Dragon Fate: Book Six of The Age of Fire

by E. E. Knight

  “I thought we should dry and salt some fish,” NaStirath said. “In case we get trapped in here by more of those—what were they called, Larb?”

  “Ugly bas—”

  “Their real name, Larb,” Scabia said.

  “Griffaran. After a manner, your ladyship.”

  “Good idea. DharSii, get that lot down into the kitchens. See what else we need if we are trapped in here. You might think about putting a few blighters on watch. Larb, go through all the main passages. Use your ears, listen for more of those things.”

  “Me stomach’s—”

  “Going to be filled as soon as you finish, so the sooner you begin, the sooner you eat,” DharSii supplied.

  “NaStirath, stay behind, would you?” she asked.

  The others moved off in the direction of the kitchens, Aethleethia and the hatchlings helping to move nets full of fish.

  “I should have brought more salt from the sheep-lick, I know,” NaStirath said. “I’ll see to it right away.”

  “Not, it’s not that, NaStirath. I’ve been lying here thinking about something.”

  “That the great hall needs better drainage?” he said, looking at the puddles on the floor beneath the circular opening at the top.

  “I won’t live forever. I might not live another day; my hearts give a flutter now and then with these injuries, and I don’t like—”

  “Matemother, you’ll outlive us all,” NaStirath said. He was skilled at coming up with the right thing to say. That might be useful to a dragon in charge of a hall and its residents. She drew back from making up her mind one more time, considering.

  “I certainly hope not,” she said. “It’s the natural order of things for me to precede you by a good many years. I wouldn’t want to outlive my daughter. You—it depends on what day I’m asked. Today I would not wish to outlive you. However—”

  “Let’s change the subject, Matemother.” NaStirath probably decided she was winding herself up into a roaring mood that would reopen her wounds.

  “No. I want you to listen. If I should die, I want you to take over Vesshall and the Sadda-Vale.”

  “Me? Why not Aethleethia? She’s your own flesh and blood. Or DharSii—he’s a relation.”

  “It’s too much for her. She needs to get those hatchlings flying. As for DharSii, he’s only half here in spirit even when his body rests on his perch. I expect he’ll be leaving to join Wistala anytime. You’ll have to be responsible for once in your life. We are, it seems, at war with the Empire.”

  NaStirath looked shocked. “I don’t know one end of a spear from another, and I’ve only ever used my fire to relight the kitchen hearth. I’m no warlord.”

  “The best generals rarely are.”

  “I’d much rather be a fool.”

  She found the energy to take a deep breath and slap her tail down. “You no longer have that luxury, dragon. You no longer have that luxury. It’s time to remove those last bits of shell from your scale. You have no reason to be confident in yourself because you’ve never been challenged. Well, dragon, the challenge is coming, whether you want to play the fool or no. You can either rise to it or die as the joke you’ve lived.”

  She let that sink in a moment before continuing.

  “You may not credit this, NaStirath, but I am glad you’re my daughter’s mate. You have brains, anyone who knows you will agree, but you just play with them rather than put them to use. You have strength and health—they’ve just never been tested by enemies and privation. You can be pleasing when you choose, which makes all the times you choose not to be doubly frustrating.

  “For once, NaStirath—for once—prove yourself a dragon. No jokes, no tricks, no idle chatter. Your sires couldn’t all have been ninnies. Reach down deep inside and find whatever drops of their blood are left in you. Let those hatchlings tell proud tales of their father to their own eggs someday.”

  NaStirath opened his mouth, let it hang for a moment, and shut it again.

  Shut it? No quip? No jibe. Perhaps there was hope.

  Chapter 11

  NaStirath went to work with energy that surprised everyone, save perhaps Scabia. He put the blighters through some simple trials, divided them into thirds, and took the best group and put them in modified versions of leather work-aprons that he had them set to studding with metal buttons as armor. This group became the “Black Sentinels,” taken from the color of their aprons. He asked DharSii to use his experience in the outer world to select an appropriate weapon for them and see about practicing.

