by Marc Secchia
The Dragon’s gesture seemed to gather momentum with the inevitability of an inescapable nightmare. “Back! Back!” Asturbar bellowed, but his unit had only begun to turn, to duck, to react, when the paw swept down with infeasible speed and force, and swatted the battling soldiers aside like so many pesky gnats. Ten gone before he could blink. Bantukor and three more felled.
The Dragon paused, seeming to concentrate its attention upon the tasty morsels scrabbling around his paws. His left forepaw, five feet wide and thirteen long, occluded the clearing sky once more.
Asturbar realised that the bone-storm had ceased. A broad field of scattered skeletal fragments lay quiescent.
The Necromancer was whole.
* * * *
In battle, hyper-awareness could be friend or enemy. Asturbar had been trained to recognise the state, to respect it and to turn it to his advantage. So it was now. He paused most incongruously in that heated flash of a moment to take stock, to scent the foetid char of the brutish Iolite Blue upon the light breeze, recognising peripherally a weakness in his right knee where he had fallen hard, and he quivered at an inward-rushing, crushing awareness of the soul. Mortality. Destiny. An infinite expansion of the spirit, sighing at the exquisite yet deathly beauty of the creature that peered down at him. Azhukazi’s fire orbs gleamed with the fearfully alien, mesmerising intelligence given to the most powerful Shapeshifter Dragons. His iolite scales were like glossy mirrors winking back the barrens and the dispersed bones in ten thousand fragmentary images.
Then the paw slapped downward, and Asturbar leaped beneath it. Deliberately. His upraised axe pierced the flat, granite-hard pad with a sound like ripping leather, while he braced the haft against solid rock. Impaled, the Dragon roared mightily, yet he pressed further, driving the weapon deep into his paw. The infantryman stood his ground. He bore the descending weight on his shoulders, hissing and cursing at his endangered men to rise, but only Bantukor stirred. A Shapeshifter Dragon of this size could weigh over fifty tonnes, despite that he had apparently rebuilt himself from bare bones. Asturbar stiffened every muscle in his body. Immense pressure! Overwhelming …
The Dragon cried out – perhaps pierced in a nerve centre – and lurched heavily to one knee.
Asturbar slipped free of the tilting paw, snatched up a stray battle-axe, and threw himself at the massive predator. He knew the thrill of madness. The joy of battle. The song of his spirit as he leaped from bony ankle to scaly knee, riding the Dragon’s startled attempted flick, exactly like a man who had discovered a plump, hairy spider on his hand, and soared up toward its – unholy champing fangs!
Not the best plan.
With a wild, mid-air chop, he managed to partially dislodge a fang just before he lodged between the upper and lower pincers of its massive maw. Cork in a skein. The Dragon champed down automatically, but its upper fangs shrieked uselessly against Asturbar’s back plates while grinding him into that newly carved gap. Asturbar chortled fiercely. Past time this lizard visited the dracodontist! Taking a short grip on the axe, he swatted at the Dragon’s tongue. A few token cuts. Then, his eyeballs popped as he saw flame, live greenish-blue flame, roiling somewhere down inside the beast’s gullet.
Vexatious madman! the beast snorted in Dragonish.
Asturbar fully expected to be turned into a slab of meat inside a roasting tin. He was a big man, so his shoulders would not slip back out again. What he did not expect was the Dragon to employ his fore-talon like a toothpick.
He popped free of that overheated death trap. Plummeted. Landed heavily upon a patch of sand, which at that moment felt like rock. “Gaah!”
For several long seconds, all he saw was pretty lights like the play of luminous dragonets across a fragrant night sky in their mating season.
Eyesight clearing. Muttering to himself, the Dragon was conjuring men and further Dragons from the bone piles. Cost me good troops, he did, the beast chuntered. His paws waved languidly, like a master weaver spinning the shuttle to create a striking tapestry. Arise, my beauties. Take up the flame of your reborn lives. I am Azhukazi the Iolite Blue, your lord and master. Follow me with the breath of undead magic empowering your souls!
Asturbar spat flecks of blood from his mouth.
