If there were any old hands at dragonfighting among their number they showed no sign of it. They didn’t try to trip her with lines or get a rope-drag on her tail. A few halfhearted charges and thrown lances against her side left her with feathered shafts dangling from her sides and backbone. She broke up more organized charges by beating her wings, hard, into the horses’ faces. The brutes didn’t care to be peppered with wingblown pebbles.

“Hy-yah! Hy-yah!” came the war cries from behind as the Hypatians charged forward to support her, the great Knights of the Directory leading the way on their tall horses, half again as high as those of their opponents.

Still, the battle would have gone ill for the Hypatians. Despite the chaos in the center, the two Ironrider wings stayed in order and reached out to envelop the Hypatians. There were not nearly enough thugs to form an armored ring capable of covering all the horsemen, archers, and footmen. Elvish arrows flew far to tear gaps in their line, but the dark riders closed each gap as remorselessly and unfailingly as ants.

They harried the Hypatian flanks. As the edges of the Hypatian battle line went ragged and uneven, the Ironriders charged, snipping off sections of spearmen and sending archers tumbling back with the precision of a skilled-body thrall shaping up a ragged scale.

Then the Firemaids struck.

The dragons came in low, with the rising sun to cover their approach.

The drakka were already in the city, hiding in garbage piles and pigsties, anywhere that would hide their scent.

None knew from where a drakka might strike next. They slithered out of sewer holes and plunged from rooftops, attacking Ironrider messengers and officers rousting the riders out of the beer-halls and tobacco-dens.

Following their example, the population forgot their fear, and their surrender, and rose. They flung crockery from balconies and dumped boiling water from high windows. Angry Ironriders set fire to houses, bringing mobs with ax and rope ready to fight either flame or invader.

Many a booted, long-haired rider ended up hanging from a laundry line strung between two buildings.

The Ironrider princes upon the Temple Hill had forgotten more about warfare than the thug-riders entering the city in street-filling columns had ever known. They organized their reserve into rows of archers guarded by spearmen, with riders ready to ride from point to point and dismount wherever an attack might develop.

It was against their ranks that Nilrasha’s first wave flung themselves.

Some landed behind the lines, some in front, some atop roofs and some in the confusing tangle of decorative gardens. Orange blossoms of dragonflame colored the hillside.

The second wave of Firemaids, kept under control by their maidmother and the veteran warriors, circled Temple Hill, dropping to strike and then retreat when the arrows grew too thick.

The Ironriders, with courage of desperation, hurled themselves against the dragons. They climbed onto haunches to hack and stab, wormed their way between slashing sii and stomping saa to sink their daggers into vulnerable undersides.

For generations after, the phrase “died like an Ironrider” passed into Drakine, used for a dragon who succumbed to wounds with teeth and claws and spurs gripping enemies.

It was easy for Wistala to find the Queen. All she had to do was listen for the high dragon cries of “Blood bats! Blood bats!”

Wistala hurried up the corpse-littered streets, between buildings roaring as flames consumed them, to find Queen Nilrasha stretched out in the ruins of an old Hypatian temple.

“I did think the roof could hold my weight,” she said. “The columns looked so thick. But here I am. The columns are still standing and I’m not. I’ve just no luck with buildings, that’s all.”

Ayafeeia stood by her, sadly surveying a torn wing. Nothing but a bloody stump remained of her left. The rest of it was a flat, gory mess under a fallen pillar.

“Perhaps his next mate will lay down a string of eggs worthy of a Tyr.” She smiled.

“Yefkoa,” Ayafeeia said, “you’re our fastest dragonelle. If ever you flew for love of your Tyr, fly now and tell him his Queen needs him.”

Chapter 26

“Aerial Host,” the Copper bellowed, trying to summon the words from his hard-pumping heart and heaving lungs. “Dive!

“Griffaran guard, with me!” he called. “Keep the roc-riders off them.”

“Teach those coop-hatched fools the terror of a free wing and a loyal heart,” Aiy-Yip shrieked.

No dragon could keep up with fast-flying griffaran. The Copper found himself tailfeather-slacking, as Aiy-Yip might have styled it.

