The Copper sent the dragon tower dragons back, save for the Blind Ripper, who smelled blood and battle and refused to go. Hermethea took some convincing to go and lagged behind, even after the others had left. Wistala decided she bore more than a comradely interest in the Blind Ripper. But, at last, she was prevailed upon to return.
The rest moved south at a steady pace. Word had spread somehow that the Empire was finished and Hypatia in jeopardy.
“Our rescue of a single dragonelle is turning into a march to save Hypatia,” DharSii observed to her.
“All these dragons,” Wistala returned. “If this is one mass-assassination, we’re making a tempting target.”
For Wistala, traveling down the Old North Road was a trip through her memories—the Thanedoms, Tumbledown where she’d met Yari-Tab, and then the outskirts of Hypat, the greatest city between the Inland Ocean and the mighty East.
They met refugees on the road north, pushing barrows and carrying their children and bundles. They ran toward the dragons for protection, something Wistala had only seen a few times in her life before. They told dreadful tales of creatures pouring out of the ground, killing, burning, and enslaving before returning to mysterious tunnels concealed deep in hill and forest.
“The Blind Ripper will get his battle long before we reach Nilrasha’s needle,” DharSii said.
They found Hypatia a city under siege. The Copper had been cautious enough to send a scout—he picked Varatheela, as being quick and intelligent—and she returned with a tale of an army encamped outside the city wall.
The Copper decided to see for himself. They left the road and followed game trails and bridle paths to a pileup of bluffs overlooking the river Falnges and Hypat farther downstream.
Much of the lower part of the city had fallen, it seemed, or that was what the smoke indicated. A black carpet of canvas sheltering the demen from the bright sun made it look like the fields outside the city had been painted with pitch. However, the area around the directory and the Protector and other dragons’ palaces were still intact. The Directory was protected by its own set of walls, towers, and redoubts, while the dragon palaces were linked together and ringed by walls to make defense against an uprising easier.
The attack on the dragons came with the speed of a swarm of enraged hornets. Suddenly, the forest at the base of the bluff was thick with black-and-red carapaced hominids. They must have been seen on the road or trails approaching the bluffs.
“Host, ring formation,” DharSii called. “Backs to the Tyr!”
They looked more like insects than hominids with their red plates and thin heads with rolling, side-mounted eyes like fish. Unlike the demen she and Ayafeeia had fought in the Star Tunnel, these were a full half again as big as a tall man. Their legs gave them an odd gait thanks to the short upper leg and stiltlike lower limb.
They’d been variegated by something—dragonblood, most likely. Some had grown scythelike claws, others had sharp spikes growing out of their backs where on a regular demen there were knobby projections. Their mouths reminded Wistala of the short tongs used by blacksmiths to pick up hot metal.
“DharSii, you fly north, as fast as you can. Organize whoever you can in the dragon tower and bring as many allies as possible to Hypat. Barbarians. Dragons and blighters on the Isle of Ice. Anyone who can make it here and fight.”
DharSii nodded and spread his wings. In three beats he was aloft and rising fast. He made one circling pass and emptied his firebladder across the demen front, then was gone.
The hordes of clattering attackers still mobbed the other dragons, who had wedged themselves into fallen trees or piles of rocks or just a steep cut in the hill. A carpet of bodies and pieces of bodies surrounded the remaining dragons. Patches of burning demen made the battle even more smoky and indistinct.
The dragons, even in their strength and fire, were losing.
“We have to fly,” the Copper called above the roars of injured dragons and the screeching cries of the demen.
“What about the people?”
“We can’t save them if we’re dead,” DharSii replied.
A mass threw chains around RuGaard. They swarmed over him like ants on a spider. He lifted—no, it was not RuGaard, it was the demen, carrying him as he struggled in a mesh of rope and chain.
They bore him away on their shoulders, moving like a hundred-legged insect that flowed across and through the dead, heading west out of town.
Wistala nodded, thrashed in a circle to push the demen back, and flapped into the air.
