He gave the instructions for a single dwarf to send a flag of truce to Shadowcatch.

Once negotiations were under way, the atmosphere in the dwarf-den lightened.

“We’re not part of the Dragon Empire, either, and we’d like to keep it that way. What are your standards for joining this ‘Northern Alliance’?”

“We never thought of it as standards so much, just each dwarf that joins swears never to betray another of the alliance.”

“Might I join?”

“You don’t shy away from putting yourself forward, do you? What’s your game?”

“I’ve been a lonely exile these past twelve years. The Empire tried to kill me more than once after I’d agreed to go. In the end, they’ll either kill me or I’ll get Tyr NiVom. Sad, we were once friends.”

“Politics does that. There was no more loyal dwarf to Fang-breaker than myself, yet I curse his name now for the death of my comrades. All for his vanity.”

The Copper sent a message to Shadowcatch requesting food and drink, as he was close to starving. True enough, the dwarfs themselves were on rations that hardly qualified as food—tree bark, straw from bedding, and cave lichens went into their soup.

Shadowcatch, reading between the lines, it seemed, or just out of his own oversized sense of what counted as a meal, sent down quarters of beef and mutton, a cask of sweet fortified wine, and onions and potatoes for “ballast.” It was carried in by the “scouts.” The dwarfs weren’t quite ready to trust a second dragon by the Copper.

The dwarfs fell on the foodstuffs like the Copper’s rats, barely toasting the meat on sticks before devouring it. It occurred to the Copper that Shadowcatch could have poisoned the food and gotten rid of the lot of them—dragon stomachs were cast from the same material that went into their scale, it seemed, and alkaloids that would kill a hominid found their way into the firebladder.

“I prefer honest beer. This stuff sticks to the tongue, rather than cleaning it.”

“Well, dragon, I believe you have a deal,” Seeg said.

The alliance almost shattered the first night of the joint dwarf-dragon hike to the tower.

The oddball band of scouts waylaid Seeg and his servant as they bathed in a stream downslope from camp. While they weren’t murderers, they were thieves and brigands, for they struck both Seeg and his servant with stones, knocking them senseless. When they awoke, Seeg’s rings and crystalline belt were gone.

The thieves fled south to Hypatian lands. Shadowcatch sent two of his grounded dragons after them, though he didn’t have hopes of catching the scoundrels.

“That elf’s raven will mark the dragons from miles off and the trail will disappear into a stream or swamp,” he reported.

Seeg thought the items a small loss. They were most useful underground, where they generated a small amount of light in otherwise pitch-black conditions. Thanks to the poor condition of the lichens in the dwarfs’ beards, the crystals were sometimes necessary.

“Why would they strike now?” the Copper asked. “If the dwarfs are to be killed, wouldn’t it be better from their employer’s perspective to follow them and see where they settle?”

“Perhaps they weren’t seeking death after all. When they could take what they were really after, they left.”

“But his rings and that belt aren’t one-twentieth of his wealth, never mind the rest of the dwarfs. If you’re going to steal and run, why not make off with gold and diamonds, not decor?”

Chapter 9

AuRon and Wistala wasted weeks tracing Nissa across the borders of the Sunstruck Sea.

They had both seen the fringes of the princedoms of the Sunstruck Sea. This was the first time either had gone beyond the villages in the jungles bordering Old Uldam.

They found an incredibly rich land. Lush fields bordered by good roads and irrigation ditches, rivers filled with sail, oared, and drawn-barge traffic, and cities teeming with white-clad men.

Everything grew huge in the sun. The heat poured out of the sky and splashed across the ground, boiling up from anything dark. Big-eared, wide-horned cattle, nearly as tall as a man at the shoulder, wandered the fields, long tails swishing at equally enormous flies. They saw wild Rocs above the jungle, riding currents on motionless, outspread wings. The only time AuRon saw wings flap was when a pair flew close enough to them to decide they weren’t prey size and went back to circling.

