Dragon Strike (Age of Fire #4)

Wistala had chosen her cave well. Ample food to be had, defensible, and water wasn’t a problem. Of course it was near hominids, but they seemed to get along just fine. Though according to his father, favors granted to one generation were oft forgotten by the next.

“What will you do?” she asked.

AuRon wondered about this woman. She was so different from the spirited Hieba he’d watched grow from a girl. Her slightly sad manner reminded him of Mother, when too long parted from Father.

He wondered if comparing a human to a dragon somehow dishonored their memories.

“Have you not decided?” she said after a moment.

Lost in his thoughts again. Well, he could give as obscure an answer as she. “I’m going to have a good nap in this cave. Then in the morning I think I’ll dive and see if I can’t find some big crabs deep out in the river there. It seems to have a rocky, sandy bed and that’s just what they like. Then in the morning I’ll trade the crabs to that innkeeper for some more eggs and sausage.”

“I mean about your sister,” she said.

“I haven’t made up my mind.”

“If you do see her, tell her we miss her here. We’re a little worried about that pass the Wheel of Fire used to guard. We’ve heard that Ironrider scouts and traders have ridden through, armed, with no more than a wave from what’s left of the dwarves there. It will take a strong heart to rally Hypatia’s north, if they should ever send more than scouts and horse-traders through, for we’ll get no help from the south.”

Why couldn’t humans ever solve their own problems? No wonder the dragons of Silverhigh grew weary of fighting.

“This is good-bye, unless you remain among us many days,” she said. “I may be called away. We’ve a mother-to-be in the shepherd hills and the cold is bringing illness.”

“Thank you for guiding me. The walk did me good. I’ve flown too much of late.”

She half smiled. “May I touch your nose? Your skin is so different from your sister’s.”

He dipped his head and felt her hand pass down his snout. She giggled.

“Your skin ripples.”

“Little buds rather than scales,” he said. “They change color.”

“I noticed earlier. Remarkable. Farewell, AuRon. Return for more sausages. You’ll be as welcome as your sister. Will you?”

He decided to answer her question. “You can tell Hazeleye that I believe I’ll have a word with those dragons allied with the Ghioz. They might have knowledge of my sister. Their Queen owes me an old debt, which I shall collect.”

“I would have wished you a good journey before. Now I’ll light candles to guide you past doubt and ignorance and into knowledge.”

AuRon cleared his throat. “Candles. Does that work?”

“I doubt it. But it’s nice to think it does. Horrible thing for a priestess to say.”

“I’ll remember you to my sister,” AuRon said, taking one final deep draught of her air. “Assuming I find anything more than a memory.”

Chapter 7

Wistala couldn’t make sense out of Paskinix’s orders to his dreadful, taunting demen.

They put her in a filthy, cramped widening of a tunnel that they couldn’t be bothered to clean. She had to have water brought to her, one precious bucket at a time, and she begrudged every splash and lost drop, as they never gave her quite enough to slake her thirst.

The demen were unhappy to have her alive, grudging her every mouthful of the wretched, rotten food they ate, but unwilling to kill her.

They bothered her in every way possible, kicking and prodding her as they passed, throwing their filthy, ropy waste at marks on her side and flank as though engaging in target practice, and not letting her sleep with their continual noise on the part of her guards, but they did not cause her any real agonies.

They smeared a piece of hollow wood, like bamboo only knob-bier, with her blood, yanked out a few scales, then clipped off the tip of her sii inclaw. She guessed them to be trophies or mementos of some kind. A grim sort of humor came over her at the thought. The last trace of her existence might decorate some deman’s hole.

They taunted and teased her over her injuries and situation, but hinted that she would soon be released to return to her kind.

The demen were clever enough in their brutal way. They inspected her bonds each time the guard changed, striking her on the joints with stout metal rods that they carried constantly. With little to do but observe, Wistala decided they used the rods to send signals. She saw them rap-tap-tapping the sides or floor of the tunnel, or listening to faint banging sounds and grumbling among themselves.

