Dragon Strike

by E. E. Knight

  He’d adopted a line of bats, or perhaps they’d adopted him, much in the way a toothy lamprey adopts a whitefish, and they had become his most trusted—albeit dirtiest and laziest—servants. He’d cured them of fouling his sleeping chamber out of necessity. Nilrasha wouldn’t stand for bat-droppings.

  “A sup, pleassse?” Wail keened.

  “Not yet,” he warned. “I want you clearheaded.”

  They hardly resembled bats anymore. The Copper wasn’t sure he understood what had happened, but everyone from Rayg to the Anklenes had their theories. The first generation of young bats raised on dragonblood grew uncommonly large and strong, flowers of batdom, long-lived and healthy. The second and third generations showed some odd . . . changes. Mutations, in Rayg’s strange word. Wail and Gnash, sister and brother, the first of the fourth-generation bats, fed almost exclusively on dragonblood as they grew into massive, thick-snouted, big-toothed, ridge-browed brutes with scaly skin and almost dragonlike claws. One of the Anklenes went so far as to call them gargoyles, a race that was thought to have died out over a thousand years earlier, along with their creator, Anklamere the Sorcerer. They hardly hung upside down save to sleep deeply, preferring to perch in the manner of griffaran when awake.

  Wail was rather brighter than Gnash, so he turned his snout to her.

  “You know the way to Anaea, right? You came along with me when CuPinnatax was installed as Upholder.”

  “The west road, the lake, the bridge, yes—yess,” Wail said. She ran her red tongue across her fangs. “A hungry journey.”

  “And you can help yourselves in a moment. In Anaea watch the kern. Examine the fields, especially the crop just coming up now. You know kern, right?”

  “Tall green stalks, yes—yess,” Wail replied.

  Gnash nodded. “Birds and mice and bugs among the stalks, good crunching.”

  “Crunch away,” the Copper said. “But observe the crops. See if anything is being done to the kern, especially as it ripens. Look and see if anything is being put on it, either before or after it is harvested. I’ll send more of your kind to act as messengers. Or Wail, send Gnash if it’s important enough. He’s a fast flier.”

  “Yes, yess,” Gnash said. “Fly the faster, I.”

  “Now you may take some blood.”

  He wouldn’t call either of them particularly intelligent, but they were wily enough and followed clear instructions.

  Sadly, the bats had lost much of their numbing saliva that had made feeding earlier generations almost pleasant thanks to the light-headedness, but the wounds they made still healed clean and quick. The Copper winced as they opened his skin. But it was worth it to have eyes and ears loyal to him, though the rest of the dragons in the Lavadome thought of bats as vermin and found his “gargoyles” positively creepy.

  Even those who secretly burned out their nests admitted the oversized bats had helped free the Lavadome of the hag-riders.

  The bats burped and belched as they suckled, then rested briefly before taking off. The Copper poked his head out of his gallery and watched them disappear in the direction of the western tunnel, then headed up to the garden.

  He felt exhausted and he’d hardly moved a dragonlength.

  A little extra pallor wouldn’t be noticed. He’d been ill, after all.

  After a long, slow climb—the best pace he could manage—he found Nilrasha holding informal court around the feeding pit. The pit, scene of innumerable feats, was a low bow-shaped trench-walkway with stairs going down to the kitchens where bearer-thralls could bring up platters. At formal feasts a continuous snake of joints and ragouts and racks and quarters, punctuated by the occasional squab on a skewer, passed under the dragons of the Imperial Line. Now only two thralls with platters of cold cut meat and toasted munchrooms passed, probably because Nilrasha felt it was impolite to have company without offering at least a gesture.

  At the center of the walkway was a sandy pit, usually reserved for hatchlings of the Imperial Line. There’d been some fine tussles and games among the hatchlings, always the best part of any dinner, to the Copper’s mind. Now the pit held only a single green corpse, resting on its side.

  All the assembled dragons quieted at his approach and regarded the dead hatchling silently.

  The Copper took a breath. He didn’t care for any of her company.

