Page 206 of Dragon Strike (Age of Fire 4)

The drakka opened the fight in the dusk, creeping down into the pass to slay horses and pack animals following a long, triple file of riders passing through. There were no warriors tending the burdened animals.

Wistala watched it from high on the sheer mountain half of the pass. The drakka dashed and jumped on the animals, which screamed as they died. Their tenders fled, east and west, screaming in their unknown chopping tongue for help.

“We will have meat tonight. I’m sick of cold fish and burned raccoons,” Ayafeeia said.

The drakka jumped back onto the cliff-face and climbed to shelter.

“I think you fight just to fill your stomach, maidmother,” a dragonelle said.

Wistala, her throat tight with fear of battle, hid her anxiety by picking at a crevice.

The Ironriders sent horsemen to investigate. They walked their mounts forward, archers just behind the scouts with spears, men on foot behind them walking their mounts with swords out. Wistala’s eyes picked out the frightened pack-train leaders talking and pointing to dead animals.

Ayafeeia carefully crept across the rock face to her reserve.

“I want them in doubt as to what they face as long as possible, Verkeera,” Ayafeeia said to the greatest of the Firemaids, a massive, mature dragonelle with a bluish tinge to her deep green. “Let some of those rocks on the mountainside do your talking.”

“Yes, maidmother,” Verkeera said. She launched herself and glided over to the other side of the pass.

A mist passed through the mountains, obscuring what came next. Perhaps Verkeera, lower down, could see. In any case, Wistala heard a krrack! followed by a series of descending booms matched with screams of alarm and pain from horse and rider.

“Now that they know we’re here, we might as well get some work done. Crack rock, Firemaids. Let’s claw ourselves a shelf or two.”

The dragons cleared fallen rock, carved falls of ice, or even wedged boulders into chimneys and chutes in the cliffside to make themselves perches so they might rest more easily.

What any ears down in the valley made of the strikes, rattles, and steady fall of small rocks and ice chips Wistala could only imagine. Perhaps they thought trolls were at work.

Wistala heard crashes and screams and the sound of galloping hooves headed back toward the Ba-drink or riding for the eastern gap.

The dragonelles flew down and collected dead horses, mules, and donkeys, then took them high into the mountains and laid them out “on ice” so they might be eaten fresh later. Then they dined, heartily, on corpses. The drakka ran down an injured horse.

“Dragonelles are suited for this kind of fighting,” Ayafeeia told Wistala. “With the Aerial Host, they get blood in their nostrils and they refuse to relent until there’s blood and flame everywhere. This isn’t the kind of fight that can be settled in one stroke.”

Nor was it.

The next day the Ironriders came through the pass in force.

The dragonelles and drakka taunted the Ironriders to come up in the hills and get them.

Of course they tried, riding as steep a rocky slope as they could, with many horses slipping down to injury thanks to the snow and ice that still lurked in crevices and shadows.

When the Ironriders dismounted, chasing after the dragons in groups with spears, archers behind, the drakka hid until the men had passed and then leaped onto the backs of the archers, gutting them and then running under showers of arrows, leaving the Ironriders the depressing task of bringing down the dead or wounded. Otherwise their much-chewed bones would be neatly arranged in the road by dawn the next day. When they charged through the pass as fast as they could trying to simply run by the dragons, one or more would drop from cover in the cliff and loose fire onto the screaming men and horses, or they would drop sii and saa full of rocks from great heights so that gravity did the killing work.

They couldn’t pass at night, either. After a successful test run of a small troop, they tried to walk a larger contingent through. The dragons first panicked the horsemen and then batted the crowd back and forth along the mountain road, attacking first the east end and then the west.

An overzealous drakka died during that, speared after she knocked a wounded rider out of his saddle.

Another dragonelle was wounded when an arrow hit a soft spot and shot straight through her lung, at such an angle and doing so much damage that she could no longer fly. She had to be content standing watch at night and trumpeting warnings when the Ironriders tried to force the pass.

Wistala could feel the despair and frustration of the tormented riders below. While the others counted bodies or, worse, brought back heads, she could only fight the cold queasy feeling in her stomach.

Was she to blame for the bloodshed in this pass? She’d humbled the Wheel of Fire, and the dwarves were taking revenge on those west of the mountains by leaving their pass open.

But the knowledge of the depredations of the riders who had already passed through to the west steeled her. Warriors and their mounts must die so that Hypatian villages would go unburned.

Of course they burned the boats the Ironriders used to cross the Ba-drink, and they downed the bridge where Wistala had once made peace with the Dragonblade, bashing at the keystone with their tails and once that gave way, widening the breach by jumping up and down on the edges.

Their greatest difficulty was coping with the cold. Though spring had come to the lower altitudes, the mountains were thick with snow. Dragons like the cool of a deep underground cave, but being caught out in the open with icy mountain winds and snow gathering in their scales leaves them ill-spirited. They slept tightly, side by side, alternating front to back, with the drakka tucked under the protection of motherly wings.

---