Ice Dragon

Chapter 4

The sparse comforts of the room in the town hall where Blade was confined did more to increase his confidence in the Treduki than all Nilando's promises, however sincere the man might be. The room had a rough wooden bedstead with a straw-filled mattress and plenty of pillows and coarse wool blankets, a chair, a table with a water jug and eating utensils on top of it, a large chest, and in one corner a wooden bucket with a lid. It was, Blade suspected, hardly more uncomfortable than the rooms in which many of the Irdnans themselves lived. Only the locked door with the armed sentry outside suggested that he was not a guest.

The light coming in through the bars of the single high window gradually turned red, then faded away entirely, and the sounds of daytime gradually gave way to those of evening and night. An elderly woman brought in a large loaf of coarse gray bread, an equally large lump of pale yellow cheese, a pot of stew, a handful of apples, and a bucket from which she filled the water jug. Blade thanked her and proceeded to dismantle the meal with an appetite sharpened by the day's activities and unhindered by any fear of poison or drugs. Nothing about the tough, proud Treduki suggested they would do such a thing, even to a person more dangerous than himself-except perhaps to a Dragon Master. If one of those could be somehow captured and interrogated, he might reveal much of what was going on up there to the north where the Dragons laired. Or rather, where whoever was responsible for the Dragons caused them to lair.

The more he considered what he had seen and heard, the more he was convinced that at some point along the line from the first advance of the glaciers to the Ice Dragons and their Masters a superior technology was operating. Not that of the Graduki either. Unless those people were extraordinarily willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces, they could hardly be responsible for systematically creating an ice age simply to attack the Treduki. Especially when one considered that the Graduk-Treduk rivalry had apparently become really serious only after the glaciers began their march.

Even if the Graduki were not responsible for the glaciation, they were certainly the people whom Blade had to approach while in this dimension. As much as he liked the Treduki, he had to face the fact that they had little to teach him or give him to bring back to Home Dimension. Possibly the Graduki didn't either, since Blade was not at all sure how good the Treduki were at recognizing a «superior» technology. But the Treduki had so far shown nothing that would have caused surprise in the days of Oliver Cromwell. Even if he wanted to help them in their resistance to the ice and its monstrous spawn, he would also need to meet the Graduki and find ways of making use of their superior technology for that purpose.

But how to get to the Graduki, without simply fleeing into the forest or stealing a boat and making his way down the river? That would betray the considerable trust Nilando and Rena had already placed in him, and besides, what he had heard suggested that the nearest Graduk settlement was at least two thousand miles farther south. He would be doing well to cross that distance unhampered by natural accidents, let alone by hostile Treduki.

The question kept, his mind working for a time, but it was not so urgent that he felt inclined to lose sleep over it, and fatigue gradually crept over him without resistance. His last thoughts as he drifted off to sleep were erotic memories of Rena.

He was awakened by a continuous blaring of trumpets from the wall, interspersed with the occasional boom of the guns on the river pier. Crimson light from torches was pouring in through the cell window. He heard shouts of anger, screams of panic, feet pounding past in all directions and in all numbers from one man to a score, ponies neighing, pigs squealing, the clatter of weapons, and the rumble of cartwheels. He hurled himself out of bed and snatched up his clothes, jerking them on as though the devil himself were knocking at the door. That might not be too far from the truth. Only one thing could be making the Irdnans turn out like this in the middle of the night.

The sentry at the door was gone, but the door was still locked. Blade shook the bars until they rattled and clanged like a smithy, bellowed in a voice louder than the panic-stricken livestock, and finally picked up the table and began swinging it against the lock. Wood splintered and smashed, metal groaned and twisted. He nearly had the lock freed when two guards came running up with pistols in their hands.

«Let me out, you idiots!» Blade yelled. «I'm a fighting man in my own land. I can help you.»

«N-n-no one can help us n-n-now,» moaned one of the guards. «Only maybe the Keeper of the Gates of the Dark World. The Ice Dragons are on us!»

«Damn you!» roared Blade. «All the more reason to let me out. Do you want to let a man die like a trapped animal here?» The two guards looked at each other, and some of the panic faded from their eyes. Dying on one's feet was a message they understood. One of them pulled out a key and turned it in the battered lock. Miraculously it still functioned, and the door clicked open.

As the door swung free, the noise outside grew to a terrible droning roar that seemed to come from all sides at once. The two guards took off at a dead run, leaving Blade to make his own way out of the cell.

