The Blood of a Dragon

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Dumery crept down the stairs with his pack on his arm, walking to one side to lessen the chance of creaking, and listening intently for any sign that someone else was still awake-someone like Teneria, for example.

He heard nothing but the wind outside. Apparently witches slept just as soundly as anybody else.

Cautiously, he made his way down the hall and through the rear storage room to the back door, the one that led out to the dragon pens.

It was barred, with three heavy bars-Dumery assumed that that was just to keep dragons out, should one escape from its cage. He looked the bars over carefully.

They were padlocked in place, and the keys were nowhere in sight.

He had half-expected that. With a shrug, he turned and made his way, slowly and cautiously, back through the house to the front door.

That had an ordinary bolt and a hook latch; he threw the bolt, lifted the latch, and then, very slowly, eased the door open and slipped out.

Both moons were high overhead, the lesser just passing the greater, and between them they gave enough light that Dumery could see where he was going.

He made his way up the path between the flowerbeds and through the garden, back over the rocky shoulder of the mountain, until he could see the forest spread out below, black in the moonslight.

The weather had finally warmed somewhat in the last day or so, and the winds were relatively calm, for once. Moonslight sparkled eerily from snowcaps on distant peaks, and the moons’ two colors edged shadows with pink and orange.

It was a beautiful night. Dumery could easily have made his way down slope and into the woods without fear of stumbling or losing his way.

That was if he were heading down slope, though, and in point of fact he had no intention of doing so.

Rather, he intended to circle around the house so as to get at the dragon pens.

Accordingly, as soon as he was certain he was out of sight, should someone wake and glance out an upstairs windows, he turned left off the path and began cutting cross-country, through the pastures where the cattle that the dragons ate grazed.

At first he had intended to simply circle around to the back of the house by the shortest possible route, but he encountered an obstacle he hadn’t known about-a fissure, separating the pasture from the dragon pens. The house appeared to have been built directly atop it.

He studied it for a moment. It was deep, and wide, and the plank bridge that the people and cattle presumably used to cross it was drawn up on the other side. One end ran right up to the foundations of the farmhouse.

He supposed it kept the dragons and cattle from approaching each other too closely, and he wished he had noticed it before.

It was too wide to leap, in the dark, and the lower end was impassable because of the farmhouse. He would have to go around the upper end.

That took him up out of the pasture, over the fence, and into the wilderness beyond.

There was no trail at all this way, and the terrain was rough; stretches of bare, jagged stone were interspersed with moss, lichen, gravel, and a few struggling pines. Dumery had to pick his footing carefully, and every so often a rock or chunk of moss would slide out from underneath him and send him sprawling. He cut his chin, bruised and scraped the palms of both hands, and twisted his left wrist painfully, but he made steady progress.

His biggest worry wasn’t falling into the fissure-he kept a healthy distance between him and that-nor falling off the mountain-for the most part the slopes were not so steep as to make that a real danger-but the possibility of encountering an escaped dragon. Despite what Kensher had said, Dumery suspected that there were probably quite a number of them in the vicinity, gone wild.

He couldn’t decide whether they would be more likely to leave the area completely and avoid the place where they had suffered in captivity, or whether they would hang around the only home they had ever known.

He tended toward the former theory, not just because it was reassuring, but because he remembered those pitiful broken wings hanging down across the hatchlings’ flanks. If he’d had something equally unpleasant done to him, such as a broken arm or two, he certainly would never again want to go anywhere near the place it had happened.

But he wasn’t a dragon, of course, and he didn’t know how dragons thought about these things. So he struggled onward and tried not to worry about it.

The lesser moon was down and the greater sinking fast when he finally scrambled around a towering boulder and found himself in sight of the back row of dragon pens, with the farmhouse just barely visible beyond them.

He smiled, satisfied, and crept down toward the pens, moving as silently as he knew how. He ignored the curious glances some of the dragons gave him. Several of the sharp-eyed creatures were awake, and some had spotted him as soon as he emerged from behind the boulder into sight of the farm, but they hadn’t done anything about it. There was no reason they should.

They weren’t watching him constantly, but they certainly knew where he was and cast an occasional glance at him.

The bigger ones did, at any rate; the yearlings didn’t seem to have noticed anything, and he couldn’t even see the hatchlings from where he was.

The hatchlings, however, were what he was interested in. If he could sneak off with a pair of them, one of each sex, then he could start his own farm, and to hell with Kensher and his brood.

He had planned it out as best he could while he was convalescing, and although he never got another real tour after that first one, and had had to hurry everything up drastically when Teneria showed up, he had had chances to watch out the window when the hatchlings got fed, and had asked a few important questions-such as, “How do you tell them apart? Male and female, I mean.”

He hadn’t gotten a good explanation, really, but in the ensuing conversation he had been told that the black one, the red one, and the reddish-gold one were all male, while the two blue-green ones were both female. The green ones included four males and two females.

He intended to ignore the green ones, since he couldn’t tell them apart, and grab a blue-green one and one of the others. He figured that if he held them by the neck, one in each hand, they wouldn’t be able to bite him-and he just hoped they wouldn’t claw him. Hauling two four-foot, forty-pound dragons was going to be quite difficult enough without getting clawed up.

