by Dante King
A cloaked figure was running as fast as it could along the track below. As we watched, it rolled nimbly under a parked hay cart, vaulted a fence, and cut through a well-tended vegetable patch. It boosted through this large garden, cutting a small loop off the dirt road, then hopped over a gate and onto the track beyond. Behind it, another cloaked figure, this one a little smaller, had pulled up and was screaming in fury at the retreating form.
“You shitstain!” yelled the second cloaked. “You thieving jackalope turd!”
The high-pitched, euphonious voice was unmistakably that of a woman.
“Looks like we’ve got a little theft-related offense,” I said. I turned to Saya and Elenari as they hovered nearby. “How about we do our good deed for the day, before we head back to the Crystal Spire and pass out?”
“I’m in,” Saya said.
Before I could formulate any sort of plan, she had dropped Scopula into a silent dive. As I watched her fall like the wrath of God toward the fleeing thief, I recalled how Elenari had dealt with the thief back in L.A.
Dragonmancers don’t do things by halves, I realized too late.
I nosed Noctis into a dive, and Elenari followed.
My Onyx Dragon’s nose had just pulled level with the concrete-gray tail of Saya’s dragon when the blonde warrior woman flung herself from Scopula’s back. She dropped twenty feet, as silent as an owl, and crashed into the retreating thief’s back with a raised knee.
“Oooh,” I said, wincing.
It must have taken the cloaked figure by surprise. I imagined it would have been like going for a jog and then being hit unexpectedly by a van. He went flying, bouncing and skidding along the dirt track like he’d been batted by a giant tennis racket. I saw something pearlescent, about the size of a baseball, fly out of his hands and jounce away up the path.
What the hell was that? Was that what he stole?
Things happened with terrifying swiftness after that. The winded, groaning figure got to his feet and looked wildly about. His hood had fallen off, and he had a shaved head and a long scar running over the top of his scalp, from ear to ear. He was dressed in a get-up that reminded me of something a ninja might wear; tight-fitting, dark gray pants and jacket, light boots with thin soles and that face-covering cowl. This outfit was also colored with splashes of dark crimson—almost like a camouflage—and I wondered whether that was to disguise any injuries that the thief might gain in a scrap and make him look stronger and more invulnerable.
Saya, who didn’t seem to have seen the object scatter up the path, clamped her arms around the thieving man. With a strained bellow, she quite simply squeezed him in two.
The sight of all those guts spilling over the ground like giant, slimy worms, the blood and stomach bile gushing out into the dirt, and the sound of the man’s final gurgling cries as Saya snapped his spine in two was enough to make me thankful that I hadn’t been able to find that bacon cheeseburger after all.
I landed Noctis down the track a little way. Behind me, Elenari brought Gharmon, her Emerald Dragon, to land next to Saya. The elf congratulated the other woman on her take down.
“I ruined this shirt though,” I heard Saya say regretfully. “You can never get stomach acid out of the linen,” she added with a disappointed sigh.
I walked along the track and searched around in the brush to the side of the path. After only a few moments of looking and some helpful tail-pointing from Noctis, I turned up the item that the thief had seemingly stolen.
“A crystal,” I muttered, “or an egg?”
To my eye, it looked like both. A heavy, solid egg of pearly crystal. It looked as if the surface had a sort of smoked pattern to it, but then I realized that it was, in fact, smoke inside the crystal, swirling ever so slowly around.
“Dragon crystal, maybe?” I thought.
Then, for the first time, and with no warning, a voice resounded in my head.
“Do not show the others,” the voice said. It resonated through my head and heart like thunder; deep, old, and powerful. Without even needing to look at Noctis and see that he was looking intently at me, I could tell that the voice belonged to him.
“We can chat?” I said in my mind.
“Indeed.”
“Since when?” I asked. I recalled what Penelope had said about how rare it was for dragons to be able to communicate with actual words.
“Since the moment we met,” the dragon said. The words bounced around in my head like an echo before fading away.
