Of course, if he really wanted to sober up, all he had to do was think about that dragon. It haunted him.
Chapter Two
Khe'sha brooded over the skull of his mate. He coiled his body around the nest mound, a living wall of obsidian scales looming taller than a man above the murky water and deep marsh grass.
Sha'khe was dead, her song cut short between one word and the next. He flicked out his tongue and caressed the sharp ridges of her crest, stroking up the long slope of her muzzle from her nose. She'd always enjoyed that, stretching flat in the sun with a rumbling sigh while he groomed her scales. He remembered how she'd relax, the membrane rising slowly across her great yellow eye as she drowsed.
Now she was gone, murdered, her bones scattered in a long cold drift through the forest where she had fallen. Her kin should have carried ribs and thigh-bones and the great links of her spine to the hidden bone-cave and sung her deeds each step of the way in a strong deep-noted poem that distilled her life into its essence, but her nest-mates lived in another land, her clan lived in another land. Her bones should lie with her ancestors in another land.
Her kind, his kind, did not belong in this land. He hated it. He hated the humans and Old Ones who had brought them here and forced them to guard a grim, gray castle instead of the bright crimson Temples of the Moon.
{I will kill them,} he mind-spoke to her empty skull. {I will rend their flesh and feed it to our young. I will tear at their keep until the stones lie scattered like autumn leaves and their bones gleam cold and white under the moon. They all will die. No one will sing their deeds and deaths. They will have never been.}
He tested the mound's warmth with his tongue, thrusting gently at both the sun side and the shade, and then rested his sensitive throat across the surface to judge the heat that flowed from deep around the eggs. He pawed dry marsh-grass over the shaded side to hold in the heat of the leaves that rotted there, warming the clutch. He studied the sky, afraid of rain -- the long, soaking rains that could flood the marsh until dark water swallowed the nest and killed the tiny dragonets inside their eggs.
Dragons grew slowly, and the seasons turned slowly. The season for nesting had finally come. Now Khe'sha guarded the end of Sha'khe's song. Twelve of the mottled brown eggs lay buried, near the time of hatching. Twelve dragons alone, far from their ancestors, far from the Celestial Temple and the Sages. Perhaps six or eight or ten would live to taste air and see the sky. Then what?
The strongest might survive to breed. With luck. And who would they join their souls to, in this land of puny apes? Who would teach them the songs, the long sonorous history of clan and bloodline, the deep thoughts and resplendent deeds that echoed through the hills and valleys and grew with each generation? They would live alone, and die alone, as he would die alone.
Only the nest remained, his life and heart. He would never take another mate. The dragon bond tied a pair for centuries, their bodies and thoughts mirrored like their hatchling half-names were mirrored around the deep booming sound in the gut that clothed monkeys couldn't make. A dragon pair grew together through the ages until one could not live without the other. Only the nest kept Khe'sha alive, now that Sha'khe was dead.
I will see the hatchlings leave the nest and hunt. I will teach them the songs I know. I will have revenge.
His belly rumbled. A huge body needed huge quantities of food. Khe'sha uncoiled himself from the nest mound. He slithered through the black water of the marsh, over muck deeper than a man, through thorn tangles that scratched harmlessly back across his scales but that would claw bare flesh to ribbons, twisting and back-tracking on his own trail to create a maze of traps and blind but deadly alleys. A beast of his bulk left a mark anyone could see. He made sure that trying to follow it would be foolish and dangerous.
If Sha'khe still lived, they would have taken turns to hunt and guard. Without his mate, he had to trust the marsh to guard their precious eggs.
He came to open water, cool after the sun on his black scales, cooler still in the depths. He sank lower, swimming slow and sinuous like a snake, controlling his breath to hold his eyes and nostrils just awash. The surface barely rippled with his passage.
Something moved in the water at the marsh's edge, head dipping and rising, a plant-eater pulling up roots and leaves, chewing, wading on, dipping, rising, shaking loose a spray of water, chewing. It was large enough to make a meal, large enough to be worth the hunt, slow and stupid and unafraid. Khe'sha lined up his body on his prey, exhaled, and sank beneath the water. He floated through the darkness, a shadow within the shadows, touched bottom, crouched low and slithered on across the muck until he felt air touch his crest, and threw his bulk forward.
His teeth slashed into meat, hot and salty and sweet, and he clamped the weight of it in his jaws and rolled. Bones cracked. His prey struggled for an instant, shuddered, and fell limp. Khe'sha whipped his neck once more to be sure, snapping more bones, tearing at the bottom of the marsh and flinging muck and blood-tinged water in wide sheets.
He rose out of the water and examined his kill. It was new
