“Yesss,” Crystal hissed. Her wing strokes grew longer and pushed them through the air faster and faster. Zahrellion didn’t think her dragon would recover from the scorching blast of fire so quickly, but Crystal went banking hard around just as soon as she was over the frontier and out of harm’s way.
“Hold on,” the dragon hissed and put forth even more effort into gaining not only speed but altitude as she went through her turn. By the time they were facing the wall again, they were well above the other dragons. Only the scarlet fire wyrm seemed to notice them. Crystal took advantage of her position and dove right down onto one of the black-scaled mudge. Like a hawk swooping on a rabbit, she latched onto the smaller dragon's back with both claws and snapped its spine. She pulled up just past the wall and tossed the screaming, writhing carcass into the hole, nearly clogging it.
“Good,” Zah called over the rush of the wind. “I wonder where those little beasts are going into the shaft? We need to find the other end of the tunnel.”
“Yesss,” Crystal agreed. “But firssst thisss.”
The agile white dragon changed their course and took them streaking low across the ground on the kingdom side of the wall. When they neared the hole in the ground she spat forth her frigid breath and froze half a score of the goblins and a pair of trolls into solidity. An orc popped up just then and took the blast full-force, but not before loosing a bolt from the crossbow in his arms. The missile flew straight at Crystal’s head. Somehow she corkscrewed through the air around its trajectory. She started to hiss something back to her bond-mate, but she felt Zahrellion go limp on her back. She had to fight with all she had to keep her rider from falling to her death. It wasn’t until she was well away again, and flying at a much slower clip, that she curled her long neck back and saw the fletching of the crossbow bolt jutting out of Zah’s bloody chest.
She made for a clearing in the scattered forest outside of the wall, but it was occupied by an orc and his company of trolls. She flew farther into the frontier because going north toward the peaks was her instinct. She knew she couldn’t fly as far as that. By the amount of blood showing through Zah’s dark robes, Crystal could only hope that the girl would survive until she found them a safe place to land.
Rikky and Silva were having much the same problem with the mudge that Zah and Crystal had. The biggest difference between the attacks on the wall at the Port gates and the battle at Midwal was that the vermin hadn’t been able to tunnel under the wall near the harbor where the bulk of the populace dwelled; the water table and the rocky terrain prevented it. The goblinkin came under a few miles east, out in the cover of some densely canopied forest. The goblins and several bands of trolls, all following the orders of their fierce-looking half-armored orc captains, were tearing through Port’s streets now. They destroyed everything that happened into their path. The men that had come over from the islands were mustering and getting organized, but the defense of the common folk was going to come too late for many. Already the northeastern quarter of the city was soaked in blood, and half aflame.
The worst happened late the second evening of the battle. Gravelbone arrived on the back of his black-skinned hellborn wyrm. With him were several dozen mudged dragons. They swarmed the wall-tops, instantly killing any man who didn’t go for cover inside the structure. They swooped hard on the men wielding the ineffective hand-held dragon guns. Some of the wyrms had troll riders that rained down heavy rocks from above. They killed the crew and destroyed one of the bigger swivel-mounted weapons that the king was having built. Luckily, King Blanchard had been wise enough to have one of the crews building inside a wagon builder's shed, and another in a lumber barn across town.
Rikky hadn’t understood why the king had wanted him to stay instead of going after the crown prince until now. He and Silva were the only real defense Port had at the moment, and they weren’t proving to be much. King Blanchard had told him, had ordered him, to protect the assembly of the big spear launchers that were being thrown together. He said that when they were done, Silva could become the fox and let the mudged hounds chase him right into the line of fire. Once they killed a few of the flying wyrms, the sky over Port would no doubt settle back down. All of that had been before the goblins tunneled the wall to the east of the city. Now chaos was running rampant. There was open warfare in the streets. The few score of actual trained soldiers who had crossed the ocean with their king were beginning to form ranks around the different sections of the city. Still there were more and more of the goblinkin running wild, killing and eating everything they could. It was madness.
