He felt something pull at his neck. The audience let out an outraged yell.
“Naf! Fus pack-par!” a screeching voice called from behind.
Auron spun. The scarecrow had maneuvered through the crowd and tossed a lasso around his neck, and even now was trying to haul him to the rails of the corral. He heard footsteps behind as the men ran in to finish him. Auron obliged the scarecrow, and uncoiled, launching himself through the gap between the upper and lower bars. The man dropped the rope in alarm, but Auron’s crest caught him in the midriff. Hross folded like a sheet fallen from a washline.
An outraged dwarf grabbed and cut the line around Auron’s neck, stopping Auron from digging his teeth into his foe’s throat. Hross lay below, arms crossed at his middle, mouth open and making unintelligible gasping sounds. In the second that cutting the line took, Auron’s furor faded, and he took up Hross’s head in his mouth, clamping his jaws firmly to either side of the man’s skull so that the scarecrow’s eyes looked out at the ax-man climbing over the rails.
Auron tried to say, “Stop the fight,” but saliva and a hissing noise were all that came out of the sides of his mouth.
“Wait! Wait!” Hross shouted, raking Auron’s snout with his fingernails. Auron made ready to crush his skull should the man try for his eyes. The ax-man looked at his employer, held in Auron’s jaws like an oversize stick in a dog’s mouth, and laughed. He dropped the ax and went down on one knee, holding his right hand palm-outward at Auron.
“The dragon wins! You win, dragon,” Hross added, to a general cheer. The shouts and applause degenerated into a hundred individual arguments over the bets.
“It turned into a bad dwarvish joke,” Djer said later as he and Auron approached the center tower. “Three hundred individual, crisscrossing arguments about wagers. Most of the dwarves that bet on the men held that Hross had invalidated the bet by getting involved. Of course, the ones that bet on you said that you won nevertheless. We finally forced Hross to pay the bets he had made, and then cough up at least a symbolic restitution to the others that bet on you. Hross complained at first, but when he saw that every dwarf in the ring would take—or give—either his money or his flesh to get what was owed, he opened his purse. I don’t know why he bothered closing it again—it was as empty as the bodies in the ring. Decent of you not to eat them after all.”
“That man with the ax, err—”
“Naf,” Sekyw supplied.
Auron tried the name. “Naf—human names are hard on a dragon’s mouth, I need to learn some of their tongues—laughed and clapped me on the back. I didn’t understand a word he said, but he seemed willing to leave it at that. He seemed a good man, and after that I lost my appetite to eat his fellows.”
“I don’t know that these mannish mercenaries keep friends long, or even care if a couple chunt off. They’re not dwarves, after all.”
They stood for a moment in the shadow of the tower. Forged wheels on the linked-shield rolling road were being oiled and cleaned.
“The towers leave tomorrow,” Sekyw said. “They’re a sight to see moving. They’ll roll along for a hundred days or more.” He took them beneath the tower; the dwarves just had to bow their heads. Sekyw rapped on a wooden portal with his walking stick. “Tower-warden, open, our brave drake wants a look inside this dwarf-wonder. The Partner Djer wishes to accompany him on a tour.”
Sekyw stepped out of the way as the flat surface above dropped down, a stairway supported by ropes. Polished brass gleamed at the ends of dwarf-size handrails.
“Our ally is welcome,” a dwarf in armor of woven leather said, descending the stairs to bow. Sekyw took them up. They saw all manner of wheels and drivers, interlocking mechanisms like the insides of an intricate clock grown to dragon-size. A forged web of steel held up the floors above. A dwarf or two lounged, giving the metal gears an occasional rub from a cloth that reeked like lamp oil.
“The first level is the driving rooms,” Sekyw explained. “Note how many of the wheels and structural reinforcements have holes. It makes it lighter, with only the tiniest loss in supportive strength. We’ll ride the cargo verticator from here—easier that way. Since the tower isn’t moving, the dwarf-lifts aren’t working.” He pointed to a vertical belt of leather, with little metal handles, or perhaps footrests, which ran on its own set of wheels, a smaller, vertical version of the treads below.
