by Paul Cook
The priest, seeing his guards scattered, turned to run. He was preternaturally fleet, but Duranix was on him in two long bounds. The disguised dragon snagged the elf priest by the back of his robe. Suddenly, there was a choking aroma of flowers, as if Duranix had been buried under a mountain of roses and lilacs, and he found himself holding an empty robe.
The smell was overwhelming. Coughing, Duranix threw down the robe and tried to find the fleeing priest. His eyes swept the horizon but saw nothing.
Pakito had subdued five of the elves by sitting on them. When one struggled to escape, Pakito whacked him with the butt of a javelin. One brave elf charged out of the dark with his weapon leveled. Duranix stepped in front of him. The bronze spearhead struck the dragon square in the chest, and the elf thrust hard. His javelin bent double, leaving Duranix unharmed. Uttering a terrified oath, the warrior dropped his weapon and fled.
Quiet descended. Pa’alu joined them, casually wiping blood from an elven sword.
Pakito looked up from his awkward position atop the unconscious elves. “Well, dragon-man,” he said genially, “I’m glad we didn’t try to take you back at camp!” He told his brother how the elf’s spear had hurt Duranix no more than a soggy reed.
Pa’alu listened intently then shoved his sword through his belt and surveyed the area. “Lucky thing we happened along.”
“Luck? You two have been trailing me since I left Karada’s camp.”
“Not us!” Pakito insisted, but his open expression easily betrayed the truth of the matter.
The dragon shook his head. “No matter. What concerns me most is the elf priest who escaped.”
“We first thought you came here to meet them,” Pa’alu said. “It wasn’t until we heard you talking that we realized you were as surprised as we were to find them here.”
“What is this place, anyway?” asked Pakito.
“I’m not certain,” said Duranix. “It feels like… a graveyard.”
Pakito jumped to his feet. The elves he’d been sitting on groaned but remained quiescent. “Who’s buried here?” the big man asked, eyes wide.
“No one.”
Pa’alu ran a hand lightly over a nearby stone. “What do you mean?”
“This formation is not natural,” Duranix told them. “These stones have stood for untold years, yet they still resonate with great power.”
“I’ve heard stories,” Pa’alu said, lowering his voice, “tales of the days before men and elves. It’s said the spirits fought a great war over who would rule the world.”
“True enough,” Duranix said.
“Maybe these are some of the losers.”
The dragon was struck by the plainsman’s surprising acumen. He knew from his hatchling days of the All-Saints War, when the spirits aligned themselves with Good or Evil, or tried to remain neutral. After some defeats, the forces of
Good and Neutrality allied themselves and defeated — hut did not destroy — the forces of Evil. What greater punishment could there be for defeated spiritual beings than to be confined to the material world, imprisoned for eons in a matrix of unfeeling stone?
Pakito broke the silence. “What about them?” he asked, gesturing toward the limp pile of bodies.
“Take their metal and leave’em,” Pa’alu said, squatting by his brother’s unconscious victims. “It’s a long walk back to the forest. Maybe a wolf or panther will get them on the way.”
“Karada should know they were here,” Pakito insisted. “There aren’t supposed to be any elves this far north. What if there are more?”
“What indeed?” Duranix shook off the oppressive aura of the stones. “Your chief should be warned. This was a small party, but if a sizable band of elves is about, your people could be trapped between it and the force ascending the Thon-Thalas.”
“Who’ll warn Karada?” Pakito wondered, looking confused. “We were ordered to follow you.”
“I return to Yala-tene. One of you can come along; the other can go back and warn Karada.”
The brothers saw the sense in this. Pakito, knowing his brother’s feelings for their chief, offered to go with Duranix. Pa’alu declined.
“I haven’t been to the mountains since I was a boy,” he said. “I’ll go with the dragon-man.”
“But — ”
“Go on, Pakito. You’re the only one who can carry all this metal back anyway.” He filled his brother’s arms with elven javelins, swords, greaves, and helmets. “Start now. You’ll reach camp before noon.”
