Dragon Rule (19 page)

Leathery flaps covered her eyes. She whipped her neck up hard and heard a satisfying splat as she crushed it against the wet ceiling.

Blinking the sting of the creature’s blood from her eyes, she saw her brother still fighting the chains around his throat.

For the first time Wistala had a clear look at their tormentors. They were batlike creatures, furless with thick, spiny skin. Evilly smiling jaws bristled with teeth and wide red eyes shone under cavernous ears. A thick mat of hair remained on the head, trailing down between the eyes to an upturned nose.

The legs, short but powerful, ended in quadruple claws. Long arms trailed veined webbing; the wings extended down the sides of their bodies to the knee joint.

“
Pah!
” one screamed at her brother, spitting a green globule at his good eye. He lifted his chin and managed to catch it on the
griff
, where it sizzled briefly.

Wistala spat back. Her fire ran across the ceiling of the bath, dropped to a pool, and spread atop it like a flaming leaf, adding to the steam. The creature vanished in the fire, its flaming body plummeted.

Striking with her wing, she brought down another. It tried to right itself on the slippery floor but she stomped down hard with a
sii
.

Just as suddenly as they’d come, they were gone, leaving hooked chains behind. And the bodies of their comrades.

She helped her brother out of the choking chain.

“We’ll need someone to extract these fishhook things,” Wistala said.

“Thank you,” the Copper managed.

Once the alarmed Griffaran Guard, Shadowcatch, and some servant thralls had attended to them, they ordered a thorough search of Imperial Rock for the rest of the assassins.

Their wounds were frightful—the hooks had left holes under the scale. They easily could have lost one or both neck-hearts in the struggle.

“How did they get into the Imperial Rock?”

“Flew—they’re dark, we don’t have a permanent guard circling in the air. The Drakwatch and Firemaids guard the entrances and lower passages. I expect they just flew in quietly and entered through someone’s balcony.”

“They must know their way around well.”

“Perhaps they explored,” Wistala said. “Late, when all are asleep.”

“I suppose they could have been mistaken for one of my bats. But not up close. These are out of the ordinary.”

“They must have been hidden by someone in the Imperial Rock. Fed, watered, washed out—until we were together and alone.”

“Perhaps they just attacked me to keep me from defending you,” Wistala said.

“Then why aren’t there three chains—or four? No, they brought two sets of hooked chains. Enough for two dragons. Someone must have seen us go off to the baths together and called them in.”

“I see being Queen is not all feasts and viewing hatchlings,” Wistala said.

“We’d better see about these wounds,” the Copper said. “Some of my own bats can take care of them.”

Wistala didn’t care for her brother’s method of treating wounds—washed out with bat spit, ragged flesh snipped away by sharp little teeth, all to the tune of cooing and animal slurping sounds in between “ ’ere, under tha’ scale” and “oh, this bit’s good, wha’s next?” But she had to admire the pleasant numbness and the clean scars.

At last, she had evidence of a conspiracy. But nothing on who might have sent the extraordinarily malformed bat creatures to kill them in the first place.

N
iVom was up to something. The Copper could smell it on him.

His Protector of Ghioz had invited him to enjoy a few days of sunlight in the Upper World “observing a show of Grand Alliance strength designed to enhance our prestige and intimidate possible rivals on our eastern borders,” or so the Firemaiden messenger told him.

After the usual courtly pleasantries and cheers welcoming him—and a small contingent of the Griffaran Guard and of course Shadowcatch 00 welcomed him to the only Protectorate that could begin to rival Hypatia—NiVom had some thralls pull away a canvas covering to show him a map worthy of the Lavadome map room itself.

Instead of a map, he’d constructed a model using sand and paint and some sort of adhesive—sugary egg yolks, the Copper suspected. It wasn’t quite up to the standards of the the map room in the Lavadome—rescaled to show the extent of the Grand Alliance, and it seemed, if NiVom would have his way, soon needing another improvement—but it showed the topography from the air in impressive detail, with blighter settlements dotting the Bissonian Scarpes like tiny black beetles. In fact, the blighter positions were beetle carapaces, now that he looked closely.

