by E. E. Knight
“And how do you like it?”
“Made me a new-shucked deman. Could that I took six matings instead of the usual three.”
“Ah. Well, the dragon-riders in the Aerial Host swear by it. Both they and their mates enjoy it regularly. A well-fed dragon’s all the better for a little bleeding now and then, I always say. Their children raised with a sip on the seven-day grow up uncommonly handsome and strong.”
“Amazing.”
“How so? I’ve heard that in Anklamere’s time dragonblood was used as a tonic.”
“No, that ye share. My apologies.”
“Well, there was some resistance to it at first, but they’re used to the idea now. It’s something of an honor, to play ‘host’ at a party for the riders and their mates. No dragon is ever forced, and there are enough volunteers willing to bleed a little.”
Gigrix smacked his mandibles. That divided jaw of the demen—most unsettling. It looked too much like an injury.
“Would you care for some?”
“I . . . I would never ask.”
“Oh, come, you’ve been most helpful to me today. You allowed me to watch your exercises, advised me on the offer to Paskinix—perhaps he’s died and your warriors can name you the new king. That would simplify things. Look, your eating knife looks clean enough, and one of those water buckets would do.”
“Not from you, Tyr!” But he did retrieve the bucket.
“Oh, come, a little blood spilled makes lasting friendship, I’ve found, and I’m heartily sick of counting demen as enemies instead of praising them as allies. Give me that.”
He pinched the short, sharp knife between his sii and cut himself just inside the turn of his forelimb.
If anything, it didn’t go deep enough. He had to continually squeeze his sii to keep the blood flowing into the bucket.
A small crowd of tired, dirty demen gathered to watch the strange ceremony.
Gigrix called to the others, and one brought a ladle with a bowl at the end.
“Fresh firewater!” a deman marveled. At least that’s what the Copper thought he said.
Gigrix filled the ladle, and like a good leader, offered the first sip to his “voice”—the deman who bellowed orders and corrected the warriors in their practice evolutions.
Then Gigrix himself took a swig. He stood still, drinking, breathing deeply, spines rippling up and down on his back.
“Yes, my Tyr,” he said, passing the ladle to the tallest and widest of his soldiers. His greenish tongue dabbed at the sides of his mandibles, and he muttered a few words the Copper did not recognize. “Just to think, some argued for a glory-charge instead of surrender! Here I am, enjoy a drink fit for a king.”
“It is fit for a king,” the Copper said. “What do you say, warriors? Wouldn’t Gigrix make a fine king?”
Eager for their turn at the ladle, the demen whistled through their mandibles and gave off piping hoots.
The Copper worried the wound to increase the flow. He used to believe himself awful at politics. But one could learn—yes, one could learn.
Pleasantly light-headed, the Copper returned to the top of Imperial Rock at a slow climb, with many pauses to talk to both dragons and thralls, hearing small news of kitchen and nursing-room. He congratulated thralls on the birth of babies or the marriage of children and made a quick visit to a distant relative’s cave to listen to the quiet taps inside three promising-looking dragon-eggs. He assured the mother-to-be he’d never seen such perfectly formed eggs. It portended great things for the brood, most certainly.
Then it was up to the gardens and down the shaft to the old cistern with his bats.
In the days of the civil wars, he’d been told, it held a reserve of water. During FeHazathant’s day, the water was mixed with a paste of ash, strange rare salts, and other nutrients and used to feed the Imperial gardens.
He’d ordered the cistern emptied and new masonry pools built to feed the gardens. Now it housed his bats.
It was a slow climb through the narrow well hole with his bad sii, but fortunately a short one. He found himself among his bats.
These were the trusted elite, descendants of the bats that had guided him as a hatchling. Each wore a tiny foot-band of metal, identifying it as a Tyr-bat. It was a crime to kill a Tyr-bat, at least on purpose.
