Dragonmaster

by Chris Bunch

  Miletus’ trumpet blatted, and the fliers circled, landed in an open patch.

  “The Roche have broken through our lines,” Miletus said. “They’re supposedly coming north, toward us. That rider ordered us to scout south, to try and evaluate the damage.”

  He looked to his nonflying adjutant.

  “Eitner, take charge of the formation. Keep them moving as far as the main north-south road, then wait for us to return. If you’re threatened, retreat north, and we’ll find you somewhere.”

  “Sir.”

  “All dragons in the air! Scout separately, don’t take any more risks than you must. Reassemble at that crossroads,” Miletus ordered, then ran for the wagon with his dragon. His handlers were already unchaining the creature.

  In ragged formation, spreading out as they flew, the dragons flapped south, climbing as they went.

  First they came on the retreat—mounted men, riding hard for the north and safety. The roads were no better than cart-tracks, and were jammed with fleeing men. After the riders came wagons, then men on foot.

  It was ugly. Soldiers weren’t supposed to run like civilians. But the Third Army, and its attached units, were in full retreat.

  Hal wondered what horror could have panicked an entire army, then saw it.

  A thin greenish cloud was spreading slowly north, holding close to the ground, no more than fifty feet in the air.

  Again he heard the rolling thunder, and the whistle of wind, even though none blew.

  Something told Hal not to get close to the cloud.

  He pulled his reins and the dragon climbed.

  Hal looked down again, and saw, in the wake of the cloud, bodies of horses, men, oxen, lying motionless.

  Behind the ghastly cloud came the Roche army. Flights of dragons, more than Hal could imagine, floated in front of the waves of cavalry, infantry behind them.

  He’d seen enough, and turned his dragon back, over the panic, to the road junction Miletus had designated as the assembly point.

  Other dragons from his flight were making the same track.

  Hal spotted the flight, drawn up near the crossroads, which was a roiling chaos of units, groups of soldiers, single men, all fighting to get on that road north, north to Frechin, Bedarisi, safety.

  He landed, and found Eitner. With him were two couriers. He made his report as the other fliers streamed in, all with bad news.

  Eitner also had some unpleasantries to pass along, learned from passing officers and one near-hysterical magician.

  The Roche wizards had cast more than the great spell that’d masked their soldiers’ movement to the lines. They had another spell, the one accompanied by the wind-whine and thunder. Eitner’d talked to men who’d paused in their flight long enough to tell him what it was like: suddenly the air had gone bad, not hard to breath, but as if all the goodness that gave life had gone out of it, even as it hazed into the ghastly green.

  The green haze killed anyone and anything that lingered for more than a few minutes.

  The fliers looked at each other, hoping she or he didn’t look as frightened as the other.

  “Be wonders if the spell’d work just on m’lice,” Farren joked feebly, and no one bothered to respond.

  “All right,” Miletus ordered. “You, courier. Take the word back to your headquarters. You, stay with us. No. Get your ass out to the road, and grab anyone who’s got a good mount and isn’t completely crazy, and tell them they’re drafted to carry messages for me.

  “You fliers, get back in the air. Keep scouting the Roche progress.”

  “What about that cloud?”

  “Just hope to hells our magicians come up with a counterspell, and keep away from it.

  “I’ll stay with the flight down here,” he said. “I don’t have any orders, but we’ll do no one any good fighting as a rear guard. We’ll try to bash our way into this column, and move north.

  “I’ll have men paint arrows on the wagon tops so you’ll be able to find us. Stay up no more than an hour at a time. Scout away from the roads for abandoned animals, for your dragons, and make sure they’re watered.

  “Rest them before you take off again, and reassemble before dark.”

  He stopped, realizing he was caught up by the panic a bit himself if he was telling the fliers what every stablehand knew.

  “Get gone,” he said.

  They flew back and forth all that long day, giving the reports of disaster, of broken, wiped out, decimated units, and the seemingly unstoppable Roche offensive to Miletus, who scrounged riders here and there, gave them dispatches for army headquarters. They rode off, and no one ever knew if they obeyed orders, or just continued their flight.

