The beach between the dying dragon and the sea's edge was tracked and scored by the feet and heavy bodies of his kind, and his entrails were trodden into the sand.
Neither Arren nor Sparrowhawk spoke until they were well clear of that island and heading across the choppy, restless channel of the Dragons' Run, full of reefs and pinnacles and shapes of rock, toward the northern islands of the double chain. Then Sparrowhawk said, That was an evil sight, and his voice was bleak and cold.
Do they eat their own kind?
No. No more than we do. They have been driven mad. Their speech has been taken from them. They who spoke before men spoke, they who are older than any living thing, the Children of Segoy -they have been driven to the dumb terror of the beasts. Ah! Kalessin! where have your wings borne you? Have you lived to see your race learn shame? His voice rang like struck iron, and he looked upward, searching the sky. But the dragons were behind, circling lower now above the rocky isles and the blood-stained beach, and overhead was nothing but the blue sky and the sun of noon.
There was then no man living who had sailed the Dragons' Run or seen it, except the Archmage. Twenty years before and more, he had sailed the length of it from east to west and back again. It was a nightmare and a marvel, to a sailor. The water was a maze of blue channels and green shoals, and among these, by hand and word and most vigilant care, he and Arren now picked their boat's way, between the rocks and reefs. Some of these lay low, under or half-under the wash of the waves, covered with anemone and barnacle and ribbony sea fern; like water-monsters, shelled or sinuous. Others stood up in cliff and pinnacle sheer from the sea, and these were arches and half-arches, carven towers, fantastic shapes of animals, boar's backs and serpent's heads, all huge, deformed, diffuse, as if life writhed half-conscious in the rock. The sea-waves beat on them with a sound like breathing, and they were wet with the bright, bitter spray. In one such rock from the south there was plainly visible the hunched shoulders and heavy, noble head of a man, stooped in pondering thought above the sea; but when the boat had passed it, looking back from the north, all man was gone from it, and the massive rocks revealed a cave in which the sea rose and fell making a hollow, clapping thunder. There seemed to be a word, a syllable, in that sound. As they sailed on, the garbling echoes lessened and this syllable came more clearly, so that Arren said, Is there a voice in the cave?
The sea's voice.
But it speaks a word.
Sparrowhawk listened; he glanced at Arren and back at the cave. How do you hear it?
As saying the sound ahm.
In the Old Speech that signifies the beginning, or long ago. But I hear it as ohb, which is a way of saying the end. Look ahead there! he ended abruptly, even as Arren warned him, Shoal water! And, though Lookfar picked her way like a cat among the dangers, they were busy with the steering for some while, and slowly the cave forever thundering out its enigmatic word fell behind them.
Now the water deepened, and they came out from among the phantasmagoria of the rocks. Ahead of them loomed an island like a tower. Its cliffs were black and made up of many cylinders or great pillars pressed together, with straight edges and plane surfaces, rising three hundred feet sheer from the water.
That is the Keep of Kalessin, said the mage. So the dragons named it to me, when I was here long ago.
Who is Kalessin?
The eldest
Did he build this place?
I do not know. I don't know if it was built. Nor how old he is. I say 'he,' but I do not even know that To Kalessin, Orm Embar is like a yearling kid. And you and I are like mayflies. He scanned the terrific palisades, and Arren looked up at them uneasily, thinking how a dragon might drop from that far, black rim and be upon them almost with its shadow. But no dragon came. They passed slowly through the still waters in the lee of the rock, hearing nothing but the whisper and clap of shadowed waves on the columns of basalt. The water here was deep, without reef or rock; Arren handled the boat, and Sparrowhawk stood up in the prow, searching the cliffs and the bright sky ahead.
The boat passed out at last from the shadow of the Keep of Kalessin into the sunlight of late afternoon. They were across the Dragons' Run. The mage lifted his head, like one who sees what he had looked to see, and across that great space of gold before them came on golden wings the dragon Orm Embar.
Arren heard Sparrowhawk's cry to him: Aro Kalessin? He guessed the meaning of that, but could make no sense of what the dragon answered. Yet hearing the Old Speech he felt always that he was on the point of understanding, almost understanding: as if it were a language he had forgotten, not one he had never known. In speaking it the mage's voice was much clearer than when he spoke Hardic, and seemed to make a kind of silence about it, as does the softest touch on a great bell. But the dragon's voice was like a gong, both deep and shrill, or the hissing thrum of cymbals.
Arren watched his companion stand there in the narrow prow, speaking with the monstrous creature that hovered above him filling half the sky; and a kind of rejoicing pride came into the boy's heart, to see how small a thing a man is, how frail and how terrible. For the dragon could have torn the man's head from his shoulders with one stroke of his taloned foot, he could have crushed and sunk the boat as a stone sinks a floating leaf, if it were only size that mattered. But Sparrowhawk was as dangerous as Orm Embar, and the dragon knew it.
The mage turned his head. Lebannen, he said, and the boy got up and came forward, though he wanted to go not one step closer to those fifteen-foot jaws and the long, slit-pupilled, yellow-green eyes that burned upon him from the air.
Sparrowhawk said nothing to him, but put a hand on his shoulder, and spoke again to the dragon, briefly.
Lebannen, said the vast voice with no passion in it. Agni Lebannen!
He looked up; the pressure of the mage's hand reminded him, and he avoided the gaze of the greengold eyes.
He could not speak the Old Speech, but he was not dumb. I greet thee, Orm Embar, Lord Dragon, he said clearly, as one prince greets another.
Then there was a silence, and Arren's heart beat hard and labored. But Sparrowhawk, standing by him, smiled.
After that the dragon spoke again, and Sparrowhawk replied; and this seemed long to Arren. At last it was over, suddenly. The dragon sprang aloft with a wingbeat that all but heeled the boat over, and was off. Arren looked at the sun and found it seemed no nearer setting than before; the time had not really been long. But the mage's face was the color of wet ashes, and his eyes glittered as he turned to Arren. He sat down on the thwart.
Well done, lad, he said hoarsely, It is not easy talking to dragons.
Arren got them food, for they had not eaten all day; and the mage said no more until they had eaten and drunk. By then the sun was low to the horizon, though in these northern latitudes, and not long past midsummer, night came late and slowly.
"Well," he said at last, "Orm Embar has, after his fashion, told me much. He says that the one we seek is and is not on Selidor It is hard for a dragon to speak plainly. They do not have plain minds. And even when one of them would speak the truth to a man, which is seldom, he does not know how truth looks to a man. So I asked him, 'Even as thy father Orm is on Selidor?' For as you know, there Orm and Erreth-Akbe died in their battle. And he answered, 'No and yes. You will find him on Selidor, but not on Selidor.'" Sparrowhawk paused and pondered, chewing on a crust of hard bread. "Maybe he meant that though the man is not on Selidor, yet I must go there to get to him. Maybe