Dragon Strike

by E. E. Knight

  “Oh, yes, many’s the sausage I prepared for your sister,” he said, as he filled mugs for his guests from a barrel. “A good friend she was—if she’d not been with us the night the barbarians attacked, I don’t know what would have become of us. Slaves or worse. Luckily we were too small to be of any notice in the Dragon-rider Wars, which I hear you put a stop to. Traffic’s good on the road again, with people fleeing the troubles to the south. Only those with coin to spend make it this far.”

  AuRon ate heartily, politely leaving the best bits of roast and stew to the others and devouring the bony leftovers. Giving your stomach something to keep it busy, as Mother used to say.

  Some of the younger humans held their nostrils pinched shut as they ate—AuRon knew that dragon odor was reckoned unpleasant to those not used to it, though Varl claimed it drove away bedbugs. The tall robed female corrected them before he could compose a joke. The room needed a joke, with this talk of war and those fleeing it, and he never was good at them. Only the innkeeper seemed to be enjoying himself; Lada was grave, Hazeleye thoughtful, the members of the innkeeper’s family harried.

  “Did my sister give any indication of when she might return?”

  Lada sighed. “She said she would probably be gone for a year or more. It’s been six. I hope nothing has befallen her.”

  “She’s a mature dragonelle. Perhaps she found a mate,” Hazeleye said. “The lead male the Ghioz had, he seemed a fine specimen.”

  “I’d like to visit this cave of hers,” AuRon said.

  “She left her books at Mossbell, where they’d be looked after,” Lada said.

  “She reads?” AuRon asked. Strange how they’d both picked up the habit.

  “Wistala holds the title of librarian,” the innkeeper said. “There’s another story there, getting that title.”

  “Title?”

  “It’s a Hypatian rank,” Hazeleye said. “The Hypatians are fond of their various ranks. Military, priestly, judicial, scholastic, and of course governing. You can get honorary titles for sport or artistry.”

  AuRon itched himself under the chin with the bottom of the doorframe. Some greasy, sausage-scented saliva had found its way down there. “How interesting.”

  “It was a trick of my father’s, for the preservation of his estate,” Lada said. “Wistala owns most of this land, in a manner of speaking.”

  “There was talk of making her thane,” the innkeeper said. “That’s an ideal thane, to my mind, one who’s never around to collect his taxes.”

  The room chuckled at that.

  “My full belly asks for sleep,” AuRon said. “Thank you for the sausages, innkeeper.”

  “Jessup does for friends,” he said.

  “Would someone aid me in finding that cave you spoke of?”

  “I know the way,” Lada said.

  “Can you ride a dragon bareback?”

  “I’ll have to shut my eyes the whole way,” she said. “I’m not one for flying.”

  “That wouldn’t be much help in finding the cave.”

  “It is not a long trip on foot. I’m used to walking, and these woods are no longer dangerous.”

  They said their good-byes. Hazeleye seemed lost in her pipe, shifting her blanket-covered legs this way and that before the fire.

  Lada led him out across grassy hills. AuRon smelled horses and cattle, but saw only a few of the latter, who shied and milled nervously when they smelled him. Now and then he heard hoofbeats as groups of horses fled his approach.

  AuRon liked the smell of Lada. It had been long since he had had a human female tickling his nostrils, so to speak. The scent excited him; though he was hundreds of years from being counted an old dragon, her scent made him feel young, as though he’d just uncased his wings.

  “So, by those robes you are a person of importance,” AuRon said, passing the time. To talk he’d have to keep close to her. “Do you have a title too?”

  “I wonder if she will return,” Lada said, as though she hadn’t even heard his question. “It seems I always lose my loved ones a year or two before I learn to value them. I’m a foolish, foolish woman.”

  “That cannot be true,” AuRon said. “These people look up to you.”

  “They look up to me because they looked up to my grandfather, an elf of great mind and experience, yet who looked beyond even his own faculties and experiences for greater wisdom still.”

