by E. E. Knight
There were other black smears of dying dragon-flame in the sky. They’d done no damage to the enemy that she could see. Even the Aerial Host dragons hadn’t caused blood to rain down. Was this the death-flight of dragonkind?
Finally a troll fell, but it took a dragon with it. They went down together, both trailing wing skin and bone in a fluttering mass as they fell.
“We’re done for,” a dragon called.
“Hunting them is one thing, but this!”
Wistala watched one of the griffaran turn in pursuit of a dragon. The graceful female dragon turned tight, her wings, body, neck, and tail working together, and even her spinal fringe doing its duty to stabilize her in the air. The griffaran tried to match it, and like a runner losing his balance, the air went out from under it and it fluttered and fell in a confused manner for a moment before righting itself.
They’re body-heavy and underwinged, Wistala thought.
NiVom and Imfamnia had made a mistake, tinkering with the griffaran. Nature is capable of perfection and adding dragon-blood means a subtraction somewhere else. They took a supremely deadly flier and made it tough and frightful, resistant to arrow and fire, but it had lost the lethal speed and maneuverability that made it such a threat to dragons. Flying against the griffaran was a contest between an osprey and a buzzard.
“Sloppy fliers. Like bumblebees! Don’t engage, hit light and dodge the counterstrike.”
“Pair off,” DharSii bellowed. “Pass word: Pair off! Just nip them at the wingtips!”
For the more experienced former warriors of the Aerial Host, the tactical advice wasn’t necessary. They’d already sniffed out these mutated griffaran’s weakness and were improvising methods for taking advantage of it.
One of the Lights—AuRon’s daughter Varatheela, by the look of it—flapped hard, her wingmate trying to keep up. She went straight at one of the glistening, reptilian griffaran. It raised its claws to meet her snout, but at the last moment she turned on her belly—a very dangerous move—and grabbed a sii-ful of feathers out of the edge of its wing as she passed.
Ungainly before, the dreadful griffaran plummeted like a duck with an arrow through its wing.
“Those edges are everything with a bird-wing,” DharSii said. He executed a dive and two griffaran swooped to follow. Extending legs, wings, tail, and even griff to their maximum, he slowed his pace in the air and they passed overhead, claws out and grasping at air. Both were marking DharSii’s course rather than each other and collided. A loose feather flew up and the two griffaran, senseless or dead, fell limp from the sky.
“I watched your brother making that move once,” DharSii said, watching with satisfaction as the griffaran struck the mountainside. “He slows himself more easily than I.”
NiVom must not have had much time to evaluate his new griffaran against live dragons. Of course, keeping secrets meant no one could tell you when you’ve gone wrong.
The trolls were another matter.
Don’t think of it as a battle. Think of it as a big hunt.
“Same thing as our hunts, only in the air,” Wistala said. “One of us draws its attention, the other one strikes!”
“I’m first,” DharSii said.
He plunged into the path of a troll and spat whatever remnants of his firebladder he could—more to get the troll’s attention than in expectation of setting it alight. He made a convincing show attack, lashing out with quick flips of his wingtips and tail in a series of blows aimed at its stalked sense-organ cluster.
The troll rolled—an unexpected move—and its arms windmilled, striking DharSii hard in the side. DharSii sagged under the blow and a wing went folded, the sign of a bad injury to the back muscles or ribs.
Wistala, silently asking the sun and spirits to have it be a clever ruse, folded her wings and dove. She didn’t open them again, even when she struck the troll a hard body blow. She ripped with sii and saa, tearing the roots of the troll’s butterfly-like wings to shreds, felt it pounding her back, but she kept her wings closed tight as they fell like bloodily mating dragons.
The troll panicked and released her and she turned as she fell away, dodged a griffaran, and opened her wings again. DharSii fell in a tight series of spirals on his good wing, heading for the unforgiving mountainside beneath the Lavadome’s crest.
Chapter 20
With Rayg and Imfamnia leading the way up, they climbed Imperial Rock.
