“Aye, so I’ve been told. We always rather considered it snack food, but it does hit the spot.” He chewed once, belched, and flamed, torching upward with all of the ferocious heat of his iron-smelting blasts. “Ah, that did hit the spot!”
A strong wind sliced through Verity’s jacket, the peacoat she had traded her cloak for when leaving the Spa and Bawdy House. The woolen jacket had seemed far more practical, but now she wished she had the cloak to throw over the top of it. Better yet would have been the oilskins. The rain soaked through her jacket quickly with the force of the wind, which was so fierce it thrust her forward until she all but ran down the mountain, in danger of rolling down it like a loose wheel.
At the bottom of the hill she slammed into Devent’s substantial back. “Hssst!” he said. “Be still. Do you hear it?”
“Hear what?” Other than her own breath and pulse pounding in her ears, she heard nothing.
“Sounds of battle,” Devent said. “You stay here with Smelt. I will investigate.”
“I can investigate as well as you can,” she said.
“Not from the air, you can’t,” Devent said. “Please stay here and protect each other while I determine the cause of yon ruckus. Is that my master’s voice I hear?” He cocked his head.
Smelt grumbled. “What master?”
“Casimir. I am still his apprentice and he is the master.”
“Kowtowing to another human! You might as well be back in the mines,” Smelt huffed and sparked.
“Not the master of me, the master of our mutual trade. And it sounds like he may require my help.”
This time he didn’t hop up from a dead stop but ran down the next hill and halfway down, spread his wings, leaped into the air, and soared.
Casimir meets Bobbinears, Spike Tail, and Chainy
Casimir had followed Devent and Smelt at a discreet distance, though his object was not so much to track them as to reach the lowest of the foothills between the valley and Smelt’s old home, for his own reasons.
The dragons were halfway up the mountain by the time he reached the base of the first hill, where the stone staircase began. It might be both lucrative and instructive to see the inside of the dragon’s lair, but it would undoubtedly be dangerous and besides, his ends would be better served by staying friendly with the young dragon and continuing to guide and educate him. It was not that he didn’t have a greedy side—simply that he had learned in his travels that one could only take just so much with one. Information was much more portable than jewels and gold.
His back to the woods and meadow, he searched the hillside, looking for the portal, until he felt a chill at his back and shadows fell over the land. Then it was that he grew aware that the strong wind that seemed to have come up so suddenly was not natural.
“Game, at last!” cried a voice from above him.
“It’s a man. Not allowed to eat ’em, men.”
“Do you see anyone around to report it?”
“Well, no…”
“What would a man be doing way out here? They belong in cities, bossing other folk around. That’s probably just some really delicious critter that resembles a man, sort of. We won’t know until we taste ’im.”
“That must be it! You’re so smart about this stuff!”
“All together now. Dive for your dinner!”
Casimir, seeing no door in the hillside but death in the air, burst into song before, as might be, bursting into flame.
“Three dragons went hunting, sing toora li ay!
Three dragons went hunting one soft autumn day.
They spied a poor troubadour along their way.
‘He’ll make us a meal, let’s eat him,’ said they.”
The rhyme came readily enough but didn’t actually improve the situation. Perhaps a clever but baffling riddle? Those always worked in the stories.
The dragons had hesitated while he sang, no doubt hoping to hear complimentary lyrics about themselves. Now they renewed their assault on him in a gusty swoop and he was within their singeing range.
“Wait!” he cried.
“Why should we?” the large, noisy, puce and persimmon colored one demanded.
“It’s the rules,” he said. He didn’t actually expect it to mean anything, but these dragons until lately had been drudges in mills and factories and other commercial concerns and would be used to rules and regulations, even if they didn’t like them. “You have to answer this riddle.”
“What’s a riddle?”
“It’s sort of a game,” he said.
“The kind where we bite off your head and chase it around the meadow or the kind where we see how many bite-size pieces we can make of you before we start eating them?” demanded a grubby gray-to-charcoal shaded dragon with drawings etched into his scales and bobbins inserted into oversize holes poked in his ears and eye ridges. Textile mill dragon then, powering the looms.
“Er no—the kind where I say something like, ‘You’re the most fearsome thing I ever did see. If you aren’t, may this mighty mountain swallow me.’ It wasn’t a riddle at all, and barely a rhyme, but it might summon the Lady to pluck him from this situation, so he hoped there were no literary critics nearby, and if there were, that the dragons might eat the critic instead of him.
“The answer to that riddle is that no hill needs to open and swallow you. The three of us will be glad to do that!” Bobbinears said.
Rani Romany
Casimir’s back longed to feel the breeze of a doorway opening behind him. His eyes yearned to see his new student flying down to chase away the three hostiles blatantly minstrel-menacing. But the dragons, fangs dripping with poor dental hygiene, snapped their teeth and whirled their eyes and smacked their tails together, first fanning out to surround him, then flying in ever-tightening circles. He did what any champion bard would do and cowered and quaked.
He also struck a chord on his instrument and tried to sing but his mouth was dry, and his beautifully trained voice quavered.
