Below AuRon saw the edge of the desert, a familiar hill or two, one with a mound over the monument well where he had said good-bye to Djer and the Diadem. AuRon steepened his glide and then circled up to bite at his pursuer. He caught a mouthful of tail before folding his wings to dive like a hunting hawk.

NooMoahk roared his outrage and followed. AuRon saw the earth hurtle up to meet him, and in the moonlight made for the tomb of Tindairuss. The black dragon dropped from the sky, perhaps looking to crush the offending fly under him even as he crashed to earth. The wind whistled in AuRon’s ears as he fell more than flew. When the rustless metal became clear in the color-draining moonlight, he opened his wings again—

Not enough. He hit the side of the pole-projection at the top of the tomb with a resounding thump and felt something in his shoulder give way. He grabbed the narrow column, thinner than a young palm, in his rear claws and looked up to see NooMoahk almost atop him, opening his wings to aim rather than stop his plunge.

AuRon leaped from the pole at the last moment. He landed atop the mausoleum at the same moment NooMoahk crashed down; the impact ran through the iron structure like a thunder from the Air Spirit. NooMoahk pivoted to bring his jaws into play, griff clattering against ancient multihorned crest, but he was pinioned. The sharp pole atop the center of the monument ran right through him, a gory needle sticking up from his back. The dragon drew a rattling breath and collapsed.

NooMoahk’s breathing became short and labored, and AuRon could feel his slowing heartbeat through the iron. NooMoahk rolled his head back and forth and scraped ineffectually at the top of the monument with his claws, the fire in his eyes finally smothered. AuRon approached, knocking aside scales that had fallen off the dragon’s body when he hit.

“AuRon, you’ve got your wings at last. You’re a dragon now,” NooMoahk said. Blood stained his teeth black in the moonlight.

“Yes. Do you know where you are?”

“The cave? No, we’re outside. What is this place?”

“You had a lapse. You chased me. We flew, and you hurt yourself landing.”

“I flew? I flew? I thought I was past it,” NooMoahk said, trying to right himself, then falling back with a groan. The black’s mouth turned up at the corners in an oddly human expression: he was smiling. “I’ll never fly again. No pain, but I feel a chill. Are we on metal?”

“It’s like iron. This is the monument the men raised to Tindairuss. He is buried here.”

NooMoahk sniffed at the blood trickling on the metallic surface, keeping in well-rounded pools. “Is that the truth? Or something to comfort a dying dragon?”

“Can you move your neck? Look at the words on the side. You know the script.”

NooMoahk dragged his head across the surface, and with his long neck examined the characters AuRon pointed to with his tail. “I never knew this place existed, or I would have visited it before.” He was silent for a moment, and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again. “AuRon, you’ll see to it. Rest me in the same earth he does. Don’t let some wizard grind my bones.” The eyes shut again. NooMoahk took a last deep breath.

“Yes, my lord. I’ll see it done.”

“Tindairuss, old friend, I come,” NooMoahk wheezed. “We’ll fly to—”

The ancient head, crest crowned with its spread of horns as numerous as a jellyfish’s strands, dropped. AuRon could not hear a heartbeat.

“Beware, Great Spirits, for a dragon has returned to hunt your realms,” AuRon quoted, without knowing the origin of the words. They just came to him. His body felt heavy, and his legs buckled.

Something wetted his eyes, something that even closing and opening his water-lids didn’t remove. AuRon flicked his tongue out, curious for the taste. Salt.

BOOK THREE

Dragon

STRENGTH WITHOUT VISION IS TYRANNY.

VISION WITHOUT STRENGTH, DREAMFUL IMPOTENCE.

BREED THEM, AND THE WORLD IS YOURS.

—Wrimere the Wyrmmaster, Wizard of the Isle of Ice

Chapter 18

The young dragon AuRon flew south after seeing to the burial of his mentor. It was no small job. He wished to do his duty to the ancient dragon, so after some thought, he started work. AuRon’s foua made a pyre of the dead dragon, and with the weight burned off, he placed the bones into a circular burial trench dug into the grassy ground of the hill. NooMoakh’s bones lay in a ring around the tomb of Tindairuss, the last buried tailbone dropped just a claw’s length from the nose. AuRon’s sii claws were dull and tender from days of moving earth, digging until his own blood mixed with the loam around the well.

