Dragon Strike (Age of Fire #4)

Nilrasha struck the Copper as less eager for bows and baubles afterwards and more attentive to the hatchlings of the Lavadome.

Whether this was a passing resolution or a real change he couldn’t say.

He liked seeing her so concerned with the hatchlings. It was part of her duty as Queen. He would like to see it become more than duty—he would be gladdened by some hatchlings of their own.

They hadn’t had any luck with eggs so far, but between the two of them they had battle injuries that might make a clutch an impossibility.

If they did have a clutch, he would try something new with the males, separate them somehow until they could be made to understand. He and Nilrasha could set the style. Perhaps others would follow. Females in the Lavadome outnumbered males on the order of two to one or more. They always had, but did that have to mean they always would? With another hundred males, the other dragons wouldn’t be so puffed up with their own importance. He could establish real dragon settlements in other places in the Lower World—the Star Tunnel, for instance. And perhaps dragonkind could look once more to the surface and put an end to lurking in the Lower World in fear.

He spoke about it once to Rethothanna. She was his favorite Anklene. She’d completed the first, and so far the only, history of the Lavadome. It was like a lifesong, only horribly long and complicated. You couldn’t even listen to the whole thing in one sitting, and he had patience for stories.

“Yes, others before you have had the same thought. In the days of Anklamere it was enforced, of course, but dragons weren’t much better than thralls back then.

“Tyr FeHazathant, glory to his name, had the same thought very early in his time. It fractured the Lavadome again. EmLar and his back-to-nature group quit the Lower World entirely and took off for the surface.”

He sounded NoSohoth out on the matter, and the old courtier’s head dipped as though his hearts had stopped. The Copper decided that he would cross that chasm when he was more secure. As it was, he waited for word from Anaea. He sent a message to his fool of an Upholder with a report of the bad kern and a request to look to the next crop with extra care. He also asked for full details about the last batch—had it been planted in an unusual place or had some trick of weather or infestation given the Anaeans difficulty?

He doubted both—Anaea’s high-altitude plateau enjoyed mild, sunny weather the year round, cave-like in the cool of the night and pleasantly cleansing brightness in the day.

What he really waited for was news from Wail and Gnash. Three more fourth-generation bats were coming along nicely—Nilrasha offered up her blood regularly, saying it helped her sleep—but they were still learning the hills of the Lavadome and the holes of the principal dragons.

One worry dominated all the others. What would happen when the supply of even the old kern ran out? It would mean long, slow debilitating illness and eventual madness.

Oddly, none in the Lavadome talked of it. At least not that he heard.

Chapter 5

Years later, when Wistala thought back on it, that last summer of peace and quiet isolation that stretched into fall remembered better than it had lived.

At the time she was surfeited by the blighters and their endless celebrations. They celebrated that year’s calves maturing, the winter’s births who had survived to take their first steps and yap their first words, the fruit and crop harvests, the extraction of the fall’s honey from the hives, the young females becoming maidens, and the young males taking their first real warrior-spear. The festivals blazed loud and vigorous and colorful and musical and all that, but one was very much like the other to her senses, and she preferred the peace of NooMoahk’s library to massed dancing.

In time, even the library galled her. She couldn’t read quickly enough to get through, and each scroll parsed out increased her sense of frustration.

Her mood was the crystal’s doing, she finally decided.

Wistala distrusted the crystal. Delightful as it was for casting light on her reading, fascinating as it was to stare into, since the slightest shift of one’s head brought different images—at times she thought she saw dragons, at other times a great tower, not quite circular and flat-headed as an anvil—it sometimes made her doubt her own mind and will.

She’d heard and read stories, of course, of travelers too long on their own who became crazed. At first she wondered if her own mind was the one at fault. The crystal, though smaller than a troll, reminded her of the one she’d fought on Rainfall’s bridge. The way it leaned forward, as if inspecting her, watching what she was doing over her shoulder, the way Auron used to try and sniff out whether she was concealing a juicy tidbit or just a dried-out old slug under her sii.

