[Age of Fire 05] - Dragon Rule Read online

  Dragon

  Rule

  BOOK FIVE OF THE AGE OF FIRE

  E. E. KNIGHT

  TO THE MEMORY OF SAM,

  MY FAITHFUL ALLY IN GOOD TIMES AND IN BAD

  BOOK ONE

  Faiths

  “Intent and result are two allies who rarely meet.”

  —Aphorism engraved on the south wall of the

  Hypatian Directory

  Chapter 1

  The Copper dragon, Tyr of Worlds Upper and Lower, Exalted Protector of the Grand Alliance, tried not to show the pain.

  The velvet darkness of the warm air over the Inland Ocean might have been that of summer instead of late autumn. The oceanic currents near the nighted shore swirled with the balm of the shallower waters of the delta country to the south. Heat rising from the phosphorescent waters, alive with tiny glowing creatures riding the warmth, caressed his wings and underbelly as he flew.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he enjoyed such a perfect night for flying.

  Not that there was time to enjoy an idyll. The moon had vanished below the horizon; it was time for hard flying to Sway-port, rocky fastness of the Pirate Lords on the Western Shores of the Inland Ocean. The soft air, seemingly made to beckon young dragons into the sky to chase and turn and embrace at last as mates, was cut instead by wings bound for war.

  Healthy wings with intact joints, that is. The Copper dragon’s pinioned right wing was held together by cable and gear, and tonight the contraption that allowed him to fly chafed and pinched. Terrible time to come up wingfelled, with a battle to be fought.

  He’d been trying for the last hour not to think about the rising pain in his wing, but a raw nerve under torn flesh would not be ignored. The pain was like an arrow tearing through his joint at each reverse of the wing. The topstroke and bottom both brought stabbing agony, alike as twins.

  Having given up not thinking about the pain, he fell back to his second line of defense, as one of his captains might have put it. He tried not showing it, to keep his appearance to the other dragons in the flight line that of a Tyr eager for battle in the coming red dawn.

  If the second line fell, he would just have to grimace, squint, fall back on his final cave-redoubt: showing the pain but keeping his place at the point of the long arc of battle-arrayed dragons, forty-one veterans aloft. They rode laden with fur-tufted soldiers with scrimshawed whalebone lensholders protecting their eyes against the wind and woolen scarves warming the breath entering their windburned noses. A proud Tyr at the head of his warriors, he’d rather have his wing give out and spin to his death into the sea than take one of the easier positions behind.

  The throbbing came from his bad midwing joint, of course. Severed by a vicious human called the Dragonblade when he was but a hatchling, he could only fly with the aid of an artificial joint his clever, dwarf-trained thrall Rayg had created. Hearing of the long journey he proposed to undertake, Rayg had crafted him a new one. So superior—thanks to the work of the best dwarfs money could rent—was his new design in execution that after a short test flight the Copper pronounced it a brilliant improvement on the older model and ordered a feast in Rayg’s name. His wing had a much more natural motion now. He could fly farther with less effort.

  Except his leathery wing skin had not yet toughened to the task of the new brace.

  The Copper blamed himself for not taking the time for conditioning flights. Both he and Rayg had been distracted by other matters: the Copper with his plans for war against the pirates, Rayg with his numerous projects. Rayg had been behaving lately like a man with his brain aflame with genius to the point the Copper imagined smoke coming from his ears. Plans for improvements to the Lavadome and everything from dragon-saddles to food storage silos covered Rayg’s laboratory walls like intricately layered paper of a wasp nest.

  The Copper, bound to his roving battlecourt watching training runs for the suppression of the Pirate Lords, had only taken to the air for brief periods of exercise before his daily consultations and messaging.

  Now he was paying for it in blood, pain, and torn flesh. What’s a little skin off my wing? If only Nilrasha, my Queen, could see how gracefully I fly. Faster, without the constant lurching course corrections…

  He promised himself a long, restful visit to his mate’s eyrie if the war against the Pirate Lords proved victorious.

