When she and the boy had run as far as they could—which wasn’t terribly far, with the boy in the shape he was—Jenivar called a halt in the relative shade of a rocky outcropping and looked to the boy’s wounds. He had had the forethought to grab one of the oversized waterskins from the pack-lizard as they fled. All Jenivar had thought to grab was her non-functional blaster.
“Smart boy,” she murmured.
“Yes, boss.”
Jenivar blinked. She had never been anyone’s boss. “I know I was offering to buy you, but I don’t want a slave. I want to help. I’m a Knight. It’s part of the Code. You’re free now.”
The boy stared at her with wide, dark eyes.
“I’m Jenivar, of the Spine. What’s your name?”
The boy shook his head and gabbled at her in a language she didn’t recognize.
“Jenivar.” She pointed to herself, then to him. “You?”
His eyes lit up with understanding. “Arturo!” he said, slapping his chest proudly.
Arturo was in completely inappropriate clothes, his arms and face almost entirely exposed. Jenivar set to work with a packet of Numb, dribbling the juice onto cuts and bruises, massaging it into the skin. She knew from experience that he would feel a faint tingle, then a spreading warmth and, as the name implied, numbness. Taken orally, it would knock a grown man out for hours. Jenivar saved half the packet and stowed it in her much-depleted herb wallet. She got out her spare jacket and draped it across Arturo’s bony shoulders. It hung on him like a blanket on a fencepost. He looked down at himself clad in what was functionally a very baggy dress, then questioningly up at Jenivar.
“For the sun,” Jenivar said, pointing overhead.
Arturo nodded. “Sohn,” he said, mimicking her accent.
With some effort and a lot of gesturing and pantomiming, Jenivar managed to convey that she had come from the south, her home a place called the Spine. “Arturo?” she asked. “Arturo home?”
Arturo pointed vaguely toward the north, the sleeve of the jacket slipping over the ends of his fingers.
“That’s where I’m going,” said Jenivar. “Are there dragons there? Have you ever seen one?”
Arturo hesitated, his eyes darting anxiously. “Yes, boss?”
Jenivar sighed. The language barrier was proving troublesome. “Well, come on. We need supplies; with two of us drinking that water we’ll be lucky to make it to the trading post that... man mentioned.”
* * *
Arturo was a quick study and an insatiable learner. Only the relative barrenness of the landscape kept him from becoming a true nuisance, asking the names of every new feature they passed and trading Jenivar words in his own language. He laughed when she fumbled the unfamiliar sounds. Jenivar found herself feeling strangely happy. She had never had any siblings, and children at the Spine were rare enough that there was no one close to her own age. Most children took up their parents’ roles quite young and spent much of their time working. It was nice to have someone to talk to, even such an excitable and largely incomprehensible someone.
During the days of travel, Jenivar and Arturo made sufficient progress in mutual understanding that when they left the Yellowcake trading post—lighter by the weight of Jenivar’s sunshade and the now-useless fuel canisters but stocked with renewed provisions—Arturo was able to tell something of the town he came from.
“Home, gone! Bad. Very bad.” He flapped the arms of his too-long jacket like wings and growled deep in his throat. “Take all. Gone! I only one. Men come and take me. Say ‘slave.’ Say ‘yes boss.’”
“Wings... a dragon? Was it a dragon that destroyed your home?”
Arturo shrugged. “Bad. Big bad. Malochiones.”
“Can you find your way back there?”
After some thought, Arturo nodded. “Many days.” He held up all his fingers.
“At least ten days, huh?” Jenivar frowned, hefting their bags of food and water.
“The men stop. Water. Food. I see.”
“Waystations? Caches of supplies?”
Arturo shrugged.
“Well,” said Jenivar. “I hope you’re right, because no Knight can refuse a request for aid against a dragon.” She hefted her pack and adopted her best forthright expression. “Come on, Art. We’re taking you home.”
“Yes, boss.”
