Song of the Dragon

remembered. “That’s a new look for you. When did that happen?”

Mala smiled and turned her head. “Several of the women from Nothree took it upon themselves to trim my ragged mop into this more pleasing form. Do you like it?”

“Yes,” Drakis said as he reached down and removed his sandals, “I like it a great deal.”

“Now, you can stop right there,” Mala said, though there was a smile still playing at the edges of her pout. “I said this is my pool, and brutal warriors are not allowed to share it.”

“I just want to put my feet in,” Drakis complained. “Surely you cannot deny me the opportunity to wash these travel-weary feet?”

“You? Travel weary?” Mala said. “You’ve done nothing but travel, Drakis-and dragged us all along with you.” She affected a serious look on her face, lowering her voice. “We go north! Keep going north! Don’t know where it is. . but it’s north!”

“Fine, have your laugh,” Drakis said, though he was chuckling as well. He slipped his feet into the water. “But it got us here, Mala. . and here is not a bad place to be.”

“No,” she said softly. “Here is a good place.”

Drakis paused for a moment and then, reaching up over his shoulders with both arms, grabbed the back of his tunic and pulled it off over his head.

“You can just stop right there, warrior-boy,” Mala said sternly.

“It’s a mess!” Drakis replied holding out the rumpled cloth. “Look at it! Hasn’t been washed in weeks. . I’ll bet it would move on its own if I left it standing. People won’t talk to me, Mala, for the stench of it. This shirt needs a cleaning. . it’s just a courtesy.”

Mala giggled. “Those are the worst excuses I have ever heard! Can’t you come up with something more creative?”

“ ‘Warrior-boy?’ ” Drakis smirked.

“Very well, that wasn’t my best either, but you have me at a disadvantage.”

“So you need clothes to think?”

Mala smiled through her pout once more. “I don’t seem to be thinking very clearly without them.”

Drakis laughed again, plunging his shirt deep into the pool. Then he drew the wet cloth up, wrung it out and then stopped, just holding it.

“What is it, Draki?” Mala asked, her lithe arms making eddies in the surface of the pool.

He stopped. “It’s good to hear you call me that again.”

“So what is it?” she urged.

“I am weary of the road, Mala,” he said in a voice that barely carried over the rushing sound of the waterfall. “I’ve been fighting all my life for things that meant nothing to me. . for masters who thought of me as property and who didn’t care if I lived or died. Now with all this ‘prophecy’ nonsense. . it feels as though everyone wants me to be something or somebody for them again. I’m tired of living my life for everyone else’s expectations. . everyone else’s life.”

“What do you want, Draki?” Mala said quietly.

“I want. .”

Drakis struggled for a moment. It was a new thought for him and he was having trouble even putting it into words.

“I want. . something of my own.”

“Something of your own?”

“Yes,” Drakis said, his words forming with more conviction around the idea. “I want a place like this, a life that has nothing to do with the Iblisi or the Imperium, or mad dwarves, or prophecies, or this damn song that keeps calling me to a destiny I never asked for and certainly do not want. I want. . I want this place, a small home in the village, cool water to drink, food to eat. I want children to raise and a life that is my own to share and. .”

“And?” Mala asked, pushing backward through the water.

“And. . and I want to know how to swim,” he finished.

Mala laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“The great big warrior afraid of the water!”

“Yes,” he sighed.

“Draki. .”

“Yes, Mala?”

“You shouldn’t be afraid,” she said softly. “I’m standing on the bottom. It’s not that deep.”

Invisible to them both, Ethis the chimerian stood watching Drakis and Mala from the shore of the pool. His skin blended so perfectly with the foliage that had they known he was there, they would not have been able to see him even were they looking directly at the spot where he stood.

All they might have discerned was the movement of the cloth as he fingered Mala’s gown where she had draped it over a bush.

But they would have had to look quickly. . for in the next moment, he was gone.

CHAPTER 40

Without Doubts

Belag crouched down in the lodge of the Elders, peering intently at the pictographs on the walls.

“Hmmm,” he growled in a low voice, his great eyes narrowing as he looked more intently at the images carved into the wall. “They appear to have some of this wrong.”

It was a perfectly reasonable assumption for the manticore-his faith was sure and unshakable.

As cubs pouncing and rolling through the tall grasses of the Chaenandrian borderlands, both he and his brother Karag had lived and breathed the legends, histories, and tales of the loremasters. In the fading light of a spent day, the two of them would gather with the rest of their pride as the stars appeared and listen as the ancient dead and their deeds were brought again to life in their imaginations. Stories of the old ways and the shattering empires of men, the fall of the dragons and the desperate charges of the Chaenandrian Guardians, whose numbers were so great that the earth trembled when they ran into battle.

But of all the legends told beneath the fading cobalt of the sky, none impressed his brother Karag more than that of Drakis Aerweaver and the Dragons of Armethia. Both of them would lie spellbound at the sound of the loremaster’s voice as he wove the tale from memory. Belag could still see in his mind’s eye those dragons that flew in their imaginations just beyond reach, weaving in and out between the stars as they appeared. He could almost picture the Northern Lords on their backs, watching over the world far beneath them. Then the loremaster came to the tragic and terrible betrayal where all the world-including many weak and covetous Lords of the Manticorian Prides-conspired in their jealousy to bring low the might of Drakosia and take on its glory for their own. In sorrow at the betrayal, Drakis removed himself from the circles of the world. Then came the mournful song of the dragons as they in turn were brought to a terrible awareness of their own guilt and began the ages-old lament even as the great cities of Drakosia vanished into the mists, never to be found again among mortal lands. The song, the loremaster told them, was still sung today by the dragons of the north country beyond the raging waters of the oceans, calling to the night stars in the hope that Drakis would hear their sorrow, accept their regret, and return once more in might and power to establish justice for all the races of Dunaea who longed once more to be free. This was the great hope of the loremaster for the Khadush Pride; for though they, too, were cursed as all the manticores for the betrayal, they had been among the prides that had broken with the Lords of the Manticorian Clans and would not allow themselves to become toothless puppets of the Rhonas oppression.

By the crackling bonfire around which he and his brother had gathered with the rest of the Khadush Pride, Belag heard the loremaster speak of their glorious destiny: to resist the Rhonas, to free the enslaved prides, and to look for the day when Drakis-the mystical human of divine power from the north-would again take form among