In the small hours of the next morning, long before sunrise, I flew above scattered clouds. My payload this time was not rocks, but came in the form of large, spherical pots of thick ceramic, each containing about 20 gallons of lamp oil. On the outside of each was a little pot with slow-burning oil and cloth. When fired from a catapult — or dropped from a diving dragon — the ceramic would break on impact, the oil would spread, and the igniter would… ignite it all. And even if the igniter failed, there would be carefully contained fires on the ships’ decks for light, which would set the fumes ablaze. A single hit wouldn’t destroy a ship, but it would cause enough panic to practically take it out of the fight. And while they were terribly hard to hit with when lobbed from a catapult, I had no problem with accuracy.
I could carry several of the things at once, and the Admiralty had hundreds of the things in stock. Yakamo had set people to wrapping them up in nets for easy carrying as soon as I’d agreed.
I was focused, trying to balance my conviction that I was doing the right thing with my guilt over staying in the city. Instinct was excited about what was to come. And Conscience was silent. I couldn’t tell if she was sullen or just sad, but after I’d separated from Yakamo and her bodyguard she’d been practically absent. Not just not speaking; there was usually a sense of presence from each of my headmates, but Conscience had withdrawn to the point where there was barely even that anymore.
She hated what we were about to do. I knew that. I understood why, of course. She was Conscience. She still balked at the idea of killing when it might be avoidable. It was harder for her when it was sailors and soldiers who probably had little to no choice in being there, and she absolutely abhorred killing in any kind of horrible, painful way. She’d been disgusted at the idea of me taking the acid spit Advancement, and she’d balked at doing exactly what I’d just agreed to when it was my idea. But after Yakamo laid out her plan, explaining just how it might be the key to stopping Tekeretek from blockading the city and assaulting by sea, there wasn’t much Conscience could say. So she hid; out of wounded pride, disappointment, or despair, I couldn’t say. She hadn’t threatened to fight me. She hadn’t even tried to shame me. She’d just… given up, and disappeared. And for all that she could be a sanctimonious bitch, for all that I literally thought of her as my conscience, I felt terrible about hurting her like this.
Now, Instinct and I may have scoffed at the idea of using fire before, but that had been equal parts placating Conscience and sour grapes. Now that Yakamo had specifically asked us, though? Now that she’d told us how much of a difference we could make? Now we were excited to see what effect we might have. So there I was, three miles up, watching the first hints of twilight touch a horizon only I could see. I was carrying eight of the firebombs, two in each hand and each foot. In moments I’d dive and start setting ships on fire. Once the first flames reached for the sky, the Karakani fleet, waiting for just such a signal, would sail out. I’d keep making bombing runs, setting as many ships on fire as I could while the two fleets fought until one either broke or surrendered.
Whichever side won, it was going to be a nightmare for everyone involved.
Picking targets was easy. With my normal night vision, the Tekereteki ships were vague blobs against the water; visible, but hard to spot. With my shadowsight they stood out sharply, rising as they did high above the gentle waves. There were three of the really big warships, with three masts and four or five banks of oars depending on the ship, clustered at the middle of the formation with only a few hundred feet between them. The rest were spread out, presumably to support the lighter ships. I decided those three would make an excellent start.
Positioning myself over the northernmost ship, I folded my wings and dropped.
Diving fourteen thousand feet so fast should have been terrifying, but I was in my element. In the darkest part of the night, before twilight, I could see better than during the day. I wore the darkness like a cloak or a shield, confident in my knowledge that even Darim with her full-color night vision would have had trouble spotting me even if she knew where in the sky to look.
I remained silent. My instincts told me not to roar or screech, even if that might have thrown the humans into terror and confusion. They’d be confused enough when their ships started burning for no discernible cause.
At about fifteen hundred feet I released all four pots in my feet. The ship I’d targeted wasn’t the largest of the three, but I wanted to begin on a success. As soon as I’d released, I turned upward sharply, climbing thousands of feet on momentum alone before flipping myself over in a lazy loop and dropping toward the next ship, the largest one in the center.
As I did, the first ship was already a boiling mass of darkness. I couldn’t tell how many of my pots had hit, but the ones that did had turned the deck into an inferno, the light of the sea of flame and the burning sails blotting the vessel out utterly in my shadowsight. On the deck of my second target, tiny dots were running to the railing to watch their compatriots burn, unable to do anything to help.
I released two more pots, and pulled up again. This time I had to flap my wings to climb, and didn’t bother going quite so high. When I decided that I’d climbed enough and turned back toward the sea, the back of the center ship was covered in black flame. It looked smaller than I’d expected; I figured one pot must have missed.
