Chapter 2

Liss-Tallian

The great old Bar-Lanian sat massive in his hall, slowly tapping his claws against the stone of his seat. Click, click, click. The hall was huge, a great cavern of space and dark, deep under the weight of the mountain. Drafts blew through the various doors and openings – but it was never cold. Deeper still in the great mountain were the fires of the earth, and they warmed the floors and the walls of the Hall, and a good job too. The Bar-Lanian don’t like the cold. They like it even less than they like being hungry, and they really don’t like that – not at all, not one little bit.

The Hall was comfortable, but the great Bar-Lanian, did not really notice. His talons tapped again on the warm, hard stone, and his tail flicked gently against the worn, smooth wall behind him. In ages past other people had lived here, other people had shaped the stone, and cut the corridors. But those people were long gone. So long gone that not even the Bar-Lanian, the dragons of the Fire Mountains, could remember who they had been, or where they went. Nor did they particularly care. The halls and caverns belonged to them now, and they were jealous owners.

The Bar-Lanian tapped his talons, and tapped his talons, and waited. And as he waited, his eyes roamed comfortably over the mounds and valleys of his treasure hoard. Clink. A gold coin slipped from its place, dislodged by the faintest tremor of the earth, and fell against another. Clink,clink, then clatter and slide, as a whole mound of coins and assorted precious metal-work slid in an avalanche of heavy clunking metal and shining glittering jewels. He grinned, wide mouthed and sharp toothed. What a lovely sound it was, the sound of coins chattering. And where was that daughter?

The daughter was far below the Great Hall in the smaller caverns and passageways. She was exploring, as she often did. 

All through the mountain there were corridors, passages, tiny cupboards, smaller chambers and larger rooms, and then more great caverns and echoing halls. All empty. No one else lived here. No one else came here. Or if they did, they kept very small, and very quiet, and very, very much out of the way. Certainly, Liss-Tallian had never seen anybody. This was her father’s mountain, and he was too great, too strong, too dangerous to mess with. Certainly, none of the other Bar-Lanian would come here. Not without an invitation. 

This was her father’s mountain all right, but the depths belonged to Liss-Tallian. Even her father did not come this deep in. It was his mountain, but he had lived a very long time, and in the manner of the Bar-Lanian, as he grew older, he grew bigger. The Bar-Lanian do not give up growing, just because they have lived a certain number of years. They keep on, slowly, slowly, getting bigger and bigger, and stronger and stronger. Until one day they start to get tired, just a little, and then they start to eat less, and to eat less, and they get smaller, and then smaller, and then one day, they die. Among the Bar-Lanian this is called the waxing and the waning. Like the moon, which grows from a slender curve of sharp Bar-Lanian talon, into a full, round shining jewel, and then fades down to a shiny sliver of dead white bone. Liss-Tallian’s father had waxed large over the long years of his life, he was great and powerful, and the mountain was his mountain. But he didn’t go down to the lower corridors and caverns. He was too big. 

Liss-Tallian did. She was still young, and small, not much bigger than even an average human, and she could go wherever she wished. The lower levels were hers, and she went there whenever she could. 

Just now, she was way, way, below her father’s hoard-hall. The corridor was long, and winding. The ancient builders – should we call them builders? the ancient tunnelers? – had obviously followed the weaker lines, the cracks and faults in the hard volcanic stone. And so, the corridor curved and twisted, dropped and rose, almost like the curls and curves of a great snake. But unlike a snake, it had doorways and side passages, it divided and split, and went different ways. Maybe it was more like a great root. Or the track of where a root had once been. You could get lost down here, in the warm, quiet dark. You could get lost, but Liss-Tallian never would. She had a talent for roads and routes. They made patterns in her mind, and she could follow them back, or work them together, just as she wished. She never got lost, but sometimes she did not know which way to go. It is a different thing.

The corridor was long and deep. She had heard her father call – don’t ask how, but the Bar-Lanian can call each other, even when they are far apart, it is a part of what the humans call the ‘Dragon Lore’. She had heard her Father call, and she knew he would be impatient. He was good at waiting – all Bar-Lanian were – but being good at, and liking, were not the same. It was a long way back to the great hall, and if there was a short cut, it would save much more than just time. It is no fun having someone grumpy at you. Especially if they are as big as a house and with claws and teeth like knives and swords.

