Dragon Avenger

by E. E. Knight

  Wistala ran her tongue along her teeth. “Then I will share the fate of my family.”

  She crossed the Ba-drink in splendor, on the dwarves’ largest cargo-barge, pushed and pulled by smaller barges filled with lines of rowers.

  The blue silk stood in place of her collar, the long sash tied loosely so as not to grate on her scales more than was unavoidable. Her little triangular diadem of the librarians dangled at the front of her fringe, sparkling in the mountain sun.

  King Fangbreaker stood beside her as they approached the Thul’s Hardhold and Tall Rock. Tall Rock stood sheer-sided all around where it met the finger of water, but Thul’s Hardhold climbed more gradually like some sort of fantastic staircase. Only to the east, where it faced Tall Rock across the Titan bridge, was it as sheer as its companion.

  Sheer or not, the sides of the rock were cut with galleries and balconies, precarious outer stairways, even gardens beneath jutting stonework houses holding still more balconies and galleries.

  And every one was lined with cheering crowds of dwarves, dropping dried flowers (or bits of torn paper or waxen wrapping if they could not afford flowers) as they passed across the water between the Hardhold and the Rock.

  “Not a dwarf lives that doesn’t aspire to a balcony of his own so that he might take fresh air and skylight,” King Fangbreaker said, waving vaguely to the crowds. “We value it more than the elves, since many of us see so little of it. Some add gold leaf to the railings, but I prefer the natural look of traditional sedimentary stonework, don’t you?”

  “I’m overcome,” Wistala said, flowers and bits of paper catching all over her scales and gathering in the folds of her wings. The rock walls to either side seemed to be coming together at the top, closing like a pair of vast jaws. But it had to be a trick of eye and distance, she’d seen their shape from across the Ba-drink.

  “Now, a tour of what your advice gave me the courage to break loose, like a gem in a mine wall,” Fangbreaker said as the barge docked. They tied to a wharf next to a cave with water flowing out of it. “Had we taken the royal barge, we might have gone right in, but I fear all you would have to do is scratch your ear and you’d capsize it.”

  More dwarves threw themselves on their faces and another firework shot up between the sheer cliff faces as King Fangbreaker hopped onto the wharf. The cheering didn’t stop until he took a short set of stairs up and entered a wide gallery. Court officials—at least, that was what Wistala guessed them to be, for they wore cockades of purple—met him on the stairs, approaching with a sort of permanent, cringing bow and rose only to speak quietly into his ear.

  “Yes, yes, I’ll attend to that later,” he said, passing through the herd of bent dwarves. They clustered and swirled about him so that Wistala was reminded of bloodsucker bats in the hotforests around Adipose attempting to latch on to a fast-moving bullock.

  Fangbreaker led the swarm around corners and came to a cavern bridge inside, where a narrow crack leading up to the top of the Hardhold inside had its walls thick with mosses and clinging ferns. Water ran down the sides of the rock in a thousand tiny trickles to a sea of ferns below.

  “Thul’s Garden,” King Fangbreaker said, passing over a short wide bridge. Wistala tested it with a sii. “Oh, come now, Oracle,” Fangbreaker said. “This is dwarf work of the highest order. We could stack dragons all the way to the sky above on this little bridge.”

  There were dwarves in blackened steel at the opposite end of the bridge, with tufts of purple-dyed fur at boot-top and helmet lining. King Fangbreaker used the guards to shake off the courtiers, the way a whale of the Inland Ocean’s cold north might use a rock to scrape barnacles from its belly.

  Wistala passed over the short bridge, her head already in the passage beyond before her tail-tip left the gap behind.

  He went up another short, wide flight of stairs, luckily for Wistala, then turned a corner where dwarves in soft leather shoes opened a set of double wooden doors. Wistala just squeezed through into a room about the size of the presentation tent where she’d awaited the dwarf that morning.

  A huge, polished black table that looked like it had been carved out of the mountain itself stood in an oval of curved marble walls. There was a great deal of writing chiseled into the walls, and more on columns that had evidently been added to the room. Wistala counted twenty oddly shaped chairs around the table, draped in black velvet so that their spikiness was softened and hidden.

