“You’re done,” Jussfin said, coming to his rescue. “No scale makes for light work. I appreciate the rest. I feel up to pulling misshapen scale from the most elderly dowager now.”
He surveyed the results. Jussfin had taken his natural dark stripes and enlarged them, adding a bone-colored outline around them to make them more pronounced. He’d dusted his wings with something that made the skin redder and a little reflective.
They settled on a price. AuRon argued only a little; Jussfin had named an amount lesser than any other he’d seen pass up and down the ranks of dragons. He ended up giving over two golden coins and telling the artist to never mind about the change.
“Many thanks, your honor,” Jussfin said. “I think you’ll find the roast pork at its most succulent to the north, by the overhang and the waterfall, your honor. Keep well above and behind the Queen’s dinner-path.”
AuRon made a special effort to rise early the day of the feast. He wanted to find a few hiding spots, should there be guards checking names or who knew what sort of introductory rituals. Still, he was not the first dragon aloft—there were messengers and a few dragons of the Aerial Host up and around, and more than a few males and females returning in the predawn gloom from assignations. Keeping to the shadows, he explored the monument to draconic vanity looking down on the city of Ghioz from the Red Queen’s old palace.
He’d been here before and had nothing but unhappy memories of the place. He’d been told that the side of the mountain had been reshaped several times; it had first been carved into the likeness of some kingly dwarf or other, for the foundations of Ghioz were as a dwarfen trading post at an important river junction. As the city changed hands and empires came and went, the face on the mountain changed races as well. When AuRon first laid eyes upon it, it was the classic, sharp-jawed visage of the Red Queen looking down upon Ghioz.
Now, with a good deal more carving and the addition of a great bronze snout and copper scale gone green with age, it was a dragon’s face, snout tucked toward breast and watchful eyes looking southwest, somewhat in the direction of the Lavadome, he supposed.
Vanity. Monuments to power. If any of the Empires had given thought to the temporary nature of the mountain’s appearance, they showed no sign of it.
AuRon wondered if deep in his hearts, his Copper brother didn’t miss the feeling of being atop the pinnacle of power represented by that carving. He frequently said that NiVom, the most intelligent dragon he’d ever met, would make a better Tyr in any case, but AuRon wondered. It seemed NiVom maintained his hold only by the exercises of Imfamnia, whom no one dared call the “Jade Queen” these days.
They were still at work on the mountainside, it seemed. Scaffolding and signs of digging ran from the eye like a twisting wooden tear. There were no construction noises this morning, however; all the thralls were hard at work preparing for the feast.
AuRon explored the works and found his answer among the ironmongery and picks. The builders were at work on the chamber behind the eyes, fixing two great lenses and fire-braziers in the manner of navigation lights he’d seen on the shores of the Inland Ocean. His own Isle of Ice had had such a fixture, though much smaller, on the cliff above the docks. AuRon guessed that when the great braziers were filled with hot coals, the light would be refracted by the lenses and intensified so that it might be seen a horizon away.
Still, among all the clutter he could watch events below. There were several hiding places amid the lumber and tunneling and sheets for keeping the dust down, and he could wriggle out and escape around the lenses if the other access points were blocked. Yes, it was quiet and safe. Warm even, out of the weather. He’d been afraid that he would have to cling to some windswept outcropping again.
For that matter, Wistala sometimes questioned DharSii about his former expectations when he’d been part of the Lavadome’s elite in his youth. Did Wistala wonder how her face would look, glaring out over Ghioz?
The feast would take place in the gardens beneath the carved mountainside and palace, above the city of the Ghioz yet below the palace of this NiVom who called himself the Sun King.
The garden was pleasantly arranged, designed to rest at a midpoint between nature and artifice. Watercourses had been routed, waterfalls conveniently placed for refreshment, stones shaped to provide comfort, and a circular track laid out with fresh wood chips that the thralls would follow bearing their platters, sometimes two or four at a time, up from the cooking pits.
