by E. E. Knight
“I won’t withdraw from this pass, with battle begun. We’re teaching them to fear the smell of dragons.”
“You can plague them here at your leisure, Wistala. I leave you in charge. You’ve learned enough about this sort of fighting to handle the rest.”
Ayafeeia departed with those who’d suffered small injuries that limited their ability to climb or run but could still fly, or hang on. She left Wistala with the most experienced and battle-tested of the Firemaids and a handful of drakka, including Takea.
On the third day after Ayafeeia left, the roc-riders attacked.
They came screaming out of the sky as the dragons were occupied dropping fire on stone-throwing machines that they later decided had been built solely to provide them with targets for their fire. The rocs raked two dragonelles across the back, tearing wing and ligament and sending them tumbling through the air into the Ironriders.
If the fall didn’t kill them, they were soon speared by the Ironriders.
Now it was the Ironriders’ turn to jeer.
The roc-riders stole the food they’d kept on ice on a high glacier. One lucky rider plucked a drakka and lifted off with her, carried screaming higher and higher as two dragonelles tried to pursue in vain. The roc dropped her, just to hear her scream as she fell, and Wistala cursed the eggs that had sheltered them.
They managed to avenge themselves on two roc-riders when Wistala suggested a tactic that had very nearly worked on her when a troll plunged out of the sky upon her. They buried two dragonelles in snow so they wouldn’t be seen, and then they fell on the riders as they rode through the pass. The dragons did better than trolls, though—they could use their wings to control their dives. When they struck the riders, rider and mount disappeared in a burst of blood, flesh, and feathers.
Takea returned that night with the top half of a beak, wearing it as a human would a helmet.
Now the sky and the heights belonged to the Ironriders. Wistala and what was left of the Firemaids had to keep clear of swooping roc-riders and their arrows.
“We could sneak away. Why do we hold this pass alone? Where are the men who would fight at our side?”
“They have troubles enough with the riders who are making it across the pass.”
“How long do we stay here?”
Wistala bristled. “Until they stop coming or we breathe our last.”
The Firemaids needed more than that, she decided. Each would lay down her life gladly if they guarded the mouth of a tunnel that had hatchlings at the other end. But the reasons for fighting here—how could she put them into words?
“I believe humans will never trust us unless we prove our loyalty to our word and their law by dying for it.”
“What’s human law to us?” a Firemaid asked, both nostrils and lips caked with blood and the marks of the desperate dagger-strokes of some Ironrider she’d finished off. “I say withdraw!”
A Firemaid muttered that they would be climbing out if they withdrew. There were no longer enough healthy dragonelles to carry the drakka.
“What’s dragon tradition to humans?” Wistala replied. “If we keep our word, do our duty, they’ll know they can rely on us in the future.”
“We should keep our word for ourselves, no matter what the humans think,” Takea said.
“A future we won’t live to see,” another replied.
“Maybe,” Wistala said. “No one knows. But every day we create a future. Our fight here creates a better one.”
“I still say they deserve these steppe-demons. Letting us die up here in the cold, alone. It’s their lands. I would not expect a bunch of dwarves to die protecting my tunnel.”
“The rest of you may go, if you wish,” Wistala said. “I’m staying here. I will prove it.” She tore off the brace on her wing, threw it down, and smashed it on an angled rock, breaking it anew.
“There,” she said through the pain. “I can’t fly off.”
Little Takea could take no more. She ran and stood before Wistala. “How do we live, Firemaids?”
“Together!” they responded.
“How do we fight?”
“Together!”
“Then how should we die?”
“Together!”
She organized all her Firemaids into pairs or trios. One would always keep watch for the roc-riders while the other dug sleeping holes in the snowdrifts or stole down into the pass looking for a loose horse or a lost dog to eat.
It was while watching the drakka melt snow for everyone to drink that Wistala had her idea.
A dam of ice and snow had built up on the southern slope. Snow exposed to the sunlight and warming spring winds was melting and running down into the pass, but as it passed into the shadows of ridges and other mountains, it froze again.
