by J. F. Lewis
Well, I have to sleep for three— Rae’en’s thoughts touched his mind, and Kholster liked the edge of bemusement which accompanied them.
Four.
Four, Rae’en admitted, hours each day, so . . .
“So you’re putting me in charge of your daughter’s protection or you . . . what? Attack? Declare war?”
“Will be exceedingly disappointed in you.” Kholster let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Just keep an eye on her and let me know if she gets into any trouble . . . in time for me to do something about it or to decide to let her handle it.” Kholster bowed low. “Please? One father to another?”
So we break for four hours every nineteen, Kholster thought at Rae’en.
“Ha!” Karl clapped him on the shoulder. “The day Kholster said, ‘Please.’ Very well. For that reason alone I’d have agreed.”
This isn’t the way to handle it, Vander thought. This is for you and not for her.
I know, Kholster answered as he turned to chase his daughter and make up some ground. I know.
*
As far as Rae’en could determine, the buildings of Bridgeland came in two varieties: the elegant well-constructed buildings owned or operated by Dwarves and the blocky ones. Dwarven construction could appear anywhere and in any shape, though she noticed that the bridge Dwarves seemed to incorporate more domes and spires than Uncle Glin’s architects might have done. Some buildings ran directly up to and through the exterior walls of the bridge itself, particularly at the tram stations. Buildings built by other cultures tended to have shingled roofs or square construction, came within no more than one hundred paces of the wall, and seemed to try to reach as high as they could without being higher than the bridge walls.
Rae’en determined very quickly that regardless of the architect or homeowner, no one liked an Aern running across their roof.
Maybe it’s the boots, she thought to her Overwatches. Even so, Rae’en wanted to be up on the wall proper, so she could look down at the vast expanse of sea. She knew she wouldn’t catch a glimpse of the fleet, but that didn’t stop her wanting to try. One part of her wanted to be out there with them, to see the look on Uncle Glin’s face around all that water. Then again, another part of her didn’t like the idea of being surrounded by water ever again.
So we break for four hours every nineteen, Kholster thought back at her. She’d half-wondered if he’d been attacked, he’d been quiet for so long. Probably something to do with the fleet more likely, she thought at her Overwatches.
Who keeps the time? she thought at her father. Still moving at a full run, she broke past the initial welcome area of the pedestrian portion of the Junland Bridge, the ornate tile giving way to smooth road with grass on either side. Rae’en let her course drift northeast off the road in hopes of seeing one of the commercial trams.
You tell me.
Bloodmane, she thought as she jumped a fence onto a plot of farmland. Dwarves and humans worked the field together harvesting red corn and some other plants. To her it was just cattle feed. AND you have to pass along to me the correct time from Bloodmane as soon as reasonably possible given your current circumstances when I ask.
In the distance, steam-powered monsters of brass and steel lurched through farmland, filling their metallic maws with produce from the fields. Overhead a dwarvenfly buzzed low, its bronze-colored body gleaming like molten metal in the sun. It swooped low enough for her to see the Dwarven pilot, then, having apparently identified her and judged it acceptable for her to be where she was, it flew higher, banking off to the west to continue its patrol.
Perhaps. Kholster answered. We’ll work out the exact wording of the oath, if we truly need one, to make sure it’s fair and decent. For the keeping of the time, I agree to trust Bloodmane if he agrees to do it.
Why wouldn’t he? Rae’en puzzled that one over as she reached a stream of freshwater running through a stone trough at the edge of the farmland. She jumped it in a single bound, barely wondering at the deep drains she saw at its center.
I think he will be happy to help, Kholster thought, but it will be a request, not an order.
O-kay, Dad. He was getting so weird about Bloodmane lately. Weird about her, too. He didn’t exactly say anything, but she felt it. If only she hadn’t fallen off the cursed wall and into that water. She wanted to blame it on Grudge, but if Kholster hadn’t forced her to exchange weapons, she would have drowned.
