The troll panicked and released her and she turned as she fell away, dodged a griffaran, and opened her wings again. DharSii fell in a tight series of spirals on his good wing, heading for the unforgiving mountainside beneath the Lavadome’s crest.

Chapter 20

With Rayg and Imfamnia leading the way up, they climbed Imperial Rock.

“You’re welcome to the throne room, if you want to eat and rest for a bit. Regalia certainly has no use for it anymore. It’s cleaner than most quarters. Some of the lower levels are still a bit—damp,” Rayg said.

A troll led each of them. It held a thick piece of chain wrapped around their necks. One hard pull from the trolls just under the jaw and their vertebrae would snap.

“Each of you will do anything to keep the other alive,” Rayg said. “You won’t risk fighting us, because the trolls will throttle you. If you try to escape, I’ll get one. Which means I’ll get both of you.”

“Weakness indeed,” Imfamnia said.

“Yes, it’s better to partner with someone you despise,” AuRon said. “Perhaps you two will set the new social standard.”

Imfamnia laughed. “I’m remembering why she used to admire you.”

“What are you going to do with us?” AuRon asked.

“In memory of your kindly brother,” Rayg said, “we’ll keep you alive, but imprisoned. I need a few couples for breeding stock, after all. Someone has to produce my perfected dragons.”

Can we find the strength to die together, AuRon? Natasatch asked. I won’t be chained in the dark again.

I won’t have my offspring declawed and desensitized.

They led them up onto the gardens atop Imperial Rock and toward Rayg’s lab.

“I’m just going to do one minor operation,” Rayg said. “I’ll sever the muscles around your firebladder. Better safe than spontaneously combusted.”

“You gave us a scare, there, dragon,” the wizard continued “We weren’t really ready to move for a few years yet. I would have liked some more time to gather the rest of the sun-shard, but I have enough to control the Lavadome and see through the various veils of space and time.”

“Time? You can tell the future?”

“I’ll keep a few dragons alive, for distilling youth draughts. They won’t keep me going forever, of course, but a thousand-year lifespan should be enough for me to design an even more perfect vessel.”

I’d rather be back in the hands of the Wyrmaster, Natasatch thought.

Or the Dragonblade. He was an honest enemy, AuRon thought back

Rayg opened the door to his tower. The trolls pulled them in. AuRon saw rows of sharp, gleaming instruments on the wall. “And I’ll work on my ideal strain. The perfect amalgamation of dragon and hominid. The demen are close to the shape I have in mind. I think if I form a dragon-man and cross the two—”

“You and your breeding!” Imfamnia said. Or rather not Imfamnia but the Red Queen, speaking through Imfamnia’s body, AuRon had to remind himself. “Men are good enough for me—they learn for themselves and increase naturally.”

“They can be a little recalcitrant,” Rayg said. “Not quite as stiff-necked as dwarfs, or as dangerous as dragons.”

A gargolyle and a griffaran, both a little bloody about the wings and claws, waddled over and whispered, alternately, in Rayg’s ear.

“Well, we’ll have to do something else a little early,” Rayg said, reaching for a long crystal staff. He tapped it three times and it lit up, a brilliant, room-filling white light that seemed to clean AuRon’s skin of the troll-stink and blood from the dueling pit. The light was answered from a mini-sun above. The huge piece of the sun-shard that AuRon had once encountered in NooMoahk’s library that was resting at the top of his observation dome, warmed them like a flame.

“I do so hate uninvited guests,” Rayg said. “Best relocate the house.”

DharSii had made a hard landing on the mountainside. Far above, they could just see the rim of the crystal at the apex of the Lavadome.

“In one piece?” she asked.

“My head hurts too much to count,” he said. “Check for me, won’t you? ”

She nuzzled him, griff to griff.

“Who won?” he asked, looking up.

“I think both sides retreated,” Wistala said. “We might want to think about getting off this mountain. They might come after stragglers.”

The earth heaved beneath their feet. “What’s this?” Wistala cried.