  “Oh, the years I sat at this table, arguing over nothings,” King Fangbreaker said, gripping the table as though he wished to lift and overturn it. “Motions, countermotions, oppositions, reconciliations, none of them worth a pot of passed water. The war with the de-men was being lost on the darkroads, and all we could do was sputter at each other. Until—after your words—I took control.

  “I said what was needed was a King with the Old Powers to forge our divided houses into a single spear.” He pointed with a finger at a notch in the table. “That’s where Barzo put down his fist in a Rock of Opposition. So I whipped up my sleeve-ax and cut it right off. Arterial blood all over the meeting notes. The others fell into line once I rolled his head down the table. Gnaw, what a day. Felt light as a feather after. Follow me.”

  As she bowed to let him pass back to the doors she lifted one of the velvet coverings to the chairs, wondering if they hid bloodstains, and was aghast to see green dragonscale. She suddenly realized what the unused velvet hid—dragon claws, opened and digits bent so the dwarves might lean in comfort against stiffened sii and saa.

  She gulped down a sickening mixture of sadness, rage, and regret, and fixed her gaze on Fangbreaker’s back. One short jump and—

  But these chairs had stood around this table since long before Fangbreaker, most likely.

  The king brushed more of the soft-shoed dwarves aside. “Oh, it’s as if I’ve no staff at all,” he grumbled, and led her to a tall, narrow hall, sort of an echo of the garden they’d bridged before.

  There were paintings all over the smoothed wall, some old and flaking, some almost unrecognizable, but he led her to a new one, so broad it partially covered two others of dwarves linking arms, or shaking hands, or pointing in various directions and talking.

  The new painting depicted some sort of ghastly underground fight in hip-deep water, with canoes like hollowed-out trees filled with dwarves firing crossbows at blighters and other hominids with what Wistala took to be exaggerated evil features.

  “The Battle of Domlod,” King Fangbreaker said. “I wasn’t actually riding the outside of one of the ramkaks, mind you, which is a fine way to get your head knocked off, but artists do insist on their frills and flourishes for dramatic effect. Lost my leg but won the war, and the de-men will be giving us no more trouble on the darkroads.”

  He let her admire it for a moment, and as they stood in silence one of the black-armored guards, this one with a purple half-cloak covering his shoulders, approached noisily and spoke in Fangbreaker’s ear.

  “Oh, I lost track of the time,” King Fangbreaker said. “If the barge is already out, let’s not keep the crowds waiting. Come, Oracle. By the way, do you have a name?”

  “Those close to me call me Tala,” Wistala said. “I would be glad to hear it from you, King.” For the best place to strike an enemy is close enough to gut, as Father used to say.

  “Very well, Tala, up the Hall of Invention and to the balcony over Thul’s tomb.”

  They passed along another wide hall with many short antechambers, each filled with devices of metal and steel and cable, some even in motion, though whether it was to amuse or accomplish something Wistala could not say. She saw daylight ahead at the opening of a very finely wrought gallery atop a huge slab of solid red granite that read THUL in both Elvish and Hypatian scripts. There were other icons and scriptings, as well, though she did not know the tongues.

  Curving stairs ran up the sides of the tomb to the gallery above. Dwarves in splendid cloaks and caps were already gathered there, and
bowed low but did not throw themselves to the floor as King Fangbreaker climbed up to join them.

  Not a few looked at her in wonder as she approached, but most of the others jostled for a place next to the king at the balcony rail, draped with purple velvet, Wistala noted.

  She climbed atop Thul’s coffin and some of the dwarves leaned their heads together at that, eyes heavily shaded, but most were still throwing elbows and hip-blocking to gain or keep a position near Fangbreaker at the rail.

  Wistala looked out and down at the finger of water running between Thul’s Hardhold and Tall Rock. A small barge looked to be fixed just downstream—if current flowed in the lake—from the Titan bridge where a crowd, but nothing like the crowd at the King’s barge trip, had gathered to watch events.

  “None at Vassa’s balcony, you see, my mighty king,” one of the dwarves said in Fangbreaker’s ear.

