by James Somers
Fiddler walked over to Percival before he could join them. “Percival, I want you to take special care for the boy traveling with them, Daniel,” Fiddler said. “Protect him with your life, my friend.”
“Of course, Fiddler,” Percival said dutifully. “I won’t let anything happen to him.”
“Good. Now, help our friends and we’ll meet again soon enough.”
Percival nodded and went to help the others with gathering weapons. Fiddler watched them and smiled.
While Nathaniel, Marissa, and Percival busied themselves inspecting his armory and procuring their heart’s desire, Fiddler silently left the room. He had more important work to attend to now that the boy had arrived with his friends.
Everything needed to progress steadily in his training from this point on and Fiddler was going to see to it that happened. As he walked back through one of his adjoining ante rooms, he passed a mirror. He took a quick glance at himself. His image changed, for the briefest moment, into a boy with death-pale skin, raven hair, and a devilish grin on his face. Fiddler walked past the looking glass and proceeded out of the building through one of his secret entrances.
MUTINY FOR A BOUNTY
Meineke grumbled angrily under his breath as he took yet another peek through the glass storefront window. He watched Louie, Mickey, and Bob making their way toward the cashier’s counter with a load of food and other supplies. Louie, spotting the wil peering through the pane, took the opportunity to shoot him a grin and a wink.
“No wils allowed in the store,” Meineke complained. “It’s discrimination! I’m of the noble bloodline among my people! This is an injustice!”
Daniel stood by to console him. “It’s nicer out here in the fresh air anyway, Meineke.”
The shop owner, a rotund, balding man, had stopped the wil shortly after he entered his establishment, barking orders for the animal to wait outside. The whole affair had been quite embarrassing, with everyone in the store turning a suspicious eye toward the wil and his company.
Louie on the other hand clearly enjoyed the situation. Every turn around an aisle, he took a jab at Meineke through the window with his expressions, causing the wil to fume all over again. “That Louie, he’s just loving this!”
Daniel turned toward the street, watching for Captain Blackborne and Marissa to emerge from The Captain’s Cabin. “Of course he loves it. Louie is just trying to get you mad, and you’re playing right into his hands by worrying about it.”
“Oh, I suppose,” Meineke said grudgingly. He turned from the store to watch the restaurant with Daniel. “I wonder how long Marissa is going to be in there.”
At the Captain’s Cabin establishment down the street, a body flew through one of the large picture windows adorning the front façade.
“Something tells me, not much longer!” Daniel said.
Louie and his cherubs appeared at the front door of the small store with their supplies slung in leather bags. “What happened?”
“Do you really have to ask?” Meineke shouted as he ran after Daniel toward the scene unfolding at the restaurant.
Captain Blackborne and a man clothed in black launched out the front door into the street. They hit the ground as an intertwined ball of flailing arms and legs. The man in black got on top momentarily, until Blackborne kicked him up and over his own body. The two scrambled for a single dagger dropped from the stranger’s hand during the scuffle.
The stranger retrieved the weapon first and stood with a glint in his eye, leering at the captain. Nathaniel looked worried until he remembered something. He pulled a pistol from a brace hidden under his jacket and took aim at the man and his dagger. Now Captain Blackborne smiled. The man threw the blade at the captain, but Nathaniel pulled the trigger with more speed, ending the contest.
Marissa backed out of the restaurant with a pair of pistols in her hands and a load of weapons hanging from belts and braces all over her torso. Daniel and Meineke spotted a gargantuan man in the doorway. He looked like a mountain of muscle and he was walking toward Marissa.
Meineke took to the air in order to protect the princess in his bird form. He dropped on the mammoth man like a scalded cat in his original form. Meineke whacked away furiously at Percival’s head as he stumbled toward Marissa, carrying another load of weapons.
“What in the world is this thing?” Percival shouted as Meineke howled a war cry and pummeled him with tiny fists and claws.
“Meineke, it’s all right!” Marissa shouted. “Percival is with us!”
Meineke interrupted his assault, leaping away from the man to Marissa’s side, but he was still ready to fight if necessary. “Are you sure, Princess? He looks gruesome to me!”
Percival gave his attacker a quick once-over. “Oy, it’s a crazy wil.”
“They’re the ones we need to be concerned about!” Nathaniel said.
A group of mercenaries, all dressed in black, appeared in the doorway. They had been beaten to a pulp. Some limped about and others were covered in bruises and their own blood. “You’re not going to get away, Blackborne!” shouted one of the men. “We’ll find you and have the reward for your mangy hide!”
Blackborne tipped his tricorn hat to the group of mercenaries. “I think it’s time for us to depart.”
They backed away, keeping the mercenaries in view as they walked out of Corsica. Many people went indoors as they approached, fearing a fight might spark up again. Others stood watching as Captain Blackborne, Marissa, and the others all made their way cautiously toward the outskirts of the city. The group kept pistols and muskets sweeping the area all around them, just in case anyone else decided to take their turn at claiming the price on Blackborne’s head.
“Who were those people?” Daniel asked.
“Oh, just some former crew members of mine,” Nathaniel said. “While in my employ, they tried to take my ship and maroon me on a deserted island. I turned it around on them, but I guess they managed to find a way off.”
“You just can’t find good help these days,” Daniel mused.
The group continued to inch their way out of the city. They still needed to rendezvous with Bon and Jale. Hopefully the metamen hadn’t caught them.
VENGEANCE
In the pale of never-night, twelve massive wings cut through the stagnate air of the Necrom Void. It looked like the wake of a forest fire—charred trunks and grey ash for earth. The droning hum permeated everything.
