wondering how SiDrakkon knew that.

"Don't bother me with trivia," the Tyr said. "I know your games, SiDrakkon. I want to know the truth about events in Bant, not the comings and goings of dropping scrapers."

"I'm sorry for his escape, Tyr," the Copper said. "Should I have chased him down?"

"Never mind that. There's one other question. It seems after my mate's brother lost two dragons on the first assault on the fortress, he gave orders for a retreat south. Why weren't those orders followed?"

"We were in a strong position, Tyr, and the Ghi men had lost much of their cavalry."

Tyr cocked his head. "According to some, everyone was ready to quit the hill until you said you'd stay by the wounded. HeBellereth insists that it was you who wanted to stick and fight."

"HeBellereth was badly hurt at that point. I helped look after his wounds, so that could be why he remembers me. Nivom was in command, Tyr. The glory and honor of the victory the next day belong to him—and HeBellereth, of course—for breaking the shield wall with his own body."

"Someone really must make a song about all this," Tyr said. "NoSohoth, call for silence. I want the banquet to hear something."

NoSohoth raised his wings, which had little chimes looped into the trailing edge. He flapped them, and at the ringing the company turned their attention to him. "Our glorious Tyr asks for silence."

The Copper slunk out of the way so he wouldn't obstruct anyone's view.

"Answer my thoughts, for a change!" Tighlia hissed into her mate's ear. "Let us retire and discuss before you make any announcements."

The Tyr ignored her. "Free dragons of the Lavadome and hope of our united lines. Twice now this honored drake at my right side, Nivom, has done great service to all of us.

"First, let it be known that I'm adopting him into the Imperial line. As a son, mind you, to replace AgGriffopse in position if not in our hearts."

That set the banquet to talking. NoSohoth had to sound his wing chimes again to give them time to settle down.

"Second, I'm getting older and don't have the attention to detail I once possessed. Nivom will take a few of the lesser responsibilities from my wings, that I might be able to pay more attention to the greater.

"Finally and most pleasantly, he'll soon be sprouting his wings, and it will be time for him to be mated. I offer any of the daughters of AgGriffopse, the champion of my only clutch, to him, so that we might be joined by more than duty and respect. He can look forward to some pleasant years choosing among my beauties, for their wings are just beginning to bulge."

The assembly at the banquet liked the sound of that and thumped their tails. Thralls danced out of the way to avoid being struck.

The Tyr's young granddaughters fluttered their eyes and griffs, save for the sickly one, who shrank behind her longer, stronger, better-fleshed sisters.

"I hope he's not expecting a blushing maiden," Simevolant said, staring at them.

The Copper glanced back at his own spine. Two ridges ran down it, parallel to his vertebrae. His were some years off too, but it made him feel better to know that horns and wings were growing.

SiDrakkon left the banquet almost immediately. The Copper grabbed a dropped mouthful or two but kept away from the throngs. They dragons either asked idiotic questions about whether arrow wounds stung much or joked about his bats.

"You, there," a cold voice said. "Rugaard. Come and have a word with me."

It was Tighlia, and her scales were up and out as though she were expecting battle. She led him to a prominence looking out over the south end of the Lavadome, where fewer orange streams lit the crystalline surface.

"Hurry along now and sit beside me. Yes, close to the edge, so you have a good view. Oh, don't blanch; I've never pushed anyone to his death, and I'm not about to start tonight.

"I like this view. There was never the fighting at the south end of the Lavadome that there was at the north. Just a few thrall hills and livestock pens and mushroom fields. No memories of where friends died."

"Was this what you wanted to speak to me about?"

"No, outcast. My time is too valuable. I expect my mate will have you in for a little chat shortly. You might want to tell him that this Nivom fellow isn't all he appears."

"What makes you think so?"

She scowled. "I know a calculator when I smell one. He weighs everything by his own ambitions. I fear for what will happen if the Tyrancy passes to a Wyrr-Anklene mix. There's already resentment in many Skotl caves. They will have their turn at the Tyrancy one way or another. Civil war could break out again."

"Why do you tell me this?"

"Because, oddly enough, I think you've got the simpleton's faith. The same as my mate has. You're duller—and uglier, certainly—but I believe you think of dragonkind first and yourself second. My mate has that quality too."

"He has all a dragon's virtues—"

"Oh, rot all that tripe. Virtues? What's the first of them?"

The Copper thought for a moment, remembering his lessons. "Destiny. The gifts of the four Spirits in shaping—"

"Mythological balderdash that lets dragons with nothing to offer the world get puffed up about themselves. Next!"

"But everyone knows—"

"No, they don't. That's the problem. Let's have another; your tongue's slow as your wit."

The Copper stiffened. "Courage to—"

"Courage? Exhibitions of courage have killed more dragons than spears. Give me a dragon who sneaks in when the warriors are otherwise engaged and visits the cribs of the hominids; they put up as much of a fight as squalling babes. Next."

The Copper found her aroma warm, comforting, pleasant. Almost motherly. She was obviously enjoying this. "You can't have anything against fidelity to mate, kith and kin. Every dragon in the Lavadome admires your devotion to our Tyr. You and your brother—"

"You're not old enough to know better. We'll talk again when your mating flight was four scale-ages ago, and your precious clutch champion has breathed fire into your face as he drives you away from your hoard. When some bright young thing spreads her wings for you and promises better times, we'll speak again. Come, come, I'm eager for more."

"Serenity."

