The Blood of a Dragon loe-4

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Of course. Look at those things-four hundred pounds each. And we can’t remove the claws or fangs, because then they can’t feed themselves. We can’t let them fly.”

  Dumery looked, just as a green dragon lifted its head with a bloody mouthful of beef. He shuddered. “No,” he said, “I guess you can’t.”

  The tour continued, past two more cages of yearlings, and then a dozen huge pens for older, more mature beasts. These ranged from about twelve feet long up to twenty or more, and glared fiercely at the two humans. Every so often one would roar, and Dumery would cover his ears against the sound.

  A heavy outer fence ran around the entire group of pens, enclosing much of the plateau. Kensher noticed Dumery looking at it as the pair walked on.

  “Sometimes they get out of their cages,” he said. “We don’t know how they do it, sometimes, but they do-dragons are tricky. When that happens, the fence there stops them from going any farther.”

  “Do any ever get away completely?” Dumery asked.

  Kensher admitted reluctantly, “Sometimes, yes.”

  Dumery looked down across the edge of the plateau toward the forests below.

  “So there are wild dragons out there?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know if they survive-after all, they’ve never learned to hunt for their food, and there isn’t much game around here, and they can’t fly. Most of them probably don’t last long.”

  Dumery didn’t find that very comforting. He remembered that he had come up the path through those woods alone and unprotected, without ever giving the possibility of being eaten by a wild dragon any serious thought.

  Then, finally, they came to the slaughterhouse, where Dumery gawped at the tangle of huge iron chains and heavy beams, used to restrain and support dragons while their throats were cut and their blood drained.

  “We cull most of them when they’re six or seven months old,” Kensher explained. “That’s where we get most of the blood. By then we know which ones we want for breeding stock, so we dispose of the rest here. If there’s any sign of illness or anemia, or if they’re unusually vicious, or if we just don’t like their looks, we weed them out then. The others we keep until they’re about four or five years old, and then they have to go, too.” He gestured at the restraints. “A healthy dragon’s about eighteen or twenty feet long by then, weighs maybe a ton, but the growth is slowing down, so it’s not worth keeping them any longer. Besides, any bigger and they get really dangerous, and we can’t handle them any more. They aren’t just bigger and stronger, either, they’re smarter. A hatchling’s no smarter than a kitten, and a yearling maybe as bright as a wolf, but by the time a dragon’s five or six years old it’s smarter than any other animal except people. A really smart one might start learning to talk when it’s seven or eight, and we can’t have that.”

  “Why not?” Dumery asked, puzzled.

  Kensher blinked. “Ah... because if... if it can talk, then it’s not just an animal any more, boy, and it wouldn’t be right to kill it.” He frowned. “It’s bad enough killing the breeding stock as it is.”

  Dumery considered that for a moment.

  How did learning to talk make a dragon a person? It was still a dragon, after all.

  But he could sort of see Kensher’s point. If you could hold a conversation with something, it wasn’t just an animal any more.

  But if a talking dragon shouldn’t be killed, then was it really all right to kill the immature ones? Did that mean that it would be all right to kill a human baby that hadn’t yet learned to talk? Maybe it did mean that; he had heard that sometimes girls did exactly that when they had babies they didn’t want.

  Dumery decided he didn’t want to think about that just now.

  But if the dragons were killed when they were still babies, too young to talk...

  “How old do they have to be to lay eggs?” he asked.

  “Oh, they’ll start breeding as yearlings, if we let them,” Kensher said. “We don’t, though; that’s why there are three separate cages for yearlings instead of one big one.”

  “Three?”

  “Well, we don’t usually get nice even numbers of male and female,” Kensher explained. “We usually have more males than females. And we don’t want them to breed until they’re about three; the young are healthier that way. So we have two cages for males and one for females.”

  Dumery nodded, staring at the ironmongery.

  The killing knife hung by the door, a huge saw-toothed blade the size of a broadsword, its metal polished and gleaming. The bottles used for the blood stood ranged on shelves against one wall, all of them empty and sparkling clean.

