He had taken her out of herself with a rush of ecstasy that swept all her resistance away. She became "dimly aware that he had cast her off. No matter. She didn't need him. She was free to revel in the delight suffusing her.

Now she was the rushing breeze, making cats' paws on the surface of the sea, tugging at ruffles of foam until the waves did her bidding, rolling and breaking. Other breaths of wind hurried to join her game, following in her train, adding their meagre strength to her growing might. Now she was the sterner draught driving in off the ocean to scour the land, relentless as she brushed obstacles aside, commanding all lesser breezes. She ignored the weakling eddies of air seeking shelter in the lee of trees and hills, sweeping past to rise into the skies beyond, carried on an exultant surge of pleasure.

Here she was rarefied, dancing in the emptiness. The sky was her plaything, the clouds her delight. The highest wisps of vapour trailed behind her like wind-tossed hair. She drew them out into glittering threads, finer than the sheerest gossamer, and threw a milky veil over the distant sun. She was an artist, weaving beauty out of sheer inspiration. Which was entertaining in its way, but what was the point of possessing such power if she didn't do more? What could she do with it? What couldn't she do?

She drew the zephyrs to her, commanding them to suck the heat from the earth below, rising high on their appropriated might. Snaring the flurries, she drove them out over the water, wrapping them into squalls fat with captured moisture. Storm clouds filled the void, coalescingunder the pressure of her ominous unseen presence. The water was too weak, falling as frantic rain in a vain attempt to escape the air's crushing sense of purpose. She sent a gale to drive the downpour into the shore, cowing the submissive earth, lashing it with hail. Crackles of lightning illuminated the darkening clouds as the rising currents of air inexorably reclaimed the fallen rain at her command.

At a whim, she set the thunderclouds spinning. The storm swirled at her bidding, drawing gusts from further and further away into the frenzied dance. The rush of the winds, wheeling ever faster, was music to her ears. The power was dizzying, enthralling. She trembled with it, revelled in it, euphoric. Ripples of ecstasy shook her. She was air, pure and simple and omnipotent.

No, she wasn't. She was Velindre. She was a mage of Hadrumal and if she couldn't master herself better than this, she had no claim on the rank of Cloud Mistress. She fought her way free of the encircling clouds, seeking the centre of stillness, the better to regain some control over herself and the element and the seductive sensations that suffused her.

With that refuge gained and some fragile hold over her wizardly senses secured, Velindre considered the catastrophic storm. How to put a stop to this self-indulgence before it ran utterly beyond her control?

The wheeling tempest loomed all around her, threatening to rush headlong into maddened violence. The clouds in the heights were spreading out to claim more and more of the sky. She concentrated on maintaining that hard-won calm, within and without, and finally saw what she must do.

Fire was caught up in the storm's coils, capturing the sea spume and drawing the moisture high up into the skies where the wind flogged the white billows till they bled great gouts of rain. Fire was the element that set all others in motion, she remembered dimly. But fire could be snuffed. Velindre reached for the warmth drifting through the seas far below and drove it away.

She seized a fugitive breeze and wove a carefully selective barrier between the ocean and the whirling storm clouds above. Rain fell, slipping gratefully through her spell to escape into the cooling deeps. Try as it might, the storm could draw up no moisture to replace the downpour. The clouds cooled, the rain lessened. Velindre tore a rent in the tempest's formidable wall, sending the thunderclouds stumbling and falling away from one another. The deadly intent of the storm dissolved into confusion.

The magewoman opened her eyes. She was standing on the shores of Azazir's lake, cold and wet in her sodden chemise and stockings. Mud oozed between her toes. Her tangled hair hung loose around her shoulders, wet and clinging. She blinked painful tears from her eyes as the sun rose over the rim of the barren valley with piercing brightness. Low beams struck pale gleams from the glistening rocks around her and tinged the ominous clouds still circling relentlessly above in a strange yellowish haze.

'Hadrumal.' Azazir's contempt was chilling.

Velindre slipped and almost fell as she turned to see him beside her. She opened her mouth but she found she had half-forgotten how to speak.

