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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Miles Cameron
Excerpt from The Court of Broken Knives copyright © 2017 by Anna Smith-Spark
Excerpt from The Two of Swords: Volume One copyright © 2017 by K. J. Parker
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Maps by Steven Sandford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cameron, Miles, author.
Title: The fall of dragons / Miles Cameron.
Description: First edition. | New York : Orbit, 2017. | Series: The traitor son cycle ; 5
Identifiers: LCCN 2017020691| ISBN 9780316302449 (paperback) | ISBN 9781478915331 (audio book downloadable) | ISBN 9780316302456 (ebook open)
Subjects: LCSH: Fantasy fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Epic. | FICTION / Fantasy / Historical. | FICTION / Action & Adventure.
Classification: LCC PR9199.4.C3456 F35 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020691
ISBNs: 978-0-316-30244-9 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-30245-6 (ebook)
E3-20170926-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
Prologue: Alba
Part I: Maneuvers and Evasions Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part II: Entanglement Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
Characters and Names
Extras A Preview of The Court of Broken Knives
A Preview of The Two of Swords: Volume One
By Miles Cameron
Praise for Miles Cameron and The Traitor Son Cycle
Orbit Newsletter
This book, and indeed the whole series, is dedicated to Joe Harley (Elves/Irks), Robert Sulentic and Jim Dundorf (the Empire), Rob Gallasch and Delos Wheeler and Stephen Callahan (Etrusca/City States), Greg Hauser (the Steppes/Horseclans), Jevon Garrett (Galle/Gargencel), as well as Chris Schulitz, Mark Stone, Doug Snyder, David Stier, Regina Harley, Frank Gilson, and all the other players in the endless RPG and war games campaign we all called “Alba.” In fact, this book is also dedicated to the men and women of the SGA, the GLA, and the Drama House, who played games for days, or taught all of us nerdy gamers how amazing role-playing could be with trained actors, or how much fun it was to game with people who’d never tried a game, and how easily we could let pretend take over our lives if we were not careful. It was thirty years ago that I folded away the maps. I miss you all. And to Celia Friedman—that’s C. S. Friedman, if you read fantasy—who taught me to be a GM.
Prologue
Alba
The Vale of Dykesdale—Bill Redmede
The sun was setting in a sky of gold, and the bronze light suffused everything, gilding the endless forest, bronzing the stones left by ancient glaciers, and burning on the spear-tips of the retreating Army of the Alliance. The golden light set fire to the bright hair of the oldest irks and kindled the fur of the Golden Bears. It smoothed faces deeply creased by terror and fatigue.
Bill Redmede looked down the long column of weary men and a few women and then looked at the strange golden sky.
“Rain?” he asked John Clothyard, who was now, to all intents, his lieutenant. Nat Tyler had left him; killed the king, or so some men said. Ricar Fitzalan had gone east to serve with Aneas Muriens as battle comrades or lovers or both. The Jarsay-born Fitzalan had been a fine leader and the best second a commander could ask for, and Redmede missed him. He missed Tyler, too. Instead he had Grey Cat, who tended to wander off into the woods, and Clothyard, who was solid and dull.
Clothyard was a broad man of middle height, and his looks weren’t helped by a four-day growth of beard.
“Rain,” he responded.
Redmede was so far past exhaustion that he didn’t have to think much about his actions. He put a hand on the bow slung over his shoulder in a linen bag and trotted back along his Jacks. “Rain!” he yelled. “Put your bowstrings in your shirts.”
“Who the fuck are you? My father?” muttered one Jack. In a single summer of constant fighting, the Jacks had dispensed with camaraderie and turned instead to discipline. Some resented it.
“I never wanted to be a goddamned forester,” said another voice. This was directed at the grim reality that royal foresters, the king’s law in the woods, were the traditional enemies of the Jacks, broken men and outlaws, and now they marched together, the last Jack only two paces in front of the first forester. Not one forester or Jack was so dense as to miss the grim irony that in the eyes of the world’s powers, they were exactly the same: superb woodsmen and rangers. Ser Gavin, the army’s nominal commander, had put the two bands together with some hundreds of irk knights mounted on forest elk and irk ponies, an armoured cavalry that could glide through heavy woods with the agility of wild deer. Together, they were a match for almost any forest foe.
“Keep your bowstrings dry,” Redmede repeated as he trotted down the column. Not everyone was surly; Stern Rachel gave him half a grin, but she was mad as a felter and loved war; Garth No Toes hummed to himself as he flourished a little beeswaxed bag.
Most of these men and women had survived the rout after Lissen Carak; had fought at Gilson’s Hole; had marched west again to face Ash and his million monsters. They knew how to survive a little rain.
He told them anyway. Tired people make mistakes.
He forced himself up the rise he’d just descended, looking for the blank exhaustion that was like a sickness; looking for signs of people who hadn’t drunk enough water. His thighs burned, but it was these displays of routine prowess that marked him out, and he knew it.
