Dragon Avenger

by E. E. Knight

  They lightened Lada’s duties as she entered her final moon of expectation and they traveled at the borders of the southlands. Dark-skinned hominids in silk headwraps visited the circus, and Wistala learned other accents of Parl. Birds that reminded her of Bartleghaff soared above the sunny grasslands, home to vast herds of cattle and horses, and Ragwrist bought beef for all.

  Wistala did no better at learning how to read the seekers.

  “That one was a prince. Had you but bowed to him when I winked and foretold his rivals in power one day bowing to him, he would have given us his golden bracers, so pleased was he with the telling!” Intanta groused as they went over the afternoon’s events.

  “But he wasn’t showing his teeth,” Wistala said.

  “People in this land don’t show their teeth to any but family! If they’re pleased, they purse their lips thus—” Intanta lifted her lips so they almost touched her nose, an expression Wistala found revolting.

  “I heard him take in breath and hold it as you spoke of his rivals. He seemed excited. His heart was pounding.”

  “You could hear his heart?” Intanta said.

  “Louder than yours,” Wistala said. “Yours makes a faint slooshing sound when you are aggravated, by the way.”

  “You give me apoplexy, young dragon. But this is of interest. Perhaps instead of reading faces and hands, you should listen to their air and hearts. That’ll let you know when you’re on the right track.”

  Moon of the Summer Solstice, Res 471

  Beloved Father,

  I write you from the Lumbriar Heights in the city of Thallia. How right you were about travel, though we see almost nothing of the cities we visit, for we are too busy either opening, closing, or performing.

  I am happy to let you know Lada and her child are well. He is a healthy boy of sparse hair but merry eyes, and his name is Raygnar, a name Lada took a liking to when we visited the Barbarian Passes, for it sounds a bit like good Ragwrist’s moniker, and it is the custom in this circus to have babies given names that are some tribute in sound. He came quickly and vigorously into the world, an easy birth according to Intanta (Easy for her to say!—L) but it seems a messy process compared to eggs. Your granddaughter clasped Intanta’s odd crystal tight all through the birth, staring into it. (The images summoned within did bring some relief.) We have put his handprint in the margin, though now he mouths the ink—

  I will keep this letter short, for Lada tires easily. (True!)

  I visited the Library at Thallia, and the librarians were somewhat surprised at my appearance. I met your Heloise, who they told me is nearly a hundred, though still keeping busy with her duties. She questioned me closely about you and the tablets restored to them—I think they suspected an arson attempt—but they allowed me into the common room, where I found myself answering questions long into the night.

  Ragwrist and Dsossa, who says she has written separately (Thank the holy soulkeepers!) send their regards. I shall end this now. Ragwrist says next summer we are to go north again.

  Wistala, Lada, and Rayg

  “Behold, Wistala, the vale of the Wheel of Fire,” Brok said at the end of a long summer day the next year. His black cat, whom he called Chunnel, slept neatly balanced on the gargant’s hairy dome.

  Wistala, though now the weight of a large pony or a small horse, was borne on the back of the gargant as easily as its fleas. She sat perched atop its spine, a little above Brok at the neck-saddle.

  By special request, she was riding gargant-back on the lead animal, offering her the best view of a vista many artists traveled far to depict.

  Until they reached the plateau, it seemed another mountain pass, easier than some, along a good road bordering a rushing river of white. But then you passed between two long mountain arms, with a low stone wall running the spine and shorn-off towers at the roads with a catwalk between. According to Brok, the old fortifications were supposed to look deceptively ill-kept.

  Once beyond them, the ground rose a little and you came to the Ba-drink.

  The Ba-drink was a mountain lake, dammed at the west beneath the towers, surrounded by steep mountainsides and cliffs.

  Shaped somewhat like a crescent moon, with horns facing north, its southmost rim was usually enclosed in a thick mist where the colder glacier-fed waters ran into hot springs. Between the horns on the other side were three short, sharp inlets reminiscent of a dragon’s footprint, though the digits were somewhat foreshortened. The mountains between the two outer inlets were almost sheer-sided where they met the lake and faced each other.