Or maybe not. Maybe I’d have just had quiet in my mind, not knowing if he saw me until the All Recall, when he decided my body could fight better without my mind in it. Or maybe I would not have fallen in the water at all. It hurt her head to think about it.
Any other rules? Kholster asked.
Huh? Speeding her pace as she approached the northeastern wall of the Junland Bridge, Rae’en felt that same queasiness in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t the mass of stone but the abrupt angle of it, jutting straight out of the ground on the other side of the tram tracks. How can I even get up there?
Jogging along the edge of the tram line, Rae’en watched as long flatbed cars on metal wheels hauled goods along the rails. Was it steam-driven? Magic? Either way the rhythmic clacking of the wheels on the rail reminded her of some of the group percussion rounds she practiced back home with her squad, all of them pounding their implements against the ground, relaying bits of stories or poems.
Workmen—Dwarves, humans, gnome, manitou, and even the occasional humanoid she’d never seen before and didn’t have a proper name for—noted, but did not seem too concerned about, her passing. After all, they had Token Hundreds of Aern at the gates . . . they’d seen Aern before.
Do you have any other rules to suggest?
What other rules need there be, Kholster?
I’ve found in many competitions, Kholster thought, it is fun to add an extra dimension to the task . . . to measure a nonphysical trait like creativity or time management. It helps—
Even the hunting ground. Yes, I can track that. Time management. Creativity . . .
Do you have another rule to suggest?
You have to buy me a present? She thought it as she saw the sign for Midian and liked the idea immediately. Kholster was always a great gift giver, but with only a little notice . . . She smirked.
Ha! I’m not sure how that—he thought back.
—I mean we each have to buy the other a present . . . in Midian. Not something expensive. We set a price limit, but the present is judged on originality and thoughtfulness and is weighed into the final results by . . . Zhan?
I would agree to that. He was silent for a long stretch. She could almost feel the weight of him studying the game now, determining his strategy. Is it allowable to make something?
Ye-es. She answered after a similar time of deliberation. But you can’t start it until Midian and you can’t leave Midian until it’s finished and you still have to buy something—it can’t be made only with what you may have stashed away in those saddlebags. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen you open your left one.
Pacing the train, Rae’en spotted an iron ladder leading up the side of the wall. She waited for the tram to pass, crossed carefully to the other side, and started climbing.
Do we consider the cost of anything brought with us if we use it as part of the item? Kholster asked.
Um . . . Rae’en thought about that as she climbed the fifty-foot (fifty-one, more likely—knowing Dwarves’ love of primes) ladder. I don’t know . . . no. If you brought it with you, you can use it.
Agreed. Kholster answered. And when do we exchange gifts? At North Gate? In Castle Guard?
At the Changing of the Gods in Castleguard, Rae’en decided.
Fine. Now about that oath . . .
*
Kholster enjoyed the idea of a race more than the actual race. By day two he’d reached Midian and used the bulk of his gift allotment to hire forge time. The look on the Dwarven smith’s face when Kholster cut off both of his own middle finge
rs was equaled only by the horror on the smithy’s face when Kholster chewed the meat off the bones to get at the bone metal. Eyes rolling up in his head, the smith fainted dead away.
That wasn’t very nice, Vander thought.
I didn’t eat the nails, Kholster thought back, I don’t know what he found so shocking.
You didn’t go with the little fingers?
No. I know you all think I’m crazy, but I feel like I lose far more hand strength that way. Kholster thought.
Or you could just do what I do and wait until you have enough discarded teeth.
Left arm. Right arm. Then repeat, I seem to recall.
That was to make my warsuit. We all did that. Vander sounded only slightly indignant.
Afraid Uled would change his mind about letting us use the Life Forge. Afraid he would understand too much about the warsuits.
What are you making? Vander asked.
You’ll see soon enough. Kholster bent to his work. Melting down the silver he’d purchased was much easier than melting down his own bones. Only the Central Forge of Midian could be heated to a sufficient temperature. How is the storm coming?
It’s time to wake Coal.
No outrunning it?
