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an enormous bowl.
It was night. What Jakkin had thought was a single bright light was really the
pale glow of the sand-colored moons, Akka and Akkhan. He d been so used to the
dim caves that the twin moons seemed uncomfortably bright. Squinting, he
stared up at them. A dark figure swept across Akkhan s face. A wild dragon, he
thought.
And then, as if in a dream, came the familiar rainbow pattern, filling him
with hope.
Sssargon waits. Sssargon watches. Sssargon hunts. Sssargon& Then the sending
was gone, blotted out by the closer patterns of the people around him and the
dark rumblings of the cart.
The cart moved more easily now, along well-worn ruts, toward a great stone
enclosure in the center of the meadow. The ring reminded Jakkin vaguely of
some of the country pits, with their stone seats around a center maw.
The men drew the cart through a stone archway and into the center of the ring,
where, with a ceremonial heave, they hauled the dragon off the cart. She lay
where they dropped her, panting and blinking sleepily up at the light.
Herded into their seats by the crowd, Akki and Jakkin sat next to one another
but didn t touch, afraid that their thoughts would thereby be doubly broadcast
to the cave folk. And soon Jakkin s attention left
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Akki and was focused on the ring.
He wondered if there was to be a fight. If so, there d be nothing but a
straightforward slaughter, for the hen could barely get her head up. In fact,
if she weren t fed soon, she d die. He didn t like the way she was breathing,
and everyone knew that a hen right after egg laying and hatching needed extra
rations. The irony of it wasn t lost on him-that he and Akki had worked so
hard to save her and were now helplessly going to watch her die. He thought
about that a moment. He wouldn t be helpless. Shaking himself loose of the
crowd-induced torpor, he started to stand and protest. But as he stood
everyone else stood, too, as if reacting to some signal he d not even
registered.
Once again in their white robes, Makk and his men entered the ring and formed
a tight circle around the dragon, as if guarding her. The five garlanded
women, infants in arms, stood by the dragon s tail. The familiar chant began
again. COME. COME. COME.
For a long moment no one moved except the hen, whose tail beat a feeble tattoo
on the ground.
Then, from the left side, through the stone arch, marched a figure in dark
red. Her robe was stiff and fell in peculiar rigid folds from her shoulders. A
cowl covered her head, a veil her face. Only her eyes showed, ringed with
black paint. She carried a long white stick in her right hand.
Coming to the circle of men, the woman stopped until they moved apart, then
walked to the dragon s head, where she raised her hands above her.
Great Mother, she sent, and the people echoed it, a dark blackand-white
picture of a towering dragon form that seemed to shimmer in the mind from so
many sendings. Where your children cradled, cradle mine. She brought her
hands slashing down toward the dragon s exposed neck.
In that instant Jakkin knew what it was she carried: a forefoot bone with the
nails still intact. Only a dragon s nail could slice efficiently through
dragon scale, though the undemeck links were the tenderest part.
Blood gouted from the dragon s neck and covered the woman s robe and cowl,
staining it a deeper red.
The hot, acidic blood spattered on the rocks below and splattered on the
woman s hands. It must have burned her, pocking her wrists and fingers, but
she never dropped her weapon. At the very moment of the cut she broadcast a
high, piercing sending of triumph and light. The answering image from both the
dying dragon and the people around the ring was a tidal wave of red: bright
red, blood red, an ocean of it that threatened to drown them all.
Jakkin closed his eyes, hoping to shut out the sight, but the sending went on
and on, replaying the scene endlessly in his horrified mind.
chapter 31
MINUTES LATER THE woman in red cut open the dragon s belly and one by one the
women laid their infants in the dragon s birth chamber, closing the flap of
skin over them to ensure the babies
invulnerability to cold and to open their minds to the linkings of dragons and
men.
Akki wept openly through it all, but Jakkin forced himself to remain dry-eyed.
He felt hardly anything but guilt, for as soon as the bloody sendings from the
crowd had ended, his own bloody memories had begun. He remembered, before the
change, the three dragons in his life who had died because of him.
The great stud Blood Brother, killed in the nursery, because Jakkin had been
careless. He rememhered
Brother as he last saw him, in a hindfoot rise, pulling his leather halter out
of the stall ring and screaming his defiance over Jakkin s prone body until
Likkam brought him down with a barn stinger. Then there was the pit fighter
S Blood, that Jakkin had allowed to get badly wounded in a fight. He
remembered
S Blood s last moments, protesting groggily in the slaughterhouse stews as the
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steward, in one economical movement, shot him through the ear while Jakkin and
Master Sarkkhan watched, helpless, from the walkway above. And then there was
Heart s Blood. Heart s Blood. That memory was the worst of all. The great red
towering majestically above Jakkin and Akki, taking the shots meant for them,
death blossoming on her neck like a hideous bloody flower.
No more, he thought. I will allow no more. Not Auricle. Not the new
hatchlings. Not even if I have to die to prevent it.
chapter 32
JAKKIN DREAMED OF it all that night, the woman in the blood-stiffened cloak so
triumphantly slashing the throat of the weakened dragon, then carving open the
worm s belly, and the five infants being cradled in the birth chamber. His
dreams were as red as the blood that had covered the babies when they were
lifted out of their fleshy nest, changed forever by their contact with the
dead dragon s body. In his dream the dragon was no longer the unnamed brown
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