The mass created hung heavy in the mountains, an avalanche waiting to happen.
They tried making noise, for noise sometimes triggers an avalanche, they knew, but the loudest dragon roars had no effect on the ice-dam and the glacier of snow behind.Their cries brought satisfying sounds of alarm from the end of the pass.
Wistala studied it, remembering what Rainfall had taught her about bridges, loads, keystones, and so on. It seemed to her that the ice-dam resembled an upside-down bridge, with a line of rocks and boulders blocking it.
She waited for a storm to try her theory. As the blowing snow reduced the horizon to a few dragonlengths and turned the sky a smoky gray, they went to the base of the dam.
“If we can’t block the pass ourselves, maybe ice and snow will do our work for us. Ready?”
“Be sure to take off as it gives way.”
“If it gives way,” a Firemaid said. “But what about you?”
Wistala pointed with her tail-tip to the cliffside just to the left of the dam. “I’ll dash there.”
“Hope you’re a good dasher.”
“Together,” Wistala said.
They vented their flame across the base of the ice dam.
The ice and snow, or possibly rock, groaned. Wistala heard cracks.
Wistala remembered being caught in the tunnel as a hatchling with Auron. They’d battered their way out with their tails, Auron hurling himself against the ice with his body until it broke.
She turned, beat the rock with her tail, beat it until she smelled blood.
“More flame!” she gasped.
They vomited fire again. Running water turned to steam in the heat—
Krrrrrack!
A stone gave way.
The ice shifted, the whole mass moved perhaps a clawsbreadth.
Wistala held her breath, every nerve alert.
“Run, Wistala, it’s giving.”
She felt wingtips lash across her back as she hurried for the rocks. The ground slid beneath her feet.
Thunder in her ears, a roaring so loud that one felt it rather than heard it, engulfed her. She lunged, leaped, managed to cling to a fall of rocks at the base of the wall of rock.
Ice and snow roared down behind her, dragging her feet with them. She felt the ground pull at her—a strange sensation, not being able to trust the ground. Instinctively she opened her wings and tried to take off, but her broken wing just pulled against the lines and braces that held it to her body.
The flow dragged at her, its icy dust trying to choke her, but still she clung. Then she realized she was lost as well—tumbling, tumbling—and she curled her wings about her.
Then her breath was gone. Somehow she sensed which way was up and, heaving with every muscle, fought her way toward the surface. But the snow was so very heavy and she was cold and tired and broken, and oh so very sleepy . . .
She woke to a bright orange eye, found a great feathered roc staring down at her, its reins piercing its beak like a leathery mustache.
It had its claw on her throat, ready to rip out her neck hearts.
She was lying in the pass, but something was all wrong. She was at the wrong height, halfway up the sheer cliff on the south side. Then she
realized that she rested on a mound of snow the size of one of the twin hills on Rainfall’s old estate.
Spirits and snowdrifts, they’d done it! She knew the weather at these heights—it would be full summer before the pass would be warm enough to melt all this down into the Ba-drink.
“It’s alive,” the rider called, in Parl, to a group of Ironriders behind. They wore baskets upon their shoes to allow themselves to walk on the snow.
“You. Hold still,” he ordered in Parl.
She wouldn’t be a prisoner again. She’d rather breathe her last in the clean mountain air than be flung into some new dungeon.
Wistala realized that only a thin layer of snow covered her body. She flexed her body, struck out with all the power in her cold-stiff tail, and a wave of snow flew out toward the bird.
As birds always do when startled, it flapped its wings and jumped back.
That was all Wistala needed. Her body stiffened and she spat flame—a thin stream, more a series of torfs than an actual stream of fire given that she’d been on short rations lately—striking bird and rider.
Both screamed and they flew off, the rider beating at the liquid fire across his saddle.
The Ironriders waddled comically, dropping the lines and chains they’d brought to drag her out of the snow.
