Too big a meal with too much left to do. Auron’s conscience roused him faster than the sense of danger did. Hoofbeats thudded faintly, far off but all around. The woods had been turned into a cage with innumerable bars.
Auron surveyed the gaps in the trees and started a slow walk through the forest. His imagination turned the trees into watchful elves with ready spears, waiting for him to step under their moon-shadow to strike. As the trees thinned, he saw flickering pinpricks of watch fires on the hills ahead.
So much effort for one small drake! Hundreds of men hunted him, a drake of no reputation. He counted nine watch fires between forest and cliff; behind him, he saw others on the ridge where he had first encountered the prowling dog. He heard dogs in the forest barking at shadows, and the cracking sounds of men blundering into branches.
He felt it was still early in the night. With enough hours, he could creep between the watch fires and get up the cliff before they knew he had slipped the encirclement. He began a slow and stealthy journey toward a fire. Drums broke out, alarming him for a moment, but no men appeared, and he relaxed—the fearsome tattoo perhaps was designed to drive him west and deeper into the wooded valley. He could pick out the silhouettes of men now and then, crossing the fire with their dogs. Curse the human-canine alliance! Men’s brains and dogs’ senses made a formidable team.
To his right, he saw a hunter in one of the tall fur hats leaning against an outcrop of rock. A stillwatch. The wind blew out of the west, and would carry his scent parallel to the watch fires rather than toward it, thankfully, but this hunter was directly downwind. The man showed no sign of smelling him, and Auron thanked the Sun for Her absence and the peculiar weaknesses of humans.
The watch fires cut his night-wide eyes with a painful glare. Auron heard some stirring beyond the crackling logs, but the sounds could have been anything from picketed horses to a herd of sheep. He had two options: slip through the shadows between the fires, the most likely areas to be guarded; or dash right across, traveling in and out of the light in a matter of a few seconds. Auron preferred the latter, and he nerved himself for the run.
A boy toting a load of firewood on his back appeared in the light. He dumped the burden with a sigh and started to build up the fire. The boy’s motion might be confused with his, and Auron took his chance.
When the boy turned his back, Auron raced up the slope toward the hilltop fire. Under other circumstances, the boy would have been an easy kill, but Auron whipped past him. A dog at the next bonfire to his left sprang to its feet and barked, but Auron was already out of the light.
“Niy! Niy!” a man’s voice called, and Auron saw a squatting figure get to its feet. A horse . . . no, a pony, got wind of him and reared before it turned to run.
Auron strung out his dash as long as he could, overfilled belly scraping the ground in between stretches. Curse his appetite! One of the mournful horns of the mountain men blew as he jumped over a stone wall running down the other side of the hill. He turned and ran along the top of the wall, hopeful that the pursuit would continue in the direction he had been moving. The cliff beckoned, but he trotted parallel to it until he heard the baying of dogs on a scent and thudding hooves behind.
He looked up at the cliff. It loomed above like the world were standing on its side. The sky around it glowed a faint pink. Dawn already? But then it was high summer, and he was north, where the nights would be short.
There was nothing to do but try. He turned for the cliff.
The baying of dogs behind and the mens’ shouts froze him in alarm.
He stood atop a shelf of rock. The shelf jutted from one of the boulders scattered at the base of the sheer wall, like fallen pinecones around a tree, and he watched them close in. Shadows loomed in the morning mist: men on horses, men afoot, dogs both free and leashed, boys with slings and mouths full of stones. Worst of all, archers with great recurved bows stood atop the rocks to either side with arrows nocked, ready to shoot when they saw a target.
A pack of dogs had caught up to him; he had killed two before the rest backed off and set to baying. Now the horsemen gathered. He could hear but could not see the mounts in the mist.
The archers would probably kill him, and the odds were worsening by the minute. Soon there would be men with spears and swords among the rocks. While the dogs were still keeping their distance, he crept to the cliff face, letting his nose lead the way and slowly curling and uncurling his body as he flowed from hiding spot to hiding spot like a tar seep. Soon he had to grip cracks in the stone with short-clawed sii. He had made the transition to vertical travel, and long climb was begun.
One of the archers shouted, “niy!” and an arrow tapped off a rock next to him. The channel he climbed closed to something like a notch a dozen body-lengths above. If he could reach that, the archers would have trouble getting an angle on him, and their bows might not throw the missiles that high.
