by E. E. Knight
“The weight of several dwarves,” Wistala said. “Over short distances.”
“This will be a long flight of short hops, then. I need you to bring him food, medicines, and above all crossbow bolts.”
“My wings are at your command, Great King,” she said.
“There’s been talk of you being absent for some time,” King Fangbreaker said. “To where did you fly?”
“To see my friends at the circus. They go into winter camp about this time each year.”
“Hmpf,” said King Fangbreaker, from behind his shield. “You seem the type to keep friends long. How about enemies?”
“I’ve set out to make no enemies, my king,” Wistala said. “I made more friends than enemies with the circus. Of course, there are those who felt they were cheated—”
“I don’t mean that. Ach, I don’t know what I mean. I’m overwrought, imagining things. You put new heart in me. Eat a good meal and be ready to fly by tonight. The star-guild will supply you with a map based on our best information.”
Wistala lowered her head to the floor, and King Fangbreaker left. She later learned he’d walked all about the city, calming the citizens on both sides of the Titan bridge, answering questions from the lowliest porter to guild-heads.
That night she came to the Titan bridge, where she was loaded with milk-powders, sugarcubes, crossbow bolts, slabs of honey, medicines, even rolls of needle and thread for stitching wounds. Dwarf wives came and stuck flowers in her scales or tied ribbons with messages inked on them about her sii and saa. She was asked to look for so many dwarves that the king’s bodyguard had to push away the supplicants.
She tried a short practice flight, and returned to the bridge.
“I can carry more,” she said, not altogether sure that she could. More bundles were strapped to her back and chest, everywhere but where her wings could flap.
The King himself drank a toast in her honor and gave her a heaping handful of gold coins to eat, slathered with something sweet and hard the dwarves called cocolat. It gave her a rush of energy, and she launched herself again, and even gliding seemed somewhat of a strain.
Behind her, they set off red fireworks.
She had to relearn to fly, laden as she was, and it was slow going until she learned to better angle her wings. After an hour she dropped, exhausted, sure she could never reach the sky again, but she did.
And so she fought her way north, an hour’s flight, a half hour’s rest, another hour’s flight, a quarter hour’s rest, another hour’s flight, a drop from exhaustion into sleep that ended at daybreak.
The next day she passed over the track of the punitive expedition. The snow had covered the burned foundations, but crows poked at charred heaps here and there, extracting unburnt marrow. She’d never heard of war like this in the Hypatian books of tactics and maneuver, parley and honorable surrender. The dwarves had struck with a heavy, vengeful hand.
Or had she?
Wistala landed in a crowd of cheering dwarves the next dusk. Their eyes burned so bright behind their masks that they glowed. Beards were shorn to show loss of comrades and officers, and they hadn’t had time or energy to clean the caked blood from their armor.
Battle Commander Vande Boltcaster moved with a limp, walking with the aid of a broken bow. His officers untied and distributed the messages bound on her legs and tail—many would never be read by the eyes for which they were intended.
“Can you carry out wounded?” Boltcaster asked her. “I have three hero-dwarves we’ve been carrying since the Norssund.”
“Oh, for some wine,” she said.
“Gone,” Boltcaster said. “Like much else. There’s toasted horsemeat and boiled entrails galore, if you like. They were to be breakfast, but there’s not a dwarf here who wouldn’t give you his portion.”
“Can you make it back?” Wistala said. The dwarves were taking turns to slip away from their lines and write notes on everything from wrapping-paper to bits of wood, in blood if nothing else would serve, and tying it to her. She submitted, hating herself for what she was about to do.
“I’ll know when we reach the Shoulder-Fell. How long before the king marches to our aid?”
“I have not seen a dwarf set out beyond the outer wall,” Wistala said, honestly enough.
Some of the dwarves growled at that.
“Silence, there,” Boltcaster barked. “I’ve still reports to send, and you have families.”
“How do you move?”
“Loose march-square. If the barbarians come, we fall in tight. The cavalry hasn’t been trained that can break a Wheel of Fire shield wall.”
