Dragon Bones (The Dragonwalker Book 1)

by D. K. Holmberg

  “Fes—”

  Fes shook his head, keeping his focus on Reina. “Get going, Alison. Don’t be stupid with this.”

  He swept toward Reina with his daggers, trying to cut through the heat. He needed to give them time, and then he could make an attempt at escape. Not before then. If he couldn’t provide them with enough time, he wasn’t about to sacrifice himself, but it might not matter. From what he had seen of Reina, she was powerful.

  “What kind of fire mage are you?”

  She took a step toward him, moving with a strange, fluid sort of grace. Each step seemed to shimmer, much the way that flame might dance and shimmer. “One of the Deshazl must ask that question?”

  “Considering I don’t know what you mean by that, I guess that he does.”

  “You made a mistake in coming here. And I will make certain that none with you escape.”

  “I’m sorry to hear you say that. Because I have every intention of getting myself—and the people with me—out of here.”

  She grinned at him. Heat continued to build.

  He swiped at the air. Each time he did, he managed to part the heat a little bit more. It was subtle, but it was noticeable. And from the look on her face—the tension at the corners of her eyes—and the strange way that she watched him, he could tell that she knew it and was troubled by that fact.

  The air became almost unbearably hot.

  He tried to ignore that, but doing so was difficult, especially the longer that he was exposed to the heat. Each breath became a struggle, almost as if he were fighting with himself, straining against his body as he struggled to breathe. His throat and lungs became raw, and it was all he could do to ignore that sensation.

  The woman watched him, though she said nothing.

  Could the sensation even be real?

  The heat on his skin didn’t seem any worse than it had been.

  Maybe it was only in his mind. Maybe this was some way that she had of trying to manipulate him into believing that something was going on with his breathing.

  He brought the daggers around, cutting through the air near his mouth and throat.

  As he did, the horrible sensation that had been nearly overwhelming him subsided.

  How much longer would he be able to keep this up? The daggers seemed to mitigate her magic, but he expected there would come a time when even that wouldn’t be enough.

  That meant that anything he would do would have to be quick.

  Fes made a sweeping motion with his daggers. He brought them around in a circle, cutting through the air in an arc. He continued to swirl with the daggers, slicing at the heat and whatever magic she used.

  Fes exploded at the barrier her magic created and lunged at her.

  There was a flash of smoke and flame. When it cleared, she was gone.

  Fes took a few breaths, and the air began to cool. The room was dark other than the flickering flames across the tabletop.

  He turned his attention to whatever it was that she had been doing, trying to understand her intentions. There was a small length of ivory bone on the table, and Fes pushed at it with his dagger, moving it away from the fire. He wouldn’t reach for it, not until he knew how hot it had gotten, but when he stared at it, he saw the same shimmering colors to it that he saw from most dragon relics.

  Fes looked over at the doorway. None of the others remained, which gave him hope that they had managed to escape.

  He made a quick survey of the room. Other than the fallen man, there was nothing else on that side. On the altar, he found a chalice that seemed to contain blood, but nothing else. There was the bone and the chalice.

  Fes returned to the tunnel, hurrying through it. When he began to ascend, he sprinted forward, wanting to reach Alison and the others as quickly as possible. It was time for him to be anywhere else.

  The others were gone by the time he reached the main tunnels, passing through the curtain and out into the section of tunnels that they had first discovered. Fes hurried through them and raced up the stairs and into the building, and then back outside.

  Once there, he looked around frantically until he saw Alison and the other rebels on the far side of the clearing and heading back toward the rebel camp.

  He breathed heavily, taking deep breaths of the fresh air. Day had changed over, leaving the sun falling beneath the horizon. Darkness would soon greet them, and Fes wanted to be somewhere away from here, especially if Reina might still be here.

  “What happened?” Alison asked when he hurried over.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did you manage to get away?”

  Fes shook his head.

  Alison watched him, arching a brow at him. “I wasn’t able to even get into that room. She was… Doing something.”

  “I’m aware,” Fes said.

  “Yet you were able to resist whatever it was that she was doing. How was that?”

  Fes looked around. “I don’t know what I was able to do, and I don’t know what she was doing. All I know is that she was controlling fire and flames and making the air so hot in my throat, it burned and…”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  Fes nodded.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Micah told me what happened. The others were captured, and she chose Victorn for sacrifice.”

  “We need to get moving. Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “What about my father?” Indra asked.

  Fes licked his lips, looking over at the young girl. Her dark eyes looked up at him, begging. How could Fes refuse that? And yet how could he do what she needed? There wasn’t any way to find her father, especially as he wasn’t confident that he was even still around here.

  He turned to Alison. “Did you find any other survivors?”

  “Some,” she said.

  “I think it’s time that we interrogate them.”

  “They probably don’t know anything, Fes. If Carter is running them, it’s unlikely that she would have shared anything with them about her plans.”

