Dragonfire

by Charles Jackson

  She was down to a slow walking pace now, heart pounding in her chest as she picked her way between the trees and cringed at every sound as her boots crunched softly through the underbrush. It was a small mercy at least that the morning seemed to be bright and clear, with patches of clear sky visible through the forest canopy overhead. True sunrise was probably still an hour away and there were clouds gathering about the distant horizon, but she was nevertheless now able to see reasonably well in the half-light, although Nev was a little disappointed to find that wasn’t really helping in her attempt to retrace her steps.

  She found very quickly that (surprise, surprise!) one tree looked pretty much the same as another, and that while she knew she was heading in basically the right direction, the complete darkness of the preceding night had not provided her with any significant landmarks to use as a guide. Her ever-present speed of doubt began to set in then and as she headed deeper into the forest, she grew increasingly worried that she’d never be able to find the clearing again.

  Amazingly, the compass app on her phone still seemed to function (she had no idea why that was still working, considering she was still getting no network connection whatsoever), however while that could certainly confirm she was moving in a westerly direction, that was about all it could do and Nev knew she’d need to be far more accurate with her navigation than that if she was going to ever find the site of that portal again. She still wasn’t at all happy about the lack of network, but it was more of an extreme inconvenience now than the earth-shattering shock it had been the night before.

  “At least I know I’m not in Hell…” Nev muttered softly, thinking of the joke her dad always made about having to sell your soul to sign a contract with their phone provider. “I’d definitely have coverage there…”

  She’d hoped a little sarcasm might boost her spirits, but it ultimately only served to increase her overall nervousness as fears over what Godfrey had said resurfaced; that the portal might not even be there. She forged on, refusing to surrender to her own negativity and making an effort to push those thoughts from her mind and stay positive.

  She’d travelled perhaps three hundred metres by her own rough reckoning – a little more than that in yards, maybe (she was already trying to remember how her dad had taught her to covert between the two) – when she came out of the forest and into a more open section of tall grass and thorny scrub, with trees spread about with less regularity. The ground also felt softer – even a little spongy – and she could once again hear the faint crash of the surf somewhere off to her left.

  Even in the alien darkness of that strange place, something about that sound and the smell of salt water in the air felt vaguely familiar and some deep, rarely-used instinct within Nev’s sub-conscious somehow knew in that moment that she was too far south. Checking her phone compass and turning toward the north-west, she continued on, feeling far more exposed now and moving almost at a crouch as she threaded her way between shrubs and bushes. With the growing light of the impending sunrise, she was at least able to see where she was going, and this time managed to avoid any major scratches or scrapes for the most part as she headed toward a western skyline that was still far darker.

  Ten minutes more of painstaking, wayward movement and she burst out into a more recognisable spot: the same open strip of shorter grass that she’d come across the previous night while looking for Chisholm Road. Her instincts again served her well; she was definitely further south than she’d been ten or twelve hours earlier, but at least she’d now found a landmark she recognised. Following that grassy strip north now, she set off again with renewed enthusiasm, a flutter of nervousness in her heart as she began to dream beyond all hope that there might actually be a way back home to her own world.

  Nev almost missed the track as she strode on, all thought of concealment forgotten in her growing excitement, and she was forced to stop, take stock and backtrack a few dozen metres to find it again. It seemed so much more overgrown than she remembered from the bike ride, although she wasn’t sure why that thought was even relevant considering she was probably in another universe entirely.

  “Here we go…” she confided to her phone, recording another snippet of something she promised herself would one day become the most awesome ‘travel’ vlog anyone had ever posted. “It’s been fun here in ‘Weird Medieval World’… in a terrifying, not-fun, ‘trying-to-kill-you’ kinda way, but it’s definitely time to go home! Time to find this portal thingy and get the heck outta here…!”

  She changed camera modes, took one slow panoramic image of her surroundings, then put her phone away and jogged off down the track, more than ready for a nice warm shower and time in front of the heater with some conciliatory ice cream.

  Time seemed to pass surprisingly quickly after the morning’s journey from the barn, although the pre-dawn sky became a little murky as she moved back into the wetlands beyond the long grass, passing through patches of heavy, low-lying mist and fog that collected in hollows and bends in the track. The hair at the back of her neck again began to prickle and rise, and having experienced the sensation already once before, Nev now got the distinct feeling that there was definitely something wrong with the area – that there was somehow something bad… something evil about it, if that were even possible.

  “Not much chance of any Native American burial ground, at least…” she muttered facetiously, with a mental nod to Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. “…Although… God knows what else might be buried around here…”

  That thought didn’t help her mental state at all, although it did push her to increase speed as she found the larger clearing where their bikes had disappeared and immediately veered off down that last track toward the site of the portal. She was almost at a run as she entered that final, smaller clearing, hoping for some hint of an unusual light… a strange voice… of any indication that the connection back to her world still existed.

  The body of the horseman still lay to one side, the dark, bloody wound in his chest as gruesome as a pair of lifeless eyes that continued to stare blindly into the sky in a fixed and quite terminal expression of sudden shock, and from what she recalled of the preceding night’s events, it didn’t seem difficult to work out where the actual area of the portal had been: the point from which the horse had first appeared.

