Dragon Outcast (Age of Fire #3)

NeStirrath drove his drakes hard, delivered bites and bashes as they climbed or jumped or dashed or swam, lobbed bruising stones into mock battles at any dragon who lagged or paused too long in evolutions. They learned to ignore pain and blood until the objective was achieved, be it a bit of tattered banner on a sharp pile of lava rock or a pumpkin-headed scarecrow with a tin crown. If they could keep the drakes off the scarecrow-king for a set time, heavily padded blighters armed with hatchling tooth–studded clubs could win a cask of the malty beverage they adored, with a leg of beef thrown in for any who managed to draw drakeblood.

They learned to take turns volleying flame in groups as they advanced or retreated, though the Copper’s stream came out thinner and more liquid than the others’ and seemed to take forever to light properly. They hunted boars goaded to savagery by cruel wires twisted into them by blighter herders. To keep things fair NeStirrath applied similar painful wires to the hunting drake’s sii or saa.

It was a toughter, tested bunch that passed out of the first-year caves.

There were losses. Sometimes adventuring drakes would simply disappear. Others were crippled permanently in duels or skirmishes. Fallen drakes would be replaced by younger drakes from NeStirrath’s little enclave of “yearling” trainees in the Black Rock.

The Copper didn’t quite feel the equal of the three other trainees. Though they bashed him and joked about it afterward, they seemed to think his joining their ranks was sort of a stunt, a bit of preening from a member of the Imperial line destined for a high cave in the resort. Though NeStirrath ordered him around and cajoled him much like the others, he never got water spit at him the way the others did around the pool, or received a playful nip as they hurried toward the hamcart at mealtimes, and while halfhearted duels were fought every other day between the other three over who should have the honor of leading the next patrol or running a message from one sissa of the Drakwatch to another, no one ever challenged him when he asked for a chance at the honor of leading an ore raid on the caves of the Firmaidens.

So once again, it seemed he wasn’t to fit in, a stranger in his own cave.

It took a full season before the Copper could walk the inside of the Lavadome without standing and gaping upward.

When the sun was down and the shining oval at the peak was dark, it was at its most spectacular. Glowing rivers of fire rose or fell along its sides, sometimes brighter, sometimes darker.

“What holds the world up?” he asked NeStirrath as they rested on one of their “saa-hardeners”: a pile of volcanic rock, the slag heap of an old tunnel leading down to the water ring.

“The Air Spirit must have made it,” Krthonius said. “Some battle with the Earth Spirit.”

“The Anklenes say it was a mighty scale that fell from the sun,” NeStirrath said. “It plunged deep into the Lower World and expelled a ball of gas.”

“The way you do when in the washing pool, Aubalagrave,” Nivom, the white drake with the slashed-off lip, said.

“Give me a whole pig for dinner and I’ll produce one as big as what made the Lavadome,” Aubalagrave said.

“May you choke on your next mouthful of pig, boaster,” Krthonius said, and he and Aubalagrave wrestled for a moment, scattering sharp lava rocks and ending it bleeding from a wound or two.

“Who are these Anklenes?”

They all looked at him.

“Half-a-drake strikes again,” Nivom muttered to the others.

“Remember, he didn’t hatch here,” NeStirrath said. “The story goes that the Lavadome was found long ago by a wizard named Anklamere. He was a grasping, conniving sort of fellow, like most hominids, and had it in mind to control everyone and everything: dragon, hominid, beast, even the worms in the earth, I expect. NooMoahk, Black Glory of Legend and Eternal Guardian of the Sun-Shard, finally got rid of him, but not before he enthralled some dragons and set them up here. They’re a spiritless sort of cringers, and they fiddle around with scrolls and books and whatnot. Always blending melting metals or heating stones or poking around in the bodies of dragons who should be decomposing honorably under a lava-stone cairn. The dragons of the lines of Wyrr and Skotl put them in their holes when we moved in.”

The Copper knew little more about the lines of Wyrr or Skotl, but after asking about the Anklenes he decided not to press his ignorance. Besides, Krthonius was getting twitchy. He had the honor of leading this patrol and wanted to set a taxing pace.