  “They say that rive was formed by the fire god’s ax,” Brok said. “Though of course, the best view is from the lake. You can just see one side of the Titan bridge at Tall Rock. The sides of Thul’s Hardhold and Tall Rock are both much cut with galleries and balconies, though those towers to the south are where the greater dwarves of the Wheel of Fire live, among their terraced gardens of soil brought all the way up from the lowlands. We shall camp here at Whitewater Landing, for the dwarves let few across the lake to their doorsteps.”

  “Do they have mines in these mountains? It seems an inhospitable spot, and cold!”

  “I imagine so. I’ve visited only a tower or two, and the Titan-bridge. They’re descended of warrior-dwarves settled in here to guard the three passes through the Red Mountains, enjoying the patronage and protection of the Hypatian Empire in Masmodon’s time, but it doesn’t do to mention that now, for now they tell stories of the prophet Thul who led them here.”

  “Why are they called the Wheel of Fire?”

  “Let us hope you never learn this the hard way! Oh, don’t look at me like that; I don’t mean to be mysterious. It comes from their banners and war formations. I can’t explain it—I’m no tactician.” He lowered his voice. “To be honest, other dwarves call them the Appeal of Gold, for they fight not for defense or honor or justice, but sell their axes and bolts for money. Shameful.”

  “Is it?”

  “Death is too serious a matter to be a subject of commerce, don’t you think?”

  They set up camp as they always did, though under the direction of Wheel of Fire road guides. The dwarves dyed their leathers and face-masks a dull red, and black were their flared helms—how ugly the memories associated with that shape!—and cloaks. Wistala found Intanta playing with Rayg, showing him her glowing crystal, and asked for a favor.

  “What’s that, me scaly student?”

  “I would like to handle the dwarves by myself.”

  The toothless lips formed a perfect o. “Now ye have the courage to do so, but skill lackin’. Still, I’ve no love for t’ dwar beggars and would be happy to have my ease. Let’s see to t’ tentin’.”

  Wistala begged a few extra candles from Ragwrist, who sighed about expenses. Lada installed them around and behind the spot where she was “chained” so their shadows played across her face and body in an intimidating manner. Lada did many of her tasks with a happier, more confident air these days, and anything that didn’t involve the routine of cleaning, feeding, or sleeping her baby made Lada break into quiet song. She had an eye for artistry, and costume, and pleasing arrangements of even the most mundane candlestick.

  Though she still stuck her tongue out at Wistala when she thought she wasn’t being watched. Hominids underestimated the sweep of a dragon’s gaze.

  The first day she had many visitors to her tent, but few of the dwarves asked to have their fortunes read. Wistala wished for Intanta’s crystal . . . perhaps that would invite the dwarves to have a peek and ask a question. Instead they peered from their heavy masks into her eyes, or muttered to each other in the dwarf tongue about she knew not what. They left as soon as she invited them to have their fortunes read.

  At last a young dwarf—or one who had lost his beard, for he had but a grassy fringe on his chin—came into the tent and flung himself on his stomach before her, a gesture she wasn’t sure how to interpret.

  “Oh great daughter of dragonkind,”
he said in rather glottal Parl. “I crave your advice. What do you ask?”

  She used the speech she’d long rehearsed, a variation of Intanta’s invocation when she sat in the tent. “Rise and place a coin upon my tongue; the quality of the metal brings quality of insight.” She extended her tongue a short distance.

  “I’m poor . . . but I have a ring of my granddame,” the dwarf said, coming up to bended knee. He reached into a pocket in his leather vest and extracted a short chain with a few pierced coins and a ring with a shining green crystal at the end. He placed it on her extended tongue—she took the opportunity to smell his hands—and she brought it to her mouth and pretended to swallow. The ring she tucked into her gumline.

  “You are troubled. Desperate,” Wistala said, which was evident enough.

  “Yes!” the dwarf bubbled.

