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the greenway to the set of stairs leading to the front door. As soon as she got inside, she raised her mind voice to a shout. “Gwydion! Bran! Find me now.”
     

Chapter Four
    Dewi lumbered into the cave system on the dragons’ borderworld right behind Nidhogg. Limestone walls rose around her and stalactites and stalagmites glistened in light reflected through the cave’s entrance. Soon it would be pitch black except for the faint glow she and Nidhogg emitted. The cave system was extensive; it could easily take two or three hours to wend their way to the fountain at its center.
    She was still seething that something as important as not being the last living dragon had been hidden from her. By now she’d figured out the Celts wanted her right where they’d sent her: to spy on Lemurians from the infernal tunnels beneath Taltos. Had she known other dragons lived, she’d have left her post in search of them.
    Bastards! They used me.
    “Sorry for eavesdropping on your thoughts,” Nidhogg lowered his voice, “but you have to be rational.”
    “All I can say,” she muttered, “is I’m having one hell of a hard time imagining what would keep our kin locked on this world. Arawn said the dragons remained because he wanted them to. Since when do we kowtow to the Celts?” Fire streamed from her mouth. “Dragons owe their allegiance to me.”
    “And me.” Nidhogg’s tone was mild.
    “You were gone forever,” Dewi said.
    “So? Calling on dead gods is a time-honored occupation.”
    “You’re not funny.”
    “I wasn’t trying to be,” he countered. “Remember our agreement.”
    “Which was?”
    “You will not harm anybody unless we have fully discussed it and are in agreement.”
    “I won’t have to harm them.” Dewi blew fire-streaked smoke out her nostrils. “If I command it, they will throw themselves into the caldera. Even dragons will burn if we’re in there long enough.”
    “When did you grow so bitter?”
    “When the Celts refused to help me rescue you, and I lost both you and our children.” She swallowed back an acrid taste coating her throat. “Once I’d lost everything, it was impossible not to be…bitter.”
    They walked in silence for a long time, winding lower and lower into caves that flowed into one another. The temperature increased incrementally as they moved downward. Nidhogg picked up the pace when they got close to the bottom. Dewi heard rustling and smelled the other dragons before she saw them. She inhaled their scents and recognized each of them.
    “At least this explains something,” she muttered.
    “What?” Nidhogg asked.
    “When I needed assistance once you’d been captured, I called upon our own kind first. It didn’t take long, since there were only eight dragons left. The four who lived near our cave were impossibly old and feeble. When I tried to locate the four I sense down here—Kra, Berra, Royce, and Vaughna—I couldn’t find them. It didn’t make sense at the time, but I was so flummoxed about you being gone I couldn’t figure it out. It never occurred to me they’d gone AWOL. I assumed they’d been killed.” She punched a wall with her foreleg in frustration.
    Finally, she rounded the last corner. Huddled in an enormous oblong chamber littered with wildebeest bones were four dragons, one red, one green, one copper, and one black. Nidhogg ground to a halt just inside the final cavern and thundered, “Explain yourselves.”
    The copper dragon, Kra, rose on his hindquarters, his dark eyes whirling pools. He bowed first to Nidhogg and then to Dewi. “We knew Dewi would come eventually,” he began, and steam billowed above his head. “We believed Nidhogg dead until Arawn told us differently earlier today.”
    “What else did you know?” Dewi asked.
    “How angry you would be,” Kra replied.
    “Then why remain here?” Nidhogg cut in. “I was imprisoned by the dark gods for hundreds of years. If any of you had been available, Dewi might have