“But you work for the royalty, not them, right?” I asked.
His smile was only a little regretful. “Well, sure. They’re the ones who can afford us. Ideals don’t pay the bills.”
“But that’s not fair,” I said, before I could stop myself. I already knew what they’d say.
“It’s not fair,” Aella agreed. “But that’s how it is.”
“What’s not fair about working for the people who can afford our services?” Mariah asked at the same time.
“It’s not as though we could stand up against the actual Elyrian army, if we did take the rebellion’s side,” Conner added, nodding at Mariah.
Tired of being lectured on the duties of a mercenary, I acquiesced quickly, not wanting to argue about it again. As talk turned to lighter subjects, I privately vowed to avoid asking about the people my new friends had been hired to fight against in the future. It wasn’t fair, but maybe they were right. Maybe life was just dealing with a series of unfair choices.
Not that that sentiment didn’t chafe me worse than a new pair of boots. I didn’t know enough about the world to argue against it though. It wasn’t as though my own experience gave me much room to talk.
Instead, when Aella and I met back up later that evening, I steered the conversation to what I had the greatest interest in: the stories the four of them had in spades, of all the different creatures they had run into.
While different types of gryphons and lesser gryphons nested all over the country, they were not a problem south of the mountains like they were where I was from. Mostly what the rest of the country dealt with were small flocks of lesser gryphons, and the occasional, but even rarer, lone standard gryphon. Outside of the harsh wintery climate that I hailed from, other types of great monsters had the ability to thrive, and in many ways, they were higher on the food chain than gryphons.
The notion was incredible to me—that any creature could make a standard gryphon think twice about nesting in an area, but that’s what I was told.
“No gryphons in the desert.” Aella informed me. She said it in a tone that made me suspect she was attempting to bolster my excitement about the prospect. Perhaps she knew that the idea of facing another gryphon any time soon gave me little panic flutters in my chest. “Southern cities always have work with dragons. That’s where we spend most of our time.”
“Dragons though…” I said, as she and I walked together from the mess hall, and out the rightmost causeway to the building Mariah’s room was in. “I’d always been told that dragons flew through the air and spat fire. That’s not what these are though, from the sound of it.”
She nodded. “You’re right. I don’t know where those stories come from. I’ve certainly never seen a dragon that could fly, thank the gods—and they’re actually known more commonly to the people of the south as drakes. That’s what a dragon is called when it doesn’t have wings.”
“Kind of like how the tales of the ones with wings, but without forelegs call them wyverns.” Luke had come up behind us, making me jump.
Aella chuckled. “Right, and the ones with only wings and forelegs at all are called wyrms.”
“Worms?”
“Wyrms,” Luke said, putting emphasis on the y.
“Are those real?” I gaped at them both, stumbling over my own feet.
Lucas laughed then. “Not as far as I’ve ever seen. You’d think people would be satisfied with the real-life horrors that they have, but you know… they feel like they have to make up stuff too.”
We went single-file up the dark stairs of the rightmost barracks, which were nearly identical to our own stairs, if a little narrower.
“So, what are real drakes like?” I asked. “What’s the truth?”
“Hmm…” Luke pushed through the door at the top of the stairs, letting the light of the second story wash over us. “Well, they can hold their breath for ages. Because of that, they spend most of their time skulking in the sewers.”
Ahead of us, Conner, who looked like he was about to knock on Mariah’s door, heard our voices and glanced back. “What’s that?”
“Drakes,” Aella said.
“Oh.” His tone was dismissive. “Pests when they’re small, but they grow fast.”
Mariah opened the door. “Come on in. I’m sure you saw, my roommates are already down in the mess hall, preparing themselves to bother me later. What are you lot talking about?”
Inside Mariah’s room, Aella finished giving me the rundown on drakes and what dangers they posed. Besides sharp teeth and claws, when threatened or hunting they sprayed an acidic salt and sulfur combination. That pungent liquid wore away at metals, poisoned waters, and could burn the flesh off someone who tried to do battle with them. They also kept growing their whole lives, which could be a problem if they were left unchecked.
The discussion about drakes opened into one about all the other monsters, and where I would see them. My friends took it upon themselves to educated me when they learned that, while I knew the names of most of the strange creatures that walked the continent, and had heard descriptions of them, I didn’t really know anything about them. I didn’t know where they lived, if they ran in groups, or how big they truly were. I never thought I’d be anywhere near them, so I hadn’t bothered to learn.
“The most common creatures to the east are these winged deer-like creatures with razor teeth, called perytons,” Mariah said. “You know what those are, right?”
I nodded uncertainly. “I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never seen them before.”
“Wait a moment.”
As we settled ourselves around the room Mariah went to her dresser where she pulled out a thickly bound book. Flipping carefully through its pages until she had found the proper one, she then handed it over to me.
I gasped. I was looking at a wonderfully detailed sketchbook with careful labels and some pictures in full color. Those drawings proved that the supposed similarities I had heard of between peryton and deer were superficial, at best. Their muzzles were too long, with the barest white tips of fangs poking downward. As well as the great wings that sprouted from their shoulders, their hind legs and tails were also that of a large bird. Even more strange was that they appeared to be green.
