“Father, I’ll be right back. I’m going to help you.”

Novosolosk, the little black dragon, had just ventured above ground. . . .

She looked up at the condor: “Fair warning! I see any of you pecking at him, I’ll be venting feathers for a week.”

“Perish the thought.” The condor fluffed up his feathers and settled. “I’m eager to see how you manage this.”

While hunting rock rats, Novosolosk found himself trapped atop a low jungle kopje by a great tiger. The tiger prowled round and round the base of the kopje, growling and panting.

She looked off the east side of the knob at the river-turn. Sure enough, masses of logs had washed up against the rocks at the base of the peninsula, wetted by the constant spray of white water. Along with more mundane lichens, tufts of gray hung from cracks and knotholes in the logs.

Novosolosk tried to bargain with the tiger for safe passage out of his territory, but the tiger just spat abuse in return. He noticed an arrow through the tiger’s neck, broken shafts sticking out either side of his coat, the orange and white gone brown with blood and green with pus.

“Tiger, tiger, I can extract that arrow. . . .”

Hope gave her tired body new life. She eschewed the cut rocks for a quicker climb down the side of the knob. Going down would be easier than coming back up. . . .

Novosolosk went to the swamp, the tiger padding along just behind, its hot breath on his tail and drops of saliva falling like rain. He expected the tiger to jump at any point . . .

Sure enough, a few of the logs had thick growths of dwarf’s-beard. The plant appeared to like broken-off ends, for some reason, or split trunks. It spilled out of the rotting black wood in a thick thatch of gray, interlaced and layered and almost woven in a way that made it difficult to tell where the growth began and where it ended. It reminded Wistala of the hair shirt from the man Father brought back to the cave for Auron to learn hominid-killing. One final test.

As the tiger groaned away, Novosolosk broke a piece of the moss at a thick joint. It was joined by a whitish band. He blew on the band. It stretched and waved in his breath but did not break. . . .

She tore off two hunks of moss, carried it in her mouth back up the stairs, feeling a bit like a bullfrog she’d seen croaking away in a stream with his windbag expanded under his chin. She took the stairs in a series of leaps.

Novosolosk crushed the moss in his sii and pulled out the arrow with one quick motion. The tiger yowled and swatted him across the crest, but he pressed the mass to either side of the hole the arrow left. Dwarf’s-beard both staunched the flow and cleaned the wound, so powerful is its magic, and the tiger’s angry fever came down. . . .

She listened to Father’s heart when she crept under his wounded sii. Father would not move his limb; she had to wedge herself into the gap between body and arm like a river clam and then flex her back so she could get at the wound.

The ugly red gash gave off a pulse of blood from one end, a steady flow from the other. She packed the wound with dwarf’s-beard, crushing its laced branches with her sii until they were sticky with the whitish gunk. It had been a brave dwarf that came so close to his sii to open the bronze dragon’s breast with his ax.

Father looked relieved as soon as she wiggled free of his armpit, although whether this was from instinct at being able to press the wound closed again or comfort brought by the dwarf’s-beard, she couldn’t say.

The stream of blood feeding the pool Father lay in slowed.

Wistala sank to her joints.

“Thank you, Novosolosk.”

Chapter 8

I still say he’s going to die,” the condor insisted.

Most of his cousins had left by the time the sun set, but a few still circled far above. The old yellowbeak chuckled every time Wistala limped up the long, long staircase, bearing another mouthful of dwarf’s-beard.

Wistala worked from nose-tip to tail, crushing the growth and placing it atop Father’s wounds. Sometimes it fell out again right away, and every time Father shifted his position, he exposed new wounds.

“Prophecies and fallacies, I’m starting to enjoy proving you wrong,” Wistala said.

“Ah, but there I’ve got you, if you’ll take the high view. There’s no hole so deep or airs so lofty for any of us that old Father Death doesn’t visit. He’s more reliable than even your fire. We, his humble retinue, clean up after him. How about giving us a taste and letting me warm my chilled grippers?”