"Now, there you may have something. It's the dragon who can control his emotions, wait instead of rage, take an insult or a setback with a song—that's a dragon to be feared. Never let your thoughts past your tongue; never let a competitor know what you really think of him."

"Then why do you tell me what you think of me?" the Copper asked.

"Because you're the sorry, sawed-off tail-tip of the Imperial line, not a competitor. Go on now; you've scored a hit. Press home."

The Copper thought it over. Tighlia was mistress of a thousand details in the Imperial Resort, from arranging matings to seeing after the quality of her mate's kern. "Diligence. It's attention to detail in the routines of—"

"Oh, and now you've gagged on it. Strained at a bat and swallowed a warthog. I'm devoted to idleness. Adore it. Gives one time to think. You'd be amazed how few dragons sit down and just think these days. Don't look cross; I'm giving you medicine that tastes bad, but it'll do you good if you have the sense to repeat the dosage." She tapped her claws on the shining black stone of the rock. "I'm waiting."

"I was going to say charity to those in your thrall, but I expect you'd answer that the more you task them, and the greater they fear you, the better the results."

"Now you're learning. Maybe you're not hopeless after all. There's only one left, so I'll save you the breath. Strength. Strength I believe in. But I'm not talking about roaring and stomping and being able to knock down trees with your tail. That just brings the foemen. Intellectual strength to form a plan, physical strength to carry it out, and moral strength to see it through—those are virtues indeed. That alone will take you farther than the rest of your Drakwatch ideals put together."

"Why do you tell me all this, Granddam?"

She winced as though struck. "Tomorrow a messenger will come for you, asking for a private interview with my mate. He's going to give you a new position as a reward. An important one. I don't want you buggering it up and making slippery bat droppings out of it. Husband your strength and display serenity, and you'll do well enough."

"Thank you, Granddam."

"That's not all. My mate may ask you about SiDrakkon and matters in Bant. Praise him and you'll find me grateful. Those who are good to me make no complaints about my kindnesses in return. But guard your tongue against any slanders, if you know what's good for you."

"I have no slanders to offer, Granddam."

"That's a clever answer, drake. Be equally clever when you talk to my mate tomorrow."

He spent a restless night in his cave, listening to the bats go in and out. Two new litters of hungry young bats suckled at a vein on his inner saa, leaving him rather dreamy.

He rose early and had a hearty chicken-and-kern breakfast brought by Fourfang, who burped and vented all while arranging the platters, proof that he had filched a hearty portion for himself.

"Let me smell your fingers, Fourfang."

The blighter shrank away. The Copper clacked his teeth together. "Your fingers or your head. Which will it be?"

Trembling, the blighter held out his hairy hands. The Copper sniffed them.

"I thought so. Don't go digging around in my dishes before I've eaten, or I'll bite few fingers off next time. Wait until after I've finished, like Rhea. Don't I always leave generous portions?"

"Yes, your honor."

"You're not the cleanest with your hands, Fourfang. Your always either digging in some orifice or scratching scabs. In either case I don't like the residue in my food. Just the other night I was offered an elf to take your place." Which wasn't true, but Fourfang couldn't know that.

"I hope to see some improvement in the future, or I'll have to make changes. But I hate unpleasant talk at the beginning of the day. Draw some water and take care of these bat droppings, won't you?"

Fourfang showed admirable energy in getting a bucket and a bristle. The Copper watched the blighter work while Rhea cleaned and filed his claws. Fourfang scrubbed his hands in the bucket after finishing the floor.

"Much better. Now go down and get yourself a dried apple. One for Rhea, too; I think she's exhausted from all the travel."

The quick elf messenger came from the Tyr before Fourfang returned from the stores. The Copper followed the messenger up the winding air shaft and through the Gardens, where Simevolant was lounging, eating honeyed beetles.

"Come over here, Rugaard. The shadebells are blooming. You must see them. You don't posses any beauty, but you have an eye for it. Oh! What did I say. An eye? I beg your pardon."

The Copper wasn't in the mood for Simevolant's jokes. "I'm on my way to the Tyr. He summoned me."

"Oh, he's arguing with SiDrakkon; you've time to spare. Speaking of which, look at the purples; doesn't it rather remind you of SiDrakkon when he's angry?"

"A striking color," the Copper said.

"I've been staring at these flowers all morning. You know, no two are alike? Why do flowers differentiate? The petals are just going to drop in a little while anyway, and unless you get right up under them, it's hard to tell. I wonder why they bother."

The elf cleared his throat.

"Don't make noise, you," Simevolant said. "You're wilting my flowers. Look, that one's gone all sad. I'll have your hair plucked out by its roots for that." The golden drake stood up.

"I can't keep our Tyr waiting," the Copper said, putting himself between the drake and the elf. "I must be off, cousin."

The elf led him past the Tyr's outer chamber, where messengers, many either bearing gifts themselves or with thralls to carry the load, waited. Curtains blocked the far end, and the elf slipped through them.

A few moments later the Copper heard a heavy tread, and before the curtains could even be opened SiDrakkon stormed out, glaring. The Copper shrank against some baskets of metal rings to clear his way, but SiDrakkon was staring at something only he could see.

The elf gestured for the Copper to come in.

He passed through a door of stone and steel that turned on a central pivot, and two blighters rushed in with braziers burning incense to clean away the angry smell within.

The Tyr's audience chamber was roughly oval, with the door at one end and a shelf at the other. A cascade of gold coins and two waterfalls of silver made it look as though the Tyr reclined upon a mountain of gold. The walls were stacked with glittering, polished samples from the Imperial horde, the metallic art of a thousand or more years, coin, cup, statue, and frieze. Curtains hung thickly about the back of his shelf, and pleasing aromatic fragrances emanated from behind them.

