Dragon Breeder 5

by Dante King

  “Something else?” I asked, a little skeptically.

  “There’s another problem,” the catmancer said carefully.

  “And that is…?”

  “The bond that the Shaykh has created between the catmancers,” Zala said, her breath warm as the desert wind in my ear, “is one of such potency that, if he is assassinated, then all of us, all those bound to him, die with him at the moment of his death.”

  I sat up a little straighter at these words and was rewarded by a buffeting of wind in my face.

  “Head down, Earthling,” Noctis growled in my head, “you’re reducing our speed.”

  I hunkered back down a little, into the Onyx Dragon’s slipstream. “You’re telling me that if we kill the Shaykh in the course of our quest to save the catmancers, there’s the chance that you will all perish along with him?”

  “Yes, that is so,” Zala said. “Although, seeing as we are being totally transparent with one another, I must tell you that is less of a chance and more of a certainty.”

  For a moment, I just digested this nugget of information. “And I don’t suppose that you would happen to know how to get around this thorny little issue?”

  Zala replied in the negative.

  “Great,” I said. “That’s just… great. There’s nothing like something going from almost impossible to completely impossible to give a warrior confidence.”

  At Kakra’s instructions, relayed to Tamsin and me by Renji, we landed about a mile outside of the walls of the capital of Akrit. Our destination was a rundown-looking farmhouse surrounded by a grove of palms that fed off a marshy bit of water supplied by an underground spring.

  “We’re safe here do you think?” I asked Kakra as soon as Tamsin, Renji, and I had placed our dragoons back into their crystals.

  “We are safe here for now,” Kakra told me with calming certainty, “although we are still too far from the city for Zala to be safe. Once the screening poultice runs its course, which will not be long now, the Shaykh will be able to pinpoint her. We need to get into the city proper, Dragonmancer Noctis, and we need to do it fast.”

  She marched swiftly across a wide and dusty courtyard surrounded on three sides by dilapidated farm buildings, her bone staff tapping dully on the hard earth as we went.

  “What was this place?” I asked the wormmancer, following her.

  “It was a former safehouse for the rebels,” Kakra told me, looking around her in a way that told me she was remembering the deserted place as it once had been. “It used to be a gathering place for those who opposed the Shaykh, but no longer.”

  Kakra led us into an open plan kitchen area in which a large wooden table was set. Around it were a collection of mismatched chairs, but none of us made a move to sit down. We all knew that there was no time for that. There was no light, but Will glowed with enough luminosity for us mancers to see quite clearly.

  Hana walked over to a shuttered window, opened it a crack, and peered out for a few seconds. Satisfied that there was no one watching us, she closed the shutter once more.

  “I appreciate that we have to get our asses into Akrit as quick as we can,” I said, speaking before anyone else could, “but Zala mentioned a couple of reasons why we can’t go in there guns—that is to say, dragons blazing.”

  “But that’s our go-to tactic,” Tamsin smirked from where she was leaning against a wall and running her thumb down one of her daggers. “Hasn’t failed us yet, Mike.”

  “No, I guess it hasn’t,” I admitted. “Regrettably, though, Zala believes that burning the palace to the ground will not endear us to the locals. They will not see this move as a move to liberate them from an oppressor they hate, but as an attack on the heart of a city that they love and call home.”

  Hana grunted. “Understandable. If dragons were to attack the Berserker Hall back in Hrímdale, even if Queen Frami was universally despised, I would see it as an attack on the seat of Vetrusca as a whole.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “And if that wasn’t enough, there is something else that might prove to be even more of an encumbrance, as far as snuffing out the Shaykh goes.”

  “And that is?” Renji asked.

  “The magical bond that links him to the catmancers, and essentially enslaves them to his will, is so powerful, so ingrained, that if we kill the fucker, then they all die along with him,” I said.

  Silence greeted this.

  “Is it true?” Renji asked Zala.

  The catmancer swallowed and nodded.

