The Black Wing (11 page)

your talk of dragons and the gathering armies. I dismissed the idea because I didn't want
to be an ordinary grunt. I didn't know about, well, you being a dragon. We'd rise to the
top, you and I. Didn't I say we made a great team?“ Onyx let her cold hand rest in his as
she considered his anxious words. ”You've got to believe me, Onyx. I thought you were the
one who abandoned me.“ Led bent his head to hers, his lips brushing her cool ones. He
pressed himself against her naked body. ”We were so good together. I should have known
better.“ ”Yes, you should have," the young woman mumbled in agreement against his lips.
Onyx could feel Led relaxing against her, eyes closed. In a heartbeat, the dragon Khisanth
replaced Onyx. She jerked him off the ground and held him up like a child examining a bug.
Before the mercenary could cry out, his handsome face disappeared into the dragon's jaws.
Then it was too late. There was nothing left for him to scream with.

Khisanth's neck muscles tensed into thick black cords. Her scales rose like hackles. There
it was again, that malevolent, watchful presence. Someone was definitely following her. Or
something. The dragon squinted skyward from the trail she'd beaten through the tamarack to
her lair. Turning a full circle, Khisanth scanned the horizon. As before, she saw nothing
to confirm her suspicion.

Ever since she'd started across the Miremier to the Great Moors in search of a lair, the
dragon had not been able to shake the feeling that someone was watching her. That was many
lunar cycles ago, when snow had still blanketed the tamarack and ice had covered the
pondsnot long after she'd eaten her human lover. Led's death was a delicious memory for
Khisanth, and she used it to reckon timeone season after the devouring of Led, four lunar
cycles since,

and so on. She'd discovered the huge fen she now called home on a practice flight with
Kadagan past the sandy desert on the western edge of the Endscape peninsula. Strong
westerly winds had made flight difficult that day and pushed the heavy, pungent scent of
stagnant water and rotting humus within reach of her sensitive nostrils. Kadagan had told
her that the Great Moors were so vast that it took an entire day for the winds to push the
clouds from west to east above them. Some instinct had told Khisanth that she belonged in
such a bleak place, that a lair in the swamp would soothe her soul the way a cold meal
sated her stomach. After the events at Needle Pass, Khisanth couldn't bear the thought of
living near there. She felt no kinship with mountains. Neither was she interested in
returning to the tiny, unremarkable lair the nyphids had found for her in the grasslands
of Endscape. The dragon had never liked it anyway. Khisanth's soul had stirred with the
memory of the moor. Taking whatever treasure she

fancied from Led and the dead ogres, Khisanth had gathered up her maynus choker and headed
straightaway for the swamp. She had not looked back. Khisanth usually explored her pond,
her territory, by foot as a dragon. To practice her qhen techniques she would occasionally
take on the forms of smaller creatures indigenous to the areasuch as field mice or mundane
serpentsto view the swamp as they would. The dragon had been curious to see how her lair
looked from a muskrat's reed-and-mud dam in the center of her pond. The furry, beaverlike
creature had been delicious.

Now, as she approached the hollow tree lair she'd taken for her own, Khisanth's gaze fell
happily on the area surrounding it. Large, looming willows and other water-loving trees
fanned out to where the earth met the dark purple sky. Low-growing shrubs covered
everything else, hiding slippery bogs. At odd intervals the dead gray stumps of stripped
pine trees poked skyward through the greenery, giving the tamarack an invitingly bleak
appearance.

Khisanth walked the perimeter of her small pond. The southern edge was flanked by graceful
willows whose draping branches fanned the filmy surface of the pond. Their size attested
to their ancient origins; most of them towered more than three times Khisanth's height.
Best of all, their trunks were thick with knotted roots that formed tall, vaulted archways
where the water lapped against them.

Khisanth stepped into the chill, murky pond and waded toward an enormous tree whose roots
arched majestically some eight feet above the pool's green surface. She bent her head to
the water and half ducked, half swam, through the archway into the tree.

Nature had hollowed the place as if it were intended as a dragon's lair. Bright, glowing
lichen that looked almost magical clung to the moist, corklike walls. Pond water reached
halfway through the chamber. Toward the back of the lair, the tree climbed onto the bank
and provided solid ground for abed.

