Dragonslayer

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Fifteen dead in less than a century, and not one of them by natural causes. The corpses were always found in some stage of mistreatment, headless being the most common. Occasionally, though, fangs would disappear, and sometimes the right foreleg. Or a wing. And once, just once, the tail.

I collected information on the killings just like I collected sapphires. One corner of my lair was strewn with various death relics -- a broadsword, a gauntlet, even a lock of hair found between a victim's back claws.

Something had changed among the humans, something which now made them deadly to dragons.

Fifteen dead in one hundred years was some kind of record. If the killings continued at that rate, we would be extinct within a millennium. Unlike most animals, we didn't breed whenever we glanced at each other. We had rituals, timing, and our own natural infertility working against us.

The infertility concerned the Lair Fathers the most, but it didn't bother me much. It seems logical, if you examine it. Impregnation takes time -- and there's often a year between that event and the laying of the egg.

The lairs themselves are the other problem. We're not social creatures; we don't like to live too close together. Only a few caves are large enough to accommodate one of us. If we wanted to dwell in the same area, we'd have to suffer through rock outcroppings or move into abandoned human dwellings -- the large stone kind with towers, poorly built because they crumble after a century or two of neglect.

Still, despite our distance and our solitude, we have our communities, rituals, and ceremonies. Every twenty years, the Lair Fathers hold the governing council. Mostly it is an excuse for everyone in the Five Regions to assemble, catch up on the news, maybe do a little bargaining. But sometimes we have serious business, like the time Vascan's youngest took to looting to increase his hoard.

The youngling was banished to the hinterlands, but apparently didn't survive the trek. The Lair Fathers were called in to look at that corpse, but it was too decayed to determine cause of death. The child could have died of exposure, and been torn apart by animals. Or he could have been murdered and mutilated, like the others.

There was no real way to tell, not without a bit of hair between the claws or a broadsword broken off in the hide.

Failure to determine cause of death didn't make the situation any less of a tragedy, though. The Lair Fathers had to reconsider the punishments they'd established throughout the regions.

The theory being, of course, that punishment didn't teach our people things if no one survived the lessons.

* * * *

We were heading into Nae The Loch's Centennial Trade Show and Swap Meet when news of the sixteenth victim hit. Most of us were already in flight -- too late to cancel plans even if we'd wanted to.

I didn't want to. I was verging on my first half-millennium, and I was heading to Nae The Loch with more than bargaining on my mind. For the past decade or more, I'd been thinking of adding an egg or two to my stash, and I finally had a large enough hoard to impress a mate.

Females are particular about the places they stash their eggs, a fact I've never understood. Females are never involved with the raising of the hatchlings, preferring to move off to new venues long before the little ones appear. Apparently there is some biological imperative, however, something that makes these flighty creatures particular about egg storage.

Females rarely pick a young male with a small hoard. They seem to prefer males with some experience behind them, and a stash the size of a small mountain.

My father used to say it was because the eggs had to cool under the hoard before hatching -- and the bigger the hoard, the safer the egg. But I was never sure of that.

After all, females left eggs all over the countryside. In their fecund period -- which can last as long as two millennia -- healthy females can drop as many as one hundred eggs, always leaving them in pairs. Rarely do both eggs hatch, and sometimes neither do, but that doesn't negate the sheer irresponsibility of it all.

If females had to feather their nests with food as well as gold, they might not be so quick to abandon their communities.

But to be honest, there isn't a male among us who doesn't envy the female her freedom. All of us wish we could spend our lives exploring the world; we just don't have the wingspan or the stamina to do so.

Besides, we are the only ones who can breathe fire. Until they develop wings of their own, hatchlings require cooked food. It isn't until adolescence that a dragon acquires the ability to eat raw meat without causing serious illness or death.

Most males never acquire a taste for raw food. We prefer to cook our own. Females haven't the time or patience for it. A few of my friends, in their early courting years, tried to seduce a female with a carefully prepared meal of cooked meat, only to have the female turn away in disgust.

I wasn't planning to make that mistake at Nae The Loch. I hoped for a quick courtship, a few months of passion, and then solitude. I wasn't even going to follow the serial seduction plan used by most males so that they would have an egg hoard the size of their jewel hoard. I wanted to take time with my children, and bring one set to adolescence before I risked having another.

Nae The Loch was a good three days flight from my home in Montagneux. Despite the long and difficult flight, I enjoyed Nae The Loch as much as the rest of my people did.

