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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.”
And getting rarer, Auron thought. But he said, “It would be a desperate dragon to go against all this for a wagonful of gold.”
“Once the Caravan gets moving, I’d like to come out of the towers and join you for a meal, young drake. It’s a long, slow trip. You’re a new experience. I’ve made near two hundred round trips since starting on the push-pull level, and you’re the first live drake I’ve seen.”
Auron wondered how many dead drakes he had crossed, but thought better of asking.
Long, slow trip. Auron had time to consider in full the meaning of those words as his cave-on-wheels ground along, day after ever-so-the-same day.
He thought of it as a cave because it was dark and enclosed. There were solid doors at the rear, but they stayed locked from both inside and out—the dwarves showed him how to work the simple sliding bolt that secured it from the inside. Auron had a source of air in the roof: there was a vent window shaped like a mushroom. A dwarf might be able to see out the slit, if he had something to stand on, but Auron could not work his crested head into it so that he could see. He settled for looking up at the sky at an angle, or sticking his nose up into the vent and experiencing the steppes through his nostrils. He smelled wraxapods, draft oxen, and sun-dried grasses, overlaid with dwarf.
They locked him inside the wagon soon after the towers, pulled by straining wraxapods, moved away from the walls of Wallander. To the drake’s ears they made a sound like a constant mild earthquake as they ground across the steppe. Auron’s own wagon had a team of no fewer than sixteen oxen pulling it along, and those numbers were often doubled at fords on the rare watercourses running across their paths. The double team was necessary for the wagon, burdened as it was with iron-banded chests of gold and silver.
Auron ate well and slept better, warm out of the cold winter wind that brought chilling rain and flecks of snow like blown sand. He got to know the sound of the traveling towers crunching snow beneath the rotating roads they carried with them. He took entertainment in his dreams, either vaguely pleasant visions of clouds and landscapes, or vivid experiences from his ancestors somehow passed down through his parents, sights and sounds and smells and tastes that wafted through his consciousness without explaination.
He found time to compose a few couplets to his own song, should he ever meet the right mate once his wings had grown. All the while, his lung healed, and the wounds from his battles became faint white scars on his gray skin. Best of all, his tail slowly lengthened.
A dwarf woman—who also cared for the beasts outside the wagon—fed him twice a day as the teams were hitched and unhitched. At those times, Djer and an accounting dwarf counted the money again and again, paying out small amounts to the nomads and merchant-nobles of the steppe for grain, eggs, and meat. Djer told him of teams of men and horses dragging tree branches and rolling bales of hay to feed the wraxapods. All had to be bartered in workmanship or paid for in coin.
At night, the dwarves allowed visitors into the camp, always ready to make a bargain with king or serf. Auron’s one and only alarm on the long trip came when he heard a stealthy set of hands trying the vent at the top. Spoiling for action, Auron gave a growl that corkscrewed into a full-throated dragon cry, and whoever explored the roof jumped off with the speed of a cat that had unexpectedly landed on an iron stove.
Auron got his promised dinner with the commodore. While Sekyw stood watch in the cart, the commodore took Auron to his room just under the command-cupola, and showered drake and Djer with food and tales. Auron heard stories of young men Stal met as warriors, who later became kings and dotards over the course of long years of Caravan. He showed them a tapestry to commemorate the Battle of Hurth crossing, where Stormrider K’ada va K’on brought his hordes against the towers until the Hurth turned red with their blood. They heard of ageless wizards living in icy wastes, writing in lost tongues on the skins of man and blighter, and the great king of the Unmapped Continent, who sent emissaries north on flying carpets. How much was truth and how much was legend, Auron had no way of knowing.
“What do you know of NooMoahk, the black dragon?” Auron asked.
Stal flicked crumbs of his meal from his beard. “Hmmmm, that’s an old name. My last news of him goes back years, must have been around the time of the Blizzard that Killed Spring, it seems. A good forty years ago. We had a band of men traveling with us. They had camels as well as horses, and planned to cross the desert to kill him, for they said he still lived, but had grown feeble. He must not have grown feeble enough, for they said they’d meet us for the return trip at the rustless iron temple at the edge of the desert. It’s a fascinating place. There’s a well there that’s never empty, and thick groves of fruit trees. They say a mighty king is buried there, but no one remembers anything more than that. But I’ve lost my grip on the tail of my tale—the men were not there waiting for us.”
A day later, when the accountant dwarf and Djer did a full counting of the coin, an argument broke out.
“We both signed the tally two nights ago,” the accountant insisted. “After we bought that herd of mutton.”
“It must not be right. How can there be so much missing?” Djer said. “None have been here but Auron and Sekyw.”
