“Oh, I think so. If only to watch what you will do. I’ll keep an eye on you afterward, too.” He brought his fiendish head down low, to a point I hardly had to crane my neck to catch full view of him. “Have you begun to feel it yet, I wonder?”
“Feel what, mighty one?”
“Such flattery! You must have been a courtier at heart—when it was still beating, of course.” He rose again, this time to his full height on all fours, his majesty and power bared in casual shifts of titanic muscle beneath crimson scales as large as dinner plates. “I speak of the madness that plagues your kind. Loss of memories of your former life, poisoning of relationships you desperately cling to, paranoia about imagined plots to destroy your precious tether.”
“I have not,” I replied. I knew of such troubles; one cannot take up a study of immortality without running across warnings of its effects on those who would take it as their own.
“You will.” The certainty in that impossibly resonant booming voice gave me no small amount of dread. “I have met with the eldest of your kind, lich. I visited him on the eve of the thousandth anniversary of his new birth. Rech Bolthek is his name. He did not remember it.”
“His birthday?” I asked.
“No,” he said with a snarling chuckle, “his name. He had forgotten his own name. It took him a thousand years to get there, but he ended up where all mortals go when they try to avoid their natural fate: utter madness. It will come to you, too. It is the way of things, little Belamy. Your kind is not meant to view the passage of centuries; doing so degrades your mind, warps and contorts it in ways too strenuous, until it, like a piece of strong and unyielding metal bent with a force greater than it can stand, must break. Perhaps it will do so when you find your prey. That would be something worth seeing!” He laughed again, smoke pouring from his mouth and throat.
With that warning, Zuri-shantar finished his toying. He described the location and name of the tribe of lizards that Petre had infiltrated, then took flight, snorting flames and smoke in his wake. I assume he watched my meeting with Petre with great interest, but it’s just as likely he forgot all about the encounter as soon as he was airborne. The minds of dragonkind are an inscrutable thing, their interests in mortals and even immortals being transient fancies, passing distractions to whittle away the time between now and eternity.
I stood amid the wreckage of the burning trees and underbrush, momentarily stunned by the unexpected meeting. Zuri-shantar is likely to be the oldest thing alive, one of the progenitors of the entire race of dragonkind. That he should have taken any time to talk with me was a wonder, and remains so to this day. In my musings, I forgot about the flames that were fast spreading in my direction.
I took flight, safe above the treetops, guided only by the words of the fast-disappearing dragon. The tribe he had described was not difficult to find; it was a prosperous community, thriving in the danger and wildness of the jungle. I landed a respectful distance away and made my approach to the village on foot.
The sentries were at first hostile to me; the fact that we seemed to have no language in common proved particularly vexing for both parties. However, I found they had some vocabulary in the language of dragons, which I have some skill in imitating. I was able to get across to these warriors that I was here searching for someone in particular. We stayed where they’d encountered me while a runner went back to the village proper. She returned with a fellow lizard decked in talismans and charms of all sorts. To my great surprise, he spoke to me in comprehensible, albeit raspy and broken, Caribolian.
“Why you here?” he said, gesturing toward me with the gnarled club he had been using as a walking stick, his necklaces and bracelets rattling with the motion. “You want someone?”
“I want to find someone who’s here in disguise,” I told him.
He seemed to work through the words. “Disguise. False face, yes?” When I nodded, he turned his head from side to side, sniffing the air through the narrow slits that served as his nose. “One who looks like lizard, but not, yes?”
I nodded again. “I’ve been told that he’s among your people.”
“Told? Who tells?” His reptilian eyes narrowed in deep mistrust. “No trust for other tribes. They would…lie of us.”
“I came by the information from a dragon, Zuri-shantar.”
At the mention of the name, all eyes went wide, and the warriors immediately dropped to one knee with bowed heads. My conversation partner similarly genuflected, though he kept his eyes fixed on me.
“You talked with Great One? Great One sent you here?” My affirmative almost knocked him over. He stood to regain his balance, and the warriors slowly returned to their feet. “Great One does not lie. Your prey is here. I think I know who it is. Come along.”
With that, we trudged the rest of the way to the village, a collection of mud huts with green-thatched roofs surrounding a particularly impressive hut that must have spanned at least fifty feet. It was into this largest domicile that my hosts took me. Therein I saw the largest lizardman I have ever seen, his hefty paunch jutting pugnaciously from a thick and sturdy frame. He sat upon a rock throne that went through the thatched floor of the hut.
The chieftain, for I assume that’s who it was, and the speaker conversed in their hissing and snapping tongue. The leader then shifted his gaze and weight in my direction, and said some more things I could not understand. My conversation partner nodded once, which I took to be a sign for what I was supposed to do, so I nodded as well. The chieftain nodded to the speaker, who tapped me on the shoulder with his clawed finger.
We left the home of the leader of the tribe and made our way to the outer edge of the village. “We think we have your man. Tried to hide…” He snapped his head side to side and sniffed; I realized later he was trying to find the right word. “…among. Among us. Wearing our skin, speaking our words. We keep him. He wears his own face now.” He gestured to a lone hut ahead of us, isolated from any others. “There. Your prey. Do what you will.”
“You’re giving me your prisoner?”
“If Great One sent you to hunt, we do not…interfere. If he leaves the area, he is free. If we see him after, we kill.”
I stepped into the hut.
Chapter 21
In which a story is finished, bibelots are explained, and bacon is served by the fire.
Belamy paused his telling, and stared into the flames. Skate had stopped drinking her coffee shortly after the conversation started, and it was roughly the same temperature as the room around it. Petre’s globe remained full of vaguely shifting blue smoke. Rattle stayed motionless in the old man’s lap.
“Forgive me. It has been ages since I’ve recounted these things aloud. I’m sure this could have been explained much more succinctly, if I had put my mind to such. Shall I continue?”
Skate nodded, but slowly, and only after a few seconds of consideration.
“You have reservations?”
“Questions,” she said, sipping the room-cooled coffee. Terrible or not, she wasn’t going to waste any. “But they can wait.”
“Might as well get them out of the way now, so I don’t have to stop again until the end. I often find that I’m unable to concentrate if I have unresolved questions needling my brain.” His eyes finally left the fire and turned to Rattle, whom he began to pet at the space where its wings met.