Dragon Outcast

by E. E. Knight

  But in his ascent, watching the aerial duel, he’d passed out of the shadow of the mountain and into moonlight. He realized it too late.

  The three hag-ridden dragons flapped their wings in unison as they turned toward him.

  Chapter 25

  They made no great effort to catch up to him as he fled east. After closing to two-score dragonlengths, they seemed content to trail him.

  The long flight exhausted him. He passed over unfamiliar country, dry and rocky and dotted with widely spaced patches of vegetation clinging precariously to what he suspected were seasonal water supplies. There was little sign of habitation in this waste.

  Thanks to his injury, he couldn’t manipulate his wing to take the wind at a favorable angle, and he suspected he was ex-pending as much effort just to glide between beats as he would climbing. His strength would fail before dawn.

  And on and on glided the pursuit. Didn’t they have buildings to burn and gold to steal? Why didn’t they close and put an end to him?

  Painful beat-glide. Painful beat-glide. Painful beat-glide. On and on through the night.

  A black scar broke the moonlit ground ahead.

  Could it be the Tooth Cavern? He knew it opened to the sky not far north of the bridge at the Lower World. He altered his course a little south.

  Fool! More the fool! The change proved to be a telltale to the pursuing dragons. They beat their wings harder, closing.

  He expended what strength he had left trying to stay ahead; still they closed.

  And still they fired no weapon, just kept him under observation.

  At last the cavern was in his glide-path. No elegant flying, just a simple turn and descent. He closed his wings a little to hurry it, making for the canyon floor.

  The leading two followed. The third stayed above, watching the action.

  He looked frantically for some sign of the tunnel, the enclosure of the Lower World, but there was none. Columns of rock could be seen ahead; perhaps they were the beginnings of the teeth.

  Reaching the stone columns, he swerved around one, the next painfully bashing his wing tip when he miscalculated his turn. Now the lead flier was closer behind, his companion a little farther back, and the Copper didn’t dare roll his good eye toward the sky lest he hit the cavern’s side.

  There. Darkness ahead. As a dragon he could see well enough. He wondered how good the night vision of the riders was. Would they let their fliers choose their own path?

  He whipped into darkness, and the first pursuer drew even closer.

  These rocks he knew. He’d flown around them often enough in his practice flights as Rayg tested the joint brace.

  The fat one ahead, in fact, had a deceptively wide but shallow route around the east side, and a narrow but deep channel to the left.

  He approached the fat rock as though going around the east, then at the last moment rolled and shot through the west gap. But instead of continuing down the cavern he stayed in the turn, hoping to meet his pursuer coming around the other side—anything but nose-tip to nose-tip.

  A flash, a thump in his wing, and they were past each other.

  He found himself flying headlong toward the second hag-ridden dragon. The rider put a shimmering piece of metal to his shoulder and something whirled past his ear, turning tight circles as it cut the air—a crossbow bolt.

  The Copper dove for the surface, and so did his opponent. He rose to turn and the opposing dragon lashed out with a saa as they passed, opening a wound in his belly.

  He turned back south for the bridge.

  Now the third dragon descended, its rider leaning over and struggling with his weapon. The Copper made for the tunnel, but the second pursuer banked in front of him. The rider hurled some kind of apparatus of chain and steel balls but missed, thanks to the tight turn his mount was making in the narrow walls of the canyon.

  Ahead the Copper saw the first dragon shooting out of the mouth of the cave, the strapped-on leather chair hanging askew and reins loose and flying free in the breeze. He’d dismounted the rider!

  Now in the cave he saw the hag-rider sprawled on the floor, unconscious or dead. He flapped into the canyon, the darkness promising safety, but still one dragon followed.

  He didn’t have time to wonder what had happened to the third.

  The chasm descended sharply and he banked around a bend, and there ahead was the bridge.

  He loosed a bellowing war call: “Firemaidens, cry havoc!”

  He turned for the south side of the bridge and a crossbow bolt punched through his wing.

  Under the bridge and up, he saw two shapes hiding at the openings of the short tunnel through one of the rocky “teeth” on the new bridge. As the dragon trailing him closed they loosed their flame and spread it.

