There is growing discontent with the archon’s silence. While he has secluded himself in his coastal stronghold with his most loyal followers, events in the rest of Ghadáreim continue at a rapid pace. Several of the high-ranking magicians who spoke to the Guild have wondered whether the archon intends to entirely ignore the breakthroughs of the great Raumuréh, or the alternative vision for the future of Ghadáreim held up by Narasíben and her companions in the desert. All efforts to contact the archon have proven fruitless, but a source in Mexesnód itself expressed worries about the direction things are going.

Many have been disturbed by a venomous and hateful speech given recently by one of the archon’s supporters in Nusgwéden. Standing right outside the house of the magician Raumuréh, he called him all the terms of abuse favored by the old-eyed and even threatened his life. Though Raumuréh is hardly in any danger from such a haranguer, this incident makes it clear how the old-eyed continue to threaten the future of Ghadáreim.

A Guild outpost not far from Mexesnód was attacked today by a band of fanatics who called themselves the servants of the archon, though of course there is no proof that they were indeed connected to him. Although the attack was repelled and the attackers face justice, we should all be aware of the forces that threaten the Guild of Sympathies, which is no different from a threat to all the people of Ghadáreim. The Guild is the voice and the eyes of the people, and we will be neither blinded nor silenced.

It is remarkable, I have often thought, how much the world can change while one is asleep. One shuts one’s eyes and when one opens them again, the darkness of night is gone and the birds have begun to greet the rising sun. The silver rod that Táfir struck me with had a similar effect, in that I seemed to travel in a second from the street outside Lugwin’s house to the back of a dragon far above the earth. I nearly fell off, in fact, when I realized where I was, but happily there were straps of some sort on my legs that prevented such an unfortunate occurrence.

“You’re awake already?” said the woman sitting in front of me. Her form was concealed by a thick cloak, but her voice was clearly that of a woman, distorted as it was by the wind that rushed past us, or perhaps that we rushed past. “That’s too bad! It’s easier to wake up when you’re on the ground, I’d think. Try to keep your head, and don’t worry about getting sick. There’s nothing but ocean below us, and it’s a very big ocean indeed.”

“Who are you? Where are we going? Where’s Rosédan?” I asked. I don’t believe I was fully awake yet, hence the perhaps confused nature of my questions.

“I’d advise not thinking too hard at first. It’ll only make your head hurt. But I am Brän, dragon rider of such and such a rank in such and such a division. They wouldn’t mean anything to you. We’re going to the city of Mexesnód, on the coast in the north. Rosédan is not coming with us.”

“Why not? Where is she?”

After a long silence, Brän said, “She’ll be all right. But like I said, you shouldn’t think too hard right now. Just relax and shut your eyes. It’ll take us a few days to reach Mexesnód, and we’ll land to have a bite and give Kantálhin some rest. Not that she needs it!”

The dragon, presumably Kantálhin, raised its fur-patched neck and cried out. Its voice was different from that of Halgh somehow. It reminded me of the Bird in a way, but more sustained, hauntingly beautiful.

“Ah, she knows I’m praising her,” said Brän. I thought about the legend Lugwin had told me, but I decided that it wasn’t the time to bring it up. No doubt the dragon riders had their own stories, I thought, and I later learned that I was right. This seems like the appropriate place to insert one such story that I heard from Brän about the origin of the dragon riders.

One of the sons of Rakka (who seems to have been a sort of legendary ancestor of the Ghadári such as many nations have) went wandering by the coast of the sea. He came to a cliff, where a demon tempted him and told him to hurl himself off the edge. “But I’m frightened that I will die,” he told the demon, reasonably enough.

“That’s exactly why you should jump,” said the demon. (In Brän’s telling, the demon had a very casual way of speaking, not how I typically imagine such fiends to speak.) “Don’t tell me you want to be ruled by your fears. You were born into this world so that you could rule, not be ruled.”

So the boy stepped off the edge of the cliff and fell. But before he could be swallowed by the ocean, a dragon caught him and carried him to its eyrie far away. The young of the dragon were there waiting, and at first the boy thought he had been brought there as their meat, but then he understood that one of them had a broken wing, trod upon by another. The boy was skilled with his hands and was able to set the wing of the infant dragon.

