The Copper appreciated the hill’s difficulty more on the way up than on the trip down. Especially with the weight of a drake supported by only three limbs. The Ghi men would have a hard time coming up it, at least from the riverside.

The wounded drake’s claws relaxed and he slipped off. The drake’s tongue hung out as he breathed.

“Can you grip my tail?”

The drake didn’t answer; he just closed his teeth around the Copper’s tail, then shut his eyes. The climb was harder, not to mention painful, with the deadweight of the drake pulling at his tail, but he made it to the others.

The wounded drake breathed no more. The Copper pried the jaws loose.

He thought furiously. The drakes would lose heart, staring at that cooling body.

“I don’t know this drake. What was his name?”

“Nirolf,” another said.

“This is Nirolf’s hill, then. Let’s put him in those rocks, there, where he’ll have a good view of the fight.”

“Why name a hill after one who was vanquished?” a drake asked.

The Copper didn’t have an answer, so he just snarled and rattled his griff until the drake backed away.

Nivom returned to him, chewing, negotiating a course through the wounded drakes as though wishing to avoid droppings.

“What’s this about you remaining behind?” he asked.

“I’m not so sure this battle is over.”

“I am. I felt the rocks fall. I felt a dragon crash to the ground. Those stone houses of the Ghi men do not burn like some blighter village.”

“There’s still a fight in these drakes. The Ghi men will learn that if they try to come up this hill.”

“Your honor,” a drake said. “If there’re still fighting claws dug into this ground, I don’t want to leave it.” He sniffed at one of his wounded fellows with a scabby snout missing a few scales.

Nivom looked around. Enough of the unbled drakes had crept up to listen to the conversation, while still keeping their distance from the wounded, so he had an audience in two rings. The duelist dragon licking at the wound in his chest formed a little hill all his own.

“How do you propose this battle be fought? No wings, no mobility, and no hominid levees.”

The Copper lowered his head. “I’ll follow any order you wish to give, Commander. As long as it doesn’t involve my leaving this hill and the wounded.”

“You mean the vanquished.”

HeBellereth lifted his massive scarred head. “Not yet, drake.”

The Copper felt a thought break loose in his mind. “Yes! That’s the spirit. Not yet. That will be our battle cry. Not yet.”

Nivom took a deep breath. “It’ll be dark soon. We’ll post wind sentries on the adjoining hills. If we get everyone out of sight they might think we’ve left. Then I’ll slip back with a siisa to the ford….”

The Copper could almost feel the heat from the gathered and the filling fire bladders. He looked across the river. “Not yet, you milksops. Not yet.”

Chapter 17

A scent Nivom called “jasmine” hung in the night air. The flowing moonlit waters beckoned below, seeming to tickle the base of the hill with silver fingers. Night birds warbled amid the flooded trees, their soft calls denying the existence of blood-caked spears and war machines that sent rocks hurtling from the skies.

Even the fortress town on the opposite bank slumbered in peace, a few slivers of light showing from shuttered windows.

The night passed quietly. The remaining blighters, no more than a few score, clustered nervously behind the wounded HeBellereth. The Copper suspected they were too frightened to venture anywhere else.

A rather long-haired blighter with unusually large eyes closed the wound in HeBellereth, using bits of sharp wooden peg and leather to close the gash.

As the sun went down the Copper asked Fourfang to go among the blighters and see if they’d be willing to send messengers to seek help from the nearby tribes. He’d seen enough burned villages while following the guides to the river to suspect that the local blighters would be more willing to fight the Ghi men than would those from farther south. He dispatched his own guides back to the king to report that there’d been fighting but it was “inconclusive,” and that they were camped within sight of the Ghi men’s walls.

Then he loosed his trio of bats on HeBellereth to do what they could to soothe his wounds. HeBellereth protested. Being tended to by savage, unenthralled blighters was bad enough, but he didn’t want “vermin” nosing about his wound—until the first licks and the numbing tingle the bat saliva brought made his eyes widen in amazement.

