by E. E. Knight
“What is that about?” the sentry asked Vii.
“Sentry at the wall,” Shatha murmured.
Vii put her finger to her lips. She ran lightly up the steps to the sentry point. Watching her bounce going up the stairs, Ileth wondered if Vii had rehearsed.
Shatha waved the limber dancers forward. They scuttled low, like crabs, to the door.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Ileth heard the sentry above say to Vii.
Vii’s voice moved away from the door. “I don’t have the right body for a dancer. I’m all tits and hips. This sheath is supposed to support, you see this band? It rubs me right under my breasts. I have this red mark every single day.”
“You’re insupportable,” the Guard said. Vii giggled.
“Don’t make me laugh. It hurts, see.”
“I, errr. I don’t see it.”
“It’s not for lack of looking.” Vii laughed from her new spot on the wall. “Here, I’ll show you. By the light there, you can see, a solid red band. Follow me.”
“Infiltrate,” Shatha said.
They passed through the Guard common room. Ileth had glimpsed it briefly upon first entering the Serpentine. The troupe helped themselves to cooking implements and pots at the little stove. Ileth took a bucket of water.
“This is the tricky bit,” Shatha said to them at the next wall. All was dark beyond, though they could make out vague shapes in beds lining either side of the interior wall.
They went single file between the flanking bunks in the nearly lightless room, the dancers barefoot and the next thing to silent. Shatha was stepping carefully at the front, feeling with her toes as she stepped for anything that might trip them or be knocked over.
“Gods, do they do nothing but fart?” Fyth said through her overdress collar held to her nose.
“Shhhh!” That was from Shatha at the front, still feeling her way.
“Their insides must be solid cabbage and onions,” Preen whispered.
Having run the gaseous gauntlet, the troupe arrived at the wingmen’s rooms, oddly like the Dancers’ Quarter in that there were partitions with the benefit of curtains. The dancers knew how to open curtains quietly, and found the cells for Dun Klaff, Heem Beck, and Vor Rapp, the ringleaders of Ileth’s ceremony. They did their best to avoid bothering with the other wingmen. Though still an apprentice, Sifler was in one of the officers’ rooms, reading by the light of a candle. Ileth put her finger to her lips and slid his curtain shut.
Shatha took Dun Klaff, who was sleeping facedown. Fyth put a cooking pot over Heem Beck’s prominent nose. Ileth readied her bucket, standing at the foot of Vor Rapp’s bed.
Shatha raised the cane, then checked her fellow dancers. “Chastise!”
She brought the cane down hard on Dun Klaff’s buttocks. Ileth heard a satisfying thwack as she sent a wave of water rolling across Vor Rapp from crotch to face. Fyth banged the soup pot with a metal ladle, ringing it like an alarm bell. Perhaps the biggest shock of all was courtesy of Preen, who let loose with a terrifying shriek right in Dun Klaff’s ear. As he startled awake, she tried to empty his bedside snuffbox on his head, but she couldn’t work the latch in the dark so she settled for jamming it deep into his boot.
The barrack roused itself at the alarm.
“Retreat!” Shatha cried, her wig now askew from the blow to Dun Klaff’s buttocks. Everyone hurled their cooking implements at the walls, intent on making as much noisy confusion as metal and fortification could create, and ran for the light of the entry room. The fleeing dancers inspired hoots, yells, and whistles from the Guards turned out of their beds at the alarm.
“Oh no you don’t,” a pair of shirtless apprentices said, moving to block their escape through the doorway.
Santeel’s leg shot out from the portal. She managed to trip one and held the other back, using a toilet sponge-stick like a stabbing sword to keep the exit clear.
“On me, troupe! Rally to me!” Santeel shouted. “Stay back, if you know what’s good for you.”
They piled out into the entry room. Preen was already laughing.
Ileth brought up the rear. She stood for a moment next to Santeel, as more and more young guardsmen gathered. Some stood on their beds for a better view of events. Ileth thought the moment called for a gesture. She remembered something she’d seen in Galantine lands, when a Tribal had been haggling with a villager over some trinket and failed to agree on a price. The villager had called her a vile name, and she responded with a gesture.
