The Blood of a Dragon loe-4

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  But he wasn’t a dragon, of course, and he didn’t know how dragons thought about these things. So he struggled onward and tried not to worry about it.

  The lesser moon was down and the greater sinking fast when he finally scrambled around a towering boulder and found himself in sight of the back row of dragon pens, with the farmhouse just barely visible beyond them.

  He smiled, satisfied, and crept down toward the pens, moving as silently as he knew how. He ignored the curious glances some of the dragons gave him. Several of the sharp-eyed creatures were awake, and some had spotted him as soon as he emerged from behind the boulder into sight of the farm, but they hadn’t done anything about it. There was no reason they should.

  They weren’t watching him constantly, but they certainly knew where he was and cast an occasional glance at him.

  The bigger ones did, at any rate; the yearlings didn’t seem to have noticed anything, and he couldn’t even see the hatchlings from where he was.

  The hatchlings, however, were what he was interested in. If he could sneak off with a pair of them, one of each sex, then he could start his own farm, and to hell with Kensher and his brood.

  He had planned it out as best he could while he was convalescing, and although he never got another real tour after that first one, and had had to hurry everything up drastically when Teneria showed up, he had had chances to watch out the window when the hatchlings got fed, and had asked a few important questions-such as, “How do you tell them apart? Male and female, I mean.”

  He hadn’t gotten a good explanation, really, but in the ensuing conversation he had been told that the black one, the red one, and the reddish-gold one were all male, while the two blue-green ones were both female. The green ones included four males and two females.

  He intended to ignore the green ones, since he couldn’t tell them apart, and grab a blue-green one and one of the others. He figured that if he held them by the neck, one in each hand, they wouldn’t be able to bite him-and he just hoped they wouldn’t claw him. Hauling two four-foot, forty-pound dragons was going to be quite difficult enough without getting clawed up.

  He hoped he could manage it. It would be tough, but if he got away with it he would be set for life.

  He had watched when the hatchlings were fed and watered, and when Seldis had given them their bath-she had climbed up on top of the cage and poured buckets of water in through the bars, and then had gone into the cage with another bucket and a scrub-brush to do a final inspection and touch-up. Wuller had gone in with her, carrying a sharp prod, and two of the others, Kinner the Younger and Korun, had stood at the door of the cage as back-up, but the dragons hadn’t given her any trouble.

  And watching that, Dumery had seen that the latch on the cage didn’t need a key. He hadn’t gotten a good look at just how it worked, but he was sure no one had used a key, or anything but fingers, to work it.

  And the calm ease with which Seldis had handled the hatchlings had been very encouraging. They were used to human touch.

  Dumery thought he could manage it-get in there, grab the dragons, and get out again, and then hide somewhere in the forest, work his way south and west, back out of the mountains and back toward civilization. Teneria wouldn’t dare follow him if he went south, near the Warlock Stone.

  He hadn’t worked out all the details, of course, but the hard part, he was sure, would be getting the dragons. Once he had his breeding pair he would worry about details, such as where he was going to keep them, and how he was going to get them there.

  First things first, he told himself.

  He reached the outer fence, and discovered that the very first step-getting back into the farm-was going to be harder than he had thought at first. This was not an easy fence to climb. It was nine or ten feet high, with black iron uprights set a few inches apart-that much he had known already.

  He had not, however, paid much attention to the fact that there were only two crosspieces holding the uprights together, one nearly at ground level and the other near the top. The uprights were far enough apart that he couldn’t brace his foot between two of them, but close enough together that he couldn’t squeeze through.

  And climbing the uprights themselves, while possible, wasn’t going to be easy, because they weren’t round, easy-to-grasp rods, they were triangular, with concave faces, so that the edges were sharp.

  He sighed, grabbed hold of two uprights, and started climbing.

  The metal cut into his palms and his fingers; if he clung tightly enough to pull himself up, the edges cut more deeply.

  And then he felt himself starting to slide back down; the smooth metal didn’t give him enough friction to hold. The edges were cutting more than ever as his hands slid down them.

  He let go and fell back to the ground, frustrated. He looked at his hands.

  The palm of his left hand was bleeding sluggishly; the fingers and his right hand were marked with red pressure lines, but the skin hadn’t been broken.

  He swore, using every foul word he’d ever heard the sailors on his father’s ships use, and wiped the blood off on the grass.

  That, he told himself, was a truly vicious fence! Why had they made it that way?

  He supposed that it was really intended to prevent dragons from getting out, rather than to keep him from getting in, but it seemed to work quite well either way.

  On the other hand, he thought, he was smarter than any dragon, and the dearth of crosspieces gave him an idea. If he could find something and wedge it between two of the bars, he should be able to bend them further apart and squeeze through. After all, he was thin enough, particularly after his recent adventures in reaching this point. The bars were iron, not steel-iron was cheaper and lasted better in the open weather, since steel would rust away.

  Iron, however, was easier to bend, and the bars weren’t that thick, no more than an inch or two through.

  He looked around, but he was standing on bare rock. His only real tool was his belt knife, and that wouldn’t do.

