by E. E. Knight
“Go away, drake.”
The Copper sniffed at the moist air around the curtain. He smelled humans, along with wine and the vaguely sickly smell of fruit.
“I want my thrall back. The girl, Rhea.”
“I sent you a replacement. Didn’t she arrive?”
“I don’t care if you sent a calf of solid gold. I want my thrall back.”
“Well, come in, then. Let’s talk. You should appreciate the air in here.”
The Copper pushed through the double layer of tanned hides on the door. The air was moist, warm and a little steamy. A pool of water filled almost half the chamber, and in an alcove on a woven matt SiDrakkon reclined, reading something written on metal plates laid out under his nose.
The place was crawling with human females sweating in the heat. Some polished his scale, one stood with a barrow containing more metal plates, one played an instrument with strings that made those annoying twanging sounds, and several more just lounged around, drinking or eating or bathing. Only a few bothered to wear even the lightest kind of wrap.
“Take a breath of nepenthe, Rugaard, and relax. Here you can let the cares and responsibilities fall away.”
The thick human musk made the Copper hungry, if anything. He looked around for Rhea and didn’t—Wait, was that her, huddled with an elder of her sex in a corner? So hard to tell without the coloration. She looked shocking with all her hair shorn off.
He noticed that none of the females had very long hair.
“Why did you shear her?”
“All my cushions are stuffed with human hair. Adds a pleasant air to the room, and they still bring a good price once they lose the smell. What do you need that one for? She’s just a thrall, or does she do something special for you? She’s only just ripening now. The next few years are going to be exquisite. I won’t eat her for years, I promise.”
He sniffed at one of the wine-sipping females. She giggled something to a companion. The Copper guessed none of them spoke much Drakine.
Rhea looked at him, a silent plea in her eyes. A muscular blighter came in bearing a stone the size of a dragon egg in iron tongs, and dropped it into a smaller pool connected to the main one. It hissed and steamed as it struck.
“I’m fond of her, and she’s quiet. I’d like her back. I don’t care about the hair. In fact, every time she gets a new coat, I’ll have it shorn and sent to you.”
“You’ve made enough trouble for me, showing me up on the Black River. You’re lucky I’ve calmed down or I’d be challenging you.”
“My memory of events on the Black River isn’t clear at all. You’d better hope it doesn’t come back, or I’ll remember how you hung back while you sent dragons to their deaths.”
He rolled and straightened. “You whelp. Nivom’s bitten out one heart, and you’re after another. Do that and I’ll challenge you to a duel of honor.”
“Challenge away. It won’t keep me from telling the Tyr all I know. Kill me and I’ll swear to its truth as I’m dying.”
Griff flickered on each of them.
“I can’t stay angry in my grotto. Take your silly little girl and snuffle away.”
The Copper switched to the rather slower form of Drakine used for the thralls: “Rhea, come away from there, if you like. Back to my cave.” The girl threw a wrap around herself and hurried to his side.
“I can get a dozen just like her in here tomorrow, you know,” SiDrakkon said.
The last sounded like more of a promise to himself than a parting blast at the Copper.
“Thank you, your honor,” the Copper said. He held the curtain open for Rhea and together they escaped the steaming grotto.
Sure enough, a “replacement” for Rhea arrived the next day, a craggy-faced female with a basket of her own scale-shaping tools. The Copper had no use for her, so he gave her as a parting gift to NeStirrath, who was kindly to his thralls. NeStirrath didn’t bother much about his appearance, and sometimes looked quite deranged about the ears and griff.
He also received a small flower from Tighlia’s own garden, with a message wishing him fortune in his assignment.
As this was no simple journey to the surface and back, the Copper had to decide what to do with the bats. He released them to go where they would, though any who wanted to come with him were welcome, but he warned them that they’d have to make themselves useful.
Thernadad was too old to fend for himself, too blind to find himself food, and too bloated to be of much use to anyone, so the Copper allowed him to drink himself into insensibility on drakeblood, then had Fourfang break his neck with a quick twist as he slept.
