The Confliction (Book Three of the Dragoneers Saga) (Dragoneer Saga)

by M. R. Mathias

  To his surprise, when he entered her quarters, she spoke directly to him. “Richard told me you soul-stepped out of my husband’s core before it passed. I didn’t believe him.”

  “How are you so sure I am who you think I am?” Linux asked.

  “You used Dour to heal yourself,” one of the witches snapped at him. “I can smell it all over you now. You reek of it.”

  “Yes,” the queen smiled at her Hazeltine sister. “You’ve no ascension symbols, Linux, and you’re working high level Dour magic,” she smiled again, smugly. “I know it’s you.”

  Linux sighed and was at least relieved by the easy manner in which he was being treated. He decided to make the best of it.

  “At your service m’lady.” He bowed. “As always.”

  He couldn’t tell if her laugh was from something she found humorous, or a snort of contempt. She said to the witch at her side, “Tell Captain Darphike that the jumper is now in our service.”

  “She’s coming!” Rikky yelled from high upon the spiral stair that led from the rotunda up to the dragon landings. “Golden’s only carrying one. I don’t see Crystal.”

  “Are you sure?” Jenka struggled to get to a sitting position. Most of his body was a plum-colored bruise. His half-rejuvenated shoulder gash was still stiff and raw. Rikky had exhausted himself healing it. Jenka found it was still hard to breathe. It hurt just to think about moving, but he wanted to know what Aikira had to say. She’d chased off after Zah and hadn’t been seen since.

  Marcherion was angry and on edge. Jenka understood the sentiment. Blaze had roasted the Sarax that got a hold of Jade after they crashed, and then landed to protect Jenka’s prone body. He was ready to go headlong into a tempest to save Zahrellion, only no one knew where the tempest was.

  Jenka pulled a thick shirt over his battered, salve-covered frame and managed to get his boots on, but it was all for naught. As soon as he was up and walking toward the staircase, Rikky and Aikira came down it.

  “They took her to the temple.” Aikira looked terrible, as if she hadn’t slept in days, which she probably hadn’t. “Only those two Sarax went there; the others went off into the darkness and disappeared. I watched them until it was clear they weren’t taking Zahrellion somewhere else. I saw that druid Richard exposed at the keep that night, too. He fed the Sarax something. The two Sarax that took Zahrellion seemed as if they’d do anything for the stuff.” She paused to catch her breath. “Crystal refused to leave her perch on the northern ridge. I think she is wounded, but she is as thick-skulled as you are.”

  “Addiction,” Marcherion said as he paced the same five-stride line he’d been pacing since the Sarax attacked. “Just like they did with those ogres, I think. They put something in that berry-wine they give them. Then they put a collar on them.”

  “She’s alive, then?” Jenka sounded aggravated that Aikira hadn’t told him how she was. “What about Zah?”

  “She was bleeding at the shoulder and looked unconscious when they carried her into the temple. That’s all I know. They didn’t eat her, though.” She slumped down onto a seat at the long oval table. “It’s a foul place that temple. Those pale winter crows and every scavenger for leagues is feasting on the frozen death the Sarax left behind last fall. I saw a troll with antlers on its head picking through the corpses.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Marcherion looked at Rikky. “Let’s go get Zah.”

  “If we go, we will have the rangers help us,” Jenka said sternly. Aikira’s last statement suddenly registered in his head, but he was intent on getting the message across to Rikky and March. “We’ll have to get King Blanchard out of there, too. You two go to the keep and get Herald’s thoughts on it. Just go to the keep. I’ll watch over Aikira while she sleeps and see what Lem and the ogres can help us get done.”

  “We shouldn’t wait,” March objected. “What if—”

  “If they want her dead, she’s dead.” Saying it caused Jenka to grind his molars in frustration. He was hurting all over and just wanted to think straight for a few moments. Aikira was softly snoring now, with her face down on the table. Her mention of an antler-headed troll was but a fleeting memory. “No one wants to go storming off after her more than I, but we may have only one chance to get them out of there. I don’t want that chance squandered. Go, and return with Herald’s thoughts as soon as you can.”

