“The sky is clouding,” I said and nodded. Good. The sickle moon was thin anyway, and the clouds were obscuring both it and the stars. Less light to reveal our movements. “We hunt,” I agreed, reaching up my arms as Ymmen’s gigantic claws once again wrapped themselves around me, and we took off.
We swooped through the night, as silent as a whisper. From this height Inyene’s workcamp where I had spent almost a quarter of my life looked so… futile. The four great wooden sheds where they housed us were small boxes, and the other assembled buildings – everything from the guard towers to the stone factory sheds – looked shabby and ill-made.
But my superior viewpoint revealed an ugly reality: I could see the open-topped rectangle of another great shed going up. They could fit almost a hundred Daza in just one, I knew. And then there was the constant smoke from the smelting shed. From up here in the clean mountain air, I could smell clearly how greasy and poisonous they were. Totally unlike dragon fire, I now knew – which to me smelled clean and purifying.
“Ssss…” Ymmen announced his concern, although he didn’t need to. Another two dragons had been added to Inyene’s three, in just the short time that we had been away. I growled in sympathy with the dragon.
“Abioye,” I tried to concentrate on our task at hand. He had to be down there somewhere – but where? I had a hunch that he would either be at the sheds or at his sister’s keep, and my gaze lifted to regard the place that had stood sentinel over my incarceration.
Inyene’s keep sat on the last saddle of rock before the Masaka foothill eased into the dark-lit plains beyond. It didn’t look as though it had ever been anything other than a martial place, and I struggled to imagine it as somewhere nice, and not just a blot on the landscape.
Her keep was built of old stone, vast gray blocks at its base that were almost as large as some of the sheds, growing smaller as the walls climbed. The walls weren’t terribly high, only about four or five stories I guessed. But they were wide and thick, and joined onto a taller inner keep built of the same gray granite. From this height, I could see that there was a wide walkway on the inner side of the wall, just under the battlements, and that constant fires burned in metal dishes around its circumference.
The entire keep looked to be hunched and snarling, and the only part of it that was in any way graceful (although I hesitated to even use that word) was a singular tower that sat on one side of the Keep. I could not know of course, but I rather thought that it had been from here that I had felt Inyene’s wave of power.
Maybe… The tangle of rage in my chest forced me to consider the possibility: Maybe we could. I thought of what I wanted to do. Kill Inyene. Make her pay for all the suffering that she had caused to me, my family, and friends – to everyone. But it was an ugly, nasty thought and it felt sour in my mind. Ymmen sensed my fury and was already turning his slow, soundless flight towards the keep.
But there was no light in any of its windows. The tower looked empty, and the only movement came from the small ant-like figures of the guards as they moved around the battlements.
Pheet! The thin sound of a whistle rose over the workcamp, and I watched a batch of slaves making their way out of the mines, feet dragging and heads bowed.
I wondered whether Oleer was a part of their number.
“They’ve increased the guards,” I whispered, seeing how the thirty or forty strong work team of slaves were flanked by Inyene’s mine guards. Maybe half to the number of slaves, I guessed, but they would all be armed just the same.
I shook my head. We could not attack the keep, however much I wanted to. “Their numbers are too strong,” I whispered, knowing that Ymmen would hear me. “And a lot of the slaves would be injured before we could free them.” I sighed. A lot of people would die.
So instead, I would have to concentrate on finding Abioye. He would know what Inyene’s weaknesses were. And he would know how to stop these metal monsters. And I was banking on that one hope – that he had wanted to be free.
I realized I was putting a lot of faith in just a few half-heard words.
“Poison Berry,” Ymmen said cryptically in my mind, and I had absolutely no idea what he was referring to. For a moment, I thought that he was referring to the smoke from the smelting shed, or perhaps some way to get at Inyene.
But then, in my mind, there was suddenly the smell of… wine? I had only tasted wine a few times, but the Daza people had their own berry-presses and vats. And the Traders who came through the Plains in their caravans always had barrels and barrels of it.
“You think we should get the guards drunk?” I said as we wheeled high over the keep. I had to admit – it was a great idea. But where was I going to find enough wine to intoxicate quite a few hundred guardsmen and women?
“No. Poison Berry – look.” Ymmen dipped his wing low so that he made a sharp turn, and then I saw that there was someone staggering along one of the terraces, illuminated by one of the wall’s bonfires, lurching across the ramp that led up to the smelting shed, and moving past it, towards one of the metal dragons.
From his fine cloak, the flash of his fine linen shirt, and his hair – I knew that it was Abioye.
And he appeared drunk.
“That’s him!” I said. But we’d have to land right in the middle of the main yard if we wanted to have even a chance of getting near him. And that wasn’t going to happen, I thought. Not with a crowd of Daza slaves surrounded by thuggish guards nearby.
We lifted up from our flight, watching as Abioye lurched to the first metal dragon and appeared to be fiddling at its stomach for several long, fraught moments.
There was a sudden burst of steam from the thing’s mouth, which turned into tendrils of rising black smoke. Abioye climbed up the creature’s leg as its face smoked, and then promptly slid back down. It looked painful.
Apparently the young man who had offered me a chance to fold his laundry for a living was undeterred however, as he clambered slowly back up again to perch in a pre-made groove just behind the thing’s shoulders.
“What under the stars does he think that he’s doing?” I asked, before Abioye leaned forward as if he were hugging the brutish machine, and suddenly the eerie, unsettling blue Earth Light flooded from the creature’s eyes.
“Ssss!” Ymmen flapped his wings in alarm, taking us higher as the wave of discomforting nausea swept over us.
Abioye was fiddling with something at his belt – it appeared to be hooks or straps or something, as the metal dragon raised its head straight up, and looked up.
If it was any normal, living and breathing creature it would have seen us, but if it did then it made no sign or sound of recognition. A shiver ran through the dragon above me, too, but the metal thing below us did nothing, at first. Abioye was still fidgeting on the creature’s back, but suddenly the beast moved forward, taking a strange step with its forelegs, and then another as it raised its hind legs and unfurled its creepy bat-like wings.
“He’s going to fly it,” I breathed, and without even having to suggest anything the black dragon was carrying us aloft, higher and further so that we were just a dark shadow in the night. But we could still see the blue radiance of the metal dragon below. It was beating its wings in an almost lifelike way, before it jumped into the air – and with hisses of foul steam and the clatter and grind of metal gears – it flew.