by E. E. Knight
“Oh, yes, you did go away with him,” Rayg said. “He’s missed. This arrangement—with Nivom above and the twins below . . . Ahh, it’s best not to talk about it.”
“I won’t say anything. I’d like to hear your opinion,” Wistala said.
“Just idle talk,” Rayg said. “In return, your breaking of your exile is safe with me, of course. You’ve taken quite a risk coming all the way down here. Audacious of you.”
“I’m trying to figure out what really happened at that feast. The deaths.”
“Curious,” Rayg said, returning to his papers. “Did you lose someone close?”
“Ayafeeia, the leader of the Firemaids. I could use your insight.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever properly thanked you for hunting me down as a child and getting me away from the barbarians. I know you acted on behalf of my great-grandfather, not me, but it’s weighed on me that you might die without my making some gesture of gratitude. So here’s this: I’ll give you a pass to go into the Star Tunnel. According to the pass, you’re gathering a specimen I need. No one will dare question that. Were I to complain to NiVom that my work was impeded by some functionary—well, let’s just say NiVom has great hopes for my work.”
He fiddled about on a mass of shelving behind his desks.
“May I ask, Rayg, why two desks?”
“A man can work for pleasure, and a man can work for reward. Ideally, you’d like both. But anything for our glorious Sun King and Tyr goes on this desk”—he indicated the tidier of the two—“and my own pleasures and interests are piled on this one.”
“Thank you, Rayg. You’ve done well here. I hope NiVom releases you from service so you have a few quiet years with the second desk.”
“I’ve long since come to terms with that. Who knows? I may outlive NiVom. I may have to. There’s so much to do.”
AuRon, in one of his storytelling moods, had said that the Red Queen talked that way—too much to do to die.
Her pass took her all the way to the Star Tunnel without question. There was a heavy guard of those oversized demen at the old rising narrows to the Star Tunnel, and several different versions of spiny officer looked at her pass from Rayg before letting her through.
While passing along the chain of command, she marked one of the blood barrels resting on a piece of conveniently shelved stone. It had been tapped and had the wide copper bowls that fit a demen’s broad face scattered all about. The demen had been swilling dragon-blood like harvest wine.
When she descended again into the passage leading to the Star Tunnel, the demen clacked their mandibles at her as she passed, but Wistala didn’t see the humor in it.
Perhaps you had to smell the humor. She picked up a dreadful reek on the flowing air, almost as bad as trolls.
The Star Tunnel was different from the wondrous Lavadome in that it was a work of nature expanded by dwarfs and demen rather than a miraculous mystery. Much of it was shaped like a triangle, with a wide bottom and sides narrowing to the top. It was scored horizontally, like sedimentary rock. Daylight could be seen here and there at the apex of the triangle, and at night stars could sometimes be distinguished if the air was clear up short tunnels rising like chimneys from the vaster cavern.
The floor was smoothed in most places, save where they’d left a decorative stand of rock or stalagmite.
Wistala had first met Ayafeeia and the rest of the Firemaids here, when they fought off a last, desperate assault of starving demen. Her brother wanted space between the demen and the important underground rivers—when talking of his reign, he’d told her that from the first he’d had ideas about expanding the Dragon Empire belowground before returning to the surface—and by taking the Star Tunnel he deprived them of some of their best mushroom-soil and worm-beds.
She caught a distant glimpse of scale reflected from light shining down from above, near the huge crack where she’d first seen the Firemaids in action.
Tempted to hurry toward it, instead she slowed, suspicious. This air was foul with rotting bodies, certainly, but there was something else in the air. Had trolls ever come down and hunted the Lower World? The smell certainly seemed evocative of them, but muted by more comfortable dragon odors.
She saw a pile of rock with what looked like some human and demen bones, dirt, and what was hopefully just detritus that had fallen through the shafts from the Upper World shoved against the wall of the Star Tunnel. She heard faint banging sounds coming from a downward-leading passage next to it—there must still be mining going on. But the slagheap made a convenient perch, and she ascended it very carefully to avoid dislodging loose material.