“Where are the barbarians?” Wistala asked.
“Where aren’t they?” a dwarf answered.
“They mostly follow our trail, scavenging discarded metalwork and despoiling the dead,” Boltcaster said. “We’ve had demands for surrender, and each time they’ve ridden from that direction. Good treatment. Ha! What do you expect, fighting savages such as these. Blighters would puke at some of their deeds.”
Wistala took off down the path and winged over the dwarven defenses—felled trees, mostly—to halfhearted cheers. She saw some horses in the trees beyond and loosed some fire, more for show than for effect, and cast about until she saw tightly knit campfires. She swooped in low over the tents.
Barbarian chieftains called for their archers and pointed. A few desultory arrows sang through the air around her.
“Tell Hammar they make for the Shoulder Fell,” she said, flying upside down to keep out the shafts. She repeated it again over another group of tents, before turning back for the dwarves.
They stuffed her with horse entrails before she took off the next morning, with the three wounded dwarves tied across her back. The burden seemed light compared with the supplies she’d carried in the previous day.
By the time she returned to the Titan bridge, one of the wounded had died. The other two were untied and rushed into the Hardhold.
Wistala lay on the bridge like a dead thing as the dwarves untied the messages. One of the lordly dwarves took the courier-pouch from her neck and rushed it to the king.
Fangbreaker himself came down to the bridge to see her, stumping along on his horse hoof, which clomped on the wood planks of the bridge.
“They are in bad shape, my king,” Wistala said. Some in the crowd cried out, and she heard mutters of dhssol. “I fear I am, too.”
“Boltcaster’s need is great,” King Fangbreaker said. “I must ask you to fly again as soon as you’ve rested. He needs more supplies.”
“You go,” Wistala said.
“What?”
Wistala raised her head, too tired to do much but speak. If the bodyguard closed on her, it would be all she could do to roll off the bridge. “You go. Gather your forces and go to his aid.”
The crowd went instantly silent.
“No,” said the king. “Boltcaster must rely on his own skill and courage. We cannot take that risk. Every dwarf will be needed here.”
“Or you could return with your number of warriors doubled,” Wistala said.
“She’s exhausted,” King Fangbreaker said, loudly. “The dragon is mazed. Pay her no mind. Go, good Oracle, go to your tower and rest.” He reached for a handful of cocolat-covered coins to place in her mouth and evidently thought the better of it. He tossed the bag down before her.
“Eat these—you’ll feel better.”
Wistala picked the bag up but did not eat them. Instead she bowed to the king and turned for her tower, trying to forget the masked faces of the doomed dwarves in Boltcaster’s column. They were getting what they deserved. Would she?
The bodyguard closed around the king behind her, seeing the hard stares of some in the crowd.
Wistala slept, and ate, and waited.
The news finally came: Boltcaster and his remaining dwarves had been defeated on the slopes of a mountain, evidently the barbarians had prepared and then rolled rocks down on them from above, breaking the
shield wall just before a charge.
Fangbreaker called their end “glorious” and a credit to the Wheel of Fire. But there were mutterings against him, arrests, even an assassination or two, and suicides that some said were not suicides.
One of these was the son of Lord Lobok, who finally agreed to take command of the outer wall at the edge of the Ba-drink.
The star-guild whispered of threats to her life, and Yellowteeth grew afraid to go down for coal. Wistala shrugged off the danger. The dwarves needed every warrior who could carry a spear and would not waste any on a dragon that could be dealt with later.
Then came a dread winter morning when word spread that a barbarian horde was on the foothills below the Ba-drink. With them were Hypatian mercenaries, cavalry, even gargants. Will-making became a popular diversion, there were parties of a desperate nature on the balconies as the dwarves who would defend the walls spent one last night with their kith and kin.
Wistala watched, from her high tower, the barges creep across the Ba-drink, disgorge the dwarves for the walls, and then return for more. Control of the Ba-drink meant control of the herds on the south shores of the lake, and access to the east road for supplies, so the wall had to be held to avoid a bitter siege.
