by E. E. Knight
That night dreams of Father’s death, bloody-mouthed dogs hanging at his sides, brought her out of her slumbers more nervous and exhausted than she’d been when she settled down.
She decided to leave. While hunting was good and the blighters had been making necklaces of brass rings for her to eat—new, hardier scales were coming in to replace the travel-thinned coat—eating water buffalo and forest deer wasn’t going to help her find her brother.
The library needed sorting. A few of the oldest and most interesting volumes could be brought to the great Hypatian library at Thallia, proof of the odd heritage of the blighters of these mountains. Then others could travel with trade goods for the rest. She suspected the blighters would part with their paper and skins and tablets easily enough. And those strange gems, so like the ones that Yari-Tab had showed her in the ruins of Tumbledown what felt like an age ago—they kept the collection dry and free of dust. She would try to sneak off with just one and see if it still worked after being removed from its post in the living rock.
I will leave! she silently told the crystal, as she counted the books she’d selected.
Her imagination said it answered back.
She yawned, and when she turned again to the samples she’d selected from the library, the volumes had vanished!
Sniffing for enemies and searching with her ears, she probed the darkness. Had she been robbed while her back was turned?
She hurried over to the shelves. The volumes she’d selected rested in their usual places on the shelf. Whoever had put them back had even arranged them so the container-titling could be more easily read. And one scroll case, which had been resting on the shelf below where it belonged when she found it, was back in its rightful place among its supporting scrolls.
Strange thieves, who would return property better organized than they found it.
Hearts pounding—she couldn’t say why—she removed the scroll case again. With some diligent labor, she reassembled the collection she intended to take along on her departure.
She ate a haunch of leftover ox she’d kept hanging in the cool, dry air at the top of the chamber and settled down for a nap, instinctively circling her selection the way a dragon often slept around its hoard, resting her jaw upon the uttermost end of her tail-fringe.
“You won’t get them this time,” she said to the crystal, keeping an open eye on it as she nodded off. One-eye-open sleep wasn’t nearly as refreshing—you didn’t dream, though your thoughts sometimes sang to you.
And if you do, I’ll just leave without them. You’ll see.
When she woke, she was a good deal less surprised to find the books removed. As she stalked over to the collection to see if they’d been put back in their proper places, she had the strangest feeling before she even knew why. Then it came—she saw a bit of loose ox-flesh on the floor. It must have dropped from her mouth at some point—but she hadn’t visited the collection in between eating and settling down for her nap. Could she have been—
A harsh clatter of gongs sounded, echoing down to her cave. Alarm! Alarm! ALARM! came the shouts, distant and echoing, from the entrance to her cave. “A dragon comes!”
A dragon? Could it be AuRon? Why would they be giving the alarm?
She swarmed up the old well, past the guards who were unaccountably throwing extra logs on the fires that heated their oils to pour down the sides of the pit should the demen come again, and to the old city at the throat of the massive cave-mouth.
The dim purple light, just framing the hanging towers at the cave-mouth, told her it was the early dawn. The cave-mouth faced southerly and it looked a clear morning. At this time of year the sun would shine full into the cave as it came up.
A perfect time to attack. The blighters would be fighting both sun and enemies.
Flame blossomed at the cave-mouth at one of the hanging, fang-like towers—the long, unbroken one where the blighters kept a small watch of archers, for they could see well down the long switchback road on the mountainside. Wistala caught a flash of white scale reflecting in the fiery bloom.
White? She’d met a white dragon once, in her almost fruitless search for others of her kind. A great, elderly queen of dragons. She saw the dragon swoop down, strike something with its tail, and rise vigorously as a second dragon, a green, dove, dropping a curtain of fire at the cave-mouth.
Two! One she could handle. She knew Uldam’s ruins, where she could spread her wings and where she had to tuck, where there were deep shadows and where the sun would fall. She would have the advantage. But two!
First one, then three, then a little less than a score of Fireblades rushed forward to the aid of their comrades.
Now more battle-horns echoed through the cave. She saw the mates and their hatchlings—or spawn, children, was that the word?—of the Fireblades fleeing from the more intact of the homes to take refuge in caves and wells. Older Fireblades lurched out of their dwellings, supporting themselves on the shoulders of youths still with downy tufts about the head and shoulders rather than a true blighter’s mane, carrying bows and crude imitations of dwarven crossbows and spear-throwers.
“Why you wait?” a warrior called to her as he hurried forward, a spear in each hand and the unlatched buckles on his helmet jingling.
“To see,” she said.
Liar. Because I hate fighting. Only the crows benefit.
“The rest of you, stay here,” she told the gathering Fireblades in their own language. “Block up the tunnel here as best as you can. Your friends may need somewhere to retreat. I want to be able to just squeeze over the top.”
One of the grizzle-hairs nodded and barked at the others. There were big casks handy, full of fat for the boiling cauldrons and mead for the warriors—they could make a start by rolling those forward.
Maybe she could drive them off somehow by just showing herself. It would be a bold pair who would dare attack a female in her cave. What if she had hatchlings to defend, and a mate lying in wait to attack from behind as soon as they flew against her?
