The Last Battle Read online

  The Last Battle

  Dragonmaster

  Book III

  Chris Bunch

  Content

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  About the Author

  Dedication

  For Monsieur Jack-Attaque Demong (d.o.b. 23-12-02)

  1

  Dragonmaster Hal Kailas, Lord Kailas of Kalabas, Member King's Household, Defender of the Throne, Hero of Deraine, and so on and so forth, banked his great dragon Storm out over the Eastern Sea, and looked back at the land.

  Spring was about to arrive. Here, fishing boats ran out their nets. There, just inland, along the cliffs, farmers were beginning to plow.

  The trees of the orchards were budding, putting forth green shoots.

  Villages and farms dotted the landscape, the chimneys of their houses curling smoke up into the sharp air.

  All was prosperous, all was peaceful, all belonged to the Dragonmaster.

  Big frigging deal, Hal thought.

  It was as if there were a gray gauze veil between him, his mind, his thoughts, and this world of peace.

  It was two years since the great victory, when Roche had been driven down to defeat and ruin.

  Kailas at times almost wished for the fighting to come back.

  He wasn't bored—at least he didn't think so—but nothing much mattered to him these days.

  The armies had been paid off, and the men and women had made their way back to their homes, if they admitted to them any longer.

  Others went to the cities, found jobs, and tried to settle down.

  Still others just wandered.

  They called themselves tramps, or beggars, but Hal, who'd been a tramp himself before the war, saw no sign of their wanting work beyond the moment, or even a full begging bowl.

  They did not seem to want anything that was offered them, no matter what it was.

  Whatever anyone had expected peace to bring, it seemingly hadn't brought anything for great numbers of soldiers—and civilians as well—too many of whom unconsciously missed the excitement of battles and victories.

  Of the three great nations who'd battled, Deraine was in the best shape, having nothing worse than economic decline to worry about.

  Sagene, once Deraine's ally, had had its eastern provinces torn and laid waste, the land laying fallow, unworked, too many farms abandoned.

  Roche, as King Asir of Deraine had worried so long ago, was in chaos, barely a nation now, with barons fighting other barons for a meaningless throne, and little law on the land save what a warrior could carve out for him- or herself.

  Hal Kailas, at least, didn't want for anything. The war had not only brought him fame, but land, honor, and riches.

  But happiness? Contentment?

  Even his marriage to Lady Khiri Carstares now lay behind that gray veil.

  Perhaps if they'd had children, it might have been different.

  He wondered why his marriage seemed to have almost vanished, like one of the cloud wisps that drifted past Storm's soaring wings.

  Maybe he and Khiri had wanted too much, expected too much, used their marriage to block off the war, to give them what comfort they'd been able to seize.

  Perhaps there'd been too much blood shed. Blood of her family, blood of the enemy.

  But now he went little to her estates on the west coast, nor she to his, here across the country on Deraine's eastern coast. Mostly, she spent her time in the capital, Rozen.

  The little they were together, they still slept in the same bed, still made love. But Hal felt the coupling was almost mechanical.

  He didn't know, was afraid to ask, what Khiri felt.

  He banked Storm again, back toward land. Just on the edge of the horizon now was his great estate. He'd flown away from it just before noon, feeling its gray, its stone, its brooding.

  Not that taking Storm up had improved matters any.

  Realizing his mood was growing darker, he decided, since there was still time in the day, to travel north-northeast, to visit Bab, Lord Cantabri of Black Island.

  He was certainly warmly clad, with a riding cloak covering him from stirrups to waist, and a hooded sheepskin coat. Hal could have flown for a week, loving the sharpness of the spring air against his face.

  He felt the irony of his destination.

  Cantabri, a yellow-eyed, scarred warrior, really had little in common with Kailas.

  But he and Hal had soldiered long and well in the service of the king.

  They had little else to unite them, though. Cantabri was frank about missing war's seductions of brotherhood, excitement, authority.

  Hal missed none of that.

  But he missed… something.

  Like the wanderers, he didn't know what it was.

  And, he realized, he and Bab seemed to be quickly turning into dotards, with not much to talk about besides their experiences in the war.

  Storm honked a lazy challenge, seeing another dragon in the distance.

  Hal hoped to see someone on its back, but the monster was wild.

  He might have been a war dragon once.

  But when the armies were cut back, the dragons were mostly set loose, abandoned, as the now-dead Danikel, Lord Trochu, Sagene's greatest killer, had gloomily predicted.

  There'd been much discussion during the war of using dragons for quick transport.

  But the beasts were deceptive—they might have been enormous, but their carrying capacity was slight. The Roche and, occasionally, the Derainians had used paired dragons to carry baskets full of infantry. But this was for very short distances, and was hardly a successful way of fighting.

  There'd been some excitement about using them to carry people about, people who were in a hurry to get somewhere.

  But weather and the natural intemperateness of dragons brought that to a quick halt, as did the loss of half a dozen or so adventurous rich men.

