The dragon tilted, turning upon the air, the vast wings searing faintly at the wind. Occasional eddies of it whistled around the spikes that defended the dragon’s backbone—some of them no longer than a finger, others almost a cubit, dagger-sharp. In flight the dragon seemed to be a thing made of silk and wire, lighter than his size would lead one to think, as if the flesh and muscle, like the mind and the shape of his bones, were different in composition from all things else upon the Earth.
This is the realm of the dragons, Morkeleb’s voice said within her mind. The roads of the air. It is yours, for the stretching out of your hand.
In the slant of the light they laid no shadow upon the ground, but it seemed to Jenny that she could almost see the track of their passage written like a ship’s wake upon the wind. Her mind half-within the dragon’s, she could sense the variations of the air, updraft and thermal, as if the wind itself were of different colors. With the dragon’s awareness, she saw other things in the air as well—the paths of energy across the face of the world, the tracks that traveled from star to star, like the lines of force that were repeated in the body, smaller and smaller, in the spreads of dealt cards or thrown runes or the lie of leaves in water. She was aware of life everywhere, of the winterwhite foxes and hares in the patchy snowlines beneath the thin scrum of cloud below, and of the King’s troops; camped far down upon the road, who pointed and cried out as the dragon’s dark shape passed overhead.
They crossed the flank of the mountain to its daylight side. Before and below her, she saw the cliff and hill and Citadel of Halnath, a spiky conglomerate of thrusting gray ramparts clinging like a mud-built swallow’s nest to the massive shoulder of a granite cliff. From its feet, the land lay crisscrossed with wooded ravines to the silver curve of a river; mist blended with the blue of woodsmoke to veil the straggling lines of tents and guard posts, horse lines and trenches raw with yellow mud, that made up the siege camps. An open ring of battered ground lay between the walls and the camp, ravaged by battle and bristling with the burned-out shells of the small truck farms that nestled around the walls of any town. Beyond, to the north, the green stretches of the Marches vanished away under a gauze of mists, the horse- and cattle-lands that were the Master’s fief and strength. From the river marshes where pewter waters spread themselves, a skein of dandefoot herons rose through the milky vapors, tiny and clear as a pen sketch.
There. Jenny pointed with her mind toward the battlements of the high Citadel. The central court there. It’s narrow, but long enough for us to land.
Wind and her long hair lashed her eyes as the dragon wheeled.
They have armored their walls, the dragon said. Look. Men were running about the ramparts, pointing and waving at the enormous wings flashing in the air. Jenny glimpsed catapults mounted on the highest turrets, counterweighted slings bearing buckets that burst suddenly into red flame and massive crossbows whose bolts could point nowhere but at the sky.
We’ll have to go in. Jenny said. I’ll protect you.
By catching the bolts in your teeth, wizard woman? Morkeleb asked sarcastically, circling away as some overeager slinger slipped his ropes and a bucketful of naphtha described a curving trajectory, flames streaming like faded orange pennants against the brightness of the new day. What protection can you, a human, offer me?
Jenny smiled to herself, watching the naphtha as it broke into blazing lumps in falling. None of them landed in the town on the slopes below—they knew their mathematics, these defenders of Halnath, and how to apply them to ballistics. For herself, she supposed she should have been terrified, to be carried this high above the reeling earth—if she fell, she would fall for a long time before she died. But whether it was her trust in Morkeleb, or the dragon’s mind that enveloped hers in the thoughts of those who lived in the airstream, she felt no fear of it. Indeed, she almost believed that, if she were to drop, she had only to spread out her own wings, as she did in dreams of flight.
Small as toys on the walls of the Citadel, the machines of defense were being cranked around to bear upon them. They looked, at this distance, like nothing so much as John’s little models. And to think I grew impatient when he insisted upon showing me how every one of them fired. She smiled, half to Morkeleb and half to herself. Swing north, Morkeleb, and come at them from along that ridge. The problem with machines has always been that it requires only the touch of a wizard’s mind to fox their balance.
There were two engines guarding the approach she had set, a bolt-firing catapult and a spring-driven sling. She had thrown her magic before, conjuring images within her mind, to foul the bowstrings of bandits in the north and to cause their feet to find roots as they ran, or their swords to stick in their sheaths. Having seen the mechanisms of these weapons in John’s models, she found this no harder. Ropes twisted in the catapult, jamming the knots when the triggering cord was jerked. With a dragon’s awareness, she saw a man running in panic along the battlements; he knocked over a bucket into the mechanism of the sling so that it could not be turned to aim. The dragon swung lazily from the weapon’s possible path, guided by the touch of Jenny’s mind within his; and she felt, like a chuckle of dark laughter, his appreciation for the ease with which she thwarted the mechanical devices.
You are small, wizard woman, he said, amused, but a mighty defender of dragons, nevertheless.
Throwing her streaming hair back from her eyes. Jenny could see men on the battlements below them clearly now. They were clothed in makeshift uniforms, the black, billowing gowns of scholars covered with battered bits of armor, some of it stamped with the royal arms and obviously taken from prisoners or the slain. They fled in all directions as the dragon drew near, save for one man tall, red-haired, and thin as a scarecrow in his ragged blackgown, who was swinging something to bear upon them that looked for a moment like a telescope—a metal tube braced upon stakes. The walls swooped closer. At the last moment Jenny saw harpoons stacked beside him and, instead of glass in the tube’s mouth, the glint of a metal point.
The lone defender had a burning spill in one hand, lighted from one of the naphtha buckets. He was watching them come in, taking aim—Blasting powder, thought Jenny; the gnomes will have brought plenty up from the mines. She remembered John’s abortive experiments with rockets.
The scene rushed to meet them, until every chipped stone of the wall and every patch on the scholar’s ragged gown seemed within reach of Jenny’s hand. As he brought the spill down to the touch-hole, Jenny used her mind to extinguish the flame, as she would have doused a candle. Then she spread out her arms and cried, “STOP!” at the top of her voice.
He froze in mid-motion, the harpoon he had snatched from the pile beside him cocked back already over his shoulder, though Jenny could tell by the way he held it that he had never thrown one before and could not have hit them. Even at that distance, she saw wonder, curiosity, and delight on his thin face. Like John, she thought, he was a true scholar, fascinated with any wonder, though it carried his death upon its wings.
Morkeleb braked in the air, the shift of his muscles rippling against Jenny’s back. All men had fled the long, narrow court of the Citadel and the walls around it, save that single defender. The dragon hung for a moment like a hovering hawk, then settled, delicate as a dandelion seed, to perch on the wall above the shadowy well of the court. The great hind-talons gripped the stone as the long neck and tail counterbalanced, and he stooped like a vast bird to set Jenny on her feet upon the rampart.