Dragon Rule - E. E. Knight [4]
A rocky bluff at the cat’s head held an ancient sloping fortress of double walls and three towers with its own wharf between the forelimbs. The fortress had been built an age ago by the Hypatian Empire at the height of its wealth and power, and the wharf was intended so that the defenders might be resupplied by sea if the rest of the landward settlement fell.
The town of the Pirate Lords proper had not been so solidly built. A tangle of streets and structures of wood and stone rose to the temple domes on the cat’s haunches. The Pirate Lords no longer worshipped the gods of their forefathers there, instead the temples sheltered gambling and drink and slave-auctions, the usual low pursuits of men who lived by fighting and pillage.
He’d promised to hand them back to the Hypatians with only minor scorching.
Swayport, and six other colonies on this coast like it, had long since declared their independence from the old Hypatian order. In the best of times there was trade across the Inland Ocean, at other times war, and chafing between rival fishing fleets and trading lines in every season—even the storm-months at the death of the year, when ships driven into opposing ports seeking shelter from storms were charged outrageous harbor fees or had their cargoes seized.
The Copper had listened to weary hours of it from Hypatian shipowners and whaling guild until he thought he’d dream of nothing but the price of lamp oil and salted fish for the rest of his life, before making his decision to end the pirate menace.
Well, if men couldn’t settle their differences, he’d force a peace. As the Hypatians were his allies, though sometimes they were hard to distinguish from unusually quarrelsome thralls, he’d see the disputes resolved in their favor.
He had two advantages, and he intended to use them. The first was a pretext for war that had all Hypatia seething. One of the great merchant lines—they flew a flag with blue and yellow and a fish design; the Copper couldn’t remember the name—had one of its deep-water trade boats blown off course and into the hands of a commerce-raider, who brought it back to Swayport.
Such a matter could usually be resolved with paying a small ransom, but this ship held the merchant line’s owner and family, a man of influence as wide as his belt size and deep as his purse. They put his crew to work cutting paving stones and his family in the fortress and sent the youngest son of the line back to the Hypatian Directory with a ransom demand.
The Copper, when told the tale by one of the Directory’s many skilled tongues, growled that if it was one of his own dragon families from the Lavadome. He’d be descaled if he’d pay anything with drakes and dragonelles locked up in some dungeon with excrement running down between the walls.
With that Hypatia begged for assistance in a war to humble the Pirate Lords.
His other advantage was knowledge of Swayport and its fortress, now ever so much closer on the horizon. But the moon would reappear soon—was it yet looming on the southeastern horizon? It musn’t be allowed to frame the oncoming dragons like a shadow-puppet light.
The far-off battlements formed a false horizion against the stars. The old works must be massive, at least the size of Imperial Rock in the Lavadome, though perhaps not quite so high.
Swayport had been attacked a generation ago by the thrall-dragons from that fog-shrouded island to the north that his gray brother skulked upon, back in the days of Wrimere Wyrmaster, the Wizard of the Isle of Ice. One of the human veterans of his Aerial Host, now a proud and battle-scarred