Dragon Avenger

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!”



Chapter 25



The dwarves took her across the Titan bridge to the sloping top of Tall Rock and established her in the second highest tower there. The only higher tower was that of the watch-guild, who kept the time of the hour-bells and looked for riders at each end of the pass through secret optics.



She found herself in the care of a blighter slave named Yellowteeth. Yellowteeth indeed possessed oversize incisors the color of dried hay, top and bottom. He kept them polished by dipping his finger in ash and rubbing his teeth, then rinsing his mouth out with water.



He grumbled a good deal in Parl, for the dwarves spoke their tongue only among themselves and taught few its secrets, save for a claw-count of pleasantries and greetings and oaths that were public knowledge anyway.



She soon learned that the dwarves used three different languages, and not surprisingly to anyone who has spent much time around dwarves, ranked them.



The lowest was Parl, the language of servants, slaves, and those who engaged in commerce. Above that was Dwarvish, “the golden letters that unite us all,” according to a dwarf-philosopher Wistala had read somewhere or other. The dwarves of the guilds spoke specialized dialects—there seemed to be guilds for everything, from armor-making to woodworking. Wistala even heard whispers of a Guild of Assassins—she guessed the Dragonblade headed that one. The choicest and most talented dwarves studied the high language, that of mathematics, according to dwarvish legend the only remnant of the perfect world that existed before darkness filled the holes.



Her tower had once been an observatory. Like the council chamber she was trying to forget, writing covered the walls, at the top star charts, moon graphs and planet tracks, beneath them explanations in the cryptic styling of the dwarves.



The star-guild had left not only numerous charts and symbols painted on the floors but on her high perch, as well, a platform designed to be lifted right up and out of the tower.



She could just get her head out the hole in the roof, which could be shut by a sheet of reinforced tin by working a bezel running around the ring-hole. (The dwarves and Yellowteeth used a pole with a hook to work it, Wistala could reach it without rearing up on her hind legs.) There were eight windows with thick shutters and curtains set around the observation room. A fixture directly beneath for some sort of apparatus stuck up from the floor below the platformlike toadstools, but all had been disassembled before they moved her into the perch.



It was a high, lonely place and appealed to her—unless a storm worked up. The tin covering on the hole rattled like a drum when rain or hail hit it, which was frequent at that altitude.



She could not fly from her room, however, without descending the center of the tower on which the blighter sat, and then moving to the Titan Bridge or squeezing herself out through a tunnel which led to one of the workshop chimneys, rising hundreds of dragon-lengths up from the heart of the mountain. Whenever she did that she ended up with soot on her scales.



The dwarves of the star-guild, who were few in number as their only employment was making maps and charts for Wheel of Fire dwarves planning a long journey, attended to her needs. Soothseekers sometimes talked—or bribed, she imagined—their way up into the observation tower and got her advice, but those visits were but rare.



So she had a good deal of free time for thought.



Thought about the Wheel of Fire and the Dragonblade, Hammar and the barbarians, the Hypatian Empire and, sometimes, the dragons of the Sadda-Vale.



On days of clear weather and light wind she explored the mountain pass the dwarves had been occupying since Thul, a General of the Hypatian Empire at its height, had guarded its mountain borders. To the east, where the steppes of the Ironriders stretched farther than even an eye on dragonwing could see, a narrow road hugged the north side of the mountain. It saw so little traffic that when Wistala saw a pack train, a rider, or a file of walkers on it she stopped to guess at their mission. Herds of cattle or horses, so long that they filled the road from its origins at the foothills to the Ba-drink, were brought in from the east by the Ironriders to trade for trade-good-quality blades and shields and helms, and the butchers-guild would work days at a stretch slaughtering and smoking and the Ba-drink would see a scum of blood from their offal.



Hardy mountain fish with knobs like horn-buds all across their sides disposed of leftovers, and were in turn pulled up and eaten by the dwarves.



The track up the west side of the mountains was not as formidable, but there the dwarves had the low wall anywhere an army could possibly march, and watch-guild dwarves in other places. Just coming to the cusp of the Ba-drink would be a feat of generalship for any invading army.



But no army could reach Thul’s Hardhold and Tall Rock without crossing the Ba-drink, and the dwarves kept all the barges in their inlets. Unless they could somehow fly over the steep, snowy mountaintops to the north, the attackers would not come within bowshot of the Wheel of Fire.



Father had been mad to attack this place.



She knew there were other roads, up from the Lower World, but could find no guides willing to take her below some of the lower chambers, and any investigating she did on her own was inevitably stopped by narrow, one-dwarf ladders or passages she was too big to climb. The dwarves working underground chuckled and told her they were not fools, the lower way was shut to keep out blighters and dragons and the foul de-men Fangbreaker had dispersed.



The dwarves would never be destroyed by invasion. Only a long siege might humble them, but dwarves were legendary siege-breakers, and had been known to eat each other rather than relent, according to Yellowteeth.



He could talk, after a fashion, though his Parl was broken and thick.



“Father taken long ago in battle, became tunneler. Father die in collapse. I born water-bearer.”



Bear water he did, up the long stairs, to arrive panting and empty his buckets into a barrel. But the dwarves hurried to install a clever system fed by a tank added to the roof; its pipes gave her clean, cold water in a brass cistern, as much as she liked, leaving Yellowteeth only food and coal to carry.



He had a platform in the tower hollow below hers, little more than an antechamber off the stairwell that had once held ropes and pulleys, and it struck Wistala as a dark and cold place. She let him bring his mat up by her fire, and he smiled as he settled in by its glow each night.