Koriana pounced, dagger pressing to the throat of her flesh and blood. She spun a yielding Eliandra, clutching her while presenting her to Dracon and me. “Like this, master?”
“Just so.”
I saw it then. The change happened in Eliandra’s eyes. They dimmed, like a light snuffed out. An hour ago, I’d have wished it on her, but no—it wasn’t what I wanted. It squeezed my heart until I ached. It was as though someone had cracked her open, drained seventy-five years of hopes and dreams, and filled that hollowed space with nightmares.
It resonated. That’s what Dak’s death had done to me. And it pissed me off, because the only one out of us all who deserved to feel this way was Dracon.
Instead, he was crowing. “I wouldn’t mind if you took your daughter upstairs.” His smile grew lascivious. “Dress her in something I’d like.”
Acid burned up my throat and I vomited. It splashed wet on the floor. I’d never thrown up from sheer disgust before. I wanted the CDC in their germ-proof suits to flamethrower the whole room, Dracon especially, and then cask his ashes in an impenetrable lead capsule. Hand it to NASA to launch into the sun, maybe.
“Kindly do not soil my floors again.” A twitch of irritation worked Dracon’s eyelid.
Hawking the last of the stomach acid into my mouth, I looked him straight on and spat.
“It’s going to be all right,” Koriana soothed, wrenching the Queen’s arm behind her back and pressing the dagger to her ribs. She marched her daughter toward the exit. “The Sky Keep is a wonderful place, once you’re used to the smell of orc.”
I dry-retched in response. The stone slab rattled down and both elves were gone. “Holy shit,” I managed, my lips numb. “You’re not misunderstood. Not crazy. There’s no diagnosis here.” I was staring at something I’d once argued, passionately, didn’t exist. “You’re evil. You’re just stone-cold fucked in the soul.” I swallowed. “You’re the reason there’s a Hell.”
“Enough with the hysterics.” Dracon stood. Then, forcing a gentler tone: “It probably looks awful. But come. I’ll show you the truth.”
He used the control ring to march me through another passageway, which eventually opened into a chamber with volume enough to compose a quarter of the whole Sky Keep—the mountain, it turned out, was hollow.
The room was set up like a stadium. We stood on a terrace, with fifty more both above and below us, each wrapping the whole way around the circular room. Below, where the field would have been, hot-orange lava bubbled. Waves of heat distorted the air as they rose from the liquid rock, funneled into the vents in the ceiling.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“The Sky Keep was carved from the volcanic mountain at the heart of my empire. This is its center. I call it the Burning Vault.”
It looked like a power source. He didn’t call it one, but he was smart enough not to. Except I was smart enough to know anyway. “What about the heat?”
“An invisible field channels it upward like a stovepipe. It moves out those vents.” He motioned to the distant ceiling.
I spun around and realized what the terraces were for. Each was a walkway, and set back into the wall made by the next level were endless alcoves full of glass display cases, each brightened with its own overhead crystal light. A sea of them shimmered in the chamber all around me. I walked the terrace clockwise, magma to my right and alcoves to my left. In twenty-five steps I passed an encased suit of armor, a human/frog hybrid, an especially deep alcove with an encased triceratops, and a first edition of Action Comics #1. I had no idea how Dracon got it into Rune, but he had, and he beamed alternately at me and his collection.
And the terrace went on. And on. All the way around the chamber, all the way down to the magma, and all the way up to the ceiling. His collection. Thousands of years of memorabilia for a god with limitless power.
I paused at a woman standing in a glass casement, recognizing her from Dracon’s artwork in Old 88 that I’d moved around. She wore the same collar and a ragged, leopard-skin top. She was older under the glass, perhaps in her early fifties, creases around her closed eyes while she appeared to sleep. Still thin and beautiful, but the museum-like display rendered her artificial.
I traced the glass near her face. “Is she alive?”
“Preserved.”
“But… alive?”
He shrugged. “Maybe if I cracked the glass. But I wanted to save her. She was my first, you know.”
I scowled. “Your first slave.”
