by Nick Harrow
The second small dragon, which was still the size of a Harley with a fifteen-foot tail and wingspan twice that, swooped out of the sky from behind me. One of its rear claws ripped a flap of flesh away from my shoulder before I could turn to parry its attack, and a wave of black sand burst into the air behind me. The creature’s wings whipped the sand into my face, and for a moment I was blinded by my own shitty excuse for blood.
Maybe I hadn’t thought this fight through. One dungeon lord against three dragons, even if two of them were on the smallish side, seemed like pretty bad odds all of a sudden.
“Boss!” Zillah screamed.
“Stay put,” I thought to her. “I’ll deal with this. You need to get the soldiers regrouped and keep marching east. We can’t afford to have the plan fall apart just because a few flying lizards fucked things up.”
Zillah didn’t respond, but I felt her on the move. She knew how important it was for the plan to stay in motion, and I trusted that she would do as I’d asked.
“Well, well, Rathokhetra,” the largest dragon growled is it stomped across the ground toward me. It still glowed like a piece of a fallen star, but the light didn’t seem to bother the enormous reptile. “You’re either brave or stupid to face us alone. What are the odds you could defeat one dragon, much less three?”
“Fifty-fifty,” I shrugged. The truth was, I had no idea how strong these creatures were, because we were outside of my territory and I couldn’t use my dungeon sight to size them up. In theory they couldn’t be a higher level than my dungeon, but there were three of them, which upped the difficulty considerably. “Maybe a little more in my favor, seeing as how you’re cold-blooded idiots and I’m a dungeon lord.”
The big dragon swept his left wing at my head, and I raised my khopesh to deflect it. Unfortunately for me, that had been a feint on the dragon’s part, and the real attack came from its right front claw. Before I could bring my weapon around to block the strike, the beast’s talons ripped open the left side of my chest to expose the yellowed bone arcs of my rib cage.
White-hot rage exploded through my veins to drown out the pain. A full quarter of the red vanished from the Hit Point circle in the upper corner of my vision, but this asshole was about to lose a lot more. Before the dragon recovered from its attack, I grabbed my khopesh with both hands, raised it over my head, and hacked into the side of the dragon’s neck.
Bolts of blue electricity screamed away from the creature’s wound, and its thick, crimson blood sprayed in viscous gouts from the hole in its neck. With an unearthly shriek, the dragon whipped its head away from me and ripped the khopesh out of my hands. The beast’s wings pumped as it bolted for freedom, and seconds later it was airborne.
“Well, this is going to suck.” I unleashed another pair of Eldritch Bolts into the sky, but the dragons shot out of range before the magical attack could reach them.
The winged terrors soared high above me, and I felt their eyes boring into me. They had all the advantages in this fight, and I wasn’t sure how to overcome the edge flight gave them. The only option I saw was to hold my attacks until a dragon closed with me, but if I timed anything wrong, they’d blast me to pieces or tear me to shreds before I could recover.
As if eager to test my theory, the smallest dragon suddenly peeled out of formation and dove toward the earth in a steep spiral. Its wings were folded flat against its body to present the narrowest possible profile, and the dragon extended them only briefly to adjust its course as it plummeted earthward. Three feet before the creature would have hit the ground, its wings flared wide to arrest its fall. The flying lizard’s body was suddenly parallel to the ground and came at me with the speed of a freight train. The monster’s jaw drooped wide and a ball of lightning formed deep in its gullet.
I had exactly one shot at this. If I fucked it up, I was probably dead.
Hell, if I got it right, I was still probably dead.
I thrust my left hand forward and Eldritch Bolts streaked away from my palm. With his mouth open so wide, the dragon never saw the ebony blasts as they flashed past its twin rows of jagged yellow teeth and slammed into the power plant it called its throat.
The dragon screamed as a blast of pain erupted from its throat. The beast’s enormous left wing dipped a little too low, and the clawed joint at the front collided with the ground and sent it into an out-of-control tumble. The airborne beast cartwheeled toward me and kicked up a spray of dirt and grass that nearly blinded me.
