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Authors: E.E. Knight

Dragon Fate: Book Six of The Age of Fire (9 page)

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

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He heard snoring dragons, saw piles of wine casks, still wet at the bungs. From one apartment above he heard the tussling, flapping sound of mating.

AuRon shook his head. Dragons mating indoors, in secret. He followed his nose until he found Natasatch’s scent. It was in one of the bigger spaces at the top, what used to be an old promenade where viewers could look down on the horses or into one of the rings. There was a nice sort of arching gallery giving her a view of the city. He found an empty apartment, passed through to the balconies, and slipped into Natasatch’s temporary residence from behind thick draperies.

He heard voices, human and dragon. Natasatch was saying something about scale-polish to a human with a head shaved and tattooed with a design that reminded him of interlaced dragon-scale. When she finished, he used DharSii’s quiet throat-clearing sound to draw her attention.

Natasatch let out a frightened squeak and raised her neck, ready to spit fire.

He met her gaze, let one
griff
twitch. “Sorry to startle you, my dear.”

“Au—FuThazar, whatever are you doing in my chambers?” Natasatch said. “I commissioned you to find a cache of old Hypatian coin to give as a gift to Imfamnia, not to intrude on my chambers.”

“I will withdraw, but first I must speak to you, Protector,” AuRon said.

“Ah, well, as long as you’re here,” Natasatch said. “Begone, you,” she told her servants. “Not a word to the Sunlight Queen of her gift. I want it to be a surprise, and if it gets spoiled you’ll hang upside down on my balcony from dawn to dusk.”

The servants scuttled off.

AuRon felt a stab at her casual mention of punishing her human slaves. He’d seen a good deal of cruelty in his life, and rather than becoming hardened to it, he’d grown more sensitive over the years. Not that any dragon dared admit a missing patch of scale for any of the two-legged races.

Worse, his mate looked as if she’d been living in the wild, and not living well at that. “You look thin,” he said. “Are you eating?”

“Very well. I get the best calves-livers in Dairuss,” she said. “It’s not doing you much good. Have you been ill?”

“I expect it’s Blood for the Empire.”

“What in the air is ‘Blood for the Empire’?” AuRon repeated the phrase to make sure he’d not misheard.

She cocked her head, as if he’d asked her why her scales were green. “I forget how long you’ve been away. Blood for the Empire. We’re bled regularly. There’s good coin in dragon-blood, especially from the rich Hypatians, and in extracts sold on the other side of the Sweep of the Ironriders.”

Fine. His mate was looking sickly and aged so some shriveled old Hypatian galleon-master could frolic with his fifteenth wife until he impregnated her.

“So, they have an Empire that spans two-thirds of the world, and they have to bleed you to acquire gold to eat?”

“It’s so much more than that, my—old friend,” she said. “Excavation projects need dwarfs. Roads must have surveyors and shorers. Armies to maintain order. They’re rebuilding the old Sailing Market so it can circle in the Inland Ocean once more, as in Hypatia’s glory.”

“I thought the point of the Empire was safety for dragons. You look like you’re about to topple, and you’re young and healthy. What happens with older dragons?”

“Less is expected of them, of course,” she said. “NiVom is brilliant. He thinks of everything.”

“I wish my brother were still Tyr. He had less brilliance and more sense. I don’t remember seeing any starved-looking dragons in his—”

“Hush! Are you flapping mad? Don’t speak of him! Every important dragon from the Sun Empire, and a few from the Dark, is here. The place is thick with
griffaran
and the Queen’s spies.”

“The birds are stuffing themselves with fruit and nuts, as far as I can tell,” AuRon said. “As for spies, half of the dragons here seem to be slipping on and off one another’s balconies or meeting in hillside glades. They’re going to keep busy reporting who is engaging in a quick tryst with whom. What sort of dragons are these? They’ve got the morals of mead-addled blighters at a spring mating festival.”

“Would you like a look around my sleeping chamber? I assure you, it’s cold and empty.”

“No colder than mine,” AuRon said.

“We could change that.”

“Were we to join, I’d prefer it to be up in the sun and clouds, as proudly mated dragons. I’m not about to join in some dreadful scuffle like a furtive blighter.”

“You know very well that’s impossible, my lord.” Sometimes she used the traditional honorific to poke fun at him when he grew pretentious. “Were I to take someone up, it would be remarkable. Every gossip would try to figure out who it was. Unlike some dragonelles of my acquaintance. It’s more strange if they aren’t cavorting over the city during a celebration, with Imfamnia setting the social tone.”

“Pity,” AuRon said.

“Will you remain long? Perhaps you could return to Dairuss. You could hide in the high pass.”

AuRon looked at the astonishing layout of tools for dragonelle preparation. There were knives and files and hooked cutters for scale, paints and dusts and glues and brushes and rags and mysterious pointed sticks for decorating scale, and vast quantities of a reddish clay.

“What’s all the clay for?”

Some of Natasatch’s good humor returned. “You really are out of date. It’s a wing-skin soother and tightener. A folded wing should look smooth and supple. It’s hard work, standing there with your wings stretched until it hardens. Then you do it again with them folded. Takes the better part of a day.”

Hard to think of his fiercely practical mate transformed into a vanity-ridden frivol. “I don’t suppose I can interest you in forgoing the clay treatment and instead eating a brace of ducks.”

“And spoil my appetite for the party?”

“Is there any way I might attend?” AuRon asked.

“It will look strange if I arrive at the Grand Feast with any but a Firemaid from my uphold. But there are so many dragons invited—I’m sure you can lose yourself in all the comings and goings.”

“I’ve no wish to speak to anyone but you there. But I am famished. I’ve been flying hard these past ten days.”