  The Deraine and Sagene forces lost their blind panic, but continued retreating, and the Roche army kept after them.

  The sodden roads, further torn by the retreating soldiers, slowed them some.

  There were rumors to fuel the flight—this attack was personally led by Duke Garcao Yasin, that Queen Norcia was with her retinue with his headquarters.

  That may have frightened some, but Kailas remembered Yasin’s failure once before. He wondered if Yasin’s brother was on the battlefield with some dragons, vaguely wanted to find him. But without any weapons, other than the instinctual ones of his beast, any encounter was more likely to result in Hal’s destruction than anything else.

  Eventually the day ended, and Hal found the flight, hastily camped near the road, still filled with soldiers tramping steadily toward Frechin.

  The next day, they retreated through Frechin. By now, the city was almost deserted, most of its inhabitants having fled before the rumored horrors of the Roche cavalry and their dragons.

  On the other side of the city, Hal, flying very high, high enough to feel a bit dizzy in the thin air, looked back and down, saw Roche dragons swarming in the air as their army continued its advance.

  “I think,” Aimard Quesney said, tugging at his mustache, “our Rochey friends have stepped upon their fundament.”

  “Right,” Mariah said. “They’re comin’ on, we’re haulin’ ass. Surefire screw-up there.”

  Half of the fliers were crouched around a dying fire, too worked up, too tired, for sleep.

  “Shut up, Farren,” Saslic said. “Make me feel better, Aimard.”

  “Well, this probably won’t make you—or any of the rest of us—feel better.”

  “I do love your abstract wisdom,” Sir Loren said wryly.

  “Any wisdom these days is better’n none,” Mynta Gart said.

  “Would you people shut up and let him explain,” Hal said. “I, for one, could use anything cheery, whether it’s about me or the King of Deraine.”

  “Thank you, Serjeant Kailas. The Roche have come a cropper, as I was saying,” Quesney said. “Now, this offensive of theirs is intended to win the war, correct?”

  “An’ here I went an’ thought it were just a spring fancy,” Farren said.

  “The best way to do serious damage would be to make for Fovant. Once Sagene’s capital falls, what’re the odds their Council of Barons wouldn’t sue for peace, together or separately?”

  “No kidding,” Saslic said. “That’s what we were told is why they invaded Sagene in the first place, which brought all us down here.”

  “Oh,” Hal said. “Of course. I got it.”

  “There’s one other great mind among us besides myself,” Quesney said smugly. “You may finish my thought, Serjeant.”

  “If they began the battle, opening the salient,” Hal said slowly, “then they were going for Fovant. But then, with this new attack, their warlord—Yasin, or whoever it is—has lost sight of what he started out to do, and is chasing us around the country, instead of heading east like he should.”

  “Precisely,” Quesney said. “Perhaps he’s lost his head with all the destruction . . . or, more likely, his queen changed orders on him.

  “In either event,” he said, stretching and yawning, “we’ll most likely get obliter
ated. But Roche just lost the chance to win the war.”

  He disappeared toward his bedroll.

  “What a cheerful man he is,” Mynta Gart said sarcastically. “He’ll make my dreams this night ever so lovely.”

  “I’ll make them worse,” Sir Loren said. “The Roche have learned something we haven’t. When this war started, it was wham, a battle, then people regrouped, reformed, looked around, and then wham, another battle.

  “Now they’re keeping up the offensive, never really letting up.

  “We’d better learn to do the same, pretty damned quickly.”

  Now the Roche unleashed yet another weapon.

  Small groups of Roche infantry suddenly materialized here and there in the rear. There were mutters of magic, then Hal saw two dragons, flying close together, with something hanging between them.

  He remembered the Roche flying show, before the war, in Bedarisi, and their stunting with soldiers, riding in baskets strung between two dragons, then giving rides.

