Dragonforge da-2

by James Maxey

  "Ah," said Burke, his head turning toward the sound of the opening door. "If it isn't Bitterwood himself."

  "I told you it isn't," Pet said.

  "You look like hell, Pet," Burke said over the rims of his spectacles. "I could still tell that was a silk shirt when I met you. Now it looks like something I wouldn't let my dog sleep on."

  Pet looked down at his torn and mud-caked clothing. Burke and his daughter gleamed in comparison. Anza looked especially immaculate, dressed in soft buckskin, her jet-black braid showing not a single stray hair. If there was a bathtub somewhere in this hellish city, she must have taken possession of it.

  "I've been working," said Pet. "Helped close the eastern gate."

  "Good," said Burke. "That will slow the earth-dragons."

  "I know," said Pet. "But, I have to admit, I'm worried. What good is having a gate when the sun-dragons can attack from above?"

  "Follow me. I'll show you what's going to be our wall in the sky." Burke pulled the heavy case off his shoulder and handed it to Pet. "Carry this," he said, then walked off briskly, with a confident stride.

  Pet hurried to draw beside Burke once more.

  "A wall in the sky?" he asked.

  "Patience," said Burke. "You're going to be the first to see it. Cold tonight, isn't it? I think we may see snow. Maybe not today, but tomorrow. I feel it in my knees."

  "It feels warmer out here than it did in the barracks," said Pet.

  "Ah, yes. The wench house. Not exactly a palace, is it?"

  "Wench house?"

  "It actually has a more derogatory name that I choose not to use in front of my daughter. Tell me, Pet, can you spot the difference between male and female earth-dragons?"

  "Not really."

  "Neither can they, most of the time. Their sex organs are hidden away in a cloaca. Until they're about ten, all earth-dragons are raised on the assumption that they're male, because the species has a gender imbalance of almost ten to one. The vast majority are male, and it's not until the females go into their first heat that their true sex is discovered. Despite their rarity, the earth-dragons don't exactly treat their females like royalty. They're locked away in the wench house during their fertile period where they're brutally used by the males until they produce a clutch of eggs. Each female lays over a thousand eggs, then is essentially done. She won't be fertile again for another seven years. She goes back to the normal duties and lifestyle of a male, even taking part in the brutalization of those poor souls in the wench house, though, of course, they aren't capable of fertilizing anything."

  "That's horrible," Pet said.

  "Is it? It's easy to judge earth-dragons," said Burke, leading Pet up a steep staircase to the top of the wall that surrounded the city. "They reproduce through violence. They eat their own babies. Most of them are dumb as dirt. It makes killing them feel less like murder, doesn't it?"

  "I suppose," said Pet.

  "You don't sound convinced," said Burke as they walked along the wall. He gave the guards silent nods of greeting.

  "I'm sorry," said Pet. "I'm not feeling up to contemplating deep moral questions right now."

  "War isn't the time for that," said Burke. "Morality becomes what you carry in your gut."

  Burke stopped, surveying the surrounding landscape.

  "Give me the box," he said.

  Pet handed him the heavy case and watched as Burke nimbly flipped clasps and slipped open hidden compartments. The box transformed into a tripod and stand for a large owl figurine with giant glass eyes. Burke leaned over to stare into a small window at the back of the owl's head, fiddling with knobs on the owl's wings. Anza waited a short distance away, her arms crossed, her hands tucked into her armpits.

  Pet looked at her and gave a wink. "Cold enough for you?" he asked.

  She glared back at him. Pet wasn't surprised his charm was failing, given the ratty state he was in.

  Burke said, "Anza doesn't speak."

  "Oh," said Pet. "Is she deaf?"

  "No. She hears better than my dog. She's just not said a word her whole life."

  "Oh," said Pet.

  "It hasn't held her back. Anza has other ways of getting her point across." Burke adjusted one more knob and said, "Ah, there we are. I've tied a ribbon in a tree down the north road, almost exactly one thousand yards distant. A thousand yards is a significant number. Do you know why?"

  "Why?" asked Pet.