  They could never hope to stand against dragons, of course, but they could help in another fight if more of those dreadful black griffaran came.

  Later, he claimed that at every spare moment he reclined and thought to himself, What would a careful and competent dragon-general do? and then set out to do whatever came to him as best he could.

  A skilled leader would set up a regular watch system and then have a method of sounding the alarm if the watchers saw something. So he rooted around in old art and artifacts, many relics of Silverhigh covered in the matted dust of generations, until he found a triumph-horn, a caramel-colored curved thing with a poured and much-tarnished brass lining. It had originally come from a hairy, four-legged titan that once wandered the steppeland marshes.

  The engineering of mounting it in the highest balcony of the Vesshall defeated him, for the horn wouldn’t fit on the small balcony. Then one of the blighters suggested building a watchtower out of three tree trunks leaned against each other, which would put the platform almost as high as the Vesshall dome’s open peak.

  So pleased was NaStirath with this solution that he gave the blighter one of the dead griffaran’s feathers to put in his rain-hat to mark him as an officer of engineers. The exercise of dragging tall, straight trees off the far slopes stimulated him in a way that lounging in the warm pools never had, and he suggested that his new engineer should pick a few energetic youngsters to be his construction team.

  That night he ate with not a single complaint about the cooking. He was too hungry from hauling timber. DharSii’s ore tasted as good as fresh blood, for once, and his mouth went thick and pasty as it was set before him. He had half a mind to go on a dwarf-raid to find some real gold, but banished the thought. Too much to do in Vesshall.

  The resulting watchtower stood as stark and ugly as a gallows against the elegantly sweeping lines of the Vesshall, and according to DharSii the cording holding the trunks bound together wouldn’t last more than a few years in the wet weather of the Sadda-Vale (DharSii helpfully pointed out all the construction shortcomings of the watchtower as together he and the striped dragon lifted the alarm-horn into position).

  “Thank you, old friend. I couldn’t face Scabia if this thing fell down and cracked. Long term, we need something else constructed. Perhaps stairs up the outside of the Vesshall dome. Could you do a study and determine the best way to mount it? Oh, the poor sentinels will get rained on, so perhaps a canopy or shelter of some kind as well.”

  When an iron-lunged blighter blew on the horn, it could be heard all the way down to the charcoal-shovelers in the kitchens.

  The young dragons and dragonelles clamored for it to be sounded again, but NaStirath cautioned them that the alarm-horn was deadly serious business, not a toy. Their clamor silenced at once—he’d never spoken sharply to them before.

  To tell the truth, he felt a little guilty. So to make amends, with youthful enthusiasm checked in one direction, he gave them something important to do. They were to do their best that night to sneak into the Vesshall past the sentinels. No fighting, not even play fighting, allowed, and as soon as they were marked and pointed out, the game was over.

  They had an opportunity to test it a few days later, when the horn sounded long and loud. It rattled exercise-loosened scale.

  “Dragons come!” came the shout from the Black Sentinels.

  NaStirath felt his firebladder pulse. When was the last time that had happened? When Wistala star
tled him at the pools when she first arrived, all those years ago?

  He found himself trembling.

  Black Sentinels assembled, bearing their spiked wooden clubs. The blacksmith was at work on short curved chopping blades that would make the most of blighter musculature and Vesshall ironmongering capabilities without breaking.

  He hurried up to the watchtower balcony, stood just below, and looked to the south. Blighters were running every which way, reminding him of the time a wild dog made it into the chicken coops.

  He saw two dragons flying across the lake, making use of the warm air rising.

  Just two? He looked across the Sadda-Vale from end to end to make sure there weren’t more approaching low through the mountains. Satisfied, he turned his neck and examined the arrivals again.

  A green with enormous wings and a gliding, more slender dragon approached from the south. NaStirath looked away, then looked back again, refocusing his eyes, to be sure of his identification.

  “It’s AuRon and Wistala,” he said. It occurred to him that they might need to set up a signal for canceling the alarm.