Then from somewhere beyond the giddy whirl of dragons a voice like a rock slide yelled, “Oy! You there, in the sky! What do you think you’re doin’ then?”
The dragons pivoted so that their backs were to Casimir. They ought to have remained where they were. Each was smacked in the chest, one after the other, with a huge boulder. Had he not seen it for himself, Casimir would never have believed stones that size could achieve such altitude and velocity.
The dragons plummeted to the ground, groaning, and Casimir looked for an escape route, but had no more luck than before, and was still standing there surrounded by fallen foes when a lumpy figure in a gaily floral ensemble of pink, purple, and yellow flowered skirt and tunic strode into the glade, the sinewy gray muscles of her massive legs bulging as she ran.
“You! Human! Your life is mine now! I just saved you.”
“Yes, yes indeed you did, Miss,” he said. Even though he had heard foghorns with more of a feminine lilt to them, he knew somehow she was female, though with trolls it was always hard to tell. They all favored floral garments which they claimed was camouflage for mountain-meadow dwellers. “At least until these monsters recover their breath and then I suppose we will both be roasted.”
“If they try anything, I will stomp them down until they can’t produce a candle flame,” she growled. “That’s a nice box you got there… er, no, not really. It looks useless, but I might be able to make kindling from it.”
She was gazing hungrily at his lute.
One of the dragons—not Bobbinears, the puce one, started to rise and the troll lifted her foot and stomped hard on his tail.
He screamed as if scalded. “You didn’t have to do that!”
“No. I just wanted to,” she said, smiling unpleasantly.
“What did we ever do to you?” Bobbinears whined.
With the troll commanding the dragons’ attention, Casimir had time to notice details about his assailants. Bobbinears’ wings were two different colors, an anemic pink closer
to the wingtip and a dirty maroon closer to his body. Recent growth, perhaps?
The middle dragon, the one who was shades of gray, all of them dingy and unattractive, wore what must have been a hundred yards of black chain looped around his middle and more tightly, around his neck, digging into it just below his whiskers. Scales on either side were broken and serrated.
The third dragon lashed his tail dangerously. He was the most fearsome of all, as his massive tail from spine to triangular tip was heavily studded with spikes, pointy side out.
Casimir, who was a professional assessor of other peoples’—make that creatures’—state of mind, judged that despite the dragons’ ferocious demeanor, they remained slaves in their own and perhaps each others’ eyes, still expecting blows, abuse, and orders. Either that or they were just mean and had mutilated themselves to show how tough they were. Which would be bad. For him. If the troll proved to be even meaner, that might not be any better. For him.
Where was a hole in a hill when you really needed one?
Chapter 15: The Fourth Aunt
Dr. Epiphany Hexenbraun, Alienist
The woman stepped down from the southbound train from Ablemarle. The ride had been a long one, but any weariness she might have felt was disguised by her authoritative, somewhat dramatic manner and purposeful movements as she hailed a hansom cab to take her to the castle.
She wore spectacles on a chain that bounced them on her chest when she moved. She wore what could best be called robes rather than a gown—layers of long tweeds woven in subtle patterns of brown lit with red, orange and gold shifting with each step or rearrangement of her arms, upon each of which she wore a silver bracelet. Her hair was gathered into a loose braid three inches above her waist and pearly shell disks hung from her ears. They emphasized her face, but couldn’t do much to enhance it. She was old, the hair striped in shades of gray, silver, and pewter, with an undertone of the brown it must have been in her youth. Her eyes, hooded by wrinkled lids, sparkled at her welcome committee as if they were funny.
“Greetings, eminent gentlemen. You sent for me? I understand you have a problem with some dissident dragons with which, perhaps, I might offer some assistance?”
“And you are?” Malachy Hyde demanded with a raised eyebrow and his haughtiest tone.
“Dr. E.E. Hexenbraun,” she said, and from a pocket in her cloak extracted a stack of calling cards, handing one to each council member. Beside her name on the card it said, Alienist.
“Thank you, madame, but you are mistaken,” Volodny Seik told her. “Dragons are not the problem. It is the sad case of our beloved niece for which we require professional scientific intervention and your signature on a commitment document.”
“Ah, forgive the misconception, please, but I overheard you speaking of a contest for dragons and I simply had to commend you on your perspicacity at proposing such a solution.”
“You think it’s a good idea, then?” asked the Minister of Subject Pacification, not stopping to inquire how she could ‘overhear’ them while they were in council chambers in the middle of the castle. She might or might not have overheard, but in this he committed an oversight.
“I do, I do!” she said, her voice slightly tinged with an Ablemarlonian accent, making it sound a bit guttural. In truth she was Argonian born and bred and lived in a bungalow built on the long-dissolved foundation of rock candy where once lived her ancestor and predecessor who had the ability to see into the present even when it was not actually present. In a way, Dr. Epiphany Brown (her real name, in Argonian) had a similar talent.
