Auron continually planned to set out westward with Hieba, to get her among her kind, but the circumstances never seemed quite right. There were too many blighters coming and going, or NooMoahk was in the mood to tell stories and hear them in return, or Hieba had lamed herself leaping from a broken wall. Her giggles when he chased her through the ruins, or wide-eyed awe when he lit a pile of tinder by spitting on it, or pony rides seemed a more profitable way to spend his time. And then it was winter, though it was a mild one on this side of the mountains, and Auron looked at it as another reason not to travel.
Hieba never tired of “visits.” She was losing her baby fat, gaining height, and steadily waxing muscular. She took to climbing down the chute to NooMoahk’s cave herself, with Auron beneath, anxious that she would slip. NooMoahk wasn’t awake when underground often, but when he was, he was entertaining to listen to. Unless the subject was his own eventual death.
“Dwarves and blighters burn their dead; humans bury them. Elves turn into treelike growths that live on for thousands of years, gradually going silent. When a dragon dies, his skull adorns some stinking emperor’s threshold or a wizard’s library,” NooMoahk said, for the third time in Auron’s memory. Hieba swung from the projecting rocks of his platform, amusing herself by hanging from wrists, ankles, or a combination like a monkey in a tree.
“If it’s found,” Auron said, for NooMoahk’s black grumblings made for long silences between him and Hieba when they returned to their attic. “The blighters don’t go anywhere the sun doesn’t touch in the cavern. They must think a strong spirit lurks here. Super—superstition may keep grave-robbers away. What do the elves do when the tree version dies?” Auron said, trying to change the subject.
This time he succeeded. “Forest fires take many. The elves then take the ashes and mix them into clay. The elves have a legend that they were formed from a clay pit. Their creator made them through sculpting clay by a riverbank. They then fire and glaze them before they are put in crypts. Good a way as any, I suppose, and if there’s anything to their legend, this creator was a master. I’ve never seen a warty elf.”
Auron saw an opening to NooMoahk’s mind. “I’ve seen an ugly elf. Scarred from battle.”
“So have I, come to think of it. Though they were honorable scars, from a fight where the odds in number and weight were against her, to hear her tell it. Could she tell stories! And could she sing! Hazeleyes was her name, it seems to me. As full of questions as you are, Auron. Wanted to know everything about dragons.”
“Did she learn ‘everything’?”
“She learned the most important thing. Not to fear us, but to leave us. Dragons don’t hunt hominids unless there’s nothing else to be had: there’s easier prey out there, though blighters breed so fast, we used to eat them like I take fish from the pool. Not many creatures kill for fun; food supplies are too vital to waste in purposeless killing. Blighters do, and they taught the trick to the other two- leggers. Wool-brained barbarians, the lot.”
“Why did this Hazeleye—Hazeleyes ask so many questions?”
“The hominids fare poorly with mind-pictures. They keep tales by writing and drawing. Haven’t you seen writing? Fascinating, I’ve got tomes full of it.”
“Yes. So this Hazeleye was recording dragon stories?”
“More than stories. How we are born, when we die. How we choose mates. I talked to her because I miss the days before I grew old. When flying was joy, instead of burning torment. When my friend Tindairuss rode atop my back with bow and javelin, in silver armor trimmed with polished black to match my scales. We used to get on better with the lesser races, Auron. Back then, they took the loss of a few cattle as the price paid for a dragon keeping order in the land and the blighters at bay. With the blighters driven away, as they are now, they’ve decided they can get along without us. Now we’re hunted, hunted as blighters, after all we’ve done for them.”
“Did this elf learn any secrets? Perhaps she was a spy, sent to discover ways to better kill dragons. Probe our weaknesses.”
“Weaknesses?” NooMoahk snorted. “Bah. I’ve heard that venting. ‘Every worm has a weak spot,’ and so on. Auron, dragons are the acme of all the creatures between the Sun and the Moon. Don’t let legends tell you otherwise. Dragons are all individuals, some better, some worse, and while every now and then there are those that survive into drakehood or beyond defected, each dragon doesn’t necessarily have a failing. Look at you. To some you’re one big ‘weak spot,’ being scaleless, but you seem to do well enough. It’s just stories the hominids have come up with to nerve themselves to kill us.”
