Condensation running from the pipes and leaking steam emptied, rather cleverly, he had to admit, into cisterns, so the blighters always had access to clean, warmed water. There was therefore no excuse for the scraps and ventings and waste heaped in the gutters.
“Squawker,” the Copper bellowed. As he inflated his long lungs to yell again, a rather scabby old blighter scrambled out of the biggest cubbyhole, a terraced multiroom wooden pile with some decorative carvings.
The Copper didn’t know his real name; he’d called him Squawker from the first.
Long arms smoothed down the blighter’s sparse fur. “RuGaard-Lord! I attending!” He practically danced in front of the Copper, bobbing.
“Trash and muck everywhere,” the Copper said. “Get it cleaned up at once.”
“Make proper! Make proper!” Squawker bellowed in Drakine, pointing to wheelbarrow, trash-cart, and scrub-broom. Blighters popped in and out of their habitats like startled rats in a trash-heap. The Copper’s one remaining purpose in life was being the prowling cat in the alley.
Most of the blighters could speak a few words of Drakine: yes, beg, at once, very sorry. Squawker was practically an Ankelene scholar, being able to carry on a conversation.
Squawker watched the action. “All fix up proper, many busy hands lighten tasking, for noble dragons orders being mine dragons obey always at once,” he blatted out, with a sweeping gesture at the cleanup action. A female blighter hurled a week’s worth of charcoal dust off her balcony and the Copper watched it descend like snowflakes. A current of air caused by the Copper’s breathing pulled the floating ash toward him and Squawker beat at it in the air like he was fighting off gnats.
“That was quite a speech. Where did you learn your Drakine, Squawker?”
Squawker explored a crevice thankfully out of the Copper’s line of sight. “Father learn in dragon tower. Father teach Squawker growing up.”
“What’s the ‘dragon tower’?”
“Far off in sunset place, on water, high,” he said, sniffing the results of his probe on caked fingertips and scowling. “Father feeder and scale cleaner, travel many flight dragons, but fall off this side mountains, loose dragons, loose circle man. All find here settle.”
“I want you and only you to prepare the Vesshall dragon dinner tonight, Squawker. No other hands are to touch it. Were there many dragons in this dragon tower?”
“Lord, yes, mine many more thans here. Good big dragons. For need stitching and cleaning and feeding. Fighting dragons, mates, ittle-ittle hatchlings. Lord RuGaard want scale cleaned? White soft very bad, Lord, scrape off grow new.”
Insolent cur. “It’s my scale! I’ll attend to it,” the Copper growled.
He tried to get a bit more about the dragon tower out of Squawker, but it was of little use. Confused tales from his father that may have been mostly brag anyway. Blighters always talked up their situation in life. Basking in the reflected power of their betters brought them status, and the better the betters, the better the blighter. Still, it gave him something new to think about.
He probed the rotting tooth, pushed hard—
It came away in a painful ecstasy of relief. The Copper had a foul, bloody, rotting taste in his mouth and spat. He took a mouthful of freshly condensed water from one of the cisterns and spat in the gutter again. Looking in the cistern, he saw the tooth, yellowed at the tip, then brown, then black at the rotted spot at the root.
His mouth already felt better. He’d have Wistala find some herb or other to soothe the pain and clean the hole. Like her dragon tower companion DharSii, she was clever about many things, but had an especially good nose for medicinal herbs.
He picked the tooth up with his lips and tossed it to Squawker.
“Treasures, my lord! Thank you, thank you, thousand thankings. May your claws breed inside many enemies throats. All proper not a moment too much!”
“You’re welcome, Squawker. I enjoy our little conversations. They’re so refreshingly deranged.”
“Always best deranged for you, Lord RuGaard,” Squawker said, bowing deeply.
The Copper prowled the tunnels of the Sadda-Vale. If he’d cared about art and stonemasonry, he would have found interest in every arch and decorative tile. Artistic flourishes might intrigue DharSii and Wistala and engage them in one of their interminable discussions. To the Copper, the facades were so much dirty old junk, with a potential to shelter bugs or vermin. Beauty was found in usefulness, like the perches in the great hall or that hole in the top of the stone ceiling that allowed you to fly in and out of the hall at need. As for these tile-decorated passages, they should burn it all thoroughly, just to kill off the scale nits and eggs and ear-diggers no doubt lurking in the moister crevices.
So there were other dragons, here in the north. His impression, from the experiences of his brother and sister, was that the only dragons not part of the Dragon Empire were a few back-to-nature oddballs and this vestige of the first age of draconic greatness in the Sadda-Vale. He’d heard of some mercenary dragons—his former bodyguard Shadowcatch had been one—who were the remnants of some mad wizard’s army. He should have questioned Shadowcatch more closely; it never occurred to him that the dragons were established and breeding.
Scabia would no more think of risking her dragons’ lives in the world outside the Sadda-Vale than she’d scrape out her nostrils during one of the interminable feasts she’d throw to celebrate some long-dead ancestor. She’d seen too many relatives die, sticking their snouts into the affairs of hominids and trying to change the flow of history. “One might as well beat back the tide with your wings,” she liked to say.
The Copper ate his evening meal alone, as usual. What wasn’t usual was the reason. Instead of making himself miserable through loneliness, this time he wanted to think.
How would a band of dragons support itself, if not as part of the Dragon Empire? Were they mercenaries who fought for food and gold, or independents banding together for protection, or some vestige of the Circle of Man who’d employed the Dragonblade, the fierce man who’d briefly helped the idiot Tyr who preceded him control the Lavadome? Perhaps men who wished no part of domination from the Empire—or their pet Hypatians—paid the dragons to protect them.
If there was bad blood between this dragon tower and the Empire, all the better.
One danger, though.