The Blood of a Dragon

Chapter Twenty-Five

Someone cleared his throat, and Dumery turned away from the window to see Kensher standing in the doorway. He was wearing green wool instead of brown leather, but it was unmistakably him.

“It really is you,” Kensher said. “The kid from Ethshar.”

Dumery blinked, but didn’t answer.

“You have got to be the stubbornest little idiot I ever saw in my life, following me all the way up here from Ethshar!” Kensher said, marvelling.

“Itold you I didn’t need an apprentice, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Dumery admitted, “but I thought that if I showed you how determined I was you’d change your mind.”

Kensher snorted. “Not likely! With eleven kids of my own? You’d need magic to change my mind.”

“Well, I didn’t know you had eleven kids-you never mentioned that when you turned me down! And if I had magic, I wouldn’twant to change your mind!”

Dumery replied hotly.

“Exactly my point,” Kensher said. “Following me here wasstupid. Do your parents know you’re all right? Do they have any idea where you are?”

“Yes, they know I’m all right,” Dumery said. “They bought a spell and checked. A sixnight ago, I think it was-the second night after we left.”

“Well, that’s good, then,” Kensher said. “That’s one less thing we have to worry about. Now all we have to do is get you safely back home.”

Dumery shook his head. “I’m not going home,” he said. “Not until I’ve served an apprenticeship.”

Kensher glared. “I just told you, boy, I’m not taking you on! No apprenticeship! No way! You’re going home!”

“And if I go home, do you know what I’ll do?” Dumery shouted. “I’ll tell everyone on Wizard Street that Kensher the dragon-hunter isn’t a hunter at all, that you raise dragons, and you have all the blood they’ll ever need right here for the taking, and then what’s going to happen to your precious family farm?”

Dumery caught himself, horrified. He hadn’t meant to make the threat so bluntly. He’d been thinking exactly that, that he could force Kensher to keep him on here by threatening to expose the secret, but he’d meant to do it subtly, gradually, not in a single angry outburst.

Kensher stared at him coldly. “Not much,” he said. “For all I know, half the wizards in Ethshar already know we run a farm and not a hunt-maybe theyall know. Haven’t you ever heard of divination spells? You can’t keep secrets from wizards, boy, not unless you’re a magician yourself.”

“But why would they have looked?” Dumery asked. “It probably never occurred to them to check!”

“Oh,” Kensher said, “I suppose nobody would ever have noticed that three-fourths of the dragon’s blood in the Hegemony all seems to come from one hunter. Nobody would ever have gotten curious about that. Nobody would ever have noticed how steady our supply is. No, in two hundred years, no wizard would ever think of that!”

“Oh,” Dumery said.

Kensher glowered at him. “If I were you, Dumery of Shiphaven,” he said, “I’d be a little more careful about what I said, and I wouldn’t argue this. We don’t need any blackmailers around here, nor anyone who makes threats to the people who took him in and sheltered and fed him, instead of leaving him to die. For all anyone back in Ethshar knows, if your parents haven’t checked in a sixnight, you might already have died lost in the mountains somewhere-and if you want to exchange threats, well, you might yet die lost in the mountains somewhere if you aren’t careful!”

“I’m sorry,” Dumery said contritely, and he was partly sincere. He hadn’t wanted to anger anyone.

He just wanted an apprenticeship.

“You should be,” Kensher answered, calming somewhat. “Besides,” he added, “I thought you wanted to apprentice to a hunter, not a farmer.”

“Oh, I don’t care which,” Dumery said, “just so long as it’s dragons.”

“You like dragons, then?”

Dumery hesitated. That hadn’t really been what he meant; he was far more concerned with the value of dragon blood than anything about the beasts themselves.

On the other hand, they were pretty interesting.

“Yes,” he said. “Very much.”

“You were watching them out the window just now, weren’t you?”

Dumery nodded.

“Do you think you’re fit enough to go outside? We could go take a closer look at them, if you like.”

“I’d like that,” Dumery said.

After all, if he was going to work with dragons-and he would find a way, somehow-it was never too soon to start learning more about them. Besides, he wanted to ingratiate himself with Kensher. He’d gotten off to a bad start, offending the man with his silly threats, and this might be a chance to get back on better terms.

Five minutes later, wrapped in a fur cape Korun Kensher’s son had loaned him, Dumery followed Kensher out the back door of the farmhouse onto the stony ground of the little plateau.

The icy wind hit him like a hard slap across the face, leaving his right cheek red and stinging. He blinked hard, trying to keep his vision clear; it felt as if teardrops were freezing in the corners of his eyes.

“Cold,” he remarked, trying to keep his teeth from chattering.

Kensher looked at him, startled. “A little,” he said. “For this time of year, especially, I guess. But it’s not that bad, really; you’ve just been curled up indoors for too long.”

Dumery gritted his teeth and didn’t answer.

“Of course,” Kensher went on, as they strolled across the yard to the first of the pens, “you’re from Ethshar, aren’t you? It doesn’t get very cold there, does it? Not like up here in Aldagmor.”