She looked at the sheer walls of Thul’s Hardhold. Many were the balconies that hung black banners, mourning their losses.
Djaybee joined her at the thin window slits.
“I think you should know, there’s a dozen of the king’s guard at the base of the tower. They don’t want you to leave,” Djaybee said. Yellowteeth hung about the passage down, as if fearing a rush of footsteps, but what he could do other than slicken the steps with shovelfuls of dragon waste she did not know. “Hard words passed between us, and I was cautioned against keeping counsel with you. I fear another night of knives is coming.”
“Night of knives?”
“As there was when our noble king, a curse be upon his name, claimed all power. Those who opposed him never woke again, but were found dead behind their bedcurtains.”
“We’d best take turns keeping watch,” Wistala said.
Her sleep was uneasy that night, and the tower went cold, for Yellowteeth was too terrified to descend the stairs to get more coal. Wistala finally let him sleep in the corner farthest from the door while she and Djaybee took turns at the stairs.
She awoke to a tickle behind her chin, dreaming that Jizara was poking her with her tail-tip. She opened her eye and froze.
Yellowteeth stood next to her neck, his shovel handle somehow transformed into a spear pressing against the interstices between her scales above her neck heart.
“Greetings from the Assassins’ Guild,” Yellowteeth said, his Parl-pigdin markedly reduced. “The king has a message for you as you die: Where is the crown of Masmodon, Oracle? Where is my crown?”
Chapter 28
Wistala smelled blood in the tower room.
Near the stair, Djaybee sat hunched over, a dark stain soaking his back. He’d never more gaze at the stars and draw maps with their aid.
Yellowteeth might have been a good assassin, but he hadn’t learned all he could of dragon anatomy.
She twitched and lowered her griff above the spear point in an eyeblink, knocking it aside as Yellowteeth threw himself off balance trying to ram it home. The point scraped across the floor instead of burrowing into her neck.
She helped him off his feet by lashing him between the shoulder blades with her tail as she came to her fours. She put a sii down on the back of his head, grinding his face into the geometry of the floor.
“In my experience, a good courier always asks if there is to be a return message,” Wistala said. “Will you be good enough to carry an answer back for me?”
“Mmpfh,” Yellowteeth snuffled.
“How thoughtful of you. Tell Gobold to come himself and try to break my fangs, if he wishes to deliver death. Now run, before I breakfast on roast blighter.”
She let Yellowteeth up, and he made better time for the stairs than he ever had running coal. If nothing else, he would muddy matters below, and he might even claim the job was done in order to effect an escape from the Wheel of Fire.
A fine cold morning of clean air and mists clinging to the Ba-drink had begun outside. She would not be taken like a rat in a mountaintop cage. The only passage out was down, but she did not want to fight her way through tunnels filled with dwarves, where she would run out of foua before they ran out of spears.
She needed the sky, and to learn if Ragwrist hovered at the edge of the siege or not.
On other days she’d examined her tower room, there were hours of leisure to do so, and the stone was most worn to the northwest, where the wind blew coldest in winter and ice accumulated. There were a multitude of tiny cracks in the masonry between the spaced windows.
She went to her water cistern and took a full mouthful of water, and imitating the unpleasant DharSii, spat it up and down around the masonry, did it once more with a fresh mouthful until the stone was well-wetted.
Then she employed her foua on the wind-chilled stone.
Loud cracks sounded through the flames. Wistala breathed through another window and smashed her tail against the wall, over and over again, as Auron had in the escape chimney, only this time a thousand times the strength was behind it.
A great piece of wall fell away between the two windows.
She could not quite squeeze through yet, but it was far easier to open it wider by pulling at the broken edges and exposed brickwork. A few more bruising tail strikes and she was out, even as footsteps sounded on the stair.
Wistala took wing above the city of the Wheel of Fire.
She roared and dived between the Tall Rock and Thul’s Hardhold, aiming for the Titan bridge. She extended her claws and tail as though to land, then stopped herself with swift beats of her wings just above the bridge.
