Elvenbane (14 page)

As he flapped as hard as he could to gain altitude, his hunger grew. He decided to hunt the herds of wild horses today, feeling very sensitive about two-horns at the moment. He found some rising air at the mouth of his canyon and caught it, letting it take him out through the little twisting cuts and arroyos leading up to the Lair. Most of the adults didn’t bother to hunt this close to home, and sometimes he had been able to find good hunting in here. Occasionally the good watering spots would lure little family herds of grazers in, despite the nearness of the huge, ever-hungry dragons.

Luck was with him; he surprised a herd of sturdy, dun-colored mares up a dead-end canyon with a tiny spring at the end of it. He spotted one without a foal at her side, nerved himself, and dove.

She was too confused to do anything but stand; he hit her full-on, talons digging into her back as he landed heavily right on top of her. He felt her neck and back snap as she went down beneath him without a struggle.

A clean kill. He felt enormously proud of himself. And a horse was a much larger beast than he usually took, too.

As the rest of the herd pounded away in panic, he feasted contentedly. He’d never bothered with the wild horses as members of his menagerie; they were just too stupid, too nervy, and too intractable for him to care about. Father Dragon said that the elves had somehow managed to get three-horns to breed with horses, and that was how they got one-horns. If that was true, it looked to him as if all the worst traits of both species had come out of the cross. One-horns as stubborn as horses, as aggressive as three-horns, and meaner than both. Keman had the feeling that they liked killing things. It figured that elves would breed something like that.

Keman decided that from now on he’d eat three-horns and horses exclusively. Most of the other dragons didn’t care for horse, anyway, which left a lot more for him to hunt. So what if the meat was tough and a little gamey? At least his conscience wouldn’t be bothering him, and he wouldn’t be seeing Hoppy’s eyes looking at him reproachfully every time be came back from a hunt. Maybe it was imagination, but it always seemed to him that she knew when he’d been eating two-horn.

The mare was more than he could eat; more than enough to take back to feed the rest of his zoo. But, carrying that much extra weight, he’d have to get some altitude before he could take off.

This was turning out to be a lot of work and he grumbled to himself. He wished they’d all just learn to feed themselves.

He climbed the side of the valley, clinging to the rocks as he hauled the carcass up after himself. It was pretty battered by the time he got it up to a ledge, and he was winded.

Oh well, the loupers wouldn’t care what it looked like.

He had to rest in the sun, spreading his wings to catch the heat and restore his strength. He basked for quite some time before he felt up to grasping the thing in his rear claws and launching himself into labored flight.

It was a good thing the Lair wasn’t far, with all the work he’d done so far, and short on sleep as he was, he was ready to drop with exhaustion.

He’d better get everybody fed before he fell over, he thought ruefully, as he tried to maneuver for a landing.

The landing was a bad one anyway, despite his care. He spilled too much air at the last minute and hit the ground too hard, falling over his kill and crashing face-first into the hard-baked adobe clay. Dust flew everywhere.

He picked himself up and winced as he felt yet another bruise on his chin.

He wondered if he was ever going to learn how to land as gracefully as his mother. Right now, it didn’t seem likely.

Turning his attention back to his kill, he tore the carcass apart and distributed it among the carnivores in his menagerie. There were only the lizards, the loupers, and the spotted cats, and of the three, only the loupers were captive. The loupers came to the front of their enclosure at his call, pointed ears up, tongues lolling out of toothy muzzles, tails wagging. They took the horse shoulder from him directly and dragged it off to the back of the alcove. Loupers couldn’t jump well, though they could run like streaks of gray lightning, and another of the ubiquitous stone fences kept them penned. One of the pack was blind; one, like Hoppy, lacked a leg; and the remaining two were too old to hunt for themselves. They were friendly little scavengers, and were perfectly willing to look to him for pack leadership.