I twisted to the left and backpedaled to get the fuck out of the crashed dragon’s way. The cloud of debris passed me by, and the world seemed to slow. The dragon’s body slid along the ground to my right, its snout buried in the dirt, broken wing folded against its flank. The round knobs of its spine bulged against the armored scales down the center of its back, and I saw my target.
My khopesh appeared in my hand mid-swing. Its blade flashed through the crimson rays of the setting sun and buried itself between the vertebrae of the dragon’s spine. A spray of dark blood jetted into my eyes, and I staggered back. My fingers slipped off the blood-slicked handle of my weapon, and I clawed at my eyes in a desperate attempt to clear them.
A blast of wind nearly drove me off my feet, and I raised my hands defensively. The maneuver kept my head on my shoulders but cost me three ugly slashes that ran the length of my left arm. Flaps of skin drooped between my wrist and shoulder as black sand poured from the ragged slashes into loose mounds around my feet.
“You should never have called us, dungeon lord.” The largest dragon landed before me, its snout level with my chest, lambent blue eyes locked on to mine. “You are too weak to dominate us. Your pride has cost you everything.”
“Doesn’t have to be this way.” I glanced toward the fallen dragon with my sword still buried in its spine. The creature’s breath gusted in and out of its lungs, and its broken wing twitched in the dirt. “I don’t have to beat your ass to make you my guardian. Accept me as your master, and we can all go home happy. Shit, I’ll have a pile of gold for you to nest on before morning.”
The dragon’s snort washed over me like a gust of summer wind through a slaughterhouse. The reek of bad meat and old blood filled my nostrils, and I couldn’t shake the image of my body crushed and shredded between those jagged fangs.
“You amuse me, dungeon lord.” The dragon snuffed at the air. “You smell of ancient times and dry sands. Yet you act like a child. Perhaps it would be best if you were to die.”
The dragon moved quicker than the lightning it breathed. One second, its head was five yards ahead of me, the next it was inches from my chest with sparks dancing on its muzzle.
I leapt into the air out of raw survival instinct. The dragon’s head shot below me, and I called my khopesh to my hand. I used the momentum of my leap and the force of the dragon’s charge to my advantage and slammed the hooked blade into the gap between the enormous creature’s shoulder blades. My blow landed so hard its vibrations ran up my arms and rattled my teeth in their sockets. Black sand drifted from my wounds to mix with the scarlet blood that jetted from the gash I’d opened down the length of the dragon’s back.
Take that, motherfucker.
The third dragon had stayed high above the fight to prepare for this precise moment. While I was still airborne from my leaping strike at the biggest dragon’s back, off-balance from the brutal attack I’d just delivered, the little guy barreled toward me like a kamikaze. Lightning blasted from his snout as he drew a bead on me, and the hairs on my arms stood straight up.
“Fuck me,” I snarled and prepared for death. There was no way I could dodge the lightning before it could flash-fry me.
Thank the gods I didn’t have to.
At the last possible second a blazing arc of pure white light slashed between the dragon’s breath and my tender flesh. The lightning bounced away and narrowly avoided the dragon who’d hurled it in the first place.
The big dragon with the razored-open back saw his shot, and he took
it. His tail cracked like a whip and slammed into my back hard enough to throw me into the air.
I landed hard and rolled to absorb the shock. Black sand blew through the tears in my flesh to fill the air with a gritty cloud that trailed me even as I rolled back onto my feet and spun to see what had saved me.
Tyrilese.
Her rags were gone, replaced with gossamer armor that flowed over her body like spilled milk and glowed with the sun’s purest light. Her weapon flared as she brought it back around to prepare for another defense against the dragon, and for a moment its blade was almost as impressive as her wings.
The beggar had fucking wings of golden light and a godda—
She had a halo.
Tyrilese was an angel. A very hot, very angry, very impressive angel.
She deflected the smaller dragon’s next blast of lightning with her enormous sword and punched it squarely in the snout as it tried to fly past her. Stunned by the unexpected attack, the dragon tumbled out of the air with the angel in pursuit.
