by E. E. Knight
She knew what she wanted to do; she simply had no idea how to go about doing it.
In the end, as the summer sun reached its zenith, she decided to start small, like Mother’s single rock that created an avalanche.
“I must see the king! I must see the king!” Wistala told Djaybee, the dwarf of the star-guild and the most senior of those who resided in their small house carved into the top of Tall Rock below the tower.
Djaybee looked through his off-center mask at the half-sun crawling up between the mountains to the east and scratched his underchin. “For one so insightful, you know little of the habits of King Fangbreaker—a golden garland upon him, long may he lead.”
“You would deny—”
“Not deny, good dragon, not deny. It’s just that he often works all night and is not to be disturbed until after the noon-bell tolls, and usually then only with his mornmeal.”
“Can you arrange an audience, then?”
“We’ve not much influence in the king’s hall—may it see no evil deed.”
“Try and I will praise you to him, good Djaybee.”
Djaybee bobbed down to one knee. “Then I will endeavor to get you a place in the line.”
Wistala got her audience that very afternoon, though whether it was through Djaybee’s exertions or the King’s interest in hearing from her she could not say.
Djaybee took her across the Titan bridge and through the passages to Fangbreaker’s throne room. Yellowteeth trailed along at the back in case during her wait anything needed to be cleaned up and disposed of, for she was too large to use the dwarvish comfort rooms hygienically.
The throne room was long, high, and austere, formed into a tunnel that narrowed at the top into a triangular arch like a shovel-tip. Squared-off pillars running up the sides created a series of alcoves. In each alcove stood a member of the king’s bodyguard.
A long, slightly raised walkway ran from the door wardens to the steps leading to King Fangbreaker’s iron throne, forged from the melted weapons of those he vanquished in single combat, or so Djaybee told her. To either side of the walkway were wooden benches of dwarf-size, positioned so the bodygard could look out over all.
Long files of dwarves filled the twin bench areas, snaking back and forth in long lines, many carrying sealed scrolls, or gifts. (Baskets of food seemed to be the most popular—Wistala smelled one surreptitiously; it was filled with sausages and cheeses and tiny bits of hard-baked salty bread.) The older or expectant mothers sat, others stood, some talked to their fellow petitioners across the raised walkway and made jokes about having joined the slower-moving line, according to Djaybee.
Upon reaching the front of one of the two lines, the petitioner would speak to a purple-garbed dwarf seated at a little half-desk. The one to the left was male, the one to the right female, her face hidden under elaborate draping. Sometimes the officials would write, sometimes they would lay a waxen seal upon the petition, and sometimes they passed gifts up to the king through his guards.
King Fangbreaker sat on his throne with his artifical leg off. He toyed with the skull-and-crystal, his heel resting on the horsehoof which had been detached somehow, and used it as a baton to point, or offer a sort of salute of acknowledgment to those who brought gifts, or to wave the very few of the petitioners up who would be granted a personal audience.
Behind King Fangbreaker sat a line of the dwarf nobles, some dozing against their fellows. She recognized a few of them from the balconies, but thanks to the masks, it was hard to tell one dwarf from another.
“I shall wait in line for you, Oracle,” Djaybee said, moving for the back of the left line, which stood three-quarters of the way toward the entrance.
But King Fangbreaker turned and called to one of his nobles, who rose and hurried down the raised central walkway. He bobbed and gestured for Wistala to come directly up the center aisle.
As she approached, she noticed that one of the sets of stairs was in fact an overhang. There appeared to be a room under the dais. She saw helmets in the shadows within and some sort of war machine with a good view of those waiting in line, and especially the central walkway.
“Tala, step up! Tala, it is a pleasure to see you,” King Fangbreaker said. “Are your accommodations lofty and airy enough for your comfort?”
“They are admirable, my king, and I could fill your afternoon with a thousand thanks, but I’ve had visions that I thought I should bring to your attention.”
“Shall we speak privately?” King Fangbreaker said, his eyes narrowing.
