"My name is Gjyrning," the dragon hissed. "Use it when you address me or die."
"I'll die anyway," Morlock pointed out. "But I'm not worried: you can be …trusted. Remember, Smoky?"
The dragon smiled-not a gesture of amusement or friendliness in a dragon-and said nothing. Venomous dark smoke leaked out between the terrible green-black teeth.
"Gjyrning …Gjyrning …" the crooked man said, as if thinking aloud. "Doesn't that mean `puff of lightly warm steam'? I seem to remember-"
The dragon barked, "It means 'mourning-suffering―death'!"
"So you knew how your career would end from the beginning," the crooked man said, almost as if he were impressed. "I wish more dragons would pick suitable names. I captured a dragon once outside of Thrymhaiam whose name meant, so he claimed, `World-shaking-conflagration-of-eternalflames,' but his fire wasn't hot enough to kindle dry leaves. It was too much trouble to kill him, so I gave him to the Elder of Theorn Clan as a gift. The dwarves used him as a beast of burden. They could `trust' him, too, because every time he tried to steal something they would beat him with sticks and he'd squeak out some smoke at either end. He soon learned his place. They called him Squeaky. That's a fine name for an elderly blue dragon whose fire is not as hot as he thinks it is, don't you think?"
Gjyrning, an elderly blue dragon whose fire was not as hot as it had been, lumbered across the open field, his jaws streaming fire and smoke. But his stump was clearly troubling him; he kept putting his weight on it, as if the right claw-foot were there, and stumbling. He halted about twenty (human) paces from the stakes and visibly brought himself under control.
"That's right!" said the horrible crooked man with the offensive manner. "They've trained you well; you can be trusted. No one can say you don't know when your fire's faded, when it's time to give up fighting and blowing flame rings and just settle down and call yourself Squeaky-"
The dragon lurched forward, his narrow chest doubling in size.
Thend couldn't understand what Morlock and the dragon were saying to each other, but he could tell from Morlock's harsh jeering tone that he was baiting the dragon, trying to provoke a rage. When he saw the dragon swell up he knew he should close his eyes and hold his breath: dragons breathe venom as well as fire. But if these were the last few minutes of his life he decided he didn't want to spend them staring at the inside of his eyelids. (He had tried that without much success earlier, anyway.)
The dragon roared out a blast of flame at Morlock. The red torrent carried him backward and Thend could see him dimly, a crooked darkness in a sheath of flames. Then he disappeared and the dragon stopped roaring.
There was a dark fog of smoke and steam and venom about the post where Morlock had been hanging. The dragon peered through it with his dimly glowing eyes, trying to find Morlock's body.
The crooked man had rolled off to one side after the flames burned through his bonds, and he wasn't dead yet, Thend was relieved to see. He knew that Morlock's strange blood protected him from fire, but he hadn't been sure the crooked man could suffer the roar of an angry dragon and live.
Morlock called out hoarsely, "Tyrfing!"
The accursed blade flew from its sheath bound to Morlock's pack; glittering, it shot through the smoke-laden air to the hand of the man who had made it. The dim blue dragon leapt back in surprise as it flew past. Then he lunged forward at Morlock, his one remaining foreclaw stretched out.
Morlock was already running forward. He dodged under the dragon's wolflike jaw as it descended and ran on past the dragon's left foreleg. The dragon turned to swipe at him with his right foreclaw-and missed, forgetting that his right foreleg was a stump. Morlock dashed on, raising the monochrome crystalline blade over his head with both hands.
Thend wondered where Morlock would strike. He had heard, in songs and tales, that dragons had numerous weak spots and hollows in their chests where a determined warrior might strike a deathblow, could he only get near enough.
But Morlock didn't strike at the dragon's body, as such, at all. The blade caught the dragon's left wing, folded batlike along his side. Tyrfing severed the joint and passed through much of the leathery flesh before the dragon screamed and rolled over. He was trying to crush Morlock, but the pinions of the dragon's wings gave the man space to scrabble through between the mass of the dragon's serpentine body and the stony earth.
Rather than roll again, as Thend expected, the dragon leapt to his feet and backed away lumberingly from Morlock.
As he watched the dragon's movement, slowed by his wounded foreleg, Thend realized why Morlock had attacked the dragon's wing. Now the dragon could neither fly away, with his broken wing, nor run away, with his wounded foot. There was no escape for him.
Abruptly, surprisingly, Thend felt sorry for the dim blue dragon: mutilated, mocked, mutilated again, and now trapped with that terrible crooked man in this narrow field hedged in with steep slopes. He pushed the feeling down as hard as he could. Morlock might be sort of a bastard, but he was their bastard, fighting desperately for Thend and his family. But the feeling didn't quite go away.
The dragon meanwhile lunged forward on his unwounded foot and made as if to snap at Morlock with his teeth. Morlock dodged to the dragon's right-and was struck end over end by the dragon's mutilated foreleg.
That might have been the end of the battle right then, if the dragon had still possessed raptor claws to catch and kill his enemy. And it nearly was: Morlock ended up slumped against the base of the post where he had been hanging; there was no sword in his hand. The dragon leapt at him with a happy roar and he had to crawl, rather than walk, away from the post; there was something wrong with one of his legs.
The dragon himself was wounded, in wing and foot, and he obviously tried to outthink his opponent. Morlock had only one place to retreat: behind the row of maijarra-wood posts. It turned right to lumber toward the nearer end of the row, attempting to get around them before Morlock retreated through them.
But Morlock, scrabbling along on all fours, was not attempting to retreat. He crawled toward something gleaming among the fire-blackened stones of the Giving Field: his sword, Tyrfing. Thend wondered why he didn't just call it to him, but then reflected that this trick might be something Morlock might have to set up in advance. In any case, his fingers had closed on the grip of the sword before the dragon realized what was happening.
The dragon turned to face him, and Morlock lurched to his feet with a harsh crowlike call that might have been a battle cry or a scream of pain for all that Thend knew. Then the crooked man, crookeder than ever now, loped forward, his sword raised high.
The dragon flinched backward toward the maijarra-wood posts, then turned again to fight.
But it was already too late. Morlock ran up on the dragon's wounded wing, trailing on the ground, and climbed it like a ladder. The dragon bucked and writhed, but Morlock stabbed down between the spikes protecting the dragon's backbone, and the dragon's back legs collapsed. He ran forward along the dragon's back and stabbed again: the dragon's forelegs gave way and the serpentine body fell wholly to the ground.
Morlock staggered forward toward the dragon's neck and what Thend guessed would be the killing blow. But he paused and spoke, although Thend couldn't hear what he said and would not have understood it if he had.
In his native language, which was also the dragon's, Morlock was saying, "I regret my words to you, Gjyrning. Need drove me; I meant none of it."
The dragon chuckled smokily and whispered, "You didn't fool me, rokhlan! At least …not entirely. I am old; most of my hoard has been stolen by others; the guile have been sizing me up for fodder. I thought …this way …if I killed you in battle, stole their prize …I could at least die in glory."