“Then is it our love of precious metals?”
“Is what?”
“The defect of dragons. What enemies could use against us. The thing that could be our downfall?”
“What are you talking about, Auron? I’m tired.”
Auron felt his fire bladder convulse with frustration. “I heard you were wise; that you had discovered some weakness in dragons. There are fewer and fewer in the world. Everyone has told me so, from my own parents to a dwarf I’ve met. I thought perhaps this elf tricked something out of you, and assassins were using it against us.”
NooMoahk closed his eyes, and for a moment Auron feared he would drop into one of his unexpected naps. Then he opened them again. “Moon’s treachery, Auron, but you’re a foolish drake. Each dragon is a little different. Perhaps you just haven’t met enough. How could we all share the same failing? As for being tempted and bound by glitter, let me show you my treasure chamber.”
NooMoahk sighed and heaved himself off his platform. Hieba, who had been lying propped against one of the projections transfixed by the crystal statue, came out of her reverie and jumped down to follow. He walked to the side of the cavern cut into galleries filled with chests and shelves. Auron heard a low humming and felt the air stir. He traced the source to shapes, like little stars, hovering in the formed cavern roof. As they approached, they glowed brighter.
“What that?” Hieba asked. She pointed with her eyes at the objects.
NooMoahk either understood her or made a good guess. “Those belonged to some wizard. She wanted to catalog my treasure, but got greedy and tried to steal some of my claws that had fallen out for some bit of alchemy. She got away, but the hair on the back of her head will never grow right again, I expect.”
Auron looked at a shelf. No stacked coin or trays of gems lay there, but scrolls. Others held books, cloth wrapped palimpsests, even etched tablets and bronze plates.
“This is treasure?”
NooMoahk nosed open a chest holding skins stained with faint ideograms. “Treasure, as you understand it, Auron, is a dead thing.”
“Treasure dead,” Hieba repeated, in creditable Drakine.
“Yes, dead. It doesn’t know how to make more of itself. This is knowledge. Philosophy. Histories. Poetry. Knowledge is a funny thing, Auron. The more of it that’s in your head, the more your head can hold. It breeds on its own. You never know what the next bit of reading is going to do, what it’s going to meet up with in your head and mate. You’d be surprised at the offspring a piece of science on trees, say, and the description of the wreckage from a naval battle will have.”
“How’s that?”
“Do you know why wood floats on water, Auron?”
“Because . . . because it’s from a tree? Water Spirit made the trees, right? They made it so it would float?”
“That could be one reason, and perhaps you’d settle for it. Another could be the air pockets inside the wood; as the wood dries, the places that held sap or water empty and fill with air. If the wood is properly treated by the hominids, it takes a long time for the water to get back in. The air is lighter than the water, so it rises to the top.”
“Then why doesn’t wood fly up in the air?”
“Because the wood is heavier than the air.”
“That can’t be. A dragon is heavier than air. A bird is heavier than air.”
“Auron, I’m tired, I can’t explain air currents across a wing creating lift now.”
Ha! thought Auron. Every dragon knows the Air Spirit gave his gift of flight to dragons. NooMoahk is just trying to make something simple difficult.
“My point is that with knowledge, you don’t need treasure. Long before I met Tindairuss, I read anything I could get under my eyes. I collected and guarded these works. Before my mind began to cloud, I had a reputation; sages from across the land mass came to consult. They made me presents of chests of money. Anyone could mine and make money; no money could buy the making of liquid fire, or how to improve fruit crops with a certain kind of insect if the knowledge was lost.”
“Do they still come?”
“No. My mind isn’t what it was, and the lands and traditions of the hominids have changed. There are just a few blighters in these mountains now. The Ruby Crowns to the south have fallen back into savagery; jungle lives in their cities. There’s the desert to the north, and the steppe country knows only the lands where they can drive their flocks. Hypat is a shadow of its former self on the Inland Ocean. The hominids put down the pen and took up the sword.”