At last he was resolved. The physical labor cleared his mind; he knew his path. NooMoahk’s hold would be his and his alone. He would live a solitary existence among the aging manuscripts, losing himself in dead tongues of even deader sages. AuRon knew now the dull ache of loneliness was trivial compared with the pain of saying good-bye to friends through death and distance. His family, Blackhard, Djer, Hieba, and NooMoahk had passed into and out of his life, each one leaving a bigger hole than the one they filled. It was better never to have others in one’s life than to lose them.

There would be the blighters to deal with, of course. He would live apart, above them in the manner of earlier days: a remote liege lord they could turn to in trouble, as long as they did not hunt in his forests or fish in his streams. Their interactions would prevent attachments that might hurt when the hominids ended their brief, furious lives.

It was a bitter lesson. He realized now there were more ways to be left vulnerable than being born without scales.

Dragons were meant to fly, to hunt, to live alone and free. Flying was the purest freedom he had ever known. Riding the sky went to his head like wine, but left him exhilarated rather than a throbbing head. It reduced distances and obstacles to nothing more than vistas beneath him, made hunting a trifle, and gave him a new world to explore—a world of cloud-heads rolling beneath him like ocean waves and wisps above as light as a goose’s feather borne by currents and tides invisible. With each beat of his wings on his trip back across the desert, he felt more a lord of the lands under his eyes beneath: a Power above ground dwellers and beyond their comprehension. He was a dragon, a terrible prince of cave, water, and sky who would rule through wit backed by tooth and flame.

He made the journey back to the mountains in two flights, resting in the desert a day, letting the summer sun bake his skin clean. With the growth spurt that preceded uncasing his wings over, his appetite was reduced; the trip brought only a pleasant hunger and thirst rather than an all-consuming appetite that drove every other thought from his mind. Instead of searching out game, he watched the heights slide up from the south until he was among the peaks, fighting the headwinds coursing through the peaks.

Now to find the blighters.

The huts clustered on the hillside like a ring of warts. Just inside a wooden palisade stood a line of stone-bottomed, rounded thatch-topped huts, most with wisps of smoke coming from a soot-rimmed central orifice. A more imposing hut, roofed with tusks of something that might have been elephants, stood at one end of the empty space in the village center: a common ground of charcoal pits and clay-colored grain dumps. A V of head-poles—AuRon dredged from memory the word for the blighter’s spikes, stood before the village. The lines extended out from the gate down the slope, groups of three empty bleached skulls mounted to stare out at visitors to the village.

AuRon wheeled and swooped over the huts, getting a better look.

Blighters took up their pointing children as AuRon circled their settlement. Livestock, mostly goats and cattle, bleated or bellowed alarm. A few blighters took up spear and bow, or held up shields against the threat from the sky.

AuRon spread his wings wide and drifted over the village in silence, riding the wind. With a dip of his wings and a swoop of his neck and tail, he turned. “I come to parley. You’re in no danger,” he called. “Bring forth your elders!”

He alighted in the center of the village, reared up, and rested on his hind legs so he towered over the blighters. AuRon was nothing like the size of NooMoahk, but in length he had already exceeded the greatest snakes of the jungles south. He got light-headed and saw spots if he sat like this for too long, but he held the pose until two blighters of commanding girth emerged from the royal hut.

“What hospitality can we offer, who speaks our tongue of old and knows our ways, young dragon?” one called, resting on a curved cane of some gnarled wood that tapered like a tooth.

“I ask nothing yet. Where is your third elder?”

“Dokla is not as old as I or as Keerh. He leads a game drive south of here.”

AuRon’s knowledge of blighter ways gave out at this impasse, so he simply asked, “Will you speak for him?”

“Yes.”

“Then bring your people out. I wish them to hear us, and to see while we talk.” AuRon’s mouth was growing sore from forming blighter words.

The blighter who had not yet spoken put a steer-horn to his mouth and made a rattling, whistling call through it. Other blighters led their wives and children from the huts, holding weapons but walking with the points trailing in the dirt to show that no threat was intended.