The Copper snorted. He’d heard many bawdy jokes in his days in the Drakwatch, about a young winged member fighting so hard in an exercise against a Firemaid that she ended up fertilized. He always assumed such stories had some basis in truth, but this was the first time he’d heard it proven out.
“You’re not still on the island, I note.”
“Soon as the mating was over, so was the mating, if you understand me, my Tyr. I heard from the wolves she did have a clutch, a small one. One of the blighters sent me a message saying that if I wanted to see my offspring well fed and thriving, I should quit devouring so many sheep and goats and go live on one of the outer islands. Too windy and cold for me, so I swam here. I used to fly mercenary for Red Hair—that’s what I was doing when we met, at that battle.”
“The hardest fight of my life, Shadowcatch.”
“Aye, I’m not often bested. Red Hair’s gray now, but she found me a place with the groundeds. You know, she calls us the ‘tower guard,’ but we don’t earn our keep. I think she just keeps us around because she’s carrying a soft spot in her heart for dragons.”
“Better a soft spot in the heart than in the head, I suppose. I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s my problem.”
He happened upon Gettel as she left a meal with her human staff and mentioned that he’d visited the pensioners.
“Ahh, flying dragons don’t go down there much.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason as they don’t bring new recruits to the lodge for crippled soldiers in the Hypatian legions, I suppose. No one likes being reminded of what might befall them.”
The Copper found himself joining with the “groundeds,” as Shadowcatch styled them, rather than idling in the tower, learning names and assignments as the aerial dragons came and went.
He had to admire Gettel’s setup, but he wondered if it would die with her. All business of the tower flowed through her hands, yet she was childless and only had a rather brittle-looking old elf to assist her. He asked Shadowcatch what he thought would happen when she was sent on a raft out into the Inland Ocean, or whatever the Juutfod custom for disposal of their honored dead was.
“We’re in better shape than most days. There’s going to be a fight with some dwarfs. There’s an old grudge between them and the barbarian chieftains, and the dwarfs are up to their usual cattle-stealing tricks. We’ve got an upriver swim ahead of us, as soon as the melt’s full up. Plenty of salmon to eat on the way. We’ll need the oily fish, too; that cursed river is cold.”
The Copper tried to learn who had commissioned the raid on the dwarfs, but was stymied. He even took it to Gettel, but she offered only that the dwarfs had made old enemies and that while they were hungry and short on everything but determination, they had a great deal of wealth at their disposal. They’d come to the surface to steal, but not to trade.
The Copper smelled a rat, and it wasn’t one of his nightly dinner companions. As Tyr, he’d raked up reasons for enough campaigns to recognize the throat-clearing that came before the battle cry.
They exercised together a good deal. The Copper even suggested a few training games he’d learned in the Lavadome’s Drakwatch.
Had they only been able to fly he would have put them up against even the best of the Aerial Host. There wasn’t any of the jealousy, the pride that caused difficulties between the dragons of the Host. These dragons, perhaps because they no longer flew, were beyond jostling for place. They relied on and supported each other, as when the Blind Ripper had difficulty finding his way in an unfamiliar patch of open ground and Thunderwing kept up a steady rustle of his good wing for the sightless dragon to align on.
He taught them a few tricks for tunnel-fighting, like using the walls or ceiling to bounce one’s fire around an angle, or how to wedge a dead dragon in a tunnel so he’s most difficult to remove from the far side.
The Copper never learned why they left that particular day. Perhaps some shepherd spotted the dwarfs as they used the entrance to their tunnel. Perhaps payment for eliminating the bandits arrived. Perhaps Gettel finally decided she could trust him in a fight.
They stalked out in a file on a fine summer day, each dragon’s nose a tongue-flick behind the tail tip of the dragon ahead. About half the expedition was made up of the flightless dragons, led by Shadowcatch.
Dragons are speedy on the march. The Copper had learned that fact to advantage when moving against an enemy who expected him to come from the air. Their long stride and muscles conditioned to the steady exertion of flying meant they could cover ground as quickly as human cavalry and could climb mountainsides that horses could never attempt.
