Contact – Unhappy Vindication
Written May 28th – June 7th, 2020.
Published June 14th, 2020.
I would like to add a quick author's note here - while my posting schedule has been clockwork as of late, I have some trips and things in my personal life to attend to and that means I won't be posting for an extended period of time - call it two weeks in July and decreased productivity all through June. Rest assured that I am writing through this time - just not as much as I'd like to. Anyhow, on to the review responses:
To Unazaki: I work very hard to keep it interesting! I thank you for taking the time to review this story; every little bit helps.
And I think I've dawdled long enough; on to the chapter you were waiting for.
Evening July 3rd, 5,015: The Mudwing Palace.
The crashing tinkle of breaking glass woke up Wells with a start. He sprang from the sofa like a jack-in-the-box popping open its lid, half-expecting a leering four-winged dragon at his throat with a talon poised to cut his arteries and leave him bleeding out. But there was no wasp, only a cascade of successively louder dragon screeches, thumping and banging and clattering like pots and pans falling to the floor, liberated from their wall hooks. Exhaustion acted like a deadly soporific on his mind and body, slowing his response to the dragons who might kill him now that Crest wasn't here.
The colonel burst into the room.
"Three moons, you were right!"
"I am unhappily vindicated," said Wells, too tired to make a fuss out of it. He strode forward and gazed through the yellowish window and down to the dimly lit courtyard of stone. The sun had set, and now the moving shadows flitting about before the pillars were as real as the forms which cast them. A warrior's morbid sarcasm came over him, and he remarked:
"I would've thought the killing fields would be better lit."
"There's no time, we've got to go," said the colonel, and made to get away.
Wells barred him from the window.
"Your duty belongs to your kingdom. I stopped by four hours ago and gave you a chance."
A roar drifted up from the courtyard below. Another crash – dragons were fighting in the air and ramming into towers, stonework, everything.
"I'm done warning dragons who won't listen," he said. "And I'm out of here."
"You can't, not on your own," said the colonel. "Not with the two of us, either."
"Then let's bloody well find soldiers who'll fight their way out of this mess," said Wells. The colonel, once a symbol of military efficiency and due caution, now seemed a cowardly bureaucrat. A Mudwing came through the window and smashed it to atoms, twinkling glass shards glistening a pale whitish yellow hue from the lamps beneath their talons. The soldier was already dead.
Sergeant and colonel looked at each other, then flew into the maelstrom in search of friendlies, the tiny hole in Wells's wing augmented by the thin, bleeding scar caused by the glass pane when he'd jumped off.
A wasp careened into the space before him, talons already filled with treasure; a blow from Crest's brass comb twisted its head sideways with a meaty chonk and it fell to the cobblestone a hundred yards below, unconscious and very shortly dead. The whole world had turned upside down, the morals and sense had fallen up and all that was left was madness, desperation, chaos. Dragons lived and died in brutal seconds where there was no time to think.
It reminded Wells of Abalone.
That thought led him to Crest.
And Crest told him to get out of here.
He found a still-alive Mudwing standing rock-still on a dais as-yet unharmed by the tempest, eyes glazed with shock: perched atop her ears was the golden tiara of a queen. Wells grasped her talon as he flew by, and for a moment it held. Then his momentum carried him away and the grip was lost forever. As he watched a wasp came up behind her and speared her through; dead in an instant. Her spirit left her in her last exhale and settled on his shoulders like another stone added to an already unbearable burden.
Wells prayed.
All they had to do was get west and north, west and north. The colonel was lagging behind – he would not go back. A Mudwing soldier joined with the little convoy – he would not go back. The eyes of the four-winged enemies seemed off; he could not place it, but they were wrong in a way, different from those of the dragons he'd killed in Abalone or those Nonam had torched. It was the darkness playing tricks; the roars getting to him.
He was going to lose it if this kept on.
They were outside the palace grounds now, and into its suburbs; elegant Mudwing homes dug into a raised bank out of the swamp, giving the impression of dry living. Dragons rose from them now, panicked, or huddled in backyard alcoves, frozen from fear. Some died before they got twenty feet off the ground; some made it to the row of soldiery escaping as best they could.
They were drawing attention now. If he was bogged down he died. He smashed another wasp out of the way with his powerful Seawing tail, pressed on as swiftly as an arrow, burning through reserves of energy replenished by the afternoon's food. The wasps were slower than he was – barely – but they were better-fed. Already he'd drawn away from the palace and gained the refuge of the rank lowlands, yet the angry four-wings behind him grew neither larger nor smaller.
