by E. E. Knight
Lights twinkled on the horizon. Swayport at last!
The Copper’s sharp eyes picked out the outlines of the port. From his position, a good score of dragonlengths above the water with the rocky coast to the west and the gentle Inland Ocean night to the east, Swayport as seen from the air resembled a reclining cat facing out toward the ocean, its spine in a gentle curve creating a sheltered bay. Against its belly was the port itself, a long crescent of sand beach, protected by a barren bar exposed at low tide. The cat’s dangerous—to rodents, anyway—sii were stuck out as a series of rocks perilous to mariners approaching from the north, its long tail a wave-breaking sandbar to the south.
A rocky bluff at the cat’s head held an ancient sloping fortress of double walls and three towers with its own wharf between the forelimbs. The fortress had been built an age ago by the Hypatian Empire at the height of its wealth and power, and the wharf was intended so that the defenders might be resupplied by sea if the rest of the landward settlement fell.
The town of the Pirate Lords proper had not been so solidly built. A tangle of streets and structures of wood and stone rose to the temple domes on the cat’s haunches. The Pirate Lords no longer worshipped the gods of their forefathers there, instead the temples sheltered gambling and drink and slave-auctions, the usual low pursuits of men who lived by fighting and pillage.
He’d promised to hand them back to the Hypatians with only minor scorching.
Swayport, and six other colonies on this coast like it, had long since declared their independence from the old Hypatian order. In the best of times there was trade across the Inland Ocean, at other times war, and chafing between rival fishing fleets and trading lines in every season—even the storm-months at the death of the year, when ships driven into opposing ports seeking shelter from storms were charged outrageous harbor fees or had their cargoes seized.
The Copper had listened to weary hours of it from Hypatian shipowners and whaling guild until he thought he’d dream of nothing but the price of lamp oil and salted fish for the rest of his life, before making his decision to end the pirate menace.
Well, if men couldn’t settle their differences, he’d force a peace. As the Hypatians were his allies, though sometimes they were hard to distinguish from unusually quarrelsome thralls, he’d see the disputes resolved in their favor.
He had two advantages, and he intended to use them. The first was a pretext for war that had all Hypatia seething. One of the great merchant lines—they flew a flag with blue and yellow and a fish design; the Copper couldn’t remember the name—had one of its deep-water trade boats blown off course and into the hands of a commerce-raider, who brought it back to Swayport.
Such a matter could usually be resolved with paying a small ransom, but this ship held the merchant line’s owner and family, a man of influence as wide as his belt size and deep as his purse. They put his crew to work cutting paving stones and his family in the fortress and sent the youngest son of the line back to the Hypatian Directory with a ransom demand.
The Copper, when told the tale by one of the Directory’s many skilled tongues, growled that if it was one of his own dragon families from the Lavadome. He’d be descaled if he’d pay anything with drakes and dragonelles locked up in some dungeon with excrement running down between the walls.
With that Hypatia begged for assistance in a war to humble the Pirate Lords.
His other advantage was knowledge of Swayport and its fortress, now ever so much closer on the horizon. But the moon would reappear soon—was it yet looming on the southeastern horizon? It musn’t be allowed to frame the oncoming dragons like a shadow-puppet light.
The far-off battlements formed a false horizion against the stars. The old works must be massive, at least the size of Imperial Rock in the Lavadome, though perhaps not quite so high.
Swayport had been attacked a generation ago by the thrall-dragons from that fog-shrouded island to the north that his gray brother skulked upon, back in the days of Wrimere Wyrmaster, the Wizard of the Isle of Ice. One of the human veterans of his Aerial Host, now a proud and battle-scarred Captain, had been involved in the attack.
The attack had failed strategically because the men of Swayport had learned dragon-fighting from the dwarfs, and filled the towers overlooking their harbor with war machines that fired aerial harpoons. His sister Wistala had shown him one, a souvenir of one of her own battles, when she gave a tutorial to the Firemaids about aboveground hominid fortifications and defenses. The Copper still shuddered at the memory, it was a horrible barbed thing the length of a spear, full of spurs that went in easily but wouldn’t come out without destruction to muscle, blood vessel, and organ. He’d rather take an arrow through the eye and die at once.