So they shot toward the spine of the Red Mountains at a steady three horizons a day. The winged dragons flew in food and some barrels of water flavored with wine and sweet spirits, for Gettel knew dragons had a taste for wine and liked to keep their spirits up on the march.
It was the Copper’s first experience with real evergreen woods. He’d known a few pines in the mountains in the south, particularly when he served as Upholder in Anaea. There they clung to rock crevices, lonely and twisted in the wind.
These pines were thick as the bristling hairs on a wild boar’s back and straight as Hypatian pillars, with branches sticking out in circles like wagon-wheel spokes. And the aroma! It made him feel vital and alive again. Clean and innocent as when he’d first hatched from his egg. If he could ever free Nilrasha, he’d take her to pine-woods and let her clean her nostrils with the faint turpentine smell.
As they traveled into the Red Mountains, the Copper thought he might be descending rather than ascending the foothills, for as the mountains loomed larger, their track remained level on one shoulder. A team of hominid guides led them, including a pair of humans, an elf—and female at that—and a dwarf. They were a grizzled and haggard lot, just the type to float between barbarian lands and the Empire.
For all their speed, dragons don’t take to marching, as the Copper had learned in his first year in the Drakwatch. Flying, yes. Short sprints—the surprisingly explosive dragon-dash—certainly. But plodding on hour after hour is oxen work, not dragon. They became irritable and quarrelsome.
The Copper, to divert their minds, had each one describe his favorite food. Most described the tender fats on certain quarters of beef. But not Thunderwing. Thunderwing had a strange scale color pattern, a watery blue covered in tiny white flecks like windblown snow. He claimed his favorite food was corn.
“For its indestructibility?” Shadowcatch said. “It passes out the other end much as it entered.” The others expressed similar flavors of disbelief: perhaps ground and used for breading, it makes fine stuffing, as it absorbs juices like good cotton paper.
“Ha!” Thunderwing said. “It’s my favorite because so much other game grows fat on it. Deer, pheasants, elk, oh, and the pigs. There is nothing like a corn-fed pig.” He smacked his lips.
“Well done, Thunderwing,” the Copper said. “Thunderwing, philosopher-king.”
The others found so much humor in that, it occupied them until the next meal-break on the march. They looked for excuses to point something out to their “philosopher-king.”
They idled for a day while their scouts selected an approach to the dwarf-exit.
“We have a lot riding on this,” Shadowcatch said. “These dwarfs have been an irritant to the barbarians in the north with their thefts of livestock. They must have made powerful enemies in Hypatia, or even among the Empire’s dragons, for they’re paying for this job.”
“How do you know that?” the Copper asked. Gettel had continued to be cagey about revealing their employers in this job until the last, though according to the other dragons, that had never been the case before.
“Strict orders! No eating of any kind of valuables. It’s stolen property. It all goes to the scouts, to be returned to the commissioners.”
To the Copper, it smacked of assassination. All the orders about returning stolen property might be a vomited-up smokescreen.
The dwarf-exit was well concealed inside a rotted-out cottonwood tree. Here the campaign met its first difficulty, as the hole was sized for a hominid, not a dragon. The guide-dwarf, the loser in a feud with these others, apparently, went down the hole and returned to say that it widened out just a short drop down, and appeared to widen farther into a cave that smelled of bats.
So the dragons set to work moving earth and pulling boulders up by using the bole of the dead and now uprooted cottonwood.
“With all this racket we’re making, they’ll have a good head start on us if they choose to flee,” the Copper said.
“They’re deep, if I know dwarfs,” Red Lightning said. “I just hope our trackers don’t fail us.”
“We want the dwarfs as much as you do,” Ghastmath, the human scout-leader replied, testing the edge of his oiled blade. He was gray-haired and coughed a great deal in the morning when he woke, but still hearty-looking. He had the wild and weathered look of a barbarian.
“Do you trust these two-legs, my Tyr?” Shadowcatch asked under his breath.