by E. E. Knight
She tried to get more about its history out of the blighters, but to them it was only “bigger-than-big magic.”
“The old tower star fell to earth. From it came taming of fire to make wheel and blade and bowstring, which raised the Umazeh to glory,” Vank, her blighter interlocutor, said. He’d found a bit of old cloth, a weave of red and gold, and tied it about his head and neck to show his status. “Then Anklamere stole it from us and used it to enslave the charioteers. He placed it high in his tower and let it glow until it rivaled the green wanderer in the heavens.”
His conversation left her bored and impatient, missing Rainfall’s nimble discourse or Ragwrist’s jokes and laments about his state of poverty.
Vank tried to give her a servant to clean her scale and teeth, a bow-legged old blighter named Harf, an escaped Ghioz slave. He claimed he’d been a body-servant to dragons in the mountains off beyond the plains of Bant. Hundreds of dragons, a powerful empire—he was quite the most extraordinary liar Wistala had ever met. She’d flown all down the spine of mountains running west of the Inland Ocean chasing rumors that turned out to be founded on some bird-creatures.
Of course, to a blighter any big flying creature might seem a dragon. Still, all the detail he’d worked out, with tunnels and a whole hidden society of dragons dug in like rabbits in a warren inside a mountain. Perhaps he’d found that his stories enhanced his prestige among the others.
Wistala had learned long ago to clean her own scale and suck up and spit out river-sand to scrub her teeth. But she did let Harf set up bed and tenting on her doorstep, with orders to keep blighters from defiling any more texts.
An entourage of tribal elders visited her, paying obeisance to the crystal and asking what she’d seen on her hunting flights. They seemed most worried about the river to the west, their informal border with a province of the Ghioz. The Ghioz had crossed the river and were “digging holes” in some of the Pine Hills, a green serration on the horizon visible from the mouth of the great cave-ruin.
Ghioz riders had even explored some of the foothills of the blighter mountain range. They’d been chased off with a hail of flung spears and arrows and slingstones, but the Fireblades who’d seen action in the old Southling war under AuRon feared they’d be back.
A chastened enemy might return. A one-eyed Fireblade insisted that not even the ghosts of destroyed enemies ever troubled him again.
Wistala could understand their worry. She’d grown up in the human lands of the old Hypatian Empire. The Ghioz on the other side of the mountains had grown from minor trading partner on the Sunstruck Sea to rival. Geography, a few good thanes in the mountain passes, and the traditional friendship of elves and dwarves in their own lands who’d shared in Hypatia’s ancient glories kept their terrible queen on her side of the mountains.
But, still, her wondering turned to worry. Wistala supposed that the choice cuts of meat and tasty organmeat sausages were inducements to stay. They even presented her with bits of old chain and nail and cooking iron along with raw gold and silver ores, gritty but satisfying in the slime that came to her mouth to aid it in its downward slide. NooMoahk’s tribute, the blighters styled it.
She’d seen one war; one war was enough for her temperament. But the idea of all these irreplaceable old books being torn up and used to start campfires or finish a bowel evacuation pained her. She could almost hear Rainfall weeping when she thought of its destruction by ignorant blighters or a heedless invading army.
That night, she fell asleep among them, counting old scrolls the way some dragons counted tasty, jumping sheep.
A deputation of the Fireblades with Vank at its head roused her the next morning with a snarling drum that made her think of desert snakes and their rattle-tails. Irritated, she was tempted to knock the whole lot of them down with her tail.
“Greenscale goddess,” Vank said, as she smacked her lips to bring moisture to her dry mouth. “The Ghioz have crossed the river. They cut down trees for a stockade in our western woods, rich with wild boar and redmonkey.”
She wasn’t surprised that he named her two favorite blighter preparations. Vank was full of himself, not stupid. He’d acquired a new belt of gold and silver rings.
“I hope you don’t want me to fight them.”
“No, keeper, no. Horblikklak, the Fireblades’ Marchchief, intends only to make a show of force and ask them to talk.”
