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“Yes, the dwarfs, who slaughtered your females and children in battle after battle.” Wistala knew little dwarf/demen history, only that their wars were long and bloody, with entire communities slaughtered in raid and counterraid. Life was as hard as stone in the Lower World.
The demen started up an eerie hissing that wasn’t quite a whistle, and clacked their spines together. On a demen it was hard to tell where limb and carapace ended and armor and weapons began. Wistala thought it sounded like a swarm of insects.
“We fight, we drink blood?” their general asked.
What had started as a victorious drink of blood every now and then had grown into a need terrible and desperate. Wistala wondered how they’d ever sate their appetites after a battle again. The idea was to lose less dragons, not more.
“You can drink from my own veins,” Wistala said. “Form for an attack!”
LaDibar and a few other Ankelenes stood at the top of the stairs leading to their hill. “If you take the Tyr’s legion, who—”
“Arm your thralls and make your own flame,” Wistala ordered. What had happened to dragons over the years in the Lavadome?
“Follow me,” she said, trotting around to the west side of Imperial Rock. Instinctively, she flapped her wings and the next thing she knew she was aloft.
Perhaps a heavier male dragon couldn’t fly with the Tyr’s traditional battle armor on, but she could. Hard flying with the armor—it cut the wind and made it harder to push through the air with the proper lift.
She circled back and the demen cheered.
A knot of dwarf-warriors, coming around to encircle Imperial Rock, saw the oncoming demen. She couldn’t read their expressions, but they were clearly shocked to see demen formed up and ready to fight for the Lavadome.
One of them raised a metallic tube, with smaller vessels and cylinders attached, capped with a bellowslike structure.
Wistala couldn’t identify it and certainly didn’t wish to see its effects. She folded her wings and dropped, spitting fire that fell only a little faster than she did. Her nostrils were well-scorched by her own flame.
The war machine sparked and sputtered as it burned, shooting thin projectiles in all directions.
The dwarfs fell into a defensive line and the demen washed over them like an incoming wave. The first demen in line locked limbs onto the dwarfs’ shields, the second braced himself low to keep the others from being shoved forward or pulled back, and the third ran up and over the backs of the second and first ranks.
The dwarf line disappeared under a carpet of demen as they rushed up and over. The dwarfs fell back.
A dwarf-leader called on his signalman to wave a banner. Wistala swooped down and struck hard with her tail, sending both rolling and cracking like a pair of dropped melons.
White sparking streaks surrounded her and Wistala felt a stabbing pain. Her wings were holed in a dozen places. She came to earth in a mushroom field, sending the growths up in a shower of fertilizer.
She’d been struck by nine or ten shafts like heavy crossbow bolts. They stank of sulphur. Luckily none caught her under the throat or in her wing joints. Three pierced her chest armor and ground a claw’s width into her scale. If it weren’t for the Tyr’s armor—
Dwarfs charged from three directions, axes and spears aiming.
Still stunned from her hard landing, she reacted more slowly than she should have. She lashed out, put a wall of flame in front of two. They came through anyway, ignoring the pain of burns, and buried their weapons in her flanks.
She struck back with tooth and claw, smelling blood, sending her opponents into the next life in pieces.
Her vision red, roaring and fighting, she saw the dwarfs setting up a larger war machine, something shaped like two crossbows stacked atop each other.
The war machine disappeared, immolated by twin streams of dragon fire.
SiHazathant and Regalia came around in a tight turn, riding each other’s air.
“Now, Firemaids! For Tyr and home-cave!” Regalia cried, leading her brother in for another pass.
Later, Wistala was told that while the demen struck the dwarfs’ right, the Firemaids struck from behind. The remaining dwarfs shifted to support their center, and that’s when the Drakwatch advanced, advancing behind and through their own flame.
Wistala’s perception was correct: the dwarfs were exhausted; the attack was a last desperate gamble to avenge themselves on a dragon who’d humiliated them twice. According to dwarfen legend, the Lavadome was beard-deep in gold ingots and stolen jewels, but there’s no accounting for folklore.
AuRon’s son AuMoahk, who was studying remedies and medicines under the Ankelenes, sniffed at her armor and wounds. “We should put some salve on your nostril burns. In the Aerial Host those are called ‘warrings’.”
“It wasn’t the fight they were after so much; it was all that dead dragonflesh on the ground,” old Rethothanna said. “Look at ’em go.”