  "Because sun-dragons rarely fly above 700 yards. Sky-dragons usually cruise even lower. It takes a lot of energy to fly. There's a safety element from being well above the landscape, but there's a trade off in the energy it takes to get up there."

  "That's still pretty high," said Pet. "Almost half a mile."

  "More significantly," said Burke, "it's about twice as high as most arrows reach. A strong man and a good bow might get 500 yards range. It's nothing to laugh at, but it means that dragons always command the high ground in war. They can drop on us anything they can carry, and we can't stop them. They might not have accuracy on their side, but they don't need it. They can fly a thousand passes over this fortress, confident that not even one arrow can reach them. If only one in a hundred of the war darts they drop kills someone, what does it matter? They'll whittle us down. If we take shelter in buildings, they drop flaming oil, or send in the earth-dragons while we're cowering. It's how they destroyed Conyers, and that town was much better prepared than Dragon Forge. We had food stocked, plentiful water, and bows in the hands of every man. Yet we were slaughtered by the thousands, and only three sun-dragons failed to return from that war."

  Burke cast his gaze toward Anza. Pet looked back to find she'd unwrapped the bundle she'd carried. Propped on the wall in front of her were three bows. At least, they looked something like bows. They were shorter than a longbow, only four feet tall, and crafted from freshly-forged steel instead of wood. At the tips of the bows were the grooved oval disks Burke had showed Pet when they first met. They served as pulleys and were strung with a thin, braided, metallic cable.

  Anza grabbed one of the bows and took an arrow from the quiver on the wall. Burke pointed toward a distant tree that was almost invisible in the darkness. Anza drew the bow, her well-defined muscles bulging as she first pulled the string, then slackening as the pulleys held the force of the bow while she aimed.

  She opened her fingers and the arrow simply vanished. The bowstring snapped back into place with a loud, musical zing!

  Burke leaned over to look in the owl.

  "Ooooh," he said, sounding sorry. "Close. You hit the limb, but missed the ribbon."

  Anza frowned.

  "Take a shot, Pet," Burke said.

  Pet lifted one of the bows. It wasn't as heavy as it looked. The metal wasn't pure steel, apparently, but an alloy with something lighter. He placed the arrow against the cable and was surprised by the resistance of the first few inches of the draw. Then, suddenly, the remainder of the pull was effortless. He held the bow at full draw without any strain at all.

  He aimed at what he assumed was the target tree. He couldn't see where Anza's arrow had hit, and definitely didn't see a ribbon. He released the arrow and was startled by the speed it launched into the air.

  Burke clucked his tongue a few seconds later.

  "You missed the whole damn tree," he said. "Shot over it, in fact."

  "I can barely see it," said Pet.

  Burke bent up from the owl, stretching his back. "Neither can I without mechanical assistance. Anza can be grateful not to have inherited my family's eyes."

  "Her mother must have good eyes then," said Pet.

  "I wouldn't know," said Burke.

  "Why wouldn't you know?" Pet asked. Immediately, he regretted asking the question. Burke's relationship with his wife was none of his business.

  Burke didn't seem offended by the question. He scratched the gray streaks of his hair, looking thoughtful. "After Conyers fell, I found good reason not to think of humans as any better than dragons. The survi
vors of the battle, the refugees, did terrible things. We'd gathered from distant villages, drawn together by Bitterwood's tale of injustice. He believed if we would all put aside our differences and stand together, we could change the world. We'll never know if he was right. We never did put aside our differences. We were squabbling among ourselves before the dragons came. After they left, the squabbles turned to bloodshed. They call it the Lost Year. For twelve months, there was no peace or safety as man turned on man in an orgy of reprisals, pillaging, and rape."

  "Oh," said Pet. He wasn't quite sure how this answered his question about Anza's mother, but it seemed like something that Burke needed to get off his chest. "I'm sorry," he said.

  "The only time I saw Anza's mother was in the ten minutes my tribe took to burn her village" Burke said. "Two of my brothers raped her. I didn't stop them. It was a bad, lawless time, a world turned upside-down."

  Pet didn't know what to say.