“Ghioz has long wanted these mountains. They are rich in precious metals and ores.”

“But this is the heart of the old Blighter Empire,” the Copper said. “Something about the age of wheels and chariots. I don’t remember the history, but wouldn’t they have mined these mountains out long ago?”

“After a fashion. But the dwarfs have a method of mining using water forced through nozzles. It scrapes away the mountainside like you cleaning your scale of dirt with your tongue. Valleys thought long since cleared of gold have been richly harvested of fresh nuggets, according to the dwarfs.”

Shadowcatch ground his teeth in impatience behind. The black dragon had no interest in technical talk.

“I wonder,” the Copper said, after a moment’s thought. “I’ve looked at the map. It’s a vast stretch of mountains, and far from Ghioz. How will you possibly manage it?”

“As you know, my Tyr, I’ve never been afraid of hard work,” NiVom said.

“Why a war? Ghioz must be rich in goods it can trade.”

“We’re still rebuilding after the conquest.”

“You’ve had years, NiVom. Let me guess. Imfamnia is spending all the tribute on parties, baubles, and gold paint.”

“No, if you must know, we’ve been working on this.”

With that he called to his linemen, who ran to their places at drag ropes and hauled off, their taskmasters counting the step.

There was a groan, the high bowstring
twang
of lines parting, and the sailcloth covering of the mountain’s face fell away.

The Copper looked across the valley, into his own reflection. NiVom had chosen their vantage well. He wondered how the people in the city below felt, under the unblinking stare of a monumental dragon.

You wouldn’t call it lifelike, but it was eerily accurate. Except they’d given him two normal eyes—perhaps modeled off of NiVom. It did look rather like him about the eyes.

“Of course, it’ll go green eventually,” NiVom said. “Copper only looks this way for a few years, unless the tarnish is removed.”

“I’ve no words.”

“A thank-you in artistic tribute, for forgetting old grievances and remembering old friendships. Imfamnia herself corrected the model to better match your appearance.”

While he was glad of a chance to praise NiVom, he refused to do the same to his mate. She’d be tolerated, nothing more, until she died a natural death. A natural death that couldn’t come a moment too soon for the Copper.

 

Just behind the vanguard of scouts, the Copper marked some unusually big soldiers. Ghioz men tended to be small and wiry; these were great hulks.

“Who are they?”

“That’s the Grand Guard,” NiVom said. “Five hundred blighters of third generation, raised on dragon-blood. Those are dragon-scale on their shield, too, mine and Imfamnia’s. A project the Red Queen started and I completed. She called them the Queen’s Terrors, but that’s a bit too battlefield-poetry for me.”

“With whose blood?” the Copper asked, astonished at his own mental calculations.

“Mine. It was taxing. But blighters thrive on dragon-blood even better than your demen. And they breed more quickly, allowing for culling and development of promising lines.”

The Copper thought about the grim business of “culling.” Well, there could be no feast without a few bullocks slaughtered.

The expedition snaked through the landscape, an ever-unfolding pavement of bobbing heads, reminding the Copper of a slow-motion King Gran. The power in its coils was latent until they wrapped around you.

NiVom appeared to be displaying to his Tyr just how soundly he could manage an expedition into enemy territory. From the air he pointed out prescouted campsites, chosen for defensible ground and access to firewood and water, and rivers where canoes laden with supplies were crawling in procession so that the expedition might always have three days’ worth of food ready for the eating.

“I doubt even old SiDrakkon could find fault with your preparations and execution,” the Copper said, referring to their perpetually gloomy and irascible commander on the expedition into Bant that they’d served together back in their days of Drakwatch service.

NiVom bowed at the compliment.

“But will the blighters give battle?” the Copper asked.

“I venting-well hope so. All this flying for nothing but a march,” Shadowcatch said.
Tchhk tchhk tchhk
, added his teeth.

