Dragonforge (51 page)

“Aim!” he shouted.

Behind him, there was a powerful
WHANG
as a catapult Burke had salvaged from the dragon armory sent a shower of shrapnel skyward. Its target wasn’t the sun-dragons, but the advancing army of earth-dragons who flowed toward the fort like a living river.

While some of the sun-dragons were pulling back in confusion, a full score continued to advance. Pet took a calming breath, making certain of his aim, then cried out, “Fire!”

Zing, zing, zang, zing, zang!

This time, ten dragons felt the bite of the arrows, some falling in gentle arcs, some in dizzying cartwheels, and a few simply plunging straight toward earth. One smashed into the ground outside the wall not twenty feet away from Pet. The vibration of the impact ran up his legs. A rust heap crashed with a noise like a band of drummers falling down stairs as one of the dying beasts smacked into it.

By now, the remaining dragons were near the wall. One by one, they tilted their buckets, and a black rain of darts fell toward the men.

“Shields!” Pet shouted. In unison, all the men along the wall lifted the wooden disks propped before them, ducking their heads as they crouched. The thick oak shields were banded with broad strips of steel. Seconds later, the darts struck, and the entire wall rang out with a clatter and chatter as a thousand tiny, deadly knives buried themselves in the wood. Men started screaming seconds later. Pet looked up. A few of the braver sun-dragons had swooped down, snatched up men from the wall, and lifted them skyward. Pet tossed his dart-studded shield aside and drew his bow once more.

“Fire at will!” he shouted, knowing there was no longer any hope of unified action. Dragons were everywhere. A score of sun-dragons remained high overhead, but their darts would now be striking their own forces if they dropped them, for at least as many of the sun-dragons had broken ranks and were attacking the bowmen on the walls directly. Below, the river of earth-dragons spread out in waves as they reached the walls. From every direction, there was shouting and confusion. Pet tried to put it from his mind.

It wasn’t courage that welled up within him at this moment. Instead, it was something far less passionate and far colder. He became deaf to the cries of his fellow men. He was undistracted by the bodies of sun-dragons falling from the sky around him and turning to red, meaty smears as they crashed into the snow. He gave no thought to his own life or safety. He simply became mindless, his body moving with a cool, machine-like efficiency.

The sole purpose of his life was to place an arrow in his bow, aim, fire. Again and again he followed this action, without a thought in his mind. Find a hole in the sky where a dragon would be, fire. Find another hole, fire. One by one, his victims fell. The sky was so thick with the bodies of dragons, it was nearly impossible to miss. If his arrow flew past one dragon, it would strike a second behind it.

Pet lost all sense of time. He maintained this trancelike state until he reached to the quiver on his back and found his fingers closing on empty air. Suddenly, the calm emptiness in him was broken and his thoughts came crashing back. His heart leapt into his throat. He consciously became aware of how empty the sky above suddenly seemed.

He cast his gaze down the wall, then toward the men on the other walls. He could tell their ranks had been thinned by the initial assault. In the city below, blood once again ran in the gutters. A wooden building near the center of town had been completely crushed beneath the remnants of a sun-dragon, and at least two more of the huge corpses blocked the streets. Yet there were no living dragons within the walls, not even an earth-dragon. Looking down, Pet surveyed a field of fallen green bodies. Many of those still surviving were crawling away on all fours, violently vomiting. The poisoned breakfast was taking hold! Despite this, there were still so many. Ten thousand earth-dragons, the spies had said. Were there even ten thousand arrows in Dragon Forge?

Turning his eyes skyward, he took comfort in the nearly empty palette of white. In the distance, he saw over two dozen sun-dragons in retreat, racing back toward their camp. Still, the aerial assault wasn’t completely over. One last dragon swooped down from the covering clouds and raced toward Dragon Forge, its dart bucket still in its claws.

Pet lowered his eyes back to the wall and began to run, spotting the body of a fallen archer ten yards away, near the eastern gate. He saw fresh arrows in the slain man’s quiver. Pet snatched up a handful of missiles and turned to find his target.

The sun-dragon he’d spotted was heading on a path toward Pet. Pet calmly drew a bead and let his arrow fly. He watched with great satisfaction as the arrow buried itself deep in the beast’s breast, a shot that almost certainly pierced the heart. The dragon’s eyes rolled upwards and its whole body went limp. It transformed instantly from a thing of grace in the air into a half-ton bag of falling meat.

