Chapter 7
In the corner, nestled in his bed of sweet-grass and clover, Pip was finishing his morning meal.
He was not eating broth today. Sprawled before his blunt, gray snout was the torn parchment title-deed to the Southern Granaries of House Palomar—a scrap Oriana had covertly swept from the administrative waste-bin two nights prior. Pip chewed with slow, rhythmic satisfaction, his crooked lower jaw grinding the wax-sealed parchment into digestible pulp.
"Chew well," Oriana whispered, kneeling down beside him. "It’s either the finest breakfast in the Empire or your last."
Pip paused, a scrap of red seal-wax sticking to his scaly upper lip. He looked up at her with those cloudy, milky eyes, gave a soft *whuff* through his perpetually running left nostril, and swallowed the rest of the deed with an undignified gulp.
He didn't look like a champion. He didn't even look like a dragon. He looked like an overripe pear carved out of slate, with two leathery nubs for wings and four crooked toes on his left hind foot.
"Come here, little one."
She held out her open hands.
Pip waddled forward, his heavy, low-slung belly scraping against the straw. He climbed onto her palms with surprising agility, his blunt talons finding purchase against her calluses, and nestled himself deep into the heavy wool pocket of her apron. He settled in with a low, contented wheeze, curling his tail around her waistline beneath the fabric.
From the hallway outside, the heavy crunch of iron on gravel announced her escort.
Four armored guards of the Sun-Guard stood in the threshold, their halberds tipped with null-silver, their crested helms shaped like the screaming beaks of raptors.
"Oriana of the Brood-Guild," the lead guard barked, his voice muffled by his visor. "The Grand Assembly sits. The Emperor has taken the Solar Dais. You are summoned to the pit."
Oriana smoothed down the front of her smock, feeling the solid, heavy warmth resting against her ribs.
"I am ready," she said.
***
The Sunken Coliseum was an open wound in the flank of the mountain.
Carved directly into the caldera of an extinct vent, its circular stone terraces rose sixty tiers high, seating ten thousand citizens beneath fluttering banners of gold, scarlet, and Imperial black. The air in the arena was stifling, thick with the stench of scorched limestone, hot tallow, and the acrid musk of four hundred caged dragons banked behind the lower iron portcullises.
Oriana was marched through the shadowed mouth of the Southern Vomitory.
When she emerged into the blinding glare of the morning sun, the noise hit her like a physical blow.
Ten thousand voices roared, cheered, and jeered, a wall of deafening sound that reverberated off the basalt tiers. High above the arena floor, perched upon a dais of solid white marble that jutted out over the northern rim, sat the Emperor. His golden mantle caught the harsh equatorial light, turning him into a faceless, radiant idol, flanked by thirty High Inquisitors in flowing robes of obsidian silk.
In the center of the vast, sand-strewn arena, the spectacle had already begun.
Lord Gideon of Palomar stood atop an elevated dias of carved black granite. He wore no field armor today. He was dressed in the ceremonial regalia of the Grand Dragonmaster: a coat of deep crimson velvet stiff with thread-of-gold, white buckskin breeches, and tall riding boots polished to the gleam of wet obsidian.
At his left and right, tethered by chains of cold-iron thick as a man's thigh, knelt forty of the Imperial Weyr's greatest war-drakes.
There were Thunder-Rippers with jaws wide enough to crush a carriage, and Blood-Scales whose crimson hides radiated an aura of suffocating heat. Yet none of them roared. None of them lifted their crests to the sky.
Every single beast was pressed flat against the bloody sand, their necks pinned beneath heavy iron collars, their nostrils whistling in terrified, forced subservience.
Gideon held the arena in the palm of his hand.
In his right grip, held high for the roaring terraces to behold, was the Imperial Crown-Rod.
It was nearly six feet in length, carved from a single, unbroken fossilized rib—the legendary ancestral bone said to have been taken from the primordial cradle of the First Wyrm, who had bowed his head to the First Emperor a thousand years ago. The bone was banded with concentric rings of celestial gold and set with three pulsating sun-stones that cast a sickening, pale yellow luminescence across the arena floor.
It was the ultimate instrument of dominion. The physical embodiment of the doctrine that dragonkind existed solely to be conquered, broken, and harnessed by imperial will.
"Behold the order of the Sun-Throne!" Gideon's voice echoed through the coliseum, magnified by the acoustic runes embedded in the arena walls. "The beast is chaos! The beast is fire! But by the blood of the First Emperor, the beast is made subject to the Law!"
He brought the base of the Crown-Rod down against the granite plinth.
*CLANG.*
A shockwave of pale, golden light rippled outward across the sand.
Instantly, all forty war-drakes convulsed. Their screams were high, thin, and strangled, choked off in their throats by the crushing psychic weight of the relic. They slammed their snouts into the dirt so hard that blood sprayed from their nostrils, groveling in absolute, agonizing submission before the glowing rod.
The crowd in the terraces erupted into ecstatic frenzy. Nobles stood on their stone seats, waving silk handkerchiefs, stomping their feet until the whole mountain seemed to tremble.
Oriana’s stomach twisted in cold, sickening revulsion.
It wasn't mastery. It was mutilation. She knew what those beasts were feeling; she had seen the hollow, weeping eyes of the drakes in the upper pens after the Inquisitors finished driving the silver pins through their skulls. The Crown-Rod didn't command their respect. It crushed their spirits into dust, leaving only broken shells behind.
The Sun-Guard shoved Oriana forward.
Her worn boots hit the churned sand, slipping slightly in a patch of dried drake-gore. She stumbled, caught her balance, and walked into the center of the ring, solitary and frail in her faded hemp apron.
The roar of the crowd began to falter, sputtering out into murmurs of confusion and mocking laughter.
"What is that?" a voice called out from the third tier. "Did they send a scullery maid to sweep the blood?"
"Look at her apron!" another shouted, followed by a chorus of raucous barks. "She's brought her laundry!"
Gideon turned slowly atop his plinth.
A razor-thin smile touched his lips, cold and precise as an executioner’s scalpel. He lowered the Crown-Rod slightly, resting its butt against his polished boot, and raised his left hand to quiet the crowd.
The coliseum fell into a tense, expectant silence.
"My Lord Emperor! High Inquisitors of the Sacred Synod! Citizens of the Sun-Throne!" Gideon’s voice rang clear and smooth, carrying the terrible charm of the high nobility. "Today we celebrate the purity of the Imperial Roost. We celebrate the cull of the weak, the forging of iron, and the unbroken chain of our draconic might."
He pointed a gloved finger down at Oriana.
"Yet even within the shining walls of our Weyr, the rot of sedition seeks a crevice to take root. Before you stands Oriana, daughter of the disgraced archivist Vance. A common keeper who has abused the sacred statutes of the *Founding Codex* to harbor genetic filth."
