The Dragonswarm

by Aaron Pogue

  I raised the spearheads up, all at once, maybe a pace higher than the formation of dragon. I frowned, weighing them in my mind, then went another pace higher still. Then I gave them a shove back, as far as I could reach, and I released my will.

  In an instant, six sorcerous constructs became simply six sharp-edged stones hanging half a mile above the earth. Momentum and affinity flung them like catapult shots into the formation of dragons, and I imagined the sick wet thuds as four of the six struck home. Four adult dragons were ripped from the air, flapping and spinning and falling away toward the surf.

  I reached for the power again, manifesting earth in bolts like arrows of solid steel. I made a score of them at once and flung them as I had the stones, and though I saw no dragon fall, I heard the roars of anger and pain as my weapons struck home. I threw another volley and another volley, and on the third I saw a red plunge to earth. Another had to break away and curl back toward the lair. I couldn't fell the yellow, though. My eyes fixed hard on that one, and I tried another volley, another, but it always dodged away.

  "Go back!" I screamed. He tried to object, but I ignored him. "I am a match for them all. Pazyarev has a debt to pay." I forgot the little arrows and instead fashioned myself a blade. I had done something like this before, calling up dusty earth and shaping it by the strength of my will, but now I made it of nothing but power. It was blacker than obsidian, harder than steel and as light as the wind within my fingers. I made another, too, a perfect match, and released the dragon's neck to hold a sword in each hand. "I will carve them from the sky."

  You will burn yourself to ash, Vechernyvetr said. It is good to thirst for blood, but you must know when and where to strike.

  "Here and now," I said. The swords felt hungry in my hands, perfect weapons for this fight, and I could already imagine the taste of the dragons' blood on the air. "In violence and blood. Take me back to them."

  For a moment Vechernyvetr said nothing. He did not slow. If anything, he strained harder beneath me. Then he banked right, flashing through a wide, low pass, and broke out over the arid plains of the Southern Ardain. I saw the world of men spread out below me, a swarm of dragons hard on my heels, and I imagined the glory of slaughtering such a force where men might actually see.

  I rose up, balancing on my toes, and bent my knees. The cloud of Pazyarev's dragons was still nearly half a mile behind us, but I felt an incredible urge to jump, to throw myself at them, and somehow the whole distance between us seemed trivial. So, too, the hard earth far below. I shifted in place, trying to find the right footing, and Vechernyvetr screamed in my head, What are you intending?

  "If you will not take me to them, I will go without you."

  You do not have the strength. You will fall. One way or another, you will fall.

  I laughed into the rushing wind. "What have I to fear from earth or wind? I am no more concerned with the fall than with the nightmare monsters on our heels. In all the world, I want only to rend their hides and spill their blood."

  Still so small, he said. And still so stupid. You're weak as a worm.

  I wanted to laugh again, but I felt him reach through my mind again as he'd done before. My fingers opened and I watched the perfect Chaos blades fall away through the empty air. My body twisted in place. My knees bent, and I was distantly aware that they screamed in agony. That they had no strength left.

  The dragon drove me forward, back to the base of its neck, and flung my arms up to grip his scales tight. There, too, I noticed the protesting muscles in my shoulders. My head was throbbing. My body ached. I could no more feel the pain than I had the weight of the mountain crushing me. The searing fire of the dragon's power obliterated it, but in that moment I became aware of it. The dragon caused me to hook my knees beneath the joints of his wings, until I was stretched out as securely as I could have been anywhere on his back, and then he said, You will not like this.

  Even drunk on the dragon's power, I had felt enough in the last few moments to guess what was coming. I had no time to brace myself, though. I could not have braced myself against this. In an instant, between one beat of those great wings and the next, the power went away.

  The fire died, and with it went my strength. My pain returned. My weariness and weakness and everything that had been done to me. I still felt the thirst for blood, the animal fury calling me to lash out at the ones that had hurt me, but without the buffeting buffer of the dragon's power, I saw it for the frantic and senseless thing it was.

