There were burnt-out townships everywhere. The destruction wasn’t as total as it had been for the Daza people of the Plains, I could see – but we Daza were a spread-out people, with far fewer of us living over a much larger space than these westerners here in the Middle Kingdom. Inyene probably had to search for the Daza villages and hut circles, and thus taken extreme pride in her work dismantling them.
Here, however, there were still many untouched and pristine villages and towns, keeps, and compounds made of stone that sat at the confluence of roads or rivers – but no sooner had one burning pyre of rock and rubble passed over the horizon behind us, then another column of smoke appeared ahead.
“It has to be Inyene,” I muttered, earning an affirmation from Ymmen beneath me.
“Aye. I smell those abominations thick in the air,” Ymmen said – which was worrying. I had hoped that, at the very least, the saving grace of our recent battle of the Masaka Pass would have been the depletion of Inyene’s forces. But it was clear that she still had enough mechanical dragons to run riot and rampage through the otherwise sedate Middle Kingdom.
The destruction looked uglier here, however, I had to admit. It was something about seeing the stone or palisade walls torn down, cracked and splintered like eggs being broken by unruly and unthinking children. Inside, when I caught a glimpse past the rising plumes of smokes, I could see the faint suggestions of shell-buildings, the odd standing corner of a wall or the tragically still standing tree inside these settlements, while all else was a field of broken blocks and wood and burning bonfires. I dreaded to think what was burning in those fires, and quickly turned my head away.
Inyene hadn’t just confined her rage to the cities and buildings of the Middle Kingdom however, she had also attacked the fields and meadows of these people as well, I saw. There were entire narrow strips of cultivated land that had been trampled into a muddy mire by steel claws. There were also more smoking and blackened stretches of land where crops that could have fed my entire village for a moon had been reduced to cinders.
“Dear Stars – what are they going to do?” I thought, instantly understanding the terrible science of not having enough food to store for winter. We Daza had many times been through our droughts, illnesses, and even a famine or two. But we were lucky that we could move out across the Plains, abandoning our hut circles for new ones or becoming entirely nomadic, following the great roaming herds of the elk and bison when we needed to.
And, just as had happened during Inyene’s battle on the Plains, I saw no concrete rhyme or reason to this savagery. There was no need to destroy crops save to punish an enemy, after all – and the villages and towns that the Metal Queen and her metal dragons had attacked did not appear to be always in strategically important locations like the tops of hills, or the bridging of a particularly wide river.
“She just wanted to crush and destroy,” I said, my heart going out to Abioye somewhere ahead of me, who must surely also be looking down in horror at what his own sister had done – and who she had finally become.
Ymmen let out a series of whistling clicks and burrs from his voice, in that singsong, highly fluid language that made up the natural dragon-tongue. But he didn’t share the translation with me in my mind, and for a moment I wondered if he were mourning this great loss of life in his own way – before his whistling was answered by another. It was the blue dragon behind us, and her tones were sharper and shorter. It immediately made me think of a tense argument, and my suspicions were proven right when Ymmen finally shared his discoveries with me.
“The dragons here have not known what danger they face,” Ymmen explained. “They could sense that there was something strange about these ‘new dragons’ they call them—” The mighty black dragon gave a cough of flame and smoke in his disgust – earning a warning cry from the steel-eyed guard behind us.
“But they did not know what sort of new thing they were,” Ymmen said gravely, and I imagined the horrified confusion that these noble creatures must have faced: To sense their kind and yet not of their kind, all at once?
“Well, now that they do—” I started to say.
“There is danger even here, my sister,” Ymmen said, and a flicker of his frustration rolled upwards through me. It had been unusual for this dragon, my friend, to feel this way: caught and even perhaps worried. It’s not natural for a dragon to worry, I thought, and earned a sense of agreement from Ymmen as he continued.
“The blue is angry. She was told that I – I! – played a part in this destruction!” Ymmen said, whipping his tail through the air behind us so violently that it sent a shudder up through his entire body to where I sat at his neck.
“What? But – that’s insane!” I burst out.
“Clearly. But madness seems to be spreading everywhere these days,” Ymmen muttered darkly. “The blue hears her riders talking about the Metal Queen – but they do not call her that. The people call her the Wild Sorceress, and the Dragon Witch.”
“Oh.” Another wave of anger rolled through me as I realized just what Ymmen was telling me. After the rage had gone, it left me feeling sick and weak with nausea. This was precisely what the skeleton guards of the Torvald watch towers had proclaimed at the Masaka Pass. That there was a wild Daza witch who was summoning dragons and wreaking havoc across the lands. That I was her, even.
“More Inyene lies!” I spat.
“Yes. And more still. The blue says that her Riders – her companions who are as close to her as another dragon – have also started talking about the Noble Inyene. That the Metal Queen has been offering aid to the very towns that she has destroyed, sending in hired laborers and mercenaries to ‘repair.’”
“Argh!” I couldn’t contain my hatred for this nest of manipulations and chicanery that I was hearing about. But – I wasn’t surprised in the slightest, either. This was just like Inyene, wasn’t it? She had started her mad quest many years before she had kidnapped me, from what Abioye and Montfre had shared with me. Inyene had played the merchant’s wife and the courtier even at the citadel of Torvald we were heading towards, all the while undermining those around her and seeking ways to seize power. She had befriended Montfre for the secrets to harness the mysterious glowing crystals known as Earth Lights, just as she had employed teams of alchemists to help experiment with her proto-dragons, before ‘silencing’ them.
And then she approached the Daza, offering gifts and medicine and aid and tools – all as a pretext to lock the early few into contracts that would turn them into indentured servants – or slaves. Of course, the irony was that as soon as she was powerful enough, with her mercenary armies and mechanical dragons – she did to the Daza precisely what she did to everyone else, she dropped all pretense of being their ally, and instead kidnapped them wholesale for her ceaseless ambition!
“So, Inyene is trying to do the same thing again,” I thought, remembering a moment of my mother the Imanu’s wisdom. ‘You may meet a wolf, and it may not bark, it may not bite, it may not growl – but never forget that it is a wolf.’
“Inyene is trying to paint us as the enemy so she can draw close to Torvald once again, to seize it!” I growled into the cool winds of the Middle Kingdom. This was something that I had to talk to Abioye about, and together we had to make this king of the dragon-city see the danger he was facing—