She launched herself into the air, cold-hearted and wingtips a-shiver. Where was that dragonelle who faced giant trolls on Rainfall’s bridge or challenged war machines of the Wheel of Fire dwarves?
A yellow halo grew over the horizon to the south. Soon the sun would be shining down the cave-mouth.
She rolled and alighted, gripping the cave-ceiling and bracing herself with her tail at the upper root of one of the pillars of mountain-muscle. Hard rock full of natural ridges and crevices offered her claws purchase. She must be hard today.
The green vomited a long stream of flame, scattering it here and there among the mostly empty outer ruins. The Fireblades kept some sheep and goats and sickly cattle near at those roofless hovels. She must have seen motion and spewed.
She wasn’t much of a fighter, Wistala decided, or at least inexperienced. She’d loosed her flame too high, scattering it into droplets and losing much of the effect. You might do that if you were trying to burn a field of crops and teach some encroaching settlers a lesson, but fighting blighters with plenty of time to see the firefall and doorways and alcoves to shelter in wouldn’t be bothered by such a display. And a dragon had only so much flame. If her firebladder wasn’t empty now, with that first gout still in burning puddles along the entry-road, it must be very nearly so.
The white dragon was a good deal more effective than his mate or sister or ally or whoever she was. Wistala guessed he was a male; she was pretty sure she saw horns rising from his crest. He dove, tilting his body to keep scale to enemy, terrorizing with beats of his wingtips and strikes of his tail, screaming as he descended. He drove the blighters back from their battlements flanking the great road.
White knew hominid fighting.
He’d taken out the most dangerous threat with his first flame, the watchtower at the cavern roof. Now he could terrorize the Fireblades without having to worry about stones or javelins being flung down upon him.
Silly Green and Canny White.
If she could surprise Canny White, down him before he knew she’d joined battle, she’d be able to handle Silly Green.
A coiling serpent, dark as a pit viper and mindlessly purposeful as a stream of ants, could be seen on the road outside the cave-mouth. Men on horseback, with banners at intervals, red leading silver followed by a purple, the third higher than the rest, with a rather dispirited green bringing up the rear. It must be a vast number, at least in the thousands, to fill such a length of road. She could hear the steady thunder of their hoofbeats on the old grass-stitched stones.
The sun climbed as though eager for a better view of the contest.
It would take too long to crawl. She went forward, glide-rest, glide-rest, in a series of barrel rolls, keeping to the darkness in the shade of Krag’s great roof. The attacking dragons harried the disorganized blighters, their quarry rallying only to be dispersed by one of White’s dives and then running again.
They must have known a dragon lurked in the area, but neither seemed very watchful. Perhaps they were carried away by the excitement of alternately smashing and driving the blighters, or assumed that since she hadn’t yet shown herself, she never would. Did they think she was some roaring male, who would announce his presence half a horizon from the fight?
Canny White saw some blighter archers falling back toward the rear of his cave. He must have decided that he’d rather fight them from the air, despite the arrows sticking out of neck and arms. Blighter bows were better for bringing down deer than dragons; while they made decent enough bows and stout strings out of mountain-lion sinew, their heads and shafts weren’t as sharp and true as elvish arrows or dwarvish bolts, and they lost velocity quickly when fired upward. Despite the arrows, Canny White swept behind them, and flapped briefly atop a broken old three-level home to push roof and chimney down on the blighters in the lane below.
Wistala saw her chance. She dove, wings folded like a hawk, gaining deadly velocity with every length in the vast cave.
She struck Canny White square at the base of his neck with a body blow. Being thick and muscular had its advantages—he bent like one of the blighters’ recurved bows and crashed into a house on the other side of the road, sending white scales flying off and falling like snowflakes.
Ha!
Wistala opened her wings and turned toward the other, resisting the urge to admire her handiwork beyond seeing Horblikklak, who’d kept his archers and a few other blighters fighting as a disciplined unit, send spearmen toward the white twitching under the fallen walls.
Arrows sang up and struck. Luckily they didn’t penetrate much farther than a full-grown scale-nit. Stupid fools, shooting at their ally!
Wistala rose toward Silly Green, who hung in the air at the entrance as if puppeted by strings. Wistala flapped hard and shot toward her like a dwarvish javelin.
Silly Green didn’t care to meet her. She turned tail and fled, with Wistala fast behind.
Probably by accident, Silly Green did the one thing that could have saved her—she headed almost straight up once out of the cave. She was more lightly built than Wistala, and the heavier green couldn’t quite match her angle of ascent. Wistala just bit off a mouthful of tail and banked to see the riders below.
They were almost to the old pylons covered with etchings of proud blighter faces and sealed casings of war-trophies. Wistala wondered how best to loose her flame.
A third dragon’s silhouette swooped out of the sun. Three! They’d kept a reserve outside in case she appeared. The sun was too bright for her to make out much, save that he was big and heavy about the forequarters and therefore most likely a male.
She turned back for the cave. An open-air fight would be difficult, especially if Silly Green joined the stranger.
As she passed over the head of the column she loosed her flame and the riders scattered—well, most of them. The scream of horses followed the twin whorls of smoke in her wake. Poor horses! They hadn’t chosen this battle.
