by E. E. Knight
Back in the Lavadome, a flightless dragon could still do tunnel-duty. But of course this peninsula was far removed from the strange underground byways he knew.
The Copper sniffed the gristle and fish guts the barrow-men were laying out for the dragons to eat. “I hope that’s not all you get, Shadowcatch.”
“It’s expensive to feed us, even on fish meal. We’re ravenous for cattle or swine, but that’s saved for the fliers, and none of them feel much like passing a quarter down for charity. Flying dragons get the best of everything here.”
There had to be a better use for healthy but flightless dragons than sitting in a dark hole.
“Will you introduce me?”
Shadowcatch inflated his long lungs. “Hey, you kindling lighters, this is my old Tyr. His name’s RuGaard. Don’t mind the scars—he’s sharp and quick still. He and I came north together, a dozen years or so back.”
The dragons, who’d devoured their meager mouthfuls, raised their heads.
“Here’s Red Lightning, a fast, tough dragon in the sky. He can still do a dragon-dash like a first-fire hatchling. He’s in charge of the groundeds. Over there we have old Thunderwing. He broke the bowline and capsized three ships in the big fight with the elven ocean city, back in the days of the great sacks. Fourfoes—we call him the Blind Ripper these days—lost his eyesight to a dwarf, but there’s no one who knows the smell of them better, and he can hear an arrow coming out of the dark before it hits. Corpsecount, Horseflinger, Wardog . . .”
The list went on, earthy, human-tongue names with deadly deeds. There were sixteen dragons including Shadowcatch.
The Copper wondered at the names. They were all mature dragons; if you added them all up there must have been a thousand or more years of life among them. AuRon had once told a tale of the Wizard of the Isle of Ice and the dragons he’d collected and bred. Most of them had been given such names with meaning in the human tongue.
They looked healthy enough. They must not spend all their days in this chamber, or they’d have thin and chalk-edged scale. “You all look fit enough. What do you do for exercise?”
“Swim. There’s a decent-sized tunnel for sluicing out the waste. Dragons produce a powerful lot of it, sometimes more than the tide can handle. We help push it out into the Inland Ocean and have a swim and some sun on the Outer Rocks. Good crabbing round the sluice, too. The carapaces are good for the digestion.”
If only they could fly! This number was half the size of the old Aerial Host, and Shadowcatch the Black was a proven fighter. If he said they were good, the Copper could trust his old bodyguard’s esteem. They’d have Nilrasha out of her refuge in no time.
“I’m sorry, Shadowcatch. I really should have come looking for you before this.”
“What, and risk death? If you don’t mind me asking, sir, what are you doing out and breaking your exile?”
“I believe NiVom broke it first when he tried to kill me on the Isle of Ice, so I don’t feel bound by it. But to answer your question, I’m trying to puzzle out a way to retrieve my mate. I’m determined to get her back or die trying. Life is too lonely without her.”
“Find another mate,” Horseflinger said. “A piece of green back’s not so hard to come by.”
“We’re not talking to you,” Shadowcatch said. “And when he does, show a little respect, or I’ll tie your ears together to remind you to keep a civil tone. Tyr RuGaard once commanded hundreds of dragons.”
The Copper put himself between the two of them and accidentally knocked over the feeding cart. Smelly fish juice rose from the mess, hopefully dampening the males’ smell to one another and cooling their heads. “Your wing never healed, Shadowcatch? I’m sorry.”
Shadowcatch lifted the crippled member and looked at it curiously as if it were a cat suddenly perched on his shoulder. “Oh, I’m not the first grounded dragon and I won’t be the last.”
“My own mate can no longer fly, as you recall.”
That caused a stir among the flightless dragons. Some pricked up their ears and began to pay attention. The Copper saw a glimmer of hope. This might be the core of the force he needed . . .
“Fine lady and a fine Queen nonetheless,” Shadowcatch said.
“What ever happened on the Isle of Ice?”