  He hadn’t thought about the actual killing when he asked for an apprenticeship. He hadn’t thought about feeding almost a hundred hungry dragons every day, about raising the cattle to feed them. He hadn’t thought about breaking wings every year, or watching for fire-breathers and killing them young, or losing fingers or hands or arms in a moment’s carelessness around the livestock. There was far more to raising dragons than he had considered.

  It looked like a dull, dirty, difficult, and dangerous business. It meant cruelty and killing.

  Dumery didn’t like any of that.

  All the same, Dumery thought, what else could he do? He had come this far; he was reluctant to throw that away. Besides, for as long as he could remember, all he had wanted out of life was magic, and he had been denied that. There was nothing else he wanted to do. Dragon-farming might not be magic, but it wassomething, anyway, and if it meant he could rub Thetheran’s nose in the dirt, then itwas what he wanted to do.

  Now all he had to do was convince Kensher to let him do it.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “You know,” Dumery remarked between bites of Pancha’s baked pudding, “my father’s a wealthy man.”

  “Oh?” Kensher said, not particularly interested. Kinner looked up from his plate, but said nothing.

  Dumery nodded. “He’d pay well to buy me an apprenticeship, enough to cover all the costs with some left over.”

  Kensher shook his head. “No apprenticeship,” he said. “I told you that. We have plenty of money as it is, and if we need more we just raise our prices; we don’t need your father’s gold.” He scooped up another heaping spoonful.

  Dumery looked down to hide his annoyance. He had thought he had a chance, that he would at least be able to put up an argument, but how could he counter that flat refusal?

  He looked up again and glanced down the dinner table, taking in all the faces.

  Most of them, he knew, didn’t understand Ethsharitic, so they had no idea what he and Kensher had just said. For all Dumery could tell, most of them might not even know that hewanted an apprenticeship.

  And did all of them want to stay here and learn the family business? Maybe he could replace one, somehow.

  He caught a glimpse of Wuller of Srigmor, the shepherd who had married Seldis of Aldagmor, the eldest granddaughter.That was a possibility-Wuller had married into the family, and there were still five other granddaughters, presumably all unmarried and probably not spoken for yet. There were not a lot of eligible suitors up here in the mountains.

  There was Shatha, and Tarissa, and Kirsha, and Shanra, and Kinthera. Shanra and Kinthera were a few years older than Dumery was-not that that really mattered.

  None of them particularly appealed to him, though. Seldis was pretty-but she was already married, andmuch too old.

  And besides, he didn’t really want to commit himself to marryinganyone yet.

  Of course, he could lie andsay that he wanted to marry Shanra; nobody would expect him to make good on that until he was sixteen, at the earliest, by which time he ought to know all there was to know about raising dragons for their blood.

  But the knowledge wouldn’t do him much good if he angered the owners of the only dragon farm in the World.

  And besides, he didn’t like the idea of lying about it. It wouldn’t be proper to get an apprenticeship that
way. And in all likelihood his lies wouldn’t be believed in any case; these people weren’t stupid, and they knew what he wanted, since he had foolishly admitted it already. They wouldn’t accept him into the family just to give him an apprenticeship, and they would know that was thereal reason he wanted to marry in.

  Besides, there was no guarantee that Shanra or any of the others would be interested in marryinghim, now, was there?

  No, marrying into the family was not going to be his answer. At least, not in and of itself.

  If he could find some way to stay, then in fact he really might eventually marry one of the girls. After all, if he stayed here for a few years he wouldn’t see anyother girls, and sooner or later, he supposed, he would want to get married.

  But that argument wasn’t going to convince Kensher to let him stay, he was sure.

  “And you really don’t care if I tell all the wizards back in Ethshar that you people are running a farm here, and not hunting dragons in the wild?” he asked.

  Kinner blinked, Pancha flinched, and Kensher sighed.