The spotted cats came to no one, but he knew he could leave the haunch just inside the exit to the lair and they’d find it; they always did. The rest, scraps mostly, he scattered among the lizards, also kept in a common pen, who would eat when they felt like it. All except for the ones who lived in the lair itself, who were very happily eating the insects there.

He went to the little spring that watered the canyon, and washed himself off thoroughly. He didn’t want to approach the one-horns or Hoppy with the smell of blood on him. He wasn’t sure what Hoppy would do, but he knew what the one-horns would do; they’d charge him, and mean it. Anything that smelted of blood brought an immediate reaction from them. And they knew very well how to use those long, wicked, spiral horns; that seemed to come inborn with them, even the fawns would charge a perceived enemy with head down, nubby little horn aimed correctly.

Father Dragon said the elves had tried to breed the one-horns for fighting, but that most of them had proven impossible to tame, much less break to saddle, and so they had turned loose the beasts in disgust. Many of those had proven so aggressive, charging even creatures like dragons, that were more than a match for them, that the breed attacked itself into near extinction.

He wouldn’t have bothered with them either, Keman thought, as he edged his way into the corral. They really were more trouble than they were worth, except as herd-guards. They
were
good at that, and they’d leave the two-horns alone, too. Maybe they figured killing two-horns was just too easy.

The one-horns seemed disposed to accept him today, perhaps because he’d fed them earlier, they just gave him a warning glare and went back to keeping a wary eye on the ground beyond the fence. Two-horns posted guards, but one-horns were
always
on guard.

It was a real pity that they were such
nasty
beasts, he thought a little wistfully, as be watched them posing against the red rock of the canyon. They really were pretty…

The single horn, a long shaft that seemed to be made of mother-of-pearl, spiraled up to a needle-sharp point from a base as thick as Keman’s talon. The base rose from the beast’s forehead, at a point directly between the eyes. Those eyes were the first clue that this was not a creature that could be commonly regarded as sane. The eyes, a strange, burnt-orange color, were huge, and the pupils were in a constant state of dilation, as if the beast were forever in a condition of extreme agitation. The head was shaped like that of a horse, graceful, even dainty, but the eyes took up so much space that it was obvious even to Keman that there couldn’t be much room for brains there. The long, snake-supple neck led to powerful shoulders; the forelegs ended in feet that were a cross between cloven hooves and claws. The hindquarters were as powerful as the shoulders, though the feet there were more hooflike than clawlike. The beast had a long, flowing mane, tufted tail, a little chin-tuft much like a beard, and tufts on all four feet. The whole beast was a pure white that shone like pristine snow.

Father Dragon said the things came in black, too, but he’d never seen one. As with everything the elven lords did, the one-horn had been bred first for looks and second for function, and they evidently thought that pure white and black were more impressive than the natural colors of the two-horns and three-horns.

At least if they were pure white or black, that let more harmless creatures see them coming.

The crowning touch to this contradictory beast came when it opened its mouth, as one of them was doing now, in a bored yawn. Those dainty lips concealed inch-long fangs. One-horns were omnivorous, and Father Dragon had warned Keman about ever letting his get used to eating meat—because if he did, before long they’d start hunting it themselves.

Keman had kept them on a strictly vegetarian diet.

They made effective guards, though. Nothing much was going to get past
them
, that was certain.

Keman had more than a year of experience in handling himself around the one-horns. He moved very quietly, and very slowly, in the direction of Hoppy and the enclosure at the rear of the paddock, being very careful never to look directly at the one-horns or to present them with his full profile. The first action they regarded as preparatory to attack, and would attack first; the second they would consider a challenge, and would attack first.

He succeeded in getting across the paddock without incident.

In the enclosure, he found a perfectly contented Hoppy with her two “offspring.” She had evidently learned how helpless the human cub was, and was keeping her body between her own rambunctious kid and the baby cradled in the straw. With only one hind leg, she was forced to nurse her own kid lying down, but she repeated her actions of the previous night while Keman watched, nosing the human cub into position so it, too, could suckle.

