A mile from the town, they passed over the ring of encamped dragons enforcing the blockade. Several catapults had been brought into range. He wondered why Ragnar hadn't used the cannons to discourage this. The big guns had a far greater range than any catapult.
Below, a few bleary-eyed earth-dragons stood near a blue silk tent. He recognized the tent style as the work of the valkyries. The earth-dragons looked up, squinting, shielding their eyes as if trying to make sense of what they were seeing. He wasn't terribly worried. Earth-dragons were notoriously near-sighted. They probably would be mistaken for sky-dragons.
With the wind in his ears, Burke barely heard their shouts. He grimaced. Perhaps they hadn't been mistaken for sky-dragons. He saw the flap of a tent flutter open and a lone valkyrie poke her head out, craning her neck skyward. She looked only half awake, but alert enough to have thought to have put on her helmet.
Suddenly, the valkyrie's eyes popped open.
He hoped that Thorny and Poocher would be okay if the sky-dragon managed to summon her sisters to the air, but there was no time to slow down. The walls of the fortress were approaching fast. He scanned the battlements, looking for any sign that the sky-wall archers had seen them. He looked again, his heart sinking. No archers had seen him because none were on the walls. No living man could be seen anywhere within the city.
The same could not be said of dead ones.
As the walls flashed beneath them, he saw a severed human head in a state of advanced decay sitting on the wooden walkway inside the battlement, gazing up with crow-plucked eyes. All around the roof tops were other remains, legs and arms and torsos, along with whole bodies wedged up against chimneys or dangling limply from rain gutters.
His first instinct was that they were too late. The rebels had already been slaughtered. Logic kicked in and he understood what the catapults had been used for. The rain of corpses had been meant to soften up the rebels for an attack yet to come.
Again, he wondered why the cannons hadn't been used. Even before he left, the big guns had been rolling off the production line. By now, the construction needed to mount them on the walls should have been completed. Had Ragnar not read any of his battle plans?
Anza tilted her feet down, her long braid trailing behind her as she dropped toward the broad lip of the well at the center of town. She seemed to be going too fast, but in the final seconds her speed dropped as if a net had caught her, and she lighted on the stone rim as gently as a fallen leaf. Burke hadn't told her of the fate Shanna had suffered at the well, and the well made an inviting target for landing, given its central location and the way it rose up like a stage from the packed earth surrounding it.
Vance and Jeremiah landed beside her. Burke drifted down and then stopped, hovering above the center of the well. He nearly gagged at a human ribcage caught in the bucket that dangled a few yards down the shaft. Rats crawled over the tatters of its desiccated flesh. He hoped a lucky shot had placed it there. They were in trouble if the dragons possessed catapult marksmen capable of intentionally scoring a bulls-eye on the well. He didn't point it out to the others, who were looking around the city. There were more than enough horrors to gaze upon.
"Why hasn't anybody pulled those corpses from the roofs?" Vance asked, as he looked around the abandoned streets. "Where is everyone?"
Burke held the shotgun Shay had given him over his head. "Let's find out," he said, pulling the trigger. The bang echoed through the empty streets.
Seconds later, a few guards appeared along the city's walls. Had they been sleeping? He counted only seven. This, compared to the hundreds that should be at their posts.
Up and down the street doors creaked open. Shadowy faces with wide eyes peeked out. Slowly, voices began to call back and forth.
"Burke!" someone yelled.
"Burke," others echoed.
"Burke's ghost!" a voice shouted.
Burke grimaced. Convincing men he wasn't dead while floating a yard above the well could be tricky. But he still wasn't planning to land. He patiently reloaded the shotgun. Anza folded her wings back into the disk and drew her tomahawks. She stood in a stance that was both relaxed and impatient. Men began to cautiously step into the streets.
Vance followed her lead. He folded up his wings and drew his sky-wall bow, placing an arrow against the string and waiting, watching. Beside him Jeremiah drew Vulpine's knife, but kept his wings spread wide.
A moment behind them, Poocher and Thorny drifted down from the sky. Poocher let out a small grunt; all four of his cleft hooves touched the rim of his well at once. He stood next to Jeremiah. The pig also left his wings open. Burke wondered if he knew how to close them.
Thorny folded his wings in while his feet were still a foot above the well. He let out a loud "oof" as he landed. He looked up at Burke and said, "I'm your friend, and I'd die for you, but I'll be damned if I'm ever going to fly for you again. I'm giving my wings to Bitterwood next chance I get."
"I don't think he needs them," said Burke as he finished loading the shotgun.
"No man needs these things," Thorny grumbled.
"Is it my imagination, or are you in a bad mood?"
"I feel like a cranky baby. Sixty is too old to be teething again." To show what he meant, he pulled back his lips and revealed his gums. Where once there had been more gaps than teeth, there were now freshly minted chompers, ten times whiter than the old teeth that surrounded them.
By now, the square around the well was filling. The crowd was full of men shouting Burke's name-not cheering him, or greeting him: merely announcing his presence to others.
Burke looked down the avenue to the red brick house at the end.
He clenched his jaw as the door opened.
Vulpine was in the habit of waking at dawn. In the quietness of the morning, he pondered the words he'd said to Balikan only a few weeks before. The world was in no danger of running out of days, or years. Yet, Vulpine was keenly aware that he was not the world. His body possessed a sluggishness in the chill of the morning that reminded him that his youth had long since vanished.
His kettle whistled upon the small oil burner. He picked it up, welcoming the warmth of the wire handle in his stiff fore-talon. He poured the oily brown contents into a tin cup. He sniffed it, savoring the complex sharpness of the odor. The soup was a mix of shaved barks, roots, and organs. The bark of the willow tree was especially bitter, but there was no questioning that it soothed the aching of his muscles. The root of the sassafras offset the bitterness somewhat with a medicinal tang and a touch of sweetness that prodded his thoughts into clarity on cool mornings. Alligator testicles, dried and powdered, ensured his continued virility and gave the whole mix a musky bouquet and salty aftertaste.
He crouched by a low table and sipped his morning medicine, reading the letter that had been delivered yesterday by Chapelion's messengers. He ground his teeth at Chapelion's incompetence. More of the aerial guard had abandoned the palace. Some new charismatic prophet had apparently established a base in the Free City and was drawing a following of both humans and dragons. Worse, Cragg, the beastialist who had inherited Rorg's abode, had announced that his tribe was seceding from the rest of the kingdom. There were reports that Verteniel, who oversaw the coastal abode that included the Isle of Horses, was prepared to do the same. This had always been the true danger of the empty throne-not that the other sun-dragons would try to conquer the kingdom, but that they would simply decide they could manage the affairs of their own small fiefdoms better without the interference of a king.