Dragon Rule - E. E. Knight [51]
“So much good metal to eat in the Grand Alliance,” Natasatch said. “I don’t miss the ore from the island one bit. It would just sit in your gold gizzard, taking forever to digest.”
“You think we’ve made a change for the better?” AuRon asked.
“Time will tell. I think the offspring have.”
“I’m going for a walk,” AuRon said. “Enjoy the silver.”
He followed his nose and ears, watched the noisy construction of the dragon-face. His brother had faults, but he didn’t believe one to be vanity. He wondered if the image was meant to flatter his brother and disperse suspicions about Imfamnia’s and NiVom’s loyalty.
Frantic hammering and calls in the Ghioz dialect still echoed from behind the canvas on the brass dragon snout and lanterns cast shadowplay of swinging limbs and distorted bodies bent over work-surfaced. NiVom and Imfamnia had their labor gangs working through the night, it seemed. He saw one group of workers, obviously off-duty, huddled in the shelter of the scaffolding like pigs in a sty. Speaking of which, the underbrush was thick with dumped buckets of hominid waste and discarded food. He heard rats and other vermin.
There were other camps here and there, with cooking fires and bakeries going even at this late hour. So many workers! They had enough men here to form a small city of them—he wondered how NiVom and Imfamnia were able to afford such a monument to vanity.
His hosts should take more care with their charges; there’d be disease if they weren’t careful. He observed red welts on the backs and arms of some of the workers as they lay on their stomachs, the injuries dabbed with some kind of chalky paste.
Whip-rash.
Poor dumb brutes, treated like horses and mules who couldn’t be reasoned into performing their duties. Men could reason, after a fashion, though the ability varied from individual to individual. Too much intelligence made them mad, like Wrimere. Naf, perhaps not as bright as Wrimere, was a far more sensible reasoner. Maybe men needed the relief of frequent laughter to purge their brains the way indigestibles purged the bowels. Naf, always ready to bray in that mulish fashion of his or cackle like a sitting bird, had his mind right.
Some of the workers twitched in their sleep as he passed, startled awake and avoided his eye, as though guilty for being at rest. He smelled quick fear in their sweat.
He wanted out of the tumult and reek. It was a fine night, Ghioz apparently had milder winters than the Bissonian Scarpes he’d lived in to the east. Perhaps he could find a spot on the ridge behind the works to watch the stars and think.
He found his way up to the ridge, making use of a dusty road that must lead to a source of lumber or a quarry or smelter or some other camp supporting the alterations to the mountainside, for it was recently and heavily rutted.
As he stepped out upon it he saw a shadow shift on an overhanging tree ahead. The tree, a lopsided hardwood, had been trimmed back to keep the road clear, but a few branches at the top still overhung the road. Near the top, a mass that he took to be an eagle’s nest reached out a limb and moved through the canopy to a thicker mass of branches.
AuRon couldn’t identify the creature, with a reach like a vulture’s wing and smaller back legs, a paunchy body, and a neckless head like an overturned bucket. As it moved it looked at him, two red eyes glowed briefly from the foliage. Then it jumped, breaking through twigs with a crackling sound, and flapped off on leathery wings.
Cautiously, he climbed the tree it had rested on and extended his head to its perch. Claw marks. He tested the air with his tongue, a sharp smell like the worst mammalian urine, that of a cat, perhaps, lingered in the air about its perch.
He suppressed a shudder. Whatever it was, it was the eeriest-looking creature he’d ever seen. He’d have to ask Naf; he’d spent more time in this part of the world.
But the road ran up toward clean sky. Wanting clean air and quiet to think, he followed it.
AuRon smelled blighter on the wind, and investigated, following