Page 249 of Dragon Strike (Age of Fire 4)

The thugs halted and lowered their heads. The men riding them dropped shutter-like shields down to cover their faces and forelimbs. A mobile wall had sprouted on the battlefield.

Arrows of the Ironriders struck the shields, sounding like hail on a metal-plate roof.

Wistala marked the approaching center banner. One of the Hypatians shot a flaming arrow into it, trying to burn it. But the bodies had been well coated with pitch to preserve them.

“I do so hate this sort of thing,” she muttered.

She gathered herself behind the line of thugs.

“Mossbell and Thallia!” she roared.

Even the thugs jumped.

Wistala tore forward, leaped, using the heavy hindquarters of the thugs as a vaulting-point. As she sailed into the air she extended body and wings, getting every dragonlength she could into her arc.

Arrows rose to meet her, but most passed behind or stuck into her tail, for she gathered speed as she fell, or so it seemed, for in battle all motion was slowed to a dreadful crawl.

She fell against the banner and its cart, knocking the totem down. Using wreckage to shield her breast, she lashed out with tail and spat fire across the ranks that faced the Hypatian right.

Horses screamed and scattered.

Wistala thought it best to keep moving. She trotted, tail lashing to keep them off, head held low where a sword-stroke couldn’t get behind her extended griff, and simply used her body as a sort of mobile linebreaker against the ranks of Ironriders.

If there were any old hands at dragonfighting among their number they showed no sign of it. They didn’t try to trip her with lines or get a rope-drag on her tail. A few halfhearted charges and thrown lances against her side left her with feathered shafts dangling from her sides and backbone. She broke up more organized charges by beating her wings, hard, into the horses’ faces. The brutes didn’t care to be peppered with wingblown pebbles.

“Hy-yah! Hy-yah!” came the war cries from behind as the Hypatians charged forward to support her, the great Knights of the Directory leading the way on their tall horses, half again as high as those of their opponents.

Still, the battle would have gone ill for the Hypatians. Despite the chaos in the center, the two Ironrider wings stayed in order and reached out to envelop the Hypatians. There were not nearly enough thugs to form an armored ring capable of covering all the horsemen, archers, and footmen. Elvish arrows flew far to tear gaps in their line, but the dark riders closed each gap as remorselessly and unfailingly as ants.

They harried the Hypatian flanks. As the edges of the Hypatian battle line went ragged and uneven, the Ironriders charged, snipping off sections of spearmen and sending archers tumbling back with the precision of a skilled-body thrall shaping up a ragged scale.

Then the Firemaids struck.

The dragons came in low, with the rising sun to cover their approach.

The drakka were already in the city, hiding in garbage piles and pigsties, anywhere that would hide their scent.

None knew from where a drakka might strike next. They slithered out of sewer holes and plunged from rooftops, attacking Ironrider messengers and officers rousting the riders out of the beer-halls and tobacco-dens.

Following their example, the population forgot their fear, and their surrender, and rose. They flung crockery from balconies and dumped boiling water from high windows. Angry Ironriders set fire to houses, bringing mobs with ax and rope ready to fight either flame or invader.

Many a booted, long-haired rider ended up hanging from a laundry line strung between two buildings.

The Ironrider princes upon the Temple Hill had forgotten more about warfare than the thug-riders entering the city in street-filling columns had ever known. They organized their reserve into rows of archers guarded by spearmen, with riders ready to ride from point to point and dismount wherever an attack might develop.

It was against their ranks that Nilrasha’s first wave flung themselves.

Some landed behind the lines, some in front, some atop roofs and some in the confusing tangle of decorative gardens. Orange blossoms of dragonflame colored the hillside.

The second wave of Firemaids, kept under control by their maidmother and the veteran warriors, circled Temple Hill, dropping to strike and then retreat when the arrows grew too thick.

The Ironriders, with courage of desperation, hurled themselves against the dragons. They climbed onto haunches to hack and stab, wormed their way between slashing sii and stomping saa to sink their daggers into vulnerable undersides.

For generations after, the phrase “died like an Ironrider” passed into Drakine, used for a dragon who succumbed to wounds with teeth and claws and spurs gripping enemies.

It was easy for Wistala to find the Queen. All she had to do was listen for the high dragon cries of “Blood bats! Blood bats!”

Wistala hurried up the corpse-littered streets, between buildings roaring as flames consumed them, to find Queen Nilrasha stretched out in the ruins of an old Hypatian temple.

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