Of Bone and Thunder (3 page)

Barely rising above the waves, Swassi was a long brown smear across the ocean. Its features could be counted on one hand: wind-bent palm trees, a rambling series of huts making up the naval way station, a hastily constructed canvas-tent sanatorium filled with sick and wounded soldiers evacuated from Luitox, and a huge burn pit behind the sanatorium that gave off a greasy, thick smoke the entire time he was there.

And I volunteered for this.
It had been a rash decision but one he didn't regret. Life in the Kingdom for his kind wasn't what it had once been. The change had happened virtually overnight with the Bastard Revelation. A royal historian—no-good muckraker, as Jawn's mother put it—found proof that King Wynnthorpe and the two monarchs before him were descended from the pairing of Queen Arbara and the royal huntsman Kofery Dar
Minkon. Every king and prince who followed was illegitimate. Instead of a monarch, chaos now reigned. In one fell swoop, the very notion of the royalty was called into question. “Rightful heirs” popped out of the woodwork like so many noxious bubbles from a witch's boiling cauldron and were just as appealing. In the span of a fortnight, five distinct High Councils emerged laying claim to leadership of the Kingdom and its many far-flung protectorates, arguing that until a true heir was found—if one ever was—they, in their wisdom and sense of duty, should rule in his or her stead.

There were no riots in the streets and no one was calling for a storming of the palace—yet—but in ways Jawn thought far more worrisome, society was changing. Town criers, until recently solely the mouthpieces of the king, were now paid men—and, shockingly, occasionally women—in the employ of the High Councils and an increasing number of concerned citizens and merchant guilds. Where there had been one official report of happenings in the Kingdom and beyond, now there were dozens. It was madness.

Jawn coughed, spitting out some black phlegm into his hand. He looked at the mess before wiping it on his trousers. Everything he'd believed to be solid and stable now had sand under its base. If the king wasn't the king, then what other lies were waiting to be revealed? He shifted in his saddle and groaned. One lie he knew he'd never believe again was that riding a rag across the sky was glamorous. All feeling in his buttocks was gone, while the pain in his lower back grew. This was no longer a flight; it was a feat of endurance.

“I did the right thing,” Jawn muttered, hoping to convince himself that it was true. The Kingdom was at war abroad and tearing itself apart at home. The place for a young man was at the point of the spear, and that was out here. It's what men did, what they always did. They went to war because there was one. There was no better way to prove to yourself and everyone around you what you were made of. Jawn knew it in his heart even if his brain had had second thoughts.

All thoughts of glory had been put to the test early, however, during training. Everything the army did seemed tailor-made to numb the mind and weary the body. For all that, he'd ultimately come to enjoy it. Even the questionable food. It was amazing how good even the grayest hunk
of boiled beef tasted after working up a real appetite. And outdoors, no less.

The physical demands had pushed him beyond any exertion he had ever attempted. He'd always been considered gangly due to his tall, thin frame, but now, instead of protruding collarbones and a washboard rib cage, he had muscles, actual muscles! He was in the best shape of his twenty-four years. Not only could he throw a punch, he could take one.

The rag lurched sideways, wrenching Jawn's attention back to his current situation. The agonizing monotony of the flight vanished in a series of erratic jerks and bumps, as if the rag were having a seizure. Jawn would have thought that very thing, but the co-driver's warning, however colloquial, finally made sense. “Rolly blues” must have something to do with rough air currents. Knowing the cause of the rag's distress did nothing to make him feel any better as she dropped vertically, leaving Jawn's stomach somewhere up around his ears. Men and women screamed all around him. The beat of the rag's wings increased, the huge leathery sails chopping the wind like two massive axe blades. Her entire body shook with the effort as she struggled to stabilize. She dropped again, then vaulted skyward as if a giant hand had scooped her up and tossed her like a ball.

As she reached the top of her climb, the rag flicked over onto her right side and began to roll upside down. Jawn experienced the sensation of hollowness as he floated in the air, his butt coming off of the simple leather saddle. The leather belts buckled around his thighs and calves bit deep through his canvas trousers and into his flesh but kept him from plummeting to the ocean some three thousand yards below. He risked looking down and saw more water than animal beneath him.

