Dragon Champion

by E. E. Knight

  “True, but there are not many among these mountains. Our flocks number in the multitudes, but our spears counted only ten score, ten times and four.”

  “It is those spears, and this dragon, that we must discuss. Noble king, great dragon, I come to you with a vision.”

  “I listen,” Unrush said.

  “It is for the ears of the Umazheh. Will the human understand?”

  “She does not know our speech,” AuRon said. “She is a decoration. No more.”

  Staretz planted his palms on the mat and leaned forward resting on his long arms like an ape god in the south. “There is confusion among our old enemies. They have grown rich, and in being rich think they deserve this, that it has always been so and will always be so. With wealth comes softness—the best money-pilers rise and breed more like themselves—while the strong and brave wither away. We, on the other hand, we of the wastes, of the mountains, of the frosts, snows, and swamps, we have grown hard in our exile far from the fallow lands.

  “What was stolen from us will be returned. The nameless gods promised us our reward after long suffering.”

  “I have heard those tales, too,” Unrush said.“‘That the skies would fill with fire, that the seas would boil, that rock would melt away like ice in the summer sun.’ None of this has passed.”

  “I have seen it. I saw it in the north, at the edges of the Hardgrounds, the dwarvish city of Kell. The Varvar joined with my people and destroyed it, three years ago. I watched a glacier melt, the skies burn, and the battlements dissolve when the UnderKell was drowned. Since then I have gone from tribe to tribe, telling my tale that the days of doom have come, and our reward and return from exile is here.”

  AuRon’s sii furrowed the ground. “What melted the glacier? Fire from the sky? How was this done?”

  “You would know best, young dragon,” Staretz chuckled.

  “A legion of chieftains gather, each with their legion of spears behind. We will roll like a wave westward, and again all the lands between the cloud peaks and the great East will be ours. As it was in the days of Great Uldam. We will not fail. Will you join our numbers and earn your reward?”

  To his credit, Unrush leapt to his feet and roar out his agreement, though he trembled. AuRon knew his blood pulsed with hopes of battle and glory, but he had his people to consider.

  “I must consult,” Unrush said.

  “Consult?” Staretz laughed. “Ha! Great kings are not made by consultation. They are made by decision.”

  “He must consult with me,” AuRon said. “I am his liege lord, and if he wishes me to be at the head of the fireblades, we must speak alone.”

  “Time runs short,” Staretz said. “I leave Balazeh and Korutz to hear your answer. I must go east, and speak to the Umazheh of the river, your cousins.”

  “Stay with us. A few days won’t matter,” Unrush said.

  “I leave in the morning, before the sun rises. The spirits compel me to make haste. Every spear will count in the reckoning that approaches.”

  Unrush gave instructions for Staretz and his retinue to spend the night in his lodge. Balazeh and Korutz retired with the magus. Unrush ordered his family to show them every hospitality, then returned to the center of the village.

  “Let us sleep, under the stars AuRon, for there is much to be discussed.”

  The celebration continued. The hints of war raced through the camp like shooting stars, causing brief outbursts of excitement as the rumors passed. Hieba, still fatigued from her journey and captivity, slept against AuRon’s belly as he turned his neck to face Unrush across the coal-pit. The red glow made the chieftain look like some god of war cast in bronze. He fingered a curved dagger that he wore on his thigh, a prize of the Battle of the Misted Dawn.

  “What is your mind on what Staretz has said?” AuRon asked.

  “He speaks like something out of a legend,” Unrush said. “But how is the truth gained? He is not the first to see the fulfillment of prophecies. But the Umazheh grow excited, I can feel it.”

  “You’ve started your people on a good path,” AuRon said. “What was empty meadow now has flocks, and where flocks once grazed, there are villages. This place has become what men would call a town, even if your streets are in rings and your huts still roofed with thatch.”

  Unrush nodded. “Next the Kwo-Atlsh-Hen, the High Mountain Road will be built, a shortcut of bridges over the gorges and through the passes that will link the villages. Bridges of stone there will be.”

  “War will mean an end to that,” AuRon said. “Your stonemasons will have to swing axes rather than hammers, your blacksmiths will make weapons instead of tools, and your laborers will carry spears rather than earth.”