The site was the most protected in the Five Regions. The lake existed inside the highest mountain peak known to dragon. The peak had once been pointed, but several millennia back, steam and pressure broke the peak open, sending boiling lava down the mountainside.

The lava cooled, reinforcing the strength of the exterior mountain, but the inside became something else. Gradually, a lake formed inside the crater. Cool, and deep, and blue -- deeper than any lake we had ever encountered -- the lake became a courtship destination long before the local males decided to hold the Centennial Swap Meet.

Even though Nae The Loch had a lot of flat land deep within the crater (all of it surrounding the lake), no males could live there. The caves ringing the lake were too small for a proper hoard, but they provided good accommodation for a summer's long trading festival.

Females often stayed in Nae The Loch on their way to other destinations. Rather than drive the females from the area, the Swap Meet brought them. It made meeting males easier, and often prevented difficult encounters on the male's home territory. Too many males fell in love with their mates, and tried to coerce them into staying.

Some females were known to stay for as many as five years. But all were gone long before the eggs began to crack, leaving some males broken-hearted and incapable of proper hatchling care.

As usual, my arrival at Nae The Loch left me breathless, and not just because I rarely flew to such heights. My body could not take more than three days' flight. My wings always ached during the first week of the Swap Meet.

Still, I enjoyed the view as I dove into the crater. Nae The Loch stretched before me as far as I could see. In the center, the lake, a perfect reflection of the pale blue sky. Around it, the black land, covered with flat-top rocks brought centuries ago to serve as tables.

Even from my height, I could see the glitter of gold, the flash of diamonds as the sun struck them. Bits of hoards, no longer wanted, brought for upgrading. I had a few rubies stuck in my pouch. Not a lot, because I couldn't afford much.

At the farthest end of the Swap Meet was the area that interested me. The none-glittery collectibles -- a few handlettered books (I particularly fancied those done in gold leaf); portraits of humans, often framed in gold; and instruments -- lutes, pipes, and horns. I fancied a harp one day. At a Swap Meet in La Mer some fifty years before, I had seen one whose frame had been made of gold leaf and whose strings were done in a material strong enough to withstand a small dragon's claws.

Dragons circled the flat area on the longest side of the lake, waiting for their turn to land. All flew at low altitudes so that they couldn't be seen over the mountain peaks.

I joined the throng, bobbing and weaving on the air currents, and trying not to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of my fellows. It sometimes took me as long as a week to be able to handle the crowds, but once I became used to them, I was able to stay for months at a time.

Fortunately, my stash was well hidden, my cave guarded by traps as well as some spells purchased centuries ago from wandering unicorns. I'd allowed nearby vegetation to overgrow the entrance. No one could see the cave but me.

The air up here was thinner, and I had been breathless when I had arrived. I was wheezing after several turns, and I wasn't the only one. The older, heavier males also seemed to have trouble keeping themselves aloft.

One, a grizzled male whose scales had gone from youth's green-gold to age's burnished copper, kept swerving across my flight path. I had to veer sideways twice to avoid hitting him. Finally, his right front claw hooked onto my tail. He didn't pierce the skin, but I lost my balance and would have toppled if two other older males hadn't caught my forearms and held me steady.

"Rumaad?" one of the males said.

I looked up, stunned. I had never been recognized at one of these things before. Most of my friends stayed away, tending their eggs. I was the last of among my peers to think of finding his first mate.

"Yes?" I said, trying not to let my surprise show. Still, I couldn't control the nervous plume of flame that emerged from my left nostril. "Can I be of service?"

"Actually, you can." The dragon who had caught my tail had managed to stop in front of me. He managed a perfect mid-air hover, something few males could accomplish. What had originally seemed like out of control flying must have been his attempts to catch my attention.

I couldn't hover. The males beside me kept me suspended, so that I wouldn't fall to the ground.

"I'm Avagas," the old male said. "I hear you have a stash from the murders."

Avagas. One of the Lair Fathers, a former leader of the Regional Council, and leader of the Rebellion that -- three millennia ago -- had made the Five Regions the most powerful nation on the Four Continents.

I was embarrassed that he'd heard of my unorthodox collection. I held my breath, trying to hide my shame, but tendrils of smoke slipped between my back teeth anyway.

"I'm not going to chastise you, boy." Avagas sounded faintly amused. "I think your knowledge might be useful."

