“What do you think they’re talking about?” Jicks asked Corva and Durge.
“I’ll swim the Cauldron if I know,” said Durge.
“Phen wasn’t lying when he told me Hyden was the most powerful wizard in the realm, was he?” asked Corva. “Not even the greatest of elven masters would dare to do such a thing as stand before a dragon.”
“Just because he has the stones, or lacks the sense to avoid standing in front of a dragon, doesn’t mean he’s powerful, elf,” Durge said. “Your old masters probably place a lot more value on their lives than Hyden Hawk seems to.”
“By the gods, he's not even afraid,” Jicks said. “Here we are, nearly a mile away from the beast, and I’m trembling in my boots.”
“See there, man,” Durge said. “You’ve got more sense than Hyden Hawk, too. Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid of such a creature.”
The sound of Hyden Hawk’s laughter came to them on the breeze and they all shared a look of utter disbelief.
A few moments later, the dragon leapt back into the sky and winged away toward the setting sun. Huffa carried Hyden to them quickly, and when they arrived, even the humans could sense the pride she showed at having faced the wyrm with her rider. The man on her back was grinning ear to ear. He looked like a kid who just had a cherry pie placed on his plate.
Hyden didn’t say what he and the dragon had spoken of, and no one asked as they closed on the huddle of dwellings at the sapphire sphere’s edge.
“What if we can’t get in there?” Jicks asked.
“We’ll get in,” Hyden answered.
“How can you be so sure?” Durge asked.
“Look.” Hyden pointed ahead of them.
Looking as if the gods themselves had arrived to greet them, a crowd of brightly dressed, dark-skinned people started streaming out of the huts. As the companions grew even closer, the people began falling to their knees and bowing their heads to the ground. Not only was their hair dyed every color imaginable, so were their clothes. Through his link with Talon, Hyden suddenly understood why they would do such a thing.
“I’m the greatest wizard that ever lived,” Hyden chuckled sarcastically. “They just saw me send away one of the dragons they are so afraid of. Do you think you were the only goofs gawking at me out there?”
Inside, Hyden was still feeling the exhilaration of being so close to, and speaking with, such a wildly powerful creature. “These people must think we are the gods.”
At the moment, Hyden felt like he was one. But even the incredible encounter with the dragon and the ecstatic glee he was feeling couldn’t eclipse the dire warning his goddess had recently given him. Even though they’d avoided a confrontation with the dragon, and these people were no threat, he knew somehow that this wasn’t going to be as easy as he hoped.
Chapter 48
The strange people spoke in a language that none of them could understand. While the women went about preparing a feast for the wolf-riding gods and the giant, Hyden tried to communicate with an orange-haired shaman by drawing pictures in the dirt beside the cook fire. The others were ushered into a community building made of sun-baked mud and straw bricks. It had a thatch roof that was just high enough for Durge to sit under comfortably. It smelled of sweat and spices. Flaming wicks floated in big pots of oil at the room’s corners.
“Why did Hyden say they were dressed so strangely?” Jicks asked Corva as a topless young woman with jiggling breasts and green hair poured them cups of some brown pungent tea.
“When they venture away from the big blue thing, the dragons that fly over the plains feeding don’t see them as food,” the elf answered.
“When they see a dragon they sit down and stay still,” Durge added. “Hyden said that, from a dragon’s eye view, they look like flower bushes or shrubs.”
“That’s what they look like from right here,” Jicks said in a whisper.
“You don’t have to whisper, Jicks. They don’t understand you,” Corva laughed at the boy.
“Aye.” Jicks nodded.
Just then the room darkened slightly, and several of the women buzzing around the long table yelped in fright. Durge chuckled and shrugged at the others. The giant had blown out the flaming wick in the pot nearest him because the smoke was rising and collecting around his head. Seeing that the gods weren’t bringing down their wrath on them, the women calmed themselves and went back to readying the table.
Outside, Hyden and the shaman weren’t doing well communicating until Talon and Urp began to help. The wolf and the hawkling enlisted the aid of a curious sparrow and a terrified goat that seemed to understand the shamans’ dialect. Through the animals’ strange translations, Hyden learned that for hundreds of years, on each full moon, a sacrifice to the dragons had been sent out from the dome. Since the changing of the seasons, almost two years ago, no one had come forth. Hyden contemplated the timing. It was almost two years earlier, at the Summer’s Day festival, that the pact that bound Claret to guard Pavreal’s seal had been broken. Hyden was certain that it wasn’t a coincidence.
All he could do at this point was nod his understanding to the shaman. The animals couldn’t speak back to the excited man. Hyden still had to convey his questions with stick drawings.
He did learn that the people who lived around the magical field were descendants of, or the actual people, who had been cast out of the world inside. They could go back in, but would be killed by some evil beast called the Saki if they did. No one had been brave enough to try. None of them wanted to. The Saki’s master, a devil god the shamans called Bavzreal, or something similar, lived in the towers with a tribe of black-scaled guardians. The shaman said that all of the humans inside were slaves. They had been born and bred only to serve Bavzreal. Being sent out to feed the dragon as a sacrifice was the only hope they had for freedom. Luckily for them, the dragon didn’t venture too close to the powerful barrier, and a lot of the sacrifices were never killed.
Hyden took all this in. Amazingly, he was starting to understand the excited man’s words without the help of the animals. Under his shirt, he could still feel the warm tingling of Claret’s tear as it fountained out its magic. The shaman went on, now speaking in a feverish tone full of hope and conviction, with more than a little fear showing in his eyes.
“It was foretold that you would come to us, Beast Master,” the shaman said, pointing an almost accusatory finger at Hyden. “We have waited and prayed to you with all our hearts and hopes. Is it true you will take this wall down and give us the citadel inside? It was built with the sweat and blood of our ancestors. It is our destiny to inherit the fruit of their labors.”
“Do the beast and the devil god still reside within?” Hyden asked.
The shaman’s eyes grew wide, hearing his own language learned and spoken back to him so quickly.
“Some were seen fleeing in the night shortly after the sacrifices stopped,” the shaman shrugged. “The rest of them are surely inside. Once there were many dragons in our sky, now only a few.”
“Are there other places, villages near here?” Hyden asked.
“There are giants and people like us across the mountains, or so the stories say. We were brought from across the sea to be here. We are few, and out there,” he indicated the expanse of barren land around them, “only dragons, and other beasts, and the roaming tribes of Wedjakin.”
When asked who the Wedjakin were, the shaman described a large race of people, not quite as big as Durge, and only partially human. Hyden pictured Bzorch, the Lord of Locar, as the man described them. He was pretty sure that the Wedjakin were breed giants. That’s what King Aldar had hinted at, too.
Figuring that they would have to face down this Bavzreal and his Saki beast to retrieve the Tokamac Verge, Hyden reassured the shaman that they would at least attempt to fulfill the prophecy of which he spoke. With that, the shaman led him to the others and the feast began.
Huffa and the great wolves were given the goat that had helped the sparrow translate for the shaman. As hungry as the wolves were, they gave the goat a reprieve. Worried that they had offended the mounts of the gods, a different goat was brought to them. This one was older and fatter. The terrified, bleating beast didn’t fare as well
