Dragon Fate: Book Six of The Age of Fire

by E. E. Knight

  Which was another difficulty. Barbarians on a raid ate as they went, barging into chicken coops, pigpens, vegetable patches, and granaries for their food. If they did that on the trip south to Hypat, he wondered if it was in the power of the local thanes to prevent violence—if the local thanes could be prevailed on to supply a horde of barbarians in the first place, especially with so much in doubt.

  What he needed was some bit of magic to transport them south, like flying carpets from the old Hypatian tales of the sorcerers of Silverhigh.

  Shipping was out of the question. The demen raid had wrecked everything bigger than a rowboat. Standing and running rigging had been cut, masts and spars chopped down, there were holes knocked in some of the hulls. There were some lighters left, and the small fishing boats that happened to be out among the lobster pots when the demen attacked, but not enough to float a force large enough to make a difference. Though there were probably glory-hunters who would go, just for the chance to die fighting in an important battle. A death in battle gave you some sort of special key to a hall of heroes in the afterlife, in their reckoning.

  The fastest way was to fly them down, of course, but that presented greater difficulties than sailing them. A fully grown, healthy dragon could carry perhaps six men in flight, fewer if they were large, fewer still if they had heavy weapons, shields, and armor. Every barbarian went into battle with a huge shield and at least two weapons in case his favorite failed, so DharSii calculated it would be a strain to carry even four. On an all-day flight, two.

  He could just see the dragons of the tower flying to Wistala’s aid with twenty or thirty warriors and arriving too tired to fight.

  “Why don’t we swim ’em down?” Thunderwing asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “One time I was fishing, and I got bit by one of those big black-and-white beasties. They eat seals and so on. Ever seen one?”

  “No,” DharSii said. “But I’ve never spent much time around oceans.”

  “Well, doesn’t matter. Point is, they weigh a fair bit. This one must have been sick or blind—it thought I was food and started a terrible scrape. It tried to drag me down and drown me—that’s a terrifying experience. You’d do best to avoid it, Stripes, but I dug into its side good and got some vitals out and that was the end of that. Soon as I had some air in my lungs, I grabbed it by the tail and hauled it to shore. Lost a bit to some sharks, the louts, but there was still more meat than I could eat.”

  DharSii reckoned himself a clever dragon, but he seemed to be missing the point. It had happened before, too. Sometimes he was so lost in mathematics and parabola that he missed the greater whole.

  “You’re the one they call the philosopher-king?”

  “Thunderwing philosopher-king. They make it rhyme, like a hatchling taunt.”

  “You’re saying pull them down, like rats clinging to a rope after a shipwreck? Humans don’t last long in cool water, let alone cold, and the coastal water here is quite cool.”

  “No, I mean we load them like bales of wool into coasters and barges and such. Haul them down on rafts on our backs if we have to.”

  DharSii froze for a moment. “You’re—you may have something. But their craft are mostly wrecked.”

  “All the gear and stuff for those wrecked ships, the rudders and masts and lines—they’re to make the boat sail, correct.”

  “Those that aren’t rowed or pulled, yes.”

  DharSii’s warnings fell on deaf ears, until refugees appeared from the south.

  The demen were taking slaves and carrying off anything that could be pried up and dragged out. They made a clean sweep of Quarryness, leaving behind only bodies of those who fought.

  “We will go south, but not as conquerors and pillagers. We will come as friends, so that north and south face this new threat together.”

  “I suspect they’re moving on Hypatia, too.”

  “They have to. The demen breed like rodents if there’s adequate food. It’s an elegant system: When food is plentiful, demen halls teem with life. When it runs out, they eat each other until their numbers match the current food supply. Most other creatures have their population adjusted by predators or disease. Demen self-regulate.”

  The boatwrights and shipfitters went to work with a will. The challenge and uniqueness of the task appealed. Even Seeg’s dwarfs joined in. At first the locals were suspicious and hostile, refusing to share a tool or tell them where they could find more cordage. But once they saw how neatly their clinker hulls overlapped and the tight staving, they were gradually won over to the dwarfs’ two-prow design.