The mountain bulged, for just a moment. Then, a thunder that shook the ground beneath their feet broke out. Cracks and fissures raced down the side of the mountain. Brown clouds shot into the sky. The air shimmered with released heat.

The Lavadome rose into the air, shedding boulders and mountainside the way a rising cormorant sheds water. Pieces of mountain slid off the faceted surface and fell in ruin into the crater below.

It was not a perfect circle, as she had thought when inside the upper half. The shape, if anything, reminded her of a jellyfish with an inverted forest of streamers beneath. The projections at the bottom followed no plan; some were longer, some shorter, thicker in some parts and thinner in others, with the irregularity of tree roots, save that all grew straight down and narrowed like fangs.

Yes, perhaps that was the way to describe it. A skull, vast beyond comprehension, hanging in the air, missing the lower mandible, so downward-growing teeth formed its base.

Wistala felt stupefied by the sight. She feared that if she tried to talk, nothing but gibberish would erupt.

“AuRon is in there!” she said.

“Go, Wistala,” DharSii said. “Go to him, if you must. But I fear Rayg has won. He’s learned how to use the sun-shard to channel the power of the Lavadome. Or perhaps not. It’s still here.”

“Where would it go?”

“Another time and place. I believe Anklemere came here from it. It might have been a vessel for traveling across time and space, the way humans cross the ocean in a ship, or it might have been a prison. I don’t believe Anklemere existed as you and I do—he was part of the Lavadome and the sun-shard.”

The interior of the Lavadome was suddenly, brilliantly lit. The rational side of AuRon’s brain knew what must have happened in all the trembling, lurching, falling dust and sudden wash of light outside the tower, but his gut refused to believe that anything as vast as the Lavadome could just lift itself up out of the crater it rested in.

Rayg put down the staff and went back to work with his surgical tools, selecting them and laying them out on a tray.

“The partnership will never work,” AuRon said, looking at Imfamnia. “While you had enemies, it made sense to work together. But you’ve defeated them and secured your refuge. From now on, every gain by one is a loss to the other. You’re competitors now, not teammates.”

“That’s not—,” Imfamnia said.

“One of you is bound to kill the other,” AuRon continued. “I wonder which it will be. And who will move first. I imagine historians will be debating the subject for centuries. The Red Queen has the advantage, in that if Rayg kills one, another can take its place. Perhaps a new tree is growing somewhere, so she has a supply of copies. Unless Rayg has figured out where the new tree is. In the Lavadome, somewhere, I expect. Down below in the crystalline caverns?

“Now, from the Red Queen’s point of view, the job is much easier. She has the physical advantage, being in a dragon. Rayg is just one wizard, and right now he’s passing orders to his bodyguard.”

“Blather and rot,” Rayg said. “Sing another pleasant little ditty, AuRon, while I carve up your mate’s breast.” Rayg stepped across the room with a long, razor-edged knife.

AuRon could feel the tension in the air, like the energy stored in the Lavadome’s crystals.

“Imfamnia, ware!” AuRon shouted.

Rayg had done nothing, of course, but Imfamnia didn’t know that. She crouched and spat fire in Rayg’s direction.

He cartwheeled out of the way, showing the agility of an elvish dancer. He reached into his voluminous overcoat and hurled a handful of glittering, starlike spiked shapes at Imfamnia. They passed through her scale like arrows shot through a gauze curtain, leaving black rings at the holes.

Imfamnia howled in rage and pain. Smoke from her flame filled the room. The trolls hauled on the chains and dragged AuRon and Natasatch to the ground.

But he could still see the action. And, more important, breathe. Maddened, Imfamnia threw herself at Rayg, who jumped out of the way again, perhaps not quite so quickly as the last time. Instead of an elvish dancer, he was a supremely agile human warrior.

Imfamnia crashed into the hard stone of his tower, cracking it and opening a wide fissure in a window. Scale and bits of masonry flew. AuRon wondered who’d built the tower. Certainly not dwarfs if the base cracked from just the force of a dragon striking it.

“I think, Rayg, you overbuilt. I’m no dwarf, but it looks like you built your tower on a poor foundation,” Natasatch said.

The tower swayed but did not give way.