Morlock calmly repeated, "If you spare our lives, we will spare yours. Blood for blood: that is Dwarvish law as I learned it under Thrymhaiam."
Math Valone lifted all three of his boneless arms, and each of his three mouths emitted a different musical sound. Behind him on the slope many of the warriors and elders mimicked him. The dancing figures in black and white covered their eyes with their palp-clusters and moaned.
Marh Valone crooked each of his arms at an alarmingly sharp angle and silence fell. "Oh gods-who-hate-us," he said at last, "I thank you. Oh Ancestors who cast us out and revile us, I thank you. Though we have earned your loathing, though we are sunk and stained with the evil of wandering through these evil lands, you have sent us this gift. We have heard the Destroyer beg for his life, and be refused."
"I am a maker," Morlock said, "not a destroyer, except to defend myself or those of my blood. If you do not choose to harm us, you need fear nothing from me. Your seers will have ways to test these words, as sure as any oath."
"No oath sworn to us can ever be binding, Destroyer, as well you know," Math Valone said. "We are the accursed. Your lies will not deceive us, either: we are the servants of the Great Lie. It is the Great Lie who tells us all these truths, who guides our visions of the future, who makes us unclean. We know who you are, even if you don't. You are the Destroyer."
"Your seers have had some vision?" Morlock guessed. "But the future is not fixed, like the past. The future is the sum of our decisions; we can change our minds in the present and save ourselves in the future."
"I tell you again, do not lie. Some parts of the future can be chosen; some come at us like an avalanche, choose what we will. I was a seer and I know this. I have walked in the future and the past, as I know you can. Do you know me, Destroyer? Did you never see me in your dreams? I am your enemy. I have dedicated my life to defeating you so that Valona's horde might be saved."
"Waste of a good life," the crooked man observed.
"You would think so. The dreams first came to haunt Valona's seers before my second birth. When the host died and I lived, they became darker and more definite. As a warrior I fought to make Valona's horde strong so that we could resist you when you came. As I became a seer at last, I walked through the dreams of terror you sent against us from the future and I made maps of the things-that-would-be so that our elders could guide the horde away from the death you designed for us. But always the shadows of future danger changed: you changed them to defeat our plans! And when I became an elder, I continued to plan for the day you would arrive.
"Because I alone truly understood your threat against us, the other elders raised me to be their chief, math of Valona's horde. Then I set my plans in motion. I purchased human agents in the city to the south. When you corrupted and defeated them, I knew the Destroyer's hour had struck and you were coming to attack us. I sent a troop of warriors to capture you and the agent you had corrupted, but you killed them all. The dreams of our seers grew dark to the point of madness; even now they rave and scream that all is over. But now, at last, it is our fear which is over. We have you! We have you! How does it feel to know that you have failed, Destroyer? How does it feel to know you will be destroyed? Will you say nothing? Is it mute, that one drooling mouth given you by the gods-we-hate?"
"I have a thing to say, if you will listen."
"Say it. I find I have a great hunger to hear you plead and whine and beg."
"Once there was a man who knew the future," Morlock said quietly. "He lived by the sea, and an oracle told him he would drown in saltwater. So he fled inland from the seacoast. When he was crossing a bridge over a river in flood, the arch collapsed and the falling stones carried him down to the water and he drowned there, in a flooded salt lick by the side of the river. His fear drove him to the fate he feared. So it is with you, Marh Valone."
"There is no fate," Marh Valone cried. "That is the lie you told before, and it is true. We have defeated our fate and your hate."
"Put aside your fear. I don't hate you, but if you harm me or mine, if you threaten to do so, you will suffer for it. Blood for blood: that is the only law I know."
Suddenly the Marh was surrounded by the dancing Khroi in black-andwhite rags. They reached out their palp-clusters toward him imploringly, and their triple mouths sang a song Thend did not understand.
The Math's eyes widened in anger or surprise. He gestured with all three of his arms, pointing back up the slope. The dancing Khroi grew silent and still; they bowed down and laid their carapaces on the ground before their leader. But they still stretched out their arms imploringly to him.
"Your presence has poisoned our seers," he said accusingly to Morlock. "I have gloated over you too long, perhaps. Now, because you are rokhlan, a dragonkiller, the guile of dragons wish to have you for their prize, and as their kharum and as math of Valona's horde, I grant that wish. You and your property will be taken from here to the Giving Field, where the guile may dispose of you for their sport. The werewolf has also killed a dragon, although by mere treachery and stealth, and he too will be given to the dragons, as, of course, our Lost One must be. This blood will seal the bond between guile and horde. These others will go and give their lives for our future in the Vale of the Mother. At the next gathering we will pray their names to the godswho-hate-us. I have spoken; let others obey."
Morlock asked, "What do you mean `seal the bond'? Aren't these dragons your servants? Don't you ride them like animals?"
The crooked row of dragons erupted in fire and noise. For a while nothing could be heard except their fiery words, meaningless to Thend. He wondered if a fight was going to break out between the dragons and the Khroi then and there, if that was what Morlock was trying to provoke.
Marh Valone fixed Morlock with one eye and stared at him. Then, when the uproar had gone on for a while, he lifted all three of his arms and called out, with all three of his mouths singing at a different tone, a word Thend did not recognize. It sounded as loud as any dragon from where Thend sat, and the row of angry dragons subsided into something like order. Marh Valone spoke a short sentence in the same language, at a slightly lower tone of voices. Thend turned to see the dragons wordlessly lowering their heads in submission. But all of them were glaring at Morlock's shoulders: he had not deigned to turn and look at them while they were shouting and he did not do so now.
"That was quite a good try," Marh Valone said to Morlock confidentially. "Pride is what binds them to us: they are exiles from the greater guiles to the south and east, ashamed to live as solitaries. If you stayed among us for a time you would no doubt find a way to use that pride and turn them against us. But you will die tonight, a free gift from horde to guile, and their pride and gratitude will bind them to us closer than ever."
Marh Valone would have turned away then, but another Khroi voice, discordant and clashing, forestalled him. Thend looked and saw standing nearby the Khroi whose carapace was marked, the Khroi he had rescued from the spiders.
The Marh stopped moving away and looked with one eye, then another, at the marked Khroi as he spoke. (Did the Math's gesture indicate surprise? Attentiveness? Some emotion a man could never feel? Thend wasn't sure.) A moment of silence followed, and then Marh Valone turned to Thend. "Our Lost One has requested that you also be given to the dragons. It is a sin against our future, but no one has ever done for one of us what you dared to do, and I grant this favor to the Lost One. I will not pray for you to the godswho-hate-us, and so they may forgive you. I have spoken; let others obey."