Living so close to water, Khisanth had learned to glory in swimming, to revel in the feel
of tepid water gliding over her scales and filling her nostrils. The feeling would never
replace that of flying, but it was a close second. She discovered a whole new world
underwater, where fish and other aquatic creatures provided tasty tidbits so flavorful
they surpassed even the most tender moose. Though she was the largest creature to swim in
these waters, Khisanth had learned to glide beneath the surface so quietly that she could
surprise beavers on their dams and gobble them whole, before panic could spoil the flavor
of their meat.

Territorial skirmishes had given Khisanth the chance to taste creatures whose flavors, no
matter how rewarding the kills, were unappealing. The lizard-bird cockatrice's ability to
turn her to stone with its touch caused her to forego her favorite trick of biting off its
head. Instead, she'd leveled it with her acid, leaving little to taste. Then there'd been
that giant poisonous toad. Khisanth still shivered at the taste of its slimy, scaleless
body filled with bitterif not deadly poison.

Still troubled by the thought of being followed, Khisanth curled up on the floor of her
lair and fell into her favorite pastime: counting and sorting the treasures hung on her
choker. Though the necklace had been conceived to transport her cache and leave her claws
free, its constant presence around her neck had become a comfort, a talisman. She'd taken
to stringing the skulls of her enemies between the shiny weapons as spacers, to keep the
trinkets fanned out around her entire neck instead of sliding down to hang in a clump from
her throat like a lead weight. She removed the choker only to add new valuables, or to
count and stroke her baubles, or to stare into the most valuable of all her prizes, the
maynus globe.

Khisanth's thoughts frequently turned to those who had given her the maynus and what they
had taught her. The memories began warmly enough, of Kadagan's patient train-

ing and Joad's healing hands. But the remembrances always turned prickly when she would
recall the younger nyphid's last words to her. They had planted seeds of doubt that easily
germinated in the fertile, damp silence of the moors. Khisanth knew now that she had not
done everything she could to save Dela. If she'd not gotten so distracted by her human
form, she would have killed the entire party the second she was certain Dela was in the
wagon. Even before.

The dragon suffered no guilt at this failure, but she did feel regret. She deeply rued
that she'd been so horribly wrong about Led. Yet, she was convinced that she wasn't
responsible for that, either. She blamed her faulty thinking entirely on her human form.
As the dragon began to muse about the nyphids and the limitations of humankind, a
familiar, unpleasant sensation dragged her attention back to her lair. Khisanth fell as
still as stone, her musings banished. There it was again, that feeling.... Whoever it was
had come close to her home this timetoo close for Khisanth's peace of mind.

She was rising to her feet when a piercing series of shrieks rang out above her willow
tree. Khisanth clapped her claws to her ear holes. Her head felt as if it would be split
in two by the hideous noise, which seemed to come from the Abyss itself. Khisanth knew of
only one creature that made that sort of noisea dragon. The spine- tingling, high-pitched
screeches might have come from her own mouth. Khisanth dived through the archway to the
pond and looked up just in time to confirm her suspicions. The body of an enormous black
dragon, wings fully extended, sped away through the dusky sky. Its underbelly was well
scarred.

Khisanth looked upon the first fellow dragon she'd seen since before the Sleep. The
strange wyrm tucked its wings, turned sharply, and dived right for her lair. When it
seemed the dragon would plunge straight into the tree, a slight twist of its wings sent it
into a sharp bank. The wyrmKhisanth could see he was a male nowleveled off just yards
above the delicate willow branches, blasting leaves from their limbs. Still moving
impossibly fast, the dragon curled his lips back from the yellowed knives of his teeth.
The night exploded in a crackling billow of stinking green acid.

Bile engulfed the graceful, arching branches of Khisanth's beloved willow. The ancient
tree split and splintered. Great holes opened as branches exploded and spun into the air.
Raising a claw, the attacking dragon boldly swooped to within a tail's length of his
astonished target. Retracting one talon, he raked two deep scratches into the living wood
above Khisanth's head. Then, with a mighty pump of his wings and a last threatening
screech, he rose above the sizzling willow and into the dark sky.

The shriek of challenge finally shook Khisanth from her daze. She gave a mighty slap of
her tail that sent a wave of water crashing over the still-smoking husk of her willow
tree, washing away whatever was left of the other dragon's acid. The corrosive bile
sputtered wherever it touched the water. Khisanth's lair at the base of the tree was still
largely intact, though hideously scarred.

Think twice, act once, Kadagan had always said. Khisanth called on her qhen training to
still the fury and the urge to chase after the wyrm. She had learned the price of such
foolishness the hard waylost information from her first battle with ogres, pain and
humiliation from the disastrous skirmish with the young Solamnic Knight at Needle Pass.