She was never sure which she spotted first, the broken bodies, obviously dumped on top of each other from a height, or the trolls picking over, climbing, shifting, and rending the mass of scaly carrion, most of the color lost to a rusty coating of dried blood.
Gross and misshapen, elephant-sized, scale-covered, and dripping with secretions from orifices of unguessable purpose, they were easily the most loathsome creatures Wistala had ever seen.
Trolls. They had to be. She knew the shape too well, the dangerous power in those heavy-forward, light-rear limbs, and the odd sensory globes extending to examine the picked-over carcasses.
She knew that men fed a little dragon-blood now and then felt energized, in their prime. The Copper, when he was Tyr, kept bats and fed them from his own veins, so it was said, and they grew into great waddling winged things, like dogs. The Tyr’s Demen Legion had evidently taken the blood-drinking process a step further and were morphing into soldiers that could grow their own armor, see in the dark, and break down walls with their bare hands.
These trolls had been feasting on dragon flesh, and blood—with the demen skimming a little, it looked like, for who knew how many years?
These had developed not scale as such, but growths that reminded her of the corals of the Inland Ocean she’d seen shaped into art in Hypatia. They even had wings of various sizes, some just vestigial, others dragging behind from their joints like capes, and a few of the biggest ones looked capable of gliding or perhaps flight.
One troll was dangerous to an unwary dragon. Two might just be handleable, if they were caught in the open by an experienced dragon with a full firebladder.
She counted nineteen rummaging around the pile of bodies. Who knew how many more lurked in the recesses of the Star Tunnel, once the home-cave of the demen, who’d spent lifetimes adding to the living and gardening space?
Further writhing, pulsing horrors supped and extended inside the bodies. They had to be troll progeny. They resembled eggs only in their overall mass; the shape was more like some fantastic hairy starfish, extending bits of itself into the dead flesh and twitching as it absorbed rent flesh.
Her stomach pulsed and she didn’t know if she would erupt in flame or half-digested ration-meats and joints. She heaved, an involuntary act, and her legs extended as though to brace herself.
She sent a skittering of dried bones and dropped troll-scale down from her perch.
Dozens of troll sensory organs shot upright, turned, and centered on her.
She released her flame in a panicked scatter. The trolls leaped over and through it, making excited glubbing sounds out of their rubbery mouths.
They fell on her like an avalanche.
Trolls fight in silence. There’s only a sort of smacking gulp as they take in air, a sound like that produced by extracting a limb from deep mud. These had a kind of carapace that lifted and resettled, adding a heavy clapping sound like two milled pieces of construction timber brought together: Craalp! Craalp!
She supposed their numbers worked against them. Each hulking, scaled troll pulled at those ahead and pushed back those behind in their eagerness to get at her. Driven by hunger or hate—trolls had no face as most vertebrates know it and were therefore impossible to read—they fought each other so that the cave became a swirling mass of scaly motion.
It was the stench that struck hard
est. Trolls smelled terrible, but there was a dragonly smell to them now that made it worse, thanks to the familiarity of that scent.
To steady her mind, to drive the stench away, perhaps to buy herself time, she roared, a fearful sound that made her blood run hot. No wonder male dragons made such a noise when they set to fighting.
The trolls paused in confusion, just for a moment, as the sound bounced, batted between the sloping walls of the Star Tunnel. Perhaps, just for that moment, they believed themselves surrounded by hostile dragons.
If only.
But it did buy her the time to spread her wings and gather herself for a jump into the air. She had no idea whether she might escape through one of the shafts leading to the surface, but it was worth a try.
Luckily the size of the Star Tunnel worked against them. She flapped into the air, spitting fire all around to drive back the plucking and rending arms seeking to pull her down to messy destruction.
One, beating its wings and flying as wildly and irregularly as a bumblebee, rose after her. She turned a tight circle and struck it with her tail, powered by both her muscles and the force of her turn. Her tail caught it across the chest and sent it spinning into one of the sloping walls of the Star Tunnel. It crashed to the floor of the chamber, dead or insensible.
