Despite being accustomed to gore, he steeled himself for what he was about to reveal before lifting the cloth away—seeing a bad wound on yourself was always far harder than looking at one on someone else. To his surprise, he found only an angry red welt, seeping fluid and blood—a superficial injury. It looked like the barb had grazed him rather than penetrated, but he distinctly remembered the sensation of it striking bone. He probed the area gently, but there was no sign of a deeper wound.
Had he thought it was worse in the heat of the moment? No, he knew what he had felt, and he remembered not being able to lift his arm. Now he could do so with no difficulty, except for a little tightness where the injury was. Had it been the Cup? Both the Order’s healers and Solène had been able to speed healing and remove fatigue—might that be another of the Cup’s offerings?
He allowed himself to relax for a moment, to let the chaos of the past few minutes wash away as the normal sounds of the countryside started to return. Then his heart raced in panic before his mind had time to catch up.
The pull, as strong as he had ever felt it. He grabbed his sword and jumped to his feet with as much energy as he could muster. The other dragon must have been nearby and come to see what was going on. He scanned the sky but saw nothing. Disbelieving, he looked again, but the sky remained clear. He spun on his heels, fearing that it might be lurking in the trees, but something that large would have trouble moving about in a forest, and would make a lot of noise. His eyes were tired—baked dry from the heat, and clogged with smoke. He blinked repeatedly to keep them clear and in focus, but he saw nothing close enough to—
Then he saw Cabham. Sitting on his horse a safe distance away, watching. No doubt he had waited to see if Gill managed to kill the dragon and now would ride back to Venne as fast as he could to claim it. Gill blinked again and focussed, and realised this man wasn’t wearing armour. It wasn’t Cabham. His hair was brown, his complexion darker, and he looked more Mirabayan than Humberlander. Gill couldn’t make out many details from that distance, but there was nothing about him that was familiar. What was he doing there? Why did he simply sit on his horse and watch?
Perhaps the man realised that Gill had seen him, for he gave a wave, and then, in no great hurry, rode away. Gill watched him for a moment. Val groaned behind him, reminding Guillot that he needed to get the horses and get himself and the boy back to Venne for some hot food and badly needed rest. Overall, the day could have gone far worse.
Pharadon was ambivalent at having witnessed the slaying of a dragon. There were many moments when he had been tempted to intervene, but he’d resisted.
The dragon had been a large, but not quite fully grown, blackscale. It was difficult to say how old it was—depending on how much food and Fount was available, a dragon could reach its full size in anything from a couple of weeks to several months. Both were more plentiful than Pharadon had ever known, so he guessed this dragon had hatched very recently.
That raised another issue—and an alarming one. This dragon had advanced to a level of maturity beyond which enlightenment was no longer possible. That was why he had allowed the human to slay it. If the man had not, Pharadon would have been forced to do it himself. Base dragons, never brought to enlightenment, were a scourge—violent, aggressive creatures driven by instinct. He had hoped to bring these young dragons to enlightenment, but both this one and the greenscale were too mature. He could sense only one more, and worried now that he was too late. Beyond this last creature, he detected no more of his kind.
All dragons were born base and would remain so if an enlightened dragon did not intervene and lift them from their wretched fate. That was a normal thing for a dragon hatched of enlightened parents. Within days of their breaking out of their eggs, their parents would ensure that the ceremony was carried out and they would join their enlightened brethren.
On a rare occasion, something went wrong and the offspring of an enlightened would not be raised in time. The window of opportunity was short—juvenile dragons grew fast even at the worst of times. When that happened, it was a tragic thing, the kind of devastating event that a parent rarely recovered from—to see their child descend into darkness.
All dragons had been base once. At some point, long before even Pharadon had drawn his first breath, the spark of enlightenment had taken hold in a goldscale and it had been able to share that spark with others. That had created the divide between enlightened and base. The first enlightenment seemed to have been a matter of luck, if the old stories were to be believed—simply a case of being in the right place at the right time.
Those who were not elevated had to suffer on as they were. There were those amongst the enlightened who tried to set that wrong to right; they had spent their lives seeking out base juveniles and enlightening them. It was a difficult, overwhelming task, and often dangerous—base dragons were hostile to everything they did not understand.
Those who were missed—those base beasts that grew to adulthood—caused problems for all the rest. They sought out territory and would fight to the death to possess it. The enlightened were eventually forced to keep them under control, and so, for a time, Pharadon had found himself killing troublesome base dragons.
The large blackscale the knight had killed had already marked out a wide-ranging territory and would soon have come into conflict with the greenscale, which had done likewise. Pharadon had found several places where their scents had overlapped. The valley was not large enough for both of them, and certainly not with a third in the area. They had probably been brood mates; that was something that Pharadon had never understood about the base. They shared blood, something of supreme importance to the enlightened, but to the base, it meant nothing. They would have killed one another without hesitation, just to protect their chosen scraps of territory, in a time when it seemed that the world was all but emptied of dragonkind. However, there was one more out there, and if he was lucky, it might not yet have matured beyond his reach.
Seeing the battle, Pharadon had learned something else of interest. Something as disturbing as having seen Alpheratz’s head on the table in that small human shop. The Silver Circle still existed. That would make his quest more difficult. A slayer couldn’t be ignored or run from—they were relentless. This one would have to be dealt with. Bringing a base dragon to enlightenment was a dangerous process. If one of the Silver Circle turned up during this time, the consequences would be disastrous for both Pharadon and the base dragon. He would check on the dragon first, and then, all being well, he would kill the knight.
CHAPTER 27
By the time Gill and Val got back to Venne, Gill’s left shoulder felt no different than the rest of him. On the way, he had done his best to surreptitiously rinse some of the blood from his armour with his water skin so he wouldn’t have to explain away the evidence of a wound he didn’t have. Val had not been too shaken by the results of his reckless act of bravery, and Gill was satisfied that things had gone as well as he could have hoped. There was only one dragon left, and he was beginning to believe they could successfully kill all three.