  Of course, if things went ill with the Pirate Lords, he might still join Nilrasha as an exile rather than as a conquering Tyr. Feeling ran hot in the Lavadome against this war, which would benefit none but their allied human provinces in the Upper World.

  Dragons bleed for Hypatia’s need!

  Some young, freshly fledged dragons had sung outside his private air gallery, before being chased away by his guard. He hadn’t objected to the opinioneering so much as being awakened after a long night’s work.

  Of course, he’d tried diplomacy. The Hypatians sent emissaries with demands that their former colonies of Swayport cease molesting their shipping and interfering with the fishing fleets. They’d returned with a tale of laughter and ridicule.

  The Pirate Lords claimed not to fear dragons, presenting trophies of a victory against the Wizard’s Dragonriders twoscore years back, when dragons who had assaulted their fortress fell before its gates.

  He wondered if the pirates had considered that dragons flighting under rein and rider fought very differently from dragons directed by their own commanders and Tyr. They showed no sign of it in their brag and bluster.

  Thinking didn’t help with the pain. So much flying. He regretted not accompanying the surfwater forces, but a Tyr’s place when going to war was at the head of his Aerial Host. Even at the cost of some pain. But the hurt did bring one benefit. It put him in a foul mood. Nothing like pain and the smell of blood to fill the fire-bladder and set it quivering. He was ready for battle.

  Lights twinkled on the horizon. Swayport at last!

  The Copper’s sharp eyes picked out the outlines of the port. From his position, a good score of dragonlengths above the water with the rocky coast to the west and the gentle Inland Ocean night to the east, Swayport as seen from the air resembled a reclining cat facing out toward the ocean, its spine in a gentle curve creating a sheltered bay. Against its belly was the port itself, a long crescent of sand beach, protected by a barren bar exposed at low tide. The cat’s dangerous—to rodents, anyway—sii were stuck out as a series of rocks perilous to mariners approaching from the north, its long tail a wave-breaking sandbar to the south.

  A rocky bluff at the cat’s head held an ancient sloping fortress of double walls and three towers with its own wharf between the forelimbs. The fortress had been built an age ago by the Hypatian Empire at the height of its wealth and power, and the wharf was intended so that the defenders might be resupplied by sea if the rest of the landward settlement fell.

  The town of the Pirate Lords proper had not been so solidly built. A tangle of streets and structures of wood and stone rose to the temple domes on the cat’s haunches. The Pirate Lords no longer worshipped the gods of their forefathers there, instead the temples sheltered gambling and drink and slave-auctions, the usual low pursuits of men who lived by fighting and pillage.

  He’d promised to hand them back to the Hypatians with only minor scorching.

  Swayport, and six other colonies on this coast like it, had long since declared their independence from the old Hypatian order. In the best of times there was trade across the Inland Ocean, at other times war, and chafing between rival fishing fleets and trading lines in every season—even the storm-months at the death of the year, when ships driven into opposing ports seeking shelter from storms were charged outra
geous harbor fees or had their cargoes seized.

  The Copper had listened to weary hours of it from Hypatian shipowners and whaling guild until he thought he’d dream of nothing but the price of lamp oil and salted fish for the rest of his life, before making his decision to end the pirate menace.

  Well, if men couldn’t settle their differences, he’d force a peace. As the Hypatians were his allies, though sometimes they were hard to distinguish from unusually quarrelsome thralls, he’d see the disputes resolved in their favor.

  He had two advantages, and he intended to use them. The first was a pretext for war that had all Hypatia seething. One of the great merchant lines—they flew a flag with blue and yellow and a fish design; the Copper couldn’t remember the name—had one of its deep-water trade boats blown off course and into the hands of a commerce-raider, who brought it back to Swayport.

  Such a matter could usually be resolved with paying a small ransom, but this ship held the merchant line’s owner and family, a man of influence as wide as his belt size and deep as his purse. They put his crew to work cutting paving stones and his family in the fortress and sent the youngest son of the line back to the Hypatian Directory with a ransom demand.

