by E. E. Knight
The blighters swept him with fresh-cut birch branches and leaves as he exited the palatial expanse of Vesshall. With skin tingling and scales clean, he left the Sadda-Vale with no intention of returning.
Chapter 3
AuRon the Gray clung to the shadowed side of Eagle
Nest Mountain, hanging over the dragon-city like a watchful spider.
His skin matched the granite, cold against his belly, to perfection, right down to the white veins crisscrossing through the stone. It wasn’t a trick he willed; his skin just shifted and rearranged its tiny faceted leaves and the play of light did the rest.
AuRon sometimes wished he’d been born a scaled dragon rather than an oddity. His father once told him that fewer than one in a hundred dragons were born this way. Certainly, his color-shifting skin came in handy when he didn’t wish to be noticed; from a distance or in any kind of cover he was the next thing to invisible. It was also quieter, since there was no sound of metallic scales clinking against each other or whatever surfaces he passed around. In the air he wasn’t weighed down with half again his bodyweight of armor, making him faster in the air than the fleetest scaled dragon—though still hardly a match for the great birds, the Rocs and griffaran, he’d at times been forced to fight.
And that was the sore spot. In a fight, without the tough covering, he’d suffered from arrows and blades and lost his tail to enemies. Twice. It had regrown, of course, but you could still see the slight indent where he’d lost it a second time. When breathing heavily, he still felt a twinge where an arrow had pierced his lung when he was a hatchling.
So he’d learned to avoid fighting if at all possible. He waited and listened his way out of trouble. He’d trailed his mate, Natasatch, here without so much as a snap of his jaws.
Once, this had been the capital of the Red Queen’s Empire of the Ghioz, the stonemasons who’d learned their craft—and their proud obstinacy—by copying dwarfs. Before her, he’d been told, it had belonged, alternately and in what order he couldn’t remember, to elves, dwarfs, and blighters. One might say the city was like a fought-over throne, occupied by whichever great power now ruled the lands beyond the mountains east of the Inland Ocean.
In this epoch, the Imperial City was that of the dragons. More specific, the dragons whom his outcast brother once ruled, with some help from Wistala now and then. A score of years ago he’d wandered into their giant, crystalline cavern, the Lavadome, and been reunited with his siblings. Since then, the affairs of his brother’s Dragon Empire with its wars and political plots had stalked him like a hunter.
As for the name of the mountain above the city, he had no idea what the dwarfs or humans or dragons called it. To an accommodatingly garrulous raven, it was the Eagle Nest, thanks to a vast snow-filled hanging valley that reminded condors and other high-flying avians of an eagle’s creche full of fluff. He’d suspected the raven of being a spy, but as it refrained from asking him a single question and instead prattled on about the lateness of the spring—“surely a sign of a hot summer”—and the doings of insects—“the dragon reek has banished the whole sunrise side of the mountain of bluebottles”—AuRon decided he was just an odd bird who enjoyed the glamour of talking to dragons. That or he hoped for exclusive rights to the head of his next bighorn kill.
AuRon didn’t care for the raven’s world and its troubles. He’d learned over the years that there were very few friends one could trust, and those who he could trust either died or drew him into their affairs thanks to bonds of friendship and honor. Every dragon had a weak spot, his father used to say, and AuRon admitted he had several, starting with his skin, but it was this accursed habit of sticking his nose into the affairs of hominids in support of old friends that had brought him within a tail-flick of death more than once.
This time, however, he was snout-deep for purely selfish reasons. He wanted to feel his mate next to him, listen to her breathing, smell her old familiar, welcoming—to a male dragon—scent. While the Sadda-Vale had its points, the conversation had grown stale, and even his sister’s intelligent companionship was no replacement for the dragon who’d curled around their eggs for long winter months.
The shadows rolled across the city of Ghioz as the sun turned the mountains bloodred. AuRon didn’t believe in omens, but he still had to suppress atavistic, fearful thoughts brought up by the dusk-washed granite.