  Part II

  Clover’s Secrets

  Chapter 5

  “Look at this,” Jenka said to Lemmy.

  They were in a musty, cobweb-filled room that annexed off of Clover’s modest librarium, a room that neither of them noticed until Lemmy found the latch that opened a section of shelving as if it were a door.

  You never know what you’ll find when you pull a book off a shelf, Lemmy joked, for that’s all he did.

  Inside the room there were several shelves full of odd components and two large, leather-bound volumes of spells that hurt Jenka’s eyes to read. He recognized the first few words in one of them. He read aloud softly and was overcome with a giddy tingle afterwards. Jenka’s vision blurred. He took a few deep breaths and wondered if he had just accidentally cast a calling spell.

  Jenka started looking at a charcoal sketch of a Sarax, with marks and carefully written text detailing sensitive and dangerous parts of the thing’s strange body. Then he saw something else and pointed it out to Lemmy. He was showing Lem a drawing of a bee’s honeycomb full of little tiny Sarax. The queen was larger, ten times as large as the Sarax. It was bulkier, too, formed like a larva, or a giant grub, with several long snaking limbs on each side of an elongated torso.

  I wonder if they really follow that thing, said Lemmy, as he took the parchment to study it closer.

  Jenka’s mind had moved on. He was searching for anything else they could use to more effectively destroy the beasts. He found a small wooden chest and forced it open with a sealing blade. Inside were several hundred golden coins with a strange feline animal on one side and two lines with a slash through them on the other. He wondered, for a long while, from where they had come. Then he pondered where the Sarax had come from and a certain fear of the unknown began to creep into him like a chill.

  Lemmy started sifting through the papers lying about and gurgled out a noise of surprise when he read something Clover had written. It was about the Sarax, and the first druids to venture into the mountains away from the kingdom. It turned out that other Sarax had escaped the encasement in the past, and one of them ended up under a spell an old High Druidon had cast. The creature was kept in the depths of the Temple of Dou and studied. In fact, the passage spoke of a room being constructed around the thing. In Clover’s day she visited the Temple of Dou often. Some of the same ogres that built the Dragoneers’ castle had apparently helped build the temple. Lemmy was over seventy years old, ninety years if you heard Herald tell it, and he remembered hearing tales of the flame-haired dragon lady from the deep Orichs, but he’d always thought she was just another Crix Crux tale. As he read on, he learned that three of the full-blooded elves that washed up with the Dogma’s wreckage two centuries ago were the ones who sealed the star ship closed after it first crashed. He also learned that the main reason for sealing it in Dour-formed crystal was that the stuff dampened the call of some greater beast inside.

  There was a drawing of a pack-like satchel rig that had a vine running from a bladder-sack. Lemmy guessed it went with Clover’s saddle designs as something to keep from getting parched on long flights. Clover was obviously a clever designer of things.

  This land seems to attract survivors, Lemmy observed. For the first time in a long while, he was afraid. The Sarax’s ship crashed here just like the Dogma, he told Jenka. This Confliction is a battle for the right to call the land home. I have a feeling we are missing something about them, though. I wish it were me instead of Zahrellion taken there.

  “How did you find this room?” Aikira asked from the door. Her eyes were puffy with sleep and her face had lines
pressed into it from her blanket.

  I tried to pull my favorite book from the shelf and the whole thing came free and swung open. Lemmy forced a grin. I’ll go fry up some of those goose eggs the ogres brought up. They’ve just about cleared the cavern out.

  “We need to find a way to draw a bunch of the bastards to us and then get ‘em all at once.” Jenka spoke more to himself than anyone else.

  “Your sword, and spells that are so powerful we can only cast them sparingly, are all that have worked so far.” Aikira shrugged and followed Lemmy out of the room. “I’d love to find a way to kill all those devil damned things.”

  Insects, Lemmy mumbled as he led Aikira to the woodstove. I think they are insects.

