The Copper dragon, Tyr of Worlds Upper and Lower, Exalted Protector of the Grand Alliance, tried not to show the pain.
The velvet darkness of the warm air over the Inland Ocean might have been that of summer instead of late autumn. The oceanic currents near the nighted shore swirled with the balm of the shallower waters of the delta country to the south. Heat rising from the phosphorescent waters, alive with tiny glowing creatures riding the warmth, caressed his wings and underbelly as he flew.
He couldn’t remember the last time he enjoyed such a perfect night for flying.
Not that there was time to enjoy an idyll. The moon had vanished below the horizon; it was time for hard flying to Sway-port, rocky fastness of the Pirate Lords on the Western Shores of the Inland Ocean. The soft air, seemingly made to beckon young dragons into the sky to chase and turn and embrace at last as mates, was cut instead by wings bound for war.
Healthy wings with intact joints, that is. The Copper dragon’s pinioned right wing was held together by cable and gear, and tonight the contraption that allowed him to fly chafed and pinched. Terrible time to come up wingfelled, with a battle to be fought.
He’d been trying for the last hour not to think about the rising pain in his wing, but a raw nerve under torn flesh would not be ignored. The pain was like an arrow tearing through his joint at each reverse of the wing. The topstroke and bottom both brought stabbing agony, alike as twins.
Having given up not thinking about the pain, he fell back to his second line of defense, as one of his captains might have put it. He tried not showing it, to keep his appearance to the other dragons in the flight line that of a Tyr eager for battle in the coming red dawn.
If the second line fell, he would just have to grimace, squint, fall back on his final cave-redoubt: showing the pain but keeping his place at the point of the long arc of battle-arrayed dragons, forty-one veterans aloft. They rode laden with fur-tufted soldiers with scrimshawed whalebone lensholders protecting their eyes against the wind and woolen scarves warming the breath entering their windburned noses. A proud Tyr at the head of his warriors, he’d rather have his wing give out and spin to his death into the sea than take one of the easier positions behind.
The throbbing came from his bad midwing joint, of course. Severed by a vicious human called the Dragonblade when he was but a hatchling, he could only fly with the aid of an artificial joint his clever, dwarf-trained thrall Rayg had created. Hearing of the long journey he proposed to undertake, Rayg had crafted him a new one. So superior—thanks to the work of the best dwarfs money could rent—was his new design in execution that after a short test flight the Copper pronounced it a brilliant improvement on the older model and ordered a feast in Rayg’s name. His wing had a much more natural motion now. He could fly farther with less effort.
Except his leathery wing skin had not yet toughened to the task of the new brace.
The Copper blamed himself for not taking the time for conditioning flights. Both he and Rayg had been distracted by other matters: the Copper with his plans for war against the pirates, Rayg with his numerous projects. Rayg had been behaving lately like a man with his brain aflame with genius to the point the Copper imagined smoke coming from his ears. Plans for improvements to the Lavadome and everything from dragon-saddles to food storage silos covered Rayg’s laboratory walls like intricately layered paper of a wasp nest.
The Copper, bound to his roving battlecourt watching training runs for the suppression of the Pirate Lords, had only taken to the air for brief periods of exercise before his daily consultations and messaging.
Now he was paying for it in blood, pain, and torn flesh. What’s a little skin off my wing? If only Nilrasha, my Queen, could see how gracefully I fly. Faster, without the constant lurching course corrections…
He promised himself a long, restful visit to his mate’s eyrie if the war against the Pirate Lords proved victorious.
Of course, if things went ill with the Pirate Lords, he might still join Nilrasha as an exile rather than as a conquering Tyr. Feeling ran hot in the Lavadome against this war, which would benefit none but their allied human provinces in the Upper World.
Dragons bleed for Hypatia’s need!
Some young, freshly fledged dragons had sung outside his private air gallery, before being chased away by his guard. He hadn’t objected to the opinioneering so much as being awakened after a long night’s work.
Of course, he’d tried diplomacy. The Hypatians sent emissaries with demands that their former colonies of Swayport cease molesting their shipping and interfering with the fishing fleets. They’d returned with a tale of laughter and ridicule.
The Pirate Lords claimed not to fear dragons, presenting trophies of a victory against the Wizard’s Dragonriders twoscore years back, when dragons who had assaulted their fortress fell before its gates.
He wondered if the pirates had considered that dragons flighting under rein and rider fought very differently from dragons directed by their own commanders and Tyr. They showed no sign of it in their brag and bluster.
