His words startled me away from my examination. Did he know nothing of humans? “It is not one human who has been killing our people. Humans live six or seven decades at most. Toward the end, they are frail creatures, not even worthy of a hatchling snack.”
His head tilted, revealing the tender underside of his jaw line. “Then what is this killing? I cannot believe it accidental.”
“It is not. I believe the humans have a ritual, which requires proof of dragon slaying,” I said. “Perhaps the Lair Fathers should capture a young human and quiz him about their customs.”
“We cannot speak to those beasts,” Avagas said. “They do not know the holy tongue.”
“But they have their own tongue. It is fine and rich. I’m sure one of us speaks it.”
“Besides you?” Avagas swiveled his head back so that he stared at the corpse.
“I do not speak it,” I said, trying not to let him hear the regret in my voice. I often wished I had spoken it, so that I would understand the texts I’d found, the songs I’d heard. “But there are traders at the Swap Meet who do.”
Avagas sighed, as if speaking the human tongue were thing beneath dragons. He did not say another word, and I flattered myself that he was considering the suggestion.
I examined each hole in the snow, realizing in short order that my first assumption about them had been right. I waddled closer to the corpse until I stood over it.
Because the death had been a recent one, and because the temperature on this mountainside was chill, the corpse had been preserved as if in life. Her eyes were closed and if one ignored the angle of her head, it would appear as if she had just fallen asleep in the snow.
She had been a magnificent creature. She had a long, narrow snout, and sharp teeth that rose above her upper lip. Her talons were scraped to fine points, and the ridges along her spine nearly hid a band of well-developed muscle that ran along her ribcage.
Her wings were still partly extended. They were thin as flower petals and probably were that soft to the touch. The silver-black of her scales had a touch of green, making them seem almost iridescent. Her tail was thick and powerful, the barb on the end intact and free of blood.
She had not attacked anyone.
I stepped closer, careful where I put my hind feet. I knew that my tail would obliterate any marks in the snow, and I made certain I examined them before I destroyed them.
So far the marks had told me little.
Avagas watched me, as if I were the curiosity, not the dead female. When I reached the weapons embedded in her side, he finally sighed, a bit of flame leaking through his nose.
Apparently I had finally reached the part of the body he had wanted me to see.
Three projectile weapons lodged in her back flank. The weapons were short and stubby, feathered on the ends. I had seen their like before, often littered around lairs. Humans who hunted dragons with these weapons—which they called arrows—often became lunch.
There were longer versions of the arrow, more effective versions—some as tall as the human who wielded them. These weapons, called spears, could slip beneath scales, go between ribs, and find a dragon’s heart.
The arrows, small as they were, rarely pierced skin.
The tips of these arrows had gotten caught between the larger scales of the female’s back. I doubted she even felt them. The feathers were wind-torn and had been sheered off one of the weapons.
She’d been carrying the arrows for some time. No one had bothered to tell her of them or help her remove them. Someone probably would have noticed at Nae The Loch, and helped her there.
It might have been the beginning of a beautiful courtship.
“Human weapons,” Avagas said. “They are more destructive than we thought.”
“These weapons could not have disturbed her flight,” I said. “She took them on the ground. Notice the angle of entry. Whoever shot them hit her from above, not below.”
Avagas crept beside me. I glanced at the snow in his path, and saw nothing that would be disturbed by his presence.
“I had not thought of that,” he muttered. “Yet she has clearly fallen from the sky.”
“Something brought her down,” I said. “I have a theory, but I am unwilling to discuss it until I examine her more closely.”
I walked around the corpse. Mine were the only footprints near the body. The tiny holes from the dirt and ice surrounded the corpse, adding to my theory that she had dropped mid-flight.
Then I realized why that disturbed me. A dragon whose flight was broken did not drop like a stone from the air. A dragon, particularly one with a wingspan as magnificent as this female’s, would glide until she saw a proper spot, and land on it.
Even if she were forced to land in a place like this, she would have brought herself in, hind feet first, scraping to slow her approach if she had to, tail as ballast, until she came to a stop.
Instead, she had landed on her belly like a flopping fish.
I walked around her other side. Finally, I saw fresh damage. Many of her scales had been ripped off. Slashes cut deep into her flesh, and blood stained the remaining scales, covering their lovely silver-green finish.
I followed the twisted neck to the head and peered at it again. She had a white patch of scales between her ear bumps. I’d seen a patch like that once before, a hundred years ago.
She’d been at Nae The Loch both times I’d been here, each time prowling for a mate. Her name was Paeche. The last time I’d seen her, she’d bent her head toward me, butted me in the side, and said, I like a male whose neck still bears a touch of red. Have you mated yet, youngling? Would you like to learn the ways of dragons?
Her approach had terrified me, and I had moved away from her, to the amusement of the traders at their tables. One of the traders later confided in me that Paeche liked her males young and biddable, and it was best that I had not become involved with her, because I would expect an attachment, and she often left the pairing without laying a single egg.
