by E. E. Knight
“Who’s left?” Wistala asked. “Seems to me many of the aboveground dragons are dead. The fighting ones, that is. I hope the Protectors are safe, for my brothers’ sakes. I don’t see what NiVom and Imfamnia will gain by killing so many of their own kind.”
“They’re mad. It must be,” AuSurath said.
“I can believe one dragon going mad,” AuRon said to his son. “Two? Madnesses that feed off each other?”
“Some curse of the Red Queen. They never should have taken over her palace,” the Copper said.
“It may be the Lavadome itself,” DharSii said. “It’s an engine of great energy. I’ve never been able to determine what it’s gathering all that energy for. All the Tyrs grew a little—funny—toward the end. Perhaps the Lavadome was trying to take over their minds.”
“Are you saying a vast mineral formation is intelligent?” AuRon asked. His griff rattled.
“Remember our hatching, AuRon?” the Copper asked.
“Less and less every year,” AuRon said. “What about you?”
“The same. Remember the fight with our brother, the red?”
“He almost had me. Then you jumped on him and I put my egg-horn into his belly. It was over in a griff-tchk. I’m suggesting we repeat that. I’ll keep the Empire busy on the surface. You go at them from under.”
“Maybe this time we’ll both end up on top of the egg shelf,” the Copper said.
“You can have it. All I want is my mate.”
“I could say the same thing, brother.”
“Do you know a safe way into the Lower World?”
“My mate’s hall, for a start.”
“Tell her to abandon her post at once. I believe this is a war of eradication. Whatever power is directing those trolls, it wants to kill every rat in the barn but leave the hayloft intact.”
“All the more reason for me to hurry,” AuRon said, eyes wide and alarmed.
He shot into the sky like an arrow. A human toddler whooped at the sight.
They left AuSurath, exhausted, at the Green Dragon Inn, where the hosts promised to feed him until he recovered. Wistala suggested that he return to either the dragon tower or the Isle of Ice and consider his future.
He insisted that he would join them to the south as soon as he recovered. He wanted to see his mother safely out of the Empire, if the slaughter of the dragons had yet spared her.
The Copper sent the dragon tower dragons back, save for the Blind Ripper, who smelled blood and battle and refused to go. Hermethea took some convincing to go and lagged behind, even after the others had left. Wistala decided she bore more than a comradely interest in the Blind Ripper. But, at last, she was prevailed upon to return.
The rest moved south at a steady pace. Word had spread somehow that the Empire was finished and Hypatia in jeopardy.
“Our rescue of a single dragonelle is turning into a march to save Hypatia,” DharSii observed to her.
“All these dragons,” Wistala returned. “If this is one mass-assassination, we’re making a tempting target.”
For Wistala, traveling down the Old North Road was a trip through her memories—the Thanedoms, Tumbledown where she’d met Yari-Tab, and then the outskirts of Hypat, the greatest city between the Inland Ocean and the mighty East.
They met refugees on the road north, pushing barrows and carrying their children and bundles. They ran toward the dragons for protection, something Wistala had only seen a few times in her life before. They told dreadful tales of creatures pouring out of the ground, killing, burning, and enslaving before returning to mysterious tunnels concealed deep in hill and forest.
“The Blind Ripper will get his battle long before we reach Nilrasha’s needle,” DharSii said.
They found Hypatia a city under siege. The Copper had been cautious enough to send a scout—he picked Varatheela, as being quick and intelligent—and she returned with a tale of an army encamped outside the city wall.
The Copper decided to see for himself. They left the road and followed game trails and bridle paths to a pileup of bluffs overlooking the river Falnges and Hypat farther downstream.
Much of the lower part of the city had fallen, it seemed, or that was what the smoke indicated. A black carpet of canvas sheltering the demen from the bright sun made it look like the fields outside the city had been painted with pitch. However, the area around the directory and the Protector and other dragons’ palaces were still intact. The Directory was protected by its own set of walls, towers, and redoubts, while the dragon palaces were linked together and ringed by walls to make defense against an uprising easier.