He could not go on forever.
He could not turn back or he would be killed.
And ahead of him there was a cordon of wasps, waiting to capture escapees just like him.
There was one option.
"Follow me!" he yelled to the wind, and whither the call went or whether it reached the ears of his compatriots he could not know. He dived, aiming straight for a watery part of the marsh, and in his peripherals he saw the enemies following him. He hit the duckweed with a boom and a splash, and scrabbled down to the grungy, utterly dark bottom two-score of feet below.
The mud caked on his gills; he was choking. For the rest of his stay down here he would be eternally wiping away the clogging dirt, never allowed more than a moment's rest unless he risked unconsciousness on the surface.
It was hell.
It was living.
There was a great fuss above him; dragons splashing around, shouting, expostulating. Cautiously he crawled on the bottom, hidden by the night. It went like this: a pause, some creeping, a rush over his head, a pause, muttering from a foreign tongue, utter silence, a scratch of an itch, some creeping, and so on. Eventually he touched something warm and scaly; a dragon.
It whirled and punched at him: Wells flashed his luminescence till the Mudwing settled down and realized it was a Seawing and not the unknown enemy. They sheltered in each other's presence for a long while, then, when the Mudwing must've been about out of breath, surfaced to see if the wasps had given up or if there was a spear waiting to stab their snouts as they came up.
There was nothing and nobody; just the light of the palace lit up like an Icewing snow globe, only this was yellow instead of blue. It was not burning, but it was being sacked. Raucous laughter drifted towards the two where they were languishing in the mud.
A whisper.
"Did you see Moorhen?"
The Mudwing's voice was deep, not unkind, but unsteady with horror.
Wells had to hedge.
"Why?"
"I'm her brother."
A pause.
"Oh."
"Did you see anything?"
Wells put a talon on the dragon's back, keeping him from going into the fray. The Seawing gulped; this was one hell of an evening.
"Not really."
"Anything!"
"Ssh."
"She's dead," broke in a voice Wells had come to think of as weaselly.
It was that colonel.
The brother's chest shook in silent sobs, but he did not cry. It was a strong dragon who could hold himself in like that, but the grief – Wells didn't want to think of it.
"What's your name?" he asked.
It was a long while before the Mudwing could compose himself.
"Foxglove."
Slowly, surely, some of the other Mudwings emerged from the mud like ancient horrors, each movement a fright in the pit of his stomach before he discerned that the dragon coming towards him was friendly.
"Headcount," whispered Wells. The word was passed around and came back. Of a palace of perhaps twenty-five hundred, with surroundings totaling thousands more, there were nine bunched up in this little group.
"Who's in charge?" asked a voice.
"Foxglove?" asked the colonel. Perhaps he was ashamed of fleeing; if so there was some hope for him yet.
"The prince?"
"Somebody told him Moorhen died."
A pause.
"Well there's nothing I can say about that that could possibly pay true respects to his bond," said the voice again. "I'm Othic."
"Phosphorus."
And several others, veterans mostly.
"We need to get out of dodge," said Wells. "When that sun rises those wasps are going to be out here moving forward to the next town, and the next town. I know 'em."
"Who are they, anyway?" asked Phosphorus. "And how come you know so much about them?"
"Four-winged invaders from somewhere else," said Wells. "I fought them in Abalone. There are some with long weapons that shoot darts that kill you if they hit you; poison, and some with stingers, like Sandwings."
"Any weaknesses?"
Othic this time.
"They die easily if you hit them over the head, and they're scared of fire."
Wells spent a long moment more looking at the castle.
"Let's move," he said. "I've discovered you can go a long way on your belly."
July 4th, 5,015: Somewhere in the Skywing Kingdom.
In the scrolls the characters were always supposed to feel regret when they killed someone. Regret mean emotion; emotion meant sapience. Regret let them know they were sane.
Byrd felt no such quality within him. His heart and his head agreed at last; he was grateful his soldiers had mostly survived taking this town; reluctant to push onward, but more reluctant to chew on the consequences from headquarters if he fell back. If there was sorrow within him it was for the mud-colored one who Monarda killed; not quite dragonet, but not quite dragon either, and boiling atop that was a thin layer of slag-like anger that events had to resolve this way.