  What would a short-bearded dwarf be troubled about? Love or his position, she expected. Perhaps both. The other dwarves smelled of goose grease or salted pork and beer, but this one’s hands only had a faint floury smell to them. His eyes looked tired.

  “You labor hard. Something to do with wheat.” A miller? In the mountains? No! “A baker.”

  “Truly!” the dwarf said, his mouth dropping open.

  “You love what you do?”

  “Nothing is better than the smell of rising dough, or the steam from a freshly baked bun just opened.”

  She shut her eyes. Did his family not want him to be a baker, or was it someone else? “I see a problem. You fear you are not loved and respected by those you wish to keep close to your heart. It is hard to put your images and impressions into words.”

  “Oh yes! She jests with me almost every day when she comes for her order, and will speak not with the owner but only with me. But she’s from a house with a chair at the council table! And who am I?”

  So that is it. She jests with him.

  “But she smiles at you, good dwarf, every day that you meet?”

  “Oh yes, but she’s famous for her disposition. She’s kindness itself! She laughs when I juggle buns and always buys extra for the poor.”

  Wistala found herself liking this young dwarf. She’d been prepared to make him miserable, as a member of a clan who’d done murder to those dearest to her . . . but this fellow seemed so troubled, her heart pitied him. Then of course, he was a baker, who would probably not be foremost in a charge into a dragon’s cave.

  She spat the ring out. “The stars and winds, waters and stones weep for your unrequited love, and will not have your offering. Take it back. Present the ring to her family, as a pledge of your love for her. Ask that you may borrow gold against the value of the ring and open a bakery of your own. If you prove yourself worthy of her hand, you shall have it.”

  “How is—?”

  Wistala bowed her head. “Do not question the workings of the Great Spirits. Ah, they’ve gone. I can see no more.”

  The dwarf sniffled. “Thank you, thank you, great dragon!”

  Ragwrist and Intanta were aghast. “You did what?”

  They spoke to her in the wheeled cabin of the washerwomen and Intanta’s cronies that night by the light of a single candle.

  “I couldn’t take the ring from one so earnest and desperate. Besides, he needed it as a pledge against borrowed money.” The last wasn’t quite true, since she’d suggested that the dwarf borrow.

  “ ’Tis the most desperate that needs their fortunes told most,” Intanta said.

  “Wistala, I cannot deny that you are a draw,” Ragwrist said. “Mostly to children who spend not a penny. I cannot pay for your upkeep, or take a percentage, on nothing. You see the position this puts me in? Why, Lada is worth more to the circus than you.”

  Wistala didn’t give a dropped scale for Lada’s worth, though her hand had improved somewhat in the letters to Rainfall. “I will try again tomorrow.”

  “No, Intanta will do the fortune-telling tomorrow. You may sit like a stone statue and keep silent.”

  “Let her try again,” Intanta said. “I’m glad of the chance to mingle. She hurts none.”

  “And helps none,” Ragwrist said. “But this is not the first time I’ve carried dead weight. Curse my soft heart! Sit in the fortune-telling tent again tomorrow, Wistala, and try not to give away my wagons.”

  Her supper that night was a poor thin jelly of cooked-down horse hooves—remains such as these were sometimes used as waterproofing or to grease the wagon axles. Short of giving her dirt, she could not see how her rations could get worse.

  After nightfall she gathered every particle of information from Brok and the other dwarves about the Wheel of Fire and their habits, then prowled the rocky slopes and managed to get a sick carrion bird. Then she sat and stared at the distant lights glimmering in the tall rocks that faced each other, mirrored in the surface of the Ba-drink. There were towers at the tops of the cliffs. No wonder Father had broken himself against them. Where was the Dragonblade now? In those rocks, or did he hunt her?

  The next morning Ragwrist himself woke her, not through noise or touch but by the smell of a thick joint still sizzling on the platter he bore.

  “Wistala, up and get to your tent and prepare yourself! There’s already a line outside the fortune-tent!”

