The Dragon Knight and the Steam World

by D. C. Clemens

  “I don’t have such faith in kidnappers and murderers, but I suppose we see things differently.”

  “Aye, we do. I see someone who’s not much of anything without his dragon. No fancy armor, no fancy wings, no fancy fire to burn away the corruption you can barely handle.”

  “I’m aware. It’s why I’m here. I want to pay back Aranath for all he’s done for me, just like you need to pay me back for not allowing you be executed.” A scoffing snort echoed in Alex’s helmet. “Life is simple for you right now, little brother. Stick with me until I trust you won’t go out in the world and start your own cult.”

  Not interested in anything else my still contentious relation had to say, I summoned Aranath. Not looking to head to Peladelle on a day I expended huge chunks of prana summoning Aranath twice, we went back to Grissel’s Watchtower. I also needed to inform the others how the repelling strategy worked.

  In the mood to amuse myself and churn Alex’s stomach, I directed the sky lord to fly with flair. He ascended, dove, rolled, and somersaulted, all with nigh reckless speed. Moreover, there was a brief period where the dragon flew upside down right above the water. On stepping foot on the ground again, even his corruption could not stop Alex’s dizziness and clenched insides from adding a wobble to his gait.

  After notifying Ghevont that a group of fiends did flee from us, he asked, “Then you mean to head for Peladelle tomorrow, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “In that case, may I ask how long I shall wait here for you?”

  “Hmm, if all goes well, it shouldn’t be more than a week. But you’re not really asking about everything going well, are you?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “I’m glad to hear you’re learning to be tact. Keep it up with others, but I don’t mind your brusqueness when it’s only us.”

  “Ah, very well. It strikes me that it will be difficult to ascertain whether you’ve died or not in a land I cannot enter on my own. If something happens to your physical self, I may be waiting quite a long time here.”

  “I see your problem. Well, if I’m out there for more than a couple of weeks, you can request our hosts here to send for more books for you to study. If there’s no word after a couple of months, I suppose that’s when you might have to suspect the worst has happened. Still, it will ease my mind now if I knew you’ll be here for at least three months. It won’t force me to rush anything in case I’m forced to take things slower than I’d like.”

  “A manageable request.”

  “Thank you. As for Ujin, you can tell him that he won’t have to stay so long. He seems the type that will go stir-crazy in a place like this. Anyway, if several thousand fiends are enough to kill me, I don’t deserve to be a dragon knight.”

  “That requirement strikes me as being too stringent, no?”

  “Unless…”

  “Unless… Oh! Right. You’re not quite serious.”

  “Aye. Continue honing your conversation skills with Ujin. That should help pass the time. Maybe not for him, but I care less about that.”

  Chapter Seven

  In the transition period between late at night and early in the morning, we soared over the channel. The idea was to get as much daylight as possible while on foot, so I risked spending some of the sinister night over Degosal. It helped that the light coming from the half moon was only somewhat dimmed by the patchy, faint clouds suspended over us. In lieu of thrilling aerial maneuvers that squandered energy, Aranath started high in the sky so he could efficiently glide for a while. When he got low, he simply climbed the air again.

  Sometimes the dragon snarled or barked a roar. It wasn’t until the burgeoning sun sprayed its rays along the sky did I see his warning cries came when a harpy flock below us fluttered too close for comfort. There must have been two or three thousand harpies in view within the next couple of hours, but they at least appeared incapable of forming flocks greater than several dozen. Like my brother and my younger self, playing well with others was not a strength of corruption.

  Without signposts in the sky, Aranath’s sight relied on the directions explained to him. The first major indication that he flew the right way was a large lake west of a small mountain range running north to south. From there he turned to a western bearing. There was supposed to be a forest near the castle, but it was clear that most trees anywhere we looked had long ago been consumed or burned to nothing. The next best natural feature to look for was a winding river. A handful of towns with castles were to be found alongside it.