  "Somehow, knowing that my own blood was capable of such atrocities made me feel as if Conyers had been doomed from the start. What's the point of fighting monsters if we ourselves could be so inhuman? How much history have you learned, Pet? What do you know of the time before dragons?"

  "I didn't know there was a time before dragons," said Pet. "I mean, I know a little of the Ballad of Belpantheron, where the dragons defeated the angels, but I assume that's only fairy tale."

  Burke shook his head, as if he was sorry to hear these words. "A thousand years ago, there were no dragons. I know this because I am a descendent of the Cherokee, the true natives of this land. We had already had our land stolen from us once, by men. When these men lost it to dragons, my tribe vowed to remember the true history of the world. We called ourselves the Anudahdeesdee-the Memory. We remembered not only our history, but the history of all nations before the time of dragons."

  "Is this how you know how to make all these things? These bows? This owl?"

  "Over time, we lost much of our knowledge," said Burke. "Some men say our memories were a curse. Anyone who knew the great secrets, such as how to make gunpowder, always met misfortune, as if some evil spirit was out to destroy the memory of these things. I've only inherited a handful of secrets: an education in alloys and engineering that's but a shadow of the knowledge mankind once possessed."

  "But why are these things secret?" asked Pet. "Why didn't your people share them with the world? Maybe men could have done more to free themselves from the dragons."

  "Perhaps. But, having watched my brothers turn into savages, I've despaired that men would only use the knowledge to hurt each other. The only good to have come out of my stand at Conyers was Anza."

  Pet looked at Anza. She looked back at him with an unflinching gaze. He had the impression she'd heard this story before, and didn't enjoy hearing it.

  "If you didn't know her mother, how did she come to live with you?"

  "As things calmed, our tribe resumed trading with villages we'd made war with only weeks before. Rumors came that the woman my brothers raped was pregnant. My brothers made jokes about it. Months later, I learned that the woman had died in labor, but her baby girl had survived."

  Burke looked at his feet as he relayed his story. Behind him, Pet heard the zing! of the wheeled bow as Anza took another shot at the distant ribbon.

  "I knew… I knew as a half-breed, a child of rape with her mother dead, the girl would be raised as nothing more than a slave. I had no children. The only woman I ever loved died at Conyers. So, I left the Anudahdeesdee forever. I stole Anza from her cradle in the dead of night. I fled north, until I reached a place where no one knew my name. I ran as far from war and death and memory as I possibly could."

  Zing! Anza let another arrow fly. The silence that followed was deafening. Burke looked out into the darkness with weary eyes. He sighed.

  "In the end, I couldn't escape. I, of all people, should have known you cannot outrun the past."

  Zing! Anza's fourth arrow flew out into the night. Seconds later, she let out a triumphant grunt.

  Burke leaned over to look into his owl.

  "That's my girl!" he said. "Right into the ribbon!"

  Anza sat the bow down, looking satisfied and smug.

  "I assume she'll be leading the archers," Pet said.

  "You assume wrong," said Burke. "She's the only one in this fort qualified to copilot Big Chief."

  "Big Chief?"

  "My giant."

  "Your giant what?" asked Pet.

  "Patience," said Burke. "You'll see it soon enough. For now, though, I do need someone to lead the archers. It's taken me three days to make three bows, but now we've got the process worked out and the machinery geared up. Tomorrow we'll have another dozen. The day after, fifty. I'm going to let you drill and train the men, Pet."

  "Me? I'm not the best shot in the world."

  "No, but you're a man who knows who the enemy is. Until someone rediscovers the formula for gunpowder, these are the most dangerous weapons any man will put his hands on. I want them aimed at dragons, not other men."

  Pet bit his lip, afraid to say the thought that instantly flashed through his mind.

  "What?" Burke asked, reading the unasked question in Pet's face.

  "You seemed willing to aim your weapons at your fellow men the other night. You had no problem with killing the gleaners."

  "We weren't killing them because we hated them; we were killing them out of strategic necessity."

  "They wound up dead all the same," said Pet.