Great armored, reptilian bodies glided through the firmament displacing mass quantities of air. These six predators remained noiseless in their approach toward the foreboding fortress ahead. No animals moved upon the ground and, had there been a breeze of any kind, there were no leaves to flutter upon it. Life itself seemed on hold in the dominion of Mortis.
The winged leviathans sailed on toward their target, having a singular purpose—vengeance. Six had been chosen. Their leader may have been the most feared dragon ever to roam the Living Land. Strom, the black dragon, flew out in front. Wispy tendrils of smoke evacuated from his nostrils.
Coercion had been Mortis’s intent, but Strom would not be blackmailed. Mortis would not expect the dragons to take the risk they were taking now. Strom would attack the Fortress of Night, rescue his progeny and, with any luck, destroy Mortis in the process.
Strom smelled the stolen eggs. The special scent upon them acted as a divining rod to the dragons, leading them straight to the fortress.
Within the eggs lay the fragile hope of the next generation of Strom’s kind. If Mortis destroyed them, then his would be the last generation. The dragons would pass from the Living Land without a fight as age slowly took them all.
As they approached the rocky spires of the Fortress of Night, Strom led his reptilian squadron into a steep dive from one thousand feet up. Six massive beasts of varying scale color plummeted toward the ground under careful control of their wings.
As they closed in, Strom noticed several guards atop of parapets. They smelled the humanoid
drones and detected the heat of their bodies even from the heights at which they had been flying.
Each dragon, in turn, glided to and perched upon the parapets, snatching the zombie-like minions of Mortis up into their toothy jaws to silence them before an alarm call could be made. The drones never saw them coming.
A great maw led downward into the fortress. Stone steps lined the lower side. Strom reared back on his great haunches exposing his gray and white under belly. The markings served him well as camouflage when hunting and gave him the appearance of clouds when seen from the ground far below.
Strom led the others down into the mouth of the fortress, following the unmistakable scent of their eggs. Surprisingly, the halls were large enough to accommodate the dragons as they crept along quickly in single file.
Strom and the others followed the powerful aroma down deep into the belly of the fortress, but did not encounter any resistance. No human drones or orcs patrolled as he might have expected. Nothing appeared to be moving within the fortress at all. Disconcerting though it was, Strom pressed on for the survival of his race.
The group came to a dead end where a huge chamber opened up beyond one last archway. Strom skidded to a halt when he beheld the egg sacks suspended from the domed ceiling by thick chains. Within each of the twelve egg sacks were twelve individual eggs—the next generation of dragons.
“Retrieve our young, but be careful,” Strom said in a voice deep and menacing. “A trap is surely set for us.”
“Indeed.”
Six dragons instantly craned their thick necks around toward the voice, like cobras disturbed from their slumber. They hissed and bore their dagger-like teeth when they beheld his form. Mortis stood alone in the hallway behind them. The red and green glowing mist within the fortress cast his face in wicked hues. “I have been expecting you, Strom.”
The dragon heard his voice, but visually it was difficult to see him. He had not moved and, strangely, Mortis gave off no heat signature whatsoever. Strom placed him by scent—the scent of decay.
Mortis appeared genuinely calm, despite the fact he was only a boy standing not fifty feet from six giant, flying reptiles with malice in their hearts for him. “We have much to discuss about your service to me,” Mortis said, his eyes never wavering from Strom.
“Strom, allow me to tear this boasting child apart,” said one of the six taking a step forward.
Strom quickly raised his wing to halt the dragon’s advance. “No, retrieve our young. I will deal with this myself.”
“Really?” A devilish smile played across his pale lips.
Mortis opened his right palm to the rocky ground beneath him. Silvery trails of fluid began to seep from the ground like tendrils of mercury. They came together in a pool of liquid metal upon the rock and then drove upward into Mortis’s hand, quickly forming a magnificent silver sword.
“Go now!” Strom shouted to his dragons as he bolted forward after Mortis.
Strom covered the fifty foot distance in one leap, pouncing upon Mortis. But the boy moved faster than expected. Mortis leaped up to the wyrm’s great beak and caught hold of the short horn upon Strom’s nose, narrowly avoiding the snapping jaws full of teeth.
Strom drove his head upward into the roof of the stone hallway, but Mortis leaped away again, bounding from wall to wall like a bouncing ball. Mortis launched forward with his weapon, shooting over Strom’s head, removing the middle of three large horns crowning his head in the process. The silver blade sang as it cut through the boney prominence and left it pouring blood from the stump.
Strom howled his dismay at the painful wound the boy had inflicted. He began to wonder if he ever really had the upper hand in this situation. His dragons ran inside the chamber where the eggs sacks were suspended. No one had tried to stop them so far.
Mortis landed on the ground between the chamber and Strom. He sent the sword spinning through the air at the great black dragon. It scattered blobs of silver liquid in flight, each reforming into eight-bladed shurikens. The spread pattern of silver stars dug into Strom’s scales as he turned to face Mortis.
Strom’s armored hide withstood the attack, but it was obvious that Mortis had intended only to toy with him. Strom heaved a stream of acid at Mortis from the glands within his lower jaw.
The stream diverted as though hitting an invisible wall in front of Mortis. He raised his hand, instantly drawing spires of rock up from the floor like prison bars to confine Strom. The great dragon howled with rage, realizing he and his group had walked into a trap.
Behind Mortis, the dragons tried to retrieve the egg sacks suspended from the ceiling. Strom roared to them, trying to warn them of the trap, but it was too late. Mortis smiled as the opening of the chamber slammed shut. A wall of solid rock fused into place, sealing the dragons and the egg sacks within.
Their stifled roars reverberated through the rock. Mortis stood there observing Strom. The canary had been caged with little effort. “Clearly you want something of me, Mortis,” he growled.
“Obviously,” he said. “Otherwise you and the others would already be dead.”