Ileth did her best to imitate it. She raised her dress hem above a buttock, slapped herself lightly, and then used that hand to make an aristocratic “be off with you” gesture while showing her teeth to the Guard. The Galantine villager had certainly seemed insulted by it.
With that, she and Santeel ran, a rearguard for the others. Vii executed a fine leap from the stairway landing and joined them.
“What happened to Vor Claymass?” Ileth asked.
“You know Rapoto, if he thinks a girl’s in distress, he’ll lever up the Beehive itself to help,” Santeel said. “I told him to fetch me a hot swirl.”
“There’s no swirl in the Serpentine,” Vii sighed. “Would that there were.”
Santeel dodged a flung apple core from behind. She hurled the toilet sponge-stick at the cluster of Guards framed by the light of the doors to the guardroom. For all her skill with fencing, she wasn’t much with missiles. It fell rather wide and very short. “Well, he’ll be busy looking for a while then, won’t he?”
“That was over quick,” Vii said, wiping her smeared lips. “Too bad, it was just getting interesting up there.”
“What did yours do?” Ileth asked.
Vii rearranged herself in her dancing sheath as she retreated; the jump had jostled things loose. “It started off with a lot of failure to attend to duty. I sort of rushed him through lewd acts once I saw you all were inside. We didn’t get as far as flagrant consortion, but maybe I’ll be luckier next time.”
* * *
—
Full of military thoughts from the well-planned raid the previous night, Ileth spent a laborious morning working on her commission in the writing room of the Masters’ Hall with her only company a dragoneer composing a letter. Or she decided it was a letter, as he smiled as he wrote. The dragoneer set his pen to rest, gently dried his lines, then favored her with a nod as he rose and left her to finish. Ileth’s smudged report was two pages of close-written paper with a great deal of crossing out and marginalia and only a hint of a solution. She rolled up her paper and visited the gate but didn’t see Sifler. After last night’s raid she didn’t brave the section of the wall with the Guard barracks to ask after him, so she returned to the Dancers’ Quarter.
No one was there. It was rare for everyone to be out, so that meant there was only one place for them to be: the Rotunda. She went up and found the troupe arrayed before Falberrwrath, formally apologizing to the dancers for losing his temper. He made no attempt to shift blame to anxiety over his about-to-hatch eggs, and when he saw that Vii wasn’t among them, he asked Ottavia to take down a written note.
Ileth thought it a handsome gesture.
Ottavia, in turn, to show there were no hard feelings, sent Ileth to keep Falberrwrath company that evening. He hadn’t even touched his wine. Perhaps he smelled the sleeping-draught. She brought one of Ottavia’s music boxes that played a cheery tune, but the great old red didn’t ask her to dance. He spoke of his own hatching—a two-egg clutch, just himself and his sister, born during the Scattering after the Fall of the Lavadome Tyrs. There’d been great rejoicing at their birth, the first dragons born to their dragon-clan after the terrible losses in the Age of Fire, whatever that was.
Ileth, who’d been going over her commission in her mind, was working on the idea of a solution. She’d heard odds and ends of stories about the fighting over the Scab
, how bad it was, the fact that they’d been taken utterly by surprise by a couple of second-rate Galantine dragons no less, but never the complete story. While her idea had nothing to do with the Scab, some of her problem was the same in principle.
Falberrwrath seemed in a mood to talk, so she asked him. He liked telling his war stories. Ileth was a natural listener. Though you more or less had to listen when a living hill of muscle and armor spoke.
“The Galantine War was a disaster from the first dragons-up. We were played right from the start. Ever hear of the Three Barons?”
“No. Tell me,” Ileth managed to say in Drakine.