He chanced a look behind to where their baggage was strapped down. Happily, the crew knew their knots as the passengers' belongings appeared well and truly secured.

The rag twisted its body into a crescent shape and began falling back toward the water. Soot flaked off its scales as they slid over one another, revealing patches of the dull brown color beneath.

“Makes you wonder if two weeks in a ship's hold would have been better than this!” the passenger opposite Jawn shouted—although currently
above
was more accurate than
opposite
. The crowny had his arms wrapped tightly around one of the rag's triangular dorsal plates, which ran down the length of its spine from the top of its head to the tip of its tail, like a row of shark teeth. “At least you can see waves on the water. I don't know how those buggers see these rolly blues up here!”

Someone near the front of the rag wailed in obvious terror. The driver and co-driver, sitting strapped in forward of the rag's wing shoulders on a wooden yoke with their feet dangling in thin air, traded shouts. Jawn still couldn't understand what was being said. A moment later, the air carried the ringing crack of iron bar against scale. More shouts and more cracks followed. The co-driver was half out of his saddle and twisted around to face backward, swinging a four-foot wrought-iron bar up against the underside of the rag's right wing where it met the huge shoulder joint.

“Gone up, ya licey stoof!” he shouted, then looked back at Jawn and smiled. “ 'Tain't but a li'l tweekin' laek, yah? Ter rag done feel a ting!”

He went back to hitting the rag, each blow timed on the wing's upstroke. The rag began to pump her appendage a little harder in response. Droplets of steaming blood and small flakes of scale began flying off the leading edge of the wing.

The rag turned her head around toward the co-driver, but the driver sawed on the chains bolted to the cast-iron bit in her mouth and snapped her back. The speed of the wind increased as the angle of the rag grew steeper.
I can't die like this
, Jawn thought. Back in the Kingdom, criers had begun relaying tales of courageous acts in battle that often included the story of the fallen soldier who had died in its commission.
Jawn Rathim, twenty-four, fell out of the sky from the back of a decrepit dragon driven by two yokel
s just didn't kiss the ear.

They'll get this sorted
, he hoped, avoiding prayer because no matter how dire his situation, he wasn't about to call for a help he didn't believe in. Independence wasn't something you gave up the first time things got a little sticky. He chose to think of something pleasant.

Milouette. The smell of strawberries and the blush of excitement coloring her neck. Milouette of the small, perky breasts; freckled nose; and long, colt-like legs that wrapped firmly around his waist. Images of his
mother's handmaiden brought a smile to his face. She'd been seventeen, he barely fifteen. The first stirrings of an erection caught him by surprise.

The rag lurched back to level flight, slamming him down into his saddle and ending all thoughts of Milouette. Lightning lanced his member as a sledgehammer drove his balls deep into his stomach.

“High Druid beyond!” Jawn yelped. His eyes watered and he gulped in a lungful of the foul air. He gritted his teeth until his temples throbbed and slowly counted to twenty until the pain began to subside.

Jawn took a few more breaths, then eased himself over to lean out and look down past the side of the rag. The whitecaps still looked small. Way too far to fall and survive.

“Done gone o'er the hills I reckon! Jus' li'l uns, yah?” the co-driver shouted. He sounded amused.

Any temptation to yell back at the man vanished as the caustic stench of vomit stung Jawn's nostrils. He ducked, feeling the wet splatter in his hair and on the back of his neck. He now had a new source of irritation.

“Hey! Quit puking!” Jawn shouted, sitting up and shaking his head in the wind. He unwound his right hand from the leather thong looped into the heavy iron chain running down the right side of the rag's spine. Reaching forward, he jabbed the man in front of him in the thigh with the knuckles of his fist. “Do that again and I'll heave you over the side!”

The officer twisted around to look over his shoulder at Jawn. The front of the man's uniform was a crusted mess of vomit; wet strings of the stuff hung from the corners of his mouth. One detached in the wind and flew back at Jawn, catching him in the cheek. The officer whimpered, “We're all going to die!”