His head swivelled. Shock piled upon shock. Here came the recently deceased troops of his unit, clambering out of the fosse to join the Dragon’s unholy army. Their eyes glowed green with the power infusing their flesh. He saw Bantukor on his knees, pleading, gibbering some kind of surrender.
None of that for him.
Asturbar scrabbled unsteadily to his knees as the Dragon sneered, Surrender? No such dishonourable deed will I consider, for you are nought to me but a craven worm!
“NO!” His voice sounded strange to his ears. Faraway. Desperate.
He sprinted toward his friend. The Dragon’s clenched fist descended. He dived.
A monstrous force pounded him into the naked rock. As darkness roared around his mind, Asturbar heard the Dragon roar:
Insignificant worms! Fetch me the Jewels of Instashi hid within this fortress. Nothing else matters!
The Jewels? The …
* * * *
“Jewels!”
He regained consciousness. Asturbar’s right hand explored the area around the small crater the impact of his body had created, before he groaned and tried to sit upright. His armour was clamped about his torso like a vice, squashed and misshapen, forcing him to take shallow, panicked breaths. Several ribs were broken for certain.
Lifting himself agonisingly into a half-sitting position, he checked his surrounds. Behind enemy lines. Soldiers marched past nearby, crossing the fosse over makeshift bridges. The House wards must already have been Spiked, because the Shapeshifter Marshal’s Dragonwing was making merry with the bulwarks around the heavily fortified entryway. The bombardment was white-hot, a constant stream of fireballs and explosions and lightning blasts. That would not hold for more than a couple of minutes longer, he ajudged.
He felt the dents in his armour gingerly. Suffering murgalizards, he felt like he had been run over by – well, by a Dragon. Asturbar began to laugh mirthlessly, but that hurt too much.
The Necromancer was here for the Jewels. At the realisation a neat latch seemed to click inside his head, spawning a rash of thoughts. That old family heirloom was stashed away down in the vaults, was it not? If a Dragon Marshal had flown his army two hundred leagues to attack a mercenary House over such a little-known bauble, then he had excellent reason to conclude that the Jewels of Instashi were a thousand times more valuable than anyone had ever imagined – anyone, save Azhukazi.
He knew one way to spite that Dragon.
Asturbar considered his new plan with untrammelled astonishment. Madness? Most likely. Maybe he was just a sore loser. Maybe Bantukor’s cowardice had jangled a nerve.
Worse, that pus-licking prowler had just absconded with his favourite battle-axe stuck in his paw.
Unforgivable.
Before Asturbar could ponder the matter with the benefit of actual logic or good sense, he found his fingers working hinges and ties and buckles. The armourers had been annoyed by his specification that they should build every clasp and lock to a size and in a position where he could operate them by himself. No servant armourers for him. He popped the greaves and vambraces loose with ease, and then the massive thigh and knee plates followed, but he became stuck at the damaged breastplate. Grip the edges. Slowly, with enormous force and pain, the Commander twisted the metal until one hinge popped free. He sank to one knee, sweating and trembling helplessly. Breathing as deep as he dared.
No time for leisure, soldier!
Ripping free of the last pieces of heavy armour, he snatched up his unconscious Infantryman’s axe – checking quickly that he was still alive – and stumbled away. In seconds, his heavy boots pounded against the ground once more. Retreat! Tactical retreat. He did not bother to make any attempt at concealment. When two soldiers tried to stop him, Asturbar sto
pped them first and harder. Axe for the left, hooked fist to the chest of the right. Every jolt stabbed pain into his right flank. Trap it. Tamp it down. He traversed the battlefield steadily, squinting suspiciously ahead and around him every few seconds. The Iolite Blue’s entire effort was focussed on the entryway. A second glance gave him a glimpse of eight Grey-Green Dragons – not Shapeshifters, but true Lesser Dragons – striking in concert. Rock fountained away from the impacts. Molten slag would be flowing already, the heavy bulwarks liquefying beneath the sustained assault of white-hot Dragon fire.
One way to end a House.
