Two! One she could handle. She knew Uldam’s ruins, where she could spread her wings and where she had to tuck, where there were deep shadows and where the sun would fall. She would have the advantage. But two!
First one, then three, then a little less than a score of Fireblades rushed forward to the aid of their comrades.
Now more battle-horns echoed through the cave. She saw the mates and their hatchlings—or spawn, children, was that the word?—of the Fireblades fleeing from the more intact of the homes to take refuge in caves and wells. Older Fireblades lurched out of their dwellings, supporting themselves on the shoulders of youths still with downy tufts about the head and shoulders rather than a true blighter’s mane, carrying bows and crude imitations of dwarven crossbows and spear-throwers.
“Why you wait?” a warrior called to her as he hurried forward, a spear in each hand and the unlatched buckles on his helmet jingling.
“To see,” she said.
Liar. Because I hate fighting. Only the crows benefit.
“The rest of you, stay here,” she told the gathering Fireblades in their own language. “Block up the tunnel here as best as you can. Your friends may need somewhere to retreat. I want to be able to just squeeze over the top.”
One of the grizzle-hairs nodded and barked at the others. There were big casks handy, full of fat for the boiling cauldrons and mead for the warriors—they could make a start by rolling those forward.
Maybe she could drive them off somehow by just showing herself. It would be a bold pair who would dare attack a female in her cave. What if she had hatchlings to defend, and a mate lying in wait to attack from behind as soon as they flew against her?
She launched herself into the air, cold-hearted and wingtips a-shiver. Where was that dragonelle who faced giant trolls on Rainfall’s bridge or challenged war machines of the Wheel of Fire dwarves?
A yellow halo grew over the horizon to the south. Soon the sun would be shining down the cave-mouth.
She rolled and alighted, gripping the cave-ceiling and bracing herself with her tail at the upper root of one of the pillars of mountain-muscle. Hard rock full of natural ridges and crevices offered her claws purchase. She must be hard today.
The green vomited a long stream of flame, scattering it here and there among the mostly empty outer ruins. The Fireblades kept some sheep and goats and sickly cattle near at those roofless hovels. She must have seen motion and spewed.
She wasn’t much of a fighter, Wistala decided, or at least inexperienced. She’d loosed her flame too high, scattering it into droplets and losing much of the effect. You might do that if you were trying to burn a field of crops and teach some encroaching settlers a lesson, but fighting blighters with plenty of time to see the firefall and doorways and alcoves to shelter in wouldn’t be bothered by such a display. And a dragon had only so much flame. If her firebladder wasn’t empty now, with that first gout still in burning puddles along the entry-road, it must be very nearly so.
The white dragon was a good deal more effective than his mate or sister or ally or whoever she was. Wistala guessed he was a male; she was pretty sure she saw horns rising from his crest. He dove, tilting his body to keep scale to enemy, terrorizing with beats of his wingtips and strikes of his tail, screaming as he descended. He drove the blighters back from their battlements flanking the great road.
White knew hominid fighting.
He’d taken out the most dangerous threat with his first flame, the watchtower at the cavern roof. Now he could terrorize the Fireblades without having to worry about stones or javelins being flung down upon him.
Silly Green and Canny White. If she could surprise Canny White, down him before he knew she’d joined battle, she’d be able to handle Silly Green.
A coiling serpent, dark as a pit viper and mindlessly purposeful as a stream of ants, could be seen on the road outside the cave-mouth. Men on horseback, with banners at intervals, red leading silver followed by a purple, the third higher than the rest, with a rather dispirited green bringing up the rear. It must be a vast number, at least in the thousands, to fill such a length of road. She could hear the steady thunder of their hoofbeats on the old grass-stitched stones.
The sun climbed as though eager for a better view of the contest.
It would take too long to crawl. She went forward, glide-rest, glide-rest, in a series of barrel rolls, keeping to the darkness in the shade of Krag’s great roof. The attacking dragons harried the disorganized blighters, their quarry rallying only to be dispersed by one of White’s dives and then running again.
