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She came only half out the door, seemed ready to jump back inside and slam it at the first sign of flame.
“I speak for the household,” she said, voice quavering only a little. “If you’ve come for vengeance, my father is not here. If you’ve come for murder, there are children within.”
“I’ve come for neither,” Wistala said. She sat, the mud squelching against her backside. Had she ever been so tired?
“What is your name, girl?” Wistala asked.
“Adaska,” she answered.
“I’m—”
“The Oracle-dragon.”
“No. Well, I was. Now I’m just Wistala, a dragon who has had enough of fighting.”
“What can you mean?” she asked, stepping a little farther onto her doorstep. Someone hissed at her from inside, but she ignored the comment.
“I don’t know when all this started. Did my grandsire kill yours, or did yours kill mine? Your father killed mine, and I should kill yours, but I expect you or your brother would come after me. Am I right?”
“We would. But dragons must be slain.”
“Must they? Size put aside, I’m not certain we’re so very different.”
“Dragons bring ruin and fear wherever they go; look what happens across the lake,” she said. Wistala looked, the carrion birds were already gathering. She wondered if Bartleghaff or his relations were among them. “This was always a peaceful place until you came.” >“Hammar has other matters to attend to,” he said. His beard still looked like the poor effort of a youth, even in the fullness of manhood. “First let us win the battle. Then we’ll divide the spoils.”
The circus folk climbed up each side of the dam and pulled and tied the blasting-casks into place. Wistala plucked crossbow bolts from her scale and nursed her javelin wounds.
“What about a fuse?” Hammar asked.
“I’m the fuse,” Wistala said, licking a spear hole in her wing clean.
When all was ready, and more barbarians had the time to come up the road and array themselves behind the wall, Wistala took flight.
She saw that perhaps half the barges still dueled with the barbarians at the waterside, ready to destroy canoes or any other light boats the savages might have brought up the mountain to cross the Ba-drink. The others, undoubtedly led by Lobok, were almost at the Hardhold.
She saw that the gargants and circus folk were well out of the watercourse down the spillway, and dropped down, summoning her foua.
She loosed it against the dam wall, and it ran down toward the packed and tied kegs. Wistala flew up and out of the way.
The explosions came, a gentle hand shoving Wistala higher—crack crack huhoom!—sending rock and masonry shooting out across the mountainside, along with bits of timber and line.
For a moment after the cataclysm, all was silent, or perhaps it was just that it sounded so to battered eardrums.
Both the masses of barbarians and the dwarves in their barges left off their gesticulations and challenges, insults and catcalls, arrows, sling-stones, and bolts—frozen as though the icy wind carried a spell across all.
It seemed to Wistala that the fate of worlds hung in the balance of those few moments, as the mountaintops tossed the sound back and forth.
Nothing happened. Water still cascaded over the spillway.
Then came more noise, a cracking, crashing sound of rocks sliding, followed hard on its heels, as wagon-wheels follow horse hooves, by the water.
When describing the scene later, Wistala always said there was no word big enough for how the water moved through the gap, opening it wider and deeper as pieces at the edge fell away—a torrent of water, an avalanche, as though the mountain had sprouted a new shoulder falling into a steep cliff.
The dwarf barges pulled like mad across the surface of the Ba-drink, but the water fell away from them, sloped under them as first one and then the next fell away, carried sideways toward the gap.
The barbarians stood transfixed as the barges fell one by one into chaos. Whether they felt for the doomed dwarves, pulling at their oars, throwing anchors in desperation, even leaping into the water to swim as though their arms could accomplish what joined oars could not, Wistala couldn’t say.
The lake drained away a claw’s-breadth at a time, but soon there was a path along the side of the lake to the Hardhold. The barbarians splashed into the fresh shallows, stomped through mud, a black sea of hide-cape, helm, and round shield replacing the receding waters.