Worse, the dwarfs and men like the Pirate Lords attached long chains, or weights to the harpoons. The chains might catch on rooftop or tree branch and yank the harpoon out with crippling damage; the weights caused even the strongest dragon to come to earth eventually, where he’d remain, ground-bound and vulnerable, until the metal could be broken.
According to Wistala, such a device had been the death of their father.
The Copper, trying to forget his wing for a few more beats by thinking back on his conversations with the captains, both dragon and human, remembered, too, the strategic blunder the dragons-slavers had made. A scouting rider had passed over the town and took it upon himself to demand food and drink for himself and his mount. When refused, the fool angered and started burning small craft in the harbor before flying off with his dragon hungrier than ever.
With Swayport alarmed, when the dragon-slavers returned, they found a populace ready for battle. After some skirmishing, cooler heads prevailed and the dragon-slavers decided the battle wouldn’t be worth whatever could be gleaned from a poor series of villages and a fishing port.
Now Swayport was thriving and prosperous, in part thanks to their resistance to the dragon-slavers. Refugees from wars elsewhere had settled under the protection of the old Hypatian colonial fortress that had seen off the dragons once.
The Copper could now make out the outlines of the craggy fortress atop the catshead bluff. The towers made it look like the cat was wearing a crown, or perhaps had grown an extra docked ear. He glanced at his wing. It was leaking blood and throbbed, but he’d made it throught the night at the head of his dragons. He’d brought the dragons to war, at the place and time arranged. The rest was up to his commanders.
The Copper swung his tail down three times.
With that, the six biggest and most ancient dragons of the Aerial Host struggled to gain altitude. The men tied and strapped on the broad dragon-backs, clad only in warm riding-furs with a few light blades, shifted position so they were boots-down, looking like storm-wrecked sailors clinging to the sides of an overturned boat.
The Copper’s Griffaran Guard closed up around him, ready to protect their Tyr in battle.
The colorful griffaran were more feather-skulled bird than noble dragoncrest, but they were fellow egg layers and ancient allies of the Dragons of the Lavadome. Though lazy and playful and argumentative around their own nests, those who dedicated themselves to the Tyr found ample mental stimulation keeping watch and guarding the Imperial family, and in return the dragons kept egg raiders away from their nests and brought delicious dried fruits and salted nuts from far away, or had their thralls bake oily seed-crackers the avians preferred above all other foods. They had long talons and powerful beaks that could tear through dragon-scale, and as they were rarely called upon to fight thought the constant stream of tasty tidbits, shiny decor, and soft nest-bedding the Imperial family gave in exchange for their service ample compensation.
Night-fishing birds cried an alarm to their kin as they passed, but Swayport itself still slept. Only a few lights glimmered in town and fortress.
A swift-winged dragonelle broke off from the rest of the formation and headed for the sandbar. There were some flat-bottomed Hypatian river barges there in the surf out
side it. Not the most seaworthy craft, but the Firemaids had managed to swim them up from the ruins of the old elven city loaded with Hypatian soldiers. Supposedly the scions of some of the great old military families of Hypatia, they looked more like a rabble in half-polished rust to the Copper, but they’d do for keeping order after the attack and going down some of the smaller, darker holes with the aid of slender young drakes and drakka swimming beside the barges.
The barges’ arrival, just off the sandbar, had precipitated the flight of the Aerial Host.
Ignoring the pain in his wing, the Copper sped up as though eager to come to grips.
Tide wasn’t in their favor. The sandbar to the south had several flooded passages across it, but with the tide out, the barges couldn’t be pulled through. They’d have to be emptied, dragged across the shallow by the dragonelles, and then filled again.