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He reached the top just as Long Peter and Gwillam Stare came over the crest, glanced back into the hell of Ash’s army, and shook their heads.
“We fightin’ agin?” Stare asked.
Redmede shrugged.
“Only have nine shafts,” Stare said.
Long Peter didn’t speak much at the best of times. He kept walking.
“I hear you,” Redmede said.
“Meaning we might fight,” Stare asked.
“Meaning I don’t know a goddamned thing,” Redmede said.
He could see his brother trudging up the hill. The same irony that made the two bodies of men and their decades of enmity irrelevant in the current crisis was sharpened by the two Redmede brothers: Bill, the leader of a rebellion against royal authority, and Harald, his older brother, who had risen to command the foresters. That maturity had brought each to a better understanding of the other’s position might have been the reason that the two bodies could cooperate at all.
“Harald?” Bill said.
“Bill.” Harald nodded. Both Redmedes were tall and ruddy-haired and rough-hewed; where Bill wore the stained, loose off-white wool cote of the Jacks, his brother wore a sharply tailored jupon in the forester’s forest green, although he carried his hat in one hand like a beggar. He stopped at the crest, and his weary men shuffled past; Bill was starting to know their names, and John Hand, tall and strong as an old oak, sporting a knightly beard and mustache, was Harald Redmede’s best officer. He grunted a greeting and kept going, glancing back at the rising tide of bogglins behind them as almost every man and woman did on reaching the crest.
“I heard a rumour we won a big fight in Etrusca,” Harald said. “Heard it this morning from Ser Gregario.”
“I heard that there’s a thousand dead of the plague in Harndon,” Bill said.
“Aye, or three times that.” Harald Redmede leaned on his bow staff.
The first drops of rain fell from the golden sky.
“We winning or losing?” Bill asked his brother.
“Losing,” Harald said. He held his hat—full of berries—out to his brother, who took a handful and ate them, seeds and all; black raspberries, fresh picked.
Bill nodded. “Well, that makes me feel better,” he said.
Both of them looked down the ridge they’d just abandoned without a fight to the enemy, who were already crowding the ground below them; a flood of bogglins, so many that the ground seemed to move with chitonous lava.
The irk knights were the last in the column. Even their magnificent animals seemed dejected; stags with racks of antlers that were themselves weapons walked with their heads down, and their riders walked beside them.
“We’re fucking doomed,” Harald muttered. “Sweet Jesu, I’ll end up being taken for a Jack if I keep on like this.”
Bill Redmede shrugged. “I trust Tapio,” he said. “He’ll see us right.” He didn’t say, The happiest hours of my life were spent in N’gara and I’ll fight for it. N’gara was just a few leagues away, and Ash’s entire autumn campaign seemed bent on taking it.
Harald smiled without mirth. “My brother the fuckin’ Jack believes an elf will save us, and I think that the queen’s commander is a lack-wit. Well played, my brother. We can change off; I’ll take the Jacks, you take the foresters.”
Bill shrugged. “You always was contrary, Harald.” He looked at the looming sky. Thoughtfully he said, “We need shafts.”
“As do we. Best hope the mighty Ser Gavin knows it, too.” Harald shook his head. “If’n we stand and talk any longer, we’ll be eaten alive by bugs.”
The two men turned, and began to trot along to catch their people, who were retreating into the strange, wet, golden evening.
The Vale of Dykesdale—Ser Gavin Muriens
Ser Gavin Muriens sat heavily on his destrier, feet out of his stirrups to ease his back, great helm and gauntlets on his squire’s saddle-bow, idly picking something wet and grisly out of the spike of his little axe.
He was looking out over the valley that the irks called Dykesdale, watching his vanguard (in this case acting as his rear guard) toil down the far ridge like a line of ants slipping along to a food source.
At his feet, the Vale of Dykesdale stretched for some miles below a long ridge whose top was dominated by old maple and beech trees in the full colour of late summer growth. Many of them had lost their tops, as if a winter ice-storm had swept along the ridge, and there were gaps where men and irks had hewed away patches of wood.
Below, in Dykesdale itself, a crisscross of streams and beaver dams funneled all approaches to the ridge into two main routes: the Dyke, an ancient dam built by long-vanished Giant Beavers, and the Causeway, a stone and earth tribute to the Empress Livia’s failed attempt to wrest N’gara from the irks fifteen hundred years before.
Ser Gavin had chosen it as the ideal battlefield, with Tapio, the Faery Knight, and Mogon, Duchess of the West, and Kerak, her mage, after the two defeats farther west. They had stood here, on the same bare, round crest that the Outwallers called “The Serpent’s Rest,” and looked out over the magnificent country.
“It’s like an impregnable fortress, built by nature,” Gavin had said.
