Dragon Strike (Age of Fire #4)

Dragon Strike (Age of Fire #4) Page 5

A number of the Fireblades bore recent scars, closed up with pins of bird-bone. Helms and shields glinted with fresh strikes and digs, still gleaming bright against the more weathered metal, but whatever had happened they did not boast of it.

She probed the pit with ear and eye. “Do enemies come up that hole?”

“It was once a great well-pool, but the demen diverted the flow and NooMoahk did not put it back in order.”

Demen? She knew something of them through the dwarves. Odd, carapaced hominids who scuttled around in the dark places of the world and prayed to mysterious shining gods. Gods who demanded sacrifices.

“The Fireblades had a hard battle with Ghioz men, the Stone-builders,” her guide said. “They sought the sun-shard.”

“What’s that?” The name tugged at Wistala’s memory, but she couldn’t quite place it.

“You see in a moment. It is the living heart of our old empire. Stolen long ago. NooMoahk restored it to us after Anklamere’s fall.”

More tough-looking blighters idled here, eating and dueling. Heavy axes propping up mountains of muscle and studded hide of those on watch.

“The Fireblades,” her guide said. “Guardians of the sun-shard.”

They stirred and gaped at her as she passed. “The witch doctors were right! A new guardian comes!”

“The ancient dragon-cave,” the well-spoken blighter said. “Here NooMoahk placed the sun-shard, taken from the tower of Anklamere. Here AuRon advised our king to build rather than fight. Here in its light my tutor taught me the tongues of the subject races. It is a wonder of the two worlds. You could be its keeper, mayhap.”

An arch of clear light shone at the center of a circular, fanged dais. This was no prism reflecting torchlight. The reflections shifted and danced, as though it lived.

She would have to give an account of this to the librarians at Thallia. A relic of Anklamere might be of enough interest for them to send scholars to study it, if the blighters could be persuaded to have “subject races” tread on holy ground.

Perhaps she could come to terms with them.

“I will refresh myself. I can repay your hospitality with more than just words of gratitude.”

The peoples in the east had given her coins just for breathing in their presence while they made prayers. She had quite a collection sewn into the trim harness that carried her notes and maps and records of her travels that she would bequeath to the Great Library at Thallia.

Wistala sniffed around—dragon odor lingered long, and a scent remained, the tang and taste of male dragon, but whether it was Au—

Her head locked and her eyes widened. Off in a corner, bathed in the glow of crystals like the ones she’d seen in Yari-Tab’s tumbledown, only much brighter, stood stone-and-wood shelves lined with books, and scroll cases, and boxes.

She left the sun-shard and made straight for the shelves.

Heaps of paper lay rotting on the floor, or scattered around in wads. She opened a crumpled page.

“Strange lost tongues, but the pictures interest, mayhap,” her guide said.

The paper bore a smear, obscuring faint ink. The blighters had been wiping themselves with pages torn out from ancient texts.

She took down a leather-bound volume, not even feeling the twinge in her shoulder as she reached, opened a book, and looked at the first leaf. A strange design of three equilateral triangles overlaid on a thicker fourth—her savior and mentor Rainfall had taught her some geometry—the memory of him dried her throat. She unrolled a scroll. Someone had added the same icon to the top of the scroll in ink of a more recent vintage than the faded writing.

Someone had gone to great trouble to collect and mark these volumes.

Tomes and tombs! And the blighters were cleaning their tailvents with it. Funny and sad at the same time.

Her studies in the archives of Hypatia concerning the history of the librarians supplied the name. The signet of Anklamere.

She may not have found her brother, but she’d discovered the half-legendary library of Anklamere.

AuRon’s cold trail couldn’t get much colder. Perhaps he would return for more books.

“I think I shall stay for a while, if you have no objection. Perhaps a season? Pray tell, what are the winters like here?”

Her guide slapped himself about the belly and chest. She’d not mixed much with blighters until now, but she guessed he was pleased. She just hoped they wouldn’t ask her to go hunt the revengerog, whatever that was. Food, rest, and some quiet to study the library would be most welcome.