Polished wooden shafts like ribs ran up either side of the chamber, joining at a peak in the top. Captured banners, some tattered and stained, hung here. Above the banners were four members of the griffaran, with polished metal talon extenders on their formidable feet. They sat on perches in the shadows above, vigilant as hawks. They looked strong enough to tear him into quarters of twitching dragon meat.

One of the griffaran let out a friendly click from the side of its mouth, and its fellows looked down at him.

"Ah, Rugaard, don't let the bodyguards worry you. Come forward, and we'll talk."

The Copper smelled NoSohoth somewhere, perhaps behind the heavy curtains surrounding the Tyr's shelf.

"What service can I do you, your honor?"

"I should be asking you that, drake. Take a mouthful of gold. No, don't pretend; just enjoy. I've more than I could ever eat if I live to be another thousand."

The Copper swallowed a mouthful of coin. The heavy yet soft metallic taste made him feel pleasantly fierce, ready to take on anything the Tyr asked of him.

Which, he supposed, was the point.

"I wanted a quick chat with you without a dozen ears listening to every word."

"Yes, Tyr?"

"According to Nivom, you're one of the better drakes in the Drakwatch, yet you always get overlooked because of your…well, let's be frank about it, your injuries."

The Tyr stood on his shelf and turned, as though finding a more comfortable spot from which to speak. The Copper marked heavy scarring, as from a burn, on the inside of one saa. He'd never seen the injury before, but then, the Tyr always rested so it was hidden against his underside.

"It is a wickedness that dragons count so much on appearances. That's the way of the world, and there are some things that just can't be changed. But you've got nice teeth and some impressive horns coming in. Hopefully they'll draw attention from the rest as you grow into your wings.

"I'll tell you this, Rugaard: It's something that impressed me about you from the very first. You get around very well, considering that sii. There are dragons who'd play it up to inspire pity, and tell their tale of woe at every pause in the conversation. But now my hunt's lost the game trail. Oh, yes. Obviously, you've done well as a courier, my eyes and ears and all that, and you've shown good judgment, which is worth a whole set of limbs."

"Thank you, Tyr."

"Do you know anything about our Uphold in Anaea?"

"We…the kern comes from there, does it not?"

"Do you like kern?"

"Not much. It fills one up, I suppose."

"That's how I feel as well. There are two varieties, yellow and orange, as you've probably seen when it's mashed. The orange variety is rarer. But there's something in kern—it keeps dragons who live long underground healthy. Without kern, scale doesn't grow right, the teeth loosen, eyesight fades. Why, I've even seen an old darkwhittled dragon or two missing claws and teeth. These days it's often overlooked, because we either eat it directly as mash or get it through livestock, but in my own grandsire's generation darkwhittle was a very plague."

"I'll be sure to pay more attention to my ration," the Copper said.

"And it's quite cleansing. I think half SiDrakkon's problem is that he doesn't eat his unless it's in a chicken's stomach, and he's always blocked up. So the pressure builds and he explodes out the other end."

"I know it's a long road to Anaea. Will I have a guide?"

"Yes, the Drakwatch is in charge of patrolling the road, and there are Firemaidens at a couple of key points as well. We'll get you a guide."

"What am I to do there? I hope the supply isn't threatened."

"Oh, no, no, nothing like that. It's just that old FeLissarath and his mate deserve more help than they get, and I'd like to relieve some of their burdens. They've done their bit. Responsibility wears after a while. And they are cut off from society at the end of that long, dark road. They deserve to start taking an honored place in society here if they wish."

The Copper bowed. "I'll do my best, Tyr. Nothing shall threaten the supply of kern."

"Then my mind shall be at ease. Let me tell you one more thing, Rugaard. I just said this to Nivom, by the way, so I apologize if it sounds practiced. The great dragons…well, they're fine warriors and all that, but it's the dragon that can handle the problems of peace that keeps an empire going. The greatest warrior fights least and all that. Do you understand?"

"I'm not sure that I do."

"You will. In time. Now, no hurry about your departure. You have a good rest. Another mouthful of silver and gold before you leave this room, as well. Can't be too careful where your scale is concerned. If you have any needs for thralls or anything, just see NoSohoth; he'll attend to it."

"Thank you, Tyr."

"Oh, one other question. About the fighting in Bant. How much did you see of it?"

"I was there for the attack on the tower under construction. I missed much of the first attack on the city on the Black River, but I was there for the rest of it."

"You know, it's odd. SiDrakkon was in the thick of battle, from his reports—battle that cost the lives of four dragons. Yet there's not a scar on him. Three engagements with heavy fighting would leave most dragons' wings in tatters, yet he's hardly holed. Did he lead his dragons against the Ghi men the whole time?"

The Copper wondered just how he could shade the truth. "He struck fast and hard. His attack on the first tower was brilliant. I saw him personally burn war machines on the first attempt to take the fortress. Even though we were thrown back, the campaign ended successfully. He deserves his share of the glory."

"I don't like dragons taking credit for the courage of others, you know. Don't like it at all. Anything to add? Just between the two of us. If you're worried about my mate, I don't tell her everything, you know." He winked.

"No, Tyr, nothing to add."

"I won't press you. Visit anytime, officially or unofficially. I enjoy the presence of virtuous young drakes. We need more of your sort."