  “It’s so in the underground rivers we can go either direction if there’s no room to turn,” Seeg explained. The men of Juutfod followed the Hypatian tradition of putting a woman on the prow—their unsleeping eyes maintained a steady vigil ahead for ice and shoal, protecting the men with maternal instinct—but the dwarfs carved dragon heads, or wings, or a griff-and-tail design that looked like an elaborate battle-axe, and soon there were so many requests for the art that the dwarfs were working days on the clinker hulls and nights on the figureheads.

  The grounded dragons were more used to swimming than the others, so they made the best “drak-kaar” pullers, as the barbarians called the queer hybrid craft.

  DharSii learned another advantage to the craft when he observed some sea trials with strong-swimming volunteers filling the hulls. With no mast and sail, the ships vanished into the Inland Ocean mists where warm southern water met cool northern air, and disappeared over the horizon more quickly than a regular sailing vessel would. They could still hug the coast for safety and travel unnoticed; without the aid of powerful—and rare—optics the whole fleet could be mistaken as whales at a distance. To aid in this they rigged weathered and gray canvas covers on the hulls, which would both keep out the rain and disguise the outline.

  Among the tower’s stores were old helmets from the Wyrmaster’s days. His warriors had fixed dragonhorns on their heads, or high ridges in imitation of a male dragon’s crest or a female dragon’s fringe. The barbarians who could speak Parl well enough to take orders were given those helms to wear, so dragons could instantly recognize a man who could understand instruction. The others made fun of the outlandish headgear at first, but were soon scrounging for dragonhorn of their own.

  “Learn some Parl, then, and you’ll get helmets, too,” DharSii advised his translators to tell them. “Even if I have to saw it off my own crest.”

  “There’s one last thing you can do, Gettel,” DharSii said. “Send out your weather-dragons. Because of the seaworthiness of our craft—or rather the lack of it—we’ll have to do the last horizon or two in darkness, coming from the north. I’d rather do it in daylight so we might circle around the city and come with rain from the south. That way we could strike up the Falnges.”

  “Will do, DharSii.”

  “Don’t let the aerial dragons get carried away and come in ahead of is. Just before or once we’re engaged would do nicely.”

  “Most of them have experience in properly joining in on an attack going back to the Wyrmaster’s days,” Gettle said, eyes bright and young with the prospect of action. “Don’t you worry, Stripes, we’ll see to it. You know, Stripes, I’m an old woman, been around dragons all my life. I’ve never ridden one into battle. Too late now, I suppose.”

  “I am relieved to hear that you concluded that. It’s cold, often wet, always dangerous. Illness would probably make you unfit for riding after a day in the air. And that’s before a single blow is struck in battle.”

  “I can’t heft anything much more than my soup spoon. Even what’s left of my teeth wouldn’t hurt a demen.”

  “Best you stay here. Isn’t there a rumor that Varangia had a clutch? She’ll need someone keeping an eye on her food and metal supplies.”

  “Ahh, she can take care of her own, easy enough. You say I’d probably drop dead like a frozen sparrow before we even reached Hypat?”

  “Th
at would be where I’d bet my foreclaw,” DharSii said.

  “You talked me into it, DharSii. Always hated the idea of having my body rolling around in the surf till the crabs find it. Death in battle and a pyre lit by dragonflame—that’s the way for—”

  “I was trying to discourage you, Gettel. You’ll die. Pointlessly. You have years left here.”

  “You’ll read the will and all that. See that it’s carried out according to direction. It’s in that legalistic high-church tongue the Hypatians use. I only get one word in six, but the local altar-circlers vouch for the wheretofores and puffery. You’ll find I’ve been generous to my dragons.”

  Wistala was on her third night flight between the remainder of the Hypat garrison and the elves.

  The elves had not struck yet. They’d engaged with the monstrous demen, at a distance, with bow and spear-thrower.

