Dragon Rule (3 page)

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 throught 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.

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 Parl 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
sii
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, tressed 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.