A Dragon at Worlds' End (15 page)

Dusk fell. The rain came down hard for a while. It was difficult to keep the cookfires going, so the slavers made a dismal meal of it. Still, their spirits were high. The dry season was over. The waters were rising. In a month or less they would be back in civilization in the cities of the southern plain. After the long season in their stink-ridden camp, the men were eager to be away. Their conversation was bright with hopes and jokes and friendly banter.

There was virtually no warning. The first thing anyone heard was the sound of a big body running in the woods and then a tremendous thud as something shook the whole stockade. Angry shouts came from the watchtowers, followed by sharp cracking sounds from the southernmost part of the wall. Nervous as deer, the men sprang to their posts.

At the southern end they found the wall stove in, with timbers broken askew and a massive tree trunk thrust through the gap. With considerable unease they examined the breach in the wall. Some men hurried back to fetch fresh timbers while others sought to repair the damage as best they might.

At that point a rain of rocks came out of the forest, forcing them to keep their heads down. Rocks slammed into the timbers or splattered the mud of the compound. A couple of men were felled, one slain. The slavers took positions close behind the wall and readied their weapons. The tension was palpable.

Then came a roaring of Ardu voices from the woods, dozens of them. Then within moments, the slave sheds awoke with a shattering roar. The females made a constant, insane ululation that was deafening, the robust males roared like lions, the children's high shrieking cut through the rest. It was an ugly sound, and frightening to the sixty slavers, who knew that if the slaves got out of those sheds, they'd tear their captors limb from limb. And everyone had seen that tree trunk, seemingly thrown through the wall by the giant pujish they'd been warned about. If the wall could be breached like that, what were they going to do when it came again?

The uproar continued and the rocks kept zinging out of the rain-splashed darkness. The defenders could see nothing and hear nothing except that hellish shrieking from the Ardu females. In vain the slavers screamed threats at the slaves, who would not be silent.

Upstream, the dragon finally reached the water's edge, where Relkin, Lumbee, and the other females tied themselves to him with a length of twisted vine rope. Together they pushed out into the river and let themselves be swept into the strongly flowing current. They floated out behind the dragon, who swam through the floodwaters with his usual assurance. Within a few minutes they were hard upon the camp. Bazil pushed himself and hauled the people behind him up to the side of one of the larger boats.

No eyes were turned toward the river. There was only a handful of men left to guard the boats. Everyone else had gone to the stockade. The uproar from the slaves was enough to wake the dead.

Bazil trod water with the use of his powerful tail, and with one arm hoisted Relkin up to the rail of the boat. Relkin slipped over and dropped to the decking silently.

There was a single guard, standing at the waist hatchway, looking over to the stockade. Two other guards were standing on land, halfway down the line of boats. The noise from the slaves covered any sound Bazil might have made in the water. Relkin slid quietly across the deck, sword ready in his hand. The man sensed him at the very last moment and turned suddenly and Relkin ran him through. The man was so shocked he barely made a sound as he slumped over the blade and started to fall over the boat's side. Relkin pulled him back from the brink and slid him to the deck and took his sword. The men on the bank were still absorbed in the drama of the stockade, giving Relkin time to investigate the cables holding the ship to the bank. They were well made, the product of civilization. He slipped back to the far side and leaned over. The dragon was waiting. The Ardu females clustered at his side.

"Two men on the riverbank," Relkin hissed. "Three boats over. The rest are at the stockade. The boat is secured with three cables at either end. We'll want to free them and then connect them together."

Bazil lofted the Ardu women to the rail so they could climb aboard and hide themselves. Then the dragon slipped back into the water and swam ashore. With Ecator he cut two of the cables at the downstream end of the boat. Relkin carried one of them over to the second boat and secured it fast at the bow. Bazil was already cutting through the cables securing the second boat. Lumbee and the other females were arming themselves with whatever they could find aboard the boats, which included some long spears for pujish. The spears were heavy, but the women hefted them nonetheless. At the signal, Relkin cut the cables at the bow of the first boat, which was now all that held two boats to the bank.

When the second boat began to leave the side of the riverbank, two guards whirled to confront an astounding sight. Their largest boats were drifting out into the stream, cut free from their moorings and propelled by some unknown force that was tugging them upriver, against the fast-flowing water.