Roc-riders rose to meet them. For one instant, the formations, rising and falling angles, turned to meet, like the spearheads of opposing armies. Then it dissolved into a whirlwind of combat.

When roc-riders attacked the dragons, griffaran swooped and dove, knocking riders loose for a long fall or tearing at wings so the roc-riders spun earthward, their mounts keening and the men screaming.

But if the roc-riders tried to turn on the griffaran, the griffaran applied the same principles that served the roc-riders so well in their fights with dragonkind—they outturned and outclimbed the big, laden birds.

Scale against feather, flame against arrow, ball-and-chain against beak-and-talon, the two forces left feather, blood, and glittering scale falling to earth as they swooped and parried, a mad aerial dance of ever-changing partners.

The Copper watched one roc fall in a blaze of flame, leaving a dark smear of feathers.

“Behind you!” one of his two remaining guard said.

Two roc-riders swooped down. They must have been high up and far off when the encounter started and both the Copper and his guard over-attentive to the spectacle below.

The Copper turned to protect his bad wing. The fliers bored in on him, diving around the griffaran. Their men loosed arrows from curved bows and the Copper felt the missiles punch him.

One passed behind, one in front. If he’d had use of his flame he might have started a feathery blaze. As it was he had to settle for turning and a futile snap of teeth in the fast-flying birds’ wake.

A griffaran got the frontmost rider, as it turned out. Or part of it, anyway. The Copper doubted the legs left in the saddle would be of much use piloting the bird.

The Copper turned to meet the other. Perhaps he could distract it long enough for one of his griffaran guard to strike.

The other roc-riding warrior, watching the griffaran tearing toward him from behind, only turned to look at the Copper when his mount shrieked and shied. The Copper flapped hard and narrowed his wings, lowered his crest at the end of a ram-stiff neck.

They struck, the roc open-winged and evading, the Copper driving.

Messy pieces of roc fell away, spraying the sky. Or worse, clung to the Copper’s scale and horns and griff.

One of his guard dropped down to glide close beside. The Copper flinched from the sudden flutter of wing, hating his nerves. That was no way for a Tyr to act, startling at your own guard.

“All right?” a griffaran asked while the other circled above, searching for more enemies.

“I’m well. Follow,” the Copper said. He dared a glance back at where the arrows had struck. Two feathered souvenirs stuck into him, one high in his mass of wing-driving muscle, the other at the base of his tail.

Then there was the blood dripping and drying from his snout and crest. He must look a fright.

Dusk had settled into the arms of the valley. Dragonflame flashed bright as the Aerial Host spread terror across the tenting. The bats hadn’t mentioned that great sculpture looking out south toward the Lavadome.

The dragons who had no flame left picked up wagons and thatched roofs, coops and trees, anything that could be set aflame and carried a little way, there to have the process repeated.

So the flame spread from roof to warehouse to dock to boat. Flapping, diving griffaran attacked knots of men who gathered to fight either dragon or flame, or patrolled the outskirts of the city to look for reinforcements. Now and then a griffaran rose to report to HeBellereth, who circled above all with his dragons, looking at the wounded, sending members of the Aerial Host to protect downed dragons as they retreated toward the outskirts of town.

The destruction had not been achieved without loss. He marked a fallen griffaran, bloody atop one of the city’s famous domes. A collapsed building had an unmoving dragon-tail projecting from the rubble.

“The whole city united will not stop that fire now,” the Copper said, smelling the awful sweet stench of burning flesh. “Recall the host. Let’s go to the palace and see what’s left.”

He felt a pang for the Ghioz. Any people who could shape mountains into art, apparently just for the satisfaction of it, had his grudging respect. Perhaps he would let some part of their society blossom after this too-long-delayed trimming.

He wondered what kind of effort it would take to shape that great flat face into a dragon-head. It would be a project mostly of cutting away, after all. Or perhaps a frieze of a profile. That might be even easier.

Such a monument would let the world know what had happened here this day, for all time.

A small portion of the Queen’s guard held her palace until death.

Dragons breathed fire onto the balconies and dropped their riders. They met AuRon and his raggedy Dairuss under their war-chief fighting inside the temple with what was left of the Red Guard.