'Sunbright! Wait!'
Chapter 11
The barbarian turned and squinted up to where something fluttered in the round, gray rim of outlined sky.
'Oh, it's you.'
The raven cocked its feet, folded its wings, plunked to a landing, and clacked its black beak. 'Stinks. Where are you bound?'
'Why should I tell you?' Sunbright's emotions were churning inside him, and anger boiled up. 'Who failed to tell me when bandits were about to attack my party and ended up killing three of us?'
The bird tipped its head to present first one, then the other beady eye. 'I can't know everything.'
'You flew right over the road! You could have warned me!'
'I told you where to find that four-prong buck in the birches, did I not?'
The barbarian piffed. 'A hunting dog could have done that! I expect a magic raven to reveal more than the weather!'
Ignoring the criticism, the bird pointed its beak toward the back of the cave. 'Why?'
Sunbright sighed, anger winking out, despair returning. He related the story of the One King holding Greenwillow.
Oddly, the raven commented on what was, to Sunbright, an inconsequential thing. 'A book? You're to retrieve a book? With a ruby set in the cover?'
'So what? All the treasure of the world might be in there, for all the good it will do me. What color are rubies, anyway?'
The bird muttered something that sounded to the barbarian like 'damsys' then croaked, 'Red. What do you know of this dragon, Wrathburn?'
'It's a big red dragon packed to the eyeballs with dung.' And armor and bones, he added mentally. The young man cast a nervous glance over his shoulder, but heard only a tick in the snoring. At least the stink was lessening, or else he was adjusting to it. He'd probably smell like death and dragon till the day he died.
'Wrathburn…' The raven hopped, nailed a cockroach from the stone floor, and gulped it down with his head back. 'Very strong, devilishly wicked, inordinately vain, as I recall. And not too bright.'
'Bright? You mean its scales?'
'No, its intellect!' groused the raven. 'You're an apt match for it.'
'What?' Sunbright warily watched the darkness for hints of advancing dragon. With his luck, he'd get stomped on without ever being seen. 'That doesn't sound very helpful. How about a soft spot, you know, a white scale where a knitting needle would penetrate? Near his tail, perhaps?'
The raven shook his beak. 'Sorry, no. But Wrathburn does have a reputation for being vain. In a man, that's usually the most damning quality. More men have lost kingdoms to vanity than to any other vice. Remember the lesson you learned on the road from Dalekeva.'
In a burst of feathers, the raven hopped into the air and plunged away, out the yawning cave mouth into the drizzle.
'Hey, wait! What lesson…?'
Sunbright clamped a hand over his mouth. Here he was shouting like an idiot in the marketplace while, within spitting distance, a dragon slept.
Or…
Silent, hardly breathing, he listened.
The snoring had stopped.
Desperately, Sunbright tried to think. The road from Dalekeva? Walking to Tinnainen? It had been a long road with many minor adventures. The only true danger he'd faced was when he and Greenwillow had bumped into patrols of orcs. Of course, he'd wanted to skulk through unseen, but she'd insisted the quick and sensible way was just to clutch their pass and march down the middle of the road…
A while later, Sunbright came swinging down a slope, sword at his shoulder, whistling jauntily. The floor of the cave was smooth from a dragon dragging its iron-hard belly scutes along the floor. The barbarian was guided by the flickering flame that welled from the nostrils of the dragon as it slept-or pretended to-and by the reflected light from the monstrous pile of gold, silver, gemstones, and other precious artifacts that made up the dragon's bed. Sunbright couldn't guess the treasure's value, but the hoard rose above his head in some places. The cave sprawled in many directions, the distances lost, but the treasure pile had been scooped out in the middle to make a resting place for the dragon, like a kitten in a pile of mittens.
The dragon was immense. Its head was longer than a rowboat, frilled with horns like stalactites, its neck like a stone bridge, its back like a low hill. Details were indistinct, but its scales seemed as big as a man's hand, overlaid so tightly they bristled outward. The beast's pointed ears drooped at the tips, and its nostrils were flame- blackened around the edges. Sunbright stopped and planted himself right in front of those nostrils and tried not to think about how hot they were.
His whistling trailed off, like birdsong fading into the forest. He bit down on his quivering stomach and willed his legs to stay steady. His bravado had almost failed him as he entered this vast cavern, for he'd passed the rotted remains of a dozen corpses of all sizes, including endless fragments wedged in cracks to rot to nothingness. But at least he'd gotten this far, which was farther than those unfortunates. And he had a ghost of a plan, which was something.
Still, those nostrils were as big as caldrons, and the flame that winked within hotter than any forge. He could feel the heat a dozen feet back. He hated to see the flames well out of that awesome nose, but on the other hand, when the dragon breathed in, the cave became pitch-black, which was even more disconcerting.
Then the slanted yellow eyes opened, and Sunbright knew what it was to be a mouse being stared down by a cat. The dragon's black pupils were bigger than his head.
Yet he held his ground and boldly called 'Good day,' his voice a bit shrill.
Without lifting its head, the dragon opened jaws that could swallow a man whole. 'You pick a painful but noteworthy suicide, fleshy morsel.' The rumble of Wrathburn's voice, like a stone boat over a wooden bridge, made Sunbright's breastbone tingle.
'I've been sent by the One King to slay you!' he announced in what he hoped were cheerful tones.
The dragon moved like a glacier, rearing upward to tower over Sunbright and better aim his nostrils. The barbarian heard plinks and clatters as jewels and coins cascaded from the beast's scaly hide in a precious rain. The dragon inhaled deeply, like a blast furnace being stoked.
'But after seeing you, I cannot even imagine harming such a beautiful creature!'
Wrathburn gulped as he swallowed fire. 'Beautiful?'
'Truly!' Sunbright assured him. 'Unparalleled beauty and unspeakable magnificence! Never have I beheld such a wonder, and never could I lay a hand on such a fearsome, awe-inspiring being! You are truly the most marvelous creature in all of Toril! Why, you take my breath away!'
Confused, the dragon mulled over the compliments. He wasn't used to flattery. Screaming, begging, crying, whining, yes, but not compliments.
Still alive, neither flinders nor cinders, the barbarian dropped his sword dramatically and slathered on the praise with a trowel. 'As long as I live I shall sing the praises of this most magnificent sight, the glory and grandeur of the king of all skies, the noblest creature in creation, who looks down upon the world with his fearsome gaze, knowing every being to be his inferior!'
Summoning every scrap of story and song he'd ever heard, the young man waxed eloquent for what seemed like hours, until his voice began to creak and his tongue grew numb and stumbled. And repeated itself, at which point Wrathburn grew restless and began to swish his tail back and forth amid the gems and gold. He wanted new praise, an endless stream of it. But Sunbright knew eventually he'd run out of words and then be dinner. So, drawing a mental breath, the barbarian took a leap into unknown territory.
'But oh, the perfidy of the One King!' Sunbright threw his arm across his eyes in mock horror. 'To think, to
