The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [168]
Salamander walked over to inspect the tower. It lacked a roof, and its wooden door and the inner ceilings had long since rotted away, but the walls still stood high, although inside green moss grew thick upon them. In the center of the roofless circle, where sunlight could reach, tall grass and some sort of bramble formed spiky tangles. Snakes and a variety of spiders and insects, Salamander assumed, lived under the greenery. He decided that he’d sleep outside the tower rather than in it.
He walked outside and glanced up, just idly, but carving on one of the higher ranks of stone caught his attention. He shaded his eyes with his hand and saw a line of lettering in the ancient style of the Elvish syllabary, picked out by the shadows of long light from the west. Craning his neck, he walked around the tower several times until he’d seen it all and could puzzle out the meaning.
“We, the last of they who stand on guard, carved these words. Traveler, if any travelers there be, we hold to our duty though no relief has reached us this hundred years.”
How much longer had they waited, he wondered, before making their retreat? Or had they all died in the tower, either in a Meradan attack or of simple old age, until the last of the last lay unburnt with no one to build him a funeral pyre? No one would ever know, he supposed.
“I’ve seen your message,” he called out. “I stand witness that you were faithful.”
The wind sighed around the stones, and in that sound he thought, just for a moment, that he heard voices answering.
In the last of the daylight the dragons flew out to hunt, Rori first, then the young. The combined beating of their wings boomed and echoed so loudly that Salamander clasped his hands over his ears and kept them there until they were well away. He scrounged himself enough fuel for a fire from the woody shrubs growing around the meadow’s edge, then considered the food he had left—half a sheep’s milk cheese, some scraps of flatbread, a sack of flour, a good chunk of purified lard, and his wooden box of soda.
Not far from the tower a little spring welled up amid tall grass. Salamander took his water bottle and hunkered down beside it. As he pulled the grass aside to reach clean water, he realized that someone had lined the spring mouth with neat blocks of stone—those watchmen of the tower, he could assume. He laid the bottle down, then used both hands to clean the grass and water weeds away until the spring welled up in a basin once again. He’d just finished when he heard the thrumming of dragon wings. A flash of silver in the sunset light, Devar circled low over him and dropped two dead rabbits on the ground next to Salamander. With a flutter of blue-and-silver wings he landed nearby.
“The rabbits are for you, Uncle,” Devar said in Elvish. “Da said you could roast them.”
“I can, indeed,” Salamander said. “My thanks, Nephew.”
“Da killed two horses for the rest of us. He and Medea are bringing them back.”
“Horses? I take it you found the Meradani army.”
“Yes. Da wouldn’t let me attack them, but it was still great fun, watching Da and Medea scare them! The horses all bucked and ran, and some of the Meradan, they ended up on the ground.”
“Splendid! How far away was this?”
“A long way north.” Devar half-opened his wings, then closed them again in the dragonish equivalent of a shrug. “That’s why they sent me on ahead with the rabbits. I can fly lots faster than the lasses can.”
Salamander considered the size of Devar’s wings and doubted it. Aloud, he said, “The horses must be heavy even for dragons to carry.”
“Yes. They had to fly slowly once they got them. Uncle, Da says that you can fly, too. Can you be a dragon like us?”
“No, alas, but I can turn myself into a magpie.”
Devar blinked at him.
“It’s a bird,” Salamander said, “a black-and-white bird that chatters a lot and loves shiny things.”
“I don’t think we have magpies in the mountains.”
“I doubt it, truly.”
Devar suddenly cocked his head, listening. “Here comes my clutch.