by Dante King
“A little light would be a help, anyone,” I said to the half a dozen dragons that shared my head with me.
“I’ve got you, Dad,” Cyan, the Faerie Dragon, said promptly.
I felt an itch in my palm. I opened my hand, and a globe of fire appeared in the center of my palm. The flickering flames were the shimmering, multi-hued color of the inside of an abalone shell; the color of Cyan’s scales. They sat in my hand like a trippy glob of levitating napalm.
“Thanks, Cyan,” I muttered, and I felt the glow of my dragonling’s pride in the back of my skull.
Flames in hand, I walked down into the darkness with the others following behind.
The stairs spiraled down into the desert. It smelled like dust and sand and time immeasurable down there. The only light was the light I carried with me, and the only sounds were the scuffs of our boots on the stone.
After what felt like a day or so, but was probably more like two minutes, the staircase spat us out into a chamber. At least, I assumed it was a chamber. The light of the multicolored fire that Cyan had helped me conjure couldn’t reach into the shadowy corners.
Momentarily at a loss while we got our bearings, I called a halt.
“Finally,” came a voice out of the dusty murk. “Finally, finally, finally. I have been waiting for you for a very long time, Mike Noctis.”
The voice was old but not weak, clever but not cocky. It was a voice that was well aware of where its strengths and, more importantly, its weaknesses lay.
And it was female.
“Oh really?” I said amiably, my senses questing around me to try and pinpoint where the voice was coming from. “Well, I’m sorry that you’ve been waiting so long. You could have sent me an invite to come and visit. I like the desert. I find it fascinating, somehow.”
The old voice chuckled. It was a comforting sound. The audible equivalent of a pie on a windowsill, cookies in the oven, a comfortable armchair by a comfortable fire with a cat sleeping on a rug in front of it.
I blinked.
It was vaguely mesmerizing too.
Thick with magical ability.
“No, nobody gets invited here,” the old female voice said. “People only come here at the time that the multiverse prescribes.”
A low groan from behind me reminded me of Zala and the peril that she had brought with her.
“That’s all comfortingly esoteric,” I said, “but how about shedding a little light on us. Let me see who you are, as you can see who I am.”
There was the snapping of fingers, and light bloomed slowly.
It was a soft and comfortable light. Soothing. Safe.
We were, as I had thought, standing at one end of a roughhewn chamber. In the middle of the space was a woman; the owner of the voice.
“Greetings,” she said.
She was willowy, with long pure white hair that fell almost to her knees. Her skin was the same caramel color as Zala’s, though it was covered in a network of fine creases. She was dressed in a simple white linen robe and leaning casually on a stick that looked like it was made out of some slender carved bone instead of wood.
“There’s something familiar about you,” I blurted, before I even knew what I was saying.
The old woman smiled, showing off some pearly whites that gleamed even in that subterranean light.
“Yes,” she said. “I thought you might say as much. In fact, I knew.”
“You knew?” I asked.
The woman waved my words away. She padded over nimbly to us on bare feet, her stick tapping on the stone floor.
When she had drawn closer, I saw then that she had strange eyes; one all blue as glacial ice and the other all red, crimson as a blood-soaked ruby.
“You’re a…” I began to say.
“Did you think that Claire was the only Seer in this world, Mike Noctis?” the old woman said. “I share her gift. And, as I say, I have been waiting for you for a very long time.”
I did a pretty good impression of a catfish that’s just been scooped out of a river at that point, unsure of how to respond.
Luckily, Hana stepped in to fill the gap in the conversation.
“Our companion, she’s hurt,” she said with Vetruscan efficiency.
The old woman knelt down to examine Zala, who had sat down on the floor and was breathing heavily.
“Yes,” she said curtly. “She is hurt, indeed. Come. Bring her. Follow me.”
She rose to her feet and hurried away, heading toward an opening at the back of the stone chamber.
“What’s - what’s your name?” I called out at her retreating back.
