by R. D. Henham
“Mysos!” one of the bystanders screamed in fear. Yes, that was the name of the western wizard in his white mourning robes. The ringmaster had said it in his wagon before they left, when they were pleading with the wizard for Belen’s life—the same way that his wife had pleaded for their daughter’s.
Ebano twitched aside, letting a bolt of crackling, arcing electricity course past him to strike the ringmaster’s wagon. There was a snapping of wood and a terrible smell of ozone, and when the smoke cleared, a black, charred scar ran all along the wagon’s brightly painted side. He smiled serenely. The wizards here were far less talented than those he served with when he fought under Salah-Khan, when the Khur tribe sought to unify with the rest of those in the deep deserts.
“You face Ebano Bakr Sayf al-Din ibn Ceham! It was I who carried the banner of my tribe. I who led the charge of my people’s mounts into battle, I who defeated and conquered others in the name of Khurdish unity! You cannot stand against me, dealer of death!” Sadly, it was obvious that the Westerner had no understanding of the boast. The man reached to draw some other spell material from his belt and stared at Ebano most absurdly. Ridiculous primitives!
Ebano tried again, stiffening and raising his hand with a flourish. “Hear me, you pale and unsightly blemish on the face of the gods’ land! You face a true mage! I have fought beneath the claws of a dragon! I feared him not, and I do not fear you!”
The crowd made squawks of fear and anticipation. Perhaps one among them had enough command of civilized languages to recognize the wonders and marvels of a good boast in combat—or perhaps they were simply impressed by the magic flying about in the clearing. Whatever it was that made their eyes widen, Ebano welcomed it. This, indeed, would be a good place to die.
“Daddy!”
The cry came from one of the children clustered in the rapidly growing audience, the circus visitors unsure if this was part of the show. The cry turned Ebano’s head instinctively, and an old memory flashed before his eyes.
Mysos spun, his white robes swirling out like the mad dances performed by dervishes in the deep desert, his hands snapping out, thrusting a ball of dark, crackling energy toward Ebano. It tracked his movement, making it impossible for him to dodge it or knock it aside. He would have to face the magic directly and control it before it could detonate.
Without flinching, Ebano stretched out his hands and caught the whirling ball of darkness. He spun it though his own magical control, swirling it around and around between his hands. It was no mean feat, and Ebano could feel sweat breaking out on his forehead as he shifted and spun the magic, twisting it into a tighter ball, refusing to allow it to untangle. Mysos stared at him openly, trying to concentrate on the spell and regain control, but Ebano was too strong. Their wills clashed, pushing against one another, fighting for supremacy, until at last Ebano gained enough ground to hurl the ball of darkness into the broken crevice at his feet. It plunged downward several feet, unraveling as it did. Ebano lunged aside, desperate to get out of the way before the magic was fully activated.
That was when he saw the crying child escape his mother’s arms. A pale-haired little boy, blue eyes terrified and panicked, fled across the crowd and into the clearing. Without thinking, he stumbled too close to the crack as it shattered and broke apart.
In his mind’s eye, Ebano saw not only the fight before him, but also one that happened long years ago.
I see a green dragon swooping in the sky, carrying the warlord Salah-Khan. The tribe of Sayf had fought bravely in the warlord’s service, but scattered as his wrath turned upon them for their failure. The terrible greenish mist began to fall from the sky in a horrible smoking rain. Men fell, choking. Horses, the pride of his tribe, screamed in agony as their lungs filled with acid gas. My wife. My daughter—
Instead of counterattacking or escaping from the white robed wizard, Ebano spun. He whirled, twisting back toward the child. He reached out, hands grasping the child’s tunic. He dragged the child close, tucking the screaming boy against his chest as he turned away from the earth’s collapse. The spell finally collapsed, erupting from the deep earth with a whooshing hiss of foul, stinking acid. A fountain punched up through the crevice, exploding with thick goo, horrible searing smoke, and hissing poison. Had it struck Ebano in the chest, the blast would have consumed him. As it was, the crevice was too narrow, too shallow to hold it all—and it escaped into the clearing with a massive, spewing explosion. Ebano felt the acid burn into his back, sear through his dark robes, and burn away flesh and velvet alike. A wash of it flowed over him, droplets spurting through the air all around. All he could do was hold the child close and pray.
