by E. E. Knight
“A curse on such dragons,” Takea said, looking directly at Wistala. “If I learned of one, I’d not rest until I saw her head left dry atop some mountain.”
Wistala began to believe she’d dropped into a whirlwind: suspicions, jealousies, politics, worries of civil war, war in the Lower World, worries of war with the surface. Still, dragons did thrive on challenge, Father always said. Dragon eat challenge and vent victory. It was surfeit that beat you.
“May I ask a question?” Wistala asked.
“Of course,” Ayafeeia said. “That’s the beginning of wisdom.”
“Why did she call you ‘maidmother’ at some times and ‘sister’ at others?”
“We are sisters after a fashion, though one presses the issue in this case. Her mate was married to my sister.”
“I still say she did it,” someone said quietly.
“None of that, now,” Ayafeeia said. “I won’t have the Queen disparaged, either in my hearing or out of it.”
“When all is said and done, she broke her oath,” one of the Firemaids said. “She took the third oath. Do our traditions count for nothing?”
“Yes. How convenient that your sister died when she did, Ayafeeia,” Takea said. “It couldn’t have worked out better for Nilrasha.”
“Takea, watch that tongue of yours. You have a little too much Anklene blood in you for decent manners. It could have worked out better for Nilrasha, if Halaflora had died with more witnesses to her choking. There wouldn’t be all these foul rumors and adder-backing. I can believe the story they told. Halaflora always had more strength of heart to her than body. I’m not sure Nilrasha isn’t the better Queen. A Queen needs energy.”
“There’s an old saying—defend loudest your deepest enemies, until it is time to strike,” Takea whispered to Wistala.
“Could it be said that becoming Queen is a higher calling?” the young drakka Nilrasha had spoken to said, raising her voice. “The Queen is the spiritual leader of the Firemaids. Nilrasha just rose above any maidmother.”
“Have some respect for her rank, and understanding of her character,” Ayafeeia said, straightening. “I abhore all this nasty gossip. My adopted brother, our Tyr, has the best interest of dragons at heart. Nilrasha has the best interest of the Tyr at heart. He makes enemies; she deals with them. Not even dragons can be governed without a little fear, I believe.”
She grated her teeth in thought. “Wistala, you must be made ready for presentation in court. I suppose I should attend. As usual I’ll leave Malitha in charge of our hill. Takea, you’ve not been atop Imperial Rock since you were presented as a hatchling. You must go, especially as Wistala is in your charge. Whatever you do, don’t let her pull up her lips like that in front of the Tyr.”
Wistala enjoyed the experience of the body-thralls working her scale.
First, several of them gave her a good scrubbing with bristly, long-handled brushes that cleaned her scale above and beneath. She was the ruin of at least three brushes.
Then they trimmed her scale in such a way that misshapen pieces covering old wounds looked a bit more comely and in line with the others. Some were considered a lost cause and—rather painfully!—yanked out and carefully gathered.
Even worse, a pair of bats, muttering to each other and with many apologies in broken Drakine, nibbled and licked at her wounds.
“The bats are, well, creepy, but they do help one heal,” Takea said. “To think, we used to eat or burn them out.”
“I still gulp one if I get a chance,” another drakka confessed. “The Tyr doesn’t miss ’em. Rodents never run out. I think the thrall capture them too, to toast on sticks and wrap their food up in the wings.”
Ayafeeia came by to check the progress. “Tuve, a little highlighting around the eyes,” she said to an older thrall with a gloriously long mane like a lion. “And Wistala, at court keep those big wings of yours tucked high. More room for everyone else.”
“And the males will notice you,” Takea said, snorting.
“It’ll be a fast suitor who can catch up to her, once she’s flying again,” the Firemaid in charge of the body-thralls said.
Wistala wondered about the thralls. They didn’t chatter the way hominids on the surface did, but just exchanged a few quiet words as they worked. They looked healthy enough, though perhaps a bit undersized. There were no marks of lash or shackle on them, as she’d seen on slaves in some of the surface lands she’d passed through, but then it sounded as though troublesome thralls were simply eaten.