  Naturally, the dragon knight journals provided detailed descriptions and illustrations of Peladelle and its neighbors. According to them, Peladelle’s most distinguishing attribute was its shape. Its form viewed from above resembled a thick, marginally oblong ring. Indeed, until they took a closer look, the dragon knights first mistook it as an arena. So using their information, Aranath inspected each riverside ruin his shadow swept across.

  About half an hour before the prana in my reserve decreased to an uncomfortable level, Aranath flew closer to the ground. After another circle around the ruins, he said, “That must be the castle.”

  Staring below, I soon made out a five-story tall stone ring dyed a brownish orange by centuries of unchecked sand and dirt blowing against its walls. Much of that earth piled up in the circular courtyard. Another heap clogged the windows and doors of the castle’s western side. Agreeing with the dragon, I slapped the back of his neck a couple of times. Even if we were wrong, it’s not as though I had the prana to keep going for long.

  Aranath dove, except he did not aim for the castle. As per previous instructions, the fire breather was to char the ground near the castle. For what was apparently the point of origin for the invaders, the ruined town east of the castle did not appear to have more than fifty fiends scurrying or flapping out in the open. Nevertheless, Aranath spewed a long line of fire between town and castle. With my partner expending prana on his flame, I needed to take a stronger hold of his link to Orda until he finished claiming his territory.

  Of course, nonsensical beings were going to be harder to convince to respect new boundaries than saner beasts. They would ramble toward the castle once the smell of dragon fire diluted or the wind shifted the scent away from them. In any event, as long as my brother’s corruption stayed strong, I trusted they would not be too eager to investigate the newcomers.

  After the semi-circular burn mark in the sand had been drawn, Aranath went ahead and landed on the sturdiest section of the castle’s roof. It buckled, but it held his weight for the moment we needed to jump off him. He let out a baleful roar before I referred him back to his realm.

  “Why couldn’t your dragon just burn the whole place down?” asked Alex.

  “If it was so easy, the last dragon knights would have done it. Destroying this place might only end up blocking the most straightforward access to the portal, not block the place or places the fiends actually pop out from. Now then, the Advent have experience with secret entrances. Any advice on where to start?”

  “I don’t think you get the point of a secret entrance. It could be anywhere.”

  “Right. Let’s get started.”

  I walked over to the worst gash on the roof. At six feet long and three feet wide, the open wound gave me the space to drop an explosive stone. Its pop incited some shrill croaks from somewhere deeper in the building. I recognized them as scamps. Unsheathing my sword, I fell through the crevice.

  Going by the row of seven rectangular stone foundations that once supported beds, I had entered one of the servants’ quarters. Everything made of wood or cloth had rotted away or been consumed by fire, insects, or fiends an eon ago. Since the dry air outside having a plethora of ways to get in, and with nothing softer than stone to cling on to, no musty smell pervaded this part of the decayed structure.

  Alex dropped behind me, his blade unsheathed as well. “Do you have any idea where to start?”

  “The records mention that straightforward sweeps of
the castle grounds uncovered nothing of note, so we shouldn’t expect the entrance to be hiding under a simple trapdoor or something.”

  “How do we even know the entrance is in this place at all?”

  “It’d be strange to pick up a portal’s aura under here without it meaning anything. Most of the other portals were apparently kept out of sight in isolated places or hidden less creatively, so this one is clearly a little more special. Who would go through the trouble of concealing a portal under a castle if the castle itself wasn’t meant to be used as an entry point?”

  “I guess.”

  “Let’s start getting a sense of what we’re dealing with. Take point, but don’t chase after any fiend we run into, at least not until we get a good idea of the layout and I recover some prana.”

  “Yeah, yeah, got it.”

  Alex poked his head through the gap where a door used to be. Seeing nothing, he stepped out. The hallway with no windows already blocked the natural light, though holes in the roof beyond the visible curve provided more than enough for now. However, it was obvious some significant cloud cover or the onset of evening would drench the inner rooms and halls in a premature nightfall. Alex, taking them from Aranath’s saddle, carried three torches for such an occasion.

