The Wizardry Consulted (Wiz, #4)(59)

In fact, he realized, a lot of what he had done since he came here was in the nature of avoiding work on the problem hoping something would bubble up from his subconscious. But his subconscious was as flat as an open can of Coke left on a programmer’s desk over the weekend.

Maybe his subconscious didn’t have enough to work on. The truth of the matter was that he didn’t know much about dragons and he hadn’t really learned much about them since he came here.

“Hey, Malkin,” he called over his shoulder, at the same time he clicked his mouse to deal another game.

“What?” came a voice in his ear.

Wiz jumped. There was Malkin at his shoulder.

“I wish you wouldn’t sneak up on me like that when I’m working.”

The tall thief shrugged. “I’m not sneaking. It’s my normal way of walking.

Kind of a professional asset, you might say.”

“You might say sneaking, too,” Wiz retorted. “Anyway, I wanted to ask you about dragons.”

“Why ask me? You’re supposed to be the expert.”

“Yeah, but I’ve noticed the people around here don’t talk much about dragons, or even seem to know very much about them.”

“They don’t know because they don’t want to know. As far as most folks hereabouts are concerned the time you learn anything about dragons is usually when someone gets eaten.”

“Still, there must be someone.”

“Well now, since you mention it, there is one fellow who probably knows more than most.”

“I wonder if I can talk to him.”

Malkin shrugged. “Easy enough. If you’re up for a little walk.”

When they left the house they turned away from the main square and the town hall and headed downhill, toward the river. Wiz, who hadn’t been this way much, looked around with interest.

“There’s a lot I don’t understand about the way humans and dragons relate to each other here,” he told her.

“It’s simple enough. Dragons eat humans when they feel like it.”

“Yeah, but beyond that. For instance why haven’t the dragons attacked the town?”

In answer Malkin pointed to a stretch of the street before them. The paving bricks were rougher, darker and shinier. Vitrified, Wiz saw, as if fired at too high a heat. Looking further he realized there was more than one such patch on the street or on the sides of buildings.

“Folks salvage what they can when they rebuild,” Malkin told him. “Usually there’s only bricks and not too many of them.”

The tall woman led him further down into the city. Soon he could smell the river and the mud flats that lined it. They must be almost to the end of the town, Wiz thought.

The river flowed under the bridge between mud banks that took up most of the bed. In spring it must be a torrent, but now, in late summer, there was only enough water to fill a narrow channel.

In the failing light Wiz could see that the earth the town sat on wasn’t ordinary dirt at all. It was heavily mixed with bits of brick, old paving stones and rubble. Here and there vitrified pieces glinted dully in the light of the setting sun.

Wiz realized the entire hill the town sat on was composed of the remains of earlier towns, like ancient Troy. Except here it wasn’t earthquakes and human enemies who had laid down layer after layer of debris to serve as the base for the builders, it was dragons.

“Malkin, look at that.”

“What?”

“The river banks. That’s not dirt. That’s rubble from older towns.”

“So?”

“So this place has been destroyed and rebuilt a number of times.”

Malkin shrugged and kept walking, unconcerned by her hometown’s history.

How many times had the town been destroyed by dragon fire? Wiz wondered as they proceeded across the bridge. How many times had the survivors returned to try to rebuild?

Yet Malkin didn’t seem to care. To her it was just a fact of life, even though it could happen again at any time.

That, Wiz decided, was the scariest thing of all.

The stone bridge was wide enough for two wagons abreast, and well-maintained. The town on the other side of it wasn’t. Almost as soon as they stepped off the bridge the streets narrowed into muddy lanes and began to twist like the tracks of a herd of drunken cows. The aroma told Wiz they weren’t cleaned regularly either. The smell of sun-warmed garbage and ripe raw sewage held a compost-like overtone that suggested they hadn’t ever been cleaned.

“Bog Side,” Malkin explained as Wiz tried to shut off direct communication between his nose and his gorge. “It’s the place to come for entertainment.”

The tall tumbledown houses and maze of narrow garbage-strewn byways didn’t look like Wiz’s definition of Disneyland. The characters who swaggered or skulked or slunk along the streets didn’t remind him much of Mickey and Snow White either. In fact, they made the inhabitants of North Beach and Sunset Strip seem innocuous. Wiz found himself pressing close to Malkin for protection.

Malkin swaggered along, ignoring the others or shouldering them out of her way like so many gawking tourists in a shopping mall. A couple of the more flashily dressed women eyed Wiz and a few of the larger men looked him up and down speculatively, but either Wiz’s reputation as a powerful wizard had preceded him or they knew Malkin too well to try anything. Except for an occasional hand lightly brushing his belt for the pouch that wasn’t there, no one interfered with them.