“What do with body?” Fourfang asked.
“I don’t care. Burn him and use his ashes for cleansing paste. Or make a stew out of him; he’s fatty enough.”
And so passed the strange, greedy bat who almost accidentally saved the Copper’s life.
Over the next few sleeps Rhea made frightened, whimpering noises. Not knowing what else to do, the Copper woke her each time, and she’d sleep soundly afterward.
As the day for departure grew closer, Nivom visited him twice. Nivom now spent much of his day accompanying the Tyr in his duties, both in the audience chamber and in brief visits to the other hills. At the end of the day they would sometimes eat, or be groomed together by thralls, and his adoptive father, as Nivom called him, would talk the day’s decisions over with him and explain why he overruled a dragon’s punishment of a thrall, or granted a petition, or refused a gift.
“The Lavadome obeys him because he’s loved. I wonder what would happen if a dragon who wasn’t so universally admired took his place atop the Rock.”
“Fighting, I expect,” the Copper said.
“It’s…it’s like a giant game of mirroring to them, with the object being ‘please the Tyr’ so they get what they want. These court dragons in the line, and the leaders of the six hills, they’re just carrion birds and jackals waiting for his death. All playing different games where no one’s quite sure of the rules, so everyone cheats as best as he can.”
“I’m glad of my place at the tail end of the Imperial line. You’ve got the end with the teeth.”
“If the head gets chopped off, the tail dies too.”
“Oh, now you’re being as gloomy as SiDrakkon. Why so downcast? I heard you were cheered as you crossed Wyrram Ridge the other day.”
“And had waste kicked up as I passed between the greater and lesser Skotl hills, let’s not forget.”
“Oh, probably just drakes. Forget it. It would take a mighty turd to slay a dragon.”
“I’d almost rather be back in a war in Bant,” Nivom said. “Well, I must be off. A good journey and success in Anaea. Honor and glory, Rugaard.”
“Honor and glory, Nivom.”
On the day he told NoSohoth he would depart, he met his guide: the Firemaiden Nilrasha. She awaited him at the western exit ramp from Black Rock. He had two long, narrow cave carts, each pulled by a plodding ox waiting for him, one filled with food and supplies for him and his thralls, and the other with grain for the oxen. The Copper bore nothing but his small hoard loaded into a hollowed log, all traded into gold so it would carry more easily, and an introductory message from Tyr to FeLissarath.
“This is a happy chance,” the Copper said.
“No chance to it at all. I bribed NoSohoth with every silver piece in the Tyr’s victory bequest.”
The Copper wondered at that. Why would she throw away the beginnings of a hoard? From what he had learned, Anaea was a quiet Uphold with little fighting chance at combat honors. “You know the Anaean Trail?”
“I served my time at its mouth.”
“Good enough for me. Let’s be off. I want to be at the river by dark.”
Several good trails led westward. The western quarters of the Lavadome were rougher, with growth only in patches of soil trapped between the rocks. Rather scraggly-looking goats roamed here under blighter herdsmen. Fourfang went forward with a switch to clear
the way of both the animals and the lesser blighters.
They rested at the riverbank and waited their turn at a flatboat, and the Copper worked up the nerve to ask a question of Nilrasha:
“Why so eager to get to Anaea?”
“I get bored with duty in the dome. All anyone talks about are the banquets atop the Imperial Resort, and it’s like having a feast described when you’re starving. That or who’s on top of which hill, six little Tyrs under one big one. They say the trail to Anaea is the most magnificent of all the lower roads.”
“They say? I thought you knew the route.”
“Oh, of course. There’s the Long Fall, then the Lake of Echoes, and then Tooth Cavern—”
“All of which are listed on several maps. I’ve looked at them too.”
“Don’t send me away! I have been on the trail. I was second in the endurance march in the tests to pass into the Firemaidens.” She swallowed. “I just haven’t been the whole length. But it’s easier after the Tooth Cavern; there are no major underroads off the trail. I’ve been that far.”
