by Devin Hanson
The dragon spit out the remains of the Incantor and stamped them into the ground. The dragon roared again, an unmistakable cry of victory.
With the Incantors dead, there was nothing forcing Andrew to hold his shield up any more. He dropped the shield and lashed out with blades of force, cleaving through the closest soldiers, armor and all. Beside him, Jules added her own blasts of alchemy, sewing howling shards of ice and blasts of flame through the Salians. The surviving soldiers turned tail and ran. There was nothing on the street for them but death.
The ground shook as the dragon returned, brushing against a three-story building casually, causing it to collapse in a slow tumble of timber, stone and billows of plaster dust.
The dragon swung his head around, until one enormous eye was hovering a few feet away from Andrew. The enormous male’s iris was a swirl of mottled gold and ebony and keen with intelligence.
I… came. The thought from the dragon was accompanied by images of Ava, and a surprisingly tender emotion, then a long flight from deep within the frozen north where the land was sculpted from naught but ice and stone.
The dragon could speak? The words were slow and simple, but unmistakable. Once, Andrew had met a male dragon of great age that could hold a conversation, after a fashion, through images and emotion, but even that dragon could not form words.
Andrew reached out one hand to touch the dragon’s snout. “Thank you.” He focused, sending an image of Ava wrapped around her eggs with the kossarigan to warm them.
Mother of my… life. You are… kossirith… to Avandakossi.
So this was Ava’s mate. She said she had waited until she had found a “suitable” mate before risking her life to lay her eggs. This dragon was truly ancient. Andrew couldn’t even begin to guess how old. He had to be tens of thousands of years old, maybe even older. Andrew felt Jules press against his side, her fear overcome by curiosity and wonder.
You… bring life. I… feel… it. Beware… the kossante… Avandir.
With that, the dragon turned and launched himself into the sky.
Andrew turned his back against the blast of grit and rubble then watched the dragon ponderously gain altitude. The street Andrew stood on had been lined with buildings on both sides, and was now almost perfectly destroyed by the ancient dragon’s attack. The dragon’s size and weight, and unstoppable strength, had reduced the street to nothing more than haphazard piles of rubble.
“That was incredible,” Jules said, looking around at the obliterated buildings. Her smile echoed Andrew’s feeling of enormous relief.
“He is Ava’s mate.” Andrew walked over to the crater in the road where Arlen had met his end, not looking forward to what he would find, but unwilling to risk the Incantor somehow still being alive. He needn’t have bothered. There wasn’t anything recognizably human mixed in with the shattered cobblestones and pulverized rock, let alone a living Incantor.
“Can’t fault his results,” Jules said by Andrew’s shoulder. “Though his methods could use a little refinement."
Despite himself, Andrew laughed. “I’ll pass on your critique next time I see him,” he said with a smile.
Meria hauled the yoke to the side and the monoplane twisted through the air. A minute ago, there had been a terrific booming roar from somewhere in Andronath, like two thousand tubas all blown at once. The searchlights had stopped searching the skies for her and had dropped down to the city. The sound could have come from only one thing.
Dragon!
The age-old instinctual fear had come rushing through Meria. She fought the desire to bring the monoplane down in a screaming dive and get underground as fast as she could. In actual fact, she was safer in the air than she would be in the city. And she still had a job to do.
She had used the distraction to swing around above another airship and unleash a searing blast of alchemical fire into one of its balloons. Wary of the balloon popping, she had held her distance, remaining at nearly the maximum effective range of her Saying. She had had to use more vitae to finally puncture the last layer of canvas.
When her Saying finally breached the balloon, the gasses inside it had ignited in a sudden flash and a rising cloud of boiling flame. She had stared up in shock at the fireball. The gasses were inflammable! Only dumb luck had saved her the first time she had tried burning through the canvas. If she had succeeded, the resulting explosion would have burned her to a crisp.
She had stayed still too long watching the fireball climb into the sky and a spotlight had swung up from an airship and focused on her. Like iron filings to a magnet, more spotlights had found her, and twist and turn as she might, she had been unable to shake them. Then the cannon had started shooting at her.
Meria pulled out of the hard turn and tilted the yoke back the other way. Grapeshot shrieked through the air a dozen yards to her left. There was no question of targeting another airship. It was all she could do to slalom between the airships as fast as she could fly and hope concern for their fellows kept the cannons from firing.
The dragon roared again and fear gripped Meria. She couldn’t slow down enough to land, not with the airships watching her, nor could she stay in the air. It was only a matter of time before one of the airships’ gunners got lucky with the grapeshot. And now there was a dragon in the city!
She turned again, passing close enough to a gondola that she could clearly see the crew looking at her as she shot past them. The fear on their faces was a little gratifying. She herself might be terrified, but she had mobility and her small size working for her. Airships were notoriously poor at surviving encounters with dragons.
Cinnamon floated in the air, making her nose wrinkle, and she turned her head just in time to see a shadowed bulk rise up out of the night and slam into the gondola she had just passed by. She got the impression of wings that seemed to envelop the entire airship, claws as long as she was tall smashing through the hardwood planking and jaws gaping open impossibly wide.
