floor.
She followed him with her hands balled at her sides and ducking for the low ceiling. She could hear her own heartbeat loud in her ears. A tunnel wound deeper into the ground at a slope, soon changing from black blocks to a natural stone cleft with a rough floor and a higher, though not nearly high enough, ceiling. A minute or two seemed much longer before light from ahead began to thin the pitch darkness. Edgewise stepped out of the tunnel into a larger, dimly-lit space with a sandy floor. Nesha-tari almost sprang out of the cramped hall behind him, and regretted it immediately.
Her dampening spell which she was presently maintaining with no more thought than it took to breathe crashed in on her like a wind storm striking from every direction. Nesha-tari’s feet flew out from under her and she gasped, spinning wildly in the air a time or two before she landed shuddering on the sandy floor, on all fours.
“Did you have a spell raised?” Edgewise demanded, voice sounding alarmed for the first time. “You can’t come in here with that!”
The goblin squatted in front of her, bronze eyes gleaming. Nesha-tari snarled.
“You might have told me that!”
“I did not think it necessary to say. Would you be allowed in the presence of your Blue Master with an active incantation?”
“Of course not, but how was I to know we were close?”
“Oh, we are that,” Edgewise said, straightening and stepping aside. “Close indeed.”
Nesha-tari had her breath back but she gasped again as she took in their surroundings. They had entered a great cavern, rough rock rising to a dome high above the sandy ground over an area larger than several city blocks, which was an easy judgment to make as there were several city blocks within the cavern. Two compass- straight boulevards lined by rows of stone buildings rising two, three, and even four stories in the air met at a square around a massive, ziggurat-like pyramid, so tall that the rough ceiling actually pressed on the top tier as though it were a central pillar. The buildings all around the pyramid gaped hollow and empty with thick sand visible in the interiors, but the two wide boulevards were swept clean to reveal the brick surfaces. Both were lined by flickering torches on regularly spaced staffs, lighting the paths to the pyramid.
“Welcome,” Edgewise said, “to what was once the ancient city of Ettacea.”
Still on all fours, Nesha-tari stared at him, but she could think of nothing to say. Edgewise extended a hand and after a moment she took it and got to her feet.
The goblin led her down the ancient street between the torches. Nesha-tari saw no one else about, and though her spell was now ended she sensed no attention on her either. Certainly not that of a human male.
Great stairways extended out on ramps from the central pyramid which may have been constructed of the same beige sandstone as the surrounding buildings, though it was faced with panels of veined marble. Edgewise and Nesha-tari took the long stairs facing them up to the first ziggurat tier, where a circular doorway big enough to drive a wagon through awaited. The entrance was rimmed in bronze, casting back the torchlight from below, but the space within was a total darkness not even Nesha-tari’s eyes could penetrate. Edgewise took his hat off as he stopped before the portal, and held out his hand again.
“Is my cousin prepared to meet my mistress?”
Nesha-tari stared into the blackness darker than any she had ever known since her Master, Akroya, had given her eyes that were as blue as his, a very long time ago now. The thought of the Great Blue Dragon brought to mind thoughts of the petty misdeeds for which Nesha-tari had seen Akroya maim or even eviscerate others among His servants. Nesha-tari was more favored than any of those others had been, but she had no expectation of mercy if she displeased the Dragon in a major way. She nodded, the movement feeling awkward and jerky, and took the goblin Edgewise’s rubbery hand. They stepped into the darkness together.
It was like passing through a veil, or a wisp of cobweb. One step and Nesha-tari was again on a sandy bit of floor, and a soft light without source dazzled her eyes.
Before her were treasures beyond comprehension; coins and gems and objects carpeting the floor, mounded into piles, spilling from chests. The wealth of kingdoms and empires spread out to the inner walls of the ziggurat, which were themselves hung with embroidered tapestries and rich curtains of purple and gold. Yet none of it made any impression on Nesha-tari, for her attention was fully transfixed by the being in front of her, for She was Ladamia, The Lady, The Great Bronze Dragon, and she was beyond magnificent.
