AuSurath picked out another troll astride a dragonelle’s neck, throttling her just at the neck-hearts. Only her tail still spasmed, but it was enough to keep the troll squeezing. AuSurath bounded out of the darkness, and this time struck the troll full on the chest. He pushed one limb down with his tail and lashed out with hind legs like a snared rabbit. The troll came apart in satisfyingly large pieces.

“We’re lost, we’re lost, fly for the Lighthalls, dragons of the Host,” he heard his lieutenant call.

A dragon or two flapped into the sky. Bounding trolls jumped out of the darkness, the clenched fingers of those huge forelimbs pounding and denting the very earth they crossed.

Gundar dug his sword into a troll’s back and used it as a handle to pull himself up onto AuSurath’s back, where he produced a double-edged dagger from a hidden sheath on his thigh.

“Let’s fly! To stay is death.”

AuSurath rose into the air but stopped with a jerk. A troll had him by the tail and one rear saa. He clawed with the other in a flapping panic.

“Too heavy,” AuSurath grunted.

“I’ve got it, old friend. Avenge me!”

Gundar ran lightly down his back, drawing his sword, launched himself off his tail, and landed atop the troll. His shining dagger fell, and rose again covered in green-and-black slime. He tore through the troll’s flesh like a rat digging into a corpse, using both hand and blade to tear at the thing’s shoulder.

With a mighty blow, Gundar plunged his dagger deep into the joint of the limb anchoring him. A second stab and the troll relaxed, falling as its blood pumped out into the night.

AuSurath rose, flapping hard. Two onrushing trolls jumped for him and collided with a scaly thunk!

He wheeled and Gundar looked up at him. His rider gave a quick salute—and was dashed into dressed meat and naked bone by the fist-swipe of the dying troll.

AuSurath watched pieces of Gundar fall, numb and cold and shocked and then his wings took over and, driven by horror, they bore him off into the night.

It took him the entire flight to the delvings to come to terms with the idea that the Heavy Wing of the Aerial Host as he’d known it was no more. The Grand Commander had fallen in battle, as had almost all of the dragons, yet the Wing Commander escaped. What would the gossips in the Lavadome say?

They didn’t understand the circumstances. They hadn’t seen dragons torn apart like cooked chickens on the riverbank. They would still judge him, though.

He followed the shining river to the delvings, saw the welcoming orange and yellow lights of lanterns at the sandy landing at midriver.

No. He couldn’t face the enormity of it just yet. Something was nagging at him.

AuSurath was not a dragon of exemplary reason. When experience and training couldn’t guide him, he had a hard time laying out arguments for and against. He was the first to admit it. But he had a way of feeling his way through to a solution in strange circumstances. At the moment, instinct told him that he needed to speak to Varatheela, perhaps more than he’d ever needed to speak to anyone.

Something was dreadfully wrong with what had happened at the riverbank. He couldn’t cite the exact reason just yet, but he was sure of it, just as he would know a mammal by the general shape and fur, without going through a catechism of questions about live birth and using milk to feed its young.

Well, if they were marching up the Old North Road, they shouldn’t be very hard to find.

It took him two days of steady flight without food, rest, or much more than a mouthful of water to reach them.

The way he saw it, there was little point in sleeping, anyway. His dreams, as sure as sunrise, would put him back among the trolls on the riverbank, and nothing on earth could make him return there ever again if he could help it.

They were resting in a town plaza in front of an inn, near the longest bridge on the road. The inn had, appropriately enough, a dragon on it.

The objects were wavy and unreal-looking. The world seemed to sway as he landed.

“Betrayed. NiVom wants us dead,” he managed, just.

When he had his wind back he continued. “We were stationed on the riverbank so we could be attacked. We were just waiting for it. Gundar dead. BaMelphistran dead. All dead. Murder.”

He tasted wine in his mouth. They were attempting to revive him. It worked just long enough for him to say:

“They don’t need dragons anymore, Father. Something dreadful is driving the Tyr.”

Before he finally dropped into an exhausted unconsciousness.