The hall was almost deserted. The few people scuttling aimlessly about had too much on their minds to notice Blade. None were prepared to challenge him when he ran down to the cellar to where he suspected the armory would be, and was rewarded by the sights of muskets, pikes, and bows. He had no idea of how to handle a flintlock muzzleloader and obviously would have no time to learn; tonight it was going to be cold steel for him. He snatched up an axe in one hand and hooked the thong through his belt, and with the other hand scooped up a five-foot bow and a quiver of arrows. Even in the seconds that this took, the noise outside rose still further, until it seemed that the robust stone arches of the building and its heavy roof timbers must crumble, crack, and fall down about his ears. As he sprinted up the stairs again, it was like running in a dream-the clatter of his boots on the stone stairs was noiseless in all the surrounding uproar.

The hall was deserted now, but outside he could see figures running past in a noon-bright glare far brighter than anything the torches could conceivably be giving off. He ran to the door and, momentarily cautious, pushed his head out for a preliminary look.

Irdna was built around a central square, with the town hall and other public buildings in the middle of the square. The shops and houses stood in two concentric rectangles around it, their windowless outer walls forming extra barriers to anyone penetrating into the town even if they breached the outer wall.

Blade saw that the rooftops and walls had sprouted clusters of armed men. Two additional groups had stationed themselves in the main square, each facing down one of the wide streets that led to the two main gates. Both streets had also been blocked with overturned carts, and Blade saw working parties busily piling timbers and sacks of grain to strengthen the barricades. All the people-a good proportion of the fighters were women-seemed armed to the teeth, with firearms, cold steel, and bows. The parties facing the streets each had a small artillery piece on a four-wheeled carriage, and Blade saw fuses smoldering and shot stacked ready for use.

Hundreds of old people and children were pouring into the square, huddling against the walls of the inner layer of buildings and avoiding both the streets and the open center of the town square. Blade wondered why they had not stayed in their homes, then remembered the way the village houses had been pushed in on themselves. Anyone caught in his house would be likely to die under the collapsing rubble, while in the open he might at least run. And no doubt the people had vain, vague hopes that the walls and the fighting parties would keep the Ice Dragons from ever reaching the center of town.

Abruptly the droning roar ceased, and what seemed in contrast a dead silence fell down on the town. But it was only in contrast. As Blade's ears recovered from the strain, he could make out a continuous crunching and snorting from outside the walls. Then the blue-white glare also died, but not before Blade saw a pair of vast and hideous fanged heads rise on immensely long necks over the main gate of Irdna. Half a dozen muskets let fly into the sudden darkness, then the crunching and snorting in turn died. There was a moment of genuine silence during which Blade found himself holding his breath-and then a series of thunderous crashes from all around the walls. It seemed that a giant was bowling twenty-ton boulders against the town's walls.

More guns went off, then the crashes came again, this time in ragged synchronization. In the moment of silence that followed, Blade heard leaders yelling to their men to hold their fire until they had a clear target. As the Ice Dragons rammed themselves against the town walls a third time, now all moving together, Blade strode over to the guards facing the main gate. Their leader turned around and stared at Blade.

«Nilando!»

«How did you get out?» exclaimed the Irdnan. «I thought-«Whatever he thought vanished in the thunder of another thrust by the Ice Dragons, sounding as though the very glaciers that were their homes were pushing against the walls of Irdna. Nilando turned back to watch the gate until the groan of its tortured timbers had died away, then repeated his question. Blade was just about to answer when in his turn he was cut off by the battering-ram crash of the attacking monsters, and then by a wild cry that somehow rose over all the crashes and screams that should have drowned it out.

«They're over the east wall!»

The east wall was invisible behind the roofs of houses and shops, but the roar and crash of falling stones and the crackle of splintering timbers told its own frightful story, as did the continuous flashes as the eastern guards fired as fast as they could load their muskets. Then Blade saw glints as they dropped their muskets and pistols, and more glints as some snatched out swords and axes. Others leaped wildly down from second- or third-story roofs, preferring broken limbs or heads to death at the hands of what was plowing into the town behind them. Another fanged head rose up, something white and shrieking writhing in its teeth. Directly ahead, three more monstrous shapes rose once again over the main gate and lunged forward in a deadly wedge. The main gate screamed in a final agony of dying metal and timber and gave inward.

Instantly the cannon the guard party was manning went off with a tremendous flare of flame and smoke and a roar that would at other times have been deafening, but now sounded to Blade no louder than the popping of a paper bag. Then the musketeers were forming up into a single line, raising their weapons to their shoulders, and firing a savage rolling volley that made dust and stone chips spurt all around the gate as balls smashed into the wall. Some of the grapeshot from the cannon and some of the musket balls must have hit the Ice Dragons, but they paid no more attention to them than Blade would have to a mosquito bite. Behind the first three Blade saw more heads rising, and he nocked an arrow to his bow and pulled back, waiting until one of the beasts held its head motionless long enough to permit a shot at the eyes. Those antique muskets the Irdnans were using might have some advantages over a longbow, but accuracy would not be one of them. Other archers were also forming up and letting fly, both from the square and from the rooftops.