“Are they really this color?” I asked, pointing, but not letting my fingers touch the picture. “That can’t be right, right?”
Luke took the book from me, and turned the page to the back, where someone had written out a description of perytons. “The creatures blend into deep boreal forests because their fur and feathers grow moss so thickly that they appear to be green,” he read. “And that’s true. I’ve seen a dead one up close. It grows on practically each hair. I don’t actually know what their real color is.”
“Brown,” Mariah said, “like normal deer. The babies look like normal fauns almost, but, you know, with wings and bird legs. If you read further, it talks about what makes them dangerous. They really are like strange deer most of the time. They barely fly. They’re shy. Supposedly, it’s only if they taste blood that things go wrong. Even if it comes from licking a cut on themselves. They go mad and won’t eat anything else after.”
“Why supposedly?” I asked. “You’ve fought them. Don’t you know for sure?”
Mariah shrugged. “I’ve fought a few mad ones, sure, but there’s no way to know why they’ve gone off. Just legend and superstition. You know.”
I did know. We all did. Monsters like gryphons and perytons and the rest had been created long after the rest of the world. Possibly as recently as a few hundred years ago. A guild of mages had done the work, and legend had it, promptly been punished by the gods for their troubles. After that, and the resulting chaos, their notes might have remained in their private libraries for others to find and study.
Might have, because no one really knew where those libraries had gone. It was possible that they had been among the casualties of the previous ruler’s conquests. Much of Somerlarth, and the surrounding lands had bee
n destroyed when King Richard and his wife Queen Illane had decided they wanted to expand their empire, by any means. Their crusade later became known as The Great Burning, as many towns and estates experienced violent sieges that often involved the fire of mage battles. As libraries burned, a great deal of knowledge disappeared or was lost, including the scrolls which held the details of the creation of the monsters. Which, if I was honest with myself, was probably just as well. The last thing we needed was someone finding those notes and trying to improve upon them.
“Anyway, it’s not too common,” Mariah assured me. “And unless that happens, they’re known to be reclusive. They don’t look to cause trouble.”
Speaking of beasts that preferred to avoid humans…. Elsewhere in Elyria and to the south, in Oshkana, there were giant birds the color of sunsets. I took the book back from Lucas to search for them. These creatures would, on occasion, burst into flames in order to molt, causing forest fires, and I wanted to see if anyone had drawn that.
That little detail of them becoming raging infernos was a shame, because much like the peryton, phoenixes were naturally shy creatures. However, since their molting made them so dangerous mercenaries were often called upon to kill them or move them, which was more difficult.
When a search through the entire book proved fruitless, I shut it against the picture of a hissing gryphon. “Phoenixes?”
“It’s hard to get a good likeness of them,” Conner told me, “because right after they molt, their plumage is a red so deep that it’s almost black until the light strikes them just right. That’s hard enough to get right on paper. If an artist wants to be brave and paint them right before a molt? That’s even harder. Their colors shift. Oranges, yellows, and bright reds—and everything in between. Sometimes within seconds of one another.”
“That sounds… fake,” I said. “Are you putting me on?”
But everyone assured me that he wasn’t. They told me that phoenixes were shaped almost like water birds—like loons, with bright red eyes, but otherwise that his description was right on point.
Seventh and Twelfth Company were known monster killers, and Ninth Company had worked across most of the country. Together they had seen all there was to see, no matter how unbelievable it was to me.
After they had given me the rundown on all the monsters there were to see in Somerlarth and the surrounding lands, they couldn’t help but compare what it was like to fight them. None of them could reach an accord on which beast was the most fearsome or fantastic. I’d thought gryphons were the worst, but I was alone in that. Instead, manticores came close to winning, and the more I heard, the less I disagreed.
“Manticores are like… gosh… I don’t know.” Aella tapped her mouth with the palm of her hand, trying not to move her head, since I was pulling her hair back into a more intricate series of braids. If I did them right, they would look as though they were all looped together. Nai had taught me how to do it a few weeks ago. I blinked. No. It would have been more than that now. Almost a year.
Shaking off that small confusion, I returned my attention to Aella, who seemed to have found the right words. It was a cold night, and we had been gathered around the fire in Mariah’s room, drinking and talking for a few hours at that point. Her words slurred slightly as she spoke, and it was funny to realize how little she had drank when she had gone with me and my one-time friends out to the woods in Nophgrin. Like the rest of the mercenaries, she must have been holding back.
“They’re like if you took a gryphon, packed on another ton of muscle, and then stuck a hot poker in its haunch and twisted. They’re big, they’re mean, and they have way too many ways of killing you.”
“They’re terrifying,” Conner agreed. “Whoever took the lead on making them was clearly having a bad day. It’s not just that they’re huge. The bat wings and the scorpion tale… those things on top of a lion’s body is a lot. And their mouths…”
“What about them?” I asked, tying off the last braid. I tapped Aella’s shoulder to let her know I was done. I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer, but I knew it was something I’d need to learn about sooner or later.
“They’re too big,” Conner said. He beckoned to Mariah, who scooted over to get the shoulder massage he had promised her earlier in the day, when she had complained about them hurting. “I don’t really know how to explain it. They’re too wide. It’s like they were designed to take a person whole.”