She had been fetched back to Queenston by a mysterious attorney, a friend of her great-great-great-niece Romany, who asked her to come and lend the newly-appointed young queen Verity (another niece with another couple of ‘greats’ attached to the relationship) the benefit of her accumulated wisdom—and talent. Before she could buy her ticket, the summons from the council arrived. N. Tod Belgaire had told her about the dragons but at that time he had not known, apparently, that Verity had fled the capital leaving the royal assistant, Malady, as regent. That the council wished Malady gone was an even more recent development. She needed time to get the lay of the land, as it were.
“Dragons adore contests!” she declared.
“They do?”
“Oh, yah. Contests appeal to the competitive nature of the beasts so necessary in their makeup as apex predators.”
“Are you an expert on dragons then, Madame?”
“Doctor,” she corrected. “I have studied these creatures a great deal, yah. I have a few little ideas about your situation here.”
The council tried in vain to get the doctor to offer her services out of a sense of patriotism, but she was having none of it. She was frequently in the service of the Ablemarlonian government, which paid her well for her insights and advice, and although she had the Ablemarlonian King’s permission to assist the rulers of her native land, she was under no obligation to do it for free.
She bargained and bartered with the council, who kept trying to return the conversation to committing the regent to the Queenston Asylum for the Magically Muddled, but the Minister of Finance’s carriage horses had disappeared from their traces only two days before, so he advised his fellows the investment might be a bargain after all if following the woman’s advice could produce results.
“Half now and half when the situation is mended,” he said. “The dragon situation. The Malady situation, we will pay for when the girl is safely incarcerated.”
Dr. Hexenbraun smiled enigmatically. If she came to the sort of understanding with the dragons that would solve the dragon issue, or even partially solve it, the council would be unwise to welsh on their agreement, since she would then have connections among the dragons. Of which there was no shortage, and scarcely any space between them. The city smelled so strongly of sulfur that people began to wear kerchiefs over the lower halves of their faces when they went out. Piles of fewmets made sidewalks and streets into obstacle courses and standing near anything tall exceptionally hazardous to one’s health.
Some of the dragons seemed to find this amusing but others—most—were too hungry and too bewildered by the problems of unemployment to care about the human reactions.
But the worst of the situation to many Queenston residents was not simply the menacing dragons loitering and looming around the city. No, the worst was the silent factories where nothing was being produced, no flames erupted at timed intervals. No exports filled the docks waiting to be exported in exchange for imports, which also failed to fill the docks. The country was temporarily financially embarrassed and couldn’t afford even more of a trade deficit.
“Yah, a contest, I think. But first, one for the humans. You have here the scientists and the metal smiths?”
“Yes.”
“Hold your contest to see which of them can build the best and most functional artificial dragon to replace those no longer working.”
“Make another dragon? Are you mad? The city is overrun with them!”
“Not the kind I have in mind. The superior, mechanical dragon. Show the creatures that they can be replaced. Perhaps that will encourage them to return to work, you see.”
The ministers exchanged dubious glances but… “It could work.”
While the preparations were underway for the contests, Malady was introduced to Dr. Hexenbraun as a court physician.
Her first meeting with the doctor was little more than an introduction. The peculiar woman had shaken her hand—not so much as a curtsey! —and said, “Good afternoon, young lady. I am to be your doctor. You must tell me all of your secrets, you see, and I will tell you what you think about them.”
That sounded no end of daft to Malady, but once she started talking she found it quite a relief to talk to someone who was not a man, was not a competitor, since the doctor was neither young nor even especially attractive, and listened to her as if what she had to say was worth listening to.
By the second meetin
g, Malady was prepared to give her an earful. She wore one of the tiaras Durance had brought her.
Epiphany Hexenbraun was not slow on the uptake. “Lovely piece, my dear,” she said.
“Thanks awfully,” Malady replied, making a minute adjustment to its position on her hair, “The dragon brought it.”
“The dragon?”
“Yes, I have an admirer who is a dragon. The uncles don’t believe me, but these days, with the creatures fouling the entire city, I don’t know why it would stretch their credulity. Except—” she said, chewing her lower lip, “it may not be the dragon part that they have trouble with. Maybe they just think nobody would like me well enough to bring me expensive gifts. They certainly haven’t been very generous with them.”
“But the dragon is?”
“Yes, he brings them to me from his hoard. He understands the value of the proper jewels to a royal ensemble. He insists that I am a real princess. Imagine! Little me!”
The doctor nodded appraisingly, casting her eagle eye over Malady’s peaches and cream complexion, her butter-yellow shining curls, her glacial crevasse blue eyes, and the rest of it, finally searching her face and taking inventory of her features again. “Ya, well, he may be onto something, your dragon. They are very wise creatures, at least in their natural state. He may realize that you have been chosen to lead your country.”
“He’d be wrong then, wouldn’t he? Verity is the queen. I’m just the regent as it stands. She’s the chosen one.”
“There can be more than one,” the doctor said. “And the way I hear it, you were chosen twice—once by Ro—Verity’s mother, and once by her. A great honor, of course, but hardly all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Malady asked.
“Oh, that depends on you, of course. Some people, if they’re feeling that others think they’re special, are burdened by the thought that there are expectations they must live up to.”
The Redundant Dragons Page 16