by Matt Forbeck
Kai and I were reloading. I selected one of the silver shells Kells had given me earlier, something I hoped could put an emphatic end to Fiera once — well, twice now — and for all. Danto had set about casting another spell of some sort, something I hoped would be more useful than helping us beat the heat.
Cindra, on the other hand, had tapped her pistol to reload it again and had drawn a fresh bead on Fiera. With the crispy elf hanging there in Belle’s eldritch netting, nothing could stop Cindra from tearing her to pieces with her pistol — nothing but Belle jumping between the two of them.
“Stop it!” Belle said. “She’s done!”
“Not yet she’s not,” Cindra said. “Get out of the way, Belle, or I’ll be damned if I don’t kill you both.”
“We need her,” I said as I slapped my shotgun back together and cocked the hammer. “Fiera, I mean. If we don’t give the Dragon her body, he’ll eat Belle instead.”
Something above us tore away with a sound I just can’t do justice. The Dragon had torn into the apartment building above us and ripped it away from the inside wall of the Great Circle the way you might open a door — if it had been mortared to the wall behind it and you had arms made of magical crowbars. The entire thing crumbled into the street in front of it, some of it toppling over onto nearby buildings and crushing them beneath its weight.
Everyone inside the building — including that frightened goblin mother and all her terrified kids — died. Can you imagine hiding away in one of the top floors, trying to stay out of troubles that have nothing to do with you, when the world below you is torn away and you and your entire family are hurled to your bloody doom?
Mortar breaking. Wood splintering. Stones falling. People screaming. The world spinning. Bones, skulls shattering. A deafening roar that smashes through every register until you want your ears to pop to put an end to it all.
And nothing you can do about it but die — and maybe wonder who’s going to use your remains. Will you become a zombie for the Ruler of the Dead? Or food for the Dragon’s belly instead?
Two things saved us.
The first was Danto’s second spell. This turned out to be an umbrella of glowing blue force, much like the tendrils that Belle had used to capture Fiera. It deflected the bulk of the debris that toppled down toward us and would have crushed us.
The second was the fact that the Dragon wasn’t trying to bring the building down on top of us. He meant to tear it away from us instead. If he’d simply knocked it down, it would have collapsed on our heads. Danto’s spell might have protected us for a bit, but it wouldn’t have stopped the countless tons of building from burying us. Eventually the spell’s power would have faded, and we’d have been flattened.
Instead, the bulk of the building fell away from us. Of the bits that inevitably tumbled toward our heads, Danto’s shield spell deflected those, leaving us trapped under them for what I thought would be the very short remainders of our lives. The bluish light illuminated the imploding cavern, showing Danto standing there in the center, his wand held over his head.
Sweat broke on his brow as he struggled to maintain his mojo and keep the spell intact. The moment he failed, I knew, we would all die. I pulled out my wand and went to bolster his strength.
“Thanks,” Danto said through a determined grimace as I cast the same spell as him, reinforcing his efforts enough that he could spare the energy to speak.
As he shouldered off some of the effort onto me, I felt it hard. “We could use a hand here, Belle!” I said.
“But Fiera —”
“Let Cindra keep her covered! She’s not going anywhere!”
Belle glanced at her sister’s broken and shattered form, still stuck there in the tendrils snaking out from her wand. Fiera snarled at her. “Go, you idiot! Do you think I wish to be crushed into oblivion too?”
Belle growled at the sister she both loved and hated. She hung there for a moment on the horns of that dilemma and then let her spell fail and Fiera’s legless form crash to the rubble-strewn floor.
As Belle turned to help us, the weight that had been pressing down so hard on the spell that Danto and I were working disappeared, and sunlight speared into the cavern, blinding us, even though we still stood in the shadow of the Great Circle. Then a great shape loomed over us, blotting out the blue.
“Keep up the shield!” Danto shouted. “Don’t let it fail!”
