Dew Drops in a Spider Web

Esau stretched out in his bed, trying to stay cool. He sometimes had trouble getting to sleep. When he was younger, he would fall asleep right away, exhausted from activity. As he got older, his habits changed, and he read himself to sleep. With his eyesight failing, he could not do this. [47886] He closed his eyes, and in his mind, he would recall visions of clearer days. "An old man, living in the past," he thought to himself. He was still valuable to the Archeron and to the town, as he well knew. His experience, and his talent at seeing the secret councils of strangers and enemies, guaranteed that he would not go hungry. He forced his mind off these thoughts. He knew that his health was slowly but irreversibly declining, and did not wish to dwell on it. "What was it that I saw? A dragon. Yes."

And like a flash of light out of the darkness, he saw her. She had a red streak down her back, and was shorter and stouter than old Minestus. It appeared that he underestimated the hazards that this dragon was facing. She appeared to be listless, and much of her power appeared to be ebbing away. But for some reason, her mind had found his. Unfortunately, he would have trouble understanding her speech. She was speaking the travelers' language, the language spoken by the mariners and by those living in faraway lands that lay beyond beyond the wastes to his town's east. "No matter," he thought. He would paint pictures.

Astra's mind wandered from her immediate problems. She saw a town by a shore. She compared it to Ilsachine, a city on the coast of Aqualaria.

First, the harbour of the strange city was magnificent, with a sheltered bay cut deep into the mainland. Off the Ilsachine coast were trawlers, and that was it. Aqualaria's neighbours had nothing that she could want, and her coast was protected by means other than ships. Hence she had neither a merchant fleet nor a navy. Here there were ten times as many ships, of many types. In addition to trawlers, there were two- masted brigs, fast jachts, and great cogs, bristling with the strange cannon.

Ilsachine had no walls. This city had a weird set of walls with points jutting out in odd places. There appeared to be some logic to it that she could not figure out, but it probably had something to do with making it hard to attack.

Ilsachine had wide streets, lined with covered walkways held up by columns of oak and hickory which grew in the nearby forests. The buildings were as light and open as the need for supporting columns could make them. Compared to the adjacent tribes, or the semi-civilised nations of the Havnheim, Ilsachine had a measure grandeur, even though it was a not a very important city.

But this small port city compared favourably even with the great city of the Queen, in some ways. The city in her daydream appeared to be layed out according to a plan. There was a sort of palace in the centre, ringed by streets that were ever-widening circles. These were crossed by avenues built in straight lines that radiated from this palace. Being in the city felt a bit like being in a spider's web.Aqualarian cities, by contrast, tended to be built on a grid with grand streets built parallel to the nearest river, but also containing numerous alleys and windy paths that met some need the time they were built, and continued to exist through a sort of civic inertia.

The people of the city in her vision had apparently not developed the covered walkway, but the palace was a marvellous feat of engineering. The roof was the top part of a drop of water! And the palace was not the only building that was like that. Several of the outlying buildings also had round tops. If the streets were like a spider's web, the important building were like golden drops of morning dew on that web. And even the majority of buildings, which had four sides like a normal building, used arches for windows, doors, and, as far as she could tell, for decoration. To her Aqualarian senses, this town had an otherworldly feel to it.

And even the Queen's court did not have that much more activity than this little city. She saw horses going in all sorts of directions. These horses appeared to be different than the war chargers and racehorses that she saw in Aqualaria. They appeared to be somewhat smaller, but very fast. She saw a large open area. It was like a theatre, but instead of being round, like the ones that she knew, it was more like an oval. She thought that it could hold six or seven thousand people, which had to be about the population of the town.

They were using the theatre to race horses! They did things differently here. Back in Aqualaria, races would be in a line from one point to another, and they were only held on four times a year, during the holiday seasons. These races were different. The horses ran in a loop, and they could only run about one-tenth of a league [about three- tenths of a mile or 500 meters] before that loop would be completed.

Astra felt herself a part of the race. The way these people were dressed did not appear to measure up their city. Both the men and the women appeared to be dressed in some sort of formless robe. All the robes had a variety of colour, but they were all pale. Both men and women wore jewelry and gold, but Astra thought that the workmanship was either bizarre or cheap-looking. Curly beards and moustaches appeared to be popular amongst men, and the women braided their hair in styles unknown to Aqualaria.

Her new dragon instincts homed in on the wealth. For a city of its small size and apparent lack of importance, the city in this vision appeared to have quite a lot of it. She felt an urge to pay it a visit.

She then found herself thinking about a frail old man in a dark room. He had something to do with this daydream. The old man was not afraid of her. He seemed to be trying to help her, for some reason. And while she couldn't quite describe why she felt this way, she was getting some other ideas. This particular city was somewhat to the south of where the ship was heading. It was one of the northernmost cities of these people. Somewhere further south she got a glimpse of a great city with a lot more wealth, built in a natural fortress a on beach with sand the colour of soot. And then some other flashes of intuition.

"Dragons leave their hoards for a variety of reasons and do not lose their power!" Even if an adventurer grabs a dragon's hoard, she still has to kill the dragon to make it safely hers. She could certainly have used a mentor for this dragon business. She was discovering the rules as she went along, and was suffering from this lack of knowledge. What was it that Sartoma and Solbert said about the coins? That they are worth more than their value in silver, as it somehow taps the power of the nation that mints them? Either something has gone wrong with the Glider nation, or something is interfering with their effect.

The other flash of intuition, "The old man wants me to come to his city! I would be, if not welcomed, at least an object of curiosity, and not fear. And he wants me for something other than my hoard." Astra could not quite understand what. But she had a strong feeling that she had to escape Colonia Gallia as soon as possible, and that it might be a while before she saw her companions again.

Esau saw glimpses of Aqualaria when he silently "spoke" to Astra. He tried to paint a comforting picture of his city, and give Astra a few glimpses of Blacksand, the parent city of many colonies, of which his city was just one. The dragon was once human and a princess of this land from beyond the sea. Her nation was civilised, if a little old-fashioned in some respects. Esau noted an important fact. Aqualaria was isolated by nature and by choice, and her people were ignorant of the wider world. This had to have had a big effect on how this particular dragon thought. Her human background explained in part why she had been defeated so easily by the pirates. It also explained why she seemed refreshingly indifferent, for a dragon, about wealth or magical power. He was also now sure that Minestus was dead, and that Astra had something to do with it. Esau pondered all this. He would talk to the Archeron the next morning. Someone had to go to Colonia Gallia and keep Astra out of the hands of the wizard there.

Astra was suddenly shaken from the wanderings of her mind. It was now night, and

1. the ship was now at anchor off Colonia Gallia.
2. the ship was somewhere else.

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