  She’d pushed Parl to the limit with that last speech. She knew how to wring every drop of meaning from a trade tongue, whatever her imagined failings. “Elf. So you’re partly elf?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell me. What is Hazeleye hiding under that drooping hat?”

  “She loves dragons, you know.”

  Could this human never answer a simple question?

  “She’s found different ways of expressing that love.”

  They walked in silence past some sweet, almost rotten-smelling vines, which she told him were “hops.” Her grandfather, and some elf relative named Ragwrist who now lived on his old estate of Mossbell, had advised the innkeeper that along with the sweet honey-mead he offered he should give his patrons a choice of bitter beer. AuRon listened attentively and remembered none of it except her smell. And so they came to a cliff-top with a good view of the moonlit bay. Only the faint susurration of moving water and a gentle fall wind broke in on his thoughts.

  Wistala had chosen her cave well. Ample food to be had, defensible, and water wasn’t a problem. Of course it was near hominids, but they seemed to get along just fine. Though according to his father, favors granted to one generation were oft forgotten by the next.

  “What will you do?” she asked.

  AuRon wondered about this woman. She was so different from the spirited Hieba he’d watched grow from a girl. Her slightly sad manner reminded him of Mother, when too long parted from Father.

  He wondered if comparing a human to a dragon somehow dishonored their memories.

  “Have you not decided?” she said after a moment.

  Lost in his thoughts again. Well, he could give as obscure an answer as she. “I’m going to have a good nap in this cave. Then in the morning I think I’ll dive and see if I can’t find some big crabs deep out in the river there. It seems to have a rocky, sandy bed and that’s just what they like. Then in the morning I’ll trade the crabs to that innkeeper for some more eggs and sausage.”

  “I mean about your sister,” she said.

  “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “If you do see her, tell her we miss her here. We’re a little worried about that pass the Wheel of Fire used to guard. We’ve heard that Ironrider scouts and traders have ridden through, armed, with no more than a wave from what’s left of the dwarves there. It will take a strong heart to rally Hypatia’s north, if they should ever send more than scouts and horse-traders through, for we’ll get no help from the south.”

  Why couldn’t humans ever solve their own problems? No wonder the dragons of Silverhigh grew weary of fighting.

  “This is good-bye, unless you remain among us many days,” she said. “I may be called away. We’ve a mother-to-be in the shepherd hills and the cold is bringing illness.”

  “Thank you for guiding me. The walk did me good. I’ve flown too much of late.”

  She half smiled. “May I touch your nose? Your skin is so different from your sister’s.”

  He dipped his head and felt her hand pass down his snout. She giggled.

  “Your skin ripples.”

  “Little buds rather than scales,” he said. “They change color.”

  “I noticed earlier. Remarkable. Farewell, AuRon. Return for more sausages. You’ll be as welcome as your sister. Will you?”

  He decided to answer her question. “You can tell Hazeleye that I believe I’ll have a word with those dragons allied with the Ghioz. They might have knowledge of my sister. Their Queen owes me an old debt, which I shall collect.”

  “I would have wished you a good
journey before. Now I’ll light candles to guide you past doubt and ignorance and into knowledge.”

  AuRon cleared his throat. “Candles. Does that work?”

  “I doubt it. But it’s nice to think it does. Horrible thing for a priestess to say.”

  “I’ll remember you to my sister,” AuRon said, taking one final deep draught of her air. “Assuming I find anything more than a memory.”

  Chapter 7

  Wistala couldn’t make sense out of Paskinix’s orders to his dreadful, taunting demen.

  They put her in a filthy, cramped widening of a tunnel that they couldn’t be bothered to clean. She had to have water brought to her, one precious bucket at a time, and she begrudged every splash and lost drop, as they never gave her quite enough to slake her thirst.

  The demen were unhappy to have her alive, grudging her every mouthful of the wretched, rotten food they ate, but unwilling to kill her.

