Dragon Strike

by E. E. Knight

  Kzzzzzt!

  Her whole body jumped within the restraints even now being secured without her willing it, and consciousness faded—rather pleasantly—to the sound of the old deman cackling.

  Chapter 6

  If it weren’t for the bridge, AuRon would have never found the place.

  He traveled at night, resting at rocky, inaccessible coves on the Inland Ocean. He hoped he’d find that inn before too long. The fall winds were kicking up and storms would soon come out of the northwest, cold furies of wind and sleet, coming ashore as though angry for having to pass over all that water.

  At first he flew up the wrong river. When he reached a fork in the river without the bridge appearing and explored both branches just to come upon an old ruin he’d once camped under with a now-dead dwarf friend, he knew he’d gone wrong.

  He explored farther south, flying up a vast river-mouth that for a while was indistinguishable from the Inland Ocean itself. Then it narrowed into true river, though a wide one. Just before dawn he came upon the bridge, a massive construct with a patched span in the middle. He vaguely remembered this bridge from his travels in Djer’s cart.

  It seemed the sort of place humans frequented, so he flew a little farther upriver and found a forbidding cliff with a nice stretch of sand under it. The river had retreated somewhat because of the season, but there was good fishing in the pools and the tangles of water-weed were thick with pinchy-crawlies. He hadn’t had the freshwater variety in years, and he enjoyed himself before settling down for a brief nap.

  He woke in the afternoon. It was a pleasant fall day and the air beckoned. He took off and rose high in the sky and flew back toward the bridge. Once there, he followed the road north and came to what might charitably be called a town on the edge of some vast collection of fields and pastures, with forest to the west and what looked like some mining cuts to the north near another tangle of roads.

  He checked the smaller of the enclaves first, circling slowly lower and lower so as not to alarm the population with too quick a descent.

  Nevertheless, he saw cattle and pigs driven into the woods and sheep scattered in the hedges under the frantic efforts of boys. Fools. If this was a livestock raid he wouldn’t dawdle so.

  Dragon-eyes had their uses, and he spotted a sign out in front of the inn, just as that strange collection of hominids had promised. A green dragon, sure enough, though they’d rather stylized the icon.

  He found an obliging field, grazed short within sight of the inn’s roof-peak, and settled down to wait. The woods were kept far enough back that he would have plenty of warning of arrows if they shot, if they had bows strong enough to cross the field, that is. An open hill behind guarded his rear.

  Boys, probably shepherds’ sons, crept from tree to tree with what they thought cunning stealth and woodcraftiness. A summer running with the wolves to the north would do them an improvement. He watched a fistfight break out among four or so and the loser went running home—or perhaps was dispatched with a message.

  Downwind, dogs barked endlessly. He couldn’t help his odor. If the dogs didn’t like it that was just too bad.

  The field smelled mouthwateringly of horses and cattle, but there was no helping that. He’d wait.

  When the locals finally showed up he understood the delay. They came in some numbers, in fits and starts and with much discussion at each advance. The collection dribbled away as it crossed the field. A tall female, with comely hair by human standards and evidently well able to feed her young, judging by the fit of the long robe, stood next to a figure swathed in blankets and a heavy, droopy velvet hat, carried on a litter by two stout-looking men.

  “My name is Lada, dragon. May we approach in safety?” she said, enunciating carefully in Parl. The figure swathed in blankets seemed to find her pronunciation funny, as she heard a rather raspy chuckle.

  “I came for converse,” AuRon said. “Parley. Please.”

  The one who called herself Lada made a gesture in the air with her right hand and they stepped forward. The two litter-bearers kept glancing back at the others hovering nearer to the inn or in the middle of the field. A local dog dashed halfway out into the field, let loose with a terrific bark, and ran back to his humans with tail tucked.

  How Blackhard’s pack would have snickered at such behavior.

  They came a little closer into an easy distance for humans to speak.

  The one swaddled in blankets tipped her head up. “Here I was waiting on the wrong dragon. I waited for the green and the gray shows up.”

