Chapter 24
Is this a joke?” Ragwrist said.
Wistala sat with him in the equestrian theater, a riding arena outside Hypat, where his riders practiced during winter camp.
She’d come south in easy stages, keeping to the west side of the Red Mountains and not raiding livestock. She slept only on the loneliest hilltops, and drank snow she melted with her foua, with an eye to avoiding the barbarians. In this way she made a long and ultimately fruitless search of the Red Mountains, even passing into the southlands and the borders of the Empire of the Ghioz, without meeting another of her kind, finding nothing but bats and bears and a horrid troll or two in likely caves. If any dragons did lurk there still, they were being quiet about it.
I am but one, and my enemies can’t be numbered. I shall have to improvise. Perhaps the Dragonblade and the dwarves have a weakness only one familiar with their habits could exploit. Cunning is required, treachery even. What would Prymelete do?
“It would be a terrible risk,” Ragwrist said after she outlined what she wanted him to do. They’d gone to some trouble to find a place where they could talk quietly. The new apprentice fortune-teller, Intanta’s great-granddaughter Iatella, had been hanging about getting an eyeful of Wistala and peering at her through the crystal shard. Though she was a skinny little girl, Wistala didn’t like being overheard, even by someone almost small enough to be gulped down in one swallow.
“I know. If the dwarves suspect me, they will kill me at once. And they know how to do it. I’ve seen the proof.”
Ragwrist did not ask her to elaborate.
“No, I don’t mean that. This Fangbreaker fellow is offering me so much money for you, I can retire to an estate and sell the circus to pay for the finest velvet cushions for my sore feet and sit-upon. I am afraid to trust myself. Especially since if your plot does not come off, I shall have made a powerful and implacable enemy.”
“You may always plead ignorance and desperation brought by poverty,” Wistala said. “You’ve had ample practice.”
“You’re getting as cynical as Brok. Where is the kindly green giant I once knew?”
“Still freezing her tailvent shut in the north, perhaps. Ah, I shall trust you. Perhaps my fate can balance out your desire to become a landlord like your brother.”
“Canny of you to mention him. But remember, elves have no particular feeling for their siblings, and evoking his memory awakes in me no desire to help avenge him. All I want to do is forget that unpleasant night.”
“Odd that you would send money to Lada to help her get Rayg back, then. Yes, I’ve been to the Green Dragon Inn and heard the latest from Forstrel. He’s raising bees for Lessup’s honey-mead now, near an old cave I sometimes use, and complained much of the share Hammar demands from all production. He also told me that you paid out of your pocket to fix some of the damaged houses. And that you raked the old ferry-bell out of the ruins and kept it.”
“Rumor, rumor, rumor. I’m interested only in facts and expenses and how much I might get from the dwarves for you.”
“I shall ask you to drive a harder bargain than you know. I want several conditions on the sale, all in the interest of my health, of course. Is Brok still with you?”
“Of course.”
“I need him to forge a very stout collar for me, something that even a troll couldn’t break.”
“What, so that the dwarves may better chain you? Suppose you wish to break away and escape?”
“I didn’t say that I wanted to break it. I just want to be able to open it.”
Wistala stood in her new collar at the Ba-drink landing, a tiny escort of circus folk with her.
They’d set up a tent around her, specially sewn for the purpose, purple and patterned with powerful symbols, for she came to the Wheel of Fire dwarves not as an abject slave, but a great treasure, one to be guarded and protected and honored.
Wistala listened to the spring melt pouring over the dam spill and waited.
The collar itself was a thick ring of steel, leathered at the inside and edges, with two forged-steel loops, one at the top and one at the bottom, for the attachment of chains, though only the tiniest wisp of azure blue silk bound her to a silver peg in the floor. There was no latch or spot for a key, and if you ran your hands around the inside only hardened leather met your fingers. Only Wistala knew where, if you opened the stitching, you could insert a claw point and open the lock, which then left only a false weld to break before the collar fell away.
At last she heard the creak of oars in their locks, and shouts and orders and calls of dwarf voices.
“King Fangbreaker comes. Sound the trumpets! Beat the drums!”
If you’re patient enough, and keep still out of sight and smell, the prey will feed itself right to you. . . .
Something took off with a whistling whoosh and exploded far overhead, Wistala guessed it to be a firework. A thundering tattoo broke out on the drums, it sounded like boulders coming down the mountains, and the trumpets pealed so high and clear, it was like sunshine had been turned to music.