The attack on the dragons came with the speed of a swarm of enraged hornets. Suddenly, the forest at the base of the bluff was thick with black-and-red carapaced hominids. They must have been seen on the road or trails approaching the bluffs.
“Host, ring formation,” DharSii called. “Backs to the Tyr!”
They looked more like insects than hominids with their red plates and thin heads with rolling, side-mounted eyes like fish. Unlike the demen she and Ayafeeia had fought in the Star Tunnel, these were a full half again as big as a tall man. Their legs gave them an odd gait thanks to the short upper leg and stiltlike lower limb.
They’d been variegated by something—dragonblood, most likely. Some had grown scythelike claws, others had sharp spikes growing out of their backs where on a regular demen there were knobby projections. Their mouths reminded Wistala of the short tongs used by blacksmiths to pick up hot metal.
“DharSii, you fly north, as fast as you can. Organize whoever you can in the dragon tower and bring as many allies as possible to Hypat. Barbarians. Dragons and blighters on the Isle of Ice. Anyone who can make it here and fight.”
DharSii nodded and spread his wings. In three beats he was aloft and rising fast. He made one circling pass and emptied his firebladder across the demen front, then was gone.
The hordes of clattering attackers still mobbed the other dragons, who had wedged themselves into fallen trees or piles of rocks or just a steep cut in the hill. A carpet of bodies and pieces of bodies surrounded the remaining dragons. Patches of burning demen made the battle even more smoky and indistinct.
The dragons, even in their strength and fire, were losing.
“We have to fly,” the Copper called above the roars of injured dragons and the screeching cries of the demen.
“What about the people?”
“We can’t save them if we’re dead,” DharSii replied.
A mass threw chains around RuGaard. They swarmed over him like ants on a spider. He lifted—no, it was not RuGaard, it was the demen, carrying him as he struggled in a mesh of rope and chain.
They bore him away on their shoulders, moving like a hundred-legged insect that flowed across and through the dead, heading west out of town.
Wistala nodded, thrashed in a circle to push the demen back, and flapped into the air.
The rest of the survivors followed in a straggling line. From the air, they saw some of the town’s children lying facedown in the fields or clinging flat-bellied to the roofs of barns. There were four dragons left, including Hermethea and Varatheela.
All the fates seemed to be against them. Another fall of Silverhigh seemed to be in progress. She wondered if those ancient dragons felt as helpless, seeing dragons dying all around and able only to wonder when your turn was coming.
How could the demen arrive so soon after AuSurath, who’d exhausted himself flying? Unless...
She followed the tracks across the pastures and fields, thick with summer growth. The land had been tramped flat by their passage.
Yes, the tracks led to the old troll cave. She hadn’t explored it thoroughly enough in her youth—perhaps it had a false floor or wall or ceiling. A thousand demen had poured up from the Lower World like floodwaters rising. Who could say where the next wave would rise? How many dragons would this one kill?
She took off and flew upriver, winging over the bridge where she’d fa
ced her first real test: the encounter with the troll that had been plaguing the local herdsmen. She’d been so small then and the bridge so high and vast—well, it still looked high to her fully grown eyes. It was still one of her prouder moments, untainted by anything but regret at the death of the old warhorse Avalanche.
She’d lost two fathers beside this river, the father of her egg and the hominid who had adopted her and helped form her thoughts and personality.
“Father,” she said to the river valley, “I wish we could speak. All I’ve loved is soon to be lost.”
“Not lost, Wistala,” she thought she heard a tree say. “Never lost, as long as it’s remembered.”
This piece of forest she’d known all her life suddenly seemed closed in. The trunks had come impossibly close to each other, like a wall with only a crack here and there—but shielding what?
Sunlight shone between the cracks in the trunks as though this forest had its own private sun—Wistala’s sky was smeared with high thin clouds coming in off the Inland Ocean, but inside that gathering of trunks different weather held sway.