May as well chance it.
He glided down the mountainside. Most probably he wouldn’t be noticed. The whole city was thick with dragons, and masses of slaves—“thralls,” to use the euphemism of the Lavadome—there to do the work of feeding and washing them.
Tracking her was not as difficult as one might have thought. Natasatch still occupied the modest cave they’d shared as Protector of the poor province of Dairuss. He’d found an old servant who remembered them—one of King Naf’s veterans, a peg-legged man who thought the smell of dragons tolerable, and certainly better than the carrion-strewn battlefields of the Ghioz wars, and he was discreet about the occasional visit of the great king’s old friend. He’d told AuRon about the enormous feast planned in Ghioz to commemorate the victory over the Ghioz that had established dragons in the Upper World. AuRon, who’d played a role in that victory, settling his own score with the Red Queen, suspected they’d chosen the date on the basis of likely pleasant weather for gathering rather than on that of history.
AuRon wondered how the Ghioz felt about a mass of dragons descending on them, to eat their cattle, pigs, and sheep and leave nothing but hooves and other offal to be cleaned up.
In any case, he learned where Natasatch had temporarily established herself—the old hippodrome, now called the Drag-onhalls. She’d gone early to aid her friend Queen Imfamnia—remarkably now on her second turn as mate to the ruler of the Dragon Empire after serving her own exile—in preparing for the party.
The hippodrome/Dragonhalls were easy to find from the air. Two small horse tracks flanked the building, which was then enclosed by a much larger horse track for long races. The outer track had multiple fences, and dogs between the fences, and guards posted behind the dogs, to keep out beggars and scale-filchers.
There was an interior ring as well, covered against weather save for a small hole in the peak. Remarkable construction, yet typical of the Ghioz. The seats had been converted to dragon-sized benches; evidently meetings of some sort were held here, though the place smelled a little of blood, which set his griff to twitching. There was a wide corridor behind the seating for bringing horses to and from their stables. The stables had been enlarged to make sort of small apartments, though the ones near the roof looked more spacious and had a view out of the city, judging from the light bleeding in.
He heard snoring dragons, saw piles of wine casks, still wet at the bungs. From one apartment above he heard the tussling, flapping sound of mating.
AuRon shook his head. Dragons mating indoors, in secret. He followed his nose until he found Natasatch’s scent. It was in one of the bigger spaces at the top, what used to be an old promenade where viewers could look down on the horses or into one of the rings. There was a nice sort of arching gallery giving her a view of the city. He found an empty apartment, passed through to the balconies, and slipped into Natasatch’s temporary residence from behind thick draperies.
He heard voices, human and dragon. Natasatch was saying something about scale-polish to a human with a head shaved and tattooed with a design that reminded him of interlaced dragon-scale. When she finished, he used DharSii’s quiet throat-clearing sound to draw her attention.
Natasatch let out a frightened squeak and raised her neck, ready to spit fire.
He met her gaze, let one griff twitch. “Sorry to startle you, my dear.”
“Au—FuThazar, whatever are you doing in my chambers?” Natasatch said. “I commissioned you to find a cache of old Hypatian coin to give as a gift to Imfamnia, not to intrude on my chambers.”
“I will withdraw, but first I must speak to you, Protector,
” AuRon said.
“Ah, well, as long as you’re here,” Natasatch said. “Begone, you,” she told her servants. “Not a word to the Sunlight Queen of her gift. I want it to be a surprise, and if it gets spoiled you’ll hang upside down on my balcony from dawn to dusk.”
The servants scuttled off.
AuRon felt a stab at her casual mention of punishing her human slaves. He’d seen a good deal of cruelty in his life, and rather than becoming hardened to it, he’d grown more sensitive over the years. Not that any dragon dared admit a missing patch of scale for any of the two-legged races.
Worse, his mate looked as if she’d been living in the wild, and not living well at that. “You look thin,” he said. “Are you eating?”