'You can't rise above their small-mindedness any more than Otrick could.' Azazir stood there, a man made out of elemental water that sparkled in the early sun, motes of green magelight rising and falling within him. 'Arrogant, self-willed, all of you. Incapable of letting yourselves go. Incapable of finding your true potential.'

'Self-control is not self-will,' Velindre retorted with effort. 'And losing one's mind is hardly a route to wisdom.'

'Self-control,' sneered Azazir. 'Self-doubt and denial.'

'Self-restraint,' spat Velindre, wiping sodden hair out of her eyes. 'Something you've never bothered with.

Not pausing to wonder if you should do something, just because you've established you could - you don't call that arrogant?' 'I serve a higher calling.' Azazir's unearthly eyes glowed green. 'I serve my element. I will not be confined by Hadrumal's petty rules and fears.'

'I wish to master my element,' Velindre retorted, 'not to have it master me. Loss of myself is too high a price to pay for whatever power I might gain in following you. Where is the man you once were, Azazir?'

'Gone where you haven't the courage to follow, that much is plain.' The translucent mage smiled with open derision. 'Go back to Hadrumal and try to live with yourself, within those confines, now that you'vetasted true freedom in your magic. Try to content yourself with your plodding progress, groping for knowledge in your fearful obscurity. Don't tell me you haven't learned more in these past days than you could in a lifetime on that rock!' Laughing, he walked towards the water, growing paler and more transparent with every step.

'Wait!' Velindre found she was trembling and not merely from cold, fatigue and slowly building outrage at his assault on her. 'What did you mean, "in these past days"? How long was I . . .' She struggled and gave up. There were no words to describe where she had journeyed.

'Who knows?' Azazir halted almost on the water's edge. Ripples ran towards him, eager to narrow the gap. 'Who cares? I abandoned almanacs and hourglasses along with all of Hadrumal's other constraints.'

'I said stop!' Velindre raised a shaking hand and summoned a wall of air to block the mad wizard's path.

The questing lake waters flowed away on either side, baffled. 'Yes, you're right. I've learned a great deal from this experience.' She stifled a shudder at the recollection of such insidious delight. 'But I haven't learned what I came for. I came to ask you about dragons.'

'Dragons?' Azazir turned with a smile of delight that was the most terrifying thing Velindre had seen yet.

'What business could a frigid inadequate like you have with dragons?'

'Not so inadequate,' Velindre retorted coldly. She looked up and wrenched the winds free from the strangling grip of Azazir's ceaseless storm. With a battering blast of air, she drove the rain aside and seized the warmth of the sun riding high above. In an instant her clothes, such as they were, were dry, and she had driven the deathly chill from her bones.

'Not so inadequate?' echoed Azazir, mocking. He raised a hand and his magic crashed through the barrier she had erected between him and the lake, brutal as a breaker from a winter storm at sea. Her spell disintegrated under the assault. He looked up at the clouds and they swirled inwards, crushing the shaft of sunlight she had pulled down. 'Want to try that again?' He grinned at her, open challenge in his eerie eyes. 'Now that I'm ready for you?'

'I came here to learn, not to fight.' Velindre shook her head. 'The lowest apprentices know better than that.' She drew a breath to keep her voice calm. 'You're right,' she repeated. 'I've learned an astonishing amount. Or rather, I've seen that I can work instinctive magic with a power I've never known, if I allow myself. Instinct isn't knowledge, though. If it was, every migrating bird is a secret sage.'

'I see they still teach how to chop reason into shards of logic in Hadrumal.' Azazir laughed, his mood as fickle as the glitter of sunlight on the lake. 'Shards so fine that there's nothing left. Knowledge is overrated, my girl.'

'But you hold knowledge Hadrumal has lost,' Velindre persisted, bolder now that she was dry and warm.

Her golden hair obscured her face, coiling and frivolous in the teasing breeze. She brushed it back with irritation. 'That's what I'm seeking: the knowledge you shared with Otrick. What do you know about dragons?'

'You're persistent, I'll give you that.' Azazir turned his back on the uneven surface of the lake and the waters sank back to a glassy smoothness. 'Or rather, I'd say Otrick gave you that. Among other things.'

His smile took on a lascivious curve that sat bizarrely on his liquid face.

