Read Dragon Fate: Book Six of The Age of Fire Online

Authors: E.E. Knight

Dragon Fate: Book Six of The Age of Fire (35 page)

BOOK: Dragon Fate: Book Six of The Age of Fire

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Chapter 18

D
harSii found Gettel and the tower surrounded by corpse fires.

There’s a distinctive smell to a pyre of recently living flesh. It was appetizing, at least to a dragon. He passed low over the fires—not much could be distinguished from the burning remains, but the hooked swords and twin-point spears favored by the demen were lying all around the tower.

For a dreadful moment he thought he’d arrived too late, but then he saw a dragon-neck poke out of the top of the tower and survey him.

Gettel wanted the news from the south, first. She already knew what had happened in Juutfod. When DharSii relayed the news of the Copper’s abduction, she looked genuinely grieved.

“I’ll miss him even more than the groundeds,” she said with a sigh.

“He was carried into Hypat. He may still be there, for all we know.”

“To think, he was on his way to rescue his mate. Now he needs rescuing, too.”

“I’m not so sure,” DharSii said. “I thought he made it awfully easy for his enemies to know exactly where he was. It might have been a tactic to bring dragons over to his side—you saw how easily he did that with the Aerial Host.”

“The demen didn’t know about the groundeds,” Gettel said. Or the dwarfs. That was a nasty surprise for them. Turns out dwarfs hate demen more than they do blighters, humans, dragons, or elves. I think they expected a few spiritless, crippled dragons. Couple of blasts of fire and then off with their heads. Somebody told them a half-truth or a bad tale. They knew, I think, that six or seven dragons were out, some of them moving south, so they took their chance. Expecting to murder tired, landing dragons, I suppose.”

There were barbarians eager to go to Hypat on what they called a “mighteous sack,” if he understood the tongue correctly, but there were several problems that seemed impossible to surmount, at least in any length of time that would make a difference.

First, the barbarians fought on foot. They had very few horses and pastureland in their crags and mountains was rare and reserved for more productive sheep and cattle. The lumber-cutters had a few, their warlords and merchants who could afford them rode, but the ordinary yeoman who picked up spear, sword, and axe when battle came marched and fought on foot. So to assemble even half of them at the northernmost stretches of the Old North Road would take days, and they would show up ravenous and thirsty.

Which was another difficulty. Barbarians on a raid ate as they went, barging into chicken coops, pigpens, vegetable patches, and granaries for their food. If they did that on the trip south to Hypat, he wondered if it was in the power of the local thanes to prevent violence—if the local thanes could be prevailed on to supply a horde of barbarians in the first place, especially with so much in doubt.

What he needed was some bit of magic to transport them south, like flying carpets from the old Hypatian tales of the sorcerers of Silverhigh.

Shipping was out of the question. The demen raid had wrecked everything bigger than a rowboat. Standing and running rigging had been cut, masts and spars chopped down, there were holes knocked in some of the hulls. There were some lighters left, and the small fishing boats that happened to be out among the lobster pots when the demen attacked, but not enough to float a force large enough to make a difference. Though there were probably glory-hunters who would go, just for the chance to die fighting in an important battle. A death in battle gave you some sort of special key to a hall of heroes in the afterlife, in their reckoning.

The fastest way was to fly them down, of course, but that presented greater difficulties than sailing them. A fully grown, healthy dragon could carry perhaps six men in flight, fewer if they were large, fewer still if they had heavy weapons, shields, and armor. Every barbarian went into battle with a huge shield and at least two weapons in case his favorite failed, so DharSii calculated it would be a strain to carry even four. On an all-day flight, two.

He could just see the dragons of the tower flying to Wistala’s aid with twenty or thirty warriors and arriving too tired to fight.

“Why don’t we swim ’em down?” Thunderwing asked.

“What’s that?”

“One time I was fishing, and I got bit by one of those big black-and-white beasties. They eat seals and so on. Ever seen one?”

“No,” DharSii said. “But I’ve never spent much time around oceans.”

“Well, doesn’t matter. Point is, they weigh a fair bit. This one must have been sick or blind—it thought I was food and started a terrible scrape. It tried to drag me down and drown me—that’s a terrifying experience. You’d do best to avoid it, Stripes, but I dug into its side good and got some vitals out and that was the end of that. Soon as I had some air in my lungs, I grabbed it by the tail and hauled it to shore. Lost a bit to some sharks, the louts, but there was still more meat than I could eat.”

DharSii reckoned himself a clever dragon, but he seemed to be missing the point. It had happened before, too. Sometimes he was so lost in mathematics and parabola that he missed the greater whole.

“You’re the one they call the philosopher-king?”

“Thunderwing philosopher-king. They make it rhyme, like a hatchling taunt.”

“You’re saying pull them down, like rats clinging to a rope after a shipwreck? Humans don’t last long in cool water, let alone cold, and the coastal water here is quite cool.”

