by E. E. Knight
The dwarf wasn’t even helmed, though he did have a sort of mask across his face and just a few scraggles of beard showing. Her store of dwarf-lore was not great, but she knew that a dwarf without a full beard was either very young or some kind of criminal. The only thing remarkable about him was his riding boots, which rose all the way to his hips.
The dwarf carefully set his frying pan down and stood.
Wistala froze, waiting for him to reach for a weapon.
But he wasn’t looking in her direction.
She tried to follow his gaze, but all she could see was the string of tasty-looking ponies, chewing their meals in bags attached to their noses.
One of the middle ponies had no interest in his meal; instead he stood miserably with one hoof tipped forward.
The dwarf went to his little two-wheeled cart and returned with a bag. She watched the dwarf lift the pony’s hoof and shake his head. He scratched it between the ears, grumbling something in his tongue, and went to work.
Wistala had gnawed at enough horse hooves to know that men sometimes put iron soles on the bottoms of their saa to save their beasts sore-footedness. Perhaps one had come loose. In any case, the dwarf carefully cleaned the pony’s hoof, extracting a sizable rock with a long device shaped like a dragon’s snout, and applied some kind of tart-smelling salve from a covered clay pot. Then he pounded in a fresh shoe, driving nails right into the animal’s foot. The pony didn’t like the hammering, but placed its foot on the ground, happy to rest its weight on all fours again.
Still grumbling, the dwarf refilled the nose bags from a sack and returned to his now-cold meal. The dwarf mopped up a little congealed grease with a lump of bread and left the rest.
The desire to leap and kill left Wistala. Any sort of creature that would leave his own dinner to see to the comfort of a four-legged brute didn’t seem the type to slaughter hatchlings in their cave. Besides, he held no helm or shield with flames; as far as she could tell, he had no sort of insignia on him, unless you counted the strange angular design like the gems Father gave them to play with on the rear doors of his cart.
He removed the nose bags on his ponies and posted them so they could nibble at the grass and growth on the banks or lie down. The nose bags intrigued Wistala, Bartleghaff’s story of men carrying around water in the bodies of animals had stayed with her. They seemed just the right size for fish.
The dwarf cleaned his tools and then sprayed a sweet-smelling liquid on his short, thin beard using a bag that hissed like a hatchling as he squeezed it.
The dwarf turned in. Once she heard snores, she crept up and licked the contents of his pan. Then she picked up two of the nose bags in her mouth. The startled ponies shifted and whinnied in alarm.
She shot into the brush as the dwarf came awake, still with the grease on her tongue. Once out of hearing from the dwarf’s camp, she dropped the nose bags and licked her teeth, searching for lost tidbits. Delicious.
Father didn’t like her playing with the nose bags: “The Four Spirits gave dragons everything they need to survive, and your mother’s wit will fill any gaps.” Once dragons started relying on hominid artifice, they’d be painting their scales and wing tissue again like the decadent dragons of Silverhigh.
But Mother’s wit told her to improvise. The nose bags were big enough to hold rabbit and pheasant or several fish. When she dumped a meal of squab—oh, the thrill of leaping on them as they took wing—out for Father, he bent so far as to say that circumstances permitted a temporary utilization of the nose bags.
They were so clever! Leather straps designed to hold them on the ponies’ heads had little brass latches like dragonclaws poking through holes punched in the straps, and a rope drawstring closed them like the leg coverings she’d examined on the man Auron ate. Wistala, after a good deal of trial and error that was more error than trial, fixed the straps so they hung across her shoulders just where the neck-dip began. They swung about a little, which was a bother, and snagged on her scales. She wished she could find that dwarf again and convince him to fix the bags together somehow.
“Tell me again about burning the bridges at Sollorsoar,” Wistala urged her father.
“You’ve heard that one before,” Father said.
“I like the part where the elves either must jump into the river or burn,” Wistala said. It was easy to place the faces of wide-eyed elves who rode after Auron upon the group of warriors trapped at the center of the bridge.