  AuRon recognized the face beneath the droopy hat, mostly because it wore an eyepatch. Hair like winter birchtwigs supported the brim of the hat. It was the elf, Hazeleye, both his capturer and his rescuer. Happily, she’d collected the debt for freeing him long ago, which had resulted in the overthrow of the dragon-riders of the Isle of Ice and his mating with Natasatch. The wizard who’d organized and purposed their race war against the other hominids had once told him that elves were like tree bark on poplars—peel back one layer of plotting and a new one appeared underneath.

  “Wistala. Her name’s Wistala.”

  “I know that. She’s a good friend to this place and we all long for her return.”

  “Why is that?” AuRon asked.

  “Her counsel would be most valuable,” Hazeleye said.

  “Then you don’t know where she is.”

  “I’m afraid she went off east hunting you, AuRon,” the one called Lada said. “She has been gone for years. But then she was a rover.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” AuRon said. “Couldn’t you have told her you dispatched me to—”

  Another yap broke in on his thoughts and the dog dashed away then. He’d come a few paces closer before barking, but shortened his warning.

  “I haven’t seen her since before the dark days of the dragon-riders,” Hazeleye said. “Thank you for finishing them and freeing the dragons from their thrall.”

  She’d spent her many years in the study of dragons. AuRon believed she was one of the few hominids with any true understanding. And better, sympathy.

  “Are you unwell?” he asked.

  “I feel the fall wind more than I once did. Do you think we might continue this conversation indoors?”

  “You have a barn nearby?” AuRon asked.

  “Better than that. An inn. The owner was a good friend to Wistala too. He’s hanging back there in the crowd with his wife. You could get your head through the door in back with ease.”

  If this had come from any other hominid but the Dwarves of the Diadem AuRon would have expected a trap, but trusting Hazeleye had always been to his benefit. Hers as well, seemingly. He would trust her one more time.

  The dog barked again from just behind the foremost party of humans.

  “I’ve no objection. Could we get that idiot dog tied down?”

  The tall woman, Lada, signaled to the people behind and a boy retrieved the dog.

  The party decamped and headed for the inn. AuRon finally grew disgusted with the litter-bearers and had them seat Hazeleye on his shoulder, gripping the simple strap-harness he wore when traveling. The dwarf trader had made it, inlaying rings of steel held by iron bands for securing packs or bags such as a mule might carry. Hazeleye seemed to have some difficulty with her legs, and kept them well swaddled in their wrap of blankets.

  “This brings back happy memories,” she said in her learned but unaccented Drakine. “It has been long and long since I rode dragonback.”

  “I would fly, but I fear you’d fall off,” AuRon returned in kind.

  “Yes, I would need a saddle.”

  “No more saddles for me.”

  “That’s certainly your choice,” she said. “But a shared journey is a happier one.”

  AuRon was tempted to reply that it depended on who was wearing the saddle, but he held his tongue.

  They walked up a path through the pines—AuRon curled his neck high and back so that Hazeleye wouldn’t
be smacked by branches—and so crossed a dry streambed and came upon the back of the inn. AuRon smelled tempting livestock. Better still, roasting meat. Also woodsmoke, pitch, horses, bodywaste, straw, and all the other smells that went with hominid habitation.

  He picked pine needles out of his crest and horns while the others went inside. A broad man in a leather apron opened the top half of the back door. He had flecks of gray in his thick hair and a drooping mustache.

  “Welcome to the Green Dragon Inn, firebreather,” the man said, not at all in awe of a dragon sticking his head through the back door and surveying the great room like a living trophy. If anything, he seemed pleased. “She’s mine, and proudly bears Wistala’s mark on the sign at the front. Any friend to the original Green Dragon, as my Elvish lodger says you are, is a friend to me and my family.”

  AuRon warmed to the innkeeper’s manner. He was rather like his old barbarian friend Varl, with the same hearty confidence and eager eye. Were that all men spoke so to dragons!