“You’re welcome to the throne room, if you want to eat and rest for a bit. Regalia certainly has no use for it anymore. It’s cleaner than most quarters. Some of the lower levels are still a bit—damp,” Rayg said.
A troll led each of them. It held a thick piece of chain wrapped around their necks. One hard pull from the trolls just under the jaw and their vertebrae would snap.
“Each of you will do anything to keep the other alive,” Rayg said. “You won’t risk fighting us, because the trolls will throttle you. If you try to escape, I’ll get one. Which means I’ll get both of you.”
“Weakness indeed,” Imfamnia said.
“Yes, it’s better to partner with someone you despise,” AuRon said. “Perhaps you two will set the new social standard.”
Imfamnia laughed. “I’m remembering why she used to admire you.”
“What are you going to do with us?” AuRon asked.
“In memory of your kindly brother,” Rayg said, “we’ll keep you alive, but imprisoned. I need a few couples for breeding stock, after all. Someone has to produce my perfected dragons.”
Can we find the strength to die together, AuRon? Natasatch asked. I won’t be chained in the dark again.
I won’t have my offspring declawed and desensitized.
They led them up onto the gardens atop Imperial Rock and toward Rayg’s lab.
“I’m just going to do one minor operation,” Rayg said. “I’ll sever the muscles around your firebladder. Better safe than spontaneously combusted.”
“You gave us a scare, there, dragon,” the wizard continued “We weren’t really ready to move for a few years yet. I would have liked some more time to gather the rest of the sun-shard, but I have enough to control the Lavadome and see through the various veils of space and time.”
“Time? You can tell the future?”
“I’ll keep a few dragons alive, for distilling youth draughts. They won’t keep me going forever, of course, but a thousand-year lifespan should be enough for me to design an even more perfect vessel.”
I’d rather be back in the hands of the Wyrmaster, Natasatch thought.
Or the Dragonblade. He was an honest enemy, AuRon thought back
Rayg opened the door to his tower. The trolls pulled them in. AuRon saw rows of sharp, gleaming instruments on the wall. “And I’ll work on my ideal strain. The perfect amalgamation of dragon and hominid. The demen are close to the shape I have in mind. I think if I form a dragon-man and cross the two—”
“You and your breeding!” Imfamnia said. Or rather not Imfamnia but the Red Queen, speaking through Imfamnia’s body, AuRon had to remind himself. “Men are good enough for me—they learn for themselves and increase naturally.”
“They can be a little recalcitrant,” Rayg said. “Not quite as stiff-necked as dwarfs, or as dangerous as dragons.”
A gargolyle and a griffaran, both a little bloody about the wings and claws, waddled over and whispered, alternately, in Rayg’s ear.
“Well, we’ll have to do something else a little early,” Rayg said, reaching for a long crystal staff. He tapped it three times and it lit up, a brilliant, room-filling white light that seemed to clean AuRon’s skin of the troll-stink and blood from the dueling pit. The light was answered from a mini-sun above. The huge piece of the sun-shard that AuRon had once encountered in NooMoahk’s library that was resting at the top of his observation dome, warmed them like a flame.
“I do so hate uninvited guests,” Rayg said. “Best relocate the house.”
DharSii had made a hard landing on the mou
ntainside. Far above, they could just see the rim of the crystal at the apex of the Lavadome.
“In one piece?” she asked.
“My head hurts too much to count,” he said. “Check for me, won’t you? ”
She nuzzled him, griff to griff.
“Who won?” he asked, looking up.
“I think both sides retreated,” Wistala said. “We might want to think about getting off this mountain. They might come after stragglers.”
The earth heaved beneath their feet. “What’s this?” Wistala cried.
The mountain bulged, for just a moment. Then, a thunder that shook the ground beneath their feet broke out. Cracks and fissures raced down the side of the mountain. Brown clouds shot into the sky. The air shimmered with released heat.
The Lavadome rose into the air, shedding boulders and mountainside the way a rising cormorant sheds water. Pieces of mountain slid off the faceted surface and fell in ruin into the crater below.