“That’s not bad for a human, and a little one at that. Well, there were these three Borderland Barons from the Galantine king’s protectorates—those old bits of the Vales that stayed loyal to the king when the Republic was proclaimed—who sent out feelers claiming they wanted to join the Republic, since they were doing better business with us than the rest of the Baronies and they were sick of all the tariffs and duties and taxes. We believed them, or the commercial lines did. The Galantines were clever bastards for humans, I’ll give them that, it was a scheme worthy of old Tighlia of the Rock. There were a lot of powerful merchants, town folk, and such who were planning a revolt, figured they’d be better off with us than they’d be with the Baronies. These Barons used their fake revolt to flush their political enemies out into the open and cut us off at the wing joint besides. They revolted, we sent our forces over, including dragons, the Galantine king screamed invasion, but well, it’s an invasion they wanted us to make because they were layin’ for us.
“That’s just the first part of the big trap we blundered into. Part two was the Scab. Now the Scab, you know, big fortress island at the end of the Tonnage Lake. Always two or three dragons there as it was the southeast end of the Republic and next to the Galantines to boot, and just a little farther down the Blue Ocean and our trade routes south and round east to the Hypatians, the Old Coast, Cold Coast, and so on. Important post. Had some of our best dragons there: Fespanarax, Agrath, and Mnasmanus. Pure gold in the mouth, those three. Should have had more, but, you know, every joint of mutton and swallow of ore costs.”
It made Ileth’s heart hurt to hear those names. Fespanarax, because he’d been secretly working for the Galantines and she’d been too blind to even suspect it and suggest he be watched on his return. Agrath, because he’d been Annis Heem Strath’s dragon, and they’d died together in the war, the dragon falling atop her, protecting her with his armored body. She’d heard the story from the lips of the man who’d commanded the dragon-killing company himself.
“Well, those dragons got shifted quietly for the big surprise we thought we were pulling on the Galantines. More the fools us. There’s not much space at the south end of the fortress where the river narrows and flows quick, tricky part for boats, it’s almost like a waterfall the current is so fierce, craft get pulled upstream by oxen on tow paths. Well, what the clever Galantines did was rather than have their dragons up in the air fighting ours, they had them hidden just off the lake. They wore this sort of apparatus on their backs, turning them into something like a walking bridge. Into the water they went, hung on to each other while their men looped the two halves together with rope, and their storming column was across the water before you could say ‘For Egg and Tyr.’
“Of course once they had the Scab, they had a plan to keep it. Meteor men, those damn Fencibles, highpoons, harpoons, bombards for launching snaggy chain, they had the lot. We tried to burn them out, but the Scab’s built bottom-to-top not to burn. I could show you all the bad patches of scale on me I caught trying, but you’d be here until morning. There’s enough Galantine iron in me still to start a smithy.
“So that’s how we lost the Scab and with it the war, plus good markets in the Baronies and south and east into the Inland Ocean and across. Of course it took some months for it to even register that we’d lost good and proper with the Assembly. They’re down on dragons now. ‘What good are they if they don’t win us wars,’ like it’s the dragons’ fault that the Galantines outnumber us on the ground six or eight to one and have figured out how to disperse their camps and columns to make them safer from dragon attack. They’ve learned to go dark at night. See, unless you get lucky with weather and terrain, their scouts sound the dragon alarm, giving them some minutes to prepare, and they do a lot of training about what to do when the dragon alarm sounds. We’ll have to adjust our tactics. They said the days of dragons were over when they started shooting meteors at us, but we adjusted for that, right? We need the brainy types, human and dragon, to figure out new ways to use us, is all. See, that’s where we’ll beat ’em in the end. Humans and dragons really working together.
“But they don’t listen to me. I’m a big fighting dragon, not a thinker. That was the argument: Assembly’s out of money, banks failing, Sammerdam Exchange lower than the Black Shaft bottom. Now’s the time to take a gamble.”
All the talking made Falberrwrath thirsty, and he drank his draught of wine and soon fell asleep. Ileth returned to her commission, begging scrap paper and old envelopes from Ottavia and using her Charge’s desk, lamp, quills, and ink. She knew she should be tired, but she wasn’t, and she couldn’t account for it. Something was sparking in her mind; Falberrwrath’s flinty talk had struck old steel in her imagination. She still didn’t have any idea how to phrase things; a good deal of military terminology was opaque to her. She turned over the idea of hunting up that Vor Rapp as Quith had praised his mind, but decided that evening was no time to poke around the Guard barracks after last night.