An elf clothed in living ivy emerged from one trunk. A she-elf with cheeks as bright as a polished apple dropped from a tree.
Their hair was as bright green as the first tulip leaves of spring and filled with unopened buds. These were elves, young and strong.
“Few really understand elves. We are like seeds that lie dormant waiting for the right conditions. We wait for the right need.”
“We are the family Rainfall now. Mist, Sprinkle, Downpour, Thundershower, Drops, and Cloudburst. I am Drizzle, sister and daughter. It’s been too many years since we have spoken.”
They looked like him, certainly, the way a group of pine trees look alike. All the same family with minor variations from specimen to specimen.
Elves continued to emerge, until the handfuls turned to dozens, and the dozens into a hundred. She knew this stand of trees to be an elf burial-ground—every elf interred here returned as a new family. She’d never heard of anything like this, beyond hatchling tales that elves “sprang from trees” when born into the world.
It made her feel young. She’d witnessed an event that was half spring sprouting and half reincarnation, according to the mystics of the Great East. How amazing to live in a world where such things were possible.
“Drizzle, you know—everything Rainfall knew?”
Drizzle nodded. “As we’re much the same being, I do. Perhaps with a sense of remoteness yet authority, like words of a song learned by heart off the page but never heard live.”
The elves were milling about, touching each other on the fingertips with flutters like leaves of trees meeting. They spoke in whispery trills and creaks, the language of trees bending in the wind.
“Why now?”
“Because you asked to speak to me. We’ve been waking up for some time and wondering when the time would be right. Is Hypatia still friendly to elvenkind, I hope? Once, they learned much from us.”
“You told me a story once, about how dragons were each given a gift by the elements.”
“There is another player in that game. There’s no exact term for it, but you can think of it as a shadow world of aether. A mirror element. ‘Aether’ is another word for ‘magic,’ and our world is desperately short of it.”
“Why?”
“I wish I knew. Perhaps if I knew why the aether was draining, we could discover a way to refill it. It is my belief that aether is a product of beauty, serenity, and grace. I’ve felt it in the presence of the graceful arches of my old bridge. Music might create it, or a high temple filled with worshippers before an altar. A brilliant thought sends waves through it.
“I am convinced that when enough of this energy builds up, there is some manner of transformation. A species grows in intelligence, or a society advances—as when the Hypatians got rid of the kings and began choosing who would make the decisions affecting the nation. Perhaps some great burst of magic formed the dragons.
“In any case, a wave of that energy rolled across Hypatia, and it awakened us. Nothing like this has happened since the first dragons appeared before the rise of Anklemere.”
“The demen are about to pass through wooded country,” an elf said. He touched a tree branch, ran his hand down it, and straightened, tightened, and formed it into a rather gnarled spear. “They may think a wooded road much like tunnel-fighting, but we’ll teach them better.”
“Don’t despair, Wistala. What’s an end and what’s a beginning depends a great deal on the observer. You said you think this is the end of dragonkind. I believe we stand on the threshold of a new beginning. Something has returned the shadow energy to the world. Now, where are we most needed?”
Chapter 17
AuRon landed atop the cool stone of the Protector’s mountainside refuge in Dairuss, not caring who saw him and reported it to whom. It was the dog days of summer in Dairuss, and the afternoon sun had one more hour of beating the land like a hammer before it disappeared behind the mountains. Even at this altitude it was hot and still. Thirst closed and roughened his throat, and his head hurt. Under different circumstances, he’d have found a mountainside pool, drunk his fill, and napped in the sun until the heat loosened muscles sore from flying. But he’d not come to enjoy basking in the sun like a lizard.
The City of the Golden Dome and whatever troubles it had with the world would have to sort themselves out. He had but one goal: getting Natasatch and taking her somewhere safe. A secret hole in the Sadda-Vale, perhaps.
“Natasatch!” he called through the balcony. Nothing answered but the rustling of the plain cotton curtains. He noted, rather dully, that they were still the heavier winter ones.