I took a small breath. His words surprised me. "How?"

"You've heard of the sixteenth victim?"

I had heard at my usual daytime rest stop in the Reed Marsh. The Reed Marsh was deep enough to allow a dragon to submerge himself in mud as protection from the sun, and wide enough to keep his presence a secret from the smaller mammals who would carry the news to the humans.

Four other dragons had chosen the Marsh as their rest stop that day and, as twilight fell and we grew restless, one of the travelers had mentioned the newest death.

"The murder occurred near here. We would like to take you to the body, see what you think of this latest death."

I glanced at the ground below me. I wanted nothing more than to land, lumber into the cave I had reserved at the previous Nae The Loch and nest for a day or two.

But one did not say no to the Lair Fathers, especially one as famous as Avagas.

"I do not know how I can help you," I said.

"You have seen the other bodies, have you not?"

I had no idea how he learned of that. I had visited the other corpses long after the Lair Fathers finished their investigations. The other corpses had been left, according to Five Regions custom, until scavengers had picked the bones clean and a young male, too young to have known the victim, took over the lair.

The hoard would have been scavenged too, but only by family and close friends. By the time, I had seen most of the corpses, the only things remaining in their stashes were the imprints the items left in the ground.

"I've seen most of the bodies," I said, because I knew better than to lie. "The early ones were already scattered when I developed my interest."

I didn't tell him though that it was at the early sites where I found the most interesting items -- a rusted scabbard picked clean of jewels; rings of metal which I later learned were part of something the humans called chain mail; and a long thin needle coated in ichor.

"Good," Avagas said. "You will come, then?"

"May I rest first?" The shame that had receded rose again. I was tired and this gray eminence, who had lived six times as long as I had, showed no exhaustion at all.

"We shall rest near the corpse," he said. "Come along."

He spun, leaving his place in the landing line, and flew up the cliff face. His companions let go of me, and I bobbled for a moment, before my wings caught the breeze.

It was easier to move forward than it was to try to hover. I managed to keep up with the trio only because one of them would wait for me at each turn.

We went through three passes, all of them part of the peaks that formed Nae The Loch. The passes were narrow and snow-filled, but the chill air felt good to my burning lungs. The flames, which I never controlled well when I was exhausted, shot out unexpectedly twice, once melting snow on the ground below, and once causing a tiny avalanche that tumbled all the way down the mountainside.

From this height, the corpse was easy to spot. It sprawled at treeline, forelegs spread, and tail pointed downhill. The head tilted backwards at an unnatural angle, the unmistakable sign of a broken neck.

As we got closer to the victim, I realized the corpse was unusually large for a male. Then we circled above, and the chill air cooled all the flames in my throat.

The corpse wasn't male at all. It had the silver and black scales of a female in her prime.

Avagas circled and landed on a flat rock far from the corpse. His companions landed beside him, leaving no room for me.

I wasn't going to land beside the corpse. The body rested on snow, and the ground beneath sloped steeply downward. As tired as I was, I might topple, scale over tail, to the forest below.

Instead, I found a second flat rock, some distance from Avagas. I landed harder than I expected, my wings giving out on the descent. I was very out of shape and much too tired. I extended my tongue, stuck the fork into the nearby snow, and shoveled a pile into my mouth.

Cool, refreshing, and much needed. I shoveled another mouthful inside, and felt some of my energy return.

The chill of the mountainside felt good against my scales. I had been overheating as well as exhausting myself. I clambered across the snow, glad that it wasn't that deep here. Otherwise, I would have had to use my wings to keep my weight off the snow, and I didn't think they were up to the task.

I folded them against my back and lumbered toward the corpse.

It looked even bigger up close. Females still scared me -- their sheer size was imposing -- almost twice the size of males. At first, I stayed back, studying the scene.

Avagas and his companions approached, using their wings to keep themselves slightly above the snow, probably so that the cold wetness wouldn't seep between their claws.

"I told you to look," he called to me while they were still a distance away.

"I am looking," I said. "Stay behind me."

"I do not understand. Why -- ?"

"Do you want me to find out what happened?"

"We want you to find out how the human reached this height, how close it came to Nae The Loch, and whether or not our most secret place is in danger," Avagas said. "How much time could that take?"

His demands did not surprise me, although he had not stated them before. We had all had the unspoken fear that the humans had found Nae The Loch. It had even been part of the discussion at the Reed Marsh.