Memories flooded him.
The dragon has her in its claws, and my fingers are sliding from her dress. Amani! If only I had remained loyal to Salah-Khan, he would not have avenged himself on us. If I had seen through his false smiles, kept our tribe away from his dark purposes, if I had listened to you when you whispered in the bedchamber that he was an evil man. But I did not, and we followed him to our doom.
It was our love that destroyed us. I told Salah-Khan that you had spoken against him, that my own wife dreaded his cause and mistrusted his purpose. I remember how Salahh’s eyes flashed when I said it, how he did nothing that eve, but stayed silent as the grave. Only after he had sent my tribe out to conquer did he act. When we returned, my wife was dead, murdered by his guard’s hands, condemned as a dishonorable, faithless traitor to the Khan.
That was the moment when I knew she had been right.
The Sayf fought. We fought against the Khan, the Khur that had been our brothers, and against his dragon, the mighty Green named Chokingdeath. Many of my men, my comrades, my brothers, died with my name on their lips. Some choked in the gaseous breath of the monster, spending their last strength to render mercy to suffocating, unconquerable steeds before our warriors fell across their saddles on the desert sand.
I, alone, survived.
My daughter, my Amani, was lifted by the claws of the Khan’s massive green serpent. Ripped from my very hands, her dress sliding through my fingers as she was lifted into the heaven, Chokingdeath’s final retribution for our revolt. The dragon’s claws were wrapped about her. For my failure to protect Amani—to protect all of them—I am doomed to walk the earth until Keja finally grants me peace and lets me rest once more in my dead wife’s arms.
He opened his eyes and saw the real world around him, shockingly hard and painful and real. The acid on his skin burned, scorching deep to the bone of Ebano’s back. The child in his arms writhed and screamed, slipping out between arms too weak to hold him as Ebano fell forward onto the dusty ground. Unharmed, he fled back to his mother and buried himself in her skirts.
Ebano lay still upon the ground, hearing nothing but the pulse of his heart. The smell of poison-charred flesh, the same smell that had risen when the dragon breathed upon his men, filled his nostrils along with the heavy scent of dust and sweat. He had tried, tried to be a loyal general and prince, tried to save his daughter, tried to rescue Belen from the curse that had so clearly been laid upon her. The foreign wizard approached, stood over him, said something incomprehensible, and then turned away.
As the hem of the death wizard’s white mourning robe filled Ebano’s vision, he choked back an agonized laugh. The Westerner did not even have the courage to send Ebano fully to his death, denying him in the end both victory and salvation. I must die in battle, Ebano thought, or I will be kept from grace. He tried to push himself up to claw at the wizard’s robe, but it twitched away from his fingers before Ebano could muster even a single clawing scratch.
Keja help me, he thought, clenching his fingers in agony and falling back against the dust. And may the gods remember that I tried.
In the end, that was all any man could do.
My name is Ebano Bakr Sayf al-Din ibn Ceham, prince of Sayf, a tribe and a land now buried in dry sand, swallowed by the deep deserts of Khur. The truth has been revealed to me, my f
amily taken from me, and I have nothing left in this world except the fire of life and the water of forgiveness. Alak-al-saham-din-al-bhar, may the blessings of the gods be upon the world.
CHAPTER TWELVE
he arcox snapped its crablike claws, slicing them through the air in an eager rhythm as it scuttled toward the friends. Jace dodged left. Cerisse leaped to the right, dividing its attention. One thing they’d learned in the short amount of time they’d been in a cage with the beast was that the arcox wasn’t very smart. This time, it followed Jace as he danced around the edge of the cage against the wagon’s internal bars. Cerisse jumped up, pulling herself almost flat against the bars of the ceiling. It wouldn’t protect her from the arcox’s reach, but it kept the monster’s attention on Jace while she rested for a moment. Soon, she would do the same for Jace.
They’d done this trick twice before, and this time, the beast was wary. It paused in its flight after the nimble boy, eyestalks turning back to look for the girl. “It’s on to us!” Jace yelled, waving his hands back and forth. The arcox wasn’t buying it. It turned on four pointed rear claws and charged for Cerisse, clicking its lobster claws over its head to reach for her. Cerisse dropped instantly, but cried out as her ankle twisted in the hay. She collapsed, and Jace couldn’t see her anymore over the chitinous armored back of the arcox. “Cerisse!”