Faster! Picking up his knees, the hulking infantry Commander put his freakish musculature to work. Three hundred yard sprint. Slither down the ladder rails into a fosse. Thirty yards further. Trigger a hidden doorway and slam it shut behind him. Thundering down the inner tunnels that eventually led inside the fortress, if one avoided the traps. There was no tell-tale tingling of the magical wards that should have kept intruders out, wards that within a House could control movement even down to the Human level. Perhaps Azingloriaxii were easier to detect, since he was four times bulkier than an average man of Herimor? He felt nothing. That meant the House was unprotected and against that force without, his every military sense told him the House must fall.
Inside the lower tunnels, the soldier discovered controlled chaos as Marshal Chanbar organised a defence he had never expected to make. Asturbar slipped away, moving more stealthily now. It would not do for his theft to be observed.
Still, it took him a good twenty minutes to find Storemaster Inshi’itak’ti – Inches, they called him – and to relieve the insipid fellow of one particular key, leaving him with a very sore head and no idea what had hit him. Asturbar had belted him with calculated force. He didn’t dislike the man enough to crush his skull like an egg.
He raced for the treasuries, wondering meantime if he should shuck his gleaming argentonium undershirt – the heavy, chainmail-like garment that protected his tough skin from being pinched and bruised by the plate armour – in favour of a less visible alternative. The tunnels were dry and sparsely lit, smelling strongly of the desiccated herbs they stored at this level of the underground fortress. He rushed down four levels, his shoulders barely fitting inside the little-used spiral staircases he chose. He heard the movement of troops overhead – felt them, moreover, for the tread of so many Dragonkind within a fortress was not easily missed. Panting. Running. Checking corners. The treasury rooms were deliberately isolated and ordinarily heavily guarded, but a quick glance down into the antechamber showed it was deserted. The Marshal had called every trooper to the defence.
Good for him.
Asturbar whisked his aching body across the hundred-foot antechamber, paved in pink-speckled granite stone and lit by more of the smokeless torches, checking its arched, shadowed ceiling for any surprises. Aye! The slightest rustling alerted him as the Marshal’s pet reticulated sammokar, a Dragonish relative of the python said to have been developed by experiments conducted by Dramagon the Red, dropped from a hidden recess with its slavering fangs bared and arcing toward his neck. Asturbar dodged and kicked out with his heavy, iron-tipped left boot.
Thirty feet of violet-stippled sammokar shuddered. For good measure, he slammed a guard table down atop the beast before dashing on. Insert key. Now for the correct sequence of turns, which he was not officially authorised to know. Asturbar’s head could have been permanently separated from his shoulders for possessing such information – he had once found the plastered Storemaster semiconscious in a back room, and discovered that alcohol loosened the man’s tongue far too easily. He had volunteered the code. Four turns left, one three-quarters turn to the right, an upward wiggle, two left quarter-turns … click. Good. Still alive. With the deadly cobra poison traps disarmed, Asturbar levered the massive Dragon-proof treble doors open and slipped inside the deeply shadowed treasury rooms. Where had those jewels been? He had seen them twice, as a boy, during lessons meant to impress upon a callow youngster the indescribable glories of the House.
The only light was from the doorway. He scouted rapidly, checking display cases and ignoring the serried ranks of weapons and the mounded sacks of platinum marks. Those were protected with invisible magical markers meant – well, to encourage recovery of the punitive and permanently unhealthy sort for any prospective thief.
Sidling past rows of squat roof support columns that effectively separated square sections with their strong arches, Asturbar passed by the chests and sacks and spoils of decades of warfare, wrangling and squabbling – in common parlance, ‘business’ – until he came at last to the display case he dimly remembered. Perfect. Six eggs set in sapphire velvet cloth. Even in the near-complete darkness, he perceived their artistry. Someone had gone to enormous lengths to craft these ovoid jewels of uncertain pedigree with stipples and markings and knobs that together, formed breathtaking and most likely priceless gemstone sculptures.
Why should he feel mawkish now?
Oddly, as he stared through the thin, transparent glass at the quintet of eggs, Asturbar felt protective. Mine, he told himself. My treasures.
Then his huge right paw formed into a fist. He smashed the glass, made himself a thief worthy of the title, and turned.
Curse it!
