Page 67 of Dragon Rule (Age of Fire 5)

“An easy life?” the Copper asked.

“You’d be surprised what having a dragon hanging around keeps away. Yeah, I call it an easy life.”

“One thing about you impressed me. The other dragons they’d hired. They flew away as soon as they saw the strength arrayed against them.”

Shadowcatch ground his teeth, creating a low clatter like woodpeckers all working the same tree. “Trash, those. Halfwit vagabonds from the Wizard’s Isle.”

“AuRon’s Isle, you mean.”

“Some call it that.”

“When we attacked, they flew away, but you stayed. Outnumbered forty to one or more, if you count the hominids, you stayed.”

“Yes,” Shadowcatch said.

“Why?”

“They paid me. I gave my word to them. I’d keep it.”

“Your word’s that important to you, that you’d die for it?” LaDibar asked, as if he was having trouble with the concept.

“Certainty nothing. I have a way of surviving.”

There was more to this black dragon than met the eye. He might be a little fat, and stupid-looking as the thickest Skotl, but there were depths to him, the Copper decided.

“Ever since then I’ve been thinking I need a bodyguard,” the Copper said. “Someone a little more intimidating than griffaran. Hominids don’t fear anything with feathers as they ought.”

“But—my Tyr,” NoSohoth protested. “He’s an outsider. He tried to kill you.”

“As he says, that was just business. And as for being an outsider, it’s the same one that led to me being acceptable to Skotl, Wyrr, and Ankelene as Tyr: no clan can trust that he won’t move against one of his own. If you took my coin and my food, you wouldn’t try to kill me, would you, Shadowcatch?”

“Of course not, my Tyr. Oathbreakers, well, may their bones get ground into wizard dust, that’s all I have to say.”

“You must tell me more of the Upper World. There’s so much to know.”

“As long as it’s not where the sea elves are hiding, or one or two other oaths I have to keep,” Shadowcatch said.

“Very well. Honorable Dragons of the Empire, meet my new bodyguard, Shadowcatch the Black.”

The Copper read their expressions like a short scroll. Yes, Shadowcatch was already proving his worth. It was good to have the biggest dragon in the room at one’s back.

BOOK TWO

Hopes

“If you live to see all your plans fulfilled,

you sold your years too cheap.”

—Partnership Articles of the Chartered

Company (Notes & Additions)

Chapter 7

There had been many changes since AuRon last flew over the city of the Ghioz and the Red Queen’s former mountainside palace.

The old monument which had worn three different faces at one time or another, he’d been told, was now being reshaped under a bright new bronze mask. Workers had scaffolding up, creating a metallic snout over a steel frame projecting out of the mountainside. The stone that had once depicted hair had been smoothed and shaped into a dragon-crest.

---