Wistala dredged her memory. The Fireblades had a three-headed leadership. Their Marchchief saw to the day-to-day organization and training of the warriors. The Battlechief, a bent oldster who used a captured battle-standard for a staff, would direct them in fighting. The Youngchief picked likely male blighters, saw to their supply, and learned from the other two. It was an old system from the ancient blighter glory, when a Battlechief might command tens of thousands represented as bits of skulls on three-dimensional maps in boxes of dried sugared sand instead of the few hundreds squatting in their storied ruins.
Horblikklak, whose name meant “Mountain Lightning” in the blighter tongue, stepped forward, quick and flashy as a warty mountain toad—which is to say not at all.
“Tell the dragon—” he began.
“I’ve improved my understanding of your tongue,” Wistala said. The language had come fast, as though she’d learned it in the egg. “You may speak to me directly.”
Some of the blighters made coughing sounds at her pronunciation, but she’d made herself understood.
“We talk to Stone-men, to Ghioz,” Horblikklak said. “You fly in distance, watching. When we signal with banner, you fly to us and circle, so they see we speak truth about presence of dragon.”
“Will you speak truth about willingness of the dragon to go into battle?”
“Some truths best left unsaid, mayhap,” Vank said, digging in his oily ear as he examined her cavern’s ceiling.
“Just don’t start a fight and expect me to rescue you. I’ve no quarrel with these men.”
Vank made a digging motion with one long arm, but the gesture was lost on Wistala. “The sight of a dragon will make them wary. The runaway, Harf, said the Ghioz fear dragons. Dragons knock down stone cities.”
Scales and tales! Evidently the blighters here liked a good liar. Well, she could do with a little exercise. For eye as well as wing, she’d been reading too much.
“I agree. Show me the signal and so on.”
It took a few days to set up the meeting with the Ghioz, then a spring storm delayed it still further. The two sides arranged for it to be held at an old rockpile that the blighters claimed was a quarry from Krag’s old glory. The Ghioz insisted it was an old stoneworks of theirs, and even dug up old tools bearing Ghioz marks that old Horblikklak thought suspiciously free of rust and rot.
Vank told her the history of meetings with the Ghioz. Their first meeting generations ago had been deep in the woods beyond the great river that, if her maps were correct, flowed all the way to Hypatia and the Inland Ocean. In those days the woods were the halfway point between the blighters and the Ghioz. At that time they arranged to take lumber from the forests across the river. After a bloody incident between human woodsmen and blighter hunters, they held a second peace council on the “Ghioz” riverbank, the new border, two generations ago. The next one after that was on the blighter side, once the Ghioz claimed rights to use the river to float their lumber down to their province on the east side of the Red Mountains. When that had happened, most of the Fireblades were running naked chasing beetles. Now it seemed the Ghioz claimed a vast swath of territory on this side of the river, and the new “halfway” point was practically on the doorstep of Great Krag.
She saw the Fireblades’ banner, a tall wooden construct that reminded her of a small boatmast. It took four blighters to carry it from base point to base point, plus two more to roll the heavy wheel base it rested in when traveling. Assorted skulls, broken shields and sword hilts, black dragonscale etched with chalky pictographs, and long strings of vertebrae like Rainfall�
��s old Winter Solstice decorations of whitebell blossoms rattled against each other or chimed in the wind. It had lines to the top where the blighters could run up signal flags for those too far away to hear orders. Vank pointed out a bronzed bit of dragonclaw, some sheath AuRon must have shed and given to them, when they told the story (again!) of their great victory when they burned the war machines in the southern jungles.
Wistala’s throat tightened as she touched the bronzed memento of her brother.
Horblikklak showed her how they would rock the banner back and forth like a tree in a heavy wind when they wanted her to fly up and circle.
Wistala couldn’t resist a predawn flight over the Ghioz encampment the day of the meeting. She knew enough Ghioz history to wonder if the Fireblades weren’t walking into some kind of trap. The Ghioz stockade was impressive, sensibly sited against a looping, swampy stream on a low rise. She drifted on the fresh spring breeze as she passed over the camp, not daring to flap, and smelled coal-smoke. Even at night there was the sound of wood being chopped and hammers at work. The Ghioz had cut down trees and fitted the trunks with sharpened stakes and set up war machines—nothing like the juggernauts of the dwarves, of course, but she suspected they were lethal enough. And there was fresh earth everywhere; they’d dug pits or trenches to confound a blighter charge.