“But you only decided to speak up now. Why?” I asked.
Noctis cocked his head, as if my question was a particularly foolish one. “Because I did not trust you.”
I glanced behind me and saw that Saya was still scraping spleen or something off the front of her shirt. Elenari was nowhere to be seen. I assumed she had headed back down the track to see if she could pick up any clues as to who the thief, or the victim, had been and if they had been working alone.
“Why shouldn’t I tell them about this orb thing?” I asked Noctis.
“It is best that this is kept between you and me for now,” the dragon said cryptically.
“Right,” I said. I felt a bit too drunk for mysteries just then. I’d leave this little head-scratcher for sober Mike. I walked back toward Saya, swaying only a little. I saw that there was only a patch of blood and miscellaneous fluids left on the ground.
“Where’s the thief?” I asked.
Saya jerked her thumb at Scopula. The squat gray dragon licked its lips.
“I see,” I said.
Elenari reappeared at that moment.
“Did you find the woman the thief mugged?” I asked.
Elenari shook her head. There was a frown creasing her brow. “No. The person, whoever it was, has vanished.”
Before we could go a step further or speak another word, a dull growl emanated from Noctis’ throat. It was not a nice growl. It was the sort of deep, rumbling snarl that spoke of a creature with its hackles up. Uneasy. Alert. Ready to rend and tear. It was taken up a second later by Scopula and Gharmon.
“What’s got into them?” I asked.
Elenari did not answer. She was watching her Emerald Dragon intently.
Gharmon’s head was moving from left to right, like a cobra under the influence of the flute.
Then it froze. Its green head was pointed up at the top of the thatched roof of a two-story farmhouse to our left. Slowly, Gharmon let out a low, angry hiss.
Saya, Elenari, and I followed the gaze of the Emerald Dragon.
There was a figure standing on the ridge of the roof. Where it had come from I couldn’t say. It was only a silhouette, a black human shape of sable cut out of the cold stars behind it, but it looked to be dressed in similar garb to that of the recently bisected thief.
As the three of us gazed up at it, five more shapes seemed to materialize beside it. They were so quiet, their movements so smooth, as though they’d taken shape out of the darkness of the night itself.
“They don’t look like your run-of-the-mill spectators, do they?” I said out of the corner of my mouth. “Not your average bunch of locals sticking their noses out to see what the commotion was all about.”
“What gave you that impression, Mike?” Saya asked drily.
“The whole standing silently on the top of a roof bit, looking down on us in a menacing fashion, I guess,” I said.
“There’s more over there.” Elenari nodded to the left at the cottage just down the road from the farmhouse.
Half a dozen more figures were standing and squatting on the ridgeline of that roof too. As we observed them in silence, six more popped up over the roofline. They sprung up, as if propelled by a trampoline on the other side of the building, hung in the air for a second longer than was normal, then landed without so much as a crunching of thatch.
On impulse, I looked sharply around at the buildings to our right. There were at least two dozen more figures lining the two cottages and the large wareh
ouse-cum-workshop on that side of the road too.
“Ah,” I said, “I believe this is what military commanders back on my world would designate as a kill box.”
“That does not sound promising,” Elenari said softly, her hands slipping casually down to the daggers at her hips.
“No,” I agreed. “Unless you are on the outside of it.”
“And we are…?” Saya asked.
“Very much on the inside,” I said.
To my surprise, Saya grinned. It looked to me as though the flight on dragonback through the chilly mountain air, freefalling onto the back of a thief, and subsequently squishing him in half had acted in about the same way as a couple of cans of Monster and a cold shower. The only aspect of her that even hinted at drunkenness was the slight redness in her cheeks.
“What a way to end the evening,” Elenari said.
“Beats a kebab, doesn’t it?” Saya said.
A soft scrapping of boots on gravel made us turn again. Five of the gray-clad, Assassin Creed-looking strangers had appeared in the middle of the road, blocking our exit that way. The only route available to us, had we been even slightly inclined to make a break for it, was back toward town.