The Dragon snorted down at us, gouts of fire leaping from its nostrils, his heaving breath like a furnace blast. A bald elf in blazing robes — the Voice of the Dragon — rode in a golden basket suspended from a chain of the same metal that hung like a living medallion from the creature’s neck.
Until last week, the closest I’d ever gotten to the Dragon was watching him from the top of Danto’s tower as he marched through town in one of his annual parades. I’d since visited him in his home in the Dragon’s Spire, but he’d never once opened his eyes that entire time, much less his mouth. If the Voice of the Dragon hadn’t spoken to me on his behalf — communicating with the Emperor by some magical means — I might have thought the Dragon had slept through the entire encounter.
Now, to see him here in all his fury, his rarely used power fully on display and — worst of all — focused on me and my friends, I could barely think. Every instinct in my head screamed at me to run, run, run!
“Give me my son!” the Voice of the Dragon said, bellowing in a full-throated roar. “Release him unharmed, or I will devour you alive!”
The only thing that stopped me from dropping my wand and turning tail was the cold fact that I had no place to flee. The destruction of the building above us — as well as the many sub-levels we’d passed by on our way to the cavern — had sealed off all the exits or obliterated the places they’d once led to. I had no choice but to keep pumping my mojo into that shield spell with Danto. The only alternative was seeing whether the Dragon would blast me with fire before he devoured me or not.
The Dragon answered that by hauling back hard and inhaling.
“Brace yourselves!” Danto said.
Danto, Belle, and I put everything we had into reinforcing the shield. Our three wands raised high, the umbrella over us glowed a blinding blue brighter than the sliver of sky the Dragon left exposed as he readied his strike.
Cindra released the dragonet then and aimed both of her pistols up at the Dragon. She started firing as the young creature flapped away. The slugs zipped straight through the shield as if it wasn’t there, then bounced and ricocheted off of the dragon’s armored chest. He raised his arms to swat the bullets away as if they were bees trying to sting a bear.
Then he let loose at us. It didn’t matter that the Dragonet was loose and on its way back to him. He wanted us dead. Not too many people had ever gotten away with frustrating the Dragon’s desires, and none that had inspired such fury in him.
The gout of fire that jetted out of the Dragon’s gullet smashed into the shield like a meteor falling from the sky. I thought the impact might break my arms, but I knew that if I faltered, even for an instant, it would crush and then incinerate me.
The spillover from the blast roasted the stones that had collapsed all around us, toasting them red hot until they began to melt into glowing streams of lava. Throughout it all, Cindra kept firing, blasting away with her pistols for six shots each, clacking their barrels together, and then starting all over again. The bullets, I’m sure, melted before they had a chance to reach the Dragon, perhaps turning into the metallic equivalent of steam and becoming just as harmless to the great beast.
“I can’t do this!” Danto said, his arms shaking with the effort of keeping them aloft and his mojo coursing through them. “I can’t hold out!”
I looked to Belle, who didn’t utter a word of complaint, although her arms had begun to wobble too. She’d set her jaw and put her mind to the task, refusing to give up. The Dragon might incinerate her, but he would never defeat her, never break her will.
Without Dant
o’s help, though, we were doomed. Belle and I might be able to maintain the shield, but Danto’s earlier spell had proofed us against the heat. If he went down — if he died — the spell would go with him, and the ambient temperatures would kill us, even if the shield held.
I wondered if I might have time to get one last kiss from Belle before the fire took us.
“I love you!” I said.
“Shut up!” she said, refusing to look at me. “Shut up and keep fighting!”
“But —”
“I love you too!” She snarled. “I always have, and I never stopped. Now! Shut! Up!”
A deafening clap of thunder smashed through the roar of the raging fire then, knocking it — and the Dragon — aside. The great beast staggered away and roared in shock and rage.
As the fire roiled up and away, becoming a ball of black smoke smeared across the sky, I saw the Dragon heave to the side, a blackened scorch mark having blossomed on his chest. He drew in gigantic lungfuls of air, and Danto, Belle, and I braced ourselves for another blast of fire. Instead, a second bolt of lightning cracked through the afternoon air and lanced him straight through.
