Dragon Rule - E. E. Knight [10]
The Copper watched in satisfaction as the storming column flowed over and through the gates, axmen foremost to break down doors. The mass of men divided, flowing off into riven portals and up the fortresses’ ladders and stairs to reinforce the men still fighting at the tower tops.
With that he watched the sun come up, while the wounded and the booty-laden returned to the waiting barges.
The resistance, what there was of it, was broken-backed by the time the last tower fell, threatened by his Aerial Host men who’d been dropped onto the higher levels and spry young drakka climbing the sides and fighting drakes from below—with the usual competition for glories and honors and tallies of bitten-off heads between the males and females, of course.
Many of the Pirate Lords had run away by secret paths, only to be rounded up by hunting Firemaids, but a few stewards and captains remained to plead with the dragons to leave the rest of the city unburned—for a city it was, a much more impressive one than the old maps based on memories of his aged warrior showed.
They’d won a rich prize indeed. The Copper had half-formed plans to carry off the valuables and leave nothing but piles of broken stones as a warning to others who might defy his emissaries, but his Hypatian allies must have their colony back.
The Copper snorted when he learned the Pirate Lords had hired three dragons to guard the skies above their cities, only to have two take flight when they looked up and saw the array of approaching dragons. The Copper wondered if the dragons had been paid in advance for their services. Only the black, cursing, took wing toward their foes.
They held a celebration, and a memorial service, the next night in the conquered fortress. The men enjoyed wines from half a world away, the dragons feasted on skewers of organ meats discreetly collected from the dead and sliced into unrecognizable hunks. The men of the Aerial Host were rather hardened to dragon tastes and appetites, but surrendered potentates of Swayport might be provoked into foolish violence.
It had been a terribly busy day for the Tyr and he was eager to fly back to Hypatia—and his mate in her fastness—but the proprieties had to be observed. Under the broken battlements the dragons gathered, awards were announced and names and deeds read into the Song of the Aerial Host that would describe the war against the Pirate Lords, as soon as a fitting one could be composed by one of the more talented dragons.
The fallen young dragon who had answered the signal-bolt at the gate was broken-backed and unconscious. HeBellereth judged he’d never fly again, or even open his eyes to receive his justly won laudi. His rider, as was the custom for the fallen in foreign lands, dispatched him with a quick spear thrust under the right sii.
The humans then lowered the head and opened the neck heart.
“Only one loss. FeMissanith, an Ankelene who fought like a Skotl. Sorry to lose him, we don’t have many Ankelenes in the host, and he was a good example to others. Until the end. Young and foolish, alighting like that in the thick of them.”
“I recall a young and reckless dragon serving in the Bant with me. Chance favored him, he recovered from his wounds, and he rose high.” The Copper nudged HeBellereth.
“Seems a waste to let all that dragon blood be spilled for nothing,” HeBellereth’s signalman-rider drawled.
“Quiet, now,” HeBellereth drawled. HeBellereth, who always bristled and sparked before a fight, spoke rather slowly and thickly afterward as he attended to his duties. The rest he could leave to his lieutenants, but he always looked after the hurt and fallen before consuming a barrel of wine and some marrow bones and sleeping the strain off.
“He’s right,” the Copper said. “Our men deserve a victory toast of dragon blood. They’ll need it for the work of loading compensation. Save us from having to open a vein.”
Someone snorted. The idea of bleeding the honored dead rankled, but the Copper needed his men’s and the Hypatians’ energy for the work of setting Swayport