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thought. Fear sliced her at the thought of the Master of Halnath, who had sent her here to the Deep to tell Miss Mab of Trey's death. Polycarp knew too much of demons for his own safety. Had he been able to escape from Bel, Jenny wondered, before things came to the pass there that they had all those centuries ago in Ernine?
    The High King of Ernine had become the pawn and slave of the demons, she remembered, seeing through Morkeleb's eyes. His two daughters had killed him, but too late to save the Inland Realm from the terrible cancers of mistrust and blood-feud. Even the destruction of the dragon corps, and the death of the wizards whom the demons had taken, came too late. Working against them with demon magic, further damage was done, though no human magic was found that would prevail.
    “How was it ended, in the end?” asked Miss Mab at length. She sat on a corner of Jenny's sheepskins, and Jenny could smell in her clothing the scents of lamp oil from the Warren of Arawan, and the dried herbs of healing. “How were the demons—and the other demons who helped to defeat those called up by Isychros—finally bound?”
    That I know not, returned Morkeleb. It was nothing to me, these squabbles of men. In those days I had the sense not to remain in a place of danger, no matter how much gold there was for the taking. I followed the dragon corps south and east, to gather up the gold of men.… And in his thoughts Jenny felt the warm, deep strength of that love for gold that is the heart of every dragon, the intoxication of the magic that dragons can breathe through the refined metal, and drink back again in almost unbearable ecstacies of dreams.
    When I saw what the demons did, that dwelled within the dragons, I was disgusted, and came away. I returned to the Skerries of Light, to the islands in the western sea where the dragons dwell. I had no more to do with them, nor with the wars of men.
    “Were you not concerned,” asked Mab, “to help your fellows among the dragons, who were enslaved?”
    Morkeleb did not reply for a long while. Jenny saw them sitting together, though her eyes were closed in sleep: Miss Mab in her green velvet jacket and bright pink trousers, her curly-toed blue slippers glinting with jewels. The dragon curled near the hothwais of heat, like a great half-visible dog before invisible flames. He had been black as a thing of carven coal when first Jenny had seen him, and huge, forty feet from the tip of his nose to the cruel spiked club of his tail. She had not known then that the great dragons, the mages and loremasters among that kind, were capable of changing their size. Among the dragons Morkeleb was foremost in lore, in the spells and wisdom passed along from mind to mind for centuries and millennia, wisdom and power growing in him until at last he had given up his magic, and passed entirely beyond dragon shape.
    Now he had the semblence of a dragon, insofar as he had any semblence at all—or perhaps, thought Jenny, it was only her perception in dreaming that saw him thus. The shape of him that she saw was the thin, snake-like body of a dragon, with its long tail like a muscled whip and great thin-boned silken wings folded along his sides. All his joints and spine bristled with spikes, and great scales like razor-edged fans. In the narrow, beaked head burned crystal eyes, mazes of diamonds that you could fall into forever. Among long horns and tufts of mane, antennae flicked lazily, the points of light at their tips the only thing about him that could be clearly seen.
    Not human, she thought. But not a beast, as so many humans considered dragons. The young among dragons were beasts. But they grew, and passed on, with the years, to become other things.
    As Morkeleb had.
    A man would have gone back for fellow men, replied the dragon slowly. Indeed I have met a man who would go back for them, though they were no kin nor friends of his. It is not a thing of dragons, to concern oneself overmuch with the