With hoarse cries the guards sprang into action, running along the side of the river, pacing the boats, trying to think of some way of getting aboard. But neither cared to dive into the dark waters, so the boats continued to drift upstream and shortly faded from view into the murk.

The guards ran back to the stockade, but their cries of alarm went unheard by the rest, who were preoccupied with the bellowing slaves and whoever it was that kept hurling rocks from the dark.

Bazil hauled the boats to shore about two hundred yards upstream from the slaver camp. Relkin and the Ardu women tied the ropes fast to trees above the flood line. The first part of the plan had gone perfectly.

They gathered themselves. Now for the real test. They had to frighten the slavers into stampeding in a panic to the remaining boats and fleeing downstream, without bothering to search too hard for the missing ones.

Bazil hefted a rock some three feet across and lurched forward, bursting out the forest, running toward the upstream end of the stockade. Relkin and the Ardu females came behind, Relkin taking pains to keep everyone out of the range of Bazil's tail, which was likely to lash around wildly.

When Bazil was a mere six feet from the wall, he hurled the rock forward, giving it the impetus of his forward motion and then some. It slammed home as if hurled by a trebuchet and burst through the timbers with a thunderous crash. Bazil reached into the breach and tore out another timber or two and forced his way inside. There was no one in sight in this half of the camp. He drew Ecator and moved on. Relkin and Lumbee slipped in behind him.

A man stepped out of the nearest tent, holding a spear. He looked up, saw Bazil and uttered a wavering little scream, than took to his heels. Relkin carefully investigated the other tents, which were all empty. The men were in the lower section defending their treasure in slaves.

On they went. There was a cluster of men at the central cook pit, where they'd gotten a fire going just before the attack began. They looked up as the fleeing man came up. At his words of alarm they turned, ice in their hearts. The pujish loomed out of the mists a few moments later. The huge sword glittered in the red firelight.

The slavers wavered on the brink of panic for a moment until one or two of the bolder souls rallied them with harsh cries. They were men, adventurers in a dangerous trade. They weren't about to run from some mad kind of pujish.

Grimly they prepared to defend themselves.

The dragon halted, threw back his head, and vented an appallingly loud roar-scream, the wyvern dragon battle cry. This scream cut through the uproar and produced a shocked silence that hung over the entire camp. Then the Ardu in the forest rushed the wall as planned and the slavers' worst nightmares were realized.

Bazil crunched into the men by the cook pit. Ecator flew and three of them were cut in two in the wink of an eye. There was a scattering, then others thrust at the dragon with spears, seeking to get in behind him. Relkin and the Ardu girls came running up to engage. With curses the men drew back. Afraid of being taken in the flank, they danced backward a few steps. Before they could gather their wits, Ecator whistled among them once more and another man's head flew away.

The power of the blow and the thin sound it made turned the slavers' resolve to jelly. At first just two, then four more, then the rest, fled for the boats, unmanned. En route they barged into a pair of their officers, who laid about them with the flat of the sword but could not stem the flight.

Then the officers looked up and saw the dragon bearing down on them. The poor men went into dragon freeze and found themselves rooted to the spot by primordial fear.

Bazil swung and sent their souls to hell, with the cry of triumph from Ecator ringing all the way. The sword seemed to grow lighter in Bazil's hand; it was an uncanny thing. But then the dragon had long since grown used to the sword's ways. It was an elf-made blade, with witchly magic buried in its heart. A spirit inhabited the steel, a fierce spirit that longed to feast on the deaths of the enemies of the light.

Now there were only the slavers concentrated inside the main stockade. Most of the Ardu were attacking the breach at the far end, and that was where the defenders were gathered, too. Bazil surged in through the interior gate, snapping it off its hinges. The men in the watch-towers saw him come with mouths gaping in horror. Ecator flashed in the light of the few torches still burning and fear overcame them. They scrambled out of the towers and ran gibbering into the woods.

The dragon paused to rip open the roof of one of the slave sheds. The slaves screamed at the sight of him, but he tore open the shed, reaching in with a huge hand, and ripped the main chain out of its anchor with a heave of enormous muscles.

Then he was gone, and Lumbee was there instead, explaining that they were free, and that it was time to kill the slavers. The robust males went wild. In moments they were bursting out of the shed, some of them still shackled, but nonetheless ready to take revenge on the slaving no-tails.

