by E. E. Knight
“A ransom?”
“Do you know our weights and measures?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“It is about the weight of a full-grown male bull.”
“That is a substantial sum indeed.”
“Then the terms are satisfactory?”
“The mission may fail. I would like to be compensated in that eventuality.”
“One-quarter shall be yours, then.”
“I do not know your customs, Great Queen. How do we call it a bargain?”
“There are seals and such that can be set upon paper, but they are only as good as one’s word, and you already have ours.”
AuRon decided that if nothing else, contact with other dragons would be beneficial. He hoped there weren’t remnants of the wizard’s old armada lurking in this Lavadome, nursing a grudge against the one who brought about their master’s fall. “Then you have mine as well.”
“We are always happy to come to agreement.”
“Will you satisfy me on something?” AuRon asked.
The mask spun around, and briefly frowned, then the smiling side turned back again. AuRon judged it a warning to get to the point. “We have other business this day, but you have our attention.”
“The friend I lost—DharSii spoke of her. How long had she been in the service of Ghioz? What were her aims and goals and so on?”
“Friend? Another dragon?”
“Yes.”
“There is some misunderstanding. We never had her in our service. We are afraid she was friend to the blighters and guarding a very great prize. As an obstacle to our will, she had to be removed. DharSii was fond of her, and gave her every opportunity to escape destruction.”
“She fought against DharSii, not with him?”
“That is our understanding. We regret that the encounter could not have ended more happily. According to DharSii, she was a worthy dragon.”
After all these years. If he’d come east just a few months earlier. . . . why couldn’t those cursed treasure-hunters have taken advantage of the first warm spring winds?
The last of his old family, gone. Why couldn’t dragons stay out of hominid quarrels? But hominids acquired gold like ants seeking fallen fruit, and dragons needed that gold. So here he was, mixing in hominid affairs again.
Maybe DharSii was right about the Ghioz. They are strong, and a tree does better to bend with a strong wind if it wishes to keep limbs intact.
He still had his new family to think about. They must come first.
“Does this change matter?” the Red Queen asked. “You may alter your decision. We have no desire to place such a mission on unwilling wings.”
“I am sorry that events went the way they did,” AuRon said. “But I still need that gold. The sooner I may claim it, the better.”
“Very well. Return to the fountain inside and we will have further instruction, and a small gift.”
AuRon idled by the fountain, thinking. The Red Queen’s evident desire for good relations with his island might be to his advantage after all. She seemed a wise ruler, and anyone who could bring different tribes of Ironriders together must be a diplomat to be reckoned with.
It grew dark outside and servants lit a few lamps. The staircases turned into pathways to shadow and doubt, but the flow of water remained constant. Eventually, even the faint sounds of stonecutting ceased.
The Red Queen reappeared, moving slowly but surely.
“A long day. We have ordered food to be brought to the stable door for you, so that you may eat before setting off, or sleep and then leave in the morning, if you prefer.”
“Thank you, Great Queen.”
“I have a simple message in Parl. Do you read it?”
“Yes.”
She gave him a scroll-tube on an oversized chain. The clasp was big enough for dragonclaws to easily work it. He extracted the message and read it, a simple, friendly offer to establish ambassadors between Ghioz and the Lavadome so that future conflicts between the Upper and Lower Worlds might be avoided. There were three seals, of gold, silver, and red wax at the bottom.
“You need a badge of rank as well,” she said, after he replaced the message in the scroll-tube. “Wear this to show you have our confidence.”
The leather blighters appeared at a wave. One carried a long, thin chain with a crystal pendant dangling at the end. AuRon examined both it and the chain closely. They seemed harmless. The crystal was of unusual clarity, with just a hint of milkiness to one side. The stone didn’t look like a diamond.
“Would you like it around your neck? DharSii wore his in his ear, back when he was an emissary.”
“The neck would suit me.”
The blighters fixed it around him as she showed him a map. He asked a few questions about the landmarks mentioned.
“So this bridge deep in a canyon cavern will lead me there, Great Queen?” he asked.
“There are other ways, we believe, but it would be better for you to take that one. It is the surest path, and well guarded so that your coming will not be a surprise. There is another entrance we know of in Bant, but there has been much blood spilled there. A message brought through Bant would just remind everyone of this.”
The Red Queen walked around in front of him to admire the necklace.
“That does look well. We guessed the length just right.” She raised the smiling mask to his face. “You are a brave dragon, AuRon.”
“I might say the same about you. A Queen who converses with a dragon without fear or bodyguards all around.”
“Oh, yes, I suppose you could envelop me in flame, if you were mad enough to do such a thing. But remember, I’ve far too much to do to do something as wasteful as dying.”
BOOK TWO
Improvise
FATE FIGHTS ON THE SIDE OF THE PREPARED.
—Irelia Antialovna
Chapter 11
Wistala, with food in her stomach giving her energy and a mind wishing diversion from the aches of healing, learned much about these “Firemaids” and the dragons they protected as they traveled from post to post.