  The greater moon’s light was already starting to fade, and he decided that speed was more important than any other consideration; he picked up a handy rock, roughly the size of his head, and jammed it into the fence.

  It went right through.

  He swore again, and picked up another, larger rock.

  This one took an effort to hoist up, but at least it didn’t go right through the bars. One end of it did. He braced it up with one hand and hammered at it with the other.

  The fence jangled loudly at the impact, and he hurt his hand, but the bars didn’t yield.

  A dragon roared at him from one of the pens, but in the darkness he couldn’t make out exactly which one it was.

  He snarled in reply, then with one hand holding his wedge-rock in place, he picked up another, and used it as a hammer, pounding at the wedge-rock with it.

  The fence rang and buzzed at the impact, and the dragons bellowed in reply-which pleased Dumery, as he judged that the draconic racket would drown out the noise the fence was making.

  Then one bar started to give, and Dumery pounded harder, holding his improvised hammer in both hands.

  With a loud snap, the rock suddenly fell through the fence, and Dumery blinked, startled. The bar hadn’t bent that far yet!

  He looked again, and realized that the bar had snapped off at the bottom. He pushed at it, and it swung freely.

  Delighted, he shoved it to one side and squeezed sideways through the resulting opening.

  Now all he had to do was to get to the hatchling cage, get inside, grab two dragons-a male and a female-drag them out, close the cage behind him, drag the dragons over here and out through the fence, and run and hide.

  Oh, sure, that was all. He grimaced slightly, and wondered if maybe he was being a little over-confident.

  It also occurred to him that he did not want to close the cage behind him. If all twelve hatchlings got loose the resulting confusion would keep the farmers much busier, which would be
so much the better for him.

  He trotted along the fence, around the largest pen, ignoring the dragons that were staring at him. His toe caught on a rock and he stumbled, which elicited a weird hooting from one of the dragons, but he caught himself and hurried on.

  The dim orange moonlight was fading, and he didn’t want to stumble over a cliff in the dark; he had to hurry!

  Chapter Thirty

  The latch was a black lump in the dimness, and he poked at it in growing frustration.

  How in the World did the damn thing work?

  It was like no latch he had ever seen before. There was no simple bar to lift, no lever to pull, no knob to turn; instead two thumb-sized stubs protruded from the top of a tangle of ironmongery that Dumery could make no sense of. He tried pushing first one stub, and then the other; both resisted, but either one could be moved. Neither one seemed to do much of anything.

  Annoyed beyond reason, he bashed at the thing with his fist, and that didn’t help either. It made the cage door rattle against the frame, but the latch stayed closed.

  A dragon snorted somewhere nearby; Dumery didn’t look up. Instead he grabbed each stub in one hand and tried working both at once, to see what would happen.

  Sliding both to the right didn’t work, nor did both to the left, but when he pushed them together in the middle he heard a clank, and the door swung open.

  Dumery smiled.

  A dozen little dragons stared up at him from inside the cage, their gleaming eyes unreadable. He stared back. The colors were harder to distinguish in the gloom than he had expected-the orange light of the greater moon turned both green and blue-green to a murky, dim, nameless color. He was about to step into the cage for a closer look when he heard the growl of a larger dragon. He turned away from all those staring little eyes to see if anyone in the house had noticed the noise, or had just happened to be looking.

  He found himself looking directly into another, much larger, pair of draconic eyes.

  He blinked, and caught his breath.

  One of the big dragons was loose, and standing not ten feet away, its long neck extended so that its head was mere inches from his own.

  It growled again.

  One of the hatchlings hissed, and snapped at Dumery’s leg; he snatched the threatened limb away and started to kick at the little beast, then reconsidered as he felt the big dragon’s hot breath on his shoulder.

  Snatching up two of the hatchlings while this monster watched did not seem like a viable plan. In a hopeless attempt to look innocent, Dumery managed a sickly smile and started to close the door of the cage. He stopped abruptly when one of the hatchlings shrieked; he had caught its neck and one wing in the door.

  He decided to leave the door open after all and to just forget about the hatchlings.

  In fact, he decided to forget about everything except leaving, as quickly as possible. He began backing away, watching the big dragon carefully.

  His foot landed on something slick, and a hatchling yowled; stepping quickly aside, Dumery saw that one of them, the black one, was out of the cage already, and he had just stepped on one of its dragging wings.

  The big dragon roared angrily at him.

  Dumery didn’t dare turn away, and he found himself with a clear view of a dark mouth lined with hundreds of extremely sharp teeth; foul breath, redolent of rotting meat, swept over him, and his ears rang.

  A window swung open in the farmhouse.

  “Who’s there?” someone called.

  Dumery wasn’t stupid enough to answer that, but the big dragon turned away for a moment, distracted, and Dumery seized the opportunity. He spun on his heel and ran, narrowly avoiding tripping over the black hatchling.

  As he ran, he heard a man’s voice shouting, “Hai, dragon! What is it? Guard, boy, guard!”