  “Yeah, it’s a pickle that we find ourselves in,” I said. “And we are running out of time.” I pointed to where the city of Akrit lay beyond the shuttered windows. “The only thing we have got going for us, really, is that the Shaykh is predictable in one thing.”

  “And what is that, Dragonmancer Noctis?” Kakra queried.

  “That he will come hunting for Zala as soon as he can. The pissant has an ego on him the size of a planet; the sort of guy who wouldn’t lower himself to go to a funeral unless it was his own.”

  “Which, seeing as what the future likely holds for him,” Tamsin said with a nasty gleam in her eye, “is convenient.”

  “Yeah. I guess it’s all part of being an all powerful Shaykh yadda yadda yadda,” I said. “Most importantly, though, it tells us that we have to get into the city as soon as possible, if only to disguise Zala. Even if we don’t have a plan as such, we can at least ensure that she is safe as possible from Shaykh Antizah’s search.”

  Zala smiled appreciatively at this, and the others murmured their agreement.

  “As to this plan that we do not yet have,” I continued, turning to fix Kakra with my eye, “I was hoping that you might have some advice. Know any way to disrupt this bond between the catmancers and their self-proclaimed master?”

  The wormmancer gave me one of those warm but slightly enigmatic grins of hers. There could be no denying, she looked pleased that I had asked.

  “My eyes and ears have seen hazy things and heard whispered rumors, yes,” the older woman said.

  “You have heard specifics, wise one?” Hana asked Kakra.

  “Not specifics, no,” the wormmancer replied. “They are just tidbits of information that I could not make any sense of before now, but I feel that they have slotted into place most snuggly.”

  “What have you heard?” I asked.

  “That the Shaykh spends much time in an inner sanctum of his palace,” Kakra said. “My spies had mentioned a focus point of power for the bond—though when I heard this months ago, I had no notion of what bond they were talking about, and they had only heard the Shaykh mention it to an advisor by chance.”

  “What is this focus point?” Tamsin asked. “And how do we get to it?”

  Zala gasped. “I know it. It is a sacred crystal in the Shaykh's inner sanctum of his palace. I have not seen it, but I have heard of it. I don’t know where it is in the palace, unfortunately.”

  I leaned forward and planted my fists on the rough wooden boards of the table and looked at each of the women standing around the room in turn.

  “I’ll say again, as I have already said to Zala here on the flight in,” I said, “that I am resolute in doing this. I’m going to end this slavery and free the catmancers.”

  “And free the rest of those citizens in the land of Akrit laboring under the yolk of Shaykh Antizah’s reign,” Zala said.

  I inclined my head.

  “So, we’re decided that we’re going to get inside Akrit, find this crystal, and kill the motherfucking shaykh,” I said.

  “We always have your back, Mike,” Renji said.

  “Yeah, and there’s no way that any dragonmancer worth their salt—” said Tamsin.

  “Or bearmancer,” interjected Hana.

  “Right, or bearmancer, would let a scumbag like Shaykh Antizah continue to forcibly enslave anyone, no matter if they were a mancer or not,” the hobgoblin finished. She slid the dagger she had been examining back into the sheath on her belt w
ith a conclusive click.

  “Just one last thing,” I said, “how do we get into the city? Every guard on the walls and gates are on the alert for any sign of Zala or the rest of us. We have to do that first, and do it fast, before the poultice wears off.”

  The six of us stared at each other for a moment.

  “Without using dragons?” Renji asked.

  “Without using dragons,” I said drily. “I imagine they’d cause quite the stir.”

  There was more thoughtful silence. Then, Kakra stepped forward, slapping her bone staff into the middle of the table to draw attention to herself.

  “No dragons you say, and I agree with you,” the old woman said. “In stealth our chief hope lies. The solution to this problem is a simple one.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her and then clicked. I laughed softly to myself and leaned back from the table so that I could point at her.

  “You’re dead right, Kakra,” I said. “The Shaykh will be expecting us to make an entrance by air. He’ll be looking to the skies. He won’t think to keep his ear pressed to the ground.”