For a second, it seemed as if the dragon were hurtling straight toward Pet, carried by momentum and gravity on a deadly path, but the dragon was actually coming down at a slight angle to his side. For a sickening second, Pet imagined the body of the dragon smashing into the gate he’d worked so hard to close, its corpse transformed into a swift and heavy battering ram.

Then, he no longer imagined it. He watched it, unfolding with an unnerving déjà vu, as the corpse rammed at high speed into the thick wood. The mass and speed of the dragon were such that the body didn’t so much crash as splash. A rain of dark gore shot in all directions as a thunderous crack split the gate. The wood tore from the hinges as the ancient logs snapped like sticks.

Pet found himself frozen, unable to think, as a hundred earth-dragons sprang against the ruptured gate, forcing it wider. Seconds later they charged into the city, with cries of victory shrieking from their turtle-like beaks.

Pet fumbled to place another arrow against the string. The calmness that had filled him so completely was now gone, replaced by the trembling certainty that he’d just doomed the city.

Then, a strange thing happened. A few of the dragons stumbled and fell, and others tumbled and tripped over them. Others who avoided colliding with fellow soldiers began to weave in drunken circles. A thick, oily smoke drifted through the city streets as Shanna and the men she commanded poured buckets of blue oil onto bonfires. Ragnar’s men surged from the doorways of the buildings, bringing a swift end to these drunken dragons. Yet for every dragon they slew, two more poured through the gate. Not all seemed affected by the smoke. Perhaps the open air didn’t allow the poison to spread evenly through the city, or perhaps the thick-headed earth-dragons possessed members of their race who simply were too dumb to be poisoned. Whatever the cause, Ragnar’s men soon found themselves being pushed back toward the open city square.

Chaos was again spreading along the walls. Some archers began firing into the city, while other aimed outside the walls. Pet looked up and found the dark shapes of sun-dragons once more on the horizon. It was time to bring order to the chaos.

“Sky-wall!” he shouted running up and down the walls. “Sky-wall, man your positions! Grab whatever arrows you can find and get ready for the next wave! Hurry!”

To his amazement, the men obeyed. He eyed the distant dragons. There were fewer than twenty. Where were the rest? If Shanna was right, there should still be over a hundred. Was this all that was left of the sun-dragons who would obey Shandrazel? Was the psychological element of the sky-wall working as Burke had predicted?

Behind him, he heard a loud, mechanical whistle. Breaking his own order to watch the sky, he looked toward the courtyard. A cloud of steam shot into the air as the whistle sounded once more. There was a loud clattering like the wheels of a thousand wagons. Into the courtyard rolled a human figure twenty-feet tall. It was a man made of iron, with buckskin-wrapped legs set on giant rolling treads as long as it was tall that propelled it forward with a rapid lurching gait. The giant had an angry, demonic, iron visage, and a headdress hanging down his back made from red and blue dragon feathers. The giant man brandished a long iron war club as it advanced and let loose another shriek of steam.

“Ah,” said Pet. “So that’s Big Chief.”

Burke the Machinist sat in the area where the giant’s crotch should be, in a wire cage that protected him from most blows but allowed him a wide field of vision. He was operating a series of wheels and levers that controlled Big Chief’s treads, while Anza sat in a similar cage at the giant’s throat, pulling levers that controlled the giant’s arms. Its left arm swung the war-club, easily seven feet long and as thick as a fence post. A lone earth-dragon stood near Big Chief, staring up, its turtle-mouth agape. The giant club came down on the stunned dragon like a sledgehammer on a watermelon.

The huge iron boiler on the treads behind Big Chief whistled in the aftermath, belching steam, giving the giant life by powering the chains and pulleys that drove it. Anza flipped a switch and flames shot out Big Chief’s eyes as she turned his head toward a crowd of earth-dragons pushing toward the square. The mouth of the demonic face opened and let fly a dozen of the razor disks that Pet had seen demonstrated in the initial invasion. The green hides of the earth-dragons suddenly sported horrid red stripes.

As a wave, the earth dragons turned and ran, leaving behind only a few stragglers.