The Copper left and saw NoSohoth in the outer room, organizing the visitors to the Tyr.

As he descended into the rock, he became lost in his thoughts. He should pay a visit to the Anklenes and learn about the conditions on the road to Anaea. Find out what he could about the kern trade. He had a vague idea that it came in on pack animals. It wouldn't hurt to ask a little of the history of Anaea as well—he wondered how somewhere so far away even became an Uphold.

Fourfang was waiting at the outer entrance to his cave. The blighter almost danced with anxiety.

"Bad! Bad news! Drakwatch came, took Rhea! Took Rhea to SiDrakkon, your honor. I think he eat her!"

The Copper had been to the outer chambers of SiDrakkon's cave only a few times to deliver routine messages concerning the younger Drakwatch trainees. He occupied one of the highest levels, practically a whole sublevel of his own, on the well-watered eastern spur of the Imperial Resort.

SiDrakkon's doorwarden thrall, a rather fleshy human with a shaved skull, begged him to wait and disappeared inside.

SiDrakkon's mate, an almost gruesomely thin dame with tired golden eyes, greeted him. "I cry welcome. You'll find my mate in his wet grotto. He's in one of his moods." The Copper had no idea what her name was, so he simply bowed.

"I'd be grateful to be shown where that is, honored dame."

"Just follow the sound of water."

He could hear splashing, and the babble of human voices, and a plucking sound of some musical contraption or other that grew more distinct as he passed a burning brazier or two throwing off expensive smelling scents. SiDrakkon's mate dropped some fragrant leaves on the flames and took a deep lungful.

A curtain blocked further progress.

"Your honor," he called. "It's Rugaard. Your mate admitted me. I wish to speak to you."

"Go away, drake."

The Copper sniffed at the moist air around the curtain. He smelled humans, along with wine and the vaguely sickly smell of fruit.

"I want my thrall back. The girl, Rhea."

"I sent you a replacement. Didn't she arrive?"

"I don't care if you sent a calf of solid gold. I want my thrall back."

"Well, come in, then. Let's talk. You should appreciate the air in here."

The Copper pushed through the double layer of tanned hides on the door. The air was moist, warm and a little steamy. A pool of water filled almost half the chamber, and in an alcove on a woven matt SiDrakkon reclined, reading something written on metal plates laid out under his nose.

The place was crawling with human females sweating in the heat. Some polished his scale, one stood with a barrow containing more metal plates, one played an instrument with strings that made those annoying twanging sounds, and several more just lounged around, drinking or eating or bathing. Only a few bothered to wear even the lightest kind of wrap.

"Take a breath of nepenthe, Rugaard, and relax. Here you can let the cares and responsibilities fall away."

The thick human musk made the Copper hungry, if anything. He looked around for Rhea and didn't—Wait, was that her, huddled with an elder of her sex in a corner? So hard to tell without the coloration. She looked shocking with all her hair shorn off.

He noticed that none of the females had very long hair.

"Why did you shear her?"

"All my cushions are stuffed with human hair. Adds a pleasant air to the room, and they still bring a good price once they lose the smell. What do you need that one for? She's just a thrall, or does she do something special for you? She's only just ripening now. The next few years are going to be exquisite. I won't eat her for years, I promise."

He sniffed at one of the wine-sipping females. She giggled something to a companion. The Copper guessed none of them spoke much Drakine.

Rhea looked at him, a silent plea in her eyes. A muscular blighter came in bearing a stone the size of a dragon egg in iron tongs, and dropped it into a smaller pool connected to the main one. It hissed and steamed as it struck.

"I'm fond of her, and she's quiet. I'd like her back. I don't care about the hair. In fact, every time she gets a new coat, I'll have it shorn and sent to you."

"You've made enough trouble for me, showing me up on the Black River. You're lucky I've calmed down or I'd be challenging you."

"My memory of events on the Black River isn't clear at all. You'd better hope it doesn't come back, or I'll remember how you hung back while you sent dragons to their deaths."

He rolled and straightened. "You whelp. Nivom's bitten out one heart, and you're after another. Do that and I'll challenge you to a duel of honor."

"Challenge away. It won't keep me from telling the Tyr all I know. Kill me and I'll swear to its truth as I'm dying."

Griff flickered on each of them.

"I can't stay angry in my grotto. Take your silly little girl and snuffle away."

The Copper switched to the rather slower form of Drakine used for the thralls: "Rhea, come away from there, if you like. Back to my cave." The girl threw a wrap around herself and hurried to his side.

"I can get a dozen just like her in here tomorrow, you know," SiDrakkon said.

The last sounded like more of a promise to himself than a parting blast at the Copper.

"Thank you, your honor," the Copper said. He held the curtain open for Rhea and together they escaped the steaming grotto.

Sure enough, a "replacement" for Rhea arrived the next day, a craggy-faced female with a basket of her own scale-shaping tools. The Copper had no use for her, so he gave her as a parting gift to NeStirrath, who was kindly to his thralls. NeStirrath didn't bother much about his appearance, and sometimes looked quite deranged about the ears and griff.

He also received a small flower from Tighlia's own garden, with a message wishing him fortune in his assignment.

As this was no simple journey to the surface and back, the Copper had to decide what to do with the bats. He released them to go where they would, though any who wanted to come with him were welcome, but he warned them that they'd have to make themselves useful.

Thernadad was too old to fend for himself, too blind to find himself food, and too bloated to be of much use to anyone, so the Copper allowed him to drink himself into insensibility on drakeblood, then had Fourfang break his neck with a quick twist as he slept.

