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“Eagle . . . perhaps . . . bird high up and far off . . . dark, possibly purple,” the Lords of the Wheel of Fire said.
“A feather fell from it, and landed on my doorstep, purple it was,” said one lord, falling to his knees. Another at the other end of the group slapped himself on the forehead as if to punish his wits for not being quicker.
“Hmfp! Very unhelpful, Lord Lobok, that I am only hearing this now,” said the king, turning a hairy eye upon the kneeling lord.
“My wife thought it suitable to, ahem, set it in a bed of flowers, or preserve it in glass. I shall get it at once,” he squeaked, and bowed himself down the stairs, and then hurried up the walkway, jumping over Wistala’s twitching tail.
“A man-child. A man-child,” King Fangbreaker puzzled.
“The boy’s face was alive with intelligence,” Wistala said. “Perhaps he will serve as an emissary, or a craftsman.”
“I’d rather Hypatia come to the mountain,” King Fangbreaker said. “But if we can find this boy, we’ll decide then. An odd sort of vision, Tala.” He scratched at his beard. “Hmfp! If it brings happiness to my people, I am satisfied. Let every one of our trading houses know to make inquiries about this boy. Say he is being ransomed through us, that none may learn his value before we acquire him. When it comes time to bring him here, I imagine I must let Lobok handle it, as the duty seems to have fallen on his doorstep along with the feather—though he is the nervous type.”
“I will take no more of your time, Lord,” Wistala said.
“And keep that out of my court,” Fangbreaker said, fixing his eye about Yellowteeth, who lurked behind Wistala.
Oddly enough, the blighter smiled back at the king as he gave a nodding bow. Wistala might even have called the expression defiant.
Chapter 26
Wistala flapped in the night sky above Galahall, a cold fall wind from the northwest helping keep her aloft as she turned circles, falling in a glide and then rising with a few hard wing-beats, wondering what transpired within.
Hammar had new hutments on the edge of his lands, the round structures of the northern barbarians with their roofs like a single-pole tent.
She accompanied the expedition at King Fangbreaker’s request. He was nervous about Lord Lobok, who’d set out from Thul’s Hardhold with an armed force some of the dwarvish lords laughed at as being oversize, especially considering the small amount of money borne as the agreed price for the youth.
“He never was the steadiest warrior, and always called for more axes and artillerists, whatever his situation,” Fangbreaker said, watching the barges set out from his balcony ten days before.
“But the feather fell on his doorstep,” Wistala said. She’d seen the purple feather, produced after some delay for the King’s court; it smelled like a white one freshly dyed. “In case of treachery, would it not be better to have a large, well-arrayed force at hand?”
“This is the simplest of transactions. Why the word treachery?” King Fangbreaker asked.
“I cannot say. I speak what comes out of my mind; why it was that word instead of another is as much a mystery to me as to you.”
“Hmpf,” he said in return.
“Are there commanders to see that the force is well handled, whether it is a peaceful march or a warlike one?” Wistala asked.
“From anyone else I’d call that an insult, Tala,” he rumbled. “But you’ve little opportunity to learn decent manners.”
“May I hazard my manners with another question?”
“Of course.”
“What happens to those gift baskets of food given to you in your throne hall? Do you eat them all?”
“I eat not a one,” King Fangbreaker said. “I’ve a queer stomach, and mostly eat gruel a-mealtimes, which is easily digested and nutritious. And I have a terrible sweet tooth at night, which is responsible for this,” he patted his paunch. “The baskets go to the poor of our city. There are many widows and orphans without a dwarf in a guild to support them. Can’t have young dwarves growing up all stoop-backed and knockkneed, coughing and feverish from malnutrition.”
Wistala felt the lordly dwarves moving about her flanks, some were pointing to her underside and talked among themselves, perhaps discussing assorted methods and tactics of dragon-killing.
“How did you get the title Fangbreaker, my king?” Wistala asked.
“I was cheated by a pair of dragons,” he said. “They were a wretched, misfortunate pair, who we helped restore to health and vitality with foods and metals. In return they fought for us, as some of the mercenary Ironriders do on the eastern side of this mountain, but they abandoned us to start their family without taking proper leave and asking permission to bear eggs. For we had a market for those eggs, a rich market, and they’d agreed that their bodies would be ours for a period under contract.
“Now I was not unreasonable. I just asked for one clutch. After that, they would be free to go where they wished, to the ends of the breaking earth in the west or the jeweled kingdoms of the east for all I cared, and hatch as many eggs as they liked. But I’d promised a full clutch of eggs to a buyer, and he would have them.
“The dragons argued that their services included only flying and fighting, not eggs, and when I stood firm, they fled. The laying time must have been close, for they did not flee far, though they turned up in an unexpected cave, one we’d gone to much trouble to seal from below to cut off the blighters within from the darkroads.
