Dragon Rule (Age of Fire #5)

Chapter 8

Fount Brass was much as Wistala remembered it. Tucked between two converging mountains like the last pea in a pod, the tin roofs gleamed from far off. Its famous wind chimes and musical water cascades—the water flowed through tubes that created notes through the flow—that gave the city its name could be heard from a hundred of dragonlengths away if the wind was favorable.

Inhabited by men, many of whom were wider than they were tall and bowed in leg and arm, who cultivated and knotted their beards with the same care dwarfs took in dusting and watering the lichen within, it was a city of ringing smithies and white-hot foundries venting sulfurous fumes.

They were notoriously independent. They were a province of Hypatia, but didn’t accept Hypatian law or temples, and had fought wars to keep their freedoms in Rainfall’s day.

She’d last passed through as a reluctant fortune-teller with a traveling circus. She’d have an easy time telling the fortunes of the men now: If they didn’t accept a dragon into Fount Brass, her brother had every intention of cutting off all trade with the obstinate men.

“The slow pillage of a dragon-lord. No thank you,” their king, a hulk of a man named Arbus Glorycry said, bouncing his daughter on his knee. The curly-furred little girl was fascinated by Wistala and watched her every move, wide-eyed.

Wistala wondered if he’d brought his spawn forward as a shield against dragon-wrath or to show courageous nonchalance against yet another of the Tyr’s emissaries.

Perhaps a little of both.

“Every other Hypatian province of the old order has accepted the help of a dragon. Why not yours?”

“Where were you when the Ghioz were battering down our towers? Where were the dragons when my daughter’s room was burned?”

“Myself, I was fighting in the snow of the Ba-Drink Pass,” Wistala said. “Others fought and died in the streets of Hypat, or over Ghioz. Have you not been at peace for ten years? Are there still bandits riding your mountains? Do Ghioz soldiers still walk your streets?”

“They never conquered us,” King Arbus said. “As to the old Hypatian order, it fell apart in my grandfather’s time, when he knew only the title of Lord Protector. My father took the title of King and passed it to me. Am I to relinquish it to a dragon?”

“We do not interfere with your traditions. Your dragon would act as an intermediary between you and the other lands of the Grand Alliance.”

“What good would that do us?”

“Trade. The Hypatians are rebuilding their armies and shipping fleets. They’ll need swords and shields and helms. Would you rather have the orders, or shall they go to the dwarfs of the Diadem, or new smithies in the north?”

“Dwarf make! Ha! Twice the price for the same quality, just to say some grubby, coal-oil-reeking dwarf labored over the edge.”

Wistala listened to the music of wind and water all around, no two refrains ever the same, no melody repeated, infinitely complex yet soothing in its smooth sameness. “You might find markets for your delightful chimes at the edge of the world to the south, or in the far north.”

At that, there was a murmur from some of the King’s retinue at the sides of his thick-beamed, tin-roofed hall. Wistala thought the style of the architecture so striking in the manner it echoed the mountains that she considered flying north at once to see if the roof on her eventual resort might be restyled in the manner of King Arbus’ palace.

“If we do not join?” he asked.

“I’ll make no threat. The world around you is changing. You can remain apart from it, in your fastness and isolation and independence, tending those throwbacks to another age you ride and harness into pulling your wagons. You’ll lose sons and daughter to the cities that will grow and thrive and ring the Inland Ocean again like a jeweled necklace.”

King Arbus laughed. “I see you’re still a fortune-teller.”

Wistala breathed easier. When the men of Fount Brass laughed, all was well.

“There’s no need to put a dragon in these hills, King Arbus. Only give your word that you and your heirs will offer food and shelter to a tired messenger, and reaffirm the old bonds to the Hypatian Directory, and you’ll have title not just here in your city, but throughout the Grand Alliance. You’ll be welcome in a dozen courts, even deep in the Lavadome, and not just be limited to your own. What say you, King?”