  “Why build a kingdom when conquest gives?”

  “Unrush, you’ve seen battle. I fear your people will be fed into war, like charcoal into this firepit, to roast another’s feast. I also tell you that the men on the other side of the Falnges know what is coming; you will find them prepared. Hieba told me as much.

  “I will go away with her; an old friend calls. I may not return. You’ve shown wisdom in leading your people, and I wish to give you the cave, my books, all the dominion I asked in our original bargain. You have many good years left to live. Think of what you can build and leave for your family, your people, if you devote the rest of your days to their future, rather than risk them in war.”

  Unrush leaned back, stunned. “You would give Kraglad?”

  “The seat of the dragon-throne could be beneath the old statue.”

  “The sun-shard,” Unrush mused.

  “A gift to you and to your people. I hope you will take my advice and learn from the library. There are lifetimes’ worth of wisdom there.”

  “My mind warned against war, though my heart lusted after it. I will follow my mind’s path. You will live in our songs as the patron of a people.”

  The dawn came. Unrush’s village woke to a brilliant summer dawn, a yellow sun set against the sky of the deepest blue. AuRon had not slept. His mind raced with the thought of leaving his cave, doubt and hope at war for his spirit.

  He felt Hieba stir at his side. She yawned and joined a file of blighters going to the town’s bathing spring, cranky children in tow.

  Staretz and his two ambassadors held court with Unrush and some of his people. AuRon picked out a few words: “One war in my lifetime is enough” and “You toss away greatness for your people” from Unrush and the ambassador Korutz respectively. Dragons do not smile naturally, but AuRon, having picked up the gesture somewhere or other, found his facial muscles pulling the ends of his mouth up at the news. Unrush had shown himself wiser than the venerable Staretz, and more persuasive, for his chieftains gathered behind him, symbolically backing him.

  The magus left, surrounded by well-wishers, those wishing to have their fortunes told, and sufferers of disease or injury. AuRon craned his neck to look at the spring, where Hieba stood waiting her turn in a line of blighters for morning ablutions and cooking water. AuRon wanted to get her back to the cave. There were a few books he wanted and he needed Hieba’s help to fashion bags to carry them away. Blighters tossed some of the bony remains of last night’s dinner into a garbage pit outside the village walls, and AuRon slithered out to join the dogs in a hunt for leftover morsels, more out of competitive interest in stealing a choice tidbit from the hounds than real hunger. As he nosed among the bones, Staretz led his retinue out of the village on his hairy camel. The magus’s face wore a mask of magnificent indifference to the rebuff. Blighters accept victory with song, and act as if defeat had not happened.

  AuRon was glad to have the distasteful camel smell out of his nose.

  Screams of pain and confusion rose from the village.

  AuRon raised his neck and looked over the stone-and-tree-trunk wall. Unrush was staggering up the steps to his house, hounded by blighters both of his village and the strangers. Korutz clung to his back, Unrush’s long hair in his teeth. A knife splashed red bloo
d on the water-smoothed stones as Korutz stabbed Unrush up under the rib cage. Unrush threw off his assailant and lashed out, but Korutz rolled to his feet, torn-out hair gripped between his teeth.

  “To me, to me, my people!” Unrush shouted from the door of his hut, spitting blood as he screamed. One of his fireblades put hand on hilt, but his mate gripped his arm.

  AuRon read death in Unrush’s eyes as easily as the restraining female did.

  Another blighter stepped forward and buried a spear in Unrush.

  AuRon’s friend turned and looked at the shaft in wonder, as if it were some limb that had sprouted mysteriously from his body. He gripped it in both hands and collapsed to his knees. Another blighter stabbed him in the neck, and Korutz kicked him over, where he lay wetting his doorstep with his own blood.

  AuRon could not help Unrush, but he could avenge him. His fire bladder throbbed hot. He jumped onto the wall and bellowed a challenge of pure fury; he had no words for the rage he felt. He would make a pyre of this place—

  The blighter Balazeh emerged from the huts, dragging Hieba by arm and hair. Others clustered around her, seeking safety in her presence. AuRon came off the wall and toward them; the crowd shrank toward Unrush’s great hut. Balazeh came to the forefront, holding a stabbing-spear tightly enough under Hieba’s chin for blood to flow down her bosom. The tattooed veins on his neck stood out with the effort to keep her in his grasp.