  We did not want to creep up on a fiend and inadvertently scare it into attacking, so there was no attempt to be sneaky. Indeed, to check for hollowed out sections of the walls and floors, I tapped them with my sword every so often, producing loud clangs that reverberated down the passageways. Sometimes the clatter would get nearby scamps to sound off in a croaking chorus. Less frequently, their shadows crossed into view, but a burst of Alex’s prana shooed them away. In this manner we scrutinized each room and hall in the top floor.

  While spacious, the chambers held no tangible evidence of once being inhabited. Considering few adventurers and plunderers possessed the means to travel this far inland, I figured there should have been gold or silver trinkets left over, but it seemed there had been an effort by unknowns to pick the place clean. While not mentioned in their journals, perhaps the dragon knights were responsible. Or maybe there happened to be enough time during the Cataclysm for people to gather their precious belongings before leaving. Whatever the reason, I began thinking I might visit another city and try treasure hunting once I was done here.

  Through the third floor windows, I marked scamps warily approaching the burn mark Aranath left. Scamps on the inside continued to avoid us. However, I overheard increasing boisterousness from them the farther down we went, not to mention smelling a blend of their shit in various states of dryness and the rotten leftovers of whatever they ate. I assumed the uppermost floors were relatively uncontaminated due to the scamps’ reluctance to dwell near the purview of the harpies.

  With fragments of bones, claw marks on the walls, dried blood on the floors, and larger mounds of waste marking our path downward, the stairwell we descended to get to the second floor was already looking much more lived-in than the areas we finished investigating. The sand pile outside choked out the sunlight, forcing me to keep an ember of dragon fire fed as we traversed this part of the castle.

  The scamps were becoming bolder. Alex’s pulse of prana got them to scatter, but for an increasingly shorter amount of time and distance. Their dancing shadows never left our sights, and a few of the bigger ones never let their beady eyes lose us. It was getting harder to drive them out of a room so we could inspect it. Alex needed no permission from me when he cut down the first scamp to persuade its kin to leave us be.

  As expected, the first floor provided the worst environment to pass through. Alex could no longer keep the fiends away on his own. While keeping a flame going in the failing light thwarted my ability to fully recover my prana, feeding the dragon flame the pulse of corruption did a better job of disbanding the voracious predators than not keeping the flame lit. Of course, the drawback was how quickly my prana diminished using such a technique.

  We soon discovered that these scamps also had greater cause to defend their territory than in preceding floors, for several rooms contained dozens of their lemon-shaped, lemon-sized eggs. The varicolored, speckled shells appeared almost leathery, and clusters of three or four were kept together in a semi-transparent membrane. These nests could not be probed for long before the presumed parents returned in force. To say nothing of the outside scamps braving through the scorched streak to spy on the fuss we caused.

  Therefore, after weighing my options, I determined the first floor and basement levels were better left until Alex and recouped our lost prana. There was a fourth floor chamber at the end of a narrow hall I liked as a place to hide away for a couple of hours, so we started to head back up for that.

  On making a turn to climb up the stairwell leading to the fourth floor, Alex stepped backward to get a better look of the eight-foot wide gap between the wall and bottom half of the steps.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He tilted his torch toward the back wall. “Look at the crack there.”

  I extended my arm to get the flame I “held” closer to Alex’s point of interest. From the floor to about seven feet up the wall rose a decently wide fracture. Such a crack was not uncommon given the old castle’s age and the fact its eastern side appeared to be sinking into the ground. We reviewed this space beforehand, but with Alex giving specific attention to the fissure, I saw what intrigued him. Despite how deep and broad the top of the fissure was, it abruptly came to a stop right below an intact stone block. Additionally, my illumination revealed all the stones above the crack appeared cleaner and free from damage altogether.