Life was being spent on the green hills, from whose slopes protruded sheer cliffs beneath a scurf of dirty earth, the rock gray and lime-yellow and ochre, striated and worn smooth in the nooks where the rain ran. There were caves in the crags also, and now they were out of the town and the tunnels worried him, for it seemed every bushy fox tail was the nose of a red soot; the music of the torpid summer breeze playing the boughs was the whispering of orders being passed to a hidden force.
The hills here seemed great, but far off to the west he saw the tops of gigantic mountains; tons and tons of rock so immense they seemed to go on forever, even in the atmospheric haze, and that brought the hills here to size, and made them seem less grandiose and easier to travel.
He spread his wings like he'd seen the enemy do, trying to catch the membranous limbs on a therm, but he sank like a weighted scroll; the draft failed to buoy him, for the four-bladed instruments were too fine to retain the lifting force, and the wind tugged at his scales as it slipped away from him and was lost for ever. Others behind him tried to copy him, or looked on with neutral snouts and glinting eyes filled with humor. Byrd decided he'd had enough, and he aborted the experiment and went back to flying the way he usually did.
There was a turn in the valley ahead, and a tall, rounded outcropping of rock and wild obscured from his sight what was around the bend. From above the country here looked almost like the little ripples in the ocean-bed at the beach when they'd jumped off Pantala into the unknown. It was as if a great Flood had washed over this part of the continent, spontaneous as the dump of water from a dragonet's bucket over a sand castle.
But he was not above it at current, but flying at the level of the hilltops; there were enemies here, and those which remained from the battle of Smolderfax and the ensuing skirmish at its hill might be waiting in the trees to exact their pound of revenge. Advertising his position by taking altitude gave his position away and gained him nothing.
"Halt!" he cried.
The body of the company came to an orderly stop; forty-five able dragons plus Chervil in the van, admirably holding his place despite the great pain it gave him. Byrd gave his soldiers a cursory glance, searching for the drooping wings of exhaustion, the blinking eyes of fatigue. They seemed alright, though heavily laden with dried meat taken from the area around Smolderfax. Some clung to the rocks on the west side of the valley to his left, some hovered. Stinger popped over the ridge from second company, shrugged and went back to the dragons on the other side. Doubtless he would go on, for dragons made bad time if they were pausing half their journey.
So the other sergeant must have thought.
"A flight of dragons on our westernmost flank, and a flight scouring the woods ahead," said Byrd. "If you see anything, report back to me. The rest of us keep on in this valley."
He named Bolt and Monarda to lead before them. Monarda had the skills and the intestinal fortitude, and she had her head set solidly on her shoulders. And Bolt? Bolt needed the experience. There was always the possibility of deceiving the soots doubtless lying ahead, or of flanking them, or of drawing them into a trap, but this was the tried-and-true way, the easiest for his subordinates to execute – for as an officer there was always the niggling doubt in the back of his mind about whether his soldiers could pull off anything complicated.
But even this was a sight better than running down the bluff corridor with no recon ahead to warn him of growing danger; he should've done this a long time ago, though he comforted himself by thinking 'I was busy'. That would be like a game of blind dragon's buff played in the dark, daylight or no, with daggers awaiting the back of the blind dragon.
That was exactly what Stinger was doing.
"Forward quarter, and on till dusk," he ordered.
"Yes sir," they said, and all was right in the world.
He could choose not to warn Stinger, and let Stinger run into an ambush and ruin, and a demotion from headquarters, and Byrd inevitably lieutenant of the battalion – or he could tell Stinger of the danger, and keep their force intact for another day of fighting. One option was better for the Hivewings; the other gave more power to him.
An hour after they'd begun again, he chose the former.
"And get a messenger to Stinger and tell him to get recon out," he said, as if continuing the conversation directly from sixty minutes ago. His designs were a moment too soon. Hardly had the courier disappeared over the eastern hill than there was movement ahead of them, blurry and dirty and brown, as if dragons of the dirtwings had risen from the earth and were upon them – for still he called the sepia dragons this.
"Bristle below!" he called; their formation of flights strung out in diamonds came together with dragons wielding spears to defend them from below and blowpipes for range.
Byrd bit his lip. The soldiers gave him sidelong looks. Shouldn't they fire?
It took sharp eyes to discern in the body of the enemy the eight-limbed form of Hivewings, but Byrd saw four wings, and his concern was ameliorated.
"Identification!" he called, when they had reached hearing range and it was obvious to all that orange and black stripes peered from beneath waistcoats of mud and dirt and leaves.