It was not a perfect circle, as she had thought when inside the upper half. The shape, if anything, reminded her of a jellyfish with an inverted forest of streamers beneath. The projections at the bottom followed no plan; some were longer, some shorter, thicker in some parts and thinner in others, with the irregularity of tree roots, save that all grew straight down and narrowed like fangs.
Yes, perhaps that was the way to describe it. A skull, vast beyond comprehension, hanging in the air, missing the lower mandible, so downward-growing teeth formed its base.
Wistala felt stupefied by the sight. She feared that if she tried to talk, nothing but gibberish would erupt.
“AuRon is in there!” she said.
“Go, Wistala,” DharSii said. “Go to him, if you must. But I fear Rayg has won. He’s learned how to use the sun-shard to channel the power of the Lavadome. Or perhaps not. It’s still here.”
“Where would it go?”
“Another time and place. I believe Anklemere came here from it. It might have been a vessel for traveling across time and space, the way humans cross the ocean in a ship, or it might have been a prison. I don’t believe Anklemere existed as you and I do—he was part of the Lavadome and the sun-shard.”
The interior of the Lavadome was suddenly, brilliantly lit. The rational side of AuRon’s brain knew what must have happened in all the trembling, lurching, falling dust and sudden wash of light outside the tower, but his gut refused to believe that anything as vast as the Lavadome could just lift itself up out of the crater it rested in.
Rayg put down the staff and went back to work with his surgical tools, selecting them and laying them out on a tray.
“The partnership will never work,” AuRon said, looking at Imfamnia. “While you had enemies, it made sense to work together. But you’ve defeated them and secured your refuge. From now on, every gain by one is a loss to the other. You’re competitors now, not teammates.”
“That’s not—,” Imfamnia said.
“One of you is bound to kill the other,” AuRon continued. “I wonder which it will be. And who will move first. I imagine historians will be debating the subject for centuries. The Red Queen has the advantage, in that if Rayg kills one, another can take its place. Perhaps a new tree is growing somewhere, so she has a supply of copies. Unless Rayg has figured out where the new tree is. In the Lavadome, somewhere, I expect. Down below in the crystalline caverns?
“Now, from the Red Queen’s point of view, the job is much easier. She has the physical advantage, being in a dragon. Rayg is just one wizard, and right now he’s passing orders to his bodyguard.”
“Blather and rot,” Rayg said. “Sing another pleasant little ditty, AuRon, while I carve up your mate’s breast.” Rayg stepped across the room with a long, razor-edged knife.
AuRon could feel the tension in the air, like the energy stored in the Lavadome’s crystals.
“Imfamnia, ware!” AuRon shouted.
Rayg had done nothing, of course, but Imfamnia didn’t know that. She crouched and spat fire in Rayg’s direction.
He cartwheeled out of the way, showing the agility of an elvish dancer. He reached into his voluminous overcoat and hurled a handful of glittering, starlike spiked shapes at Imfamnia. They passed through her scale like arrows shot through a gauze curtain, leaving black rings at the holes.
Imfamnia howled in rage and pain. Smoke from her flame filled the room. The trolls hauled on the chains and dragged AuRon and Natasatch to the ground.
But he could still see the action. And, more important, breathe. Maddened, Imfamnia threw herself at Rayg, who jumped out of the way again, perhaps not quite so quickly as the last time. Instead of an elvish dancer, he was a supremely agile human warrior.
Imfamnia crashed into the hard stone of his tower, cracking it and opening a wide fissure in a window. Scale and bits of masonry flew. AuRon wondered who’d built the tower. Certainly not dwarfs if the base cracked from just the force of a dragon striking it.
“I think, Rayg, you overbuilt. I’m no dwarf, but it looks like you built your tower on a poor foundation,” Natasatch said.
The tower swayed but did not give way.
AuRon heard the trolls’ lung-flaps working harder in the smoke.
“Get them out!” he shouted at the trolls. They just stood there. He took out his horn and started blasting.