  The Copper, when told the tale by one of the Directory’s many skilled tongues, growled that if it was one of his own dragon families from the Lavadome. He’d be descaled if he’d pay anything with drakes and dragonelles locked up in some dungeon with excrement running down between the walls.

  With that Hypatia begged for assistance in a war to humble the Pirate Lords.

  His other advantage was knowledge of Swayport and its fortress, now ever so much closer on the horizon. But the moon would reappear soon—was it yet looming on the southeastern horizon? It mustn’t be allowed to frame the oncoming dragons like a shadow-puppet light.

  The far-off battlements formed a false horizon against the stars. The old works must be massive, at least the size of Imperial Rock in the Lavadome, though perhaps not quite so high.

  Swayport had been attacked a generation ago by the thrall-dragons from that fog-shrouded island to the north that his gray brother skulked upon, back in the days of Wrimere Wyr-master, the Wizard of the Isle of Ice. One of the human veterans of his Aerial Host, now a proud and battle-scarred Captain, had been involved in the attack.

  The attack had failed strategically because the men of Swayport had learned dragon-fighting from the dwarfs, and filled the towers overlooking their harbor with war machines that fired aerial harpoons. His sister Wistala had shown him one, a souvenir of one of her own battles, when she gave a tutorial to the Firemaids about aboveground hominid fortifications and defenses. The Copper still shuddered at the memory, it was a horrible barbed thing the length of a spear, full of spurs that went in easily but wouldn’t come out without destruction to muscle, blood vessel, and organ. He’d rather take an arrow through the eye and die at once.

  Worse, the dwarfs and men like the Pirate Lords attached long chains, or weights to the harpoons. The chains might catch on rooftop or tree branch and yank the harpoon out with crippling damage; the weights caused even the strongest dragon to come to earth eventually, where he’d remain, ground-bound and vulnerable, until the metal could be broken.

  According to Wistala, such a device had been the death of their father.

  The Copper, trying to forget his wing for a few more beats by thinking back on his conversations with the captains, both dragon and human, remembered, too, the strategic blunder the dragons-slavers had made. A scouting rider had passed over the town and took it upon himself to demand food and drink for himself and his mount. When refused, the fool angered and started burning small craft in the harbor before flying off with his dragon hungrier than ever.

  With Swayport alarmed, when the dragon-slavers returned, they found a populace ready for battle. After some skirmishing, cooler heads prevailed and the dragon-slavers decided the battle wouldn’t be worth whatever could be gleaned from a poor series of villages and a fishing port.

  Now Swayport was thriving and prosperous, in part thanks to their resistance to the dragon-slavers. Refugees from wars elsewhere had settled under the protection of the old Hypatian colonial fortress that had seen off the dragons once.

  The Copper could now make out the outlines of the craggy fortress atop the catshead bluff. The towers made it look like the cat was wearing a crown, or perhaps had grown an extra docked ear. He glanced at his wing. It was leaking blood and throbbed, but he’d made it through the night at the head of his dragons. He’d brought the dragons to war, at the place and time arranged. The rest was up to his commanders.

  The Copper swung his tail down three times.

  With that, the six biggest and most ancient dragons of the Aerial Host struggled to gain altitude. The men tied and strapped on the broad dragon-backs, clad only in warm riding-furs with a few light blades, shifted position so they were boots-down, looking like storm-wrecked sailors clinging to the sides of an overturned boat.

  The Copper’s Griffaran Guard closed up around him, ready to protect their Tyr in battle.

  The colorful griffaran were more feather-skulled bird than noble dragoncrest, but they were fellow egg layers and ancient allies of the Dragons of the Lavadome. Though lazy and playful and argumentative around their own nests, those who dedicated themselves to the Tyr found ample mental stimulation keeping watch and guarding the Imperial family, and in return the dragons kept egg raiders away from their nests and brought delicious dried fruits and salted nuts from far away, or had their thralls bake oily seed-crackers the avians preferred above all other foods. They had long talons and powerful beaks that could tear through dragon-scale, and as they were rarely called upon to fight thought the constant stream of tasty tidbits, shiny decor, and soft nest-bedding the Imperial family gave in exchange for their service ample compensation.