Whether the volleys stung the Ice Dragons or, more likely, gave their Masters a moment's pause, the massed monsters coming through the gate slowed for a moment and milled about. Blade looked off to the right, toward the broken east wall, and saw more heads looming there too, as more Ice Dragons poured through the breach and ramped and raged about amid the buildings on that side of town, snatching the last few defenders screaming from the roofs. But they showed no signs of pushing on into the town square from that direction.

Blade looked back to the gate attack just in time to see the whole mass surge forward, a wall of flesh on a forest of tree-trunk legs, and the musketeers and archers let go another massed volley. Then the Dragon formation split apart, as two at each end of the line hurled themselves at the houses on either side of the street, like rugby players ramming a hole in the opposing defenses for the ball carrier. Blade heard timbers crack, stones cascade into the street, ponies and livestock scream as they died in the collapsing buildings, and the fighters of Irdna do the same as they fell to their deaths on the stone streets or felt fanged jaws close around them. In the darkness, Blade dimly saw the capture webs flick out, snatching still others up from the streets or down from the roofs and windows.

The Dragons closed ranks, moved forward, opened again, and again buildings fell and men and animals gave their death cries. Now the Dragons were less than fifty yards away and their odor marched before them like a mephitic wall. Some of the men of Irdna, tough as they were, stared with panic-stricken faces at the death lumbering slowly and inexorably toward them, but most, including Nilando, simply gripped their weapons tighter, licked their lips or sipped from their canteens, and waited to die on their native earth. Then the Dragons reared up, and as one of them turned slightly sideways Blade caught his first clear glimpse of a Dragon Master.

In every limb and feature Blade could see, the Master was human. But he was dressed from the neck down in a shimmering silver suit, slightly bagged at the joints and showing signs of extra padding on the torso, and his head was concealed in a spherical silver helmet with a dead-black visor. In each hand he carried the short stave or wand that Rena had mentioned, and as he flicked them forward and backward along the Dragon's neck Blade could see the monster responding. The Master looked in fact like nothing as much as a cross between a moonwalking astronaut and a medieval knight, and it was easy to guess that the helmet and suit provided virtually complete protection from any missile. But if one were to close in, and strike full force at a Dragon Master with, let us say, an axe-supposing the Dragon permitted one to close-what then? Blade found he had a great desire to gather in one of the Dragon Masters and with him perhaps a few clues to the menace that threatened this dimension.

But for the moment there was no time to do any of the planning such a move would require. The wall of Dragons reared up now once more, came down with all their legs thudding into the ground like pile drivers, then moved forward at a steadily increasing pace. Before this avalanche of flesh there was nothing except death to be found by staying, and Blade, Nilando, and the others scattered before the rush. Blade saw one man stumble over the pile of shot, and before he could recover his stride a huge head swooped down like the bucket of a power shovel and then swooped up again, with the man firmly clamped in its teeth. Others met the same fate; still others simply failed to clear the path of the onrushing Dragons and vanished under the massive feet, moving forward with a thunder that drowned out even final screams.

«Irdna has fallen,» gasped Nilando as they reached the street that led out of the square toward the river gate and the pier and the boats beyond it. «But I think we may get many people clear if we get the river gate open and have boats ready. The Ice Dragons cannot swim and I much doubt if they can plow through virgin forest as fast as our river can take us south.» He began shouting orders to the men of the party that had been guarding the river approach to the square. Some had already fled; most were stubbornly waiting on rooftops and in windows, letting off muskets and bows whenever they thought they had a target, waiting for the Ice Dragons to finish them off. It was a determination to defend their town to the death that Blade could have admired more if it had not been so blind. Even one of their fellow Irdnans, who presumably loved his town no less than they, now felt that it was time to seek safety and the chance to fight another day.

The men on the roof recognized Nilando and began disappearing into windows and trap doors to head downstairs, or simply sliding down the wood drainpipes at the corners of the roof. One of the first to join Blade and Nilando was Rena, with a knife in her belt and a pistol as long as her arm in one hand. She seemed none the worse for her experiences of the day before, although her eyes were wide and alert as she stared around her. Nilando embraced her, then sent her off toward the river.