  A few dragons became polished popinjays, their owners offering flights for the citizenry for a few silver coins. But the monsters' eyes seemed as dull as the fliers who took the villagers aloft.

  At least Storm was fat, happy, and lazy, although when he saw another dragon he still bristled, his huge tail whipping behind him, challenging combat.

  He was in the very prime of life, perhaps seven or eight years old, gray and black. He was about fifty feet long, twenty feet of that in his huge whip of a tail, and about twelve feet tall, on all four legs. His natural weapons were many: his head with cruel fangs and dual horns, and spikes on either side of his neck. All four legs had taloned "hands," and there were talons on the leading edges of his wings. They stretched more than a hundred feet from tip to tip.

  Fat and happy… but there were too many dragons, once-feared weapons of the king's forces, now cast aside as unneeded.

  There'd been enclaves set up by the King's Master of Remounts, to take care of wounded, crippled dragons. But Kailas had heard that these hospitals had gone unfunded. He had visited a handful of them, finding them all empty, and desolate but for the lingering reek of the monsters.

  He'd heard rum
ors that these dragons had been killed, or taken to a desolate island and just abandoned, but they were only rumors.

  In any event, to see a dragon with a rider these days was a surprise, the handful Hal had encountered being wild.

  He'd sent letters to Garadice, at the king's palace, about the hospitals, offering to pay for their costs as best he could, but never received an answer. He'd heard that Garadice had quit his post in disgust over the maltreatment of his monsters, gone off on an expedition to Black Island and on into the north, but was never able to confirm the story.

  Hal's King's Own First Dragon Squadron still existed, as a ceremonial unit only the size of a flight. There were two other such "squadrons" in the Royal Army.

  They'd regularly written Hal, requesting the pleasure of the Dragonmaster's presence at one or another ceremony.

  Hal had declined them all, somehow realizing that witnessing these hollow shells would further depress him.

  As for the handful of men and women who'd flown with him, and somehow lived, he'd been able to find out what had happened after the war to only a few.

  Mynta Gart had, as she'd vowed, put together a shipping firm that grew and grew. She was now very rich, with more than twenty-five bottoms under her command, and, seemingly, very content.

  Sir Loren Damian had retreated to his estates in the west, and busied himself in stock breeding. Hal got an occasional letter from him, always swearing that he didn't miss dragons or flying.

  He wasn't the only ex-flier to remain firmly ground-borne. Hal had wondered why people could walk away from the soaring joys of seeing dawn from the heights, long before the land-tied, or chasing a rainbow or just what lay on the other side of a mountain. Then he realized many ex-fliers remembered only the terror of being attacked by one of the Roche black dragons, or seeing a friend or lover torn from his or her saddle to fall screaming into death, and needed and wanted no reminders of those days.

  Hal could understand what those fliers felt—the squadrons had taken a terrible toll during the war.

  Farren Mariah, the city rogue, sometimes self-taught wizard, had simply vanished, and no one seemed to know of his whereabouts, although a few guessed prison or worse.

  A flier he barely remembered from the squadron, a Calt Beoyard, who'd joined just before the war's end, still tried to keep some sort of squadron association alive, and circulated a round-robin periodically. Hal read it, but without the interest he thought he should have felt.

  Kailas, unlike his wife, went seldom to Deraine's capital, Rozen, or to the lavish apartment he and Khiri had across the Chicor Straits, in Sagene's city of Fovant.

  Khiri, however, throve on travel.

  Which made Hal's life on his estates more empty, but somehow the emptiness wasn't unwelcome.

  Within an hour, Hal was overflying Lord Cantabri's land. When King Asir had decided to reward Hal with property, it had been Cantabri who'd pressured the king into making Hal his neighbor in the east, telling Kailas that he always felt more comfortable living near a man who'd been tested, and Cantabri felt the only real test of a man or woman was war.

  Cantabri might have been a friend as well as a war leader, but Hal always had a bit of trouble using his first name, in spite of Cantabri's insistence.

  The demarcation between the two lords' lands was clear—the farmhouses on one side were a little shabby, the lands not as well tended, the villages a bit on the rundown side.

  Cantabri had been a fierce soldier, but he was, in Hal's eyes, far too indulgent to his farmers and workers, always ready to grant a boon, or an exemption from estate taxes.

  But that was Bab.

  Ahead was Cantabri's great castle, sitting solitary on an easily defensible promontory.

  That showed another difference between the two—the manor that Hal used the most was nestled in a valley that stretched to the sea, all rich farmlands with small villages nearby, with sere moorlands above it, on the fells.

  Hal sent Storm slanting downward, already half smiling in expectation of his welcome.

  Cantabri would growl him out of his foul mood, as would Cantabri's wife.

  He was only half a hundred feet from the ground, just level with the castle walls, when he saw that the great banner that normally flew from the battlements was gone, replaced by a somber black pennon.

  Other black flags hung from the ramparts.