'Don't think you're in any condition to follow him there.' Velindre was surprised into an incautious response. 'And I've long since given up on lesser liaisons.'

'My condition is whatever I choose it to be.' Azazir walked away from the water and with every pace he took on a greater solidity. His skin turned a pearly white, pale as a fish's belly, shining with a faint suggestion of scales. His hair and beard bristled, long and unkempt and washed to a colourlessness somewhere between grey and white. Only his eyes stayed the same, lit from within with that same green madness. 'So you want to know about dragons, my cold and constrained lady mage? What do you already know?'

'I know they laired in the Cape of Winds from time to time, where the mountains of Tormalin run into the sea.' Velindre kept her eyes resolutely on the mad wizard's face. 'Where they were hunted for their hidesand teeth and claws. One voyage could set a man up for life, if he came back. Plenty didn't, from all I've read. And I've also read, in Otrick's notes, that there always had to be a wizard on the ship otherwise the dragon hunters wouldn't sail.'

'But you don't know why,' Azazir taunted her. 'No, you wouldn't. Hadrumal has been happy to see that knowledge erased from its dusty libraries and learned tomes.'

'Why?' demanded Velindre.

Azazir stepped close to whisper in her ear. 'On account of all a dragon can do for a mage. Because of what a mage can do with a dragon.'

Velindre spread her hands. 'I don't understand what you mean.'

Azazir's grin had all the reassuring warmth of a death's-head. 'No, you wouldn't.'

'Then teach me,' Velindre challenged, hands on her hips. 'If you don't want to see that knowledge lost up here in the wilds.'

'Why should I care?' Azazir studied her intently.

'Because you want to see wizards exploring their full potential,' Velindre shot back. 'How can they do that without a fuller understanding of all they might achieve?'

'You think you're up to it?' His smile turned cruel.

'I think I can take what I learn back to Hadrumal and share it with others,' she said steadily. 'Whereas you'll be condemned out of hand if you go back.'

'All right. I'll show you what I know of dragons. Then maybe you'll see why I live up here in the wilds.'

The emerald madness in Azazir's eyes faded as cunning lit his face. 'Whether you can learn from it, whether you can set aside your fears, with your mind hobbled by Hadrumal's teachings, that's another question.'

'Let's see, shall we?' Velindre raised her eyebrows expectantly. She fought not to shiver, not with cold but with apprehension.

'Yes, let's,' murmured Azazir as he squatted in the mud and thrust his bony white fingers into the cloying ooze. The ground trembled and the lake glowed suddenly green in its crystal depths.

The spiralling clouds above fell apart to blow away. The sun flooded the valley with brilliant light and frail spring warmth. Velindre looked around to see the mud all along the shore drying out, the glistening rocks turning dull.

Dust wafted from the ridges of the valley's edge, confused and helpless.

She turned her attention to the lake. That was where all the water was going, concentrating all the elemental power the mad wizard had gathered here. She frowned. Why were the ripples receding from the shore? Shouldn't the water be swelling the lake? She took a step forward, the parched ridges of mud now hard enough to bruise her unshod foot.

'Careful,' warned Azazir, intent on the depths. 'You don't want to catch its eye. It'll be hungry.'

The waters seethed, boiling into white foam shot through with cold green phosphorescence. A dragon erupted from the lake. The long, sinuous body seemed to flow endlessly upwards, water streaming from its glowing scales. Its underside was pale as the lightest jade, its sides dark as deepest agate. A crest of emerald spines snapped erect along its backbone, running up its snakelike neck to crown its long head with a diadem of lethal spikes. It spread vast wings, greater than any ship's sails, leathery membranes translucent in the sunlight. It rose higher, long tail finally leaving the lake, water streaming from the viciously barbed tip. The dragon soared up and circled the lake, coiling around itself in defiance of the empty air and the pull of the ground below. It opened its long, predatory jaw and screamed out a challenge, its glittering white teeth as long and as sharp as swords. With the last echoes of the ear-splitting shriek still reverberating around the hills, it folded its wings with a clap like thunder and dived back into the water. A cascade of spray exploded from the lake, falling to vanish into the thirsty ground.

