The Blood of a Dragon

Chapter Twenty-Three

When Dumery woke he found himself lying on something warm and soft, surrounded by the scents of soap and lavender. He heard gentle creakings and rustlings and thumps, the sounds of a household going about its ordinary business.

It took a moment before he had the nerve to open his eyes, but when he did he was looking up at an undistinguished plank ceiling.

His eyes worked their way down from there.

He was in a small bedroom, lying in a well-fluffed featherbed, under a fine warm blanket. Blue sky was visible through the one window. A wash-stand stood at the bedside, and two plain wooden chairs were nearby. A boy perhaps half his own age was standing at the window, looking out at the World.

Dumery coughed.

The boy turned, looked at him, then ran to the door of the room and shouted something in some language other than Ethsharitic-Sardironese, presumably.

Then the boy turned back and stared at Dumery.

“Hello,” Dumery said. His voice didn’t sound very good.

The boy just stared.

Footsteps sounded, and people began pouring into the room.

The first was an old man, surely at least sixty years old, Dumery thought. He had been a big man once, and was still tall, but he was bent now, and his muscles sagged, rather than bulged. His left arm was gone from the elbow down, the long-healed stump projecting from the shortened sleeve of his tunic.

Behind this rather frightening figure came a swarm of small children-Dumery thought there were four of them, but they moved about so much he wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t missed one.

And finally, a black-haired woman, small and pretty, appeared and stood in the doorway.

The one-armed old man said something in Sardironese.

Dumery blinked up at him, and tried to sit up, but wound up leaning on one elbow instead.

“Does anyone here...” he began, before being interrupted by a cough. He cleared his throat and tried again.

“Does anyone here speak Ethsharitic?” he asked.

“Yes,” the old man said. “Of course I do. Could never have done much business without it. Is it your only language? You don’t know any Sardironese?”

Dumery nodded.

“That’s too bad,” the old man said. “The little ones won’t be able to follow what we’re saying, then.” He smiled. “Well, when I tell them all about it later I can dress it up a little, make it sound better, right?”

As he spoke, the woman in the doorway slipped away.

A girl, perhaps four years old, tugged at the old man’s tunic and asked him a question in Sardironese.

The old man answered, and Dumery caught a word that sounded like “Ethsharit”

in his reply.

The girl asked another question, and the old man shook his head. “Ku den nor Sardironis,” he said.

The child started to ask again, but the man held up a hand and said something.

Dumery could only guess what all this was about, and he was still too battered and worn to give it much thought, but he supposed the girl had wanted to know why he and the old man were talking funny.

In any case, the girl stopped asking questions after that, and the old man turned his attention back to Dumery.

“Now, boy,” he said, “who are you, and just what were you doing turning up on my doorstep? You looked half-starved, and half-frozen, and you weren’t wearing anything but some rags that look like they used to be fancy city street clothes-how in the World did you get way up here in the mountains?”

This mention of his clothes brought to Dumery’s attention that he was wearing an unfamiliar, but very comfortable, flannel nightshirt. He wondered what had become of his own attire, but he didn’t ask; instead he answered, “I’m Dumery of Shiphaven. From Ethshar.”

“Which Ethshar?” the old man asked, before Dumery could say anything else.

“Ethshar of the Spices,” Dumery replied, startled. It wasn’t a question he had ever been asked before.

But then, he had never left the city until this trip.

The old man nodded. “Go on,” he said. “How did you get way up here?”

Dumery hesitated, unsure what to say.

If he told the truth, that he had followed Kensher Kinner’s son into the mountains, what would happen?

Where was he, anyway? Was this the house at the dragon farm? If so, where was Kensher? Wasn’t it his farm?

“I was lost,” he said.

The old man frowned.

“Where am I, anyway?” Dumery asked, a trifle belatedly. “And who are all you people?”

“My name’s Kinner,” the old man said, and Dumery’s heart jumped at the name.