Well, if that was the worst thing to go wrong in the war with the Pirate Lords, he would take it.
A blue-white light on one of the boats in the harbor danced across the deck, then ran up the rigging. A signal of some sort.
The Aerial Host had been spotted. Or perhaps the dragons coming across the sandbar had become tangled in someone’s lobster pots.
The Copper checked to see that his man-laden veterans were on the way to the fortress towers, two heading for each, and then stiffened his wings and went into a glide toward the signaling ship.
He picked out a yellow and blue banner atop the tallest mast. So they had a guard on the captured Hypatian ship ready to signal at an attempt to retake the craft.
The Copper ran his tongue along the inside of his teeth in satisfaction. Much more than that is on its way, oh pirate sailor. But now the foua pulsing in his firebladder would have to be directed at some other target.
He shot over the captured ship and swung with his tail. Lines sang as rigging parted and he felt a satisfying krrack! as his tail broke salt-dried timber. But when he glanced behind, the man climbing the mast still hung there, waving his burning blue light in circles. Sparks from it rained down toward the bay in brilliant parabolas only to die like fireflies.
Little man, think you’ll escape me?
The Copper folded his hurt wing—sweet relief!—in a quick diving turn and—
A mass shot under him kunk-twaaang! followed by chattering chain.
Clever men! They put a dragon-harpoon on the boat. Of course everyone knew the Hypatians had dragon allies; it was a sensible precaution.
“Get them—at the war machine!” he called to his Griffaran Guard, who banked to flank him with their usual effortless grace. Griffaran could literally fly circles around a dragon.
Two circled, misunderstood his order—the unfamiliar dwarfish-based word translated into Parl translated into the accents of dragontongue and then hurled at a pair of anxious users of a patois of dragontongue and birdspeech in the night was a recipe for confusion but two others darted for the forged shell of the harpoon-thrower in its reinforced pinioned mount.
The griffaran landed atop the device and tore into the men working cranks on the machine like fresh calf meat. Pieces flew messily in all directions.
The Copper saw men at the tail—or rather stern, the tail end of ships were called sterns—aiming another war machine at the dragons cutting across the bay. All this nautical terminology suggested secret knowledge as obscure as any of the studies of the sages on Ankelene Hill, but it was part of the marvel of all the devices hominids invented to compensate for physical, mental, and moral weaknesses.
He forgot the man in the rigging, folded his wings, and landed on the deck—shattering rail, machine, and men. A few good stomps and the whole mess went overside, weighted down by heavy chains and weights.
Good riddance.
Ship fighting wasn’t without its hazards. He felt several painful splinters in his sii and saa and he had lines and nets tangled in his scale. His griff rattled in vexation.
“My Tyr!” HeBellereth, his scarred old Commander of the Aerial Host called. “Are you injured?”
The Copper straightened his neck to trumpet:
“The towers! The gate! Never mind me. Keep to the plan! That fortress must be taken.”
The moon peeped opened the top sliver of its great white eye over the Inland Ocean. By it the Copper could see the barges coursing across the bay, pulled by churning pairs of Firemaids with leather-wrapped cables in their mouths.
The smell of salt—salt from the blood, salt from the water, salt from his own rended flesh, brought the night to brilliant life. He’d rarely felt more alive. The pain of his sore wing was forgotten in triumph as he watched his laden dragons alight atop the shielded towers of the fortress.
Men dropped off the hovering dragons and onto the battlements the way squirrels fell out of a tail-swiped tree. As planned, they seized the deadly war machines in the towers before they could be loaded and readied.
A mass roared out of the night. The Copper couldn’t react until it was upon him, so intent was he in watching the human warriors of his Aerial Host.
It struck him and the deck of the ship with such force the ship flopped over on its side. The ship’s timbers groaned in protest.
It was a dragon. Not one of his own, no laudi marked its wings as testament to worthiness to serve in the Aerial Host, no white stripe painted on the side of its flank and crest for the night attack showed him as friend. Nor was it a dragonelle.