Thinking didn’t help with the pain. So much flying. He regretted not accompanying the surfwater forces, but a Tyr’s place when going to war was at the head of his Aerial Host. Even at the cost of some pain. But the hurt did bring one benefit. It put him in a foul mood. Nothing like pain and the smell of blood to fill the fire-bladder and set it quivering. He was ready for battle.
Lights twinkled on the horizon. Swayport at last!
The Copper’s sharp eyes picked out the outlines of the port. From his position, a good score of dragonlengths above the water with the rocky coast to the west and the gentle Inland Ocean night to the east, Swayport as seen from the air resembled a reclining cat facing out toward the ocean, its spine in a gentle curve creating a sheltered bay. Against its belly was the port itself, a long crescent of sand beach, protected by a barren bar exposed at low tide. The cat’s dangerous—to rodents, anyway—sii were stuck out as a series of rocks perilous to mariners approaching from the north, its long tail a wave-breaking sandbar to the south.
A rocky bluff at the cat’s head held an ancient sloping fortress of double walls and three towers with its own wharf between the forelimbs. The fortress had been built an age ago by the Hypatian Empire at the height of its wealth and power, and the wharf was intended so that the defenders might be resupplied by sea if the rest of the landward settlement fell.
The town of the Pirate Lords proper had not been so solidly built. A tangle of streets and structures of wood and stone rose to the temple domes on the cat’s haunches. The Pirate Lords no longer worshipped the gods of their forefathers there, instead the temples sheltered gambling and drink and slave-auctions, the usual low pursuits of men who lived by fighting and pillage.
He’d promised to hand them back to the Hypatians with only minor scorching.
Swayport, and six other colonies on this coast like it, had long since declared their independence from the old Hypatian order. In the best of times there was trade across the Inland Ocean, at other times war, and chafing between rival fishing fleets and trading lines in every season—even the storm-months at the death of the year, when ships driven into opposing ports seeking shelter from storms were charged outrageous harbor fees or had their cargoes seized.
The Copper had listened to weary hours of it from Hypatian shipowners and whaling guild until he thought he’d dream of nothing but the price of lamp oil and salted fish for the rest of his life, before making his decision to end the pirate menace.
Well, if men couldn’t settle their differences, he’d force a peace. As the Hypatians were his allies, though sometimes they were hard to distinguish from unusually quarrelsome thralls, he’d see the disputes resolved in their favor.
He had two advantages, and he intended to use them. The first was a pretext for war that had all Hypatia seething. One of the great merchant lines—they flew a flag with blue and yellow and a fish design; the Copper couldn’t remember the name—had one of its deep-water trade boats blown off course and into the hands of a commerce-raider, who brought it back to Swayport.
Such a matter could usually be resolved with paying a small ransom, but this ship held the merchant line’s owner and family, a man of influence as wide as his belt size and deep as his purse. They put his crew to work cutting paving stones and his family in the fortress and sent the youngest son of the line back to the Hypatian Directory with a ransom demand.
The Copper, when told the tale by one of the Directory’s many skilled tongues, growled that if it was one of his own dragon families from the Lavadome. He’d be descaled if he’d pay anything with drakes and dragonelles locked up in some dungeon with excrement running down between the walls.
With that Hypatia begged for assistance in a war to humble the Pirate Lords.
His other advantage was knowledge of Swayport and its fortress, now ever so much closer on the horizon. But the moon would reappear soon—was it yet looming on the southeastern horizon? It mustn’t be allowed to frame the oncoming dragons like a shadow-puppet light.
The far-off battlements formed a false horizon against the stars. The old works must be massive, at least the size of Imperial Rock in the Lavadome, though perhaps not quite so high.
Swayport had been attacked a generation ago by the thrall-dragons from that fog-shrouded island to the north that his gray brother skulked upon, back in the days of Wrimere Wyr-master, the Wizard of the Isle of Ice. One of the human veterans of his Aerial Host, now a proud and battle-scarred Captain, had been involved in the attack.
The attack had failed strategically because the men of Swayport had learned dragon-fighting from the dwarfs, and filled the towers overlooking their harbor with war machines that fired aerial harpoons. His sister Wistala had shown him one, a souvenir of one of her own battles, when she gave a tutorial to the Firemaids about aboveground hominid fortifications and defenses. The Copper still shuddered at the memory, it was a horrible barbed thing the length of a spear, full of spurs that went in easily but wouldn’t come out without destruction to muscle, blood vessel, and organ. He’d rather take an arrow through the eye and die at once.