  An idea came, and he flew back to the flight, in the middle of the ponderous retreat.

  He landed, found Miletus, told him.

  “Damn, but I wish I had more rank,” Miletus said. “I’d grab some smithy unit, and set them to fabricating . . . but I don’t, so I can’t. But I’ll send men back to that village we just passed through. That temple had iron gates on it, that should work. Our smiths can shape the metal this night, and we’ll give your idea a try on the morrow.”

  By sunrise, all fifteen dragons were equipped. The wrought-iron gates had been cut into pieces, and each section bent into a hook. Three hooks were brazed together into a grapnel. Ropes were requisitioned from a retreating quartermaster unit, and harnesses improvised. Slings hung from each dragon’s neck and hindquarters, the hook at their bottom, hanging about twenty feet below each beast.

  The dragons didn’t object too much to this latest weirdness from their masters, snorting and hissing no more angrily than usual in the dawn grayness.

  Miletus gave the flight its orders, told them he’d give the word for takeoff when he sighted some of the Roche dragon-transports, and took off.

  Vad Feccia came to Hal, said his dragon wasn’t behaving properly, and perhaps he ought to stand down.

  Hal told him to get back to his mount.

  Asser looked at him with a wry face, quickly looked away.

  They ate buttered bread and cheese, cut from a great wheel Chook had liberated, waited. An hour after sunrise, Miletus flew overhead, trumpet blasting.

  They mounted their beasts, kicked them into a stumbling run, and were in the air, following Sir Lu back toward Frechin, hooks cradled behind them.

  They’d only flown a few minutes when they sighted pairs of dragons, twenty of them, soldier-carrying baskets between them.

  Hal forgot the others, tossed his grapnel overside and steered his dragon toward one pair. His monster honked protest for an instant, then screeched a challenge as his courage grew.

  Hal closed fast on the pair. One beast was looking up at Hal, head whipping, the other was looking down, ready to flee. Their riders were shouting, kicking their mounts, and Hal steered his dragon just over their heads, going in the opposite direction.

  His dragon jerked as the grapnel caught on one of the basket’s support lines and tore it away.

  The paired dragons banked away from each other, terrified, and the basket spilled soldiery, falling, flailing, to the ground five hundred feet below.

  Hal came back, tore at another dragon pair. These two held together, diving for the ground, and he let them go, climbing back for another target.

  He ripped at a third, and this time his rope broke and he lost his grapnel as the Roche basket broke away from its dragons, and plummeted down.

  Saslic’s dragon, Nont, flashed past him, and he heard her yelling, face fierce in anger. Behind her came Sir Loren, his grapnel half awry, but still after the Roche beasts.

  Hal forced his dragon up, reaching for height above the shattered Roche formation. He saw, in the distance, onrushing dragons in threes, which could only be Roche.

  He turned to meet them, hoping, without a grapnel, to give the others a chance to wreak further damage.

  Then they were on him, shouting, dragons hissing, each trying to terrify the other, and the air was a swirling mass of monsters.

  There was a dragon turning, just above him, its head darting. He leaned away, and it missed, tried to grab his mount’s neck in its fangs, talons ripping at the air, reaching for Hal.

  Hal had his dagger out, and thrust hard. It went home in the beast’s eye, and it screamed deafeningly, rolled, dumping its rider, who fell, endlessly.

  Then he was in empty sky, looked back, saw the Roche dragon-carriers and the other Roche monsters in the distance, no signs of his own flight.

  Hal dove for the ground, found the main road, and followed it back to his flight.

  There was jubilation—they’d finally found a way to strike back at the beasts.

  “Now, let’s find a way to kill the damned riders and leave the beasts alone,” Saslic said. “They don’t deserve what we’re dealing out to them, any more than the poor damned horses deserve that green horror.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” Hal said. “And I’ve got some ideas, if this war would slow down for a little and give me a chance to work them out.”

  There was one man separate from the others—Vad Feccia. He claimed his dragon was sick, unflyable. Hal noted that, put it aside for later.

