He seemed to know he had drawn the dragon’s attention to himself, for Burrich turned and gave Swift a savage shove that sent him flying to sprawl facedown in the snow. He turned, weaponless, to face the dragon. And then a second shock threw me from my feet. Suddenly the earth seemed to be giving way under me. Icefyre was also abruptly struggling to keep his footing. He spread his tattered wings wide and clawed at the edges of the pit. Men fled before him as he scrabbled at the edge of it and then hauled himself up out of it. As he did so, the ice beneath him fell away into a gaping hole. Even as I clung to the edges of the pit, some part of my mind recognized what had happened. His struggles to free himself and perhaps Chade’s exploding powder had weakened the ceiling of the Pale Woman’s grand throne room. It was caving in on her. I savagely hoped she would be crushed under the fall. I looked down at the collapsing ice chunks, draining in ponderous boulders into the palace below. I wondered if some opening to the chamber below would suddenly be revealed, wondered if I could enter that way and survive such a fall amid the cascading ice and somehow free the Fool while he still lived. More likely was that the collapse of the ice ceiling into the chamber below would fill and obliterate it. A quick end for him, some part of me suggested, but I roared out, “No! No, no, no! Beloved Fool! No!”
As if in answer to my cry, something shifted in the ice below me. I stared at it, unable to comprehend the strength of whatever bucked and heaved beneath that avalanche. The movement subsided. I clung to the icy ledge, and cried out in shock as Dutiful’s hand suddenly gripped my wrist. “Come up!” he bellowed at me, and I suddenly knew he had been calling to me before this, trying to get my attention away from the fall of ice and the struggling dragon. Icefyre was almost free of the pit. The others seemed to have fled, save for two limp bodies that I could not identify.
I gave Dutiful my weight and he grunted as he took it, bracing to allow me to scrabble up the edge of the pit and out. “Where is Chade? We must flee!” I bellowed at him. He made a wide gesture that seemed to indicate that the others had fled downhill, toward the camp. Then he opened his mouth wide and then wider as his eyes popped from their sockets in terror. I twisted to look back over my shoulder, for he was staring down into the pit. In the bottom of the collapsed pit of ice, churning his way to the top like a toad emerging from an icy hibernation, was the Pale Woman’s dragon. Life had imparted no grace to him. He was still a creature crudely carved and fashioned of many discordant lives, a murky gray color like unfired clay. My Wit sensed his roaring hunger. He was hollow with appetite and I knew he would devour anything within his reach. Then the blast of his Skill-thrust hit me, and I quailed before it. It was not just the hunger of a ravenous beast. One personality had come to dominate the dragon that wallowed and roared beneath us. I knew that she must have flung him to her stone dragon in a last wild effort to wake it. And the Pale Woman had succeeded.
Rawbread comes! I come to conquer and kill and devour. I hunger for farmers’ flesh. Revenge shall be mine today! His gaze snagged on Icefyre. Six Duchies dragon, today you die! The stone dragon lunged, his great jaws closing on the base of Icefyre’s tail. He braced his stubby legs and began to drag the black dragon back into the pit with him.
Chapter 25
Dragons
During the Red Ship War, many of the mothershouses paid unwilling tribute to Kebal Rawbread and the Pale Woman, in the form of a sacrifice of the males of their clans. Those who refused Rawbread’s forced muster of their warriors were punished by what is called here in the Six Duchies “Forging”. The Forging was mainly carried out against the women and female children of the clans. This left the males in an untenable position. The Forged females were a shame and a disgrace to the clan, yet no mothershouse could allow a male of the house to slay a female without exacting the same fate against him. It was better for the men to embark as warriors for Rawbread than to risk the complete destruction of their clan. The men who did eventually return to their mothershouses were changed creatures. Many of them apparently died in their sleep after the war. Some say their own mothershouse women poisoned them, for they no longer had the spirits of righteous sons.
A blue and silver lightning bolt fell from the cloudless sky. She plunged directly into the pit, all lashing tail and darting head, her wide-held jaws revealing rows of daggerlike teeth. She landed on the dragon that had been Kebal Rawbread like a furious cat and her jaws closed on his neck just behind his blocky head. Her claws screeched and clattered over his scales as she sought to make good her grip on him and stay on top of his back. His shock at the attack broke his concentration on Icefyre. He opened his jaws to roar, and Icefyre jerked away from him.
Get clear of him. Clamber away, take flight. Do not seek to battle this one on the ground! Sounds came from Tintaglia. It was not language, but meaning rode with the sounds and I perceived it as speech. I do not think that all humans there grasped that she spoke. Certainly Icefyre knew that she spoke to him, and he bugled back to her, but I did not grasp his meaning fully. Perhaps my earlier exposures to Tintaglia had increased my comprehension of her. Whatever the reason, I saw the ragged dragon clamber to the edge of the pit, away from the lashing tangle of true dragon and stone dragon below him. I knew Tintaglia could not hold Rawbread long. She was a female, and I suspected it was a disparity of gender that made her so much smaller than Icefyre.
The stone dragon was massive and blocky, thick where Tintaglia was slender and flexible, heavy where she was light. In comparison to Rawbread, she was an attacking falcon pitted against a bull. She was quickness itself, yet she could not seem to damage him. Her teeth had sunk into his neck, but I saw no flow of blood. The scoring of her powerful clawed hindquarters down his flanks left only white scratches, as if a boy had scraped one stone down another. He did not appear to take hurt from them. He shook himself heavily, trying to dislodge her, but she gripped him fast, futilely battling him with weapons that did him no harm. Her claws were a woman’s fingernails pitted against a warrior’s leather armor. I wondered, did he have blood to shed? Or was he all stone animated by will?
And what could kill such a stone dragon? If his hide was impervious to a powerful creature like Tintaglia, what could stop him?
Wave after wave of Skilled hate emanated from Rawbread. I sensed his confusion and frustration as he tried to adapt to his unwieldy but powerful body. Quickened he might be, yet he was still somehow incomplete. His legs churned beneath him in the broken ice without propelling him from the pit. He unfolded one wing awkwardly but could not seem to flap it or even to tuck it back to his body. It remained outflung and useless. He whipped his heavy head ponderously from side to side in a futile effort to loosen the determined female. Tintaglia’s silver eyes rolled to watch Icefyre’s progress. It was pitiably slow. He heaved himself out of the pit. When he rocked back onto his hind legs, the ravages of his long encasement in the ice were made even plainer. I could see his keeled breastbone through the sag of his scaly hide. He reminded me of a bird’s carcass, all eaten away by ants. He lifted his ragged wings wide. When he shook them experimentally, a waft of stinking sickly animal washed past me. He limbered his long neck and lashed his tail several times, like a man settling himself into clothes he had long outgrown. He seemed to take his time to do all this, as if the struggle in the pit did not concern him at all. He nosed over his wings, almost like a bird preening. Then he extended his wings and rattled them like a beggar crow settling his feathers back into place. He flapped them once, slowly, and again, and then the third time he drove them down with a force that sent snow whisking away from him and wind whistling through the rents in them. Suddenly he leaned into his wings, his muscled hind legs driving him forward and up. He lifted from the ice heavily like an awkward seabird, but once his claws left the ground, it was as if he were released from its bonds. He rose steadily.