  The innkeeper was saying something about quantities of food that would be ready by sunset, but AuRon didn’t need words. His nose said there was beef stewing, sheep roasting, and best of all . . . sausages. He hadn’t tasted a good greasy sausage in years. His eyes almost rolled up into the backs of their sockets at the thought as the man asked what he might bring hot from the kitchen.

  “Sausages, yes,” AuRon said. “As many as you can manage.”

  “Ah, you’re a dragon after my own heart. Have you ever had a Thickwurst? Stuffed with garlic and ground liver and onion? And for those with a taste for it, ginger.”

  The common room itself seemed comfortably stuffy after the manner humans liked. Everything, from shutters to furniture, was stoutly hewn, planed smooth, and a bit smoky. Faces of—oh, what were they called—cats, that’s it, stared at him from the warm corner between hearth and dried woodpile and atop the chimney mantel. Between the chairs around the fire and the bar, a big round platter that looked like it had been made out of a barbarian shield held broken nutshells. Another cat scratched at the shells, sniffing suspiciously at a mound.

  Hazeleye settled herself in a chair by the fire and took up a long white pipe of the kind AuRon had seen sailors smoke when at their ease.

  She cocked her bright eye at AuRon. “Never used to smoke. Filthy habit. But it’s soothing, now that my last seasons are in sight. Herself over in the great house is a fair herbalist and her mix doesn’t half take my aches and pains away.”

  Hazeleye drew deep on her pipe and sighed out a thick cloud of rather sickly-sweet-smelling smoke.

  Lada, standing quietly at the door, smiled. AuRon didn’t know hominid expressions well enough to distinguish pleased from wistful.

  “What can you tell me of my sister? How did she come to this place? When did you last see her?”

  “That’s some tale, dragon,” the innkeeper said.

  “She went off years ago, before the Dragon-rider Wars,” Lada said.

  “For all we know she’s returned,” Hazeleye said. “Perhaps to those librarians in Thallia.”

  “Not without calling back here,” the innkeeper said.

  “Her old cave is unoccupied, save for a few kestrels and such,” Lada said. “Perhaps she left some sign or instructions there we wouldn’t deciper, or even recognize.”

  “She went in search of her brother. I know that,” the innkeeper said.

  “I am her brother,” AuRon said. “I’m AuRon. Auron, as was. Known briefly as NooShoahk on the Isle of Ice.”

  “So it is true then,” the innkeeper said.

  “Strange fates have befallen all your family,” Hazeleye said.

  AuRon wondered about the use of the word “all.” She’d been partly responsible for the destruction of much of his mother and sister, in an ancient pact between mercenary egg-hunters and wicked dwarves.

  But she’d freed him from bondage and a probable death on the Isle of Ice.

  Wrimere Wyrmmaster, the Wizard of the Isle of Ice, once told him that elves wove truth and lie into invisible strings through which they manipulated the other races. AuRon didn’t believe him—elves spread out across the world spending all their time manipulating others would have difficulty knowing who lied about what to whom. But Hazeleye’s motives for anything, from freeing him to asking him to find the Isle of Ice and kill the wizard, were her own.

  “Why are you waiting for Wistala?” AuRon asked.

  “You may not believe this, but it was to pass news of you. It’s come to my ears what happened on the Isle of Ice, that you’ve mated and so on.”

  “How did you hear that?”

  “Shadowcatch. He’s become quite the sea dragon these past two years.”

  AuRon wasn’t sure he wanted events on the Isle of Ice generally known. He switched over to Drakine.

  “You wanted to give her news of me?”

  “Yes,” Hazeleye said. “At one time or another I’ve thought each of you dead. I’m happy to be proven wrong. I’d like to know more about both of you. I’m at work on my last book, and I doubt I shall write the last word before this form dies.”

  “So you’re still interested in dragons.”

  “Few can claim to know more about them than I.”

  AuRon decided to ask what was on his mind. “What happened to your legs?”

  “I’ve lost most of the use of them. I can stand, just. I need assistance to walk.”

  “I am sorry for that,” AuRon said. “An accident?”