“First collectible.” He motioned around the Burning Vault. “They’re all collectibles.” He chuckled. “You’ll catch on soon. I hoped this would jog it for you. It took me centuries to feel it, too. How everything here is… fake.”
“It’s not fake. Nothing here is fake.” My throat tightened. I’d befriended, fallen in love with, and lost people in this world. It was as real as anything I knew.
“It felt real for me too, at first. But over time you notice things. People only come in maybe thirty varieties, all variations on a theme with different clothes or colors or presentations. But thirty flavors. There’s a staleness in the air, a garishness in the yellow sun. A simplicity in their lives and conversation. At first, I blamed myself. But Cassandra’s changes improved nothing.” He smirked. “Admittedly, your changes were… bothersome. I did see perhaps four new varieties of person. Not enough, though. Your Cataclysm failed to change the reality that undergirds all of Rune: it is artifice. No one here is more than a simulation.”
Realization hit me like a truck. “It’s not fake, you moron! You just feel that way. It’s the ennui from all your killing, and selfish hedonism, and obsession.”
He guffawed. “Oh, yes. It’s me. Live a few hundred years and you’ll sing a different tune.”
I didn’t have to. Ronin had lived far longer than him, and she was as normal as a magical cyborg samurai could be. “You glutted yourself on every whim until it numbed your soul. You filled your trophy room with slaves who you treated like playthings! It’s not the world that’s fake. It’s you.”
He waved me off. “You’ll see. But enough of these dour subjects. Let’s focus on tonight. How about you draw me a lovely monster? I’ll crack the glass on one of my originals. We’ll pit them against one another. The victor selects the next activity.”
I was dumbstruck. He wants to be my friend. He wants to play games. It was like getting to the end of Alien only for the xenomorph to whip out Apples to Apples and ask to braid Sigourney Weaver’s hair. “All right,” I said evenly. “But I can’t make a very good monster if you keep me in this collar.”
“Ha! Treat me less like a fool and more like a god. The collar stays put until the truth catches on. You seem sharp. I suspect it will take only a couple of decades.” Dracon smiled, showing too many of his teeth. “Now. How would you like to see the pirate room? I spent eighty years on the high seas. The head of the island turtle barely fits in its case.”
I was horrified at the prospect of listening to him bloviate on his collectibles for two decades. Granted, we’d moved past hot pokers and flaying, but the specter of a preening sociopath’s twenty-year vacation slide show had me wondering what I could do to get put under glass myself. “This isn’t what I expected.”
“Oh, you mean the torture I promised.” Dracon shook his head, as if he were fond of the memory. “I was livid about the changes you made, but with your help, we can undo the worst of them. And I’d rather not torture you. We’re too much alike.”
So that was it. He wanted to use my power to return Rune to the status quo. Over my dead body. I set my jaw, not letting myself back off the vow just because I knew it was likely to happen just that way.
“Also, at some point, you contacted Earth. That’s not permitted. When you sync our dimensions, I age normally.”
“You mean you aren’t immortal?”
“Neither of us is. We age one year for every hundred we live, provided Rune and Earth aren’t synchronized.” He clapped h
is hands again and turned toward the cases. “No more questions. First the pirate room, then a monster fight.”
He wants me to dance like his pet monkey. “Fine. I’ll fight monsters with you. But if I win, I don’t want to pick our next activity. I want Eliandra.”
He snorted. “Then we’re at an impasse. I want her too. She’s part of a matching set.”
“She killed my friend. I’m firm on this.”
Dracon glanced over his shoulder at me. “Take my word on this: punishing them will bring only transient pleasure. There isn’t enough inside them for moral agency. But if it makes you feel better to beat on a highly realistic mannequin, very well. She’s yours. Provided your monster wins, of course.”
I kept my face neutral, forcing down the adrenal jolt to my pulse caused by dangerous thinking. “All right. Let’s play.”
***
Crowning the Sky Keep’s highest peak was Dracon’s coliseum, its pillars cracked and discolored from centuries of disrepair. Volcanic heat seeped from vents ringing the sandy arena floor. It was eerily empty, not a soul in the seats. I wondered if Dracon’s keep had always been so lonely.