They were of all different sizes, from small and quick, who lived mostly by eating parasites clinging beneath dragonscale—many a dragon would be revolted at the thought of some filthy, greasy mammal doing him a service as he slept—to medium-sized, who ate flies in the livestock and thrall pens to the big, blood-drinking brutes. Then there were the monster-bats, those who for generations had been raised on dragonblood. Some of them didn’t even sleep upside down anymore, but slept in cracks above the noisome floor.
The Copper was relieved to see that the floor had been freshly scraped. The bat offal was greatly prized by the Anklene herbologists for their gardens.
“Ahh! ’Tis himself,” a bat called as he clambered in.
“Ooo, is there a sup? Perishing hungry I am,” one squeaked.
“No. No blood this time,” the Copper said, climbing carefully to the cave floor so he didn’t slip in filth. His body-thralls would be burning their cleaning rags later.
“I need three quiet, very healthy bats, small and smart. The duty will require a good deal of flying and cave-sense. But on completion I’ll give you a permanent place in the Aerial Host caves.”
He had scores of squeaking, clamoring volunteers. Two brawls broke out. It was difficult to pick three, but he found two brothers who claimed to be descended from Enjor and one female who seemed better-spoken than the rest.
“You’re Ging,” he said to the female. He looked at one of the males. “You’re Gang. You’re Ghoul,” he said to the bigger male, for his fur was a ghostly gray. “Come with me, you three.”
He walked and they flew to the edge of the gardens and he looked down at the assembled demen. “Those are demen. Get to know their sounds, their smells, their voices. In another day or two, a pair of demen will leave that group. I want you to follow them. It will probably be a trip of some days. When they find another group of demen and meet with a big, sort of bluish one who walks with the aid of a big stick, you return and let me know where he is.”
They had the usual questions about dying of hunger on the way—he told them that they would just have to sneak a sup from sleeping Firemaids, there should still be some left in the Star Tunnel—and of course, there were the demen themselves.
“Now, you can help yourself to a little of my blood. Just a little. I’m weak enough from feeding demen. You can clean out this cut, while you’re at it.”
Nothing like bat saliva for speeding healing, he’d found. Even Nilrasha thought it was disgusting, but she couldn’t argue the result—the wounds healed thrice as fast with only the faintest of scars.
Thinking he’d done a good day’s work, he told the thralls he would have an extra haunch of roast pork for supper. And perhaps a second or even third helping of that wine his adoptive grandmother used to be so fond of. He had blood to make up.
All the while he met that afternoon with NoSohoth, the smells coming up from the kitchens made it very hard to keep his mind on affairs in the hills. NoSohoth’s droning lulled him, and he had to resort to his old training cave-watch trick of digging sii into saa to stay awake.
Unfortunately, dinner was spoiled by one of his thralls, the female in charge of the cleaning staff. She was a massive creature, as wide as she was tall, almost white hair bound up in a Tyr’s household kerchief.
“Oh, sir. One of my scrubs, she found some strange odds and ends in your wizard’s sleeping chamber. We’re used to his strange devices, but we wondered about this.”
A similarly wide young man, probably one of her family, moved forward with a bundle wrapped in a blanket. He unrolled it before his Tyr.
There was rope, a mallet on a lanyard, spikes, food, waterskins, hooks, spiked shoes wit
h soft fronts for gripping.
“I know a runaway being planned when I sees it,” the old woman said.
“This was in . . . Rayg’s quarters?”
“Aye, sir. All between two boards in his bed under the matting. Clever, but she heard it sliding around when she moved the bed. No one can say my girls don’t do a thorough job cleaning.”
The Copper thanked her and told her to help herself to whatever she might find hanging in the Tyr’s larder.
He didn’t finish the meal with the same appetite as he’d started it.
Later, the Copper invited Rayg out into the gardens, so they might have a private talk under the red light of the flow. Other dragons and drakes and drakka enjoying the gardens and the fading light at the crystal circle in the top made room for him.
The Copper brought Rayg to the banquet pit and showed him the assortment of gear.
“Rayg, these were found in your quarters. Tell me what they mean.”
“It’s not obvious?” Rayg said in his good Drakine.