Liss-Tallian adjusted her light, and it shone stronger and brighter, chasing the dark back into the corners and through old doorways. The corridor was bare, flat on the floor, but curved and arched up to the roof. Stones, dust and occasional shards of pottery, scraps of wood, or other relics of past occupants lightly littered the floor. Her nose twitched. She moved very quietly, very softly, but even she raised some of the dust as she moved, and the dust was tickling her nostrils. Which way to go? Back through her own dust, or onward to find a new way up? The new way was tempting, but the Bar-Lanian have a saying, ‘nothing so long as a short cut’. She turned, and started back the way she had come, through the long corridors, through the deserted halls, through doorways – some with their wood rotted to dust, some with the timbers turned to stone by the dry and the uncountable years. She moved quickly, and surely. So surely that she could twist her light down to only a faint glow, lighting the way just ahead of her. This was the way to move underground! Dark enough for excitement, light enough to be sure. She trotted steadily along, smooth and balanced, relaxed and confident. And as she ran she thought of the bag slung around her shoulders – a deep poacher’s bag, bouncing slightly with the rhythm of her run. She thought about her collection, the treasures and oddities that she searched out and gathered from the roots of the mountain. The Bar-Lanian love to collect, and then to hoard. She thought about her most recent find. She had been down in the Elf Galleries. She called them ‘the Elf Galleries’ because they still held great, giant pictures, painted somehow on the high, arched ceilings. Pictures of the tall and thin, bright and dangerous folk that are called the elves. Of course, elves, if there really were such creatures, would never have lived this deep in the ground, and could not have painted these pictures themselves. They were creatures of woodland and forest, not stone and fire. But someone – not a Bar-Lanian, but some kind of someone – had painted these pictures. Liss-Tallian had never seen elves. She had never even left the mountain, though she had been outside, out on the cold, bent-tree, stony-bare, wind-washed slopes of the great rock. Liss-Tallian had never seen elves, and she doubted that there were such things. But the pictures were there, and so she called the place ‘the Elf Galleries’, and she loved to go there and look at those tall, agile folk, with their great wooden bows, and their bright clothes, their smiles, their laughter, and the tears that they shed on their dying heroes, and she would dream of these creatures of myth, and her dreams would follow the stories that the pictures told. For Liss-Tallian, the Elf Galleries were her escape, her wonder, her way to a different world, and to new ideas and different things. The Bar-Lanian had no books, though they had heard of the idea. For Liss-Tallian, these great frescos were her books, her stories and her music, all rolled into one.

She had been in the Elf Galleries, looking at the ceilings, and wondering about the great tales of the Bar-Lanian. The Bar-Lanian may not have books, but they do have stories, and story tellers. Last winter, one of those story tellers, ‘Scop Lords’ they called them, had come to the mountain, and had stayed for some months, telling tales to herself and her father. He used no books, no notes, no pictures. He just told his stories in the great rhythms and flows of the Bar-Lanian style, drawing the tales from his mind-hoard, and recreating them each evening, fresh and new with his own words, old and crusted with the ancient forms. Maybe, when she left her father, Liss-Tallian would apprentice as a Scop. Maybe not.

But for today, the pictures on the ceilings and her dreamings of past and future were not the most exciting things that had happened. She had been walking around the edge of one of the greater galleries, following the line where the walls met the floor, going into the rooms that branched off, out of the great dome of the chamber, browsing and wandering, and looking for finds. 

Some of the rooms were empty, bare-stone holes, others were cluttered with forgotten junk, rotted cloth, and time shattered wood from shelves and cupboards, occasional pots, cups and plates, and very occasionally, pieces of metal – old ornaments, rings, even long lost and forgotten jewel cases holding the treasures of someone long, long gone, and long, long lost to anything but the memory of solid things. 

Liss-Tallian was too young yet to have gone out in the world to collect her own hoard, to do a Searching, but here, in the depths of the mountain, what she found was hers. Even her father, who loved bright things so much, so much that even he, who loved to eat almost as much as he loved to breathe, had been known to miss meals, with his mind wrapped in the beauty of his treasures, even he, allowed that what she found in the deep places could be hers. No one else could go there, so she kept what she found by right of finding. 

She didn’t find much. Others had been through here before her. Maybe other young dragons, in the days before her father took over the upper halls. Maybe other kinds of folk, passing through, searching for treasure, for excitement, or just a way out. Maybe even the original owners. Maybe they had taken most of their treasures with them when they left the mountains. No one knew. Probably no one but Liss-Tallian cared.

But she had a hoard. A small hoard, and a poor hoard, but it was her own hoard, and she loved to see it grow. Today she had found nothing. Not surprising really, because she had looked through these rooms many times before. She liked the feel of the place, and the side rooms gave her a comfortable place to sit, to eat a small snack or lunch, and to relax from the imposing pressure of the beautiful ceiling pictures. 

Today’s lunch was a mixture of dry crunchy oatcakes, and strings of dried, cured meat, all washed down with the clear mountain water that she carried in her flask. 