He sniffed around the sleeping chamber. He smelled his mate. Also, cleaning-vinegar, oranges, and oliban, dried hunks of tree sap that, when burned, smelled profoundly soothing. Someone had burned a good deal of it in the dining pit fire. Had she thrown a party? To celebrate what?
In any case, the thralls were keeping busy maintaining what he still, oddly, considered “their” temporary home.
His hearts beat hard. It was too still. Especially for the middle of the day. The refuge held its breath, waiting for him to discover whatever gruesome display of death awaited within.
The eating-pit room was awash in fabrics. Colors hung on the wall, bolts of cloth were laid out and marked with chalk, and a net on the ceiling held tools and buckets and sea-fishing instruments.
Halfway across it he heard a step. Natasatch! He looked twice to make sure it was she, and alone.
“I’m—I’m so sorry, AuRon.”
“I understand, and you have to forgive me as well. The dazzle of the Empire, jealousy for my brother—”
She tucked her face back, into her wing. “No, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry you came back. For this.”
A net came crashing down on him. The weights and hooks made his natural thrashing only entangle him further. He heard the clattering rush of demen entering the eating room. They clamped his nose and pinched his nostrils until he relaxed enough to allow them to put chains on his legs.
“So, so, sorry, my love. I think we shall die together. Soon. It’s all gone wrong.”
“Don’t be, my dear,” Imfamnia said. She strode into the room briskly, carelessly catching scale on the fabrics that had hidden the crouching demen. “To think, I once took a mild interest in you. Your skin may change color, lizard, but your behavior is entirely predictable.”
She considered AuRon. “Hmmm. It will take at least two trolls to move him.”
“Where are you taking him?” Natasatch asked her.
“You’ll find out the same moment he does. Now, come along, please, dear, or I’ll slit your graceful little throat open one side to the other.”
Chapter 18
DharSii found Gettel and the tower surrounded by corpse fires.
There’s a distinctive smell to a pyre of recently living flesh. It was appetizing, at least to
a dragon. He passed low over the fires—not much could be distinguished from the burning remains, but the hooked swords and twin-point spears favored by the demen were lying all around the tower.
For a dreadful moment he thought he’d arrived too late, but then he saw a dragon-neck poke out of the top of the tower and survey him.
Gettel wanted the news from the south, first. She already knew what had happened in Juutfod. When DharSii relayed the news of the Copper’s abduction, she looked genuinely grieved.
“I’ll miss him even more than the groundeds,” she said with a sigh.
“He was carried into Hypat. He may still be there, for all we know.”
“To think, he was on his way to rescue his mate. Now he needs rescuing, too.”
“I’m not so sure,” DharSii said. “I thought he made it awfully easy for his enemies to know exactly where he was. It might have been a tactic to bring dragons over to his side—you saw how easily he did that with the Aerial Host.”
“The demen didn’t know about the groundeds,” Gettel said. Or the dwarfs. That was a nasty surprise for them. Turns out dwarfs hate demen more than they do blighters, humans, dragons, or elves. I think they expected a few spiritless, crippled dragons. Couple of blasts of fire and then off with their heads. Somebody told them a half-truth or a bad tale. They knew, I think, that six or seven dragons were out, some of them moving south, so they took their chance. Expecting to murder tired, landing dragons, I suppose.”
There were barbarians eager to go to Hypat on what they called a “mighteous sack,” if he understood the tongue correctly, but there were several problems that seemed impossible to surmount, at least in any length of time that would make a difference.
First, the barbarians fought on foot. They had very few horses and pastureland in their crags and mountains was rare and reserved for more productive sheep and cattle. The lumber-cutters had a few, their warlords and merchants who could afford them rode, but the ordinary yeoman who picked up spear, sword, and axe when battle came marched and fought on foot. So to assemble even half of them at the northernmost stretches of the Old North Road would take days, and they would show up ravenous and thirsty.
