Dragon Fate: Book Six of The Age of Fire

by E. E. Knight

  Dwarfs with chains and grappling hooks stood by, ready to throw and snare and drag him over and expose his belly.

  “May I ask, Master Dwarf, who finally humbled me?” he asked in Parl. “I am curious to know who it is that finally sends me into the mystery beyond the final veil.”

  A dwarf with double-rings on each of his index fingers, matching gems of red and blue, emerald and diamond, waved the others to stillness. “First-rank Seeg, dragon, of the Deep Alliance,” he answered, using the trade-tongue with more facility than the Copper could ever manage. “My fathers were of the Wheel of Fire in its glory, though we’ve dwarfs and dwarf-wives of all four craft-marks in our number. We’re the last survivors of a punitive expedition sent into barbarian lands by the Wheel of Fire. Abandoned by our king and brothers, we counted ourselves clanless and established a new dwarfhold. Others have since joined, those who can’t stand the arrogant Hypatians and their dragon backers, that is. We’re the last of the Free Northern Dwarfs.”

  Enemies of my enemies, eh, Master Dwarf? Perhaps they should know his name.

  For all the jewels Seeg wore on his finger, the most impressive was a plate-sized white gem ringed with gold joining his thick girdle. The Copper had to stop himself from gazing into it. Though he hadn’t thought about Rayg for years, for some reason the crystal in Seeg’s belt made him think of his old assistant.

  “I’m called RuGaard in the Lavadome, though now I’m an exile and at enmity with the new Tyr. If you call yourselves ‘free,’ does that mean others of your kind are slaves?”

  “He asks strange questions for one about to be bled and butchered into cuts and roasts,” a dwarf observed.

  The Copper tried to answer well. “I entered first in the hope of preventing bloodshed. If it causes all of my own to be spilled, that will make an ironic story for the afterlife. I’m curious about you and how you’ve made enemies willing to hire dragons to destroy you. No ordinary hate burns hot enough to melt that much gold.”

  “We’re the holdouts,” said Seeg. “We’re the only ones who don’t tithe headtax to your damn dragons and their blood-drinking demen.”

  “Why did you take me alive?”

  “We’ve got plenty of sick down here. We heard from some blighter runaways from your Empire—before we decided to distribute their heads and bodies to different caves—that dragon-blood was good for ailing folk. Most of our folk are ailing these days, what with the wet roads and dry passages blocked by the cursed demen.”

  “Let’s bleed him a little now—I’m thirsty!” one of the dwarfs with the chain and sharpened, harpoonlike grapnel said.

  “Perhaps I can help with other kinds of thirst. Thirst for sunlight, or fresh air, or even revenge.”

  “We tried an alliance with a dragon once. It ended in our ruin,” Seeg said. “Though I do find you unusually coolheaded for a cornered dragon. Usually they spit fire and oaths, and leap.”

  Another dwarf argued, “If you mean that she-dragon, it was we did her wrong. She came through the barbarians and brought wounded out. How many dwarfs would have died without their last messages, were it not for her?”

  “I was Chartered Company. Dragons were a boon for us, until the Empire came. Let’s hear him out.”

  “Let’s look at it from your point of view, then,” the Copper said. “Bleed me, and you get a few barrels of blood. Maybe not even that, if I struggle and thrash. There’s bound to be spillage. As testament to my word, I’ve done bargains with dwarfs before. Look at this wing joint.”

  “It’s in poor repair, dragon. A blighter could do better.”

  “A blighter tried. But the design is dwarf work.” That wasn’t precisely true. Rayg had designed the wing joint, but he’d been trained by dwarfs in his youth.

  “A dragon in shackles is worth two—”

  “At best, I’m a temporary solution to a permanent problem,” the Copper said. “Perhaps I can help you find a permanent solution. I imagine you’re sick because you’re living off stored food.”

  “If only! Stone soup, more like, with a few old bones thrown in for flavor. Bootheels and belts ran out a year ago.”

