NiVom found Rayg in his workshop, fiddling with hunks of crystal again. A belt that smelled vaguely of dwarf lay discarded on the floor. It had been carefully cut out to extract the gem, not that a mere knife was likely to do a gem of that size any harm.

Someday, Rayg had confidently told him, he would puzzle out all the bits and pieces of the sun-shard and use the power that Rayg maintained was stored in the bowels of the dome to create an invincible fortress for dragons.

NiVom didn’t like the idea of a thrall, no matter how long he’d been in the family or who he belonged to, wielding such a weapon. It would have to be quietly “put away” for his own safety. Surely Rayg could see that.

Rayg was a legacy of RuGaard. He had somehow fallen in among some dwarfs as a youth and been trained in their workshops. He had an astounding mind, quite out of the norm for hominids—one might almost say dragonlike.

He’d grown old in service to the Empire, lost—or forgot—his family in his search for secrets. He was something of an authority on the crystal structure of the Lavadome. He owned a few precious samples of it, keeping them around him in his laboratory.

NiVom had once calculated that it would take him a year and a half to identify every tool, piece of equipment, and obscure-language book in Rayg’s laboratory.

Sadly, Rayg had designed it with his own convenience in mind, not a dragon’s. It was hexagonal in shape, with five floors, each open on the one below, with gradual increases in floor height. At the top was a dome-observatory, with a painted star field that could be rolled and shifted to match the sky at any time. Delicate numbers and gears allowed one to re-create star positions at any date. It was in great demand with the few dragons who took an interest in astrology.

The six walls beneath that were his library. Thanks to the high windows looking out on the Lavadome, that level of the laboratory had the best light. For his comfort, Rayg had installed a chair, a bed, and even a rope-and-canvas hammock such as sailors use. When he wasn’t working, he could usually be found sleeping on that level.

The level below held curiosities that engaged his intellectual interest. Odd skulls, unidentified teeth, freakishly thick or thin dragon-scale, cross sections of a crab—there was no telling what might be out of the shelves and cabinets and put on a table where it might be examined.

The level below that one held raw materials for his inventions. Ropes, cables, wood, bits of metal, chains of different size, and a few tools for the shaping and manufacture of some of the same. He didn’t do serious blacksmithing in his lab; for that he and a few thrall assistants carried his specialized tools down to the base of Imperial Rock.

At the bottom was the workshop. This was where he spent most of his time, and constantly hovered between utter disarray and impossible chaos. There were piles of paper on the floor and plates of rotting, dust-covered food atop the cabinets. These attracted rats who’d found their way into the Lavadome—and the Imperial Rock’s kitchens—but Rayg didn’t mind. He set traps and took them alive for use as experimental subjects. After the experiments were over, they were reexamined.

That’s what disgusted NiVom about visiting Rayg, more than his abominable personal hygiene. The bits of exploded rat scattered about the place brought the contents of his stomach up to just touching the back of his throat where he could taste it.

His First Thrall laid down the magnifying lens he’d been using on the circular crystal. “NiVom. Good to see you.”

Rayg had long since given up on the formalities when addressing his dragon superiors. He guessed, correctly enough, that he was too valuable to eat, or even to punish for something as prosaic as bad manners.

“Troubles, Tyr? Are the new lower-drag saddles falling off?”

“Nothing like that. I need your opinion on a political matter.”

“A political matter? How fascinating.”

“Your old friend RuGaard is back. Not back in the Lavadome, but he’s returned to the Empire. On foot, it seems.”

“Wing joint. He can’t fly without it. I built him a pulley-based replacement back when he was Upholder of Anaea. It’s probably broken.”

“I’m not sorry to hear that an invention of yours failed, for once.”

“I wouldn’t call a score’s worth of years of wear and tear before breaking a failure. Quite the opposite.”

“That’s not why I’ve come to see you. Do you know of . . . of any way to put a large group of dragons, outside, to sleep or something, quickly?”

“Just sleep?” Rayg said. “Suppose one or two die?”

“That’s an acceptable risk.”

“For how long?”

