They were nearing the spring at the heart of the oasis. Human carcasses littered the sand; swooping down into the basin was like descending into a pool of blood scent. In the late afternoon sun the corpses were starting to bake into carrion.
After we feed, we will leave here and find a cleaner place to sleep, the black dragon announced. We will have to abandon this spot for a time, until jackals and ravens clean it for us. There is too much meat here for us to consume at one time, and humans spoil quickly.
He skidded to a landing in the pool where a few human bodies still bobbed. Tintaglia followed him in. The waves of their impact were still brushing the shore when he picked a body out of the water. Avoid the ones encased in metal, he counselled her. The archers will be your best choices. Usually they just wear leather.
He sheared the body into two, and caught one of them before it could fall into the water. He tossed the half-carcass up into the air, then caught it in his jaws, tipping his head back to swallow it. The other half fell with a splash and sank in the pool. IceFyre selected another one, engulfing it head first, crushing the body with his powerful jaws before swallowing it whole.
Tintaglia waded out of the contaminated water and stood watching him.
They will spoil rapidly. You should eat now.
I’ve never eaten a human. She felt a mild revulsion. She’d killed many humans, but eaten none of them. That seemed odd, now.
She thought of the humans she had befriended: Reyn and Malta and her young singer Selden. She’d set them on the path to being Elderlings and not given much thought to them since then. Selden. She felt a spark of pleasure at her memory of him. Now there was a singer who knew how to praise a dragon. Those three humans she had chosen as her own, and made them her Elderlings. So they were different, perhaps. If she happened to be near one of them when they died, she’d eat the body, to preserve their memories.
But eating other humans? IceFyre was right. They were only meat. She moved along the shore of the pool and chose a body that was fresh enough to still be leaking blood. She sheared him in two, her tongue writhing at the feel of cloth and leather, and then chewed him a few times before consigning him to the powerful crushing muscles at the back of her throat.
The body went down. Meat was meat, she decided, and she was hungry after the battle.
IceFyre ate where he was, wading a few steps and then stretching his neck out to reach for more dead. There was no lack of them. Tintaglia was more selective. He was right about how quickly humans spoiled. Some already stank of decay. She looked for those who had died most recently, nosing aside the ones that were stiffening.
She was working her way through a pile of bodies when one gave a low cry and tried to crawl away from her. He was not large, and venom had eaten part of his legs away. He dragged himself along, whimpering, and when IceFyre, attracted by the sounds, approached, the boy found his tongue.
‘Please!’ he cried, his voice breaking back to a child’s squeak on the word. ‘Please, let me live! We did not wish to attack you, my father and me. They made us! The Duke’s men took my father’s heir-son and my mother and my two sisters. They said that if we did not join the hunt for you, they would burn them all. That my father’s name would die with him, and our family line would be no more than dust. So we had to come. We didn’t want to harm you, most beautiful ones. Most clever dragons.’
‘It’s a bit late to try to charm us with praise,’ IceFyre observed with amusement.
‘Who took your family?’ Tintaglia was curious. The bone was showing in the boy’s leg. He wouldn’t survive.
‘The Duke’s men. The Duke of Chalced. They said we had to bring back dragon parts for the Duke. He needs medicine made from dragon parts to live. If we brought back blood or scales or liver or a dragon’s eye, then the Duke would make us rich forever. But if we don’t …’ The boy looked down at his leg. He stared at it for a time and then something in his face changed. He looked up at Tintaglia. ‘We’re already dead. All of us.’
‘Yes,’ she said, but before the word settled in the boy’s mind, IceFyre had reached out and closed his jaws on the lad’s torso. It happened as quickly as serpent strike.
Fresh meat. No sense letting him start to rot like the others.
The black dragon threw back his head, engulfed the rest of the boy’s body, swallowed and moved away to the next pile of carcasses.
Day the 29th of the Still Moon
Year the 7th of the Independent Alliance of Traders
From Reyall, Acting Keeper of the Birds, Bingtown to Kim, Keeper of the Birds, Cassarick
Greetings, Kim.
I have been given the task of conveying to you a complaint that has been received from several of our clients. They allege that confidential messages received show signs of tampering, even though the wax plugs of the message cylinders appear intact. In two cases, a sealing wax stamp was cracked on a highly confidential scroll and in a third, the wax seal was found in pieces inside the message cylinder, and the message scroll appeared to have been spindled crookedly, as if someone had opened the cylinder, read the messages, and then replaced them, resealing the cylinders with Bird Keeper wax. These complaints come from three separate traders, and involve messages received from Trader Candral of Cassarick.
No official investigation has been requested yet. I have begged them to allow me to contact you and request that you speak with Trader Candral and ask for a demonstration of the sort of sealing wax and impression stamp that he is using for his messages. It is my hope and the hope of my masters here in Bingtown that this is merely a matter of inferior, old or brittle sealing wax being used rather than a case of a keeper tampering with messages. Nevertheless, we would request that you scrutinize any journeymen or apprentice keepers who have come into your employ in the last year.
It is with great regret that we ask this and hope that you will not take it amiss. My master directs me to say that we have the greatest confidence in the integrity of the Cassarick Bird Keepers and look forward to putting this allegation to rest.
The favour of a swift response is requested.
CHAPTER ONE
The Duke and The Captive
‘There has been no word, Imperial One.’ The messenger on his knees before the Duke fought to keep his voice steady.
The Duke, cushioned and propped on his throne, watched him, waiting for the moment he would break. The best a bearer of bad tidings could expect was a flogging. But delayed bad news merited death.
The man kept his eyes down, staring doggedly at the floor. So. This messenger had been flogged before. He knew he would survive it and he accepted it.
The Duke made a small gesture with his finger. Large movements took so much energy. But his chancellor had learned to watch for small motions and to respond quickly to them. He, in turn, made a more eloquent motion to the guard, and the messenger was removed. The boots of the guards thudded and the lighter sandals of the messenger pattered between them as they hurried him off. No one ventured a word. The Chancellor turned back to him and bowed low, his forehead touching his knees. Slowly he knelt, and then was bold enough to look at the Duke’s sandals.
‘I am grieved that you had to be subjected to such an unsatisfactory message.’
Silence held in the audience chamber. It was a large room with walls of rough stone that reminded all who entered that once it had been part of a fortress. The arched ceiling overhead had been painted a midnight