  She rushed her breakfast—meaning it took her three eyeblinks to eat—and hurried through the show preparations for the back flap of the fortune-telling tent. Lada was already inside arranging the candles; Brok stood ready with her chains and collar.

  Brok spoke in her ear as he helped fix her in the false collar. “The dwarves all say an ambitious young dwarf named Stava demanded entrance to House Steelforge last night. He was so insistent, so fair-spoken, and so complimentary about their eldest daughter and plans for his betterment that Dwar Steelforge himself put their hands together, and the engagement party will last a week. There’s some talk of Stava being an unchaired member of the Wheel of Fire Council. A few say Dwara Steelforge just wanted her overripe eldest out of the way so the younger ones could marry, but there’s a sour belly at every feast. But all say it was our dragon’s doing, and that you bring fortune.”

  Much of the morning passed in a blur.

  Ragwrist himself helped usher dwarves in and out of the tent. Most offered her silver or gold coin in return for advice with their problems and plans, though a few grumbled when the “Spirits” failed to return the coin as she had the ring. If Wistala seemed stuck, Ragwrist announced that the reading was over. They had to take two breaks to extract the coins from her gums.

  “I’m hardly able to speak without rattling or shooting silver into their faces,” she said as Lada put new candles in the holders and fresh incense in the brazier Ragwrist had confiscated from the luxury trade-tent.

  The afternoon went much like the morning, only more so.

  As the sun fell, there was some murmur outside, and the sound of dwarf bodies dropping to the ground.

  Ragwrist bowed as he opened the tent flap and a dwarf strode in, a thin red cape of silk hanging down from a light ornamental helm that reminded Wistala of a spiderweb or the loose-knit caps of the librarians in Thallia, for it was more holes than plate save for a line of what looked like dragon teeth at the top, descending in size from large at the front to small at the base of the skull, rather like her own fringe. His faceplate was golden, and had flames at the edge like those used on some sun signs of the astrologers in Hypat. He carried a staff fully as tall as he was in his left hand, and atop it was a reddish crystal the size of his fist.

  “Hmpf,” the dwarf said. “You’re not four years out of the egg.”

  “Her egg drifted down the Holy River of Mherr,” Ragwrist said, still in his odd balancing bow, “and was plucked from the bullrushes by a daughter of—”

  The dwarf tapped his staff on the ground. “Spare me the biography. A fortune-telling drakka?”

  “I hide nothing from your greatness,” Wistala said. Ragwrist bobbed a bit, and Wistala bowed.

  “How much am I to giv
e you?” the dwarf said.

  Ragwrist raised his thumb three times.

  “I can ask nothing from one who has a chair at the Council Table of the Wheel of Fire,” Wistala said, and Ragwrist turned his thumb into a fist and shook it at her. “But if you care for my oracle, you may reward me as you wish.”

  The fist stopped shaking.

  The dwarf gave a nod that bent his waist just far enough that a charitably inclined person might take it for a bow. Wistala concentrated every iota of her attention on him; were her perceptions claws, they would be dug into his eyes. “My name is Fangbreaker. That’s all I’ll tell you, drakka.”

  “No, it’s not,” Wistala said, having heard his heart miss a beat as he spoke the name. Ragwrist toppled out of his bow but came to his feet again quietly.

  The staff came down hard enough for Wistala to feel it through the packed mountain dirt. “Gnaw! It is!”

  “Were you born with that name?”

  She saw eyewhites inside the mask. “I am titled Fangbreaker, but you speak the truth. I was born to a common name. Gobold was I on the day of my birth.”

  “Let us call the score even.” She studied his hands. There was a white scar across one set of fingers, those of his right hand. He was wide, even for a dwarf, and still puffed from his walk into the tent. Perhaps wheezed a little.

  “I’m not the first dragon you’ve matched yourself against,” Wistala said, feeling her foua pulse. “You’re a warrior at heart, now relegated to the table and dusty papers that make you sneeze.”

  “True. But I wish to speak of the future, not the past.”

  “You are often opposed at the council table.”

  “Any rower on the icewater could tell you this. I would know the future.”