His best guess was that Wistala would be helping defend the Directory. That seemed more likely than that she would let others do the fighting while she aided DharSii. The two of them were obviously in love and neither wished to step on the other’s toes.

“Tooth line,” DharSii called, using the one formation they’d had time to practice. The dragons staggered themselves in two lines, so the rear dragon looked through the wingtip-to-wingtip open line of the rank in front. The front could deploy their fire, and in the confusion and destruction the rear rank would dash forward and become the front rank. They could then add further terror by loosing their flame on whatever part of the enemy was still capable of resistance.

Then and only then could the howling barbarians be released, to leap through the pools of dragon film and bring axes to the heads of their enemies.

Warfare wasn’t meant to be sporting—it was meant to be won.

The dragons advanced from Falnges, looked around anxiously. One overzealous member who’d either never or not recently seen a battlefield had sprayed fire at the sudden rise of a flock of pigeons and seagulls, feasting on the pile of garbage waiting to be scraped into the bay.

“Uff tha?” one of the barbarians asked. Off now?

“No!” DharSii snarled, quieting the youth who was seeing his first real battle.

“Wait until we see them close enough to make out fingers,” DharSii called to his battle line. He repeated it down the other end.

War makes strange back fellows, DharSii thought, glancing back at the barbarians on what was left of a barge. Wistala would have liked this, the challenge to carry more than any other dragon.

The demen did them no favors. They did not come out to join battle, instead retreating into the city, where they clustered in the alleys, doorways, and rooftops.

“Bad-mannered of them,” DharSii said to no one in particular, but a barbarian who understood some Drakine translated it, and soon the men were shouting it up and down water-dripping vessels.

“We’ll have to improvise. Form head-to-toe lines. Let’s try to keep our warriors above them. We’ll never fit down some of those streets, so we’ll have to disembark some of the barbarians, but only once battle is joined and they’re good and keyed up.”

“Formation coming in from the left,” Thunderwing reported.

DharSii lifted his head. He did a double take. The hominid forms wore ordinary Hypatian rain-cloaks, a cheap and oil-clothed tight weave favored by lumberers and miners. But he saw green and flowery colors about their brows. Either they were men garlanded for a summer solstice baby-counting festival, or they were . . .

Elves? Elves coming to the aid of Hypat?

In such numbers, too. By the hundreds, formed into the traditional swan-wings of the northern Hypatian coast, with two companies in front, spread in open-order carrying bows, the traditional groups of unbonded males and females, and a more tightly packed set of male spearmen behind, the battle-givers.

They flowed over the fields and pens of the outskirts of Hypatia like a wind.

The elves fired a volley of arrows into the joined wall-faces of the city proper, dropping some gathered demen trying to set up a dragon-killing lance-thrower on the main avenue. Other arrows rained down on carts, paving-stones, signs, and barrels that had been wedged together as a roadblock.

“To the Directory!” DharSii called.

“Which one is the Directory?” Thunderwing asked, having already forgotten the council of war at the tower.

“I’ll go first,” the Blind Ripper roared, starting a dragon-dash that threatened to spill his warriors out of the vessel on his back like a pail of water carried by a running child.

The warriors from the barges behind formed into the usual barbarian mobs, order and chaos in one. The warriors with the biggest roundshields and small axes formed the first two ranks, spear-carriers behind, and the swordsmen behind them, ready to be vaulted into action up over the backs of the shield-men when the fighting grew thick.

They swept forward into Hypat, leaving a trail of seawater that soon became mixed with blood.

Chapter 19

The long nightmare was almost over, the Copper calculated. There’d be no bargaining with demen, not NiVom’s horde. They’d carried him through burning quarters of Hypatia. The slaughter on the streets was sickening; the demen had made a quick inventory of their captives and slaughtered those determined to be either too young or too old to survive the underground march to their picks and shovels.

Then they took him underground, following in the wake of a dropped and dead captive or two. They hit a small underground river that bore the tunneled look of dwarf-work on their old Ghioz canal system and threw him into a tube of wood, half filled with coconut coir. They threw him in, bound, and arranged the coir so it padded him—and, incidentally, helped keep the cage afloat—and started dragging it by what he assumed were tow ropes along the canal. He heard human-sounding coughs and cries from the drag-ropes.