It was a pleasant enough land, too hot to be idyllic as far as the dragons were concerned, but a place pleasing to the senses. For the eyes there were intense greens and blues in the water that matched the sky above. The locals preferred to build in white masonry, though most buildings had colorful awnings.

The people of those countless city-states, each a walled island of civilization surrounded by jungle, riverside, mountain, coastline, or some valuable combination of all the above, fled at the sight of dragons. Wistala’s prediction proved true again and again. Archers and spearmen would occupy walls, towers, and high domed steeples. The steeples in the wealthier towns curved and twisted in snail-shell shapes and those in the poorer towns were simple constructs of steam-bent wood and metal hoops.

Even when a few brave souls emerged from a sally-port in the walls to speak to the dragons, there were language difficulties. AuRon and Wistala, between them, knew the trade-tongue of the outskirts of Hypat and some human tongues, but none of them had any effect on the men. Desperate, AuRon even tried mindspeech, but all it produced was a broad smile and nods from the interlocutors.

At night, settling beside each other head to tail as they had when they were hatchlings, they chatted, sometimes in the rain that seemed to strike every afternoon. They switched between mindspeech and words without much paying attention to which they were using, as humans having an animated discussion will use their voices, expressions, and hands.

The talk turned to the origins of trolls.

“DharSii told me a legend once,” Wistala said. “He said he heard it from a dwarf. According to this dwarf, trolls have only recently joined the world. They arrived on a piece of stone that fell from the sky. The stone was so heavy and so hard that when it struck the earth, the very land puddled and formed into waves like a lake when a heavy stone is tossed. A hurricane washed over that part of earth, uprooting entire trees and flinging them, scorched, a whole horizon away. When the cataclysm was over, the trolls appeared out of the choking dust and fiery sky.”

AuRon said, “One of the blighter sweepers at the Sadda-Vale told me his legend. He’d just lost a brother to that troll that raided our flocks and came right down to the fishing pools two years ago—remember? He was mourning his brother through a cask of beer Scabia allowed him—odd that the blighters brew beer for their own use, but they must get permission from Scabia to drink it—and he said something along the lines of wishing Anklemere had never called them down from the sky.”

“DharSii believes trolls are connected to Anklemere, too.” Wistala stared off into the northern sky, where Susiron, and presumably DharSii, stayed in place while the world turned.

AuRon, were he to confess his secrets, was a little jealous of his sister’s devotion to DharSii. He was an impressive dragon, but he’d treated his sister poorly. Allowing the phony mating with Aethleethia, keeping her twisting like a bauble on a string while he attended to other matters . . . Cruel was the only word for it. A dragon should have the courage to name his mate and fight for her.

“I can’t see that Natasatch has treated you any better,” Wistala said.

Cursed female! Dragonelles and dragon-dames had such highly tuned abilities with mindspeech they could read private thoughts if you weren’t guarded in them!

So they followed the coast, zigzagging to visit the interior cities.

It was a patchwork land. Always there was a palace or two, occasionally a fortress, and a city built around the mysterious conical minarets of the priests. Wistala, better read than he, explained that theirs was a fetish that believed in a single vast god encompassing all, but this god’s will was so inscrutable he either sent emissaries down or elevated men to demigod status to speak for him. Each of these temples was watched over and named for one of these gods or demigods. The priest caste wasn’t as involved in day-to-day life as the Hypatian “low clergy” that Wistala was familiar with—quite the opposite, in fact. They renounced the world and lived lives of simplicity. They sat in the temples, heard the prayers of the locals, and meditated long on them, in the hope that this universal God would nudge the universe in the proper direction.

AuRon preferred the straightforward cults of Old Uldam. You took a deer from the forest and you thanked both your personal god and the deer-god, and you always left a vital at the kill as an apology to the leopard whose game you poached. It just seemed to him that the blighters got all their business done right away, dealing directly with the gods. Priests and such made him wonder just how much of the offerings to the gods ever made it beyond the priest’s purse.

The princedoms of the Sunstruck Sea were a frustrating lot to deal with. They had negotiating intermediaries who came out and spoke to AuRon and Wistala.