“That’s Talger, Kalthen, Kirsha, Shatha, and Tarissa, some of my grandchildren,” the old man went on, pointing first to the boy who had been in the room when Dumery awoke, then to another boy, then to three girls. Kirsha had been the one asking questions.

Just then the black-haired woman reappeared in the doorway, holding a tray, and the old man added, “And that’s Pancha, my son’s wife.”

“I brought soup,” the woman said in heavily-accented Ethsharitic, raising the tray.

Dumery groped for words as he sat up, and couldn’t find them; he settled for looking as grateful as he could as the tray was set down atop the washstand.

Then he didn’t worry about words or appearances as he began slurping up the soup. It was a thick beef broth with carrots and peas and other vegetables in it, and Dumery considered it the most wonderful thing he had ever eaten in his entire life. It was warm and filling and savory and settled very nicely in his empty gut.

When he had to stop eating to catch his breath he managed to say, “Thank you.”

Then he picked up the spoon again and continued.

When the last trace was gone, the bowl almost dry, he looked up and realized that the old man, the woman, and the five children were all staring at him.

They had apparently been whispering among themselves, but that stopped when they saw his eyes upon them.

“Thank you, lady,” he said. “That was delicious.”

She shrugged, but a pleased smile lit her face.

“Now,” old Kinner said, “you were explaining how you got here.”

That wasn’t quite how Dumery remembered the conversation, but he had learned long ago that arguing with adults was usually a mistake. “I walked,” he said.

Kinner looked exasperated. “But whyhere?” he demanded.

Dumery hesitated. These people seemed friendly enough, and he was grateful that they had taken him in and fed them-but on the other hand, it seemed very likely that the existence of this farm was supposed to be a secret, and he had stumbled upon it. Admitting that he was interested in a career involving dragons would draw attention to that fact.

But then, they must know he’d seen what was going on, and it really didn’t matter how or why he had come here-he still knew the secret.

Besides, he couldn’t think of a good lie.

“I was following someone,” he said. “A man named Kensher Kinner’s son.”

Talger glanced up, startled, at the sound of the familiar name. Kinner eyed Dumery with interest. “Were you, indeed,” he said.

Dumery nodded.

“And why were you following my son?” Kinner asked.

That confirmed Dumery’s suspicion. “I thought he was a dragon-hunter,” he admitted.

“Oh? And why were you interested in following a dragon-hunter?”

“I was seeking an apprenticeship.”

Kinner stared at him silently for a moment, and Dumery stared back defiantly.

The children, puzzled, looked from one to the other and back again.

“You want to be a dragon-hunter?” Kinner asked.

Dumery nodded.

Kinner said, “What made you think that Kensher was a dragon-hunter?”

“I saw him selling dragon’s blood to the wizards back in Ethshar,” Dumery explained.

“Ah,” Kinner said, a satisfied smile of comprehension spreading across his face. He rocked back on his heels. “And you assumed he’d gotten it by hunting dragons.”

Dumery nodded again.

“I suppose you saw this place clearly before you passed out,” Kinner remarked.

Once more, Dumery nodded.

“Then you now know that Kensher isn’t primarily a dragon-hunter,” Kinner said.

“He’s a dragon-farmer,” Dumery agreed. “That’s all right. I still want an apprenticeship.”

Kinner sighed. “Boy,” he said, “you may have the most wonderful reasons in the World for wanting to be Kensher’s apprentice, but I’m afraid it doesn’t matter. It will never happen.”

“Whynot?” Dumery demanded.

The old man stared at him, considering, for a moment. Then, holding up an admonitory finger, Kinner said, “Wait.” He stepped out the door of the room and called something in Sardironese.

Dumery had little choice; he waited.

A moment later footsteps sounded, and faces appeared in the doorway-young faces, varying from a little younger than Dumery to several years older.