On the third ship I dove to less than two hundred feet before releasing. I heard the roar of surging flame behind me.
When I returned to Karakan to rearm, the first ships were already leaving the harbor to form up. From the height of the lighthouse, the burning Tekereteki vessels were visible as tiny, bright dots; the Karakani captains had wasted no time when the signal came down from the lookouts that my attack had begun.
Yakamo was waiting in the near-dark of the munitions stockpile, along with a much recovered Miranna. The smile the lady admiral gave me was one of the most vicious I’d ever seen on a human. “The Tekereteki fear dragons more than any other nation,” she told me. “Perhaps they should have remembered that, and fled when they saw you. Go on like this, and we may just turn the course of the war!”
“Even against the greatest of odds,” I said. The words slipped out of me, a half-remembered quote I’d once heard from my brother. “You have no right to win, and yet you will.”
“No one ever has any right to win,” Yakamo said confidently. “You prepare as best you can, pray to the gods, place your hope in the Mercies, and then cheat as ruthlessly as possible. You, Lady Draka, are my cheat.”
The Tekereteki navy learned a very important lesson that morning about air superiority. I set every one of the fifteen largest Tekereteki warships alight, along with several smaller ones. If it looked like the crew of one was getting the fire under control, I hit it again. Flight after flight, dive after dive, strike after strike, I drove terror into the hearts of the Tekereteki fleet. Meanwhile, the Karakani carved them to pieces. With catapults and giant crossbows, bows and slings, and ramming and brutal boarding actions, they split the panicking Tekereteki formation apart, destroying or capturing their ships in detail.
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The Tekereteki had no defense against me. Even hours after my first attack, once the sun had risen and they could see me, their handheld bows couldn't reach me and their heavier weapons couldn’t aim at an angle where they could threaten me. All they could do was hope that I wouldn’t target them next, surrender, or, in the case of some of the lighter ships, break for the open sea. And I showed them no mercy. I felt no hesitation or regret for what I did. I pushed myself to the brink of exhaustion, and every small figure I saw throwing itself into the waves, many aflame, only spurred me on. I was destroying my enemies, and I felt nothing but satisfaction.
Conscience went from being silent and distant to being entirely absent. She told me later that she'd hidden in Kira. In her own words: “I needed to remember what compassion looks like.”
It wasn’t a flawless victory, but it was a brutally decisive one. Karakan lost ships, but they ended that battle with more than they started, even if the captured vessels were all of the smaller types. The burned out hulks of the Tekereteki behemoths slowly sank beneath the waves, perhaps to wash up on the shore over the next several weeks, perhaps to vanish forever.
As I swooped by the ships in the aftermath, going low and slow so I could really understand what I’d been a part of, the Karakani sailors cheered my name, or any of the titles they'd given me, or just cried out in wordless triumph. And I roared in response, loud and proud and flush with victory.
It didn’t take long for the reality of what I’d just done to start catching up to me. It was much harder to feel proud about breaking a fleet once the adrenaline wore off, and the images of burning men throwing themselves into the sea began to mean something again.
When I returned to the Admiralty to report to Yakamo that the battle was won, her staff wanted to throw me a party. No matter that it was still morning; they’d just learned that the blockade of their city had been broken along with the destruction of a significant chunk of the enemy’s navy, in large part thanks to me. That quickly escalated to half-formed plans to demand the Council throw me a parade. I thanked them but declined, with the excuse that as long as there was a war on, we all had better things to do.
I most certainly did. While I’d been indulging in the joys of strategic violence, unable to leave without risking some severe damage to the morale of the Karakani sailors, Mother had returned to Malyon. And she was in a mood.
Yakamo herself thanked me, promised to have my prize money calculated and brought together if possible, and then indicated that she planned to return to her office to sleep. It said a lot that I didn’t wait for my reward to be collected, or even to find out how much I’d be getting paid. I simply told Yakamo that I’d trust her to set aside a fair sum and that I’d pick it up when I could, then asked that someone bring me my things so I could leave. Only minutes later the clerk Dratal came running with the bag in which Barro had collected the translations of Sekteretesh’s letters and the lightstones; I’d picked them up the previous evening, before taking a nice, long nap to gather strength for the battle.