Pa’alu hung a few extra waterskins — taken from the elves — around his hulking brother’s neck and, with a hearty slap on his back, sent him on his way. While the brothers were parting, Duranix went to where Vedvedsica’s robe lay. A dense odor of flowers still clung to the empty garment.
Pa’alu approached. “Find something?”
“I’d hoped to find the bag of stone chips he carried,” said Duranix. “It appears he took them with him.”
“How are such things done?”
“It’s a talent, and a rare one among flimsy creatures like yourselves. I think the priest has somehow learned to tap the latent power of the stones. It’s a dangerous ability for savages.”
Duranix stood, tossing the robe aside. When he did, a single small stone fell from the folds. Pa’alu picked it up. It was a smooth, heavy nugget, no bigger than a walnut, and of a richer yellow color than bronze.
“Heavy,” said the plainsman, handing the stone to Duranix. “What is it?”
“Gold.” What felt like cold stone to the plainsman almost burned Duranix’s hand. The nugget was saturated with power.
To Pa’alu’s bewilderment, Duranix put the yellow nugget in his mouth. Without further explanation, he struck out due west for Yala-tene, leaving Pa’alu hurrying on his heels to keep up.
*
Smoke poured from the mouth of the tunnel. Amero and his chief digger, Mieda, stood back from the opening with strips of wet birch-bark over their noses and mouths. Deep inside, they could see a red flicker of flame. More diggers emerged, coughing and soot-stained. When they reached open air, they doused themselves with handy buckets of cold lake water.
“How goes it, Farun?” Amero asked anxiously.
The digger, his face blackened by soot, coughed and said, “It’s still burning, but no one can stay in there long.”
“That’s all right,” Amero replied. “As long as we can run in and feed the fire, there’s nothing else to do right now.”
Fire had been Mieda’s idea. The storage tunnels had progressed well as long as there was sandstone to burrow through, but when the diggers found a strain of hard black stone, the project stopped dead. They tried various tools on the black stone, including shovels fashioned from the dragon’s cast-off scales, but nothing made an impression. Then one morning Amero found Mieda by the shore of the lake. He’d built a small twig fire and was watching it intently.
“Catch a fish?” Amero asked.
Mieda tapped the black object in the fire with a stick.
“What’s that?”
“Black stone, like in tunnel.” Mieda’s command of the plainsman’s language wasn’t complete. Many villagers still thought he was slow-witted because he didn’t talk much. Amero knew better.
“You’re cooking a stone?”
“Yes.” Mieda remained cross-legged on the sand, staring at the fire.
Amero dropped down on the other side of the flames. He said nothing for a long time, then impatience stirred his tongue.
“What are you doing, Mieda?”
“Learning to break rock.” He leaned forward and spat on the black stone shard. Satisfied with the hiss that it produced, Mieda dipped his hands in the lake and dumped the water squarely on the stone. Smoke and steam rose. The little fire sputtered and died.
“What did that accomplish?” Amero asked.
Mieda raised his stick — a limp pine branch, plucked green from the tree — and struck the black rock smartly. To Amero’s amazement,
the rock cracked and fell apart.
“How did you do that?” he exclaimed.
Mieda smiled. “Seen it before. Cooled fast, hot stone breaks.” He met Amero’s eyes. “Understand?”
“Yes! We can do this in the tunnel!”
So they did. It wasn’t as easy as cooking a rock on the beach. The tunnels filled with smoke when the first dry pine boughs were set alight. The diggers ran out for fresh air, but someone had to go back at intervals to feed the flames. Every bucket, gourd, and bowl in Yala-tene was filled with water, ready to throw on the heated rock face. Normal work in the village came to standstill as everyone waited to see if Mieda’s technique worked as well in the large scale as it did in the small.
The fire had been burning all morning. Farun reported the heat inside the tunnel was unbearable. Amero looked to his chief digger.
“What do you say, Mieda?”
“Water.”
Amero held up his hands. “Take the water now! Two at a time, go!”