The Copper chuckled. “Oh, I wouldn’t send you away, not for half of the Tyr’s gold.” In fairness, though, no one was making the offer.
“Why’s that?” she asked, glancing at him from lowered eyes.
“You’re lucky. NeStirrath always said he’d choose the lucky drake over the toughest or the most skilled. I imagine the rule applies to drakka as well.”
“I’ve never thought myself lucky.”
“It’s in that name the blighters gave you, Ora.”
“Some would use the word cowardly. I lived because I hid.”
“Besides, you saved my life. I’m not forgetful when it comes to things like that.”
Their journey to Anaea was lengthy but fascinating. They passed through several different strata on the Long Fall, and the Copper saw geologic formations he’d never viewed before: rocks like eggs with crystals inside, gardens of colored stone that some indigent blighters kept polished and shaped and exhibited to travelers for gifts of food or coin, even veins of iron and copper they could lick to get the pleasant taste of heavy metals and cleanse their mouths.
In the tunnels after the Long Fall they caught up to a mule train bearing bags of shed dragonscale to Anaea for trade. Shaggy humans handled the mules under the supervision of a thick-hided deman and a drake apprenticed to one of the Lavadome’s trading houses, very simplified versions of the roving markets the dwarves had perfected. The drake’s conversation was boring, and he continually pointed out that the Copper was giving his draft animals and thralls too much to eat to ever make a profitable run.
By the end of the trip the Copper was loosing his bats to feed on the unpleasant drake every other night. Fatigue shut him up about the weight of grain given to his oxen when they were unhitched.
The Lake of Echoes required that they take a flatboat. They poled on its broad back across the water. The vast cavern was low and dripping, divided in places into chambers by walls of old rock that hinted at masonry, some underground settlement drowned long ago by a shift in water drainage. The ceiling of the cavern was covered with slimy creatures that lived in shells, like snails with many tiny legs. Translucent insects gathered around the flatboat’s sole lamp, which they took turns spitting fire into to keep it lit, at the request of the dwarven ferrymen. They were an odd bunch, outcasts from better dwarf societies, the Copper suspected, and sharp dealers who would take only gold. The dwarves tried to sell them grain and dried fish, and Nilrasha advised him to purchase the first but avoid the second. But they took them across and on the other side picked up a two-score mule train bearing bags of kern.
The bats feasted on the insects, and the dwarves muttered among themselves. One held out his hands as though estimating the wingspan of the bats, and another pulled at a scraggly, unlit beard.
They came to the Tooth Cavern, and even Rhea stopped and stared with mouth open. Far in the distance to the north it was open to the sun, but here it was just a wide chasm with hanging or rising formations carved by wind whipping through the cavern. The road here leaped from massive stalactite to massive stalagmite, most slightly bent and sharpened like dragon teeth.
A garrison of Firemaidens greeted them here, including two sii-sore young almost-hatchlings at the end of an endurance march, and the Copper saw a nest of griffaran on a high ledge.
The bridges were strange patchwork contraptions of metal, wood, stone, wire, even thick rope, an odd quilt that showed evidence of all manner of different builders’ hands. There were even carved poles of wood that he suspected had been decorated by elves, for they bore faces. Skulls dangled from the bottom of the spans and overhangs, trophies of fights on, below, or around the bridge.
“During the last siege on the Lavadome, the demen threw a whole army into this cavern,” Nilrasha said.
“But that was ages ago, Nilrasha,” the Firemaidens of the garrison said. “All we have to worry about these days are bandits.”
“Which does not mean it can’t happen again,” Nilrasha said.
“You’ve been visiting those sour-bellied historians. Spirits! When I get back to the Lavadome, I’m joining swimming parties on Sunshaft Beach, not listening to Anklenes recite their epics.”
They picked up an escort of Drakwatch at the other side of the canyon. The tunnel here was wider, with small cracks and passages that hostile hominids sometimes used, but according to the drakes they fought one another rather than risking the ire of the Lavadome. But desperate demen might be tempted by an unguarded party.
