Dragon Strike

by E. E. Knight

  “Yes, but there’s another road around the water, it seems. We can only make things more difficult for them at the lake. No, we must fight in the pass.”

  Wistala’s knowledge of warfare was limited to observing men and dwarves in battle, and the dragon attack on the blighters in Old Uldam.

  “Horsemen,” Ayafeeia said. “They may be masters of warfare on four legs, but we will fight so that their charges and lances avail them not.”

  Wistala saw what she meant. Or thought she did.

  “Where the pass narrows there, by the rock-slides.”

  “If only the dwarves would fight alongside us, yes, that would be the place,” Ayafeeia said. “With such a wall there, we could hold many.”

  Wistala saw only a steep cliff on one side and a mountain broken and sharp in three places like one of her rear teeth. The road traveled around the three turns like a snake’s body.

  “What kind of wall?” Wistala asked, befuddled. Would the drakka drag rocks, or push snow?

  “The same sort that keeps rocks from rolling uphill, my dear. Yes. Yes. This will do very well. Perfect ground for the drakka.”

  Wistala flew back to Mossbell. Ragwrist had left his estate to see to the muster of his huntsmen and militia levies.

  “There were four new babies born over the winter, still alive after the winter’s sickness,” Lada said. “I cut and washed each one myself. What will happen to them, I wonder.”

  “They’ll be eating mash mixed with their milk by the fall, if I have a part in the matter,” Wistala said. “But I would hide them somewhere in the hills. Perhaps a shepherd’s shelter.”

  “I’d rather they died of cold than crushed under the hooves of the Ironriders. I’ve heard terrible stories.”

  “What does Ragwrist intend?” Wistala asked.

  “He’s mounted a small company. But they’re hunters of deer and foxes, not warriors. For the rest, he says he will hide as much as he can in the old mines on the twin hills. The entrances are blocked up, but the old airshaft has a new ladder. Though it’s been a dirty business cleaning out the bats.”

  “Don’t speak to me about bats. We’ve a few of these great toothy ones with us, to lick clean our wounds and trim ragged flesh. Rodents who ride in bags. Our Tyr’s idea.”

  Dragons, flying all this way with vermin snug and warm against hot wing-muscle in their bags. She shuddered at the memory.

  “There’s wisdom in your Tyr’s notion, if they’re the sort of bats I’m thinking of, cattle-feeders. Their saliva numbs and it cleans.”

  Back at the dragon encampment at Tumbledown, Ayafeeia put the Firemaids to work sharpening their claws.

  The thane had installed some of his retainers in a corner of the ruin, and the men pounded together a new roof for three empty walls. Wistala sent for him through the warriors.

  “Remember your oaths,” Ayafeeia said, walking up and down the line to inspect the leather straps and wooden pins the drakka used to hang on to the dragonelles. “Remember the years of comradeship. In this next battle they will be tested. It will take true hearts to face the coming danger and death and pass the highest test asked of our sisterhood.”

  Hesturr rode in.

  “What news, green allies? I have none good. There’s rumor of burned villages east of here. I believe they make for the road here.”

  “They do,” Wistala said. “I’ve seen them. This is but a vangard for what is coming across the pass.”

  Thane Hesturr gripped his sword in its scabbard tightly. “It will take time for us to join battle, then. We cannot fly, and there are already many riders on this side of the mountains. We must meet them first.”

  “More importantly, defeat them,” Wistala said, after translating for Ayafeeia.

  “Let us put the past behind us, from this day on,” Thane Roff said.

  “I have no particular grievances to burn,” Wistala said. “But I am happy to call you an ally.”

  “It is a long walk back to my horses and dogs. They won’t easily come near your dragons, I’m afraid. We’ll meet again on the slopes of the Red Mountains.”

  “They’ll be red with more than sunlight, if we’re still there when you come.”

  “Every rider that can be kept from crossing is a victory,” Roff said. “We’ll meet again, Wistala.”

  “I hope so.”

  The thane pointed to his retainers and standard-bearer, and they departed.