  Night-fishing birds cried an alarm to their kin as they passed, but Swayport itself still slept. Only a few lights glimmered in town and fortress.

  A swift-winged dragonelle broke off from the rest of the formation and headed for the sandbar. There were some flat-bottomed Hypatian river barges there in the surf outside it. Not the most seaworthy craft, but the Firemaids had managed to swim them up from the ruins of the old elven city loaded with Hypatian soldiers. Supposedly the scions of some of the great old military families of Hypatia, they looked more like a rabble in half-polished rust to the Copper, but they’d do for keeping order after the attack and going down some of the smaller, darker holes with the aid of slender young drakes and drakka swimming beside the barges.

  The barges’ arrival, just off the sandbar, had precipitated the flight of the Aerial Host.

  Ignoring the pain in his wing, the Copper sped up as though eager to come to grips.

  Tide wasn’t in their favor. The sandbar to the south had several flooded passages across it, but with the tide out, the barges couldn’t be pulled through. They’d have to be emptied, dragged across the shallow by the dragonelles, and then filled again.

  Well, if that was the worst thing to go wrong in the war with the Pirate Lords, he would take it.

  A blue-white light on one of the boats in the harbor danced across the deck, then ran up the rigging. A signal of some sort.

  The Aerial Host had been spotted. Or perhaps the dragons coming across the sandbar had become tangled in someone’s lobster pots.

  The Copper checked to see that his man-laden veterans were on the way to the fortress towers, two heading for each, and then stiffened his wings and went into a glide toward the signaling ship.

  He picked out a yellow and blue banner atop the tallest mast. So they had a guard on the captured Hypatian ship ready to signal at an attempt to retake the craft.

  The Copper ran his tongue along the inside of his teeth in satisfaction. Much more than that is on its way, oh pirate sailor. But now the foua pulsing in his firebladder would have to be directed at some other target.

  He shot over the captured s
hip and swung with his tail. Lines sang as rigging parted and he felt a satisfying krrack! as his tail broke salt-dried timber. But when he glanced behind, the man climbing the mast still hung there, waving his burning blue light in circles. Sparks from it rained down toward the bay in brilliant parabolas only to die like fireflies.

  Little man, think you’ll escape me?

  The Copper folded his hurt wing—sweet relief!—in a quick diving turn and—

  A mass shot under him kunk-twaaang! followed by chattering chain.

  Clever men! They put a dragon-harpoon on the boat. Of course everyone knew the Hypatians had dragon allies; it was a sensible precaution.

  “Get them—at the war machine!” he called to his Griffaran Guard, who banked to flank him with their usual effortless grace. Griffaran could literally fly circles around a dragon.

  Two circled, misunderstood his order—the unfamiliar dwarfish-based word translated into Pari translated into the accents of dragontongue and then hurled at a pair of anxious users of a patois of dragontongue and birdspeech in the night was a recipe for confusion but two others darted for the forged shell of the harpoon-thrower in its reinforced pinioned mount.

  The griffaran landed atop the device and tore into the men working cranks on the machine like fresh calf meat. Pieces flew messily in all directions.

  The Copper saw men at the tail—or rather stern, the tail end of ships were called sterns—aiming another war machine at the dragons cutting across the bay. All this nautical terminology suggested secret knowledge as obscure as any of the studies of the sages on Ankelene Hill, but it was part of the marvel of all the devices hominids invented to compensate for physical, mental, and moral weaknesses.

  He forgot the man in the rigging, folded his wings, and landed on the deck—shattering rail, machine, and men. A few good stomps and the whole mess went overside, weighted down by heavy chains and weights.