your shape, and they will ignore you.’
I was actually embarrassed. Why hadn’t I thought of that? For all our sophistication, the instinctive reaction that seizes you when you realize that something wants to kill and eat you is sheer panic.
I formed the image in my mind, and slipped myself into the shape of the wolf. My companion seemed to be impressed. ‘Much better,’ she said approvingly. ‘You are a handsome wolf. Your other shape is not so pleasing. Shall we go?’
We angled up from the stream-bed and stopped at the edge of the trees to watch the Hrulgin. The sudden disappearance of my scent confused them and it seemed also to infuriate them. The herd stallion reared, screaming his rage, and he shredded the bark of an unoffending tree with his claws while flecks of foam spattered out from his long, curved fangs. Several of the mares followed my scent down the gorge, then back, moving slowly and trying to sniff out the place where I’d turned aside and slipped away.
‘One suggests that we move along,’ the she-wolf said. ‘The flesh-eating horses will think that we have killed and eaten the man-thing they were hunting. This will make them angry with us. They may decide to stop hunting the man-thing and start hunting wolves.’
We stayed just back of the edge of the trees so that we could watch the baffled Hrulgin near the edge of the mountain stream in case they decided to start hunting wolves instead of men. After about a half-hour, we were far enough out in front of them that the chances that they could catch up with us were very slim.
The change in the Hrulgin had me completely baffled. The peace of UL had always been absolute before. What had driven the Hrulgin mad?
As it turned out, the Hrulgin weren’t the only monsters that’d lost their wits.
My automatic use of the word ‘monster’ there isn’t an indication of prejudice. It’s just a translation of an Ulgo word. The Ulgos even refer to the Dryads as monsters. Ce’Nedra was somewhat offended by that term, as I recall.
Anyway, I decided not to revert to my own form once we’d evaded the Hrulgin. Something very strange was going on here in Ulgoland. My companion and I reached that peculiarly shaped mountain upon which Prolgu stands, and we started up.
About half-way to the top, we encountered a pack of Algroths, and they were just as crazy as the Hrulgin had been. Algroths are not among my favorite creatures anyway. I’m not sure what the Gods were thinking of when they created them. A blend of ape, goat, and reptile seems a bit exotic to me. The Algroths were also hunting for people to kill and eat. Whether I liked him or not, I definitely needed to have words with the Gorim.
The only problem was the fact that Prolgu was totally deserted. There were some signs of a hasty departure, but the abandoning of the city had happened some time back, so my companion and I couldn’t pick up any hint of a scent that might have told us which way the Ulgos had gone. We came across some mossy human bones, however, and I didn’t care for the implications of that. Was it possible that the Ulgos had all been killed? Had UL changed his mind and abandoned them?
I didn’t really have time to sort it out. Evening had fallen over the empty city, and my companion and I were still sniffing around in the empty buildings when a sudden bellow shattered the silence, a bellow that was coming from the sky. I went to the doorway of the building we’d been searching and looked up.
The light wasn’t really very good, but it was good enough for me to see that huge shape outlined against the evening sky.
It was the dragon, and her great wings were clawing at the sky and she was belching clouds of sooty fire with every bellow.
Notice that I speak of her in the singular and the feminine. This is no indication of any great perception on my part, since there was only one dragon in the entire world, and she was female. The two males the Gods had created had killed each other during the first mating season. I’d always felt rather sorry for her, but not this time. She, like the Hrulgin and the Algroths, was intent on killing things, but she was too stupid to be selective. She’d burn anything that moved.
Moreover, Torak had added a modification to the dragons when he and his brothers were creating them. They were totally immune to anything I might have been able to do to them with the Will and the Word.
‘One would be more content if you would do something about that,’ the wolf told me.
‘I am thinking about it,’ I replied.
‘Think faster. The bird is returning.’
Her faith in me was touching, but it didn’t help very much. I quickly ran over the dragon’s characteristics in my mind. She was invulnerable, she was stupid, and she was lonely. Those last two clicked together in my mind. I loped to the edge of the city, focused my will on a thicket a few miles south of the mountain, and set fire to it.
The dragon screeched and swooped off toward my fire, belching out her own flames as she went.
‘One wonders why you did that.’
‘Fire is a part of the mating ritual of her kind.’
‘How remarkable. Most birds mate in the spring.’
‘She is not exactly a bird. One thinks that we should leave these mountains immediately. There are strange things taking place here that one does not understand, and we have errands to attend to in the lowlands.’
She sighed. ‘It is always errands with you, isn’t it?’
‘It is the nature of the man-things,’ I told her.
‘But you are not a man-thing right now.’
I couldn’t dispute her logic, but we left anyway, and we reached Arendia two days later.
The tasks my Master had set for me involved certain Arends and some Tolnedrans. At the time, I didn’t understand why the Master was so interested in weddings. I understand now, of course. Certain people needed to be born, and I was out there laying ground work for all I was worth.
I’d rather thought that the presence of my companion might complicate things, but as it turned out, she was an advantage, since you definitely get noticed when you walk into an Arendish village or a Tolnedran town with a full-grown wolf at your side, and her presence did tend to make people listen to me.
Arranging marriages in those days wasn’t really all that difficult. The Arends – and to a somewhat lesser degree the Tolnedrans – had patriarchal notions, and children were supposed to obey their fathers in important matters. Thus, I was seldom obliged to try to convince the happy couple that they ought to get married. I talked with their fathers instead. I had a certain celebrity in those days. The war was still fresh in everybody’s mind, and my brothers and I had played fairly major roles in that conflict. Moreover, I soon found that the priesthood in both Arendia and Tolnedra could be very helpful. After I’d been through the whole business a couple of times, I began to develop a pattern. When the wolf and I went into a town, we’d immediately go to the temple of either Chaldan or Nedra. I’d identify myself and ask the local priests to introduce me to the fathers in question.
It didn’t always go smoothly, of course. Every so often I’d come across stubborn men who for one reason or another didn’t care for my choice of spouses for their children. If worse came to worst, though, I could always give them a little demonstration of what I could do about things that irritated me. That was usually enough to