He and Mieda were the first to enter. Still holding soaked bark to their faces and waddling under the weight of full buckets, they entered the smoky passage. The heat was overwhelming. Sweat coursed down Amero’s face as they neared the fire. In addition to the pine boughs, the diggers had stacked oak wood against the wall. The hardwood had burned down to a glowing drift of coals.
Mieda dropped his mask and picked up his bucket in both hands. He flung the water high, so it would run down the rock face. Amero did the same, then both men retreated, coughing hard. As soon as they were out, the next pair ran in, and the next, until forty pails had been dumped on the fire.
Amero, Mieda, and the diggers stood around the mouth of the tunnel, wrapped in steam and smoke. A gentle breeze helped clear the mist away.
“Now, we’ll see.” Amero started for the opening. Farun held out a long-handled stone mallet. Amero smiled and rested the heavy tool on his shoulder.
The others trooped in behind Amero. The carved stone floor sloped downward, so the farther they went the more standing water they encountered. By the time they reached the black stone wall, water, ashes, and rock dust had combined to make a soupy black mud. Some of the men slipped and fell. A few others snickered. Amero let the mallet hit the floor, and the resulting clunk silenced the crowd at his back.
“Give it a whack,” said Farun.
“It ought to be your honor,” Amero said, offering the handle to Mieda.
The dark-skinned man pressed the mallet back into Amero’s hands. “Honor’s yours,” he said. He gestured to Farun and the others. “My life, their lives, are owed to you. You hit.”
Amero swung the hammer high and brought it down smartly on the obstinate wall. The hammer head was granite, and many granite tools had been broken on the black stone before, but this time the obstruction shattered. Grit flew, and hand-sized flakes fell to the muddy floor. The diggers roared with satisfaction.
Outside, the waiting villagers heard the cry of success and echoed it. Men ran out of the tunnel calling for baskets to haul away the debris. More mallets were brought, and soon the cliff side rang with the blows of stone on stone.
Amero and Mieda stood outside and watched a continuous line of diggers emerge bearing baskets full of broken rock. These were emptied on a large pile of leavings that rose by the side of the lake. As more black stone was thrown on top of the sandstone debris, tiny avalanches cascaded down the pile into the lake.
“We’ll have to find a better place to dump that,” Amero mused. “We don’t want the lake tainted with rock dust.”
A young woman emerged from the tunnel with a basket on her back. Amero quickly lost interest in the rock pile when he recognized Halshi, eldest child of Valka, one of the first plainsmen to settle by the lake with his family. Halshi had jet-black hair, smooth, tanned skin, and a ready smile. Amero had hinted to Valka he was interested in becoming Halshi’s mate, but with one thing and another, this task and that, nothing was ever settled between them. Still, Amero always found himself watching her whenever she was around.
Halshi added her burden to the pile. She’d started for another load when Amero called to her.
“How goes it?” he asked. “Are they breaking through?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, hitching her basket on her hip. “The rock’s flying apart now. You did a good job, Mieda.”
The chief digger acknowledged the compliment with a nod. Amero found himself wishing he’d earned Halshi’s praise.
A scattering of red glints in the rock pile caught his eye. Amero squinted to see them better. It wasn’t a trick of the light. As he drew nearer, he saw the debris was flecked with hundreds of small red beads.
“What’s this?”
He knelt and picked a larger nodule out of the pile. Roughly globular, the bead was shiny and hard, like Duranix’s scales, though a different color.
“That stuff?” said Halshi, looking down at him. “I don’t know, but the pit’s full of it.” She returned to the tunnel.
Amero found himself intrigued by the strange red beads. He dug through the coarse slag with his hands and found most of the black stone was dotted with them. Even odder were the larger slabs of rock that had red beads oozing out of them.
A shadow fell across Amero. Mieda had come to see. “Ever seen this stuff before?” Amero held up a handful of red beads.
Mieda examined the pellets closely, holding them up to the light, even putting one between his teeth and biting on it. At last, he replied, “It’s copper.”
