Elvenbane

moon rose and a million stars appeared overhead, painfully bright in the clear, thin air of the heights.

And finally, as the deer finished feeding and picked their way back to the shelter of their trees, she gave up. She fanned the air with her wings, and leapt for the sky, beating her wings so strongly that another shower of snow flew everywhere, a good deal of it spraying all over the huge, white sprawl of Father Dragon.

He gave no sign that he even noticed.

She circled three times, still waiting for another response, but got nothing. Not even a stirring of thought. Father Dragon might just as well have been a great snow-covered ice-sculpture.

Not only was he not going to solve her problem for her, he had no intention of giving her any more direction than she already had.

She flew off to the east, back towards the Lair, her frustration more than enough to keep her warm on the long flight back.

Chapter 16

IT SEEMED VERY strange to be standing on two limbs instead of four, but Keman had gotten used to it.

What he couldn't get used to was all the two-leggers. People, he reminded himself. They were people. Not 'two-leggers.' Whatever, they were everywhere he went, and everywhere he looked.

This city was as full of them as an anthill, it felt like an anthill, crowded and congested, with every human in the place going somewhere on some task. The elves...might have been the drones. Pampered and cared for, without a great deal of effort on their part. Even the lowest of elves had at least a handful of human slaves to serve him... most had more than a handful. Humans were cheap, plentiful, and constantly reproducing.

Keman looked out of the window of his second-story room at the crowds below, streaming along the street on the other side of the wall around this townhouse, and tried to convince himself that the task he had taken on was not an impossible one. There were times he wondered; times he was tempted to turn right around and run home to his mother.

He had arrived at the city in the guise of a young elven lord; one with just enough magic to be treated with deference, but not enough to be a threat, or even particularly interesting. But by the time he managed to reach the city, after taking a circuitous route to confuse anyone on his trail, it was already autumn, and Shana was long gone.

He found the city alive with rumors and crawling with the agents of every major elven lord he'd ever heard his mother mention. There was no room in any of the inns, even if he'd had the coin to spend, and changing his guise to a human bondling would have restricted his movements too much. He wandered the streets for a couple of days, leaving the city by night to hunt, and tried to find a way to get himself into the circles of those who knew something.

And, just as important, tried to find somewhere he could live, at least temporarily.

He despaired of finding a place to stay until he decided to act like a young elven lord and risk everything in one bold move. To his amazement, it worked. He got himself quarters in Lord Alinor's townhouse by strolling up to the door and announcing that he had been sent. He didn't specify by whom he had been sent, or for what purpose, and no one ever ventured to ask him. Lord Alinor's elven underlings were too busy with matters more important than the presence or absence of one young guest, arid the human bondlings assumed the elves knew what he was there for.

He'd been given one small room...small by his standards, at least...overlooking the street. He figured out pretty quickly what his putative status was. Too high to be put in the servants' quarters, and not high enough to be given a ground-floor or upper-floor suite.

He wasn't the only young elven lord there either, and most of them seemed to have just as little to do as he did...'

He spent most of his time in the streets, either in elven or human guise, listening to anyone who would talk to him, buying drinks for those with loose tongues, cultivating his peers in Lord Alinor's house, and gambling occasionally...never twice with the same person; he'd figured out that much...and always winning. Working with Shana he had learned that draconic magic was suitable for manipulating dice and knucklebones, even if it couldn't pick up rocks and hurl them through the air. He had used some of the gems of his hoard for his first stakes; now he had enough coin in his pocket to buy drink for bondlings and lesser elves who looked as if they might have information, and to entertain the other young elves when their boredom took them out of the house.

And he could usually win whatever he'd spent on them back before the evening was over. There were some advantages to this form, one of which was that no one ever considered he might be cheating. He simply looked too young and callow. And elven magic simply didn't work that way. Anyone who was possessed of magic powerful enough to enable him to cheat at dice would not have bothered with cheating at dice.

He had considered moving himself to an inn after the first couple of weeks...but those were still full, and the agents, human and elven, who had taken the rooms were suspicious of everything and everyone. Above all, he needed to be invisible. Some ^of those agents might be more Kin in shape-change, and if they learned what he was, he might well be recaptured and bundled home to Alara.

He had managed to learn a great deal in the past several weeks; most of it about Shana, and none of it liable to get him to her.

The story was a strange one. Lord Dyran's bondling had bought her at auction; he carried the Lord's own gold, and the representatives, of several other elven lords recognized him.

But then the same man had come running up, out of breath, and as angry as a bondling was permitted to be, just as the auction closed. He swore he had not bought the girl; he swore he had fallen asleep in his room at the Lord's town house...while standing. He had been found on the floor where he had collapsed, by one of Lord Dyran's other slaves. He had been roused and then taken to the auction...only to learn that the girl was gone and he had supposedly bought her!

It was extremely unlikely, so common opinion ran, that the man lied. That could only mean he'd been bespelled and another had taken his place to buy the girl. But who? And, more important to Keman, why?

He was fairly certain that it was not another underling of Lord Dyran, although that was one of the many rumors. If it had been, the bondling who had lost the girl would have vanished, never to be heard of again. And whatever servant had arranged for the actual purchase would be in ascendancy. Instead, the bondling had been questioned and demoted, but was still alive and in Lord Dyran's service. And there had been no power changing hands on Lord Dyran's estate.

So said the most trustworthy and reliable of Roman's informants, another young elven lord, cynical, disaffected from his own father, who would have had ideals if only he didn't see honor, loyalty and truth bartered about among his elders like any other coin. Or so Keman surmised. The young man talked a great deal about these things, but still treated the human slaves like invisible automata with no feelings.

Keman sighed, and turned away from the window to lie down on his bed and think.

The closest he had come to finding out where Shana had vanished was the folded bit of paper under his pillow. His young friend had gotten it from his father's agents, and had copied it for Keman before passing it on to Lord Alinor. That was the main task V'dern Iridelan an-Lord Kedris had; to take select information and pass it to his father's ally. He did this perhaps once every four or five weeks, and the rest of the time he spent on his own amusement. Privately, Keman thought this was hardly the right way to handle someone like Iridelan, but his acquaintance was one of the few young elven lords who had an older brother, the el-Lord, or heir. There he was; useless for a marriage alliance...unless his father found a family with only daughters...and not to be trusted with the reins of the estate and fortune his brother guarded so