A Darkness of Dragons

by S. A. Patrick

  Wren nodded. What branch of the Elite had they offered you? she signed. Arable?

  Patch shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now.” He felt a little distant for a moment, before snapping out of it. “My turn to have a question answered,” he said. “How did you manage to get a Sorcerer angry enough to curse you like this?”

  I was kidnapped, she signed. The Sorcerer wanted a maidservant. This was last summer, too. As your life was changing, so was mine. When I almost managed to escape, he caught me, and that was that.

  “He turned you into a rat.”

  Exactly. I fled into the forest, terrified of the dangers around me from hawks and the like. I was even fearful of other rats at first, but they proved to be generous creatures. Stupid, but generous. I found a little rat community near some local wheat fields and stayed with them for a few weeks. Ten rats, terrified of the farmer’s dog, half starved. They knew there was something unusual about me, and started to follow my lead. The dog was easy to outsmart, and soon everyone was well fed, but it came time for all of us to move on. As we travelled, we’d come across other rats, and they’d tag along. We snuck onto a barge transporting barley, and spent a week on it. I’d hoped we would make it to a warmer place before winter, but we were discovered and had to flee the barge. Turned out we were in the middle of the Breydram Valley, and winter came faster than I’d expected.

  “Patterfall was your only refuge,” said Patch.

  Yes. We tried to push further downstream, but gave up in the end and stayed put. At first I thought we had plenty of food to last us through winter, but a population explosion put paid to that idea. Rats will be rats, and they just wouldn’t be told.

  “The villagers were terrified that you’d eat them. So was I, come to that.”

  They’re much more mild-mannered than people believe. The villagers needn’t have feared, but the rats didn’t get the chance to prove it… She looked at Patch. Would they have suffered?

  He shook his head. “I know the Dispersal is horrifying, but as far as I know the effect is instant. They wouldn’t have suffered at all.”

  She nodded, tears in her eyes. I didn’t make a very good leader in the end, she signed.

  He picked her up and put her on his shoulder. She snuggled down, and they sat together in silence for a time, until they both felt ready to get back to the Merisax number system.

  In the afternoon, shortly after the food and water arrived, Vague Henry shouted loud enough and long enough that he couldn’t be ignored, and Patch removed the old blanket from the hole between their cells.

  “Thank the stars!” said Henry. “Set something in front of it if you want to stop me peeking in, but please don’t block it up like that. God help me if it rained!”

  “Sorry,” said Patch. “I forgot it was there.” He gathered up the blanket and left it a little way in front of the hole, perched over the narrow channel in the floor so Henry couldn’t see into Patch’s cell. “That okay?” he said.

  “That’s fine,” said Henry. “No harm done.” He didn’t waste time moving on to a subject he was clearly more interested in: “So, um, your visitor? A Custodian Piper, then? I saw that much.”

  “A friend,” said Patch. “He came to commiserate with me on how things turned out.”

  “Oh,” said Henry. “I just wondered if you were holding up okay? I mean, I thought he’d given you more bad news or something, since—”

  “Since?”

  “Since you’ve started to talk to yourself. And don’t say you haven’t!”

  It occurred to Patch that if Henry thought he was crazy, he could chat with Wren as much as he liked without worrying about how loud he was talking. “Let me deal with things my own way, Henry,” he said, smiling. “I’ll be fine.”

  After a little more Merisax practice, Wren was eager to get started on Fox and Owls. She took the game board and rearranged Patch’s failed attempt at placing the pieces.

  Which do you want to be? she signed. Fox or Owls?

  Patch shrugged. “Remind me of the difference.”

  Okay, signed Wren. I’ll start with the basics. There’s only one fox piece, and two owls. Say you be the fox, then you move, and I move one of the rabbits, then I move both owls, then you move a rabbit and it starts again. Easy!

  Patch smiled, bewildered by the game but curiously happy. The cell around him had suddenly stopped being so oppressive. He looked at the pile of rotting food and vowed to get it cleaned up soon. He faintly wished for a chair, or a mirror.