"It could take a great deal of time," I said, even though I had never done anything like this before. I had a hunch, though, that the best way to understand what had happened was to study the details.

"What would you have us do?" Avagas asked.

I swiveled my head, trying not to show my surprise. I did not expect him to ask me for instructions.

If I had been with my birth-year companions, I would have given a different answer -- a more strident one, which did not take their feelings into account. But, for all his interest, Avagas was a Lair Father. I could not order him about like an equal.

"Perhaps," I said, "it would be best if your companions brought us the evening meal. I have been flying all day, and I'm sure this crisis has occupied you. We shall be here for some time. Nourishment would be advised."

Avagas waved a claw, not even bothering to repeat my words. The other two males flew off.

"And me?" Avagas asked.

"Observe," I said. "Between the two of us, we might decipher what happened here."

The snow around the corpse was littered with small holes. The corpse had hit hard, sending ice chunks and debris into the air. They landed in a splatter pattern around the body.

"Your caution amazes me," Avagas said. "I would simply like to find the human source of our troubles and slay him before he makes our situation worse."

His words startled me away from my examination. Did he know nothing of humans? "It is not one human who has been killing our people. Humans live six or seven decades at most. Toward the end, they are frail creatures, not even worthy of a hatchling snack."

His head tilted, revealing the tender underside of his jawline. "Then what is this killing? I cannot believe it accidental."

"It is not. I believe the humans have a ritual, which requires proof of dragon slaying," I said. "Perhaps the Lair Fathers should capture a young human and quiz him about their customs."

"We cannot speak to those beasts," Avagas said. "They do not know the holy tongue."

"But they have their own tongue. It is fine and rich. I'm sure one of us speaks it."

"Besides you?" Avagas swiveled his head back so that he stared at the corpse.

"I do not speak it," I said, trying not to let him hear the regret in my voice. I often wished I had spoken it, so that I would understand the texts I'd found, the songs I'd heard. "But there are traders at the Swap Meet who do."

Avagas sighed, as if speaking the human tongue were thing beneath dragons. He did not say another word, and I flattered myself that he was considering the suggestion.

I examined each hole in the snow, realizing in short order that my first assumption about them had been right. I waddled closer to the corpse until I stood over it.

Because the death had been a recent one, and because the temperature on this mountainside was chill, the corpse had been preserved as if in life. Her eyes were closed and if one ignored the angle of her head, it would appear as if she had just fallen asleep in the snow.

She had been a magnificent creature. She had a long, narrow snout, and sharp teeth that rose above her upper lip. Her talons were scraped to fine points, and the ridges along her spine nearly hid a band of well-developed muscle that ran along her ribcage.

Her wings were still partly extended. They were thin as flower petals and probably were that soft to the touch. The silver-black of her scales had a touch of green, making them seem almost iridescent. Her tail was thick and powerful, the barb on the end intact and free of blood.

She had not attacked anyone.

I stepped closer, careful where I put my hind feet. I knew that my tail would obliterate any marks in the snow, and I made certain I examined them before I destroyed them.

So far the marks had told me little.

Avagas watched me, as if I were the curiosity, not the dead female. When I reached the weapons embedded in her side, he finally sighed, a bit of flame leaking through his nose.

Apparently I had finally reached the part of the body he had wanted me to see.

Three projectile weapons lodged in her back flank. The weapons were short and stubby, feathered on the ends. I had seen their like before, often littered around lairs. Humans who hunted dragons with these weapons -- which they called arrows -- often became lunch.

There were longer versions of the arrow, more effective versions -- some as tall as the human who wielded them. These weapons, called spears, could slip beneath scales, go between ribs, and find a dragon's heart.

The arrows, small as they were, rarely pierced skin.

The tips of these arrows had gotten caught between the larger scales of the female's back. I doubted she even felt them. The feathers were wind-torn and had been sheered off one of the weapons.

She'd been carrying the arrows for some time. No one had bothered to tell her of them or help her remove them. Someone probably would have noticed at Nae The Loch, and helped her there.

It might have been the beginning of a beautiful courtship.

"Human weapons," Avagas said. "They are more destructive than we thought."

"These weapons could not have disturbed her flight," I said. "She took them on the ground. Notice the angle of entry. Whoever shot them hit her from above, not below."

Avagas crept beside me. I glanced at the snow in his path, and saw nothing that would be disturbed by his presence.

