by Dante King
Now, them choosing to take the lesser walked paths and the lesser trodden streets must have saved them from some potentially awkward run-ins with pedestrians, there can be no question of that, but it also made our job easier so far as tracking them went.
“Wait one moment,” I said, holding up my hand and bringing us to a halt on the corner of a back street that smelled beautifully of stale vomit and fresh piss. I strained my hearing and heard hurried footsteps moving westward toward the outskirts of town.
“I can hear them now,” Tamsin said. “We must be close.”
We followed the voices through streets that became gradually more and more noisome, until we found ourselves in what was most definitely the warehouse district. Nearby, I could hear the sound of the river, and that distorted the sound of the two men that we were following.
“This way, I think,” I said, moving on silent feet down a particularly fetid alleyway.
“This is where much of the goods for the town are brought in by poled barge,” Tamsin breathed in my ear. “It’s also where a lot of the timber—supplied by lumber camps like the Leprechaun one that we helped out today—passes through on its way to Wyverngarth.”
I nodded, only half listening. I heard, not too far away, the sound of a rusted gate or door being opened.
“Hurry,” I said.
We rushed around a corner, down a couple of steps, and through a very tight space which looked like it had been carved out of a solid mound of refuse. Squeezing carefully through this space, we turned another corner and found ourselves nose to nose with a rusty wrought iron gate that led into a tunnel.
It was locked.
Beyond this gateway, there was a short stretch of tunnel that could just be made out in the dim light of the stars above and with the help of our heightened vision.
“That tunnel leads downward,” said Tamsin. She sniffed long and hard through her perfect nose, then breathed out through her mouth.
“I can smell oil lamp smoke,” she said. “Fresh. And the air isn’t as foul down there as it is up here.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I’m following your lead. I’m telling you that I think those two men went down there and lit an oil lamp—the smoke is acrid, which tells me the wick hasn’t started burning cleanly yet.”
I was about to say something inane about the gate being locked—with a nice, shiny new padlock no less—but I caught myself.
I reached out, took hold of the gate, and jerked it. I ripped it straight out of the mortar and set it one side.
Tamsin’s smile was a white line in the dim light.
“I guess we’re going in, Mike Noctis,” she said.
“I’d say ‘ladies first,’” I said. “But from what I saw earlier, I think we both know that you’re no lady.”
The white line in the darkness widened. “You’re fucking right I’m not,” Tamsin said. “Lead on.”
Thanks to our dragon-enhanced senses, the blackness that enveloped us within seconds of walking through that gateway wasn’t so much pitch as… smoky.
I had never been able to rely so heavily on my senses of smell and hearing to supplement my eyesight as I did then. Even my heightened touch played its part—and I don’t mean the touch afforded to me by my fingers. It was my feet that did most of the heavy work in that department. They felt every contour and groove and weakness in the steps under my feet, as Tamsin and I walked steadily down into the dark.
The steps were roughly hewn and cut from soft rock. The air smelled moist and earthy and minerally, but not rotten. It was obvious that we were corkscrewing down into the ground, below the bed of the river.
In due course, the spiraling hand-cut stairway leveled out and deposited the two of us into a dim corridor. It was a narrow and confined space, and I didn’t much like it. It wasn’t going to win any architectural prizes, that was for sure.
We paused to get our bearings then. I moved my booted feet carefully, and the sound of water greeted my ears. There was a little rivulet running down the center of the underground passage in which we were now standing.
Gods, I thought—ironically not knowing anything about the local religious beliefs to merit using the word ‘Gods’—please don’t let me get buried alive tonight. Please give me a chance to go back to The Nobody Inn and carry on where Tamsin and I left off.
“There’s only one way they could have gone,” I said.
I heard Tamsin take a couple of steps and slap at the wall behind us. “Correct,” she said. “It’s either go back the way we came or push on.”
I gave a soft laugh. I could feel that familiar tingling of adrenaline slowly building. “That’s no option,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We followed the passage onward.
After some time, even without the aid of our dragon-magnified senses, we noticed the light growing around us. The dull murmuring of many voices added to the sound of the running rivulet.
We continued, moving with greater and greater stealth. We were afforded, thanks to our dragon bonds, the ability to move almost noiselessly, complemented by the small stream running along at our feet.
The light broadened, until we found ourselves moving in a dull orange twilight.
“Torches,” Tamsin whispered into my ear.
She was right. The passageway widened ahead of us so that Tamsin and I could stalk along side by side. I made out two men standing on either side of where the tunnel opened into whatever space lay beyond. They were standing casually—not with military precision, or anything like it—holding long-shafted tridents by their sides. We were still hidden from the glow of their torches, and they weren’t dragonmancers so they wouldn’t have been able to see us.
“You go right, I’ll go left,” I said over my shoulder.
Tamsin didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
I slotted Noctis into my Head slot and used Blink to teleport behind the guard on the left.