“False claws, lines—this is climbing gear.”
“You’ve noted how old some of it is,” Rayg said.
“Well.”
Rayg lifted one of the spike-studded shoes. “See the rust. Years old.”
“You were planning an escape.”
“I had my reasons.”
“Numerate them for me. Have I been ungenerous?”
Rayg wasn’t behaving like a thief caught by his owner dragon. They might have been discussing the bulbs in the gardens. “Oh, I’ll take you over the barbarians, of course. You are fair. You’ve been very generous to my family. They’re prosperous and happy. The time I spend with them is wonderful. If another dragon became Tyr, however . . . Must I say it?”
“I intend to be Tyr for a good many years yet.” It didn’t do to mention the relative life spans of humans and dragons.
“It seems a Tyr doesn’t always have a choice. You’re the third Tyr since I’ve been here, I believe.”
“Rayg, you’re a great help to me. Indeed, invaluable. If you were to run away and be killed in the Wind Tunnel, as I’ll hazard this gear is meant to ascend—”
“Oh, no. I won’t run away on you, RuGaard.”
For a thrall to use a dragon’s name, let alone the Tyr—The Copper glanced around, but if anyone was trying to listen to the conversation they were as stealthy as his bats. The banquet area was empty.
“Hmmm. I’ll give orders that you’re allowed to have whatever sort of equipment you need for climbing. I’ll say it’s for your experiments. No sense having your life depend on this rusting old junk.”
“Thank you, my Tyr.”
“Will you tell me something, though? Why do you stay?”
“I like dragons.”
The Copper thought that over. Strange thing for a slave, even a pampered and privileged slave, to say.
“You don’t mind the smell, being underground?”
“Oh, the years have accustomed me to that. You’re not cruel. I lived among barbarians when I was very young. Dragons aren’t cruel to those in their power. They don’t go out of their way to make captives miserable to amuse themselves.”
“You’re never afraid I’ll lose my temper and eat you? I thought that all thralls, free or no, lived with that fear.”
“Not particularly. It would be an easy death.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever seen a really old dwarf?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” the Copper asked, puzzled.
“I am getting to that. They get so they just sit. Can hardly lift a finger anymore, but too stubborn to die. Some get wheeled about in tiny pushcarts, for a time, while they still talk and give instructions. Eventually, when truly ancient, they lapse into silence. They get fed and washed off once a day, from the same contraption, a sort of portable pump you wear on your back. They might as well be a potato plant. Rows of statues in the hall of ancients.” Rayg shuddered. “Just eyes, glaring out of this bird’s nest of hair. I think death’s better.”
“You’re not a dwarf,” the Copper said.
“No one can accuse you of being of philosophical mind,” Rayg said. “I only mean I’m troubled by the frailties of inevitable age.”
“I’ll see to it that a few of your children are around to help as you get older.”
The Copper looked at Rayg. He knew him to be at least a score of years into adulthood, yet he still looked hale and hearty. He wondered if he didn’t have a secret source of dragonblood or something to keep himself so youthful looking.
A pair of young drakes, glaring at each other, approached, but the Copper waved them off.
“More grievances to be settled,” the Copper said, trying to put a briskness in his voice that he didn’t feel. Rayg’s talk of decline depressed him. “It is enough to make one wish for a return of dueling.”
“But you hate duels.”
“Oh, I’m just tired and I didn’t enjoy my wine. Just last night I had my meal interrupted by two dragons—never mind their names; they were sort of a charcoal and a dull bronze. Charcoal sold a herd of cattle, an even score, to Bronze in exchange for three young thralls. By the time Bronze delivered the thralls and picked up the cattle, two of the beasts had sickened and died. Charcoal insisted that Bronze take the carcasses, as they could still be eaten.
“Neither could resolve anything between themselves, so they brought it to me. Bronze wanted to keep the ten kine but give only two slaves, but Charcoal demanded that the original deal for the herd be kept.”
“What did you do?”
