by Chris Bunch
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Teaser chapter
Praise for the Novels of Chris Bunch
“Bunch knows how to mold heroes . . . and how to create exciting scenes of battlefield mayhem.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Glorious swashbuckling . . . absolutely riveting.”—Locus
“An excellent fantasy adventure.”
—Science Fiction Chronicle
“Stirring.”
—Realms of Fantasy
“Powerful . . . a well-crafted universe that seems starkly real . . . will delight fans of military SF.”—Affaire de Coeur
“Remarkable.”
—New York Times bestselling author Michael A. Stackpole
“Bunch’s battle sequences are second to none.”
—The Oregonian
“Complex plots, intrigue, and great descriptive narratives of battle and combat.”
—SF Site
“Lovers of military science fiction could hardly find better fare.”
—Painted Rock Reviews
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Copyright © Chris Bunch, 2002
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Again, for L’il Karen
1
Hal Kailas heard the distant chittering of the dragon as he plodded home. He looked up eagerly, needing to see color beside the gray cobbles, stone houses, mountains, drab mine buildings, high-piled tailings, even the overcast sky.
The crimson and deep green monster, he guessed a cow, although the beast was really too high for him to see the female’s characteristic darker belly stripes, banked back and forth, horned head darting from side to side, looking down.
Somewhere in the crags just above the village, and Hal thought he knew just where from his solitary, but not lonely, hill explorations, the beast had its nest. The nest where dragons had hatched their young for over a century.
He wondered what had sparked its curiosity, what could spark any creature’s interest in the village of Caerly. Nothing but gray, including, he thought morosely, all the people who lived there and went down into the tin mine for their slender living.
He’d ducked his schooling this day, thinking that if he had to hear the tutor drone on once more about the workers’ duty to support the way things are, which meant obediently going down the Tregonys’ mine, and kissing their hands in gratitude, he’d go mad.
He dreamed, or rather tried to dream, for it seemed impossible, of the hillmen’s legendary past. A past of fierce reivers and warriors, until the king of Deraine’s army came through, and slew all those who didn’t bend, kiss the sword, and become good little servitors to those nobles the king named as the region’s overlords and exploiters.
Two hundred years gone, certainly. But there were still those who muttered about the injustice.
A wind blew cold across his face, and he pulled his wool coat, new only last birthday, closer about him.
Kailas was a bit past thirteen, tall for his age, but he had never been gawky. He had slender arms and legs, belying his strength. His brown hair was tousled, and he had green eyes in a somewhat long face.
The dragon shrilled loudly, and Hal started, for very close to him came an answering cry, higher, not as loud, from seemingly around the corner.
He rounded the corner, and saw four boys torturing a dragon kit. He guessed it to be fresh-hatched, for it was no more than a yard long. It must have fallen from its nest onto something that cushioned its landing.
Now the mother was frantically trying to recover it.
One of the boys was Nanpean Tregony, the local lord’s son, and Hal knew the kit wouldn’t be allowed to live beyond the hour. Tregony, a year older than Hal, good-looking, always ready with a smile for his elders, kept his cruel streak well hidden.
Hal knew better, having come on him laughing in hysterical glee after he’d soaked a kitten in lantern oil, and struck a sp
ark.
None of the four noticed him. Tregony had a broken broom across the dragon’s neck, pinning it to the cobbles, while the other three poked at it with sharp sticks.
Hal knew the other three as well, Tregony’s toadies, like Nanpean a year or two older than Kailas, always sucking around him, hoping for favor from the mine owner’s son.
The dragon screamed in pain, and an answering scream came from above, drowned by Tregony’s jeering laughter. Tregony reached into a pouch inside his waistband, took out a slender, evil-looking spring knife. He touched a button, and its blade sprung out.
“Hold it still,” he told one of his cohorts, passing him the broomstick. “And watch this, now,” he said, and bent over the struggling kit.
Hal Kailas didn’t have much of a temper . . . or so he thought. But when he became truly angry, his voice sank to a whisper, and the world seemed to slow to a crawl, so that he had all the time in the world to do as he wished. That cold rage had made him more than a bit feared by the other village boys.