Worse, the dwarfs and men like the Pirate Lords attached long chains, or weights to the harpoons. The chains might catch on rooftop or tree branch and yank the harpoon out with crippling damage; the weights caused even the strongest dragon to come to earth eventually, where he’d remain, ground-bound and vulnerable, until the metal could be broken.
According to Wistala, such a device had been the death of their father.
The Copper, trying to forget his wing for a few more beats by thinking back on his conversations with the captains, both dragon and human, remembered, too, the strategic blunder the dragons-slavers had made. A scouting rider had passed over the town and took it upon himself to demand food and drink for himself and his mount. When refused, the fool angered and started burning small craft in the harbor before flying off with his dragon hungrier than ever.
With Swayport alarmed, when the dragon-slavers returned, they found a populace ready for battle. After some skirmishing, cooler heads prevailed and the dragon-slavers decided the battle wouldn’t be worth whatever could be gleaned from a poor series of villages and a fishing port.
Now Swayport was thriving and prosperous, in part thanks to their resistance to the dragon-slavers. Refugees from wars elsewhere had settled under the protection of the old Hypatian colonial fortress that had seen off the dragons once.
The Copper could now make out the outlines of the craggy fortress atop the catshead bluff. The towers made it look like the cat was wearing a crown, or perhaps had grown an extra docked ear. He glanced at his wing. It was leaking blood and throbbed, but he’d made it through the night at the head of his dragons. He’d brought the dragons to war, at the place and time arranged. The rest was up to his commanders.
The Copper swung his tail down three times.
With that, the six biggest and most ancient dragons of the Aerial Host struggled to gain altitude. The men tied and strapped on the broad dragon-backs, clad only in warm riding-furs with a few light blades, shifted position so they were boots-down, looking like storm-wrecked sailors clinging to the sides of an overturned boat.
The Copper’s Griffaran Guard closed up around him, ready to protect their Tyr in battle.
The colorful griffaran were more feather-skulled bird than noble dragoncrest, but they were fellow egg layers and ancient allies of the Dragons of the Lavadome. Though lazy and playful and argumentative around their own nests, those who dedicated themselves to the Tyr found ample mental stimulation keeping watch and guarding the Imperial family, and in return the dragons kept egg raiders away from their nests and brought delicious dried fruits and salted nuts from far away, or had their thralls bake oily seed-crackers the avians preferred above all other foods. They had long talons and powerful beaks that could tear through dragon-scale, and as they were rarely called upon to fight thought the constant stream of tasty tidbits, shiny decor, and soft nest-bedding the Imperial family gave in exchange for their service ample compensation.
Night-fishing birds cried an alarm to their kin as they passed, but Swayport itself still slept. Only a few lights glimmered in town and fortress.
A swift-winged dragonelle broke off from the rest of the formation and headed for the sandbar. There were some flat-bottomed Hypatian river barges there in the surf outside it. Not the most seaworthy craft, but the Firemaids had managed to swim them up from the ruins of the old elven city loaded with Hypatian soldiers. Supposedly the scions of some of the great old military families of Hypatia, they looked more like a rabble in half-polished rust to the Copper, but they’d do for keeping order after the attack and going down some of the smaller, darker holes with the aid of slender young drakes and drakka swimming beside the barges.
The barges’ arrival, just off the sandbar, had precipitated the flight of the Aerial Host.
Ignoring the pain in his wing, the Copper sped up as though eager to come to grips.
Tide wasn’t in their favor. The sandbar to the south had several flooded passages across it, but with the tide out, the barges couldn’t be pulled through. They’d have to be emptied, dragged across the shallow by the dragonelles, and then filled again.
Well, if that was the worst thing to go wrong in the war with the Pirate Lords, he would take it.
A blue-white light on one of the boats in the harbor danced across the deck, then ran up the rigging. A signal of some sort.
The Aerial Host had been spotted. Or perhaps the dragons coming across the sandbar had become tangled in someone’s lobster pots.
The Copper checked to see that his man-laden veterans were on the way to the fortress towers, two heading for each, and then stiffened his wings and went into a glide toward the signaling ship.
He picked out a yellow and blue banner atop the tallest mast. So they had a guard on the captured Hypatian ship ready to signal at an attempt to retake the craft.
The Copper ran his tongue along the inside of his teeth in satisfaction. Much more than that is on its way, oh pirate sailor. But now the foua pulsing in his firebladder would have to be directed at some other target.