The Ghioz fought like dwarves, it seemed.
She returned to the Fireblade camp and fortified herself with a blood pudding the blighters made for her and some crisped bits of hide from the evening’s feast. They had a pile of bones and joints, but if she had to spend much time aloft a bellyful of rattling offal wouldn’t be a welcome companion.
“If you have to vent something on an enemy, better fire than what comes out the other end,” Mother used to say.
She climbed a pile of rocks with a good view of the land between the Fireblade camp and the meeting site half a horizon away. Treetops bubbled across the valley leading to the distant ridge of the Ghioz camp. The old quarry made a chalky scar in the greenery.
She settled down for a one-eye-open nap. She’d perfected the art in her travels across the endless expanses of the east. Hunting horns, faint in the distance as the birdcalls from the adjoining woods, indicated that the two sides were approaching each other. Then relay signalmen took up the call, long sonorous swan-honks relaying the news of a peaceful meeting.
With that, she launched herself aloft.
Good thing she hadn’t eaten all those joints. Her stomach writhed in anxiety. She hoped the blighters wouldn’t get riled up and start a battle in the expectation that she would come to their aid. Or suppose the Ghioz decided to launch a quick strike—according to the Fireblades they had some tough riders called the Red Guard who patrolled their eastern borders.
What kind of dragon was she, to dread battle so? She’d once been fierce enough in avenging her family’s destruction, dared the dwarves to fire their weighted harpoons at her. Now her griff twitched at the thought of a few arrows flying in a far-off forest.
Well, the appearance of bravery and bravery itself were identical to all but one, and she’d never had difficulty keeping secrets.
She didn’t mind surveying the forest. The trees looked tall, straight, and sturdy on this well-watered ground west of the mountains. She dipped and looked down tumbling streambeds choked into pools like blue jewels on a string by beaver dams. The blighters, or lightning in a dry season, had burned open meadows in between stands of older timber, and these were thick with ground birds and game on hoof. Herds of deer hurried, a brown-backed flood, for tight-laced branches as she passed over. She smelled sweet berries and saw the muddy smears of wild pigs tossing ground cover for nuts and sweet roots.
No wonder the blighters wanted the forest.
She promised herself a pig hunt in these woods before too many days passed. She’d probably have to examine the game-trails closely and then find a place to lie in wait, making use of wind and dew to hide her scent. Pigs weren’t easy to catch, but their ample, tasty flesh more than made up for the effort.
More blighter horns!
She flapped higher, alarmed that they’d joined battle, but the encounter seemed to be ending peacefully. The Fireblades sang as they marched away from the meeting place, shaking their standards until the battle-banners seemed like dancing giants accompanying them on the march.
The Fireblade mass exploded into various shades of green.
“As best as best can be,” Vank said, when she alighted to hear the news. “We told them to get back on their side of the river, or there would be bloodshed and unceasing war so long as man dared walk in our woods.”
“That’s the way to treat men,” a warrior interrupted, thumping fist against his small round shield, edged with swordcatchers. “Like dogs! Fierce enough until they meet a fight. Then they tuck tail and scuttle. Scuttle!”
“Aye!” another barked.
“And?” Wistala asked, ignoring the byplay.
Vank managed to dance without moving his feet, waving his arms first one way, then the other. “They agreed to withdraw. True! Their prospectors, who thought they found gold, were mistaken in any case. ‘Profitless mine,’ they said.” Vank had to use Parl to quote them accurately. “No profit! No profit! Ghioz never move but for profit. The men will be gone. They promised to withdraw their huntsmen and break camp. Tonight!”
Only Horblikklak seemed downcast.
“Too easy!” he grunted, as he sent out more flank-guards, pointing and swatting his warriors into position. “Too many smiles. Too much promised.”