  “What are you…” Tamsin said, but then she trailed off as if she too had been visited by the old lightbulb of realization.

  “That’s right,” I said, “we’re heading underground once more. Kakra will just get—sorry, I’ve forgotten the name of your worm.”

  “Sejuc is my worm’s name,” Kakra said. “And yes, he will happily consent to help us. I will summon him, and he will tunnel ahead of us. There is a corner of Akrit city that is home to little more than a patch of swamp which is used as a dumping ground for rubbish.”

  “Sounds like a perfect spot for us to infiltrate the city,” I said.

  “Only ibis birds and crocodiles live there,” the Last Wormmancer told me. “I shall have him excavate an entrance there. I will summon him back into the staff so that he does not have to surface and give himself away. Then, when we are all safely above ground, Sejuc can materialize back in the tunnel, fill it in, and then I can summon him back to his home.”

  Kakra ran her hand lovingly along her bone staff.

  “He lives in there?” I asked.

  Kakra nodded.

  “Excuse me for voicing what might seem like an impertinent question, wise one,” Hana said, “but are you certain Sejuc will be able to navigate us accurately? Any slight miscalculation might result in any number of disasters.”

  “The least of which being that your creature might inadvertently make a plughole in the bottom of the Silver River,” Renji said.

  Kakra chuckled and gazed happily around at the five of us.

  “Ah, I might have expected such questions from those who travel mostly by air,” she said. “You do not have to worry. You might not be able to fathom such a thing, but once a wormmancer is well underground, they know exactly where they are. A worm’s tunnel is structurally perfect and will only collapse after many years, they choose the ground so carefully. You can be entirely your own master down there and you don’t have to consult any person, governor, or shaykh as to how to live, or mind any rules that might be imposed by such people up on the surface. Lives and society go on overhead the same as they ever did, and you have the luxury to let them, and not care one whit about them. When you need to, you go up and resurface, and there the old things are, waiting for you, just as you left them.”

  The old wormmancer gave a little weary sigh. “Yes,” she said to herself, “there is freedom underground.”

  Suddenly, she looked up at Zala, who had suddenly clutched at her chest and given a little grunt of discomfort, with her odd blue and red eyes.

  “Come, we are almost out of time,” Kakra said. “The poultice is almost spent. Follow me out into the courtyard and let Sejuc lead us on our way under the walls.”

  Chapter 17

  Sejuc, giant worm and bonded beast of the Last Wormmancer, cut a perfect tunnel out of the mud, rock, and sand that lay under the desert of Akrit.

  Will, making himself useful as he always did, bobbed along at the front of our little group of explorers, casting his ghostly blue luminance so that we could see.

  The worm was not at all like the projection of himself that we had fought in the desert. For one thing, he was only about as long and as big around as your average eighteen-wheeler—pocket-sized compared to his phony replica. In reality, he was also a beautifully colored beast, each segment of his long armored body alternating between iridescent blue and muddy red. The same color as Kakra’s unusual eyes.

  Sejuc drilled through the ground ahead of us, leaving only a thin, crumbling layer of dirt for us to jog through.

  As we moved along the worm-made tunnel, Kakra spoke.

  “My scheme is a simple one,” the wormmancer said. “Once we are above ground and are safe in the city, and are sure that the Shaykh’s guards are not onto us, we will all head for the outskirts of the palace.”

  “You think that the safest place to be when a manticore is hunting is on its back?” Tamsin said.

  “Precisely,” Kakra said, stepping nimbly over a head-sized boulder behind the grinding powerful form of Sejuc. “Once we are outside the palace, our company should divide. The plan, as I see it in my mind, is for Zala and the rest of us females to make our way through the outer grounds of the palace and head for where the Shaykh’s harem is quartered.”

  “Why divide?” I asked.

  “And why head for the harem?” Zala asked in a perplexed voice.

  “Because, once we are there, we can all overcome whatever guards might be stationed there, start a diversion, and take out as many more of the Shaykh’s soldiers as he might send our way,” Kakra said.

