He remembered voices in the cave echoing from long years ago, old voices with moss growing on their scales and crests worn smooth by the centuries. Songs held layers of meaning, with cross-currents and eddies and changes in the flow that brought new odors to your nose as you sank deeper into the words beneath the words. Sometimes the surface of the water told you nothing of the real story, or turned it on its head.
"Forward, my dark friend. Forward only. Turn back and I will kill them." Her voice came from behind him, speaking to his thoughts. So he led her to the last mound, as if she could not have found it on her own, and they were done.
"And now the little dears will sleep for a night and a night, as you asked. That is, unless you do not do my bidding. We've so much trust between us that I've added my personal binding to the common spell. It ties their lives to my own. To make my meaning plainer still, if I die, they die."
She pointed to the stone tower, looming dark on the hill above them. "Remember, if I do not return from there, they will sleep until the sun dries them to powder and they wash away in the rain. You'd best see to it that we win. Shall we get on with it?"
{I hate you.}
She smiled and shook her head. "I can live with that, love. In fact, I'm rather used to it. A great many people hate me. But they can't do anything about it, and you've just joined their ranks. You're wasting time."
Each step, each stroke of his tail against the water, drove him deeper into her plot. She'd planned her moves to leave him a single path. He bowed his head into the attitude of shame.
{What do I do next?}
"I've made your role simple enough -- even a dinosaur could understand. All you do is climb by the straightest way from this shore to the castle. When you reach the castle or along the way, you kill anyone you meet." She paused, smiling. "Anyone except me, but I suspect you've worked that out. The hatchlings, love, remember the hatchlings."
He growled, a long articulated note deep in his belly. Another dragon would hear that as a challenge to the death.
She cocked her head to one side. "You wish. Anyway, the forest and the land won't like your claw-marks on Maureen's soil, so you can expect some resistance."
And then she vanished between two trees. She hadn't told him what she planned to do. She'd mentioned other allies, other slaves more likely, but she hadn't told him who they were or what her chains bound them to do in the attack. She hadn't told him to spare their lives. That also fit her character. He had learned many things about the dark witch, but each one of them too late.
Straight to the castle? Khe'sha looked up. The way hung steep above him, near the limit a dragon could climb, tangled with old trees and heavy boulders. He had never walked this route before -- when he'd guarded the keep, taking turns with Sha'khe for the Master, they'd followed a gentler path and never come close to the house of piled stone on the crest.
The red witch had killed the Master. The red witch had made no move to claim the beasts that served him. The forest and the winds spoke of falcons set free to fly, of other hunters following their own prey where they wished.
The red witch left the marsh untouched, and brought prey to Khe'sha and the other hunters, and held back the rains that could drown the hatchlings. He understood those things now, too late. But she must die. She must die, and the dark witch live, or Sha'khe would no longer live on in Ghu and Po, in Liu and Shen and Chu . . .
The red witch must become part of Sha'khe's song.
"Hair of fire and temper matching,
"Passion and clear eyes well wed.
"Witch blood drawing ever onward,
"Past obsidian armored head."
Words grew in his head, chanting. The form matched nothing in his memories, a new song, fit for the new race of Pan'gu's children living in this new land. More would come to him, verses in the song that remembered Sha'khe through the generations.
Upward, to the tower on the hill. Khe'sha dug his claws into the hillside and felt soil gripping at them, active, aware. He shouldered his bulk between two trees and they resisted, scratching hard sharp limbs at his eyes. Dirt fell away beneath his hind legs. He dug deeper, clinging to the hillside.
The ground shook under him, gently and more local than any earthquake, and a boulder broke loose from the slope above him. He twisted away, but it swerved and rolled across his forefoot with uncanny accuracy. Sharp pain stabbed up his leg. A broken claw -- broken clean off, deep in the quick with blood welling up between his scales.
". . . you can expect some resistance." The dark witch's voice echoed back to him.
The whole hillside slumped under him, a land-slip from the heavy rains and his sudden added weight. Rains that had kept to the forest, rains that had soaked deep into the soil and hadn't raised the water level of the marsh. A tree tottered on the slope over his head, and he ducked as it crashed to the ground. The outermost leaves brushed his nostrils, bitter and hostile. He slipped back toward the marsh, shaking his head, and dug his claws deeper into the soil.
Fresh stone gleamed above him, shiny with streaks of mud, a rampart twice his height where the land-slip sheared off from the slope. Dragons had many strengths, but climbing wasn't one of them. He'd have to go around, find a new "straightest way" to the top of the hill and the keep waiting there.
He had
