Shadowed By Wings (41 page)

Rutkar Re Ghepp ducked through the sally port third, his sable hair a stark contrast to Kratt’s saffron locks. And, after a string of daronpuis and lords, a creature cowled, veiled, and gowned entirely in white came through the door.

A moan escaped my lips: an Auditor.

The Auditor scanned the vast field that teemed with action, and though I couldn’t see his face beneath his cowled veil, I knew his eyes rested upon me. He came toward me, gliding over the rutted ground as if he were windblown through water.

When he reached me, he extended a chalk-whitened hand to my Cafar jailer. The guard handed him the end of my chain without touching the Temple executioner’s hand, then stepped back several paces.

Cold spread up the metal links of the chain about my neck, I swear it did. I broke into a chill sweat and stared across the field, trying to ignore the massive scimitar scabbard hanging from the Auditor’s waist.

Every destrier was finally ready, burdened with fodder, gear, or riding saddle. Every lord and Holy Warden who was blessed with the honor of accompanying Re on the momentous journey was present. Every dragonmaster apprentice in the stables stood on the field. Every one of the destriers in the stables was loaded and saddled.

Departure time.

Around me, my fellow apprentices began chanting the cinai komikon walan kolriks, the dragonmaster apprentice prayers for guardianship from Re. My lips moved of their own accord, my voice joining the intense drone as if I were entranced. United, our voices held all the strange power of a sand gale.

The apprentices began removing the hobbles and wingbolts from the destriers, clipping the empty brass shackles and bolts to the saddles.

The destriers knew flight was coming. While most stood taut and ready, hindquarters quivering, a few of the youngest shifted to and fro and impatiently beat the air with their wings, lunging against their tethers fastened to the pillars sunken in the field.

The lords approached the destriers, each talking to his beast and stroking its muzzled snout with familiar affection. It was then that I fully understood that, of course, the dragons did not belong to the dragonmaster. Not at all. These bayen men of influence and wealth were the masters of those fine beasts, many master of two or three, and Waikar Re Kratt, under the auspices of Temple, was the guardian of them all, including the great Re.

The lords mounted their destriers. The apprentices began to untether them.

There were fifty-four apprentices in the dragonmaster’s stables, twenty-four of the latter being inductees, myself included. Holy Wardens mounted behind the bayen lords of highest status. Those lords of lesser status carried servitors behind them. One gore-potted lord looked unskilled in dragonflight. Indeed, he would fly seated behind a chosen veteran. Dono was thus favored. Some destriers had no lords to fly them; those would be flown by the veterans, some flying two to a beast.

Lastly, the lords of least standing were required to carry an inductee or two behind them. The dragonmaster would fly upon the great bull himself, alone. Waikar Re Kratt would fly his own destrier, an impressive beast caparisoned with a delicate metal lacework of ornamentation and jewels.

I was to fly behind the Auditor. No lord would carry a deviant.

Under the masked gaze of the Auditor, the Cafar guard unlocked my restraints so I could mount the destrier. Shuddering still, I placed my left hand on the saddle, my left foot in a stirrup, and swung up. Straddling the destrier, I assumed the flight position, laying forward along the destrier’s dorsum. The saddle leather was smooth and sun hot beneath my thighs. I reached my shackled hands forward and grasped the saddle rungs on either side of the destrier’s neck.

The saddle lurched as the Auditor climbed up behind me. I tensed, couldn’t help it, and recoiled from his weight as he lay atop me, the touch of his gown drifting to either side of me like a shroud. Odd, how I rode in front while every other apprentice rode in the rear position. Perhaps it was unseemly for a woman to lay atop a man’s back. Perhaps it was merely an extra measure to ensure my arrival at Arena, to prevent me from flinging myself from the dragon midflight and plunging to my death.

The dour Cafar guard secured my wrists and ankles to the saddle. The Auditor placed his albescent hands atop mine.