“Had a merry game with that beast Ouistrela, my Tyr. She saw the island as hers more than the Empire’s, and when she wasn’t hunting me to pull out my throat, she was shooting fire at our—or rather at the dragons of the Empire. Hypatians thought about establishing a fishing village for cod-drying and whale oil and whatnot, but they lost boats in the fogs—or at least that’s how it seemed to them. What was really happening was Ouistrela was swimming up under them and knocking holes in them or tearing off rudders. Clever old stump.”
“How do you know she’s the one who was sinking them?”
“Bit of a long story, my Tyr.”
“Let’s have it.” The Copper had little else to do and it was so pleasant to see old Shadowcatch, he would be happy to hear fishing stories from the fat old black.
“Well, we came to sort of a stalemate, see. Most of the wolves, they knew I was friends with that brother-gray of yours, so they took my side of things, you might say. They kept me abreast of where she was and what she was doing. She had the blighters on her side and if they spotted me they sent her a report. We usually each knew what part of the island the other was on, and kept away from each other. It’s a big island—wasn’t that hard to do.
“I had information that she was hunting around a glacier-pool way off from the blighters, so I snuck up the glacier and dug into some loose soil the glacier had pushed down the mountainside. When she was snuffling around, following some goat tracks, I jumped out of the loam and had her, or so I thought.
“We took a bit of a tumble down the mountainside and ended up in the glacier pool. Next thing I knew, we were—mated, I guess you call it. I’m not sure when the fighting died down and the mating began, but it seemed well along before I noticed.”
The Copper snorted. He’d heard many bawdy jokes in his days in the Drakwatch, about a young winged member fighting so hard in an exercise against a Firemaid that she ended up fertilized. He always assumed such stories had some basis in truth, but this was the first time he’d heard it proven out.
“You’re not still on the island, I note.”
“Soon as the mating was over, so was the mating, if you understand me, my Tyr. I heard from the wolves she did have a clutch, a small one. One of the blighters sent me a message saying that if I wanted to see my offspring well fed and thriving, I should quit devouring so many sheep and goats and go live on one of the outer islands. Too windy and cold for me, so I swam here. I used to fly mercenary for Red Hair—that’s what I was doing when we met, at that battle.”
“The hardest fight of my life, Shadowcatch.”
“Aye, I’m not often bested. Red Hair’s gray now, but she found me a place with the groundeds. You know, she calls us the ‘tower guard,’ but we don’t earn our keep. I think she just keeps us around because she’s carrying a soft spot in her heart for dragons.”
“Better a soft spot in the heart than in the head, I suppose. I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s my problem.”
He happened upon Gettel as she left a meal with her human staff and mentioned that he’d visited the pensioners.
“Ahh, flying dragons don’t go down there much.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason as they don’t bring new recruits to the lodge for crippled soldiers in the Hypatian legions, I suppose. No one likes being reminded of what might befall them.”
The Copper found himself joining with the “groundeds,” as Shadowcatch styled them, rather than idling in the tower, learning names and assignments as the aerial dragons came and went.
He had to admire Gettel’s setup, but he wondered if it would die with her. All business of the tower flowed through her hands, yet she was childless and only had a rather brittle-looki
ng old elf to assist her. He asked Shadowcatch what he thought would happen when she was sent on a raft out into the Inland Ocean, or whatever the Juutfod custom for disposal of their honored dead was.
“We’re in better shape than most days. There’s going to be a fight with some dwarfs. There’s an old grudge between them and the barbarian chieftains, and the dwarfs are up to their usual cattle-stealing tricks. We’ve got an upriver swim ahead of us, as soon as the melt’s full up. Plenty of salmon to eat on the way. We’ll need the oily fish, too; that cursed river is cold.”
The Copper tried to learn who had commissioned the raid on the dwarfs, but was stymied. He even took it to Gettel, but she offered only that the dwarfs had made old enemies and that while they were hungry and short on everything but determination, they had a great deal of wealth at their disposal. They’d come to the surface to steal, but not to trade.