"Bolt and company, sir," came the reply from fifty yards.
It sounded like the guy.
"Report," said Byrd.
"We mussed in a streambank, then proceeded forward. There's five soots holed up in a tall bluff northwest looking out for us, and they outnumbered us but they didn't notice us, so I skedaddled back here. There might be a bigger force near them, sir."
"Extrapolating is my job, not yours," said Byrd.
"Yes sir," said Bolt, not much cowed. Dragons of his type would keep wondering in their minds, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
But it was an excellent move, camouflaging the scout group like that, relying on the inattentiveness of lookouts who'd seen nothing and expected to see nothing to slip through valleys which were putatively guarded.
So why did Bolt sometimes do stupid things?
"Half of you camouflage in the valley stream, the other half stay your stripes," ordered Byrd, reversing his no-complicated-tactics policy. To split up his force any more than he had was to be overwhelmed individually by the ambushers he know knew for sure were in the hills, but he had a plan. While the dragons camouflaging were being picked by their comrades, Byrd took Bolt aside.
"Where did you get the idea to roll in the mud?"
"I was curious to see if anybody'd see me if I did," said he, "and whether they'd mistake us."
Byrd would say the tactic worked pretty well. The answer explained why the soldier was at times brilliant and at others made seemingly dumb moves; he was insatiably curious.
It made him wonder how many camouflaged enemies were running around with his lookouts oblivious to them.
That was an unpleasant thought.
"Get the dirt off in your brook, then lead us to the cliff," said Byrd. "How close would you say the lookouts were to Stinger?"
"Oh, not very far, sir. Second will run right into them if they keep going."
Then they needed to hurry. He looked ahead, saw the friendlies rising from the middle of the valley with dirt all over them. Where was Monarda? The seeds of worry began to burn holes in his thought processes, and they were hard to quench.
No; Monarda could take care of herself.
"Bolt here will lead us to the enemy. You in the camouflage, keep in touch but stay in the trees. When we find a large concentration of soots we'll blow the horn and you'll hit the enemy flanks."
"Yes sir, sir," they said.
Battle was close upon them, and Byrd put the matter of Monarda out of his mind. If she was alright that was well and good; if she wasn't, that was her mistake, and if her force was estranged from his, they would work back to the point of their departure and catch up to third company from there.
"Forward!" he ordered, and the soldiers tagged along behind Byrd and Bolt; Byrd a beat ahead for purposes of appearance, but his subordinate nudging him in the right direction every time they went off track. They went over the westward ridge and settled into the next valley; a false path that would lead a dragon in circles if he wasn't careful, for the corridors ended suddenly, and curved when they seemed straight, and obscured the sun and made navigation difficult, all of which was dangerous to the uninitiated traveler.
But they had compasses, one for every four of them on paper (though two of the twelve had been lost in the river at Smolderfax somehow), and common sense and Bolt's inner direction skills, which led them unerringly to the bluff, a loaf of sheer rock perched on a table-like plateau, with trees growing on the crust. Byrd ordered his force beneath it, making a great show of being oblivious to everything and seeing nothing, while all the while he scanned out the corners of his eyes, his head turning neither right nor left. The soots must have been delighted.
"Hivewings ahead!" cried a lookout; it was Stinger, there was no one else it could be, and Byrd's plans were unraveling in front of his eyes. The enemy would be spooked, would not make an attack during daylight, would not play into his talons as he had so hoped.
Those wise words of long past came to him, unindoctrinated as he was in them at officer school. No plan survives first contact with the enemy, they said, though he thought of it in a rather different way. What was the use of planning anything at all, if plans came apart so easily?
There was a notch in the bluffs ahead, and Stinger's dragons were traipsing through it, perhaps five miles away, but clearly in Byrd's area of engagement. It was a perfect place for an ambush, too, and as Byrd whipped out his spyglass he saw the train of Stinger's group going through in diamond groups of four or five, undisciplined and ripe for the pickings, and the courier he'd sent coming back in frustration.
It was as well he did.
Half an hour later Byrd and company were making good speed north along the next ridge westward, slowing every now and then to let the camouflaged dragons behind them keep up without breaking concealment and becoming conspicuous. Stinger was still racing ahead of them, gaining two miles of separation every hour. A gap was opening up between them, making them weak. Observing on the wing, Byrd looked to his spyglass again, eyeing the strange environs, then cast a cursory glance at the friendlies, expecting the usual snafu.
