“If you lived in Ysaa-den, what would you do?”
I thought it over. “True.”
Del slid, caught at rock, climbed upward again.
“After all, what does it hurt? No one really knows where Dragon Mountain lies—there are countless maps with countless mountains called after Chosa Dei’s prison—and no one really knows if Chosa Dei ever existed. He’s a legend, Tiger. Some believe it, some don’t.”
“Which are you, Delilah?”
Del laughed once. “I told you, stories about Chosa Dei and his battles with Shaka Obre were favorites when I was young. Of course I want to believe. But it doesn’t mean I do.”
I wondered, not for the first time, what childhood for Del had been like. I knew bits and pieces only, because that was all she’d shared, but it wasn’t hard to put a few of them together.
I imagined a pretty but strong-minded girl who preferred boys’ doings to girls’. And who, as the only daughter, was allowed the freedom to be a boy, even symbolically, because it was probably easier for father and uncles and brothers. Easier for a mother who knew she was outnumbered. No skirts and dolls for Del; she’d been handed a sword in place of a cooking spoon.
I’d asked her once what she would be if she hadn’t become a sword-dancer. And she had said probably married. Probably bearing babies. But it was impossible for me to think of Del in those terms, to even imagine her tending a lodge, a man, a child; not because I didn’t think she could, but because I’d never seen it. All I had ever seen was a woman with a sword, tending to men in the circle.
For six long years, it was all Delilah had been. But I wondered. Even if she didn’t, I did. I couldn’t help myself.
What would become of Del once Ajani was dead?
Yet more importantly: what would Del become once Ajani was dead?
“Tiger—look.”
I looked. Was too out of breath to speak.
“Almost there,” Del gasped, nearly as winded as I. “Can’t you feel the heat?”
Heat, yes, if you’re a Northerner. To a Southroner, it was merely a gentle warming, like the breeze of a spring day. What I noticed was, it stank.
“Hoolies,” I muttered, “if this man’s that powerful a sorcerer, why can’t he live in a place that smells better?”
“No choice,” Del croaked. “It was a spell put on him by Shaka Obre.”
“Ah. Of course. I forgot.” I topped off the last bit of mountain and arrived at the dragon’s lip. Heat and stench rolled out to bathe me in dragonish breath. “Hoolies, this place stinks!”
Del came over the edge and paused to catch her breath. I saw her expression of distaste as the odor engulfed her as well. It’s hard enough trying to suck wind back into laboring lungs, but when it smells this bad the task is that much harder.
Smoke rolled out of the “mouth.” I steeled myself and went over for a closer look.
From below, it looked like a dragon. The shape of earth and rock, the arrangement of the same—from below, it looked dragonish. But from up top, from the opening in the rock, it was only a large odoriferous cave extending back into the mountain. The spires of rock forming “teeth” were nothing more than stone columns shaped by ancient rain and the wind moaning incessantly through the cavern’s entrance, bearing the stench of rotting bodies and a trace of something more.
Does magic have a smell?
“No hounds,” Del observed.
No hounds. No dragon. No Chosa Dei.
“Wait a moment,” I muttered, frowning down at the ground. I bent, squatted, looked more closely at turfy ground and the tracks pressed into it. “Pawprints,” I said, “going straight into the cave.”
Del took an involuntary step back, one hand drifting up toward the hilt riding above her left shoulder. “It couldn’t be their den—” But she let it trail off.
“Leave her sheathed,” I suggested, thinking of Halvar’s warning, “and yes, I think it could be … if I believed they were really hounds. It’s what I’ve called them—the Hounds of Hoolies—for lack of a better name, but I never believed they were. And I don’t think beasts live in dens.” I shrugged. “Although I suppose they could.”
We stared at one another, not liking the idea. Not liking the vision I’d painted. I thought it pretty disgusting; Del didn’t say anything.
She edged closer to the entrance. She didn’t draw Boreal, but her right hand hooked in her harness as if to stay close just in case. And I didn’t really blame her.
“Tiger, do you think—”
But I didn’t hear her finish. A blast of malodorous wind came roaring out of the cavern; with it came an overwhelming presentiment of power.