They must have known a dragon lurked in the area, but neither seemed very watchful. Perhaps they were carried away by the excitement of alternately smashing and driving the blighters, or assumed that since she hadn’t yet shown herself, she never would. Did they think she was some roaring male, who would announce his presence half a horizon from the fight?
Canny White saw some blighter archers falling back toward the rear of his cave. He must have decided that he’d rather fight them from the air, despite the arrows sticking out of neck and arms. Blighter bows were better for bringing down deer than dragons; while they made decent enough bows and stout strings out of mountain-lion sinew, their heads and shafts weren’t as sharp and true as elvish arrows or dwarvish bolts, and they lost velocity quickly when fired upward. Despite the arrows, Canny White swept behind them, and flapped briefly atop a broken old three-level home to push roof and chimney down on the blighters in the lane below.
Wistala saw her chance. She dove, wings folded like a hawk, gaining deadly velocity with every length in the vast cave.
She struck Canny White square at the base of his neck with a body blow. Being thick and muscular had its advantages—he bent like one of the blighters’ recurved bows and crashed into a house on the other side of the road, sending white scales flying off and falling like snowflakes.
Ha!
Wistala opened her wings and turned toward the other, resisting the urge to admire her handiwork beyond seeing Horblikklak, who’d kept his archers and a few other blighters fighting as a disciplined unit, send spearmen toward the white twitching under the fallen walls.
Arrows sang up and struck. Luckily they didn’t penetrate much farther than a full-grown scale-nit. Stupid fools, shooting at their ally!
Wistala rose toward Silly Green, who hung in the air at the entrance as if puppeted by strings. Wistala flapped hard and shot toward her like a dwarvish javelin.
Silly Green didn’t care to meet her. She turned tail and fled, with Wistala fast behind.
Probably by accident, Silly Green did the one thing that could have saved her—she headed almost straight up once out of the cave. She was more lightly built than Wistala, and the heavier green couldn’t quite match her angle of ascent. Wistala just bit off a mouthful of tail and banked to see the riders below.
They were almost to the old pylons covered with etchings of proud blighter faces and sealed casings of war-trophies. Wistala wondered how best to loose her flame.
A third dragon’s silhouette swooped out of the sun. Three! They’d kept a reserve outside in case she appeared. The sun was too bright for her to make out much, save that he was big and heavy about the forequarters and therefore most likely a male.
She turned back for the cave. An open-air fight would be difficult, especially if Silly Green joined the stranger.
As she passed over the head of the column she loosed her flame and the riders scattered—well, most of them. The scream of horses followed the twin whorls of smoke in her wake. Poor horses! They hadn’t chosen this battle.
She felt arrows pluck at her wings and break off in her side, and she chanced a glance back. The column of riders had divided into a fork, circumnavigating the pool of dragonflame. Archers had dismounted and were firing from the—what was that military term again? Flanks, that was it. Some dwarf who’d started off in life as a butcher and become a general had codified war in his volume describing the long, grinding war against the Charioteers.
Strange how the mind raced in battle. An arrow stuck through her tail like a crossbar. She didn’t even feel it.
She flapped up to the cavern roof and alighted on one of the great pillars, built up with clay cisterns and lead pipes of an old gravity-well that had fed the king’s citadel, a sort of triangular fortification anchored by rocks carved into shapes like mammoth-tusks. The Fireblades under their war-chief manned what was left of the battlements there, with long slides greased on both of the remaining towers. Strong young blighters stood ready to send stones down the slides, which could be turned and tilted to better aim the dropped projectiles at those beneath the walls.
The riders streamed in, and the two columns turned into three, the thickest heading straight down the wide road for the citadel. Their hoofbeats echoed in the cavern like the roar of a waterfall, and the sun glinted off of polished helm, shield, and spear-tip.
Too few blighters. Too few. Perhaps they would content themselves with plundering the ruin. Except there was no plunder, just old broken brick and bat-haunted roof.
The third dragon appeared again, bearing a cylinder that looked like a sawed-off tree trunk. She couldn’t quite make him out, silhouetted against the sun. He flapped hard, gained a little height, and at last she could see him.