Then she was past, twisting through the airships at a mad rate, her mind empty of all but the desperate need to escape. It wasn’t until she had flown by the last airship that she realized none of the spotlights were focused on her any more. The cannon were firing, but no shot was screaming by the monoplane.
The airships had more to concern themselves with than the monoplane. Curiosity abruptly replaced fear. Since the spotlights were no longer following her, she was safely lost in the inky blackness of the night once more. She turned the monoplane about, cutting her speed back until she was moving just fast enough to stay airborne.
Even from her current distance, the dragon was plainly illuminated, moving with easy grace and striking with impossible power. She could hear the heavy cannonballs ricocheting off the dragon’s scales. The airships were fighting back, but already some were burning, and one was making the final plummet to the city below.
Not all the airships were fighting, though. One airship with a massively armored gondola and airon-plated balloons was sitting a quarter-mile away and making no move to engage the dragon. Meria saw an opportunity. The airship could only be the personal airship of the King of Salia himself. If she could bring ruin on that airship, the Salians might give up on their assault on Andronath. She had the opportunity to end this war, here and now.
She swung the monoplane around toward the lone airship and raised the throttle until the wind was whistling around her ears.
As she grew near the airship, she was able to make out the lettering on the gondola near the prow. The Pride of Salia was an enormous airship, nearly twice the size of the others. The armor around the gondola was thick and angled to help deflect cannonballs. The balloons were covered in airon scales, seamlessly protecting the vulnerable canvas. Cannon bristled from the decks.
Meria circled the Pride slowly, marveling at the thoroughness of the airship’s protection. It was a veritable floating fortress and must have cost hundreds of thousands of gold crowns to construct. Somewhere, an alchemist was very rich from tr
ansmuting each of the thousands of scales protecting the balloons.
Nowhere did Meria find a possible flaw in the armor that she could exploit. If she had had Jessa and Otto with her, maybe she could have landed on the deck and fight her way to the engine room, but from the outside, the Pride was impregnable.
An explosion flared in the night as the swampgas reserves in an airship caught fire and detonated, washing the Pride with orange light. Seconds later the thunder of the explosion rolled over Meria. The flash of light had glinted off something moving, and Meria flew down until she was below the level of the gondola.
Airships used enormous props to provide their locomotion and the Pride was no exception. Given the expense put into the rest of the construction, she had no doubt the lazily spinning double prop at the stern of the airship was also airon. Seeing the motion had given her an idea, though.
She didn’t need to destroy the airship herself. All she had to do was keep it from going anywhere. If it couldn’t flee the city, it was inevitable that the dragon would find it and destroy it. The airon plating might slow the dragon down, but no construct of man could stand for long against the primal strength of that creature.
It was the slowness of the prop that had caught her attention. If the airship had been underway, the prop would have been a blur of motion, moving far too fast for her to do anything with it. As it was, all she had to do was to get it to stop moving.
As Sayings went, aqat’nig was more suited to chilling a drink than building up ice sufficient to halt an airship’s prop. It didn’t help that Aq wasn’t one of her best runes. Meria could feel how inefficient the Saying was as it took long minutes of concentration before the mass of ice forming around the base of the prop shaft grew large enough to lock the prop into place.
Almost immediately, muffled crashing and the shriek of rending metal came from inside the armored gondola of the Pride. Voices rose in panic, and spotlights stabbed out into the night. Meria goosed the throttle as bright light stabbed down at the monoplane, and shot away from the stricken airship.
She heard the command to fire from the deck and swerved wildly to the left as a rippling broadside roared from the Pride. The noise was staggering, both the cannon fire and the subsequent howl as grapeshot ripped past the monoplane.
The yoke jerked wildly in her hands and she fought for control of the monoplane. Strangely, she didn’t feel fear this time as her control of the monoplane fell apart. Her hands stung from where the yoke had bruised her palms, but she held on, trying to wrest control back. The monoplane’s balance was off and she started listing into a slow spin.
Meria looked around, trying to figure out why the controls weren’t responding and found her left wing was a ruin of splintered airon and flapping wires where the control surfaces had been destroyed. She still had control of the elevators that enabled her to tilt the monoplane vertically and the engine still seemed capable of producing thrust, but neither of those did her much good if she couldn’t balance out the weight again.
Andronath was beneath her now, visible in brief flashes as she tumbled through the air. Without much hope, Meria pulled back on the yoke, ignoring the pain in her hands and fighting against the vibration. The elevators did their job, after a fashion, but she was now tumbling on three axes instead of two.
Fear started to grip her as the monoplane hurtled toward Andronath. With a last, desperate attempt at slowing her fall, she grasped the lever controlling the thruster. The ground was spinning around her and she tried to measure the intervals, but there simply wasn’t enough time to be patient and get it right. She gritted her teeth and yanked the throttle wide open for half a second before slamming it closed again.
She had the space of a breath to wonder if she had timed the burst correctly before the monoplane slammed through the second story of an inn. Her head jerked forward before the restraints across her chest yanked tight. There was a sickening crack and everything went black.