Wistala, hearts hammering, waited for the audience.
The tent flap opened, letting in a little fresh air that Wistala welcomed, as Ragwrist was having incense burned to abate the dragon- smell for the honored guests.
“Winged, as you see. And a little grown, a little more appetite at mealtimes, but the same Oracle,” Ragwrist said as he ushered three dwarves in. Wistala saw prostrate dwarves outside, who looked as though they’d been felled or struck by sleeping spells.
Wistala noted the changes in him even as the mighty dwarf looked her over.
Gobold Fangbreaker wore a silver mask now, emblazoned with a four-pointed star, two slits for his eyes and two more beneath flanking the ridges of the star, whose shining points extended beyond the dull plate of the mask. Below, his beard had swirling designs of gold and silver dust worked into it, and a golden cord bound it into a tuft at the bottom from which hung a piece of glass Wistala guessed to be a magnifier. He was somewhat thinner but still broadly built, in a cuirass of silver and leather cushioning, oddly like her own steel collar in its padding, only with more elaborate flourish down the centerline, evocative of spear heads. King Fangbreaker now wore purple caping at back and throat and sash.
The most obvious difference, though, was the absence of his right leg. An inverted half skull—Wistala guessed it to be a hominid’s, though she knew not what branch had such strangely long fangs and a ridge at the temples that almost resembled horns—capped the missing limb at the knee. Projecting out of this and running to the floor was a rod of white crystal, like lighting frozen into immobility. A mundane steel-shod horse hoof at the base gave him some stability on the ground.
He still wore the helm capped with dragon fangs, only now overlarge horn-tips projected from its sides, gilded and filigreed.
Evidently the crown of Masmodon still eluded him.
Behind King Fangbreaker stood two more dwarves, one bearing a tall banner he had to dip somewhat to fit in the tent. It was the old ruby-tipped staff Fangbreaker had carried before, only now grown and with a crossbar added at the top to support a small purple banner, and the ruby was the perch of a stern-looking brass eagle. The other dwarf lugged chests and bags tied on either side of a steel shoulder pole.
Wistala dipped her snout until it almost touched the ground. “I see changes in you, Gobold Fangbreaker. Did my oracle come true, or have you come for my head and claws?”
Why, why, why did you say that? It sounds like a challenge—
“Hmpf,” King Fangbreaker said. “I come to do this, though there are many who will swear, when the tale is told, that it is an impossibility.”
He approached her and threw his strong arms about her neck, and patted her three times with his right hand hard enough to make her scales clatter.
“Yes!” King Fangbreaker said. “So happy am I that I embrace you like a sister! For no sister ever gave brother such encouragement as you gave me. You set my heart afire as though you had spat flame into it! And look!” He cast his arms wide and lifted his purple robes. “Results speak louder than any words.”
He spun on his horse hoof, then stepped over to Ragwrist. “Elf, let us settle the accounting. Name your price, and if it’s her weight in silver, I’ll melt every plate and goblet on both sides of the Titan bridge to meet it.” He turned back to Wistala. “I do not come to buy you, Oracle, but to free you. I would not have one who has done such service choking in the wake of gargant flatus.” He extracted a knife from his sleeve with such speed that it almost looked as though it had grown there and moved to cut the blue silken cord.
“No, I beg you, mighty king,” Wistala said. “That twist could be broke at the slightest pull. I would keep it as a souvenir of happy journeys under the kindest of masters.”
“I’ve never known a dwarf to begin negotiations at such a disadvantage as saying ‘name your price,’ ” Ragwrist said. “I’m quite befuddled. But if that is the case, the negotiations shall be brief. I seek only assurances as to her treatment.”
“Treatment!” King Fangbreaker said. “She may go where she likes. But if she will reside with the Wheel of Fire, she’ll want for nothing as long as I have voice to call for it to be brought to her. I would ask only her counsel in return.”
“Let us adjourn to my tent, if you will accept my hospitality, great king,” Ragwrist said. “It would be unseemly to name a price before the object of the negotiations, methinks.”
“Elves and their protocols. Of course, Circusmaster, of course, but I am tempted to simply behead all present and free the dragon.”
“My king, no!” Wistala said.
King Fangbreaker laughed. “I joke, of course. Let’s get this over with, Ragwrist. It’s too nice a day for tents and incense.”
