Sky Dragons Dragonriders of Pern

by Anne McCaffrey

  Thank you! she replied warmly. Lorana and K’dan were both gifted at drawing, although the ex-queenrider seemed to have more flair than the new Weyrleader.

  “So when we’ve followed the Dawn Sisters back here, what next?” Avarra asked.

  “Then we start our proper watch,” Xhinna told her. “We’ll need a watch stationary over Benden from sunrise to sunset, the same for Telgar and High Reaches—”

  “That should let us see everything there,” Jerilli agreed.

  “And we’ll keep the same length of watch here over the Great Isles.”

  “We’ll have fourteen hours over the Northern Continent, but only eleven over our own,” Jerilli noted. When Avarra grunted in confusion, Jerilli explained, “We only get eight hours of sunlight in one place; there’s six hours’ difference between Benden and High Reaches, whereas we’ve only got three at best between the easternmost of Eastern and the westernmost of Western.”

  “Oh, I see,” Avarra said a bit doubtfully. She glanced at Xhinna. “So how do we manage that?”

  “I’m open for suggestions,” Xhinna said, throwing her hands wide.

  “No, you’re not,” Jerilli countered with a chuckle. “You’ve already got something in mind and you’d prefer us to come up with it on our own.”

  “You’ve been taking lessons from the Weyrwoman, haven’t you?” Avarra asked.

  “Actually, I think it’s just general wingleader deviousness,” Jerilli said. Avarra gave her a look, so she said, “Don’t you do the same with your people?”

  “I’m still pretty new at this,” Avarra said diffidently. She turned to Xhinna. “So, you have a plan?”

  “I think it’s simple enough,” Jerilli said. “We’ve got three hours of slack on this side, so we double or triple up.”

  “That’s pretty much what I was thinking,” Xhinna agreed. “I was also thinking that we should stay up longer—”

  “How long?”

  “How do you feel about five minutes?”

  “Nervous,” Avarra admitted.

  “If we set it up right, we could have overlaps,” Jerilli said. “That would give us more than one pair at any one moment, and the newer pair could ensure that the older pair was still safe.”

  “I’d prefer three minutes and do that as well,” Avarra said.

  “I think starting with three minutes makes sense,” Xhinna said.

  “Very well,” Jerilli said, “we’ll start with three minutes.”

  “The biggest problem is to keep everyone from getting bored,” Xhinna said.

  Jerilli gave her an astonished look. “What? Looking at home from so high up?”

  “It’s always the same!” Jerilli complained when they met in the evening six days later. “I’m practically wishing something would happen.”

  The three wings had performed brilliantly, picking up the new schedule without a hitch and sticking to it steadfastly, despite the difference in time zones and the stress of being up in the lifeless cold near the twinkling stars.

  “Why don’t we switch around, so people are looking at different places?” Avarra suggested.

  “Because if we do that, we lose the advantage of having people trained to spot differences in the terrain they know so well,” Xhinna replied.

  Avarra pinched her lips together in disappointment.

  “We can continue with flaming,” Jerilli said.

  “We’ve been doing that,” Avarra snapped. She shot the other wingleader an apologetic look immediately, but her words hung in the air.

  “I think we’re doing all that we can,” Xhinna said. She raised a hand as the other two started to protest. “I know that the work seems dull now—”

  “And it’ll be near a month before we first see Thread—” Jerilli interjected sourly.

  “Actually, not true,” Xhinna corrected, raising a hand to forestall Jerilli’s protests. “We know that dustfall was seen over Fort two days before Turn’s End—”

  “Great, so we’ve only nineteen more days to—”

  Thread! Thread! Thread falls over Bitra!

  The three riders were out of the room and into the air in an instant, grateful for the sacks of firestone that were still tied to the neck of their dragons.

  Tazith, tell K’dan that we’re going to investigate, Xhinna told her dragon as they rose into the evening air. Tell the wing to join me at the Dawn Sisters. She paused for a moment. Have you got the image?

  In response, Tazith took them between. They burst out in the early morning sky high over Benden, next to the watch riders who were still close to the Dawn Sisters.

  Xhinna quickly found Bitra. There, dark smudges seemed to mar the landscape. She looked around, saw the rest of her wing form around her, and called to her blue, Take us there!