Chapter 29
A Last Task
Travis Bellwether rode behind Baron Priah and kept his eyes fixed on the baron’s back. Assaulting a fortified city was a dangerous proposition in the best of times, but when the defenders were wardens reinforced with alchemists, the death toll grew to terrible proportions. The evidence of that was stacked in sloppy windrows on both sides of the road until it seemed like they were riding through a canyon of death.
The Salian force had numbered barely over three thousand when they had made their initial attack on the city walls. Nearly half that number now lay dead. Among the bodies, the occasional dun robe of a warden was visible, but it was clear that for every warden that was killed, two dozen or more of the king’s force was also slain.
Baron Priah took a left turn through a hastily cleared path and Travis followed, trying not to choke on the heavy miasma of clotting blood as he passed by the corpses. Travis’ horse shied and he soothed it automatically, his voice calmer than it had any right to be. Then they were through and into parts of Andronath that had seen very little fighting. There was still a body here or there, sometimes tangled together in pairs, but nothing like the corridor of ruination up the main road.
Behind Travis, Trent rode his own horse, humming a cheerful tune. Travis glanced back and shuddered at the hungry look on Trent’s face. The man was enjoying the trip, even licking his lips as he looked over the deceased.
Travis’ skin crawled, and he turned to face forward again. The skin between his shoulder blades itched and he could imagine the gaze of the Incantor resting on his back, could picture the hunger in the man’s eyes as he imagined ripping Travis’ heart out while it was still beating and sinking his teeth into the pulsating flesh…
“Hold up!”
The quiet but commanding call snapped Travis’ attention out of his horrible imaginings and his reined in his horse before he bumped into the baron’s mount. A pair of guards wearing alchemically reinforced breastplates and aiming long rifles at them guarded the street. A third was standing in the middle, blocking passage forward.
“I am Baron Priah, with my entourage,” the baron said. “My son, Trent Priah and my lieutenant, Travis Bellwether.”
The guard held up a lantern illuminating the baron’s face, then moved back down the line, verifying Travis’ identity and Trent’s before lowering the lantern with a grunt and waving to the riflemen.
With a nod, the rifles were lowered and the baron clucked his horse into a walk. As Travis followed, the close street opened up into a wide market square. More riflemen walked about in pairs, patrolling or on urgent errands.
A stretch of shops had been demolished by the armored bulk of the Pride of Salia’s gondola. The airship had been grounded in haste. Engineers worked at the rear of the gondola, chipping a buildup of ice away from the prop shaft. Grounding the Pride had been a move of last resort by the captain, and one that had probably saved the king’s life. The other airships had either fled the dragon or had been destroyed. Andronath was littered with the ruins of destroyed airships and the air was thick with the smoke of burning buildings. Until morning came and it was safe to fly once more, the Pride was going nowhere, even if the engineers could repair the damaged prop.
A pavilion had been erected near a gangplank leading up to the gondola’s deck. Beneath it, illuminated by the light of many lanterns, King Delran studied a map of Andronath, listening to a report from General Forthist.
Baron Priah drew his horse to a stop and dismounted, handing the reins to a page. Following the baron’s lead, Travis dismounted as well. He looked to the baron for instruction and got a curt signal to stay close.
From what Travis had seen of the city so far, the battle was already over. Without airships providing cover, there was no way the remaining Salian forces would be able to assault the last of the barricades. And then there was the Academy’s shield, an impenetrable wall of alchemical force. Trent had managed to breach it during his last attack, but they just didn’t have the numbers to overcome a concentrate
d force of wardens and alchemists once the breach was made.
To Travis, it was obvious. The war was over. The king might still hope for a way to fight through anyway, but Travis sincerely hoped he would see reason.
“Ah, Baron Priah,” King Delran said as the baron approached and bowed. Behind the baron, Travis dipped into his own bow and held it until the king gestured for the baron to join him at the table. Travis hung back while Trent passed him to join his father. Without a specific invitation from the king, Travis had no business at the table.
“I’m relieved to see you survived, your Majesty,” the baron said smoothly with a glance at the Pride.
“Yes.” Delran frowned and sighed. “Brought down by a single alchemist on a powered glider, I’m told. I wasn’t aware such things even existed. We shot the flyer down, though.”
“Nor I,” Corvis said. “I would dearly like to examine the flyer, though. It must have been a marvel of alchemy.”
The king shrugged. “It crashed within the city somewhere. There will be time to find it once this mess is over. We have more important things to discuss.”
“My apologies, your Majesty. How can I assist you?”
“That dragon was a stroke of bad luck,” Delran growled. “We had the defenders on the run.” He pounded his fist on the table. “Of all the nights for a dragon to attack Andronath, it had to be this one.”
“The dragon was called here,” Trent rasped. “It was no coincidence. My alchemists reported contact with the Speaker, and I have not heard from them since. The Speaker seems to have summoned the dragon to do his killing for him.”
“So this Condign, the Dragon Speaker, he truly speaks to these beasts?”
Trent sneered. “A single one of which destroyed your entire fleet. You see why he must be slain.”