The old woman did not pause in her hurrying but answered over her shoulder.
“My name is Kakra, Dragon Breeder. The last wormmancer. Now, hurry and bring the girl to me.”
Carrying the moaning and now only half-lucid Zala over my shoulder, I followed the old woman, Kakra.
In the room beyond the dimly lit chamber, Kakra was busy ferreting among some crudely constructed stone shelves. They looked to be carved out of the living rock of this sub-desert hidey hole. On them were an assortment of stone, glass, clay, and wooden vessels. Each of these homemade containers had a label stuck on it or words carved into it, written in a tongue I could not read.
“Lay the catmancer on the pallet,” Kakra ordered me, jerking her thumb at a simple but clean bed to one side of the narrow room.
I did as I was bade, gently placing the exotic Zala on the pallet.
“So, you’re a wormmancer?” I asked.
Kakra continued to shuffle and rattle hastily along the shelves, muttering to herself and occasionally scrunching up her odd-colored eyes as if she were trying to remember something.
“Yes, yes, that’s right,” she said. “A wormmancer. I suppose it might be accurate to say the wormmancer now, seeing as I am the last of my kind.”
I cleared my throat and cast an uncomfortable eye at Tamsin, Renji, and Hana.
“So, uh, so that worm that me and my companions slew up top the other day,” I said slowly. “That was… I mean, we killed your worm?”
Kakra paused briefly in her frantic search for whatever the hell it was she was looking for and let loose a low and melodious chuckle. She shot a blue and red stare at me, slapped her thigh, and carried on with her search.
“Ah, I knew that you would be different,” the old seer said. “I knew that as no other person except a seer can know, but the guilt you just felt at slaying a creature that was apparently attacking innocent folk… That is a very good trait to possess, Mike Noctis.”
“So we didn’t kill your worm?” Tamsin butted in.
“No, hobgoblin, it was not my worm that the four of you fought and bested,” Kakra said, “but a spell that my worm can cast. It can create copies of itself, you see. Very convincing, very dangerous replications of itself. No, my worm is safe and sound still.”
That made me feel a little better about things.
“So, it was you who set it on those travelers? On the caravan that we rescued?” Renji asked in her thoughtful tone of voice.
Kakra made a noise of satisfaction as she reached far back on a high shelf and extracted a dusty pottery vessel.
“Yes, it was me who did that,” she said. “But they were not just any old travelers making their way to the capital of Akrit. That caravan was conveying weapons to the Shaykh. That is why I was trying to destroy them.”
“We didn’t—” Hana began.
Kakra waved her into silence, popped open the stopper of the pottery container she had found, and hurried to sit next to Zala. As she moved past me, I caught the scent of treacle, roasted garlic, burnt sugar, and frankincense.
Without bothering to explain what she was doing, she scooped out the unguent that was inside, applied it to a piece of clean white cloth that she had extracted from somewhere in her robes, pulled down Zala’s shirt, and slapped the cloth between her breasts right on top of the strange branding that the enslaved catmancer bore. Th
en, the old woman piled more of the unguent on top of the cloth and put another cloth on top of that, until she had crafted a thick poultice.
“This will hide her from the Shaykh’s influence,” Kakra said, getting to her feet and leaning on her bone staff again. “But it won’t last forever, unfortunately.”
“How long does it buy us, wise one?” Hana asked.
“A day at most,” the wormmancer replied.
The five of us stood looking down at Zala, who had fallen into a twitching sleep of sorts, then Kakra motioned us all to follow her into the next chamber.
Inside this room was a low table surrounded by comfortable mats to lay on and plump pillows to lean on.
Once we were all comfortably seated, I cleared my throat respectfully and cut to the chase.
“Kakra,” I said, “I know that as a seer you probably have a good idea of what is going on and how things are going to play out, but I’ve got to tell you something right now.”
A small smile flickered as quick as summer lightning across the old wormmancer’s face.
“And what would that be, Mike Noctis?” she asked me.