“Very well. I get the best calves-livers in Dairuss,” she said. “It’s not doing you much good. Have you been ill?”
“I expect it’s Blood for the Empire.”
“What in the air is ‘Blood for the Empire’?” AuRon repeated the phrase to make sure he’d not misheard.
She cocked her head, as if he’d asked her why her scales were green. “I forget how long you’ve been away. Blood for the Empire. We’re bled regularly. There’s good coin in dragon-blood, especially from the rich Hypatians, and in extracts sold on the other side of the Sweep of the Ironriders.”
Fine. His mate was looking sickly and aged so some shriveled old Hypatian galleon-master could frolic with his fifteenth wife until he impregnated her.
“So, they have an Empire that spans two-thirds of the world, and they have to bleed you to acquire gold to eat?”
“It’s so much more than that, my—old friend,” she said. “Excavation projects need dwarfs. Roads must have surveyors and shorers. Armies to maintain order. They’re rebuilding the old Sailing Market so it can circle in the Inland Ocean once more, as in Hypatia’s glory.”
“I thought the point of the Empire was safety for dragons. You look like you’re about to topple, and you’re young and healthy. What happens with older dragons?”
“Less is expected of them, of course,” she said. “NiVom is brilliant. He thinks of everything.”
“I wish my brother were still Tyr. He had less brilliance and more sense. I don’t remember seeing any starved-looking dragons in his—”
“Hush! Are you flapping mad? Don’t speak of him! Every important dragon from the Sun Empire, and a few from the Dark, is here. The place is thick with griffaran and the Queen’s spies.”
“The birds are stuffing themselves with fruit and nuts, as far as I can tell,” AuRon said. “As for spies, half of the dragons here seem to be slipping on and off one another’s balconies or meeting in hillside glades. They’re going to keep busy reporting who is engaging in a quick tryst with whom. What sort of dragons are these? They’ve got the morals of mead-addled blighters at a spring mating festival.”
“Would you like a look around my sleeping chamber? I assure you, it’s cold and empty.”
“No colder than mine,” AuRon said.
“We could change that.”
“Were we to join, I’d prefer it to be up in the sun and clouds, as proudly mated dragons. I’m not about to join in some dreadful scuffle like a furtive blighter.”
“You know very well that’s impossible, my lord.” Sometimes she used the traditional honorific to poke fun at him when he grew pretentious. “Were I to take someone up, it would be remarkable. Every gossip would try to figure out who it was. Unlike some dragonelles of my acquaintance. It’s more strange if they aren’t cavorting over the city during a celebration, with Imfamnia setting the social tone.”
“Pity,” AuRon said.
“Will you remain long? Perhaps you could return to Dairuss. You could hide in the high pass.”
AuRon looked at the astonishing layout of tools for dragonelle preparation. There were knives and files and hooked cutters for scale, paints and dusts and glues and brushes and rags and mysterious pointed sticks for decorating scale, and vast quantities of a reddish clay.
“What’s all the clay for?”
Some of Natasatch’s good humor returned. “You really are out of date. It’s a wing-skin soother and tightener. A folded wing should look smooth and supple. It’s hard work, standing there with your wings stretched until it hardens. Then you do it again with them folded. Takes the better part of a day.”
Hard to think of his fiercely practical mate transformed into a vanity-ridden frivol. “I don’t suppose I can interest you in forgoing the clay treatment and instead eating a brace of ducks.”
“And spoil my appetite for the party?”
“Is there any way I might attend?” AuRon asked.
“It will look strange if I arrive at the Grand Feast with any but a Firemaid from my uphold. But there are so many dragons invited—I’m sure you can lose yourself in all the comings and goings.”
“I’ve no wish to speak to anyone but you there. But I am famished. I’ve been flying hard these past ten days.”