  Pain. I had felt the pain right away, but it took time for my mind to process it. It hit me again, some seconds later, like a wave crashing down and crashing down and crashing down. I kept expecting it to end, and it kept coming harder. It crushed my breastbone to my spine. It twisted at the bones of my arms and legs. It thrummed inside my skull and crackled along my skin. I gasped. I grunted. And then I cried. I screamed myself breathless in the rushing wind, and still the pain grew harder and harder and harder.

  And then I slipped. Between one moment and the next, I lost my grip. I slipped down the dragon's back and spun sideways for a moment before slamming my head hard against the long, powerful arm supporting the dragon's left wing. Lights flashed behind my eyes, and I washed up and down and head over heels. I tumbled along the dragon's body as though I were suspended in breakers, churning with the current. I dropped a short distance then cracked my right side hard against a talon. It stopped me for a moment, and then I fell into open air.

  I heard the dragon shouting curses in my head. I felt the grinding pain and wrenching stop as its talons closed hard around me. I felt a blast of flame that singed my whole side. Then destruction and darkness and exhaustion buried me, and words I could not quite hear chased me to my grave.

  6. What Dragons Know

  I woke again on hard, cold stone, the taste of sulfur and stale water in the air. Darkness, too, stained gray by the spill of sunlight through a gap in a distant wall. I felt a moment's crushing despair, remembering the dream of my escape. I tried to heave myself to my feet, to go for a drink, but my muscles screamed protest, and I didn't make it off the ground.

  Frail human body, a voice boomed in my mind. I felt its sneering contempt...and still I breathed a happy sigh of relief.

  "Vechernyvetr," I thought. "You are real."

  More real than you. He landed on the floor before me, resolving like a darker shadow from the gray light. Two nights beneath the silver moon and still you groan like a child.

  "Our bodies do not heal like yours," I thought. I tried to sit up, to meet his eyes, but I could not even do that. I ached all over.

  Blistering red light tinted the darkness as fire began to roil in the back of the dragon's maw. He made a sound, too, an avalanche rumble like the growl of an angry dog.

  Be still and let your body mend, he snapped. Day and night you sear within my mind like an unhealing wound.

  "You feel my pain?" I asked. And then the things he'd said before struck home. "Two moons? I've been here days? And all the dragons hunting us—"

  Are gone, he said. I felt his weary calm within my mind, and it eclipsed my sudden fear. So many fell, they would not chase me past the edge of Pazyarev's territory.

  "Pazyarev," I said, tasting the name. And then I remembered our mad flight, soaring miles over the earth, past trackless mountains and well out over the southern plains. I frowned. "Just...where is his territory?"

  The dragon knew no names of human cities, nor the roads or river names that defined our borders, but he showed me more clearly than any words would have. He drew an image within my mind, a manufactured memory more detailed than any map.

  From high above and far away, I saw the green lands around Tirah in the heart of the fertile Ardain. I saw the hair-thin line of the river Teel and the lands around Isabelle's home. I saw the dusty fields to the south and the impassable mountains to the west, towering over the stormy sea. I saw the sheltered cove beneath the city of Whitefalls that no army could ever take. I saw a third of
the continent, hundreds and hundreds of miles square. I waited for him to move the image closer, to define Pazyarev's territory within it.

  Instead, he said, Here. These lands belong to him. We are outside his domain now, in a territory all my own. The image swam in my mind, spinning dizzily, and showed me the smaller range of worn-down mountains that sprawled along the barren eastern coast. Now he moved in, narrowing the field of view to one mountainside of rough rockfalls and scrawny trees. I saw perhaps two miles square, of little more than dry, cracked stone, and felt the vast imbalance between Vechernyvetr and the massive broodlord.

  "He is hunting you," I thought.

  I know. He has been calling me back.

  "How?"

  For a long time, Vechernyvetr gave no answer. I felt a great emptiness from him, something like fear. Something like despair. And in answer to that helplessness, I felt a blind, furious rage. I once belonged to his brood, the dragon said.