“Right, but drakes are able to plan better than manticores,” Luke pointed out. He thought drakes were the worst of all the monsters, and his comment required a tangential discussion on which magical monsters really had the ability to see the big picture and think ahead.
The idea was a frightening one. Any mountain dweller knew that gryphons were aware of ways to lose someone who was tracking them. They reacted to things cleverly. Thinking ahead though… to me, that bespoke an ability to plan, and that was more than I wanted any monster to be able to do. If a monster could plan ahead, it could plan ways to lure prey. To trap them. In something bigger and meaner than a gryphon, those traits would be devastating. I stuck my tongue out and shuddered as a chill swept over me, despite the fire crackling in the hearth.
“Blessedly, drakes and gryphons are in a rank of their own when it comes to those skill sets,” Luke assured me, seeing my discomfort. “From my experience, all of the magically made beasts are more intelligent than mortal animals, but those two breeds are the smartest, and even they aren’t like humans.”
Luke’s claim that manticores were too brash to have real intelligence did not go over well with Conner. The two of them bickered good-naturedly over whether drakes were worse to face, especially since manticores were solitary creatures.
That piqued my attention. I’d thought all the larger monsters were solitary. Even standard gryphons tolerated each other in only small doses, when mating. As it turned out, drakes would stay close with their clutch-mates for several years, until competition for food became too great.
The debate raged on until the conversation wandered into talk of people. That made me nervous, but luckily, they didn’t seem inclined to talk about people they had fought. Rather, they talked about the people who hired them. What they could all agree upon was that even when hired to do so, they often didn’t end up having to kill a monster at all.
Though no story was quite like mine, they could recollect time and again being called to a town because a gryphon, dragon, or manticore was killing livestock— only to find that the culprit was the local priest or the farmer’s neighbor.
“You get an eye for it,” Mariah said languidly. The sun had long since sunk below the walls outside her room, and her roommates were still down in the mess hall, drinking. “You ask a villager which of their livestock has been taken, and if it’s the prized pig, or the most robust cow, well, it’s probably not an animal catching it.” She pulled a cork-screw curl straight in front of her eyes, going cross-eyed to look at it. “Magically made or not, animals are simple. They go after what’s easiest to get. Humans are simple too. They go after what’s most valuable.”
“A lot of it is knowing the tracks backward and forward,” Conner said. He had moved on from Mariah and was now kneading at the knots in Aella’s shoulders. “You’re lucky that you’ve spent your life right next door to gryphons. You’ll be their resident expert every time they go north.”
I smiled at him. Time and more information had softened my jealousy of Conner. If he and Aella had ever been intimate, the time was long past. Like many of the mercenaries, he was interested in both men and women, but he preferred same-sex partnerships. He liked to joke with Luke that it was easier than spawning children higgledy-piggledy, or spending money on continually refreshing an anti-pregnancy charm.
“I suppose that’s true. What sort of animals did you grow up around?”
“Chickens.” Conner made a face. “Cows. I grew up in the heart of the capital. Took up mercenary work just for a breath of fresh air.”
We all laughed at that. No one became a mercenary “just because,” though some were more open about how they had come to the work than others. Whereas someone older might have come to this line through their own bad decisions, debts, or personality defects, people our age were more likely to have come to mercenary work because of parental poverty or death. This life was not a breath of fresh air for anyone. More like the result of a gale force wind, where everything else had been stripped away.
“Yes, if my ma hadn’t gotten sick,” Mariah said, dryly, “I might have been breathing in chicken air as well.”
“You’re from the capital?” I asked, and she nodded.
“Well, not the capital exactly, but nearby, in the midlands. My pa worked there as a chandler’s assistant. My ma worked in the service of a lady.”
“So how did you end up here? I mean, is that all right to ask?”
She made a face. “It’s fine. I don’t mind telling. My pa died when I was so high.” She raised her hand level with the top of the mattress of the bed she was sitting beside. “The master chandler got them a job in the capital, and my pa went with him. He got knifed, some time during that trip. I honestly don’t even know the whole story. Ma would only tell me that much.”
“Oh… Mariah, I’m so sorry,” I said, but she was still speaking.
“We were all right, for a few more years. The lady ma worked for said she understood what it was like to fall on hard times. She gave Ma a raise, and we were able to put some of it away. Then ma’s balance went out. It was slow at first. She’d get dizzy, and she’d need to sit down, but it would clear up. Eventually though, walking got to be impossible, and the lady let her go.”
I made a noise of outrage, but it was Luke who muttered, “Typical.” He moved closer to her and rested a hand on her thigh.
Mariah covered his hand with one of her own. “The healer said the sickness was going to keep getting worse, and they couldn’t just make her well. It was something in her head, and it needed years of small healing sessions to fix. We didn’t have the money for that. I got my first job when I was thirteen, to help with our savings cushion, but when she was fired our money got ate up pretty fast… The town had so few opportunities. The way I looked at it, my choices boiled down to mercenary work or going to the capital for work.”
Of Dragon Warrens and Other Traps Page 8