  “They’ll know something. They have to.” He looked at Indra. Somehow, this was connected. He wasn’t sure how, and he wasn’t sure what it meant, but there was a connection between what had happened. He would find out whatever purpose they had in capturing her father. And then he would save him.

  Fes crouched down in front of Indra. “I have to do a few things that you shouldn’t see.”

  “What sort of things?” she asked.

  “Things that I won’t be very proud of when they’re done.”

  “Why not?”

  “For me to learn what might’ve happened with your father, I’m going to have to ask these men some questions. Doing so will require that I force them to share what they have no intention of sharing.”

  “If my father is involved—”

  “You can’t be there for this,” he said.

  He worried that she would argue with him and was thankful she did not. If she had argued, what would he have said? Would he have been able to tell her that there was no way for her to learn what he was going to do? Would he have told her that he needed her to stay away while he tortured at least one man, and possibly many more?

  “Please find out what they did with him,” she said.

  Fes looked up at Alison, tearing his gaze away from Indra, not able to meet her eyes. “Is there anyone who can stay with her?”

  “I think I can find someone,” she said.

  “Are you going to try and prevent me from doing this?”

  Alison shook her head. “Even if I could, I would not.”

  They made their way behind the hillside and into the caravan. It seemed as if it had been days since he had traveled with them rather than only hours. So much time had gone by and so much had happened that he felt uncertain about.

  Alison led him to a wagon near the center of the caravan. Two men stood outside the back, and Fes noticed that bars wer
e set on the windows. A massive lock prevented access to it.

  “Let us in,” Alison said.

  The nearest guard shook his head. “You know what the commander said.”

  “I know what he said, but we have to find out what happened.”

  “Not without getting his permission.”

  Fes stepped forward and quickly unsheathed his daggers. He flipped them, jabbing them up at each man until the tip pressed into the underside of their necks. “Don’t make me do anything that will get me kicked out of the caravan. I’m already not all that thrilled about being here.”

  The men glared at him, but the first man tipped his head back, away from the dagger. “The key is in my pocket.”

  Fes fished into the man’s pocket and pulled the key out. He tossed it to Alison, who reached past him, unlocking the wagon.

  “I won’t be long,” Fes said, pulling the door open and jumping inside.

  It was dark, the only light inside coming through the barred windows. The man inside was shackled. He looked up when Fes stepped into the wagon, and then looked back down at his shackles.

  “I’m not going to say anything. I know that you want me to talk—“

  Fes took a dagger and jammed it into the meaty part of the man’s thigh.

  He screamed, and Fes slipped forward, clasping his hand over his mouth, silencing him. He left the knife in the man’s thigh and kept his face only a few inches away from the other man. “I need you to be quiet, or I’m going to continue to jab this dagger into your leg. Do you understand?”

  The man met his gaze with a wide-eyed stare before nodding.

  Fes carefully brought his hand away, and the man sucked his breath, trying to control his breathing while the dagger remained in his flesh.

  “Good. Now that I have your attention, I have a few questions for you.”

  “I already told you I don’t know anything.”

  Fes twisted the dagger slightly. The man’s eyes widened even more. “I’m thinking you know more than you let on. Tell me about the terms of your employment.”

  The man shook his head. “We took a job. It was a simple mercenary job. We’ve taken many of them over the years, and this one was only meant to bring us to the north.”

  “You didn’t know that you would be asked to attack a merchant caravan?”

  The man hesitated too long, and Fes twisted his knife.

  “So you did know. Interesting. Was that part of the term of the employment?”

  “We were told that we might need to be involved in something that required a certain level of aggression.”

  “Such as slaughtering an entire family of merchants.”

  “There wasn’t a family. There weren’t even that many merchants there.”

  “Did you bother to look in the wagons?”

  “We looked, but most were gone.”

  Fes frowned. That wasn’t what he’d seen, was it? Could they have abducted some of the Bayars? What purpose would that serve?

  “And you didn’t have any trouble with the fact that you would be asked to destroy so many people?”

  “I’ve seen the way you fight. I know that you understand that sometimes the job requires difficult decisions.”

  Fes sighed. “Difficult decisions. I have never made a difficult decision to destroy an entire family.”

  “You would if the price was high enough.”

  “And how much have you been promised?”

  “A gold a day.”

  Fes’s breath caught. He had thought that he was getting paid well, but if these mercenaries were offered that much…

  It meant that whoever Carter worked for had real wealth.

  He already knew that whatever they were after was incredibly valuable. It might be more valuable than anything that he’d ever been asked to collect. This confirmed that for him.

  “How many days have you been out here?”

  “We followed the caravan when it left the city.”

  Fes had lost track of time and no longer knew how long he had been out of the city. Had it been two weeks? Three? Maybe it was even longer than that.