  Hal felt a sudden clench in his gut.

  He brought Storm in for a landing in the huge forecourt, and an equerry ran out to take his reins.

  The man's face was flushed, and his eyes red.

  "The Lord… the Lord Cantabri is dead," he managed, and burst into tears.

  2

  Hal slid from his saddle, grabbed the man by the shoulders.

  "How? When?"

  "It must've been his heart… or something," the man said, fighting for control. "He… it was just after the morning meal, and he was going to ride out to see the new piggery… and then… then… he didn't even say anything… just fell on his way to the stables… no one knows…"

  That was about all he could get from the retainer.

  Grimly, Hal went looking for Lord Bab's wife. No, widow, he corrected himself.

  Two days later, he was airborne, headed back for his own home.

  House, he corrected himself. Home is supposed to be welcoming, and those cleverly piled reddish rocks offered him no seductions.

  The last two days had been just as painful as he could have expected.

  Lady Cantabri was very brave, and very firm, except periodically, when the reality of the loss made her dissolve in sobs.

  Part of Hal was unshocked. He'd had too many friends die around him in the war to not have an armored shell around his heart.

  Part of him found it a bitter irony that Cantabri, having lived through a nightmare, should drop dead before looking at a collection of pigs.

  And a very selfish, unacknowledged part led him to the realization of just how alone he now was.

  He wished Khiri would be waiting for him.

  Then he corrected his thought. He wanted the Khiri that was.

  His mind made another wry correction.

  Maybe the Khiri that was… waiting for the Hal that the war had killed… the Hal that Kailas had never been? The Hal that had been part of a flying circus, in the days when dragons were creatures to marvel at, and cosset?

  The sprawling castle, built when Deraine was still torn by civil war, was even emptier than he'd thought it would be. But Hal didn't notice it for a time. Waiting for him were two letters: The longest was, finally, from Garadice. It ran:

  Dear Lord Kailas,

  My humblest apologies for not returning your posted inquiries, but I have just recently returned to Deraine, after a protracted expedition to the north countries.

  I took the assignment, which came directly from His Royal Highness, feeling the bitter frustration after my attempt to provide shelter for our dragons, which I trained, and'which foughtfor us so well, and wanted little to do with my country for a time.

  I will be preparing a paper before the Royal Society of the Sciences, but that will be months in the offing, and you might be curious about what we found, since you were always the dragon flier most interested in the beasts we tamed and rode.

  There were almost 200 of us who sailed from the north of Deraine, aboard the venerable Bohol Adventurer, which I assume you remember full well from the war.

  It has not improved any in its lack of seaworthiness nor victualing.

  There was also a frigate with the Adventurer, since no one knew what to expect once we sailed beyond Black Island.

  Twenty of us were scientists in one specialty or another, three diplomats, one magician, a certain Bodrugan that you'll remember, who sends his greetings. All of the rest were sailors or soldiers, already in the king's service. His Majesty mounted the expedition to satisfy his curiosity about unknown lands, and chose these men, and I auote him, "because they're already eating me out of ho
use and home."

  At any rate, to continue.

  We sailed north and east, seeing no other ships in our passage, not even fishermen.

  Black Island was exactly as we left it in our raid—Roche did not bother to rebuild its dragon-breeding station after we destroyedit

  But there was a cheerful note—there was more than a plethora of black dragons, soaring, dipping around the island heights. Evidently they needed little encouragement to breed, and those we studied from a respectful distance were very healthy, and had little interest in man other than barely suppressed hostility.

  We sailed on, this time due north, and wearisome were the days for me, since I had no interest in labeling the various fishes that we brought up.

  There were dragons aplenty, some flying overhead, others on the water, being blown along with their wings furled over their heads, in the peculiar rafting position you, I believe, were the first to describe.

  These last were sometimes healing from wounds suffered some time ago, and were being driven east.

  They behaved toward us like wild dragons who'd never let Man on their backs. Some of the ones in the air seemed to recognize Man, but did not care to come close.

  After a week's sail, while storms howled around us, we came upon a solid wall of ice, with bergs breaking off at intervals.

  It was impassable, and so we turned east, keeping the wall within sight, hoping to find either a breakdown in it so we could continue our northern auest, or something other that would be of interest to the king.

  We were almost on the land before we saw it. The day before landing, we sighted sharp rises, which we thought were skerries in the middle of the ocean. They were not.

  They were sharp pinnacles that rose from an almost flat land, what is called tundra, no more than slowly drying peat, from long-vanished forests.

  And here we found dragons galore.

  They flocked to every pinnacle as if they were rookeries, living off fish they brought up like great cormorants or, more plentifully, the shaggy wild oxen that grazed in the tundra.

  And here, too, we found Man.

  There are fairly primitive tribes occupying these lands. They were not particularly friendly.

  Bodrugan devised a language spell, so we could communicate with them. But mostly they seemed interested in procuring, either by trade or theft, our nets and fishhooks.