by E. E. Knight
“I’m sorry. It grieves me to see the Delvings as they are now.”
“That was a good year, when Djer landed at Wallander with you. You brought us luck before, maybe you will again.”
“But too late for Djer, it seems.”
This last came as AuRon spied the burial cave, set well away from the rest of the Delvings. Thankfully only two lanterns lit the place, hiding most of the agony in shadow. Moaning dwarves lay under blankets stretched above, to shield them from the sun. Flies buzzed everywhere, thick enough on the dead to give the bodies a blue-green carpet. Two hollow-eyed dwarves wandered among the dying, giving water in response to weak pleas but deaf to all other requests. The charnel house smell of burning flesh filled AuRon’s nostrils from a fire pit where wisps of blue-black smoke despoiled the clear glint of the stars above.
The buzzing of the flies made AuRon narrow his eyes and fold his ears.
“Skin of the Golden Tree, it’s worse than ever,” Altran said. “They must have brought up the batch from the last attack. They had Djer in the cave when I last saw him.”
Altran picked among the bodies, dead and near-dead.
“Have we surrendered?” one of the attendants said in a tone that marked him as one who didn’t care either way.
“No, this is a friend. An old friend. Where’s Djer?”
“Djer who?”
“The Partner. Djer Highboots. Come, dwarf, pull your helm on straight.”
AuRon stepped carefully over the prostrate dwarves, and put his head into the shadow of the cave. He found Djer, not by smell, not by sight, but by the cloak hung to separate him from the other dying dwarves. A blazoning of a dragon, akin to the one on the ring, marked the cloak and what was left of the vest on the wheezing body.
Altran removed his hat and bent next to the dwarf. AuRon forced himself to look at what remained of his old friend. Djer’s skin was blackened and flaked like that of a spit-roasted pig. His eyes were withered, lifeless things in horribly empty sockets streaming pus down his nose and cheeks, and his lips burned back to reveal teeth belonging to a corpse.
Yet he still breathed.
“Djer, the dragon AuRon is here. He would speak with you.”
“Why is he not . . . bandaged?” AuRon growled, having trouble finding his words. “By . . . by . . . by the Sun and Stars, I’ll have someone’s skin for this.”
The attendant shrank away in fear, but Altran held up a hand.
“Ach ...’ andages ... no . . . hurts . . . worse . . . AuRon,” Djer wheezed. “Just cool air.”
“Djer, do you know me?”
“AuRon ... AuRon. I ’ish I could see. Ears only ’ing working . . . ha’ you co’ wi t’ dragons?”
“Against them. I’ve come against them, my friend.”
At this the dwarves, even the attendants, lifted their chins and looked at AuRon.
“How did this happen?” AuRon finally said. He’d take Djer’s dwarsaw and wrap it around this Wyrmmaster’s neck. Then pull . . . slowly.
Djer tried to talk, but began to cough, in weak, pained gasps.
Altran spoke up. “He was at the front doors. The second attack. We hadn’t rigged the ballistas at the balconies yet. We had to lure the dragons in close, so we’d have a chance with the crossbows. Djer, myself, and six dwarves, may they rest undisturbed, sheltered under some rocks near the door. The dragons had to land to get at us. We got one. Another landed, and Djer tried to get everyone inside the doors. Muftor fell, and Djer went back for him. They both got caught in the open by another’s fire. Djer got Muftor in all right, but he was a corpse by the time the doors were shut. We claimed our vengeance. The dragon that burned Muftor and Djer, the crossbow dwarves got him, too, when he took off again.”
“AuRon,” Djer said, his coughing dying away.
“Yes?”
“I tuk ’lame inta lungs. It ’urts. E’ryt’ing ’urts.”
“Can they do anything for him?” AuRon said, turning on the dwarves.
“What medicine we have goes to those that will live,” Altran said.
“End it . . . AuRon ... as my ’riend,” Djer said.
AuRon didn’t look around for agreement or assent. He stabbed down with his neck. His snout smashed into Djer’s head, crushing his skull as quickly as if Altran had brought a sledgehammer upon it. The wet crash echoed off the walls, and even the dying startled.