A pair of the Black Hand assassins appeared on the lip of the hole the Dragon had dug through his city to get to us. Each of them had a black wand in his hand, and the sticks crackled with electrical surges they couldn’t quite contain.
“Yes!” the Ruler of the Dead cried out through Fiera’s remains. “Do it! Kill the Dragon now!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
A full wing of flying chariots appeared in the air then, the Guard coming to their Emperor’s rescue. They didn’t bother with threats this time. They just opened fire at the Black Hand assassins with everything they had: wands, pistols, and rifles.
The bullets caught one of the assassins through the head and blasted his brains back over the edge of the pit we were in. As he toppled out of sight, the other assassin returned fire, letting loose with his wand. The bolt of lightning from it forked and lanced through two of the chariots, turning the elves inside of them into smoking husks and knocking their transports from the sky.
“Keep up the shield!” I said to Belle and Danto as I started to chant another spell and charge out of the cavern. Before I could release it, though, Cindra took aim at the other assassin — who was too busy dodging the Guard to worry much about us — and hit him with a barrage of bullets.
The first enchanted slugs smacked into the killer and froze him solid. The next rounds chipped away at him bit by bit. The final one shattered him into countless bloody pieces.
A cheer went up from a crowd of people somewhere up top and then fell silent fast as the Dragon pushed himself back up on his hind legs and stretched his wings wide. The Voice of Dragon pulled himself out of where he’d fallen into his basket. His face was bloody, and his skin had been scorched a painful pink, a harm done to him that his still-burning robes had never been able to manage.
“You will all die!” The Voice slurred his words like a wizard smashed on dragonfire. “All of you! Die! Die! Die!”
I couldn’t tell if the Voice had been hurt worse than the Dragon or vice versa, but at least one of them wasn’t doing well. Maybe both.
I cast a spell on myself as I sprinted forward, then jammed my wand between my teeth. I leaped for the rubble-strewn side of the cavern as I reached it, and instead of scrabbling against the almost vertical surface, I stuck to it like a spider and started climbing.
The chariots still hanging in the sky swiveled about and brought their guns to bear on a target out of my line of sight. They emptied enough firepower into whatever they were attacking to turn the ground beneath it to a puddle.
Despite that, another Black Hand assassin popped up just a bit down the rim of the pit from where the first two had appeared. He let loose a blast from his wand, and another two chariots fell from the sky as if someone had cut the strings keeping them aloft.
The bigger problem, at least as far as I was concerned, was that the bastard had spotted me trying to scramble up out of the cavern. As he turned his wand in my direction, I went for my own, even though I knew it would be too late. As high up the side of the pit as I was, he wouldn’t even have to hit me with a spell. Just getting close enough would knock me off the wall, and that fall alone would be fatal.
Before he could strike, though, Moira leaped out of the collapsed walls behind him, a vicious knife flashing in her one good hand. I clung to the wall as hard as I could, afraid that the assassin might get his spell off anyhow, but I shouldn’t have worried.
Moira screamed like a vengeful ghost as she tumbled through the air at the assassin, and he turned to face her. He tried to bring his wand around to blast her away in midair, but she batted away his stick with her stump of an arm and plunged her knife straight into the killer’s neck.
Moira landed hard on the assassin with both feet and then kicked off against him, knocking him into the pit and at the same time pushing herself clear of it. He tumbled out over me, dead long before he hit the ground.
The assassin landed next to Fiera, and the Ruler of the Dead cackled through the destroyed elf’s lips. “Kill them all!” she said to the Dragon, screeching every word. “I already got what I wanted here.” She cackled in triumph.
The Dragon righted himself over the top of the pit and peered down at the cavern floor below. I did my best to avoid his attention, flattening myself against the wall and hoping he wouldn’t scrape me off it like a cockroach he’d found in a well.
“You gave me my greatest challenge since I founded this city,” the Voice of the Dragon said. “But you have failed. I still live, and the city is sill mine.”