  I stepped up to the wall and slapped the tip of my sword above the crack. The clang sounded lower-pitched and the reverberation felt softer than any stone hitherto. Delivering a harder blow to the same spot produced an almost imperceptible ripple that spread out for several inches. It felt a lot like a ward, one so powerful I would not have been surprised if it started to numb my arm. Fortunately, no such thing occurred.

  I blackened my flame, then tossed it at the center of the upper wall. It resisted with a wobble, only for whole wall above the crack to burst a half second later. A cool whoosh of formerly obstructed air blew out from the new opening.

  “A ward spell combined with an illusion one,” I said. “The Advent ever cast something like that?”

  “Maybe they did. I never checked all their illusion spells to see if any were solid.”

  “So no.”

  “Whatever. You should pay more attention to the fact that this magic has lasted for a long-ass time.”

  “Or someone cast it recently.”

  “Who would bother casting an illusion spell in a ruin no one can get to?”

  I shrugged. I next reached up and grabbed on to the edge of the square opening to pull myself off the ground. Sitting on the edge, which was no thicker than the length of my hand, I asked Alex to hand me his torch. I studied the breach with its light.

  While the torch’s light easily illuminated the ceiling of the shaft, its rays fell far short of its base. The inner walls of the shaft were filled with bumps and indents, presumably acting as foot and handholds so someone may climb up or down the four by four vertical tunnel. A thin, glittering band of whitish rock drew my eye to the left edge of the stone. Due to its straightness and the fact it lined all four edges, it was clear that it was purposely embedded in the stone. The spell’s energy source?

  “What are you looking at?” asked Alex.

  “Vlimphite, I think. Could explain how the cloaked ward stayed up for so long.”

  “That must be a lot of vlimphite.”

  “Yeah, I can’t tell unless someone digs it out. There’s no ladder, but the stone is uneven enough for us to climb down.”

  “Then let’s get this over with.”

  “I’d prefer we get some rest first.” I hopped off the edge. “If the portal is really down there, then who knows how many fiends we’ll encounter. Best we wait a few hours.”<
br />
  “A few? That long? Real warriors without corruption won’t worry about taking care of a few scamps and hounds.”

  “Well, I’d really prefer to wait until dawn’s light.”

  “For what? We’re going underground. There’s not going to be any sunlight down there.”

  “Ah, then we’ll just wait a couple hours here.”

  “Ugh, fine.” Alex went to sit on one of the lower steps. After a minute, he asked, “Wait, did you mention waiting until dawn just to get me to agree with you?” He saw me shrug. “Don’t treat me like a child you can trick.”

  “Then I’ll use adult tricks.”

  “Arrogant asshole.”

  The lit torch approached its death ten or so minutes later. Not wanting to waste its last light, I got back on the shaft’s edge and dropped it. I watched it fall somewhere between seventy and eighty feet before a rattling splash quenched the embers. The evidence of water got me hoping this shaft wasn’t merely the best hidden well in all of Orda.

  I proceeded to use a dagger to try and chip out some of the rock surrounding the entrenched vlimphite. However, the density of the stone made it a difficult affair. No doubt it had been made stronger with earth magic. I would have to use too much prana in my strikes to make real headway.

  We only needed to chase away a few scamps every now and again, so our prana recovered without too many interruptions over the next couple of hours. Nevertheless, the mounting ruckus of harpies outside brought additional scamps inside. That led to less space at the lower levels, causing an upsurge of scampering feet at our floor.

  “Either we go now or we waste energy chasing them off,” said Alex.

  “Then follow me.” I once again hauled myself up to the shaft. “Light both torches and hand me one.”

  Alex, after pouring out all the oil from a pouch, sparked our torches to life by striking a rock against his blade. I grasped mine and set my feet in the first stable cavities I found. With one hand holding the torch, I judiciously descended the wall. My brother came along when he got the space. As often as possible, I opted to put my hand and feet within recesses, figuring they had less chance to crumble compared to the jutting stone. Despite my precaution, when I did step on a protrusion, it held quite well. It seemed the stonework all along the shaft had been strengthened by magic.