"Oh." This time Shana looked chagrined, and a little alarmed. "But what about the way that your warriors were immune to the magic we used against them?"
"Ah," Diric spoke up. "That, I know the answer to. Magic coming from outside is reflected from it, so that the wearer takes no harm. So you see, between the collars and the armor and jewelry, we are well protected. Unless—"
"Unless magic is not directed against you, but against what is around you," Shana supplied grimly. "Believe me, it would not take long at all for the greater elven lords to figure that out! They have the advantage of having waged war successfully against your ancestors, the ones who fled into the South with their cattle.
Personally
, I mean. It is not tradition that guides them, but memory."
"Eh?" Diric said, sure he had not heard her correctly.
"If your legends say that the demons live forever, they are not far wrong," Shana told him, so earnestly he could not doubt her. "Many of the same elven lords who fought your ancestors are still alive and hale today. I would not like to see what would happen if your warriors went into a charge on their bulls, and a great fissure opened up in the earth in front of them."
Since Diric had, in his time, seen the tragic results of many stampedes in uncertain terrain, he could and did know what would happen—with the addition of human bodies to the bovine ones. He shuddered, and welcomed the distracting
click
as Kala forced the lock of the collar open. She took it from Shana's neck with another smile.
"See how I trust you because my husband trusts you," she remarked, bending now over the collar in her lap. "You know all our secrets, and if you were a true demon, you would have us at your mercy."
Shana only laughed, and felt of her neck. "I would never have believed how heavy a simple iron band could be."
"It is not the weight of the metal, but the bondage that it represents," Diric said solemnly, and she nodded. "But you have not all of our secrets. There remains one. Do you wish to know it?"
"How you can keep me from knowing your thoughts?" she asked. "I wonder that you have that secret at all, since the elven lords don't have that magic. Only humans do."
"But humans can be enslaved by demons," he reminded her. "They can even serve them willingly. So we learned, when we fought beside the Com People and were forced to flee. But the discipline of the Mind-Wall is easy for one to learn who does not possess even the least and littlest bit of that magic himself. Our children all are taught it as they are taught to speak, until it is as unconscious as breathing."
"So how
do
you do this?" she persisted.
He laughed. "I think—very hard, and in the front of my mind—of just that. A wall, a simple, blank wall. So—"
He demonstrated for her. "Thus—it is down. Thus—I create it, slowly. Do you see? We call this being 'double-minded,' hiding our thoughts behind the Mind-Wall."
She frowned as he did it twice more, and shook her head. "I see how you do it, but to do it myself—"
"It takes much practice, when you come to it late," he assured her. "The Priests who have the thought-magic test all the people at intervals, and those who seem weak are given some personal attention to strengthen their wills. Now you know all."
Shana sighed. "I knew it had to be something simple, both the blankness and the problems with true magic. I knew that the elven lords didn't like having iron or steel around them, I just never knew why. I always assumed that it had something to do with the fact that if they are hurt with the metal, they can sicken."
"Possibly because bits of the metal too small to be seen poison the wound," Diric hazarded, "and then any magic they cast would turn upon the flesh that was wounded—well, it does not matter. Now, have you anything to offer me? Jamal will be expecting great amounts of information about your lands and people—what am I to give him?"
She grinned so hugely, he wondered what the jest was. "I couldn't take the chance that you people might have a way to tell if I was telling the truth or not, so I phrased that declaration very carefully.
My
people would be very, very pleased to see trouble come to the elves, so what I really
said
was that I would tell you everything I knew about the green-eyed demons."
Now Diric saw the jest, and stifled his own bellow of laughter behind his wrist. "Oh, most excellent! And let us be most pedantic and thorough, so that we have occasion for many, many meetings."
"I'll tell you right down to the number of blankets in their storehouses, if I know it," she promised. "So where shall we start?"
"With the property of the demon closest to our current line of march who is also farthest from
your
people," he said promptly. "If we must give him a target, let us give him a true and tempting one."
"Diric," she replied, after studying him for a moment, "I come to like you more and more with every passing moment."
"And I, you, oh crafty maiden," he told her truthfully. "And I, you."
Keman got his turn later that afternoon; he was looking forward to it with an anticipation that made his teeth ache. He wanted out of that cursed collar so badly, he could hardly stand it. Not only because he wanted to go hunt—in this form, it was easier to live on the kinds of foods available to him than it was for Dora in her bovine form, but he still needed fresh, raw meat in quantity every so often—but because he wanted to meet Dora tonight face-to-draconic-face.
What he had learned of her last night had been something of a trauma to both of them; she had no idea there were any other dragons in the world at all, and he had no idea there were any Lairs as far south as hers was. Without talking to one of her elders, he was not able to determine if her people had discovered their
own
Gate, if they were a late-arriving group from the peaceful haven that his Kin had left because it proved boring, or if she was even a dragon as
he
knew them. After all, dragons and elves were both immigrants to this place from elsewhere. There might be yet another group of creatures that had found its way here.
But the time spent in her company had been far too short, and despite all the momentous occurrences since sunset yesterday, the meeting she had promised with him for this evening was still the thing that preoccupied his thoughts. He begged Shana to let him be the second one to have his collar removed, using persuasion and some truth, so that he
could
go fly with Dora in his true form. She had not been able to shift where he could see it last night, because that would have been well within sight of both the herds and the herdsmen, so he still had no idea what she really looked like.
The truth was that he had traveled over more of the elven lords' lands than any of the four of them, when he had made his search for Shana after she had been captured by slavers. He had not confined his travels to being in elven form, either; he had made plenty of trips in the air. Draconic memory for territory was excellent and very precise; he would be able to draw maps that should send Jamal into paroxysms of delight.