"I had not thought of that," he muttered. "Yet she has clearly fallen from the sky."

"Something brought her down," I said. "I have a theory, but I am unwilling to discuss it until I examine her more closely."

I walked around the corpse. Mine were the only footprints near the body. The tiny holes from the dirt and ice surrounded the corpse, adding to my theory that she had dropped mid-flight.

Then I realized why that disturbed me. A dragon whose flight was broken did not drop like a stone from the air. A dragon, particularly one with a wingspan as magnificent as this female's, would glide until she saw a proper spot, and land on it.

Even if she were forced to land in a place like this, she would have brought herself in, hind feet first, scraping to slow her approach if she had to, tail as ballast, until she came to a stop.

Instead, she had landed on her belly like a flopping fish.

I walked around her other side. Finally, I saw fresh damage. Many of her scales had been ripped off. Slashes cut deep into her flesh, and blood stained the remaining scales, covering their lovely silver-green finish.

I followed the twisted neck to the head and peered at it again. She had a white patch of scales between her earbumps. I'd seen a patch like that once before, a hundred years ago.

She'd been at Nae The Loch both times I'd been here, each time prowling for a mate. Her name was Paeche. The last time I'd seen her, she'd bent her head toward me, butted me in the side, and said, _I like a male whose neck still bears a touch of red. Have you mated yet, youngling? Would you like to learn the ways of dragons?_

Her approach had terrified me, and I had moved away from her, to the amusement of the traders at their tables. One of the traders later confided in me that Paeche liked her males young and biddable, and it was best that I had not become involved with her, because I would expect an attachment, and she often left the pairing without laying a single egg.

It had been that moment with her that had put me off my quest for a mate at the last Nae The Loch, convincing me that I still had much to learn about females. That did not stop my friends from becoming her conquests. Two of my birth-year companions had heeded her invitation, only to become locked in a struggle over mating rights.

She left both of them for a male I had not met, a son of one of the table traders, who abandoned the Swap Meet altogether and took her to his lair.

"What do you see?" Avagas asked. Apparently my analysis of the human weapons had impressed him. He seemed to have more patience than he'd had earlier.

I did not tell him I recognized the female. I made myself look away from the white patch. More scraps ran along the side and back of her skull. The scrapes were deep, and at the edges, puncture marks.

Four of them, as I had expected.

Avagas' companions flew overhead, their wings whistling in the wind. In their foreclaws, they each carried an iron container. The meal that I had requested.

They flew past, and Avagas headed toward them. He probably expected me to follow, but I was unwilling.

The light was dimming, and I wanted to see one last thing before the sun set over the mountain peaks. I peered closely at the scales running along the right side of Paeche's face.

Scorch marks ran down the center of her shapely snout. I didn't have to sniff them to know they would smell faintly of sulfur.

I sat down in the snow, feeling even more tired than I had when I'd arrived.

Humans did not slay this dragon. Instead, she had been murdered by one of our own.

* * * *

Avagas insisted on a full explanation of my theory. We sat around the fire we'd started with the wood the companions had gathered, and snacked from the iron containers. Raw meat -- mostly animal flesh -- had been piled inside. We each speared a piece with our claws, charred it with our own breath, and ate long into the night.

The corpse had given up details so clear that I could almost imagine the murder.

Whoever had attacked Paeche had known her flight path and had waited for her on a nearby peak. I knew that if we flew the surrounding peaks at dawn, we'd find the imprint of a small dragon's tail and hindquarters in the otherwise pristine snow.

Paeche's killer had waited for her, and when he saw her, he crouched until she passed. Then he flew after her.

He was small enough to slip between her wings, but the strategy didn't work as well as he thought. She must have caught him, making him tumble away from her. As he spun in the air, his back claws dug into her side, ripping it open, and angering her.

She turned on him, but he surprised her with a blast of fire across the snout.

As she pawed at her eyes, perhaps trying to protect them from the flames, he flew above her, and grabbed her skull with his forelegs, puncturing through the scales and skin with his claws.

Either she turned or he yanked or both. Ultimately, it did not matter. The movement -- its suddenness and ferocity -- killed her.

She dropped like a stone from the sky, and he fled -- whether in fear or triumph, I could not tell.

After my fifth retelling in which I explained how her impact had caused the snow to rain around her corpse all at the same time, after I had again detailed the difference between fresh wounds and older ones, after I had explained how arrows (as opposed to their larger cousins, spears) could not kill a female dragon, Avagas was finally satisfied with my interpretation.