"What do with body?" Fourfang asked.

"I don't care. Burn him and use his ashes for cleansing paste. Or make a stew out of him; he's fatty enough."

And so passed the strange, greedy bat who almost accidentally saved the Copper's life.

Over the next few sleeps Rhea made frightened, whimpering noises. Not knowing what else to do, the Copper woke her each time, and she'd sleep soundly afterward.

As the day for departure grew closer, Nivom visited him twice. Nivom now spent much of his day accompanying the Tyr in his duties, both in the audience chamber and in brief visits to the other hills. At the end of the day they would sometimes eat, or be groomed together by thralls, and his adoptive father, as Nivom called him, would talk the day's decisions over with him and explain why he overruled a dragon's punishment of a thrall, or granted a petition, or refused a gift.

"The Lavadome obeys him because he's loved. I wonder what would happen if a dragon who wasn't so universally admired took his place atop the Rock."

"Fighting, I expect," the Copper said.

"It's…it's like a giant game of mirroring to them, with the object being 'please the Tyr' so they get what they want. These court dragons in the line, and the leaders of the six hills, they're just carrion birds and jackals waiting for his death. All playing different games where no one's quite sure of the rules, so everyone cheats as best as he can."

"I'm glad of my place at the tail end of the Imperial line. You've got the end with the teeth."

"If the head gets chopped off, the tail dies too."

"Oh, now you're being as gloomy as SiDrakkon. Why so downcast? I heard you were cheered as you crossed Wyrram Ridge the other day."

"And had waste kicked up as I passed between the greater and lesser Skotl hills, let's not forget."

"Oh, probably just drakes. Forget it. It would take a mighty turd to slay a dragon."

"I'd almost rather be back in a war in Bant," Nivom said. "Well, I must be off. A good journey and success in Anaea. Honor and glory, Rugaard."

"Honor and glory, Nivom."

On the day he told NoSohoth he would depart, he met his guide: the Firemaiden Nilrasha. She awaited him at the western exit ramp from Black Rock. He had two long, narrow cave carts, each pulled by a plodding ox waiting for him, one filled with food and supplies for him and his thralls, and the other with grain for the oxen. The Copper bore nothing but his small hoard loaded into a hollowed log, all traded into gold so it would carry more easily, and an introductory message from Tyr to FeLissarath.

"This is a happy chance," the Copper said.

"No chance to it at all. I bribed NoSohoth with every silver piece in the Tyr's victory bequest."

The Copper wondered at that. Why would she throw away the beginnings of a hoard? From what he had learned, Anaea was a quiet Uphold with little fighting chance at combat honors. "You know the Anaean Trail?"

"I served my time at its mouth."

"Good enough for me. Let's be off. I want to be at the river by dark."

Several good trails led westward. The western quarters of the Lavadome were rougher, with growth only in patches of soil trapped between the rocks. Rather scraggly-looking goats roamed here under blighter herdsmen. Fourfang went forward with a switch to clear the way of both the animals and the lesser blighters.

They rested at the riverbank and waited their turn at a flatboat, and the Copper worked up the nerve to ask a question of Nilrasha:

"Why so eager to get to Anaea?"

"I get bored with duty in the dome. All anyone talks about are the banquets atop the Imperial Resort, and it's like having a feast described when you're starving. That or who's on top of which hill, six little Tyrs under one big one. They say the trail to Anaea is the most magnificent of all the lower roads."

"They say? I thought you knew the route."

"Oh, of course. There's the Long Fall, then the Lake of Echoes, and then Tooth Cavern—"

"All of which are listed on several maps. I've looked at them too."

"Don't send me away! I have been on the trail. I was second in the endurance march in the tests to pass into the Firemaidens." She swallowed. "I just haven't been the whole length. But it's easier after the Tooth Cavern; there are no major underroads off the trail. I've been that far."

The Copper chuckled. "Oh, I wouldn't send you away, not for half of the Tyr's gold." In fairness, though, no one was making the offer.

"Why's that?" she asked, glancing at him from lowered eyes.

"You're lucky. NeStirrath always said he'd choose the lucky drake over the toughest or the most skilled. I imagine the rule applies to drakka as well."

"I've never thought myself lucky."

"It's in that name the blighters gave you, Ora."

"Some would use the word cowardly. I lived because I hid."

"Besides, you saved my life. I'm not forgetful when it comes to things like that."

Their journey to Anaea was lengthy but fascinating. They passed through several different strata on the Long Fall, and the Copper saw geologic formations he'd never viewed before: rocks like eggs with crystals inside, gardens of colored stone that some indigent blighters kept polished and shaped and exhibited to travelers for gifts of food or coin, even veins of iron and copper they could lick to get the pleasant taste of heavy metals and cleanse their mouths.

In the tunnels after the Long Fall they caught up to a mule train bearing bags of shed dragonscale to Anaea for trade. Shaggy humans handled the mules under the supervision of a thick-hided deman and a drake apprenticed to one of the Lavadome's trading houses, very simplified versions of the roving markets the dwarves had perfected. The drake's conversation was boring, and he continually pointed out that the Copper was giving his draft animals and thralls too much to eat to ever make a profitable run.

By the end of the trip the Copper was loosing his bats to feed on the unpleasant drake every other night. Fatigue shut him up about the weight of grain given to his oxen when they were unhitched.