They returned to the towering black overhang of the Imperial Rock sore of claw and thirsty. The others hung back, arguing and snapping, until the Copper drank, then jostled one another and splashed and slurped up their thirst. The Copper’s good front limb felt as though it were going to fall off, and he dragged his tail on the way back to his shelf.

NeStirrath entered and took a nostrilful of air.

“Whew. Smells of bats in here. What, are you keeping them as pets, Rugaard?”

“Habit from my travels,” the Copper said. “I…I used them to mask my odor. I got to kind of like having them around.”

NeStirrath wrinkled his nostrils. “They call you ‘Batty’ when your crest is turned, you know.”

“I’ve heard them,” the Copper said. He knew NeStirrath thought him soft. “They’re a good ward against starvation too. Food’s hard to find when you’re traveling underground.”

“I’d have to be starving to eat a bat. But I wanted to have a talk with you, lad. You might be in charge of a whole sissa of young drakes someday. You need to scrap it up a bit. More of the rough-and-tumble, or they’ll never accept you or respect you.”

The Copper felt his stomach sink. “I don’t like fighting. They’re all older and bigger than me. I always seem to come out of one worse off. Like my toe.”

The missing digit itched as though solid with scale mites, a sensation made all the more disagreeable by the fact that it wasn’t there anymore and he couldn’t scratch it.

“You’ve got to be willing to be the first to jump into a fight if you’re to win respect from this lot. Even if you lose a tooth or two, stick up for yourself, lad. It’s not the size of the drake that wins the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the drake. Let your father know he hatched a dragon.”

Mention of Father just made him miserable.

“Don’t look glum,” NeStirrath growled. “Doesn’t matter where you came from, or what you know or don’t know. You’re in the Imperial line now. Cor, someday you could be the Tyr himself. Keep your thoughts behind your eyes; don’t wear them on your face—and above all, let them know a set of dragon hearts beat behind your scale.”

“Yes, your honor,” the Copper said.

NeStirrath loved to pit his drakes against one another in contests and challenges and games, when they weren’t having the weak points of ax-dwarves or fighting-shield demen pounded into their heads, that is.

He ran dragon dashes (the Copper came in last), jumping contests (the Copper fell short of the mark Krthonius set, even the time Krthonius stumbled before the vault mark), and tried to whack a barrel full of sand off a dragon’s nose with his tail (the barrel easily avoided the Copper’s stiff tail).

They looked at one another in triumph. He knew what was going through his fellow drakes’ minds: Another rodentlike performance from Batty, lowest of the Imperial line. They probably sent him to the Drakwatch so they wouldn’t have to look at his odd eye and listen to him limp about the upper chambers.

At each failure he shook off the dirt and dust and tried to keep his face from showing his disappointment. Krthonius found all the athletic events so easy, but he held his tongue and didn’t bark out his triumph. Unlike Aubalagrave, who sometimes could outjump his black-scaled comrade and let the whole Lavadome know it when he did. Nivom also rarely won anything, and it put him in a foul mood.

It was after a particularly gruesome humiliation in which the drakes had to climb up a sheer wall with the drake behind gripping at the tail, a deadweight to be hauled (the Copper’s twotoed saa gave way at the last and he and Nivom fell three full lengths to a mud pit) that Nivom pushed past the Copper on the way to the bathing pool.

Harf and a couple other thralls hurried to get hot water and pumice to scrub the dragonscales.

“Filthiest last, or you’ll dirty the water for the rest of us,” Nivom said.

The Copper, still smarting in his tail from Nivom’s hatchling-sharp teeth, let out a squawk that everyone later said sounded more like a startled chicken than a drake’s battle cry. He threw himself on Nivom and thumped him in the snout with the joint of his crippled arm.

Snarling and growling, the Copper thumped him again every time Nivom tried to shrug him off.

“Batty’s tearing Nivom a new tailvent,” Krthonius cried out to Aubalagrave.

“Rugaard!” the Copper snarled, griff rattling all on their own as though they wanted in on the contest. He left Nivom and dashed at Krthonius, head low and down so Krthonius couldn’t get under his guard and flip him.

Some of the hominids shouted in excitement.