Velindre couldn't help but tremble, standing with her hands clasped to her face.

'Did you feel the power? You should have done. Air and water are so often partners in magic. That's why you were so open to me before.' Azazir was at her shoulder, pressing his cold body against hers. 'Did youfeel the power? That's why Hadrumal doesn't want its wizards knowing how to summon dragons: because that dragon's aura has a more powerful resonance for the likes of me than the highest, mightiest waterfall in the world. You could do more with the merest touch of a cloud dragon's aura than with all the storms of a winter brought together. A fire mage wouldn't know such power if he stood on the lip of a flaming mountain's crater. There's no place in the darkest depths of the earth that would hold such power even for the likes of Planir. That's why Hadrumal doesn't want us knowing about dragons.'

'I felt power, yes . . .' Velindre stared at the water. 'Pure power. I could have worked water magics far beyond my own affinity-'

'It's barely a hint of the power surrounding real dragons.' Azazir squatted to sweep a hand across the undulating edge of the lake. Out in the deeps, emerald radiance rose lazily to the surface. The dragon broached with barely a ripple, lolling in the crystal waters, wings folded close to its long, lithe body.

'That looks like a real dragon to me,' Velindre observed, motionless.

'Look at it,' commanded Azazir.

'I am looking,' Velindre retorted.

'Look at it like a wizard,' he ordered with some irritation. 'Not like a gawping peasant.'

Velindre narrowed her eyes and studied the dragon idling in the water. She could see the beast in all its savage glory, coiling this way and that to send countless little swells hurrying to the shore. More pertinently, she could half-see, half-sense the magic that pervaded it. She realised that elemental power was as much a part of the creature as the scales and sinew, bone and blood that a peasant would see, in that instant before he soiled his breeches and fled. What was there for a wizard to see? She focused on that roiling nimbus of elemental power, tracing the pulses, the ebb and flow.

'There's a void.' She frowned. 'Where its heart should be.'

'Well done,' approved Azazir. 'It's a simulacrum, not a true dragon. For which you should be very grateful; a true dragon would know you for a mage and see you as a rival to be slain. It would bite your head off before you could think of escape.'

Velindre strove for understanding. 'You mean this is an illusion?'

'Does it look like an illusion to you?' Azazir snapped. 'Would I give up so much of myself, the power that I have amassed over a lifetime, to make an illusion?'

Belatedly, Velindre noticed how the mage's appearance had changed. He was still naked, but the shimmering patina of fishlike scales had faded, leaving his ancient skin wrinkled and scarred, mottled with age, his ribs visible. His hair and beard were a sodden mess, stray strands clinging to his hollow cheeks.

His eyes, deep set and shadowed, no longer glowed with that unearthly light, for all they were still as green as emeralds.

Discomfited at seeing the old man thus revealed, she turned back to the frolicking dragon now blithely lashing the lake with its tail and snapping at the resulting spray. 'So this is something between an illusion and a true dragon?'

'And it's an innocent. It knows nothing of a true dragon's magic or cunning.' Azazir cackled suddenly, startling Velindre horribly. 'It's a mighty beast all the same and real enough to bite the head off anyone coming up here to bother me. Do the hunters and trappers still whisper about me, wondering what riches the mad wizard is hoarding?' He laughed again, sounding quite insane enough to deserve the title. 'They don't get past the dragon even if they force their way through my other spells. It's tied to me, you see, because I'm the one who made it.'

'It'll do your bidding?' asked Velindre, incredulous.

'Does that look like a lapdog?' mocked the ancient wizard. 'No, but if I look on something and know it for an enemy, the dragon feels it, too. Dragons kill their enemies. They're creatures of unfettered power and untamed instinct, even such fleeting ones as this.'

'You told me not to move, in case it ate me.' Velindre tried to pick out the crucial questions from the clamouring maelstrom inside her head. 'But I'm no enemy to you,' she insisted, emphatic, in case the old wizard let slip any doubts to the distant dragon.'No, but you could be food.' Azazir gazed happily on his creation. 'I told you, I don't control it. It'll go off to hunt soon enough and there's no man or beast in this forest that will escape it.'