“Oh, no, this is good news for you and all your people. But I fear I must ask that all who participate in the discussion speak Parl that I may weigh their words, for I have no knowledge of Dwarvish.”
“Easily done. Do all hear?” King Fangbreaker said.
The nobles behind stirred, and the two attendants to either side set down their pens and seal-wax. All listened.
Wistala spoke loudly enough for all—at least all who could understand Parl—but she kept her snout fixed on the king: “I’ve had troubling dreams the last week, but I thought they only applied to me. It was of tasty dishes, gold, all things a dragon’s stomach desires. But they came in one door and out the other all while I slept unaware.”
“Opportunity passing you by,” King Fangbreaker said. “The lowliest soothsayer could tell as much.”
“Ah, but then last night came a very specific dream. I saw a great triumphant parade, celebrating dwarves, fireworks, marching up a street paved with gold toward you, Good King. I believe an opportunity is coming your way.”
“Can you add anything more helpful?” King Fangbreaker asked, twirling his leg.
“The one who led the parade was a human boy, a boy of fair hair and wide set eyes, bronze skin. But he was in manacles, my king. You embraced him, struck off his manacles, and took him to your breast, and the broken pieces of manacle turned into an ancient crown, and the boy put it on your head, but as he hesitated, the crown began to fade, and I woke up.
“I fear this opportunity may be brief, Great King.”
“This is not helpful at all. There must be a million boys—”
“He was aged eleven years or so. Garbed like a barbarian, somewhat dirty about the face and hands. Perhaps he is a slave.”
King Fangbreaker set his chin on his hand and thought. “Still a search for a nugget in a riverbed.”
Wistala cocked her head, the way Auron used to when he had trouble understanding one of her ideas. “What do you mean—you must know the name! Is no one talking of it? Did you not hear the eagle?”
She saw the whites of King Fangbreaker’s eyes. “Eagle? What eagle?”
“A most remarkable eagle flying at sunrise circled over Thul’s Hardhold, my king. Purple it was—”
“Purple?” Fangbreaker thundered.
Wistala continued: “And as it circled it called the name Rayg in so mighty a voice, I can’t imagine anyone didn’t hear it. But now I fear it was part of the dream, as well.”
“Did anyone see this eagle?” King Fangbreaker said, hopping off his iron throne and standing on one leg, using the throne-arm to balance.
“Eagle . . . perhaps . . . bird high up and far off . . . dark, possibly purple,” the Lords of the Wheel of Fire said.
“A feather fell from it, and landed on my doorstep, purple it was,” said one lord, falling to his knees. Another at the other end of the group slapped himself on the forehead as if to punish his wits for not being quicker.
“Hmfp! Very unhelpful, Lord Lobok, that I am only hearing this now,” said the king, turning a hairy eye upon the kneeling lord.
“My wife thought it suitable to, ahem, set it in a bed of flowers, or preserve it in glass. I shall get it at once,” he squeaked, and bowed himself down the stairs, and then hurried up the walkway, jumping over Wistala’s twitching tail.
“A man-child. A man-child,” King Fangbreaker puzzled.
“The boy’s face was alive with intelligence,” Wista
la said. “Perhaps he will serve as an emissary, or a craftsman.”
“I’d rather Hypatia come to the mountain,” King Fangbreaker said. “But if we can find this boy, we’ll decide then. An odd sort of vision, Tala.” He scratched at his beard. “Hmfp! If it brings happiness to my people, I am satisfied. Let every one of our trading houses know to make inquiries about this boy. Say he is being ransomed through us, that none may learn his value before we acquire him. When it comes time to bring him here, I imagine I must let Lobok handle it, as the duty seems to have fallen on his doorstep along with the feather—though he is the nervous type.”
“I will take no more of your time, Lord,” Wistala said.
“And keep that out of my court,” Fangbreaker said, fixing his eye about Yellowteeth, who lurked behind Wistala.
Oddly enough, the blighter smiled back at the king as he gave a nodding bow. Wistala might even have called the expression defiant.