“Just a few moments would be enough. You see, some of the Host have joined him. I believe we could talk sense into them, in time. Also, I want RuGaard taken alive. I’ve no intention to make a martyr of him or his mate. I’d like everyone to see how wretched he is before he gets tossed into the darkest hole in the Lower World.”

“Why do you hate him so? He’s not a bad sort. Very decent to me, in my youth. Though he never did get around to granting me my freedom.”

“I was an exile, too. Had he remained faithful to our friendship and Tyr Fehazathant, I should have become Tyr after Tighlia died. She arranged for my exile. I should have known he wanted the title for himself.”

“He never gave me that impression,” Rayg said. “I had the feeling he would rather have been anything but Tyr. No ambition, you see, except perhaps for a quiet life in the country somewhere. I imagine that if you offered him his mate and that, you’d never hear from him again.”

“No, I’m afraid you’re wrong there, Rayg,” NiVom said. “Once you get a whiff of the real power of the Lavadome, it’s impossible to think about much else.”

He let the toe-tapping Rayg get back to his crystal studies and left Imperial Rock, feeling vaguely dissatisfied. The coppery sorcerer was after something. NiVom had more than half a mind to order the execution of Nilrasha. The only reason they’d kept her alive this long was as a hostage to his good behavior. He’d violated that trust—never mind the little skirmish at the Isle of Ice, his orders on the matter had been greatly exceeded. He’d been punished enough for it by having to deal with Ouistrela as one of his Protectors, of an island that had contributed exactly three boatloads of salted cod the whole time it had been a part of the Empire . . .

No question, this was a setback. With a break in the action, the princedoms would have their chance to get organized. Perhaps he should have pressed them for a settlement while he had the advantage. But negotiating with the princedoms was like building a statue out of sand, as soon as you had one side formed up and began to work on the other, it all slid into the same heap you started with.

The key, of course, was completion of his plan for the Lower World. He hoped he’d live to see it: an underground system of tunnels, waterways, mines, and exits that would allow dragons to appear in any of his major provinces by surprise. He was fortunate in finding the old Anklemere works linking so many natural passages—the wizard had expanded something the dwarfs had begun in the Red Mountains in ages past, making use of the two mighty underground rivers, one flowing north and the other south, at heights and intensities that varied with hemispheric seasons. Back then it was the center of the hominid resistance against Silverhigh and a way for rebels to get about without being observed from the air.

Once it was complete, food and coin tribute would go beneath the earth immediately in the province where it was collected and be put on dwarf-rails, not transported across a quarter of the known world, subject to weather, theft, bandit raids, and misdirection. Whole armies of dragons or demen could move in secrecy. Only dwarfs could hope to stop them, and there wasn’t a dwarf army left in the world worth mentioning. Thralls of all ages were working themselves to death by the dozens each day to complete new tunnels and expand old ones under the practiced lashes of the demen.

NiVom spent a few pleasant moments imagining the paired worlds, Upper and Lower, locked in an eternal, dragon-directed embrace. His name would live forever, loom larger in draconic imagination than the greatness of Silverhigh, even if his body couldn’t.

He rather hoped the name of his mate would be forgotten.

As a young dragonelle of the Imperial Family in the Lavadome, Imfamnia’d been one of the silliest young dragonelles it was ever his unpleasant duty to meet. Attractive enough and healthy, certainly, but there were plenty of healthy dragonelles to catch his eye among the hills and rock of the Lavadome, and many of them were pleasingly formed as well.

No, it wasn’t until he was wandering, hiding from the Lavadome, in exile near the site of his aerial raid triumph in Bant that he met her again. She’d been hunting in an almost comic fashion, setting brush fires and then devouring whatever rushed out to escape the flames, not knowing that the nutrition lost from the fats in the firebladder would never be replaced by the lean little rodents and small birds she was snapping up.

What was attractive in the teeming Lavadome became a vision, a creation of the Four Spirits to grant him succor in the wilderness. He fell hopelessly in love with her. Her own deprivations had erased much of the callowness of her youth and taught her the value of a silent tongue. He pursued her with every elaborate courtesy he remembered from the Lavadome: presents, poetry and songs in her honor, gifts of fowl and fish, and blighter wirework that passed for jewelry in Bant.