  “I’ve only known a few dwarfs, but those of my past acquaintance enjoyed roasts, beer, and a sort of boiled bread with lots of salt on it. Sweets, too, especially honey. I remember giving a good deal of butter, marmalade, and honey to those dwarfs who’d worked with us long underground, and they were most appreciative.”

  The dwarfs smacked their lips. Saliva ran in disgusting froth into their dimly glowing beards.

  “Honey, oh honey!” a dwarf said.

  “Beer! What I wouldn’t give for a mug . . .” another mused.

  “You’ll give your life if you keep listening to this dragon,” the one with the grapnel warned. “Don’t go chasing the chance of a big profit when a purse of coin drops in your lap, however modest. Take the surety, Seeg!”

  “Perhaps we could organize a truce,” the Copper said, thinking it would be best to ignore the dwarf with the grapnel. Though if he threw at all and a fight started, the Copper would try to reduce him to a creamy holiday pudding before the others killed him. “I’ll stay down here as your hostage, and a party can go back to the surface and bargain for a few fresh fruits and vegetables. Yes, we get fruit up from the south coming on the coastal trade, oranges and pomegranates and pineapples.... If you’ve no money to spend, I’m sure doing a few odd jobs would endear you to my mistress in the tower. We have a winch much in need of repair.”

  “What, fix the hovel of those who do battle with us?” Seeg said. “You’ve gone mad, that’s what’s happened.” The insult made the Copper believe a sliver of opportunity had appeared, now he just had to widen it enough to wriggle through.

  “Who started the war?” the Copper asked.

  A scattering of dwarfs chorused: “The barbarians, of course!”

  “What was the reason.”

  Some murmurs broke out as the dwarfs consulted.

  “We’re sure it was their fault. You know humans. Whatever bargains their fathers strike are forgotten by the sons.”

  The Copper nodded. “Well, perhaps it was their fault. I certainly wasn’t around for it. I do have certain resources, perhaps I can pay, oh, what do you people in the north call it—weregild, is it?”

  “Forked-tongue dragon!”

  “It’s split, perhaps, but that just is so a dragon’s most sensitive taste buds may close up so they are protected from his flame. I’d hardly call it a fork.”

  “How much is certainly important,” Seeg said. “But more important still is whether we can find a place safe from our enemies.”

  “I once had all the wealth of dragonkind at my command,” the Copper said. “While I don’t expect to get that back, I did have some personal possessions, tributes and presents and such, that I intend to reclaim.”

  “Ha! Hot air. Just what you’d expect from a dragon,” the grapnel dwarf said.

  The Copper drew himself up to his full height and extended his wings as far as they’d go without the bad one drooping. “My name is RuGaard, former Tyr of the Dragon Empire and Worlds Upper and Lower, and I don’t make idle boasts. I will regain what is mine, or you may sell me to the dragons who usurped my throne. Either way, you will profit.”

  “You are RuGaard?” Seeg said.

  “I heard he was a Copper dragon,” a dwarf said in Seeg’s ear.

  “And blind in one eye.”

  “Crippled, too. By the Golden Tree, it is him.”

  “Ha-hem,” said Seeg. “You may have just won yourself a little more life, dragon. You seem to understand dwarfs well enough that I suspect we could become partners. Certainly not friends, probably not allies, but partners—yes, we may just be able to get that to work.”

  He gave the instructions for a single dwarf to send a flag of truce to Shadowcatch.

  Once negotiations were under way, the atmosphere in the dwarf-den lightened.

  “We’re not part of the Dragon Empire, eit
her, and we’d like to keep it that way. What are your standards for joining this ‘Northern Alliance’?”

  “We never thought of it as standards so much, just each dwarf that joins swears never to betray another of the alliance.”

  “Might I join?”

  “You don’t shy away from putting yourself forward, do you? What’s your game?”

  “I’ve been a lonely exile these past twelve years. The Empire tried to kill me more than once after I’d agreed to go. In the end, they’ll either kill me or I’ll get Tyr NiVom. Sad, we were once friends.”