  “Not much,” Kensher said. “The hunting story is a convenient fiction, and we’re happy with it, but it’s not really essential. We’d stay in business without it; we might need to negotiate a little with the Wizard’s Guild, that’s all.” He put down his spoon. “Look, Dumery,” he said, “give it up. We don’t need an apprentice here, and if we did, it wouldn’t be a rich, spoiled city boy who was stupid enough to follow me home the way you did. And particularly not one who makes threats about revealing secrets.”

  Pancha flinched again. “Kenshi,” she said, “don’t be so harsh. It took courage and resourcefulness for him to come all the way up here by himself.”

  “Doesn’t mean it was smart,” Kensher said. “And resourceful or not, we donot need an apprentice!”

  Kinner made a noise of agreement, and even Pancha couldn’t argue with that.

  Dumery often didn’t know when to quit, but this time it finally sank in that he wasn’t getting anywhere, and he finished his pudding in silence.

  When he was done he sat staring at the empty plate, and inspiration struck. He looked up.

  Pancha was clearing away the empty dishes, and Kinner had gone off somewhere with some of his younger grandchildren, but Kensher was still at the table, leaning back comfortably.

  “What if I bought a dragon?” Dumery asked.

  Kensher let out his breath in a whoosh, then leaned forward, startled.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “What if I bought a dragon?” Dumery repeated. “Or two, actually. They wouldn’t have to be good ones; a couple of hatchlings you’d cull anyway would do just fine.”

  “We don’t sell dragons,” Kensher said, eyeing him suspiciously.

  “You sell their blood,” Dumery said. “What’s the difference?”

  “Plenty,” Kensher said. “A bottle of blood never bit anyone’s arm off.”

  “All right, so it’s not the same,” Dumery admitted. “Will you sell me a pair anyway?”

  “A pair, is it? You mean you don’t just want any two dragons, you want a male and a female?”

  “Well, yes,” Dumery admitted, “that is what I had in mind.”

  Kensher stared at him for a moment, then leaned back in his chair and said, “Boy, you’re amazing. You must think I’m as dumb as you are! You want me to sell you a breeding pair so you can set yourself up your own little dragon farm and go into business in competition with us?”

  That was, in fact, exactly what Dumery wanted, but it seemed impolitic to say so just now. Instead he sat silently frustrated, staring at Kensher.

  “I have got to admit, Dumery, you are the stubbornest, most persistent lad I have ever met in my life,” Kensher said, his tone almost admiring. “Even the dragons aren’t as determined as you. But it doesn’t matter. We arenot going to set you up in the dragon-farming business, either here or in competition with us. We’re going to send you home to your family, and hope you have the sense not to go and cause pointless trouble by telling everybody where we live and what we do. Is that clear enough?”

  Dumery reluctantly nodded. “It’s clear,” he said.

  And in fact itwas clear that the descendants of Sergeant Thar wouldn’t help him intentionally.

  Perhaps, though, they might be made to provide assistance without knowing it.

  As he carried his empty plate to the scullery Dumery was planning just how that might work.

  It would involve lying and stealing and a good bit of danger, but he thought he could manage it.

  Just a little while ago he had been reluctant to lie to Kensher and his family about wanting to marry Shanra, and here he was considering not just lying, but robbing them as well.

  Well, he was desperate. And this new scheme was much more likely to succeed, anyway, and it would be over much sooner, one way or the other.

  There was a chance it would get him killed, but he refused to worry about that. It might work.

  And if it worked, it would be well worth the risk.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Teneria stared in disbelief at the pens.

  Dragons!

  Dozens of dragons!

  Big dragons, small dragons, red, blue, and green dragons!

  She had never seen any dragon before, in her entire life, and here there were dozens of dragons.

  What in the World was this place?

  And what was Dumery doing here?

  She lowered her pack to the ground, then scooped the spriggan off her shoulder and dropped it onto a nearby rock. She sat down, still staring at the farm, and tried to think.