At least this unprovoked attack had solved one mystery. “He's obviously the one who's been
watching me,” Khisanth muttered aloud. But the intent of the assault still puzzled her.
The dragon's acid could easily have destroyed her lair, if that was his goal. He was
either a bungler or a rival for the same territory.

Her fury turned to puzzlement, then curiosity. Another dragon ... It would be interesting
to talk to another of her kind. Looking at her still-smoldering lair, she thought it
unlikely he had conversation on his mind. Khisanth sprang from the ground and into the
air. She headed west, in the direction the

other dragon had taken. From her one flight over the rest of the moors, when she had
scouted for her lair, she knew the place was enormous. Even a simple flight from east to
west would take many days, and the moor was twice as long from north to south as it was
from east to west. A shrub-by-shrub examination could take a lifetime. Pushing herself
hard, she hoped she would gain enough ground to catch sight of the dragon again, but she
couldn't be sure of his flight trail.

After some time, when her wings began to ache and she had seen only Lunitari in the dark
night sky, she landed. The dragon adopted the shape of the first creature she saw. Upon
questioning, the blue-necked mallard admitted seeing another flying creature, much larger
than itself. But it had never encountered the winged creature on the ground.

Khisanth traveled westward on foot in a variety of guises, from snout-nosed aardvark to
zebra, questioning everything she met for some sign pointing to the other dragon's lair.
Her first useful clue came when, as a curly-tusked warthog, she learned of a place over
which an enormous winged creature flew regularly. The other warthog had also heard loud
rumblings just beyond a ridge of rocks to the north and west. Changing yet again into the
sleek, weasel-like body of a meerkat, hoping to be overlooked as a rodent by a wary

dragon in his lair, Khisanth scampered over a low ridge. From the rise Khisanth surveyed
the stretch of marsh ahead. With her magic, she detected dark emotions in the vicinity,
too far away to read but too strong to come from even the largest bear, or even the
deadly, many-headed hydra. Khisanth knew better than to approach the other dragon's lair
too closely, knowing from her own experience that his senses would warn him of intruders
if they were too bold. Instead, she took to the sky as a dragon to scout at a distance. A
dragon's imprint on the area was unmistakable to another dragon's eye. The largest trees
were withered and blackened, but left standing as signs of ownership. Where boulders
jutted above the water or marshy ground, they were cut deeply with parallel claw marks. At
the center of this area was a knob of ground covered in reeds and rocks. The stones looked
unnatural, as if deliberately placed there ages before. The pattern suggested a series of
concentric rings, but most of the rocks were now tumbled and overgrown with rushes and
swamp grass. Near the center of this knoll there was a blackness, clear indication of a
lair. Khisanth intended to leave a message not unlike histhe destruction of her tree.
Blood once again pulsed pleasantly behind her eyes. Using the maynus, she banished the
darkness from the night sky. A blinding beam of light shot forward from her claws to the
entrance of the wyrm's lair, enveloping it in absolute brilliance. As Khisanth had hoped,
the other dragon crawled from the mouth of its lair and into the painfully bright light.
Blinking against the light, the other dragon held up a claw arm to block it out. It kept
the light from cutting at his eyes, but still he could see nothing but blinding whiteness
around him. Khisanth now had perfect opportunity to study her fellow black dragon,
illuminated as he was. He had deep age lines around his eyes. His graying, spotted lips
sagged on the sides like an old man's jowls, revealing more teeth missing than not. He was
decked out in a necklace of sky-blue sapphires and forest-green emeralds with a matching
anklet. Circling his massive head was a pearl diadem, a large pear-shaped ruby at its
center. Khisanth allowed herself a brief, smug smile at his pain and confusion. She chose
her first words carefully. “Now, dragon, we meet on equal footing.” She hadn't heard her
voice in so long that its deep, even timbre pleased her.

The other dragon held as still as stone for a moment. His eyes, one orange, the other
blue, shifted from side to side. “Is that you, Talon?” his old voice rumbled, curious and
concerned. “Put out that light so that I can see you.” “No, I'm not Talon. And as for the
light, answer my questions first, and I will consider dimming it.” Khisanth watched for
the other dragon to ready his breath weapon. His chest rose slowly, evenly. Still, her
eyes never left him. “First, so that we may converse like civilized dragons, tell me your
name.”