The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [169]
Salamander concentrated on listening, but a fair many moments passed before he too heard the measured drumming of wings. The twilight began to deepen just as the three dragons, burdened with their dinner, reappeared above the valley. With a high-pitched roar, Devar leaped into the air and flew up to join them as they landed, one at a time, on the outcrop by the cave mouth.
Salamander watched as Rori divided up the kill for the hatchlings. He snapped at a greedy Devar and told him to wait for his sisters to take their share, had Mezza lick her face clean after a particularly disgusting bite of horse, and praised Medea for the care she’d taken of the younger wyrms while he’d been gone. It struck Salamander as passing strange that Rori would show the concern for this family that Rhodry Maelwaedd had never shown for his human children. He’s too much at ease in dragon form, Salamander thought. We’re pulling him back just in time.
Salamander lit his fire with a snap of his fingers. By its light he cleaned the rabbits, then wrapped them in the fresh wet grass he’d pulled earlier and set them to roast in the coals. Overhead the twilight was deepening into night. He walked away from his fire and stood in the darkness to watch the stars appearing over the remains of the stone tower. The sight moved him nearly to tears. Why, he couldn’t say, except to speculate that he had once served the Seven Cities here on the border, perhaps even among the last of the watchmen in the tower.
Dalla’s right, he thought. I must meditate more and study more and do all those things I’ve fled from all my life. While normally he found such thoughts wearisome, that night they gave him a peculiar pleasure, a sense of rightness, fitting the harsh times. All night he dreamt of the Western Mountains. He saw confused glimpses of a splendid fortress and of a city in ruins that, even in its ravaged state, dwarfed any he’d ever seen in Deverry.
On the morrow, Salamander woke to a less than splendid reality. He was eating cold roast rabbit for his breakfast when Rori glided down to the meadow. The dragon first drank from the spring, then waddled over to join him.
“My thanks for pulling the grass and suchlike away from the basin,” Rori said. “I tried to claw it away once, but all I managed to do was get mud in the water. Not having hands is a cursed nuisance.”
“I can well imagine.” Salamander paused to wipe his own greasy fingers on a clump of grass. “Devar told me that you found the Meradan last night.”
“Yes, we did. They’re some miles to the east of us, which doesn’t matter, and about two days’ march—for them, that is—to the north.” Rori considered briefly. “Which puts them a good six days from Cerr Cawnen, assuming they recaptured all their horses in time to get a full day’s march in today. How close to the army do you have to be to work whatever it is you have in mind?”
“Where I can see them but they can’t see me.”
“Easily done. Are you ready to leave?”
“I am. Let me just scatter these rabbit bones for whatever wants to eat them.”
Thanks to Rori’s powerful wings, they caught up with the Horsekin army just as the sun was reaching zenith. The enemy was marching through a narrow but long grassy valley, bordered on either side by forested hills. A silver riband of a river threaded itself through a stripe of trees for the entire length of the valley. Streams trickled from the hills to either side to join the river.
As he looked down from the height of dragonback, Salamander found himself thinking of the army as some sort of animal, huge, dangerous, but as awkward as a dragon on the ground as it plodded around clumps of trees and outcrops of rock. At every stream, it slowed to a crawl in order to ease its horses across the bad footing of the fords.
Rori circled high above to match its tedious pace. After a few miles the army halted, or at least, the front ranks halted, then those behind them, and so on down the entire length of the column in a sort of convulsion or ripple that at last reached the slaves and servants at the rear. Have they seen us? Salamander