Keman was overjoyed. He’d already learned that the two-horns were as clever as the one-horns were stupid, but he really hadn’t known whether Hoppy would be able to adapt her own behavior to this strange orphan.

While the baby nursed, he crouched down and watched Hoppy cleaning it vigorously with her tongue. That was another worry out of the way until his mother could deal with it. He had figured the baby would need special sanitary provisions, but he hadn’t the foggiest how to take care of them. For now, at least, Hoppy seemed on top of the problem.

So there was only one thing that needed taking care of.

“You need a name,” he told the mite, which paid no attention to him. “I can’t go on calling you’the cub.’ It doesn’t seem right. Even the one-horns have names. They don’t answer to them, but they
do
have names.”

He gave the matter careful consideration, choosing, then discarding, at least a dozen while he pondered. Draconic names seemed somehow inappropriate, but the kind of names he’d given his pets seemed even worse. He knew a little of the elven tongue, not too many names. Still, the elven language seemed fitter than the language of the Kin as the vehicle of her naming.

Finally he decided to call her simply what she was: “Orphan.” In the elven tongue it sounded pretty enough, and almost draconic.

“Your name is Lashana,” he told the child gravely. “But since you’re so little, ‘Shana’ will do for now. Do you like it?”

The baby, who had finished nursing, waved her hands in the air and gurgled a little. Keman took that as a good sign, and went to take a nap, feeling he’d done his best for her.

Keman rested his head on his crossed forearms and watched his newest little charge wave her arms in the air and coo at her hairy foster mother, and sighed. No matter how hard he tried, or how he braced her in her nest of straw, she
would
roll out into the sun—or Hoppy would nudge her there because the two-horn didn’t want to leave her orphan, but wouldn’t give up her morning doze in the sunshine either. Keman wasn’t certain how much sunlight Shana could take, but her pale skin didn’t augur well on that score. He’d seen albino animals scorched and blistered by the sun, and they had fur to protect them.

And that brought up another problem. Besides being exposed to the sun far too much, she was getting scratched by the straw. Hoppy was keeping her clean easily enough, but her little body was crisscrossed with a series of thin pink welts from the straw-ends poking into her.

No doubt about it, something was going to have to be done. He was going to have to improvise some sort of covering for her, a garment of some kind, as he’d seen the adults wear when shape-changed to elven lord or human. It would have to be made of something that was tough enough to protect her, soft enough not to hurt her, and impervious to the various bodily functions that she was exercising at the moment.

And it would have to be something that wouldn’t hurt Hoppy, frighten her, or make her stop tending Shana in any way.

Keman pondered the problem, his tail twitching in the dust behind him. He’d rooted through his own family’s storage areas often enough, and knew what kinds of things were kept there. The Kin brought home plenty of souvenirs in the way of fabrics, among other things; the lair was full of things Alara had carried off, then forgotten. But none of them seemed to be quite what Keman wanted. A good half of them were likely to end up in Hoppy’s stomach, in fact; the two-horn’s notion of taste was a catholic one, and Keman was often amazed at what she considered edible.

Keman toyed with several possibilities, discarding them all eventually. Try as he would, he couldn’t think of anything in the storage area that was suitable. He
would
be able to make something for her now. He was better equipped to manipulate small and delicate things than he had been when he’d first taken over Shana’s care. Over the past several days he had discovered that if he concentrated very hard, he
could
shift the shape of his foreclaws to give him something like human hands.

There had to be something back there in the lair. Mother was as bad a collector as a miser-mouse. While he thought, he scratched at an itchy spot on his ankle; the skin around his joints was dry and had been bothering him since he came out to the pen.

The itch became a torture, and he scratched harder.

The skin on his ankle finally broke and tore along the claw-lines. He peeled the strips away and got at the new hide beneath with a sigh of relief, scratching the delicate skin lightly with just the tips of his talons. The new scales had to cure for a bit before they were as tough as the old hide, and until then they were easily damaged.

It just figured he was starting to shed. He could never think when he was shedding, he just
itched
all the time—