He shot over the captured ship and swung with his tail. Lines sang as rigging parted and he felt a satisfying krrack! as his tail broke salt-dried timber. But when he glanced behind, the man climbing the mast still hung there, waving his burning blue light in circles. Sparks from it rained down toward the bay in brilliant parabolas only to die like fireflies.
Little man, think you’ll escape me?
The Copper folded his hurt wing—sweet relief!—in a quick diving turn and—
A mass shot under him kunk-twaaang! followed by chattering chain.
Clever men! They put a dragon-harpoon on the boat. Of course everyone knew the Hypatians had dragon allies; it was a sensible precaution.
“Get them—at the war machine!” he called to his Griffaran Guard, who banked to flank him with their usual effortless grace. Griffaran could literally fly circles around a dragon.
Two circled, misunderstood his order—the unfamiliar dwarfish-based word translated into Pari translated into the accents of dragontongue and then hurled at a pair of anxious users of a patois of dragontongue and birdspeech in the night was a recipe for confusion but two others darted for the forged shell of the harpoon-thrower in its reinforced pinioned mount.
The griffaran landed atop the device and tore into the men working cranks on the machine like fresh calf meat. Pieces flew messily in all directions.
The Copper saw men at the tail—or rather stern, the tail end of ships were called sterns—aiming another war machine at the dragons cutting across the bay. All this nautical terminology suggested secret knowledge as obscure as any of the studies of the sages on Ankelene Hill, but it was part of the marvel of all the devices hominids invented to compensate for physical, mental, and moral weaknesses.
He forgot the man in the rigging, folded his wings, and landed on the deck—shattering rail, machine, and men. A few good stomps and the whole mess went overside, weighted down by heavy chains and weights.
Good riddance.
Ship fighting wasn’t without its hazards. He felt several painful splinters in his sii and saa and he had lines and nets tangled in his scale. His griff rattled in vexation.
“My Tyr!” HeBellereth, his scarred old Commander of the Aerial Host called. “Are you injured?”
The Copper straightened his neck to trumpet:
“The towers! The gate! Never mind me. Keep to the plan! That fortress must be taken.”
The moon peeped opened the top sliver of its great white eye over the Inland Ocean. By it the Copper could see the barges coursing across the bay, pulled by churning pairs of Firemaids with leather-wrapped cables in their mouths.
The smell of salt—salt from the blood, salt from the water, salt from his own rended flesh, brought the night to brilliant life. He’d rarely felt more alive. The pain of his sore wing was forgotten in triumph as he watched his laden dragons alight atop the shielded towers of the fortress.
Men dropped off the hovering dragons and onto the battlements the way squirrels fell out of a tail-swiped tree. As planned, they seized the deadly war machines in the towers before they could be loaded and readied.
A mass roared out of the night. The Copper couldn’t react until it was upon him, so intent was he in watching the human warriors of his Aerial Host.
It struck him and the deck of the ship with such force the ship flopped over on its side. The ship’s timbers groaned in protest.
It was a dragon. Not one of his own, no laudi marked its wings as testament to worthiness to serve in the Aerial Host, no white stripe painted on the side of its flank and crest for the night attack showed him as friend. Nor was it a dragonelle.
A black dragon, and a huge one at that, climbed out of the mass of lines and wood, dragging it like a water dog emerging from seaweed.
This dragon hadn’t grown up in the Lavadome, and fed on stringly lightsick cattle and fatty pork. Its limbs and haunches and back ridge were meaty, and nine long horns had been left to grow riotous and wild into a barbed thatch, a barbaric look when compared to the polished horns of his own dragons.
“They said I’d be able to spot the leader with the birds and all,” the great dragon said thickly, speaking Drakine as though it were a foreign tongue.
The Copper scrabbled up onto the side of the tipped ship, fighting lines that tried to pull him under. The two dragons’ joint weight sent it rolling again and the Copper felt the snaps of masts transmit through the hull.
His Griffaran Guards fluttered about like anxious nectar feeders. The black dragon batted one away with the tip of a massive wing.
Griff flanking his jawline rattling of their own accord, the Copper tasted the air around the stranger. He reeked of whale blubber.
“I take it these are your men?”
The black ignored him and lunged forward, mouth agape. Their weight upset the ship, and they both slid into the bay before the diving griffaran could sink their claws into the stranger’s flanks. The big black struck him like an avalanche. Only the water, slowing his enemy’s limbs, kept him from being opened at the inner joint of his left saa.