  “What was the purpose in staying here?”

  “We were asked to guard.”

  “Guard what?” When the man didn’t answer quickly enough, Fes twisted the dagger again. He had pressed it down this time, digging into the bone. Each time that he twisted would be incredibly painful, and he was more than a little surprised the man was still coherent through the pain.

  “We were asked to guard the dragon base.”

  “Did you know that there was a fire mage there?”

  The man’s eyes widened. “There was no fire mage. We were supposed to meet up with the rest of our party, and from there we would continue our journey.”

  “The rest of your party? How many more were you expecting?”

  “I don’t know. A couple dozen? Maybe more.”

  Maybe that was the second wave of soldiers that they had encountered. They hadn’t hidden at all; they had been sent here, coming to meet the rest of the mercenaries.

  “Why here?”

  “I don’t know. That’s not part of the job that I’m given. I’m given information that I need, and I fight when I’m asked. You know how that goes.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Because you have the look of a mercenary about you. And I’ve seen the way that you fight with those daggers. In the way that you’re torturing me.”

  “Be glad that it’s me who’s torturing you and not any of the others. There’s a woman who’s with me who is even more eager to extract information from you.”

  “What are you going to do with me?”

  Fes shrugged and gently wiggled the dagger in the man’s thigh. “That really depends on what you do. If you cooperate with us, if you can be counted on to provide information, it’s possible that you’ll be allowed to live.”

  “Even after I’ve seen the rebellion?”

  Fes smiled. “Rebellion? What makes you think that this is any sort of rebellion?”

  “Because I have eyes.”

  Fes smiled. “Then if you have eyes, you should recognize that you need to cooperate. If you’re willing to cooperate, they will allow you to leave.”

  “The way that you’re cooperating?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I never saw you anywhere with them. You aren’t one of them. You were hired, or brought in, but you’re not the same as them. What happens to you when whatever cooperation you have been providing begins to end?”

  Fes resisted the urge to jam the dagger deeper into his thigh. Instead, he yanked it free and wiped it on the man’s pants. “Like I said, you would do well to cooperate with them. There is a woman with me who is more than willing to show you just how far she’ll go to get the information she wants.”

  He crept back out of the wagon and jumped down, slipping the lock back on the door. He looked over to see Alison standing with the commander. He recognized the expression on her face, a mixture of annoyance and disappointment. He had seen it from her often enough during the time they were together, and he knew it well.

  “Come with me,” the commander said.

  Fes shrugged at the two guards before following the commander and Alison. They reached the edge of the caravan and then went beyond it, heading to the ridgeline that looked out over the dragon base.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the commander asked Fes.

  “I’m trying to find information. I understand that I’m not one of you, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are things that I can do that can help.”

  The commander looked from Alison to Fes before. “What kind of information do you think that man will be able to provide you, Fezarn? What kind of information do you think that a low-level mercenary will know about whatever is planned?”

  “For starters, I learned that they were hired with the intent of attacking the merchant caravan. He knew what he was g
etting into when he took the job. And he claims that there weren’t that many people in the caravan when they came through. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but if it is, it raises the question of what would they have done with the rest of the Bayars family?”

  The commander sighed. “Even if that were true, that’s not what we’re here for. What we’re after is more important than one family.”

  Fes shrugged. “It might not be what you’re here for, but it’s a question that I need to be answered. If I am to understand what is taking place and what Carter is after, I need to—”

  The commander stepped forward and got close to Fes, looking up at him. “You need nothing. You are here because you were hired for a job.”

  The commander started to turn away, and Fes called after him, “What are the Deshazl?”

  The commander froze. He turned back to Fes. The color had leached out of his face. “Where did you hear that term?”

  “You first.”

  “No. This isn’t a negotiation.”

  “Maybe not to you, but I’m the one who faced a fire mage beneath the dragon base. There was a woman there. We found an altar and she had sacrificed one of your men—”

  “Victorn,” Alison said.

  The commander squeezed his eyes shut and nodded.

  “Now, what does all of that mean?” Fes asked.

  The commander took a deep breath. “What all that means is that you came face to face with someone who could succeed at getting across the plains before us.”

  “She wasn’t terribly interested in harming me so much as she was interested in keeping me from going anywhere else.”

  The commander sighed and turned back to Fes. “And what did she say to you?”

  “She used the term Deshazl.”

  “Are you certain that you heard that?”

  Fes frowned at him. “I’m pretty certain. That’s what she used to refer to me, whatever that is.”

  The commander regarded Fes with a different sort of interest than he had before. He stepped to the side, cocking his head, and he frowned. “Deshazl. That can’t be right, can it? There can’t be any of the Deshazl remaining.”

  “What are you talking about? What are the Deshazl?”

  “You are aware that we are trying to head north, and that we intend to find a powerful dragon relic.”