  It feels more like a home than a prison, he thought. Just because I’m here with a friend.

  Overnight it started to rain heavily. When they woke, the importance of Henry’s warning about not blocking the hole in the wall became clear – the channel in the floor had turned into a murky stream, flowing towards the toilet hole.

  Patch saw the opportunity to clean things up. He gritted his teeth and scooped up handfuls of the rotting pile of food, carrying it to the toilet hole and letting the filthy rainwater wash it away. Once finished, Patch used a little of the water from mealtime to clean his hands.

  Outside, the weather kept getting worse, and with it the murky stream threatened to overflow its channel, but as the hours passed the flowing water became a little less filthy, and the stench in his cell began to fade.

  Henry, meanwhile, kept trying to get Patch to converse. He seemed sure that Patch was falling apart, talking to himself and – God help him! – actually laughing occasionally.

  “I’ll be okay,” Patch told him.

  “I’m just worried,” said Henry. “I asked some of the others if they could help, and all I managed to do was land you with your nickname.”

  “Which is?”

  “The Mad Piper, I’m afraid.”

  Patch laughed out loud, which presumably didn’t settle Henry’s nerves one bit.

  The heavy rain continued unbroken for the next two days.

  Patch, meanwhile, was improving at Fox and Owls. At the start, Wren had always won within a dozen moves, but now it was taking perhaps twice as long for her to be victorious. In one game, his owls had taken four rabbits, and he’d clapped with excitement.

  Then, after a particularly vicious thunderstorm that continued until dawn, the rain faded at last. The dungeon seemed oddly quiet with the rain gone. The drainage channel in the cell had little more than a trickle running through it.

  When chatter started to grow from the prisoners along the corridor, it was hard to miss in the relative silence. With Wren on his shoulder, Patch went over to the hole in the wall. “Henry?” he said. “What’s the fuss about?”

  “All this rain has caused serious flooding lower in the dungeons,” said Henry. “They’re having to move some prisoners from the deepest levels until it’s sorted out.”

  There were footsteps in the corridor. For a moment Patch wondered if it was Erner again, but this time the sounds stopped short of Patch’s door.

  It was Henry’s turn for a visitor. “Henry Trew!” called a voice.

  “Yes?” said Henry.

  “Ready your things, you’re to be moved up a level.” Other prisoners called out to ask if they would be moved too. “Shut up!” yelled the guard. “None of you lot are going anywhere.”

  The whole corridor complained.

  “We’ll be bringing a prisoner up shortly from a flooded cell,” said the guard. “Keep the noise down or you’ll not get a meal today! Now, hurry up, Trew!”

  “I’ll just fetch my things,” said Henry. He came back over to the hole. “Patch! Did you hear? I’m getting an upgrade! Moving up a floor, until it’s sorted out. Maybe they’ll let me stay up there!”

  “I’ll miss you, Henry,” said Patch. “Good luck upstairs!”

  “God bless you, Patch. And I’m sure whoever they put here in my place will, um—” Henry paused, and Patch knew why – any prisoner from the deeper levels would likely be unpleasant company.

  “It’ll be fine, Henry,” Patch said. He looked
at Wren, who seemed fretful. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I mean, how bad could it be?”

  It wasn’t long before they found out.

  An hour later Patch heard the sound of rattling chains in the corridor, soon followed by the shouts of the other inmates: “Who’s your prisoner, eh? We don’t want no scum here!”

  The clanking stopped at Vague Henry’s cell. Patch and Wren heard the door open, and they both went to the hole and looked through. A narrow shaft of light from the window fell on the prisoner, who was shuffling into the centre of the cell.

  You want me to go in there and take a look? signed Wren.

  “No!” whispered Patch. “Stay here, where it’s safe.”

  The prisoner stood in the light, but all Patch had sight of was the legs, chained together, thick manacles at the feet. The prisoner was facing the window, and Patch presumed the light was so unfamiliar that they were mesmerized. They might not have seen any sunlight in years.