Mero, Lorryn. and Kalamadea would be able to add their information that would send Jamal into fits of greed as well. All of them knew something about the properties that various elven lords held, and what they didn't know, they were equipped to make up. It should be interesting.
It would be even more interesting if Jamal actually got as far as attacking the elves.
One thing at a time
. For now it was most important that he get this
cursed
collar off!
Diric was waiting, with stylus and a set of smoothed slabs of clay. So was his wife, with her little pouch of tools. Both were smiling as he entered the tent.
"Make your rough maps on the clay," Diric told him without preamble. "This way you can erase or change things; when you are certain of your map, I will give it to one of my Priests to be burned onto leather."
He nodded, and sat down beside Kala, Diric's wife. After several days of living with these people, he had begun to accustom himself to their idea of beauty, and he could see that she had been a great beauty when she was young, and was still quite attractive now. She still moved with a precise and studied grace, and when she smiled, she glowed. If her figure had spread with age, if gray had crept into her coarse black curls, it hardly mattered. Her eyes were the loveliest that Keman had ever seen on a human or even an elven lord; a beautiful, deep brown, as wide and guileless as a doe's.
"This will not take long, now that I have the trick of it," she told him—and a few moments later, after skillful probing with her tools, the lock gave a
click
and the collar came off in her hands.
He rubbed his neck reflexively with one hand, and picked up the stylus in the other, grateful now that his mother had taught him reading and writing as the elves practiced it. These Iron People still had no idea what he was—and he was not about to give that particular secret away!
And the sooner he got some maps into this clay, the sooner he would be out of here, free to meet Dora for a flight and a hunt.
It took a little longer than he had really wanted—it proved to be much more difficult than he had thought it would be to translate what he remembered from the air and the roads into scratches of the right relative length in the clay. By the time he had filled the four clay tablets with maps of the territory between here and Lord Tylar's estate, it was fully dark.
"This is very rough," he warned, as Diric placed the last of the tablets into the hands of one of his under-Priests. 'There was a lot of detail I had to leave out because of the scale we were working in."
"Then you will have to return to give me that detail, will you not?" Diric replied, logically. "Indeed, you and Shana and the other two should all be here to give me that detail. It will mean many, many meetings, I would think."
"Oh," he replied, feeling very, very stupid for not seeing that very thing. "Of course. We want to have many, many more meetings, right?"
"As many as it takes," Kala replied, and held out the hated collar. "Here you are, slip this on and push it closed; you will hear it click as if it has locked, but it cannot lock now, it can only latch." She showed him a tiny stud on the underside of the collar. "You push this, and it will release, and you can take it off."
"Thank you," he said, fervently, and slipped the collar back on. He tested her work by closing it, then opening it again, immediately, and smiled with relief when it came open exactly as she had promised.
She only raised an eyebrow at that, but made no comment other than, "You must promise to take those with you; I would not want faulty collars in among the rest. If all you say is true, and if Jamal has his way with his dreams of conquest, we may well need true collars in the future."
"Thank you again," he replied to both of them, and slipped out of the tent door, onto the platform, into the cool breeze that always followed the setting of the sun.
He scampered down the stairs, then stopped by the tent to see Shana, but Kalamadea reported that she and Mero were with Lorryn. "I shall join them shortly," the elder dragon added. "And what of you?"
"Ah—I want to hunt," he said truthfully. Kalamadea nodded.
"See to it that you go well beyond the herds before you shift, then," he only said, "and take the collar with you. We do not want it to be found without you inside it. Not yet, anyway."
Keman promised, and escaped while he still could.
Dora was waiting for him where
she
had promised, at the edge of the herds. He was both pleased and relieved at that; she could so easily have taken the chance of the day to make her own escape and he would never have seen her again.
:
.-Something happened
,: he told her as soon as he was near enough to recognize her among the other cattle.
:Diric
is on
our side, and his wife is fixing our collars so that we can take them off!:
Surprise and delight colored her thoughts. :
But
—
that means we can fly together! You can escape
!:
:Not without my friends
,: he replied immediately, and perhaps a touch more sternly than he had intended.
She ducked her head in shamefaced apology. :
I
am sorry, Keman. I
—
I
forgot about them. It is hard to think of them when I do not know them
.:
The shame in her thoughts made him feel bad. :
I'm sorry I snapped at you; it's been a very hard day
,: he apologized.
:And I haven't hunted since we were caught; I suspect I'm pretty sharp-set by now! My temper is none too certain when I'm hungry
.:
-:Then let's go, quickly
—: she urged, and he was happy enough to slip his collar, shift into the form of a young bull, pick up the despised circlet of iron in his mouth, and join her in making her way to the edge of the herds. She had done this before; he hadn't, so he followed her lead, moving when she moved, stopping when she stopped.
She waited at the edge of the herd for a very long time, or at least it seemed that way to him. The metallic taste of the collar in his mouth was distinctly unpleasant, and he had to keep his head down as if he were grazing to keep it from showing. It was very heavy, too; it made his jaws ache to hold it this way. Finally she moved out into the grasses, slipping like a huge shadow as clouds crossed over the face of the moon. He followed, his body knowing how to keep his bulky form from making any noise as they moved away from the herd at a rapidly increasing pace.
Soon they were running, but they were too far from the herd for the herdsmen to see, and if a scout or a herdsman heard them, he would probably assume they were some other beast running free, and not two of the cattle. Cattle and other herd beasts
wanted
to stay together, most of the time. They were uneasy when they were separated from others. Only a cow about to calve would wander off by herself, and no cow about to calve would be running at a bovine gallop.