Silva used her molten breath to reduce troll after troll into hard, disfigured lumps. Rikky felt helpless and vowed to retrieve a good longbow as soon as he had the chance, for he could have been shafting trolls all along if he had one. As it was, he had to watch on as man after man was pulled down into the fray below and eaten alive.
An orc with a strip of chainmail running diagonally across his huge chest was barking and chattering out orders. Beyond him, more of the wild trolls were loping into the closer confines of Port. From above, a rock came zipping into Rikky’s head and nearly knocked him from Silva’s back. The silver wyrm did an impossible aerial direction change, and the troll who threw the stone was tumbling to the earth while his dark, blue-scaled wyrm felt the crushing of Silva’s teeth clamping down on its neck. Silva shook the wyrm until its neck snapped, then let it fall away. Rikky watched as it tumbled into the dusky shadows. He couldn’t help but cringe when the wyrm’s upper half hit the wall-top, causing the broken carcass to go spinning into the wide lane that spanned between the wall and Port proper.
Rikky clung to the spinal plate in front of him as Silva made a slow turn, trying to take in the battlefield which the Great Wall and the entire city of Port had become. Several of the ships in the harbor were aflame, sending huge, billowing pillars of smoke up into the night sky. Several parts of the city were burning, too. The trolls had stopped invading the city, and were building up their numbers in the forested outskirts east of Port, just like they had the night before. The trolls still ravaging the city were more than enough for the men to contend with. Rikky knew that by morning the kingdom's forces would be exhausted and there would be score upon score of fresh goblins and trolls coming up out of the hole all night long. The morrow would bring a slaughter, and Rikky didn’t want that to happen.
He racked his brain and decided that Master Kember would have gone straight to the root of the problem. He decided that he should find a way to close up the tunnel. He would have loved to have Jenka or Solman there to give him advice, but Solman was dead, and he had no idea where Jenka was. Better yet, if he had that druida that had blasted the big red mudge after they left Swinerd’s farm, she could probably blast it closed.
“Master Vahlda!” Rikky exclaimed out loud. Then to Silva he said, “Take us to our landing on the wall. I have an idea. Can you carry two people?”
“Yesss,” Silva hissed in her soft, slithery voice. “For a while.”
When they landed, the men gave the slick, gray-scaled dragon a wide berth. In the light of the torches and barrel fires burning atop the wall she looked more of a muted pewter color than silver, like clouds just before a terrible storm.
Rikky didn’t want to dismount because it would be a pain to have to climb right back up. Mounting his dragon with a peg leg wasn’t easy. He told a man to run and fetch Spell Master Vahlda. “And remind him to bring his cloak,” he added when he was finished with the order.
Less than a turn of the glass later, the nervous Spell Master was climbing clumsily up to sit between the spinal plates ahead of Rikky. Rikky had remembered that Vahlda was much more than a just a healer. He was an accomplished practitioner of the arcane, or so he had once said. Rikky asked him if he could come look at the hole from above and see if he could use his magic to close it.
“I don’t know, but I’m tired of watching young men die, so let’s see what we can do,” The middle-aged mage said in a wearily sarcast
ic tone. “I might never get another chance to ride a dragon.”
Silva didn’t even give the man time to settle before she leapt into the air and started winging her way east. Long hours of healing the injured and logging the dead into the book had taken a toll on Vahlda. He let his chin rest on his chest and kept his eyes closed as they went. Rikky was just glad that he was actually doing something besides riding around on Silva watching. Silva was intent on scanning the sky ahead of them for mudge. None of them noticed the sleek black hellwyrm with its ivory-antlered rider gliding high above them. It was silently pacing them, getting ready for the swoop and kill to come.
Part V
The Dragon's Tear
Chapter Thirty
Jade had been flying for a day and most of a night and still hadn’t reached the base of the cliff where the corpse of the mighty emerald dragon lay. Jenka would have stopped them earlier, nearer Kingsmen’s Keep, to rest and find out what the situation was there, but the area was thick with vermin. It had been in the deep of the night when they passed over Crag as well, and he hadn’t been able to tell much. Now dawn was approaching, and they were much farther north.
