“Yes. It rained, you were fishing.”
“Oh, of course. You have an old dragon’s apology. Age plays tricks on the mind. What is that on the end of your tail?”
“Dwarves made it for me. It’s sort of a shield and a weapon.”
“You weren’t planning to fight me, I hope.”
“No. I think you said you’d be happy to let us stay for a time, that you’d be glad of the company,” Auron said. NooMoahk hadn’t said exactly that, but it wasn’t a lie.
“I did? So I did, and I am. Come, come, the main entrance to my hall isn’t far. I don’t travel more than a few hours from the doorstep anymore. Follow. It looks like it might rain again, and you might as well arrive dry.”
He did not travel up the mountainside, but down. They crossed the fishing river by walking across NooMoahk’s back as if it were a bridge, and then trailed him down the side of the mountain. Auron saw a road zigzagging its way out of the forest and up the hill. It must have been long abandoned, for giant trees grew through unearthed sheets of paving rock. At each turn a broken tower stood, straddling the road on two legs planted far apart. Only one arch remained; the rest had fallen away long ago.
“They were pretty,” NooMoahk explained. “Flowers used to grow from the tops, they trailed greenstuff down. The earthquake that came before the dustcloud brought them down, and the flowers died in the darkness. It was a blighter road once. Never let the other hominids tell you that the blighters didn’t build anything of beauty or wonder.”
They climbed under an overhang with the remains of inverted towers hung like teeth from the cavern roof. The ruins of the mountainside city made even NooMoahk seem small, though the buildings that hugged the cavern walls had long since collapsed. Three roads at one time threaded between the buildings and into the mouth of the cave, but only one was still open. The others were dammed by crumbled granite and blood-brown brick piles.
“This was once Kraglad, a city of Uldam. The Empire’s southgate. A wonder of engineering, half-a-thousand years in the making. Files of men in loincloths used to come up the arched road, bearing tribute. Before disaster and war, of course. Don’t bother poking your head in the windows, um, ummm-Auron. The blighters have picked it clean as a desert skeleton.”
“Were you the disaster?”
“No,” NooMoahk said. “Though some say I was, it isn’t true. I was formidable in my day, but not that mighty. It would take ten dragons or more to do this. I will admit that I drove some squatters out of the halls beneath.”
He led them down, and the smashed buildings gave way to a termite nest of caves. NooMoahk sniffed at one of the passages. “Blighters are down here again, poking around. They won’t trouble us, or you, as long as you’re with me.”
It felt good to be underground again. Quiet underground, forgotten underground. Not full of moving air, water, and light like the Delvings of the Diadem, or some shallow cave with no secrets to it save a hibernating bear. The air tasted like it had been placed there at the forming of the world and not moved since. Echoes of their movements disturbed a bat or two, which kept them company by flapping along NooMoahk’s long sides. Best of all was the smell of dragon. Not Father’s sharp tang, or Mother’s comforting nepenthe, but a dragon smell nonetheless. Hieba gripped his back-ridge with both hands as she rode him.
“Dark,” she said.
“Yes, safe dark, Berrysweet. Good with us.”
NooMoahk snaked his head between his legs and looked at them. “Careful here, we’re going to go down a sink. There’s plenty of holds for your sii.”
Auron squeezed past his elder and poked his head into the sink. There was a glow beneath, like the one in Father’s hoard. NooMoahk must have accumulated an enormous trove over his many years. He snapped his jaws shut and listened to the echo. It was a long drop.
“Arms and legs. Strong now. Hang on,” he told Hieba.
She swung herself so she was against his chest, arms around his neck and legs around a foreleg. NooMoahk started down, almost filling the chute. Auron waited until he was sure he wouldn’t be swatted off the cavern wall by a careless swipe of the old dragon’s tail, and then he climbed down.
“No like,” Hieba protested after a minute.
He shifted himself around so she was right side up. It made the climb slower. Below him, NooMoahk’s tail disappeared.
The chute changed direction after a dragon-length. Auron heard NooMoahk’s bulk receding down another passageway, blocking the glow. He followed and Hieba came up and sat on his back again. She began talking to herself; Auron understood enough to know that she was counting things.
