fs busily picking up cups, plates, and bracelets and packing them back into the basket. Blade had forgotten what dragons were like about gold. He began to feel anxious. “Did they say why?” Scales asked.
“They said it was tribute because Mr. Chesney’s Dark Lord of the world,” Blade said.
Scales went very still, with that stillness that suggested muscles making ready to spring.
“But that can’t be right, can it?” Blade asked anxiously.
Scales’s wings rattled in a shrug. “They must have made a mistake,” he rumbled. “I think we’ll feed the murderers now, since we’re stopped, anyway. Go and milk cows.”
After lunch they pressed on again, leaving the dwarfs to go the opposite way, to Blade’s relief. He had not altogether trusted Scales to leave the gold alone. The soldiers’ hangovers seemed to have abated with exercise. They marched over open grassland, where trees clustered beside small streams, at quite a brisk pace, with Scales steadily crawling behind, and by evening they were beginning to see mountains in the distance ahead. By this time Blade was ashamed that he had not trusted Scales over the gold. Dragons nowadays did not have hoards—except things like Callette’s gizmos for the tours—and Scales seemed to be adapting to modern ways. He had to be, Blade thought, or he would not be helping them like this.
“Helping!” said Kit when Blade mentioned this to him. “I call it taking over!”
The next camp came into sight soon after this. Barnabas had set it up almost tastefully beside trees that were beginning to turn gold or faint orange. Everyone made for it thankfully. As soon as the soldiers were inside and Blade had taken the animals to drink at the nearby stream, Scales beckoned Kit and made Kit walk with him all around the camp, showing him how to seal the magics of the dome more securely into the ground.
“Wizard who did these camps did a rather sketchy job,” he explained when they had finished. “But you should be safe for the night now. I’m off for a while. I’m getting hungry, and I fancy a hunt. I’ll see you soon.”
He spread his wings, took three light running steps forward, and soared away into the wide evening. The soldiers, with their faces misty blue from the dome magics, lined the curving wall and made rude gestures after him. The rest stared after him in alarm.
“He’s gone after those dwarfs,” said Don.
“I’m afraid he has,” Blade agreed.
“And maybe he hasn’t,” Shona disagreed cheerfully. “He gave me a sort of insight after I—when I looked into his eyes that time, and I was rather amazed at how civilized and learned he was.”
“Anyway, we can’t stop him,” Kit pointed out.
Blade knew Shona was wrong. He knew Scales was hunting dwarfs. The knowledge took the edge off even the Wild Hunt that night, though that was splendid fun. Blade came back with his hamper of satisfied avians and took off again with a black griffin on either side of him. With the weight of illusory horns on his head, Blade rode a winged black horse in the freshness of an autumn night under a growing yellow moon. Pretty had refused to come, but on the ground below, the dogs bayed and yelped and belled and made a wonderful din crashing through brushwood to keep up. Ahead of them, three times over, a small crowd of people made even more noise, running for their lives. The Pilgrims were never near enough to see, to Blade’s annoyance, and the Hunt had to turn back each time after the tourists had pelted over a bridge across one of the rivers, because Kit said the black book said the Black Rider was not supposed to cross running water. But it was still great fun. It would have been even greater fun if Blade had not kept thinking of small pigtailed men being crunched the way Scales had pretended to crunch that soldier.
FOURTEEN
QUERIDA SAT ALONE IN the conference hall of the University, working at the long table. Today she had managed to get from her house to this building by supporting herself on one real crutch and a magical one that she could handle with her broken arm. But it had been hard work, and the stairs up to her study had defeated her. The bones were a long way from healed yet. She had become pretty weak during her healing coma, too, and the effort tired her. She wished now—as she had wished last time she had broken a bone—that she had not insisted on the coma. But she was so bad at bearing pain.