He looked around and breathed in deeply, trying clear the worry from his mind. The foothills were far behind them now, as was any sort of civilization. They were almost in the heart of the peaks, which meant the terrain was deathly steep in most places. Jenka could see snow on the sharp ridges ahead of them. The trees were all tall pines and firs, scattered about in random clumps.
The sun was just starting to break over the horizon, but the horizon was far below the level of the mountains, so the first light of the day was muted and indirect. Jenka’s breath came out in clouds.
He wondered about Rikky. He hoped they had rescued Prince Richard, but he had doubts that they had. Mysterian had left the impression that after he had the tear he would have to take on the Goblin King himself. He had no idea what to do if it came to that. He couldn’t even cast a simple fire spell consistently. He had no idea what the witch thought he could do with a tiny amber droplet.
They were planning on resting for a while after Jade hunted them a meal. There had been fewer and fewer mudge in the sky as the night wore on. They had all left the mountains to go fight with the Goblin King’s horde. Neither of them felt that there was any sort of threat this high up.
“I resssted when I watched for the Royal, but it wasssn’t much. He offended me,” Jade told Jenka. “I was angry when I flew out over the sssea.” Jade still seemed to be bitter over the way Royal had dismissed him.
“I’m glad that Herald and Mysterian found you.”
“Yesss, we owe the witch,” the weary dragon said. “I mussst feed now. Will you be all right here?”
Jade let Jenka off just below a ridge near a relatively flat extension of earth. Even in the cloak, the air was cold and the light breeze biting. A half dozen dark-needled sentinel trees protected one side of the space, but they did little to block the cold air.
“I can’t believe you flew this far without rest, then tried to cross over the ocean to King’s Island,” Jenka mildly scolded Jade after they landed. “That wasn’t very wise. I’ll stay against this tree until you return from your hunt. Then I’ll be the lookout while you rest your wings,” Jenka assured. He put his aching arse against the trunk of an old pine and slid down it until he was sitting on the freezing ground. He scooted around a bit to get out of the breeze and hunched into the cloak he had lifted from the post inside Mysterian’s door. By the time he was settled and comfortable, Jade was already gone.
There was less life up here in the altitudes than there was down in the valleys, but still Jenka could hear some birds calling out. He listened to them and wondered about his mother and the crown prince until he drifted off into a fitful, jittery slumber.
Jade circled over a nearby valley, searching for a sign of movement from some unlucky creature. Even though he was hungry, he wasn’t feeling the urge of the hunt. He was thinking and paying little attention to the terrain he was searching. In his heart, he was hesitant about returning to where his mother's decomposing body lay. It had been one of his favorite places when he was just a hatchling, but he had no desire to see it now. He wouldn’t know what to think when he saw what she had become. It pained him to even think about it, but he understood that Jenka needed the tear that his mamra had cried to pay for the freedom that the witch had granted. The witch had saved him from the sea as well, and he felt that helping Jenka pay the debt was important.
Jade had something similar to a fleeting memory, a thought that had been implanted in his head by his mother as she lay dying. He knew that the tear had power, and that it could be dangerous, but that was all he had retained from his mam’s hurried lessons. He would brave his fear and take his bond-mate there, but he had to feed and rest first, and feeding required him to pay attention. A short while later, his vigilance was rewarded.
Like a rabbit startled out of its hiding place by an owl or a fox, a large, iron-gray colored mountain cat bolted from the shadows of some boulders. Jade’s focus was immediately drawn to it. The animal was nearly half as big as Jade and would be no easy kill, but the young dragon had no doubt that he could eat most of it.
Using a technique he had watched his mother use a few times, he swooped in when the fleeing animal was traversing a steep rocky face. The first time he shot past the big cat at close proximity, the beast froze in place, but that wasn’t the idea. The idea was to knock the cat from its footing so that it tumbled down and hopefully broke some bones.