  The dragon closed its wings, and the rider crossed shield-elbowed in front of the Copper’s face. They passed through flame together, the oily, burning mess sliding off dragonscale but clinging to the rider’s exposed surfaces. The dragon flipped over, whether by orders, instinct, or accident, allowing the fire to fall off.

  Until a stalagmite clipped off its rider from the waist up as neatly as a blade.

  Now unguided, the dragon turned and fled, passing over the bridge this time.

  A Firemaid spread her wings to pursue.

  “No!” the Copper called, landing. “There’s another waiting out there.”

  Alert Firemaidens guarded each end of the under-construction bridge and the tunnel in the center. The Copper felt confident they could deal with the remaining rider, even if the dragons assisted. They didn’t seem like well-trained tunnel fighters, judging from their performance as soon as the walls closed in.

  “What’s your name?” he asked his rescuer.

  “Asleea, your honor.”

  “Asleea, there’s a rider down out there. If he’s still alive, bring him back that way. If he’s not, bring his body and whatever dropped weaponry you find. I’ll fly above, close to the cavern ceiling, and keep watch. If they come down on you, turn tail and fly like the wind. Perhaps I can surprise them.”

  As it turned out, they retrieved the corpse without incident. Perhaps, having lost two riders, the remaining one flew back to wherever they came from to report.

  He was a squatty sort of man, tanned and dark-haired, very different from the thin, darker, well-formed men of Anaea. His beard was almost as full as a dwarf’s, and he had several layers of clothing on to protect him from the cold.

  Rayg was most interested in the crossbow quarrels he found in a leather case strapped on the man’s thigh. They were wooden, with nickel-silver tips, and two thin glass tubes to either side just behind the arrowhead containing a clear liquid.

  “I’m guessing that’s poison,” Rayg said.

  He carefully emptied the glass tubes on the ground, rinsed out the glass, then put them back in the sides of the quarrel. He wrapped his hand in a bit of leather and drove the quarrel into the dirt.

  “Fascinating,” he said, extracting the point.

  “Yes?”

  “When the head strikes it slides down the shaft, just the width of my thumb. But it’s enough to shatter the glass, putting both vials into the wound.”

  The Copper thought back to the fight over Anaea. “I saw FeLissarath pass over one. He died within a few seconds. I thought an arrow found one of his hearts, but it could have been one of these.”

  “A few seconds, you say? That’s a deadly toxin, to bring down a dragon so fast.”

  “Perhaps it found a heart after all.”

  “You should take that into consideration when fighting these dragon-riders. The quarrels are light; I suppose every bit of weight counts when you’re loading a dragon. Unless they were fired from a very close range, they probably wouldn’t go through scale without a lucky shot.”

  “‘Close’ and ‘probably’ are not exact enough that I wish to bet my life on it. I’m exhausted. I need a meal. Oh, and find one of my bats. I’ll give him a nip of blood if it
would hurry him down the tunnel in search of the Drakwatch.”

  The Copper sent messenger bats in both directions on the western road looking for Drakwatch patrols, bearing a request to hurry to Anaea and assist the Upholder’s mate and the Firemaid at the cave mouth.

  Upholder’s mate. His mate. Sickly little Halaflora. So much depended on a cripple and a weakling. Whatever Spirit had put into dragons’ nature the desire to contest every mouthful, with the weakest dying off, must be having a good, ethereal laugh at that.

  Rayg found one other item on the dragon-rider and brought it to him before one of the Firemaids ate it. It was an odd little pendant on a thin chain, a tiny figure of a man standing with his arms and legs outstretched within a circle.

  “I wonder what that could mean?”

  “Man’s first destiny,” Rayg said.

  “You know that symbol? Where does it come from?”

  “The barbarians in the far north. I’m…familiar with them. They’ve got a few prophets and shamans who say life is like a great game between gods of each of the races, and we’re all just pieces dropped into the world and taken up again when we fall to an opponent’s piece.”

  “That’s a grim way to think about life.”

  “The ones who wear this believe man is destined to rule the earth—worlds, Upper and Lower, as dragons think of it. Man will eventually remove all the blighters, the elves, the dwarves—”

  “Dragons too?”