Nilrasha made interesting conversation, but she never chattered for the satisfaction or the noise of it, a failing of some drakka the Copper had observed.
She often steered the conversation to him, which he found a little unsettling. He wasn’t used to drakka asking him anything beyond, “Rugaard, please don’t drool on the platters,” at banquet. She was even interested in his bats, how he became affiliated with them, and he told her an abridged version of his time in Thernadad’s cave.
“I’m not used to talking about my life,” he confessed.
“Why not? You’re in the Imperial line. You’re well thought-of. I’ve heard the story of you and the griffaran eggs, and that alliance is important to us, for they guard the plateau above and the river below and the Tooth Cavern. Being of the line, you’ll never want for food or pleasant accommodations.”
“I’m a…fortunate dragon, in that respect. Why is my situation of interest to you?”
She looked at him a moment before speaking. “I’ve no intention of ending my years as a Firemaid. You may want a mate someday. A dragon in the Imperial line needs someone clever at his side.”
Her honesty was as startling as one of her sudden leaps from the grass.
“I haven’t thought of mating.”
“Few drakes do, and then they lose their heads to the first flash of green that crosses their path after they crack their wings.”
“About that. I…I was injured as a hatchling. I may never be able to fly.”
He showed her the scar, a little more visible now that his growing wings were rising beneath his skin.
“So you’re a little bitten and bled. I get sick of drakes so full of themselves they do nothing but swell and preen.”
“Then never having a mating flight doesn’t bother you?”
“Well—oh, Spirits take it. I figured out life isn’t a song years ago, Rugaard. No, it wouldn’t matter. We wouldn’t be the first dragons forced to mate under stone rather than above the clouds. But what do you think of me?”
“You’re just the sort of drakka I think any drake would want.”
“Any drake?”
“Yes. Especially a rather beat-up one.”
She touched her neck to his. He felt an electric thrill run up his spine, and something stirred under his skin along his back. “Then I really am a lucky drakka, Rugaard.”
The trading drake interrupted the conversation with an opinion, detailed an
d long-winded, about the advantage of selling him the oxen at the end of the trip, and the Copper tapped the side of the wicker chest housing the bats with a sii-claw where the drake couldn’t see.
Nilrasha fluttered an eyelid at him flirtatiously.
Chapter 20
The Copper spent his last years of drakehood in diligent service to FeLissarath and his mate. They were both courtly, well-mannered dragons when humans were about, and quite in-formal when they weren’t. The pair had been unable to have a clutch of their own, so they looked on the kern kings of the high Anaean plateau almost as their own progeny.
He learned much of what he needed to know about the humans there his first summer. Their lives were organized around agriculture, growing kern in their high, sunny plateau. Something about the soil and the dry summers, bright sun punctuated by heavy rain at either end of the season, lent itself to their strange-sheathed crop. There were planting festivals and rain ceremonies and harvest celebrations and winter pod picking for their other staple, a rather reddish, bulbous berry that made decent enough wine but tasted eye-crossingly sweet, at least to a dragon.
The kern kings traded dragonscale for kern. The dragonscale they used at human or dwarvish trading houses to buy finery for themselves, or gold. These humans had a lust for gold that matched that of dragons. They wore it, wove it into their hair, girdled themselves in it, decorated their bedchambers with it, ate off it, and even, the Copper suspected, voided their bowels into it if they could afford the pots.
The mated dragons, when they weren’t talking commerce, talked only of hunting. They were friends with the great condors of the mountains, who kept them abreast of conditions of the herds, and they hunted deer, mountain goats, sheep with vast, twisted horns, elk, even woodland sloths and the taut-bodied big cats that preyed on all the above.
Whenever their presence wasn’t required at some kern-king ceremony, they were off after game.
The kern kings had no enemies that could get at them on their mountain-girded plateau, though sometimes their young warriors descended the slopes to raid the fringes of what the Copper learned were the old southern borderlands of the Hypatian Empire, dragging off females and stealing horses, more for sport than bloodlust.