“Perhaps—perhaps we could find some time together. Again, with all the pairs of dragons at this feast. Stay about the fringes, and for the Four Gifts’ sake, don’t come near me when Imfamnia’s about. I think she suspects you and I communicate in secret.”
She quieted, and switched over to mindspeech. I’m unsettled, AuRon. Imfamnia and NiVom are up to something with this feast.
But what? Whatever would they try, with so many of the leading dragons of their Empire in attendance?
I may not show it, but I’m so glad you’re here. I feel safer with you about.
AuRon warmed at that. He felt the pulse of emotion returned across their mind-link. Very well. I’ll keep to the fringe of the crowd.
“You’ll need to blend in,” she mused aloud, half to him and half to herself.
Now it was his turn to cock his head in astonishment. “That’s my specialty.”
“No, with the Empire throng. Paint and such.”
“You are the expert,” he said, wondering if she had thralls just to run tools back to the worktables while her cosmeticians worked on scale.
She gestured with her tail at a bowl set high up, out of reach for a hominid but accessible to a dragon-neck. “You’ll need some coin. I keep some silver around for guests who want a polite mouthful. Take some of that.”
“Where does it come from?” AuRon asked.
“What does that matter?”
“You know how I feel about this whole Dragon Empire. Organized robbery.”
Natasatch stiffened. “There were some bandits in the mountain pass—you know, the high road above the capital. I found their camp, burned out the bandits, and recovered a good deal of livestock and bundles of fabrics. The Merchants’ League gave me half the worth of the recovered goods in exchange. This was two years ago, and a good deal of it is left. As Protectors go, I don’t live high. Our cave is still much as you remember it.”
AuRon felt ashamed, both by the explanation and by her use of “our cave.” To him, their cave was back on the Isle of Ice, the shelf where their eggs had been hatched. Her use of the phrase suggested that her most happy days had been spent with him in the Protectorate.
Humans, elves, and even dwarfs, he supposed, had elaborate notions of love. They all had elaborate rituals for courting and aligning with prospective mates, oftentimes with extensive involvement of both families. Blighters looked on wife-gathering much as a herdsman tries to increase his herd—it meant more wealth and power. He’d heard stories from the ancient black dragon NooMoahk, his mentor after the loss of his family, of dragons in the distant past tending more toward the blighter view than the human. With several females surviving hatching to each male, powerful males sometimes accumulated what NooMoahk called a “harem.”
Dragons used the word “love,” and it meant something that was oddly more practical, yet deeper than the human notion. A male dragon did not obsess over the object of his affection or write odes to her various perfections, but he usually admired the one he wanted f
or his mate for specific, practical reasons. Once mated, it was his duty to provide and, if necessary, to lose limb or life defending her refuge.
With Natasatch he admired her courage in adversity. He would have given in to despair had he spent most of his youthful years chained in the dark, as she had. He liked her wit and her open-mindedness to his ideas that dragons could—must!—do better, lest their kind fall into twilight and then vanish from the world.
Her expression of concern, desire for him to be there, troubled him. She was a dragon who was hypersensitive to trouble, the way you could feel a thunderstorm before the dark clouds appeared. Perhaps it was all those years in the dark hatching cavern on the Isle of Ice.
He scooped up a mouthful of coin.
“I’m grateful,” he said, meaning so much more than the money.
Even in the predawn, dragons were already preparing themselves for the feast. AuRon saw a mass of torches in a mountain pasture, and assumed food preparation was under way. He glided down to investigate, wondering if they would accept a trade of manual labor in hauling whatever sides they were smoking in exchange for a hearty meal.
It turned out that the flames weren’t from pits for charring and smoking flesh, but banks of light for thralls already at work decorating.
He scanned the waiting crowd of dragons for familiar faces—their own hatchlings all served the Empire in one capacity or another, and they would quickly recognize him from his twice-stumped tail. Not recognizing anyone, he landed and settled his wings so that they tented and changed his outline as much as possible. All eyes were on the workers, mostly men and blighters, shaping and prepping scale.