“How do you do?” Wistala said to the thrall working with her brushes, painting scale about her eye.
“My apologies, mistress, did I get paint in your eye?” she asked.
“No, I was just introducing myself. My name is Wistala. How do you do?”
“Your thrall is named Tuve, mistress,” Tuve said.
“You must not mind dragon-breath, Tuve,” Wistala said.
“Oh, Susiron help us,” the Firemaid in charge of the thralls said. “Not another of these Anklene radicals.”
Tuve smiled. “A little oliban ash and witch hazel in the nostrils, mistress,” she said quietly. She took out a thinner brush and blackened it and went to work again.
“They’re hypocrites,” Takea said, tapping a scale that needed to be removed. “The Anklenes have three thralls to every one the Firemaids have. If they’re so concerned about how they’re treated, they can start with their own. The thralls die like flies over there. Bad air from all those illumination lamps.”
“Some say they only report them dead, then sneak them to the surface.”
“I’ll wager they eat them. Always counting and measuring things. No one will cheat you like the one doing the accounting, my father used to say.”
“Not enough honest dwarves to go around,” the Firemaid in charge of the thralls said. “You can trust dwarves. They’ll cut their own throats before they lie. If only they wouldn’t starve themselves. Not like elves, who play games with definitions of truth and falsehood. Now a good stupid man, that’s almost as good as a dwarf. If you ever mate and set up in a cave of your own, Tala, look for the ones who count on their fingers instead of in their heads. That’ll be a thrall you can trust.”
Wistala’s painting thrall gestured to a younger version of herself with similar thick hair. The girl brought forth a polished sheet of tin. Wistala saw herself, as in a silvery pool at sunset. Her eyes looked bigger and brighter.
“Have her show her teeth, Tuve,” Takea said. “She’s a Firemaid now, and she does have a royal set of renders. She should be showing a lot of tooth.”
Tuve smeared a foul-tasting grease on her teeth. Wistala’s lips retreated in disgust, practically of their own accord.
“That’ll impress the Tyr!” Ayafeeia said, having completed her own preparations in a very few moments with the aid of a single thrall. “Though the rest of him’s a bit of a wreck, he bears very fine teeth.”
“The Tyr’s sure to remember you!” Takea said.
Chapter 15
The Copper sent the body-thralls away to hear the report from Gnash. He’d given her just a taste of his blood and promised her the use of a steer once her report was done.
“I saw them myself, great one,” Gnash said. “Mighty birds, with men lumpy under fur riding them. They flew low over the kern, only at night and in cloud or rain, and dropped a bitter powder, like dried dung.”
The Copper could picture it. He knew those midnight mists that settled over the plateau, where trees grew short and thick, filling the hillsides with their tangled black roots and boughs, giving way to the rich volcanic soil of the plains that produced running rows of strawberries and grapes separating the rows of kern stalks. The fierce, brilliant sunshine that seemed to come from all directions rather than one, the stars bright at night until the clouds collected and distributed the dew. The whole Aerial Host could glide in unseen by the Anaeans, quiet in their rich clay houses parsing out their horoscopes from the day’s observations.<
br />
Those had been happy years, with Halaflora in the sunshine. He was more than half convinced it was the sun that set her on the mend and gave her the strength to believe herself to be carrying a belly full of eggs.
Didn’t dragons deserve their share of the sun?
He brought himself back to Gnash, who was snuffling about where he’d eaten his mid-meal.
“Could you follow them when they were done?”
Gnash licked up some bit of skin and gristle that hadn’t been cleaned yet by the household thralls. “No. They flew too high, too fast. I am but a poor bat in my master’s service. The air is so thin, indeed, in Anaea I could hardly breathe. Everything, everything left me panting, even a short glide.”
“Thank you for your fatigues,” the Copper said. “Can you at least say in what direction they came from, and where they flew to?”
“To the north.”
