Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [193]
“I wonder if we dare light one.”
“True spoken. Well, a summer night without a fire never killed a man.”
As they walked on, heading straight toward the center of the bowl, they both kept a good watch, turning their heads constantly, glancing up at the sky often, but the valley lay in the deep silence of coming night.
“I don’t suppose the dragon would lair right out here, anyway,” Rhodry said at last. “All the tales I ever heard said caves.”
“In where it be warm, near the fire in what’s left of this mountain, I’d wager. Deep in its belly, most like.”
“Not what you’d call a safe place to make your home, then.”
“Not for us. Safe enough for a dragon. These ancient fire mountains be full of flues and passages, all smooth and round, where the molten rock poured out fast and left its skin behind like a shedding snake. That outer bit, the skin if you would, hardens to leave a proper tunnel. And heat rises into caverns. They were big bubbles in the melt once, most of them. The wyrm will have found one of those cozy spots to lair in.”
“Maybe so, but the mountain could blow again, if it’s not dead.” Rhodry glanced round, with a cold shudder as he tried to imagine what sort of eruption it would take to gut half a mountain this way. “The dragon couldn’t trust it.”
“The great wyrms do share a soul with the fire mountains, or so the tales say. Deep, deep in their hearts a fire of their own does burn, just as fire burns deep in the mountains, and there in their hearts they understand each other. The wyrms know when the mountain sleeps and when it’s about to rouse. The mountain itself will warn them, like, because at root they’re brothers.” Then he laughed. “But my father, he did say that the beasts have splendid hearing, that’s all, and sensitive bellies. When they plop themselves smack down on the bedrock, they can hear the melted rocks gurgling and scraping below and feel the mountain trembling under them. They learn to judge the noises, he always said, like a midwife with her ear on a pregnant woman’s paunch.”
“I prefer your way of speaking, but no doubt he was right.”
Enj grinned and started to speak, then fell silent, raising a warning hand. By then they’d reached the shelter of the first ratty-looking trees, stunted and half-bald as well, but some sort of cover. They froze, straining to hear, as the sound that had caught their attention came again, distant and more the impact of a sound than a noise. To Rhodry it seemed like the slap of hand on a drumhead when the goatskin cover’s got loose with age—a distant thwack, all spongy, but throbbing again and again, and closer and louder until it resolved itself into the beat of enormous wings against still air. Automatically they both looked up, peering through the branches.
Black against the sky, its legs curled under but its tail flung out for a rudder, the dragon flew over the valley. For a dozen strokes its huge naked wings beat the air; then they held steady, and it glided, dipping down straight for the cliffs on the far side, turning a little toward a vast rock formation shaped like a pillar stuck to the cliff by its length. With a smack and rustle of folding wings, it settled. For a moment they could see it clinging to the flume like a woodpecker clinging to a tree trunk. In the darkening light, judging accurately was near impossible, but Rhodry guessed it thirty feet long, not counting its tail. With a little shake it squirmed; the tail whipped; the dragon disappeared inside some crack or cave that not even his half-elven eyes could find. Enj let out his breath in a long sigh. He looked like a man who’s just seen his beloved appear briefly at a window, then pull the shutters closed.
“Lucky, aren’t we?” Rhodry whispered. “They must hunt by sight, not smell.”
“So my father always said.” Enj was whispering as well. “So it be not lairing in the high peak, then.”
“Let’s hope not, but it may have found some passageway through and up. Think we could climb to that hole?”
“Mayhap, but I’ll tell you this, Rori. I don’t much like the idea of crawling right