  The drakka were mounting for the ride to the pass.

  “I must send a messenger back to the Lavadome,” Ayafeeia said. She’d been taking more and more charge of matters as the time of battle grew closer. “Angalia, you’ve been ill since those swamps. I will send you back to the Lavadome to let our Tyr know where we will make our stand.”

  Angalia, a pale green Firemaid with the wrinkles about the snout and flanks that showed her to be one who suffered from much sickness, nodded.

  “May I send a messenger as well?” Wistala asked.

  “Angalia may carry more than one message.”

  “Not there. To my brother, on the Isle of Ice. A fast flier, and intelligent.”

  “Yefkoa would be a good choice. She is young and fast.”

  The dragonelle came forward, eager for her chance at distinction.

  “Yefkoa, you must find a place strange to all of us. My brother is there. Go to the great river just north of where we camped. You can’t miss it—there’s a long bridge with a repaired patch in the center. Downstream from the bridge on the north side there’s a hole shaped like a dragon-eye. In it you’ll find instructions in Dwarvish notation for finding an island to the north.

  “Find my brother AuRon there. Tell him that we have gone into battle. I know he lives with other dragons. Ask their aid, for their good and ours. If we fall, beg him, in my memory, to save those at Mossbell who I love best. Fly them to safety.”

  “But—the battle.”

  “Oh, from what I’ve seen we’ve a long fight ahead of us,” Ayafeeia said. “There’ll be blood enough for all of us, sisters.”

  Chapter 19

  The conduct of the battle of the pass surprised Wistala.

  Luckily, it surprised the Ironriders even more.

  It was a battle of angles and slopes and gravity, fought in mountain fogs and bright sun. The science-minded Anklenes might have called it a war between vertical and horizontal.

  They arrived at the pass in the dead of night with the moon down so that they wouldn’t be spotted, circling in well north of the star-charting tower at the Wheel of Fire fortifications, which Wistala knew well from her brief time as an ally of the dwarves.

  Wistala, clinging in a deep crevice so long to the mountainside as she waited for the order, finally decided the horses passing up the road were the ones in strange perspective, walking sideways before her.

  Ayafeeia kept her forces hidden in the clouds of the mountaintops.

  There were deep seams in the vertical mountain-face. The dragons settled themselves into them, latching on with sii, saa, and wing-spurs. One could even rest, hanging in that manner.

  The drakka opened the fight in the dusk, creeping down into the pass to slay horses and pack animals following a long, triple file of riders passing through. There were no warriors tending the burdened animals.

  Wistala watched it from high on the sheer mountain half of the pass. The drakka dashed and jumped on the animals, which screamed as they died. Their tenders fled, east and west, screaming in their unknown chopping tongue for help.

  “We will have meat tonight. I’m sick of cold fish and burned raccoons,” Ayafeeia said.

  The drakka jumped back onto the cliff-face and climbed to shelter.

  “I think you fight just to fill your stomach, maidmother,” a dragonelle said.

  Wistala, her throat tight with fear of battle, hid her anxiety by picking at a crevice.

  The Ironriders sent horsemen to investigate. They walked their mounts forward, archers just behind the scouts with spears,
men on foot behind them walking their mounts with swords out. Wistala’s eyes picked out the frightened pack-train leaders talking and pointing to dead animals.

  Ayafeeia carefully crept across the rock face to her reserve.

  “I want them in doubt as to what they face as long as possible, Verkeera,” Ayafeeia said to the greatest of the Firemaids, a massive, mature dragonelle with a bluish tinge to her deep green. “Let some of those rocks on the mountainside do your talking.”

  “Yes, maidmother,” Verkeera said. She launched herself and glided over to the other side of the pass.

  A mist passed through the mountains, obscuring what came next. Perhaps Verkeera, lower down, could see. In any case, Wistala heard a krrack! followed by a series of descending booms matched with screams of alarm and pain from horse and rider.

  “Now that they know we’re here, we might as well get some work done. Crack rock, Firemaids. Let’s claw ourselves a shelf or two.”