  As she did, she was aware once again of a sort of soft muttering in the back of her mind, as if someone were trying to sneak up on her, or was thinking loudly about her somewhere nearby. The same uncomfortable sensation had come over her a few times on the way up into the mountains, and she didn’t like it at all.

  She had disliked it right from the start, but oddly, it had taken until the fourth time she felt it before she recognized it.

  It was the Calling.

  Witches weren’t supposed to be susceptible to the Calling-but on the other hand, Adar had told her that people who got too close to the Warlock Stone could spontaneously become warlocks, and witchcraft and warlockry were apparently not all that different, after all. She knew that she had been born with a strong talent for witchcraft-Sella had told her as much. That was why Sella had been willing to take Teneria on as an apprentice even though Teneria’s parents couldn’t pay the customary fee.

  And if Teneria had the innate talent for witchcraft, why wouldn’t she have the talent for warlockry, as well?

  Even so, she might not have picked anything up, might not have sensed the Calling, if she hadn’t spent those long, horrible hours focused on Adar’s mind, trying to hold the Calling out. That had taught her what the Calling was, had attuned her to it.

  She wasn’t a warlock, even now, by any means; she could levitate things, of course, but it still tired her, it was still witchcraft, not warlockry.

  Witch or warlock, though, she could feel that unpleasant mental touch, ever so lightly.

  And it seemed to be growing more noticeable as she continued southward and eastward. She did not like the idea of venturing even farther in that direction.

  But now she wouldn’t have to. Dumery was here; despite the delays, she had finally caught up to him. And this, surely, was where he had been headed all along.

  She could see why he hadn’t wanted to tell the truth when his parents’ hired wizard contacted him. That would have sounded so reassuring to his poor mother... “Oh, I’m hiking up into wild, dragon-infested, warlock-haunted mountains in Aldagmor, along what used to be the frontier of the old Northern Empire. I’ll be up there in the freezing cold weather without any supplies or money, with nothing but the clothes on my back. I’m going to a secret menagerie of dragons up there.”

  And what in the World did Dumery want in this miser
able, gods-forsaken place, anyway? What business did a twelve-year-old boy have at an all-dragon zoo like this? Had he been tricked into coming here as dragon-fodder?

  No, that didn’t make any sense; he was still alive, she could tell. And even if there were some reason to feed dragons boys instead of sheep or cattle, surely there were gullible boys to be found closer than Ethshar of the Spices.

  Maybe the boy was on some errand for a wizard? Everybody knew he had been hounding half the magicians in the Wizards’ Quarter for an apprenticeship; maybe he had settled for a job as a wizard’s errand boy. Wizards seemed to take an unhealthy interest in dragons; she had certainly seen enough of them with dragons embroidered on robes, or with carved dragons adorning their shops.

  Well, there were ways to find out what was going on. The simplest and best was to walk right up and ask.

  If it turned out that her interest wasn’t welcome, well, she was a witch; she could defend herself.

  She marched down the path. Behind her the spriggan let out a small yip of dismay, which she ignored, and then scurried after her.

  She reached the door, stopped, raised a fist, and knocked loudly. The spriggan grabbed her ankle and held on.

  Even through the heavy oak, and even though she had never had any contact with the people on the other side, she could sense the astonishment within. She waited.

  Eventually, the door creaked open an inch or so.

  “Yes?” a handsome young woman asked, in Sardironese. “Can I help you?”

  Teneria could see that the woman was thinking in Sardironese-hardly surprising, as they were still in Aldagmor. The witch was still not very comfortable with the local language, but she tried. “I am looking for Dumery of Shiphaven,” she said, unhappily aware that she had spoken with a very thick Ethsharitic accent, and that the spriggan was clinging to her leg, hampering any fast movement.

  “Dumery?” the woman in the house replied, startled. Teneria saw that she knew exactly who Dumery of Shiphaven was; the mental image she conjured up matched Teneria’s own perfectly.

  “Yes,” Teneria said, nodding. “Dumery.”