  Wistala didn’t know which was Vassa’s balcony, and didn’t care. She looked down the sheer side of rock at the barge. A dwarf, shorn of his hair and beard and stripped to a loincloth, was staked out in the daylight, no mask on his face. It looked as though he had something wrapped around his head, but it was at the mouth level.

  Five dwarves in black capes, with black great-axes, stood around him, at each limb and the head.

  A dwarf on the Titan bridge was reading from a scroll box, but Wistala didn’t understand the words.

  “What is this?” she asked Fangbreaker. A long neck had its advantages for reaching over crowds.

  “Justice. That fellow spoke against me in his guild hall. Dozens of ears heard it; there’s no doubt as to his guilt. Oh, the poor fool. It’s like a madness; it’s struck some of the best families with balconies on the Ba-drink.”

  “He’s gagged?” Wistala asked as the ax-men, at some signal, lifted their blades.

  “We used to let them say last words, but it led to tedious and insulting speeches. Now we open their mouths and give them just enough time to scream.”

  The dwarf at the staked-out figure’s head nodded at some signal from above, and bent to remove the gag. Wistala heard a shout in Dwarvish from the staked-out man, and Fangbreaker thumped the balcony rail.

  In quick succession the ax-man at his right arm brought down his blade, severing the limb, and four regular strikes followed on the stained wooden deck of the barge. The assorted bits danced a little, like landed fish.

  Some cheering broke out, loudest at the king’s balcony, or so it seemed to Wistala’s ears. She wondered what his limbs might be used for, but they were simply dumped in the Ba-drink.

  “A traitor’s burial,” one of the lordly dwarves said in Parl, perhaps wanting to please the king by explaining.

  “Hmpf,” King Fangbreaker said. “Dismembered and dead in five tics. And with his last words he called me brutal!”

  Chapter 25

  The dwarves took her across the Titan bridge to the sloping top of Tall Rock and established her in the second highest tower there. The only higher tower was that of the watch-guild, who kept the time of the hour-bells and looked for riders at each end of the pass through secret optics.

  She found herself in the care of a blighter slave named Yellowteeth. Yellowteeth indeed possessed oversize incisors the color of dried hay, top and bottom. He kept them polished by dipping his finger in ash and rubbing his teeth, then rinsing his mouth out with water.

  He grumbled a good deal in Parl, for the dwarves spoke their tongue only among themselves and taught few its secrets, save for a claw-count of pleasantries and greetings and oaths that were public knowledge anyway.

  She soon learned that the dwarves used three different languages, and not surprisingly to anyone who has spent much time around dwarves, ranked them.

  The lowest was Parl, the language of servants, slaves, and those who engaged in commerce. Above that was Dwarvish, “the golden letters that unite us all,” according to a dwarf-philosopher Wistala had read somewhere or other. The dwarves of the guilds spoke specialized dialects—there seemed to be guilds for everything, from armor-making to woodworking. Wistala even heard whispers of a Guild of Assassins—she guessed the Dragonblade headed that one. The choicest and most talented dwarves studied the high language, that of mathematics, according to dwarvish legend the only remnant of the perfect world that existed before darkness filled the holes.

  Her tower had once been an observatory. Like the council chamber she was trying to forget, writing covered the walls, at the top star charts, moon graphs and planet tracks, beneath them explanations in the cryptic styling of the dwarves.

  The star-guild had left not only numerous charts and symbols painted on the floors but on her high perch, as well, a platform designed to be lifted right up and out of the tower.

  She could just get her head out the hole in the roof, which could be shut by a sheet of reinforced tin by working a bezel running around the ring-hole. (The dwarves and Yellowteeth used a pole with a hook to work it, Wistala could reach it without rearing up on her hind legs.) There were eight windows with thick shutters and curtains set around the observation room. A fixture directly beneath for some sort of apparatus stuck up from the floor below the platformlike toadstools, but all had been disassembled before they moved her into the perch.

  It was a high, lonely place and appealed to her—unless a storm worked up. The tin covering on the hole rattled like a drum when rain or hail hit it, which was frequent at that altitude.