Other trolls climbed the walls, their half-wings buzzing angrily. Trolls are terrific climbers and leapers, and if they couldn’t catch her on the ground, they’d jump and hang on—the weight of a single troll was liable to bring her down. That would be the end of her, with that dragon-flesh-hungry mob.
The blow across her back surprised her. Two powerful limbs gripped her wings and she found herself unable to beat them. She plunged, the world whirling, toward the floor of the Star Tunnel.
This is the end of Wistala, the curiously detached part of her mind thought. What legacy have I left?
At the last moment, using every iota of her strength, she lurched and flipped onto her back so the troll riding her struck first with her atop it.
The others rushed in to finish her. She dug her claws into the ones battling her and prepared to sell her life at a terrible and bloody auction.
A rain of liquid fire fell around her like a protective storm.
Wistala! called a voice. It too bounced off the walls of the Star Tunnel. She knew that slightly high-pitched but clear carrying voice, and loved it more than any save one.
AuRon!
Was she dead? Was she lying in pieces on the cavern floor already, and this was some comforting, dying fantasy of her oxygen-starved brain? Was he dead, too, unbeknownst to her, and calling her to join him in this stormy afterlife?
No, it couldn’t be a fantastic death-dream. Her brain would have DharSii fly to her rescue, not her moody, mercurial brother.
She stomped the broken and bleeding troll hard and came away with a sii full of semi-scale and skin.
AuRon’s stumpy tail tip lashed her across the face. “Wistala!” he said again, flapping hard over her head as he shot another gout of fire. This one was thinner than the previous rain. Perhaps he had one more in him. He swooped under a troll diving after him, executing an infinitely more fluid maneuver than the troll could manage. It smacked into the cave floor with a sound like a dropped melon splitting.
“I’m coming, brother,” she said, leaping into the air. She tasted blood on her lips.
“Just follow me.”
She flapped after him. It turned into a strange escape, half flight and half climb. Soon they were in a rougher tunnel. He pulled her up over the lip of a hole when she swooned.
Cold. The stone of the cave floor was so cold. Had they been transported, somehow, to the permafrost in the far north?
“Wistala, are you hurt?” AuRon asked. It seemed a ridiculous question, with her leaving a trail of blood behind like a snail’s track.
Her brother. He tended to babble inanities under stress. He was a most sensible dragon before a fight and turned into a cornered dwarf, for all his lack of scale, once at grips with the enemy. But right after, he turned strange and hysterical until he recomposed himself.
She glanced down at herself, at the patches of rent and missing scale where the troll-blows had struck like boulders of a landslide, the great bite clean through her haunch that she expected would mean a limp for the rest of her life, the loose skin of one wing flapping like old Widow Lessup’s hanging linens on laundry day.
“Yes, I believe I am. May we rest for a moment?”
“Of course,” AuRon said. He returned to the hole, took a deep draught of air rising from it and cocked an ear so he might listen.
“You need water, or wine and brandy, to help the shock. Dwarfsbeard, if I can find the damn stuff in this thick forest.”
As AuRon babbled, she licked the worst of her wounds—the one in her haunch—and almost immediately languished into sleep, tucking her nose under her wing. In fitful consciousness, she assured herself she was still breathing and that her heartbeats could be heard. Then she passed into fair dreams involving DharSii and a matched set of hatchlings, four males and four females. They were residing in a cave painted gold—no, wait, that was just the sunset shining down the cave’s throat. White flowers bloomed all around the exit and she heard the distant cries of birds below.
“Eight the rare way,” DharSii said in the dream, griff out but closed tight in pride at her achievement. “Not one in a thousand dragonelles produce such a clutch,” he said.
BOOK TWO
Ability
“EGGS HATCH BEST IN SILENCE.”
—Dragon proverb
Chapter 8
The dwarfs ringed him like wolves around a hobbled horse. But they hadn’t eaten him yet. Maybe they were new to butchering dragons and were trying to determine where the best cuts of meat resided in him.
