Malta felt an instant of hatred purer than any emotion she had ever felt. "I hope you die first so I can watch," she croaked at him.
"Traitor!" Cosgo lifted a trembling finger and pointed at her. "Only a traitor could speak so to me! I am the Satrap of all Jamaillia. I condemn you to live flaying and to be burnt afterward. I swear that if we live, I will watch my sentence carried out on you." He looked past her at Kekki. "Companion. Witness my words. If I die and you survive, it is your duty to make my will known to others. See that bitch punished!"
Malta glared at him but said nothing. She tried to work moisture into her throat but found none. It galled her to let his words stand, but she had no choice. She turned her back on him.
TINTAGLIA SATED HER HUNGER WITH A FOOLISH YOUNG BOAR. SHE HAD spotted him rooting at the edge of an oak grove. At the sight and scent of him, hunger had roared in her. The puzzled pig had stood, staring at her curiously as she stooped down to him. At the last moment, he had brandished his tusks at her as if that would scare her off. She had devoured him in a matter of bites, leaving little more than blood-smeared leaves and detritus to show he had ever existed. Then she had taken off again.
Her voracity almost frightened her. For the rest of the afternoon, she flew low, hunting as she traveled, and killed twice more, a deer and another boar. They were sufficient to her hunger, but no more than that. The grumbling of her belly kept distracting her from her avowed intention. At one point, she lifted her eyes to scan the general lay of the land and was suddenly aware she had been paying no attention to where she was flying. She could no longer see the river.
She forced herself to stop thinking of her belly. Swiftly she soared across the wide swampy valley until she returned to the choked thread of the river. Here the trees encroached on the flow of water, and the swampy banks of the river spread wide beneath the forest canopy. Nothing promising here. Once more, she flew upstream, but this time she drove herself, flying as swiftly as ever she had, looking, always looking for a familiar landmark or a sign of Elderling occupation. Slowly the river widened again, the forest retreating. Soon it regained grassy banks as she followed its flow into foothills. The land around it was firmer here, more true forest than swamp. Then, with heart-stopping suddenness, she recognized where she was. On the horizon, in a bend of the river, she glimpsed the map-tower of Kelsingra. It glinted in the westering sun, and her heart lifted. It still stood, and her eyes picked out the detail of other familiar buildings around it. In the next instant, her heart sank. Her nose brought her no odors of chimney smoke or foundry and forge at work.
She flew toward the city. The closer she came, the more obvious became its death. The road was not only completely devoid of the lively traffic it had once sustained; at one point, a landslide had sheared the road away entirely. The memory stone still recalled blackly that it had been told to be a road. She could sense the trapped memories of the merchants and soldiers and nomadic traders who had once traversed it still humming in the stone. Grass and moss had not overcome it. The road still shone, black, straight and level as it made its businesslike way to the city. The road still recalled itself as a highway, but no one else in the world did.
She circled above the deserted city and looked down on its ancient destruction. The Elderlings had built the city for the ages, built it blithely assuming that they would always stroll its streets and inhabit its gracious homes. Now its emptiness mocked all such mortal illusions. Sometime in the past, a cataclysmic settling of the earth had riven the city in two. A huge cleft divided it, and the river had claimed that sunken piece for itself. She could glimpse the rubble of sunken buildings in the depths. Tintaglia blinked her eyes, forcing herself to see the city as it was rather than how the memory stone recalled itself. Thus had the Elderlings built, cutting the memory stone and bringing it here to build their fair city on the plains by the river. They had bound the stone, forcing into it their concept of what it was to be. Faithful and silent, the city stood.
Tintaglia came to the city as the dragons always had, and nearly killed herself in the process. Always, her ancestral memories told her, the dragons had arrived by landing in the river itself. It made a spectacularly showy arrival. The sliding plunge from the blue sky into the cool water always sent up a great feathery splash. The alighting of a dragon always set all the docked ships to rocking in their berths. The water cushioned the landing, and then the dragon would wade out of the cool depths onto the pebbled shore to the cheers and greetings of the gathered folk.
The river was far shallower than her ancient memories told her it would be. Instead of plunging completely beneath it and letting the water catch her, Tintaglia crashed into it. It was scarcely shoulder-deep on her, and she was fortunate not to break her legs. Only the cushioning of her powerful muscles kept her from harm. She cracked two claws on her left foreleg, and bruised her outstretched wings painfully as she caught herself and waded out of the river not to cheers and songs of welcome but to the whispering of the wind among the deserted buildings.
She felt as if she wandered through a dream. The memory stone was nearly impervious to the encroaching of organic life. As long as it recalled what it was supposed to be, it rejected the tendriling roots of plants. Animals who might have claimed the city as a place to nest and den were turned aside by the stone's memories of men and women dwelling there. Even after all these years, she saw only tentative signs that the natural world would eventually reclaim this place. Moss had begun to find its first footholds in the fine cracks between the paving stones and in the angles of the steps. Crows and ravens, ever scornful of humanity's claims of mastery, had a few messy nests jutting out from window ledges or wedged into belfries. Algae stained the edges of the fountains that still held rain water trapped in their ornate basins. Domes had caved in on themselves. The outer walls of some buildings had collapsed in some long-ago quake, leaving the interior chambers open to the autumn day and scattering rubble across the street below them. Eventually, nature always triumphed. The Elderlings' city would ultimately be swallowed by the wild world, and then no one would remember a time when man and dragon had dwelt together.
It surprised Tintaglia that such a thought could cut her heart. Humanity as it now existed little appealed to her. There had been a time, her ancestors whispered in the back of her brain, when dragon essence mingled with the nature of men, and Elderlings emerged from that accidental blending. Tall and slender, dragon-eyed and golden-skinned, that ancient race had lived alongside dragons and gloried in the symbiosis. Tintaglia walked slowly down streets made generously wide enough to allow a dragon to pass in ease. She came to their halls of government, and ascended the wide, shallow steps that had been engineered to allow her kind gracious access to the gathering halls of the Elderlings. The exterior walls of this building still gleamed blackly, while figures of gleaming white decorated the exterior in bas-relief. Cariandra the Fecund still endlessly plowed her fields behind her team of massive oxen, while on the adjacent wall Sessicaria spread wide his wings and trumpeted silently.
Tintaglia passed between the impassive stone lions that guarded the entrance. One wide door had already collapsed. As she brushed past the other immense wooden door, a chance graze of her tail brought it slumping down into a heap of splinters and fragments. Wood had not the memory of stone.