* * *
It was twelve days, actually. The caches Arturo had indicated held stale water in wax-sealed casks, and food, primarily dried or heavily salted. Many of them were nearly empty, but there were clear signs of travel and something approximating a path. It seemed Arturo’s home had not been completely isolated before the attack. Jenivar wondered if a rescue had already been mounted; if she was too late to slay the dragon herself. She wasn’t even certain if she was allowed to hope that she wasn’t, that the rescuers had failed and the dragon still menaced the area. It was Knightly to be bold and face danger alone, but it wasn’t terribly Knightly to wish harm on people so she could save them from it. Arturo wasn’t much help; even after Jenivar spent hours trying to explain her concerns, he only shrugged and smiled.
They passed a valley that had a familiar glassy sheen. How many Big Glasses could there be? Across the way, resting on the rim of the opposite side, Jenivar saw the open maw of a stone dragon skull. Behind it, the body humped, massive and threatening, and beyond that was a curiously squared pillar of gray stone, apparently hollow and riddled with jagged cracks.
Jenivar never knew what the town was called. She wasn’t sure which of the words Arturo babbled was the name. It was a desolate place, whatever it had been called. The dragon had fallen splayed on the ground rather than curled, as the Spine was, and the gaping stone mouth led down a long, low tunnel to a massive city in the belly and below. Jenivar saw a waterworks that put the Spine’s rope-and-pulley system to shame, several gardens, including an edible fungi farm and a smelting facility. There were also more esoteric workshops, full of steam pipes and rusting gears, whose purpose Jenivar could only guess at. Filled to capacity, the enclave would have held triple the Spine’s thousand occupants easily.
“But there’s no destruction,” she said to Arturo, who was pale and withdrawn. “I mean, things are knocked over and everything is dried up or run down, but how did the dragon get everyone without breaking open the ceiling?”“
“Many,” said Arturo. “Many flying. Big, but not so big.” He shuffled his feet, sending echoes across the vast central area that still contained the detritus of what looked to have been a semi-permanent market.
“Big but not big, huh?” Jenivar poked at a fallen board with her toe, sending withered fruit tumbling away. Something skittered into the shadows.
Arturo huddled close behind her. “Yes.”
What could that mean? A nest of hatchlings, perhaps? “Well, we just got here. Let’s find a place to sleep and we’ll start searching for spoor in the morning, okay?”
Arturo didn’t answer. His eyes were black holes in the darkness.
* * *
Jenivar woke from a crushing dream in which Terk, grown to enormous size and sporting dragon wings, flexed hands made of crumpled cycle parts and gathered her up to swallow her whole. His mouth opened to reveal a rushing torrent of water that wasn’t water at all but the acrid rotgut Tymon favored, and at the bottom of Terk’s gullet was Tymon himself, bloated and sweating, swallowing the flood as it poured down.
Jenivar fell, and came to herself amid a tangle of dusty blankets. Arturo’s own sleeping roll lay crumpled on the floor. The room they had scrounged together was empty. A glowstone, nearing the end of its life, emitted a feeble radiance from the small ledge provided for that purpose. The heavy metal weapons rack they had pushed to blockade the door had been tugged laboriously aside, just enough for a slender form to creep out.
Jenivar frowned but could not muster much anger. She had lost her home voluntarily, but Arturo’s had been taken from him in brutal fashion, and the only other person who cared that he was alive
couldn’t even speak the same language. Jenivar knew about needing to be alone and the healing that solitude could bring.
But she was a Knight, or she would be soon. And Arturo was her ward, her responsibility. She couldn’t leave him out there alone; this place was not safe, not yet.
Outside, the dragon’s central cavity opened up, darkness on every side. Jenivar was aware as she had never been in the Spine of how organic the dragon-stones were. The Spine was old, and layered with tunnels, filled with platforms and rickety ladders, ropes and cubicles: the detritus of humanity. Here, in this place, Jenivar was only a speck of human life in the belly of an ancient beast, living in the holes left where its life had fled, scrounging the stones of its body for shelter. When the dragons had ruled the world, killing a dragon, even successfully wounding one, was sufficient to make a man a Knight, a hero whose name would live on in legend forever. The dragons had been so vast and so grand and so terrible. What, in comparison, was one human? How could a Knight have ever prevailed, alone against a dragon? It was not a comfortable feeling. Jenivar stared into impenetrable night with her hand on a stone that had once been the bones of a dragon and wondered if she really could slay a dragon if she met one. She wondered if she would even want to.
