“A decent meal of metal for your mate, at least,” Naf laughed.
“Save them,” AuRon said. “The workmanship’s too fine for a dragon belly.”
“The dwarves of the Chartered Company are old friends of ours. They feel the weight of the Queen’s grasping hand and have sent armorers to aid our cause.”
“Then I’m doubly sorry I can’t carry them.”
AuRon tried one more flight and found he could bear the weight creditably. If this was anything like flying with a coat of scale, his mate was ten times the dragon he was, to fly so far so fast under such a burden.
Without any complaints except an occasional groan. He didn’t deserve such a dragon-dame.
Naf’s picked band gathered their shields and spears.
“I’m sorry,” AuRon gasped, his wings aching. “The rest are too heavy to carry.”
“Shields and helms will have to do for a start. We can scavenge from the dead if we must.”
“They’ll laugh themselves to death, seeing loinclothed men attacking with nothing but spears, helms, and shields,” one of the warriors joked.
“Are you ready for your chance in a thousand?”
Naf laughed. “The spirits my men are in, I say it’s a chance in a hundred now. But if I’m to die, it’s best for my people if I do it under the walls of Ghioz. Better for me, too. If I’m to take up residence in the other world, I’d just as soon be near my beloved.”
They made their way into Ghioz in easy stages, taking old smuggling trails between Hypatia and Ghioz. AuRon walked most of the way with the men, though it galled him to crawl along at a foot pace after years of flying.
The borderlands were empty. Even the usual watch stations at the main mountain passes had only a handful of soldiers in them and a single messenger horse.
The scouts found a group of young men hiding in the woods, avoiding the Queen’s service. According to them, every pair of legs who could walk were either raiding in the southlands or aiding the Ironriders in their invasion of Hypatia.
“They’re risking being sold on the auction block by avoiding the Queen’s bondsmen,” Naf told AuRon. “When I rode with the Red Guard, we rounded up a score or two like those every year. They all said the same thing—better service in the fields under a taskmaster than facing arrows and cutthroats in the Queen’s garrison houses.”
They crossed over into Ghioz, and gradually the lands gave onto mountain pastures and terraced fields. The rivers and streams began to run off to the southeast—they’d made it across the flow divide and into Ghioz.
When they could see the lights of the city—amazing that you could see a city at night from a horizon away—they said their goodbyes.
Naf had his men divest themselves of their weapons and arms and rig AuRon’s netting in a tree so he could easily slip into it.
“We will travel faster if we go by road, as a labor levy.”
“We might even beg a meal or two at the Queen’s breadhouses,” one of the scouts, now dressed as a taskmaster, said.
They made arrangements to meet in the Queen’s woods outside the citadel, at moonrise three days hence.
“I feel naked without so much as a dagger on me,” Naf said, shivering in a bare loincloth, sandals, and a blanket wrapped about his shoulders and closed with a bit of twine.
“Let’s hope that the Citadel Guard has been stripped as completely as the border posts,” a captain said.
“See you at moonrise, three nights hence,” AuRon said.
“I hope so,” Naf replied, his usual smile absent. “I don’t care to spend the rest of my years knee-deep in the irrigation ditches or breaking road-gravel.”
After they moved on down the mountain trail through the high fields, AuRon stayed under tree-cover and waited, watching the skies and sniffing the wind and hoping for good weather three nights ahead. He was tempted to raid livestock, but satisfied himself with wild goats that had evidently escaped captivity and learned to live in the mountain forest. They were alert, and it was all he could to catch the old and the sick without using flame to aid his hunting.
Finally, the time came. The weather was cooperating in their endeavor at the moment—bluster but likely to rain. Depending on when the rain arrived it might be a good thing or a bad. He got into his harness of netted weapons and shields, climbed to a steep hill where he’d have a nice drop, and launched into the night air.
He stayed so low on the trip that he sometimes touched treetop on his downstrokes.
A light drizzle set in. He was glad he’d overflown the city in perfect weather and so had some idea of the land Naf selected for their meeting.
