The Dragon Keeper

In response to her request, Malta sent the light globes flocking after her. They followed her and when she halted, they did. When they gathered around the tapestry, it was almost like looking out a window into a woven world. It was all there. The perspective had been skewed deliberately by the weaver so that more landmarks could be included. 'There.' She lifted her hand and pointed as she spoke. 'That would be the famous map tower of Kelsingra. From what I have read, I believe that map towers were created in several of their larger cities. In each tower there would be a large relief map of the surrounding area, and the encircling windows of the tower looked out on the depicted area. Sometimes there were symbols for more distant locations. The scrolls imply that somehow the map towers helped people to travel swiftly, but they do not say how. The map tower at Kelsingra is referred to in several scrolls, perhaps indicating that it was of more importance than some of the others.'

Distantly she heard her own voice. She had taken on a pedagogic tenor, the tone she had sometimes dreamed that she would employ someday when her scholarship was recognized and people would wish her to share her knowledge. Never had she dreamed she would lecture in a place like Cassarick or that her audience would include an Elderling. Her hand moved and she pointed again. 'You can see that the map tower is in the spire of a very impressive building. The decorative frieze on the front shows an Elderling woman ploughing behind an ox. The adjacent wall, as you can see, depicts a queen dragon. I speculate that the conjunction of the two is no accident, but shows that the two of them were as important to the city as the two walls that support this main city structure. We can only wonder what was on the other two faces of the building.

'Note the depth and width of the stairs that approach the grand entry doors. Human, or human-sized Elderlings would have no need of such steps, nor of such immense doors. It's clear to me that this structure, identified in one scroll as the Citadel of Records, welcomed both Elderlings and dragons inside its walls.'

'But where is it? Where is Kelsingra?' Malta's low anxious voice cut through Alise's lecture.

Slowly the Bingtown woman turned to look at the Elderling.

'I ca

'I could,' Malta asserted flatly. 'I could ask for a map that would clearly show us where the city once existed in relation to the two Elderling cities that we have already located.' She flicked her fingers as if in a

'Without our help, all of them would have died. Without our help, most of them would never have cocooned, let alone hatched.' Trader Polsk presented the fact simply.

'Without us cutting them up into planks to build ships, more of them might have survived to hatch during that quake,' Malta retorted.

'If there had not been liveships, would you have been there at all?' Alise dared to interject the question. Malta appeared to be mired in despair, but Alise felt a growing excitement. The most wonderful idea she had ever imagined was slowly unfolding in her mind. She hardly dared state it. She teetered on dread that they might refuse her and terror that they might accept her offer. She tried to keep her voice steady as she asked, 'How soon must the dragons be moved?'

'The sooner the better,' Trader Polsk replied. She ran both her hands through her brush of grey hair, standing it up like a dragon's crest. 'Delay can only make it worse for all of us, including the dragons. If it were possible for them to leave tomorrow, that is what I would choose.'

'Yet I have come all the way from Bingtown just for the purpose of studying these dragons and possibly conversing with them,' Alise objected.

'You will find them little inclined to conversation,' Malta said drearily. 'Even if you had come months ago, it would have been so. They have ancestral memories of the dragons they should have been. Much as I hate to admit it, Trader Polsk is right. They are and have been miserable where they are. I have done my best to visit them often, and I know the hardships that have been created for those who tried to keep faithfully the terms of our bargain with Tintaglia. I am not blind to those things. I just wish it could have a better ending. I wish that I could go with them and see them safely settled in some better place. But I ca

She sounded so defeated that Alise wondered if the Elderling woman were ill. But then she set her hands to her belly in the unmistakable gesture of a woman who is with child, and sets that child's well-being above all in her life. It was like the last piece of a puzzle falling into place. The circumstances were exactly right for her; if it was not fate, it was close enough.

'You ca

Silence greeted her words, but it was of a mixed sort. Malta looked at her as if she were a vision of salvation. Trader Polsk looked intrigued. Two of the committee members were regarding her with sick horror. She made an intuitive leap; those two had had some inkling that Kelsingra was real and that valuable Eldering relics might be discovered there. She'd just spoiled some sort of secret scheme without even intending to do so. The thought of that fired her courage. She spoke aloud to Malta. 'If Kelsingra is rediscovered and is intact at all, it could be the greatest resource yet for understanding how Elderlings and dragons interacted. The mysteries that have been discovered at Trehaug and Cassarick may be solved at Kelsingra.'