  I thought, "He told me that. But why? And what does it mean?"

  Again he paused. Then he drew away. You do not know what dragons know, he said. I can scarce explain it. I felt him bank the emotions burning in the back of my mind, until only the anger remained. You need food. I will go and fetch some. You should sleep and heal.

  "But—"

  In time, he said. In time. But not while all your agony is buzzing in my head like a summer storm.

  Frustration flared up in my heart, then echoed back much magnified from the dragon. He hit me with his will, poured pressure on my soul, and all my desperation could barely hold him for a heartbeat. Then he washed me away in darkness and left my body resting.

  Vechernyvetr's lair was not the fearsome prison I'd found beneath the monstrous Pazyarev's control. It was a large cave, but only just high enough for Vechernyvetr to walk beneath its dark ceiling. It had a cooling pool, too, but his was barely three paces across and perhaps a foot deep at its center. The cave floor opened through a wide fissure onto a broad sun-baked ledge, and the breeze that sometimes rustled in tasted like pine and winter frost.

  There was a wide spill of gold and silver treasures against the back wall—easily enough to drape a man in luxury for life—but compared to the great flowing mountain of riches in Pazyarev's lair, it seemed a sad pittance.

  And then there was no brood, no army of retainer drakes. There was just Vechernyvetr alone. During the day, most days, Vechernyvetr slept curled atop his gold like a beggar on a threadbare blanket. I could feel his shame long before I understood it.

  Most nights he would go hunting. I could lie upon the stone within the lair and feel the wind beneath the dragon's wings, taste the hunger and rage, feel the thrill of every kill. I could feel, too, the itching fear. The resentment. It boiled and burned and ground him down. And it all stemmed from his memory of the broodlord Pazyarev.

  It took me three days to overcome the crushing weakness that followed my escape from Pazyarev's lair. For those three days I could barely hold consciousness for more than minutes at a time. I drank acrid water from Vechernvetr's pool and ate the meat he brought me, but mostly I slept.

  In time that weakness passed. Far faster than it should have, perhaps, because of the dragon power that drove me. But even when I could retain awareness, I was not much a man. Vechernyvetr's presence was too strong in my mind. I felt his sensations more than my own.

  When I tried to move, my limbs felt awkward—clumsy and weak against the memory of the dragon's great power. When I tried to think, my attention always drifted back to whatever held the dragon's interest. A dozen times I tried to put myself through the wizard's exercises to still my mind, and always I was interrupted by the graceful motion of a doe in full flight, or the sudden sharp scent of soot on the air. I never left the lair, but still wherever the dragon went, he carried me with him.

  He spoke with me, though, in the border hours between day and night. On the fourth day he found me awake and waiting when he returned. I was sitting just inside the cave mouth, staring west over trees and rugged hills to the distant plains of the Ardain. The dragon landed awkwardly on three legs, holding up the fourth to protect a wild pig speared on a talon as long as my arm. He took three hopping steps, wings beating wildly, then settled to a trot back toward me. He dropped the pig like a prize at my feet.

  "Dinner?" I asked.

  For you, he said. I had my prey with life still in it. Tastier that way.

  I nodded. For a moment I wished I didn't understand. But I could remember the thrill of the hunt, the pleasure he'd taken devouring a buck still whole. Mostly whole. I wanted to shudder at the memory, but the dragon was reliving it too, and his quiet satisfaction overwhelmed any response of mine.

  I took a slow breath, gathering my courage. Then I asked the question that had been nagging at me in whatever awareness I'd had for days. "I'm your broodling, aren't I? I'm like the drakes."

  That massive head swung to me, faster than should have been possible, and eyes like cauldrons narrowed. We should not speak of this. His displeasure rumbled in my head.

  "I do not know what dragons know," I thought. "But you can tell me. And perhaps I suspect more than most men could. Pazyarev is not the master of that swarm of dragons. He is the swarm. The drakes and winged adults are not...they're not his servants. They're part of him."