“That’s Seldis,” Kinner said, “and Wuller, and Kinthera, and Shanra, and Kashen, and Korun, and Kinner the Younger. You already met Talger, Kalthen, Tarissa, Kirsha, and Shatha. They’re all my grandchildren except Wuller, who’s married to Seldis-and more importantly, they’re all Kensher’s children. And Pancha’s, of course,” he said, with a slight bow to the woman.

Dumery stared. Eleven children, ranging in age from a young woman down to a boy of two or three-not to mention the young man Wuller, who had married into the family.

“And every one of them has a prior claim to an apprenticeship here on this farm,” Kinner pointed out.

“But...” Dumery began.

“Boy,” Kinner said, cutting him off, “it doesn’t take eleven people to run this farm. It doesn’t take more than, oh, two or three, really, though more hands mean less work for each. And this is the only dragon farm left in all the World, so far as we know, so there’s no point in training you with the idea you’ll find work elsewhere once you make journeyman.”

Dumery hesitated. “The only one in the World?” he asked.

Kinner nodded. “So we’re told.”

“But how... if it’s the only one...” Dumery puzzled over this for a moment, and then asked, “How did itget here?”

Kinner sighed. As he did, the girl-young woman, really-he had called Seldis whispered something in his ear. Kinner nodded, and muttered something in reply.

Seldis and Wuller vanished from the doorway, and as Kinner told his tale most of the others gradually drifted away as well.

“You know about the Great War,” Kinner said.

Dumery nodded. “When Ethshar destroyed the Northerners,” he said.

“Yes, exactly,” Kinner agreed. “It was a long, long war-nobody knows anything about what the World was like before it began, not really. So we don’t know where dragons came from originally, because they were around from the earliest days of the war. Personally, I suspect some wizard invented them, maybe by accident-why else would they have so much magic in their blood? And they aren’t like any other animals I ever heard of, the way they grow, and behave...” He blinked, stared silently and thoughtfully at nothing for a moment, and then recovered himself.

“Well, anyway,” he continued, “wherever dragons came from, originally they were all raised by people, there weren’t any wild ones at all, anywhere. They were used as weapons in the war-if they weren’t just an accident, that must be what they were invented for. They were fighting animals. One big dragon can tear up a whole town pretty quickly, after all, and that’s without even mentioning that some can breathe fire, and some can fly, and most of them have hide like armor, and if you let them grow big enough they get smart enough to talk-I mean, how does that fit in with the rest of the World, animals that can learn to talkas adults, when it’s too late to civilize them? It just doesn’t make any sense unless somebody invented them for the war.”

Dumery stared. This was beyond him; the idea that somebody might haveinvented dragons was all new to him. After all, did squid fit in with the rest of the World? Had someone invented those, too? What about camels, or nightwalkers?

Did they make any sense?

Kinner noticed the dazed expression on the boy’s face and realized he was losing his audience. He hurried to get on with his tale.

“So,” he said, “during the war the army kept dragons around as fighting animals, and bred them as part of the war effort. Some were trained to fight; others were just turned loose behind enemy lines, where they grew up in the woods and ate up all the game, and when that was gone and they got hungry they turned on the livestock and the civilians, and they just generally made life more difficult for the Northerners. And of course, Ethshar’s military wizards needed a steady supply of dragon’s blood for their spells-the war was fought as much with magic as with swords, southern wizards and theurgists against northern sorcerers and demonologists. So the army ran its own dragon-breeding operations-I don’t know how many, but several of them. And toward the end of the war one of them, right up near the front but hidden in the mountains, was run by a man named Thar, who was a sergeant in General Anaran’s elite Forward Command.” Kinner smiled. “Sergeant Thar was my... let’s see... my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Six greats-that sounds right.”

Dumery blinked. “Oh,” he said. “But the war... I mean, that was hundreds of years ago...”