She wished she could find someone to bring her a hot healing drink. The janitor had said he would do what he could, poor fellow, but it was not really his job, and he did not know where cups or kettles were kept. There was no one else about. The healers and the male wizards were all out with the Pilgrim Parties. Normally during tourtime the place would be abuzz with female wizards, who usually took this opportunity to use the equipment, but this year they were away on urgent business as well. In fact, the silence and emptiness of the University were a very satisfactory sign that the hasty arrangements Querida had made before she insisted on the coma were being acted upon.
She considered her plans. Querida’s feeling had always been that Oracles helped those who helped themselves. The tours were not going to end just like that. So, in order to help the prophecies along a bit, she had all the women wizards out around the continent organizing mistakes, failures, and trouble for Pilgrim Parties. She was trusting Derk to make a thoroughly bad job of being Dark Lord, and it was always possible that if things went badly enough wrong, Mr. Chesney might decide the Pilgrim Parties were unworkable. But there was that demon of his. Querida’s plans there hinged upon the fact that demons were very legal-minded. For this reason, the women wizards were also looking for anything—any small thing—that the tours were doing which was not in the contract. Querida could then confront the demon and tell it that Mr. Chesney had broken the law and it was free to go. If Mara did her part as well, then Mr. Chesney would be faced with three ways the tours had broken down. Surely that would be enough to make even Mr. Chesney give up.
Anyway—she pulled forward pen and paper—this accounted for the way the place was so strangely quiet and empty. Better get on. Almost the only people in town were the bards. But they had flatly refused either to join the tours or to help Querida stop them. Their college was out on the edge of town, and they were presumably all inside it sulking.
“And we can do without artistic tantrums,” Querida murmured.
Her small, dry voice rang through the great silence of the building.
“I wish I didn’t talk to myself,” she said. “I keep making myself jump. Heigh-ho. Down to work.”
She had sixty or more pigeon messages to write. She hoped the janitor was up to fixing them to pigeons—the right pigeons—and setting the birds loose. She had no faith in the man. But first she would have to get down to reading some at least of the great stack of messages that the janitor—after having it explained several times—had fetched from her study and piled on the long table.
Querida sorted through the stack, awkwardly one-handed. Surely one of them by now would be from a woman wizard reporting a breach of contract. Surely. About half the messages were indeed from women wizards, but they all seemed to be saying, “We have done what you said. What do we do next?” There did not seem to be one from Mara, and there ought to have been. Mara had promised to deliver a suitable miniature universe before the sieges started. Better write to Mara at once. And to the woman in the Emirates. Oh, here was a message from Barnabas.
Querida unfolded it clumsily. Barnabas wrote that he was worried. Derk was turning out to be much more efficient than either of them had expected. “With this in mind,” Barnabas wrote, “I have jinxed the avians and made sure the containing camps for the army are really flimsy. I am putting the base camp in the wrong place and will probably jinx that, too, but I have to report that so far these measures have had little effect.”
Hmm. Querida leaned back in the large chair, considering. This was annoying. She had been relying on Pilgrims complaining about the Dark Lord. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise that she had been injured herself before she could help Derk with either a demon or a god, or maybe it was the work of the Oracles, in which case it was possibly worth all the pain. She had better drag her heels a bit over demons and gods—while pretending to be helpful, of course—and it might be an idea to nag and bully Derk as well. In Querida’s experience, most men responded badly to bullying. It got them making mistakes. Mara’s activities ought to unbalance the man, too, and get him doing things wrong. Derk had to make mistakes. Had to.
“Because we have got to win, now we are showing our hand,” she murmured. “Once Mr. Chesney realizes there is a fight on, we could all be in terrible trouble.”
This time her voice did not ring out entirely on its own. There were other noises, too, most of it a considerable scuffling outside the hall. Perhaps the janitor had actually managed to find the kettle and was bringing her a drink at last. If so, by the sound, he was making heavy weather of it.
Querida turned inquiringly toward the doorway, just as a scrawny gray wolf, with its hackles up in a hedge all down its spine, came backing in through it.