We tried. Irritation and weariness crept into the edges of Vander’s thoughts, coming through loud and clear. I’d swear the thing is following us.
It probably is. Kholster cursed. Wake the dragon then. I’ll wait on deploying the warsuits. You may yet make it through intact.
True.
Unable to do anything to help his troops out at sea, Kholster turned all his energy toward making Rae’en’s gift.
An hour later, Kholster was pounding the resulting silver bone-steel alloy into a square wire. The Dwarven smithy had suggested a wire mill, but Kholster couldn’t imagine it working properly. Besides, this was how he knew to do it, and six thousand years of habit doing things a certain way were hard to overcome.
You’ll want to see this, Vander broke in. Hear it, too.
I’ve got time, Kholster thought. Show me.
*
“You thought I was going to flee?” Coal croaked, his voice an unhealthy rasp, steam hissing from his throat as he struggled to be heard over the howling of the wind. After months at sea the great wyrm’s skin had gone a powdery gray, the only hints of flame visible in the dark of night when faint lines of orange and red played along his scales in a dying dance like embers in a fire pit. Under the pounding rain, the dragon looked pale, wet, quenched.
Vander stood at the edge of the Dragon’s Perch, an enormous steel coracle topped by a flat platform. Five Long Arms took turns stabilizing it, but the real secret to its seaworthiness was, as far as Vander could determine, found in Dwarven rune magic.
“You did say to wake you so you could take flight,” Vander shouted back, his hand clenching the abbreviated bow of the Dragon’s Perch, rain pelting his skin hard enough that he wondered how the human Long Arms endured it without complaint. Their robes flapped madly about them despite the soaking they’d taken.
“Were I younger—” Coal erupted into a torrent of wheezing laughter. “Were I younger I would have charbroiled you for such impertinence, such lack of faith and vision. Get off my ship.”
“I meant no—”
“I know when offense is and is not meant by an Aern, you bareheaded spy.” Coal’s eye lit up from within, and a bloom of red and orange leeched out to light his scales. “Get off my ship because it’s going to sink when I take off.”
Vander scrambled back into the rowboat he’d used to approach, a feat only possible in these chaotic seas with the assistance of the human Long Arms who now joined him in a rush. The Dwarven glass lenses one of the Long Arms wore in wire frames across his nose were ripped from the man’s face, flying off into the storm to be brought back in pieces by the human’s power.
Vander looked into the angry clouds, then back at the fleet. Not a stitch of canvas showed anywhere. As waves crashed over the side of the rowboat, he sincerely hoped the dragon’s plan could keep them all from going to the bottom . . . although it would have been impossible to be any wetter, even standing in Queelay’s court. The Armored would survive, but the humans and Glinfolgo . . . and all those guns and cannons . . .
Oars? He thought to his fellow Overwatches.
Three gold tokens flashed assent in his mind.
We’re coming back. The dragon is going to do . . . something.
Vander gave the order, and three of the Long Arms latched onto the nearest ship with the strength of their minds, beginning to pull the vessel away from the Dragon’s Perch.
Waves pitched the vessel maddeningly from side to side. At one point, Vander seemed certain he would be cast into the sea, but the Long Arms held him fast.
“Get some distance,” bellowed the dragon, shifting from side to side, stretching his wings, each stretch punctuated by a series of deep, fast inhalations and sharp exhales. “I’ll have to pull heat out of the water for many jun in all directions to kill it, and I don’t want you stuck in the ice!”
“Ice?!” Vander yelled back. “What do you mean?”
“Everything in nature has its predator, Aern.” Coal’s chest swelled up, and he unleashed a huge gout of steam into the air as he spread his wings out to their fullest. “Gods, Humans, Dragons, even hurricanes!”
“What hunts weather?”
“Watch and see, Vander by Uled on the Life Forge, Second of One Hundred.” Curling in on himself, gathering his strength, Coal sprang into the air. “Watch and see for the very last time on this plane of existence! See what it is to be a dragon!”