Belen was closer, although the bars of her cage kept her from reaching out or directly intervening. She stopped pounding on the wall of the wagon and turned quickly toward them. She hurled a hard lump of earth from the floor of the wagon and struck the arcox in one of its delicate eyestalks. The monster screeched and slowed, but did not change its course of attack. It had already learned that Belen was out of reach. Still, the pause gave Cerisse the opportunity to get to her feet. She stood unevenly, gingerly putting weight on the ankle, and shook her head dismally at Jace.
With two of her three darts—the only weapons they had in the wagon—in her hands, Cerisse faced the horse-sized arcox, dodging beneath the first sweep of its mighty claws. It was a waste of time to counterattack the crablike pincers, as they were thickly armored. The only place that the armor didn’t cover was the beast’s underside. It showed only when the arcox reared up to attack.
Like it was doing now.
Cerisse dived forward—exactly the opposite of what the monster expected—and threw herself under the arcox. She slid between its six thin, pointed legs, kicking herself farther beneath them until they surrounded her like a sapling forest. Holding the darts tightly, she thrust upward, burying the long points into the arcox’s belly. The monster let out a thin shriek, first trying to pedal backward, then when it bumped into the bars of the cage, sprinting forward to escape the pain. It left Cerisse lying on her back and ran directly toward Jace.
Claws outstretched, blood dripping from shallow wounds on its stomach, the arcox snapped at him, forcing him to dance between its claws. One caught his shoulder, snipping through the cloth and skin in an instant. It wasn’t a direct hit or it might have removed Jace’s arm, but as it was, white bone showed where the claw withdrew. Jace let out a muffled yell of pain and quickly spun away.
“Jace!” Belen yelled. “Are you—”
“I’ll live! Can you pull it off me?”
“I can try.” Unable to walk swiftly, Cerisse bit down on the remaining dart, jumped up, and grasped the bars of the ceiling. Agile as ever, she swung forward, flipping from hand to hand toward him faster than many people could run. She threw herself onto the back of the arcox and wrapped her legs tightly around its wide, armored back. “Hooo!” she yelled between gritted teeth, wrapping her hands around the arcox’s head.
The beast shrilled again, lifting its claws to snap them. Cerisse pressed herself flat against the armored back, causing the pincers to flail a few inches above her flapping auburn braid. “We need to do something about this!” she cried out. “We can’t keep it busy forever!”
“Yeah,” Jace gasped, ripping a sleeve from his shirt and tying it around his wound. “I noticed!”
“I have to do something!” Belen struggled with the thought, jerking helplessly at the thick iron bars that separated them. “I’m a dragon!”
“If you change form, we all get crushed against the bars. You’re too big. You’ll smash the wagon!” Jace shot her a comforting look. “We’ll handle it!”
Belen growled, tearing at the bars in a frenzy, her gray eyes burning with a bright anger. Jace knew he didn’t have much time before Belen sank into another one of her fugues, as she’d done at the tower. She might forget their situation entirely and attack, changing into the mighty dragon without understanding where she was or what she was doing, and if she did that, he and Cerisse would surely die.
“Can you get the point of the dart under its armor from back there?” he called, dashing around the wagon. The arcox had noticed him again. Since it couldn’t reach Cerisse or Belen, he’d become the target of its rage.
“Trying!” the half-elf yelled, tossing about on the arcox’s plated back. “Tip’s too short, and my hand’s weak from the chimera’s poison. I can’t thrust hard enough! Curse it, these darts were designed for juggling or throwing at corkboard, not for killing a gigantic lobster! We need another weapon!”
Belen backed away from the bars and was stared at her hands. “Jace, am I a woman who turns into a dragon, or am I a dragon that turns into a woman?” she asked suddenly.
He blinked. “What?”
“Answer the question!” she screamed at him, eyes glinting with a strange intensity. Her skin had turned grayer, her body seemed larger than the slight form of the dancer he remembered. Was she losing herself again?