  “Dragon!” Balazeh cried. “What’s done is done. We bear no ill will for you.”

  “Stab and burn, you filth!” Hieba swore in the human tongue. “AuRon, tear this creature’s arms off!”

  Balazeh showed no sign of understanding her. Everyone shouted and talked at once.

  AuRon reared up and raised his neck until his head swam. “Let her go and I’ll hear your terms,” he said.

  “Hear them now. The faint-hearted one is dead,” Korutz said, waving his bloody dagger at the corpse. “This is a matter for the Umazheh elders now, not for outsiders, however powerful.” As he spoke, Balazeh dragged Hieba toward the door of Unrush’s hut, where a number of the females had already disappeared. “You return to your cave, and she will be released to walk back to you. On the journey, she will be watched; if you appear in the skies or on the ground before she reaches your cave, we’ll loose an arrow through her.”

  Balazeh turned at the door of Unrush’s hut.

  “Perhaps an offering of cattle and sheep as well will satisfy? We can be friends again.”

  AuRon lowered his head and took a step toward the crowd on the stairs. He snapped his teeth shut, and the clack echoed from the village walls.

  At the sound, Unrush’s body twitched. The bloody body rolled over. Only AuRon saw the turn, every other pair of eyes was on him.

  “I must think. . . . Cattle, eh?”

  Unrush crawled to his door, pulling his body along with one arm, leaving a wet trail.

  “Fat cattle, heavy with the summer’s feeding. And sheep,” Balazeh said, his eyes alight. He kept the blade of the stabbing-spear to Hieba’s throat, but he pulled its point from her chin. “You have my word.”

  AuRon had to give Unrush his chance. “How many cattle?” he asked.

  “A five counted five times, five over. Yearly.”

  Using a sii claw, AuRon drew a circle in the dirt and filled it with a stick-figure of a man, arms and legs outstretched. “This sign will hold your vow.”

  Balazeh trembled as he looked at the sign. “The Wyrmmaster’s power praised be.”

  Every movement wrote further pain on Unrush’s face, but the crippled figure still crept along the wall of his hut. He reached to his waist and found what he sought.

  Unrush opened his mouth and sank his teeth into Balazeh’s ankle. His ceremonial dagger flashed up, held in his good arm, and cut across the back of the assassin’s knee. Balazeh shrieked, and Hieba broke from his grasp.

  AuRon sprang. The blue sky turned red, the yellow sun into an angry orange eye.

  The blighters fell under his fury like wheat caught in the crook of a scythe. He crushed Balazeh’s skull in his claw before backarming Korutz so hard that he flew over the village wall. He loosed his fire bladder upon hut and pen, and a frightened wail rose like a storm’s wind. He caught up a screaming blighter in his jaws and bit down until he felt his teeth join inside its belly. He swept his tail across the village square—where only a few hours ago, celebrants had danced—and dashed a trio of blighters against a hut wall. Nothing lived within his reach, save Hieba.

  Hieba was the only figure who ran toward him. The rest fled. She jumped onto his back; his head whipped back, and he almost bit her, so mindless was his anger in the fight. He lifted his head and spat fire into a grain pit.

  “AuRon, it’s over. It’s over now,” Hieba said.

  The red color faded. Colors took on their normal hue.

  He touched Unrush with his nose, but the blighter showed no sign of life. Unrush’s teeth still held pieces of tendon from Balazeh in a death grip, but the wrinkled eyes were vacant. AuRon ran his tongue across the Umazheh’s face, shutting the staring gaze.

  An arrow whistled under his chin.

  “AuRon, enough, let’s go,” she urged.

  AuRon remembered the burning poison the blighter darts bore and raised his wings. He launched himself into the sky, leaving wind-driven flame and raised dust behind.

  Chapter 20

  AuRon fought headwinds all the way west. The landscape crawled beneath them, belying their speed toward the falling sun. They left the mountains and crossed the tributary of the Falnges far above where it joined the larger river. Beneath them, on the banks above the blighter settlement, a warlike camp stood on the peninsula of a pear-shaped bend in the river under hilltop watch-towers. Warrior blighters built walls and boats from the ample timber, ready to transport a great army downriver.