  There was LaDibar, one of the senior Anklenes, at the honored position to her left where the freshest dishes arose. In his youth the gold had been proclaimed a genius, a prodigy, a dragon of rare mind and discernment. The Copper didn’t dispute any of it, but for having such a rare mind he never did much of anything useful with it.

  A handsome young couple of almost perfectly matched Skotl dragons sat across from Nilrasha. He was red and she, of course, was green, but their snouts were much alike. SiHazathant and Regalia were high in the Imperial Line; the mystical said they were SiDrakkon and Tighlia reincarnated. No one disputed that they were related to SiDrakkon through a cousin; their father had died bravely in battle against the hag-riders when first they arrived. Their hatching was still talked of, for they came from a strange double-egg, sharing a single egg-sack, though both had been rather small in consequence. When SiHazathant was losing to his brother in the hatchling contest, Regalia fought at his side and together they triumphed.

  They’d been inseparable ever since. Regalia served with her brother in the Drakwatch by a special dispensation during SiDrakkon’s rule—it was either that or SiHazathant would have had to go into the Firemaidens. It hadn’t been as awkward as some predicted. She’d proved herself equal to the drakes, and she had a dragonelle’s ability to hold her temper. They were both unusually grave for dragons of their age, as though in private mourning of some unspoken grief.

  The third dragonelle was an unmated female Wyrr named Essea. She didn’t have any particular talent or skill that the Copper could discern; if anything, she was a silly gossip, but she was of the Imperial Line and a friend and confidante of Nilrasha. The rest of the Imperial Line looked rather down on his mate because of her humble birth—Nilrasha had come out of the hovels at milkdrinker’s hill—and slighted her whenever possible. The Copper was grateful to Essea for her unstinting kindnesses. She’d helped Nilrasha acquire a modicum of courtly manners and speech.

  In a sense he and his mate were both outsiders to a line that they ostensibly led. He’d been adopted high into the Imperial Line by Tyr FeHazathant after rescuing a batch of griffaran eggs; she’d mated him after the overthrow of the hag-riders and the Dragonblade and taken the title of Queen. They were more popular in any other hill than they were in their own home caves.

  Thus the emptiness of the gardens as Nilrasha mourned.

  “It is good to see you well, my Tyr,” Regalia said, and all but Nilrasha gave a prrum of agreement.

  The Copper looked at the dead little hatchling at the center of the sandpit. A Skotl, but small, even for a hatchling. Her jawline, the lift of her protective griff—

  “This was Tilfia,” Nilrasha said, speaking low, as she did when unhappy. The Copper felt a little stab behind his breastbone. For all the bluff and strength that he admired, she sometimes sounded like the tired, defeated drakka who’d dragged herself out of that Bant waterway after the lost battle with the Ghioz. “I didn’t know her name.”

  “The hatchling who complained about her brother sitting on her,” the Copper said.

  “I should have known her name,” Nilrasha said.

  “You can’t expect to know every hatchling,” Essea said, pressing tail to tail with her friend.

  “Tighlia did,” Nilrasha said. Regalia’s eyes lit up at the name. FeHazathant and Tighlia, of Wyrr lines and Skotl, had mated and put an end to the civil wars that had almost emptied the Lavadome, and the Anklenes had suggested that FeHazathant take on the ancient title of Tyr, a kingly name out of dragon legend dating back to Silverhigh, if not before.

  “We’d rather have you as Queen,” Essea said. “Tighlia was a scold. And a t
raditionalist.”

  Nilrasha yanked her tail out from under Essea’s. “Tighlia watched me win a whole sheep in the single leap and triple leap as a hatchling, and invited me into the Firemaids herself. She never forgot a name. I can’t even be bothered to learn them in the first place.”

  “How many have we lost to this plague?” the Copper asked.

  “Eight dragons. It seems to be hitting the Wyrr hardest,” LaDibar said. “Fourteen hatchlings and a drakka. We also lost Gubiez in the Anklene hill.”

  “Rayg says the cause is a brown growth on the latest train of kern.”

  “Oh, scut,” LaDibar said. “Bad meat, perhaps. But a disease that attacks kern wouldn’t bother a dragon. Completely different entities, sun-eating and meat-eating. To think—za! Now, perhaps a poison—but no one’s mentioned a smell or taste.”