  “It will also afford us the opportunity to tell the catmancers what is going on,” Zala said. “There is little doubt that most, if not all of them, will join us.”

  Kakra put a hand on the shoulder of the catmancer and smiled at her warmly. “Excellent. Meanwhile, Mike Noctis will be accompanied by the wisp and tasked with destroying this crystal. Hopefully he can get this done fairly easily, if our diversion does what it should.”

  I gritted my teeth. It was at times like this that I struggled with military and combat planning. It was a bitter pill to swallow; to know that my friends would be bearing the brunt of Shaykh Antizah’s wrath while I stealthed my way into the inner sanctum.

  Still, it was a good plan and it made sense, and we didn’t really have time to come up with another.

  “We have the element of surprise and we have the cover of night,” I said. “I should be able to sniff out where Shaykh Antizah is keeping this crystal pretty fast with Will’s help. Once I’m within striking distance, I’ll send Will back to you as a signal to get the hell out of the palace grounds. Is that agreeable?”

  The other mancers all voiced their agreement to this.

  “Excellent,” I said, “then we’re all set. Everyone sticks to the plan and I’m sure we’ll look back and laugh at where it all went wrong later.”

  Tamsin, Hana, and Renji laughed.

  “It is not bad work, I don’t think,” said Zala, “considering how quickly we had to make it up.”

  “Not bad at all,” I said, turning so that I could waggle my eyebrows at the catmancer. “The fact that we actually have a plan at all is a vast improvement as to how we usually operate. We must be growing up.”

  “Yes,” Kakra said, “it is well made, and just in time.”

  There was a grinding, sucking sound from Sejuc’s mouth end. Then, abruptly, fresh air flooded down the tunnel, sneaking past the great sides of the massive worm as it moved out of the hole.

  “Will, stop playing the Human Torch and dim down as much as you can, yeah?” I said to the wisp, who had pulled back toward us.

  Will sportingly did as I had asked him, bringing his light down low so that, if there was anyone bar a curious crocodile or nosy ibis watching, his luminance wouldn’t give us away.

  When the worm had apparently excavated our escape route, the seven of u
s headed cautiously outside.

  We emerged into precisely the kind of area that Kakra had described; a swamp land that looked as much like a rubbish dump back on Earth as anything else.

  There were crocodiles, as she said there would be, too. One of them was quite large and aggressive, and it took two pretty juicy haymakers on my part to dissuade the bastard that we were not the Akritite version of Uber Eats.

  By the time that I had done that, and the twenty-foot maneater had been persuaded that living another day in a dumping ground was preferable to ending up as a pair of shoes or a fashionable bag, Sejuc had filled in the exit hole he had made and been summoned back to Kakra’s staff.

  “Now, follow me,” Zala hissed, and we set off toward the bright lights of Akrit city, to lose ourselves in the noise and stink of society.

  It wasn’t so tricky, worming our way into the heart of Akrit once we were disguised in some carefully purloined robes and shemaghs. Will was hidden under Kakra’s skirts. Privately, I would have been interested to quiz the wisp how things looked down there—if her face and body was anything to go by, the seer would still have it going on downstairs—but, of course, the wisp was saying nothing.

  The trickiest part of the whole infiltration was getting through the outskirts of the city, where it was mostly residential streets that were not quite so populated as the inner city. However, once we had our disguises, we were able to bypass the abundant patrols.

  “Are there more guards than usual?” I muttered to Zala.

  “Definitely.” She winced and clutched at her chest.

  “Are you okay?” I asked as the others gathered around us.

  “I - I think so,” Zala said. “A sudden weakness, a lightheadedness, just came over me though.”

  Kakra wagged her head sagely. Stepping forward, she reached out and told Zala to open her shirt for her. The catmancer did as she was asked. Kakra scrutinized the poultice that she had plastered over Zala’s strange branding in the middle of her breasts carefully. With delicate fingers, she brushed at the poultice, and the covering flaked away, revealing the brand or scar or whatever it was underneath.