The Lake of Echoes required that they take a flatboat. They poled on its broad back across the water. The vast cavern was low and dripping, divided in places into chambers by walls of old rock that hinted at masonry, some underground settlement drowned long ago by a shift in water drainage. The ceiling of the cavern was covered with slimy creatures that lived in shells, like snails with many tiny legs. Translucent insects gathered around the flatboat's sole lamp, which they took turns spitting fire into to keep it lit, at the request of the dwarven ferrymen. They were an odd bunch, outcasts from better dwarf societies, the Copper suspected, and sharp dealers who would take only gold. The dwarves tried to sell them grain and dried fish, and Nilrasha advised him to purchase the first but avoid the second. But they took them across and on the other side picked up a two-score mule train bearing bags of kern.

The bats feasted on the insects, and the dwarves muttered among themselves. One held out his hands as though estimating the wingspan of the bats, and another pulled at a scraggly, unlit beard.

They came to the Tooth Cavern, and even Rhea stopped and stared with mouth open. Far in the distance to the north it was open to the sun, but here it was just a wide chasm with hanging or rising formations carved by wind whipping through the cavern. The road here leaped from massive stalactite to massive stalagmite, most slightly bent and sharpened like dragon teeth.

A garrison of Firemaidens greeted them here, including two sii-sore young almost-hatchlings at the end of an endurance march, and the Copper saw a nest of griffaran on a high ledge.

The bridges were strange patchwork contraptions of metal, wood, stone, wire, even thick rope, an odd quilt that showed evidence of all manner of different builders' hands. There were even carved poles of wood that he suspected had been decorated by elves, for they bore faces. Skulls dangled from the bottom of the spans and overhangs, trophies of fights on, below, or around the bridge.

"During the last siege on the Lavadome, the demen threw a whole army into this cavern," Nilrasha said.

"But that was ages ago, Nilrasha," the Firemaidens of the garrison said. "All we have to worry about these days are bandits."

"Which does not mean it can't happen again," Nilrasha said.

"You've been visiting those sour-bellied historians. Spirits! When I get back to the Lavadome, I'm joining swimming parties on Sunshaft Beach, not listening to Anklenes recite their epics."

They picked up an escort of Drakwatch at the other side of the canyon. The tunnel here was wider, with small cracks and passages that hostile hominids sometimes used, but according to the drakes they fought one another rather than risking the ire of the Lavadome. But desperate demen might be tempted by an unguarded party.

Nilrasha made interesting conversation, but she never chattered for the satisfaction or the noise of it, a failing of some drakka the Copper had observed.

She often steered the conversation to him, which he found a little unsettling. He wasn't used to drakka asking him anything beyond, "Rugaard, please don't drool on the platters," at banquet. She was even interested in his bats, how he became affiliated with them, and he told her an abridged version of his time in Thernadad's cave.

"I'm not used to talking about my life," he confessed.

"Why not? You're in the Imperial line. You're well thought-of. I've heard the story of you and the griffaran eggs, and that alliance is important to us, for they guard the plateau above and the river below and the Tooth Cavern. Being of the line, you'll never want for food or pleasant accommodations."

"I'm a…fortunate dragon, in that respect. Why is my situation of interest to you?"

She looked at him a moment before speaking. "I've no intention of ending my years as a Firemaid. You may want a mate someday. A dragon in the Imperial line needs someone clever at his side."

Her honesty was as startling as one of her sudden leaps from the grass.

"I haven't thought of mating."

"Few drakes do, and then they lose their heads to the first flash of green that crosses their path after they crack their wings."

"About that. I…I was injured as a hatchling. I may never be able to fly."

He showed her the scar, a little more visible now that his growing wings were rising beneath his skin.

"So you're a little bitten and bled. I get sick of drakes so full of themselves they do nothing but swell and preen."

"Then never having a mating flight doesn't bother you?"

"Well—oh, Spirits take it. I figured out life isn't a song years ago, Rugaard. No, it wouldn't matter. We wouldn't be the first dragons forced to mate under stone rather than above the clouds. But what do you think of me?"

"You're just the sort of drakka I think any drake would want."

"Any drake?"

"Yes. Especially a rather beat-up one."

She touched her neck to his. He felt an electric thrill run up his spine, and something stirred under his skin along his back. "Then I really am a lucky drakka, Rugaard."

The trading drake interrupted the conversation with an opinion, detailed and long-winded, about the advantage of selling him the oxen at the end of the trip, and the Copper tapped the side of the wicker chest housing the bats with a sii-claw where the drake couldn't see.

Nilrasha fluttered an eyelid at him flirtatiously.

The Copper spent his last years of drakehood in diligent service to FeLissarath and his mate. They were both courtly, well-mannered dragons when humans were about, and quite in-formal when they weren't. The pair had been unable to have a clutch of their own, so they looked on the kern kings of the high Anaean plateau almost as their own progeny.

He learned much of what he needed to know about the humans there his first summer. Their lives were organized around agriculture, growing kern in their high, sunny plateau. Something about the soil and the dry summers, bright sun punctuated by heavy rain at either end of the season, lent itself to their strange-sheathed crop. There were planting festivals and rain ceremonies and harvest celebrations and winter pod picking for their other staple, a rather reddish, bulbous berry that made decent enough wine but tasted eye-crossingly sweet, at least to a dragon.

The kern kings traded dragonscale for kern. The dragonscale they used at human or dwarvish trading houses to buy finery for themselves, or gold. These humans had a lust for gold that matched that of dragons. They wore it, wove it into their hair, girdled themselves in it, decorated their bedchambers with it, ate off it, and even, the Copper suspected, voided their bowels into it if they could afford the pots.