She felt arrows pluck at her wings and break off in her side, and she chanced a glance back. The column of riders had divided into a fork, circumnavigating the pool of dragonflame. Archers had dismounted and were firing from the—what was that military term again? Flanks, that was it. Some dwarf who’d started off in life as a butcher and become a general had codified war in his volume describing the long, grinding war against the Charioteers.
Strange how the mind raced in battle. An arrow stuck through her tail like a crossbar. She didn’t even feel it.
She flapped up to the cavern roof and alighted on one of the great pillars, built up with clay cisterns and lead pipes of an old gravity-well that had fed the king’s citadel, a sort of triangular fortification anchored by rocks carved into shapes like mammoth-tusks. The Fireblades under their war-chief manned what was left of the battlements there, with long slides greased on both of the remaining towers. Strong young blighters stood ready to send stones down the slides, which could be turned and tilted to better aim the dropped projectiles at those beneath the walls.
The riders streamed in, and the two columns turned into three, the thickest heading straight down the wide road for the citadel. Their hoofbeats echoed in the cavern like the roar of a waterfall, and the sun glinted off of polished helm, shield, and spear-tip.
Too few blighters. Too few. Perhaps they would content themselves with plundering the ruin. Except there was no plunder, just old broken brick and bat-haunted roof.
The third dragon appeared again, bearing a cylinder that looked like a sawed-off tree trunk. She couldn’t quite make him out, silhouetted against the sun. He flapped hard, gained a little height, and at last she could see him.
A reddish copper color that might be called orange, broken by dark stripes, six good-sized horns—
DharSii!
She knew him. They’d met, briefly, years ago in Sadda-Vale, where she’d searched for others of her kind. She’d found only a handful of indolent dragons, comfortable and uninterested in the world outside their steaming valley.
Her thoughts, racing a moment ago on two wings and all four legs, stilled, fading like the ink on one of those ancient scrolls in NooMoahk’s cave.
DharSii carried a heavy column of stonework, one of the columns that flanked the road near the entrance to the old city. He flapped one more time, strain on his face, and dove for the citadel.
She dove as well, leaping from her perch, wings open only enough to allow her to guide her fall. If he saw her he gave no sign of it. Instead he released his load, which fell like a huge arrow toward one of the old towers. She just managed to strike the stone as she crossed under him.
Arrows flew up, peppering both dragons, with no more effect than the flowers tossed at young blighters passing through the end of their final mating ceremony.
The stone tumbled, missing the top of the tower, where it would have smashed the blighters and their rock-slide into gory streaks. It struck the wall below, sending rubble falling into the city and out into the gate-lane in front. Dust clouded the air.
Each dragon completed half of a double-loop.
DharSii gaped at her, hardly moving his wings. He alighted on an old terrace, rows of garden-troughs thick with shadeweed. His ribs heaved as he caught his breath.
Wistala returned to the cavern roof.
Some of the riders chased their quarry like rabbits through the old streets and alleys, vaulting obstructions with wild cries.
Blighters streamed down from their battlements. With the wall in the old citadel broken, they hurried for some old hole, she guessed. The city had any number of ancient undercourses for the disposal of waste or retention of water. Perhaps they made for some secret bolt-hole.
Canny White had retreated to a corner near the entrance, blood making dark stripes on his sides even more vivid than DharSii’s natural ones. He did not seem eager to rejoin the fight. As for Silly Green, she was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she was soaking her tail-tip in the chill of a mountain stream.
She had to de
lay the riders. Wistala mastered herself. One more effort, and then she would return to the back of the cave.
DharSii cried out as she flew, but whether he was calling to her or summoning the white she couldn’t know.
The front of the column fell into confusion as she came at it, wings beating hard. Carts and horses wheeled—
A presence behind, coming fast—must be DharSii.
She banked a little to stay out of striking distance, took a breath so she might better press her firebladder—
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Sparks and smoke and rattling—what evil was this?
Three projectiles like the oversized javelins dwarves fired from their war machines flew toward her, not arcing like arrows but spinning like a playful squirrel running along a straight branch. They trailed smoke and flapping lengths of line with ugly barbed hooks.
“Down!” she heard DharSii shout. He struck her on the haunch.
Why he warned her, she couldn’t say. She struck some old roofs, scattering rotted thatch like dandelion tufts.
The missiles passed howling and sparking just above her, their ugly flail-tails thick with barbs and hooks dancing a mad jig in their wake.
She banked to the rear of the cave and made for her old hole lest some other aerial monstrosity be launched at her.
DharSii thrashed, entangled in one of the things, raising dust and debris in an old plaza.
Wistala saw ugly sights in the streets below as the human warriors discovered a little hovel of Fireblade females and their babes. Hominids must love death for death’s sake—there was no other way to explain the bloody scene there.
She returned to the rear of the cave and the tunnel to the old downshaft and library. Only a few elderly warriors remained, calming frightened mates and wailing spawn.
“The city is lost,” she told them. “If there’s some secret tunnel where you can flee, you may wish to take it. I can delay them here for a few moments. Then they will come.”