They stepped onto a metal-webbed platform in the center of the tower. It rested in a cage with bars at the corners, and Sekyw reached for a bell-rope. He pulled twice, and the grate on the floor lifted to a gap in the ceiling above. Djer gasped and grabbed at one of the handrails running between the corner bars.
“First time in a verticator?” Sekyw said.
“Ach, no, I used them in the mines. We’d ride up in the coal-scuttles. You had to jump in right or you’d get a good knock in the head. What do you think, Auron?”
“I could have hopped up to the next level easily enough,” Auron said.
“Dwarves can’t jump like dragons. Well, not up, anyway,” Sekyw said.
The second and third floors each held two spoked wheels, like wagon-wheels without the rims. They turned the tree-trunk-thick axles that descended into the driving room below.
“A testament to the strength and endurance of dwarves. Each spoke takes three dwarves, two pulling and one pushing so they interlock with the team ahead. They push-pull for four hours on floors sanded to keep them from losing their footing in their own sweat. The towers are also pulled by teams of wraxapods, but the capstan-dwarves can drive the towers in an emergency. Each floor runs one side of track. If they want to turn the tower, they just slow down one side. They match their pace to the beat of drums. The tower captain sends down orders to the drummers through that speaking-tube,” Sekyw said, pointing to a flowerlike projection from the wall.
Auron had enough imagination to picture the room filled with sweating dwarves, turning the wheels in time to the beat of the drum. Sekyw rang his bell-rope again, and they traveled up to living-floors. This floor was a little higher than the others, to give the dwarves more air as they ate and slept. Sekyw showed them store-rooms full of food and coal, kitchens and bathrooms, and the fixtures where the dwarves slung their hammocks. Wide dwarves, almost as broad as they were tall, greeted them merrily and explained everything from how to get a drink from the gravity-fed cisterns to the watchkeeping system, with labor teams tracked on polished slate boards marked with something Sekyw called chalk.
They walked out onto the first battlement, level with the walls around the settlement. In the welcome clear air and sunshine, Sekyw walked them past war machines designed to hurl javelins, fire, or helmet-size scoops of metal missiles.
Djer picked up one of the pieces of shot. It was a little smaller than his fist, a round sphere of iron. “They can knock out a helmeted man, fired from a height, or kill his horse. They’re fired from something that looks like a slingshot on a board.”
There were two more battlement levels as the tower narrowed to the top. They had to ascend ladders to go higher. Fixed crossbows placed between timber crenellations in the walls replaced the larger engines of the floor below. “Archers, too,” Djer said, opening a case and looking at the arrows standing within.
They moved up to the tower-captain’s post, where a nest of speaking trumpets projected from the floor like a bouquet of oversize pitcher-blossoms under a peaked wooden canopy. A single watchdwarf nodded to them as they explored the level, but kept an ear cocked to the trumpets. They looked down at the chains being laid out for the wraxapod team. A walkway projected out from the tower-captain’s post in all four directions of the compass. Above them, a pole with rungs going up it like legs of an insect led to an observation post at the tip, with the huge—now that they were near it—flag of the Diadem fluttering above.
Auron marked a veritable nest of speaking tubes.
“The towers talk to each other, the teams, and the convoy with flags by signalmen at the end of these walkways. At night we use fireworks of different colors.”
“May the Law and Order pity the apprentice who misses a signal,” a gruff voice said from the tower-captain’s post. “For I won’t.”
They turned to see another squat dwarf emerging through a hatch in the floor. He wore a sash of red with gold braiding, but was barefoot. Auron couldn’t help staring at his feet; he’d seen horses’ hooves that looked more fragile.
“Commodore-of-the-Caravan Stal, pleased to meet you. You must be Djer and his dragon,” the barefooted one said, bowing with a gesture only a little more pronounced than a nod.
Djer and Sekyw bowed low, so Auron lowered his head, as well.
“Heard about the fight from some of my men—sorry I missed it,” he said. “What does our guest think of the Traveling Towers?”
“I didn’t know such things existed, or could exist, sir,” Auron said in Dwarvish.
The commodore gave a more pronounced bow. “So you know a civil tongue, as well. I worry at times how we’d fare against a full-grown dragon. This wood is coated to stop flame, but that’s just from fire-arrows and what-have-you. Thankfully, your kind are rare.”