The mated dragons, when they weren't talking commerce, talked only of hunting. They were friends with the great condors of the mountains, who kept them abreast of conditions of the herds, and they hunted deer, mountain goats, sheep with vast, twisted horns, elk, even woodland sloths and the taut-bodied big cats that preyed on all the above.

Whenever their presence wasn't required at some kern-king ceremony, they were off after game.

The kern kings had no enemies that could get at them on their mountain-girded plateau, though sometimes their young warriors descended the slopes to raid the fringes of what the Copper learned were the old southern borderlands of the Hypatian Empire, dragging off females and stealing horses, more for sport than bloodlust.

A single, lonely Firemaid guarded the dragon lair and the entrance to the lower world. Her name was Angalia, and she took Nilrasha to be her own long-awaited replacement. She sniffed Nilrasha's back every morning for signs of wing growth.

"The air's too thin up here. I'm not a high-altitude dragon; never was," Angalia complained whenever the Copper visited. Constantly. "My hearts beat so. I'll burst my hearts and be dead within a year. Mark my words!"

But Nilrasha had it worse. She had to live at the entrance to the Lower World with Angalia, risking burst ears at the endless complaints.

He had a nice chamber in the Upholder palace temple, filled with square carvings of grimacing faces of the kern kings. The men had built a sort of temple to their dragon gods on a spur of one of the mountains surrounding their plateau, over the mouth of the gate to the Lower World. Like all the other constructs on the mountain-girded land, it was done in what the FeLissaraths styled the "Anaean Royal." Meaning great, heavy square blocks of limestone, elaborately carved, piled on other great, heavy square blocks. They also liked stone globes, smooth and undecorated as turtle eggs. Sometimes the builders placed them on the great, heavy square blocks. But for some reason, perhaps religious prohibition, they never put great, heavy square blocks atop the globes, unless the globes were holding up a roof. Then it was allowed.

"Hominid frippery," the Copper said to himself, extracting a crunchy beetle from a crevice with his tongue.

So much for the dwelling place of the Anaean royal families' god allies. Almost every morning the Copper arose to cool, fresh air and bright yellow light. When there was no water in the raincatchers he had a short walk to a melting glacier and tasted runoff from ice older than any dragon and most legends he knew.

In his opinion, his rooms here were as fine as the Tyr's in the Lavadome, and a good deal sunnier.

A long, straight flight of many scores of scores of scores of stairs led down the mountainside to the dragon-keepers, special priests of the kern kings who offered up pigs and cattle whenever FeLissarath and his mate didn't have fresh game—a rarity. It was hard to stand at the top of that stone ramp and not feel part of a higher world. He wondered how FeLissarath and his mate seemed such normal, earthy dragons. It would be easy to get delusions of godhood with such a vista.

The Copper made such improvements as he could to the long road back to the Lavadome. After studying how the kern kings sent messages by relay runners carrying hollow, gold-dipped bones with scrolls carried inside, he copied the practice.

He colonized a few caves with bats, and taught the Drakwatch and Firemaids to use them as messengers in return for either draft-animal blood or a taste of dragon vintage. Some of them found the practice creepy, but others enjoyed the tickle of a bat tongue and the euphoric light-headedness and the strangely pleasant dreams that followed. In any case, they reserved dragonblood for the most intelligent of the messenger bats who could be relied upon to carry either a verbal message or a written one to the right post.

At this remote Uphold, they got their news rarely and in large, sometimes confused batches. SiDrakkon's thin little mate died of a stomach disorder. The incense trade so vital to peace between male dragons continued to leap in price with barbarian attacks on the trade routes in the east, and Nivom had opened his wings and begun instituting contests between the Drakwatch and the Firemaidens, in which they fought mock battles for hills and caves.

So the years passed and the Copper's horns came in and the bulges on his back rose. He looked forward to his wings emerging, just because there was so little going on in the plateau, with its unvarying seasonal routines and cool, sunny weather. Nilrasha, perhaps a year behind in her own wing growth, would rub fats into the stretched skin to soothe it. They became translucent, and FeLissarath judged them ready to pop.

"You should return to the Lavadome, Rugaard, so that there can be a proper celebration. You're in the Imperial line, you know," FeLissarath said one sunset as the plateau turned to gold and orange.

"Yes, take this winter off and return. Take poor Nilrasha with you," FeLissarath's mate added, looking at Nilrasha, who sometimes went stalking on the mountain slopes with the older dragon-dame, and therefore was frequently invited to dinner. "She's a lively young thing. A great huntress, too. It's a deprivation to be up here, away from society."

"I do have friends I'd like to see. But will you be all right on your own?"

"You've learned little these four years to ask a question like that. Nothing ever happens in Anaea."

"All the same, I'd like to stay here. I'm not much of a drake for parties."

Oddly enough, something did happen in Anaea that very night.

It began with being woken by Nilrasha. "Rugaard, there's a wounded dragon come up from the Lower Road. He asks to speak to you in private. He's just ouside."

Rather than being frightened, the Copper was almost delighted to hear it, after the first startle of being prodded from a deep sleep, of course. "Send him in."

A silver-white dragon, his sii and saa wrapped in rags to enable him to move more quietly on the stones of the palace, mud smeared all over his wings, and his face wrapped in bloody bandaging, stepped in.

He glared at Nilrasha.

"A moment, please, Ora," the Copper said. The visitor's wild eye looked panicked.