“Fucking idiot officers,” came the reply from the crowny on the other side of the dorsal plate.

Jawn wiped his cheek and came away with a hand covered in wet, black soot. Sighing, he rubbed it against his filth-covered tunic and turned to look at the man beside him. They'd barely talked the entire flight, not that the crowny hadn't tried to strike up a conversation more than once.

“He might be right,” Jawn said, hiding his annoyance at the other man's use of obscenities.

“Aw, don't listen to him,” the crowny said, wedging his upper half between two dorsal plates. He looked like he was bellying up to the local bar. “This old rag might be a clapped-out carcass not long for the rendering vat, but she'll get us down in one piece. Rags were built to fly.”

“It's a long flight for one this size though, isn't it?” Jawn asked, reluctantly leaning to the left and grabbing the edge of the nearest dorsal so their conversation could continue at something less than a full-throated shout. “She's not exactly making this look easy.”

The crowny smiled. He had the look of a jovial talker, one of those pudgy-faced, grubby bar patrons whose friendly smile hid a desperate need to talk when all a person wanted to do was to be left in peace.

“Not her fault. See the notches on her tail fin?” he said, pointing with his thumb toward the back of the rag. “They mark it every time a rag makes a long haul like this. One this size is supposed to be good for two hundred trips before they switch them over to shorter routes. Something about the muscles pulling away from the bones and their internal workings getting too hot.”

Jawn turned his head and watched the rag's tail as it swayed back and forth. Her vertical tail fin looked as tall as him. As it swept far to the right and then back he did a quick count of the notches. His eyes widened.

“That looks closer to four hundred.” He noticed the heat again emanating from the scales beneath him. It was more than the sun. The rag was definitely getting hotter.

The crowny's smile got bigger. “Yeah, ain't that a newt in the cauldron. Between the upheaval back home and the overthrow of the governing tribal council in Western Luitox by the Forest Collective, the Treasury's vault is more cobwebs than coins. And we haven't been there four years yet. So old girls like her are having to take the strain and fly farther and longer.”

His pronunciation of
Luitox
was spot-on. It even had the slight hard click on the start of the second syllable that Jawn had only heard used by long-serving diplomats. Maybe he could have an intelligent conversation with this man.

“You jest. The war can't be costing all that much,” Jawn said.

“It's bleeding us dry, is what it's doing,” the crowny said. “Do you know what the single most unproductive use of a man's time and energy is?
Fighting wars. You destroy the fields, maim the livestock, kill the farmers, and leave the women barren.”

Jawn had never considered that, nor did he want to. “You're completely ignoring the moral imperative to wage war. We don't fight to fill our coffers—we fight for what's just. We defend the weak and vanquish evil.” He didn't bother adding that they fought because it was an adventure beyond all others. Jawn could tell this fellow wouldn't understand that. “It's our duty to crush the Forest Collective and return Western Luitox to the peace-loving peoples that live there. If we don't stop them now, what next? We—”

“You're serious?! High Druid's balls!” the man said, his eyes wide. “We
absolutely
fight war to fill our coffers. Problem is, it's a terrible way to do it. Always ends up costing more than what we get. Hang my words from the highest branch: Luitox will not pay off.”

“Perhaps they don't keep you up-to-date in the Crown Service with what's going on military-wise,” Jawn said, not bothering to hide the disdain in his voice. “The army is confident that the fighting in Western Luitox will be over before the first autumn leaves fall. The Forest Collective are disgruntled peasants, not a well-trained army like ours.”

Instead of being duly humbled as he should have been, the crowny grinned, his smile full of butter-colored teeth. “I didn't realize you were so up-to-date on things. But first, where are my manners? Name's Rande Cornalli Ketts, field inspector, Commerce and Taxation.” He paused for a moment before continuing. “Most know me as R. C. Ketts, but
you
can call me Rickets.” He raised his eyebrows as he pronounced his nickname.

Cute.
Jawn obligingly nodded. He took the man's outstretched hand and shook it. It was surprisingly rough for a paper-and-quill jockey. “Jawn Rathim. I've been assigned to the Seventh Phalanx, Command Group.” He hesitated to say more.