And I bet my ass that’s exactly what they want us to do. Make a break back past all those other buildings so that their buddies can ambush us.
There was no question that there’d be an altercation. I could feel it in the air and taste it on the wind. The only questions remaining were: when was it going to kick off and who was going to start it?
I glanced over at Saya and Elenari. Elenari looked as cool and composed as she ever did. She was scanning carefully around at our foe with her glittering jade eyes; analyzing, counting, and weighing up tactics. Saya looked like she was ready to claim the title of Belle of the Brawl. Her jaw was set, and she was even now tying her ash blonde hair up in a practical ponytail.
The tension built to such a level that I found myself subconsciously reaching into that mana-well inside of me, my fingers tingling with the beginnings of Shadow Sphere. With only the barest thought, I switched Noctis into the Right Arm slot of my crystal, making him vanish.
Out of the starlit gloom of the road leading to town, I heard the running of many booted feet.
My two fellow dragonmancers and I tensed for a second, but then I heard the familiar grunting rasp of Bjorn.
“Bugger me, but runnin’ is harder with a belly full of ale sloshing about inside of you!” the half-Jotunn said from out of the gloom.
My squad had arrived!
But how the hell they had found us beat me. All such questions vanished from my mind when a high, shrill call pierced the night like the cry of some nocturnal hunting hawk.
It was obviously the battle cry for the mysterious ninjas arrayed on the rooftops around us because, as one, they quite literally leapt into action.
Chapter Sixteen
In response to the hawk-like battle cry of the ninjas, Elenari, Saya, and I scattered with our dragons. You didn’t have to be Einstein to know that those gray-clad ninjas would make killing dragonmancers their top priority. As they disappeared from my sight, I saw both women’s dragons vanish, telling me that they had assigned their powers to different slots in their own crystals.
As I ducked left, using a dry stone garden wall as cover, a particularly zealous ninja floated down and landed like a cat in front of me. Without hesitating, I hit him square in the chest with the Shadow Sphere that I’d had waiting especially for just such an asshole. His torso vanished in a blast of black mist, and his head and limbs fell into a tidy pile in the dirt.
I vaulted the weirdly neat pile of body parts and headed back down the road, toward town and my oncoming squad.
A flicker of movement to my left made me dive and roll as a couple of gun-metal gray shuriken thudded into a barrel behind me.
I popped onto my feet and saw the ninja who had tried to perforate me. As he somersaulted off the cottage roof nearest me, I hit him in mid-air with another Shadow Sphere. Once more, the sphere of Chaos Magic caught the figure square in the torso, and his limbs and head went spinning in all directions into the night.
A roar nearby made me look up, and I saw Bjorn running up the middle of the road, heedless of the throwing-stars zipping at him. One ninja stepped into his path, drew a gleaming blade, and attempted to run him through with it. Bjorn caught the man’s hand, jerked it viciously upward, and dislocated his shoulder. The ninja dropped the dagger with a muffled howl. The big man flung the ninja away from him like a half-finished sandwich, and the cloaked bastard cartwheeled through the air. He landed, with a sickening crack, bent backward over one of the low stone garden walls.
Gabby, following in Bjorn’s ruinous wake, snatched up the dagger the ninja had dropped, and flung it at one of a pair of gray-clad warriors heading after Elenari. The dagger hit the running man in the side of the throat and caused the other ninja to turn. Before the second warrior could do a thing, Gabby had sprinted up and ripped the dagger out of the first ninja’s neck at such an angle that blood spurted like a geyser into the other ninja’s face. The warrior staggered back blindly as his comrade fell, and Gabby lunged at him, punching the dagger into his chest and stomach in a blur of psychotic stabs that had blood flying in all directions.
A tap on my shoulder made me whirl about with my fist raised.
“Easy, sir!” Rupert said. “It’s j-j-just me!”
“How the hell did you guys know we were here?” I cut straight to the heart of the matter.