Off in the distance, beyond pounding waves and cascades of beating rain, the wall of the hurricane loomed, its funnel churning across the surface of the ocean. Overhead, the sky flashed blue, red, and green in a way Vander had never before experienced.
Great Torgrimm, Kholster thought
Vander was at a loss for words.
Coal rocketed at an angle, following the spin of the mighty storm. The dragon’s skin began to change, a wave of black flowing out from the center of his mighty chest to the tips of his massive wings. All light left the surface of the beast. The air crackled and snapped, the sultry heat of the storm shifting to cold. Rain become hail, then a mixture of hail and snow as Coal whipped around the eye in tighter and tighter circles.
Lighting arced from the roiling storm clouds to the sea and across the clouds themselves along a horizontal plane.
How is he doing that? Kholster asked.
Vander didn’t even know he’d made it back to the Oathkeeper until he felt himself lifted into the air by the combined might of the Long Arms and heard Glinfolgo’s voice in his ear.
“He’s absorbing the heat,” Glinfolgo shouted, his voice elated even as he clung to the deck for dear life. “It’s why his surface has gone completely black! What we’re seeing is a massive display of heat absorption and energy exchange! A hurricane is heat converted to work . . . to power. It’s driven by heat and the water cycle!”
“I don’t understand.”
“Dragons live on heat,” Glinfolgo shouted. “I just hope he survives the cold.”
“What cold?” Vander shouted. “The snow? Why is it snowing? Is Yhask attacking us as well?”
“Pulling out the heat creates the cold! It’s simple thermo . . .” Glinfolgo’s mouth snapped shut like a trap. “Just trust me! Have you ever seen ice form around the cooling pipes near the geothermal linkages back home?”
“Yes!”
“It’s the same principle!”
Round and round the dragon went, the storm spewing lightning in all directions.
*
From his spot in the smithy, Kholster watched the impossible. He barely noticed the first assassin. Kholster killed him with a distracted blow to the throat on instinct alone, refusing to look away.
*
A sheer white line of ice and frost advanced along the slick black surface of Coal’s hide. For one
, two revolutions, the great wyrm trailed a cloud of snow and ice, then the funnel of the great storm seemed to collapse upwards, expanding as it blew out and up against the clouds that roofed the sky. Coal dropped down into the sea. Where he struck, the surface of the ocean froze as he vanished beneath it.
“We need to move!” Glinfolgo shouted. “Aern to the oars and row! Quick as you can.”
“Wha—?” Vander started. “I don’t. What?”
“To keep the hurricane from re-forming he’ll have to steal the heat over a vast area,” Glinfolgo shouted, “an area we don’t want to be in. Be glad you listened to my committee when it came to building the ships. Why use sails alone when you have all this tireless muscle?”
Vander gave the order but stayed frozen watching the waves as they stopped moving. With the crackle, hiss, and snap of water transforming from liquid to solid at an astonishing rate, the sea began to freeze. A wall of pale green and white rippled across the paralyzed waves, radiating out from the point at which Coal, the great gray dragon, had plunged beneath them.
They stopped rowing an hour later. Aern and Dwarf stared back at the layer of oceanic ice. With a roar and a crack, the ice shattered upward, and out climbed the dragon, clawing his way onto the ice and then launching into flight. His skin blazed as if he were made of molten lava, and indeed, chunks of shed liquid rock dropped to the ice, melting through and tossing gouts of steam into the air.
As old scales dropped away, liquefied, Coal seemed to shrink slightly, revealing a layer of black scale chased with flame. Diminished, yet also much more lithe and serpentine, the dragon buzzed past Vander’s flagship with a deep rumbling laugh.
“I will meet you on the Eldren Plains or in The Parliament of Ages,” he cried, looping the ship.
“What? How?”
“I am quickened.” Coal reversed course so quickly Vander’s neck ached keeping pace with the adjustment. “This is my last state. Number now the years of my life upon a human’s scale. A final blaze to burn bright and clear and sear my mark upon the world . . . and when my fire dims and cools, I shall burn no more.”
