three galleries had been sunk into the mountain, but after forty days, the diggers met tougher rock. All three passages were blocked by the same impenetrable black stone, and their deer-antler picks and stone hammers could make little progress against the impervious wall.
“Do you need my help?” Duranix said.
“Not yet,” Amero replied. “There’s no better way to wake a lazy mind than to put it to work. Mieda will figure out some way around the problem.”
Mieda was their chief digger, a man of many unusual talents. He’d walked into Yala-tene a year ago, starving and unable to speak. With patience and many good meals, he’d recovered, though he remained a taciturn, enigmatic figure. He had many skills, but his black skin and tightly curled hair marked him as being from a far different place.
Amero had been thrilled to meet Mieda, remembering the glimpse he’d caught of the two black men the day his family was attacked by the yevi. However, any questions Amero and his fellow villagers had about his origins were doomed to remain unanswered. Mieda would not talk about where he was from or about his past, but he did work hard and well, winning the trust and respect of the plainsmen.
“Speaking of problems, how’s yours?” Duranix asked.
“Oh! My fire!”
Amero ran down the steps to the great hearth in the center of the cave. He used the leg bone of an ox to rake the ashes away from the morning fire. Buried under the ashes were several bronze dragon scales. Amero was trying to find a way to work Duranix’s bronze into forms the villagers could use. Gingerly, with much waving of singed fingers, Amero snatched the blackened metal from the ashes.
Duranix slipped off the platform in one sinuous movement and came to the hearth. He found the notion of formulating tools from his hide peculiarly human. His wide reptilian head hovered over Amero’s shoulder.
“Well?”
Though warped and blackened by heat, the scales had not melted. “Failed again!” Amero cried. “I was sure it would work this time!”
“What did you do differently?”
Amero threw the hot shards of bronze back in the firepit and dusted his sooty hands. “I wrapped the scales in wet river clay. I thought it might hold in the heat and melt the bronze.”
“You laid an ordinary fire?”
Amero ran a hand through his cropped hair. “Yes. I’ve already tried using different kinds of wood in the fire. That had no effect. Are you sure your scales can be melted?”
“So I was told, long ago. It’s not something I’ve given much thought to, you understand,” said Duranix, rapidly losing interest. He flowed under the larger cave opening and reared up, resting his foreclaws on the rim of the hole and stretching his wings slightly. “I’m leaving the valley tonight. I may not be back till dawn.”
Amero yawned, stretching his arms wide. “I was in the diggings all day, breathing dust and smoke from torches. I think I’ll just wash up and go to sleep.”
Long ago, at Amero’s request, the dragon made a rent in the outer wall of the cave. A steady trickle of water from the falls flowed down this crack and filled a deep basin Duranix clawed out of the rock.
Amero stripped off his buckskin shirt and dipped his hands in the cool water.
“Where will you go?” he asked.
“South by east.”
Amero stopped, water dripping from his cupped hands. “You’ve scouted that direction twice in the last five days. What’s out there?”
“I don’t know. Something. I’ve seen large clouds of dust hanging in the air at twilight. I’ve seen swaths cut through the grass by some large, moving formation. The tracks I’ve found are of four-footed creatures.”
Amero dipped his hands in the water again and splashed a double handful on his face. “Yevi?” They’d periodically had to hunt down and destroy small yevi packs, but there’d been no massing of Sthenn’s minions in almost ten years.
Duranix shook his head. Several loose scales fell from his neck, ringing when they hit the stone floor.
“It’s the wrong direction for yevi unless they moved east in large numbers without my detecting them,” the dragon said. “Whatever it is, they don’t want to be seen. They move by night and hide by day. Game animals flee before them but follow after them, if that makes any sense.”
The dragon thrust his head through the cave opening and sniffed the evening air. “Nothing seems amiss, yet something is,” Duranix rumbled. “I’ll find out what. Nothing on the plain can hide from me for long.”
With his back feet gripping the rim, Duranix squeezed his bulky shoulders through the hole and unfurled his wings. A single push of his massive rear legs launched him skyward.
“Be careful!” Amero shouted. It was a silly thing to say to a creature as powerful as a dragon, but Amero meant it. He’d grown extremely fond of Duranix, slowly coming to understand the dragon’s odd sense of humor — and developing a sense of humor himself in the process. He enjoyed their companionship greatly. It still amazed him that he had such a fantastic creature for a friend.
He pulled a fur blanket around his shoulders and sat down on the warm hearthstones. Scratching a piece of scorched bronze with his fingernails, he pondered his problem. He needed more heat if he was ever to melt the bronze. What made one fire hotter than another? Women in the village would sometimes hurry a pot to boiling by blowing the flames with a reed fan. Would such a technique work on metal? Maybe he could get one of the town basket weavers to make him a big fan for the experiment.
Amero lay down on the hearth. Sleep claimed him, but his rest was not peaceful. For the first time in many years he dreamed of the day the yevi had killed his family. In his dream he kept looking back over his shoulder to see Nianki running behind him. Faster! Go faster! She mouthed the words, but no sound came out. Amero raced for the nearest tree. By the time he reached it and looked back again, Nianki had vanished under a seething mass of fanged, gray-furred bodies. He woke calling her name.
Duranix cruised slowly at a great height, buoyed by warm updrafts rising through the cold, high air. Far below, the valleys were deeply shadowed clefts where any number of enemies could hide. The valleys opened onto the plain, which by night resembled a featureless sea of gray grassland. The dragon gazed down, trying to detect movement. Individual creatures would be invisible from this height. Even the heat of their blood wasn’t discernible. It would take a hundred creatures moving in unison to register in Duranix’s vision.
He floated for some time, bearing south and east from home. Far to the south was the homeland of the elves, a region he could safely ignore. They were no danger to him. The elves were too civilized, too powerful to succumb to the influence of Sthenn. The host moving across the eastern plain by night, slowly closing on the mountains, could be an elf band, but he discounted the idea. He’d found signs in the Khar River region that the elves had been fighting a formidable foe there. Daylight investigation revealed half a dozen elven strongholds burned to the ground since the red moon last waned.
Duranix had landed at one such site. The log stockade had still been smoldering when he arrived, but the only bodies he’d found were of slain elves. There had been no clues left behind to identify the marauders. Whoever had attacked the outposts carried away their own dead and scoured the battlefield for lost weapons.
The dragon hadn’t shared this with Amero or the villagers. The settled life of the plainsmen was still precarious. One wrong word and many frightened humans would flee for the imagined safety of dispersal on the open grasslands. Amero had worked long and hard to win the trust of his people. He cared deeply that the village succeed. Duranix was too fond of his friend to allow his great project to fail, so he’d decided to hold his tongue until he had more certain knowledge of the possible danger.
A red glimmer broke the monotonous gray expanse below. It was only a momentary flare, but it caught the dragon’s attention. Wings beating hard, he held his place and watched for a repeat of the telltale light. It did not appear again.
He spiraled down as quietly as possible, slowing his speed by letting his feet dangle. The savanna gained more detail. A strip of silver water running east-west, probably the river the elves called the Thon-Tanjan, appeared on Duranix’s left. The ground was dotted with a few very large, widely spaced trees, burltops and vallenwoods. Scores of men or beasts could hide under a single one of them. He’d have to get closer still to investigate. At least the hilly terrain afforded him a concealed place to land.
The dragon alighted in a narrow draw and shrank to human guise. By the time he climbed the highest of the