A digging, rending grip caught him across the back. Not since he’d fought old King Gan in his bats’ cave did he feel such power. The only chance the Copper had was to make it to the surface where his guard could hit the big stranger from all sides. He pressed with his legs and broke the grip, losing more skin and scale in the process.
Whoever the stranger was, he hadn’t spent his youth in endless trials against other dragons. For all his strength, he fought rather clumsily, used to letting his size exhaust his prey. He should have coiled with his tail to secure his hold from the other direction.
The Copper lunged out of the water and the griffaran swooped down to meet him, letting out alarmed cries. A dragonelle circled above, crying out, but his ears had little but his only pounding pulse in them and he couldn’t distinguish her words.
He was halfway out, using the crusty creatures covering the bottom of the overturned ship for purchase, when the black’s head broke water. The black took a deep breath and shot a warning gout of flame at the frantic griffaran.
He dove again and the Copper felt teeth clamp around his tail. The Copper dug in sit and saa, but the black swam like one of the great whales beneath the overturned ship, and once again the hull rolled as the he was dragged under.
The Copper became doubly entangled in rope and wreckage. A powerful mass closed around him, and the black hauled him to the surface, its neck wrapped around his.
They came out, tresses of rope and broken wood hanging about their crests and horns.
“Call off your dragons,” the black gasped.
Strong, but not in very good fighting trim.
He tried to feel around with his saa for somewhere to gut, but the black had his legs about them like the coils of King Gan.
“Before I say anything, I’ll have your name,” the Copper grunted.
“My name’s Shadowcatch the Black, from the Isle of Ice,” the dragon said.
His brother’s island? Had the reclusive wretch sent assassins? Madness, especially since his drakes and drakka—or had they fledged—were promising young members of the Drakwatch and Firemaidens.
Two of his veteran dragons, having lost the heavy load of troops, now circled low overhead.
“My Tyr?” one called.
“Answer with aught but a recall of your wings, and I’ll tear your head off,” Shadowcatch said.
Not an intelligent dragon at all, more bulk than brain. Did the brute think he could just bellow and have the soldiers now landing on Swayport’s beaches and advancing behind flame-spewing dragonelles return to their craft? Fire burned bright at a sea wall protecting the town and in one of the towers of the looming fortress, an orange torch sending reflective flame across the comfortably warm waters of the bay. A little foggy, the Copper reckoned some of the warmth came from the two opponents’ mingled blood.
The Copper struggled in vain. He thwacked the brute’s head with his tail, but that great tangled crest warded off the weak blow; all they did was spin.
A broken mast floated among the wreckage, tangled in place like the rest of them by rigging lines.
“Even if I pass the word, it will be some time before I can recall all my forces. The moon will be halfway up.” The Copper flailed about with his tail, managed to strike the mast. He got some semblance of a grip with his tail, for once in his life grateful that his sii had been maimed in the hatchling fight rather than his tail.
“Just do it,” Shadowcatch said.
“As you say,” the Copper said, doing his best to get a better view of his opponent.
He reached with his tail, found a grip. With all his remaining strength he pulled the splintered end of the mast hard toward him, striking the black in the thinner scale of the neck where the tight coils of his own left the scales raised and turned at a vulnerable angle.
The black bellowed, gave one final tremendous pull—the Copper was sure his spine would snap under the pressure, leaving him to be pulled under by the deadweight of his hindquarters—and reared up to bite.
A pair of griffaran clawed at the black’s head, not going for his eyes but wrapping their talons around his thatch of horns. Flapping together, they pulled him out of biting range; dragon jaws are strong, their necks less so, and a third member of the Guard whipped under his chin and clawed at his throat, going for the pulsing neck-hearts.
Shadowcatch released the Copper and used weight and momentum to topple back into the water. One of the griffaran released his hold and flapped away, his companion was caught under the black’s mighty crest and struck water hard.
Water roiled and the Copper bobbed in the black’s wake.
“He’s heading out to sea!” the Firemaiden above called.
“Leave him,” the Copper gasped. He pushed the sodden, dead-eyed bird up onto the wallowing hulk of the ship. The Copper bent his ear to it, heard a faint pulse. Not sure what to do, the Copper tapped it a couple of times with his snout and gave his guard a lick on the display crest between the eyes. The bird was a veteran of many battles; he had painted marks on his beak. The Copper felt he should know his name—Mishi or something like that. Suddenly the bird-reptile’s pulse strengthened and the griffaran blinked.