The rest of the survivors followed in a straggling line. From the air, they saw some of the town’s children lying facedown in the fields or clinging flat-bellied to the roofs of barns. There were four dragons left, including Hermethea and Varatheela.
All the fates seemed to be against them. Another fall of Silverhigh seemed to be in progress. She wondered if those ancient dragons felt as helpless, seeing dragons dying all around and able only to wonder when your turn was coming.
How could the demen arrive so soon after AuSurath, who’d exhausted himself flying? Unless...
She followed the tracks across the pastures and fields, thick with summer growth. The land had been tramped flat by their passage.
Yes, the tracks led to the old troll cave. She hadn’t explored it thoroughly enough in her youth—perhaps it had a false floor or wall or ceiling. A thousand demen had poured up from the Lower World like floodwaters rising. Who could say where the next wave would rise? How many dragons would this one kill?
She took off and flew upriver, winging over the bridge where she’d faced her first real test: the encounter with the troll that had been plaguing the local herdsmen. She’d been so small then and the bridge so high and vast—well, it still looked high to her fully grown eyes. It was still one of her prouder moments, untainted by anything but regret at the death of the old warhorse Avalanche.
She’d lost two fathers beside this river, the father of her egg and the hominid who had adopted her and helped form her thoughts and personality.
“Father,” she said to the river valley, “I wish we could speak. All I’ve loved is soon to be lost.”
“Not lost, Wistala,” she thought she heard a tree say. “Never lost, as long as it’s remembered.”
This piece of forest she’d known all her life suddenly seemed closed in. The trunks had come impossibly close to each other, like a wall with only a crack here and there—but shielding what?
Sunlight shone between the cracks in the trunks as though this forest had its own private sun—Wistala’s sky was smeared with high thin clouds coming in off the Inland Ocean, but inside that gathering of trunks different weather held sway.
An elf clothed in living ivy emerged from one trunk. A she-elf with cheeks as bright as a polished apple dropped from a tree.
Their hair was as bright green as the first tulip leaves of spring and filled with unopened buds. These were elves, young and strong.
“Few really understand elves. We are like seeds that lie dormant waiting for the right conditions. We wait for the right need.”
“We are the family Rainfall now. Mist, Sprinkle, Downpour, Thundershower, Drops, and Cloudburst. I am Drizzle, sister and daughter. It’s been too many years since we have spoken.”
They looked like him, certainly, the way a group of pine trees look alike. All the same family with minor variations from specimen to specimen.
Elves continued to emerge, until the handfuls turned to dozens, and the dozens into a hundred. She knew this stand of trees to be an elf burial-ground—every elf interred here returned as a new family. She’d never heard of anything like this, beyond hatchling tales that elves “sprang from trees” when born into the world.
It made her feel young. She’d witnessed an event that was half spring sprouting and half reincarnation, according to the mystics of the Great East. How amazing to live in a world where such things were possible.
“Drizzle, you know—everything Rainfall knew?”
Drizzle nodded. “As we’re much the same being, I do. Perhaps with a sense of remoteness yet authority, like words of a song learned by heart off the page but never heard live.”
The elves were milling about, touching each other on the fingertips with flutters like leaves of trees meeting. They spoke in whispery trills and creaks, the language of trees bending in the wind.
“Why now?”
“Because you asked to speak to me. We’ve been waking up for some time and wondering when the time would be right. Is Hypatia still friendly to elvenkind, I hope? Once, they learned much from us.”
“You told me a story once, about how dragons were each given a gift by the elements.”
“There is another player in that game. There’s no exact term for it, but you can think of it as a shadow world of aether. A mirror element. ‘Aether’ is another word for ‘magic,’ and our world is desperately short of it.”
“Why?”
“I wish I knew. Perhaps if I knew why the aether was draining, we could discover a way to refill it. It is my belief that aether is a product of beauty, serenity, and grace. I’ve felt it in the presence of the graceful arches of my old bridge. Music might create it, or a high temple filled with worshippers before an altar. A brilliant thought sends waves through it.