“No,” Dumery said, “I guess not.” He had always thought that Ethshar of the Spices got quite cold enough in the winter, when the snows came, but by the middle of spring-which it now was-the snows were long gone, and the spring rains getting progressively warmer. Warm, damp breezes would be blowing in from the Gulf of the East, nothing like the cold, cutting blast that swept across these northern mountains.

He shuddered, literally, at the thought of what this place must be like in the winter.

It occurred to him that maybe he didn’t want to stay here after all.

He thrust that thought aside and looked around.

He and Kensher were standing at the first pen, where wrought-iron tracery connected black iron beams as big around as a man’s thigh. The pen was perhaps thirty feet long and fifteen feet front to back, and the iron barrier was at least ten feet high. The ironwork continued across the top in a graceful arch.

The ground behind the metal was bare stone.

Inside the pen, a dozen tiny dragons were staring up at them.

Dumery stared back.

“Hatchlings,” Kensher said. “Broke the shells a sixnight ago, while I was on the way back from Ethshar-I’d wanted to be here to help, but I didn’t make it. Just two clutches this year; we usually do better.”

The largest baby dragon, which was also the closest, was black, with golden eyes and gleaming white talons. From nose to the tip of its tail it was four or five feet long, Dumery estimated, but most of that length was in the long, curling tail. It had four legs, thin and bony, each one ending in five long, curling claws; its head was long and narrow, with long, upright, pointed, set-back ears. The gleaming yellow eyes had black slit pupils, like a cat’s.

When the dragon realized Dumery was staring at it it opened its mouth and hissed, and Dumery glimpsed a pointed, yellowish-red tongue surrounded by hundreds of tiny white teeth.

They looked very sharp.

It had wings on its back, great black wings, shaped like the wings of a bat, rather than any sort of bird, with thin, leathery skin stretched over a bony frame-except that the wings hung down limply.

“The wings...” Dumery said, pointing.

Kensher snatched the boy’s finger back away from the bars. “They bite,” he said.

Dumery gulped, and looked at his finger, making sure it was still there.

“Broken,” Kensher said.

Dumery looked up at him. “What?”

“The wings are broken,” Kensher explained. “We have to do that to make sure they don’t fly away. We don’t want a bunch of wild dragons running around loose in the woods down there.”

“Oh,” Dumery said, looking back at the little black dragon. “But you have a roof on the cage.”

“Yes, of course we do, but...” Kensher stopped, groping for the best way to explain. After a moment’s thought he continued, “Look, when they fly, they’re a lot harder to handle. If you go in the cage they can knock you down and slip out the door and get away, and there’s no way to catch them if they can fly. That black one there must weigh thirty or forty pounds, and it’s still a hatchling. In a month it could be fifty or sixty pounds; in three months it could top a hundred. You do not want to argue with a hundred-pound flying dragon. It’s bad enough when they can’t fly, believe me.”

“Oh,” Dumery said, looking through the bars.

Behind the big black hatchling were about half a dozen green ones, smaller, but still big enough to be frightening. A reddish-gold one was pacing about in a far corner of the cage; two blue-green ones and a red one were curled up together asleep.

All of them, Dumery noticed, had broken wings.

“So dragons really can fly,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” Kensher said. “Most of them, anyway. Some don’t have the wingspan, or the muscles don’t develop right, but most of them can fly. At least when they’re young.”

“Do any of them really breathe fire?”

Kensher grimaced. “Not around here,” he said. “There are fire-breathing dragons, all right, and back during the war they raised them here, but it doesn’t make any difference in the blood, and that’s the only market we have left, so my great-great-great grandfather culled them all. They’re just too damned dangerous to have around. My ancestors used to have to wear armor just to go near them, and even so, a couple of several-times-great uncles got fried. Sometimes we get a throwback-the trait’s not completely weeded out of our bloodlines yet-but when that happens, we kill it as soon as we find out about it.”

“Oh,” Dumery said, looking at the hatchlings. “So none of these can breathe fire?”

“Not that we know of, anyway, and usually they start to at least spit sparks by now.”

“Oh,” Dumery said, stepping back.

“Come on, let’s look at the yearlings,” Kensher said, beckoning.

Dumery followed him around to the right, past the hatchlings’ cage.

The next cage was several times the size of the hatchlings’; Dumery didn’t care to guess its exact dimensions. The wrought-iron tracery was much simpler, but much heavier, with larger openings. Four dragons, each ten or twelve feet long, occupied it; two were green, two golden yellow. There was a strong and unpleasant odor to the place-Dumery wrinkled his nose at it. He noticed the pile in a corner that was presumably the source for most of the stench.

All four dragons were clustered around the remains of a steer, eating noisily.

One gave the two humans a red-eyed glance, then turned back to its meal.

All four had wings, and again, all the wings were broken and hanging limp.

“Those are just a year old?” Dumery said, looking at the curving talons, claws bigger than his fingers.

“That’s right,” Kensher said.