  Jenka picked up the stack of stuff they had piled on the room’s only chair and sat it on the floor. Then he collapsed into the old oak seat and put his face in his hands. He was so worried about Zahrellion that he had all but forgotten his bruised and battered body. He was going mad. Rikky and Marcherion had only been gone two days. Hopefully they would return soon with some great foolproof scheme of Herald’s design. He hated leaving Zahrellion confined as a prisoner for even a moment longer. But he didn’t want her killed.

  He remembered when King Blanchard threw the two of them into the dungeon on King’s Island. He remembered how Zahrellion took the time to appear to him in his cell every day to teach him how to call his dragon. She never let him feel alone in there. Those summonings he learned were second nature to him now, but he remembered something else, and suddenly his heart was pounding with hope and excitement. He decided if Rikky and Marcherion didn’t return soon, he’d have to go find them.

  Jenka had just figured out what they needed to do, at least what he needed to do. He wondered if Jade was healed enough to carry him to the temple, and without a thought for his torn shoulder and broken ribs, he started up to the dragon landing to find out.

  Again, King Richard was being pursued, but this time it was because he had sought out one of the strange thick-necked alien creatures and taunted it into chasing him. He was putting it through a vigorous series of high climbing rises and then long swift, curving descents. The Nightshade was tireless. The Sarax wasn’t long of body or sinuous. The descents left it lagging far behind the sleek hell-born wyrm. The climbs took their toll, too. The Sarax’s humanoid form was heavy and hard to lift over and over again. After a while, the creature was so weary that it just started plummeting out of the sky. They weren’t over the sea this time, but the way the Sarax bounced and tumbled into the rocky streambed below left no reason to think it would survive.

  Richard summoned, then slung forth, a pulse of glassine gray power at the thing just to be sure.

  “Sea water and extended rigorous pursuit,” Richard said to himself as he headed the Nightshade back toward Midwal. He was about to erase a hundred years of progress. He was going to order the people to abandon the Mainland. He wanted the people of his kingdom all safe and surrounded by the sea. He wanted to—

  He saw two young trolls standing beside a snow-covered, partially wooded copse. It was an area that trolls normally avoided due to the large canyon wolves who hunted the craggy terrain between the forested ridges. When he had his mount swoop down one of them turned, and hissed at his proximity. Richard’s blood nearly froze in his veins. It was Gravelbone, or it looked just like him. Two of them?

  Notssss, the Nightshade hissed. Pupas.

  “Pupa?” Richard asked indignantly. He was shocked beyond reason by the sight of the ivory-antlered demon beast. Are they demons? He found himself holding onto the Nightshade with all he had. Even though it wasn’t the Goblin King, the idea of more of those things roaming around was chilling. Gravelbone had made him witness terrible things.

  When they came back around for a second look, Richard saw that a third of the antlered vermin was emerging from a grotesque bloody puddle of what might have been skin, just under the trees. He remembered his lesson on butterflies from Mysterian and suddenly was feeling an emotion he had all but forgotten. He was terrified.

  “There are more of those things?” Richard asked his sleek scale-less wyrm. The sheer fear that was building up inside him was more than he could take.

  Without another thought Richard called out to Mysterian, the Eldest of the Hazeltine. She was probably angry with him. She would never forgive him for killing her witchy sister, but he knew she wouldn’t want the realm to fall under some feral horde of merciless metamorphosing alien hatchlings because of it.

  Chapter 6

  Lemmy didn’t like the idea of leaving Aikira alone at the castle. Jenka knew that it was more because Lem didn’t think he and Jenka should be doing what they were doing than for fear of her safety. Jenka knew Lemmy wanted them to wait on Rikky and March to return from the keep, but he was determined to make contact with Zah just as quickly as possible. Jade carried them on an unstable flight through a sky thick with steady snowfall to a place near the temple. The sore green wyrm set them off and found a place to curl up and wait outside the druids’ valley. Fat flakes were falling all around them. Now Jenka and Lemmy were creeping through a sparse forest, in snow that was knee-deep, with their range of visibility reduced to an arm’s length.

  “Least we don’t have to worry about being seen,” Jenka commented. The cold was fierce, but it numbed his aching body. When Lemmy didn’t respond, Jenka turned to see why and was struck with the awkward, guilty feeling he used to get when trying to communicate with Lemmy the mute.