They were embroiled in combat. Bolt's unlooked-for hunch was true, and a dread prophecy had come to pass, its words unspoken by anyone but known by all.
"Flank speed!" ordered Byrd, and third company broke from its stealth. But the wide expanse which had grown between the two forces would take at least twenty minutes to traverse. As he watched the lead of Stinger's group spun around and attempted to succor their rear, yet as quickly as they arrived the soots engaged the stragglers of the move.
Byrd had warned Stinger and Stinger had paid no heed. And he had best look after himself or he would be shortly engaged as second company was – there! Russet movement in the trees.
"Slow to full!"
Not a moment too soon. The move bunched his soldiers into one mass, the uncamouflaged ones anyway. But where were the others?
No time for that now. A deluge of soots fell upon them like angry hurricanes before they could get into formation properly, and there was a hue and cry from both sides.
"Spears, spears!" he ordered. Some failed to respond; doubtless they had not heard him. But others moved at least, better than last time, and put up a defense from which the enemy veered, unwilling to impale their own on Hivewing steel. There was an outpouring of flame from which he instinctively recoiled, and the enemy burst through the smoke like demons and all was chaos.
He was twisting and dodging and biting and doing everything he could to fight back; his life was his to surrender on a deathbed, not here, not now. He thought he killed another dragon; it was impossible to know. Then the soots retreated, circling the chaos and looking for stragglers. Hivewings appeared from over the ridge, only four of them, but much more to Byrd in the heat of battle and likewise to the enemy, for they made to withdraw.
A cheer went up from the beleaguered company, and he looked and then he saw why. The enemy had run square into the other half of third, stalking unseen through the trees; the tide of battle had reversed.
"Crescent! Engage!" cried Byrd.
The enemy was caught between hammer and tongs, unable to escape except at the fringes; still he gave up not arms but fought like a tiger in its den, twice as dangerous as before. The enemy dead and dying were strewn across the meadow when the last of the soots gave up and bugged out.
There was no time to attend to them, however; Stinger was still embattled, the clashing of weapons and dragon roars audible over the buzzing of the flies. Byrd ordered them on, and at their presence the enemy in Stinger's valley feinted, then withdrew. For him it was a sudden victory; for Stinger it was an embarrassing defeat.
"Report!" cried Byrd, looking over his company himself. They were shifting and writhing, going over the bodies for souvenirs, and all sorts of things. "Stop moving."
And when they were all lined up he counted forty-three dragons, including Monarda's, who had come back in the nick of time. Five more casualties of injury, to a varying degree – and here was the forty-fourth dragon, worse hit than Chervil, and clearly unable to go on much longer in this hostile country, yet unable to go back, either.
They had won by a long shot, but the butcher's bill was larger than he would've liked. Such was the nature of war. There was one dead somewhere; eventually he was found and a cairn of stones heaped above his final resting place.
His casualties had doubled in an hour, but Stinger's plight revealed it could've been much, much worse. A third of second company was hurt, and three more were dead, and equipment and supplies strewn everywhere with no replacement. They spent an hour hunting for weapons and compasses and dropped food, and more time getting water for the injuries and building cairns, and at the end of it the victorious enthusiasm of third company was damped. As to Stinger? His morale was the lowest of the low.
An answer came to Byrd's earlier question about plans. They were useful inasmuch as they allowed soldiers to respond in a crisis where there was no clear leadership, and so gave order to otherwise hopeless chaos. Often they went horribly astray, but without them even the smallest action was a monumental task.
The new system was looking more attractive every second.
In the meantime, the sun was setting, and the soldiers had little will to go on, except to get away from the scene of the recent graves, the trees still stained ochre with foul-smelling blood. They went north a few miles to a brook, and posted a watch and ate victuals, though Byrd ordered there would be no fire that night. It would've given their position away, but as it was the cold, smoked food was tasteless, and the lack of light on the rapidly darkening ridge meant there was no cheer.
Things seemed like they couldn't get any worse.
Naturally, the weather decided now was the time to act up.
The gathering storm jutted its lip before it near the ground, and curved away from them until it reached the midpoint of its height, whence it billowed back, and spread out at hitting an invisible ceiling, and the cloud-top formed the surface of an anvil. A thin layer of air separated the clouds from the ground ahead of them, and the land beneath was darkened even to dragon-sight, obscured by blue-gray cascades of rain which fell from above, churned by the wind midair.
It was beautiful.