  They came out in the sky high above Bitra. The air was cold, and the pocket of evening air that Tazith had brought with them from over Sky Weyr shone at its edges with small ice crystals frozen by the colder Bitra air.

  Without urging, the blue turned his head to her and Xhinna found herself fumbling as she opened a firestone sack and fed him chunks. She knew, without looking, that behind her the rest of her wing was doing the same.

  Far, far above Bitra, the dragons prepared for what they had been born and bred to do: flame and kill Thread.

  No flame! Tazith cried as his first belch brought forth only the merest flicker of light.

  Lower, lower! Fall with it! Danirry’s Kiarith relayed.

  Do it, Xhinna agreed.

  They fell, twenty-five dragons in unison, following the small oblongs through the thin atmosphere.

  R’ney is worried about our air, Tazith relayed after they’d fallen for thousands of meters.

  Look! Look at the Thread! Coranth relayed.

  Xhinna looked at the Thread, so tantalizingly close, deadly, threatening. The clumps were changing, glowing with a heat of their own and—extending, growing, streaming into—

  Thread! Tazith bellowed, bursting forth with another belch of firestone—this time it lit and the streaming Thread in front of him caught fire, crisped, and charred into nothingness.

  Behind her, Xhinna suddenly heard the triumphant bellows of the dragons, heard the roar of flame, and the fantastic sound of Thread charring, burning, turning into lifeless dust.

  Avarra, Jerilli! Xhinna called. Where Tazith had found them was suddenly empty as they went between and Xhinna knew that the two other wings were en route to join them. And then, to her left she saw Jerilli, waving and crying with joy; to her right, Avarra was diving toward a clump of Thread and flaming at it even as it started to stream from a small ball into its normal, long, thread-like shape.

  They flew until there was no more Thread, until there was only dust, until Xhinna and the others had exhausted their sacks of firestone.

  Back, Xhinna called to the exhausted riders and dragons. Back to the Weyr.

  Moments later, there was nothing over Bitra to indicate that the Sky Dragons had ever been present, except for small shards of ash that were presently borne upward and away by the morning breeze.

  “We caught it just as it was Threading!” Davissa exclaimed jubilantly, rushing to grab Xhinna in a bear hug. Xhinna had barely a moment to catch her breath before the two of them were engulfed in huge, strong arms and lifted off their feet.

  “We did it, we did it!” R’ney’s voice boomed in Xhinna’s ears.

  “Put us down, put us down!” she begged, banging on R’ney’s arm ineffectually and laughing all the while. No sooner had the brown rider complied than Xhinna found herself embraced once more, this time by the two exuberant blue riders.

  “You know what this means—,” she said to them, only to hear K’dan reply, “It means that perhaps you should report to the Weyrleader.”

  Instantly the circle broke and Xhinna turned to meet the bronze rider’s eyes.

  “Oh, come on, it’s not like it’s necessary,” Fiona said, moving by K’dan’s side. “Danirry’s Kiarith reported
to everyone, and you knew that Xhinna and her—ahem—consorts were going to fight the Thread.”

  “It worked! It worked just like I thought it would!” Danirry crowed exultantly, causing everyone to turn toward her with wide eyes. “Flaming Thread!”

  “Uh, dear …,” R’ney prompted.

  At this, Danirry seemed to realize that she’d left a few important words out—a habit of hers that her fellow blues and greens had come to accept, but which was foreign to most others.

  “I’m sorry, Weyrleader,” Danirry said. “It’s just that I was sure we could flame the Thread up high, just as it blossomed—”

  “Blossomed?” Fiona cut in, her face going pale at the revolting image.

  “Spooled, then, if you will,” Danirry corrected with a quick shrug.

  “Please explain, blue rider, and assume that we’ve never heard what you’re talking about before,” Fiona said.

  “Because we haven’t,” R’ney added, reaching forward to poke the blue rider affectionately on the shoulder. “Once again, dear heart, you forget what you haven’t told us.”

  “Oh,” Danirry said, only slightly repentant. She collected herself, glanced in the direction of K’dan and Fiona, and then said, “Well, it’s just that I thought that—well, Thread burns, right?”

  K’dan nodded slowly.