No, not stragglers.

Warriors. The earth-dragons left behind wore gleaming armor and carried broad axes that cut a swathe through the humans around them. Pet recognized the dragon at the center of this band, and knew that Burke was in for a fight.

“Charkon,” he whispered.

The
zings
of the sky-wall bows rang out and he turned away. He had his own job to do. The rest was up to Burke.

Chapter Thirty:

Stomach for Brutality

Big Chief lurched
and shuddered as Burke pushed it in its second forward gear and rolled into the square. The mob of earth-dragons all turned toward the noise as he pulled the steam whistle. Their beaks dropped in astonishment as flames shot from the giant machine’s eyes. At his back, the falling snow sizzled as it vaporized against the boiler. Anza released a round of the razor disks; the ratchets and springs firing in sequence sounded like music. There were probably five hundred earth-dragons in the square—at least half of them turned tail and ran as Big Chief lumbered forward on its treads. Even though most of the components for the steam giant had been assembled over the years in his basement back at the tavern, until this moment he’d worried that building Big Chief had been a foolish waste of time and resources. But as the earth-dragons stampeded, he felt his devotion to the machine had been worthwhile. The fact that darts weren’t raining down on everyone in sight told him the sky-wall bows had worked as well. It looked as if they’d survived the initial assault. Now all they had to do was clean up stragglers, clear the streets of dragon corpses, and prepare for the inevitable siege.

In his confidence, Burke didn’t notice the human head hurtling through the air toward him until it clanged against the wire cage and splattered him with blood. The jolt of adrenaline that surged through him completely changed his view of the battle. Yes, most earth-dragons were running from the square. But so, too, were many of Ragnar’s men. Was Big Chief frightening them as well? Or was something worse hidden in the square behind the crush of bodies?

A second head flew up in the air, then a third, a fourth, a fifth, until it looked like a demented juggling act. The crowd between himself and the source of the flying heads parted as men fled. At last he had a good view of the problem.

“Charkon,” he muttered.

The earth-dragon leader and his five bodyguards advanced in a tight circle, protecting each other’s backs, spinning through the human warriors like a giant killing wheel, Their axes slashed out, cutting down anything in their path. Burke found himself in grudging admiration of the choreography and teamwork the six warriors displayed. They were fighting with years of experience, the finest weapons and armor the dragons had ever produced, and sheer superhuman power. Earth-dragon muscles grew denser as they aged. Charkon was twenty years stronger than when they’d last met. Burke was twenty years older.

And Burke had spent those twenty years designing this machine for exactly this moment.

“Okay Anza,” Burke said. “Chew them.”

The giant tilted its head and Burke listened with great satisfaction to the precise clockwork click zzizz, click zzizz as the razor disks shot from their cartridge. Anza handled the disk shooter better than he’d ever managed. Each one sliced through the air straight toward its target, a testament to Burke’s precision craftsmanship and Anza’s steady aim. Unfortunately, Charkon’s elite armor proved to be of an even superior craftsmanship. The disks snapped and ricocheted from his breast plate in a shower of sparks. The wildly careening shards cut into the human warriors nearby, biting into bone.

Anza stopped firing. Burke could tell from the clanking of chains that she was resetting the war club to strike. Burke shifted gears and spun the guide wheel to swing Big Chief into a better attack position. The ancient, hard-packed earth of Dragon Forge was the perfect surface for Big Chief. Not even the snow was slowing it down.

Charkon gazed up at the approaching giant. Suddenly, the elder dragon broke ranks with his fellows and leapt forward. Anza swung the war club. Charkon raised his massive shield and took the blow. The shudder of the impact knocked Burke’s spectacles free. He caught them against his chest. Slipping them back on, he found that Charkon’s shield had been shattered by the blow—but Charkon himself seemed unharmed.

Charkon tossed the fragments of his shield aside before Anza could raise the club again. Dropping his axe, Charkon grabbed the iron club in his gauntleted claws. He twisted the weapon with all his strength, grunting loudly. Big Chief’s arm groaned and creaked from the stress. The wrist joint exploded as Charkon tore the weapon free. Shrapnel rattled off the mesh cage surrounding Burke. Big Chief’s arm fell limp, the shoulder ratchets completely stripped.