The Copper smelled a rat, and it wasn’t one of his nightly dinner companions. As Tyr, he’d raked up reasons for enough campaigns to recognize the throat-clearing that came before the battle cry.
They exercised together a good deal. The Copper even suggested a few training games he’d learned in the Lavadome’s Drakwatch.
Had they only been able to fly he would have put them up against even the best of the Aerial Host. There wasn’t any of the jealousy, the pride that caused difficulties between the dragons of the Host. These dragons, perhaps because they no longer flew, were beyond jostling for place. They relied on and supported each other, as when the Blind Ripper had difficulty finding his way in an unfamiliar patch of open ground and Thunderwing kept up a steady rustle of his good wing for the sightless dragon to align on.
He taught them a few tricks for tunnel-fighting, like using the walls or ceiling to bounce one’s fire around an angle, or how to wedge a dead dragon in a tunnel so he’s most difficult to remove from the far side.
The Copper never learned why they left that particular day. Perhaps some shepherd spotted the dwarfs as they used the entrance to their tunnel. Perhaps payment for eliminating the bandits arrived. Perhaps Gettel finally decided she could trust him in a fight.
They stalked out in a file on a fine summer day, each dragon’s nose a tongue-flick behind the tail tip of the dragon ahead. About half the expedition was made up of the flightless dragons, led by Shadowcatch.
Dragons are speedy on the march. The Copper had learned that fact to advantage when moving against an enemy who expected him to come from the air. Their long stride and muscles conditioned to the steady exertion of flying meant they could cover ground as quickly as human cavalry and could climb mountainsides that horses could never attempt.
So they shot toward the spine of the Red Mountains at a steady three horizons a day. The winged dragons flew in food and some barrels of water flavored with wine and sweet spirits, for Gettel knew dragons had a taste for wine and liked to keep their spirits up on the march.
It was the Copper’s first experience with real evergreen woods. He’d known a few pines in the mountains in the south, particularly when he served as Upholder in Anaea. There they clung to rock crevices, lonely and twisted in the wind.
These pines were thick as the bristling hairs on a wild boar’s back and straight as Hypatian pillars, with branches sticking out in circles like wagon-wheel spokes. And the aroma! It made him feel vital and alive again. Clean and innocent as when he’d first hatched from his egg. If he could ever free Nilrasha, he’d take her to pine-woods and let her clean her nostrils with the faint turpentine smell.
As they traveled into the Red Mountains, the Copper thought he might be descending rather than ascending the foothills, for as the mountains loomed larger, their track remained level on one shoulder. A team of hominid guides led them, including a pair of humans, an elf—and female at that—and a dwarf. They were a grizzled and haggard lot, just the type to float between barbarian lands and the Empire.
For all their speed, dragons don’t take to marching, as the Copper had learned in his first year in the Drakwatch. Flying, yes. Short sprints—the surprisingly explosive dragon-dash—certainly. But plodding on hour after hour is oxen work, not dragon. They became irritable and quarrelsome.
The Copper, to divert their minds, had each one describe his favorite food. Most described the tender fats on certain quarters of beef. But not Thunderwing. Thunderwing had a strange scale color pattern, a watery blue covered in tiny white flecks like windblown snow. He claimed his favorite food was corn.
“For its indestructibility?” Shadowcatch said. “It passes out the other end much as it entered.” The others expressed similar flavors of disbelief: perhaps ground and used for breading, it makes fine stuffing, as it absorbs juices like good cotton paper.
“Ha!” Thunderwing said. “It’s my favorite because so much other game grows fat on it. Deer, pheasants, elk, oh, and the pigs. There is nothing like a corn-fed pig.” He smacked his lips.
“Well done, Thunderwing,” the Copper said. “Thunderwing, philosopher-king.”
The others found so much humor in that, it occupied them until the next meal-break on the march. They looked for excuses to point something out to their “philosopher-king.”
They idled for a day while their scouts selected an approach to the dwarf-exit.
