The Copper had done away with dueling when he became Tyr. Ever the smaller and handicapped by his injuries, he had never been treated well by duels. He preferred to use the chamber to address larger groups of dragons than could meet before the throne, but still in more privacy than in the gardens atop Imperial Rock.
The place looked dusty and there were old crates and barrels stored on the shelves where dragons once reclined and listened or spoke. Old banners, somewhat mildewed, ringed the walls—they were trophies of poorer quality from battles that weren’t good enough for the throne room but still worth keeping as reminders of victories. Now the banners, like his victories, were disintegrating.
Rayg and Imfamnia stood in the old Tyr’s shelf looking out over the dueling pit. Rayg, with an old human’s run-wild hairiness, managed to look more vital than the emaciated dragon-dame. When he’d known her growing up, she was a beautiful, vital dragon, sleek and well fed, all swooping lines made for the smooth passage of wing. Now she looked thin—you could actually see hip joints and where the ribs ended, all angles and sharp edges. The overindulged, mocking gaze that held you until, embarrassed, you looked away had been replaced by brief, pointed glances at those all around and in the shadows, as if she expected an assassin’s lunge from the old banners hung around the walls. The years of exile must have sharpened her, like a broken decorative sword cut down and sharpened into a stabbing dagger.
“Meet the new exemplar of your tired, fractious species,” Rayg said.
The red dragon was newly fledged, though his wings drooped and dragged along behind him like a gown on a female hominid of the Directory. He was a rather dull silver, with a stupid half-smile on his face.
“Wave to the old-kind, SuSunuth,” Rayg said. The red held up a sii. Its claws had been removed, only sawn-off-looking digits remained. They were red and raw, as though they’d been chewed at.
“Three operations,” Rayg said. “Simple enough for a blighter to do. Clip two tendons at the base of each wing, take out the front and rear claws and cauterize, and then—most important—a minor operation, drilling into the skull just behind each eye along the horizontal to the base of the crest. It renders the dragon docile and cooperative. The only harm this dragon is capable of doing is by accident. I’m still working on removing the glands to ignite the firebladder oil. I haven’t quite managed that yet. The roof of a dragon mouth seems prone to infection—tinker with it and it goes dry and then black rot sets in and it reaches the brain in a flash. I keep losing hatchlings that way. Perhaps I should try permanently tapping the firebladder, hmmm?”
AuRon wished he could tap Rayg’s brain with a piece of bamboo. right to the base of the skull, and then see what secrets leaked out.
All my fault, AuRon, his brother thought to him. Rayg’s been too long chained in the dark. First by dwarfs, then by dragons. No wonder he cracked.
“Are you going to let him do this, Imfamnia?” the Copper asked. “You, a fellow dragon?”
“But I’m not a dragon, blockhead. I may look like Imfamnia, and I’m ashamed to say I’ve been practiced into speaking like her, but she’s long gone. I’m just making use of the very serviceable body. I’m the Red Queen. Didn’t I once tell you, AuRon, that I was too busy to die?”
“Infamnia—when?”
“Shortly after she met up with NiVom. I’ve been engineering their return to power ever since. She came to me through the attentions of my society—we can be found here and there, traveling with entertainments and telling fortunes.”
“Let’s not waste time on speeches, Queen of Hosts,” Rayg said. “The important point is that a dragon in this condition is rendered harmless, but is still thick with blood and flesh. Even thicker, as the brain operation renders it rather listless, so it tends to put on flesh rather than burn it off. One day, every palace in the east will have one, fed and bled for vitality draughts for rich princes. They’ll go out rendered incapable of breeding, of course. I don’t want competition. The Lavadome will be home to only the remaining dragons capable of having offspring, once we clear out a few odds and ends.”
“You might find the odds and ends tougher to clear out than you think,” the Copper said.
“What will you send up to deal with Scabia?” AuRon asked. “Hatchlings in the Sadda-Vale are rolling your assassins’ skulls across the Vesshall to knock over wooden pins.”
“Even the Sadda-Vale isn’t remote enough, AuRon. The trolls will clear it out eventually.”