It was also headed right for them.
Dark came, and it rained and it rained and it rained, paused, then rained some more. It was halfway through the dratted night before any of them could get some sleep, and of course then they were woken up for their turn as watch, so that when morning came they were in a very bitter mood, yet there was nothing to do but go on.
Confusticate and bother this war.
"Well," said Chervil, as they shook off the rain and slapped mosquitoes before the start, "it's got to get better since we've gone through the worse."
Oh Chervil. If only Byrd could share his enthusiasm, he would be the cheerfullest guy in the world.
July 4th - 8th, 5,015: Also Somewhere in the Skywing Kingdom.
That Thrush made it through the enemy lines while hardly noticing he had was not, in hindsight, a particularly big surprise. That he was in some consternation when he realized he had wasn't a big surprise, either. But it was what he did after this epiphany which set him apart from lesser commanders, and his soldiers from lesser dragons, and – you shall see. At any rate it was at this point that he decided to use best judgment. There were (in his opinion) wasps down the entire coast of Pyrrhia, stretched thin like butter too finely put on bread, and with their supply lines long and doubtless getting longer, with the vanguard (wherever they were, and if they existed) far behind, left in the dust by the huge gains of the last couple of days.
Thrush had a very practical mind.
"Too unproductive to keep going south," he'd say. So he ordered a full turn and took the hundred west, moving by night, eating the miles in droves, so that he came very nearly to the coast before any news of his passage could be carried to headquarters in the conventional way, or made sense of if indeed 111th brigade (for it was they who he had burst through during the first advance) could have gotten the news by the new way, for the speed of his journey could not be anticipated by one unfamiliar with Skywings in general and Thrush in particular.
It was on the sixth that he at last sighted the enemy lines of communication; about forty dragons coming out of Azley, a few hundred miles south of Smolderfax and nearer the coast; exceedingly near indeed, and the risk he ran of coming to grips with the vanguard of second cohort he could only guess at, though it was an incredible one. There were wasps, and Skywings transporting freight under them; obviously not of their own choice, for there were guards there, sixteen.
And Thrush retreated from where he first sighted them, and guessed their path through one of the passes of the bluffs, and laid up in it without showing himself in the way Byrd had feared two days ago, and justifiably so. The enemy made camp in the valley, and one-by-one, dooming themselves to their fate, the sentries went to sleep.
Thrush had their throats cut.
Now there were forty Skywings freed, and a good deal of them veterans, or reserve warriors, or youngsters who'd never been in a war but had been trained by their fathers and mothers to handle themselves in it. They were excitable, unknowing of the eternal consequence which came from slaying another being. They needed supervision, and Thrush set about organizing the new joins with military precision; putting them under dragons who had been sergeants or even colonels in their time, and folding the remainder into his own unit, all the while picking through the enemy supplies with the constraint of moving before dawn.
No one wanted to have their necks sliced.
Despite this, however, the mood of the company was optimistic; they had food for days, stored in caches here or on their bodies; their enemy was naive and unsuspecting; never having had to fight a war in their generation, while the dragons under Thrush had been through as many as fifteen years of fighting in one case, and sixteen of the invaders were lying dead in the meadow while two-score of their tribe had been liberated and were now fighting with them (though half of them were very confused, and frightened inside, and insecure from the world going topsy-turvy).
The Skywings were uniquely prepared for war, being a tribe almost made for it, and trained in self-defense before they came of age and battle-winning afterwards, and a practical mindset which allowed them to get over the shock of being invaded (mostly) before other tribes would've stopped blinking.
It was a sanguine log report which Thrush wrote on the morning of the seventh.
The enemy is not so powerful as we originally believed: after breaking through their thin lines we have been tearing around the country. 1 LoC wrecked w no casualties; noted location of intercept on map; departing for different area but will come back here someday to catch another convoy.
Eagle, however, was much more beleaguered. Looking at the map on his desk it could be said he was in a good position; he had a number of divisions coming together, and brigades all over the place, and battalions sprouting from the fertile Skywing population like weeds.
But he knew the reports of Skywing strength were wrong. The divisions were overzealous paper creations; the brigades were about the size of companies, and the battalions were zany, disorganized units with no cohesion as yet. The main objective had been specified – they would gradually fall back to the mountains, taking everything with them – but such a cleancut directive was hard to accomplish in practice. The young dragons who were charged with taking Skywing material to their strongholds might not know the way; their elders might have war injuries restricting their ability in a fight, and it was doubtful the order had even reached half the kingdom.
