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piece of log he'd been sitting on and lowered himself down onto it. "I...can
see that."
The dragon lowered his head until his eyes were level with
Kyrtian's face. "You can do us as much harm, knowing this, aswe could
ever do to you, you know," the creature said, quietly.
"Forgive me," Kyrtian managed, finally gathering some ofhis wits
about him, "If at this moment with a mouth bigenough to swallow me whole not
an arm's-length away fromme I find that a little difficult to believe."
The dragon suddenly reared up, and for a moment, Kyrtian was certain
that they were all going tobe swallowed up
But then an enormous, rumbling laugh started somewheredeep inside the
dragon, bubbled up through the long, long throat,and emerged from the upturned
snout as a trumpeting hoot.
It should have terrified him and his men further still. Itwas a
completely alien sound, something thatcould have meant the thing was about to
attack them. But somehow, it wasn'tfrightening at all, somehow, in the depths
of Kyrtian's mindwhere the basest of instincts gibbered in terror and tried
tocrouch as small as possible so as not to be noticed by this mon-ster, it
translated as exactly what it was the laughter of a fel-low creature who meant
no harm at all. And that primitive partof him stopped gibbering, and
relaxed....
"Look aside, Lord Kyrtian," the dragon said, when he'd fi-nally done
laughing. "I think I'd best come back down toyour level."
He didn't need urging, not after his previous experience.
When Keman looked again like an ordinary wizard, poor Resso had been
revived, and they were all seated around the fire, Kyrtian contemplated the
wizard-dragon from across theflames as Lashana and the foresters discussed
which of severalpossible caves they ought to penetrate first. He couldn't help
himself; he couldn't reconcile the apparent size of the wizardwith the obvious
size of the dragon he'd become. The puzzle ate at him; he couldn't explain it,
couldn't rationalize it, andwhen he couldn't find an explanation for
something, he had the bad habit (and heknew it was a bad habit) of worrying at
it tothe exclusion of everything else.
Finally the dragon himself leveled a stare across the flamesand
said, "What, exactly, is bothering you, Lord Kyrtian?" in a tone of irritation
mixed with amusement.
"Where did it come from?" Kyrtian blurted, as conversation ceased
among the others. "I mean, you're no larger than Ressoright now, and you're
not exactly having that log splitting underyou from your weight but when you
were " he waved hishands wildly " that wasn'tair, that was mass well, look at
the imprints you left! So where did it come from? And wheredid it go?"
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Keman shrugged. "Elsewhere, Kyrtian," he said. "That's all Ican tell
you. We call it, 'shifting into the Out.' We move the realbulk of ourselves to
and from the Out, but well, we don'tknowwhat the Out is. It's here, but it's
somewhere else "
"But when you know what to look for, a dragon casts a
sortof shadow when he's in another form," Lashana put in. "It'snot the kind of
shadow you get from light falling on you, butit's there, and when you've
learned how to see it and look for it, you can always tell whether something
is a dragon or not."
Kyrtian could only shake his head, more puzzled by the ex-planation
than by not having one. But at least that obsessivepart of his mind had it to
turn inside out and examine while heset most of his attention to work on more
important things. "Never mind," he said, after a moment. "What in the name of
the Ancestors are those invisible horrors that lie in wait for you on deer
trails? And what can we do about them?"
Lashana and Keman exchanged a look and a nod, and the planning moved
into more practical spheres.
Caellach Gwain was beside himself with rage.
He'd followed Lashana to this benighted forest once he'dscryed out
her location and once she'd abandoned it, trusting todistance and
preoccupation to keep her from noticing the"noise" of his arrival. Of course,
just as he apported into thespot, the wretched trees delivered a load of water
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