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“A duel? With vermin? Spare me your wit, creature.”
“Then I will go about my business—,” Wistala began.
“No. Walk with me. I will start no fight with you here. You have my word.”
Wistala wondered if she could trust the word of an assassin.
“I must be growing old. You are the second dragon to slip through my fingers,” he said.
“Who was the first?”
He turned toward the Hardhold. “Come. I wish to show you something, Oracle.”
He led her down many sets of stairs, across chambers filled with trophies and statues, and finally down a shaft where one traveled by having the floor descend rather than going afoot. He gave a password to guards in a workshop filled with the sound of hammers and deeper pounding, and Wistala smelled hot metal and burning coal.
She passed a group of young dwarves, their faces unmasked, listening to another older dwarf talk as he pointed with a stick at various features of a hose that fed water into a series of smaller and smaller pipes, until it shot out the bottom with tremendous force. She recognized Rayg among the apprentices, the only human other than Drakossozh this far in the Hardhold.
“We’re deep in the Guild of the Armorers,” the Dragonblade said. They passed racks of weapons and stacked helms, with dwarves bent over workbenches on all sides. The symphony of noise was as chaotic as a battle, and the air thick with the tang of heated metal. “Have you ever wondered how the Wheel of Fire got its name?” he asked.
“You see the burning shield here and there,” Wistala said. “It’s an emblem.”
“They were called the Wheel of Fire before that. Here, follow.”
He passed into a quieter gallery. The ceiling here was wide but low, and Wistala smelled an oily smell like lamp fats overlaid with other workshop odors.
Long ranks of machines stood in little bays. Some had wooden platforms next to them, one or two had been wheeled out so the dwarves could work. A few of the workers gave Wistala a startled look as she crouched to get through the doors.
The pieces of craftsmanship were like great walls on wheels of assorted sizes. If there was an average, she would put that wheels were fully dwarf height and the walls perhaps twice that, but it seemed some walls and wheels came taller and some shorter, some wider and some narrower. But on each two spars jutted out from the axles of the wheels behind the wall, with handles at irregular intervals. Wistala watched a team of dwarves move one by having four dwarves stand at each spar and lift, then push it forward. Behind the shield were big tanks like water-cisterns, only with hoses and glass devices like clock faces fixed to the joints, along with assorted levers and cables connecting wheel to tanks.
But the objects at the front caught her attention more than anything.
Pipes projected from slits in the great wheeled shields. The slits, indeed the shields themselves, reminded her of overlarge dwarf battle-masks with their thin gaps so the dwarves could see and still have their eyes shielded.
Open-jawed dragon heads, horribly real, had been fixed to the front of the pipes, their faces forever frozen into snarling fury. Their eyes had been replaced by painted crystals, but otherwise they looked ready to come alive. There were heads with eight horns and heads with none, heads with green scales and heads with bronze, heads of hatchlings, drakes, drakka, dragons, dragonelles. . . .
Some were familiar.
The world spun about her. She fixed her eyes on the Dragonblade, who stood with hand on sword hilt, helmet cradled at his elbow. His knees were bent just a trifle, as though he were waiting to leap into action. Wistala noticed shadows, heard excited breathing, the alcoves just ahead.
“I’m not aware of all the mechanics to their operation,” the Dragonblade explained from somewhere on the other side of the Endless Steppe, or so it seemed to her ears. “But the turning of the wheels forces air into one of the tanks, and that air is then used to drive flame, like dragonflame, out of the other tank and through the pipe at the front. It’s ignited by a coal gas-flame there. Certainly not what a dragon is capable of, but I hear it’s terrifying in tunnel warfare.”
The dwarves had all frozen in their labors, watching her as though fixed by spellcraft.
“Most interesting,” Wistala said. “Is there another stop to the tour, or am I done?”
“You hold your anger well. Here’s another test.” He extended his gauntleted palm. In it rested two ancient Hypatian coins, one of gold, the other of silver. “I found these in the jowls of a bronze I killed on the banks of the Whitewater. There was also a female hatchling there. That hatchling wouldn’t have been you, would it?”
Wistala shot out her tongue, but the Dragonblade was quicker of hand, closed his fingers around the coins and withdrew them.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were offering me a treat,” Wistala said. “Speaking of which, I am late for my dinner.”
“A dragon who can hold her temper,” the Dragonblade said.
Just,, Wistala thought.
“There’s something about you that frightens me,” the Dragonblade said, eyebrows together. His horridly flat face wrinkled in thought. “A dragon who can keep her temper could be a deadly enemy. Or—”
“Or what?” Wistala asked.