“Belen, calm down!” he yelled. “You’ve got to calm—”
Cerisse shrieked over him, breaking into his sentence, “Dragon, Belen! You’re a dragon! You’re only a person because you want to be! Now somebody help me with this thing—I only have one dart left!”
“Then if the spell breaks,” Belen spoke in measured tones, her breathing tight and controlled, “I turn into a dragon.” She stared down at her hands, where small scales glistened like a silk sheath over her skin.
“Yes, right. Exactly!” Jace ducked under the arcox’s claws once more and heard them clang against the iron bars behind where he’d been standing, but found himself in the corner of the cage with nowhere to go. The monster lunged, Cerisse still clinging to its back. She lifted a fist and punched it atop its armored head, and it stumbled, missing him by only a few inches. In the space between sharp claw clacks, Jace managed to squeak between its chitinous body and the bars. The arcox must have felt him there, because it shuffled sideways to trap him.
The monster was heavy. Jace found himself edged between the thick plates of the arcox’s shell and the heavy iron bars of the cage. The monster rammed sideways, scuttling on thin legs, and the force of the blow knocked all the air out of Jace’s lungs. He choked, scratching and kicking at the arcox to try to knock one of the spindly legs out from beneath the monster, but nothing was working. The creature only pressed harder, refusing to budge even when Cerisse kicked and punched at it from above. It was going to crush him to death!
“So if something that is a part of me becomes no longer a part of me, then it’s dragon. Not human.” Belen wasn’t making any sense—or maybe it was the shooting stars that Jace saw exploding in his vision that kept him from understanding her. She froze for a moment longer, and then jerked her hands apart. Jace glimpsed blood on her palm, and her face drained of color. “Cerisse!” she cried. “Catch!”
Something silvery and bright spun through the air, whisking between the bars. Instinctively, the juggler reached up to catch it, her certain hands grasping it tightly. She arched back on the arcox’s shoulders and then plunged it downward, shouting her anger and her fear with a wild cry. The purple bandage fluttered around her wrist, her eyes as wild as a deep-forest elf as she attacked the beast. The shining blade in her hand looked like some sort of a dagger twi
nkling between her fingers. Where had Belen found that? It sank between the gap of the arcox’s thick plating like water through a sieve.
The monster screamed, and it was the first real sound of pain they’d heard from it since being locked in this cage. It writhed, crushing Jace further. Cerisse scrambled on its back, drawing the blade out to stab again. The arcox broke away from the bars and charged across the cage, hurtling toward the far side of the cage at breakneck speed. Cerisse hung on tight, bringing the dagger down a third time even as the arcox threw itself against the wagon wall. It hit so hard that Cerisse was thrown free. She tumbled to the ground in front of the monster, the shining silvery blade still clutched in her hand. The bars creaked, and the wood above them began to splinter. The wagon’s roof shuddered, and Belen let out a little cry.
“Cerisse!” Jace screamed, falling to his knees. It felt like his ribs were broken, and he could hardly draw a breath.
She didn’t stop fighting, twisting to her feet like a cat. One of the arcox’s claws caught her on a backswing, the thick curve of its closed pincer cracking against her injured arm. Cerisse let out a scream of pain but leaped in the air to avoid the sharp blade of its clacking claw. She landed between its writhing pincers and threw herself forward again, toward the monster’s eyes. It dodged to avoid her, backing into the bars
A quick slash, and she cut through one stalk, then another, and the arcox was blinded. Cerisse dodged the vicious pincers once more and plunged the dagger forward, cutting between the chest plates of the arcox with a vicious swipe.
The creature stumbled, tottered, and fell. Cerisse crumpled to her knees in front of it, gasping for breath. Jace made his way toward her, picking through the hay and crawling over the arcox’s fallen form. He reached out and touched her shoulder. “Cerisse, are you all right?”
Belen was already on the other side of the bars, tugging where the arcox had caused the wood of the roof to splinter. While Jace helped Cerisse slowly to her feet, Belen managed to separate the bars enough to squeeze through. “I think the weight on the bars broke part of the roof,” she called out, standing on her tiptoes to pound a board loose. “We might be able to climb through and get outside.” Even at this distance. Jace could see that Belen’s left hand was bloodied, her fingertips leaving slick red traces on the wood.