  “And it grows; it eats things,” Danirry continued. “So it’s something that lives and needs air.” She glanced around, her eyes darting quickly toward K’dan and Fiona before coming to rest on Xhinna as she took a deep breath. “So I figure that it lives. And if it lives, then while it’s in the cold of space it must be dead—”

  “Dead?” K’dan repeated, his brows furrowed.

  “Asleep, like a seed out of the ground,” Danirry said. “Inert, if you will.”

  “I see,” K’dan said.

  “So when it falls, something has to wake it, as it were, or it would still be a seed when it hit the soil, wouldn’t it?” Danirry said.

  “We’re with you,” R’ney said encouragingly.

  “So I figured that when it woke up would be when it was at its most vulnerable, when it would be smallest and easiest to destroy,” Danirry continued. She looked K’dan full in the eyes as she concluded, “Just when it was spooling out into Thread. Just when there was enough air to slow it down, enough air that we could flame it into dust.”

  “By the First Egg!” Fiona swore in awe. She glanced to K’dan.

  “It worked?” K’dan asked.

  “Perfectly,” Xhinna said, moving to Danirry’s side and hugging the blue rider’s shoulders. She glanced toward Avarra and Jerilli. “Not a dragon or rider injured, and no Thread reached the ground.”

  “We could kill it before it ever got near enough to threaten Pern,” Fiona said, looking up hopefully to the Sky Weyrleader.

  “Yes,” K’dan said abstractedly.

  “You’re worried about the timing, aren’t you, Weyrleader?” Danirry asked in the silence that fell.

  “Thread fell over Bitra?” T’mar asked as he and the other Weyrleaders—along with Danirry, R’ney, and the three blue wingleaders—gathered later that evening in the stone hall of Sky Weyr. “So early?”

  “What matters more is where will it fall next,” Fiona said. She looked at K’dan.

  “From what we’ve determined, this Fall is preceded by the Fall over Benden and Keroon,” K’dan said. He laid out a map of the Northern Continent; it was marked with long, thin swaths running northeast to southwest. He pointed at one, then flicked his finger to another. “After which, there’ll be a Fall over Nerat and Upper Crom, and then—”

  “But our first Fall came over Benden and Igen, and not until the new Turn!” H’nez protested.

  “There were three dustfalls before that,” T’mar recalled. “One at Fort, one at High Reaches Tip, one at Southern Tillek.”

  “What if—” Danirry began. Then, realizing the august company surrounding her, she cut herself off abruptly.

  “Please,” K’dan said, gesturing for her to continue.

  “I was just thinking, Weyrleaders,” Danirry said, blushing lightly, “what if those dust Falls were because—well, because we’d flown them?”

  “What?” “How?” “When?” The cries echoed around the stone room.

  “And the other Falls?” T’mar asked. “If K’dan’s right, there are …” He gestured for K’dan to fill in the number, but it was Fiona who said, “Five more Falls between now and that first dustfall.” T’mar nodded his thanks, then continued, “Are you suggesting we flew them all ourselves?”

  “Why not?” Avarra said, glancing toward H’nez before continuing, “We had no casualties, not so much as a dragon scratched. If we keep doing that, Thread has no chance against us!”

  Outside, a chorus of bugles from the greens and blues of the three wings shook the air.

  “You’ll need the queens to catch you,” a small voice spoke up from the doorway as silence fell. It was Jirana.

  “I think that’s an excellent idea!” Fiona said, nodding so fiercely at K’dan and the other Weyrleaders that they all, wisely, kept silent.

  “We still will need to keep watch,” K’dan said. “We don’t know when Thread will fall here, after all.”

  “It would not be wise to trust both the watch and these Falls to just three wings,” H’nez said.

  “Well, we’ve got wings to spare,” Terin spoke up, nodding at C’tov, the nominal Weyrleader of her Southern Weyr. She glanced expectantly at T’mar, who stood as Weyrleader of both the Southriver and Western Weyrs.

  T’mar smiled. “Let me talk with Garra and Jassi,” he said. “I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to free a wing each.”