  They bothered her in every way possible, kicking and prodding her as they passed, throwing their filthy, ropy waste at marks on her side and flank as though engaging in target practice, and not letting her sleep with their continual noise on the part of her guards, but they did not cause her any real agonies.

  They smeared a piece of hollow wood, like bamboo only knob-bier, with her blood, yanked out a few scales, then clipped off the tip of her sii inclaw. She guessed them to be trophies or mementos of some kind. A grim sort of humor came over her at the thought. The last trace of her existence might decorate some deman’s hole.

  They taunted and teased her over her injuries and situation, but hinted that she would soon be released to return to her kind.

  The demen were clever enough in their brutal way. They inspected her bonds each time the guard changed, striking her on the joints with stout metal rods that they carried constantly. With little to do but observe, Wistala decided they used the rods to send signals. She saw them rap-tap-tapping the sides or floor of the tunnel, or listening to faint banging sounds and grumbling among themselves.

  She suspected half of their ill temper was from short commons. There were constant squabbles over food as it was shared out, and a thicker slice of mushroom could be cause for much head-butting and spine-yanking.

  One night—morning—who could say when it was?—shortly after her capture, a good deal of tapping woke her. Her agitated guards jumped up and shouted. Two of them picked up a stout spear with evil-looking, twisting fluting to the edges and put the tip against her side.

  “No! Please,” she managed out the side of her mouth—awful last words for a dragon. Oh Father—

  But they didn’t ram it home—instead they listened while her mind raced. She was chained such that she couldn’t strike the point away with tail or neck or limb, and even her wings were secured by a pair of chains running beneath her belly to the injured wing.

  Her injured wing—it would hurt. . . .

  A faint roaring—undoubtedly a male dragon—echoed in her prison.

  Awful moments passed, trying to judge the roars—drawing closer or no? Then more tapping and the demen with the spear relaxed.

  More tapping still and they hooked claws and snorted and honked into each other’s faces. She wouldn’t care to have another dragon clearing its nostrils right into her face, it was almost as bad as men picking and digging at their dirty corners.

  She was gaining enough of their language to guess they were enormously pleased with something. Paskinix made an entrance with a few warriors, one much singed about face and fingers. Paskinix’s spines alternately drooped and waved like sea fronds as he spoke.

  “Ye own comrade came down the shaft. Turned him back easy enough and would have taken his head, but he’s a cursedly good nose for traps.”

  He? She wondered if it was DharSii.

  “The orange one with black stripes?”

  “I didn’t see much of yon roaring cockspur. He’s been pricked good, cowering in the muck bottom anow. Too many shafts in him to think about climbing out. We’ll let him bleed out and then hit him again.”

  More warriors arrived, displaying gory weapons under her nose. She shut her nostrils to the smell of dragonblood.

  “Now he’ll be of a mind to bend, that he will,” she thought she heard Paskinix tell his warriors as they hurled themselves about in celebration. They jumped around, overleaping each other like startled frogs.

  Never dance out your victory over a living dragon, she thought. But hope was hard to come by.

  Why would he come after her? To finish her off, or to rescue her? To tempt her to join his flying circus and kill not for food or for honor but at the orders of some greedy hominid queen?

  She hated him anew at the thought. Then there was another thought, and a third, equally hateful.

  Because they were all about him.

  She turned her back to the revels and pretended to go to sleep, moving her good wing within its limits as though to block the light.

  Working at her bonds as she never had before, Wistala pulled and twisted, not minding the ripped-out scales or the blood smearing the metal. Her blood might lubricate the shackles and let her get a saa free. If she could just—

  Kzzzzt!

  That lightning-smell again and her mind emptied. Her thoughts were concise and clear but oddly unmoored.

  It seemed easier to just drift off to sleep . . .

  Paskinix stood by her nose when she woke, waggling one of those rubbery digits at her. A moment later? An hour? A day? His spines made stabbing gestures toward her, threatening like scorpion tails. That odd machine huffed behind him.