She was massive, nearly as large as Akroya though where the Azure One’s scales shimmered like a sunny sky, the Lady was everywhere a burnished shade of bronze, deepening to a warm brown along her great flanks and powerful limbs. Those limbs ended in grim claws like swords, presently sunken into the treasure carpeting the floor beneath her. She lay supinely, seeming to fill the vast chamber with her very self, tail coiled along the edges of the room and great wings folded back against her flanks of overlapping scales, each larger than a man’s shield. On her back along her spine emerged a double row of spikes, also folded down, that ran up the length of her long, graceful neck which described a vast over-reaching arc, like a bridge up to the heavens. Then there was her head, suspended in the air over Nesha-tari like the face of a god.
The Lady was crowned by a pair of horns with flared bony plates extending back from them, giving the joint of head and neck an armored appearance. She had a long, broad, reptilian snout that nonetheless gleamed as though polished, and her teeth were a white fence of swords. Though reclining in rest the Lady’s very stillness spoke of power, as though at any moment she chose she could languidly reach out a limb and throw down the stone walls around her. A flick of her tail could slice the great spade-shaped tip through the solid black bedrock beneath the city of Souterm, which the locals still called by her name.
Yet for all that, her gleaming eyes were gentle. Though Nesha-tari willingly served the Great Blue Dragon, his attention was always piercing. No one came under Akroya’s blue gaze without falling to their knees. But in the eyes of the Great Bronze Dragon there was a warmth. Almost, strangely, an inexplicable feeling of home. A home of a kind different than any Nesha-tari had ever known.
“Great Mistress,” Edgewise said, releasing Nesha-tari’s hand. “May I present my cousin, a servant of your Blue cousin in the east.”
The Lady’s voice came to Nesha-tari then. The Dragon’s mouth did not move but her words filled the room.
“Nesha-tari Hrilamae,” the voice said, conveying a sense of faint distaste that was something other than audible. “One such as you should not be.”
Though it was not said nor otherwise conveyed with malice, Nesha-tari’s heart lurched and she choked out a sob. She thought she might fall to her knees after all, but the Lady’s bodiless voice continued.
“Stand up straight, girl. I do not condemn you for what you are.” The great serpentine neck eased back and the Lady’s head lowered to regard Nesha-tari on a more even level. The great unblinking bronze eyes looked into hers with a depth of expression impenetrable to a human, or half-human, mind.
“You are protected by my Pact-given word, child,” the Lady’s voice said from everywhere. “Even were you not, I do not choose to kill indiscriminately. No matter your dark origins, you are what you do. Not just what you are born.”
Nesha-tari stammered. “I…I have not always done well.”
“No,” the Lady agreed, sending a wave of disapproval rolling over Nesha-tari that brought her close to nausea. The bronze eyes before her seemed to darken momentarily.
“You have the blood of innocents on you, it is true. But many of us do.”
Tears she was scarcely aware of coursed down Nesha-tari’s face, her real face. She felt an urge she never had before Akroya, whose presence demanded only supplication. But the Blue was a very different sort of dragon than was the Bronze, of the Sky and not of the Earth. Before the Lady, Nesha-tari wanted only to ask forgiveness for her failings, and perhaps for her very existence.
“But it is not mine to give,” the massive head before her said before anything was asked. “Now, you will speak to me of why my Blue cousin in the east has sent you into my domains, for I know you have not come for your own reasons.”
Nesha-tari had been instructed on precisely what to say to the Lady, beginning with a long, memorized litany of formal salutations from the King of the Sky. None of it was in her head at the moment and Nesha-tari spoke only truth, and that simply.
“Lady, I am bound for Vod’Adia, and must pass through your domain to reach it. Once there, I must kill a man who seeks to enter the Sable City.”