  The Hypatians held but a sliver of their former city, hugging the coastal cliffs and the riverbank. The Directory was filled with starving refugees improvising water-catchers and ground mist condensers. The rest of the city belonged to demen.

  What was left of the resistance was concentrated at NoSohoth’s vast new palace, where his private dwarfish guard still held the high walls and javelin-launcher minarets, the old walled city by the docks, and, of course, the Directory. With the fight against the Ironriders still within living memory, the Directory had established a fine outer wall with metal-sheathed gates.

  Wistala had seen their whips flicker as they drove captives to the sinks that had opened beneath home and street.

  So many! So many! When three were killed, thirty took their place. Against such force of numbers, even dragons were helpless.

  The dragon-ships, filled to capacity with the barbarians, crept south.

  To DharSii, by all rights half their company should be sunk and dead. They’d seen a burst of heavy weather coming and tried to make landfall, but the storm caught them just ahead of the surf.

  Which was a tricky enough barrier. They lost one back-bourn boat, and the barbarians—rather cheerfully, to Wistala’s idea of dutch—switched over to another dragon’s overcrowded back. Someone might have asked first; they weren’t oxen with longer tails, after all. Still, they found room for a few more in the manner of rabbits in a winter den.

  At DharSii’s signal, the groundeds heaved themselves up and out of the water along a pleasant stretch of Hypatian riverbank park. Shadowcatch shook seaweed from his limbs. The barbarians clinging to his back returned their round shields to their arms and slipped off the cargo netting tied across his back from tail-vet to neck. Someone had cut himself on sharp dragon-scale sliding off his back. Shadowcatch risked his throat to arrows and raised his head high to bellow orders to his dragons.

  The dome of the Directory and NoSohoth’s palace could just be seen over the hill in the distance. Hypat was unimaginably vast—unimaginable, that is, until you tried to cross its twisty streets and muddy lanes without being assassinated.

  DharSii led them up to a wide, column-flanked avenue leading to the Directory. Ignoring javelins and arrows fired from rooftop and window, the mass of dragons and barbarians followed. Sensibly, the human warriors sheltered behind the dragon’s scale-wrapped bulk.

  DharSii wanted room to maneuver. The demen were born tunnel-fighters, experts at lunging out of an alley or doorway and then retreating. The dragons had their flame, and could lay many enemies low with a long sweep of the tail or a plunge-and-roll. The barbarians liked to see their enemy at a distance, too. They would begin to sing and chant and shove each other as they jostled to be at the forefront of the battle. Then, when every face was red and the eyes wide and fanatic, they charged forward as a mass.

  His best guess was that Wistala would be helping defend the Directory. That seemed more likely than that she would let others do the fighting while she aided DharSii. The two of them were obviously in love and neither wished to step on the other’s toes.

  “Tooth line,” DharSii called, using the one formation they’d had time to practice. The dragons staggered themselves in two lines, so the rear dragon looked through the wingtip-to-wingtip open line of the rank in front. The front could deploy their fire, and in the confusion and destruction the rear rank would dash forward and become the front rank. They could then add further terror by loosing their flame on whatever part of the enemy was still capable of resistance.

  Then and only then could the howling barbarians be released, to leap through the pools of dragon film and bring axes to the heads of their enemies.

  Warfare wasn’t meant to be sporting—it was meant to be won.

  The dragons advanced from Falnges, looked around anxiously. One overzealous member who’d either never or not recently seen a battlefield had sprayed fire at the sudden rise of a flock of pigeons and seagulls, feasting on the pile of garbage waiting to be scraped into the bay.

  “Uff tha?” one of the barbarians asked. Off now?

  “No!” DharSii snarled, quieting the youth who was seeing his first real battle.

  “Wait until we see them close enough to make out fingers,” DharSii called to his battle line. He repeated it down the other end.

  War makes strange back fellows, DharSii thought, glancing back at the barbarians on what was left of a barge. Wistala would have liked this, the challenge to carry more than any other dragon.

  The demen did them no favors. They did not come out to join battle, instead retreating into the city, where they clustered in the alleys, doorways, and rooftops.

