“So you’ve seen me, Drakossozh. Is there to be a duel here, under the eyes of the Wheel of Fire?”
“A duel? With vermin? Spare me your wit, creature.”
“Then I will go about my business—,” Wistala began.
“No. Walk with me. I will start no fight with you here. You have my word.”
Wistala wondered if she could trust the word of an assassin.
“I must be growing old. You are the second dragon to slip through my fingers,” he said.
“Who was the first?”
He turned toward the Hardhold. “Come. I wish to show you something, Oracle.”
He led her down many sets of stairs, across chambers filled with trophies and statues, and finally down a shaft where one traveled by having the floor descend rather than going afoot. He gave a password to guards in a workshop filled with the sound of hammers and deeper pounding, and Wistala smelled hot metal and burning coal.
She passed a group of young dwarves, their faces unmasked, listening to another older dwarf talk as he pointed with a stick at various features of a hose that fed water into a series of smaller and smaller pipes, until it shot out the bottom with tremendous force. She recognized Rayg among the apprentices, the only human other than Drakossozh this far in the Hardhold.
“We’re deep in the Guild of the Armorers,” the Dragonblade said. They passed racks of weapons and stacked helms, with dwarves bent over workbenches on all sides. The symphony of noise was as chaotic as a battle, and the air thick with the tang of heated metal. “Have you ever wondered how the Wheel of Fire got its name?” he asked.
“You see the burning shield here and there,” Wistala said. “It’s an emblem.”
“They were called the Wheel of Fire before that. Here, follow.”
He passed into a quieter gallery. The ceiling here was wide but low, and Wistala smelled an oily smell like lamp fats overlaid with other workshop odors.
Long ranks of machines stood in little bays. Some had wooden platforms next to them, one or two had been wheeled out so the dwarves could work. A few of the workers gave Wistala a startled look as she crouched to get through the doors.
The pieces of craftsmanship were like great walls on wheels of assorted sizes. If there was an average, she would put that wheels were fully dwarf height and the walls perhaps twice that, but it seemed some walls and wheels came taller and some shorter, some wider and some narrower. But on each two spars jutted out from the axles of the wheels behind the wall, with handles at irregular intervals. Wistala watched a team of dwarves move one by having four dwarves stand at each spar and lift, then push it forward. Behind the shield were big tanks like water-cisterns, only with hoses and glass devices like clock faces fixed to the joints, along with assorted levers and cables connecting wheel to tanks.
But the objects at the front caught her attention more than anything.
Pipes projected from slits in the great wheeled shields. The slits, indeed the shields themselves, reminded her of overlarge dwarf battle-masks with their thin gaps so the dwarves could see and still have their eyes shielded.
Open-jawed dragon heads, horribly real, had been fixed to the front of the pipes, their faces forever frozen into snarling fury. Their eyes had been replaced by painted crystals, but otherwise they looked ready to come alive. There were heads with eight horns and heads with none, heads with green scales and heads with bronze, heads of hatchlings, drakes, drakka, dragons, dragonelles. . . .
Some were familiar.
The world spun about her. She fixed her eyes on the Dragonblade, who stood with hand on sword hilt, helmet cradled at his elbow. His knees were bent just a trifle, as though he were waiting to leap into action. Wistala noticed shadows, heard excited breathing, the alcoves just ahead.
“I’m not aware of all the mechanics to their operation,” the Dragonblade explained from somewhere on the other side of the Endless Steppe, or so it seemed to her ears. “But the turning of the wheels forces air into one of the tanks, and that air is then used to drive flame, like dragonflame, out of the other tank and through the pipe at the front. It’s ignited by a coal gas-flame there. Certainly not what a dragon is capable of, but I hear it’s terrifying in tunnel warfare.”
The dwarves had all frozen in their labors, watching her as though fixed by spellcraft.
“Most interesting,” Wistala said. “Is there another stop to the tour, or am I done?”
“You hold your anger well. Here’s another test.” He extended his gauntleted palm. In it rested two ancient Hypatian coins, one of gold, the other of silver. “I found these in the jowls of a bronze I killed on the banks of the Whitewater. There was also a female hatchling there. That hatchling wouldn’t have been you, would it?”