He longed for some good news – perhaps the enemy were not so powerful as he'd thought they were; perhaps they were inexperienced; perhaps their lines of communication were stretched; perhaps their front was coming apart at the seams. But he didn't think so; at least, there was a good chance Thrush had gone and been caught and died, a hundred decent warriors gone down with him, or on another part of the continent and not helping him.
So Eagle was in a somber mood when at last they left the Skywing palace on the sixth, the stronghold which had been the seat of the kingdom for so many thousands of years, and now he was the one who would be forever remembered in the tribe's eyes as the marshal who abandoned it. That he had forever earned himself a place in the history books wasn't much of a comfort.
There was at least another marshal on the trip: Forge, recently arrived from the mountains, but everything which was worth talking about had been talked about, and rehashing their plight would be misery, so all in all it was a quiet journey west to the higher peaks of the Claws of the Clouds. Ruby, too, a beacon of hope on the fourth, was grim.
They crossed the Diamond Spray river and soon were in the wild country.
"Here we are," said Forge, on the eighth, when they looked up and beheld the first mountain of the first mountain line; Alpine Peak, renamed after that dead grand marshal from the great war whose steps Eagle now felt he was faithfully tracing. It had an older name: Azkilach: the Stronghold.
"A fourth of the way to Possibility," said Eagle. There was a great deal of mountain land between here and that town, insurance in case the war went even more wrong, but the distance already traversed reminded him how far they had fallen.
"Skywings; gardeners, guards, cooks, and what-ho," he said, addressing those who had come along with them. "You are soldiers first, and professionals. The tunnels in this fortress are old and decrepit, and we must fortify them."
Finding them was a hard job in and of itself. The sheer slopes, snowy crevices and craggy rimrock defied description; this was the highest mountain in all these parts of the north, and it showed. Though the base was sizzling with midsummer heat, the peak chilled Eagle to the bones. And it was a thousand feet down from the peak that they found the gate, facing southwards and protected from the elements by a gray outcropping, its bars rusted away by untold age, the rock at its foundation cracked by the freezing and thawing which came to this place every hundred years or so, during particularly bad storms.
"There's a cave-in farther down," said Forge. Being the less important marshal, he'd ventured down the tunnel before them, and found a pile of rock blocking their way.
Creating another set of tunnels, and another gate, and another labyrinth within the mountain – that was outside the reach of what they could do. It was spoken in whispers of their ancestors' propensity with sudden fire, and blasting, and a society of craftmanship so competent the average mason of their time did work fit for queens. And as Eagle looked upon the ancient structure, he knew well they could never regenerate all of its old glory.
But they could bend it to their own ends. And that was exactly what he did.
"Put up pillars to keep up the roof, and dig through the blockage," he ordered. "And get a fire going, and a party going around the mountains assembling all the dragons you can find."
Even Ruby helped with the digging; it was one thing to be ordered to do something unpleasant, and another thing to see your ruler doing it alongside you, for as long as you were, and with about as many rest breaks as you had, which was to say none. The walls of the square tunnel were shored up with cobble and the blockage was partially cleared by nightfall.
"Eagle!" called Forge, from down the hall. "Permission to explore the halls, sir."
"Granted," Eagle shouted back. "But make a map!"
"Of course."
And marshal and soldiers tramped down the confusing corridors and vanished out of sight, and the flickering orange glow of their torches glinting off the frozen walls was the only remark of their passage, until that too faded. It reminded Eagle of ferreting out Blister's underground fortresses near Jade Mountain all those years ago; going on a dozen now, the bad old days, but none the better for the passing of time.
The notion of giving up tickled the back of his mind. To put his people through another war; more death and another blight on their future – this was anathema. But to surrender to a foreign power was also anathema; it had never been done, and he was not about to do it. Already he had surrendered the palace.
"The buck stops here," he said, muttering.
"You were saying?" asked Ruby, from just inside the firelight, tired and bedraggled yet still looking fine.
"The buck stops here."
"There might come a time when we'll have to give from here, too. We can't get attached to this place," said Ruby.
"I do mean to keep it," said Eagle. He looked down the valley and to the base of the next mountain east, its snowy peak a foreground to the far glint of the palace, still visible if one cared to look long and hard. Two weeks ago he was looking forward to peace and quiet, and a dignified retirement and perhaps children. Now… "What place do we have but this?"