So it was now, on this gray, windy street.
He saw a length of wood, almost as long as he was tall, lying in a pile of scrap nearby. Hal soon had the wood, half as thick as his wrist, in both hands.
“Stop!” he shouted, and ran toward the four boys. One turned, was hit on the head, very hard, howled in panic, and started running.
Tregony jumped to one side.
“Kailas!” he shouted. “Get your peasant ass away from here, or my father’ll roast you!”
Hal barely heard the words. He lifted the wood, and another boy raised his hands to fight back. Hal kicked him in the belly. The boy collapsed, near the dragon, and his face was ravaged by the kit’s tiny claws as it flailed. The fourth boy was running after the first.
But Tregony had a bit of courage.
“Come on, then,” he said, his face a smiling rictus. “Come on,” he said again, waving the knife back and forth in front of him.
Hal had the stick in both hands, like a fighting stave wielded by men in paintings in his father’s taproom, moving it up, down, keeping the knife away.
Tregony lunged, and Hal jerked sideways, held the stick like a spear at one end, and thrust hard. He caught Tregony along the neck, and the jagged end tore flesh. Hal pulled back, lunged once more, into Tregony’s breastbone, heard ribs crack. Nanpean howled in agony, had hold of the spear’s end, then stumbled back, fell hard against the stone wall beside him. He tried to get up and Hal kicked him, quite deliberately, in the face.
His eyes stared hard at Hal, then glazed, closed. For an instant Kailas thought he’d killed Tregony, then saw the steady rise and fall of the young man’s chest.
Instantly he forgot him, knelt over the dragon, who was up on unsteady feet.
It shrieked fear, and, from above, his mother answered.
“Now for you,” Hal muttered. “You little pain in the ass.”
The dragon kit wriggled, wrapped in Hal’s coat, as the boy reached for another handhold. He almost slipped, feet scrabbling on wet stone, then he was safe, inside a jagged crevice that led straight upward.
He looked down at Caerly a thousand feet below him, and was surprised he felt no vertigo, no particular fear beyond what any fool should feel high on this huge crag, only a few yards below a dragon’s nest.
“Dammit!” he said, trying to sound like an adult. “Stay still! I’m on your side!”
The kit didn’t seem to understand, squirming more frantically.
Across the valley, gray rain was sweeping toward him in the dusk, and he realized, unless he wanted to be trapped here by nightfall, he’d best keep moving.
He scanned the skies for the mother dragon, saw nothing. Hal wondered where the bull was, hoped not diving at the back of his head.
The musky scent of the nest came to him, something he’d heard others describe as nauseating. He found it quite otherwise, not attractive, but certainly not disgusting.
Realizing he was avoiding the last of the climb, he hitched his coat more securely to his waist, saw that the little dragon had ripped the cloth, knew he’d pay for what he was doing when winter winds struck, put his back to the crevice wall, and pushed upward with his feet.
He’d seen egg-gatherers walk their way up sheer cliffs like this, their grass baskets tied to their chests, tried to imitate them.
The rock wall behind him tore at his linen shirt, scratching his skin, but he ignored it, looking only up, only at that huge nest, looking like a pile of abandoned lumber and brush.
The nest had been built in an alcove of the crag, out of the way of wind and most weather. It was huge, thirty feet in diameter. As Hal got closer, he smelt carrion over the dragon-reek, and his stomach churned, wondering what he’d find inside the nest.
A shriek tore at his ears, and he jumped, almost losing his hold, and a wind pulled at him as the mother dragon dove past him, less than ten feet away.
“Go away, dammit!” he shouted. “I’ve got your baby! Go away or you’ll kill us both!”
The baby dragon wiggled, squealed, and the mother heard. Hal had enough of a hold to let the kit’s head snake out of the jacket.
The cow roared at him again, climbed, leathery wings, over a hundred feet across, slowly stroking down, lifting the monster high into the air.