It was not hard to do. The burnt, suppurating thing at the mouth of the cave was not Djer, but a corpse still tormenting the remains of consciousness within for a few more days. Djer had died at the door of the Delvings as he had lived, risking himself to help a friend.
Something cold, like a block of swallowed ice, rested in AuRon’s stomach. It hurt.
He smelled a familiar scent from Djer’s body and marked a tobacco pouch at his waist. He bit it away from Djer’s belt.
The attendants wouldn’t come near the body until AuRon took his blood-and-brain-smeared snout out of their sight. AuRon turned away and sat up so he could wash himself. It felt good to breathe the clean air away from the dying.
Altran approached, wet eyes glistening in the moonlight, and cleared his throat. AuRon saw the dwarves dragging Djer’s body to the fire pit.
“Wait!” AuRon growled. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“No time to bury the dead,” one of the attendants said.
“What do you do with your dead at other times?”
“As a Partner, Djer would rest in the Hallowhall,” Altran said. “Others have cairns in the mountainside. It’s too dangerous for many to be out piling stones.”
“Why should those who give their lives defending the Delvings be accorded less honor than those who die in their beds? Even blighters have more ceremony for their fallen than this.”
The dwarves looked at each other unhappily. AuRon thrashed his tail. “There’s not a dwarf here but deserves to be laid out in the Hallowhall. Does this cave connect to the Delvings?”
“Yes, by a narrow passage. No dragon your size would get through,” one of the attendants said.
“I don’t want to get through. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll carry these dwarves, living and dead, into the Hallowhall and arrange them as you would a Partner.”
“After all this, we’re to take orders from a dragon?” the other attendant said, taking up his water pail again. “Bah!”
“None of that, you! He has the dead Partner’s signet-ring,” Altran said, his voice loud and harsh. “He’s served the Chartered Company. I’m no lawdrafter, by the Golden Tree’s roots, but I’d say he has authority to give orders to bed attendants. Unless another Partner says otherwise. So do it, with my help and what’s left of Djer’s staff, or I’ll have you expelled. You wouldn’t want that. The wilds are not a good place for a dwarf these days with all these murderous men about.”
The dwarf’s fury faded as quickly as it came on. He turned to AuRon. “Dwarves are quick to quarrel when events turn against them.”
“Not just dwarves,” AuRon said. “I can do nothing more for Djer. Will you see that he takes his rightful place among your dead?”
“I’ll attend to it. I expect it won’t be too long before I see him again in the spirit-world. Even the Delvings can’t be held forever against dragons. We hear of hosts of men coming out of the north.”
“There may be blighters descending the river before winter, though the men of Dairuss will fight them as long as they can.”
“Then all is lost.”
“Don’t despair. That does half your enemy’s job for him,” AuRon said. He removed the ring from the dwarsaw chain, working the heavy clasp with his sii. He held out the ring to Altran. “I know Partnerships cannot be inherited, but whatever dwarves and interests in the Company Djer possessed are now in your hands.”
“They were considerable. Doesn’t seem it matters now.”
AuRon put the dwarsaw in Djer’s tobacco pouch and tucked it into his ear. “I must hurry on my way. Don’t le
t your fellow dwarves scatter. You have friends yet, east with the Dairuss, south with the elves scattered in the forests, and west in Hypat.”
“What about north? That is where the true danger rests.”
“Leave that to me.”
AuRon backed away from the wounded dwarves and saw that the attendants were fashioning litters to carry them back into the Delvings. He would come back one day, and visit Djer’s resting place.
“Altran, one more thing. Djer didn’t die for nothing. He won’t lie in his grave unavenged.”
Chapter 22
The old maps of the Hypatian cartographers AuRon had lingered over showed the Isle of Ice to be not one isle, but many. Like a great tree that had thrown off hundreds of saplings, the island was surrounded by small rocky islets. It was a daring sailing master who took his boat to the largest isle in the best of weather. When the winds of the equinoxes blew, attempting it meant a storm-tossed suicide.