The second attempt was successful. The terrified animal balked at a leap and skidded forward with its momentum. It went into a tumble, flailing down the face of rock, futilely scrabbling for a purchase that would never come. When it landed, it hit hard on its side. Before it could recover and limp away, Jade dropped out of the sky and tore into its flesh. He was hungry like he had never been before. By the time he had sated himself, he was covered in dark sticky blood, and heavy from his gorging. He flew until he found a stream, then drank and licked his scales clean. After that, he returned to the flat area under the ridge and found Jenka asleep against the tree.
Jade curled up close to his bond-mate, close enough to keep Jenka warm with the heat of his body. He didn’t sleep at first. He kept watch for most of the morning, but as the sun rose over the tops of the sharp mountain peaks and shed its warm rays on them, the young dragon found that he couldn’t keep his eyelids down. It wasn’t long before he too drifted into slumber. There he found Jenka in the misty world of dreams, and together they flew toward a woman’s singing voice. The sound was so sweet and harmonious that it filled them both with hope and pulled them deeper into the ethereal.
“Where are we?” Jenka asked. His voice was a hideous sound compared to the woman’s song.
“Shhh,” Jade hissed softly. “Lisssten.”
“Break from it, Jade,” Jenka warned. “I think it’s a spell.”
“But itsss ssso perfect,” the young dragon responded slowly.
Jenka shook his dragon in the dream and Jade jerked suddenly into true wakefulness. Jenka woke, too. It was late in the day and warmer than it had been earlier, but still cold. They both stretched and yawned, but neither of them could forget the song and the beauty of the voice that had been singing it.
“Who was singing, do you think?” Jenka asked Jade as he ate a few bites of the frosty meat the dragon had brought him. It wasn’t until he swallowed the second bite that he realized he was eating uncooked meat. He decided that he didn’t want to know what sort of creature it had come from.
Jade hissed a little more sharply than he intended. The song was still echoing in his head, and it distracted his emotion from the growing unease that was filling him. He found that a pleasant thing. When he lowered himself to let Jenka mount his shoulders, he let out a long, hissing sigh. After he got his irritation under control, he answered. “I do not know whose voice it was, but it was coming from the other land of m
en.”
“The other land of men? What do you mean?” Jenka’s curiosity was piqued.
“Far towards the sunset, in the upper reaches, there are settlements of men much like the ones I have seen along the land barrier that you call the Great Wall.”
For a long time after they were in the air, Jenka was thoughtful. Jade had to be talking about the Outlands, but Jenka had never imagined that there were cities there. From the tales Master Kember and his mother had told him, he gathered that there was a large trading village and safe harbor mostly populated by kingdom defectors and pirates. It was supposedly somewhere up north, on the west coast of the mainland.
Jenka wondered if they too were being attacked by the goblinkin and the mudge.
Jade’s sharp hiss caused Jenka’s mind to abandon the strand of thought it had started down. Then the smell of rot hit his dull scenting nose and he understood the dragon’s sickened response.
The smell was putrid and thick, even in the cold air, and Jenka knew what it was from. It pained his heart deeply for Jade to be doing this, but it had to be done. He had to keep his word to the witch. He vowed not to forget the dragon’s deed. He would strive to make up for it with every fiber of his being.
Jenka saw that it wasn’t only the giant emerald rotting away against the base of the cliff. There were dozens of troll carcasses, and more than a few orcs as well. From the air it looked like some huge, festering scab at the base of an otherwise healthy, cold gray mountain ledge. Living creatures, larger ones, had fed on all of the dead until the meat had turned, leaving a sickening mangle of buzzing insects and squawking birds hovering over what was left of the carcasses.
Jenka was amazed at how accurate his dream had been. He had witnessed the emerald’s death and her tear falling while lying half-conscious in King Blanchard’s dungeon. It was unnerving that he had done such a thing, and he could plainly feel Jade’s sorrow. That fact that he could feel the tear calling out to him was even worse. It was unreal.
The Royal Dragoneers: 2016 Modernized Format Edition (Dragoneers Saga) Page 26