Wistala felt too tired and cold to give chase. But shadows crossed the sun, shadows of dragons—
“Wistala, we are coming!” cried the Firemaids.
Drakka came shooting down the snowy slope, heads up, sii and saa tight against their sides, steering with their tails.
Roc-riders, drawn by the motion, dived and whirled, their riders firing arrows.
The drakka shot past her, flying like scaly arrows across the snow.
The Ironriders didn’t have a chance. They couldn’t run with the baskets on their feet, and they couldn’t move through the snow with the baskets off. One after another fell, knocked down by the drakka.
Takea lay behind, an arrow through her throat.
Wistala went to her side.
“Bats! Some bats here!” Wistala called.
“It doesn’t hurt, Wistala,” Takea whispered. Wistala put her head close to the drakka to better hear her words. “I can feel the wound. It is bad, isn’t it? But it doesn’t hurt. Strange.” She still wore the brown beak on her head. Wistala thought the horn-lines in it made it look like an agate.
“We’ll get that shaft out and close you up. You’ll sit the rest of this fight out.”
Takea tapped her tail. Wistala heard her hearts fluttering. “Sister, do not lie to me. I can feel my hearts slowing. We loosed HaVok himself on them, didn’t we?”
“For a while,” Wistala said. She’d failed. She’d failed her sisters in the Firemaids, all for a stupid hatchling’s fancy-dream.
“I would have opened my wings next year. I wonder if some male would have wanted me, with the glory of a fight like this to my name.”
“I expect so,” Wistala said.
She removed something from deep in the pocket of flesh behind her ear. It was the rabbit’s foot. “Tell Zathan—I must break my promise to him. Return . . .” She began to pant.
Wistala, half choking and blinking tears, looped the little ring on her wing-spur.
Takea’s voice grew quiet and clear. “Pity the humans never showed up. It’s a good idea you have, though, Wistala. I mean, why couldn’t we share white cities in the sun. Dragons would even make fine thanes, I expect. We could see brigand camps from miles off and keep the roads safe. Dragons could even—”
Her head lolled and her body seemed to shrink, save for the swelling wing-cases.
The Drakwatch pried Paskinix, with some difficulty, out of his hole. He, of course, had a hidden exit, but the bats had discovered it and an expert blighter thrall-netter waited where the bolt-hole joined river-tunnel.
Paskinix showed admirable dignity as they brought him before the Copper in the empty assembly hall. He was so gaunt the Copper wondered if a soft tail-tap would pass right through him. The horny plates of his self-grown armor looked oversized, some old trophy of a ancestral deman worn in tribute, perhaps.
The Copper ordered food to be brought. Paskinix, sensibly, did not even make a pretense of refusing. Instead, he opened that strange swinging deman jaw and began to stuff himself.
“Not too much, or you’ll make yourself sick,” the Copper said, by way of starting.
“My last meal, I suppose, now that you’ve holed me at last,” Paskinix said. “May as well enjoy it.”
“I am ready to make peace if you are,” the Copper said.
“Peace? With what? My people are destroyed.”
“This old war is not my fault. It was going on when I came here.”
Paskinix swished out his mandibles and spat on the floor. “We have claim to the Lavadome too, dragon-king. It was here the sun-shard fell to earth, and it was here the first demen recovered it at the dawning of thought. Only the Eternals are older than ourselves.”
“All the more reason to share its control. I propose to give you a voice in the Lavadome, my old friend.”
“Our people have shown a curious brand of friendship.”
“We’ve forged a history. We’ve learned to respect each other. Out of that respect, cooperation can bloom. I have some lovely gardens here atop the rock, and the blueblooms are bigger than ever since I put them on that mix of bat-dropping and dried cow dung. I could show you the old pools one of my predecessors put in, a very fine set of caves, and I know you like things warm and moist and comfortable. Perhaps you could move your household there temporarily while we work out an understanding?”
“I am . . . suspicious.”
“Of course.”