  That is astute, he said. For a human mind. He blew a puff of flame and charred the pig's hide to a cinder. Then he slithered past me into the depths of the lair. But there is so much more than that—

  "I know," I thought. "There had to be. Because drakes are not born into that slavery. They're...conquered. Overwhelmed."

  How can you know this?

  "They don't match," I thought. I felt his puzzlement and rushed to answer it. "The dragons in his brood don't look like siblings. Their colors, their shapes and sizes...they're all different, as though he gathered them from everywhere."

  A feeling of shock washed over me. And then laughter tolling in my head like an immense bell. They do not match, he scoffed. Such is frail human reason.

  I frowned. "I'm wrong?"

  You're right. I heard his snort in the cavern behind me, and felt his irritation. You're right, but for all the wrong reasons.

  I grinned, satisfied at that. "I knew it! And the ones that serve Pazyarev are like his trophies."

  No. My mind rang with the beast's disdain. Not trophies. They are his power.

  "Power?"

  His authority. His dominion. His reach.

  I thought of the territory Vechernyvetr had shown me. I thought of the swarm of dragons that had attended upon the monster. I thought of its great hoard of gold. I swallowed. "Which comes first?"

  I do not understand.

  "There are three measures of a dragon's power. No, four." I felt a prickling in the back of my head, discomfort and irritation. He did not want to speak of these things, but my curiosity compelled me. I rose and entered the cave so I could meet his eyes across the still pool. "Territory," I thought. "And the brood. And the gold hoard."

  His mouth fell open in a hiss, his long, sharp teeth flashing white within the darkness. Shame and vulnerability bubbled up hot in my head, and I found myself hissing, too. I shook my head. I took a slow breath and steeled a corner of my mind until my thoughts cleared, and then I nodded to the gold again.

  "That is your power, too."

  For a long time he said nothing. He didn't move. His gaze burned hot and his breath rasped, but I did not back down. He pressed at my mind, too, but I refused to relent. For the first time in days I felt human again, and I would not give up.

  At last he backed down. And the fourth? he asked. You said there was a fourth.

  I nodded to him. "Your size. In men, that one is easy. We grow with time, gradually and steadily, and the larger we are, the stronger."

  As simple as that? he asked, and there was mockery in his tone.

  I nodded instantly, but then felt doubt. The dragon relaxed some, his long tail rolling out and wrapping lazily arou
nd him, then he settled to the floor. Strong men have power, he said at last. You take much power from your strength. But women in your world have power, too.

  "Well, we protect them out of need—"

  He laughed and laughed. Without forming a word he showed me the sense by which he'd meant power, a memory of Isabelle and the feel of her soft skin beneath my fingertips, and a blush began to burn in my cheeks. He went on as though I hadn't interrupted.

  And there are wizards. Wizards greater than you who take power from their understanding, from their clarity of vision. And kings who take their power from their blood. And rich men buy their power with their gold.

  I nodded understanding. "Of course. You're right. We are at least as complicated—"

  Not by half, the dragon said. But nothing is so simple as it seems. A dragon does not grow in time, like man. We grow by spilling royal blood and devouring the strong. We grow by stealing human wealth and by shattering understanding. And the reward for all of this is power. It's control. It's dominion over reality.

  "Like wizards—" I began to say, but he cut me off with a snarl that burned in the dark cavern.

  Not like wizards at all, he said. I thought you, among them all, would understand. Wizards exercise dominion over nothing. Over the gossamer shades of illusion men call real. But it is daydream and fancy. Dragons are reality. Power is reality. Chaos is reality. And only we can tame it, control it, command it.

  "We," I thought. "The dragons. And me."

  And you, he said in agreement. I have never known it done before. Men should not know what dragons know. Your kind stains the world enough at six removes.

  "I gained it from you," I thought. "When we bonded on that mountainside. You gave me a power wizards don't even dream of." He said nothing. I could feel his uneasiness again, gnawing at the back of my head. I pushed it away. "You told me you could not kill me. You wanted to, but you could not. I think I understand."