We both knew he would investigate for himself come dawn, but that did not disturb me. In his place, I would have done the same.

What disturbed me, and what I did not say, was that we had no punishments for dragon-upon-dragon slayings. Such things were unheard of. Because we were solitary creatures who rarely interacted, we did not solve our differences through killings.

Certainly, we neglected our eggs at times, but eggs were not hatchlings. Once a hatchling took its first breath, it became a dragon, subject to all the respect accorded to one of our kind.

Respect Paeche had not.

* * * *

I woke before dawn to find Avagas stoking the fire with more wood, then blasting it into a bonfire with a single breath of flame. His eyes were red-rimmed, his scales even grayer than they had seemed in the daylight.

He had not slept at all. It was clear this matter disturbed him as much as it disturbed me.

His companions snored, curled around the iron containers as if they were a stash instead of boxes that had to be returned to some trading table.

Sleeping in the snow left me sluggish. Cold had never agreed with me. I did not appreciate the slower heart rate, and the feeling that, if I stayed but a day or two longer, I would become a block of ice.

I sat up, and Avagas handed me a piece of meat so charred that it crunched as I ate it. I washed it down with some melted snow.

When he finally spoke, it was with weary resignation. "Nothing in your details gives us any hint as to who did this. All we know is that our culprit is male."

I licked the last of the burned meat off my claws, considering my response. If I told him what I had dreamed of, we would move from the realm of certainty to the realm of conjecture. I was not certain that conjecture was appropriate.

He sent another blast of flame at the fire, although it did not need stoking.

"I almost wish it had been a human after all," he said softly. "At least then, I would know what to do."

He was right. Our options in that case were plentiful. We could defend Nae The Loch with young males or abandon the site altogether. If neither of those plans satisfied the Lair Fathers and the rest of the Five Regions, we might terrorize the humans, setting fire to nearby cities and driving them from the area.

Driving humans away did not last, but the humans who would return to a settlement decades later did not seem to be related to the group who had fled there. Such an action would have a good chance of preserving Nae The Loch.

"What of the other Lair Fathers?" I asked. "Perhaps they -- ?"

"No." Avagas' tone was pained. "I am one of the few who remembers the Rebellion. It is the last time that dragon turned on dragon."

"That we know of."

He swiveled his head toward me. "What do you mean?"

I could not look at him as I spoke. "For the most part, we live alone and die alone. Often our corpses are not discovered for decades. Who is to say that a dragon was murdered? It cannot be proven after so long a time. We were fortunate to find this female so quickly after her death -- and even more fortunate that we investigated. If we had not, we might have thought that she had landed wrong, breaking her neck, or -- if enough time had passed -- we might have found only the tips of the human weapons, and concluded that a human had killed her after all."

Smoke curled from his nostrils. Avagas looked as if he wanted to blast the fire again, but he could not. There wasn't enough wood left to take the brunt of the flames. He would risk burning his sleeping friends.

"So the fifteen -- "

"May have died at human hands," I said.

"May." A small puff of smoke followed the word out of his mouth.

"I have often thought it curious that creatures who wear armor that clanks and carry weapons that can rarely slice through our scales have managed to slay fifteen of us," I said.

Avagas bowed his head.

He did not seem to want to hear what I had to say, but now that I had started, I had to continue. "I do know that at least one of the fifteen died from a human-inflicted wound. I once found a needle covered in ichor."

Ichor was only found in a dragon's eye. An eye without ichor was concave, and the dragon blind.

"I believe a human found his victim napping, crept on top of the victim's head and pierced his eye before the victim even realized he was under attack. A dragon in such pain would thrash, but not be able to harm something so small, clinging to his skull."

Avagas wrapped his tail around his hindquarters, head still down, obviously listening.

"It would take little to blind the other eye, and then the dragon would be helpless. A human in such a position could find the tender spot beneath the jaw, shove a sword into it, severing the fire pipes and the lungs. It would take time, but in that circumstance, any one of us would die."

"But what of the others? The mutilations? We had always thought they were caused by humans." Avagas spoke so softly I could barely hear him above the snores.

"So they were." The cold had gotten worse. I leaned closer to the fire. "But there is no way to know when these mutilations occurred. Perhaps they occurred long after death, and the human returned to his tribe, regaling them with his exploits when in truth all he had done was slice a part from a corpse."