“I see,” Wistala said, opening her wings. Maybe she should take one more flight around the Fireblades as they entered the thickest part of the forest.
“One more!” Horblikklak interrupted. “Too big a pile of rock in thick-axled wagon, covered by tarp and guarded, in the center of camp. ‘Profitless mine,’ my dung!”
Chapter 3
“Tyr, you have won another victory,” the messenger from the Drakwatch reported, puffing the whole length of his sides. The stretched skin against his sides where his wings would soon emerge was swollen and cracked.
The Copper dragon, Tyr of the Lavadome RuGaard, Imperator of the Dragonfumes of the Lower World, Courses Wet and Dry, Sunned and Cavenighted, the Three Lines, Seven Hills, Grand Guardian of Egg and Hatchling, Scale and Song, Fiery Heritage and Winged Future, as that gassy firebladder NoSohoth liked to style him, reclined on a small projection overlooking the old sand-floored dueling arena. He dismissed two blighter thralls who’d been polishing his teeth.
The projection, once used to attach the ropes and pulleys thralls needed to extract a deceased loser from a duel—a duel in theory could be stopped at any time, but some dragons made it a point of honor to die rather than cry vanquished—was still being rendered fit for a Tyr. Thrall artisans, under direction from NoSohoth, had smoothed and saddled the stone and were slowly filling in etchwork of the pleasing laudi-like designs commemorating his victories in Bant and Anaea, and against the Dragonblade.
The Copper preferred to hold court in the old dueling pit. He’d killed the Dragonblade here, but happier was the memory of the dragons roaring in triumph as his hag-riders fell. The chamber yawned big enough to admit many dozens of dragons, and it meant less of a climb to the gardens at the top of Imperial Rock for dragons, and yes, even the occasional free thrall, who wished an audience.
He’d outlawed dueling to settle differences, which was just a way for dragons to determine which one was rich enough to hire the best Skotl duelist. Poor dragons had to do their own fighting, and more often than not they died.
At his hatching the Copper had come off worse in duel. His maimed left sii still gave him an awkward gait and an uneven frame owing to the overdeveloped shoulder of his right.
Now dragons were supposed to take their differences to the leading dragons of the Seven Hills. And if they couldn’t work it out between each other, they came to him and pleaded. It made for many a wearying day hearing
them out and deciding which to favor or how to divide guilt.
Dueling still took place on the quiet, of course, beyond the river ring around the Lavadome, but he made sure his mate didn’t invite reputed duelists to any of the feasts atop Imperial Rock.
In compromise to the dignity of his rank, he had two golden perches added, flanking his saddle-shaped rock. Brightly colored griffaran with well-preened feathers and sharpened talon-extenders stared owlishly down on the sandpit. Though smaller than the dragons, they were quicker, with beaks strong enough to break a dragon’s neck and talons that ripped through scale. Griffaran could fly in spaces where heavy, big-winged dragons couldn’t hope to launch, like the river tunnels that allowed quick travel in the Lower World, and up through the mountainside cracks near the Lavadome.
The Copper gave a pleasant nod to the Drakwatch courier.
“I won?” the Copper asked. “I’ve conquered precious little this morning beyond from my tortoiseshell of hot kern.”
That brought a few polite chuckles from senior members of the three lines who idled about the sandpit. Some, like the rather dull red CuBellereth, were simply busyhaunches who liked to drop anecdotes about the Imperial Court at their home hills. Others, the blue CoTathanagar, for instance, engaged in office seeking, constantly putting forward relations for assignment.
Luckily dragons he respected and trusted also lounged nearby. Word had spread that good news was on its way. NoSohoth saw to it that messengers bearing good news trumpeted it to an audience. Bad news crept up the thrall passages to the anteroom off his sleeping-chamber.
The Copper burped as he listened to the messenger’s report. His kern wasn’t sitting right. He’d had nothing since last night but a little kern in blood pudding. The Copper wasn’t fond of the taste of the stuff, but dragons who lived long underground benefited from the grain. Usually it aided the digestion—there wasn’t a bullock so tough and stringy that it didn’t settle better when followed by a nice hot gruel of kern. Odd.
