They went as fast as they could, but it felt like crawling. Whenever possible they kept to the shadows, hiding from those fiery eyes in the eastern sky. But they stumbled over stones in the dark, and they had to feel their way carefully over the broken ground, lest they fall into a pit or a ravine. They didn't dare strike a light.
Soon they heard Morlock's voice shouting, "Khai, gradara!" Rising like a swift distorted moon over the line of rocks to the east, they saw a dim blue dragon fly upward, lit by its own smoky red eyes, snarling in triumph. The struggling shadow of a man was gripped in its right foreclaw. But the man still carried a glittering crystalline sword and, dealing it deftly, he cut the claw from the dragon's foreleg at its joint. The man fell out of sight, still gripped by the severed claw; the dragon screamed in pain and wrath and plunged upward, vomiting fire and smoke. Other fire-eyed, bat-winged, serpentine shapes followed the course of the fallen man to earth.
Thend clung to the side of the rock face, stunned with the thought that Morlock was dead, or soon would be. He hadn't known it would hit him so hard. He felt somebody sneak her hand into his, and looked down to see Fasra looking up at him with a tear-streaked face. She shrugged as if to say, What can we do?
There was nothing they could do except try to get away, and that was what they did, creeping along the dark side of every rock they could find to cover them.
But it was all for nothing. The dragon cavalry flew over them and dropped nets and, when they were trapped, the Khroic soldiers came and knocked them out one by one.
Thend struggled as best he could, but it was no use. He noticed, too, that the Khroi who clubbed him into unconsciousness had a purplish carapace marked by savage scraping near the neck. The point of a rock was stuck there in the Khroi's shell like a tooth.
"I should have left you for the spiders!" Thend shouted; then the Khroi's club descended and darkness with it.
Thend dreamed he was flying, and then when he woke up he found it wasn't a dream. He was hanging facedown in a wire net, hundreds or thousands of feet over the moons-lit broken ground of the Kirach Kund. Twisting around, he saw the net was gripped in the claws of a dragon. He wanted to shout something defiant and insulting, but fear kept a grip on his throat: he had never been so high in his life and he didn't like it. He closed his eyes and pretended he was somewhere else, anywhere else.
He must have slept or passed out. When he awoke he could hear the adults talking to each other in low voices. But he could hear other, inhuman voices, too, so he was spared the terrible, tempting illusion that their captivity was only a dream.
Thend opened his eyes to see Fasra's frightened face in profile. If she was scared, then things were pretty bad. Beyond her Thend saw his brothers. On the other side he saw his mother and her brother, and beyond them Morlock looking rather beat up.
Roble and Naeli avoided meeting Thend's eye, but Morlock looked him straight in the face, smiling sadly. "We meet again!" said the crooked man.
"Unfortunately," Thend said rudely, because he didn't know what else to say, and Morlock nodded in agreement.
Things were unfortunate indeed. They were all sitting there in a valley, bound hand and foot with leathery rope. Even the werewolf was there, hogtied and snarling. Standing over them were huge Khroi warriors, of a type Thend had never seen. On one slope of the valley, rank on rank, sat a whole horde or tribe of Khroi. Facing them, on the other side of the valley, were dozens of fiery, bat-winged, serpentine forms in various dark colors: an irregular burning rainbow of dragons.
Thend looked up to the sky. Chariot, the major moon, was eastering; and Horseman, the second moon, was high in the sky. Thend looked up at it, thinking that this was the last sky he would ever see. The thought was convincing but cold; he felt nothing about it. He wondered if this were part of dying: giving up interest in anything as the jaws of death clamped down.
He looked at the valley. He saw the Khroi were of many different types. There were the strange gigantic warriors who stood over them, guarding them with spears. Nearby were the warriors, wearing spiked blades on their palp-clusters; they wore white ceremonial tabards with some kind of writing on them. Above them were ranks of Khroi wearing black surcoats. It struck Thend that they might be elders, Khroi who had aged out of the warrior class. Above them on the slope was a milling crowd of Khroi dressed in black and white rags. Some were dancing, others were lying on the ground, waving their palp-clusters and ped-clusters in the air. Highest of all was a lone figure who sat on the steps of an empty gigantic throne. He wore a tabard of white embroidered with red and black in a chaotic pattern.
The dragons all spoke only to this Khroi who sat before the empty throne, never to the others, and all the other Khroi also spoke to him; he alone spoke to the dragons.
There was some sort of discussion or negotiation going on; Thend didn't know if it was all about them, although some of it clearly was. He had thought that the dragons were merely animals that the Khroi rode, like a man riding a horse, but he saw now that he was wrong. There was some sort of alliance between the two races.
The discussion appeared to be coming to some kind of conclusion when it was interrupted. Morlock interrupted it, rising to his feet (he must have untied the rope around his ankles), and, turning away from the Khroi, he spoke directly to the dragons in something that sounded a great deal like the language they had been using.
The dragons responded heatedly, and a few edged closer to Morlock when the Khroi leader interrupted them with a harsh word.
"If you have anything to say," the Khroi leader called down the slope in Coranian, "you will speak to me, Morlock Ambrosius. I am both kharum to this guile of dragons and marh to this horde of Khroi. They speak to me, and I speak for them. But I tell you now, Destroyer: there is nothing you might say that I would wish to hear."
Morlock looked once down the line of dragons, left to right. Thend thought there was a smile on his face as he met the dragons' burning eyes. Then he slowly turned his back on them and many snarled in anger as he did so.
Morlock called up the slope to the Math, saying, "Your name? It seems you know mine."
"I have many names," the Khroi leader said. "I was called one thing by the gods-who-hate-me in their thoughts before my first birth. That is ever my true name and I will learn it only in death at my final damnation. The Virgin Sisters called me another name after my second birth, when I ate my way clear from my dying host. As warrior-in-training I had a third name; as warrior-in-deed I won a fourth. In my time I became an elder and a seer, and I had names in both those avatars. Now I am Marh Valone, math of deathless Valona's horde. Work your magic on my name at your peril, Destroyer: it has Valona's strength in it."
"I don't use binding magic," Morlock observed, "or fear it. I greet you, Marh Valone. You call me Destroyer, but if you spare our lives we will spare yours."
Marh Valone fixed one of his three eyes on Morlock. He left his seat before the vacant throne and walked down the slope, never looking away. The dancing figures in black and white tried to restrain him, but he kicked them out of his way and continued down the slope, where the elders and warriors made a lane for him. He stood at last before Morlock, just beyond the hulking spear-carrying guards, and said, "What did you say?"
"Perhaps I wasn't clear. I-"
"I speak and understand this language better than you," Marh Valone interrupted him. "I use it because most of you understand it. That's Dwarvish law, as you learned from your foster kin under Thrymhaiam. If I had chosen I could have addressed you in Dwarvish, in Brythonic or Latin: in any language you know. No one-face language is difficult for us; our young invent more complicated ones before they lose their quadrilimbs. You can have no vowels-inharmony, no consonant-rhythms. Each of you has but one mouth, only one! And you are barely able to use that, in song or speech. No, Destroyer, I ask you to repeat what you said simply because I desire to hear you say it again."