Mercedes Lackey - Elvenborn

human, there would be no need for all this secrecy and fiddling about.

But it was obvious that he wasn't going to get any further in­formation out of the woman unless he did as she asked, so, with a sigh, he gathered threads of magic and wove them into a net, casting it over the two of them, just for good measure. He might as well see if the Elvenbane herself was under a glamor.

Nothing happened. The two of them remained exactly as they had been when they walked into the firelight.

Now Kyrtian was puzzled. Had the magic been countered? It couldn't have been deflected; he'd have seen that. Could they have absorbed it, then negated it? But how? "Are you carrying something new that works like iron?" he asked. "Or have you—"

He never got a chance to finish his question, because in the next moment, the young man who had been standing at the fire­side, looking altogether as normal as it was possible for a wizard to look, suddenly began to ... change. He didn't writhe, exactly, but he blurred and twisted in a way that induced a really violent case of dizziness and nausea. It felt as if something was wrench­ing Kyrtian's eyes out of their sockets and stirring up his guts at the same time, and Kyrtian clapped his hand over his mouth and turned away. He wasn't alone; the rest of his men were doing the same thing, their complexions in varying shades of green.

What in the name of—

As soon as he turned his eyes away his symptoms subsided, and he looked up, glaring at Lashana, angry accusations on his lips.

Which died, as he continued to look up—and up—and up— into the jewel-like and surprisingly mild eyes of a very large, sapphire-blue dragon.

At least, he thought it was a dragon. He couldn't think of anything else it could be. It was huge, scaled, winged, fanged and taloned. There weren't many other creatures that fit that description.

As he stared, he heard the men behind him reacting to the presence of the creature. One was praying in the ancient lan­guage of the humans, one was cursing with remarkable fluency,

and he distinctly heard the thud of a third dropping to the ground, presumably having fainted dead away.

Not that Kyrtian blamed him in the least.

"You can cast all the illusion-breaking spells you like, but dragons can look like anything they care to and you won't know it. The dragons are shape-changers, you see," he heard the Elvenbane say, quite cheerfully, but it was as if he heard her in the far distance. His mind was still too involved with the im­possibility of what he had just witnessed, and the sheer pres­ence of the dragon itself. "That's our biggest secret, and that gives us undetectable spies among you Elvenlords. The drag­ons can go anywhere and be anything or anybody, and you can never tell that they're there, because they're not taking on illu­sions, they're taking on the real form of whatever they imitate. They've been spying on your people—oh, forever. From the moment the Elvenlords arrived here, the Eldest say."

"Oh," Kyrtian said, faintly. "I suppose—dragons must have been in my camp, then?"

Lashana let out a peal of laughter. "My good Lord Kyrtian, dragons were guarding your tent. And neither you nor your good Sargeant Gel had any notion!"

"Actually," the dragon said, with a note of apology in his deep voice, "I was one of them. Sorry. Hate to eavesdrop and all that, but we really didn't have much choice. We had to know what you were, you understand. Suddenly you were doing all sorts of efficient things against the Young Lords, and we calcu­lated that you'd be coming after us, next."

Kyrtian wasn't entirely certain how the dragon was speak­ ing; the voice seemed to rumble up out of the depths of that massive torso, and the mouth opened and closed, but the dragon didn't have anything like lips, and he couldn't figure out how it could shape words with that mouth....

"At any rate, this is our biggest secret, and now you know it," Lashana continued. "So—well, you can see that we trust you."

"Ah ... yes." Carefully, very carefully, Kyrtian felt blindly for the piece of log he'd been sitting on and lowered himself down onto it. "I... can see that."

The dragon lowered his head until his eyes were level with

Kyrtian's face. "You can do us as much harm, knowing this, as we could ever do to you, you know," the creature said, quietly.

"Forgive me," Kyrtian managed, finally gathering some of his wits about him, "If at this moment—with a mouth big enough to swallow me whole not an arm's-length away from me—I find that a little difficult to believe."

The dragon suddenly reared up, and for a moment, Kyrtian was certain that they were all going to be swallowed up—

But then an enormous, rumbling laugh started somewhere deep inside the dragon, bubbled up through the long, long throat, and emerged from the upturned snout as a trumpeting hoot.

It should have terrified him—and his men—further still. It was a completely alien sound, something that could have meant the thing was about to attack them. But somehow, it wasn't frightening at all, somehow, in the depths of Kyrtian's mind where the basest of instincts gibbered in terror and tried to crouch as small as possible so as not to be noticed by this mon­ster, it translated as exactly what it was—the laughter of a fel­low creature who meant no harm at all. And that primitive part of him stopped gibbering, and relaxed....

"Look aside, Lord Kyrtian," the dragon said, when he'd fi­nally done laughing. "I think I'd best come—back down to your level."

He didn't need urging, not after his previous experience.

When Keman looked again like an ordinary wizard, poor Resso had been revived, and they were all seated around the fire, Kyrtian contemplated the wizard-dragon from across the flames as Lashana and the foresters discussed which of several possible caves they ought to penetrate first. He couldn't help himself; he couldn't reconcile the apparent size of the wizard with the obvious size of the dragon he'd become. The puzzle ate at him; he couldn't explain it, couldn't rationalize it, and when he couldn't find an explanation for something, he had the bad habit (and he knew it was a bad habit) of worrying at it to the exclusion of everything else.

Finally the dragon himself leveled a stare across the flames and said, "What, exactly, is bothering you, Lord Kyrtian?" in a tone of irritation mixed with amusement.

"Where did it come from?" Kyrtian blurted, as conversation ceased among the others. "I mean, you're no larger than Resso right now, and you're not exactly having that log splitting under you from your weight—but when you were—" he waved his hands wildly "—that wasn't air, that was mass—well, look at the imprints you left! So where did it come from? And where did it go?"

Keman shrugged. "Elsewhere, Kyrtian," he said. "That's all I can tell you. We call it, 'shifting into the Out.' We move the real bulk of ourselves to and from the Out, but—well, we don't know what the Out is. It's here, but it's somewhere else—"

"But when you know what to look for, a dragon casts a sort of—shadow—when he's in another form," Lashana put in. "It's not the kind of shadow you get from light falling on you, but it's there, and when you've learned how to see it and look for it, you can always tell whether something is a dragon or not."

Kyrtian could only shake his head, more puzzled by the ex­planation than by not having one. But at least that obsessive part of his mind had it to turn inside out and examine while he set most of his attention to work on more important things. "Never mind," he said, after a moment. "What in the name of the Ancestors are those—invisible horrors that lie in wait for you on deer trails? And what can we do about them?"