NiVom ignored the outburst. “They’ll do what blighters always do. Divide. Some will take to the mountain passes, and they can be dealt with later. Some will throw in with us and look for the Ghioz order to set them above their fellows. Some will grudgingly accept our presence and sneak sand into the corn and flower baskets when they can. A few tribes will band together and give us one good fight. Were they all to unite, of course, that might give us difficulty, but blighters never seem to manage that.”

“The same might be said about dragons,” the Copper said.

“At other times, of course,” NiVom said.

“Let’s hope so.”

There was something about an army on the march, perhaps all the orchestrated chaos, like an improvised song, that set the Copper’s hearts to beating quickly. He had a weakness for this sort of thing, he had to admit. It was so much more invigorating than dull sessions with NoSohoth in the Audience Chamber. Being out under the sky with an army, especially one as disciplined and well-directed as this was wonderful.

A doubt crept in. This army was well-directed, anyone could see it. Might NiVom be displaying his prowess so that whispers would begin that the Tyr had a rival. There was never any question in the Copper’s mind that NiVom was a brighter dragon than he. The only mark against him was a tendency to fly from difficulty or submit to circumstances. Sometimes a Tyr needed the obstinacy of a cave-caught bear to get results.

 

NiVom chose what looked like bad ground for the crossing into Old Uldam. The river ran narrow and swift here, and there were high ridges on either side and thick vegetation and driftwood along both banks. It seemed like good country for archers and spearmen.

“It looks like we’re about to fight our first skirmish, my Tyr,” NiVom said. “Our scouts are across the river and into the disputed lands. They say there’s a party of blighters sheltering in the woods behind that ridge. I’m sure they see us.”

“Do you think they mean to contest the crossing?” the Copper asked.

“We have a footbridge in two pieces. You see it ready there. I can swim out and join them, and we’ll be across in no time under a canopy of shields. They won’t be expecting that. Then the bridge can be expanded with rafts to bring the carts across. The river is narrow enough here for lines from side to side to hold the bridge against the current; that’s why I chose this spot.”

“Provided you can hold the far bank. Otherwise your bridge may disappear downriver as fast as those leaves.”

The Copper watched NiVom and his men go through the crossing as though practicing a military evolution. He saw a blighter go loping away from the riverbank carrying what the Copper first mistook for a short, leaf-shaped stabbing sword but turned out to be a fish when he sat the blighter tear it in half with his teeth and throw away the tail.

NiVom sputtered and gasped in the current, but with some difficulty and the aid of his tail joined the two ends of the wooden raft bridge with metal pins extracted from behind his ear. Fleet-footed linesmen secured it on the other side to thick trees and brawny axmen moved driftwood out of the far landing under NiVom’s attentive direction.

NiVom’s Grand Guard crossed first, interlaced shields layered together like oversized dragon scales held over their helms against a rain of arrows that never came.

Archers and crossbowmen followed. Artillerists dragged a cart across and set up some kind of war machine that NiVom claimed could hurl clusters of long, dartlike throwing-spears over the top of the ridge.

The Copper took his word for it. NiVom was a clever engineer.

“That was the tricky part. We shall be safe, now. Downriver is a landing for the canoes. We’ll move there and be established by nightfall; the rest of the march will be irresistable once the base is secured.”

Frantic activity on both sides of the river held the Copper’s interest for a little while, but his stomach began to growl. He was just wondering how to properly phrase a request to one of his Griffaran Guard to go and get him a fatty joint from the soup pots, when a bump appeared at the ridge above the crossing.

The bump resolved itself into the outlines of two dragons, walking to either side of a tall blighter carrying a taller banner on a staff.

The Copper recognized the banner—the knotwork-and-goat-tracks design of the Grand Alliance. It gave him a turn for a moment: Was this some scouting party returning?

No, there was no mistaking that gray dragon with the regrown tail. His brother AuRon. And that near-orange-striped fellow, DharSii. He’d turned up unexpectedly again, like the musked stone in a game of Nose-Hunt.

What sort of game was his brother playing?

He forgot his empty stomach, called the Griffaran Guard, and flew to the other side of the river. He alighted just behind NiVom.