But then, they must know he’d seen what was going on, and it really didn’t matter how or why he had come here-he still knew the secret.
Besides, he couldn’t think of a good lie.
“I was following someone,” he said. “A man named Kensher Kinner’s son.”
Talger glanced up, startled, at the sound of the familiar name. Kinner eyed Dumery with interest. “Were you, indeed,” he said.
Dumery nodded.
“And why were you following my son?” Kinner asked.
That confirmed Dumery’s suspicion. “I thought he was a dragon-hunter,” he admitted.
“Oh? And why were you interested in following a dragon-hunter?”
“I was seeking an apprenticeship.”
Kinner stared at him silently for a moment, and Dumery stared back defiantly.
The children, puzzled, looked from one to the other and back again.
“You want to be a dragon-hunter?” Kinner asked.
Dumery nodded.
Kinner said, “What made you think that Kensher was a dragon-hunter?”
“I saw him selling dragon’s blood to the wizards back in Ethshar,” Dumery explained.
“Ah,” Kinner said, a satisfied smile of comprehension spreading across his face. He rocked back on his heels. “And you assumed he’d gotten it by hunting dragons.”
Dumery nodded again.
“I suppose you saw this place clearly before you passed out,” Kinner remarked.
Once more, Dumery nodded.
“Then you now know that Kensher isn’t primarily a dragon-hunter,” Kinner said.
“He’s a dragon-farmer,” Dumery agreed. “That’s all right. I still want an apprenticeship.”
Kinner sighed. “Boy,” he said, “you may have the most wonderful reasons in the World for wanting to be Kensher’s apprentice, but I’m afraid it doesn’t matter. It will never happen.”
“Whynot?” Dumery demanded.
The old man stared at him, considering, for a moment. Then, holding up an admonitory finger, Kinner said, “Wait.” He stepped out the door of the room and called something in Sardironese.
Dumery had little choice; he waited.
A moment later footsteps sounded, and faces appeared in the doorway-young faces, varying from a little younger than Dumery to several years older.
“That’s Seldis,” Kinner said, “and Wuller, and Kinthera, and Shanra, and Kashen, and Korun, and Kinner the Younger. You already met Talger, Kalthen, Tarissa, Kirsha, and Shatha. They’re all my grandchildren except Wuller, who’s married to Seldis-and more importantly, they’re all Kensher’s children. And Pancha’s, of course,” he said, with a slight bow to the woman.
Dumery stared. Eleven children, ranging in age from a young woman down to a boy of two or three-not to mention the young man Wuller, who had married into the family.
“And every one of them has a prior claim to an apprenticeship here on this farm,” Kinner pointed out.
“But...” Dumery began.
“Boy,” Kinner said, cutting him off, “it doesn’t take eleven people to run this farm. It doesn’t take more than, oh, two or three, really, though more hands mean less work for each. And this is the only dragon farm left in all the World, so far as we know, so there’s no point in training you with the idea you’ll find work elsewhere once you make journeyman.”
Dumery hesitated. “The only one in the World?” he asked.
Kinner nodded. “So we’re told.”
“But how... if it’s the only one...” Dumery puzzled over this for a moment, and then asked, “How did itget here?”
Kinner sighed. As he did, the girl-young woman, really-he had called Seldis whispered something in his ear. Kinner nodded, and muttered something in reply.
Seldis and Wuller vanished from the doorway, and as Kinner told his tale most of the others gradually drifted away as well.
“You know about the Great War,” Kinner said.
Dumery nodded. “When Ethshar destroyed the Northerners,” he said.
“Yes, exactly,” Kinner agreed. “It was a long, long war-nobody knows anything about what the World was like before it began, not really. So we don’t know where dragons came from originally, because they were around from the earliest days of the war. Personally, I suspect some wizard invented them, maybe by accident-why else would they have so much magic in their blood? And they aren’t like any other animals I ever heard of, the way they grow, and behave...” He blinked, stared silently and thoughtfully at nothing for a moment, and then recovered himself.
“Well, anyway,” he continued, “wherever dragons came from, originally they were all raised by people, there weren’t any wild ones at all, anywhere. They were used as weapons in the war-if they weren’t just an accident, that must be what they were invented for. They were fighting animals. One big dragon can tear up a whole town pretty quickly, after all, and that’s without even mentioning that some can breathe fire, and some can fly, and most of them have hide like armor, and if you let them grow big enough they get smart enough to talk-I mean, how does that fit in with the rest of the World, animals that can learn to talkas adults, when it’s too late to civilize them? It just doesn’t make any sense unless somebody invented them for the war.”
Dumery stared. This was beyond him; the idea that somebody might haveinvented dragons was all new to him. After all, did squid fit in with the rest of the World? Had someone invented those, too? What about camels, or nightwalkers?
Did they make any sense?
Kinner noticed the dazed expression on the boy’s face and realized he was losing his audience. He hurried to get on with his tale.
“So,” he said, “during the war the army kept dragons around as fighting animals, and bred them as part of the war effort. Some were trained to fight; others were just turned loose behind enemy lines, where they grew up in the woods and ate up all the game, and when that was gone and they got hungry they turned on the livestock and the civilians, and they just generally made life more difficult for the Northerners. And of course, Ethshar’s military wizards needed a steady supply of dragon’s blood for their spells-the war was fought as much with magic as with swords, southern wizards and theurgists against northern sorcerers and demonologists. So the army ran its own dragon-breeding operations-I don’t know how many, but several of them. And toward the end of the war one of them, right up near the front but hidden in the mountains, was run by a man named Thar, who was a sergeant in General Anaran’s elite Forward Command.” Kinner smiled. “Sergeant Thar was my... let’s see... my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Six greats-that sounds right.”
Dumery blinked. “Oh,” he said. “But the war... I mean, that was hundreds of years ago...”
“That’s right,” Kinner agreed. “It was. And when the war ended, about two hundred and thirty years ago, Sergeant Thar simply kept on raising dragons. The government didn’t care. Or maybe they didn’t even know. The way I heard it from my grandfather, orders came down saying the dragons were surplus, that the army didn’t need them any more and they should all either be killed, or set free up north, to help polish off any survivors after the Northern Empire fell. Well, Sergeant Thar thought that was stupid and wasteful, so he kept the dragons and the breeding camp for himself, and passed them down to his son, and so on, and so on, until I inherited them from my father. And when I die, my son Kensher will inherit the dragons and the farm from me.”