The river was in full flood, it being spring, and Naf and his men were waiting on a dry island surrounded by river. They were in a cold camp.
“In happier days Hieba and I walked these woods,” said Naf. “The view of the city and the sculpture on the mountain is incomparable.”
On the other side of the river were many wharves and built-up sections, and a few lights burned through the mist. The citadel itself.
AuRon remembered what Naf had told him of it as the men buckled on their helmets and shields.
Ghihar. The old city of the Ghi men, walled in the days when they had enemies on every border or fought civil wars with the population downriver.
It was a simple enough plan. They’d size the old city’s small garrison, free Hieba from her house—and whatever other hostages the Queen kept who wished to leave the prison that masqueraded as fine homes—and leave before the sun rose, Hieba and her daughter upon AuRon’s back, Naf and his men riding on the fresh horses under the standard of the Citadel Guard, who would have been taken prisoner in their beds and then locked up tight in one of the old towers. AuRon could fly quickly enough that they’d be back in the borderlands by the time the sun rose.
Dirty weather would only slow the roc-riders and make their search difficult. It seemed likely that they’d see some, judging from the wall of clouds coming up from the south.
Of course there was the problem of the dragons the Queen was known to employ.
AuRon would take care of diverting them. And even if he did see them, he could outfly anything scaled.
The first job was to get the men across the river and onto one of the lesser roads leading to the citadel.
He did the swimming. All they had to do was hang on to his fringe, half in and half out of the water. They showed admirable fortitude in the crossing, sucking air as the cold water struck their loins and puffing like nervous baboons he’d hunted in the jungles.
Four trips later, he and Naf and the men were hurrying up the road toward the citadel, while residents barred their doors and shutters.
A pair of men ran off up the hill toward the citadel, ringing handbells.
Naf made a hissing noise and arrows brought the unfortunate pair down, three in one and two in another, tightly grouped around the upper spine.
“I’m glad your bowmen aren’t shooting at me,” AuRon said.
“Firewatch, I think,” Naf said, lifting their belts and examining the buckles.
The walls of the citadel appeared out of the rain. Water streaked down their sides, running down crevices worn into the masonry over hundreds of years. They were impressive walls for man’s handiwork. AuRon guessed they were wide enough at the top to allow horses to ride upon them or animals to pull siege engines. Dripping fabric sunscreens at the top flapped in the wind.
What had once been a ditch around the walls was now filled with muck and refuse.
“To the gate! Hurry!” Naf called, pointing to a small arch between two towers, like twin legs of some great troll, torn by arrow-slits.
The gate, under a low arch, was a trifling affair of iron bars. He saw lights beyond, an open courtyard of some kind. A horn sounded from the wall at the sight of the soldiers. A glass shattered on the paving stones in front of the gate.
AuRon flung himself against the gate and tore it from its hinges in one solid piece. It landed flat and Naf and his men dashed across it.
“Siegecraft isn’t necessary when you’ve the aid of a dragon,” Naf said.
A man in a twilight-red tunic appeared in the gap to a stairway. AuRon lashed out with a saa, and knocked him back where he had come from, and dragon-dashed out into the courtyard.
Naf’s men paused as they took their bearings, then divided into three disciplined columns, save for a few who stayed behind to care for men blinded by the contents of that smashed glass that had fallen behind him. One file made for a staircase climbing the back of the walls, a second moved toward an angled-in tower, almost a pyramid, at the center of the citadel, and a third, led by Naf, went up a road lined by fine wooden and stone homes with sharp-angled roofs like a row of teeth.
He watched the center column enter the angled-in tower and the other column divide to move around each side of the walls. There was hardly any guard at all atop the walls, and what there was dropped their weapons and ran for the tower doors.
AuRon flew up to the wall and helped the wall-storming party by bashing in a barred tower door with his tail. In another tower a trio of men cranked around a boxlike war-machine. He was tempted to use his flame, but a sudden burst of fire would draw whatever might be riding above in the clouds.