Dumery noticed a golden wing flopping. “Don’t the wings heal up?” he asked.

“Of course they do,” Kensher replied. “That’s why we have to break them again every year.”

“You do?”

“Of course. Look at those things-four hundred pounds each. And we can’t remove the claws or fangs, because then they can’t feed themselves. We can’t let them fly.”

Dumery looked, just as a green dragon lifted its head with a bloody mouthful of beef. He shuddered. “No,” he said, “I guess you can’t.”

The tour continued, past two more cages of yearlings, and then a dozen huge pens for older, more mature beasts. These ranged from about twelve feet long up to twenty or more, and glared fiercely at the two humans. Every so often one would roar, and Dumery would cover his ears against the sound.

A heavy outer fence ran around the entire group of pens, enclosing much of the plateau. Kensher noticed Dumery looking at it as the pair walked on.

“Sometimes they get out of their cages,” he said. “We don’t know how they do it, sometimes, but they do-dragons are tricky. When that happens, the fence there stops them from going any farther.”

“Do any ever get away completely?” Dumery asked.

Kensher admitted reluctantly, “Sometimes, yes.”

Dumery looked down across the edge of the plateau toward the forests below.

“So there are wild dragons out there?”

“Maybe. I don’t know if they survive-after all, they’ve never learned to hunt for their food, and there isn’t much game around here, and they can’t fly. Most of them probably don’t last long.”

Dumery didn’t find that very comforting. He remembered that he had come up the path through those woods alone and unprotected, without ever giving the possibility of being eaten by a wild dragon any serious thought.

Then, finally, they came to the slaughterhouse, where Dumery gawped at the tangle of huge iron chains and heavy beams, used to restrain and support dragons while their throats were cut and their blood drained.

“We cull most of them when they’re six or seven months old,” Kensher explained. “That’s where we get most of the blood. By then we know which ones we want for breeding stock, so we dispose of the rest here. If there’s any sign of illness or anemia, or if they’re unusually vicious, or if we just don’t like their looks, we weed them out then. The others we keep until they’re about four or five years old, and then they have to go, too.” He gestured at the restraints. “A healthy dragon’s about eighteen or twenty feet long by then, weighs maybe a ton, but the growth is slowing down, so it’s not worth keeping them any longer. Besides, any bigger and they get really dangerous, and we can’t handle them any more. They aren’t just bigger and stronger, either, they’re smarter. A hatchling’s no smarter than a kitten, and a yearling maybe as bright as a wolf, but by the time a dragon’s five or six years old it’s smarter than any other animal except people. A really smart one might start learning to talk when it’s seven or eight, and we can’t have that.”

“Why not?” Dumery asked, puzzled.

Kensher blinked. “Ah... because if... if it can talk, then it’s not just an animal any more, boy, and it wouldn’t be right to kill it.” He frowned. “It’s bad enough killing the breeding stock as it is.”

Dumery considered that for a moment.

How did learning to talk make a dragon a person? It was still a dragon, after all.

But he could sort of see Kensher’s point. If you could hold a conversation with something, it wasn’t just an animal any more.

But if a talking dragon shouldn’t be killed, then was it really all right to kill the immature ones? Did that mean that it would be all right to kill a human baby that hadn’t yet learned to talk? Maybe it did mean that; he had heard that sometimes girls did exactly that when they had babies they didn’t want.

Dumery decided he didn’t want to think about that just now.

But if the dragons were killed when they were still babies, too young to talk...

“How old do they have to be to lay eggs?” he asked.

“Oh, they’ll start breeding as yearlings, if we let them,” Kensher said. “We don’t, though; that’s why there are three separate cages for yearlings instead of one big one.”

“Three?”

“Well, we don’t usually get nice even numbers of male and female,” Kensher explained. “We usually have more males than females. And we don’t want them to breed until they’re about three; the young are healthier that way. So we have two cages for males and one for females.”

Dumery nodded, staring at the ironmongery.

The killing knife hung by the door, a huge saw-toothed blade the size of a broadsword, its metal polished and gleaming. The bottles used for the blood stood ranged on shelves against one wall, all of them empty and sparkling clean.

He hadn’t thought about the actual killing when he asked for an apprenticeship. He hadn’t thought about feeding almost a hundred hungry dragons every day, about raising the cattle to feed them. He hadn’t thought about breaking wings every year, or watching for fire-breathers and killing them young, or losing fingers or hands or arms in a moment’s carelessness around the livestock. There was far more to raising dragons than he had considered.

It looked like a dull, dirty, difficult, and dangerous business. It meant cruelty and killing.

Dumery didn’t like any of that.

All the same, Dumery thought, what else could he do? He had come this far; he was reluctant to throw that away. Besides, for as long as he could remember, all he had wanted out of life was magic, and he had been denied that. There was nothing else he wanted to do. Dragon-farming might not be magic, but it wassomething, anyway, and if it meant he could rub Thetheran’s nose in the dirt, then itwas what he wanted to do.

Now all he had to do was convince Kensher to let him do it.