“You’re an odd sort of dragonelle, Wistala. Those saddlebags, and now war stories. Even your Mother only asked for my battle anecdotes when she wanted to be lulled to sleep. You gobble them like gold.”
“She’s a young Ahregnia, or imagines herself one,” Bartleghaff said.
Curse that condor! Every time he mentioned Ahregnia, Father went into one of his lectures. She felt her sii extend as Father cleared his long throat.
“My sire knew her as sister, Wistala. A bitter female, consumed by revenge for her lost mate. Scarred she was, poisonous of mind, with tongue as sharp as her claws. Leave battles to dragons, and save your hearts for husband, hatchlings, and home cave.”
“Jizara, Auron, and Mo—”
“Are mine to avenge, daughter. If I can ever get aloft again.”
Father spread his wings, wincing at the pain in his ax-hacked neck and shoulders. He beat his wings, stirring hardly enough wind to blow Wistala’s fringe to the other side of her neck. One long black fringe-point dropped to the corner of her eye, and she reached up with her left sii and snipped it short with her claws.
“That’s a terrible habit, Wistala,” Father barked. “A long fringe means a healthy dragonelle.”
A failed attempt at flight always leaves Father irascible. But his tone still stung, no matter how many times she told herself that.
“You’re just wearing yourself out,” she said. “I smelled deer spoor in the woods. I’ll try to find you a yearling.”
“What I really need is some metal. Look at these scales coming in! A snake would be ashamed.”
“Deer wouldn’t carry gold and silver,” Bartleghaff said.
“I saw a . . . a . . . ,” Wistala said, searching for the word, “. . . road. Might riders carry gold?”
“They’d carry weapons, as well,” Father said. “I thought I saw some ruins in the forest to the southwest, probably Old Hypatian. There might be iron to be plucked. I’d settle for nails. You could carry them in your neck contraption.”
“How far?” Wistala asked.
“Too far for you to find it on foot. You’d spend weeks searching,” Bartleghaff said.
“Exactly,” Father said. “Listen, old vulture, you’re getting fat on all those fish heads. Fly and guide her so your wings stay in training.”
“Why?” Bartleghaff asked. “I need nails like I need a captive hawk’s hood and tether.”
“Call it a favor to an old friend keeping an eye on his daughter. Two, if you can spare a glance down now and then.”
“High flier! Not an errand-wing,” Bartlegaff cawed.
“Smoldering pile of feathers for taking advantage of her hospitality,” Father said. He spat a globule of fire off the steep rock-side facing the river, watched it fall and hit the froth in a hiss. It rode the waves for a moment, still burning, before succumbing to the white water. “She’s been catching and hauling fish for you for weeks. And you fair bubbled with gratitude last night over that rabbit. Or did the gratitude get coughed up along with the bones?”
Bartleghaff worked his trailing wing feathers with his beak. “Oh, very well.”
“Have a few mouthfuls of metal yourself, daughter. You’re growing, and you need your ferrites. If you come across any quartz or fine sand, a mouthful or two wouldn’t hurt. Scours the teeth and aids the digestion.”
“So you and Mother have told me. Over and over,” Wistala said. But she couldn’t hide her excitement at the errand.
Bartleghaff’s guidance consisted of a few visits throughout the day,
mostly to tell her she was heading in the wrong direction. He always picked out landmarks that she couldn’t see, even by climbing a tall tree! She’d follow a ridge he put her on for an afternoon, only to have him swoop down and tell her she’d been making too easterly for hours, and she had to veer back south. She felt her fire bladder twitch at some of the abuse he employed—birdspeech had no end of colorful calumnies.
“You could come down and correct me more often,” she said, her fire bladder pulsing in time to her angry hearts.
“You could rest in a clearing now and then so I might see you through these confounded trees.”
She guessed it was a young forest. Now and then she passed a stone wall that led nowhere and divided nothing but its mossy side from the bare. She found a tall brick building on a bank. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to divert the stream years ago so that it flowed close to the building; now all was overgrown and inhabited by raccoons who retreated to tight holes in the bricks and bared their teeth when she sniffed at them. According to Father, where one man came, soon there would be ten and then hundreds, but whatever men had lived here, they’d long ago abandoned the land to the thriving trees, leaving the waterfall and pool they’d crafted to tasty frogs and fish.
