He froze nervously while it circled. He was sure he had not summoned it, and he hoped that the sorcerer would know that. Before he could decide whether he ought to send it away, it glided in and landed on his shoulder, heavier than he had expected, uncomfortably warm against his ear and neck, like a freshly baked loaf. Its claws were both sharp and very hot. He had to divert some of his pain-suppression efforts to the points where they were digging in, and his farsight saw beads of blood fizz and darken. It also kept shifting its grip. He did not care! The chick’s corona turned bright blue, and when it rubbed its warm, scaly neck against his, he felt a wash of pleasure that was astonishingly enjoyable. It was a romp with a puppy. It was a dog’s tongue and tail telling him he was the nicest guy in the world. It was almost as good as kissing a pretty girl. Now he understood Bright Water’s pleasure at having a baby dragon as a pet.
He raised a hand to stroke the smooth, hot scales, and the fire chick purred in his mind, radiating love, blazing up in washes of blue flame brighter than all the five others together, even casting shadows where there had been none before. It felt so good Rap wanted to weep.
There were now six young gnomes gathered around Athal’rian, ranging from Ugish down to a pocket-size baby. The baby was crawling off on business of its own, but the others all burst into shrill laughter at Rap’s conquest of the dragon.
And Ishist had turned to stare, with his bulbous gnome eyes as round as black buttons. He was no cleaner than his wife, and much older. The fringe of hair around his scalp was probably gray—even Rap’s farsight could not be certain—but his face was certainly entrenched with wrinkles like ditches. His beard was the most nauseating thing Rap had ever seen near to a human face. He wore some sort of uniform, anonymous in a stiff coating of dirt, and the front of its tunic gaped over a pot belly. Barefoot, he squelched forward through the muck to peer at Rap more closely.
The wall on which Rap was so uncomfortably sitting was no higher than a normal chair, and yet his head was higher than the gnome’s. Rap decided to remain seated, and tried not to show nervousness as he was scrutinized by the hard black eyes.
Small though he was, the man’s stink was powerful enough to register over all the others. Could this disgusting little scavenger truly be a powerful sorcerer?
“Lily seems to think she has met you before, Adept.” So that was it! “She may have . . . my lord—”
“Just call me Ishist. I always detect overtones of irony when day men offer me titles. Your name is Rap. You say you are only an adept?”
“Yes . . . Ishist.”
There was shrewdness in those inkwell eyes, and sudden surprise. “You have indeed met Lily before!”
“She was called Precious then.”
The fire chick reacted to the name with a flash of blue-green flame that made Rap wonder when his hair would start smoking. His ear and neck were turning painfully red.
“Bright Water?” the gnome muttered. “Well! I did not know that. My master did not take me into his confidence.” He grinned, showing innumerable little teeth, still white and needle sharp despite his age. ”You wander around bearing strange secrets, Adept!”
He chuckled at Rap’s horror. “Yes, I am poking around in your memories. Don’t worry—you have no more bizarre obscenities in there than most men do. Remarkably few, in fact.” He showed even more of the tiny teeth. “Some minds can disgust even a gnome, Master Rap, but I congratulate you. Now I must attend to your injuries; but I’m not going to try it with a fire chick on your shoulder. Come away, Lily.”
The dragon turned a sulky green, and crouched low, while trickles of Rap’s blood oozed out around its tightening claws. The other fire chicks, meanwhile, were circling him in flickers of curious pink, gradually daring to approach more closely. He thought he would be scorched or shredded if they all tried to land on him.
“I’m not doing this, sir! Ishist, I mean.”
The sorcerer scratched thoughtfully at the old carrion caked around his mouth. “I know you’re not. It’s very unusual, and probably a very real compliment. But we can’t stay here all night. Be off with you all!”
Lily shot up from Rap’s shoulder in a stream of purple fire, and the whole juvenile blaze of baby dragons went swirling high into the ghostly upper reaches of the chamber, to race around like six violet comets, while their squeaks of anger and fright echoed as discordant bell strokes inside Rap’s head.
Ishist ignored them, frowning at Rap. “Now, Master Adept, it is safe to use a little power around you! Never entered my head that you might not be a full sorcerer. You terrified poor Primrose. Fools rush in where mages fear to tread . . .” While he was muttering, Rap’s wounds were closing and healing, from his mangled feet to the dragon scratches on his shoulder. “ . . .so I overdid the summoning spell . . . at least we know you’re not holding back anything if you had to endure this . . . there. How does that feel?”
The black-button eyes twinkled shrewdly, and Rap suddenly realized that even his fatigue had been lifted, or most of it, and he had lost his sense of smell also. That was the greatest blessing of all. He took a deep breath of relief.
“That’s much better, Master Ishist. Thank you.”
The gnome nodded with ironic amusement. “I was planning to throw you in a dungeon, but my wife is very anxious that you dine with us.”
Athal’rian had been staying back, as if not wishing to interfere with business. Now she said, “Oh, yes!” breathlessly, and came over to cuddle against her husband and place a hand on his shoulder. Ishist took it and kissed it; she stooped to place a kiss on his bald pate, although it was plastered with what seemed to be old bird droppings. The elderly gnome and the much-younger elf woman were behaving like two lovesick adolescents, yet she had apparently already borne him seven . . . no, there were eight children present now. What was that baby eating?
“It will have to wait awhile, my love,” Ishist said. “I must go and find Master Rap’s two companions before the wildlife does.”
Athal’rian wailed. “You won’t be long, though, darling?”
“No, no! And it is still dark. I shall be as quick as I can, dearest.” He patted her lovingly on the rump, as if she were a horse.
“But the food will spoil. And I did so want the children to see what a proper dinner party is like.”
As a mother she seemed to have strange priorities. Ugish and the oldest girl were now fighting furiously, rolling around in the mire and biting each other, but Athal’rian was paying them no heed at all.
“It won’t hurt them to stay up past dawn for once,” Ishist said firmly. “Now, magic is magic, but sleep has its own magic. I’m sure that our guest would appreciate a little rest. Where are you planning to put the visitors?”
She hesitated, shuffling her toes in the dirt. “I thought . . . the northwest tower?” She waited anxiously for his opinion. “Very good choice, my dear. So you show Master Rap to his chamber. I promised Ugish he could come with me. Stop that, you two!” He separated the combatants with a couple of wellplaced kicks. Then he accepted a very long, tight embrace from his tearful wife, before plodding off toward the door. Young Ugish trailed after him, angrily licking a bleeding arm with a very long black tongue.
Still holding his wisp of dirty rag, Rap followed his hostess along innumerable corridors and up narrow, winding staircases. The walls were rough stonework, the floors soft with dirt as if they had not been cleaned since the founding of the Impire. Mummified carcasses and gnawed bones lay in drier comers, while wetter parts were ankle-deep in sewage and the doors had rotted away to rusty relics of hinges. In other places the ceilings had collapsed, requiring painful climbs over heaps of rubble.
He could not assess the full extent of the huge ruin, but he could easily believe that it was old enough to have known the Dragon Wars. Everywhere he detected ancient occult barriers, although once in a while he caught shadowy vistas running off for incredible distances between them. Sometimes then he glimpsed far-off groups of gnomes going about their business.
Many parts were more or less illuminated by the sort of sorcerous mist he had seen in the Mews; others were pitch black. Athal’rian seemed to find her way through those mostly by memory and touch, but he followed her with farsight, trying to ignore the details: the rashes under the dirt, the close-packed insect bites, the elven grace of her slender hips. She glided like a moonbeam, confirming all the tales he had heard about elves and dancing.