The fact that they were taking their time about finishing him increased his sense of doom. Dwarfs in doubt about the matter would rush in and start hacking.
Perhaps these weren’t dwarfs after all. He’d never seen dwarfs, who took as much pride in a well-groomed beard as a well-balanced axe or a well-filled purse, in rags and bodily filth like this. Such a combination of pallidness with grime would indicate madness in any other hominid, but dwarfs were as resistant to failings of the brain as they were to hunger, disease, or loneliness.
They’d dragged him into a circular chamber and made sure of the bracing on the circular stone that had rolled along a gutter into a sort of natural stone socket. The rolling, wheel-like closing stone reminded the Copper of the support for a wheelbarrow; it even had a giant handle attached so the dwarfs could drag it back and forth by means of a pulley chain. The stone, bound with iron, would not easily give way, supported as it was by the ironmongery and the stone socket. With all the twists and turns in the passage, even a troll or a dragon couldn’t force it or wield a battering ram that would crack it. Stout miners with picks would take days to break through.
Help would not come from without, at least not before the dwarfs could make stews and pies of his last leftovers. He had to find it within.
Alcoves ringed the circular chamber, with tiny hearths, some vented by metal housings for the air, others burning next to cracks in the walls, with smoke being drawn up into the cracks as though directed. It offered the cave a homey, smokeless warmth, and the burning fuel did much to mask the muscat odor of unwashed dwarfs. Knowing the cleverness of the bearded race, he supposed the smoke probably vented into the outer passage. To poison besiegers, they needed only to build up their fires or burn some sort of poisonous chemical in the fire. Perhaps even now, deadly fumes were dropping that elf’s dozing raven and the rest were fleeing even farther up-tunnel to escape.
He looked about. How many dragons get a chance to examine the site of their own death in detail?
There was a great deal of writing on the wall, both carved into it and written with chalk. A big stretch of marking looked to be a calendar, but there were other testimonials, some in multiple lan
guages such as:Fust died here with his comrades
He killed 11 enemies before falling.
Jospir regrets never having a son.
Old Kuk the blacksmith swears the best ale he ever enjoyed was brewed by Daza Yellow in the House of Yril.
Dwarfs usually had black or red beards, thick and often glowing, thanks to a curious luminescent fungus they cultivated in the thick mats of their beards. These had faded, and their beards were reduced to patchy hair the color of cold ash. Their arms and armor were rusted and bent, with no two suits matching. Those that had shields had tied them on with bits of twine, and there was not a boot to be seen, though some wore sandals of metal and chain or slippers that looked to be fashioned out of dried mushroom. Their ragged pants gaped, especially at the back where he caught glimpses of their frightfully dirty and hairy backsides.
Still, a few had enough care for their appearance that they’d knotted their mustaches and beards, or washed the filth from some jeweled brooch or an ancient family helm. Dwarfs took a good deal of wear and tear without bending their necks—even the Empire at its height had never managed to make thralls out of them, though a few served for pay and grudgingly fulfilled bargains they made to save their lives. The Copper had heard legends of dwarf prisoners surviving on nothing but licked moisture from a cave wall, until they eventually returned to the rock from which they’d sprung—if you believed old tales. Which he didn’t.
A dwarf peeked at him from a slit in a huge oval shield. A blade waggled just below the slit like a taunting tongue. “No wonder they had this one up front. He’s half blind and a cripple to boot.”
The Copper acknowledged his fear. Doing so allowed you to control it. Sometimes it even came to your aid in a critical moment. He’d escaped death many times; if it came here, he’d still done better than any dragon tossed into the world with his injuries could expect. At least a throng of famished dwarfs wouldn’t rejoice and snicker that he’d finally passed up and into the night sky, as they would if the news reached the throne room in the Imperial Rock. He could stand anything, but he particularly disliked being the subject of laughter. It might be better to fall here, unknown and unnamed.