  Burke reached out and put his hand on Pet's shoulder. "The fact you feel this way makes me trust you all the more. I knew what you were made of the second you stepped to the defense of that poor gleaner. I told you, morality comes from the gut. I think you've got the guts to stand on this wall when the dragons come and, more importantly, after the dragons fall."

  Pet wasn't certain that Burke had the right man. However, Burke was a genius and Pet wasn't a genius, so his gut said to trust the man's judgment. He gave Burke a nod of acceptance, and then pulled another arrow from the quiver. He gave Anza the most charming smile his chapped lips could manage before taking aim once more at the distant tree.

  "I'll split your arrow before the night's out," he said.

  She smirked.

  He never even hit the branch. But he did eventually hit the tree.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine:

  At Dawn, As the Dragons Came

  The following day, Pet joined Burke in the task of auditioning archers. There were three thousand men inside the fort, but finding fifty with eyes sharp enough to meet Burke's criteria proved challenging. Burke had sent Anza out to a rust heap about 700 yards away. She stood atop it, holding a dinner plate over her head. A large letter was painted on the plate. The plate was nearly a foot tall, but Pet could only see the letter as a smudge. He was glad Burke was apparently satisfied enough with his performance the night before that he wasn't being asked to read the letter.

  After they'd tested a hundred men and found only two with sufficiently sharp eyes, Pet said, "Burke, I know you're a lot smarter than I am. But, isn't this test tougher than it needs to be? We're fighting dragons, not dinner plates."

  "True," said Burke. "But your arrows are going to be mere specks at killing range. And while dragons are big targets, they only have a few body areas were a single arrow is going to knock them from the sky. If you can't see where your arrow's going, you can't adjust your aim."

  Pet nodded. "Makes sense."

  Another candidate stepped up, a young man, boyish except for a wispy blond mustache. He was five feet tall at most, but looked wiry and tough. Pet felt there was something eerily familiar about the boy. The youth gave Burke a crisp salute.

  "What's your name, son?" Burke asked.

  "Vance," the young man answered.

  "Where you from?"

  "Stony Ford, sir."

  "Never heard of it. That one of the towns where Ragnar gave his 'join or die' speech?"

  "No, sir," s
aid Vance. "It's down the river a spell. My brother and I heard about the rebellion and came to take a stand, sir."

  Burke pointed toward Anza in the distance. "You see my daughter out there?"

  Vance shielded his eyes from the sun. "Yes, sir."

  "What's she holding above her head?"

  "Looks like a plate, sir."

  Burke gave an approving nod. "And do you see something painted on the plate?"

  "Yes, sir. Some kind of marking."

  "Good. It's a letter. Can you tell me which letter?"

  The boy shook his head. Burke looked disappointed.

  The boy said, apologetically, "I don't know one letter from another. But it looks like this." The boy traced a serpentine shape in the air.

  Burke smiled. "That's an 'S,' boy. And you're an archer now."

  The boy gave a wide smile.

  "You won't regret it, sir. Me and my brother were the best shots for miles around."

  "Excellent. Where's your brother? What's his name? Let's get him to the front of the line."

  Vance looked solemn as he reported, "His name was Vinton, and he's dead, sir. Vinton was charged with killing the disloyal gleaners the night we took the fort. We found him dead from an arrow shot. The two fellows he was running with were also killed. One had his head sliced clean off."

  Pet felt a chill run down his spine. Now he knew why the boy looked familiar. The rapist with the scratched cheek was a ringer for this boy if you added five years and thirty pounds.

  "Sorry to hear it," Burke said. "I'm sure Vinton was a good man."

  "Yes, sir," said Vance. "One of the best."

  Burke gave a nod toward the ladder leading down the wall. "Go down and join the others. You'll be given a bow. Later, we'll start target practice. Welcome to the sky-wall."

  Vance couldn't stop smiling as he climbed down the ladder.

  Pet felt the need to say something about the boy's brother.

  "Don't say anything," Burke said, reading Pet's mind.

  "But…"

  "But the past is past. As of now, Vance is your brother-at-arms. What happened before this moment is of no importance."