“I’ve no fire yet, and even if I did, I wouldn’t waste it on a grouser like you.”

“Grouse! I’m a High Mountain Condor, hatchling. Barring your kind, no one matches my wingspan save the lost Rocs of the east. And once you dragons are gone—”

“What’s that you say?”

“Please, take no offense. We carrion birds value our manners. If I spoke on a delicate subject—”

“I should have asked you to explain yourself. Do you mean once Father and I leave the river, you’ll be the skyking?”

The condor clacked his beak. “I rarely see a dragon anymore. In the time of my father’s father’s father’s egg, I’m told your kind were thick in these mountains, and there was good feasting on the remains of your kills, for kind dragon lords always offered fresh, delectable heads with eyeballs intact to us of lesser wing.”

Wistala wondered how many other caverns hid butchered, moss-covered families. “Who is driving the dragons away?”

“Perhaps you should ask your father that, if he ever speaks again.”

“You must see everything. I’ve seen you soaring as high as a dragon.”

The condor straightened a little; birds were as vain as dragons sometimes.

“So who can master dragons and bid them depart?”

“The hominids, I suppose. They do shape the world to suit themselves, don’t they?”

“The world wins back, in the end,” Wistala said, thinking of the toppled, overgrown battlements around the home cave.

“We condors look to the day of the Last Swancall. Do you know what a swancall is?”

Wistala twitched her nose. “No.”

“It’s a great metal thing shaped like a dragon’s neck, and it makes a call as loud as the white swans you see on the lakes of the north. The hominids blow them before slaughtering each other. We carrion birds wait upon the war of the Last Swancall, when all the hominids kill each other off; then there’ll be the vast battle feast in celebration and the world will be given over to we of talon and feather again.”

She sniffed at the wound around the great shaft. It smelled evil. While waiting and dreaming of the condor’s last swancall might be pleasant, she’d have to venture along the slippery banks of the river in search of more dwarf’s-beard.

A clear morning sky brought rainbows to the waterfall upriver. If Wistala weren’t so weighted down with worry, the bright colors would have made her hearts glad. But Father still seemed to be worsening.

“Wistala, I’m so thirsty,” Father panted. “I’ll perish of it before I can move again.”

River, river all around, and not a drop within reach. Father chose a good location to collapse, for it would be difficult and dangerous to cross and climb all the slippery rocks for a hominid bearing arms, but he couldn’t reach the river swirling below as it bent back around the knob.

“But you must move!” She didn’t have enough digits to count how many times she urged Father to move. The blood around him had dried into a brown stain, still claw-deep and sticky under his scales.

Father pressed his back against a horizontal slab at the center of the knob, not a fallen obelisk but obviously a cutting of some importance, judging by how it stood on a little platform. His claws slipped against the stone. He rolled a little, got his claws under him.

Wistala had to look away; she couldn’t bear to see Father’s limbs trembling under him again. Father’s mighty head fell.

Gluck-glk-glub . . .

Is Father crying?

“He must have water,” Wistala called.

The watching condor looked at the sky, checking for rain clouds, perhaps. “Were you speaking to me?”

“No . . . yes.”

“Water flows up to down, not down to up. What you need is a train of pack-dwarves carrying waterskins.”

“Waterskins?” Wistala asked, thinking it was some sort of plant.

“Hominids make them. They scoop out the insides of sheep and lambs and fill them with water to drink on journeys.”

Hominids must have stomachs stronger than the condor above to drink water stored inside rotting flesh. Disgusting creatures.

Why did the condor spew such a useless detail? He might as well have said, “You need a good rainstorm,” or “A spring bubbling up through these rocks would help.” She wouldn’t begin to know how to scoop out a dead animal and fill it again with water. They had nostrils, throats, tailvents, never mind the holes one made while killing it. If she could reach up and grab the condor, she’d be tempted to try it with him . . . squeeze it out like mother bringing up a tenderized sheep for hungry hatchlings.