“The dragons are dead,” Jenivar said. Her voice bounced and echoed from the holes left by ribs and scales. “The dragons are dead, and there are no more Knights.” She felt something leave her with the words, and she could not tell if it was a loss or a relief.
Then she heard Arturo screaming.
She snatched up her sword and gun and fled half-clad into the darkness.
* * *
They’d taken him into a tunnel. Drackles, bigger than any she’d ever seen; some the size of rats or house-iguanas. They’d poured out of it like foul water and retreated just as quickly when she slashed at them with her blade. She waded into the fray, sword flashing, shouting a battle cry like the Knights of old. She’d killed two or three with every swing, but there were more, more, always more. Through the press, she caught glimpses of Arturo in the dimness ahead. At first, he’d clawed and flailed, but then he cried out and went limp. The bites were poisonous, after all, each one a tiny dose, but collectively...
That was the problem. Collective. The drackles moved as one swarm, and it gave them power beyond what any of them could have managed alone.
Now Jenivar crawled through the tunnel that was barely big enough for her scrawny frame, pushing her sword and gun forward. The empty cavern behind her hadn’t been destroyed by some unknown terror; some nest of hatchling dragons breaking in. It had been eaten from the inside. By vermin. Nuisances. Pests.
Jenivar kept crawling through the dark, unable to see, unable to smell anything other than the fetor of the drackles and their slime on her sword; barely able to hear the ever-receding scraping and clattering of uncountable feet on rock, the slither of clothing and warm skin dragged by numberless pincers.
If they came back for her, they would swarm her, and she would be helpless. Her sword was almost useless in these narrow confines. They would bite and sting and smother her nose and lips with their shuddering carapaces, and she would sleep and die knowing that she had failed. There were no dragons to slay. Not anymore. There were only drackles and slavers and empty caverns. She would never become a Knight.
It seemed to be an endless nightmare crawl, but Jenivar had gone only fifteen or twenty meters when her sword tip dropped unexpectedly. She barely kept her grip on the hilt, scraping metal against stone. Echoes answered back from a much larger space ahead of her. She eased forward. The floor was only a few feet below the tunnel exit and stretched on farther than she could reach with her blade. Jenivar struggled out and stood in the dark. The surface below her feet had an unpleasant springy quality to it. Taking a risk, she thumbed the power on her blaster and held up the faint green glow to light her surroundings.
The walls were square, sharp corners forming a plain cubic shape. Jenivar, acclimated to the curves and bubbles of the Spine, found the shape of the room disturbing. Every surface, walls, floor, and ceiling, was covered with thin black fibers like roots. She reached to touch them and found them warm, almost hot to the touch. Ahead, a set of stairs rose out of the gloom. There was no sign of any drackles.
Jenivar stepped forward and heard a crunch. Something long and round moved under her feet. A bone, drained of every drop of nourishment and rendered brittle, either through age or some other mechanism. Tendrils grew into the sides of the thing, and she resolutely looked upward and gripped her sword more tightly.
Other than the thin coating of slime, the stairs were easy to climb. This had been a human place, once; the stone beneath was a different quality to anything Jenivar had seen and clearly not something the drackles had made. They were just occupying the space, filling in areas that someone else had built and abandoned. She refused to think about them any further.
Jenivar peeped over the lip of the staircase, her blaster growing warmer in her hands. She ducked back down immediately, quieting her retching as best as she could manage. Slowly, carefully, she moved again.