"Your theories make sense." Avagas shuddered. "I do not like them."

This, then, was my chance to discuss the last one. Still, I hesitated, knowing if I did, all that we understood about dragon custom would change.

"Then let me give you one more," I said.

He closed his eyes, as if he did not want to hear. Then he sighed, and opened them. "Speak."

"This is not a common path to Nae The Loch. I doubt many males travel this distance. There is little food in the snow and there are no obvious resting areas. Females may go this route, but in this case, we must not concern ourselves with females."

The snoring stopped, and so did I. Then the nearest companion huddled closer to his iron chest, and let out a whistling breath. The other companion grunted. Their snores rose in harmony once again.

I lowered my voice. "If the male who first reported seeing her corpse is also a male who has mated with her, then you will probably have your killer."

"Why?" Avagas asked.

"He would know her flight path, and he would -- "

"I meant," Avagas said, "what would cause anyone to attack a female? Let us forget that she is larger and more powerful. Females are not permanent part of our lives. There is no reason to destroy them."

"Males get irrational about their mates," I said. "And Paeche was known for consummating but rarely completing the cycle. This killer had the advantage. He had surprise on his side. Yet he chose to burn her face instead diving beneath her and going for the tender spot."

"And this has given you a theory?"

I poked the fire with one claw. "I believe that our killer was trying to get her to return to his lair, to finish something they had begun a century ago. He did not mean to kill her. Instead, he meant to use flame to force her to fly away with him."

"For that to work," Avagas said, "he would have to have a lair near here."

"And not many do," I said. "It would seem that you have but to look through Nae The Loch. The killer should not be hard to find."

* * * *

And indeed, he was not. As I suspected, the killer was the trader's son who had lured Paeche to his lair at the last Swap Meet. She left while he slept one night, without a word. There were no eggs, nothing to remember her by, except the humiliation of an improperly completed mating.

He had a century to plan how to get her to return.

When confronted, he confessed to the murder. It had happened as I had imagined it -- an accident in the midst of a badly made plan.

The Lair Fathers are debating his punishment now. Some want to reinstate banishment. Others disagree, believing it is not harsh enough. A few have suggested leaving him to the females.

Throughout this all, he has been imprisoned in a shallow cave at the mouth of Nae The Loch, guarded by males with more fire power than the rest of us combined.

What becomes of him does not concern me. I am not a Lair Father, and probably not destined to be one.

My concerns are new, things I had never considered before. And because of them, I find myself in a strange position.

My collection of relics from the fifteen deaths, once considered esoteric and slightly odd, has made me famous in the Five Regions. There is talk that I should investigate all new deaths as soon as we learn of them.

I do not like this idea. It requires travel, and I know of no way it will help me improve my own stash. And I need to concentrate on my hoard since I did not find a mate at Nae The Loch.

Indeed, the females abandoned the place when they learned of the murders. There is talk that the females will not return to the Swap Meet. Instead, they will flock to other festivals, ones in less remote locations.

Because of one male's actions, females now view all of us with suspicion.

Still, I think back to that moment on the snow-covered mountainside, as I realized the corpse left me a message about her death.

All males collect. Our hoards are what separate us from each other. Anyone can find sapphires or diamonds. Most of us have, at one point or another, raided human dwellings for gold.

But I am the only dragon in recorded history -- male or female -- who has collected information and, more to the point, the only one who has found value in it.

I like that distinction. But the distinction also disturbs me. Because, for my collection maintain its value, the information must remain useful.

I am not certain I want to read corpses. I do not think I will like what they tell me.

I have reviewed my collection, looked over the items found at the fifteen death sites. Only the needle contains a substance from a dragon's body.

The other items carry human blood or bones too tiny to be dragon. It seems to me that the humans died at the whims of a dragon, as they always have, and only once was it the other way around.

Which means that fourteen male dragons died before their time.

We are large creatures, with no natural predators. We should all die of ill health or old age. Yet fourteen of us were murdered -- in the space of a very short time.

Something has changed in the past century. Initially, we thought it was the humans.

Now we know it is not.

What frightens me the most about this is that the details show me one other thing, something I have confided in no one else.

It is true that the fourteen died at another dragon's hand. However, I do not believe that a single dragon committed the killings.

I believe we as a species have changed. And it is clear that change could doom us all.

-- END --