Weather not only guarded the isle, but conspired to hide it, as well. The currents of the inland ocean moved as the hands on a dwarvish clock, bringing warm air up from the sunny southwest before changing direction at the archipelago to run down the barbarian coast toward Hypat. As the air passed over the cooler waters, mists formed and shrouded the topography in belts of fog, and atop that, a cloud belt. It was this last that AuRon tiredly cursed as he drifted in the sky.
The Bowing Dragon stood higher in the sky than he had ever seen, and were it not for him and the polar star, AuRon would have despaired. But the science of Hypat had mapped the stars as well as the coast, and their positions told him he was in the right latitudes to find the isle.
He needed rest. He had been flying for three days, fighting a cold north wind. Autumn, the most dilatory of the seasons, was already on her way in the north of the Inland Ocean.
A faint light flashed in the clouds far ahead, like reddish lightning, only the light grew and faded in the time it took for AuRon to inhale and exhale, rather than in the eyeblink of a storm’s burst. AuRon forgot his fatigue and drifted. He counted twenty breaths, and it happened again, and he angled himself to make for the light. When it happened a third time, leaving an echo of itself on his sensitive eyes in the same place it had flashed before, he knew it was not a weather phenomenon, but something happening at a fixed point below.
His wings rose and fell with new energy brought on by hope. AuRon descended into the clouds, following the regular pulses of light. The air currents changed; he felt the loom of the land underneath, though he could not see it.
He broke out of the clouds, over land as far as he could see in the dim light. A flame, a great jet of burning gas, lit up a cratered mountaintop beneath him. It reflected from ice frozen into the rocky bowl. The fireball rose and dispersed into faint purple flame before dying out entirely. AuRon drifted, waiting for the next expulsion. It came as expected, with a whistling roar. Its burst gave shape to the land beneath, a vista of crags and ice. AuRon could neither hear nor smell the sea; he must have been flying over the island almost since he first saw the flames through the clouds.
AuRon dipped his wings and turned for the nearest mountainside out of the wind. He landed at a crag just deep enough for it to be an easy climb to the bottom, drank a mouthful of water running into it from a melt on the mountainside, and fell into an exhausted sleep.
AuRon awoke to a cold, sunless dawn. The sky was a colorless overcast. Only the shading of gray varied as one patch or another began to drizzle rain. He climbed out of the crag and stretched and folded his wings a few times, feeling sore. There were rain puddles caught among the rocks everywhere. It must have poured while he slept.
The crater-topped mountain still whooshed out a fireball at the same rate as it had last night. In the muted light of day the explosion was subdued. AuRon looked around the valley.
He felt as if he were at the roof of the world, a land of jagged peaks and ice. The valley fell away to the south, opening up on flatter lands, but flinty ridges interwoven with seas of snow blocked the view in the other directions. AuRon leaped into the sky and circled the fireball-spewing crater.
Past the ridges the land became more hospitable. Moss gave way to pines and grass, which in turn fell into little meadows, forests, and lakes in the steep-sided valleys between the mountains. Glaciers like dirty walls hung between the mountain ranges, emptying into lakes and streams of white water rushing down the slopes. There were forests and long stretches of bush, depending on whether the trees could find footing. On the rolling hills at the feet of the mountains bighorn sheep and mountain goats moved in herds. There was no sign of human habitation.
AuRon flew south, to the widening in the valley. The craggy plateau gave way to steep fells coated in green. He spotted another mass of brown grazers beneath, and flew lower to take a look. A herd of some kind of cattle with a high ridge of muscle atop their forelegs had their noses buried in the mountain pasturage. They had shaggy faces and curved horns, tougher and wilder looking than the cattle AuRon had seen elsewhere. He saw a shepherd, marking the fact that the herdsman just scratched a dog and watched him fly overhead. Were the dragons on this island under orders not to hunt cattle?
There were glaciers everywhere between the mountain peaks, looking like white floods that had been halted by some magic as they poured out of the mountains. The base of every glacier was soggy, alive with birds poking amongst clumps of plantains and wild buckwheat. AuRon saw a few houses, thick-walled constructs with only a door under a thick roof alive with wildflowers and ivy.