The party left, and Wistala sagged. Her spine had been tightening, her body closing on itself like a telescope all through the audience, yet she could not account for her fear.
“Shall I read your fortune?” a tiny voice squeaked.
Wistala looked down to see Iatella crouching between brazier and piles of pillows, cradling Intanta’s old, saucer-shaped crystal in her lap as though it were a very fat doll. The girl was on the fire-keeping staff and had come along to work the camp kitchen and get road experience.
“Certainly. Practice away,” Wistala said.
The little girl stood before her gravely, then knelt, all seriousness as is the manner of hominid children when hard at play. She drew designs around the crystal, then found something wrong with its placement, and inclined it a little so it faced her better.
“I see tragedy in your life,” Iatella said.
This was no great secret to anyone with knowledge of Ragwrist’s circus, but it showed the girl had some skill, for you always wanted to start out on firm footing.
“Wonderful,” Wistala said. “I’m most impressed.”
“Elves, dwarves, men—you have seen a good part of the Hypatian Empire,” Iatella went on, pulling at her lip in thought.
“Amazing,” Wistala said.
“Birds, too,” she added. “Birds and death.”
How . . . Where was she going with this?
“I see you. Something in shadow, a dragon with a scarred face the color of an old soup-pot. And one of many colors, turned white as snow. You thought him dead when he turned white.”
How was this possible. Auron? How on earth could she know about Auron, or that morning on the mountainside she thought him frozen to death?
“Oh,” she said, and her voice was no longer that of a little girl, but something older and croakier than even Intanta. “A terrible reckoning. Three dragons, opposition, and the fate of worlds in the balance.”
And then she screamed, such a scream that it seemed to shoot right through Wistala’s body, the tent, the soil itself, and fainted.
A circus dwarf, one of Brok’s staff, and a pair of the Wheel of Fire dwarves rushed into the tent.
“What happened?” the circus dwarf asked, after a dwarvish expostulation from the others.
“We were playing a game. I coughed,” Wistala said. “I think it frightened her.”
They patted Iatella on the cheek, and her eyes fluttered open. She claimed no memory of what caused her to faint, and picked up her crystal and fled.
Ragwrist entered next, and the same questions were asked and answered. The dwarves wandered back out, leaving her and Ragwrist alone. “No matter. The bargain was easily struck. You have been ‘freed’ by the generosity of King Fangbreaker, Wistala,” he said, untying the azure band of silk.
“Dare I ask the price?”
“I kept it low, saying that his good opinion would one day be worth more to me than any gold, and he looked pleased, though I think sometimes dwarves wear those masks as much to hide their emotions when bargaining as to keep out the light. I or others may visit you at any time, though the dwarves, as always, hold the right to decide who will be admitted to their city, and you are free to fly as you will. But I wonder. He told me to strike off your collar, by the way. All that effort wasted.”
“Ragwrist, you are good to run this risk,” Wistala said, quietly.
“Ha!” he said, patting her shoulder, and her scales were happy to have a memory to replace the embrace of King Fangbreaker. “You still hold Mossbell’s lands, should true Hypatian law ever be reestablished across Whitewater. It’s the land I’ve got my eye on. So having let you know my true motive, will you take this last opportunity to turn back? This is no arguing council of dwarves. If Fangbreaker senses a threat, he will deal with you . . . harshly.”
Wistala ran her tongue along her teeth. “Then I will share the fate of my family.”
She crossed the Ba-drink in splendor, on the dwarves’ largest cargo-barge, pushed and pulled by smaller barges filled with lines of rowers.
The blue silk stood in place of her collar, the long sash tied loosely so as not to grate on her scales more than was unavoidable. Her little triangular diadem of the librarians dangled at the front of her fringe, sparkling in the mountain sun.
King Fangbreaker stood beside her as they approached the Thul’s Hardhold and Tall Rock. Tall Rock stood sheer-sided all around where it met the finger of water, but Thul’s Hardhold climbed more gradually like some sort of fantastic staircase. Only to the east, where it faced Tall Rock across the Titan bridge, was it as sheer as its companion.
Sheer or not, the sides of the rock were cut with galleries and balconies, precarious outer stairways, even gardens beneath jutting stonework houses holding still more balconies and galleries.
And every one was lined with cheering crowds of dwarves, dropping dried flowers (or bits of torn paper or waxen wrapping if they could not afford flowers) as they passed across the water between the Hardhold and the Rock.