A black dragon, and a huge one at that, climbed out of the mass of lines and wood, dragging it like a water dog emerging from seaweed.
This dragon hadn’t grown up in the Lavadome, and fed on stringly lightsick cattle and fatty pork. Its limbs and haunches and back ridge were meaty, and nine long horns had been left to grow riotous and wild into a barbed thatch, a barbaric look when compared to the polished horns of his own dragons.
“They said I’d be able to spot the leader with the birds and all,” the great dragon said thickly, speaking Drakine as though it were a foreign tongue.
The Copper scrabbled up onto the side of the tipped ship, fighting lines that tried to pull him under. The two dragons’ joint weight sent it rolling again and the Copper felt the snaps of masts transmit through the hull.
His Griffaran Guards fluttered about like anxious nectar feeders. The black dragon batted one away with the tip of a massive wing.
Griff flanking his jawline rattling of their own accord, the Copper tasted the air around the stranger. He reeked of whale blubber.
“I take it these are your men?”
The black ignored him and lunged forward, mouth agape. Their weight upset the ship, and they both slid into the bay before the diving griffaran could sink their claws into the stranger’s flanks. The big black struck him like an avalanche. Only the water, slowing his enemy’s limbs, kept him from being opened at the inner joint of his left saa.
A digging, rending grip caught him across the back. Not since he’d fought old King Gan in his bats’ cave did he feel such power. The only chance the Copper had was to make it to the surface where his guard could hit the big stranger from all sides. He pressed with his legs and broke the grip, losing more skin and scale in the process.
Whoever the stranger was, he hadn’t spent his youth in endless trials against other dragons. For all his strength, he fought rather clumsily, used to letting his size exhaust his prey. He should have coiled with his tail to secure his hold from the other direction.
The Copper lunged out of the water and the griffaran swooped down to meet him, letting out alarmed cries. A dragonelle circled above, crying out, but his ears had little but his only pounding pulse in them and he couldn’t distinguish her words.
He was halfway out, using the crusty creatures covering the bottom of the overturned ship for purchase, when the black’s head broke water. The black took a deep breath and shot a warning gout of flame at the frantic griffaran.
He dove again and the Copper felt teeth clamp around his tail. The Copper dug in sii and saa, but the
black swam like one of the great whales beneath the overturned ship, and once again the hull rolled as the he was dragged under.
The Copper became doubly entangled in rope and wreckage. A powerful mass closed around him, and the black hauled him to the surface, its neck wrapped around his.
They came out, tressed of rope and broken wood hanging about their crests and horns.
“Call off your dragons,” the black gasped.
Strong, but not in very good fighting trim.
He tried to feel around with his saa for somewhere to gut, but the black had his legs about them like the coils of King Gan.
“Before I say anything, I’ll have your name,” the Copper grunted.
“My name’s Shadowcatch the Black, from the Isle of Ice,” the dragon said.
His brother’s island? Had the reclusive wretch sent assassins? Madness, especially since his drakes and drakka—or had they fledged—were promising young members of the Drakwatch and Firemaidens.
Two of his veteran dragons, having lost the heavy load of troops, now circled low overhead.
“My Tyr?” one called.
“Answer with aught but a recall of your wings, and I’ll tear your head off,” Shadowcatch said.
Not an intelligent dragon at all, more bulk than brain. Did the brute think he could just bellow and have the soldiers now landing on Swayport’s beaches and advancing behind flame-spewing dragonelles return to their craft? Fire burned bright at a sea wall protecting the town and in one of the towers of the looming fortress, an orange torch sending reflective flame across the comfortably warm waters of the bay. A little foggy, the Copper reckoned some of the warmth came from the two opponents’ mingled blood.
The Copper struggled in vain. He thwacked the brute’s head with his tail, but that great tangled crest warded off the weak blow; all they did was spin.
A broken mast floated among the wreckage, tangled in place like the rest of them by rigging lines.