NiVom tore off the false bandage covering his torn lip as soon as she left. "The blood is from a donkey," NiVom said.

"NiVom! What in the two worlds—" The Copper at least had wits to pronounce his adult name correctly.

"I'm a fugitive, Rugaard. Hunted. Branded a coward."

The Copper would have sputtered questions until the bats returned, but instead he listened.

"It's all Tighlia's doing, you know. She's room for only one dragon in her heart, her brother. She aims to make him Tyr, and she's destroying any dragon that stands in her way. First AgGriffopse. Then DharSii. Now me."

"Have some wine. Some food." The Copper looked in on Rhea, who had a comfortable anteroom. "Rhea, get the leftovers from last night's dinner. Hurry, but do it quietly." He worked a small cask and poured some wine into a bowl, and NiVom took a deep draft.

"Spirits, that's good," NiVom said. "Oh, Rugaard, I've been such a fool. I was set to be mated to Imfamnia, and now I suspect she's lost to me. I've been blinder than any of your bats in the sun. Imfamnia, gone. As though she'd care; she'll fly with SiDrakkon if its his destiny to be Tyr."

"How did this come about?"

"Let me see. Five, no, seven days ago—can it be only a week?—seven days ago Imfamnia threw herself down before the Tyr and Tighlia, covered with bites and scratches, claiming I'd done it to her during an argument. She's never had so much as a cross word from me! I was brought before the Tyr, and I challenged her word, and Tighlia worked herself up into a fury and named SiDrakkon's son SiBayereth Imfamnia's champion."

"I remember SiBayereth. He seemed a decent sort."

"He's obsessed with dueling ever since his wings came in. He lives for the pit. He's my size and half again my weight, and has a very long neck and tail. I'd never live close."

"So you fled?"

"No, like a fool I took the challenge. My blood was up, you see? The accusations—I couldn't think. Then Tighlia—"

Rhea arrived bearing a platter of meats and kern. NiVom stuffed food into his mouth like a dragon starved.

"Please say there's more, Rugaard," he said.

"Rhea, get Fourfang up and have him help you in the larder. A whole side of beef—raw is fine; it's hung." The girl fled.

"Thank you, Rugaard."

"You were saying something about Tighlia…."

"She accused me of always being a blighted egg. Said I lied about her brother. So…oh, what did I do? I challenged her, and anyone else who said I didn't give a correct account of matters at the Black River. So she appointed that old duelist ventlick of SiDrakkon's to defend her word, NoTannadon.

"Oh, I said some very fine words to that. Quite a speech, all about my innocence seeing me to victory. The Spirits themselves would fight on my side—ha!" He spit out a chuck-bone. "But that night all I could think about was my poor, lame father—he had a limp a little like yours; did I ever tell you that?—in the dueling pit. How I jumped down atop his body."

NiVom looked away. "I was terrified. I flew, flew across the Lavadome like baying dragonhounds were after me. Rugaard, I'm a coward."

The Copper looked at the blazing, mud-smeared victory insignia painted on his former cavemate's wing-leather. "You're nothing of the kind. Nivo—NiVom, I'm honored that you came to me this night."

The onetime future Tyr gulped. "Honored?"

"That you trusted me. And you can trust me. What can I do to assist you?"

"You've done enough. Keep quiet; there will be hunters after me, I expect."

"News of this is bound to reach the ears of the Upholder and his mate. You must leave before they rise."

"Of course."

"I'll put off the pursuit and confuse the word, if I can. You can't hide in the plateau; the kern kings will wonder at it and report to the Upholder. The condors see much of what happens on the outer slopes. The mountains trail off farther south; you could try there. When Nilrasha gets her wings I'll send her looking."

"What about your own—Oh, of course. Well, so be it. Don't worry, Rugaard; I'll speak to none but you or Nilrasha."

"I think the Tyr means for me to take over this Uphold when I mature. When I do, and they've left, I'll have the roof marbled white. Look for it. That means it's safe to visit."

"Roof marbled white. Very well."

"It shouldn't be long. My wings are almost in. Failing that, visit late at night. The balcony is big enough for you to slip through."

Rhea and Fourfang arrived with the side of beef, bearing it on a pole between them. NiVom tore great gaps in it, belched, and then crept out onto the balcony and spread his wings. He fell into open air and soared off.

Thanks to the clear moonlight the Copper could watch him for a long time as he flew south. He called Nilrasha to him and told her a somewhat expurgated version of events.

"So what now?" she asked.

He almost swore at her in his frustration and grief at NiVom's news. "We're taking that trip back to the Lavadome. I'm going to do what I can to confuse the pursuit. Then I need to see the Tyr."

"Darling, your wings are weeping. I think they'll be in any day now. Must be all the excitement."

He went over to one of the square stone blocks bordering the balcony and tore his back across it. Nilrasha gasped. The pain, and with it hot, sweet-stinking relief, helped his ugly fighting mood. He raised his left wing. Beautiful blue-veined membranes blotted out the moon and the receding dot of NiVom.

He turned. Now for the real test. He opened the right, and pushed out the wing.

He was thankful the pain blotted out some of the disappointment when it wouldn't extend. The main joint at his forespur kept slipping each time he tried to unfold it.

Nilrasha stifled a sob. "I'm sorry, Ru. But it doesn't matter. Your wings are uncased." She began to lick his wounds.

By hooking the wing tip in a crack on the balcony and pulling his bad wing open he was able to let the membrane dry.

"You're a dragon now, my love," she said.

"Good. Because I've got a dragon's work to do."