“Dragonmancer Elenari’s squad followed her as best they were able to on foot, sir—Mike,” Rupert said, his mad eyes flicking all around as the din of fighting rose around us like a fog.
“Why?” I asked.
“After her indiscretion involving sneaking off to Earth to find you, it seems that they were under strict orders from Sergeant Milena not to let her out of their sight.”
“And they saw us get into this pickle?” I asked. “And sent one of their number to grab you guys?”
Rupert nodded, his ridiculous hat waggling on his mess of black hair. “And Dragonmancer Saya’s.”
“All right,” I said, “keep your head down as best you can and let’s take out these mystery party-crashers.”
“Very good, Dragonmancer,” Rupert said.
There was a high pitched shriek of bloodthirsty delight, and I turned back to the road. Saya galloped past on Scopula’s back, having summoned her dragon once more. As she rode past one of the unknown ninja warriors, she grabbed the man by the throat and crushed his windpipe like a cheese straw. Then, she backflipped off the charging dragon, which vanished back into her crystal just as three black arrows thunked into the section of path it had been about to run over.
I looked up at the roof where the arrows had come from, spied the three archers, and let loose a couple more Shadow Spheres. One missed, but vanished the chimney on which one of the archers was perched so that he fell to the roof. The second Shadow Sphere struck another archer’s leg, dispersing it into nothingness and causing him to roll off the roof and fall to his death.
A winded feeling immediately rolled through my body, as if I’d just run five miles without knowing it. I recognized it at once as mana exhaustion. It looked like I was going to have to work on my mana stamina if I wanted to be flinging spells around like fucking Merlin.
Saya landed her backflip in a perfect crouch, right in front of another ninja. She lashed out with a Spartan kick of such power that her enemy was flung bonelessly backward, a good thirty feet, with such force that his heels left twin grooves in the dirt road. He smashed into the side of a cart with such violence that the wooden timbers of the cart exploded in a shower of splinters. The cart itself upended into the air with the power of the impact, flipping side over side before crashing down with a noise like Dorothy’s house landing right on top of another hapless ninja.
That’s why dragonmancers were primary targets.
The other two archers ha
d redrawn their bowstrings to their ears, and were sighting at Saya. I was helpless to act, out of magical juice as I was.
“Saya, watch out!” I yelled.
The arrows flew.
Saya transformed.
One minute, she was the imposing, blonde Baywatch beauty, the next she was a nine-foot tall stone golem-looking creature. She hadn’t actually transformed into a different kind of creature, but her armor made it look that way. She was now covered in stone plate armor, and her blue eyes shone like blue coals.
Chest slot, I thought.
The arrows struck her back and pinwheeled away.
Elenari appeared then. The red-headed elf’s hair flew behind her like a flickering flame. Looking up at the building on which the two archers were redrawing their bows, she raised her fist and punched it into the earth. Two cracks shot out from where her fist had made impact. They ran, dragon-quick, toward the cottage, then two roots emerged from the earth. The two roots ran up the wall of the cottage, like ivy on amphetamines, and across the thatched roof. Before the two archers could loose their next arrows, they were snatched from their feet, constricted by the roots, and dragged thrashing and screaming under the thick thatch.
My attention was arrested by a ninja thrusting a spear toward my face. Flicking Noctis mentally into my Head Slot, I used my Blink spell to teleport behind my assailant. While the cowled warrior’s spear was thrusting through the air that had, a second before, been occupied by my face, my arms closed around his neck. I wrenched it savagely to the side. A dull click and a gurgle told me that I’d exerted enough force to snap the bastard’s spine.
“Arnie eat your heart out,” I muttered as the ninja slumped to the deck.
“Form up!” Saya bellowed, making me glance up. Her squad instantly formed a tight circle around her, knives drawn, showing the sort of precision and unswerving loyalty that a dragonmancer’s squad were said to embody. It became clear in an instant that I was going to have to ensure that my lads were as good, if not better, than Elenari’s and Saya’s squads.