They came to a cavern, wide and low. Stalactite-stalagmites joined to make columns between floor and ceiling, though they had been carved to make grotesque faces, or figures in tortured poses. Hanging upside down from the ceiling or squatting on the floor beneath were carvings of blighters driving or tormenting the other forms. Flat and polished panels had been formed in the middle of some of the vertical tableaux, writing like claw-scorings told tales of the glory of Uldam.
A rattling filled the cavern, like rocks being shaken in an iron drum. It came from NooMoahk. The old dragon lay curled a little above him on a circular dais in the center of the cavern, already asleep. Rather than steps as humans and dwarves used, the surface went up to a platform marked in a series of foothold notches. The dais had curved stonework, tapering like giant dragon claws, projecting up and out from the platform. They must have been carved from the rock of the dais, for they were strong enough to bear the weight of NooMoahk, who slept against them like a snake resting against tree branches.
A crystalline statue, worked with silver, gold, and gems, stood in the center, bathing NooMoahk with cold light. Auron had seen enough artifacts of the hominids to know that it was some kind of artistry, but what it was supposed to depict, he could not say. The crystal leaned out and bulged at the top, cut into thousands upon thousands of facets. There was a faint white glow from within, refracted by the crystal into a blue-white shape that changed and danced as Auron circled the giant gem.
Hieba pointed at the crystal. “Pretty!” she exclaimed.
Auron swung his head up and down. From some angles, it looked as if a form with two arms and two legs writhed within, limbs disappearing and reappearing as he shifted his gaze. But if he took two more steps, it turned into a starburst of light. Two more steps, and the starburst shattered into a thousand slivers. The heart of the stone never presented the same image twice. He wondered if this was all that remained of NooMoahk’s hoard.
He broke away from the stone and walked around to the edges of the cavern. Hieba protested for a moment, but her eyes turned to take in new sights. There were galleries and filled-in passageways. He saw chests and shelves against one side, a dim glow from the cavern roof revealed iron-bound books and scroll tubes. Another wall looked to be some kind of honeycomb with the cells filled in with masonry. A trickle of water, but just a trickle, fell into a pool at another end. Then there was the end of the cavern where they came in. There must have been battles by the chute, the carven stalactites were broken and the walls blackened from dragonfire. Melted metal had sunk into cracks in the cavern floor and hardened.
Hieba jumped off him and rooted in his saddlebags for a blanket. “Cold,” she explained, wrapping herself up and hugging his back tight. If they were to have a home in the mountain, Auron decided to make it nearer the entrance, where he could have a fire for her.
Given space and a permanent home, Hieba turned out to be something of a packrat. Odd shapes, vivid colors, and interesting textures collected in the form of broken bricks, agate stones, and bark accumulated in the room they shared within the ruined city. It was built into the wall of the cave: rock face formed their rear wall, and could be gotten to only by ascending the staggered staircases of the building next to them, then traversing a broken bridge. He placed a sapling trunk across the gap in the span and drew it in after them each night. Auron took a lesson from the dwarves and had his hold reachable only by this circuitous route. If the blighters came prowling, he could meet them at the broken bridge or grab Hieba and climb down the far wall.
There was a sort of a porch at the front of the room formed by the roof of the larger home below. It was thickly coated with soil, though whether in the old city it meant that the porch served as a garden, or simply that over the long years detritus accumulated, Auron could not tell. He stood there with Hieba and tried to picture the city in its glory with both the cavern roof and floor occupied.
He worried about the blighters because he stole their offerings to NooMoahk. The elder dragon didn’t seem to miss them; he sniffed the empty fountain at the center of the outer city now and then as he passed in and out, not knowing that many of the sacrificial goats and birds ended up in Auron’s hideout. When Auron went back to the cavern to speak with the dragon, the subject never came up. But the blighters set about their offerings with ceremonial bells and gongs, and howling responsorials as the animals were slaughtered. After that kind of effort, if the blighters found that the flesh was going into stomachs other than those the demigod had intended, there would probably be trouble.