“I think it shall be my summer palace,” Imfamnia said. AuRon had trouble thinking of a hominid spirit—soul, whatever one wished to call it—in the body of a dragon. No wonder she’d lost weight—probably still had a hominid’s appetite.
The sand smelled like the place had been used to store rotten potatoes. Vermin had the run of it, judging from the slightly sweet, dead-mouse smell coming from the piles of crates. Like much else in the Lavadome these days, the old dueling pit was half empty and going decrepit. He looked up and the glint of a bat eye peering at him from the darkness of a crack in the ceiling twinkled back like a star.
In his time, they’d held public debates in this space. Now the only squabbles settled were by bats looking to take a more comfortable perch.
“Whoever wins gets to have their mate live,” Rayg said.
“A little battie told me you two have never much liked each other,” Imfamnia added.
Trolls, answering a hooted call blatted out from a short brassy horn Rayg carried, brought in Nilrasha and Natasatch. They were muzzled and hobbled, back left saa to front right sii.
The Copper sidestepped, circling to his right to keep his injured limb away from AuRon. For an instant, AuRon’s posture seemed to be the same as when he was on the egg shelf at their hatching: Charge, charge and push him over. . . .
His brother made no move to grapple, though his tail lashed angrily. Tail—AuRon noticed that his brother, at the longest extent of the lash, briefly pointed at the high perch where Imfamnia rested with Rayg beside her, beyond their wall of troll-flesh.
Me above, you below, came the mindspeech. Just like on the egg shelf.
No. The trolls will have us.
They’ll have us anyway. Eventually. Rayg is the key. He directs the trolls somehow. If he can be distracted . . .
AuRon made a feint, snapped where the Copper’s throat had been a moment before. That would impress the watchers in the stands—a good bite always did. The problem was, as Father pointed out all those years ago, a dragon’s mouth isn’t powerful enough to kill anything but smaller, hominid-sized quarry. When fighting something your own size, you let the saa, with their thick claws, do the ripping and killing.
The Copper charged in return, rearing up and raining blows on him. AuRon backed up, blocking with griff and his wings. The Copper backed up, let out a snarl to get the blood up, and sprang forward in two great bounds.
On the third he leaped for AuRon’s back. AuRon had to find it in his hearts to trust his brother not to dig in and sever his spine at the neck. He braced himself.
Instead of landing with claws digging in, the Copper gathered himself for another bound off AuRon’s back between his wings. AuRon threw his body up with all his might, giving what leverage he could to the Copper’s leap, before turning himself.
He watched the Copper extend, striving to reach the shelf holding Rayg and Imfamnia.
The wizard and the self-proclaimed Queen of the Hosts recoiled in fear. The Copper landed just short of their shelf, his sii extended and holding on, keeping him from falling back into the fighting pit.
Had he only been able to spread both wings—
A troll reached up and grabbed his brother by the tail. They fell together, messily, into the sand.
AuRon rushed to his brother’s aid, ignoring the shrieks of Imfamnia—something about Rayg hiding behind her, as always—and Rayg’s frantic hooting amplified through a speaking tube.
He tore into a troll with frustrated fury. An elf would appreciate the irony of dying next to his brother, after all the years and all the distance they’d traveled separately. But every dragon meets his end, death being even more certain than the rising of the sun, and if this was to be his, so be it. He didn’t care to live to see what sort of world Rayg and Imfamnia would fashion, full of declawed, flightless dragons.
Remarkably, he brought down the troll that he’d been fighting. It continually raised its head to hear Rayg’s frantic hoots, and AuRon managed to get a saa up and popped it off its stalk like a grapefruit loosed from a tree.
The troll picked itself up and charged off in a frantic search for its sense-organ cluster.
His brother was beneath another troll. Both were bloody, but his brother seemed to be getting the worst of it.
He moved to help, but one of the trolls from the balcony bounded down and landed squarely on his back. He heard a bone in his wing snap.
We tried. Proud to be teamed up with you, brother. We should have tried this sooner, the Copper thought to him.
AuRon heard the reed-cutting sound of cartilage snapping in the troll’s grip, and his brother’s head dropped. The troll released its grip when the Copper’s eyes ceased whirling and bulging and went glassy-still. A mechanical death rattle escaped his brother and no breath followed.