BOOK THREE

Outcome

“ALL TALES END IN TRAGEDY. FOLLOW THE HERO LONG ENOUGH,

YOU’LL STEP ACROSS HIS CORPSE.”

—Ballad of the Dragon Kings (Elvish origin)

Chapter 16

The news from AuSurath left the celebration in front of the Green Dragon Inn stunned.

Wistala had been enjoying the homecoming to Mossbell and the hills and fields where she’d spent her hatchling years. The old rooflines were as familiar and comforting to her as her mother’s fringe. She’d grown up at the local estate under an elf named Rainfall. He was now dead and growing in a patch of forest overlooking his beloved river valley and the four-span bridge he’d so long kept in repair.

Elves didn’t die so much as transform after death. She’d read some philosophy that even dragons returned to the earth eventually, where their bodies provided nutrients for plants. The elves just removed a few steps from that chain of life and transformed directly.

She was beginning to see why RuGaard insisted on walking all the way to Nilrasha’s refuge. The whole way, entire populations were turning out to see the dragons pass. To these northerners, dragons were something they saw only overhead, at a distance, or a reason for painful levies of cattle and grain. Few had seen dragons in their grandeur up close. Every little village they passed through turned into a parade, continued for a long while until the hardiest boy and girl following turned back for home.

Yes, strange and remarkable as a fox running the top rail of a fence. Strange and remarkable until you knew about the stolen chickens and the pursuing hounds. There could be no quiet little murders with a whole thane’s population leaning on their shovels and berry-baskets, watching a dozen dragons file down the road.

The Green Dragon put out food for them and quickly slaughtered some pigs to be eaten in Wistala’s memory of the day they’d all fought off a barbarian raid together.

“It appears the Empire had a parasite growing inside it,” DharSii said. “I’m afraid that unlike a tapeworm, this one can grow large enough to kill the host and then continue on its own.”

“But who or what is it?” AuRon asked.

“NiVom and Imfamnia are behind it all,” RuGaard said. “I’m certain of that.”

“Who’s left?” Wistala asked. “Seems to me many of the aboveground dragons are dead. The fighting ones, that is. I hope the Protectors are safe, for my brothers’ sakes. I don’t see what NiVom and Imfamnia will gain by killing so many of their own kind.”

“They’re mad. It must be,” AuSurath said.

“I can believe one dragon going mad,” AuRon said to his son. “Two? Madnesses that feed off each other?”

“Some curse of the Red Queen. They never should have taken over her palace,” the Copper said.

“It may be the Lavadome itself,” DharSii said. “It’s an engine of great energy. I’ve never been able to determine what it’s gathering all that energy for. All the Tyrs grew a little—funny—toward the end. Perhaps the Lavadome was trying to take over their minds.”

“Are you saying a vast mineral formation is intelligent?” AuRon asked. His griff rattled.

“Remember our hatching, AuRon?” the Copper asked.

“Less and less every year,” AuRon said. “What about you?”

“The same. Remember the fight with our brother, the red?”

“He almost had me. Then you jumped on him and I put my egg-horn into his belly. It was over in a griff-tchk. I’m suggesting we repeat that. I’ll keep the Empire busy on the surface. You go at them from under.”

“Maybe this time we’ll both end up on top of the egg shelf,” the Copper said.

“You can have it. All I want is my mate.”

“I could say the same thing, brother.”

“Do you know a safe way into the Lower World?”

“My mate’s hall, for a start.”

“Tell her to abandon her post at once. I believe this is a war of eradication. Whatever power is directing those trolls, it wants to kill every rat in the barn but leave the hayloft intact.”

“All the more reason for me to hurry,” AuRon said, eyes wide and alarmed.

He shot into the sky like an arrow. A human toddler whooped at the sight.

They left AuSurath, exhausted, at the Green Dragon Inn, where the hosts promised to feed him until he recovered. Wistala suggested that he return to either the dragon tower or the Isle of Ice and consider his future.

He insisted that he would join them to the south as soon as he recovered. He wanted to see his mother safely out of the Empire, if the slaughter of the dragons had yet spared her.