The Copper considered. He knew Anaea well, having served as first assistant to the Upholder there and then as Upholder himself. North? Hypatia was to the north, but there were no reports of Hypatia employing giant birds. Only the Ghioz used such mounts, since some years after their brief war in Bant, according to the Anklenes. The Ghioz would be more to the east of Anaea, perhaps northeast. And he knew little of the prevailing winds off the plateau in that direction.
“Well done. Rest some days, then fly back and get Wail and the both of you may return. I’m sorry flying was so difficult for you there.”
“The Tyr is just, the Tyr is kind, thinking of his poor servants. Oh, and he is so generous, so generous.”
“Yes, I haven’t forgotten about the animal.” He took a silver disc, a coin with the Red Queen’s image upon it, and carefully bit through it with his most distinctively shaped fang. “Here, give this to the chief steward of the Imperial Herd.”
The bat-creature, which the Anklenes had started calling a “gargoyle,” took it and tucked it tight in an ear. He hardly noticed the flap as it left.
Ghioz.
He could put a stop to their flights easily enough. He could send part of the Aerial Host there. Under a skillful captain, they might trace the return flights and discover the base of the feathered giants. One swift, massive strike . . .
But all this was shadow theater, such as the thralls used to entertain young drakes and drakka of the Imperial Line. Perhaps the fliers were like those shadow images, their movements a provocation to draw him into just that sort of action. If he committed the Aerial Host to far-off Anaea, suppose she struck elsewhere. They could scrape out an existence for a time without kern—the Anklenes were even now experimenting with ways to cleanse it of the blight, starting with boiling and roasting—or, in a pinch, he could send a few hills to the surface to take the sun for a season, if the hills would trust each other not to pillage each other’s properties.
That was the ridiculous part of being Tyr. All the little drakes and drakka thought if he gave an order, it would be obeyed. Some orders were obeyed, some weren’t, it all depended on how carefully he watched and how advantageous his people considered his decisions. They found a hundred ways to interpret his words.
Dragons were altogether too selfish, when they weren’t out and out dishonest, to put the Lavadome’s needs above their own.
If dragons wouldn’t change, they’d have to figure out a way to change the world to better suit their needs.
“My Tyr,” NoSohoth said, breaking in on his thoughts. “The griffaran have met a most astonishing visitor to the Lavadome. He would speak to you.”
The Copper limped up the short passage to the throne room. It was always a slow trip; it bent around to the right and he couldn’t trust his left saa.
He looked out on the assembled dragons. He’d had Nilrasha invite a few key leaders of the various hills, the principal members of the Imperial Line, and the leaders of the Firemaids, the Aerial Host, and the Drakwatch. His griffaran guard straightened and fluffed their feathers as he stepped out onto the throne-shelf.
The old banners won in battle and glory could really use some stitching and cleaning. He recognized one taken in Bant, when SiDrakkon’s swift-dashing drakes attacked the half-completed tower of the Ghioz.
Dragon-necks, waving this way and that as the gossipers took part in two or three conversations at once, stilled and heads turned to the throne end of the room.
Nilrasha stood talking to Essea and two other females, aged widows of some of the hills but still important in influence with their families.
Everyone had a polite mouthful of coin? he thought to her.
Yes, and they’re still restless.
At a nod to NoSohoth, more oliban went on the braziers, filling the air with its thick, spicy odor. He sensed his dragons relaxing, griffs stilled, tails ceased thrashing, waiting for him to speak.
“Thank you for attending me,” he told the assembly. “We have several matters to discuss. Questions to answer, options to consider.
“But first, the war with the demen is over. We are victorious.”
That set them roaring to shake the dust from those rotting old banners. You’d have thought they’d spent the last score of years digging demen out of their holes personally.
Wistala, far at the back of the long, narrow chamber, could hardly see the Tyr for the waving dragon-necks and tight wings.
“Then where is Paskinix?” a well-proportioned young female with almost-healed wingcase wounds asked. “Do we get to see his head?”
“That’s Regalia,” Takea said, from her perch upon Wistala’s back. Ayafeeia, being a high leader of both the Firemaids and the Imperial Line, was at the other side of the press of shoulder-to-hip dragons. “She and her brother, SiHazathant, don’t much like the Tyr. They were just young drake and drakka when he became Tyr—otherwise, some say, SiHazathant might have taken the throne instead of RuGaard. They were of SiDrakkon’s line, but related to Tyr FeHazathant as well.”