Imfamnia charged out of the smoke, blood smearing down her forehead, and AuRon saw her hindquarters lash around as the trolls dragged them outside.
He saw Imfamnia with the crystal staff in her hand. She hurled it like a spear at Rayg, an unnatural motion for a dragon but a perfectly sound one for a hominid. The staff broke and the Lavadome lurched in the air, tilted.
Suddenly everything was groaning and cracking in the tower. AuRon scrambled to push Natasatch out, dragging a troll.
“Rayg, when you built that tower, I imagine you thought it would always sit on a level surface.”
The Lavadome shifted back level again. The tower didn’t cease groaning, however, and pieces of masonry and jets of dust shot from the bottom two levels.
He heard a pained cry from Imfamnia.
The air above was full of whirling bats, disturbed by the change in the light in the Lavadome, AuRon guessed. Flocks like clouds circled about the gardens. The vermin had multiplied in the years of the Lavadome’s neglect.
Rayg staggered out and into the bats.
“Revenges! Revenges for our Tyr and our dark!” they squeaked, covering him in flapping wing and fur. Just like his brother, AuRon thought, to inspire such loyalty in vermin.
A cloud of bats whirled overhead like a living tornado. The funnel reached down . . .
AuRon lashed out sideways with a saa. Now that he knew where to hit a troll, it was easy to detach the sense-orb.
The remaining troll, waving those oversized, overmuscled, dragon-killing arms, staggered through the cloud of bats, its sense organ covered in a bag of brown balls of hair and leathery wings. The bats in the air around it dodged its blows as easily as they circumnavigated stalactites. It plunged off the edge of Imperial Rock with a last surprised hoot.
The tower gave a final shudder and fell in on itself blam blam blam blam! as each floor collapsed into the other. Metallic shrieks and the sound of glass breaking added to the noise.
The tower’s collapse shocked Rayg and Imfamnia out of their duel. “Hurry, before the Firemaids find us!” Rayg said.
Infamnia came to her senses, picked up Rayg, and threw herself into the air, out over the edge of the Imperial Rock. But there are disadvantages to not being born a dragon but living within one. She forgot to check her wings before trying to fly. A cut tendon left a third of one wing flapping. They both followed the troll off the edge.
“How did the bats know?” Natasatch asked.
“I imagine Nilrasha or my brother told them.”
The Lavadome belonged to the dragons again. And the bats, of course.
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Epilogue<
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Years later—not too many, at least not in the reckoning of a long life of a dragon—Wistala and DharSii established themselves in the old Queen’s Eyrie; Nilrasha’s Needle, a few roving hunters called it.
A new Dragon-Hominid alliance, the Chartered Trust—drawn up by dwarfs and based on legalistic elven political philosophy—had replaced the Empire. No one much liked the compromises, for the dragons had to hand over much of the precious metal they’d accumulated and the hominids agreed that the dragons would keep their Upper World estates and vast hunting preserves.
The Lavadome had come to rest back in the crater it rose from, though not quite as deep. With so much sun coming in, it was a cheerier place, but a great deal of work had to be done to even restore an exit where you could just walk up a path rather than do a twisting, turning scramble thorough rock and slag.
Neither her Copper brother nor Nilrasha was ever found. They certainly never came to claim their remote refuge. DharSii assumed she was still dragging him toward the last place they’d been seen heading, the river ring, when the cataclysm struck. Their bodies might be buried under the better part of what had been the Lavadome’s mountain, or they might have been burned in molten rock, or even scalded and swept away by the steaming waters.
Still, rumors persisted that they’d survived. A story gained currency among Hypatian dragon-fanciers and historians that some blighters in Bant had helped a mated pair open an old, forgotten exit to the Lavadome for a pair of crippled and grounded dragons, and showed copper and green scale to prove it. But the blighters of the savannah were notorious for creating juicy and mysterious tales to tell travelers by the fireside, in the hope of hiring more scouts to lead them to elephant graveyards, lost diamond mines, or even a former Tyr of Dragons and his family in their spacious cave overlooking the crashing sea.