  “They don’t speak of it much, but I believe it’s implicit in their philosophy.”

  “You get better with the dragon tongue every day, Rayg. You’re an intelligent fellow. I’m glad you aren’t wearing one of those.”

  “I was once,” he said. “Now I’m just here to finish a bridge.”

  After getting landmarks from the Firemaid, the Copper scouted the mouth of the cavern as the sun set the next day. He took a short, circular flight. There was no sign of his pursuers—or pursuer, rather. It was hard to think of dragons as little more than brute service animals; he still couldn’t quite get his mind around the idea.

  Satisfied, he hurried west at the best speed he could manage. Luckily the wind here blew hard out of the northeast, a direction he vaguely knew to hold the Inland Ocean.

  He managed to take down the smelliest, hairiest herbivore on four legs he’d ever encountered and, using the tiny gob of flame that was, as ever, all he could ignite, set fire to some brush to cook its skin off. Even the smoky scent didn’t help the taste.

  He saw the plateau a long way off, arriving in the late afternoon. It was an unusual sort of mountain range; all the peaks were so close to one another in height that from a distance they appeared identical. Only once you came closer did you see the variety in formations.

  The plateau over the Lavadome was smaller, lower, and rounder than that of Anaea. Instead of being lush and green, it steamed and smoked.

  He found one of the shafts the griffaran used and circled down toward it.

  Two griffaran flapped up to challenge him, but recognized him, he supposed, by his bad limb.

  “Good wind, egg saver!” one said, floating beside him effortlessly. The mixture of lizard and bird looked a little less strange aloft, thanks to its colorful wings.

  “I’m on urgent business. I must use one of your shafts, and I can’t be delayed. One of you, fly ahead and tell the Tyr I must see him as soon as I land.”

  “Follow, then.”

  The griffaran had to wait several times for him to catch up. He made the rather terrifying drop through the shaft—plummeting with wings folded into a shadowy gap was a bit of exhilaration he could do without—but it wasn’t a far fall, and his eyes adjusted instantly to the tall cavern of the water ring.

  He paused for water and to catch his breath, then went aloft again for the last, mercifully short leg to the Imperial Resort.

  He made for the top of Black Rock and the griffaran swooped in front of him.

  “Yark! No. No landings on Gardens. Through kitchens now fastest.”

  Next, he supposed, SiDrakkon would forbid flying in the Lavadome, or bathing in the river. The orange streams of lava, once so bright and beautiful against the otherworldly crystalline surface of the dome, seemed to have picked up on SiDrakkon’s dour moods and now looked gloomy to him. Or maybe his eyes hadn’t fully converted over to tunnel-sight yet.

  He made for the red glow and smoke of the kitchens, and landed next to a pile of dead swine.

  Thralls scattered.

  He hurried past boiling vats and frying platters, smelling the sweat of the nearly naked kitchen workers. He knew the rest of the way to the Tyr’s door.

  NoSohoth, meeting him on the stairs, started babbling about Skotl and Wyrr, of course. “There’s been a duel on almost every hill. The mating between SuUpshauant and Deresa—broke, now, and the Skotl blame the Wyrr, and the Wyrr blame the Skotl side. Hardly a moon goes by where we don’t lose a dragon. Now there’s a Wyrr Drakwatch and a Skotl, and they spend their whole time brawling with each other. CuTarin hill and the north side have threatened to burn each other’s herds—”

  “This is war news, man.”

  “War? The empire is cracking. After cracks, pieces crumble off. Then collapse. If the Kayai Uphold declares independence—”

  “Flames burn in Anaea as we speak.”

  “Then you must speak to the Tyr. Except he’s in his Gardens. He won’t emerge until this evening, when the light fails.”

  “I know my way to the Gardens.”

  Though he knew the way, a wide-bodied Skotl, fully twice his weight, blocked the tunnel up to the courtyard and the gardens.

  “Tyr level,” the small mountain of scale grunted.

  “Please, Skotl, let him pass,” NoSohoth said. “It’s war news.”

  “I have my order,” the Skotl said.