How – had he lost track of time? Forgotten his defensive listening and perceiving? There were men in the treasury room already. Soldiers of his command, he reckoned, recognising the particular sound made by their heavy plate armour. Resurrected men, if he could say that, but Asturbar knew he had seen an accomplishment far removed from resurrection. The men moved with a slight hitch of the limbs, and the eyes beneath their helms did not gleam with that fey greenish light – they seemed hollow. Devoid of life, or feeling, or any form of compassion whatsoever. He shuddered.
“Thief!” someone shouted.
Had he been spotted? No, they must have heard the tinkling of breaking glass. He hugged the shadows, clutching his booty to his body one-handed, axe in the other. How to escape? How to survive?
“Cut off the exits!”
Freaking lizard slaves! No ward in Herimor could stop that Shapeshifter.
Cupping his hands to his mouth, Asturbar called with a trick of inflection he had learned from a ventriloquist, “Over here!”
The soldiers charged. To provide added impetus, he threw a random artefact, a gold plate, away into the darkness.
Clang! “This way! They went down here!”
Then, he slipped past. They were not smart enough to have left a guard by the door, so Asturbar just kept running. Three soldiers – previously living ones, he presumed – had fallen foul of the sammokar out there, and their grotesquely contorted bodies and fixedly staring eyes proclaimed their fate all too clearly. The sammokar in turn had been hacked to pieces. Good riddance.
Now, to plot his staggeringly astute escape.
* * * *
Three hours later, Asturbar was cornered together with three other soldiers of another unit he had joined up with, and his Intelligence Officer Hachiki. Escape over. Astuteness decidedly lacking. He touched the large pouch hidden beneath his gleaming gambeson. So, would-be thief, what next? Azhukazi had already reactivated the wards enough to help his forces systematically round up each and every one of the Marshal’s staff, down to the lowliest cleaning girl. They had been herded en masse into the Master Hall, the great dining and meeting hall at the heart of the fortress. Shrewd Dragon. The magical wards had highlighted exactly where the five fugitives were hiding and a Dragon stood outside the doorway, demanding their surrender.
But … surrender rather than annihilation? What did this portend?
One last gambit.
“Let’s go find out what they want,” he said jovially, clapping Hachiki upon the shoulder. The smaller man winced. “Alive beats being dead, eh, soldier?”
“Yes, sah.”
“We’re coming out!”
“Good,” growled the Dragon, mangling the word
s between his fangs. “You try Marshal Azhukazi’s patience, little Humans!”
With a few more hearty slaps, Asturbar encouraged the others to file out of the narrow storeroom ahead of him. Maybe they just wanted to avoid the heavy swat of his hand. At the back, he ducked his head and swiftly slipped the pouch open. Down the hatch, all eggs! Thank the fates for his size. The egg-like Jewels of Instashi were as large as two ordinary men’s fists put together. No problem for a maw conceived in Azingloriax, by ballad and lore made infamous for their greed – wrongly so, Asturbar would argue – and enshrined in the Isles saying, ‘When a Man out-eats a Dragon, amazing glory acts!’
Sadly, his oesophagus was not quite as happy with this arrangement as his brain had been. He almost choked on the fourth egg, scraped the fifth between his teeth and swallowed too hastily, and felt its sharp, bejewelled points score multiple cuts across his soft palette and down past his voice box. The sixth and final jewel was slightly larger than the rest. The other soldiers were outside already, being browbeaten by the belligerent Dragon. One second’s grace. He had to do it. Using his fingers to force his mouth open like a military dentist preparing to extract a tooth, Asturbar tried to devour the last family heirloom. His throat rebelled. Twice. And … on the third attempt, the ovoid moved down inside his neck with a sensation as though he had quaffed a goblet of fire. Gagging, heaving, choking, he stumbled out to face the Dragon.
The burly Grey-Green glared at him. “What’s the matter with you, soldier?”
Asturbar could not physically speak. The egg was lodged immovably in his throat; he felt as if his eyeballs would pop out from the pressure of the circulatory constriction in his neck. Dissemble! Dribbling weakly onto his palm, he showed the Dragon a gobbet of blood.
“Wounded?” snarled the beast. “Good. With me, you worthless miscreants.”
He was in far too much discomfort to laugh at the thuggish Dragon mispronouncing the word, ‘miscreant.’ Still, irony was fun of a sort before the Iolite Blue obliterated them all.