Backing slowly toward the gate, Nilando's party picked up men and women in twos and threes. The screams from the square were even more hideous than before, as the Ice Dragons raged and slaughtered the people huddled against the buildings with jaws and tails and trampling feet. The roar of the dragons, the fading crackle of musketry from the remaining defenders, the crash of falling buildings, and the screams of dying people blended into a death cry from the town of Irdna.

The Dragons in the square-or their Masters-were so concerned with systematically killing or capturing what lay within easy reach that Nilando's party, forty or more armed men and women, was able to reach the river gate unmolested, even unnoticed. Looking up as Nilando and one of the men set themselves to turning the cranks that released the bars and opened the gates, Blade was relieved to see none of the hideous Dragon heads towering above the gate. As the gate swung open, with creaks and groans hopefully inaudible above the noise behind them, he was even more relieved to see the town's boats still bobbing at the pier.

«It seems the chief Dragon Master-«began Nilando, turning to Blade. But the sentence was chopped off by a hiss and a roar like an erupting geyser as a Dragon in the forest to their left gave tongue, then surged out into the open in a single lunge that toppled full-grown trees like ninepins in all directions.

The party scattered, some toward the river, some back toward the walls. Blade stood his ground, then lifted his axe and darted to the left as the Dragon Master urged it to the right, cutting off the people running toward the boats. In a matter of seconds the Dragon's whole right side was exposed to Blade, both beast and rider apparently completely unaware of his presence.

Now! He ran forward, as fast as he had ever covered ground before in his life, crossing the forty yards between him and the Dragon in seconds. He leaped up onto the knee of one of the splayed-out legs, saw the Dragon Master turn toward him and shift one of the control wands, leaped again onto the creature's back, and swung the axe full force with every muscle in his body behind it into the Dragon Master's chest.

The Dragon Master sailed off his perch, wands still clutched in his hands, like a shot from a cannon. He landed twenty feet away and lay motionless while several bolder spirits from the party ran in and started clubbing him savagely with their axes and stabbing and slashing at him with pikes and swords. Blade, meanwhile, was hacking furiously at the Dragon's neck where two small metal studs protruded through the thick hide. Here was where the control wands had been applied; here if anywhere the monster might be vulnerable.

As he kept hacking, scarring the metal and gradually chewing out chunks of scaled hide around the studs, the Dragon kept slowly on along the course which its Master had set. On its own, it seemed to have no perception of anything not directly in front of its eyes. In fact, even that seemed to be lacking, as the creature kept straight on as though running on rails until it rammed into one of the guardhouses at the end of the bridge. Stones and timbers flew.

At that exact moment, Blade's flashing axe finally sank through the haggled and scarred hide and severed something-flesh or metal, he didn't know which-deep within. There was a spurt of purplish fluid that stung like acid, and an even larger cloud of blue smoke spewed from the now open wound. The creature jerked convulsively, reared up on its hind legs so suddenly that Blade slid down its back onto the tail and was tossed with bruising force by that flailing tail halfway across the clearing, then collapsed into the ruins of the guardhouse. A moment later, something in its neck exploded like a bomb, spraying bits of flesh, drops of purple goo, and unidentifiable chunks of metal in all directions. After that, two more bombs went off, one in the skull and the other near the base of the tail. Again, smoke and debris spewed up and pattered down or drifted away.

Blade quickly recovered from his fall and ran to where the Dragon Master had landed. He would have liked to try opening the helmet and suit on the spot, but instead Nilando was at his elbow, ordering four men to seize the Dragon Master, bind him in case he was not dead, and carry him to the boats. Then he turned to Blade.

«Blade, there will be a statue of you in the town square of Irdna when it is rebuilt. We have slain a Dragon Master, captured his body, and killed his Dragon as well. Never before have all three been done at once and by the same man.» He looked sharply at Blade. «You did not seem surprised at the explosions within the creature. Do you think that a high knowledge is at work among the Dragons, as among the Graduki?»

Blade nodded.

«Such has been my thought for some time. But we can talk of this later. Now it is time to flee downriver in the boats before the Dragon Masters see us, and our victory is wasted.» He turned away and began urging the laggards and those who had run away from the river toward the pier. Blade followed him, reflecting that Nilando would be a man for the Dragon Masters to reckon with, particularly if he could ever be equipped with weapons capable of slaying Dragons.

Behind him darkness had fallen over Irdna as the last few torches on the wall went out, but Blade could see monstrous shapes still lumbering about dimly in the shadows, and hear the crashes and screams rising up from the dying town. He took a last look, then swung his purple-stained axe up on his shoulder and strode toward the pier.