A highpoon trailing chain, fired by a mighty war-machine, shot across the bridge. As it fell the chain caught and Wistala slipped sideways to grab the chain. A second highpoon lanced out from the other side, but she was watching for it, and reared out of the way.
Father, your pain was not wasted, even if your head now sits on a war-machine.
She flew into the air, as hard and as fast as she could, as other spears whizzed toward her. One pierced her wing, another glanced off her saa, but scale thickened by dwarf gold kept the worst of the damage out.
She swung the round iron weight at the end of the chain, back and forth, back and forth as she rose, with each swing building momentum. She let it strike the Titan bridge, breaking off a massive chunk which spun as it fell into the Ba-drink.
She flew off, flying oddly, fighting to the counterweight on the end of the chain, but her wing muscles were equal to the weight. She smashed a tower on the Hardhold where dwarves fired crossbow bolts. Two swings of the ball, and the shattered tower collapsed and slid down, smashing balcony, gallery, and garden on the way to the wharf.
Wistala noted that there were arrows sticking out of her scales and wing-leather, but in the heat of combat, she felt no pain.
She carried her burden to the far side of the Ba-drink and let the weight go at the flat part of ground by the landing. She flew over the lines of dwarves. Their war-machines were hurling missiles down the mountainside at a wave of barbarians coming up.
“Dhssol! Dhssol!” she wailed as she passed over the lines of dwarves at the wall. “All is lost! Dssol!”
And so she called over the lines of dwarves until she spotted Lord Lobok, standing with a few nobles and commanders on a prominence behind the wall at arrow-shot.
“Oh, Dhssol!” Wistala mourned as she landed. “I have seen it. There are too many! All is lost, see how they approach. You must fall back to the city, we are surely defeated on these slopes.”
“Terrible thought,” Lobok said, wringing his hands as a few ineffective arrows flew over the wall and landed near them in the rocks. “It goes badly for us, Battle Commander! Thes
e dwarves are the Wheel of Fire’s last hope.”
“Who needs a last hope when there’s a battle being won? Your imagination has you counting each one thrice,” the commander said. “Step back and let veterans command the fight. The closer they come, the more we kill, see? Our losses are but few.”
But some of the troops had been unnerved by Wistala’s cries, and were running for the barges.
“Hold hard there,” the battle commander shouted through a speaking trumpet. “Groundholders, get those skulkers back in line. To the line!”
“Nothing can stop them, Oh, Dhssol!” Wistala said, as a mass of barbarians came up the hill. Many to the front fell as the dwarves fired, but others behind came on. . . .
“Shut up!” the Battle Commander insisted. “Someone muzzle this fool lizard.”
“The Oracle is right,” Lord Lobok shouted, lifting his own speaking trumpet. “They cannot be held here! Back to the barges, dwarves—we must fall back to the city!” He set an example to his soldiers by hitching up his robes and running toward the barges as fast as his legs would carry him.
The dwarves, many untested in battle, agreed with the sentiment, and the lines fell away like laundry carried off by a strong wind. Dwarves of all descriptions ran, even as the more experienced ones at the war-machines shouted and gesticulated at them.
The battle commander reached for his ax, and Wistala thought it best to take wing. Pebbles flew up into the eyes of the commanders and nobles as she took off.
They, too, ran for the barges as the barbarians leaped up the wall with wild cries.
The battle paused for a moment as the barges pulled away, firing crossbows at the barbarians, who fell back from the water to the wall and continued to hoot.
Wistala flew down to Ragwrist’s gargants. She saw Lord Hammar there, in a thick fur coat that hung to his bootheels, helping with the blasting kegs being handed down from gargant back.
“Place them to either side of the spillway, and on those two supporting columns, right where they join the dam,” Wistala said.
“I hope this works, Wistala,” Ragwrist said as the circus dwarves and riggers went forward with climbing poles and lines. “These casks weren’t cheap.”