“Not a dwarf lives that doesn’t aspire to a balcony of his own so that he might take fresh air and skylight,” King Fangbreaker said, waving vaguely to the crowds. “We value it more than the elves, since many of us see so little of it. Some add gold leaf to the railings, but I prefer the natural look of traditional sedimentary stonework, don’t you?”
“I’m overcome,” Wistala said, flowers and bits of paper catching all over her scales and gathering in the folds of her wings. The rock walls to either side seemed to be coming together at the top, closing like a pair of vast jaws. But it had to be a trick of eye and distance, she’d seen their shape from across the Ba-drink.
“Now, a tour of what your advice gave me the courage to break loose, like a gem in a mine wall,” Fangbreaker said as the barge docked. They tied to a wharf next to a cave with water flowing out of it. “Had we taken the royal barge, we might have gone right in, but I fear all you would have to do is scratch your ear and you’d capsize it.”
More dwarves threw themselves on their faces and another firework shot up between the sheer cliff faces as King Fangbreaker hopped onto the wharf. The cheering didn’t stop until he took a short set of stairs up and entered a wide gallery. Court officials—at least, that was what Wistala guessed them to be, for they wore cockades of purple—met him on the stairs, approaching with a sort of permanent, cringing bow and rose only to speak quietly into his ear.
“Yes, yes, I’ll attend to that later,” he said, passing through the herd of bent dwarves. They clustered and swirled about him so that Wistala was reminded of bloodsucker bats in the hotforests around Adipose attempting to latch on to a fast-moving bullock.
Fangbreaker led the swarm around corners and came to a cavern bridge inside, where a narrow crack leading up to the top of the Hardhold inside had its walls thick with mosses and clinging ferns. Water ran down the sides of the rock in a thousand tiny trickles to a sea of ferns below.
“Thul’s Garden,” King Fangbreaker said, passing over a short wide bridge. Wistala tested it with a sii. “Oh, come now, Oracle,” Fangbreaker said. “This is dwarf work of the highest order. We could stack dragons all the way to the sky above on this little bridge.”
There were dwarves in blackened steel at the opposite end of the bridge, with tufts of purple-dyed fur at boot-top and helmet lining. King Fangbreaker used the guards to shake off the courtiers, the way a whale of the Inland Ocean’s cold north might use a rock to scrape barnacles from its belly.
Wistala passed over the short bridge, her head already in the passage beyond before her tail-tip left the gap behind.
He went up another short, wide flight of stairs, luckily for Wistala, then turned a corner where dwarves in soft leather shoes opened a set of double wooden doors. Wistala just squeezed through into a room about the size of the presentation tent where she’d awaited the dwarf that morning.
A huge, polished black table that looked like it had been carved out of the mountain itself stood in an oval of curved marble walls. There was a great deal of writing chiseled into the walls, and more on columns that had evidently been added to the room. Wistala counted twenty oddly shaped chairs around the table, draped in black velvet so that their spikiness was softened and hidden.
“Oh, the years I sat at this table, arguing over nothings,” King Fangbreaker said, gripping the table as though he wished to lift and overturn it. “Motions, countermotions, oppositions, reconciliations, none of them worth a pot of passed water. The war with the de-men was being lost on the darkroads, and all we could do was sputter at each other. Until—after your words—I took control.
“I said what was needed was a King with the Old Powers to forge our divided houses into a single spear.” He pointed with a finger at a notch in the table. “That’s where Barzo put down his fist in a Rock of Opposition. So I whipped up my sleeve-ax and cut it right off. Arterial blood all over the meeting notes. The others fell into line once I rolled his head down the table. Gnaw, what a day. Felt light as a feather after. Follow me.”
As she bowed to let him pass back to the doors she lifted one of the velvet coverings to the chairs, wondering if they hid bloodstains, and was aghast to see green dragonscale. She suddenly realized what the unused velvet hid—dragon claws, opened and digits bent so the dwarves might lean in comfort against stiffened sii and saa.
She gulped down a sickening mixture of sadness, rage, and regret, and fixed her gaze on Fangbreaker’s back. One short jump and—
But these chairs had stood around this table since long before Fangbreaker, most likely.
The king brushed more of the soft-shoed dwarves aside. “Oh, it’s as if I’ve no staff at all,” he grumbled, and led her to a tall, narrow hall, sort of an echo of the garden they’d bridged before.