“Thank you, my Tyr-awk!” it squawked, taking a deep breath and preening out sodden feathers.
The rest of the Griffaran Guard made a colorful, taloned tornado above his head as the Copper gladly left the wrecked ship and coursed for the beach, limbs tight to his sides and body writhing like a snake’s. The whole waterfront was alive with flame and cries.
The Copper pulled himself up onto the beach and shivered, chilled. He must have lost a good deal of blood between the wing and his fights. He made a pretense of issuing orders as reports came in—the overall direction of the battle could be better handled by HeBellereth.
Someone brought him a dead horse and he managed a few mouthfuls. Digestion warmed him, and he brought the rest of the meal and propped it atop the chimney of a burning building facing the sea wall so it might toast and smoke. He’d lost his taste for raw mammal flesh long ago.
He took to the air, rather tiredly and painfully, his Griffaran Guard trailing him so close they looked like a colorful extension to his tail.
HeBellereth had done a dragonlike job of directing the fight. Some fires raged below, small fast ships that might be used to put crews into the larger ships burned and a few houses wore hats of flame. The Aerial Host had spared the warehouses and workshops, fishing boats and big-bellied merchant craft. The wealth of Swayport remained intact.
Discipline. His dragons knew better than to burn a city. Reducing flimsy human dwellings to splintered fuelwood and charcoal with flame and tailswipe might be fine fun, but it wasn’t the way of the Tyr’s dragons as Protectors of the Grand Alliance. Burning homes meant the exposed humans would sicken and die, a loss of valuable thrall capital.
Alley fighting sputtered below, brief shouts and clashes that faded into chases in and out of urban gardens, tiny side doors, or narrow staircases.
The Copper dipped first his right wingtip, then his left, ignoring the newly revived pain as he sought a better look.
A young human led one of the storming columns off—at least he seemed young insofar as the Copper could judge things. He was fencepost-thin and thickly furred, his thick and shining mane flowed out from beneath helm—even the best older human warrior tended to go a bit thin as they aged. He was a whirlwhind, tearing doors off their hinges, upsetting carts placed to block streets leading to the cliffside fortress, hurling javelins uphill at the fleeing Swayport archers two full dragon-lengths and more when he wasn’t leaving crumpled foes like dropped bundles in his wake with swings of a battle-ax.
The Copper marked that he wore the furs and goggles of one of the Aerial Host. He thought he knew most of the men, but this tall, thin fellow was new to him.
The storming columns converged. Though the gates had been bashed open by tailswipe and dropped stones, the Swayport soldiery had made a barricade of the rubble, broken timber, and bent metal. The Hypatian soldiers faltered here, and were flung back by desperate spear fighting and pressed shields.
The young human picked up a fallen Hypatian banner, leaped upon the pedestal of a broken statue in the paved plaza before the citadel’s gates, and swirled the banner. He called to one of the Aerial Host crossbowmen behind, who touched arrow to smoldering match and sent a sparkling signal-bolt into the Swayport crowd at the gate.
The Copper marked that one of the attacking dragons passed low. The dragon altered course, swooped for the gate, and executed a neat spin to dodge a harpoon fired from some concealed war machine in the fortress.
Alert fellow to mark the signal and attack so quickly. He’d get a new laudi dyed to his wing for that.
The dragon landed atop the rubble and turned into a biting, clawing fury. Swayport soldiers were tossed through the air or fled the dragon’s fighting madness. The dragon leaped into the sky again as missiles rained down from the tower. A boulder struck him hard across the back and he fell.
The lanky young human, howling the raaaaah! battle cry of the Aerial Host, ran forward, armed only with the Hypatian banner. Soldiers of the Lavadome and Hypatia streamed behind.
The Copper watched in satisfaction as the storming column flowed over and through the gates, axmen foremost to break down doors. The mass of men divided, flowing off into riven portals and up the fortresses’ ladders and stairs to reinforce the men still fighting at the tower tops.
* * *
With that he watched the sun come up, while the wounded and the booty-laden returned to the waiting barges.
The resistance, what there was of it, was broken-backed by the time the last tower fell, threatened by his Aerial Host men who’d been dropped onto the higher levels and spry young drakka climbing the sides and fighting drakes from below— with the usual competition for glories and honors and tallies of bitten-off heads between the males and females, of course.
Many of the Pirate Lords had run away by secret paths, only to be rounded up by hunting Firemaids, but a few stewards and captains remained to plead with the dragons to leave the rest of the city unburned—for a city it was, a much more impressive one than the old maps based on memories of his aged warrior showed.
