The temperature had risen considerably on this side of the mountain; Wistala no longer felt frozen and windstruck, but simply chilled and damp. She didn’t like this much wet in the air, it fed itchy growths that lived under your scales.
As she rested she counted waterfalls. It seemed every mountainside had a trickle or two running down, more easily spotted at a distance, as they cascaded between the thick fern growth—higher up they looked like faint veins against the rock face.
An orange flash caught her eye, a gout of flame that welled and slowly faded. The odd shape to it was evocative of a dragon’s—no, there was a dragon there, on a ledge where the mountain was broken by a crack, like a smashed plate unevenly repaired.
So excited was she—hope died hard in Wistala—that she immediately launched herself off the prominence, flying for the dragon as fast as sore wings would carry her.
The dragon—she saw it was a male by his distinctive coloring: a dull orange like a fading sunset that alternated with stripes of black. The pattern intrigued her; in her experience scaled dragons were usually uniform in color. Auron sometimes showed stripes like that against his gray, but he’d been born without scales.
She landed a little up the ledge from him—she folded her wings as she came in, absorbed the impact with her tail and settled with only a slight slip. She wanted the advantage of height just in case.
Though she thought it a well-done landing. But the dragon ignored her.
He nosed in a pile of broken rock, grasping pieces with his tongue and swallowing them. He had four horns, and two more buds, rising from his crest. Older than she, younger than Father, and there was a strange gold behind his griff: he had a ring threaded in the skin of his earhole.
He extended his long neck, took a big mouthful of water, then swung his neck to the other side, where the mountain face was broken. Wistala looked closely at the rock—there were threads of metal in the rock, like bits of ragged sewing.
The four-horn spat water into the broken rock. His head bobbed as he read distances, then he spat flame where he’d placed the water. The rock flamed and hissed, cracking, and with a suddenness that surprised her and made her edge back, he whipped up his tail and struck the flames. Pieces of broken rock slid down and hit the ledge, and he commenced nosing again, still ignoring her.
“I take it there’s metal in that stone,” Wistala said.
He swallowed a piece, and rolled an eye toward her as he sniffed over more shattered rock. “What is your name?”
“Wistala,” she said.
“We don’t know each other.”
“No,” she said. “May I have your name?”
“DharSii.” He swallowed another stone.
The name struck her ear funny. If the word were rendered in the simplest form of Parl, a human would have called him “Sureclaw.”
“Do you live here?” she asked.
He made a strange throat-clearing sound: Ha-hem. “As little as possible.” He kept eyeing her leather carry-harness and the blue emblem at the base of her throat.
“How is the metal?”
“Adequate, though you have to eat a good deal for it to do any good. Cleansing, though.”
He took another mouthful of water and spat it into the cracks in the rock face.
“I’ve come to find others of my—our kind.” He said nothing in reply. “The water helps break the stone up, I take it.”
“I doubt you’d understand.”
Wistala felt her fringe rise a little. “I suppose when your foua strikes the water it vaporizes into steam. The sudden expansion in the confined space of the crack, combined with the heat, shatters the rock.”
DharSii left off his mining and turned his head so he could fix her with both eyes. He seemed about to speak, his mouth opened anyway, shut again, and finally he said: “If your design is to meet the others, please follow.” Then he launched himself off the mountainside and flapped away on wings long and thin that reminded Wistala of knife blades.
She couldn’t say whether she’d been insulted or not, but she flew after him. He sailed off north, crossed the hills that Wistala noted held red, wide-horned, high-backed cattle, and was soon skimming the misty water of the vast lake. The lake was so wide, the trees upon the other side were an indistinct green smear; and so long to the south, the waters ate the horizon.
It felt distinctly warmer over the lake, and some of the mountains to the east smoldered from vents in their sides, adding to the overcast trapped between the mountains. The mist layer hanging above was tinged with green, gold, and even blue depending on the thickness of the murk and its nearness to the vents. Wistala saw more of the long-horned cattle with the mountainous humps projected up at the base of their necks. They grazed on the thick grass, stupidly oblivious of the dragons overhead.
