Page 96 of Dragon Strike (Age of Fire 4)

Gigrix called to the others, and one brought a ladle with a bowl at the end.

“Fresh firewater!” a deman marveled. At least that’s what the Copper thought he said.

Gigrix filled the ladle, and like a good leader, offered the first sip to his “voice”—the deman who bellowed orders and corrected the warriors in their practice evolutions.

Then Gigrix himself took a swig. He stood still, drinking, breathing deeply, spines rippling up and down on his back.

“Yes, my Tyr,” he said, passing the ladle to the tallest and widest of his soldiers. His greenish tongue dabbed at the sides of his mandibles, and he muttered a few words the Copper did not recognize. “Just to think, some argued for a glory-charge instead of surrender! Here I am, enjoy a drink fit for a king.”

“It is fit for a king,” the Copper said. “What do you say, warriors? Wouldn’t Gigrix make a fine king?”

Eager for their turn at the ladle, the demen whistled through their mandibles and gave off piping hoots.

The Copper worried the wound to increase the flow. He used to believe himself awful at politics. But one could learn—yes, one could learn.

Pleasantly light-headed, the Copper returned to the top of Imperial Rock at a slow climb, with many pauses to talk to both dragons and thralls, hearing small news of kitchen and nursing-room. He congratulated thralls on the birth of babies or the marriage of children and made a quick visit to a distant relative’s cave to listen to the quiet taps inside three promising-looking dragon-eggs. He assured the mother-to-be he’d never seen such perfectly formed eggs. It portended great things for the brood, most certainly.

Then it was up to the gardens and down the shaft to the old cistern with his bats.

In the days of the civil wars, he’d been told, it held a reserve of water. During FeHazathant’s day, the water was mixed with a paste of ash, strange rare salts, and other nutrients and used to feed the Imperial gardens.

He’d ordered the cistern emptied and new masonry pools built to feed the gardens. Now it housed his bats.

It was a slow climb through the narrow well hole with his bad sii, but fortunately a short one. He found himself among his bats.

These were the trusted elite, descendants of the bats that had guided him as a hatchling. Each wore a tiny foot-band of metal, identifying it as a Tyr-bat. It was a crime to kill a Tyr-bat, at least on purpose.

They were of all different sizes, from small and quick, who lived mostly by eating parasites clinging beneath dragonscale—many a dragon would be revolted at the thought of some filthy, greasy mammal doing him a service as he slept—to medium-sized, who ate flies in the livestock and thrall pens to the big, blood-drinking brutes. Then there were the monster-bats, those who for generations had been raised on dragonblood. Some of them didn’t even sleep upside down anymore, but slept in cracks above the noisome floor.

The Copper was relieved to see that the floor had been freshly scraped. The bat offal was greatly prized by the Anklene herbologists for their gardens.

“Ahh! ’Tis himself,” a bat called as he clambered in.

“Ooo, is there a sup? Perishing hungry I am,” one squeaked.

“No. No blood this time,” the Copper said, climbing carefully to the cave floor so he didn’t slip in filth. His body-thralls would be burning their cleaning rags later.

“I need three quiet, very healthy bats, small and smart. The duty will require a good deal of flying and cave-sense. But on completion I’ll give you a permanent place in the Aerial Host caves.”

He had scores of squeaking, clamoring volunteers. Two brawls broke out. It was difficult to pick three, but he found two brothers who claimed to be descended from Enjor and one female who seemed better-spoken than the rest.

“You’re Ging,” he said to the female. He looked at one of the males. “You’re Gang. You’re Ghoul,” he said to the bigger male, for his fur was a ghostly gray. “Come with me, you three.”

He walked and they flew to the edge of the gardens and he looked down at the assembled demen. “Those are demen. Get to know their sounds, their smells, their voices. In another day or two, a pair of demen will leave that group. I want you to follow them. It will probably be a trip of some days. When they find another group of demen and meet with a big, sort of bluish one who walks with the aid of a big stick, you return and let me know where he is.”

They had the usual questions about dying of hunger on the way—he told them that they would just have to sneak a sup from sleeping Firemaids, there should still be some left in the Star Tunnel—and of course, there were the demen themselves.

“Now, you can help yourself to a little of my blood. Just a little. I’m weak enough from feeding demen. You can clean out this cut, while you’re at it.”

Nothing like bat saliva for speeding healing, he’d found. Even Nilrasha thought it was disgusting, but she couldn’t argue the result—the wounds healed thrice as fast with only the faintest of scars.

Thinking he’d done a good day’s work, he told the thralls he would have an extra haunch of roast pork for supper. And perhaps a second or even third helping of that wine his adoptive grandmother used to be so fond of. He had blood to make up.

All the while he met that afternoon with NoSohoth, the smells coming up from the kitchens made it very hard to keep his mind on affairs in the hills. NoSohoth’s droning lulled him, and he had to resort to his old training cave-watch trick of digging sii into saa to stay awake.

Unfortunately, dinner was spoiled by one of his thralls, the female in charge of the cleaning staff. She was a massive creature, as wide as she was tall, almost white hair bound up in a Tyr’s household kerchief.

“Oh, sir. One of my scrubs, she found some strange odds and ends in your wizard’s sleeping chamber. We’re used to his strange devices, but we wondered about this.”

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