He hoped he could manage it. It would be tough, but if he got away with it he would be set for life.

He had watched when the hatchlings were fed and watered, and when Seldis had given them their bath-she had climbed up on top of the cage and poured buckets of water in through the bars, and then had gone into the cage with another bucket and a scrub-brush to do a final inspection and touch-up. Wuller had gone in with her, carrying a sharp prod, and two of the others, Kinner the Younger and Korun, had stood at the door of the cage as back-up, but the dragons hadn’t given her any trouble.

And watching that, Dumery had seen that the latch on the cage didn’t need a key. He hadn’t gotten a good look at just how it worked, but he was sure no one had used a key, or anything but fingers, to work it.

And the calm ease with which Seldis had handled the hatchlings had been very encouraging. They were used to human touch.

Dumery thought he could manage it-get in there, grab the dragons, and get out again, and then hide somewhere in the forest, work his way south and west, back out of the mountains and back toward civilization. Teneria wouldn’t dare follow him if he went south, near the Warlock Stone.

He hadn’t worked out all the details, of course, but the hard part, he was sure, would be getting the dragons. Once he had his breeding pair he would worry about details, such as where he was going to keep them, and how he was going to get them there.

First things first, he told himself.

He reached the outer fence, and discovered that the very first step-getting back into the farm-was going to be harder than he had thought at first. This was not an easy fence to climb. It was nine or ten feet high, with black iron uprights set a few inches apart-that much he had known already.

He had not, however, paid much attention to the fact that there were only two crosspieces holding the uprights together, one nearly at ground level and the other near the top. The uprights were far enough apart that he couldn’t brace his foot between two of them, but close enough together that he couldn’t squeeze through.

And climbing the uprights themselves, while possible, wasn’t going to be easy, because they weren’t round, easy-to-grasp rods, they were triangular, with concave faces, so that the edges were sharp.

He sighed, grabbed hold of two uprights, and started climbing.

The metal cut into his palms and his fingers; if he clung tightly enough to pull himself up, the edges cut more deeply.

And then he felt himself starting to slide back down; the smooth metal didn’t give him enough friction to hold. The edges were cutting more than ever as his hands slid down them.

He let go and fell back to the ground, frustrated. He looked at his hands.

The palm of his left hand was bleeding sluggishly; the fingers and his right hand were marked with red pressure lines, but the skin hadn’t been broken.

He swore, using every foul word he’d ever heard the sailors on his father’s ships use, and wiped the blood off on the grass.

That, he told himself, was a truly vicious fence! Why had they made it that way?

He supposed that it was really intended to prevent dragons from getting out, rather than to keep him from getting in, but it seemed to work quite well either way.

On the other hand, he thought, he was smarter than any dragon, and the dearth of crosspieces gave him an idea. If he could find something and wedge it between two of the bars, he should be able to bend them further apart and squeeze through. After all, he was thin enough, particularly after his recent adventures in reaching this point. The bars were iron, not steel-iron was cheaper and lasted better in the open weather, since steel would rust away.

Iron, however, was easier to bend, and the bars weren’t that thick, no more than an inch or two through.

He looked around, but he was standing on bare rock. His only real tool was his belt knife, and that wouldn’t do.

The greater moon’s light was already starting to fade, and he decided that speed was more important than any other consideration; he picked up a handy rock, roughly the size of his head, and jammed it into the fence.

It went right through.

He swore again, and picked up another, larger rock.

This one took an effort to hoist up, but at least it didn’t go right through the bars. One end of it did. He braced it up with one hand and hammered at it with the other.

The fence jangled loudly at the impact, and he hurt his hand, but the bars didn’t yield.

A dragon roared at him from one of the pens, but in the darkness he couldn’t make out exactly which one it was.

He snarled in reply, then with one hand holding his wedge-rock in place, he picked up another, and used it as a hammer, pounding at the wedge-rock with it.

The fence rang and buzzed at the impact, and the dragons bellowed in reply-which pleased Dumery, as he judged that the draconic racket would drown out the noise the fence was making.

Then one bar started to give, and Dumery pounded harder, holding his improvised hammer in both hands.

With a loud snap, the rock suddenly fell through the fence, and Dumery blinked, startled. The bar hadn’t bent that far yet!

He looked again, and realized that the bar had snapped off at the bottom. He pushed at it, and it swung freely.

Delighted, he shoved it to one side and squeezed sideways through the resulting opening.

Now all he had to do was to get to the hatchling cage, get inside, grab two dragons-a male and a female-drag them out, close the cage behind him, drag the dragons over here and out through the fence, and run and hide.

Oh, sure, that was all. He grimaced slightly, and wondered if maybe he was being a little over-confident.

It also occurred to him that he did not want to close the cage behind him. If all twelve hatchlings got loose the resulting confusion would keep the farmers much busier, which would be so much the better for him.

He trotted along the fence, around the largest pen, ignoring the dragons that were staring at him. His toe caught on a rock and he stumbled, which elicited a weird hooting from one of the dragons, but he caught himself and hurried on.

The dim orange moonlight was fading, and he didn’t want to stumble over a cliff in the dark; he had to hurry!