  The cell door slammed shut, catching Patch by surprise. He’d expected the guard to remove the chains before leaving, but apparently not. The prisoner’s arms came into view, wrists also manacled with a long chain between them. That was when the sobbing began, deep and agonizing, as the prisoner fell to their knees and out of the shaft of light.

  After a while, the prisoner’s hands came back into the light, twisting around, almost playing with it. Yes, thought Patch, this is someone who hasn’t seen daylight in a while.

  Wren sneezed. Suddenly the shape in the gloom snapped up into a sitting position, chains clanking.

  Patch and Wren pulled back from the hole.

  Sorry! signed Wren.

  Let’s wait a bit before we have another look, Patch signed back.

  The chains in the other cell rattled as the prisoner moved around within. Eventually the rattling stopped, and after a few minutes of silence Wren and Patch glanced at each other and nodded.

  They looked through the hole.

  An eye was looking back at them, full of desperation.

  And there was something around the eye, Patch saw. Some kind of metal.

  Iron.

  Patch pulled back, and so did Wren.

  “Oh,” said Patch. “Oh no.”

  “Aye?” came a quiet voice through the hole. It sounded like pleading. “Aye?” More sobs followed, and then the prisoner spoke again, louder and louder, becoming more and more angry, the same word every time. “Aye! Aye!”

  The other inmates knew immediately what this meant.

  “Guard!” came the shouts. “Take him away! You can’t do this! Anyone but him! Anyone but him!”

  “Aye!”

  “Guard! You can’t leave him here!”

  “AYE!”

  “Show us some mercy!”

  Patch grabbed the old blanket and stuffed it into the hole, pulling his hand out quickly – fighting the childish terror that the fingers of the Hamelyn Piper would close around his wrist. He lifted Wren from the floor and ran to the little tent at the far side of the cell. They stayed there all night, awake and shivering with fear as the Hamelyn Piper screamed.

  Soon after dawn, Patch took the sleeping Wren from his lap and set her on the soft blanket Erner had brought. He went to the hole and pulled out the old blanket, then looked inside the other cell.

  The Hamelyn Piper was asleep near the hole, and Patch could see the Iron Mask clearly. It seemed to be made from many smaller sections, forming a mesh that wrapped around the back of his head and obscured most of his face, save for his eyes and mouth. It looked grubby and tarnished, unsurprising after almost a decade of imprisonment. The Hamelyn Piper’s beard – if that was a word that could be used for such a jumble of hair – had grown through the mask, and seemed to have been haphazardly cut quite recently. The guards had probably taken advantage of the move to do this most basic of maintenance.

  As the other prisoners awoke, the complaints about the new arrival started up again, growing in volume all morning. The response from the guards came later – when the tubes arrived, it was only water that came, and no food. That night the Hamelyn Piper screamed again, and the prisoners complained again, and the only difference was the hunger that gnawed at Patch. Wren nibbled at her grain, offering Patch some, but he refused to take it from her.

  “They’ll feed us tomorrow,” he said. “They’ll have to.”

  But the next day, the food was still withheld. Complaints about hunger were now almost as loud as the complaints about the Hamelyn Piper.

  The day after, the prisoners had learned their lesson. Any grumblings were quickly silenced by a scolding from the others, and the food came at last.

  Once Patch’s bowl and jug were full, Wren asked to sit in the tiny window as she sometimes did. Patch was quietly jealous, as Wren could scurry to the far end of the six-foot-long hole and see much more than Patch, who was limited to a tiny piece of sky and distant hill.

  As he finished his food he heard Wren squeak urgently. He came to the window.

  You need to see this, she signed, looking worried. She hopped onto his shoulder and he went up on his toes, straining to look out of the window. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the bright sky, but eventually he saw dark spots against the blue: birds flying.

  “Starlings?” he said. Wren shook her head, agitated. He looked out again at the dark spots in the sky. It had to be starlings, he thought, with so many of them – a vast flock, coming over the distant hill.

  Wait. The distant hill?

  The trees on that hill were so far away they seemed tiny, yet he could see the individual birds, see them flap… How was that possible? He froze, staring at the dark cloud. He looked at Wren, and she nodded.