It had been that moment with her that had put me off my quest for a mate at the last Nae The Loch, convincing me that I still had much to learn about females. That did not stop my friends from becoming her conquests. Two of my birth-year companions had heeded her invitation, only to become locked in a struggle over mating rights.
She left both of them for a male I had not met, a son of one of the table traders, who abandoned the Swap Meet altogether and took her to his lair.
“What do you see?” Avagas asked. Apparently my analysis of the human weapons had impressed him. He seemed to have more patience than he’d had earlier.
I did not tell him I recognized the female. I made myself look away from the white patch. More scraps ran along the side and back of her skull. The scrapes were deep, and at the edges, puncture marks.
Four of them, as I had expected.
Avagas’ companions flew overhead, their wings whistling in the wind. In their foreclaws, they each carried an iron container. The meal that I had requested.
They flew past, and Avagas headed toward them. He probably expected me to follow, but I was unwilling.
The light was dimming, and I wanted to see one last thing before the sun set over the mountain peaks. I peered closely at the scales running along the right side of Paeche’s face.
Scorch marks ran down the center of her shapely snout. I didn’t have to sniff them to know they would smell faintly of sulfur.
I sat down in the snow, feeling even more tired than I had when I’d arrived.
Humans did not slay this dragon. Instead, she had been murdered by one of our own.
***
Avagas insisted on a full explanation of my theory. We sat around the fire we’d started with the wood the companions had gathered, and snacked from the iron containers. Raw meat—mostly animal flesh—had been piled inside. We each speared a piece with our claws, charred it with our own breath, and ate long into the night.
The corpse had given up details so clear
that I could almost imagine the murder.
Whoever had attacked Paeche had known her flight path and had waited for her on a nearby peak. I knew that if we flew the surrounding peaks at dawn, we’d find the imprint of a small dragon’s tail and hindquarters in the otherwise pristine snow.
Paeche’s killer had waited for her, and when he saw her, he crouched until she passed. Then he flew after her.
He was small enough to slip between her wings, but the strategy didn’t work as well as he thought. She must have caught him, making him tumble away from her. As he spun in the air, his back claws dug into her side, ripping it open, and angering her.
She turned on him, but he surprised her with a blast of fire across the snout.
As she pawed at her eyes, perhaps trying to protect them from the flames, he flew above her, and grabbed her skull with his forelegs, puncturing through the scales and skin with his claws.
Either she turned or he yanked or both. Ultimately, it did not matter. The movement—its suddenness and ferocity—killed her.
She dropped like a stone from the sky, and he fled—whether in fear or triumph, I could not tell.
After my fifth retelling in which I explained how her impact had caused the snow to rain around her corpse all at the same time, after I had again detailed the difference between fresh wounds and older ones, after I had explained how arrows (as opposed to their larger cousins, spears) could not kill a female dragon, Avagas was finally satisfied with my interpretation.
We both knew he would investigate for himself come dawn, but that did not disturb me. In his place, I would have done the same.
What disturbed me, and what I did not say, was that we had no punishments for dragon-upon-dragon slayings. Such things were unheard of. Because we were solitary creatures who rarely interacted, we did not solve our differences through killings.
Certainly, we neglected our eggs at times, but eggs were not hatchlings. Once a hatchling took its first breath, it became a dragon, subject to all the respect accorded to one of our kind.
Respect Paeche had not.
***
I woke before dawn to find Avagas stoking the fire with more wood, then blasting it into a bonfire with a single breath of flame. His eyes were red-rimmed, his scales even grayer than they had seemed in the daylight.
He had not slept at all. It was clear this matter disturbed him as much as it disturbed me.
His companions snored, curled around the iron containers as if they were a stash instead of boxes that had to be returned to some trading table.
Sleeping in the snow left me sluggish. Cold had never agreed with me. I did not appreciate the slower heart rate, and the feeling that, if I stayed but a day or two longer, I would become a block of ice.
I sat up, and Avagas handed me a piece of meat so charred that it crunched as I ate it. I washed it down with some melted snow.
When he finally spoke, it was with weary resignation. “Nothing in your details gives us any hint as to who did this. All we know is that our culprit is male.”
I licked the last of the burned meat off my claws, considering my response. If I told him what I had dreamed of, we would move from the realm of certainty to the realm of conjecture. I was not certain that conjecture was appropriate.
He sent another blast of flame at the fire, although it did not need stoking.
“I almost wish it had been a human after all,” he said softly. “At least then, I would know what to do.”
He was right. Our options in that case were plentiful. We could defend Nae The Loch with young males or abandon the site altogether. If neither of those plans satisfied the Lair Fathers and the rest of the Five Regions, we might terrorize the humans, setting fire to nearby cities and driving them from the area.
Driving humans away did not last, but the humans who would return to a settlement decades later did not seem to be related to the group who had fled there. Such an action would have a good chance of preserving Nae The Loch.
“What of the other Lair Fathers?” I asked. “Perhaps they—?”