“What’s copper?”
“It’s strong. It’s — ” Mieda groped for a word the plainsman would recognize. “The dragon, his hide is like this.” He made two fists and banged them together. “Strong. Hard. This is copper.”
“Metal? It comes from rocks?” asked Amero, amazed.
“I’ve lived long, been many places, seen it before. I never saw it made. It makes tools and pretty things, if you have enough of it.”
Amero was lost in thought. “There were no beads in the black stone before the fire,” he muttered to himself. “Somehow the fire sweated the copper out of the rock.”
His mind was racing. For years he’d sought to make use of Duranix’s cast-off scales, but aside from bending or sharpening them, he’d found no way of changing their shape. All his experiments with fire had failed to melt a single bronze scale. If a substance with scale-like hardness could be extracted from the earth around them, couldn’t it be worked into more useful forms, into any form they wanted?
He set a gang of children to work sifting through the tunnel slag. All the red pellets were to be collected and saved.
By sunset the tunnel had been extended five paces deeper into the mountain. They’d planned to go twenty paces in each tunnel. That would guarantee cool, safe storage for a long time. The villagers were tired but happy with their success.
Amero was too excited to sleep. He had a basket full of copper beads and a head full of ideas. Other tunnels could be extended through the black stone blockage using Mieda’s heating method. If each one yielded similar amounts of copper, Amero would have enough raw material to begin experimenting with it. He wished Duranix were here to advise him. The dragon found the human predilection for toolmaking amusing, and he was a fount of useful ideas.
Thinking of the dragon raised a new question: Where was Duranix? His flight to and from the east should have taken only one day. The sun was now setting on the dragon’s second day away.
Amero realized Duranix might have been diverted by any number of things. Who could know what would interest a dragon? Still, he found himself staring at the eastern range, a frown on his face, as the setting sun turned the sky at his back crimson. He kept hoping for a glimpse of the dragon flying home, but the darkening sky remained empty
Chapter 10
A strange and ominous calm hung over the banks of the Thon-Thalas. Cold river water, collected in the mountains to the west, chilled the warm summer air, creating patches of mist slowly flowing a
long with the current. Half of Karada’s band, almost two hundred-fifty men and women of fighting age, crouched in the bushes a pace or two from the water’s edge. Further up the hill, the rest of the plainsmen waited on horseback, their position screened by a hedge of freshly cut saplings.
Now and then a horse snorted or tried to eat the tender leaves of the camouflage just in front of them. Karada glowered at these indiscretions, and the riders quieted their mounts quickly.
Pakito came up the hill, moving with remarkable stealth for a man his size. He’d been appointed to lead the warriors on foot, partly because of his great strength, but also because they had no horse that could carry him.
He ascended by way of a path carefully screened with vines and replaced undergrowth. When he reached the hedge Pakito waved to his chief.
“Any sign?” she whispered.
“They were at the deer ford last night,” Pakito replied huskily. “Our scouts counted thirty-two rafts, sixteen with warriors, ten for horses, and the rest laden with supplies.”
Karada nodded, satisfied. The elves never traveled without what seemed to plainsmen like copious, unnecessary supplies — food, tents, tools, and assorted mysterious gear whose purpose was known only to elves. Their equipment allowed them to do many things the plainsmen couldn’t, but carrying it also slowed them down. Karada intended to exploit this weakness to the fullest.
“Go back to the river,” she told Pakito. “Make ready. They’ll be here about dawn.”
He grinned widely. “I wouldn’t want to be an elf this morning!”
“I wouldn’t be an elf ever,” she muttered, dismissing him. Pakito hurried back down the path to his waiting men.
Gradually the violet pre-dawn gave way to the rose of daybreak. Karada took off her heavy headband and wiped her forehead. The band was made of bear teeth, bored through and strung together on a backing of black ox hide. Her people had contributed all the bear’s teeth gathered in a year’s hunting to make the headband for Karada. She clenched it tightly in her hand as if to take the power and ferocity of the bears into her own spirit.