  There was one man missing—Asser. No one had seen him after they’d taken off that morning, and he was never seen again by the army. Hal didn’t know if he’d been killed in the fight, or, more likely, if he’d flown north toward Paestum, toward safety as far as he could, then melted into the crowd and made it across the Straits to Deraine. He guessed he wasn’t much of a hard man, for he sort of wished Asser luck.

  Twice more that day Miletus sent them against the soldier-carriers. Once they tore a formation apart, the survivors flying back at full speed. The second time the dragon-carriers were escorted by thirty Roche dragons, and Hal’s flight couldn’t attack.

  They were fighting back—but the retreat went on, to Bedarisi.

  Bedarisi was an even bigger nightmare than Frechin, units on top of other units, soldiers looking for their fellows, others trying to avoid rejoining a fighting formation, bewildered civilians, officers without commands bawling orders, and always the walking wounded, staggering, looking for a chiurgeon or a wizard to treat them, forcing themselves to keep moving, afraid of what the Roche would do if they captured them.

  Everyone was terrified the Roche would bring that greenish fog down once more, but it didn’t materialize. Perhaps the Deraine sorcerers had found a counterspell.

  It was bad enough that the Roche dragons were flying close to the city, and the suburbs were being harried by Roche light cavalry.

  Hal remembered a ring road from before the war, led the unit around the city and found a place to set the flight up. Chook and his helpers went looking for a ration point or foodstuffs to buy or steal, and Miletus rode into the city center, looking for Third Army headquarters.

  He came back in a few hours, looking very grim.

  He’d not found Duke Gwithian’s headquarters, but had encountered a lord who was somewhat in authority.

  That nobleman had brayed that the army wouldn’t need spies or fliers, but only men with swords, and for the flight to leave its dragons and work its way to the front lines forming before the city, and become infantrymen.

  Ev Larnell was gray-faced, obviously sure he would never cheat the death he’d avoided.

  “Damme,” Farren said softly, “wot a waste of all that trainin’. Not to mention some pretty good folks as well.”

  13

  “The Roche are expected to attack before dark,” Miletus said. “Every man who can fight is to be on the lines.”

  He was about to continue when Rai Garadice gasped, and pointed. Ev
eryone turned.

  Smoke coiled above Bedarisi, and Hal thought for an instant the Roche killing fog was about to strike. But the smoke firmed, and became the huge figure of a man, armored, sword in hand, but helmetless.

  Kailas recognized him. It was Duke Jaculus Gwithian, the Third Army Commander, the man who’d refused to admit the Roche were on the attack, standing more than three hundred feet tall, noble, warlike, awe-striking.

  He lifted his sword, pointed it south, and spoke, his voice a rumble that shook the ground, or so Hal thought.

  “Soldiers of the king! I call on you in this most desperate hour. The enemy has driven us back, but from this hour, this minute, we shall retreat no more.

  “I order you as soldiers, and also you of Sagene who fight alongside us. This shall be our finest hour.

  “Here we will make our final stand. Not one man, not one woman shall fall back, shall flee.

  “We call upon our courage, our gods, our heritage as free men and women to fight to the last man.

  “This battle, shall Deraine and Sagene live on for an aeon, will be looked back by those who come after us with awe, and give inspiration for a thousand generations.

  “Here we stood, moving back not one yard, not one inch, fighting for our king and, uh, our barons.

  “Here we shall stand, like a rock against the tide, firm, to the last man.

  “Here, in Bedarisi, a new legend is being born, a legend of—”

  Suddenly the figure writhed, and changed, and became a rooster wearing armor, who crowed loudly.

  Then the image changed once more, and was a Roche warrior, who looked down at Bedarisi, and began laughing, a grating, ominous laugh.

  And then there was nothing.

  “Dunno,” Farren said skeptically, “what that was supposed t’ do for my morale.”

  “That isn’t important,” Sir Loren said. “We’ve just got our marching orders . . . or, rather, our dying orders.