  “No.” She drew deep on her pipe. “I was tortured. Those fools in Ghioz thought you could break an elf’s spirit by breaking her body. That Queen of theirs. You’d think one of her kind would know better.”

  The Copper remembered his friends there. “Naf allowed such a thing?”

  “It was Naf’s fault I was brought before the Queen. I was living quietly in the mountains and she had need of an expert on dragons. I was fooled once. Never again.”

  “Naf—Naf didn’t . . .”

  “Of course not. He helped me escape. He’s an outlaw now. If he still lives.”

  “Outlaws! He’s one of their great commanders.”

  “He disobeyed the Queen. That put an end to his rise among the ranks of the Ghioz.”

  “What about Hieba?” He’d watched her grow into a woman, saw her look at Naf with the same love she’d once shown him.

  Hazeleye shrugged. “With Naf, I hope. The Red Queen is no kinder to her own sex than to men.”

  “Where is he now?” AuRon wondered if he should offer them refuge in the north. Not on his island, of course—men came with trouble the same way dogs carried fleas—but he could settle them on one of the more hospitable coasts nearby. He could use some intelligent humans in the nearest port. If nothing else, just to keep strange parties like the treasure hunters from getting themselves eaten.

  “On the Hypatian border somewhere. I haven’t seen him since he sent me north in the company of a traveling circus, some time ago. But I suspect they won’t be safe for long.”

  Something poked at his tail. AuRon removed his head from the inn and saw a small boy fleeing toward some chicken huts, where others, equally scruffy, were beating him to the tree line. A dropped stick lay next to his tail.

  Insolent little pup. Well, it would be a story for his family over the dinner-meal.

  He returned—well, his head returned, anyway—to the common room. “Why? Is Hypatia sending him back?”

  “War is coming between Hypatia and the Ghioz. You can feel it building all along the border.”

  AuRon didn’t give a loose tooth for humans and their battles.

  “The Queen of the Ghioz wanted to know about dragons to use them in this war?”

  “I expect. She probably took the idea from the wizard. He laid many strong places low with his riders, and the tales are told everywhere.”

  AuRon’s indifference began to melt. These people seemed reasonable, even kindly, and they’d been good to his sister. Hazeleye had be
en treated cruelly, but she herself had been responsible for cruelty in the past, and the world had a way of putting itself back in balance just as a hot, dry summer was often followed by an extra-cold, extra-wet winter.

  As for a war between Ghioz and Hypatia, the more damage their armies did to each other, the less likely either would be to molest the dragons on the Isle of Ice. Let them kill each other off, the more the better, and good riddance to them.

  His harsh thoughts, as they so often did, softened the more his mind worked on them, like a wolf gnawing at a tough bone. These humans seemed content to be friends with dragons and let Wistala come and go as she would. Indeed, they seemed to honor Wistala’s memory. Dragons could do with more of these sorts of friends among the hominids. Did this Ghioz Queen allow the same freedom?

  “I suppose you will tell me that the Ghioz have Wistala beholden to them and are using her in this war.”

  “I know they have at least three dragons. One is a female. I did not get a close enough look to say whether it was your sister.”

  “With riders and so on?”

  “No. The dragons flew as dragons should. Still, I wonder what hold the Red Queen has over them.”

  “Probably a weak one if she sought your knowledge of dragons in order to tame them,” AuRon said.

  The arrival of dinner prevented further discourse. The innkeeper had both hot and cold meats, bread, cheeses, and different forms of vegetable matter, mostly mashed and baked or peeled and jelled.

  The innkeeper brought out a platter of sausages especially selected for AuRon, some hot and some cold. He talked about the mixes of meats and herbs in each, and spoke of eggs as the perfect companion to sausage in the morning, breads at midday and through the afternoon, and cheeses their favored partner in the evening.

  AuRon tasted a few and asked him to continue the discourse.

  He then begged AuRon to sample a suite prepared just so, calling for two dozen eggs to be specially cooked so the dragon might eat his sausages in proper order. If all humans were as hospitable to dragonkind, the world’s history might be happier.