I drew my monster from inside the imperial box, Dracon hovering at the periphery to monitor every line I put to paper. I despised having him there. I was used to Dak standing in that spot. It was yet another thing Dracon had profaned in my short time under his thumb.
Sentry dragons circled the keep. I realized the Akarri were likely still docked, waiting on Eliandra. How long until they realized she wouldn’t come back? Would they just leave? Or would they try to fight their way in? God, I hope not.
I illustrated, casting an occasional glance at those volcanic vents. We were right above the Burning Vault.
“An insect.” Dracon appraised my monster. “Interesting approach.”
The ten-legged creature had a segmented body and brutal mandibles.
“More armor plates,” Dracon said.
I bristled, hand trembling against the power of the collar. I added the plates, forced to erase whole swaths of texture I’d penciled in, rubbing the page raw in places.
“Maybe fire breath,” he added.
I ignored the command, since it wasn’t a direct order. He was using me, same as he did everything else in his palace. Ronin said his powers had weakened—perhaps that was why he wanted me. Instead of fire, I switched to colored pencils and added a blue-hued aura to the mandibles.
“An electric bite? Now that’s more like it!” Dracon cheered. “Perhaps you’ll win this round after all.”
Not electric, no. I added minuscule copies of the insect, the baby versions skittering underfoot and clinging to its body. I kept it just sparse enough to look like flavor, but in reality, it was central to my monster’s concept. I’d always used comic images to get my point across, but now I constructed an elaborate ecological story for the insect in my head. Like a glacier, only a portion of my creation broke the surface.
I set pencils down when I’d finished. “What now?”
“Let me show you mine.” He whistled. A metal platform in the arena floor opened and a lift clinked upward bearing seven orcs that circled an enormous glass case, chipping away at it with picks.
Under the glass was a tree creature whose crown of branches shadowed an old man’s solemn face seemingly carved into the trunk. The orcs drove their picks into the glass that held it, pocking the glass with holes and hairline fractures that spread wider with each ringing strike. When the cracks had covered almost half the case, the tree opened its yellow-glowing eyes.
“Best hurry your creature to the arena before mine gets a head start,” Dracon sang.
I blew on my hand and flattened it to paper, distance pulling directly into the arena. My body lurched at the effort of summoning something so large.
Silver lines whirled through the air just forward of the tree creature, who shattered the glass, casting it off with a roar of challenge. My creature didn’t so much manifest as it pounced from the silver lines, ramming face-first into the living oak.
“Oh, you summon them like she did,” Dracon muttered.
I realized distance pulling had been Cassandra’s trick. Somehow, he’d never learned it.
My insect had its mandibles locked around the tree monster’s trunk. Silently, though, I cheered Dracon’s creature on. C’mon. You have to hurt it for this to work. The mandibles pulsed their blue glow, and the tree’s leaves wilted.
“Not an electric attack,” Dracon murmured. “What does that bite do?”
“Drain him of magic.”
“Hm.” He shifted uncomfortably.
Finally, the tree clubbed its fist into my centipede’s carapace with a crack like a giant snow-crab leg breaking open.
“See? Should have armored it better. That monster’s one of my oldest and strongest.”
So he made it when he was new to Rune. I saw it then. The tree’s old-man face stared not at the insect killing it, but at us. It stared at Dracon, confused and sad. It didn’t know why Dracon was making it fight.
“What did you call the tree?” I asked quietly.
Dracon squinted, as if recalling. “Obadai, I think.”
He gave it a name. Obadai cried out, clobbering the centipede again and again. Terror filled his carved-wood face. My fingers gripped the table and I leaned in, praying—it was all I could do. I needed Obadai to kick my monster’s ass.
Finally, the tree got a hold of one mandible and ripped it off. Gripping it like a dagger, Obadai drove it between the centipede’s segments at the root of its head. Levering it, he decapitated the beast in an explosion of orange blood.
“Ha! Opposable thumbs,” Dracon said. “So handy. Looks like Eliandra will go to me. But I promise to keep her in relatively good condition for next week’s bout.”