  You understand now? she signed.

  “Yes,” said Patch, watching the dark cloud come ever closer. It wasn’t a flock of birds.

  It was dragons.

  Thousands of them.

  Warning bells rang out on the Castle battlements, something Patch had heard in the occasional drills during his training.

  “It’s been centuries since anyone dared attack Tiviscan,” he told Wren. “They’ll be readying the Castle defences now, with the garrisoned Pipers preparing the Battle Horns.” Those huge horns were mounted permanently on the roof of the Keep, able to create barriers of turbulent air strong enough to protect against flaming catapult attacks, say – or to knock dragons out of the sky. He shook his head, stunned. “Why, though? Nobody wants war. What could they hope to achieve? Sending such a huge army?”

  The dragons were obscuring more and more of the sky as they came ever nearer, the flock filling their little window now.

  No, thought Patch. It wasn’t a flock. That wasn’t the right word.

  The right word depended on the creatures in question: a flock of birds, a swarm of bees, or a pack of dogs. There was a word especially for dragons, too, and until now Patch hadn’t understood why that word had been chosen, instead of something more appropriate for fire-breathers. Surely, he’d always thought, a burning of dragons would make more sense? Or a firestorm?

  But seeing the dark cloud approach, blocking out more and more light, he understood at last why the right word was darkness.

  A darkness of dragons was coming. And it wouldn’t be long before they reached the Castle.

  Wren scurried up to the far end of the window for a better view. After a moment, she came back. Some of the dragons are carrying something, she signed.

  Patch looked past her, trying to make it out. Yes, there it was – small groups at the front were linked in some way, a shape hanging down below them.

  “Are those…?” said Patch, squinting. “Are those rocks?”

  Wren nodded. She hopped onto Patch’s shoulder. Closer and closer the dragons came.

  “What would they need huge rocks for?” He looked at Wren. “Not to—”

  Wren nodded again.

  Patch stepped back from the window and kept going until he reached the cell door.

  The other
prisoners were yelling to be released – “So we can help defend the Castle!” cried one, although Patch very much doubted their sincerity – and the general air of panic and doom was overwhelming. He sat at the base of the door, Wren on his shoulder, and waited.

  The sounds of shouted commands, fearful cries, and angry prisoners were soon joined by another sound.

  The beating of giant wings.

  “Here they come,” said Patch. He cupped his hands around Wren as a roar of fire came. Flame lit the window and the cell, then a black shadow flew past, heading up. After a moment there were screams and explosions. The dragons they’d been watching couldn’t have reached them so quickly. He realized that some must have come in low, unseen, then shot up at the last instant to surprise the garrison. Certainly, he couldn’t hear any sign of a barrier Song being played on the Battle Horns.

  “I wonder if—” he started, but then the wall exploded and everything went black.

  Patch felt something hitting his nose repeatedly, but all he could hear was a high-pitched continuous tone. He opened his eyes. The air was thick with dust. Wren was on his chest, slapping his nose with her paw.

  Sit up, she signed.

  “What happened?” Patch said – or tried to say, as his voice didn’t seem to work. He clapped his hands but couldn’t hear it. He was temporarily deafened; time to switch to hand-speech. What happened?

  The dragons used their rocks, Wren signed, pointing at the wall.

  Patch coughed as he looked. At least now he couldn’t complain about having a small window. A large chunk of the wall had gone, taking the window with it.

  His hearing was starting to recover. Wind howled past the damage in the wall, and there were groans and shouts from the prisoners and beyond, but it seemed that there was a definite lull in the attack. He set Wren on the floor and went to the hole, climbing up into it. The view was dizzying. The forest and hills were now home to the many dragons, bursts of flame coming here and there as shows of bravado. He looked up at the outside wall above him. “My God,” he said.

  The damage was considerable. Huge slabs of stone had fallen away, but the attack had been tightly targeted. He climbed back down to the cell floor and realized he was shaking. “This is madness,” he said. “What could they possibly want—?”