  “Politics does that. There was no more loyal dwarf to Fang-breaker than myself, yet I curse his name now for the death of my comrades. All for his vanity.”

  The Copper sent a message to Shadowcatch requesting food and drink, as he was close to starving. True enough, the dwarfs themselves were on rations that hardly qualified as food—tree bark, straw from bedding, and cave lichens went into their soup.

  Shadowcatch, reading between the lines, it seemed, or just out of his own oversized sense of what counted as a meal, sent down quarters of beef and mutton, a cask of sweet fortified wine, and onions and potatoes for “ballast.” It was carried in by the “scouts.” The dwarfs weren’t quite ready to trust a second dragon by the Copper.

  The dwarfs fell on the foodstuffs like the Copper’s rats, barely toasting the meat on sticks before devouring it. It occurred to the Copper that Shadowcatch could have poisoned the food and gotten rid of the lot of them—dragon stomachs were cast from the same material that went into their scale, it seemed, and alkaloids that would kill a hominid found their way into the firebladder.

  “I prefer honest beer. This stuff sticks to the tongue, rather than cleaning it.”

  “Well, dragon, I believe you have a deal,” Seeg said.

  The alliance almost shattered the first night of the joint dwarf-dragon hike to the tower.

  The oddball band of scouts waylaid Seeg and his servant as they bathed in a stream downslope from camp. While they weren’t murderers, they were thieves and brigands, for they struck both Seeg and his servant with stones, knocking them senseless. When they awoke, Seeg’s rings and crystalline belt were gone.

  The thieves fled south to Hypatian lands. Shadowcatch sent two of his grounded dragons after them, though he didn’t have hopes of catching the scoundrels.

  “That elf’s raven will mark the dragons from miles off and the trail will disappear into a stream or swamp,” he reported.

  Seeg thought the items a small loss. They were most useful underground, where they generated a small amount of light in otherwise pitch-black conditions. Thanks to the poor condition of the lichens in the dwarfs’ beards, the crystals were sometimes necessary.

  “Why would they strike now?” the Copper asked. “If the dwarfs are to be killed, wouldn’t it be better from their employer’s perspective to follow them and see where they settle?”

  “Perhaps they weren’t seeking death after all. When they could take what they were really after, they left.”

  “But his rings and that belt aren’t one-twentieth of his wealth, never mind the rest of the dwarfs. If you’re going to steal and run, why not make off with gold and diamonds, not decor?”

  Chapter 9

  AuRon and Wistala wasted weeks tracing Nissa across the borders of the Sunstruck Sea.

  They had both seen the fringes of the princedoms of the Sunstruck Sea. This was the first time either had gone beyond the villages in the jungles bordering Old Uldam.

  They found an incredibly rich land. Lush fields bordered by good roads and irrigation ditches, rivers filled with sail, oared, and drawn-barge traffic, and cities teeming with white-clad men.

  Everything grew huge in the sun. The heat poured out of the sky and splashed across the ground, boiling up from anything dark. Big-eared, wide-horned cattle, nearly as tall as a man at the shoulder, wandered the fields, long tails swishing at equally enormous flies. They saw wild Rocs above the jungle, riding currents on motionless, outspread wings. The only time AuRon saw wings flap was when a pair flew close enough to them to decide they weren’t prey size and went back to circling.

  It was a pleasant enough land, too hot to be idyllic as far as the dragons were concerned, but a place pleasing to the senses. For the eyes there were intense greens and blues in the water that matched the sky above. The locals preferred to build in white masonry, though most buildings had colorful awnings.

  The people of those countless city-states, each a walled island of civilization surrounded by jungle, riverside, mountain, coastline, or some valuable combination of all the above, fled at the sight of dragons. Wistala’s prediction proved true again and again. Archers and spearmen would occupy walls, towers, and high domed steeples. The steeples in the wealthier towns curved and twisted in snail-shell shapes and those in the poorer towns were simple constructs of steam-bent wood and metal hoops.