“I thank you for not salting your tongue with threats. I am moved by the truth in your eyes. I suspect you are a dragon Fount Brass can trust. Prove your words with deeds, though, Wistala. I provisionally—provisionally, mind!—accept. If all goes well for three years, we shall call it an Alliance. There! I have given. Will you give as well?”

“In the name of the Lavadome, as Queen-Consort, I accept.”

Wistala wondered who she should report the change in Fount Brass to first. The Lavadome or the Hypatian Directory? The Directory dealt more frequently with the men of Fount Brass, but she held a more important position in the Lavadome as Queen-Consort.

In either case, she allowed herself a short prrum of satisfaction at crossing the very last item off of Nilrasha’s list of issues to which she should devote mind and talent.

Save the unwritten one. Of a conspiracy against the Tyr she knew next to nothing. There were complaints and gossip, but unless her brother and Nilrasha had become unhinged, there was no danger in complaints and gossip.

Wistala decided to return to the Lavadome with the news of Fount Brass. Her brother, glad to have another triumph to celebrate, ordered a feast held in her honor for the new Protectorate—even if it was a provisional one.

“There’ll be nothing provisional about the provisions,” the Copper said.

NoSohoth saw to it that the banquet pit atop Imperial Rock was decorated with wind chimes, a gift from the King of Fount Brass.

The old silver dragon assigned Wistala the honor of the first position at the feast, so that fresh platters from the kitchen passed under her nose as they were brought up.

So many members of the Imperial Line and the principal hills attended that the dragons had to take turns around the feasting pit. By tradition, the younger ate first and the older ate longer.

Thanks to new Hypatian trade there were entertainments to delight the dragons beyond the usual songs. Trade with the Hypatians had brought fireworks from across half a world. Rayg had arranged them on a series of wooden platforms, starting off with fountains of light and having them grow into colorful missiles that almost touched the top of the Lavadome.

“Exquisite,” Wistala said to her brother, thumping her tail with the others. “Who is that human controlling the display?”

“Have you never met him? That’s Rayg, my engineering adviser.”

Wistala hadn’t thought of the name in so long it took her brain a moment to make the connection.

“Rayg… Raygnar?”

“I believe so. He was raised and taught by dwarfs, I believe.”

“Rayg. Trained by dwarfs?” Wistala asked, shocked. This was Lada’s child! What was he doing in the Lavadome? For him to have come so far, she had no idea the Wheel of Fire dwarfs traveled so far in the Lower World. The last she’d ever learned of him was that he’d disappeared into the Lower World after King Fangbreaker’s death in the barbarian victory over the Wheel of Fire dwarfs—an assault and a regicide in which she’d played no small part.

“How did he ever come here?”

“I hardly remember,” the Copper said. “Some traveling dwarfs we captured, I believe. He’s smarter than any of our Ankelenes. He designed and built my wing joint. Dwarf-training, I suppose, but he’s built things not even a dwarf could create. I keep meaning to free him, but there always seems to be one more task for him to do.”

One more trip to make. She’d have to find time somehow to go north and tell Rayg’s mother that he still lived. Not only lived, but had grown into brilliant manhood.

But nevertheless, he was little more than a slave.

So when her brother asked her for a private chat in his baths after the feast, she happily accepted.

“It’s much reduced from SiDrakkon’s day. At one time his bath took up most of the upper level of this end of the Imperial Rock.”

“I’ve heard stories from the Firemaids about all the human women he kept.”

“Not my weakness,” the Copper said.

Thralls brought in stones heated in the cooking fires until they created an optical illusion of waves above them. The thralls dropped the stones into shallow pools of water, which instantly boiled and filled the bath with steam.

The heat raised her scale and the water beaded up on skin and scale, washing her delightfully clean from nose to tailtip. She felt as though a dwarf’s weight in dirt ran off her and into the sluices.

“You’ve never been in the Tyr’s bath before, have you?”

“It’s pleasant,” Wistala said. “Why doesn’t the Queen have her own?”

“The Queen, or Queen-Consort, can use this one whenever she likes,” the Copper said.

“I shall. Nilrasha never said how much flying would be involved in being Queen-Consort.”