  She could not fly from her room, however, without descending the center of the tower on which the blighter sat, and then moving to the Titan Bridge or squeezing herself out through a tunnel which led to one of the workshop chimneys, rising hundreds of dragon-lengths up from the heart of the mountain. Whenever she did that she ended up with soot on her scales.

  The dwarves of the star-guild, who were few in number as their only employment was making maps and charts for Wheel of Fire dwarves planning a long journey, attended to her needs. Soothseekers sometimes talked—or bribed, she imagined—their way up into the observation tower and got her advice, but those visits were but rare.

  So she had a good deal of free time for thought.

  Thought about the Wheel of Fire and the Dragonblade, Hammar and the barbarians, the Hypatian Empire and, sometimes, the dragons of the Sadda-Vale.

  On days of clear weather and light wind she explored the mountain pass the dwarves had been occupying since Thul, a General of the Hypatian Empire at its height, had guarded its mountain borders. To the east, where the steppes of the Ironriders stretched farther than even an eye on dragonwing could see, a narrow road hugged the north side of the mountain. It saw so little traffic that when Wistala saw a pack train, a rider, or a file of walkers on it she stopped to guess at their mission. Herds of cattle or horses, so long that they filled the road from its origins at the foothills to the Ba-drink, were brought in from the east by the Ironriders to trade for trade-good-quality blades and shields and helms, and the butchers-guild would work days at a stretch slaughtering and smoking and the Ba-drink would see a scum of blood from their offal.

  Hardy mountain fish with knobs like horn-buds all across their sides disposed of leftovers, and were in turn pulled up and eaten by the dwarves.

  The track up the west side of the mountains was not as formidable, but there the dwarves had the low wall anywhere an army could possibly march, and watch-guild dwarves in other places. Just coming to the cusp of the Ba-drink would be a feat of generalship for any invading army.

  But no army could reach Thul’s Hardhold and Tall Rock without crossing the Ba-drink, and the dwarves kept all the barges in their inlets. Unless they could somehow fly over the steep, snowy mountaintops to the north, the attackers would not come within bowshot of the Wheel of Fire.

  Father had been mad to attack this place.

  She knew there were other roads, up from the Lower World, but could find no guides willing to take her below some of the lower chambers, and any investigating she did on her own was inevitably stopp
ed by narrow, one-dwarf ladders or passages she was too big to climb. The dwarves working underground chuckled and told her they were not fools, the lower way was shut to keep out blighters and dragons and the foul de-men Fangbreaker had dispersed.

  The dwarves would never be destroyed by invasion. Only a long siege might humble them, but dwarves were legendary siege-breakers, and had been known to eat each other rather than relent, according to Yellowteeth.

  He could talk, after a fashion, though his Parl was broken and thick.

  “Father taken long ago in battle, became tunneler. Father die in collapse. I born water-bearer.”

  Bear water he did, up the long stairs, to arrive panting and empty his buckets into a barrel. But the dwarves hurried to install a clever system fed by a tank added to the roof; its pipes gave her clean, cold water in a brass cistern, as much as she liked, leaving Yellowteeth only food and coal to carry.

  He had a platform in the tower hollow below hers, little more than an antechamber off the stairwell that had once held ropes and pulleys, and it struck Wistala as a dark and cold place. She let him bring his mat up by her fire, and he smiled as he settled in by its glow each night.

  As he slept, she had ample time to study his physiognomy. There was something of each of the other hominid races in the blighter, though half-formed and rudely constructed, like an apprentice’s clay imitation of a master’s sculpture. He seemed to take three times as long to accomplish anything when compared with one of the accommodating dwarves, and burned himself once or twice in a stupid fashion on the coal furnace, which struck her as strange for one who’d been fetching and filling coal all his life, especially since he did most of his other duties intelligently. His intelligence might also account for the lack of scars on his hairy back; most of the other blighters Yellowteeth’s age she’d seen elsewhere had bare patches on their shoulders and backs from the lash.

  When alone she looked out the windows and dreamed as lazily as Yellowteeth shoveled waste. She kept thinking of the hacked-to-pieces dwarf, feeling somehow responsible for placing this dread monarch at the head of these dwarves, who she hated to begin with but now felt a little sorry for. After all, the whole nation of them didn’t storm her home cave.