She rapped it once—accidentally, she told herself—as she turned, but it did not shatter or fall. Instead light played head-quick-tailchase around the inside, up and down, back and forth, in and out, until the center of the crystal seemed farther off than the distant horizons of the eternal plain she’d crossed while traveling east.

That night dreams of Father’s death, bloody-mouthed dogs hanging at his sides, brought her out of her slumbers more nervous and exhausted than she’d been when she settled down.

She decided to leave. While hunting was good and the blighters had been making necklaces of brass rings for her to eat—new, hardier scales were coming in to replace the travel-thinned coat—eating water buffalo and forest deer wasn’t going to help her find her brother.

The library needed sorting. A few of the oldest and most interesting volumes could be brought to the great Hypatian library at Thallia, proof of the odd heritage of the blighters of these mountains. Then others could travel with trade goods for the rest. She suspected the blighters would part with their paper and skins and tablets easily enough. And those strange gems, so like the ones that Yari-Tab had showed her in the ruins of Tumbledown what felt like an age ago—they kept the collection dry and free of dust. She would try to sneak off with just one and see if it still worked after being removed from its post in the living rock.

I will leave! she silently told the crystal, as she counted the books she’d selected.

Her imagination said it answered back.

She yawned, and when she turned again to the samples she’d selected from the library, the volumes had vanished!

Sniffing for enemies and searching with her ears, she probed the darkness. Had she been robbed while her back was turned?

She hurried over to the shelves. The volumes she’d selected rested in their usual places on the shelf. Whoever had put them back had even arranged them so the container-titling could be more easily read. And one scroll case, which had been resting on the shelf below where it belonged when she found it, was back in its rightful place among its supporting scrolls.

Strange thieves, who would return property better organized than they found it.

Hearts pounding—she couldn’t say why—she removed the scroll case again. With some diligent labor, she reassembled the collection she intended to take along on her departure.

She ate a haunch of leftover ox she’d kept hanging in the cool, dry air at the top of the chamber and settled down for a nap, instinctively circling her selection the way a dragon often slept around its hoard, resting her jaw upon the uttermost end of her tail-fringe.

“You won’t get them this time,” she said to the crystal, keeping an open eye on it as she nodded off. One-eye-open sleep wasn’t nearly as refreshing—you didn’t dream, though your thoughts sometimes sang to you.

And if you do, I’ll just leave without them. You’ll see.

When she woke, she was a good deal less surprised to find the books removed. As she stalked over to the collection to see if they’d been put back in their proper places, she had the strangest feeling before she even knew why. Then it came—she saw a bit of loose ox-flesh on the floor. It must have dropped from her mouth at some point—but she hadn’t visited the collection in between eating and settling down for her nap. Could she have been—

A harsh clatter of gongs sounded, echoing down to her cave. Alarm! Alarm! ALARM! came the shouts, distant and echoing, from the entrance to her cave. “A dragon comes!”

A dragon? Could it be AuRon? Why would they be giving the alarm?

She swarmed up the old well, past the guards who were unaccountably throwing extra logs on the fires that heated their oils to pour down the sides of the pit should the demen come again, and to the old city at the throat of the massive cave-mouth.

The dim purple light, just framing the hanging towers at the cave-mouth, told her it was the early dawn. The cave-mouth faced southerly and it looked a clear morning. At this time of year the sun would shine full into the cave as it came up.

A perfect time to attack. The blighters would be fighting both sun and enemies.

Flame blossomed at the cave-mouth at one of the hanging, fang-like towers—the long, unbroken one where the blighters kept a small watch of archers, for they could see well down the long switchback road on the mountainside. Wistala caught a flash of white scale reflecting in the fiery bloom.

White? She’d met a white dragon once, in her almost fruitless search for others of her kind. A great, elderly queen of dragons. She saw the dragon swoop down, strike something with its tail, and rise vigorously as a second dragon, a green, dove, dropping a curtain of fire at the cave-mouth.