There were paintings all over the smoothed wall, some old and flaking, some almost unrecognizable, but he led her to a new one, so broad it partially covered two others of dwarves linking arms, or shaking hands, or pointing in various directions and talking.
The new painting depicted some sort of ghastly underground fight in hip-deep water, with canoes like hollowed-out trees filled with dwarves firing crossbows at blighters and other hominids with what Wistala took to be exaggerated evil features.
“The Battle of Domlod,” King Fangbreaker said. “I wasn’t actually riding the outside of one of the ramkaks, mind you, which is a fine way to get your head knocked off, but artists do insist on their frills and flourishes for dramatic effect. Lost my leg but won the war, and the de-men will be giving us no more trouble on the darkroads.”
He let her admire it for a moment, and as they stood in silence one of the black-armored guards, this one with a purple half-cloak covering his shoulders, approached noisily and spoke in Fangbreaker’s ear.
“Oh, I lost track of the time,” King Fangbreaker said. “If the barge is already out, let’s not keep the crowds waiting. Come, Oracle. By the way, do you have a name?”
“Those close to me call me Tala,” Wistala said. “I would be glad to hear it from you, King.” For the best place to strike an enemy is close enough to gut, as Father used to say.
“Very well, Tala, up the Hall of Invention and to the balcony over Thul’s tomb.”
They passed along another wide hall with many short antechambers, each filled with devices of metal and steel and cable, some even in motion, though whether it was to amuse or accomplish something Wistala could not say. She saw daylight ahead at the opening of a very finely wrought gallery atop a huge slab of solid red granite that read THUL in both Elvish and Hypatian scripts. There were other icons and scriptings, as well, though she did not know the tongues.
Curving stairs ran up the sides of the tomb to the gallery above. Dwarves in splendid cloaks and caps were already gathered there, and bowed low but did not throw themselves to the floor as King Fangbreaker climbed up to join them.
Not a few looked at her in wonder as she approached, but most of the others jostled for a place next to the king at the balcony rail, draped with purple velvet, Wistala noted.
She climbed atop Thul’s coffin and some of the dwarves leaned their heads together at that, eyes heavily shaded, but most were still throwing elbows and hip-blocking to gain or keep a position near Fangbreaker at the rail.
Wistala looked out and down at the finger of water running between Thul’s Hardhold and Tall Rock. A small barge looked to be fixed just downstream—if current flowed in the lake—from the Titan bridge where a crowd, but nothing like the crowd at the King’s barge trip, had gathered to watch events.
“None at Vassa’s balcony, you see, my mighty king,” one of the dwarves said in Fangbreaker’s ear.
Wistala didn’t know which was Vassa’s balcony, and didn’t care. She looked down the sheer side of rock at the barge. A dwarf, shorn of his hair and beard and stripped to a loincloth, was staked out in the daylight, no mask on his face. It looked as though he had something wrapped around his head, but it was at the mouth level.
Five dwarves in black capes, with black great-axes, stood around him, at each limb and the head.
A dwarf on the Titan bridge was reading from a scroll box, but Wistala didn’t understand the words.
“What is this?” she asked Fangbreaker. A long neck had its advantages for reaching over crowds.
“Justice. That fellow spoke against me in his guild hall. Dozens of ears heard it; there’s no doubt as to his guilt. Oh, the poor fool. It’s like a madness; it’s struck some of the best families with balconies on the Ba-drink.”
“He’s gagged?” Wistala asked as the ax-men, at some signal, lifted their blades.
“We used to let them say last words, but it led to tedious and insulting speeches. Now we open their mouths and give them just enough time to scream.”
The dwarf at the staked-out figure’s head nodded at some signal from above, and bent to remove the gag. Wistala heard a shout in Dwarvish from the staked-out man, and Fangbreaker thumped the balcony rail.
In quick succession the ax-man at his right arm brought down his blade, severing the limb, and four regular strikes followed on the stained wooden deck of the barge. The assorted bits danced a little, like landed fish.
Some cheering broke out, loudest at the king’s balcony, or so it seemed to Wistala’s ears. She wondered what his limbs might be used for, but they were simply dumped in the Ba-drink.
“A traitor’s burial,” one of the lordly dwarves said in Parl, perhaps wanting to please the king by explaining.
“Hmpf,” King Fangbreaker said. “Dismembered and dead in five tics. And with his last words he called me brutal!”