The battle shrank down to what Pirvan could see himself or what Haimya’s face and eyes warned him of. He lost the ability to tell an ogre from a human, except that now there seemed to be some full-sized ogres with their immense reach.
He saw Haimya duck away from one club’s swing, lose her footing on the path, and go down. Without thinking, he straddled her, kicking and slashing. The ogre drew back, but it had a comrade on each side. They came on, and Pirvan had the sick certainty that he and his friends were disastrously outnumbered.
The warbling came again, louder than before, then a third time, so loud that the bird might have been perched on Pirvan’s shoulder, crying into his ear. Then the thief heard a splintering like all the fences in Istar being torn down for firewood, and a dragon came out of the forest.
It was a copper dragon-Pirvan could see its color plainly, even with only one lantern still lit. It was a pale copper, in parts almost white, and the scales seemed smaller than the pictures, perhaps no larger than a baby’s hand. One wing flapped, the other dragged, but from nose to tail it had to be more than thirty feet long.
That dragon would be formidable if it only sneezed. Pirvan hoped it remembered that it was good, and the ogres were not.
The dragon did more than sneeze. It swung its head, its eyes closed, and its breath weapon poured out. It was green and smoky, and smelled just like something that came out of a dragon’s stomach.
As it struck the ogres, they stopped moving. Those caught in midstride fell down and seemed to be struggling to regain their feet. Those swinging clubs dropped them. Pirvan saw one ogre bend over to retrieve his weapon, struggle as if he were wading against a strong current, then fall over on top of the club.
The dragon warbled again, swung its head, and poured the smoke down the other side of the path. This time it caught a soldier grappled with a human opponent. A slash at the enemy’s head turned into a tap with the flat of the blade, as the sword turned in the soldier’s slowed hand. The enemy tried to bring a knee up between the soldier’s legs, but lost his balance and fell. The soldier tried to kick him in the head, but lost his balance.
When the soldier fell on top of his opponent, Pirvan heard him laugh.
There wasn’t much else to laugh about for at least a few more minutes. The wind was from up the path, so that as long as the dragon breathed down either side of it, those in the middle escaped the worst of the spell. Unfortunately, they couldn’t close with their opponents; if they entered the smoke, they also would be slowed.
The archers were ready to try arrows on the slowed attackers. The officers weren’t ready to let them, as they might hit friends. Pirvan snatched a bow out of one archer’s hand, then Haimya hit him in the stomach with the hilt of her sword. He lost interest in archery.
The lack of archery made little difference. Slowed and unslowed, ogre and human alike, the attackers started to flee downhill. At times the unslowed helped pull their slowed comrades to their feet and clear of the dragon’s smoke; at other times they let them lie or struggle.
Pirvan found himself leading the pursuit downhill. Halfway to the foot of the hill, the path seemed to sprout half a dozen unslowed opponents. One of them threw a club at Pirvan and hit a soldier coming up behind him. Then Haimya was again on one flank, Kurulus on the other. There were only the three of them, but the taste of victory was in their mouths, and they moved faster than their opponents could have, even unslowed.
A moment came when Pirvan realized that they faced only one opponent, though he was fighting hard enough for three. He was also shouting to comrades carrying away the wounded and others Pirvan could not see:
“Run! Run, but not downhill! The fort has to be awake! Run, you fools, the dragon’s on your heels!”
Pirvan wondered about that; he hadn’t heard that weird and sinister warbling for some time. Dragons were hard to kill, but what of a wounded dragon-which should be sound asleep a mile below the earth?
Pirvan suddenly knew he would feel great sorrow at not knowing the dragon better. If there were any doubt about its being good, it had settled the matter.
The defender of the retreat lunged forward, swinging a club and thrusting a short sword. Kurulus spun clear of the sword thrust, but not of the club. It cracked across his head, and he went down. Haimya nearly went with him, but rolled and sprang up, thrusting at the enemy’s chest.
The thrust never went home. The ogre toppled as Pirvan lunged in from the rear, flinging his dagger. The pommel-weight drove hard against the back of the ogre’s skull, and for a second time Haimya nearly went down.
By the time she was on her feet, Pirvan had wrestled the ogre over on to his back, to keep him from suffocating in the mud. No, make that wrestled the half-ogre.
He was the height of a tall, muscular man, and his body’s proportions were wholly human, except for the hair. The brow ridges, the jaw line, and the shape of the skull told of the mixed blood.
Mixed in blood, perhaps, but wholly a warrior. As the half-ogre opened his eyes, Pirvan knelt beside him.
“Can you walk?”
“Unh?”
“I said, can you walk? I will let you go, but you have to walk-”
Pirvan felt warm breath on his back. “I shouldn’t kill him?” came a rasping voice, too deep to have a human source.
The thief did not waste time turning around. “No,” he said. “He fought too well. If he can walk-”
“I heard you the first time,” the half-ogre said. He might have been a child being awakened for school. With a grip on a low branch, he heaved himself to his feet and stumbled off into the darkness.
“Good,” the dragon said. “I do not like killing, though I would have killed him if I were more in your debt and you asked it of me.”
Pirvan tried to translate that remark; the dragon turned its head upslope. Its body tensed, both wings twitched, and moments later a mudslide rumbled and sloshed down the path. It was not a deep mudslide, just calf-deep, but it drew a furious cry from up the hill.
“What son of fifty fathers turned those rocks to mud! I had them all locked up!”
Pirvan laughed. He recognized Tarothin’s voice, which made one less thing to worry about. With Haimya, he pulled the reviving Kurulus into a sitting position, so that he could spit the mud out of his mouth and wipe it from his eyes and ears.
Then he stared at the dragon. “You can talk!”
“Of course,” the dragon said. “My only problem, once I was fully awake, was not having anyone to talk to.”
He sniffed at Pirvan and Haimya. “But before we do any more talking, I think we should all bathe.”
Chapter 12
The dragon was male and gave his name as Hipparan. Either Tarothin did not have the power to counter whatever protective spells guarded the true name and discover that, or he did not care to offend the dragon.
Pirvan quickly became persuaded that it did not really matter. Hipparan seemed to feel that he had discharged most of his debts to the human race by driving off what he called “a sorry pile of sweepings and scourings of several races.”
Pirvan asserted that if the victory had been so easy, then the dragon owed his rescuers even more. Hipparan replied that it was all very well to say this by human reckoning, but dragons reckoned debts otherwise. Copper dragons reckoned them the most minutely, of all good dragons. Indeed, the only dragons that reckoned profit and loss more tenaciously were the evil white dragons, and everyone knew that they went about feeling superior with very little to justify that opinion.