  The dragons cleared fallen rock, carved falls of ice, or even wedged boulders into chimneys and chutes in the cliffside to make themselves perches so they might rest more easily.

  What any ears down in the valley made of the strikes, rattles, and steady fall of small rocks and ice chips Wistala could only imagine. Perhaps they thought trolls were at work.

  Wistala heard crashes and screams and the sound of galloping hooves headed back toward the Ba-drink or riding for the eastern gap.

  The dragonelles flew down and collected dead horses, mules, and donkeys, then took them high into the mountains and laid them out “on ice” so they might be eaten fresh later. Then they dined, heartily, on corpses. The drakka ran down an injured horse.

  “Dragonelles are suited for this kind of fighting,” Ayafeeia told Wistala. “With the Aerial Host, they get blood in their nostrils and they refuse to relent until there’s blood and flame everywhere. This isn’t the kind of fight that can be settled in one stroke.”

  Nor was it.

  The next day the Ironriders came through the pass in force.

  The dragonelles and drakka taunted the Ironriders to come up in the hills and get them.

  Of course they tried, riding as steep a rocky slope as they could, with many horses slipping down to injury thanks to the snow and ice that still lurked in crevices and shadows.

  When the Ironriders dismounted, chasing after the dragons in groups with spears, archers behind, the drakka hid until the men had passed and then leaped onto the backs of the archers, gutting them and then running under showers of arrows, leaving the Ironriders the depressing task of bringing down the dead or wounded. Otherwise their much-chewed bones would be neatly arranged in the road by dawn the next day. When they charged through the pass as fast as they could trying to simply run by the dragons, one or more would drop from cover in the cliff and loose fire onto the screaming men and horses, or they would drop sii and saa full of rocks from great heights so that gravity did the killing work.

  They couldn’t pass at night, either. After a successful test run of a small troop, they tried to walk a larger contingent through. The dragons first panicked the horsemen and then batted the crowd back and forth along the mountain road, attacking first the east end and then the west.

  An overzealous drakka died during that, speared after she knocked a wounded rider out of his saddle.

  Another dragonelle was wounded when an arrow hit a soft spot and shot straight through her lung, at such an angle and doing so much damage that she could no longer fly. She had to be content standing watch at night and trumpeting warnings when the Ironriders tried to force the pass.

  Wistala could feel the despair and frustration of the tormented riders below. While the others counted bodies or, worse, brought back heads, she could only fight the cold queasy feeling in her stomach.

  Was she to blame for the bloodshed in this pass? She’d humbled the Wheel of Fire, and the dwarves were taking revenge on those west of the mountains by leaving their pass open.

  But the knowledge of the depredations of the riders who had already passed through to the west steeled her. Warriors and their mounts must die so that Hypatian villages would go unburned.

  Of course they burned the boats the Ironriders used to cross the Ba-drink, and they downed the bridge where Wistala had once made peace with the Dragonblade, bashing at the keystone with their tails and once that gave way, widening the breach by jumping up and down on the edges.

  Their greatest difficulty was coping with the cold. Though spring had come to the lower altitudes, the mountains were thick with snow. Dragons like the cool of a deep underground cave, but being caught out in the open with icy mountain winds and snow gathering in their scales leaves them ill-spirited. They slept tightly, side by side, alternating front to back, with the drakka tucked under the protection of motherly wings.

  The cold made them torpid and slow until the activity of battle heated their blood.

  It was glorious fun. “Better than tunnel fighting, and horsemeat twice a day,” Takea said.

  As the days of sporadic fighting wore on, the dragonelles noticed a slight change. Traffic began to flow the other way over the pass. Ironriders, in ones and twos, with horses laden with loot or bringing sore-footed captives behind with necks bound in rope-line.

  The Firemaids were only too happy to spread havoc among exhausted men and worn-out horses. They were easier to chase down and devour. Ayafeeia gave them the contents of various captured saddlebags and their pick of whatever they wanted from the corpses now littering the pass.