AuRon had taken his blighters to war with less planning and organization. Though for all the beautiful surroundings and the glittering dragons, the whole spectacle disgusted him more than it impressed.
AuRon, with a fine view of the feast from his spot between the eyes of the dragon-face, had never seen such waste. Entire bullocks were slaughtered, with just the blood, loins, and liver extracted to be turned into delicacies, leaving hundreds of pounds of meat and marrow for who knew what purpose. The myriad thralls wouldn’t be able to eat a tenth of a tenth of it. His old blighter tribe, with their great herds of cattle, wouldn’t have done that with the stringiest old billygoat, down to little but skin and horn.
Once the feast was in full swing and the sweating wine-runners dropping and replaced with fresh legs, he ventured down to get a better look at NiVom and Imfamnia.
Jussfin was right—she was in red with yellow highlights. She had blackened her wings as well and jewels and peacock feathers ran along the edge of her spinal fringe. He had to admit, she looked splendidly wealthy, though perhaps not healthy. Thin and bony and nervous. A few of the females in her coterie had aped her coloring, though perhaps in less vivid red or shining black.
NiVom had done little to his white but give it a clear polish so it caught, alternately, sunlight and gold from the great damask rug he lay upon for the feast. A pair of
griffaran
stood at firm attention on high perches to either side of him, wings outstretched as though signaling. AuRon thought their pose looked imposing but uncomfortable; they must have done a good deal of exercising to keep the pose hour after hour. Still, they were relieved by other
griffaran
who adopted the exact same outflung-wing stance.
Imfamnia was much more the socialite, roaming around from group to group, exchanging brief words and issuing constant orders to her staff of thralls for more.
Natasatch had been seated a little behind Imfamnia, up toward where Jussfin had claimed the best pork would be. AuRon saw only some overweight dragons there, some with imposing battle-scars. Jussfin may have had the Queen’s coloring correct, but he was wrong about the pork.
A distinctive curve and a thickening of the blade at the outer edge caught his eye. He’d seen that shape before—the fireblades! The distinctive curved swords with their heavy, chopping rise near the point, an arc that imitated a dragon-tooth.
Yet the white turbans bobbing were those of the warriors of the Sunstruck Sea. AuRon’s one great act of generalship while serving as the protecting dragon of the blighters of Old Uldam had been to turn back an invasion by these selfsame white-turbaned warriors. He knew, by blood and bone and kidney, that they’d been human. Yet only a fool would fail to recognize blighters under the white turbans.
Well, perhaps not a fool. Perhaps it was only meant to fool someone who was ignorant of the difference.
They formed a great crescent and waded fearlessly into the dragons. From AuRon’s vantage, they looked like a stream filled with cherry-blossoms washing into rocks. Some fetched up against the rocks and clustered there, stuck, while others flowed around until they fetched up against more stones downstream.
Dragons fell with astonishing speed. The turbaned men may just as well have been slaughtering cattle in a pen for the speed of dragons falling.
The men yelled as they charged, a high wail. Some beat gongs and cymbals to add to the clatter and confusion. Clever. Dragons have good hearing, and a cacophony of sound confused their senses more than rain or darkness would have.
Rather than rallying, forming a line, and fighting, the dragons scattered. The old and fat ran, the younger dragons took to the air—and just as often fell, struck with bolts fired by deadly-looking crossbows held by pairs of missile-men.
NiVom turned the slaughter around, and for that AuRon admired him. As the wave washed toward him, tightening into a spearpoint as it neared, he threw that thick damask bedding around his neck and over his back and charged, calling to the scarred dragons behind. Crossbow bolt after crossbow bolt sank into the material. AuRon assumed the thick weave slowed the bolts enough that they couldn’t pierce his armor.
NiVom belched out fire, high over the swinging, screaming swordsmen. It fell like burning rain on those behind with the crossbows, and their fire slackened.