Chapter 26
Wistala flapped in the night sky above Galahall, a cold fall wind from the northwest helping keep her aloft as she turned circles, falling in a glide and then rising with a few hard wing-beats, wondering what transpired within.
Hammar had new hutments on the edge of his lands, the round structures of the northern barbarians with their roofs like a single-pole tent.
She accompanied the expedition at King Fangbreaker’s request. He was nervous about Lord Lobok, who’d set out from Thul’s Hardhold with an armed force some of the dwarvish lords laughed at as being oversize, especially considering the small amount of money borne as the agreed price for the youth.
“He never was the steadiest warrior, and always called for more axes and artillerists, whatever his situation,” Fangbreaker said, watching the barges set out from his balcony ten days before.
“But the feather fell on his doorstep,” Wistala said. She’d seen the purple feather, produced after some delay for the King’s court; it smelled like a white one freshly dyed. “In case of treachery, would it not be better to have a large, well-arrayed force at hand?”
“This is the simplest of transactions. Why the word treachery?” King Fangbreaker asked.
“I cannot say. I speak what comes out of my mind; why it was that word instead of another is as much a mystery to me as to you.”
“Hmpf,” he said in return.
“Are there commanders to see that the force is well handled, whether it is a peaceful march or a warlike one?” Wistala asked.
“From anyone else I’d call that an insult, Tala,” he rumbled. “But you’ve little opportunity to learn decent manners.”
“May I hazard my manners with another question?”
“Of course.”
“What happens to those gift baskets of food given to you in your throne hall? Do you eat them all?”
“I eat not a one,” King Fangbreaker said. “I’ve a queer stomach, and mostly eat gruel a-mealtimes, which is easily digested and nutritious. And I have a terrible sweet tooth at night, which is responsible for this,” he patted his paunch. “The baskets go to the poor of our city. There are many widows and orphans without a dwarf in a guild to support them. Can’t have young dwarves growing up all stoop-backed and knockkneed, coughing and feverish from malnutrition.”
Wistala felt the lordly dwarves moving about her flanks, some were pointing to her underside and talked among themselves, perhaps discussing assorted methods and tactics of dragon-killing.
“How did you get the title Fangbreaker, my king?” Wistala asked.
“I was cheated by a pair of dragons,” he said. “They were a wretched, misfortunate pair, who we helped restore to health and vitality with foods and metals. In return they fought for us, as some of the mercenary Ironriders do on the eastern side of this mountain, but they abandoned us to start their family without taking proper leave and asking permission to bear eggs. For we had a market for those eggs, a rich market, and they’d agreed that their bodies would be ours for a period under contract.
“Now I was not unreasonable. I just asked for one clutch. After that, they would be free to go where they wished, to the ends of the breaking earth in the west or the jeweled kingdoms of the east for all I cared, and hatch as many eggs as they liked. But I’d promised a full clutch of eggs to a buyer, and he would have them.
“The dragons argued that their services included only flying and fighting, not eggs, and when I stood firm, they fled. The laying time must have been close, for they did not flee far, though they turned up in an unexpected cave, one we’d gone to much trouble to seal from below to cut off the blighters within from the darkroads.
“I caught up to them in the end, so that I might turn over hatchlings to my buyer, if not eggs. Though that Dragonblade got overzealous in the fight and in attempting to pinion a hatchling killed it. I poked a hole in the female who’d lied to me, spilling her fire bladder and rendering her harmless and gasping, and smashed in her lying mouth with my gauntlet for defying me, turning her teeth into bloody ruin. She died cursing me through a broken jaw. Does this talk sicken you, Tala?”
Wistala, wondering how King Fangbreaker’s body would dance as flame consumed it, took a deep breath. “There are good dragons and bad dragons, just as there are good and bad dwarves, Dread King.”
“But so I was titled and given a place at the council table, for we managed to hunt one hatchling down and the Drakossozh killed another with his dogs.”
“Bad luck, for the Dragonblade to kill two while trying for capture.”
