'The fire dragon would have fought to defend its territory,' mused Velindre. 'I wonder if their feral magic stirred up the fire mountain.'
'I'd say it was more likely the other way round,' Naldeth demurred.
'You're sure it's gone, this earth dragon?' Kheda glanced up to reassure himself that the cloud rising from the narrow peak was still blandly white.
'Yes,' the young mage said slowly. 'Though this is still a very strange place as far as the elements are concerned.'
'Where did it go?' Risala shared Kheda's concern. 'We'd have heard if any other dragon had come to the Archipelago.'
'The news would have run the length and breadth of the domains,' Kheda agreed.
'There are plenty of places in the northern mainland where dragons could find a focus of elemental power.' Velindre shrugged. 'And hide themselves from anyone wishing them ill.'
As if anyone other than a mage could threaten a dragon with the slightest harm.
Kheda held his tongue as the ship rounded the bulbous headland to find a narrow cove clogged with the floating stone that erupting fire mountains threw up into the air and Aldabreshin seers prized for its contrary nature. But these were not the fist-sized pieces that traders offered in the Archipelago. Slabs of the frothy rock as thick as a man's arm was long bobbed in the slack water.
Tree roots and stumps were caught up with the jostling stones, dark and waterlogged yet kept afloat by the strange rock. Paler shards lay atop some of the uncanny rafts, yellow as old bone. Kheda looked more closely. It was bone. He saw sallow lengths knobbed at each end and the shattered fan of a ribcage. The stained bones were dry and free from flesh and there was no smell of putrefaction.
Countless animals must have been killed when the mountain exploded. No wonder there are still plenty of birds here. The scavengers must have feasted till they couldn't fly.
Then he saw the smooth dome of a skull, empty eye sockets vacant, lower jaw gone. Now he knew what he was looking at, his eyes were irresistibly drawn to a ghastly grin just beyond, a smashed brow above the stained teeth.
He found his voice. 'This is what happened to the women and elders.'
'And the children.' Risala pressed her hands to her face, eyes rimmed with white as she stared at a fragile broken skull amid a mess of tiny bones.
'With all the animals dead, and all the people too, there was nothing for the dragon to eat.' Velindre strove to keep her words dispassionate but her voice shook nevertheless.
Kheda looked at the uncanny, macabre scene.
Can this really be the end to it all, after this long voyage and all its apprehension?
'Their mountains were burning and their land was drowning. They had some way of living with one dragon but a second came to fight it.' There was an odd strained
note in Risala's voice as she turned her back on the charnel cove. 'The men and their mages sailed off on their logs and rafts, heading east into unknown waters full of sea serpents and whales and all manner of sharks. Did they know how far they would have to go to find somewhere safe? Did they even know the Archipelago lay out there? And the women and children and the old men and women waited and waited, but no one came back because they all died in the fight for Chazen. So everyone here died as well when the mountain exploded.'
We didn 't know. We didn 't know who they were or why they had come. They attacked us with fire and spears and magic and showed us no mercy. We didn't start the fight. All we did was defend ourselves and our own.
Kheda turned around, but any attempt at words to comfort her died on his lips. There was no more land on this side of the fire island. The eerie waters lapping this drowned domain yielded to more natural seas that stretched out dark and mysterious in the deepening twilight. The indigo sea melted into a lavender sky streaked with all the reds and oranges of sunset. Black and featureless as the sun sank behind it, a vast island lay long and low on the horizon, larger than any Kheda had ever seen or heard tell of, capped with a bank of gilded white cloud.
Risala gazed at it. 'What's over there that's so horribly frightening to people with wizards and even a dragon to call on somehow, that they'd risk the open ocean rather than make less than a day's sail to a certain shore?'
Kheda could only shake his head for an answer.
'Let's find out,' Naldeth said incautiously.
Kheda found his voice. 'Why?'
'Because that earth dragon went somewhere,' Velindre reminded him. 'And we don't know what other dangers
might lurk there. Forewarned is forearmed. That's why we came here.'
'Can't you scry from this distance?' Kheda objected. 'Why put ourselves at risk, if the wild men and their mages chose to avoid the place?'
'Hadrumal's magic is considerably more sophisticated than these savages' spells.' Naldeth sounded faintly offended. 'You must have learned that from Dev.'
'Scrying's not the most robust of enchantments.' Velindre silenced the young mage with a wave of her hand. 'There's fire beneath the water hereabouts and both are woven into the depths of the earth where the mountain's eruption has split the sea bed. The steam and the ash are weaving all the other three elements into the air. The best course is to sail over there and see what there is to see with our own eyes.'
'The confluence of elements stretches all the way over there.' Naldeth was looking increasingly eager as he stared at the distant shore. 'We've come all this way. There has to be more to learn here.'
'I suppose so,' Kheda said with deep reluctance.
/ had better return with some solid news to set in the balance against the contented indolence and self-indulgence of this voyage so far.
CHAPTER TEN
The old woman liked being by the boundless water. Not just because she could forage among the rocks when the waters receded in their daily dance and fill her belly with the sweet salty shellfish she prised from the damp crevices. Not just because she felt so safe sitting high in the cranny she had discovered half-way up the shallow rocky cliff, which was only accessible from below. She would see anyone walking along the shore long before they saw her and she had painstakingly stockpiled stones on her ledge to break the heads and hopefully the resolve of anyone who wanted to capture her. Not that she had seen anyone else on this exposed shore in all the days she had been here.
She simply loved to look at the water. It fascinated her. She had never imagined it could be so vast. The painted men had often said that the whole land was ringed with endless waves, so fleeing their supremacy was pointless. She had heard such tales since her childhood in that village she could scarcely remember. She had imagined these boundless waters were like the floods that swept through the green forests when the great storms came and the empty rivers overfilled and overflowed.
Some years the floods came quicker than others. The rivers roared down from the high ground in ravening spate, surging through the trees, felling the forest giants whose day was done and crushing lesser trees with the tumbling trunks. Once such fury was done, the flooded
forests were quiet and still. The swamped shrubs were briefly home to swimming lizards and snakes, and to the birds that preyed upon them. Gradually the waters seeped away into the soil to hide once more from the all-seeing sun and the rivers shrunk back into their narrowest courses.
The spectacle before her was so far beyond such floods that there was no comparison. This water was alive, defying the sun with a brilliance quite unlike the muddy clumsiness of the rivers. She couldn't imagine it ever drying up. It scoured the shore with crashing waves, white as a great beast's teeth. It came and went back and forth over the rocks as it saw fit. She had watched its powerful billows shaping the long expanse of dunes where the cliffs fell away. This flood wasn't about to sink into the sand and vanish.