“Those are the biggest bats I’ve ever seen. They’re like hunting dogs,” Nivom said.

“They were raised on dragonblood,” the Copper said. “Almost from birth. It appears to agree with them.”

“They’ll get their fill this night.”

Nivom told him what had transpired between his trip back to the Lavadome and his return. SiDrakkon sent NiThonius to the Mud City to press on the king the need for more forces—men or blighter—then he and his dragons caught a large force of Ghi cavalry in the open and scattered them. SiDrakkon concluded that with their main strength gone, it was time to strike at their largest settlement in Bant, the quarry city on the Black River.

But the Ghi men had prepared against the coming of the dragons. Poor iron spears, tin axes, and cowhide shields were met by steel broadswords, chain armor, and far-flying dwarvish crossbow bolts. As for the dragons, the war machines of the men struck as the dragons turned and dived, and every issue of flame was fought by bucketfuls of sand.

Leading to the debacle the Copper had partly witnessed.

“They’ll come in the morning to finish the wounded off,” Nivom predicted.

“They’ll have to cross the river to do that,” the Copper said. “Humans can’t swim like drakes. Not with their false-scale.”

“My father told me once that the best place to strike an upright is in the crotch, when they take a long step forward.”

“Wise dragon. Does he still live?”

“No. A Wyrr was he, like the Tyr himself, and distantly related. He lost his hill and his life to a Skotl-clan duelist. My mother, an Anklene, took her own in her despair.”

The Copper thought it best to switch subjects, as Nivom could become gloomy, and he wanted his old cavemate alert and active. Every time talk turned to clan friction it left him nonplussed. Had not dragons enemies enough? “So that’s where you get your cleverness. The Anklenes.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised if you had some Anklene blood in you too. Your eye ridge is like theirs, though that odd eye spoils the effect. You spout strange ideas. Why all the concern over a vanquished drake?”

“I’m not sure I can put it into words. How are you with mind-pictures?”

“Baby stories? I’m a drake, and you’re not my mother. Or some dragonelle angling to be flattered.”

“In my travels I came across the bodies of two demen sitting back-to-back in a cave, as though they were guarding each other as they died of their wounds. When I smelled the bodies, it was just two more bodies; I’d seen plenty before. But that…that…comradeship…”

“Did you just say comradeship? That’s a queer word. I think it’s taken from a hominid tongue.”

“Dragons could use a little of that, instead of always working out who’s above whom and adding to their own store of glory and gold.”

“You’re not one of these foamers who wants everyone to have the same rank and offer up metals to those who can’t be bothered to get it on their own, are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve had a sun-struck dragon or two before. Do your dreaming while you’re asleep.”

The Copper thought it best to change the course of the conversation. “So what do you propose to do about catching them in the crotch?”

“I’ll take a sissa of the healthy drakes to the river. Can you handle matters here on the hillside, with the better of the wounded?”

“Yes. I was thinking that trick they played, with their war machines hiding in the brush, could be played on them too. You grab them at the crotch and I’ll bite their arms off.”

“By the Earth Spirit, yes! Rugaard, I’d be proud to cry havoc with you at my side.”

“I was thinking. Some cooperation from the blighters might help. How are you with their tongue?”

“I know a little.”

The Copper thought. “I have a thrall who has a way of making himself agreeable. Maybe he can fill in the gaps.”

A very unlikely reinforcement arrived after a short rain squall—the weather at this time of year seemed to mandate a rain in the early afternoon and a second in the long hours of the night before dawn—a bashed and mud-splattered Firemaiden named Nilrasha.

According to Fourfang, the blighters now named her Ora, a word that in their tongue referred to some hunting season festival or other, during which one of every kind of game animal was sacrificed to their capricious deities. But the blighter shaman always chose one sacrifice at random—the Ora—to be released back into the wild to let the rest of the game know that though the herds might be thinned and a few jaguars brought down, enough would be left to ensure future hunting. According to Fourfang, Ora either meant lucky or redeemed, as the rather fatalistic dragon-tongue didn’t have many words for those blessed and guarded by the gods.