“You’re a dragon yourself. You must know that it is not the easiest of tasks. But I feel for you, at the unfortunate loss of others of your kind. Would that more dragons grew up to live useful lives!”
Would that more dwarves did the same, Wistala thought.
“How can I ease your mind about Lobok?” Wistala said. “I can go to my tower and try to force a vision. Perhaps if you gave me some personal tokens—”
“No. I wouldn’t care to force a wrong reading from you. But hear! You could act as a courier between my throne room and Lobok’s camp. You can bring a message in a few hours over a distance that a rider would take a day to cover.”
“Nothing that would make me happier,” Wistala said. “Than to be able to set your mind at ease.”
So she’d gone to Lobok’s camp twice carrying messages from the mountain king, carrying reassurance that all was going according to plan—and made a side trip or two to the vicinity of the Green Dragon Inn to speak to Forstrel among his honeycombs.
“I wonder why he asks for word?” Lord Lobok asked. His hands kept coming together and then running up his arms and back down again as he paced and thought, as though the right was worried that the left had eloped with an elbow.
“I do not know all the messages King Fangbreaker, high may he remain, receives. I only do my duty,” Wistala said. “You have ample dwarves for a march through enemy territory.”
“Enemy?” Lobok asked. “Lord Hammar is a good friend, we’ve had much commerce with him. The dwarves just come to guard our prize on the way back.”
“I’ve heard he’s been calling himself King Hammar,” Wistala said, and flew off back to Fangbreaker with Lobok’s reply.
So as she hung in the darkness over Galahall, seeing the lights go on within and the carpets laid on the doorstep, she turned and made a careful approach to the nearby stream where the dwarves were camped at the base of the ridge she’d crossed so many years ago in the company of Stog.
She asked for a meeting with Lord Lobok, busy dressing for the court dinner celebrating another successful transaction, for the boy Rayg waited at Galahall to be sold to the dwarves. She was admitted with the expediency one would expect of a courier from King Fangbreaker, and found him buttoning a formal robe over a chain shirt. He wore a mask of red silk stretched under and over a decorative wooden frame, like a child’s kite.
“Lord Lobok, are you going yourself?” she asked, putting her head in his tent so as not to crowd him and the servant
-dwarf helping his lord dress.
“Of course. It’s a welcoming dinner, and as leader and emissary I’m expected. You don’t—”
“The night feels wrong to me,” Wistala said. “Are your soldiers arrayed well?”
“We’re on the thane’s land,” Lord Lobok said, fingers fluttering against his chain shirt. “There’s nothing to fear here.”
“As long as the thane is true. I’ve had horrible dreams, but they must be wrong. They must be.”
Lobok left off dressing, turned his silk-masked face to her. “Why do you say your impressions must be wrong? You are King Fangbreaker’s, honors upon his name and so forth, famous Oracle.”
“Who could mistake such omens? The feather landed on your doorstep. The Fates have chosen you.”
Lobok and his servant exchanged a glance. “Of course.”
“Yes. I am overwrought, seeing those barbarian encampments around the thane’s hall. I’m imagining things.” She began to shake. “But beware, O lord; if anyone speaks of a blood relationship between Hammar and the child you are receiving tonight, blood will be shed. A dagger at your back.”
She let her eyes roll wildly and then flopped over, closing the water-lids over her so that she would look glassy-eyed.
“Oh! Oh! Oh, no,” Lord Lobok said, his hands clasping and unclasping, then gripping elbows tight. “Someone. Ummm. Is it safe to dump water on dragons?”
Wistala rattled her sii and lifted her head. “Nur . . . what am I doing here? Ia, I’m happy for you, Lord Lobok, you live again . . .” She blinked, shook her head. “I beg your pardon, my lord, were you saying something? I seem to have fainted.”
Lobok gestured to his servant, took a quavering gulp of wine from a proffered cup. “You didn’t have another vision, did you?”
“Oh. No, I don’t think so. Hazy, so hazy. My eyes vex me. There’s a mist about you, my lord. It must be the scented candles. Excuse me, I am obliged to fly back to the throne room.”