“That’s right,” Kinner agreed. “It was. And when the war ended, about two hundred and thirty years ago, Sergeant Thar simply kept on raising dragons. The government didn’t care. Or maybe they didn’t even know. The way I heard it from my grandfather, orders came down saying the dragons were surplus, that the army didn’t need them any more and they should all either be killed, or set free up north, to help polish off any survivors after the Northern Empire fell. Well, Sergeant Thar thought that was stupid and wasteful, so he kept the dragons and the breeding camp for himself, and passed them down to his son, and so on, and so on, until I inherited them from my father. And when I die, my son Kensher will inherit the dragons and the farm from me.”

“And you sell their blood?” Dumery asked, mildly revolted by the idea of raising the animals just for that. It seemed awfully wasteful.

“That’s right,” Kinner said, nodding. “We kill them and sell the blood. It’s a fine business, too. There are plenty of wizards out there who need the stuff, and there isn’t a lot of dragon’s blood around. It seems, from all we’ve heard, that the other old dragon-breeding operations, the other ones that the army ran during the war, alldid shut down. At least, we’ve never heard of any others, and we don’t seem to have much competition out there selling blood. I guess the other breeders didn’t see that wizards would still need dragons even in peacetime-or maybe they just didn’t want to disobey orders. So they must have all killed their stock, or set it free. So we’re the only dragon farm left.”

He smiled, and added, “At least, as far as we know.”

“So you...” Dumery began, then stopped and tried again. “So this one farm is where all the wizards in the World get the dragon’s blood for their spells?”

“Well,” Kinner said judiciously, “maybe not all the wizards in the World. We have a good-sized operation here, though. We can satisfy most of the demand from wizards in the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, and throughout the Baronies of Sardiron, and that’s where we sell. The wizards in the Small Kingdoms-what few there are, magic isn’t very popular there-well, anyway, in the Small Kingdoms, or in the Tintallions, or in any of the other northern lands, the wizards have to get their dragon’s blood elsewhere. They can buy it from middlemen in Ethshar, where there’s always some trader who’ll get it from us and double the price, or they can try to obtain it magically, which isextremely difficult-I mean, it involves things like demons-or else they can buy it fromreal dragon-hunters.”

He laughed, and Dumery didn’t like the sound of it. “If you think we dragon-farmerscharge a lot, boy,” Kinner said, “you should try buying from a dragon-hunter!” He sobered. “There’s a good reason for it, too-a beginning dragon-hunter is lucky to live more than a few months. Or maybe days.” He shrugged. “We know dragons here, since we grew up with them and work with them every day; they’re dangerous creatures, no doubt about it. And the wild ones can grow bigger than we ever let them get here. There are ways to deal with them, but it’s risky. Dragons aremean, sometimes. It was a dragon that did this.” He gestured with the stump of his left arm. “Not a wild one, either-one here on the farm. After that happened I decided I was getting old, and I let my son Kensher make the sales trips down to Ethshar and run things around here, instead of doing them myself. And my granddaughter Seldis does the run to Sardiron of the Waters.” He smiled reminiscently. “Seldis killed a wild dragon once-that was how she met her husband, Wuller. This dragon was preying on his village, and they sent him for help, and he saw Seldis in Sardiron of the Waters selling dragon’s blood and talked her into getting rid of it for them. But we know dragons, as I said-she did that with a trick, she didn’t hunt the thing down out in the open, with a sword or a crossbow or something. And my other sons, besides Kensher-two of them took up dragon-hunting, and last I heard, one of them was still alive. We’ve lived with dragons all our lives, and we don’t do anything stupid. Most dragon-hunters don’t live long enough to learn what’s stupid.”

Dumery struggled to take this all in.

It was too much. He fell back on the bed, trying to think.

Kinner realized he’d been rambling, taxing his guest’s strength. He called quietly, “You rest, boy.” Then he herded the remaining children out of the room and stepped out himself, closing the door quietly.

Dumery looked at the closed door for a moment, then lay back, decided it wasn’t worth the effort to think about it all just now, and fell asleep.