  Dumery ran for the loose upright in the fence, not worrying about what that meant, not worrying about anything except whether that huge, angry dragon was following him. He didn’t see it start after him, nor did he see it stop when it heard the order to guard. He didn’t see it return, disgruntled, to the door of the hatchling cage, where it began snatching up errant dragonets by their tails and tossing them back into their pen.

  Dumery didn’t dare look back as he groped along the fence in the dark, feeling for the broken bar, but at last he found it and squeezed through. He stumbled on until he rounded the boulder and was out of sight of the farm.

  There he fell to the ground, panting.

  After a moment he felt sufficiently recovered to sit up, look around, and listen.

  He heard dragons bellowing, but that was off in the distance somewhere; there was no sign of pursuit. The lesser moon was up again, looking even more pinkish than usual and half-obscured by a wisp of cloud. The greater moon’s glow had faded to a mere tinge in the west, and no more stars were visible through the gathering mist and cloud.

  All Dumery could see was rock and moss and sky.

  He sat and gathered his wits.

  It appeared that Kensher and company had a line of defense they hadn’t mentioned-trained watch-dragons. Or one watch-dragon, anyway. That hardly seemed fair.

  But then, they weren’t trying to be fair-they were trying to defend themselves.

  Against what, Dumery wondered. What was there out here in the middle of nowhere that called for that sort of defense?

  Or was it to keep the dragons in?

  Would a dragon, even a trained one, help in imprisoning its own kind?

  Well, yes, Dumery thought, it probably would. People served as gaolers willingly enough, didn’t they?

  Whatever the watch-dragon was there for, it was there, and it had kept him from getting his hatchlings. The exact reason for its presence didn’t seem anywhere near as important as thefact of its presence.

  His burglary attempt was a failure; he hadn’t gotten his breeding pair.

  Had Kensher guessed what had happened? Would he be guarding against another attempt? Would Teneria know what was going on?

  Well, the ground was so rocky that there would be no footprints to show that an unauthorized human being had been there. The watch-dragon wouldn’t be able to say anything-would it?

  No, Dumery just couldn’t believe that Kensher would keep a talking dragon around. And that one had growled and roared, but shown no signs of any greater vocal ability than that. It also wasn’t any bigger than some of the dragons in the cages.

  So it couldn’t talk and say it had seen Dumery. The only evidence of his presence would be the broken fence-if that was noticed-and the open cage door.

  That was quite an extensive fence, and there were a great many uprights in it; one broken one might well go unnoticed. It would almost certainly not be found until daylight, at the very least, not unless someone walked the entire fence with a lantern.

  Of course, someone might do just that, Dumery had to admit.

  And there was that witch. He had no idea what she might see, with her magic, or what she might do about it.

  He decided that he would assume that she wouldn’t know anything more than anybody else. After all, what did she know about dragons or burglars? Neither one had anything to do with witchcraft. So he would ignore her for now, and assume that she would go along with whatever the others thought.

  If he was lucky, they would see the open cage door and would think that one of the hatchlings had somehow opened it, or that whoever was last in there hadn’t closed it properly, and that what the watch-dragon had spotted was hatchlings getting loose.

  After all, could they really expect intruders up here?

  Almost certainly, they’d just think it was an accidentally-opened cage that caused the fuss.

  In that case, once everyone had settled down again, Dumery would be able to sneak back into the house. Or even sneak back to the pens and try again.

  He had to think about that. If he were going to make a second attempt it would be best to do it tonight, rather than waiting, because the longer he waited the mor
e time they would have to find the break in the fence.

  There was the problem of the watch-dragon, however. Did the creature ever sleep, or was it constantly on guard? Was there any way he could elude it, or fool it into thinking he belonged there?

  This was a matter that required some thought. Besides, it would take some time for everything to settle back to normal, and there was the darkness to worry about-the lesser moon was still low, and didn’t give all that much light in any case. Dumery decided that he would wait until everyone had had time to calm down, and then would decide whether to make another try, or to slip back into the house and pretend he had slept through all the excitement.

  For now, he would wait. He settled down, making himself as comfortable as he could on the hard stone.

  He had no intention of sleeping, but all the same, within minutes, he was asleep.

  When he awoke the sun was warm on the bare stone, and he realized with a start that he had missed his chance. The sun was well up in the east, peering down at him over the peak of the mountain-half the morning was gone. Kensher and his family would be out and about; they might well have found the break in the fence. They would surely have all the hatchlings back in their cage, and might have put a lock on it. The watch-dragon would surely be awake.

  And he had missed his chance to get back into the house. They would surely have noticed his absence by now.

  In fact, that Teneria might already be looking for him, brewing up her spells or whatever she did. She might come upon him at any moment; if she had followed him to the farm from all the way back in Ethshar, finding him now should be easy.

  He sat up and considered.

  She hadn’t found him yet, though. Maybe she wasn’t looking, or maybe something had gone wrong with her witchcraft.

  If she didn’t find him, he could slip away, hide somewhere, wait until nightfall, and then try again; he could break the fence again, if it had been repaired.