  “Ye’ll be free in yon Tyr’s own good time, once his neck unbends at last.”

  They zapped her again so the lesson might sink in.

  She was beginning to welcome the surcease of hunger the sparks brought. But no point telling them that.

  “Tomorrow we all dine on dragon meat!” Paskinix promised, and his throng beat their rods on stone in clattering celebration.

  Wistala wondered, rather dully, whether they meant hers or DharSii’s.

  The demen learned a lesson about counting breathing dragons dead the next day. Just after a meager breakfast Paskinix stormed back into her little run and struck the inoffending guards keeping watch over her, knocking them this way and that with sideswiping kicks.

  “Climbed out! Three spears in him and yon scaly devil climbed out! No sign of the watch I left. Down three, and naught but bloody footprints showing for it!”

  He raised his club and gave her a couple of bashes about the neck. Then he threw down his club and squatted with his face to the wall, his spines rising and falling in a confused manner.

  The guards tried to ply him with one of those hollow tubes, opening it so a sweet-tart smell, like molasses and juniper, wafted into the tunnel. He put his mouth to it and worked the other end, and Wistala heard a sucking sound. Then he threw down the tube.

  “ ’Twas my plan to lead my people to greatness,” he said in his strange Drakine, his back still to her. “It all went wrong in the war with the dwarves. I thought myself mighty clever, sneaking down the river. We’d raided up the Ghioz palace itself and came away with riches. Why not do the same to the dwarves? They and their cursed battle boats.”

  “The Wheel of Fire?” she asked.

  “Ye know them?”

  “I’ve fought them too.”

  Wistala told her tale, briefly, of how she had brought down King Fangbreaker and of the gruesome battles she’d seen, showed the long-healed scars in her wing-leather. Paskinix made excited wheezing sounds as she told of the slaughter of the dwarf-column sent into barbarian lands.

  He folded his hand under a bit of carapace and worked a crack in the cave wall, widening it and sending bits of stones flying as he twisted his armored limb-shell this way and that. “I should have taken that offer yon old Tyr gave me. Not that new whelp with his damn trained monkeys riding dragonback, I mean the old Tyr. His Cussedness. An alliance.”

  “You didn’t?�
��

  “Nay. I thought I’d just gamble, try and master the wizard’s crystal, what with NooMoahk’s yon cave empty and echoing. Thought it’d show me a path to victory, ye see. But someone’d put heart in the blighters and they fought like mad. We were long licking our wounds from that beating. I even thought for a while that some blighter genius had been born and unlocked the crystal’s secrets. But they never followed us down. Next thing I knew the Star Tunnel was full of mad dragons under that green demon. Oh, she’s taken the better bits of the Tyr and his mate.”

  It was like trying to piece together an entire song from a line or two at the end. In any case, he seemed in no mood to hit her again.

  “May I offer something?”

  “Words of comfort from a dragon? Nay.”

  She took a careful breath. “You could release me. I’d serve as an ambassador to this Tyr. Perhaps he’d renew the offer that other fellow made.”

  “Oh, aye. One of the Tyr’s own Firemaids. Ye’d keep my interests close to heart, I’m sure.”

  “You’re clever, but you don’t know everything, Paskinix. I know nothing of this Tyr or his dragons. I fell into the Lower World thanks to a quick slip and a long fall.”

  His spines stiffened, then relaxed again.

  “A good try, Firemaid. Well done. Ye almost had me with that lying tongue.”

  With that he rose and shuffled off.

  Wistala felt herself growing thinner on slight rations and lack of exercise. Secretly, she rejoiced at it. Much longer and she would be able to slip out of her bonds.

  To pass the time she improved herself in the demen tongue so she could chafe her guards for more water or a chance to clear out the filth coating one end of her alcove. They gave her some bits of dried mat-leaf and she scrubbed and sponged vigorously. The harder she worked the thinner she would get.

  But the demen knew their business. There was only so much one could do to swell a joint when they stuck a finger in to test the bonds. They tightened her shackles.