  He couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed that there wouldn’t be a battle. His blood was well and truly aroused. Was he, against all his inclinations and attitudes, fierce?

  Wistala landed, hard enough that a loose tile on the vast, stone-paved expanse before the entrance to Vesshall shifted noisily under her.

  AuRon was a tough companion to fly alongside.

  She remembered, rather grimly, that Natasatch once told her that she’d long since given up trying to keep up with her mate in the air and so she landed to rest and let AuRon’s anxiety to reach his destination go off with the winds. Wistala took pride in her strength and reserves of energy. She limited her pleas to asking AuRon to slow down, lest she burst a heart struggling to keep up.

  AuRon had apologized repeatedly, and he remembered for a day or so to set his speed on hers, but he liked being lead dragon—it let the follower relax a little, riding in the air that his wings broke. But his natural pace always crept back in mid-flight and she had to once again gasp for him to slow down.

  The process had been repeated over the week it took them to travel north from the Sunstruck Sea back to the Sadda-Vale. They alighted in a gray dawn, with AuRon’s scales almost colorless from fatigue. DharSii set the blighters to work bringing them fresh-plucked chickens with the blood still warm within.

  “We came here to warn you,” Wistala said, tearing into shredded chicken flesh. The blighters had left the digestive track in the birds, but she was too hungry to complain about the taint. “We’ve shown ourselves as enemies of the Empire.”

  “They moved before you,” DharSii said. “Or perhaps faster than you. No way to know which.”

  They gratefully accepted food and wine hurriedly set out in Vesshall. Scabia greeted them and promised they’d talk in the morning, once they were rested. Then she slept like the dead.

  Scabia ordered another overlarge breakfast. Wistala sensed that something had changed at Vesshall. Scabia was subdued—what in another dragon would be called deferential, but it was hard to apply that word to the white matriarch she’d known for so long.

  Things seemed different between Aethleethia and NaStirath as well. She was less captivated by her hatchlings and more eager to settle down so that her tail rested against his.

  But the greatest change was in NaStirath. He still joked, but his jokes revolved around trivial matters such as the weather or the state of the drains in the Vesshall. He talked sensibly about ways to increase the food supply should more dragons arrive, and wondered what the chances were of getting some dwarfish artisans in to set some matters straight in the kitchen and food storage. She kept expecting him to fall into his old role of Vesshall fool again and demand to know who fell for the new, masterful NaStirath and who knew it was an act.

  A little blood spilled in the Sadda-Vale seemed to have created a world of change.

  “We won’t stay long,” Wistala said, finishing her breakfast. “I go in search of my brother.”

  “I go along,” AuRon said. “More for Wistala’s sake than my brother’s. I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

  “He might say the same of you,” DharSii said. “An open attack on the Empire by two dragons?”

  “Sometimes all it takes is one blow to give others courage,” Wistala said.

  “You’ve been reading Ankelene sagas again,” DharSii said, referring to the intellectual strain of dragons who kept records, knew strange tongues, and served as a learned caste in the Lavadome.

  “We talked it over,” AuRon said. “They’ll be more careful in their raids on the princedoms now, worried about dragons fighting for the Sunstruck Sea. There’s great discontent in the Lavadome. Some may decide to ally with us.”

  DharSii cleared his throat. “If no one objects, I’ll come along. I know you two have never gotten along with your brother, AuRon, but I respect him. In his time as Tyr, he made enemies, not all of them fairly, but he did well in a nearly impossible job and left dragons in a better position than he found them. Skotl, Wyrr, and Ankelene found they could get along better than anyone might have believed once they no longer had to worry about which clan was carrying the title ‘Tyr.’ I’ve no idea what his vision for the Empire was, or if he even had one, but what’s happened since he was overthrown has been dreadful. Shameful to hold one of a mated pair as hostage to the behavior of another. I’ll oppose it with him, or I’ll avenge his death and bring comfort to his mate.”