Wistala shot out her tongue, but the Dragonblade was quicker of hand, closed his fingers around the coins and withdrew them.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were offering me a treat,” Wistala said. “Speaking of which, I am late for my dinner.”
“A dragon who can hold her temper,” the Dragonblade said.
Just,, Wistala thought.
“There’s something about you that frightens me,” the Dragonblade said, eyebrows together. His horridly flat face wrinkled in thought. “A dragon who can keep her temper could be a deadly enemy. Or—”
“Or what?” Wistala asked.
“I won’t misjudge you again,” the Dragonblade said, not answering her question and crossing to the opposite gallery. “You’ve escaped me twice. There won’t be a third.”
“No,” Wistala said. “I expect there won’t.”
“And even if I fall, I have a son and a daughter to avenge me.”
“I’ve met your son. I hope he gets his chance.”
“Ah, yes. Not his finest performance. I thought I’d try him on an easier target his first night out. I never thought you’d chew your wings open. They’ve grown out nicely.”
Wistala took a breath. If she kept her eyes on the Dragonblade, she couldn’t see the heads, except he kept strolling around so she couldn’t help but view the machines.
“I wonder if Fangbreaker knows all your history,” the Dragonblade said.
“I wonder if he knows you’ve disobeyed him, and killed when he told you to capture.”
She turned and moved back through the workshops, keeping one eye on him just in case. But he stood there, helmet at his hip, chuckling. “You may walk away, dragon. Even fly. But wherever you go, you cannot hide forever. Dragons are noticed, you see?”
As she retraced her steps back dwarves seemed to be rushing about everywhere, or standing on stairways talking and gesticulating. Something had them dreadfully agitated but Wistala did not ask what. Her head hurt, perhaps from the fumes in the workshops, and she wanted to retire to her tower to sleep.
“Dhssol.”
“Oracle, what do you think?” some asked, but she passed in a daze.
“Dhssol! Dhssol!” the dwarves said, one to the other. Dwarf wives wailed it from their balconies as Wistala crossed the Titan bridge.
“Who is this Dhssol?” she asked one of the leather-slippered court workers.
“Not a who, a what,” he said, pulling at his beard. “ ‘Disaster,’ it would be in Parl. An evil star is on our house.”
The dwarves of the star-guild told her the terrible news when she returned to her tower. A tradesdwarf of the Chartered Company had made a rare appearance at the Wheel of Fire to bring tidings of sorrow and fear: the punitive column had been wiped out almost to a dwarf.
After a bloody march through villages where the dwarves left burned bodies in wooden cages, they’d been betrayed by their hired scouts, supposedly belonging to a rival clan to the lands they’d been traversing. The false scouts led to a flooded river, and while attempting to cross, they had been attacked during a snowstorm from both sides and by forces shooting down the river in narrow boats.
Hammar, now called the Dwarfhanger by his barbarian legion, was reputed to be on the march for the Wheel of Fire, destroying what remained of the column as the survivors retreated.
Some important voices were calling for Lord Lobok to be put in charge of the defense of the city, he’d had his share of luck against the barbarians and Hammar before.
“And he’s cautious, and would not improvidently expose his troops to destruction,” Djaybee said. “He can stand against this Hammar, for years if need be. The barbarians always lose interest in war after a season. It’ll be over by the summer flowers. Should he assume command?” the scientifically minded dwarf, who’d never asked her advice before, wondered.
“I would like nothing better,” Wistala said.
They were interrupted in this discourse by a visitor. This time Gobold Fangbreaker himself came to her, rather than going through the delay of having her brought to the Throne Hall.
“Tala, you have heard the rumors?” the king said as he arrived, surrounded by his black-armored bodyguard.
“Yes. Is it true, my king?”
“True enough,” he said. “Though not quite so bad as some losing their nerve would have it. Battle Commander Vande Boltcaster has a full maneuver array of dwarves left, and they are fighting as they turn back. But they’ve been forced to abandon their train and are short on supplies and have no time or capacity to seek more. I’ve had an idea. How much do you think you can carry?”