Everyone was mounted, save for ten of the veterans. Four of these began unbolting Re’s wings. Two crouched ready at the hobbles between Re’s rear legs; the remaining four stood stationed by the sunken pillar to which Re was tethered. The dragonmaster sat astride the great bull, all but his pate lost from sight by Re’s great wings, folded across the beast’s dorsum.

The tension in the air was bone piercing.

The last wingbolts came off. At the exact same moment, the veterans who were crouched by Re’s hind legs unclasped his hobbles, and the four veterans stationed on the ground by the sunken pillar unclipped the tethers that held Re’s snout low to the ground. All the veterans ran then, heads ducked, thigh muscles and arms pumping, sprinting as furiously as they could to get as far from Re as possible.

The bull raised his head from the ground. Shook it, great dewlaps flashing in the sunlight. He craned his neck to the sky, bugled, still muzzled, and unfurled his great wings.

A forty-foot wingspan, it was, but much larger it seemed upon the ground.

A great cry rose up around me, thrilling and blood foaming: The lords of Clutch Re were urging their dragons into flight. Above me, the Auditor likewise bellowed, and the excitement and power of the moment was as intoxicating and terrible as the first taste of venom.

We exploded into flight, the whole field of us, mighty Re in our midst.

Noise and wind and dust and the smell of dragon were all about me, and I closed my eyes and pressed into the saddle, gripping it with thigh and hand. Surging tumult beneath me as dragon muscles worked and flanks heaved and ribs sucked in and expelled air.

Then we were flying, the alleys below us packed with people, like a honeycomb with a swarm of bees.

The journey to Fwendar ki Bol quickly assumed a routine, and while each landing and takeoff was fraught with tension, the destriers over and over proved themselves worthy of Clutch Re’s stable domain. They were stalwart, highly disciplined beasts, and although the occasional dragon was headstrong and nervy, the veterans and lords who flew such beasts controlled them with wondrous skill. Whenever one could not subdue his mount, the dragonmaster did so using skill, willpower, Djimbi curses, and vein-popping strength. I learned a new measure of respect for the bandy-legged piebald.

As for the great bull, he too behaved well, though the quivering power of him and his occasional outraged trumpeting imparted the impression that discipline played no part in his control, solely a constrained, waiting fury. At all times while in flight and on the ground, the bull was muzzled, and also hobbled and wing-pinioned while grounded, and for the duration of each night, he slept tethered by muzzled snout to a great pillar sunken in the ground. Each landing site sported such a pillar.

The flight path to Fwendar ki Bol had been mapped out a century and a half ago and used by every Clutch along the route every year since. Each landing field, annually slashed and burned free of sapling and vine, was situated by a river or lake. The apprentices erected a clawful of small canvas tents for the bayen lords and daronpuis to share every evening. Each morn, they dismantled the same. The rest of us slept upon ground, amongst the hobbled dragons.

As a woman, a condemned deviant, and an inductee, I was at all times avoided. Only the Auditor stood by my side, and he as silent as mist. I was given neither food nor drink the entire time, though the Auditor ate whatever an inductee brought him. Never once did the Auditor remove his long, enveloping garment from over his face, but instead he slipped food and water up under the white cloth to his mouth, through a slit barely visible amongst the folds, just below where I assumed his chin to be.

What I ate, I stole from our destrier’s feed sack. What I drank, I sucked from river and lake, on all fours alongside the dragons, when the Auditor took me down for watering each evening.

By the time our cavalcade reached Fwendar ki Bol, I was weak, muddled, and nigh on incoherent from the stress of the journey and the lack of water and food.

Fwendar ki Bol, the Village of the Eggs, is situated a half day’s easy flight from the outskirts of Liru, Malacar’s capital city. Surrounded by sesal fields, orchards, and vineyards, the sprawling village is home to Malacar’s nashvenirs, or hatching farms. Nashvenir Re is a splendid place, boasting a vineyard, a three-produce orchard, and a melon field, none of which I could appreciate because of my debilitated state.

