Passivity wasn’t usually a desired setting among any of the families that chose to buy seadrake young, but vos Sidus enjoyed having the beasts entirely calm and nearly puppy like for transport. The best money to be had was for the pit fighters, to be sure, and for those, all three heads needed to be as vicious as possible. Other drakes, with shepherd training and control spellware, were used to corral the pure fighters and move them from training pits into arena-bound slidercages.
A clear sky with brilliant sunlight pouring over the ocean surf marked this morning as a very good one for the day’s fight, and float-bespelled spectator palanquins were just beginning to jostle for position around the distant island.
The Sidus VI breed was being tested against a new Vacus line. They’d captured and bred a kind of shark creature that breathed through gills instead of lungs. Vos Sidus thought it might have some small use as a guard fish around prisons and the like, but the gladiatorial sales would be miserable. The beasties were smaller and tended to clutter the view of carnage with blood and entrails. If it were only the entrails, many shakira would enjoy watching, but put too much blood in the water and even the clearest pools suddenly showed nothing but boring red.
Breeding a special kind of prey fish that didn’t cloud up the waters had been tried, but the interesting fights were always the ones that involved humans in some way. Vos Sidus’s aunt had tried bringing in the great whales for fights, but those fights were too dull. Some pleasure boats still went whale hunting-which was to say they followed behind a pair or a small nest of seadrakes and watched as they found and devoured the larger cetaceans-and vos Sidus had been on a few of those pleasure cruises as a child. Aunt Kellbok had pointed out the garthan ship captains’ maneuvers to set the drakes against only the very largest and toughest of the whales, but he’d agreed with his aunt: cetacean prey wasn’t tough enough for a drake. Whales lacked sufficient intelligence and cunning for a decent fight.
Sometimes, when Aunt Kellbok had used just one drake and set up an ocean arena around a full pod of masked whales-the ones with the black and white coloring that hid so well in the water-she’d entice cetacean combatants to perform a show worthy of a shakira audience. But even then, she’d had to send in a drake youngling bloodied from an earlier fight. When it got dull-because it would get dull-she’d signal the show master to release the mother drake to empty the seas as a grand finale.
The best argument vos Sidus had seen for cetaceans having some modicum of intelligence-more than, say, that of a barnyard cat-was that the larger whales all avoided the Mythlan coasts. That the masked whales still came said something else, but Aunt Kellbok insisted insanity had entertainment value.
Universes beyond Arcana Prime allowed for more varied open ocean shows. In New Mythal, there were still oceans where native creatures didn’t know to swim for their lives the moment they tasted drake blood in the water or heard the bellows of a hunting drake reverberate across the ocean bottom.
Of course Union law forbade the release of drakes into the wild, but a breeder couldn’t truly know his training held until it was tested. The Seadrake Owners’ Association understood that, so from time to time vos Sidus could fill his slidercages and transport a nest of seadrakes to a preserve on New Mythal owned by a cousin of Aunt Kellbok’s.
Sometimes training failed. In those cases, he’d make a discreet report to the Seadrake Owners’ Association and send in a troop of garthan for cleanup. If the team was too slow, a few ships would be crushed or a crew might be eaten, but the accidental fodder were generally garthan of low value, with few years of service left, and the SDO paid well for the use of the land. Every shakira with property near by knew when tests were scheduled to be run and would remove their persons and garthantri well in advance. But there was no point trying tell that to an Andaran or a Ransaran! They didn’t understand that acquiring true wisdom required a certain amount of…breakage along the way.
Every monument worth building killed a few garthan in its construction. That might be unfortunate for the garthan involved, but better a dozen garthan lost than a single shakira maimed, and even the Ransarans understood the value of experience. “A burned hand is the best teacher.” That was one of their own proverbs, although they turned their noses up at the Mythlan equivalent, of course. “Blood buys true value,” as the great vos Hardyna had observed thousands of years ago, and it was true. It was always true, and if the barbarians thought it applied solely to garthan, that only showed how stupid they truly were. Vos Sidus had memorized every proverb in the Book of the Shakira at Aunt Kellbok’s knee before his tenth birthday-most non-Mythlans were still playing at learning their sums at that age-and he knew that proverb applied to all Mythlans. Even the blood of a thousand shakira was nothing to the honor due a Line Lord.
Non-Mythlans didn’t understand context. The SOA used only drake males for arena events outside Arcana Prime for that precise reason. An escaped drake gone feral in Delkor had devastated a fishing community for several decades before a passing magister put the beast down as a favor to a shakira cousin. But when a breeding pair had escaped on New Mythal, it had taken a full company of magisters over a month to hunt down the creatures and all their offspring. If it happened again, the Union of Arcana would expect exactly that second level of effort, even if it were just to clean out the oceans of a wilderness world hardly worth preserving. These annoyances were the cost of working with the uninitiated, but one day every Arcanan would bow to a Line Lord and hold the teachings of the Book of Secrets more valuable than their own hearts.
That would be a lifework worthy of Line Lords. Emm vos Sidus had his own small part to play in the great glory of Mythal, and in the between times he had the drakes. All too often, he found himself wishing he could uncage a nest of seadrakes in the Garth Showma Falls Basin and remake the Union in a bloody baptism, but that, sadly, was not his assignment.
The sand-in-silk frustration that annoyed him the most was that the Andarans had never recognized the military power inherent in the proper use of seadrakes. He blamed their focus on land. Sure people lived on land, but any fool could see over a third of the Arcanan-discovered frontier universe transits required ocean passage to reach the next portal-not to mention that two of the five newly taken portals were on those universe’s equivalents to the North Mythal River and the Evanos Ocean. Now that war with these Sharonian barbarians was afoot, perhaps it was time to finally put together a multiverse nautical power with more teeth than the Union of Arcana Navy. Let the Andaran Army struggle with the arcane logistics of a cross portal war with “gun”-carrying Sharonians. The Mythlan Navy could save them all with a simple seadrake barricade.
And slipping drake mating pairs into hostile universes’ oceans could do wonderful things for the destruction of their economies, vos Sidus reflected dreamily while he petted Seasprite’s long neck.
The great benefit of the seadrake’s amphibious nature was that these beautiful creatures didn’t just hunt the oceans. They claimed the beaches and seaside cities as well…and if Sharonians were anything like Arcanans, more than eighty percent of their population lived on ocean coasts and riverways.