They’d won a rich prize indeed. The Copper had half-formed plans to carry off the valuables and leave nothing but piles of broken stones as a warning to others who might defy his emissaries, but his Hypatian allies must have their colony back.
The Copper snorted when he learned the Pirate Lords had hired three dragons to guard the skies above their cities, only to have two take flight when they looked up and saw the array of approaching dragons. The Copper wondered if the dragons had been paid in advance for their services. Only the black, cursing, took wing toward their foes.
They held a celebration, and a memorial service, the next night in the conquered fortress. The men enjoyed wines from half a world away, the dragons feasted on skewers of organ meats discreetly collected from the dead and sliced into unrecognizable hunks. The men of the Aerial Host were rather hardened to dragon tastes and appetites, but surrendered potentates of Swayport might be provoked into foolish violence.
It had been a terribly busy day for the Tyr and he was eager to fly back to Hypatia—and his mate in her fastness—but the proprieties had to be observed. Under the broken battlements the dragons gathered, awards were announced and names and deeds read into the Song of the Aerial Host that would describe the war against the Pirate Lords, as soon as a fitting one could be composed by one of the more talented dragons.
The fallen young dragon who had answered the signal-bolt at the gate was broken-backed and unconscious. HeBellereth judged he’d never fly again, or even open his eyes to receive his justly won laudi. His rider, as was the custom for the fallen in foreign lands, dispatched him with a quick spear thrust under the right sii.
The humans then lowered the head and opened the neck heart.
“Only one loss. FeMissanith, an Ankelene who fought like a Skotl. Sorry to lose him, we don’t have many Ankelenes in the host, and he was a good example to others. Until the end. Young and foolish, alighting like that in the thick of them.”
“I recall a young and reckless dragon serving in the Bant with me. Chance favored him, he recovered from his wounds, and he rose high.” The Copper nudged HeBellereth.
“Seems a waste to let all that dragon blood be spilled for nothing,” HeBellereth’s signalman-rider drawled.
“Quiet, now,” HeBellereth drawled. HeBellereth, who always bristled and sparked before a fight, spoke rather slowly and thickly afterward as he attended to his duties. The rest he could leave to his lieutenants, but he always looked after the hurt and fallen before consuming a barrel of wine and some marrow bones and sleeping the strain off.
“He’s right,” the Copper said. “Our men deserve a victory toast of dragon blood. They’ll need it for the work of loading compensation. Save us from having to open a vein.”
Someone snorted. The idea of bleeding the honored dead rankled, but the Copper needed his men’s and the Hypatians’ energy for the work of setting Swayport in order ahead, and dragon-blood would do the trick. Besides, hadn’t their allies just feasted on human corpses? “Speaking of victory toasts, I’ll offer my own blood to that young human who led the storming column in from the sea. I didn’t know him.”
The Copper hoped he had enough to spare. But he’d always had a strong constitution and was used to veins being tapped by his bats.
“That’s old Gunfer’s son,” HeBellereth said. “He was the first human boy born to the new Aerial Host after you became Tyr. Gunfer’s too old to do much but sharpen weapons and fix buckles before we fly into battle and tend wounds after; his years take him back to the glory days of that cursed Wizard on his isle. Threading dragons with rein-rings indeed.” HeBellereth snorted.
“One more thing, HeBellereth. Make sure he gets a golden storming stripe upon his wing before his body is burned.”
“I’ll paint it myself, my Tyr,” his rider said in a choking voice, cleaning the merciful spearpoint with his own silken scarf.
There’d have to be a new promotion from the Drakwatch into the Aerial Host HeBellereth had mentioned, more than once, a likely young dragon, newly fledged. His brother Au-Ron’s son AuSurath the Red had strength and wit and skill and followed orders well, even if it meant hanging back rather than being foremost in seeking glory in battle. Most reds flamed first and answered questions after. But something in him rebelled at putting one of AuRon’s into the Aerial Host.
Always too suspicious, he told himself. Well, that’s how you’ve managed to stay alive all these years, he argued back to himself.
He could think about it later.
A few of the dragons shifted uncomfortably as the human dragon riders gathered around FeMissanith for the victory toast from the dead hero’s neck. The Copper silenced them with a glare as he personally filled the first tankard and handed it to the human captain of the Aerial Host, a one-armed fellow the Copper always thought of as “Blaze” because of his red-veined nose and ruddy, windburned skin.
