Dragon Rigger by Jeffrey A. Carver Page A

sufficient to the need.
    Windrush, your skills are the greatest of any dragon flying free in the realm today. And tonight , when you ate the lumenis , your skills grew.
    Windrush blinked. If you mean the vision . . . will you explain it to me ?
    It was not from us, but from another. Know this: there is one who is trying to help. You must seek in the windows he has left you here. Find him, before it is too late! Start tonight! With those words, the iffling suddenly turned and bounded through the doorway and was gone. The doorway vanished as well.
    Windrush stared after the being, blinking in bewilderment at its parting words. What exactly did it want him to do? As he peered again about his cavern, his bewilderment grew. His haven was a changed place. There were openings in the weave of the underrealm, passages out of his cavern that did not exist in the outer world, that had not existed here before. Someone had cleverly penetrated his protective spells—someone who knew his mind and his thoughts. This was truly rakhandroh— astonishing, and most unnerving.
    The passages were dark; he could not guess where they led, or what lay beyond them. But he sensed that they were windows onto other places in the underrealm. Rakhandroh! He caught hints of smells from them: salt and tree, sulfur and fire, wind and dust. As he sat and studied this puzzle, he came to realize that the passages might open further in response to his active touch.
    After a long hesitation, he stretched out his thought to one dark passage. With a shimmer, the weave in the underrealm became an open window. Peering through it he glimpsed a barren land, a sun low and red in its sky. It looked remote, and oppressively empty and desolate. He pulled back, uncertain what sort of spell this was. Could his thoughts, his kuutekka, actually come and go through these windows? It darkened as he drew away.
    He touched the next one with his thought. It opened to a view from a great aerie, high over a woodland. Yellow sunlight glinted from the tops of the trees, and shone from within the forest. He smelled a distant ocean, mingled with the forest smell. It was not a place he recognized. Most strange. He let the window close.
    The next opened onto darkness, a subterranean gloom lit by a red flicker of distant fire, volcanic fire. He could not see much, but he sensed a labyrinth of underground passageways. He smelled sulfur; he sensed, though at a great distance, the presence of the enemy. He pulled back with a shudder and made certain that the window drew itself tightly closed again.
    The fourth window opened onto darkness, also. But it was a kind of darkness he understood; it was the natural gloom of the underrealm. He could see connecting threads rippling outward, twisting and joining and stretching off in various directions. He was surprised by the clarity of the view. One thread seemed particularly bright and promising, and he thought he heard a faint tinkle of laughter from it. He sniffed cautiously—and thought he caught the smell of a demon-spirit. He was startled to realize that he recognized the smell. Start tonight, the iffling had said. Find your way in the underrealm.
    Sighing, he stretched his kuutekka cautiously outward through the window, into the underrealm beyond his cavern. His thoughts ranged down the thread, searching and testing every knot he encountered, taking note of each change in direction. The laughter grew louder, but came to sound more like crying than laughter. In time, there was a faint yellow glow ahead, and the demon smell became stronger. Windrush sniffed the underrealm for treachery. He heard a faint metallic jangle of protection spells, but easily swept them aside. A moment later, a lazily dancing figure of light came into view. When he had last seen it, it had been a figure of shadow-fire, but there was no mistaking who it was.
    Hodakai, he called.
    There was no answer. The figure seemed to be stretching its arms and turning about, as