  An hour’s flight downstream, they came to the town of the river-men. The settlement had grown since AuRon had last seen it. Mines of some kind scarred the hills around it, and men waded into the current to gather the lumber floated down the river from the loggers. They were in Dairuss.

  They found a secluded field, and AuRon landed. Hieba climbed off his neck, hardly able to move after a full day’s flight. “How far have we come?” she groaned.

  “We’re across into the headwaters of the Falnges.”

  “You’ve left your cave, your library, everything. Just because I asked.”

  That was not quite true. AuRon still had a few books, Djer’s ring, and the dwarsaw, secreted in the pouch of skin that held his armored fans.

  “After what happened back there, it will be a brave blighter that goes in my cave for a few years. Nothing there matters. I would like to talk to Naf, and there’s a dwarf to whom I owe much that I haven’t seen in years.”

  “Dairuss is not a rich land, AuRon. There are terrible tragedies happening on the other side of the mountains, around the Inland Ocean. Naf knows about it more than I; I just know that our land has more and more people coming through the passes every month. They sicken, they starve. The Silver Guard turns away many more, and none can say what happens to them.”

  “What do they flee? War? Starvation? Disease?”

  “It is dragons, AuRon, a plague of dragons. Naf can tell you more. He’s spoken to many of the elves and dwarves.”

  “Dragons? If it is so, I cannot blame them. My kind are hunted wherever they live, from the deepest cave to the highest peak. If you expect me to fight against my own kin, just trying to protect home and clutch—”

  “AuRon, I don’t think it’s like that. These dragons are slaves of men, who ride them into battle as the Ironriders do horses. The dragons do the bidding of another, and his orders are harsh.”

  “Does he have an signet?”

  Hieba rubbed her thighs, thinking. “Yes, I’ve heard tale of a golden circle, with an open-armed man within. Do you know aught of it?”

  “Only a piece or two in a long chain of events, a
t most. Barbarians from the north, a wizard . . . and an old wrong.” He thought of the emblem that had once rested on his snout. “I wonder who knows the full tale?”

  “Naf may introduce you to the one. It is she who said we must seek you out.”

  Zanakan, the City of the Golden Dome, stood between two long arms of mountain. Old battlements, fallen into ruin, traced the ridges down to a stronger wall and gate below. Wood and stone stood in the gaps of older, greater battlements like scarecrows standing where soldiers should be. It was a strange sort of city, AuRon thought as he circled above it. More people lived outside the walls than within, judging from the occupied shacks and tended cooking fires. A broad loop of the Falnges writhed between the sheep-covered hills to the city’s gates. A stone wharf and wooden piers covered a length of riverfront that rivaled the great ports below the falls, but AuRon could discern little activity at the river. There were many boats, but sails had been converted to tentage, and lines that should have held up masts tied boat to boat or pier.

  Alarm horns blew from the steps of the Golden Dome, a star-shaped structure with six points radiating from the dome-covering. This landmark, a legacy of Tindairuss, gave the city its fame and name.

  “Don’t go any lower,” Hieba shouted. “Crossbowmen wait in those towers around the dome. Go into the mountains—there’s a watchpost high on the north side. Can you see the trail leading to it?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a ledge big enough for you. Land there.”

  AuRon had seen the spot she described—his distance-vision rivaled an eagle’s,—but there was no need to boast to a weak-eyed human.

  “Are there men with crossbows there?”

  “Yes, but when they see me, they’ll not shoot. The scouts of the Silver Guard call Highhold home. They know me.”

  AuRon still made a fast pass over the stone stairs of the tiny castle clinging to the side of the mountain like a barnacle on a breakwater. No stinging arrows rose, and he turned and made a slower pass below the arrow slits set in the side of the structure, giving the watchers a good view of Hieba. He saw a landing spot before a door in the side of the castle. The men had planted a flower garden on their doorstep with dirt hauled from below. AuRon did his best to land without crushing the blooms, but his hind leg still inadvertently stomped a row of flowering ferns.