Wistala swallowed the last silver coin she’d pocketed in her gum-line. She’d taken a very modest mouthful from the offered platter and had swallowed each one slowly, to savor the taste. But her mouth was still thick with the slime that always came when one had metals, and her eyes were on the cascade of silver and gold descending from the Tyr’s throne-perch.
“His forces are dead, captive, or scattered,” the Copper Tyr said. “The hunt goes on.”
“I hope so,” a red said. His scales were so dark they verged on the brownish color of dried blood. “Wretched egg-thief.”
“HeBellereth,” Takea said. “He’s the best—”
She didn’t find out what HeBellereth was best at.
“It is not the past or present that I asked you here to discuss, but the future. You all know about the shortages of kern because of the blight.”
That caused them to stir. Wistala liked the sound of the Tyr. He reminded her a little of Father with his deep voice, even if she could only glimpse a little scale here and there between the necks and wings and heads. He was probably broadly built, like Father, from what she could see, though he rested against his throne in such a way as to hide his right, and turned his back to hide his left.
A rather serpentine pose for such a noble dragon. Mother always taught her to face friend or enemy with all claws forward, weight distributed evenly—to better move, forward or back, right or left, as circumstances warranted.
“We have an important visitor from the north,” the Tyr said. “He brings news that concerns us all. Make room at the back, there!”
The dragons parted, and the rather officious silver-and-black dragon—NoSohoth, that was it—who’d been going up and down the center aisle of the throne room with some muscular blighters burning pleasant-smelling chips of what looked like resin of some kind used his neck and tail to help clear a path.
A dragon or two gasped. Wistala felt as though her head detached from the end of her neck and dropped to the floor as though severed.
DharSii of the Sadda-Vale, looking haggard and bright-eyed,
fixed his eyes on the throne and walked forward.
“I don’t know who that is,” Takea said.
“DharSii, a renegade,” said an old dragon with thin scales so blue they were almost silver. “He once commanded the Aerial Host, but he tried to overthrow Tyr FeHazathant.”
“That was a lie spread by Tighlia and you know it, cousin,” an aged green said. “He saved the Tyr’s life, is what he did. What did he get as a reward? His good name taken.”
Wistala looked at Takea, but she was craning her young neck to see up the aisle to the throne.
Wistala had eyes only for DharSii.
“Have a mouthful of gold, visitor,” Queen Nilrasha said. A few gasped, and the old silver-blue rattled his griff.
“More oliban, there,” NoSohoth said quietly, but Wistala was near enough to overhear. Hearts pounding, she wished he’d shift his great black bulk so she could see better.
DharSii’s horned head dipped and he pecked at the pile of gold at the base of the throne like a bird taking an insect.
“Thank you, Queen.”
Another big, multi-horned blue dragon, griff down and scales bristling, planted his saa in an effort to still a thrashing tail. “How dare such as you—”
“Quiet,” NoSohoth barked.
“Like that scalepainter ever tasted blood and sand in the dueling pit,” the old blue grumbled.
“Uncle, you’re no duelist yourself,” the one called HeBellereth baited.
Why could these fool dragons not still tongues? She had to listen!
“I ask no hospitality, no justice, and seek no duel and will refuse any challenge,” DharSii said.
“We’ve done away with that brutality,” the Tyr said.
“Have you?” DharSii said, looking at the Tyr. “That’s a jump in the right direction.”
“No, dragons have always—” someone protested, and was lost in a general exchange of opinions. Voices rose to an excited crescendo.
Wistala shoved forward as everyone offered an opinion of the visitor. “Tear him to bits!” “No, let’s hear him.” She’d already heard a few whispers from her fellow Firemaids about her broad frame and the length of her tail, but muscle-mass had its uses. “He’s done no wrong!” “Cowards, this is insult!” She forced herself halfway through the press so she could see and hear.
