The Dragon Round (Dragon #1)(57)

Now archers, who aren’t sailors doubling as crossbowmen and who can fire more frequently and accurately, move up and shoot at the dragon’s eyes. Arrows whisker its snout. The Pyg’s pepper pot gives it another whiff.

Mylla winces as the harpoons pull out the dragon’s hide, and the creature gags on the pepper. Its roars are horrible. She thinks she hears words, threats promising the worst sort of death. Its head and neck twist wildly. It heaves more furiously and to her horror the bows of the galleys lift a bit and the crews brace themselves. She has to be like Solet, though: However impressive dragons are, and in the old books she’s read dragons are spell-weaving, mysterious, and wise, in reality they are just big cows waiting to be slaughtered.

Solet says, “Jos, take us behind it. Mylla, tell our harpooners, on my signal, to pin its wings.” It can’t stay up with three galleys on it, he thinks, not with three. Jos pipes and the galley glides around the struggling dragon. Solet raises his fist, and the harpooners raise their firing rods.

When the dragon flings out its wings, he hammers the rail. One iron bursts through the right wing and falls into the water. The dangling chain widens the hole in the membrane with each flap. The second iron catches in the thicker membrane near the dragon’s left elbow. Solet orders, “Backrow halftime.” The chain unspools. When it turns white, the winch is locked, and the galley pulls the wing back until the dragon can barely stay aloft.

This is almost too easy, Solet thinks. The shipowners have to be impressed.

The dragon, desperate for lift, changes tactics and lunges, pulling the Gamo and causing the Pyg and the Kolos to lurch. The Pyg’s rowers lose their coordination for a moment, the dragon lunges again, and the chains connecting them slacken considerably. As the Pyg’s oars find the water together again, the dragon’s head lowers against its chest, its belly heaves, and its head flips up. A huge, yolky gob flies from its mouth and splashes just ahead of the Pyg’s bow.

The yolk doesn’t splatter. It spreads. Waves sloshing over it burst, and the spray wafts over the harpooners, who frantically rub their hands and faces.

Peering beneath the dragon’s wings, Mylla says, “What was that?”

Solet shakes his head. “Vomit?”

“Acid,” Jos says. “Same idea, though.”

Mulcent says, “Why is it not breathing fire?”

How long he has been standing beside them on the stern deck, still as a piling, Solet doesn’t know, but this is no place for him. “To the mast,” he says, “or to your cabin.”

“We sell phlogiston,” Mulcent says. “What use is . . . regurgitation?”

Solet’s hand is waving to larboard as Jos maneuvers them directly behind the dragon so they can pull it away from the Pyg. He says, “This is hardly—it still has hide and bone.”

“The profit is in the phlogiston,” Mulcent says. “Hide and bone won’t recoup the repair costs you will inevitably incur. Cut it loose.”

“It’s too late for that,” Solet says. “This isn’t some gamefish. It’s a dragon. It’ll swallow you whole if we let it go.” The dragon lunges again to make his point, throwing them off balance.

“Cut it loose,” Mulcent says, regaining himself, “so we can cut our losses.”

“I’m captain of this ship,” Solet says. “Mylla, two more harpoons.”

“And I own these ships,” Mulcent says. “You’re just a foreman in fancy pants.”

Jos’s eyes widen. This is too much for Solet. Before he does anything rash, he shouts down the ladder to two firemen, “Put this man in his cabin. If he tries to leave, put him in a barrel and nail the lid down.”

The men scramble up and grab Mulcent, who tries to shake them off. As they pull him down the ladder, he says, “That’s the end of the operation. And you.”

“Only a fool leaves an Ynessi with nothing to lose,” Solet says. This worries Jos even more than Mulcent’s comment.

Meanwhile, the dragon turns its head all the way around and peers at Mylla. Its eyes remind her of Solet’s when he’s up to something.

The dragon’s belly heaves again, its head whips around and another gob flies at the Pyg. The whip action gives the gob more momentum; it clears the bow and foredeck and breaks on the archers. They’re knocked back by its weight, and it spreads over their skin. The Pyg’s harpooners dance around the deck to avoid the fumes.

Firemen with pails move in to douse the injured with water, thinking the acid some strange liquid fire, but the water makes their skin boil and spit. Those with shovels scoop up the sand spread on the deck to remove the acid and toss it overboard. The deck is turning black, and all understand if the acid burns through, it’ll kill the rowers, then go through the hull and kill the ship.

One shoveler named Blass notices a clump has landed on the powder barrel. It reminds him of a jellyfish stranded on a beach after a tide. He and his sister used to poke them to see if they would move. They never did. Then the clump bubbles and drops through the steel lid.

In the dragon’s lee Solet sees a flash make the dragon’s wings translucent. He watches shards of wood and metal, bone and Blass, pierce the wings’ membranes and rain across the Gamo, chased by an immense boom, men’s screams, the dragon’s roar, the snap of chains, and the groaning of a ship going down by its bow. Somehow above them all he hears a long sharp whistle from the Kolos.