  “Grieving over her is just making everyone miserable,” SiHazathant said. “Enough mourning. We’re not her parents. Let’s be done with this.” He opened his mouth and reached for the little body.

  “Don’t touch her!” Nilrasha roared. Regalia hooked her neck neatly under her brother. “I said she’d go into the Firemaidens, and go into the Firemaidens she will. Her bones will rest in the cairn, and in a generation or two some other young hatchling might make a talisman out of a piece of her scale. As far as I’m concerned, she died in battle.”

  “Battle?” LaDibar said. “What battle? There’s been no battle. To think!”

  “Don’t be so sharp that you’re brittle,” Nilrasha said. “Someone’s been at work at the kern, to poison us.”

  “Dragons?” Regalia said. “Treated like parasites? Like bat—or scale-nits, I mean?” Her eyes flamed even brighter than they had at the mention of Tighlia.

  The Copper would have chuckled if he hadn’t trained himself not to betray his emotions in public. Regalia had a good head on her neck. Nilrasha had better instincts, or perhaps she was just reading half-formed suspicions drifting through his own mind.

  “To think! Is it so strange for natural food poisoning to take the weak?” LaDibar said. “That human is just puffing himself up again. He strings a few words of Dwarvish together and everyone calls him a savant. Za!”

  “LaDibar, if you’re so sure Rayg’s wrong, feel free to eat the hatchling,” the Copper said. “We’ve mourned. Let’s finish it.”

  Nilrasha took a breath and glanced at Essea. Essea tightened her lips and drew in her head a little, a signal for dignified silence and attention.

  “Barbaric custom,” LaDibar said, after just long enough of a pause to make the Copper suspect he’d been searching for a way to refuse and keep his dignity. “We don’t eat drakes or dragons, so why eat hatchlings?”

  “Very well,” the Copper said. “SiHazathant is hungry and already offered to perform the service. With the word of one of our most respected young Anklenes to guide him, I’m sure he’ll have no qualms, and if something should happen, well, Regalia’s legendary for her forgiving nature.”

  Regalia settled her griff. Not quite a warning rattle, but her brother shut his nostrils and raised his head away from the hatchling.

  “Yes,” LaDibar said. “Well, in circumstances like these, I think it meet to test your caution, and take caution in your tests, as we say in the temple when probing the unknown. Our Queen’s wishes should be respected, in any case.” He tilted his head complyingly at Nilrasha.

  Nilrasha scooped up the hatchling, and for a dreadful griff-tchk the Copper feared she would swallow the corpse herself in her misery. But she merely made for the grand stair.

  “I’ll be at the Firemaiden cairn in mourning for some time,” she said, forming the words out the side of her snout with difficulty.

  Her coterie bowed deeply as she left. Essea raised herself up for a moment as if to follow, then thought better of it. Or maybe she just wanted to discuss the Queen’s strange behavior with the others.

  Nilrasha mourned through several lightings. Two more old dragons died. Rayg’s strange, inverted manner of obtaining fluids allowed the remaining sick hatchlings to recover with the resiliency of young blood, with the exception of one poor little soul who hardly breathed as Rayg attended her.

  Privately, the Copper credited Rayg with more than a score of lives saved against that one which would have been lost anyway. He must think of a suitable reward—one that didn’t deprive the Lavadome of Rayg’s services, of course. The offer of having his own (golden!) chair installed in the throne room didn’t impress the quirky human. Much of the rest of the Copper’s thinking as to rewards was met with a shrug.

  The Copper suspected that Rayg chose the gesture just to revolt him. The humans’ tendency to apparently dislocate their shoulders at will turned the stomach.

  Rayg, when the crisis was past and after a good deal of work and experimentation, discovered that washing and boiling wouldn’t remove the strange blight, but long roasting in a dry pan rendered it harmless—and made the kern almost indigestible.

  Nilrasha struck the Copper as less eager for bows and baubles afterwards and more attentive to the hatchlings of the Lavadome.

  Whether this was a passing resolution or a real change he couldn’t say.

