Amero approached the flames warily. The heat felt pleasant on his face. Duranix’s cave was chilly by night, and the fire dispelled both the somber shadows and the clinging cold.
“How do we stop the yevi?” he asked, staring at the flames.
“‘We?’” said Duranix. He smiled, showing lots of teeth. “‘We’ shall try to stop the spread of the yevi packs, somehow. I don’t think Sthenn will come out to fight me, dragon to dragon. If we defeat the yevi, that will be enough for the time being.”
Again, Amero didn’t quite grasp every word, but he knew enough to believe Duranix could be a powerful ally to his people. But the plainsmen were scattered. How to let his people know? And what to do once Amero found them? Most, faced with Duranix in his natural shape, would react like Genta and his sons — they would want to kill the “monster.” There had to be a way to let the hunters and plainsmen know that Duranix was actually their friend.
“No, boy, I’m not,” the dragon said, once more hearing Amero’s thoughts. “I don’t love your kind. You’re smelly, quarrelsome, and violent.”
Amero opened his mouth to protest, but Duranix waved away the unspoken words.
“But, tiresome as you are, I prefer humans to Sthenn’s mindless beasts. You at least can choose to be good or evil, and that makes you greater in spirit than all the yevi Sthenn commands.” He tossed a dry branch on the fire. It blazed up, the flames casting weird shadows on the arching walls. “It puts you in advance of us dragons, too, in some ways.”
Amero regarded him quizzically, disbelieving. Did he have a power the dragon didn’t possess? If he did, what about other men and women? Would their collective strength be great enough to resist Sthenn?
This time Duranix did not respond to his unspoken question. Still in human form, the dragon had ascended to his broad stone bed and fallen deeply asleep. Eating did that, he’d explained earlier.
Amero watched the glowing embers of the dying fire for a long time. The fire fascinated him. He pushed a dry fir bough into the ashes and watched it catch light. As each needle flamed, it spread its fire to its neighbor, until they were all ablaze. Once burned, the fir bough fell rapidly to ash, crumbled, and disappeared. What if the yevi were like the fire, and the plainsfolk their kindling? If the plains people didn’t band together, would they be consumed until nothing remained but smoke in the air and dust on the ground?
“There must be an easier way,” Amero said. He was standing inside the cave mouth, hundreds of paces above the foaming falls. He’d just asked Duranix how he was supposed to get down, and the dragon’s first response was, “Jump.”
“I’ll carry you,” Duranix said patiently.
“Well, yes, but — ” He dug his toe into one of the shallow grooves in the cave floor. “Could you cut handholds in the rock for me?”
Fearlessly Duranix leaned out, bracing himself casually with one hand. “Do you really want to climb up and down a sheer cliff face?”
He didn’t, but Amero hated being so dependent on the dragon. “I’ll think of something else,” he muttered.
Duranix wrapped an arm around Amero’s chest and leaped through the waterfall. The brief shock of cold water was followed by a prolonged sensation of falling. Amero felt Duranix’s arm transform from human to dragon. The great creature spread his wings, and with a snap, their downward plunge ceased.
Amero opened his eyes. They were gliding across the lake of the falls, a long triangle of water whose sharp end curled west and narrowed to become the Six Canyons River, a tributary of the mighty Plains River. Above them the sky was dotted with dull white clouds. The enormous shadow of the dragon raced over the placid surface of the lake, growing larger and faster as Duranix lost altitude. Beating his wings rapidly, the dragon slowed and lowered his hind legs. He landed lightly on a sandy hillock on the north side of the river.
With some effort, Duranix writhed and shrank into human form. He was red-faced and panting by the time he resumed his borrowed shape.
When Amero looked at him quizzically, the dragon said, “Going from large to small is work. From small to large is… liberating.”
Since searching by air failed to turn up many of the roving yevi, Duranix had resolved to return to the plain on foot. At ground level he could pick up individual tracks, scents, and spoor of the yevi. He could see far when aloft, but the dragon could also be seen from far away. Tracking the hunting packs on the ground was a slower method but promised better results. He set off at a rapid pace that soon had Amero floundering to keep up.
“Wait — wait,” the boy gasped, staggering through the waist-high grass. “Don’t go so fast!”
“There’s a lot of ground to cover. The faster I go, the sooner it will be done.”
“I can’t keep up! Remember, I’m only a human!” Duranix slackened his pace reluctantly, making no secret of his disdain for Amero’s weakness.
The land below the mountains was terraced by flattened hills that widened and lowered as the pair headed west. Clumps of highland pines and cedars thinned until solitary ones stood out like lonely sentinels on the horizon. Striding along with no attempt at stealth, Duranix scattered herds of wild oxen ahead of them and flushed coveys of pigeons from the tall grass.
The boy and the human-shaped dragon made rapid progress. By midday the mountains were only a smudge at their backs. Duranix agreed to a respite when he reached a wide, flat boulder in the midst of the plain. Amero went scouting for water while the dragon perched comfortably atop the sun-baked stone, soaking up the heat like a basking lizard.
A small stream, choked with grass, ran down a gully a few dozen paces from Duranix’s sunning spot. Amero parted the grass and dipped out a few handfuls of water. It was poor stuff compared to the waterfall, tasting tepid and weedy. He lifted his head and looked downstream. A fallen twig, boldly white against the green grass, lay half in the water not far away. Wood that white had to be birch, he thought, rising to his knees, but birch didn’t grow on the high plains -
On closer inspection, the “twig” proved to be the arm bone of a human child a girl, judging by the scraps of clothing left on the skeleton. Rain had washed away the smell of decay, but the ferocious bite marks on the girl’s bones were ample evidence of what had caused her death.
Amero recoiled in horror and opened his mouth to summon Duranix. Before he could form the words in his throat, Duranix was beside him.
“I heard your shock,” said the dragon. He knelt by the pathetic remains. “Yevi?”
“Probably. A panther would eat the marrow from the long bones as well as the flesh, and a bear would carry a kill back to its den.”
Duranix snapped an arm bone in two and sniffed the marrow inside. Amero grimaced.
“Dead no more than four days,” said Duranix. “What the yevi left, the scavengers finished.”
“She must have had a family,” Amero said sadly. “I wonder what happened to them?”
Duranix stood up. “No trees nearby to hide in, and no caves. I’d say they were killed.” He swept the horizon with his powerful senses, trying to locate any living humans or yevi in the vicinity.
His search was interrupted when Amero dropped to his knees and began to dig. With his bare hands he tore up tough lumps of prairie grass. Worms and grubs fled into the earth as quickly as he exposed them. He clawed angrily at the root-infested soil.
“What are you doing?”
“The girl must be buried, else her spirit cannot rest,” Amero replied, without slackening.
“Is that true?”
“I believe it.”
Duranix went down on one knee. With two sweeps of his hand, he doubled the depth of the hole Amero had started. When the hole was elbow deep, Amero gently placed the dry bones in it. Some of them were missing, but when all the bones present were placed in the hole, Amero said, “Rest now. May your ancestors greet you with joy.”
Duranix cocked his head curiously at the boy’s words but said nothing as Amero pushed the dirt back and pressed clumps of sod in place.