Velindre turned her thoughts resolutely from what Hadrumal's Council would say or do if they knew Azazir was wont to set a dragon eating fur hunters. 'You called it fleeting. What did you mean by that?'

'You don't think I would reduce myself to this for long?' Azazir studied his withered hands. 'You saw the void at its centre. It has no heart, nothing to hold its power together or to hold the other elements at bay.

It will fade, in time.'

'How much time?' Velindre asked immediately.

'That depends,' said Azazir with a sly smile, 'on how much power went into its making.'

'How do you make something like that?' Velindre wondered aloud.

'Simple.' Azazir waved an airy hand. 'And quite the most difficult thing you'll ever attempt. The first step is like creating an illusion; I assume Otrick taught you that much? Summon all the elemental power you can, bring it together and use that to fabricate the creature. You'll probably still fail,' he predicted gleefully.

'You said it wasn't an illusion.' Velindre swept her hair back off her face again, irritated.

'It isn't,' said Azazir with biting precision, suddenly angry. 'Once you have the shape of it in the midst of your magic, you summon still more power, if you're capable, which I doubt. Force enough elemental power in on itself, letting none escape - none at all - and it will reach an intensity where the magic grows out of its own substance, doubling and redoubling. Once you've achieved that, the creature will live, for as long as the magic remains. While the magic remains, its aura is a source of purer power than you can possibly imagine . . .' His voice trailed off, his expression avid. 'Of course, the more you draw on it, the sooner the magic is gone. When the element exhausts itself, the dragon fades.' The passion in his eyes dwindled to be replaced by something akin to weariness.

'Simple, as you say,' Velindre murmured sceptically. 'How do you guard against being consumed by the magic you're summoning?'

'Like some mageborn taken unawares by their manifesting affinity?' Azazir looked at her, sardonic. 'That, my dear, is your problem. As is finding sufficient power. My element is all around me here. You couldn't give yourself over to the air, even for a little while. What makes you think you can attempt such a spell?'

'Otrick could do it,' retorted Velindre, 'without letting himself run howling mad on the wings of a storm.'

'You think you're the equal of Otrick?' Azazir guffawed as if he had heard a ripe tavern jest.

'I would be,' Velindre murmured, more to herself than to the mad old wizard, 'if I could do this.' She gestured out to the water where the green dragon was now floating, wings outstretched, basking in the sun. 'What will that one do, if I can summon up another dragon?'

'A rival coming into its territory?' Cruel expectation lit Azazir's face. 'It'll fight. They may be born of the elements but they're beasts when all's said and done. True dragons claim a territory for themselves where they hunt, where the elements are at their rawest, to give them power for working their own magics. They fight among themselves for the choicest territory, to the death or until the loser yields and flies away.

That's why dragons would come to the Cape of Winds, following the heights and the storms when they'd been driven out of the far mountains.' As he spoke, his eyes drifted towards the north.

'So they were never the strongest,' he continued, 'for all the hunters would boast of their bravery in taking on such a mighty quarry. Even a dragon isn't so mighty if it's already wounded, with its magic exhausted.

Dragon and mage alike - spending too much of our substance on our spells can be the death of us,' he warned Velindre with a sharp expression.

'So the hunters just found them exhausted and "butchered them?' she asked with distaste.

'You think they needed a wizard along to help them do that?' Azazir's screech of laughter made her jump.

'You think they'd pay a wizard half of everything they made just to whistle up a wind or calm the seas on the voyage? No, you stupid chit. Even a wounded, weary dragon could kill a boatload of hunters without blunting a claw.'

He fell silent, one wrinkled hand absently stroking his straggling, knotted beard, dark-green eyes hooded and contemplative. He looked old beyond imagining. 'No, the wizard was there to summon up asimulacrum like that one, to fight the wounded dragon to utter exhaustion and sap what remained of its elemental magic so that it couldn't breathe death or lethal illusion on the hunters.

If a wizard could manage that, he'd more than earned his share, wouldn't you say? Then dissolving the simulacrum was his problem while the hunters tracked the exhausted dragon to wherever it was laired and hacked it to pieces as it lay helpless. If they were lucky, it wouldn't take their heads off in its death throes. That happened more than once,' he added with ambiguous neutrality.