A distant speck caught his eye, framed against the steely sky. It was a dragon. His kindred rose into the sky with lusty wingstrokes. AuRon changed his direction a little more eastward, catching a whiff of the sea.
He swung behind a rainsquall and came upon the castle. It was nothing much to look at, just a roofless tower atop an overhanging cliff, with a circle of buildings behind a wall at the base of the tower. Someone had used the tower to erect a wooden platform atop it, three ladders with intermediate platforms climbed up to the final level. A low wall, not even shoulder-height on a man, threw a wide loop over the lands on the grassy slope leading to the tower, where a herd of sheep grazed. A man stood up among them, a cloak tight around his shoulder and hood turned against the wind, bearing a silver-tipped bugle made out of one of the twisted horns of the cattle he had seen in the highlands.
Below the watchtower, a cave yawned in the cliffside. AuRon saw another dragon within, leather and steel clamped tight around its mouth. It had only recently uncased its wings; AuRon could still see scar-tissue among the scales on its back. Two more men, thick girdles holding tufted cloaks shut against the cold and furred boots on their feet, held the young dragon with ropes while another sat on its back. He tapped the dragon with a steel-hooked staff and pulled on reins looped through rings in the youngster’s ears. More men with cords threaded through holes punched in the dragon’s wing-edge pulled at the thin bones of its wing, raising and lowering the limb. The dragon’s tail hardly twitched when the man rapped it beneath the armpit in the delicate, unscaled flesh.
The work proceeded until one of the men noticed AuRon drifting outside the cavern. The cliff faced into the wind, creating an updraft that AuRon could ride, hardly flapping his wings. One of the men on the wing-ropes glanced at AuRon, then took a second look. He called to his fellows, and they stopped what they were doing to look at AuRon.
AuRon looked farther into the cave. It narrowed, but not by much. There was an older dragon in a tunnel branching off from the main tunnel. Men crawled across its back adjusting some kind of harness. The dragon looked to be offering advice to the men. It raised its head to look at AuRon, and its armored fans flicked out briefly.
Bold action was usually preferable to looking indecisive, so AuRon caught a favorable slant of wind and dropped into the cave. He didn’t even have to fold his wings to land.
The cave was even rougher than the ruins of Kraglad. The floor sloped, the walls were of uneven h
eight; no chimneys or chutes provided ventilation that AuRon could detect. It smelled of male dragons; a thick, sharp smell like lye permeated the air. The two other males in the cavern ignored AuRon, though AuRon twitched and shook as he passed, every muscle alive and ready to jump.
A warrior with an elaborately wrought girdle approached. Blue eyes peered out at AuRon from a tangle of hair and beard. It was hard to tell where the man’s eyebrows ended and his beard began.
“What brings you, high-flyer?” the man said, in glottal Parl. “Are you a messenger out of the East? I don’t know you.”
“I’m a stranger here,” AuRon admitted. “My business is my own. I’ve flown from a land where even the stars are strange. My name is NooShoahk, of the line of NooMoahk.”
“You’re a civilized dragon. You speak well.”
“I read and speak the four hominid tongues, and dialects besides. I’ve heard you need dragons who can fight, and flew far to join.”
“Join? Join? We’ve had men join, but never dragons.”
“A wise man knows that just because something hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”
“I leave wisdom to the Wyrmmaster. I’m but a servant of his Supremacy.”
“Wyrmmaster? I’ll obey a just lord as liege, but I’ll call no man my master.”
“He has a way with your kind. Wait here.” The man turned, muttered something to one of the men at the ropes, and moved off into the cavern until he disappeared into the shadows left by tallow dips set into the walls. The other men continued with their duties, watching AuRon out of their eye-corners and drooping lids. AuRon smelled bloody meat somewhere within the cave.
The older dragon, wearing a harness that reminded AuRon of the baskets he had seen men and blighters put on mules, approached. It had scales of muted red, like laterite. There were no challenging bellows, no display of armored fans. Its crest bore six goodly-size horns.
“You I not know,” it said, golden eyes blinking at him in confusion. “You fly with men other side mountains?” Its speech was harder to interpret than the hairy man’s Parl.