  Even when a few brave souls emerged from a sally-port in the walls to speak to the dragons, there were language difficulties. AuRon and Wistala, between them, knew the trade-tongue of the outskirts of Hypat and some human tongues, but none of them had any effect on the men. Desperate, AuRon even tried mindspeech, but all it produced was a broad smile and nods from the interlocutors.

  At night, settling beside each other head to tail as they had when they were hatchlings, they chatted, sometimes in the rain that seemed to strike every afternoon. They switched between mindspeech and words without much paying attention to which they were using, as humans having an animated discussion will use their voices, expressions, and hands.

  The talk turned to the origins of trolls.

  “DharSii told me a legend once,” Wistala said. “He said he heard it from a dwarf. According to this dwarf, trolls have only recently joined the world. They arrived on a piece of stone that fell from the sky. The stone was so heavy and so hard that when it struck the earth, the very land puddled and formed into waves like a lake when a heavy stone is tossed. A hurricane washed over that part of earth, uprooting entire trees and flinging them, scorched, a whole horizon away. When the cataclysm was over, the trolls appeared out of the choking dust and fiery sky.”

  AuRon said, “One of the blighter sweepers at the Sadda-Vale told me his legend. He’d just lost a brother to that troll that raided our flocks and came right down to the fishing pools two years ago—remember? He was mourning his brother through a cask of beer Scabia allowed him—odd that the blighters brew beer for their own use, but they must get permission from Scabia to drink it—and he said something along the lines of wishing Anklemere had never called them down from the sky.”

  “DharSii believes trolls are connected to Anklemere, too.” Wistala stared off into the northern sky, where Susiron, and presumably DharSii, stayed in place while the world turned.

  AuRon, were he to confess his secrets, was a little jealous of his sister’s devotion to DharSii. He was an impressive dragon, but he’d treated his sister poorly. Allowing the phony mating with Aethleethia, keeping her twisting like a bauble on a string while he attended to other matters . . . Cruel was the only word for it. A dragon should have the courage to name his mate and fight for her.

  “I can’t see that Natasatch has treated you any better,” Wistala said.

  Cursed female! Dragonelles and dragon-dames had such highly tuned abilities with mindspeech they could read private thoughts if you weren’t guarded in them!

  So they followed the coast, zigzagging to visit the interior cities.

  It was a patchwork land. Always there was a palace or two, occasionally a fortress, and a city built around the mysterious conical minarets of the priests. Wistala, better read than he, explained that theirs was a fetish that believed in a single vast god encompassing all, but this god’s will was so inscrutable he either sent emissaries down or elevated men to demigod status to speak for him. Each of these temples was watched over and named for one of these gods or demigods. The priest caste wasn’t as involved in da
y-to-day life as the Hypatian “low clergy” that Wistala was familiar with—quite the opposite, in fact. They renounced the world and lived lives of simplicity. They sat in the temples, heard the prayers of the locals, and meditated long on them, in the hope that this universal God would nudge the universe in the proper direction.

  AuRon preferred the straightforward cults of Old Uldam. You took a deer from the forest and you thanked both your personal god and the deer-god, and you always left a vital at the kill as an apology to the leopard whose game you poached. It just seemed to him that the blighters got all their business done right away, dealing directly with the gods. Priests and such made him wonder just how much of the offerings to the gods ever made it beyond the priest’s purse.

  The princedoms of the Sunstruck Sea were a frustrating lot to deal with. They had negotiating intermediaries who came out and spoke to AuRon and Wistala.

  AuRon felt like the poor supplicants seeking intervention from the all-powerful. They never managed to speak to any of the princes, just the intermediaries. They did what they could to warn them that the Dragon Empire was readying for war.

  They tried to find out about Nissa, inquiring about a princess from the north, or an old arranged marriage from the Ghioz, and mostly received shrugs in return, or blank looks, or some old legend that either illustrated the maxim that it was best to get a good look at the bride before the ceremony of an arranged marriage or a sad story about a heartbroken bride who drowned herself on her wedding eve for she’d been pledged to a rich man rather than her true love.