“I told Charcoal that if dead cattle were so valuable he should keep them and replace them with live beasts. Bronze claimed that he would be given two more sickly beasts and insisted on the return of one thrall and that anything else would be a cheat. Now both are more angry with me than with each other. United in their disgust at my decision, they had a fine session of tail-bowling after, it seemed.”
“Dwarves had disputation hearings,” Rayg said when he’d finished chuckling. “I saw one once. Part of one—I’m told it went on for much of the day. Each side brought several others to give their version of events.”
The Copper couldn’t dig teeth into it, but something about speaking to Rayg always settled his mind. Or the purge settled his mind and he was simply used to venting his firebladder—figuratively—in Rayg’s presence. It often gave him ideas. Maybe Rayg’s manner of settling disputes could be put into practice here.
“Speaking of disputes, may I ask you for a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Those twins, SiHazathant and Regalia. They’ve been giving dragonblood to the expectant mothers among their thralls, trying to breed extra-strong humans or something. A little dragonblood is a fine thing, but a diet of it exclusively—the babies are born dead, or don’t live long. Which is probably just as well. The mothers are deeply grieved by the . . . the mutations. One killed herself. Would you tell them to stop experimenting?”
Idle fools. Of course, it wasn’t all that different from what he’d done with his bats, but the bats weren’t dangerous to begin with and had been much improved by doses of dragonblood. Humans, on the other hand, were and always would be a threat.
All those old rumors about the Dragonblade drinking the blood of dragons he’d slain. If those two were to inadvertently breed a generation of dragonblades . . .
An ugly doubt crept in on claw-sheathed saa. What if it wasn’t inadvertent? What if they were trying to breed another dragonblade, or two, or six, or a score? He would have to keep an eye on those two, and his eyes already had too many other dangers to be watching.
“I’ll put a stop to that.”
He sent Rayg and his collection of climbing gear away. Even if Rayg had dazzled him with lies, suppose he did escape? He owed such debts to Rayg—he should really grant him his freedom and let him enjoy the sunshine in the Upper World.
But it wasn’t up to one sentimen
tal, indulgent young Tyr. The Lavadome needed Rayg’s skills.
NoSohoth spoiled his digestion with a new round of complaints from Upholds to the south and northeast. The Ghioz were stealing cattle, brigands were raiding their blighter allies on the world’s end.
Nilrasha returned late, ill-tempered, tired, and footsore. She’d been accompanying some drakka in the Firemaidens on a fast training march to the river ring.
“On the return trip I brought a gift of fowl to SoRolatan at the Six Ridges. He’s still smarting over that dragonelle you took out from under his nose.”
“In a fair flight he’d never catch up to her. Fat old thing.”
“Still,” she said, “I had to listen to his fool of a mate babble while I tried to come up with new features to praise on a dragon remarkable only for how little there is to praise. I kept the compliments flowing through an entire meal to get a promise that his latest hatchlings would go into the Firemaidens.”
“You play this game like you’ve been doing it since you were in the egg.”
She looked off, beyond their little outer chamber. “You forget, my love, that I grew up on milkdrinker’s hill. Only one rich dragon there—that bug Sreeksrack—and the rest of us were fighting over his scraps. It’s the same game. They want what you have, only the stakes have changed. Under milkdrinker’s hill it might have been a rusty shovel scoop or a scrawny old chicken. Now it’s rooms looking out on the dome and or a share of oliban trade.”
The Copper touched tail-tip to tail-tip. “You’re the rock my rule rests upon.”
“Quit cracking it and I wouldn’t have to spend all my time filling cracks.” She stared at him as though she were looking at him for the first time tonight. “My Tyr, you look positively bled! You weren’t feeding those bats again.”
“No. Demen.”
“Oh, whatever—”
“That general of theirs, Gigrix, he’d had dragonblood before. I saw an opportunity.”
“You’ll lose his respect. A Tyr doing such a thing.”
He told her about the twins’ experiments with humans and Rayg’s opinion.
“I’ll have a word with their thralls,” she said.