In an instant, I appeared behind the guard. I reached up, covered his mouth with my hand, and drove my fist into his kidney. I hit him so hard that the man pissed himself on the spot—a first for me, I must say—then dropped to his knees with a gurgle of pain that was lost in the sound of the rivulet at our feet. I released his mouth but kept my hold on his head, then I squeezed his melon until it popped like, well, like a melon. I shook my hands to free them of blood and brain matter.
Never thought I’d actually be able to pop someone’s skull with my bare hands, but there you go.
I glanced to my side and saw that Tamsin had snapped the neck of her guard. She gave me a look that suggested I’d made an awful mess, and I shrugged.
Tamsin and I dragged the bodies and their ridiculous tridents out of sight, then slipped through the exit of the passageway and into the main underground atrium beyond.
“What kind of carnival of fuckuppery have we stumbled upon here?” I whispered as we emerged into the semi-light of the main chamber.
Tamsin and I had walked out onto the edge of what I can only describe as your garden variety satanic ritual.
We were standing in a large, hollowed out cavern—a subterranean hall almost. It looked as if it had been carved out by an army of dwarves armed with pickaxes and sledgehammers and only a rough idea on how to use them. Stalactites and stalagmites acted as pillars throughout the large open space. In short, it was something you might have found in the Mines of Moria, if the architect had been suffering from a hangover and had only had a rudimentary grasp on design in the first place.
Standing around the chamber, dressed in the cliched brown robes of the hopelessly devout were about fifty or sixty people. What really snared mine and Tamsin’s attention, like a catfish that had just been hooked with a whaling harpoon, was the spectacle taking place in the center of the chamber.
A dragon was chained there.
A dragon that was a little bigger than Noctis, chained, and spread out like a starfish in the middle of that underground chamber. Right under D
rakereach.
I didn’t know what was going on but, whatever it was, the person behind it had balls the size of goddamn watermelons.
The dragon was shackled with lengths of pure gold chain, which were then fixed to spikes of what looked like ebony, embedded deep into the ground. The chains were so taut that the dragon could only move its head.
“Look!” Tamsin said, pointing off to the right. “That’s Amara!”
At the edge of the chamber, fastened and cuffed and bound in much the same way as the dragon, was a woman—a dragonmancer. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, and a volleyball player figure. I recognized her as the woman who had stopped me at the gate of the Crystal Spire, when Elenari had first brought me from Los Angeles.
You didn’t have to be a genius to see that Amara was up to the roots of her beautiful blonde hair in the shit.
“What, in the name of all the gods, is going on here?” Tamsin murmured. Her voice was low, cold, and deadly. “What do these people think they’re doing?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure what they thought they were doing, but it sure didn’t look like anything good.
“What do you reckon?” I asked Tamsin, my voice a barely audible whisper. “Do we go for back-up, or do we stay and try to mop these guys up ourselves? Doesn’t look to me like Amara is here of her own volition, does it?”
“I’d say not,” Tamsin replied, watching our fellow dragonmancer heave and strain in the chains that wrapped her. “Why can’t she break out of those fucking chains? Conventional chains should present no challenge to one who has been bonded with a dragon.”
“Taking a wild stab in the dark, I’d say that they’re not conventional chains. Look,” I said.
It was hard to get a clear view of Amara through the milling crowd of rebels or insurgents or whoever they were. However, by craning our heads and still managing to keep in the shadows at the edge of the cavern, Tamsin and I witnessed Amara make every effort to get free from her bonds. The blonde woman, sweat beading her brow and sticking her fringe to her forehead, twisted and tensed, but the chains only clinked, and steam rose from them.
“Steaming chains? That looks like an enchantment to me,” I said.
“But what kind?” Tamsin asked.
“Damned if I know,” I replied. “How about we go out there and ask the leader of this sweet little gathering?”
“And who would that be, do you think?” Tamsin said.
“My money would be on that guy,” I said, jerking my head at a tall, robed figure that had just slid out of the crowd and was making its way toward the restrained dragon and dragonmancer.
“How the hell did Amara get herself into this mess?” I asked Tamsin as the tall figure walked purposefully out toward the dragon, and a ripple of excited whispering swept the crowd of onlookers.
“She was sent out on a scouting mission the other day,” Tamsin whispered as we lurked in the mouth of the tunnel and tried to remain inconspicuous.
“What about her squad? Shouldn’t they have been watching her back?”
“I overheard my coterie talking amongst themselves when I left you earlier this evening,” Tamsin said. “They were saying how pissed Amara’s squad were at having Captain Cade tell them that they would not need to accompany Amara on her mission. Apparently, Cade instructed them that they’d spend the entire day drilling on dragonmancer defense formations instead.”
“Fucking Cade’s name surfacing again,” I said.
“Like a bubble of marsh gas,” Tamsin growled.
“And, like marsh gas, it stinks,” I said. “I reckon that Cade is tied up in this somehow.”
At that moment, there was a scuffling of footsteps from behind us, and another robed figure came hurrying out of the tunnel. By the shape of her face and her almond-shaped eyes, she appeared to be a nymph of some kind—a forest nymph, I guessed, if her mossy green hair was anything to go by.