“Just that, as a last wormmancer, if you’re looking to…” I said and then had to clear my throat again. “It’s just that, you called me Dragon Breeder, right? You know who I am and what I can, uh, do?”
“Correct,” said Kakra.
“Right, so if you’re mulling over the notion that you and I are going to… You don’t want me to… You know…”
And, for some reason, I made the good old circle with one forefinger and thumb and ran my other forefinger through it a couple of times in the universally acknowledged signing that signified boning, the horizontal bop, making bacon, giving guitar lessons, or however else one might refer to the act of sexual intercourse.
From my right, I heard Tamsin try to turn a snicker into a cough. She failed magnificently.
“Because as beautiful as you might be, in a milfy mature kind of way that I dig very much, I’m all out of Etherstones,” I added.
Kakra laughed; a warm sound that dispelled any worries that I might have had of offending her.
“No, I do not wish for you to clean out those particular cobwebs, Mike Noctis,” she said. “Although, I am sure that I could teach you and your friends here a trick or three.”
I grinned and winked. “No doubt.”
“No, I will be the last of my kind,” Kakra continued. “I have made peace with that. No, what I wish for is that you and your comrades here might help to cleanse the stain that is Shaykh Antizah and his Bloodletter allies from Akrit.”
I looked around at the other three mancers then back at Kakra.
“Kakra,” I said, “I’d like nothing better than to wipe that flying shitheel off the face of Akrit, but I’ve been sent here to—”
“Do this,” Kakra interrupted me, gently but irresistibly, “and I will tell you where the Fateseeker’s Cavern lies.”
That brought me up short and made me trail off mid-sentence.
I closed my mouth slowly. Then I opened it again, ready to tell the old wormmancer why I had to get my mission accomplished before I could help her in hers, but I stopped and grinned knowingly instead.
Kakra smiled too. It seemed she could read my thoughts as clearly as if they were stenciled on my forehead.
“You’re a seer,” I said, “and you know how this little chat is going to play out, right? I was going to launch into a bit of rhetoric about why you should tell me where the Fateseeker’s Cavern is first, because I’ll need whatever power or relic that lies within it to go against the Shaykh, if I want to make sure of beating him.”
Kakra’s pearly white smile broadened, her perfectly proportioned nose wrinkling.
“But you’re not going to now?” she asked.
I sat up from my cushion and shook my head.
“You know what sort of man, what sort of warrior I am,” I said. “You know I’m the kind of mancer that gets the job done before embarking on something else. My first responsibility is to the Mystocean Empire, and you know that. You know that I am intractable.”
Kakra clapped her hands. “Oh, well done, Mike Noctis. You are just as I have seen you, and yet so much more.”
“You’ve seen us have this conversation, I’m sure,” I said.
Kakra nodded.
“And always we come to my way of thinking?” I asked.
“In almost all outcomes,” Kakra admitted. “You are strong-willed.”
“So, you’ll tell us where the Fateseeker’s Cavern is located?” Hana asked.
“I will give you the location where the Fateseeker’s Cavern lies,” Kakra, the Last Wormmancer said, nodding. “I will tell you where it lies beneath the earth, in a specific section of the Subterranean Realms accessible only through a gateway found within a sand temple. But whatever you are searching for, the Shadow Nations are also searching for. What it is, it must be a powerful relic. The Shaykh himself has been meeting with them to discern its location.”
“The sooner we find whatever is down there, the sooner that we can slip the Shaykh is final marching orders.” I leaned forward, expecting this desert seer to spill the beans straight away.
Instead, Kakra leaned back on her cushion and said, “Yes, I will help you. First, though, why don’t we take a moment to rest, recuperate and have a drink. While we do that, I will go through the road that lies ahead of you.”
Chapter 13
Kakra, the consummate host, poured us little cups of the same strong black coffee that Shaykh Antizah had supplied us with when we had first met him. When she was done, she raised her own cup to her lips quickly and drank first. She switched her gaze from me to Tamsin to Renji to Hana and then, lastly, to Will, who was bobbing unobtrusively just behind my right elbow, as she did this.