Dratal fawned and praised me, and I did my best to look and sound proud, despite how tarnished that pride felt. Then I was off. It was going to be a miserable flight, I knew — I’d run myself ragged to get as many bombing runs in as I possibly could, and I needed some serious rest before I’d be ready to fly far or fast again. But that couldn’t be helped. I had hours of flying ahead of me, and I refused to delay any further. I’d just have to suck it up until I arrived, at which point I’d be able to rest in the magically charged air of Malyon.
I’d barely made it as far north as Sweet Creek and Piter’s Clearing when I spotted a bright dot in the distant sky, rapidly getting closer. Mother had not been content to wait.
I ceded control to Instinct, who kept our same heading without so much as a hitch. She was remarkably calm — maybe her capacity for excitement had been filled by the battle only hours before. She even waited to speak until Mother had passed us and came around to settle into close formation to our left, though I could feel her struggling to keep quiet.
“Mother!” Instinct finally cried once Mother was in a position to speak. “Where have you been? I was worried!”
“You were worried?!” Mother asked incredulously, using flight-signs to tell us to land. She picked the closest meadow, barely large enough for the both of us, and set down there. Once Instinct had followed suit Mother continued, “Tell me, little one, and hold nothing back: have you seen any sign of other dragons where you were?”
“No?” Instinct replied, seeming confused by the question. “Why would there be? You have been keeping them away!”
“And it has been a struggle and a half these past days! What happened in Malyon? I tried interrogating your humans but they could only tell me that some ancient enchantment in an underground chamber was involved, and that it had released a massive amount of magic.”
“I do not know any more than that myself,” Instinct said. “Except that it hurt my siblings—”
As Instinct mentioned our siblings, Mother slowly blinked her second eyelids — the dragon equivalent of rolling her eyes. Instinct narrowed her own and continued. “It hurt my human siblings badly enough that they fell into a sleep from which they will not wake. They were dying until I drained them of excess power.”
“I am not surprised,” Mother said. “Your other healer said that she felt the surge of power, despite not being anywhere near the others. I imagine that at its source it must have been overwhelming to any human sensitive to magic. For hours, it was an overwhelming presence in my mind, and that half the island away! Even now I can feel it calling if I know where to turn. Can you not?”
“No,” Instinct admitted. “But it was blinding when I was inside the chamber. The magic was so strong I could not see anything else.”
“Perhaps it is due to your youth,” Mother mused. “Or perhaps you are simply different. Night certainly was unique in many ways. I can tell you this, dear daughter: that enchantment was an invitation to any dragon within several days’ flight. In only the short time since, I’ve seen three new strangers and sensed more, and I…”
Embers fell silent. She snorted unhappily. I could have sworn that she fidgeted. Then she said, with the air of a shameful admission, “I cannot keep them all at bay. Not without hunting them down one at a time, leaving you exposed to the others in the meantime. And I cannot say how many more might arrive from farther afield. This is beginning to look like a conclave.”
Instinct didn't even try to hide her anxiety. And why would she? Embers, our mother, likely the single most powerful creature we had ever seen by an order of magnitude, had expressed concern regarding her ability to keep us safe! That wasn't the kind of thing any sane person, no matter how proud, could ignore. For once, she immediately asked the most pressing questions.
“What does this mean for me?”
“It means, little one, that I shall have to remain with you at all times. No more patrols. I cannot risk you going off on your own and having some opportunist find you. You may be able to escape, through speed or stealth, but if one of these strangers wants to harm you, you need to succeed every time, whether through effort or luck. They only need to succeed once.”
“You are so certain they will wish me harm?” Instinct asked. Her voice was subdued, her normal, boisterous self nowhere to be found.
“With the younger females, I have little doubt. The males, and any older females, are harder to predict. They may tolerate your presence, due to your age; with your size, they may even respect your claim to a territory. Or, they may not. I simply cannot risk it.”
“Oh.” Instinct was silent for a beat before asking. “You said it is starting to look like a conclave. What is that?”
“Usually, a tiresome obligation where the weak argue that they deserve more than they can hold. Sometimes, the only way to prevent an all-out territorial conflict. I expect that many will wish to make a claim here to some stretch of forest or group of mountain peaks. But do not worry, daughter. This island is yours. I will not tolerate any violation of your territory without concessions that are agreeable to you.”
She leant down and nuzzled our head, rumbling and chirping in an attempt to soothe her daughter. It worked somewhat, too; it really was quite calming to know that someone who could destroy nations was utterly committed to my own well-being.
“Come now,” Mother said after a few long, almost peaceful moments. “I am sure you are worried about your humans. Let us return to them. I am sure any dragons within many hundreds or even thousands of miles will be going there as well, so humans or no, that is where we must be.”
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