  “Keep the bronzes for catching,” Jirana said. The others looked at her and she blushed. “I’m sorry, I meant to—”

  “You meant to do exactly what you did,” Fiona said, smiling and wagging a finger at the young queen rider. She turned to T’mar, who frowned at the girl before nodding to the Weyrwoman and saying resignedly, “She’s right. It makes more sense to have the blues and greens up high, and the browns and bronzes down low to catch—”

  “Because there’s no way a blue can catch a bronze,” C’tov said with a chuckle and an apologetic waggle of his eyebrows to the blue riders present.

  Xhinna said to R’ney, “While I’d hate to lose your services fighting Thread, I can think of no one I’d prefer to have catching us if we were to fall.”

  R’ney frowned, then nodded. “Put that way, Wingleader, I accept.”

  “Flightleader?” Xhinna exclaimed when Fiona and K’dan sprang their latest surprise on her the next morning in the High Kitchen.

  “Well, ‘Weyrleader’ seems perhaps a bit much,” K’dan told her, barely able to keep the grin off his face.

  “Although Flightleader is an insult, because you’ll be in charge of two Flights,” Fiona added. She turned to K’dan, suggesting, “Over-leader?”

  “No,” Xhinna said, raising her hands in horror. She knew how persuasive Fiona could be, particularly with the Weyrleader. Well, actually, pretty much with all the Weyrleaders. It was absolutely necessary to nip this in the bud. “No, anything but that!”

  “So, Flightleader it is,” Fiona said triumphantly.

  “Still,” K’dan began, clearly enjoying himself, “it’s not quite right, because you’ll be in charge of six wings.”

  “Flightleader will do fine,” Xhinna muttered. Shaking her head, she looked across the table at the two of them. Settling her gaze on Fiona, she accused, “You set me up for this.”

  “Well, of course,” Fiona agreed easily. “Although far be it from me to suggest that perhaps you actually earned it—”

  “No, that would be my job,” K’dan inserted. He grinned at Xhinna. “You’ve got all the qualifications. And, you’ll note, the other Weyrleaders all saw fit to send their best—”

  “And not a bronze among them,” Xhinna noted tartly.

  “Well, that�
��s not fair,” Fiona said, her light tone evaporating. “Jirana makes too much sense with her notion of catching falling dragons—”

  “If it’s practical,” Xhinna cut in.

  “Well, it worked for you,” Fiona said, forcing Xhinna to remember Turns back to when she and Tazith had made their abortive attempt to jump forward in time, only to be rescued by X’lerin and his wing. “And it worked for me,” the Weyrwoman continued, “and it worked for T’mar. But, admittedly, we had a whole Weyr ready to help, so I think, all things considered, it really is better to stick with blues and greens on these Sky Wings—”

  “Sky Wings?” Xhinna interrupted.

  “Well, I don’t think Space Wings makes much sense,” Fiona continued, thoroughly enjoying herself, “as you’re not really up in space for all that long, after all.”

  “Sky Wings,” Xhinna repeated with a long sigh of resignation. She was rewarded with chuckles from the Weyrwoman and Weyrleader, which was what she’d intended.

  “And we’ll base them here, at Sky Weyr,” K’dan said. When Xhinna shot him a startled look, he waved it aside. “T’mar agrees. That’s partly because you’ve managed to convince so many queen riders to stay here—”

  “Not that we’re complaining,” Fiona interrupted, another smile blossoming on her lips. “Even Talenth has decided to take it as a compliment.”

  “Anyway,” K’dan continued, ignoring Fiona’s outburst, “the extra queens make it that much easier to build catching wings—”

  “Catching wings?” Xhinna repeated.

  “I like the sound of that!” Fiona said.

  “You’re taking charge of them, aren’t you?” Xhinna begged.

  Fiona chuckled and waved away Xhinna’s worry. “Of course,” she said. “Although I’m not so foolish as to separate Jirana from the rest of her charges.”

  “But without the green queens, how—”

  “How will we guard the Hatching Grounds?” Fiona guessed. “J’keran and his guard will do the bulk of the work, but Jirana has assured me that her queens are keeping constantly in touch with the eggs.”

  K’dan shook his head in renewed awe at the strange arrangement that existed between unhatched eggs and the green queens. It had been, over the past several Turns, the cause of many late-night conversations throughout the six Weyrs of the Western Isle.