Tapio smiled so that his fangs showed. “It isss an impregnable fortress, oh man. But it wasss built by my kind, to defeat all comersss.”
And Mogon had lowered her great crested head. “Armies founder here, as the wardens know all too well. But our enemy comes in numbers that this place has never withstood.”
“Aye.” Tapio nodded.
Lord Kerak smiled. “You see only defeat. But we have discussed this, Lords of the East. We have slowed him, and made him show us his real warriors, his broken wardens, his hastenoch, his trolls. All I ask is that we make him use his power. Harmodius and Morgon and I have … a surprise.”
“Will it work?” Ser Gavin asked.
“That depends on the depth of his arrogance and some fortune,” the scholar-daemon said. His heavily inlaid beak opened to reveal the purple-pink tongue within—the Warden’s equivalent of a smile.
Gavin was still coming to grips with the idea that the battlefield had been built. “It is all apurpose?” he asked, somewhat awed.
“Every tree, every branch,” Tapio said. “We didn’t build the ssstone caussseway.” His fangs showed. “We jussst left it asss a monument to the ssstupidity of men.”
Tonight, with the sun setting in a ball of fire beyond Ash’s legions, Tapio’s confidence seemed empty vanity. So did Kerak’s.
“We can’t fight many more times, and lose, without the whole will of this army snapping,” he said. “We need a win, even if it is fleeting.”
Kerak shook his head. “In this war there will be no victory, short of a miracle. Tomorrow, if we make a stand here, I will invite the opportunity for a miracle, but that is all I promise.”
Why did I want this job? Gavin said, but only inside his head. He’d already learned the key role of a commander in an alliance is to show relentless good humour and confidence.
So instead of speaking, he looked back west into the setting sun. The light was turning bronze from gold, but the strange metallic quality of the light was unchanged.
As far as Gavin could see, a carpet of moving creatures covered the earth, so that instead of grass, shrubs, and marsh, he could see only a vast blanket of enemies stretching to the horizon.
At his elbow, Tamsin’s voice was soft. “He has emptied every nest along the banks of the West River. Every bogglin. He has stolen the wills of millions of beings and he will use them as fodder for his vanity. Oh, how I hate him.”
“Tomorrow, I will use that vanity against him,” Kerak said.
“From your beak to God’s ear,” Ser Gregario said with his usual humour. “Let’s sleep. Unless you think they will come at us in the darkness.”
Tapio was still watching the endless carpet of foes. “If we lose here, we lose N’gara,” he said.
Tamsin kissed him. “Yes,”
she agreed. “I am ready to lose it. Are you, my love?”
Tapio looked at Gavin. “We are all sssupposed to trussst your brother. Perhapsss I do. But even sssuppose that in the end, we triumph. Will there be anything left of my world?”
Very softly, Tamsin said, “No, my love.”
They all looked at her, for she was renowned as an astrologer and prophetess.
She shrugged. “When the gates open, the world changes. It has always been so. I need no wizardry to predict this.”
Gavin shook his head. “Let’s get some sleep,” he said. Far off to his right, the last of the column of rangers arrived at the foot of the great ridge to find rough shelters built of bark, and hot food. And bundles of arrows. There was fodder for man and beast, and fresh water. Everything that the hand of man and irk could do had been done.
“Tomorrow,” Tapio said. “I can feel it. I think we can stop him. My people have never been beaten here.”
Kerak bowed. “Tomorrow,” he said.
Mogon laughed. “In my youth, when this tree was young, I tried to make it up this ridge against you, Prince of irks, and my nest died like bogglins,” she said. “It is really quite pleasant to be on this side. Tomorrow we will win.”
Gavin nodded. “Tomorrow,” he said.
The sun rose somewhere, but over Dykesdale there was first fog, and then light rain, and the light grew very gradually.
Not a man or irk or bear or warden had slept damp, though, and every one had a hot breakfast. When Gavin had eaten his share of oatmeal porridge and bacon, he mounted a riding horse and rode the length of the ridge with Tapio and Ser Gregario. The highest summit, on the far right, was held by Mogon’s main battle; Exrech’s veteran bogglins, and Mogon’s hardened Saurian warriors, demons all, their inlaid beaks and engorged red-crests shining like myths come to life in the grey light of morning. In reserve, two hundred of the magnificent bears of the Adnacrags, the Long Dam Clan inured to war and many of their cousins and outbreeds, their golden fur darkened with damp. Many of them were sporting the heavy maille that the Harndon armourers had made for them over the summer, and almost every bear was wielding a heavy poleaxe as big as a barge pole in their paw-hands. A handful of Outwaller warriors stood with the bears; most of their kin were off in the east or fighting in the north against Orley, and the Sossag, once the mightiest of the Outwaller clans, were now protecting Mogon’s heartland from giant Rukh and yet more bogglins coming along the Inner Sea from the west.