Any trained Arcanan with the right spells could control a drake, but Sharonians didn’t use magic. Every single one was garthan, and their ignorance made them nothing more than walking meat for the seadrakes’ triple rows of teeth.
Vos Sidus scratched the underside of Seasprite’s vestigial wing and she lifted all three heads to hiss in pleasure. Then the dexter side head suddenly snapped to the right, the whole drake launched across the pool, and the delicate plantings screening the handler station broke instantly.
Vos Sidus shook his head in resignation and waited for the gurgling scream to stop before he keyed the spell to force the docile head to resume control. The new servant hadn’t worked out. Seasprite went through handlers faster than his other drakes, but then she also cost less to feed. Unless one started counting the cost of a garthan against her food bill, which he was beginning to seriously consider. These weren’t his valued servants, of course. He used only pit drake handlers on Seasprite. That kind of garthan one bought by the dozen from the prison system, with special care taken to ensure no past members of one’s own estate were included in the lot.
He held Seasprite bespelled with no backup handler for three full minutes, patting her noses, and using her scrub brush to get the worst of the carnage off her faces. Then he stepped back through the bars of her enclosure and retreated across the white sand circle that marked the far edge of her bite reach. Just beyond the line, he released her. The timbre of her hiss changed, but not one of the three heads made a lunge for him. Seasprite knew her range.
A pair of garthantri with long tongs worked from the opposite side to withdraw the remains of the body. Seasprite watched their progress coldly with her sinister head while the other two quite reasonably remained fixed on the magister who’d most recently held control of her minds.
When the garthantri finished retrieving the corpse, one made the sign of Mithanan and spat on the body. Emm couldn’t hear what the other said, but neither showed any care when they dumped the parts into a wheelbarrow and trundled it off to a convict’s pit. Funeral pyres were reserved for honorable servants.
He shrugged mentally, dismissed the garthantri from his attention, and turned back to his original train of thought.
Anyone could operate the pre-charged spells to control a seadrake, he reflected, although few demonstrated the persistent, careful attention required to become a veteran handler. Yet if the Sharonians lacked not only magisters but also even the most rudimentary understanding of the principles of magic, nests of drakes could be sent in entirely handlerless. The Mythlan Navy could never do that in a war against a civilized nation, because the opponent’s magisters or even ground troops armed with spellware would simply take control of the drakes. But Sharonians might not even realize it was possible. This kind of opportunity had never existed before.
There were potential difficulties as well, of course. For example, uncaged drakes in Mythal found without a handler would be re-enchanted by a neighboring house and claimed as feral foundlings under the old estray laws. That sort of carelessness could lead to a century or more of careful breeding going to enrich a rival drake line without even a sum of coin or lot of chattel in exchange. The Siduses had taken a few such opportunities in the past, as had every other member of the Seadrake Owners’ Association when granted the chance, but he certainly didn’t care to give away his stock easily, and he considered the legal difficulties of free roaming drakes in the frontier universes. Some type of branding could work, he decided. And he would have to insist marked drakes be reclaimed only by the respective breeder houses after the end of the war, with offspring to be divided on a pro rata basis determined by share contributions of the possible parent drakes released in each universe.
And the Union of Arcana would need to pay rental fees to the breeders for the use of the animals for the duration of the conflict. It wouldn’t do to have the Union’s other members just assuming that Mythal would pay the heavy blood price of war simply because they were best suited to it and were the only ones who had prepared to fight properly at sea.
* * *
Ullery the Fool patted each long neck of his drake and paced around the beast examining every inch of her armor. The sand of the small, created island off the coast of the Sidus estate burned Ullery’s bare feet, but he did his best not to limp. The shakira would be watching, and Ullery kept all his attention on Silverstreak’s hide as he scratched the base of her dexter neck carefully. The scales were thinner here at the very back of the animal in the indentation where a drake’s garthan driver latched in. The spiny ridges on either side had small, carefully drilled holes which gave the purchase needed to attach his ropes and body netting.
The crystal implants in Silverstreak’s center head were giving her trouble again. Ullery could tell from the way her neck ticked that head in an uncontrolled spasm every few minutes. If they were still back serving the House Belftus, he would have known which of the shakira lords to go to and could have gotten it fixed. But since their sale to House Vacus a fortnight ago, he hadn’t been able to figure out which, if any, of the shakira masters actually cared about maintaining their drake property.
He’d been born a garthan servant, and from certain of his features, he was fairly sure his father had been a member of the Belftus family. But since no Gift had manifested, his bastardry was an embarrassment to be hidden from other shakira. A lord was supposed to only breed true.
Ullery himself had continued to expect to be taken into the family proper long after he should have realized it was never going to happen. Still, his unusually advanced early education had granted him a few advantages. Those had kept him alive when no Gift manifested and his early mistakes earned him a place as a drake rider on the animals used to host spectator fights for shakira amusements. Ullery did at least understand magic theory, even if he utterly lacked the spark necessary to cast spells. He knew how the drake’s spellware worked, and he had the sense to be very, very careful with the control crystal belted across his waist.
The other garthans of the Belftus House had been careful not to offend Ullery lest his possible shakira father choose to take offense. And since Ullery didn’t complain and managed his drakes so cleverly that they never quite caught anyone who tried to swim the straits to leave shakira service, he’d been treated well by his fellows.
But that had been in the last household. In House Vacus, Ullery knew far too few people to really know what his place was. He was beginning to suspect that the reason for the chill distance was that none of the other servants really wanted to get to know him. They’d prefer not to know the man-like-object who’d end up mangled by their House-bred drakes during the next exhibition event.
It was a fair assumption. Except that the last two weekends had passed without a drake-on-drake fight. And just recently orders had come down to begin seeing if any of the drakes could be trained to work together. He’d overheard one of the Vacus handlers muttering worriedly about it. They didn’t seem to think it could be done. And maybe with Vacus drakes it couldn’t. But House Belftus had done it any number of times. The trick was to keep the calm driving head dominant during all the close maneuvers.
Ullery could show them all how to do it…if he survived the next few hours.
The fins in the water around the island were moving in ways he didn’t think were natural. A shark’s head came up with far too wide a mouth for the body and snapped at empty air.