It was an uncomfortable journey. Chilly water half filled the cage, and it was impossible to shift himself so that he could vary what part of his body rested in water and what didn’t. At least he wasn’t bound so tightly that it interfered with his circulation. He could be grateful for that.

The journey sped up and they entered a new channel after he heard the sound of locks being closed and filled.

A last trip inside the Lavadome. Funny that NiVom wasn’t going to do something spectacular, like hang him from the brass dragon-snout in Ghioz, but then NiVom was always more intelligent than imaginative. He remembered the day when NiVom had come up with the idea of bouncing rocks into the Ghioz fortifications after seeing his thrall skip stones on the river.

A team of demen with four chained-together trolls opened the leaky vessel where he had expected, at the far side of the river ring, the circular underground lake encompassing the Lavadome. How fitting. This was where his life really began, crossing this engineered body of water with a griffaran egg. This is where it would end, beneath these old columns that harbored the Griffaran Guard. There was something satisfying about coming full circle. He’d achieved more than most, though it was hard not to count much of the labor he’d put into building the Dragon Empire as wasted. Instead of securing his species’ future, he’d sealed its fate.

Under barbed whips of the demen, the trolls lifted his wet cage and carried him up the tunnel leading into the Lavadome. It was the tunnel he’d used the first time he’d entered the Lavadome. Fitting that he should use it for his last trip.

Cramped and cold from the long, soggy journey, he accepted his fate. So be it. If NiVom expected him to beg, polish his conquerors saa claws with spittled tongue, call on old memories of their time together in the Drakwatch, he’d be disappointed. He would just ask that Nilrasha be spared.

He revived enough to revisit the Lavadome as they carried him through its orange-lit expanse. Where there’d been pens and laboriously built-up potato and onion patches, muddy masses that looked like cattle-wades remained. One of the signaling towers he’d had built—the one on Skotl hill, a rock column with a lantern and mirror atop so a signal could be flashed to other hills or the observation post on Imperial Rock—had collapsed into a pile of rubble with ugly, thorny dwarfhook thriving and expanding through the cracks.

The gentle rocking and the warmth of finally being out of the cold of the river overwhelmed him. Despite a firm conviction of being carried to his death by trolls, he fell soundly asleep.

He awoke in a dark chamber. A few moments of snuffling around in the dark convinced him he was in one of the cells in a rocky outcropping adjacent to Imperial Rock, where some fragments of the forming monolith fell and piled up in a broken imitation of the colossal growth towering above.

The rocks had been re-dug and rearranged into holding pens for dragons awaiting the Tyr’s justice. No bars as in hominid cell doors; dragon-flame could burn wood and weaken iron. No, extremely heavy slabs were dragged over the tops of the cell-pits with a boulder or two thrown in for good measure. Air came in through the uneven seal between slab and cell-pit, and there was a cistern for drinking and washing if you wished.

His cistern was dry and smelled as though it hadn’t seen water in a year.

In his time as Tyr these cells had been used only rarely. Only the worst class of dragon, or those deranged by illness or injury, were put here while their fate was considered and decided. Most dragons waited quietly at the home-cave for the Tyr’s decision, if they’d committed some breach of the peace.

Nothing to do but wait. If he was very lucky, one of the Lavadome’s smaller bats might find him. . . .

Odd that NiVom never came to triumph over him. He was the sort of dragon who, when he’d beaten you, offered you the courtesy of a visit as though to seal his triumph by looking down his snout at you. All very affably, of course, with intelligent conversation about where the loser had misstepped.

The trolls took him to the base of Imperial Rock and down into the old dueling pit beneath.

It was a strange sort of structure, sort of a darker lavadome-within-the-Lavadome. When Imperial Rock had been formed, something had pushed up against the bottom of the rock, leaving a domed chamber. An air channel led up from it to the main open staircase winding up through the whole length of the rock. Some time before records were kept, it had been discovered, hollowed-out further, shaped, and then filled with sand. Three rows of shelves where dragons could recline ringed the sandy pit in the center.