The sky was the high sort of muted gray-blue with the last of the Plains Stars stubbornly holding on to their brilliance. It made me think of the shining dragon that Ymmen had become last night. I think we need all the brilliance we can find, about now, I thought a little morosely.
But Ymmen the black was beside me; a wall of night who padded softly and steadily. I could feel the quiet purpose emanating from him, and it made me forget for a little the buzz of a tension headache that I was sure, now, was coming from the accursed Stone Crown.
“We will move until true dawn, and then find water and take stock of our forces,” I whispered, partly to Ymmen, and partly to those who had been the first to stand up and follow me.
It was Abioye, Tamin, and Montfre, of course. Abioye nodded first, before turning around to look back across the gaggle that had decided to join me.
“Narissea!” I heard him whisper, surprised.
Expecting something bad – like the sudden crash of metal teeth or bone ones – I found myself looking back towards the distant sleepy camp that we had made last night and its many campfires glowing like half-covered coals. The sky was lightening quickly, but the camp was still set against a backdrop of blue-indigo. We had marched for a little while over the grasslands until Abioye had turned, and it gave me the distance to see the long line of people that followed us out of the camp.
“But – what?” I whispered in puzzlement. There was clearly a half of Naroba’s forces that had decided to take up my mission. The majority of them, I could see, were made of Nol Baggar’s mercenary group, the Red Hounds, but the rest was also exclusively Daza faces that looked up towards the dawn behind me. Of the half left with Naroba, I presumed they had to be made of mostly Daza and the ex-Mine Guards.
“We’ll need experienced fighters,” Abioye said with a grin. I shared his enthusiasm somewhat, but I was more surprised that anyone would choose the dangerous passage across the last of the Plains and through the Masaka mountains to confront a tyrant with magical metal dragons.
“Hm.” I heard a disagreeing note coming from Montfre behind us, who had stopped to see what had raised such concern. He had made it no little secret how much he still disliked the mercenary fighters. “Don’t employ a wolf for a guard dog and be surprised when it eats the chickens,” he said heavily, which made Tamin, my uncle, snort and Abioye growl in disagreement.
I shook my head. I didn’t care to fathom the vagaries of obscure Westerner parables.
Maybe we have need of difficult women and wolves, I thought, as I turned with a stronger step to march forward into the dawn.
But it seemed that the journey, with all of my earlier hopes for it, was going to prove difficult from the first.
We reached the Greenbow – a wide river that separated the more open grasslands and climbed to the scrublands before the mountains. I could see what we called the Masaka (and what the Red Hounds would call the World’s Edge!) raising their heads to their constant clouds. They glowered and looked down to where the bridge across the Greenbow had been completely, and utterly, destroyed.
“Oh no!” Tamin groaned, moving faster down the bank that led to the broad edge of land that banded the river. The bridge was a rare stone construction out here in the vastness of the Plains. It owed itself to the ancient ruins and relics that still dotted our wide country – some forgotten time where people built cities of stone against the charging winds and sands. The bridge would have been made of broad stones, carved into exact angular shapes, resting on stanchions of similar stone standing in the flowing waters. It was one of the safest places to cross the river at this place on the grasslands. Further north and further south, the river was narrower but stronger, dangerous to cross without ropes or canoes.
Or bridges, I thought in dismay.
“It was Inyene!” Montfre growled as he shrugged his borrowed Daza cloak about his shoulders.
“I don’t smell any metal abominations in this.” Ymmen stopped at the edge of the riverbank and growled, his tail flicking a little in the grasses. “But I still smell dragon.”
“Not Inyene?” I echoed, wondering who would do this then, no, who could do this act of destruction. The flags of the bridge – each one taller than two of me and probably as thick as I could reach with my hands – had been tumbled and, in many places, completely cracked. I could see their crisp and sharp edges sticking out from the furious waters like the points of crocodile teeth. Even the stanchions – great circular disks of stone – had been torn from their riverbed, and seemingly rolled or scattered down the stream.
Oh, I thought, as Ymmen spotted what I did at the same time. Or maybe the shared space of our mind spotted it together, perhaps. Ymmen gave a low, guttural growl as both our eyes focused on the deep rents in the ground, scattered with telltale dragon scales. The scales still gleamed red, green, and blue.
“That is where they cleaned their broken scales, after,” Ymmen said, his voice so low and serious that I wondered at the sadness he might feel to be opposing his own kind.
There was no sign of spilled oil, fuel, or the smell of acrid smoke that constantly followed Inyene’s mechanical dragons. And besides which, Ymmen couldn’t smell their activity here. But the sign of natural dragon behavior – and dragon strength – was clear.
“Lady Red is trying to make our life harder, is she?” I said hotly, feeling the buzzing sound in my ears raise in a sympathetic notch with my anger. I could call that red Den Mother here, with the power of the Crown, I thought savagely. I had sudden, cruel dreams of me ordering her to kneel across the river for me so that I could walk my army, slowly, across the new bridge that I had made—
“Nari?” It was the soft murmur of Abioye at my side. I blinked, refocusing on him as the buzzing in my head started to subside. How did he know that I was getting lost in the Crown again?
“What do you want to do?” he asked instead, although his brow was frowned a little with concern.
“Right,” I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts a little, even if I couldn’t quite clear the buzzing from my ears. “We’ll have to ford it, somehow. We have rope. The Daza have their long spears – we can make it work,” I said, although my voice quavered a little. We have to make it work.
“Hmph.” There was a disgruntled growl in my mind from Ymmen, who had raised himself from his haunches to snuff a little at his brethren’s abandoned scales. “I might as well help, as I’m not carrying all of you across the river!” he said a little moodily, before lunging towards the river to push and scrape one of the large stones nearer to the others.
With a dragon to help, it got easier trying to negotiate fifty-odd people of varying heights, weights, and familiarity with both water and common sense across a river. Ymmen worked to make something like a ford – lines and humps of the cracked bridge stones that allowed the Daza with their spears, strung with ropes, some shelter from the currents. The dragon’s ‘islands’ of stone made the water flow faster between them of course, but now there was a sort of rope walkway to cling on to when your feet slipped.