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Grom?"
    "Dead. Doing battle with a great serpent in the Tarn Bay-renrich."
    "Poor Grom! Well, Prospero then."
    "Out of business. Abandoned his power once and for all. Vanished into the crowd."
    "Ha! Doesn't surprise me. The Merridyd sisters, then."
    Valerian again shook his head. "One dead and the others entangled in equivocations and brews. We hear they've lost almost all their power for the Good, and have given themselves over to gold and wickedness."
    "Yes, that is the temptation, the great danger for sorcerers. Well, what about Elexvir, or Hunneguendo, or Scam, or . . ."
    Valerian shook his head firmly. "Dead. All dead. We've checked. No, you're the last. You are our last hope."
    The old man sat quiet for a long minute, and the others waited anxiously for him to speak. At last he said, "I didn't know. The years pass, you lose touch . . . Perhaps in the Western Isles? Someone new?"
    Valerian shrugged and shook his head.
    Ulrich lowered himself slowly into the chair at the end of the table, looking more serious than Galen had ever seen him look. "Tell me about this dragon."
    "Better," said Valerian, "I'll show you." He motioned to Xeno-phobius the muleteer, who came shuffling forward, frowning at Ulrich, and deposited a knapsack at Valerian's feet. "Relics." Valerian opened the sack and drew out first a handful of fire-blackened stones, ordinary enough except that they exuded such a foul stench that Ulrich's nose wrinkled.
    For an instant Galen thought he saw a flicker of fear in the old man's eyes, but then Ulrich waved the stones away. "Dragon breath? You're going to tell me that is dragon breath? Pah! Nonsense! Mere fetid swamp gas. Take it away, Galen! Into the moat!"
    Not wanting to soil his hands with the odor, Galen scooped up
    the pebbles in a scuttle from the fireplace, bore them to the window, and dropped them. For a long time after they had sunk, the moat's slime bubbled and seethed, and Galen watched it fascinated.
    "And bone," Valerian was saying, back at the table. "A victim."
    Ulrich peered at the cracked and fire-blackened part of a hand. He shrugged, unconvinced. "People die. They die in many ways. They all leave bones."
    "And—" Valerian dug deep, "—these." He spread on the table three glistening translucent disks, each roughly triangular and about the size of his hand. They bore the same odor, but their shimmering beauty made the stench seem less foul. They attracted everyone who gazed upon them; the pilgrims clustered around the table, Ulrich leaned close, and Galen, drawn from the window, felt a chill as palpable as fingers moving on his spine.
    "Dragon scales," Ulrich said softly. "Unquestionably."
    "I gathered them," Valerian said. "Near the mouth of the cave."
    "A very old dragon. Very, very old." Ulrich was musing, running a finger over one of the surfaces. "Observe the striations, like ripples in the bottom of a lake. If you were to count them, you would know how old."
    "Hundreds," said Greil.
    "Many hundreds," said Malkin.
    "When a dragon is this old," Ulrich went on softly, still touching the scale, "it knows pain, constant pain. After a time it comes to know only pain, to believe that it itself is pain, and that it exists only for the sake of the pain. There comes a point for such a dragon when, after years of yearning for an honorable adversary, it passes beyond that longing, grows more dependent on its young —yes, even for its food . . ." The old man's voice grew even softer, and at last he lapsed into a reverie all his own, a reverie so profound that he seemed at first not to hear Greil's whisper to his neighbor:
    "This is a dragonslayer? Why, he talks as if he knew the thing, liked it! Does he not know that the beast is evil?"
    "I know," Ulrich replied after a long pause, looking not at Greil but at the scales still. "I know that there is something called evil. And I know that there are imbalances to be . . . righted. And I believe that it is possible for a creature, like man, to be