  “Bad-mannered of them,” DharSii said to no one in particular, but a barbarian who understood some Drakine translated it, and soon the men were shouting it up and down water-dripping vessels.

  “We’ll have to improvise. Form head-to-toe lines. Let’s try to keep our warriors above them. We’ll never fit down some of those streets, so we’ll have to disembark some of the barbarians, but only once battle is joined and they’re good and keyed up.”

  “Formation coming in from the left,” Thunderwing reported.

  DharSii lifted his head. He did a double take. The hominid forms wore ordinary Hypatian rain-cloaks, a cheap and oil-clothed tight weave favored by lumberers and miners. But he saw green and flowery colors about their brows. Either they were men garlanded for a summer solstice baby-counting festival, or they were . . .

  Elves? Elves coming to the aid of Hypat?

  In such numbers, too. By the hundreds, formed into the traditional swan-wings of the northern Hypatian coast, with two companies in front, spread in open-order carrying bows, the traditional groups of unbonded males and females, and a more tightly packed set of male spearmen behind, the battle-givers.

  They flowed over the fields and pens of the outskirts of Hypatia like a wind.

  The elves fired a volley of arrows into the joined wall-faces of the city proper, dropping some gathered demen trying to set up a dragon-killing lance-thrower on the main avenue. Other arrows rained down on carts, paving-stones, signs, and barrels that had been wedged together as a roadblock.

  “To the Directory!” DharSii called.

  “Which one is the Directory?” Thunderwing asked, having already forgotten the council of war at the tower.

  “I’ll go first,” the Blind Ripper roared, starting a dragon-dash that threatened to spill his warriors out of the vessel on his back like a pail of water carried by a running child.

  The warriors from the barges behind formed into the usual barbarian mobs, order and chaos in one. The warriors with the biggest roundshields and small axes formed the first two ranks, spear-carriers behind, and the swordsmen behind them, ready to be vaulted into action up over the backs of the shield-men when the fighting grew thick.

  They swept forward into Hypat, leaving a trail of seawater that soon became mixed with blood.

  Chapter 19

  The long nightmare was almost over, the Copper calculated. There’d be no bargaining with demen, not NiVom’s horde. They’d carried him through burning quart
ers of Hypatia. The slaughter on the streets was sickening; the demen had made a quick inventory of their captives and slaughtered those determined to be either too young or too old to survive the underground march to their picks and shovels.

  Then they took him underground, following in the wake of a dropped and dead captive or two. They hit a small underground river that bore the tunneled look of dwarf-work on their old Ghioz canal system and threw him into a tube of wood, half filled with coconut coir. They threw him in, bound, and arranged the coir so it padded him—and, incidentally, helped keep the cage afloat—and started dragging it by what he assumed were tow ropes along the canal. He heard human-sounding coughs and cries from the drag-ropes.

  It was an uncomfortable journey. Chilly water half filled the cage, and it was impossible to shift himself so that he could vary what part of his body rested in water and what didn’t. At least he wasn’t bound so tightly that it interfered with his circulation. He could be grateful for that.

  The journey sped up and they entered a new channel after he heard the sound of locks being closed and filled.

  A last trip inside the Lavadome. Funny that NiVom wasn’t going to do something spectacular, like hang him from the brass dragon-snout in Ghioz, but then NiVom was always more intelligent than imaginative. He remembered the day when NiVom had come up with the idea of bouncing rocks into the Ghioz fortifications after seeing his thrall skip stones on the river.

  A team of demen with four chained-together trolls opened the leaky vessel where he had expected, at the far side of the river ring, the circular underground lake encompassing the Lavadome. How fitting. This was where his life really began, crossing this engineered body of water with a griffaran egg. This is where it would end, beneath these old columns that harbored the Griffaran Guard. There was something satisfying about coming full circle. He’d achieved more than most, though it was hard not to count much of the labor he’d put into building the Dragon Empire as wasted. Instead of securing his species’ future, he’d sealed its fate.