It seemed there were three strains of dragonkind, according to her rescuers. The Skotl were reckoned the best fighters, as they tended to be the biggest and thickest of scale. They were also the most numerous, by a thin margin, though they were flexible enough to count any largish dragon as an honorary Skotl regardless of bloodline, so their counts couldn’t be trusted. The Anklenes were the cleverest, as they’d once been close servants of the ancient Anklamere, who’d once kept and bred dragons much as dragons now kept other races as thralls. The Anklenes were the fewest and the most clannish. The Wyrr considered themselves the mortar that held the others together, noted for their cool heads and sound judgment and skill at song, story, and sooth.
All the Firemaids apparently thought well of their Tyr, and while there was some doubt as to his parentage, as he’d been orphaned young, each line seemed assured that he was, deep down, of theirs. The Anklenes argued his distinctive eye-ridge and classical crest as proof of their line’s intelligence, the Skotl bragged that such hardihood in the face of battle injuries could only result from Skotl parentage, and the Wyrr praised the friendship he seemed to inspire in not only dragons but bats and thralls and such as well.
“It’s more that what went before him was so bad, he seems thrice as great as he really is,” Ayafeeia said when they chanced to be alone after one dinner when the Tyr’s latest order that Paskinix should be told that a substantial chunk of his army was waiting for him to come and claim it in the Lavadome came down via a Drakwatch messenger. “He gets what he wants. He’s just cleverer about it than most.”
The irony of her situation appealed to her. She wished nothing more than that Rainfall was still alive so she could get back to his estate and tell him. She’d exhausted herself flying from the frozen north down the spine of the world to the south, searched the borders of Hypatia, across the endless plains, and even into the East seeking first ot
her dragons, then AuRon.
All those horizons under her wings, exhausting days and sore nights. Wasted. Well, not wasted. A broader knowledge of the world could hardly be called a wasteful activity. But what she really needed was one slippery step and a fall into the Lower World to bring her into more contact with her own kind than she’d ever imagined.
The one filcher in her hoard was that drakka Takea.
“The Tyr must know about you helping Paskinix escape,” she said. At every opportunity.
“And he shall,” Ayafeeia said. “But from me, not you. All I know for certain is that an exhausted, starved, injured dragon fell during a difficult climb.”
Wistala’s exhaustion was cured by rest, her starvation was remedied by two-a-day meals—one could tell day from night in the Star Tunnel by taking a trip to one of the openings—and her injuries were set by blighter-thralls, who put a brace on the break and used a charcoal forge to seal it closed.
“It feels awful at first, like something’s clutching at your wing. Quite unnerving,” Ayafeeia said. “The itch feels like it will drive you mad if you don’t keep yourself occupied.”
Wistala took her up on it and tried to keep her mind occupied. “Who built the Star Tunnel?” she asked during one of the restorative meals. “Dwarves?”
“It doesn’t look like dwarf-work,” one of the Anklenes in the Firemaids said. “It’s too dry for demen and as for blighters—why? They’re comfortable underground, but they prefer the surface. The triangular shape, while structurally sound, wastes a good deal of space for anything but dragon-sized creatures.”
“But we’ve no legends of dragons making it,” Ayafeeia put in.
“The proportions are right for trolls. They’re rather triangular. And they’re so odd, it’s easy to believe they’re out of the Lower World.”
“Trolls!” Ayafeeia said. “Where are there trolls? I thought they’d vanished.”
“There are still some in the north, regrettably.”
“Trolls! They are supposed to be strong,” a Firemaid said.
“Fast, which is worse. And they can climb like giant monkeys.”
“Best just to fly away and burn them.”
“Well, they squeeze into cracks like spiders. They don’t know fear. But if you burn them good at the tailvent—their lungs are to the rear—you’ll drop them.”
“How do you know all that?” Takea asked.
“I helped kill one, and just survived another. He jumped on me while I was flying through some mountains.”
Takea shut her nostrils, and a few others whispered among themselves. The Anklene stared at her closely.
“You have a great deal of experience in the Upper World,” Ayafeeia said.
“I’ve traveled it my whole life. I know Hypatia better than most areas, but I’ve been up to the icy wastes, I’ve seen the Sadda-Vale, the eastern kingdoms, and some of the Inland Ocean.”
“No one could survive so many journeys,” the Anklene said. “How were you not hunted?”
“By not giving them a reason to hunt me. I don’t raid pasturage or pens, and if I must go hungry for a week to do so, I go hungry. One can always get by on badgers and skunks and so on. They’re disgusting but easy to smell out.”
The Star Tunnel went on for days. At one point it seemed to end in a sheer rock face, with a new tunnel, smaller and rougher, bored so that it joined up with the old, and a second break in it soon after, this one requiring a brief climb.
“Some change in the Lower World itself since the tunnel was made,” the Anklene Firemaid asserted. “You can see the demen dug connecting shafts.”
“This was where the hardest fighting took place. Every hill lost a dragonelle or a drakka here,” Ayafeeia said, showing hidden pits full of broken spear points and holes that had fired javelins or whirling blades. “One day we’ll build a shrine at the Bloody Cut.”
There was a shrine, of sorts, in the form of a stack of demen heads. Wistala lost her count as she realized it was in the thousands.