The Ruler laughed again. “I didn’t need to kill you,” she said. “I just needed to show that it could be done. Your days — your hours — are now numbered, oh Emperor with claws of clay!”
The Dragon reared back his head and inhaled once again. This time, I wouldn’t be down there to help Danto and Belle with the shield — or Cindra with the shooting — and I was sure they couldn’t hold it without me. The dragonet may have gotten to safety, but without my help the rest of my friends in that pit were going to die.
Cindra started firing at the Dragon, peppering him with the freezing bullets she’d used against the Black Hand. They appeared as blue-black splashes against the Dragon’s scales, but those colors evaporated almost instantly in the Dragon’s ferocious heat. In his rage, they didn’t seem to do more than tickle him, but they forced him to cough to clear his throat. Then he inhaled for another fiery blast once again.
The smart thing to do, I knew, would have been to crawl up the side of that pit as fast as I could and hope the Dragon was too busy with the people below to pay any attention to me. I looked up toward the top of the hole and spotted silent Moira there, beckoning for me to join her. I glanced back at the trio of my friends below, bracing for the blast.
I couldn’t leave them to die, and I knew it. Not while I had even a single bullet to fire or spell to cast. I didn’t know any magic that could hurt the Dragon, but I had something in my holster that might.
I drew my sawed-off shotgun, pointed it at the humongous beast’s chest, and fired. The bright silver slug Kells had given me kicked so hard that the recoil almost knocked me off the wall, sticky spell or no. It spun me about, wrenching my back and smacking my gun arm against the rocks behind me with such force that I bobbled the gun. I barely caught it before it tumbled into the cavern below.
The slug slammed into the Dragon’s armored hide and knocked him sprawling. Maybe he was off balance to begin with. Maybe Cindra’s bullets and the Black Hand’s lightning bolt had hurt him more than it had seemed.
Either way, the slug smashed between the Dragon’s ribs and left a crater there the size of a dinner table. Believe it or not, though, the big bastard’s scales held. The bullet might not have broken through his armor, but it put a dent in it massive enough it made it hard for the beast to breathe.
I pulled myself bac
k onto the wall, finding new footholds, and I scrambled to break open my shotgun one-handed by bashing it against the rocks next to me. The Dragon’s head snapped around to glare me, and the Voice started to scream in agony and surprise.
The Dragon howled along with him, making a racket that made me want to stop to cover my ears, even if it meant I would fall to my death. I fought that urge and instead tried to hunker my head down between my shoulders until the awful ruckus went away.
“That damn well hurt!” the Voice said with more emotion than I’d ever heard from him.
As he spoke, the Dragon huffed for a big breath once more but winced in pain at what I hoped was a broken rib instead. Giving up on trying to fry me with his fire, he peeled back his lips instead and bared his rows of sword-long teeth at me.
I tucked the broke-open shotgun into my holster and fumbled in my pocket for another one of the silver slugs. As I pulled out a box of red shells instead, I knew I was dead. The Dragon would pluck me from that wall and swallow me whole before I could get that gun back together, and he’d probably belch up my incinerated remains a minute later and use my femur to pick the shreds of my jacket from between his teeth.
I hollered in frustration as I tossed the red shells aside and stuffed my hand back into my pocket, hoping for a box of silver slugs this time. The Dragon came right at me, cocking back a mighty claw to strike me dead and stuff me into his mouth in a single, lethal move.
“Son of Gib!” the Voice said. “You have lost my favor!”
The dragonet zipped down between us then, hovering between his father and me and shielding me with his body. The Dragon didn’t even blink at his child. He used the claw he’d raised against me and swatted his son out of his way. The dragonet sailed high up into the air and disappeared over the Great Circle, skittering off the side of the Night Tower before he vanished from sight.
I wanted to call out the little guy’s name, but it struck me then that I’d never given him one. I knew if I hung a moniker on him, that would mean he was mine — and that I was his — and I’d not been ready for that. Not then.