From that day on the dragons were the boy’s protectors and guardians. If robbers threatened him, the dragons chased them away. If lions menaced him, the dragons fought the beasts and devoured them. If the boy was hungry, the dragons brought him game. If he needed to visit an island, the dragons carried him there. The dragon whose wing he had set became his particular companion. He gave it a name and trained it to heed his commands.

When he grew to manhood, he began to desire a wife, and one day as he and his dragon were flying over the eastern hills, he saw a beautiful young woman gathering flowers. So that he wouldn’t frighten her, he told his dragon to land some distance away and then went on foot to greet the woman and talk to her. They passed a pleasant day together and when they parted, Rakka’s son promised the woman that he would return to marry her.

But when he returned the next day, there was no sign of the young woman. He searched all the neighboring hills, until he came across a house of stone where a barbarian king ruled over a tribe of barbarians. There at last he found the woman, but to his horror she was tied to an altar, about to be sacrificed to a roaring lion.

He and his dragon flew down and bit and clawed and stabbed the lion until it ran away. The barbarian king embraced him and promised him that he could marry his daughter (for so she proved to be) the very next day.

When he returned, however, he found the woman tied to an altar, about to be sacrificed to another dragon. Rakka’s son called to the dragon, because he recognized that it was one from the litter he had befriended. The dragon left the woman and circled around him in its glee. Then the barbarian king embraced him and promised that he could marry his daughter the very next day.

On the third day (and I promise my readers that it is the last) when he returned he found the woman tied to an altar, about to be sacrificed to a vast dark demon, more terrible than any lion or even any dragon. In despair Rakka’s son cried out, and his dragon answered him with its own cry. The sound of it pierced the air and tore its way through the misty shape of the demon, scattering wisps of it in every direction until it could no longer be seen.

The barbarian king embraced him and promised him that he could marry his daughter the next day, but Rakka’s son wasn’t about to be fooled again. He signaled to his dragon, which approached the king to loom over him with jaws open wide, and the king was persuaded. That very day Rakka’s son married the king’s daughter. He taught the barbarian king the wisdom of Heaven. And he and his children were the first Ghadári.

A charming enough tale, and one can see in it despite its comical trappings the deep feelings that the riders have for their dragons. I didn’t want to risk offending Brän by asking her about Lugwin’s less pleasant story, so I was left to draw my own conclusions about the differences. Perhaps there was a war in which the Ghadári used dragons to conquer Lugwin’s people.

In any case, Brän wasn’t wrong when she said it would be a few days’ journey to Mexesnód. We returned to the ground to eat and to sleep at regular stations that had been built and maintained for the use of the dragon riders (so I was told by Brän), but the rest of the time we were in the air. It was quite novel to me, even if I had briefly ridden Halgh with Rosédan, and by the time we reached our journeys’ end, I considered myself an experienced dragon rider. By which I mean, of course, that I was able to look in every direction and even to nap without feeling sick to my stomach.

It was from one of these naps that I was wakened by Brän shouting, “Look down there: you can see Mexesnód now!”

It was an impressive view, I had to admit. Ahead of us the land rose into mountains that drew near to the ocean on our left, and I was reminded of the highlands north of the Parakō peninsula, though those were small hills compared to these, which rather resembled the mountains south of Alka’ales, or indeed around my home of Tarinzar. Westward of the mountains, in the level region next to the coast, the land was covered with artificial structures that I find it difficult to describe as I think back. I know their function now, but their form remains a mystery to me. Why they should have been built with shining metal trusses above the roofs, or why the boundaries between the walls were shaped so as to resemble hooks curving upwards, cannot be answered by any architectural principle of which I’m aware. No doubt there is some magical reason about which I shall have to ask Rosédan.

I could see the ships too, the great golden ships that dwarfed any vessel I had seen at the docks of Edazzo. They were so large, in fact, that at first I assumed that each ship was a village onto itself before I discerned their shape and the way they were resting on the water.

Brän said, “There’s another dock like this to the south, where our southern brethren the Sotlací are preparing their own ships. But,” she added with pride, “Mexesnód is greater, and we have the archon.”

Then the dragon Kantálhin pitched upwards and took us away from the ships towards a nearby hill where a rampart of stone rose about halfway up the rocky slope. A second rampart rose behind the first, and it seemed to be dotted with hundreds of light-filled windows. We were headed for a flat area between these two ramparts. Brän made the clicking sound that I had come to recognize as the signal for Kantálhin to descend to the ground.