“Perhaps—perhaps we could find some time together. Again, with all the pairs of dragons at this feast. Stay about the fringes, and for the Four Gifts’ sake, don’t come near me when Imfamnia’s about. I think she suspects you and I communicate in secret.”

She quieted, and switched over to mindspeech.
I’m unsettled, AuRon. Imfamnia and NiVom are up to something with this feast
.

But what? Whatever would they try, with so many of the leading dragons of their Empire in attendance?

I may not show it, but I’m so glad you’re here. I feel safer with you about
.

AuRon warmed at that. He felt the pulse of emotion returned across their mind-link.
Very well. I’ll keep to the fringe of the crowd
.

“You’ll need to blend in,” she mused aloud, half to him and half to herself.

Now it was his turn to cock his head in astonishment. “That’s my specialty.”

“No, with the Empire throng. Paint and such.”

“You are the expert,” he said, wondering if she had thralls just to run tools back to the worktables while her cosmeticians worked on scale.

She gestured with her tail at a bowl set high up, out of reach for a hominid but accessible to a dragon-neck. “You’ll need some coin. I keep some silver around for guests who want a polite mouthful. Take some of that.”

“Where does it come from?” AuRon asked.

“What does that matter?”

“You know how I feel about this whole Dragon Empire. Organized robbery.”

Natasatch stiffened. “There were some bandits in the mountain pass—you know, the high road above the capital. I found their camp, burned out the bandits, and recovered a good deal of livestock and bundles of fabrics. The Merchants’ League gave me half the worth of the recovered goods in exchange. This was two years ago, and a good deal of it is left. As Protectors go, I don’t live high. Our cave is still much as you remember it.”

AuRon felt ashamed, both by the explanation and by her use of “our cave.” To him, their cave was back on the Isle of Ice, the shelf where their eggs had been hatched. Her use of the phrase suggested that her most happy days had been spent with him in the Protectorate.

Humans, elves, and even dwarfs, he supposed, had elaborate notions of love. They all had elaborate rituals for courting and aligning with prospective mates, oftentimes with extensive involvement of both families. Blighters looked on wife-gathering much as a herdsman tries to increase his herd—it meant more wealth and power. He’d heard stories from the ancient black dragon NooMoahk, his mentor after the loss of his family, of dragons in the distant past tending more toward the blighter view than the human. With several females surviving hatching to each male, powerful males sometimes accumulated what NooMoahk called a “harem.”

Dragons used the word “love,” and it meant something that was oddly more practical, yet deeper than the human notion. A male dragon did not obsess over the object of his affection or write odes to her various perfections, but he usually admired the one he wanted for his mate for specific, practical reasons. Once mated, it was his duty to provide and, if necessary, to lose limb or life defending her refuge.

With Natasatch he admired her courage in adversity. He would have given in to despair had he spent most of his youthful years chained in the dark, as she had. He liked her wit and her open-mindedness to his ideas that dragons could—
must!
—do better, lest their kind fall into twilight and then vanish from the world.

Her expression of concern, desire for him to be there, troubled him. She was a dragon who was hypersensitive to trouble, the way you could feel a thunderstorm before the dark clouds appeared. Perhaps it was all those years in the dark hatching cavern on the Isle of Ice.

He scooped up a mouthful of coin.

“I’m grateful,” he said, meaning so much more than the money.

Even in the predawn, dragons were already preparing themselves for the feast. AuRon saw a mass of torches in a mountain pasture, and assumed food preparation was under way. He glided down to investigate, wondering if they would accept a trade of manual labor in hauling whatever sides they were smoking in exchange for a hearty meal.

It turned out that the flames weren’t from pits for charring and smoking flesh, but banks of light for thralls already at work decorating.

He scanned the waiting crowd of dragons for familiar faces—their own hatchlings all served the Empire in one capacity or another, and they would quickly recognize him from his twice-stumped tail. Not recognizing anyone, he landed and settled his wings so that they tented and changed his outline as much as possible. All eyes were on the workers, mostly men and blighters, shaping and prepping scale.

Some of the cosmeticians were creating outlandish, colorful designs on their dragons, working paint and shaping scale into swirls or spikes or what looked like vines or jagged bolts. He recognized some iconography from the Lavadome. He knew enough to recognize a toothy Skotl sigil from the pen-quill-like flourish of the Ankelenes.

At the other end of the spectrum were dragons just giving scale, teeth, ears, and wings a good cleaning and oiling.

AuRon opted for something in the middle. He joined a line for an artisan who was deepening faded greens on older females and pulling misshapen scale from male dragons’ faces, making them look neater, sleeker, and wind-friendly.

“I’m Jussfin, your honor,” the human said when AuRon’s turn came, in decent Drakine. He had the squat body and heavy shoulders of a Ghioz stonelayer. “Some skin-painting, sir?”

“Make me look a little heavier and more imposing, if you can,” AuRon said.

“Of course, sir.” He gestured to some colors and a blighter assistant started to pour paint into a pan.

“So, where will you be seated, your honor?” Jussfin asked.

“Near the roasting hogs, I hope,” AuRon countered.

They fell into chitchat. AuRon decided to try his story, that he was a small-time trader who flew into the Far East selling “medicinals.” He’d been east a lifetime ago with the Chartered Company in its traveling towers and could describe the markets of the East from memory.

“Ah, so you’re an aboveground most of the time,” Jussfin said.

“I’ve always been a traveler,” AuRon said.

AuRon tried to imagine what a dragon of the Empire might possibly talk about with someone painting his body, and finally asked if he knew what color the Queen would be wearing.

“Black, I hear,” Jussfin said.

“No,” the dragon next to AuRon countered. “I’m sure it will be red, to commemorate the battle. Yellow highlights.”

AuRon deployed DharSii’s famously noncommittal throat-clearing, lest he fall into a conversation with this dragon.

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

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