He decided to leave the door open after all and to just forget about the hatchlings.
In fact, he decided to forget about everything except leaving, as quickly as possible. He began backing away, watching the big dragon carefully.
His foot landed on something slick, and a hatchling yowled; stepping quickly aside, Dumery saw that one of them, the black one, was out of the cage already, and he had just stepped on one of its dragging wings.
The big dragon roared angrily at him.
Dumery didn’t dare turn away, and he found himself with a clear view of a dark mouth lined with hundreds of extremely sharp teeth; foul breath, redolent of rotting meat, swept over him, and his ears rang.
A window swung open in the farmhouse.
“Who’s there?” someone called.
Dumery wasn’t stupid enough to answer that, but the big dragon turned away for a moment, distracted, and Dumery seized the opportunity. He spun on his heel and ran, narrowly avoiding tripping over the black hatchling.
As he ran, he heard a man’s voice shouting, “Hai, dragon! What is it? Guard, boy, guard!”
Dumery ran for the loose upright in the fence, not worrying about what that meant, not worrying about anything except whether that huge, angry dragon was following him. He didn’t see it start after him, nor did he see it stop when it heard the order to guard. He didn’t see it return, disgruntled, to the door of the hatchling cage, where it began snatching up errant dragonets by their tails and tossing them back into their pen.
Dumery didn’t dare look back as he groped along the fence in the dark, feeling for the broken bar, but at last he found it and squeezed through. He stumbled on until he rounded the boulder and was out of sight of the farm.
There he fell to the ground, panting.
After a moment he felt sufficiently recovered to sit up, look around, and listen.
He heard dragons bellowing, but that was off in the distance somewhere; there was no sign of pursuit. The lesser moon was up again, looking even more pinkish than usual and half-obscured by a wisp of cloud. The greater moon’s glow had faded to a mere tinge in the west, and no more stars were visible through the gathering mist and cloud.
All Dumery could see was rock and moss and sky.
He sat and gathered his wits.
It appeared that Kensher and company had a line of defense they hadn’t mentioned-trained watch-dragons. Or one watch-dragon, anyway. That hardly seemed fair.
But then, they weren’t trying to be fair-they were trying to defend themselves.
Against what, Dumery wondered. What was there out here in the middle of nowhere that called for that sort of defense?
Or was it to keep the dragons in?
Would a dragon, even a trained one, help in imprisoning its own kind?
Well, yes, Dumery thought, it probably would. People served as gaolers willingly enough, didn’t they?
Whatever the watch-dragon was there for, it was there, and it had kept him from getting his hatchlings. The exact reason for its presence didn’t seem anywhere near as important as thefact of its presence.
His burglary attempt was a failure; he hadn’t gotten his breeding pair.
Had Kensher guessed what had happened? Would he be guarding against another attempt? Would Teneria know what was going on?
Well, the ground was so rocky that there would be no footprints to show that an unauthorized human being had been there. The watch-dragon wouldn’t be able to say anything-would it?
No, Dumery just couldn’t believe that Kensher would keep a talking dragon around. And that one had growled and roared, but shown no signs of any greater vocal ability than that. It also wasn’t any bigger than some of the dragons in the cages.
So it couldn’t talk and say it had seen Dumery. The only evidence of his presence would be the broken fence-if that was noticed-and the open cage door.
That was quite an extensive fence, and there were a great many uprights in it; one broken one might well go unnoticed. It would almost certainly not be found until daylight, at the very least, not unless someone walked the entire fence with a lantern.
Of course, someone might do just that, Dumery had to admit.
And there was that witch. He had no idea what she might see, with her magic, or what she might do about it.
He decided that he would assume that she wouldn’t know anything more than anybody else. After all, what did she know about dragons or burglars? Neither one had anything to do with witchcraft. So he would ignore her for now, and assume that she would go along with whatever the others thought.
If he was lucky, they would see the open cage door and would think that one of the hatchlings had somehow opened it, or that whoever was last in there hadn’t closed it properly, and that what the watch-dragon had spotted was hatchlings getting loose.
After all, could they really expect intruders up here?
Almost certainly, they’d just think it was an accidentally-opened cage that caused the fuss.
In that case, once everyone had settled down again, Dumery would be able to sneak back into the house. Or even sneak back to the pens and try again.
He had to think about that. If he were going to make a second attempt it would be best to do it tonight, rather than waiting, because the longer he waited the more time they would have to find the break in the fence.
There was the problem of the watch-dragon, however. Did the creature ever sleep, or was it constantly on guard? Was there any way he could elude it, or fool it into thinking he belonged there?
This was a matter that required some thought. Besides, it would take some time for everything to settle back to normal, and there was the darkness to worry about-the lesser moon was still low, and didn’t give all that much light in any case. Dumery decided that he would wait until everyone had had time to calm down, and then would decide whether to make another try, or to slip back into the house and pretend he had slept through all the excitement.
For now, he would wait. He settled down, making himself as comfortable as he could on the hard stone.
He had no intention of sleeping, but all the same, within minutes, he was asleep.
When he awoke the sun was warm on the bare stone, and he realized with a start that he had missed his chance. The sun was well up in the east, peering down at him over the peak of the mountain-half the morning was gone. Kensher and his family would be out and about; they might well have found the break in the fence. They would surely have all the hatchlings back in their cage, and might have put a lock on it. The watch-dragon would surely be awake.
And he had missed his chance to get back into the house. They would surely have noticed his absence by now.
In fact, that Teneria might already be looking for him, brewing up her spells or whatever she did. She might come upon him at any moment; if she had followed him to the farm from all the way back in Ethshar, finding him now should be easy.
He sat up and considered.
She hadn’t found him yet, though. Maybe she wasn’t looking, or maybe something had gone wrong with her witchcraft.
If she didn’t find him, he could slip away, hide somewhere, wait until nightfall, and then try again; he could break the fence again, if it had been repaired.
But how could he get past the watch-dragon?
And looking at the situation in the light of day, how would he get two squirming hatchlings out through the fence, and down the mountain?
And what if one of the hatchlings turned out to be a fire-breather?
It was a good thing that Kensher didn’t raise flyers or fire-breathers, even as watch-dragons. If the watch-dragon had been a fire-breather, Dumery realized, he might have been dead by now, a charred corpse lying on the stone, instead of alive and well. If the watch-dragon could fly it might have pursued him past the fence-and he hadn’t gone very far, had he? Around that boulder and across maybe fifty feet of open ground lay the fence; surely, the dragon could have tracked him that far.