“It’s not over.”
The centipede’s body skittered around for a moment, collapsed, and went still. Then it split along the abdomen and an undulating curtain spilled from its belly. We were too far away to discern what I already knew: that the rippling, moving drapery was a swarm of its young.
“What—what is that?” Dracon sounded nervous.
I grinned, triumphant. “It was a momma.”
He chuckled. “Obadai is in trouble.”
“Actually, the young will ignore him.” I turned to Dracon, beaming. “Note the serpentine body and digging tools on its face. It’s a burrowing monster. The babies will instinctually dig where they expect their mother to have buried their first meal.” Already they wriggled through the sand, tunneling through dirt and stone, some skittering through the volcanic vents—all headed at once for the Burning Vault.
Dracon wheeled on me. “My things are in there, you idiot!”
“Gosh. I sure hope their anti-magic bites don’t disrupt your Sky Keep’s power source.”
He lifted a ringed finger. “Then I’ll make you draw a proper countermeasure!”
I hadn’t thought this far ahead, but I did have one choice left. Break my thumbs. If I couldn’t hold a pencil, his fortress would crash. I’d probably die either way, but hell, maybe he would too. I was just getting up the gumption to drop my full weight back on both outstretched thumbs when the sky above us cracked open.
Something enormous burst into existence, like a Star Destroyer popping out of hyperspace over our heads. It was the size of the Washington Monument and flying straight for us, built in the same icy style as the Citadel of Light. It gleamed in the sun with a pink sheen on its flanks. The entire world filled with a booming voice projected from the craft.
“HEY ISAAC, GUESS WHO FOUND THE CAPITAL SHIPS?”
“Dak!”
Chapter Eleven: Do and/or Die
“HOLD ON, ISAAC, I THINK THIS SHOOTS ICE GOLEMS. GOING TO EXPRESS DELIVER YOU SOME MINIONS.”
The sharpened spire at the tip of Dak’s ice destroyer fired a beam of crystal light that frost-burned my retinas. It struck the Sky Keep’s coliseum wall and from a hundred feet away, the air im
mediately cooled fifteen degrees. Instead of summoning ice golems, though, it glazed the wall in sheets, the sharp drop in temperature causing fissures to burst open in the stone.
“OH SHIT, NO. MAYBE IT’S THIS BUTTON.”
A frosty mist formed beneath the front end of Dak’s cap ship, manifesting a rod of ice the size of a telephone pole. It fired as though from a railgun, slamming into the coliseum’s frozen wall. The whole imperial box shook and I stumbled out, hightailing down the stairs to the arena as the building collapsed behind me.
Dracon whizzed past me for the roof hatch, cursing in that rich baritone: “Shit! Oh shit, fuck!” The warlord’s cloak flapped behind him like a flag of surrender.
Dak was grumbling: “…should be more clearly labeled. No, that did not turn the mic off, it was the volume control.”
“Give me the helm.” Ronin’s voice, annoyed.
He brought her? And they’re both alive!
Music belted over the speaker: “Let it go! Let it go! I am one with the wind and sky!”
“Shut up, iSword! You’re supposed to be on shuffle. Isaac! Your stupid iSword has a personality, and it’s getting on my nerves.” Muffled: “It’s not that button, I already tried that one. Fine! Hand me the ghost stone. I’m deploying.”
Through the mirrored flanks of the ice destroyer, I saw dark shapes flake off the Sky Keep’s crags. They spread their wings, caught updrafts, and a vast, leathery cloud of dragons swirled through the air and broke into three separate streams that each attacked the vessel en masse and from a different angle.
Smaller beams of blue light fired from the destroyer’s every facet, raking through the cloud of dragons. Eruptions of fire from the flying reptiles raked across ice, filling the air with clouds of vapor. One dragon tried to land, executing an indelicate sprawl and skidding across the slippery surface like it had hit a grease patch. It shot over the side, fell through a blue beam that froze it solid, and shattered against another dragon.
Only Broken Things Are Free (A Pygmalion Fail Book 3) Page 13