They found themselves with plenty of opportunity. Bazil's arrival on the scene had produced a convulsion in the mob of slavers gathered at the breach. As Ecator thinned their ranks, so they broke back, away from Bazil in an expanding ring. Immediately, Ardu males from outside thrust their way in and threw themselves at the nearest slavers. Other Ardu, just released from the sheds, took the slavers from behind. The fighting grew general and quite desperate and dreadful deeds were done in a medley of screams, grunts, and hard sounds made from steel stabbing home into men's bodies. Then the slavers broke and ran, unable to withstand the fury of the assault from both directions. Bazil hewed down another pair who lingered too long and the rest fled for the boats, the Ardu in hot pursuit. Bazil tore open more slave sheds while Relkin, Lumbee, and the other women worked to break the main chains and free the slaves.

The boats pushed off and the surviving slavers withdrew hastily from the shore, along which stalked the dragon, his sword resting on his shoulder. Behind him the camp was in the noisy process of being completely tom asunder by the Ardu.

The Ardu celebrated their sudden freedom with wild rejoicing, and indeed there was a lot to be joyous about.

Lumbee, for instance, had found both her parents, alive and as well as might be expected after spending so many weeks confined within the stinking horror of the slave sheds. Her parents, Erris and Uys, were astounded when Lumbee came to them. They had long thought her dead, lost in the northern forests, devoured by monstrous pujish. At first Erris was convinced that Lumbee was a ghost, and it took quite some persuasion to change her mind.

Around the fires they made from the stockade timbers and the slave huts, the Ardu danced. They gorged on the stocks of food they recovered from the slavers' pantry. Then someone found the brandy cache and some of the males became frenzied under the influence. The bodies of the dead slavers were cut to pieces and hurled into the fire.

Bazil was regarded with a mixture of awe and intense curiosity, as befitted his status as forest god. Once it was firmly understood that he was not a dangerous pujish, the children gathered around him in a devoted clump. The females brought him offerings of food, which he gladly devoured. He sat on a log, Ecator in its scabbard lying beside him, a ring of bright little Ardu faces surrounding him. He pondered occasionally the bizarre twists and turns of the world of humans. Here were the tailed human people. They seemed fine vigorous specimens to a wyvern dragon who was very familiar with human beings of the no-tail type. They had been enslaved, a difficult concept for a dragon mind to really understand. But now that he had seen the way they had been confined in those sheds, chained up like domestic animals, he understood better. Of course, no dragons would ever dream of making other dragons into slaves. What wyvern had the time for such laborious concepts? Who needed to work anyway? One scoured the shoreline and the shallow waters. One took whatever one found and ate it then and there. One slept in contentment and awoke to the sound of the waves.

Alas, that life of wildness was something Bazil had never really known except as legends. For him there had been nothing but service to the war against the great enemy. Since he first hatched from the egg, he had been primed for that war. In the beginning he was indoctrinated, but later he saw for himself the nature of the conflict. He saw what that enemy had done to the Purple Green of Hook Mountain, the wild flying dragon that was Bazil's great friend and colleague in the 109th fighting dragons of Marneri. He had fought that enemy's creatures—trolls, imps, and even the giant ogres—and laid them low by the score. He knew that though he had been indoctrinated as a spratling, the cause he fought for was a just cause. Furthermore the alliance between wyvern dragons and men was necessary, because in the world imagined by the enemy, there would be no dragons, they would all be slaughtered for the making of death magic. And so he fought willingly in the Legions. His great love, High Wings the green dragoness, had called him "slave" and he had not understood the term. He served in the Legions and obeyed orders. Did this make him a slave? It was an issue sometimes chewed over by the wyverns, whose natural disposition to wild, individual activity made military discipline hard at first to acquire. Bazil did not think he was a slave. He had fought battles of every scale during his period of service. He understood the whys and wherefores of command and combat and he knew how important Legion discipline was for the battlefield edge they maintained over all foes. They were not slaves, and even though they were not volunteers, except perhaps for the Purple Green, they were volunteers in spirit. They would always be ready to take up the sword against the enemies of the light. Bazil angrily rejected the idea that he was a slave. He was a battledragon, and woe to those he fought against.