She chased some smaller crows away from a dead groundhog and decided the meat was too noisome to interest her, but Bartleghaff thought it palatable.
Greenstuff filled every nook and cranny of the ruins, but where wind and water contested the mosses and lichens, marble still gleamed. Wistala crept to the edge of the forest, swarmed up a tree looking out over the ruins, and tried to put a mental map together.
Wistala watched men graze their sheep in the wide grassy lanes of what must have once been a city as their women and children gathered nuts and berries. Dogs, more interested in disturbing the cats sunning themselves atop ruined walls or in the gaps between decorative friezes, trotted from man to sheep, learning whatever might be discovered in each other’s tailvents.
The fallen city had three clusters to it, each atop a hill, linked by low walls between, like three spiderwebs sharing a hollow log. A marsh stood at the very center of the three hills, but ancient vine-wrapped columns projected from it, showing that it hadn’t always been a wetland. The village of the men stood a few dozen dragon-lengths off, outside a fallen gate that admitted a stream into the ruins. The stream fed the marsh.
She decided to hunt and rest for the day, and then explore the ruins at night. Metal would smell the same day or night, and she’d just as soon poke around after the men had retreated to their hearths. She just hoped they didn’t loose dogs in the rubble.
She released Bartleghaff. Retracing her steps would be of no difficulty now that she knew the landmarks. She could find the brick ruin by the stream, and from that the ridge, and from that the wall corners, and from that—
“Keep clear of those men,” Bartleghaff warned. “If you smell stewing lamb, just shut your nostrils. ‘Temptation hatches instigation which hatches assassination!’ ”
The old condor had perched over Father too long: he was starting to sound like a dragon.
“Tell Father I’ll be back in a day or two.”
“Wasted air. He’ll send me back to watch you,” Bartleghaff grumbled. He took to the skies, wings wider than she was long beating the air as he rose.
Wistala flattened some tall grass and let the sun clean her scales. As twilight fell, she found a pile of old timber riddled with termites and tore open the pieces with her claws, taking up the crunchy tunnelers three at a time with her tongue.
Insect eating, once started, is difficult to stop, and it was a very lucky termite that escaped into the fallen leaves. The next thing she knew, the sun had disappeared in her silent fall, and the night belonged to her.
It was a warm summer night, with red clouds purpling overhead. The air had a thick softness to it that promised a hot day tomorrow.
Wistala started her search, mostly following her nose from corner to alley to stoop.
She found a few nails, almost unrecognizable for their rust, and found it was easier to break up the wood where they still lay than it was to pull them out. She ate one—it tasted almost like blood. She found what might have once been a cutting tool beneath some broken shards of pottery. It smelled like bad steel.
She chased a smell down and dug at the base of a wall, but found only bits and pieces of mixed metal and glass.
“What-t-t on earth-th-th are you?” a voice said to her in rather breathy birdspeech.
A pair of yellow eyes, slit like hers, watched her from a deep shadow.
“A scaled snaggletooth. Are you a cat?”
“Look, learn, and give in to the awe!” the owner of the eyes said. Wistala found her easy to understand, her body and throat issued patterns sisterly to dragonspeech.
The eyes came out into the moonlight, walking along the wall. Wistala read the thin orange-striped silhouette from whiskers to long twitching tail. “A word of advice: Never ask a softstalker whether she’s a feline or not. If she is, you may admire at leisure. If she isn’t, you’ll just shame her. My name is Yari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter, born this spring here in Tumbledown, and I’ve never seen anything dumb enough to swallow metal before. Even dogs are brighter. Did you think it a beetle?”
“No. I have strange appetites.”
“I’ll say,” Yari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter agreed. “Have you a name?”
“Wistala. Here hunting metals.”
“I prefer rats, myself.”