“Hey!” I yelled, suddenly wondering how the hell Will had come to be with us. “When did you get here, buddy?”
The little ball of light zipped around the chamber, clearly pleased with himself.
“You traveled all the way here from Vetrusca?”
His light grew brighter.
“I have not seen a wisp for so very long,” Kakra said. “He is welcome here.”
“Good, because I don’t think you’d be able to tell him to leave even if you wanted to,” I said.
The old wormmancer nodded and sighed as she put down her coffee. “You’re aware of the coffee customs of Akrit?”
“Shaykh Antizah gave us a rudimentary lesson,” I replied.
“He drank before the rest of you?” Kakra asked.
“Now that you mention it, wise one,” Hana said, “I don’t think he did.”
Kakra made a face and let out a little snort of contempt as she shook her head.
“That surprises me not at all,” she said.
“What’s the significance of drinking first?” Renji asked.
“It shows the guest that they need not fear poison and treachery,” Kakra said.
I laughed lightly. “Well, he might be a rude little snake in the grass, but at least we know now that he was running by the form book as soon as the gates opened.”
Now that Kakra had stirred the memory of that first meeting with Shaykh Antizah from the depths of my mind, like the silt at the bottom of a muddy river, I remembered the few things that we had learned from the man.
I pushed my own as yet untouched cup of coffee forward to show that I wished to hold discussion with her. Kakra’s eyes sparkled at the move.
“You wish to speak, Mike?” she asked solemnly.
I laughed again. I didn’t want things to be too damn formal—that wasn’t my style.
“I’m curious,” I said. “When we were having lunch with Shaykh Antizah, he told us a story about how his father had a guy come to him and seek his counsel and a horse from him. This dude was on the run from a bunch of guys who were after his blood because he had just killed one of the Shaykh’s brothers. Now, rather than just impose his retribution t
here and then, Shaykh Antizah told us that his father had given his brother’s murderer a horse and then told him he had three days in which to get as far away as he could before the Shaykh began hunting him.”
I paused. Kakra took another sharp sip of her coffee. Steam curled around her lined face.
“I have heard the story,” she said. “I remember when the events you speak of took place. Many years ago now.”
“So, it was a true tale?” Tamsin asked the older woman.
Kakra smiled. “It was true, yes. The laws of hospitality in Akrit are very strict. Most believe they were written by the gods of the sand and the wind and the water and passed to us. Shaykh Antizah’s father was a cruel and iron-fisted shaykh, but he respected the rules faultlessly. Three days is the time given in such matters. It gives the injured party, in this case the Shaykh, time to grieve and to plan his revenge in meticulous detail.”
“So, it’s true?” I said. “I thought it might just be some fabricated anecdote that Shaykh Antizah wheeled out to try and intimidate his guests.”
“No, it happened, just as you say,” Kakra said.
“Which brings me to my next question,” I said. “Now that we have offended Shaykh Antizah by roughing up some of his guards—”
“One was decapitated, Mike,” Renji chimed in.
“Yeah, but that was Zala, not us,” I reminded her.
“I’m not sure if the shaykh will worry himself unduly about those sorts of details,” Kakra said.
“That’s what I’m getting at,” I said. “Seeing as we roughed up some of his men, and I smashed his robed ass through a solid wooden door, what do you think the chances are of him waiting the customary three days to come hunting us?”
Kakra shook her head, turning her coffee cup slowly around on the low table that we sat around.
“No chance,” she said. “He will come as soon as the power of the poultice I have put over Zala’s brand fades. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, you did not go to him over coffee and discuss the matter, opening up this sacred agreement over the sacred bean. Secondly, he is quite simply not that sort of man: he does not respect tradition or the niceties. So, even if you hadn’t attacked him head-on to free one of his slaves, and told him that you planned to try and break one of them out, I doubt very much whether he would have let you leave him in one piece.”