“See to his leader, dungeon lord,” Tyrilese called to me as she plummeted from the sky.
“On it.” I had a sudden thought and shouted to the angel, “Don’t kill the little guy. I’ll want to talk to him later.”
The largest dragon, wounded and bleeding, tried to take to the air, but the number I’d done on its shoulder and neck made that impossible. It crawled across the ground with its tail dragging behind it and its snout barely above the churned-up earth where we’d battled.
“Stop right there.” I held my khopesh at the ready, just in case the big blue meanie got a stupid idea. “We need to talk.”
The dragon paused, shuddered, and then turned to face me. It plopped down in the dirt with its head resting on its front claws and stared at me with eyes that reminded me way too much of a sad dog.
“You think we are beaten?” The dragon tried to sound imperious, but the blood that ran down its body and pooled beneath its claws robbed it of most of its strength. “Others will come to avenge us. Do your worst.”
“Hey, asshole.” I thumped the dragon on the nose with the back edge of my khopesh. “I don’t want to kill you. I want to give you a job.”
“We are broken.” The dragon tilted its head toward the little guy with the shattered wing, and to the groans of the other dragon I assumed was under Tyrilese’s boot right about then. His bravado had vanished the instant he realized I didn’t want to murder him. “What use are crippled dragons to a dungeon lord?”
“Oh, my God. You are such a fucking idiot.” I threw my khopesh into the air in exasperation and let the dragon watch it with worried eyes for long seconds before I banished the weapon. “I don’t have time to explain this shit to you, but let’s just do the deal. Can you swear for your little bros back there?”
The dragon nodded but seemed dubious about the whole prospect. Clearly, he’d never dealt with a dungeon lord before and didn’t understand how much I could do for him.
“All right. Do you solemnly swear to serve and protect me, Lord Rathokhetra, for as long as you live, and be my guardian in sickness and in health, ’til I get sick of your stupid ass and send you off somewhere to die?”
“That is a terrible oath.” The dragon’s head sagged onto its claws again. “Fine, we will be your guardians.”
“Fucking awesome.” I summoned the Tablet of Guardians and blew a giant chunk of my ka. Turned out that big boy and his little pals were a deadly encounter, and the cost to turn them into guardians was a whopping forty-four motes.
Ouch.
On the other hand, now I had dragons on my payroll. I was pissed as hell that the flying lizards had flash-fried a bunch of my soldiers and had considered killing them for their crimes. I’d dealt with the lamia far harsher for a lesser crime, but my back was against the wall. These flying artillery platforms could help me win this fight. It was a shitty trade for my soldiers’ lives, but I didn’t have a choice.
“What have you done, dungeon lord?” Tyrilese asked. Her voice was stern, but there was more than a hint of humor under the words.
“I got myself a few new pets.” I took a good, long look at Tyrilese and decided I liked what I saw. “Man, you clean up nice. Think you can help me get these guys back to my dungeon in—oh, I dunno—the next fifteen minutes?”
“The two of us will never be able to do that.” Tyrilese shook her head and her hair flashed like platinum fire.
“That sucks. Well, I guess, I could—”
“We will aid you, dungeon lord,” a chorus of voices rang out from the sky above me.
Twelve more angels descended from the darkening sky, their wings spread wide and their swords bared. It was like a Victoria’s Secret runway show, only with more cutlery and attitude.
“Uh, wow.” I took a deep breath. “I mean, wow.”
“Thank you,” Tyrilese said. “Show us the way to your dungeon.”
And that, kids, is how the hottest angels in the multiverse helped me bring my dragons home.
Chapter 23 – What Was in the Boxes
THE ANGELS DID NOT approve of my methods.
“Did you have to do...that?” Tyrilese nodded her head to the three blue dragon heads I’d recently removed from their owners.
“Kinda,” I said. “Give me two minutes. I need to check on something.”
“Coming aboard, Neph,” I thought to my familiar, and then mounted her flesh.
“That’s almost as bad as the teleporting stuff." Nephket shivered as I settled into her body. “The good news is, your plan is working.”