She rose early, gathered her notes, and used them to assemble a report fulfilling her commission. Her solution presented endless difficulty. She didn’t know how to phrase any of it so that it wouldn’t sound like a hope tossed to the breeze, with no more design to it than some farmer’s son balancing on a fence post and imagining himself a king of all the lands in his view.
But such plans had to exist. She could model her report on one, just as she used to model her correspondence to the Dun Troot servant Falth on a book of letters. She read over the first part of her commission, hardly touching breakfast, as her mind worked. She wanted to be a dragoneer, so shouldn’t she write it as a dragoneer? And where could a dragoneer’s battle plan be found?
The archives. She’d just finished dressing—Fates, there was the problem of the sash again—and went out when Ottavia started waking the others to see Vii depart. She was leaving to assist Joai in her little kitchen.
“Joai’s been trying to get someone younger to help her, why not me?” Vii spoke of her plans to add swirl to Joai’s more routine menu. “Served midmorning and midafternoon, just like a Sammerdam swirl room.”
Ileth would miss her. Vii had been her first real friend in the Dancers’ Quarter.
* * *
—
Dun Klaff and two other wingmen, Heem Beck and Vor Rapp with his big ring, had volunteered to carry Vii’s things by way of a peace settlement between the dancers and the Guards. Perhaps there was a secret romance; they’d all been novices in the same draft as Vii and she’d heard Santeel speaking to Vii, saying something about getting Dun Klaff to leave her alone. Speaking of whom, Santeel had helped Vii pack an old trunk of hers and warned the men to return it.
“We’ll be prompt about it,” Dun Klaff told Santeel. “Best be quick when a favor is owed.”
Ileth chuckled to herself and waited for Santeel to put him in his place. She liked to cut men off at the knees and was good at it, but the Dun Troot spirit was elsewhere today. Santeel just looked at her feet.
Come to think of it, there was something odd about Santeel. Her overdress wasn’t its usual immaculate self, and it showed signs of wear. Her stocking had a hole. The double duty of being an apprentice and dancer both must have been wearing her down.
Quite a contrast next to the trio of wingmen, also of Santee
l’s class if not quite so illustriously named, similar physically, identical in their shiny military dragonriding boots, each sporting odd haircuts that made it look like a contest to see who could give the other the choppiest and most uneven cut with a razor. They had the newer, simpler style of riding rig favored by the men of their generation with money—shorter coats cut at the waist with a tight girdle built into the back for the safety tether and slightly puffed shoulders for insulation. It gave them an exaggerated triangle of a silhouette. Ileth thought longer coats looked more gentlemanly, but that was just what she was used to seeing on “her” trio of dragoneers.
If these three ended up replacing Dun Huss, Amrits, and the Borderlander, the Serpentine would be worse off for the switch.
“It’s Ih-Ih-Ih-Ileth,” Heem Beck said.
“Be quiet,” Vor Rapp said, glancing at Ileth’s scar.
“Traskeer’s been riding a lot of the apprentices. Looking to shorten the roster and make things look good for the ledgermen,” Vor Rapp said, turning his ring to his palm so it wouldn’t get scratched as he carried Vii’s trunk. “One of the boys in the Guard fell asleep on watch and says Traskeer’s marked him in his index for elimination in the cut.”
He’d obviously heard the same rumors traveling around the Serpentine.
Dun Klaff struck a pose, one leg straight out, his sword-hand elbow out resting behind his body while his left gestured at Ileth. “Should I make dragoneer, I believe I want a dancer as one of my wingmen. I want three wingmen, if they’ll let me have three: a right good cook, someone with a physiker bent to keep a dragon sound, and a dancer. You might do, Ileth.”
Ileth was tempted to ask who the other two would be, just to see if a fight would break out if he didn’t name both Heem Beck and Vor Rapp.
