Page 153 of Dragon Champion (Age of Fire 1)

“Now, Umazheh, to me!” AuRon called.

The blighters swept out of the morning fog. Their blades, axes, and stone hammers could be seen dull against the pinkening sky as they poured up and over the barricades, dispersed ranks coming together as the circle closed. A few still carried torches, holding them high as they went so smoke masked their coming.

The men of the south died well. They gathered in little clusters, standing back to back and meeting the blighters on the tips of their spears. In this bitter chapter of the history of hominid warfare, quarter was not asked or expected. AuRon did what he could with his tail—hammering down a shield wall here, knocking aside a phalanx of spears there. By the time the sun was what the blighters called “two hands” above the horizon, it was over. Dead blighters lay piled around little mounds of white rags red with blood.

The blighters formed a ring around AuRon and sang their song of Deathrage, thanking the fighting fury that carried them through their losses to victory. Then the skull-taking began.

For a moment in that misty dawn, with the heavy air thick with blood, AuRon thought of leading the blighters south. With so many men dead in the jungle, there would be villages, even towns to the south awaiting spear and flame. Men tried to drive the blighters from the mountains; it would only be just to dispossess the would-be conquerors of their lands and lives. He could, in time, rule a land from the mountains to the southern ocean, that blue ribbon that he had seen on his farthest flights. If he had done this with a few thousand blighters, what could he do with ten times ten the number in a few score of years?

This would require some thought.

He saw a blighter turn over a writhing comrade whose gut had been opened by a scimitar sweep. The blighter mumbled something to the pain-racked warrior, then thrust a knife into the cripple’s armpit. The wounded one died with a whimper, answered with equal sadness by the one who ended the pain. AuRon watched tears run down the face of the blighter as he took a ring from the dead warrior’s ear and slipped it over the thin, semi-opposable finger opposite the true-thumb before dragging the body to the hero’s pyre.

One such victory was enough—even for a dragon’s lifetime.

There were dead to be burned, families, herds, and possessions to be distributed, leaders to be replaced. Unrush lived through the battle, but all his chieftains had fallen before their men. The bravest of their warriors rose to take their places at the sitting-mats of council meetings. Unrush found a charred sword with a dragon’s head on the pommel in the wreckage of the battlefield, and named his seat the dragon-throne to honor AuRon’s role in preserving his mountains from the encroachment of men. But AuRon took little pleasure in the ceremony.

He could still enjoy his library. In it were thoughts and ideas far richer than the bickering and chafing between blighter clans that required his occasional attention. AuRon almost wished that Unrush ruled as the kind of blighter-king the men’s tales described: a blood-thirsty warlord who lopped the heads off of any malcontents. Instead, when Unrush’s chieftains could not compromise on the parenting of a family of orphans or watering rights at a mountain pool, they came to AuRon with their petitions. Criminals sometimes appealed Unrush’s judgments. If they were backed by any kind of numbers in the community in the case of crimes of property rather than blood, AuRon told the blighters that exile would be sufficient punishment.

They were a greedy, quarrelsome race, so AuRon found himself holding audience more frequently than he wished.

It wasn’t all irritation. The blighters offered him animals every time they came before his dais. AuRon rearranged the crystal-centered cavern to make use of its glowing light: his favorite books and scrolls stood on long tables circling his dais, the wizard-stones that preserved the books ringing the shelves. A tradition grew that only certain favored blighters were admitted past the tables; those lower on the pecking order had to address the dragon from beyond the ring of books. AuRon heard the blighters coin a new title, Uthvhe-Rinsrick, appended to their names, which he translated as “of the Lord’s Inner Circle.”

But one spring, even the blood of knowledge began to stick in his throat. Driven by an urge only half-understood, he sought escape in flying, circling far out over forest, mountain, and desert. He searched the sky more than he searched the ground, and it occurred to him that he was looking for other dragons.

The taunts of his sisters came back to him at those moments. Even if he were to fly across a female, “bright of scale, long of tail, and free of male,” as Father used to say, he was not the sort of dragon who made an impression to a potential mate. Nor did he have a rich hoard of coin and gems to tempt her appetite, or a litany of burned towns and hosts scattered to prove him a dragon of fearsome reputation able to guard their young. He looked at his reflection at times in NooMoahk’s fishing pool. He had two horns on his crest already longer than even his rear spur-claws, and two more nubs were coming in. All his battle scars proved was that he was a thin-skinned gray, ruler of a few villages of goat-herding blighters hiding among the ruins of a broken empire.>They sang as they marched (to the beat of drums so long they had to be carried by three blighters):

In fighting lust

our blades we trust.

To herd and hut

The way is shut.

While Umazheh stand

with spear in hand

and blood that runs

from Umir’s sons.

Uh-rah! Uh-rah!

Battle will try!

Arrows will fly!

Foekind will die!

Uh-rah! Ur-ri!

The men camped on a hilltop within a circle of cut-down trees, the branches facing the forest trimmed and sharpened into obstacles. AuRon watched them from above, hanging silently in a cloudy evening sky, deep in memories of battles and wars handed down from his fathers or pieced together in NooMoahk’s library. He drifted on the jungle updrafts and counted their numbers before flying back to tell Unrush that the men had two spears, at least, to his one, and war machines besides.

“Then we must have the humans attack us,” Unrush said, after consulting with his chieftains.

AuRon knew how the men would array themselves for battle. “The men will attack with bow and missile-machine. When they’ve done their killing from afar, they’ll come in to take the heads of those who are left.”

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