“No.” Avagas’ tone was pained. “I am one of the few who remembers the Rebellion. It is the last time that dragon turned on dragon.”
“That we know of.”
He swiveled his head toward me. “What do you mean?”
I could not look at him as I spoke. “For the most part, we live alone and die alone. Often our corpses are not discovered for decades. Who is to say that a dragon was murdered? It cannot be proven after so long a time. We were fortunate to find this female so quickly after her death—and even more fortunate that we investigated. If we had not, we might have thought that she had landed wrong, breaking her neck, or—if enough time had passed—we might have found only the tips of the human weapons, and concluded that a human had killed her after all.”
Smoke curled from his nostrils. Avagas looked as if he wanted to blast the fire again, but he could not. There wasn’t enough wood left to take the brunt of the flames. He would risk burning his sleeping friends.
“So the fifteen—”
“May have died at human hands,” I said.
“May.” A small puff of smoke followed the word out of his mouth.
“I have often thought it curious that creatures who wear armor that clanks and carry weapons that can rarely slice through our scales have managed to slay fifteen of us,” I said.
Avagas bowed his head.
He did not seem to want to hear what I had to say, but now that I had started, I had to continue. “I do know that at least one of the fifteen died from a human-inflicted wound. I once found a needle covered in ichor.”
Ichor was only found in a dragon’s eye. An eye without ichor was concave, and the dragon blind.
“I believe a human found his victim napping, crept on top of the victim’s head and pierced his eye before the victim even realized he was under attack. A dragon in such pain would thrash, but not be able to harm something so small, clinging to his skull.”
Avagas wrapped his tail around his hindquarters, head still down, obviously listening.
“It would take little to blind the other eye, and then the dragon would be helpless. A human in such a position could find the tender spot beneath the jaw, shove a sword into it, severing the fire pipes and the lungs. It would take time, but in that circumstance, any one of us would die.”
“But what of the others? The mutilations? We had always thought they were caused by humans.” Avagas spoke so softly I could barely hear him above the snores.
“So they were.” The cold had gotten worse. I leaned closer to the fire. “But there is no way to know when these mutilations occurred. Perhaps they occurred long after death, and the human returned to his tribe, regaling them with his exploits when in truth all he had done was slice a part from a corpse.”
“Your theories make sense.” Avagas shuddered. “I do not like them.”
This, then, was my chance to discuss the last one. Still, I hesitated, knowing if I did, all that we understood about dragon custom would change.
“Then let me give you one more,” I said.
He closed his eyes, as if he did not want to hear. Then he sighed, and opened them. “Speak.”
“This is not a common path to Nae The Loch. I doubt many males travel this distance. There is little food in the snow and there are no obvious resting areas. Females may go this route, but in this case, we must not concern ourselves with females.”
The snoring stopped, and so did I. Then the nearest companion huddled closer to his iron chest, and let out a whistling breath. The other companion grunted. Their snores rose in harmony once again.
I lowered my voice. “If the male who first reported seeing her corpse is also a male who has mated with her, then you will probably have your killer.”
“Why?” Avagas asked.
“He would know her flight path, and he would—”
“I meant,” Avagas said, “what would cause anyone to attack a female? Let us forget that s
he is larger and more powerful. Females are not permanent part of our lives. There is no reason to destroy them.”
“Males get irrational about their mates,” I said. “And Paeche was known for consummating but rarely completing the cycle. This killer had the advantage. He had surprise on his side. Yet he chose to burn her face instead diving beneath her and going for the tender spot.”
“And this has given you a theory?”
I poked the fire with one claw. “I believe that our killer was trying to get her to return to his lair, to finish something they had begun a century ago. He did not mean to kill her. Instead, he meant to use flame to force her to fly away with him.”
“For that to work,” Avagas said, “he would have to have a lair near here.”
“And not many do,” I said. “It would seem that you have but to look through Nae The Loch. The killer should not be hard to find.”
***
And indeed, he was not. As I suspected, the killer was the trader’s son who had lured Paeche to his lair at the last Swap Meet. She left while he slept one night, without a word. There were no eggs, nothing to remember her by, except the humiliation of an improperly completed mating.
He had a century to plan how to get her to return.
When confronted, he confessed to the murder. It had happened as I had imagined it—an accident in the midst of a badly made plan.
The Lair Fathers are debating his punishment now. Some want to reinstate banishment. Others disagree, believing it is not harsh enough. A few have suggested leaving him to the females.
Throughout this all, he has been imprisoned in a shallow cave at the mouth of Nae The Loch, guarded by males with more fire power than the rest of us combined.
What becomes of him does not concern me. I am not a Lair Father, and probably not destined to be one.
My concerns are new, things I had never considered before. And because of them, I find myself in a strange position.
My collection of relics from the fifteen deaths, once considered esoteric and slightly odd, has made me famous in the Five Regions. There is talk that I should investigate all new deaths as soon as we learn of them.
Dragon Slayer SS Page 2