She suspected half of their ill temper was from short commons. There were constant squabbles over food as it was shared out, and a thicker slice of mushroom could be cause for much head-butting and spine-yanking.

One night—morning—who could say when it was?—shortly after her capture, a good deal of tapping woke her. Her agitated guards jumped up and shouted. Two of them picked up a stout spear with evil-looking, twisting fluting to the edges and put the tip against her side.

“No! Please,” she managed out the side of her mouth—awful last words for a dragon. Oh Father—

But they didn’t ram it home—instead they listened while her mind raced. She was chained such that she couldn’t strike the point away with tail or neck or limb, and even her wings were secured by a pair of chains running beneath her belly to the injured wing.

Her injured wing—it would hurt. . . .

A faint roaring—undoubtedly a male dragon—echoed in her prison.

Awful moments passed, trying to judge the roars—drawing closer or no? Then more tapping and the demen with the spear relaxed.

More tapping still and they hooked claws and snorted and honked into each other’s faces. She wouldn’t care to have another dragon clearing its nostrils right into her face, it was almost as bad as men picking and digging at their dirty corners.

She was gaining enough of their language to guess they were enormously pleased with something. Paskinix made an entrance with a few warriors, one much singed about face and fingers. Paskinix’s spines alternately drooped and waved like sea fronds as he spoke.

“Ye own comrade came down the shaft. Turned him back easy enough and would have taken his head, but he’s a cursedly good nose for traps.”

He? She wondered if it was DharSii.

“The orange one with black stripes?”

“I didn’t see much of yon roaring cockspur. He’s been pricked good, cowering in the muck bottom anow. Too many shafts in him to think about climbing out. We’ll let him bleed out and then hit him again.”

More warriors arrived, displaying gory weapons under her nose. She shut her nostrils to the smell of dragonblood.

“Now he’ll be of a mind to bend, that he will,” she thought she heard Paskinix tell his warriors as they hurled themselves about in celebration. They jumped around, overleaping each other like startled frogs.

Never dance out your victory over a living dragon, she thought. But hope was hard to come by.

Why would he come after her? To finish her off, or to rescue her? To tempt her to join his flying circus and kill not for food or for honor but at the orders of some greedy hominid queen?

She hated him anew at the thought. Then there was another thought, and a third, equally hateful.

Because they were all about him.

She turned her back to the revels and pretended to go to sleep, moving her good wing within its limits as though to block the light.

Working at her bonds as she never had before, Wistala pulled and twisted, not minding the ripped-out scales or the blood smearing the metal. Her blood might lubricate the shackles and let her get a saa free. If she could just—

Kzzzzt!

That lightning-smell again and her mind emptied. Her thoughts were concise and clear but oddly unmoored.

It seemed easier to just drift off to sleep . . .

Paskinix stood by her nose when she woke, waggling one of those rubbery digits at her. A moment later? An hour? A day? His spines made stabbing gestures toward her, threatening like scorpion tails. That odd machine huffed behind him.

“Ye’ll be free in yon Tyr’s own good time, once his neck unbends at last.”

They zapped her again so the lesson might sink in.

She was beginning to welcome the surcease of hunger the sparks brought. But no point telling them that.

“Tomorrow we all dine on dragon meat!” Paskinix promised, and his throng beat their rods on stone in clattering celebration.

Wistala wondered, rather dully, whether they meant hers or DharSii’s.

The demen learned a lesson about counting breathing dragons dead the next day. Just after a meager breakfast Paskinix stormed back into her little run and struck the inoffending guards keeping watch over her, knocking them this way and that with sideswiping kicks.

“Climbed out! Three spears in him and yon scaly devil climbed out! No sign of the watch I left. Down three, and naught but bloody footprints showing for it!”

He raised his club and gave her a couple of bashes about the neck. Then he threw down his club and squatted with his face to the wall, his spines rising and falling in a confused manner.