The dragon caught the wind, banked, came back, mouth open, fangs menacing. The kit saw its mother, screeched, and again the cow turned away.
Hal scrambled up the last few feet, tumbled into the nest, landed on the decaying, half-eaten carcass of a lamb.
The nest was a litter of bones and debris. Here and there were tattered clothes, stolen from washlines below, bits of shabby rug that the dragons evidently fancied for either padding or decoration.
A deep roar sounded, and Hal saw the bull dragon, above its mate, fifty feet long, its spiked tail, a twenty-foot-long killing whip, lashing, head darting back and forth on the ten-foot-long neck.
“Here,” he said, and unwrapped the kit, spilling it into the nest.
He pulled his coat and arm away, not quite fast enough as the kit caught him below the elbow with its fangs, tearing his arm open to the wrist.
The kit shrilled in evident triumph, and the bull dove at the nest.
Hal had one instant of pure awe, seeing the dragon, jaws yawning, foreleg talons extended, wing talons reaching, coming at him, and the thought flashed of how few people could have seen this and lived, realized if he didn’t move quickly he might not be one of those survivors, and eeled over the edge of the nest, almost falling, then had a hold on a two-inch length of lumber sticking out of the brush.
The cow flared her wings and landed above him, in the nest, her interest only in her kit.
The bull had climbed, dropped a wing and came back at him, but Hal was tucked in the crevice, slithering down as fast as he could.
The dragon tried again for him, couldn’t slow enough to reach into the cranny, screaming rage.
It was below him then, and Hal looked at its wide shoulder blades, at the carapace behind the dragon’s long neck and horned head, thought, insanely, that could be a seat, and you could be flying yourself, if you could figure a way to make the dragon do your bidding, and he forced that away, climbing down and down.
The dragon’s rage receded as he shinnied down the outcropping, and cold fear finally came, fear of what would greet him when he reached the ground and his parents’ tavern.
“I hope that’ll not leave the scar I fear,” Hal’s mother said, as she finished bandaging Hal’s arm with the spell-impregnated bandage she’d gotten from the village witch.
“It’ll be fine, Mother,” Hal said.
“Then that’ll be the only thing that shall,” she said. She rubbed her eyes wearily. “Twenty years gone for us now.”
“Lees,” Hal’s father, Faadi, said quietly, “that’s not going to make our son feel any better about what happened . . . nor is it likely to offer any solutions to our problem.”
“I’m
sorry for what happened, Da,” Hal said.
“Are you really?” his father asked.
Hal started to reply, thought, then shook his head. “No. Nossir, I’m not. That Nanpean ought not to be able to pain others, even a dragon.”
“No,” Faadi said. “He ought not. Any more than his father ought to be able to use his gold and power given by the king to rule our lives.” He shrugged. “But that seems to be the way of the world.”
“Some of Lord Tregony’s men—” Lees began.
“Thugs,” Faadi corrected. “Goons. Bullyboys. Hardly men of good or free will.”
“Regardless,” Lees said. “They wanted you, Hal.”
“Naturally, we told them to go away or we’d call the warder,” Faadi said.
“They laughed at that, and said that even if they didn’t find you,” Lees went on, “there’d be charges pressed, and our tavern would be theirs, and we’d be beggars on the road. We should know full well the warders and the magistrate are on their side, like they side with everyone of riches.”
“Tomorrow, before dawn, I’ll ride for the city, and hire the best advocate I can,” Faadi said. “That’ll put a bit of a stave in their wheel.”
“But aren’t those expensive?” Hal asked.
“We own this building clear,” Faadi said. “That should pay at least some of his price. For the rest, he—or she—will have to take payments.”
“Which will be a time in coming,” Lees said. “Tregony’s men also said that Tregony would order none of his miners—his miners, indeed, as if they were his slaves—to drink here. That’s the greater part of our business.”
“Not everyone in Caerly dances to the Lord’s precise fluting,” Faadi said.
“Most do.”
“But there’s others who’ll still come here for their pint and pasty,” Faadi said.
“I wish . . .” Hal said forlornly, his voice trailing away.