  The Firemaids had never enjoyed such a variety of rich, refined metals. While their enemies grew weaker, they became thick-scaled and stouthearted on devoured steppe ponies and their riders.

  Then there was the freeing of the Ironriders’ captives. Wistala had the most gentle-winged dragonelle fly them to a sheep-trail down the western slope of the mountains, heavily laden with smoked meat, skins, and traveling clothing thickened by stolen furs.

  Hopefully, the liberated captives would return to their villages and hearths with a tale of outrage—and the kindness of dragons.

  Chapter 20

  The Copper received news of the opening of Ghioz’s war in the map room.

  None of it was good. All his Upholders to the east and south reported fighting, all begging for the immediate aid of the Aerial Host or the land was sure to be lost.

  “Four cries of disaster,” the Copper said. “One Aerial Host. What should we do?”

  “Start at the south,” HeBellereth said. “The Yellowsand reports only a roc-rider or two, and bandit attacks on our caravans. The Ghioz will be weakest there, and easiest to locate. Then sweep north. Move slowly and surely so the rumor of our coming travels faster than the dragons themselves. Terror will do half our work for us.”

  “Should we let our enemies choose the ground of the fight?” NoSohoth asked. “They are plundering our Upholds. We could send the Aerial Host to burn out a few of their lands.”

  “I would think Chushmereamae is the base of their attacks on us,” LaDibar said, tapping his tail on the depiction of the islands on the map in thought. “Destroy that base. Then we may restore order in the Upholds.”

  “Fine idea,” Nilrasha said. “We must commit the Aerial Host, my Tyr. With their boats burned, the threat in the south will be ended.”

  That gave him pause. Nilrasha didn’t much like LaDibar. To see her supporting him in a debate made him wonder if she was really speaking her mind or playing some political game to win support of the Anklenes.

  “I fear all of these are feints,” the Copper said. “The Red Queen doesn’t care where we react, as long as we do. As soon as the Aerial Host is committed, she will launch her counterstrike. Their roc-riders worry me. They can beat our dragons to any fight.”

  “You are too cautious!” HeBellereth said. “Let them come. We have been practicing flying in a new, tighter formation so that our riders may better cover each other with bows.”

  The Copper stared at the map
. The little statues representing the type and kind of Ghioz forces scattered up and down the eastern Upholds seemed to be mocking, willing the arrangement to reveal the Red Queen’s mind. “I fear I’m not being cautious enough. I’ll choose when to commit the host, and where. I won’t have the Red Queen make that decision for me. We’ve lost too many skirmishing over Bant already. Curse the eggs that hatched those featherbrains.”

  He was just in a foul mood because Wistala had made a mess of things in Hypatia. According to Ayafeeia’s courier, the Hypatian “Voice,” or whatever they called the king, had rejected his offer of an alliance. They were fighting in the Red Mountains to help some Hypatian provinces north of the Falnges River.

  Practically the other side of the world.

  Well, Ayafeeia knew her business. Perhaps she would occupy the Ironriders so they wouldn’t come rampaging through Bant. But he ordered Ayafeeia to return with as many of her Firemaids as she could.

  His mood didn’t improve until he received a bat with his evening meal. Paskinix had been found, hiding close to the river ring where he could keep in contact with the demen settled there to keep in contact with the “Tyr’s demen,” as they were beginning to be called.

  “Tell the Drakwatch,” the Copper ordered. “I want him captured. Alive. Don’t bring me a charred corpse and say he committed suicide, or I’ll yank every scale out of the capture-party leader myself.”

  Angalia returned from the Tyr with a complaint about shooting pains in her joints caused by the altitude and a message that war had broken out all through Bant and the southern provinces. As Hypatia had rejected his appeal for an alliance, he had other uses for the Firemaids. He ordered Ayafeeia’s return with her forces.

  That night it snowed—probably a heavy spring rain on the woods west of the mountains but at their altitude it made fighting impossible and even movement dangerous. They talked it out over a meal of dragonflame-warmed horse.