  Not smart enough to remember more than one, NoSohoth mind-spoke to him. The Copper thought it a rare intimacy.

  “I’m mated to the sister of his mate. He can see me.”

  The Skotl’s eyes narrowed as he tried to work out the family dynamics.

  “You see Imfamnia, then,” the Skotl said.

  “Oh, very well.”

  NoSohoth led him, the Copper nudging him along whenever he tried to stop and talk politics. They found Imfamnia in Tighlia’s old quarters. She’d mounted colored quartz and sheer fabrics in her balconies and galleries, bathing the room in a hideous watery color trying to be green.

  “Tighlia lives with the Anklenes now,” NoSohoth said. “She fell into a rage and started burning the silks and smashing Imfamnia’s glasswork with her tail.”

  They found Imfamnia with SiMevolant. A thrall was painting her griff, and another slave was mixing colors for the one with the brush.

  “No, dull as passwater,” SiMevolant said as she lowered her griff and turned her head this way and that. “Would you consider having gemstones embedded?”

  “But then my griff wouldn’t close up properly.”

  “That may become the new fashion, then. Remember, as queen of the Lavadome you set the style.”

  Tyr’s mate was always title enough for Tighlia, NoSohoth thought.

  “Mate-sister,” the Copper said, breaking in on the decorating. “I must see the Tyr at once.”

  “NoSohoth, I thought there were orders about guests without invitations,” SiMevolant said.

  The Copper came forward, the quartz-filtered light making the whole interview dreamlike. “Anaea has been attacked. By men flying on dragons.”

  “Ewwww. That must look a fright,” SiMevolant said. “Skin tones.”

  Mother had warned him that he would have to overcome. But there were few foes as implacable as stupidity.

  “Quiet, love,” Imfamnia said. “You’ll find my mate in his Gardens.” She walked over to curtains dividing this chamber from another, opened them, and then stuck her head outside and said a few words.

  “Not you, NoSohoth,” she said as the Copper moved toward t
he gardens. “Family only.”

  The Copper passed out under two silver-clawed griffaran perched high to keep watch over the Tyr’s privacy. He saw SiDrakkon in one of the warm pools.

  One of his human females washed him behind the crest by sitting astride him, a blanket-sized piece of soft leather polishing Tyr SiDrakkon’s scale, grinding her body back and forth. The rest of his human females bathed, or lounged, or ate, or anointed one another with oils taken from silver vials.

  A muscular blighter brought forward a huge, polished turtleshell of wine. He grunted as he set it down.

  “Idiot!” SiDrakkon roared. He knocked the vessel over. “Silver! I won’t drink out of anything that isn’t silver.”

  The blighter scurried away in the direction of the banquet entrance.

  “The purity of silver! I require purity!”

  The Copper approached and bowed. A few of the women covered themselves and cleared the way between the dragons.

  SiDrakkon glared at him. “Everything around me is tainted and corrupt!”

  The Copper didn’t know whether it would be more dangerous to agree or disagree. One of the griffaran fluffed up his feathers and shifted his stance, leaning forward a little.

  “Why am I being disturbed, RuGaard?”

  “Bad news from Anaea. We’ve been attacked. Dragons, hag-ridden by men. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. They control them somehow.”

  Blighters extracted big river stones from his bath and disappeared as three more emerged and dropped the oven-hot stones in. “You can stop that now,” SiDrakkon said to the blighters. “I’m climbing out.”

  He lowered his head so the females could dry his ears and griff. “I’ve heard these odd fables before, RuGaard. Men riding dragons come and take away young male dragons and insert logs into their—”

  “No, they came with flame. They dueled and killed the FeLissaraths.”

  “My Upholder? Murdered?”

  “They fell in battle. The riders use poisoned quarrels fired from crossbows.”

  “War, eh?” He climbed out of the steaming pool, and water cascaded off his scales into the tiles. It ran in channels down toward the lower Gardens. “War may shake the Lavadome out of the madness that seems to have crept in. I’ll call for dragons and appoint a grand commander for the Drakwatch. Revive the title of aerial host commander. Perhaps I’ll assume the responsibilities myself.”