Bright
griffaran
swooped in from all corners, plucking heads from the swordsmen like children gathering dandelions.
AuRon found Natasatch in the crowd, back by the waterfall with Imfamnia and some of the scarred veteran dragons, who’d formed a ring around the Queen and a few friends. The dragons beat their wings hard, kicking up a whirlwind of dust, fierce enough to slow the crossbow bolts.
Now NiVom and his dragons slithered down like snakes, protecting their tender bellies and neck-hearts. The turbaned men fell back from the line of snapping jaws, and from falling back it was easier then to turn and run for their lives. The slaughter ebbed as quickly as it flowed, some of the soldiers actually running down their fellows in their haste to escape the draconic fury.
A few bands of warriors put their backs to decorative rocks and tried to sell their lives dearly. But the raging dragons uprooted trees and boulders and sent them bouncing into the men. The shattered few who managed to dodge the projectiles were pounced upon and torn to bloody pieces.
AuRon, transfixed on his perch, had never seen dragons die like this. This day would no longer be a triumphant celebration of the destruction of the Red Queen and Ghioz. It had become a day of mourning for a tenth part of dragonkind.
That night he sought Natasatch in her quarters. She was attending to the travel expenses of a thrall or two and seeing that her dyes, paints, and dusts were properly sealed for transport.
“Thank the Gifts you’re alive,” AuRon said.
“That was a . . . distressing scene. I’m glad none else of our family were there.”
Silence took over, as though it sat down between them. A clatter of sandaled footsteps along the passage outside broke through.
“Your honor! Your honor!” A gray-clad thrall burst in, panting. “The Queen comes!”
AuRon glanced outside, saw one of the
griffaran
guards swooping along the promenade-balcony.
Next room! It’s empty. Up and over the divider!
she thought to him.
He slipped up and over the divider and landed lightly. He pressed tight against the wall, so that anyone glancing in would see an empty apartment. He heard the distinctive tinging of decorative coins clinking against scale.
“Ah, Natasatch, I’m so glad you’re still here,” Imfamnia said. “I’d like to speak to you.”
“I thought my Queen might need me,” she replied. “It is a black day.”
AuRon heard a frustrated sigh echo over the partition. “NiVom says we’ll have to come up with a new word to describe such losses. He thinks we’ve lost one dragon in ten, so he’s calling it the ‘Decimation.’ Most of the losses were among the Lavadome dragons, fortunately. No one of importance lost. Oh, the male twin, that pseudo SiHazathant, Regalia’s brother. He was killed. She’s become quite imbalanced, as they were very close. I don’t expect she’ll be able to rule the Lower World without him.”
“With dragons so established on the surface, I wonder why even keep the Lavadome, save as a curiosity,” Natasatch said.
“You don’t understand. You’ve always been a surface dragon. It means more to us than any egg.”
“Will there be some ceremony for the dead?” Natasatch asked.
“If only your mate were here, Natasatch.” Imfamnia sighed. “He’s a sensible dragon and hates the Lavadome almost as much as I do. He’d get to the bottom of this killing.”
The walls were decorated with copper plates, AuRon noticed. He could just make out reflections from Natastach’s lodgings.
“He also keeps his side of bargains. He’s staying in exile, with his brother, the former Tyr,” Natasatch said.
“Does he indeed?” Imfamnia turned away and made a great show of inspecting a woven hanging. “Never slips in for a quick, discreet visit?”
AuRon held his breath.
“He has no wish to become entangled in politics. I suspect he’s unhappy. I am, too, truth be known. I get lonely.”
“Do you now? You know, Natasatch, I could hear your claim of abandonment—I promise you the Sun King will act in your favor—and find you a suitable mate. True, you run a very small province, but it’s an important one. Half our slaves come from the lands of the Ironriders. With the new tunnel to the Lower World that those miserable dwarfs overcharged us for, you’re second only to Ghioz as the most important entry point west of the mountains.”