She was rushing down the tunnel, her eyes wide, and her hands covered in blood. I figured she’d just stumbled upon the two guards Tamsin and I had killed.
I switched Noctis to my Right Arm slot and flung a Shadow Sphere at the woman. The ball of black and white energy shot toward her. Her eyes widened just a tad more before it slammed into head. Instantly, her green-haired noggin vanished, and the rest of her body crumpled lifelessly to the ground.
A few days ago, I might have winced, but I’d witnessed a lot of bloodshed today, and I was starting to get immune to it all.
I returned my attention to the tall, hooded man in the center of the chamber as he reached the prostrate dragon. He wisely did not approach the beast’s head, but ran a hand down its scaled flank, caressing it. Then he walked around to where Amara was fastened to her ebony stakes, bent down, and stroked her hair. The dragonmancer gritted her teeth and tried to thrash in her bonds, but all she achieved was to have some more steam rise from the chains that held her. The hooded figure bent his hidden face to her ear. He must have said something that made an impression because Amara stopped trying to move and looked up at him, thunderstruck.
The hooded figure straightened to his full height, turned away from the prisoners, and raised his hands.
The murmuring in the cavern faded away and died.
Once he was sure he had everyone’s attention, the figure lowered his arms slowly and, as he did so, removed the hood that obscured his features. As the cowl dropped to his shoulders, he exposed a head of black hair shot through with gold, cold gray eyes, a mathematically precise beard, and an axe blade-thin face that I had had a hankering to dropkick ever since I had first laid eyes on it.
Captain Remington Cade.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“That son of a whore…” Tamsin hissed through her teeth at my side.
I was weighing up the options. Cade looked to be up to his fucking eyebrows in some serious degeneracy here, and I thought that Tamsin and I had better stop it. However, thanks to the solid education I had had in buddy cop movies and nineties action flicks, I was aware that there was always the chance that he was potentially in the midst of some undercover scheme.
Maybe Cade and Amara are doing whatever it is they’re doing as part of a sting or something? Maybe they’re about to spring the trap on these bunch of idiots any second?
Cade addressed the gathered throng of hooded figures, breaking into my thoughts.
“Sisters! Brothers!” he cried in his commandingly polite voice. “My thanks goes to you for assembling at such short notice. We are here, as you may have surmised, to finally put our plan through its initial testing phase!”
The swell of chatter rose again at these words. The attention of every person in that underground cavern was turned toward the middle of the space. Every eye was on Cade. There was a lot of elbow nudging, and some of the robed figures leaned in to exchange a few excited words with their neighbor.
Captain Cade held his hands up once more. When he next spoke, there was a bite of his old crispness in his voice.
“Yes, yes. It’s promising indeed. However, our plans have been fast-tracked somewhat due to meddling from the Empire’s military.”
There was a chorus of disgruntled mutterings at this. A couple of people yelled out “Down with the Empress!” and “A curse on tyranny!”
“Yes,” Cade continued, his voice riding smoothly over the cranky mumblings of his audience. “Yes, the fresh batch of dragonmancers that have been taken on by the Drako Academy have turned out to contain more zeal than I would have thought possible. There is a streak of meddling in them that has forced some of our plans to be pushed forward.”
“What does that mean?” someone in the crowd said in a loud voice. “Speak plainly! Every minute we spend down here with a trapped dragon and dragonmancer increases the likelihood of discovery.”
Captain Cade looked for a moment as if he’d like to give whoever had spoken the sort of reprimand that only a swift backhand could communicate. However, he swallowed the retort that was doubtless tickling the back of h
is throat and said, “It means that tonight we will run the first tests…”
The crowd began chattering in earnest. Cade had to raise his polite, authoritative voice considerably to be heard over the noise.
“We all know that the secret of the Transfusion Ceremony is one that is held more closely to the chest of the dragonmancers of the Drako Academy than any other. Even I, a Captain in the Empress’s own army, am not privy to that particular secret!”
The bitter resentment in Captain Cade’s voice when he uttered these words convinced me that this was not an elaborate set-up that he had been spearheading on the behalf of the Academy or the Empress Cyrene. There was no faking the disdainful jealousy that laced his words.
Tamsin looked at me, the question of whether we should move in shining in her eyes.
I shook my head. Not yet. I wanted to see exactly what Cade was mixed up in and with whom. I wanted to see what the envious, devious, vindictive asshole had been cooking, and why he had tried to have me and my squad killed by the bandits in the Windy Belt.
“Yes, we may not have been allotted sufficient time to puzzle out the secret that gives Drako Academy—and, more pertinently, Empress Cyrene—the power that holds the rest of us so firmly under their thumbs, but I have formed the best hypothesis that I can about how they give the dragonmancers their powers.”
“How?” someone yelled.
“Show us!” bellowed someone else, a note of hysterical eagerness crackling and echoing off the chamber ceiling.
“Yes, show us!” someone else agreed.
“I will!” Cade said, raising his hands once more. “Tonight, my brethren, we become Bloodletters not just in name, but in practice too!”