The floor above was the drackles’ larder. Tendrils and slime coated everything, and the floor was pocked with shapeless lumps and uneven depressions. Every pile of extruded filth concealed one or more bodies, none of them moving. Drackles skittered haphazardly across the floor, pausing at this bundle or another to flense a bit of flesh with their jaws. The whole room reeked of rot and drackle-spew. Jenivar stepped carefully out. The drackles here didn’t seem to have noticed her yet. The bulk of the visible ones were busy at the far end, swarming over something Jenivar couldn’t see. She thought she knew what it was. She walked, barely daring to breathe. The goal was everything.
Motion beside her foot broke her concentration. A dusky-skinned face with black, curly hair—just like Arturo’s—stared sightlessly from one ruined eye socket. The rest of the face was covered in matted black crust, the color and texture of a drackle’s body. Something moved in the inside of the head, a flicker in the tunnel of the macerated flesh. A miniature horde of pale, many-legged things burst out, swarming down the cheek and dropping to disappear in the layered crust of the floor.
It wasn’t just a larder. It was also a nursery.
Jenivar didn’t make the decision to start running forward. Her feet moved on their own. She would have told them to stop, but her mouth was busy screaming. Not pain, not fear, but anger. Drackles scattered from her path, a dozen crushed under her feet as she charged the mass at the far end of the room.
She launched herself at them and sprawled on the heap; punched out with the hilt of the sword, kicked and bit at the endless wriggling forms. The largest one, its central body the size of her head, hissed and lunged at her with open jaws foaming with milky froth. Jenivar rammed her pistol down its throat and heard its insides sizzle from the overheating battery.
Suddenly, the swarm was gone, drackles scattering and receding into their hive. Jenivar lay across Arturo, whose skin was pale and unhealthy in the flickering light of the blaster’s readout screen. He was covered with a thin glaze of the omnipresent tendrils.
She tore them away with cries of disgust. “Art! Arturo!” Jenivar shook him, but his head only flopped bonelessly with the motion. “We have to get out of here. We have to run!”
Arturo didn’t move.
Around her, outside of the tiny ring of radiance, came the sounds of squelching and crackling. Drackles coming out of hiding. She saw the hive-substance heave and fracture by her feet, and a pincer as long as her forearm emerged. They were coming from every direction, and she had only a sword and a broken gun to face them.
She had two options. The Code told her that a Knight never gave in to despair.
That left one option.
She thought back to the lessons Groton had taught her about the care of a Knight’s weapons and his admonishments regarding the malfunctioning blaster. She then carefully broke every single rule he had laid out.
She shoved every switch to full on the already-hot blaster, watched for the gauges to begin flashing red, and pulled the trigger.
The weapon clicked and squealed, unable to discharge the energy it had built up in its core. Jenivar tossed it to the middle of the room; the bodies squirmed beneath its crimson-lit arc. She tore Arturo from his half-made cocoon, threw him across her shoulders, and fled for the stairs.
Drackles boiled up after them, quickly filling the stairwell, but Jenivar had no intention of leaving that way. Instead, she sprinted up. There was a door at the top, which she shouldered through and slammed behind her.
The next level had less hive-stuff. The level after that had less still. Drackles, like the humans they had stolen, preferred the damp and cool of underground to the blistering sun. The frantic beeping sounded below, increasing steadily in volume and pitch.
Jenivar’s legs burned and her arms ached, but she forced herself to run and recited the Knight’s Code in her head. Another floor. Another. The walls had holes in them here, and she could see the sky, burning the red-orange of impending dawn. Jenivar kept climbing, so exhausted she was able to move only at a walk now but knowing she had to get more distance before the blaster’s power pack reached critical mass.
They burst onto the roof, she and Arturo, just as the sun crested the horizon. From below, the shrill alarm went silent, replaced with a subsonic rumble and the taste of copper in the back of Jenivar’s throat. The explosion made a noise so loud it was like no noise at all, flaring orange light shining through the cracks and crevices at the base of the building like a second sun. Contained by the walls around it, it blossomed out of the cavernous belly and shot from the stone dragon’s mouth. It looked like the dragon was breathing fire.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #142, Special Double-Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2 Page 6