  He liked seeing her so concerned with the hatchlings. It was part of her duty as Queen. He would like to see it become more than duty—he would be gladdened by some hatchlings of their own.

  They hadn’t had any luck with eggs so far, but between the two of them they had battle injuries that might make a clutch an impossibility.

  If they did have a clutch, he would try something new with the males, separate them somehow until they could be made to understand. He and Nilrasha could set the style. Perhaps others would follow. Females in the Lavadome outnumbered males on the order of two to one or more. They always had, but did that have to mean they always would? With another hundred males, the other dragons wouldn’t be so puffed up with their own importance. He could establish real dragon settlements in other places in the Lower World—the Star Tunnel, for instance. And perhaps dragonkind could look once more to the surface and put an end to lurking in the Lower World in fear.

  He spoke about it once to Rethothanna. She was his favorite Anklene. She’d completed the first, and so far the only, history of the Lavadome. It was like a lifesong, only horribly long and complicated. You couldn’t even listen to the whole thing in one sitting, and he had patience for stories.

  “Yes, others before you have had the same thought. In the days of Anklamere it was enforced, of course, but dragons weren’t much better than thralls back then.

  “Tyr FeHazathant, glory to his name, had the same thought very early in his time. It fractured the Lavadome again. EmLar and his back-to-nature group quit the Lower World entirely and took off for the surface.”

  He sounded NoSohoth out on the matter, and the old courtier’s head dipped as though his hearts had stopped. The Copper decided that he would cross that chasm when he was more secure. As it was, he waited for word from Anaea. He sent a message to his fool of an Upholder with a report of the bad kern and a request to look to the next crop with extra care. He also asked for full details about the last batch—had it been planted in an unusual place or had some trick of weather or infestation given the Anaeans difficulty?

  He doubted both—Anaea’s high-altitude plateau enjoyed mild, sunny weather the year round, cave-like in the cool of the night and pleasantly cleansing brightness in the day.

  What he really waited for was news from Wail and Gnash. Three more fourth-generation bats were coming along nicely—Nilrasha offered up her blood regularly, saying it helped her sleep—but they were still learning the hills of the Lavadome and the holes of the principal dragons.

  One worry dominated all the others. What would happen when the supply of even the old kern ran out? It would mean long, slow debilitating illness and eventual madness.

  Oddly, none in the Lavadome talked of it. At least not that he heard.

  Chapter 5

  Year
s later, when Wistala thought back on it, that last summer of peace and quiet isolation that stretched into fall remembered better than it had lived.

  At the time she was surfeited by the blighters and their endless celebrations. They celebrated that year’s calves maturing, the winter’s births who had survived to take their first steps and yap their first words, the fruit and crop harvests, the extraction of the fall’s honey from the hives, the young females becoming maidens, and the young males taking their first real warrior-spear. The festivals blazed loud and vigorous and colorful and musical and all that, but one was very much like the other to her senses, and she preferred the peace of NooMoahk’s library to massed dancing.

  In time, even the library galled her. She couldn’t read quickly enough to get through, and each scroll parsed out increased her sense of frustration.

  Her mood was the crystal’s doing, she finally decided.

  Wistala distrusted the crystal. Delightful as it was for casting light on her reading, fascinating as it was to stare into, since the slightest shift of one’s head brought different images—at times she thought she saw dragons, at other times a great tower, not quite circular and flat-headed as an anvil—it sometimes made her doubt her own mind and will.

  She’d heard and read stories, of course, of travelers too long on their own who became crazed. At first she wondered if her own mind was the one at fault. The crystal, though smaller than a troll, reminded her of the one she’d fought on Rainfall’s bridge. The way it leaned forward, as if inspecting her, watching what she was doing over her shoulder, the way Auron used to try and sniff out whether she was concealing a juicy tidbit or just a dried-out old slug under her sii.

  She rapped it once—accidentally, she told herself—as she turned, but it did not shatter or fall. Instead light played head-quick-tailchase around the inside, up and down, back and forth, in and out, until the center of the crystal seemed farther off than the distant horizons of the eternal plain she’d crossed while traveling east.