“You hold every advantage. Were I to have conquered the Lavadome the way you had the Star Tunnel, I would not be inviting you to the most comfortable cavern off the Wisterfall.”
“You’ve played so many tricks yourself you expect them in others. I have spoken honestly to you. If I have been generous, it is because I wish your help as an ally.”
“Ally? All my warriors together would hardly be a match for a pair of your dragons.”
“Ah, but you count your experience in the Lower World cheap. I am engaged in a war on the surface.”
“Then I wish you fortune. The Red Queen burned out our sun-mines on the surface years ago.”
The Copper wondered what a sun-mine was but decided not to ask.
“Would you care to play one last trick? Strike one more blow against your surface enemy?”
“Perhaps.”
“If I wished to reach the lands of Ghioz in secret, could I do it with dragons? I have examined the maps of the Norflow. It seems to me it runs right under Ghioz lands.”
Paskinix shut his eyes in thought.
“It does. It does at that. But why not fly?”
“My dragons cannot get near her capital because of those roc patrols,” the Copper said. Paskinix clucked in confusion. “Great birds, bigger than our griffaran. They can outfly and outfight dragons in the air. She would have two days’ warning, at least. If I could cut that down to two hours—”
“Getting there is not the problem. Reaching the surface is. But if I had a dragon or two instead of just my warriors—”
“You might get your sun-mines back.”
“I could refuse.”
“Gigrix could just as easily lead your people. I’ve consulted him on the matter already, and he is drawing us a map.”
“Then why not just kill me?”
“You fought the Firemaids and the Aerial Host to a standstill for years, with numbers less than a quarter of what we believed you to have, if the talks with your general have led the Anklenes to the correct conclusion. I would be mad to kill such a resourceful warrior.”
“Tyr RuGaard—your dragons said you were unlike any Tyr since FeHazathant. I am beginning to understand their opinion.”
“Thank you. But I warn you, praise in the Lavadome o
ften comes before the bite.”
“My Tyr, I saw many deman skulls about the entrance to your fine towering rock. I’ve no wish to see mine displayed in a place of prominence, especially with such a meal as you’ve fed me dissolving so pleasantly within.” He belched. “My compliments to your cook. It’s been long since I ate flesh flavored with anything but the tears of the meal’s friends and family.”
Chapter 21
The courier dragonelle’s arrival on the Isle of Ice set all the dragons to talking and arguing. Yefkoa spoke of a time of decision for the dragons.
And of their Tyr, a prophet who would lead them all into the bright sun of a new age.
For such a young dragonelle, she spoke well, fearless in the face of strangers.
War in the south—a lost kingdom of dragons—Ironriders on stout horses with big, hearty livers—dragonelles and drakka dying in battle.
The population of the Isle of Ice was mostly female, and their sympathies naturally ran to the dragonelles fighting for their lives. She painted pictures with her words and the dragons began to stamp and roar in agreement.
Save for AuRon. Wistala had joined with the Copper and had flown herself into this scrape. She would have to fly herself out.
“Is the isle flying to the aid of the dragons, Father?” Varatheela asked, her hindquarters dancing.
“Did I ever tell you how I came to be in that cargo hold?” Natasatch asked AuRon.
“Not willingly. I asked you once about it, I recall. You said you were captured while hunting.”
“That was true—after a fashion.”
“Tell me,” AuRon said.
“I was a few weeks from my first trip aboveground,” she said, toying with a dry shard of one of their hatchlings’ eggs she’d kept as a piece of memory.
“We did not have a large cave, but there was a long tunnel leading to the surface. I liked to explore the tunnel, at least the dragonlength or two near the mouth of the egg-cave. To me, that was like going aboveground. I was exploring, when suddenly I saw a pair of legs walking past me.
“Before I knew it I had a sword-point before my eye. The elf offered me a choice, speaking Drakine. Silence or death. I was at the high end of the egg-cave. My voice would have carried had I screamed. The family might have been saved. I tried to scream. I decided on it. But the sound never came. I was frozen. I bought my own life with their death.”