  Dropping her bag in the middle of the clearing, Nev moved quickly from place to place, pushing through grass and between bushes and trees as she searched desperately for something she might not even recognise. The heavy breathing of exertion became soft whimpers of despair, her movements more frantic as her fear of failure grew greater with each passing second.

  It took just a few short minutes to realise that there was definitely no portal, exactly as Godfrey had predicted, although actual acceptance didn’t come immediately. Much as her rational mind had thought itself prepared for the possibility, the reality of it still dealt her a crushing emotional blow and with a soft, low moan of despair, she sank to her knees beside her duffel bag and began to sob softly, head in her hands.

  Slim as her chances had actually been, she’d hung the entirety of her hopes on them simply because there’d been no other option. With all hope now in tatters, she awkwardly, jerkily took out her phone once more and began to search through her saved images, tears pouring down her cheeks as she found a random selfie of her and her dad taken a few months before. She even remembered the evening – a Saturday night dinner for Drake’s fiftieth – and there they were, Nev dressed almost identically in the clothes she’d worn yesterday, and her father looking happy but a little awkward in a jacket and tie.

  Searching further through her gallery, she found a video this time: one her father had made for her on their old computer almost exactly two years earlier as part of his gift for her fifteenth birthday. It was short video just four minutes long, and she’d pretended it had been an embarrassment when he’d posted it on his rarely-used Facebook page for everyone to see. Taking her headphones from her jacket po
cket, she plugged them in and played it now though, the tears already building in intensity as she set it playing.

  A new-born baby crying on a delivery table, swaddled in blankets, and the opening bars of Rob Thomas’ Little Wonders chimed melodically in Nev’s ears as she heard her father’s own voice in the background, filled with emotion. He’d worked for weeks on it, all by himself, and produced a short movie of clips from the first year of Nev’s life, all of it set to that Disney soundtrack song, and as much as she’d made a great show of how humiliating the whole thing was in front of her friends, deep down she’d loved it more than anything he’d ever bought her, before or since. Her dad knew it too – she’d made sure of that – and watching that video now, the emotion of the song sweeping over her, she felt completely overwhelmed.

  Danger and the simple process of remaining active had allowed her to keep anxiety and depression at bay for most of the last twelve hours, but that all came crashing down now as she knelt there in that silent clearing, hearing her father’s voice through the headphones and not knowing where he was or if he still even existed. She felt broken and completely alone, and she threw her head back in that moment, allowing a mournful wail of despair to rise unchecked into the coming dawn, the terrible sound carrying with it all the loss and betrayal she’d carried with her since first fleeing that clearing the night before.

  “And here was I, thinking maybe there was a dyin’ wolf out ‘ere or somethin’…” a completely unexpected voice called out laughingly from behind her. “Whaddya reckon, Dimble…?” He continued unfazed as Nev outright cried out in fright and leaped to her feet, whirling on the spot and backing quickly away with her bag in one hand and the phone in the other. “This one might be a pure breed from what I can see…”

  There were two of them… two dirty, scruffy and intimidatingly tall men dressed in what appeared to be some kind of pre-industrial soldier’s uniforms: plain, tan-coloured pants and tunics of thick cotton, covered by heavy, oversized vests of boiled leather. Even in the dim light, she thought she could see the faint shimmer of chain mail beneath the vests, and both wore large, flat-brimmed helmets of polished iron that looked almost like misshapen prototypes of the ‘tin-hats’ she often saw being worn by soldiers commemorating the First World War.

  It was the swords in their hands however that attracted most of her attention. Short and broad-bladed, they looked similar to a Roman gladius and although they’d never have been of much use against something like the far-longer sabre the dead horseman had been wielding the preceding night, Nev had no illusions as to how lethal they might be as a melee weapon if used in combination with the round, iron shields the pair also carried against their opposite forearms.

  “Reckon y’ might be right there, Kane…” the other observed with a nasty grin. “Hard to tell in this light, but might be a pretty present indeed, once the packing’s all taken care of…”

  “Now… now, I don’t want any trouble…” she began falteringly, not at all liking the dangerous way they were looking at her as she stuffed her phone back into her jacket.

  “Oh, no trouble at all, missy…” the first one – Kane – assured, taking a step forward as Nev matched it in slow withdrawal. “Thought we was bein’ picked on by the squad sergeant, makin’ us get up so early just to bring Cragelen’s body back…”

  “Not like he was goin’ anywhere,” Dimble pointed out with a morbid chuckle.

  “…But now it looks like maybe we’re the lucky ones…” Kane continued, taking another step. “No need for any silliness, lass…” he added, noting with some amusement that her right hand had reached down across her body to close around the hilt of a sword at her belt, partially hidden beneath her cloak.

  “He said it weren’t no trouble…” Dimble pointed out, a cold edge to his voice.