Every Clutch of any consequence had a nashvenir, and those that did not rented a portion of a wealthier Clutch’s hatching farm. It was in a nashvenir that each Clutch overseer stabled the bevy of wing-intact dragons annually bred to a bull in Arena. Those breeders, called exactly that in the Emperor’s tongue, onahmes, were the dragons that laid fertilized eggs ninety-two days after being mounted in Arena. Their eggs were then transported in incubation wagons back to each overseer’s Clutch, the unborn hatchlings within destined either for wing and tongue amputation and life in the brooder stables, or for service elsewhere upon each estate. A few lucky hatchlings kept their wings and tongues and joined a dragonmaster’s stable.

Nashvenir Re stabled seventy onahmes. On average, each onahme laid a clutch of six fertilized eggs yearly. Save for a clawful that were sold and one or two that were kept to replenish the nashvenir ranks, the bulk of those 420 fertilized eggs were transported to Clutch Re, to restock and increase Re’s egg-laying herd. Given the average forty-year life span of a dragon, and taking into account the small number of hatchlings that died unhatched in the incubation wagons, a well-stocked nashvenir ensured the continual prosperity of a skillfully managed Clutch.

Waikar Re Kratt, for all his many flaws, managed the egg-and-dragon portion of Clutch Re most skillfully.

On the far west side of the Fwendar ki Bol alluvial plains, Arena rose up like a strange monolith. There the bulls from each Clutch were stabled during Arena, in heavily guarded chambers underneath the huge coliseum. Outside, a labyrinth of taverns, inns, and elegant manors knelt about its base like subjects paying homage to a liege. Save for when Abbasin Shinchiwouk flooded the plains with hordes of bayen and rishi spectators, those manors and taverns stood empty except for the innkeepers’ families, who worked in a nashvenir orchard or stable the rest of the year.

As an inductee, I stayed in neither manor nor inn. I stayed in the nashvenir Re stables, shackled to a manger, eating and drinking from the same trough of an onahme fated to be mated with the same bull that would kill me.

The Auditor stayed beside me always.

TWENTY-ONE

T
he Bill the Ashgon had issued throughout Malacar listed which apprentices from each Clutch would enter Arena on what day, and which Clutch bull was performing at what time. My name, Clutch Re’s Zarq-the-deviant, was on the Bill for two successive days.

To list my name for more than two days would have emphasized Temple’s concern about me and suggested that I possessed the skills necessary to survive beyond the first day. Impossible, that. It was certain that such a deviant as myself would die the moment holy Re was loosed in Arena alongside me. His divine fury would slay me for my depravity and aberrance, and cleanse the nation of my presence.

But a second day was assigned me. Just in case.

These, then, were the wagering details for Clutch Re that year: Over the eight days of Abbasin Shinchiwouk, our bull would enter Arena alongside our dragonmaster once each day and mount ten to fifteen onahmes each time. (Kratt had sold his ten surplus breeding rights to the bull-less Clutches that annually paid to have their onahmes mounted by Re.)

All of Clutch Re’s twenty-four inductees were slated to enter Arena at least once over those eight days, as well as all eighteen servitors. Of the eighteen servitors, only twelve were expected to survive. Of the twenty-four inductees, only six.

Of Clutch Re’s veterans that year, only Eidon, Dono, and four others were required to perform. The Ashgon had slated Dono to enter Arena twice, each time alongside me.

So.

Of the fifty-four Clutch Re apprentices present at Arena that year, only twenty-nine were expected to live through the event.

I was not one of them.

The long, unpaved road to Arena was crowded with rishi who could not afford entry into the great stadium, but who desired a glimpse of the apprentices who would compete. That year, they desired a look at me.

Rocks and rotten plums rained upon my cart, and the apprentices traveling with me covered their heads and ducked low. Beside me, the Auditor remained improbably still until a stinking turnip splattered soundly against his nape.

He didn’t bellow rage or hurl invective. He rose slowly to his feet, withdrew his massive, wicked scimitar, and stood, swaying above me, as the cart trundled forward.