I already knew the bad news. Despite the fact that I’d told my guardians to stay hidden away on the other side of the Solamantic Web while the raiders finished up their portion of my big bad war tricks, Del and Neph were both embedded with Charlie’s folks.
And they were running like hell from what looked like the tax collector’s whole army.
The plan had been for Charlie to perform several harrying attacks to draw part of Lexios’s army to the west, away from the rest of his troops. When the bad guys were halfway along the ridgeline, the two units of infantry that Zillah had led through the woods would swoop down and flank them super hard, right in the junk. With any luck, the surprise attack would have given us the edge we needed to knock a serious chunk out of Lexios’s forces without losing many of our own troops. With their enemies in disarray, my boys and girls could have retreated into the dungeon tunnels I’d hidden in the ridgeline, regroup, and then come at the army from a different side.
Unfortunately, Lexios had taken the bait too well. Instead of dedicating a few units of infantry or a cavalry to run down the raiders, he’d gone hog wild and committed his entire army to the attack.
My mind scrambled to find a solution. Neph, Del, and Charlie were a half mile from the east gate and had drawn even with Zillah’s ambush point. Unfortunately, the bad guys were only a quarter mile behind the home team and closing fast. There was no way the raiders would reach the gate and get to safety before Lexios rammed an army straight up their asses.
I had to buy them time.
“Keep running, Neph.” I hoped using the Spirit Mount ability on Neph gave her the strength and speed she needed to escape from this mess. I didn’t care if every one of the raiders was run down by the invading army, but I would not lose my familiar. I stayed inside Nephket and reached out to Zillah’s mind.
“Change of plans. Don’t attack. Let the army pass you, then follow them. But stay hidden in the forest.”
“What happened to the plan?” The scorpion queen’s voice was tight with worry.
“It’s fucked.” That was the understatement of the century. Instead of picking off bits and pieces of Lexios and his army until they were too weak to breach the city’s gates, we’d done the exact opposite. That’s what I got for being clever.
There was nowhere for the raiders to hide from the army on their tail. They could have turned up toward the forested ridge, but they couldn’t hide there for l
ong. The army had enough boots on the ground to root my people out of the woods and slaughter them.
I needed Kez.
“Drop whatever you’re doing and go to the Solamantic Web,” I thought to my dark elf guardian. “Hurry.”
“On it.” Kez had to have been preparing spells, but she abandoned her plans to follow my orders without a second’s hesitation. I’d have to remember to thank her for that. “I’ll let you know when I’ve reached it.”
I risked a glance over Nephket’s shoulder, and her heart tripped over its next beat. The enemy forces had closed the gap by a hundred yards, maybe more. It wouldn’t take much more than five minutes for the army to catch my people and slaughter them all. As powerful as Nephket and Delsinia were, they would be no match for that many soldiers and the tax collector.
“I’m here,” Kezakazek gasped into my thoughts. “Good thing for you I was in Kozerek’s study when you called.”
Thank whatever gods were still out there for small miracles.
“Keep running,” I whispered to Nephket. “I’ll be back.”
And then I was inside Kez, eyes focused on the Solamantic Web.
“We need a new portal. Fast.”
“Show me where.” The gears of Kez’s mind turned at terrifying speed. The world inside the drow was nothing like what lay within my other guardians. A constant stream of thoughts swirled around me like a whirlwind of dark shadows. It took me a moment to orient myself, and then I switched my view of the world to the dungeon lord’s overhead sight.
Nephket and Delsinia glowed like golden stars on the grid, and my settlement and dungeons were silver outlines. Lexios and his forces were a shadowy cloud far too close to my people.
“We have to open a web just ahead of Neph and Del. Pretty much immediately.”
“Nothing like giving a girl a short deadline for a difficult task.” Kez’s mind churned around the problem, and the dark fangs of her intellect nibbled at its edges in search of a way to unravel it. She stared at the surface of the Solamantic Web, and her thoughts merged with mine to guide me to the path we needed. “There.”