Wistala caught up to DharSii, flying a little below—yes, he was scarred around the right pocket of his arm, and the outer toe was missing from his left saa. Not so scarred as Father, but not so old either. And his snout only showed the barest hints of white fangs—Father’s had seemed permanently on display.
He rolled an eye toward her, and she felt embarrassed to be watching him, so she fixed her gaze ahead.
She marked a white construct of some kind on the northern shore, well above and back from the lake. Or was it some trick of geology? A spur of the mountain came down and divided, and from the divide on down the mountain was scored with white, far too regularly for the marks to be snow or ice.
The lake here steamed, tendrils of moisture danced across the smooth, clear water before dissipating into the chill. She saw a head rise from the water, dripping, and a golden dragon made a leisurely climb to a mushroom head of volcanic rock, where he scratched his belly on the stone and stretched out neck and tail with a bit of a yawn as his snout turned to the fliers.
Wistala dropped back a little, not knowing if there would be a battle between the dragons. Her striped companion paid the wet dragon no more attention than he did the fork-tailed birds zipping around the masses of rock. The stones here looked shaped, but to dragon proportions rather than hominid, progressing down into the water like irregular, broken steps.
Her guide continued on his way toward the point between the divided spur.
Closer now, Wistala could see a “garden” of thick thorn trees—she thought of it as a garden because it was, precisely edged both inside and out and regularly shaped, a great crescent with the points running up the outer edges of the divided mountain spur, thinning somewhat as they climbed the thin-soiled heights. The thorn trees were thick and intertwined, so it wouldn’t be a matter of just cutting down trees, for they all supported and wound around each other; sever trunk from root and the rest would hang. She guessed a team of dwarves with axes could hack through it in a day or two—under a tasking leader—and it would be a remarkable thief who could negotiate that wall without becoming hopelessly lost or torn to pieces and waste much time backtracking out of blind alleys.
The thorn wall guarded a vast courtyard, almost as big as all of Mossbell’s cultivated grounds, between the two mountain arms. Instead of wild cabbages and berry bushes, this plaza was paved with broken and irregular bits of masonry. Even the odd statue fragment of a hominid arm or face showed here and there, placed to fit between an old fountain rim or some unknown chunk of temple wall.
Two pairs of blighters walked here and there and swept up some long thin leaves fallen from the thorn trees. Judging from the size of the courtyard, when they finished they’d have to start all over again where they’d began.
She forgot the blighters as soon as she saw the arch.
The stone of the mountain had been formed and carved into a great gallery leading into the darkness between the spurs of the mountain, going up an interlacing like a woven basket of round reeds, meeting like snakes hooking at the neck. The stone had been carved so it evoked bones, or tree roots, or dragon tails, anything but dull and lifeless rock. It was supported both from the courtyard and the mountain ridge by pillars, all shaped to match the whole and etched with scale patterns. At the outer rim of the stony lattice there were holes big enough for a dragon to climb through, but the spacing grew tighter and tighter as it approached what looked to be a cave mouth, though the most regular and finished Wistala had ever seen.
It was wide enough for a dragon to fly into it and pick a comfortable, well-lit landing spot before the cave. DharSii glided in, widening and then slowly folding his wings as he alighted. Wistala tried to imitate him and made a clumsier landing, not expecting the smoothness of the courtyard paving. It wasn’t a sprawl, but it could have been one if her tail didn’t catch on a fortunately placed crack.
“Welcome to Vesshall,” DharSii said, letting his griff give an elegant little flutter. “I will take you to the dragons within, but I shan’t stay.”
“Do you have enemies here?” she asked.
“You ask a lot of questions. Scabia will be delighted with you. Make your queries sound like praise, and you’ll share endless hours of chatter.”
A cave entrance, wide enough for two dragons to pass abreast, stood just above a ledge about the height of one human seated on another’s shoulders. A ring of stones, chiseled and filled in with a black material like glass forming unfamiliar glyphs like thorns crossed and arranged, decorated the entrance.
