Dragon Rule - E. E. Knight [56]
AuRon recognized the odor of a healthy male dragon as he descended. The blazing, almost red-orange scales and the black stripes stood out even in the dim reflected light of the deep cave.
“Greetings, AuRon,” DharSii said. “Is this your mate and the mother of your quiet daughter? Honored to meet you, madam. I’m afraid there’s a war in the offing, and we may be on opposite sides of it.”
Chapter 8
Fount Brass was much as Wistala remembered it. Tucked between two converging mountains like the last pea in a pod, the tin roofs gleamed from far off. Its famous wind chimes and musical water cascades—the water flowed through tubes that created notes through the flow—that gave the city its name could be heard from a hundred of dragonlengths away if the wind was favorable.
Inhabited by men, many of whom were wider than they were tall and bowed in leg and arm, who cultivated and knotted their beards with the same care dwarfs took in dusting and watering the lichen within, it was a city of ringing smithies and white-hot foundries venting sulfurous fumes.
They were notoriously independent. They were a province of Hypatia, but didn’t accept Hypatian law or temples, and had fought wars to keep their freedoms in Rainfall’s day.
She’d last passed through as a reluctant fortune-teller with a traveling circus. She’d have an easy time telling the fortunes of the men now: If they didn’t accept a dragon into Fount Brass, her brother had every intention of cutting off all trade with the obstinate men.
“The slow pillage of a dragon-lord. No thank you,” their king, a hulk of a man named Arbus Glorycry said, bouncing his daughter on his knee. The curly-furred little girl was fascinated by Wistala and watched her every move, wide-eyed.
Wistala wondered if he’d brought his spawn forward as a shield against dragon-wrath or to show courageous nonchalance against yet another of the Tyr’s emissaries.
Perhaps a little of both.
“Every other Hypatian province of the old order has accepted the help of a dragon. Why not yours?”
“Where were you when the Ghioz were battering down our towers? Where were the dragons when my daughter’s room was burned?”
“Myself, I was fighting in the snow of the Ba-Drink Pass,” Wistala said. “Others fought and died in the streets of Hypat, or over Ghioz. Have you not been at peace for ten years? Are there still bandits riding your mountains? Do Ghioz soldiers still walk your streets?”
“They never conquered us,” King Arbus said. “As to the old Hypatian order, it fell apart in my grandfather’s time, when he knew only the title of Lord Protector. My father took the title of King and passed it to me. Am I to relinquish it to a dragon?”
“We do not interfere with your traditions. Your dragon would act as an intermediary between you and the other lands of the Grand Alliance.”
“What good would that do us?”
“Trade. The Hypatians are rebuilding their armies and shipping fleets. They’ll need swords and shields and helms. Would you rather have the orders, or shall they go to the dwarfs of the Diadem, or new smithies in the north?”
“Dwarf make! Ha! Twice the price for the same quality, just to say some grubby, coal-oil-reeking dwarf labored over the edge.”
Wistala listened to the music of wind and water all around, no two refrains ever the same, no melody repeated, infinitely complex yet soothing in its smooth sameness. “You might find markets for your delightful chimes at the edge of the world to the south, or in the far north.”
At that, there was a murmur from some of the King’s retinue at the sides of his thick-beamed, tin-roofed hall. Wistala thought the style of the architecture so striking in the manner it echoed the mountains that she considered flying north at once to see if the roof on her eventual resort might be restyled in the manner of King Arbus’s palace.
“If we do not join?” he asked.
“I’ll make no threat. The world around you is changing. You can remain apart from it, in your fastness and isolation and independence, tending those throwbacks to another age you ride and harness into pulling your