Page 3 of Dragon Rule (Age of Fire 5)

Of course, if things went ill with the Pirate Lords, he might still join Nilrasha as an exile rather than as a conquering Tyr. Feeling ran hot in the Lavadome against this war, which would benefit none but their allied human provinces in the Upper World.

Dragons bleed for Hypatia’s need!

Some young, freshly fledged dragons had sung outside his private air gallery, before being chased away by his guard. He hadn’t objected to the opinioneering so much as being awakened after a long night’s work.

Of course, he’d tried diplomacy. The Hypatians sent emissaries with demands that their former colonies of Swayport cease molesting their shipping and interfering with the fishing fleets. They’d returned with a tale of laughter and ridicule.

The Pirate Lords claimed not to fear dragons, presenting trophies of a victory against the Wizard’s Dragonriders twoscore years back, when dragons who had assaulted their fortress fell before its gates.

He wondered if the pirates had considered that dragons flighting under rein and rider fought very differently from dragons directed by their own commanders and Tyr. They showed no sign of it in their brag and bluster.

Thinking didn’t help with the pain. So much flying. He regretted not accompanying the surfwater forces, but a Tyr’s place when going to war was at the head of his Aerial Host. Even at the cost of some pain. But the hurt did bring one benefit. It put him in a foul mood. Nothing like pain and the smell of blood to fill the fire-bladder and set it quivering. He was ready for battle.

Lights twinkled on the horizon. Swayport at last!

The Copper’s sharp eyes picked out the outlines of the port. From his position, a good score of dragonlengths above the water with the rocky coast to the west and the gentle Inland Ocean night to the east, Swayport as seen from the air resembled a reclining cat facing out toward the ocean, its spine in a gentle curve creating a sheltered bay. Against its belly was the port itself, a long crescent of sand beach, protected by a barren bar exposed at low tide. The cat’s dangerous—to rodents, anyway—sii were stuck out as a series of rocks perilous to mariners approaching from the north, its long tail a wave-breaking sandbar to the south.

A rocky bluff at the cat’s head held an ancient sloping fortress of double walls and three towers with its own wharf between the forelimbs. The fortress had been built an age ago by the Hypatian Empire at the height of its wealth and power, and the wharf was intended so that the defenders might be resupplied by sea if the rest of the landward settlement fell.

The town of the Pirate Lords proper had not been so solidly built. A tangle of streets and structures of wood and stone rose to the temple domes on the cat’s haunches. The Pirate Lords no longer worshipped the gods of their forefathers there, instead the temples sheltered gambling and drink and slave-auctions, the usual low pursuits of men who lived by fighting and pillage.

He’d promised to hand them back to the Hypatians with only minor scorching.

Swayport, and six other colonies on this coast like it, had long since declared their independence from the old Hypatian order. In the best of times there was trade across the Inland Ocean, at other times war, and chafing between rival fishing fleets and trading lines in every season—even the storm-months at the death of the year, when ships driven into opposing ports seeking shelter from storms were charged outrageous harbor fees or had their cargoes seized.

The Copper had listened to weary hours of it from Hypatian shipowners and whaling guild until he thought he’d dream of nothing but the price of lamp oil and salted fish for the rest of his life, before making his decision to end the pirate menace.

Well, if men couldn’t settle their differences, he’d force a peace. As the Hypatians were his allies, though sometimes they were hard to distinguish from unusually quarrelsome thralls, he’d see the disputes resolved in their favor.

He had two advantages, and he intended to use them. The first was a pretext for war that had all Hypatia seething. One of the great merchant lines—they flew a flag with blue and yellow and a fish design; the Copper couldn’t remember the name—had one of its deep-water trade boats blown off course and into the hands of a commerce-raider, who brought it back to Swayport.

Such a matter could usually be resolved with paying a small ransom, but this ship held the merchant line’s owner and family, a man of influence as wide as his belt size and deep as his purse. They put his crew to work cutting paving stones and his family in the fortress and sent the youngest son of the line back to the Hypatian Directory with a ransom demand.

The Copper, when told the tale by one of the Directory’s many skilled tongues, growled that if it was one of his own dragon families from the Lavadome. He’d be descaled if he’d pay anything with drakes and dragonelles locked up in some dungeon with excrement running down between the walls.

With that Hypatia begged for assistance in a war to humble the Pirate Lords.

His other advantage was knowledge of Swayport and its fortress, now ever so much closer on the horizon. But the moon would reappear soon—was it yet looming on the southeastern horizon? It mustn’t be allowed to frame the oncoming dragons like a shadow-puppet light.

The far-off battlements formed a false horizon against the stars. The old works must be massive, at least the size of Imperial Rock in the Lavadome, though perhaps not quite so high.

Swayport had been attacked a generation ago by the thrall-dragons from that fog-shrouded island to the north that his gray brother skulked upon, back in the days of Wrimere Wyr-master, the Wizard of the Isle of Ice. One of the human veterans of his Aerial Host, now a proud and battle-scarred Captain, had been involved in the attack.

The attack had failed strategically because the men of Swayport had learned dragon-fighting from the dwarfs, and filled the towers overlooking their harbor with war machines that fired aerial harpoons. His sister Wistala had shown him one, a souvenir of one of her own battles, when she gave a tutorial to the Firemaids about aboveground hominid fortifications and defenses. The Copper still shuddered at the memory, it was a horrible barbed thing the length of a spear, full of spurs that went in easily but wouldn’t come out without destruction to muscle, blood vessel, and organ. He’d rather take an arrow through the eye and die at once.

Worse, the dwarfs and men like the Pirate Lords attached long chains, or weights to the harpoons. The chains might catch on rooftop or tree branch and yank the harpoon out with crippling damage; the weights caused even the strongest dragon to come to earth eventually, where he’d remain, ground-bound and vulnerable, until the metal could be broken.

According to Wistala, such a device had been the death of their father.

The Copper, trying to forget his wing for a few more beats by thinking back on his conversations with the captains, both dragon and human, remembered, too, the strategic blunder the dragons-slavers had made. A scouting rider had passed over the town and took it upon himself to demand food and drink for himself and his mount. When refused, the fool angered and started burning small craft in the harbor before flying off with his dragon hungrier than ever.

With Swayport alarmed, when the dragon-slavers returned, they found a populace ready for battle. After some skirmishing, cooler heads prevailed and the dragon-slavers decided the battle wouldn’t be worth whatever could be gleaned from a poor series of villages and a fishing port.

Now Swayport was thriving and prosperous, in part thanks to their resistance to the dragon-slavers. Refugees from wars elsewhere had settled under the protection of the old Hypatian colonial fortress that had seen off the dragons once.

The Copper could now make out the outlines of the craggy fortress atop the catshead bluff. The towers made it look like the cat was wearing a crown, or perhaps had grown an extra docked ear. He glanced at his wing. It was leaking blood and throbbed, but he’d made it through the night at the head of his dragons. He’d brought the dragons to war, at the place and time arranged. The rest was up to his commanders.

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