He felt something pull at his haunch, and looked down to see an arrow piercing the thin webbing between leg and stomach. These were not elven arrows, but ugly black shafts with barbed points and red fletching. Auron looked back: two archers stood shoulder to shoulder, speaking to each other out of the sides of their mouths as they drew marks.
Auron heard the bows twang, and he threw himself to a new fissure. He felt the passage of the arrows before they hit bare stone where his chest had been, sending sparks from their steel heads. Auron flattened himself into a crevice, painfully snapping the shaft in his leg. If only he were a real armored drake! By now he would have scales on his back that would allow these assassins to rain all the arrows they could at this distance, without effect unless they caught him in the throat or eye. The fissure protected him from arrows for the moment, but it did not run up farther than a neck-length or two.
A bow twanged again, and it would be hard to say who was more surprised at the hit: the archer or Auron. The drake felt something like a horse-kick in his side. An arrow stood out from his chest, its black shaft projecting from his rib cage, blood welling around the edges of the wound. Auron took a surprised breath, and pain racked the right side of his body. He lost his grip and tumbled from the cliff.
He righted himself in the air and landed on his feet, among men with spears. A silver-helmeted man managed to skewer his tail, holding him pinned while the others closed in to kill.
Auron spat fire in a great arc at the spear points closing in and was rewarded by screams louder than the air-eating roar of his flame. He turned to bite at the one holding the spear in his tail. The man put up an armored forearm, and his mouth closed on that, but he was free of the pinning grip. Auron clawed the man across the legs and leaped away into the rocks before others could get him from behind.
Wriggling between cliff walls and boulder, careful to keep the arrow shaft from striking rock, Auron was leaving a blood trail, and he knew it. The screams of a dying man gave him grim satisfaction. He felt short of breath, weak but content. He might be trapped, but he had taken his share of hunters and their animals.
“Dragon!” someone called in Parl, a booming roar that might have come from a bear. “Dragon! Come out and face me. Bring fire, tooth, and claw, foul creature.”
Foul creature, indeed! Auron thought. Even bleeding, he was cleaner of skin than any of the greasy men or flea-hosting dogs hunting him.
“Demon spawn! Plague of women and children! You face a man this time, not a child. Come and try to take me.”
The voice was at least ten body-lengths behind, somewhere among the rocks. The hunter would see the blood trail soon. Best to distract him.
Auron lowered his head and tried to sound as much like Father as possible. “Do you throw a spear, man, or just insults?” Auron said in Parl, doing his best to rattle his griff as loudly as a winged dragon might.
“I throw Byltzarn, ‘white spear of lightning’ in this tongue, and wield Dunherr, ‘the thunder’s edge.’ Their bearer is known as the Drakossozh, ‘the dragon blade.’ Hear my name and despair, for I hunt your kind up and down these hills!” The voice moved away from the cliff’s edge. Auron heard words hissed back to another voice using the human tongue.
Auron extended his neck around another rock. “Noble titles. Kill me today, and you will have earned them.”
“I will only have dispensed justice, child-snatcher. It’s been a hell of a spring for me. I killed two dragons plaguing the Burning Wheel dwarves at the Highlake: a great bronze male and a young female. I’ve been on your trail since the coast, when you did murder to the village of Sarsmyouth and killed old men and boys trying but to feed their families. ‘The sooner a blood debt is collected, the better,’ as my grandsire Odlon used to say.”
Auron froze against his stone. Wistala, Father, it had to be! His fire bladder filled even as his heart went cold. He heard a heavy tread among the boulders. He finally saw Drakossozh, a tall man with shoulders like a draft ox. The Dragonblade wore a shining silver helm marked by two curving wings sweeping up and meeting like two crescent moons above a spiked face mask. His spear gleamed white even in the gloom of the morning mist; his sword handle was formed like an open dragon’s mouth. The wide blade of Dunherr projected from it like a dragon’s tongue before ending at twin points. He wore scale armor, also shaped like that of a dragon’s, though if they were dragon scales, some craftsman had carved and polished them into art. A red sash was thrown over his shoulder, human ideograms stitched into it in a series of white dots, and tied at his sword hilt.