  Lemmy flushed with frustration, or maybe embarrassment, giving his elvish face an icy blue tint for a few heartbeats. Jenka forced a grin. “Just like old times,” he said as he started them on toward the temple.

  Over his shoulder Jenka said, with a hint of aggravation showing in his voice, “I guess having your help with the spell words is out.” After about five long strides he stopped and turned. “Can you cast spells without saying the words, Lem?”

  Lemmy laughed his strange wheezing, hacking laugh, but nodded in the affirmative.

  “When me and Zah were in the dungeons, she came to me, like a ghost or a spirit would,” Jenka explained. Great plumes of steamy breath rose as he leaned against a tree and thought about how to describe what Zah had done. “She’d been beaten by the guards on the tilt yard and was near dead, but she bothered to appear to me and spend time teaching me how to summon Jade with my mind and such. I want to try and reach her like that. That’s not an ethereal spell is it?”

  Lemmy was already tapping his chest and nodding that he knew the spell. He’d lived and studied with the druids for a few decades and would have still been among them had he not disagreed with Linux, and Lanxe, and the rest of the inner Order about some of the experiments they were performing. He was feeling foolish now for not seeing what Jenka had. If they could get close enough to the temple, then one of them could send their aura inside to visit Zahrellion while the other watched over them.

  “So you can do it?” Jenka was looking at him like a child on the Giver’s Day. Lemmy kept nodding that he could, and with a point of his finger, got them moving again. Before long, the snowfall lessened enough that they had to start using the woodsman’s stealth that came easily enough to both of them. Then Jenka stumbled over a warm, squishy mound that would have been exposed and steaming had it not been for the fresh layer of snowfall.

  Jenka couldn’t tell what it was, but he sensed Lemmy’s sudden revulsion. And the smell was terrible. A strange familiar aura radiated from the thing, and Jenka was suddenly alarmed because the last time he had sensed such a disgusting roil was when he’d been in the presence of Gravelbone during the battle for Mainsted.

  “Son of a—” Jenka gasped. “What in all the hells? Is it a young troll with horns?”

  A wet, partially formed body the size of a man was fidgeting in a mess of steaming bloody pus and slime. Whether Jenka had ruined the antlered troll emerging from the cocoon, or if it had been spoiled otherwise, it was clear that this thing wasn’t goi
ng to live long.

  Lemmy remembered seeing a skull once, on a farmer’s cart, well east of Delton. The man said he found it at the back of his field. It was a trollish skull with stunted antlers growing out of it. He’d never thought about that until this very moment, and his mind suddenly wrapped around something he could barely believe.

  Lemmy understood the sketches in Clover’s study now. He understood them well enough to know that they were all in far deeper than any of them could have imagined. Gravelbone hadn’t been an anomaly. He was just the first of his kind, or maybe the second, to morph out of the cocooned pupa stage of metamorphosis. The Sarax were the caterpillar, eating their fill of human meat so that they could cocoon and change into foul ivory-horned vermin masters like Gravelbone. This idea was hard to conceive, but he sensed it was the case.

  Suddenly there was a troop of trolls being driven by a huge ogre wielding a whip formed of silvery blue lightning. They were passing on an unnoticed trail, less than a pebble toss away. The falling snow must have been dampening the sound of their passage, because now that they were close, the beasts were as noisy as could be. The ogre’s enchanted whip hummed and hissed and cracked in long statical spurts. Luckily, Lemmy grabbed Jenka and pulled him into a crouch then almost dragged him backwards on his arse under the skirt of a huge pine.

  They were huddling there waiting for the band of trouble to pass when Lemmy spotted a pale spider the size of a girl’s fist dropping at Jenka from the branches above. He wanted to whisper a warning, but had no voice. He grabbed Jenka and shook his arm violently to get his attention then pointed at the thing, all while the ogre driver was lashing and yelling in some strange dialect of ogrish just a few yards away. Lemmy gave up that tack when Jenka shushed him with a glare.