  Watch both of them… watch their movements… watch their eyes…” she thought quickly, struggling to recall her training in a sudden moment of stress. Their eyes will give them away… warn you when they’re going to move…

  “How ‘bout you put that bag and the sword down and we have a nice little chat… just the four of us, like…?” Kane suggested genially, his eyes leaving hers only once as they flicked momentarily to a point just beyond her shoulder, and it was then that her mind registered what he’d just said and did the required math.

  She was spinning again, dropping her duffel bag and turning away from the third soldier even as she heard his footsteps behind her. The bokken was instantly pulled free from its scabbard and rising in a tight arc, drawing speed and power from her turning body as she went with it and completely wrong-footing her would-be attacker as he suddenly and unexpectedly found empty air where she’d been standing just a split second before.

  Instinct and muscle memory guided her movements, accelerating her reflexes with the help of many years’ practice, and the wooden ‘blade’ of the bokken cracked against the side of the man’s neck just above his chain-mail collar. That same training however had also instinctively taught her to pull her strike at the last moment, something she’d always done for fear of seriously injuring Honda during their regular sparring (although the number of times she’d actually connected with him could be counted on one hand).

  As a result, although the contact was extremely painful, it wasn’t the debilitating blow it should’ve been. Staggering awkwardly away from the strike, the newcomer released an exceptionally foul curse in response, clutching at his bruised neck and falling to his knees as his helmet toppled from his head and rolled away into the grass.

  “Ooh, you’re a quick one, aren’t ya…!” Kane growled, a little surprised but still ready to enjoy himself with a little harmful fun at her expense. “Get up, Perry, you whining git!” He barked, cutting the third man no slack at all. “It’s wood for Crystals’ sake! Hate to see ya in real battle, if that’s how easy a girl can take you down! Come on now, missy… let’s have a little fun…” he added, turning back toward Nev and advancing faster this time as Dimble split off to one side, opening the gap between them and forcing her to keep track of separate threats.

  “I don’t want to hurt you…” she tried to warn, but her chest was still heaving from her earlier sobbing, and her voice sounded too frail and croaky to sound at all convincing.

  “Oooh, don’t tease me, now…” he growled as Dimble sniggered over the comment and moved wider still, intending to flank her from one side as Perry, now back on his feet, made a move toward her other flank.

  Be ready… she warned herself. Keep the saya hidden from view...

  They were lessons Honda had taught her time and again: keep the scabbard against your body and hide it as much as possible – never let an enemy see how long your blade was or how far you could reach with it. Never draw your sword until you were ready to strike… until there was no turning back and you were ready to end the fight.

  Kane lurched forward, slashing the sword from left to right without any real conviction but forcing her backward with a gasp all the same.

  Not yet… not yet… Now…!

  He lunged a second time, slashing vertically this time, but Nev had seen his muscles tense and predicted the move. She was ready as the sword arced down, stepping lightly to one side and deflecting the blade with a deft flick of her wrist. As he stumbled forward on the follow-through, wrong footed and over-extended, she whipped the bokken sharply downward to rap him hard on his exposed knuckles.

  He cried out in pain, the sword falling from his grip as if he’d been stung, and stood motionless and staring for a moment, too surprised to react. Her tactical mind immediately recognised a perfect moment to step in and ‘finish’ him with a quick thrust straight to the throat: even the blunt-tipped bokken could’ve caused enough damage to put him out of action for some time. Yet she again hesitated and backed away, instead sliding the bokken back into its scabbard at her belt in a text-book noto manoeuvre, using the webbing of her left hand as a guide around the scabbard and drawing the flat of the wooden b
lade across her hand until the point automatically found the sheath and she was able to slide it smoothly back inside.

  “You little bitch…!” Kane howled, not so much hurt as humiliated in front of his mates, which was probably far more dangerous. Snatching up his sword, he charged again, the rage in his eyes a clear indication of his desire to cleave Nev’s head from her shoulders. He slashed downward again, surprisingly fast for his size, but he was no expert swordsman, and he was also far too committed to his own strike as Nev again deftly sidestepped him to his left side, this time forcing herself not to hold back as she again drew the bokken at the last moment.

  “Hyah…!” Nev barked loudly, releasing a kiai shout to focus and increase her power as she drew the wooden blade and snapped it sharply downward against his outstretched forearm. Her placement was as precise as the amount of force she applied as she struck quickly then instantly leaped back and away into a classic samurai ‘ready’ stance, her weapon raised high above her head and pointing toward her enemy with its blade inverted. The blow caught the middle of his forearm, cleanly snapping Kane’s ulna with a sickening crunch that turned his cry of rage into a howl of agony, and he collapsed onto the damp ground, unable to do anything other than clutch at his broken arm and wail in frustration and pain.

  She instantly turned to engage Dimble as he too leaped forward, hoping for a chance to strike while she was dealing with his colleague, and Nev very quickly showed him the error of his ways. He was a little smarter than Kane at least, and he made no attempt to overreach or unbalance himself, but he was also markedly slower and Nev was easily able to dodge his first, short jab at her mid-section. As his sword sliced through empty air where her left side should’ve been, she stepped into his blow and clamped his outstretched arm beneath her left armpit, trapping it and him against her.