*       *       *

Of course, it is well known these days that dragons are like great flying serpents, they go out from their lairs, and they rampage – killing and carrying off to their caves, cow after cow, pig after pig, sheep after sheep, that they even eat people, that they gorge themselves so much that they are fat, bloated and unable to move, and then they sleep for months, slowly digesting their enormous belly-bursting dinners, and waiting for their drum-tight stomach skin to relax and soften, and for their bodies to grow lean and slim again, until the next time the hunger hits them – and then out, flying, to rampage, kill, and gorge themselves stupid, all over again. All this is well known. But of course, like many of the things that are so well known, it is completely wrong. Dragons don’t rampage when they are hungry (though being hungry might make them a little more grumpy and therefore a lot more likely to rampage). No. Dragons rampage when someone is stupid enough to steal something from the dragon’s hoard. Otherwise they quite like to have a nice, regular, three or four meals a day, though it is usually dried or preserved stuff, because they tend not to like cooking. And so Liss-Tallian ate oatcakes and dried meat, and thought it very nice to picnic on the stone benches of the odd, roundish room, with her back to the wall, with her tail curled round her ankles, and with a view of a small part of the Elf Gallery, framed by the empty doorway. Very nice, and very relaxing. And as she relaxed she looked around. Dragons have eyes that see well in almost any light, but they also have ways of looking that most humans have either forgotten, or never knew. If they look carefully, and if they twist their brains, just so, they can see lines and threads of all sorts of colours, stretching between things, wrapping around things, or even, on rare occasions, weaving between and around themselves to make shapes and patterns. Dragons don’t need to learn how to do this, they are just born – or rather, hatched – with the ability. Some are better at it, some are worse.

Liss-Tallian was quite good at following the lines. She enjoyed seeing what was connected to what, and what was woven into where. But she also enjoyed just looking. After all, the patterns of the lines and threads could be lovely to see. So, she let her mind wander around the room, following the lines, enjoying the combinations of the colours and the thicknesses of the threads. She could even see the delicate pink lines stretching back from her oatcakes, still connected to the storeroom she had taken them from. The lines vanished as she ate the cakes. Or maybe they didn’t, maybe they just became part of the thicker line that connected her own body with the great pantry. It didn’t matter. She let those lines fade from her mind, and she focussed herself on the walls, following the lines made and left by the diggers and masons from centuries past. The lines left by the inhabitants were largely faded and lost now, but the builders had left their mark more strongly, and faint traces remained. She followed the lines, just as someone who has windows might follow the lines of rain dribbling and dropping down a piece of glass. And as she followed, she noticed something odd. One part of the wall was blank. She looked more carefully. Nothing at all. She looked away, and then back again. Nothing. Very strange. Things always had some sort of something, some sort of colour or connection. But this piece of wall had nothing. 

She twisted her mind a different way, brightened the light that she always kept floating beside her, and she looked with her eyes. Nothing. Just the same as any other piece of wall. Scratched, marked by chisels, dirtied by centuries of life, bland and unremarkable. To her eyes, there was nothing to see. Or rather there was plenty to see, but it was exactly the same as any other random bit of hewed and chiselled hard-stone wall. She looked again in the other ways, the ways that used more than just eyes, and still there was nothing. But it was a different kind of nothing, it was a nothing where there ought to be something. It was like looking at a room, and finding that part of the wall was in black and white and shades of grey, uncoloured and bland. Easy to miss if it is not a very colourful room anyway, or if the light is bad, but once noticed, very odd. Very odd indeed.

Well now it was noticed and Liss-Tallian sat, and she thought. 

Most of the magic of the Bar-Lanian, the Dragon Lore, was not something learned or studied like the old stories, like the histories, like the riddles and puzzles that the Bar-Lanian love. Instead it was like eating, or walking, things that everyone learns whether they try to or not. But you can learn to do things better, and she did. Her Father had taught her some of his ways of using the Lore (like not getting lost), and some ways of understanding what it was that the lines of magic did. So she knew enough to see that this lack of lines on the wall was not something natural. It was something made. She also knew enough to know that this was not Bar-Lanian work. It was too fine, to delicate, too smooth and quiet. It was also too crude. If, by chance, any of the Bar-Lanian had had the talent to do work as fine as this, they would also have had the talent to cover the wall with false lines to hide the missing patch. She smiled to herself, grinning her great, sharp toothed, Dragon grin. This was work done by people who had great talent controlling the lines of power, but who lacked the natural perception to see the weaker, natural lines. Definitely not Bar-Lanian work. Not that it really mattered. What really mattered was that someone, or some kind of someone, had worked very hard, and with a very great skill, to hide something. And anything that was so well worth hiding, must also be well worth finding. Something had been hidden inside the wall. And, since the wall was still unbroken and whole, something might still be hidden inside the wall. Maybe today was going to be a very nice day.