“We have a lot riding on this,” Shadowcatch said. “These dwarfs have been an irritant to the barbarians in the north with their thefts of livestock. They must have made powerful enemies in Hypatia, or even among the Empire’s dragons, for they’re paying for this job.”
“How do you know that?” the Copper asked. Gettel had continued to be cagey about revealing their employers in this job until the last, though according to the other dragons, that had never been the case before.
“Strict orders! No eating of any kind of valuables. It’s stolen property. It all goes to the scouts, to be returned to the commissioners.”
To the Copper, it smacked of assassination. All the orders about returning stolen property might be a vomited-up smokescreen.
The dwarf-exit was well concealed inside a rotted-out cottonwood tree. Here the campaign met its first difficulty, as the hole was sized for a hominid, not a dragon. The guide-dwarf, the loser in a feud with these others, apparently, went down the hole and returned to say that it widened out just a short drop down, and appeared to widen farther into a cave that smelled of bats.
So the dragons set to work moving earth and pulling boulders up by using the bole of the dead and now uprooted cottonwood.
“With all this racket we’re making, they’ll have a good head start on us if they choose to flee,” the Copper said.
“They’re deep, if I know dwarfs,” Red Lightning said. “I just hope our trackers don’t fail us.”
“We want the dwarfs as much as you do,” Ghastmath, the human scout-leader replied, testing the edge of his oiled blade. He was gray-haired and coughed a great deal in the morning when he woke, but still hearty-looking. He had the wild and weathered look of a barbarian.
“Do you trust these two-legs, my Tyr?” Shadowcatch asked under his breath.
“I don’t trust any humans,” the Copper said.
“How about elves?” Halfmoon, the female elf, asked. She had the caramel skin of the south, such as he’d seen in Bant. Her hair had acorns in it, though whether they were wound into it or growing out of it he couldn’t say. A raven sat on her shoulder with eyes shut, as though napping.
“I’ve known only one, as a hatchling. She was kindly, but not so kindly that she saved me from a crippling,” the Copper said.
The dwarf approached. “I think we can fit a dragon in now,” he said, as he shook dirt and bits of root from his beard.
The cave smelled a bit like skunk, but that might be a dwarf-trick to keep bears out. In any case, they were soon past the skunk smell and into a cave whose floor was slick with guano. They waded through a bowed water-catch, then climbed down a short chute and reached the tunnel proper. This was dug, not natural formatio
n. There were fewer crevices for bats to occupy, so the droppings thinned out.
The Copper was excited to be in action again. The tension that comes from a mix of fear and anticipation of a fight made him feel alive in a way that he hadn’t experienced since well before his exile.
“Let’s get past the bats,” Red Lightning said. “Once we’re out of the stink, we can send our scouts ahead again.”
Their scouts examined some obscure marks at a corner. The elf picked up a piece of nail, which she identified as belonging to a boot.
“We’re in a bit of the old Dwarf-Kingdoms, unless I’m mistaken,” the dwarf said.
The Copper smelled dwarf more than guano now. They were close.
“Why do we still need the scouts?” he asked.
“I don’t mind their help, sir. They’re the ones who are paying, seems like they’re eager to come to grips with the dwarfs. Since spoils are to be shared, they’re probably along to make sure no coin gets eaten before it can be counted.”
The grizzled ex-barbarian and the elf consulted the dwarf at the next turn of the tunnel. A smaller branch tunnel led down. It had a half-finished look and was small enough that even a dwarf would have to stoop.
“Leave it,” the elf finally said, making a mark with a piece of chalk at the intersection.
The scouts found a hidden door in what looked like a piece of tunnel collapse. A pile of heavy and sharp-edged stones balanced precariously at the top made the cave-in look lethal to investigate.
“Something smells. I don’t mean the bats,” the Copper said.
Shadowcatch sniffed in the direction of the probing hominids, as though he could detect a betrayal by smell. “Right. Well then, if fighting starts, sir, keep an eye on them. Let me and Red Lightning and the Blind Ripper worry about the dwarfs. We’re used to handling the front. It’s my flanks I want watching.”