“No, I mean we load them like bales of wool into coasters and barges and such. Haul them down on rafts on our backs if we have to.”

DharSii froze for a moment. “You’re—you may have something. But their craft are mostly wrecked.”

“All the gear and stuff for those wrecked ships, the rudders and masts and lines—they’re to make the boat sail, correct.”

“Those that aren’t rowed or pulled, yes.”

DharSii’s warnings fell on deaf ears, until refugees appeared from the south.

The demen were taking slaves and carrying off anything that could be pried up and dragged out. They made a clean sweep of Quarryness, leaving behind only bodies of those who fought.

“We will go south, but not as conquerors and pillagers. We will come as friends, so that north and south face this new threat together.”

“I suspect they’re moving on Hypatia, too.”

“They have to. The demen breed like rodents if there’s adequate food. It’s an elegant system: When food is plentiful, demen halls teem with life. When it runs out, they eat each other until their numbers match the current food supply. Most other creatures have their population adjusted by predators or disease. Demen self-regulate.”

The boatwrights and shipfitters went to work with a will. The challenge and uniqueness of the task appealed. Even Seeg’s dwarfs joined in. At first the locals were suspicious and hostile, refusing to share a tool or tell them where they could find more cordage. But once they saw how neatly their clinker hulls overlapped and the tight staving, they were gradually won over to the dwarfs’ two-prow design.

“It’s so in the underground rivers we can go either direction if there’s no room to turn,” Seeg explained. The men of Juutfod followed the Hypatian tradition of putting a woman on the prow—their unsleeping eyes maintained a steady vigil ahead for ice and shoal, protecting the men with maternal instinct—but the dwarfs carved dragon heads, or wings, or a
griff
-and-tail design that looked like an elaborate battle-axe, and soon there were so many requests for the art that the dwarfs were working days on the clinker hulls and nights on the figureheads.

The grounded dragons were more used to swimming than the others, so they made the best “drak-kaar” pullers, as the barbarians called the queer hybrid craft.

DharSii learned another advantage to the craft when he observed some sea trials with strong-swimming volunteers filling the hulls. With no mast and sail, the ships vanished into the Inland Ocean mists where warm southern water met cool northern air, and disappeared over the horizon more quickly than a regular sailing vessel would. They could still hug the coast for safety and travel unnoticed; without the aid of powerful—and rare—optics the whole fleet could be mistaken as whales at a distance. To aid in this they rigged weathered and gray canvas covers on the hulls, which would both keep out the rain and disguise the outline.

Among the tower’s stores were old helmets from the Wyrmaster’s days. His warriors had fixed dragonhorns on their heads, or high ridges in imitation of a male dragon’s crest or a female dragon’s fringe. The barbarians who could speak Parl well enough to take orders were given those helms to wear, so dragons could instantly recognize a man who could understand instruction. The others made fun of the outlandish headgear at first, but were soon scrounging for dragonhorn of their own.

“Learn some Parl, then, and you’ll get helmets, too,” DharSii advised his translators to tell them. “Even if I have to saw it off my own crest.”

“There’s one last thing you can do, Gettel,” DharSii said. “Send out your weather-dragons. Because of the seaworthiness of our craft—or rather the lack of it—we’ll have to do the last horizon or two in darkness, coming from the north. I’d rather do it in daylight so we might circle around the city and come with rain from the south. That way we could strike up the Falnges.”

“Will do, DharSii.”

“Don’t let the aerial dragons get carried away and come in ahead of is. Just before or once we’re engaged would do nicely.”

“Most of them have experience in properly joining in on an attack going back to the Wyrmaster’s days,” Gettle said, eyes bright and young with the prospect of action. “Don’t you worry, Stripes, we’ll see to it. You know, Stripes, I’m an old woman, been around dragons all my life. I’ve never ridden one into battle. Too late now, I suppose.”

“I am relieved to hear that you concluded that. It’s cold, often wet, always dangerous. Illness would probably make you unfit for riding after a day in the air. And that’s before a single blow is struck in battle.”

“I can’t heft anything much more than my soup spoon. Even what’s left of my teeth wouldn’t hurt a demen.”

“Best you stay here. Isn’t there a rumor that Varangia had a clutch? She’ll need someone keeping an eye on her food and metal supplies.”

“Ahh, she can take care of her own, easy enough. You say I’d probably drop dead like a frozen sparrow before we even reached Hypat?”

“That would be where I’d bet my foreclaw,” DharSii said.

“You talked me into it, DharSii. Always hated the idea of having my body rolling around in the surf till the crabs find it. Death in battle and a pyre lit by dragonflame—that’s the way for—”

“I was trying to discourage you, Gettel. You’ll die. Pointlessly. You have years left here.”

“You’ll read the will and all that. See that it’s carried out according to direction. It’s in that legalistic high-church tongue the Hypatians use. I only get one word in six, but the local altar-circlers vouch for the wheretofores and puffery. You’ll find I’ve been generous to my dragons.”