  “Nobly spoken, DharSii,” AuRon said. “Do the same for mine, won’t you?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Can we be in less of a hurry to die and more of a hurry to fly?” Wistala asked, removing her dragonhelm. “I’m not getting anything through this.”

  “Let me try,” Scabia said. “I used these a great deal in my youth with my mate. Hmmm. You know, Wistala, we may share but little distant blood, but I think our years together here have made us as close as though we were hatched here.”

  She settled it on her head and closed her eyes. After a long moment, her pinkish gaze returned to the assembly.

  “Nothing. He may be dead, he may have lost it, or had it taken. He may have some injury or defect that prevents its working—how is his mindspeech?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Wistala said. “We never used it much.”

  AuRon said he’d never tried.

  “Do we know he made it to the old tower of the Circle of Man?” Scabia asked.

  “I believe he did,” Wistala said. “I saw a tower set against the sea and clouds. Dragons, some kind of a sea-cave, or maybe it was just the ocean striking rocks at night.”

  “Then go to him. I have an—intuition—that the fate of our world will be decided to the east, in Hypat.”

  Wistala could tell AuRon was out of sorts. She flew close to him and let DharSii take the lead of the trio.

  “You look unhappy, brother.”

  He stared grimly ahead, straight down his nose, where the point of his egg-tooth could still be marked between his nostrils. He’d kept it, believing it brought him luck, but the cartilage of his aging snout had thickened and swallowed much of it. “I’ve an odd feeling. Intuition, perhaps. Foreboding. I’ve a strange feeling that I’m on my last journey—my last corporeal journey, that is. I’m not sure what mystical paths I might tread.”

  “You?” She was surprised to hear this kind of statement from him; AuRon hid his emotions as his skin hid him against a cavern wall. He’d always been such a prosaic dragon. Even DharSii was more poetic.

  “I’m a very frightened dragon deep down, Tala. Hiding it is survival instinct. It doesn’t serve to tell others what you are thinking under the best of circumstances. Before, every flight I’ve taken has had purpose. On this one, I do not see how it gets me to where I wish to be.”

  “Where is that?” Wistala asked.

  “With Natasatch by my side, in some quiet, roadless land with d
ecent hunting.”

  “Our parents fulfilled that dream. It did not do them any good.”

  He changed course slightly to catch a shift in wind direction. “That’s no reason not to try for ourselves. An ideal is no less estimable just because some fail in practice. Honesty is an ideal worth pursuing, but no one is completely honest. You, Wistala, you’re one of the most honest dragons I know and I admire you for it, but you can’t say you’ve been honest at all times with everyone.”

  She thought it in bad taste for AuRon to bring up her hatchlings like this, but she had to agree.

  The weather warmed and dampened as they crossed the Red Mountains. Thicker forests grew on the western slopes of the Red Mountains, even the snowline held clusters of pines, clinging to each other like roped-together explorers.

  Forests within forests could be found on foot. A second layer of thick, thorny shrubs with broad leaves captured what light filtered through the treetops. A third forest of lichens and fungi lived below that, more brilliantly green than either tree leaves and needles or thorny midgrowth. Fungi had turned much of the tree bark and inevitable deadfalls into a green carpet.

  AuRon knew this ground—he’d hunted across it with some wolves in his youth. He found a quiet glade where they could rest and take water. Unfortunately it was poor hunting ground, unless you liked stripping bark for insects and digging up mice and shaking polecats out of fallen logs, but they could rest without fear of being disturbed by anything but jays complaining about dragon-scent from the branches.

  They reached Juutfod in one long flight from the mountains. Three dragons arriving together as darkness fell struck up an alarm.

  AuRon seemed to be on some sort of guardedly hostile terms with the dragons of the tower. On the one sii, he’d brought down the Wizard of the Isle of Ice, who’d bred and trained some of these dragons together and raised them to glory, but over on the stronger saa side even the most nostalgic old dragon, remembering when they’d been feared across the Inland Ocean, had to admit that every flight the wizard’s dragons took was at the orders of their men, and the dragonelles had been most abominably treated, like laying hens in coops.