“I don’t smell blood on you.”
The cat licked one of her black paws and rearranged the hair on her ears. “The moon hasn’t smiled on me yet tonight. I’m a free spirit. All the big males have the best spots staked out for their mates and kits.”
The cat seemed terribly thin to Wistala. “I hate rats. My brothers could swallow them whole, but those tails . . .” She shut her nostrils.
“You must know these ruins, then,” Wistala said.
“Of course.”
“Do you know where I can find more metal?”
The cat turned a neat circle, looked Wistala up and down. “You’ve got short thick claws. Almost badgerlike. How are you at digging?”
“I—I don’t know. I’ve clawed through ice.”
“The rats have a place under Tumbledown here. They call it Deep Run. A network of tunnels. Not built by them, of course. Supposedly there are outlets in the swamp, but no self-respecting feline will traipse around in there for fear of the channelbacks. I know a hole that leads to Deep Run. If you enlarge it, I’ll show you some metal coin. It’s old and crusty, but metal nonetheless. Nice little mouthfuls. Of course, you’ll have to dig again. I don’t think you’d fit.”
Wistala considered. At the rate she was going in the ruins, her improvised nose bags would take days to fill. The men had obviously picked the surface clean of anything useful.
Anything worth the having is worth the effort, Mother used to say.
“It’s a bargain.”
“It occurs to me,” the cat said, “that once underground, you could make a meal of me.”
“Can you keep something from the birds earthbound and ditch-gossips?”
“Of course. Felines are full of secrets.”
Wistala drew herself up on her stubby legs. “I’m a dragon, feline, and I give you my word as Wistala Irelianova that I’ll keep a fair bargain if you will.”
Whiskers twitched. “And what would a dragon be?”
Wistala froze for a moment. The cat seemed perfectly worldly, well-spoken and felicitous of fang. Apart from the chopped-short neck and face, she was almost drakine after Jizara’s elegantly limbed fashion. How could she not know what a dragon was?
“We are old, falling between mountains and man, gifted by the Four Spirits with strengths to order the world.”
The cat’s back rose in a graceful arc. “Order? Order is the enemy of the feline. We thrive on chaos, and if there’s not enough about, we i
nstigate some. I hope you haven’t come to bring order to Tumbledown.”
“Nothing like.”
“I should think a creature meant to bring order to the world would be bigger.”
“I’m young.”
Yari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter turned her alarmed pose into a casual stretch. “Make me this hole, Wistala Irelianova, and I and my kits will be in your debt and keep your secret that a dragon has come to Tumbledown.”
“Bargain.”
“Then let us touch whiskers . . . errr . . .”
Wistala extended her griff. “Will these do?”
“How beautiful! Yes, of course.”
The cat approached and stood nose-to-nose with her, then put her head alongside Wistala’s. Wistala felt the cat’s whiskers tickle as they flicked along her scales and probed the gaps. They prrumed at each other, and Wistala felt a warm affinity.
“I fear I shall have to like you for your mind, Wistala Irelianova. You are too hard to perch on for a comfortable nap and smell like that furnace the men use to cook their metal.”
“It’s Tala to my friends.”
“Then I’m Yari-Tab to you. Follow.”
The cat jumped away, tail flicking this way and that in excitement. Dragons and felines must be related somehow! Even their naming customs bore some resemblance.
“What’s catspeech like, Yari-Tab?”
The cat spoke from deep in her throat: long garble garble hrrr hunt and fair garble garble hrr blood.
Why, felines used words of Drakine!
“Beware blighters bearing gifts,” Wistala said back to her in Drakine, quoting an old dragon-proverb.
“Watch out for—ummm, dirty presents?” Yari-Tab said, as she trotted up a leaning column that reminded Wistala of a windblown tree on a mountainside.
“Close. That was dragonspeech.”
“Well, I never! I feel like I’ve got a new tchatlassat.”
Wistala thought she knew the word. “A . . . clutchmate?”
“More like a—umm . . . cousin. A distant blood relation who is also a friend.”