“I have a few requests, in the interests of making our association a happier one,” she added. “First, no one touches the library. Second, your warriors wash away their filth somewhere other than that trickle in the corner, as I’m not fond of drinking sewage. And last,” she said, trying to keep her mouth from watering so much it spoiled her Parl, “tell me more about the game found in the jungle.”

So subtle was the sun-shard’s effect, Wistala at first attributed it to her imagination. Or its light, allowing her to read more quickly.

She’d brought a few volumes onto the formidable-looking dais to read in better light—and hold up the pages to a bright enough source to allow her to see the icons written in subtle inks at the edges of the triangles, some form of categorization—and she found the words came easier, tongues she’d last read years ago in Rainfall’s library came fluidly, she even fancied a deeper understanding of the scribes’ words.

Awa, the dwarf philosopher whom she’d never been overly fond of thanks to his elaborate metaphors and disjointed manner of writing, rose in her esteem when she read him by the light of the sun-shard. But then when she returned to a passage that had echoed in her mind by the ordinary lights of the library he seemed leaden and obtuse again.

Though she had to be careful about falling asleep in its presence. She had dark and disturbing dreams when this happened, awaking as though from a nightmare, hearts pounding. Yet for the rest of the day after one of these nightmares she was oddly vital, with a hatchling’s curious energy.

She tried to get more about its history out of the blighters, but to them it was only “bigger-than-big magic.”

“The old tower star fell to earth. From it came taming of fire to make wheel and blade and bowstring, which raised the Umazeh to glory,” Vank, her blighter interlocutor, said. He’d found a bit of old cloth, a weave of red and gold, and tied it about his head and neck to show his status. “Then Anklamere stole it from us and used it to enslave the charioteers. He placed it high in his tower and let it glow until it rivaled the green wanderer in the heavens.”

His conversation left her bored and impatient, missing Rainfall’s nimble discourse or Ragwrist’s jokes and laments about his state of poverty.

Vank tried to give her a servant to clean her scale and teeth, a bow-legged old blighter named Harf, an escaped Ghioz slave. He claimed he’d been a body-servant to dragons in the mountains off beyond the plains of Bant. Hundreds of dragons, a powerful empire—he was quite the most extraordinary liar Wistala had ever met. She’d flown all down the spine of mountains running west of the Inland Ocean chasing rumors that turned out to be founded on some bird-creatures.

Of course, to a blighter any big flying creature might seem a dragon. Still, all the detail he’d worked out, with tunnels and a whole hidden society of dragons dug in like rabbits in a warren inside a mountain. Perhaps he’d found that his stories enhanced his prestige among the others.

Wistala had learned long ago to clean her own scale and suck up and spit out river-sand to scrub her teeth. But she did let Harf set up bed and tenting on her doorstep, with orders to keep blighters from defiling any more texts.

An entourage of tribal elders visited her, paying obeisance to the crystal and asking what she’d seen on her hunting flights. They seemed most worried about the river to the west, their informal border with a province of the Ghioz. The Ghioz had crossed the river and were “digging holes” in some of the Pine Hills, a green serration on the horizon visible from the mouth of the great cave-ruin.

Ghioz riders had even explored some of the foothills of the blighter mountain range. They’d been chased off with a hail of flung spears and arrows and slingstones, but the Fireblades who’d seen action in the old Southling war under AuRon feared they’d be back.

A chastened enemy might return. A one-eyed Fireblade insisted that not even the ghosts of destroyed enemies ever troubled him again.

Wistala could understand their worry. She’d grown up in the human lands of the old Hypatian Empire. The Ghioz on the other side of the mountains had grown from minor trading partner on the Sunstruck Sea to rival. Geography, a few good thanes in the mountain passes, and the traditional friendship of elves and dwarves in their own lands who’d shared in Hypatia’s ancient glories kept their terrible queen on her side of the mountains.

But, still, her wondering turned to worry. Wistala supposed that the choice cuts of meat and tasty organmeat sausages were inducements to stay. They even presented her with bits of old chain and nail and cooking iron along with raw gold and silver ores, gritty but satisfying in the slime that came to her mouth to aid it in its downward slide. NooMoahk’s tribute, the blighters styled it.