The demen had done construction of things other than walls and traps throughout the Star Tunnel. There were small ponds where they stocked fish and shell-creatures, pens where they had kept livestock beneath platforms that brought fodder down from the holes, even smoking rooms for the preservation of foodstuffs.
“This one was filled with men. All withered, as though they’d been long dead. The demen like their smoked meat very dry,” a Firemaid told her.
“We drove the demen away from their underground rivers. Many of these improvements are recent, to try and feed themselves. What’s left must be mightily hungry by now.”
“I think they eat each other,” Takea said. “Drakka exploring fissures have found some dead demen. Always small and weak-looking, always with flesh and guts and brains removed.”
“A shame,” another Firemaid said. “Demen liver sewed up in their own skin and boiled with the brain is an old Wyrr favorite.”
The others smacked snouts and licked lips in agreement. Wistala didn’t care for the idea of dragons behaving like battlefield crows and tunnel rats. But after her enforced short rations, her mouth watered nevertheless, and she was forced to gather the saliva back in with her tongue just like the others.
While all but a watch slept, nose to flank or curled belly to back, Ayafeeia sought her out.
“Come. I want to see how that wing is progressing,” she said quietly.
Wistala followed her to a wider section of the Star Tunnel, where bits of dead leaf and other fallen dirt from above had accumulated, making a soft bed for cave moss and mushrooms.
Ayafeeia plucked up a pair of mushrooms and ate them. “Dwarf food, I know, but they clean the bowel. Let’s extend that wing, if you can.”
Wistala found that she could, at the cost of some pain. Ayafeeia had her raise the wing, lower it, sweep it about.
“You’ll fly again. Even if it doesn’t heal entirely, we can have a lighter brace made for you,” Ayafeeia said. “Our own Tyr uses a contraption that keeps the proper tension at the joint. But be sure you extend your wings now whenever you get the chance, several times a day. A little—a very little—strain on the wing will encourage it to heal more firmly.”
“I feared—”
“Well, don’t. I know it’s instinct, one-winged birds make easy prey, and you’re keeping it tucked tight, hiding the injury.”
“Thank you.”
“There’s more. I’ve wanted to have a talk with you.”
“Yes?”
“Now that you’ve regained some of your strength, I was wondering what you planned for the future.”
“To continue searching for my brother. I don’t know where he’s gone, but if I return to the librarians in Hypatia perhaps they will have some news. I’ve asked my friends there to collect any news of dragons they hear.”
“Ah,” she said.
“You are disappointed?”
“I’m an honest dragonelle, Wistala. It’s why I never rose far or won favor in the Imperial Line. Politics is not in me. I had hoped you’d use your skills and knowledge here, for the Lavadome and the Empire. For your kind. We’re the last hope of dragons. One as well traveled as you must know that.”
“Go on. I’ll try and hear your words fairly.”
“I’m no expert on the Upper World, Wistala, but it seems to me that dragons are just about done there. We’ve had several groups of back-to-surfacers leave, to live natural as dragons ought and all that rot, but we never hear from them or their hatchlings again.
“The one set of dragons we did meet were—well, the only word I can think of is thralls. They were thralls to men, dragon-riders who briefly arrived and made us part of their dominion. It’s a story with much wickedness and a bloody finish, if you’d like to hear it.”
“Maybe someday, when I’m a bit stronger of hearts, but I’ll take your word for it. Where is this discourse leading?”
“I believe our kind is vanishing from the world.”
&n
bsp; Wistala couldn’t argue with that. She’d seen few enough dragons in her life. These Firemaids were more than all she’d ever met put together.
“Perhaps. Your opinion of the surface is true enough. There aren’t many dragons about.”
“Dragonkind needs you. Your aid would be invaluable, if the Lavadome is to survive.”
“What is the Lavadome to me?”
“Your original home, I expect.”
“Whaaat?”
“It must have occurred to you that our dragonspeech is very similar.”
“Perhaps, but I’ve not spoken with many dragons.”
“I’ve talked with some of the dragons who formerly were under the thrall of riders. They’re a slow and stupid bunch, and their speech is most odd. Half the time I must ask them to repeat what they say. I have no trouble understanding you. In fact, you’re easier on my ears than some of the Anklenes, and I’ve been among them my whole life. I can’t help but think we’re related.”
“How can that be?”
“How much do you know of your parents, your grandsires?”
“Very little. AuRon knows more, as he talked with Father about his song now and then, and Mother supplied a few details. I know my mother’s mother was named Irelia.”
“An Anklene name if I ever heard one. Was your mother clever?”
“Yes. I would call her clever. Father was always praising her ability with tongues.”
“I suspect, Wistala, that you’re from a line of one of those renegades. Some hated living much of their lives underground. Others objected to keeping thralls—they even compared it to Anklamere’s enslavement of dragons, if you would believe such sophistry—and they left. There were those happy to see them go—more food for the rest of us and the voracious griffaran. But what I’m getting at, Wistala, is that you’ve come home. What are you going to do about it?”
Wistala felt as disoriented as after her crash down the well. “I—I need time to think. I’ve lived among hominids, so I’m used to new ideas, but this requires getting used to a new . . . a new me.”