The second came out of his own sii at the elbow joint, one of the favorite spots for his “gargoyles” to sup. He gave that to the young human, Gundar, son of Gunfer.
The young human drank it in one lusty downing. Red overflow ran out either side of his mouth, and when he put down the cup his almost hairless face suddenly had a new beard and a mustache.
The Copper watched captured Swayport men gathering wood for the pyre. One of the Aerial Host kept a watchful eye on them, lest they try to dig out a tooth or claw.
It had been often pointed out to the Copper that odds and ends of dead dragons were worth a great deal in trade in the Upper World. Even his Hypatian allies, canny merchants all, had suggested it.
It was one thing to collect dropped scales for sale in the Upper World. Harvesting bones and teeth, hearts and livers and sinews for alchemists and craftdwarfs gave him a ghoulish shudder. No, he’d never allow that.
Once an Ankelene named CuRemom had approached him in the throne room. CuRemom, probably urged on by some dwarftrader, had calculated what a year’s dead dragons would be worth to the Imperial Treasury if properly harvested, bottled, ground, and dried. Hominid witch doctors and physicians counted dragon bits as the most potent of medicines and magics. He’d even tried it on a corpse of a dragon killed in an illegal duel, weighing each part and saying how long it had taken to properly preserve. The Copper did his best to forget the sum mentioned. He’d given the slinker a fuller appreciation for his Tyr’s disapproval of corpse-robbing by hard words and harder pokes with the tip of his tail.
CuRemom had slunked out, promising to make amends.
The Copper watched Gundar, invigorated by the blood, dance a jig. He looked to his father, short and stout and squinty, clapping along from the throng. The father was short and fair and the son tall and dark.
“Fine pup you have there, Gunfer,” the Copper said. Now the youth was whirling, his whipping hair blurring with his face as he spun.
“M-my T-tyr?” Gunfer said, kneeling at the address. He trembled a little at being recognized.
Humans! He’d never once simply reached out and eaten a thrall, and he wasn’t about to start now. Wasn’t he famous for decreeing an end to the summary devouring of the Lavadome’s thralls?
“Your boy. I marked him carrying the Hypatian banner through the gate at the head of the storming column. You should be proud.”
“Yes, my Tyr. First boy born after you took charge, so to speak.”
“Yes, I’ve heard. He’s grown up strong, even without the sun and rain of the Upper World.”
“Aye, little secret of ours, passed down from the Isle, you know. For the long winters. His mother, she worked in the nursing halls during all the fighting with the demen. Lots of blood being sloshed about as broken scales were pulled out and wounds sewn up, especially during the fighting in the star cave.”
The strangest of all the hominid races, the demen were pointy and thick skinned, almost as though they were carrying their armor with them like a lobster. They were vassals of the Dragon Empire now, contributing the Tyr’s own Demen Legion.
In the air above them a young dragon and dragonelle flew circles around the city in celebration. A Hypatian banner flew in the highest battlement of the Pirate Lord fortress. His human allies had reclaimed their own. It was soon joined by the woven scale and knotwork pattern of the Grand Alliance. Some Hypatians and an Ankelene had labored hard over the design and presented it to him in great solemnity. The Copper didn’t have the heart to tell them he thought it looked like goat tracks, but then he wasn’t of an artistic bent.
“She drank dragon blood every day while nursing, and mixed it in with his gruel when he started eating on his own. Turned him into a little hellion, but so healthy he practically burst his skin growing.”
Gunfer chattered on in the manner of humans suddenly admitted into conversation with their superiors, describing his boy’s doings as a youth in exercises and games with the Drakwatch. Apparently he’d never once been caught in a game of Fugitive Hunt.
Gundar dropped and began a wild kicking dance, spinning like a child’s toy. Then he jumped to his feet as though born on his own set of wings, landing lightly, black hair flashing—
The Dragonblade!
The youth might have been a statue cast in the likeness of the man who’d briefly ruled the dragons thanks to a foolish wretch of a Tyr named SiMevolant.
Humans and their infernal constant mating. It made bloodlines almost impossible to develop and decent breeding futile for all but the most diligent owner of human thralls.
“Yes, a very fine boy you have there, Gunfer,” the Copper said, more to silence the annoying chatter without insulting a worthy warrior than because he wanted to converse. “He bears watching.”
He dismissed the unhappy thought, saving it for another day. With that he raised his head high and watched the goat-track banner of the Grand Alliance flutter above the captured city.
