by Marc Secchia
Why was she so afraid of the Iolite Blue?
“It’s not alright,” cried the dragonet in his hands, before switching to her diamond bracelet form. She trembled against the pulse of his wrist. “It’s far, far from alright!”
“It’s me he wants,” Asturbar said grimly.
“Truly? How can you be sure?”
“Argh!” he gritted between his teeth. “You’ve a way of opening up whole realms of unpalatable possibility to this simple soldier, Nyahi. What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”
Yet something was in rather scarcer supply than nothing, Asturbar reported sourly to his Commanders and Dragons as they met at dawn. Nothing was the sum total of the damage they had managed to inflict upon Azhukazi’s forces, who having set up camp overhead, proceeded to do very little at all. Azhukazi crouched motionless beside the blackened circle. Five hours was his vigil. Sitting, doing nothing, whilst his troops risked life and limb to destroy any Drake that dared to approach.
The Marshal said, “And there he squats like a ghoulish carrion eater, gathering bones. I don’t like it and neither should you. I want additional sweeps of every corridor beneath level seven and checks on the activities of every soldier.”
“And the Dragons,” said Yuaki.
“Yes. He’ll have at least one creature on the inside, if not a team. We need to sniff out his plan before he executes. Thoralian’s forces appear impotent against their shields and protections, as are our conventional weapons – save for the Iridium Dragoness, and I believe that despite the success of her attack, which has left Azhukazi visibly wounded in the left wing and downed one of his other Shifters –”
“Hopefully permanently,” Bantukor growled.
“Indeed. He’s gravely injured at the very least … my assessment? We may well have revealed our strength too early. Iridiana?”
She said diffidently, “Yuaki and I believe he may be doing something with the bones of the Drakes downed in the pit. There must be well over a thousand corpses down there now, burned and fresh, and while we all might wonder what even a reanimated creature could do against solid rock, there’s no knowing what other powers the Necromancer might have up his scaly sleeves. Ah –”
“Hidden in the sinister paw, Dragons would say,” said the Brown Shapeshifter.
“So, summary?” asked another Dragon.
Bantukor hawked and spat next to his huge boot. “We know we’re in trouble, noble Dragon-sah. We just don’t know what sort yet, nor how deep.”
“Oh, we’re in it way past our necks,” said Asturbar. “Ideas, people. I want every idea on the table, be it clever, witty or plain insane. We’re surrounded. Flying out was never an option. The First Egg will turn up within a day or two, and with that, we’ll have the three Thoralians to contend with as well.”
“Surrender, sah?” another Commander suggested.
The new Marshal glared at the man. “Every idea except that one.”
* * * *
There was an idea out there, he just could not pin it beneath his finger. Asturbar knew he had stuck his head into this noose for a good reason. Only, he feared he was losing sight of that reason amidst fury and fear and frustration. Pictures assailed him, such as he and a few key staff flying away on the backs of these Lesser Dragons while the rest of the House crumpled beneath the assault and they vanished like an Island’s early mists burning away beneath the twin suns.
He found himself a nice quiet room on his own, banged the door shut, and thundered, “FESTERING MURGALIZARDS!”
“Sah?” came from outside the door.
“GET LOST!” Asturbar was still yelling at the man as his footsteps faded at a run, making up a rash of increasingly creative and ridiculous names until he started coughing and laughing. Tears squeezed from his eyes at the pain in his gut; just as he bent over, compressing his lips to stifle a moan, a bluish cometary streak conveniently ignored the fact that there was a door, or actual privacy for that matter, and having circled him a dozen times at eye-watering speed, resolved into a pretty, silver-blue young woman with simply the most remarkable ankles … which rather improved matters. He jerked his gaze upward.
“They told me you were going mad in here,” said Nyahi.
He tried to maintain eye contact. Honestly, manfully, with every fibre of his being, he really did his utmost to focus upon her dazzling eyes, and failed miserably.
With a heavy sigh, Asturbar muttered, “Alright. I admit I possess zero willpower around you. I humbly apologise for my behaviour.” She made a befuddled clucking noise with her tongue. “I am a bad, bad man, Iridiana”
His eyes dipped.
A smile curved her generous mouth immediately. “Ooh, the male of the species ogleth muchly. I see.”
“You are indescribably ogleworthy,” Asturbar agreed.
“Would this be the military standard territoriogle or the Azingloriax omniogle magnificus?” she retorted, blithely abusing the Island Standard language as much as he.
“It is the most comprehensive form of oglanalysis known to Humankind; oglipotent in every sense of the word. Now, I wish to oglinspect your every inch undisturbed. Kindly turn around, gorgeous creature. Slowly, please. Slower. Verrrrrrryyyy good. Oh, yes – uh, oglificient!”
When she returned to facing him, he found a quirked eyebrow asking the question.
“Well, if I died tonight …”
Nyahi promptly shut his mouth with a kiss. “Every comment except that one.”
Bang! Bang-bang-bang! The door shook violently as a fist pummelled it without. “Marshal, come quickly! You have to –”
Asturbar roared, “Does the whole stinking world know where I am? One kiss! That’s all I wanted. One kiss, and a decent ogling session! Can’t a man command any peace around here?”
BOOM!! This time, the fortress shook. That blow was way above their heads, and bigger than anything he cared to imagine just then.
Iridiana quipped, “Peace is apparently not an option.”
Asturbar began to grumble under his breath, but found himself folded through the keyhole, turned inside out, and whisked on a whistle-stop tour of the fortress ending at an arrow slot overlooking Azhukazi’s operations. Really? Marshal no-power had just arrived on the field of battle.
Sans dignity.
What he saw blew every other thought clean out of his head.
Previously, Azhukazi had raised creatures from bones that looked and behaved like real Dragonkind. This squat, broad-bellied monster was vaguely shaped like a Dragon without wings, but it had bone hammers the size of hundred-foot Dragonships for its forepaws, and evinced a lumpen, unfinished quality of form, as if the Necromancer had run out of power midway or simply not bothered to complete his creation. The vast, heavily muscled back and flanks wore grey-black flesh in strips as tattered as a beggar’s robes, streaked white with preposterously thick thews. Dull, malicious green eyes gazed out at the world over a broad, misshapen muzzle as though personally affronted by everything it saw. He wanted to say the creature was a hundred and fifty feet tall. Two hundred was likely shy of the mark; it dwarfed any self-respecting Asjujian Emoflit by a considerable margin, and though it moved ponderously, the power of each slow-motion blow shook the Island to its roots. Asturbar could almost hear the ragions crying out as the slow, steady pounding reverberated throughout the Island, and his boots leaped off the stone at every impact.
Azhukazi’s creation steadily worked at enlarging the hole. It shuffled about on spatulate paws, the armoured protuberances of its belly scraping the ground with a leathery metallic sound, snuffling and grunting in some guttural form of Dragonish. The paw hammers rose and fell, thumping out its dreadful drumbeat. Several dozen Lesser Dragons laboured around its flanks, clearing the rubble, but by far the greater number engaged with Thoralian’s Drakes in the skies above in bloody battle.
Freaking ragion stink, that thing was an obscenity!
He grinned briefly as the le
ft forepaw-hammer brained an inattentive Lesser Dragon. Intelligence had clearly been elided from the design. Nonetheless, he had no doubt in his mind that given sufficient time, it would pound its way through any Island, given as it was the size of a small Island!
“Where’s the Iolite Blue?” Nyahi whispered.
He scanned the area. “Oh, what do you know? He’s doing an Iridiana.”
“A what?” Following his finger, she snorted, “Oh, very funny. His post-magical snooze, did you mean? What an unpleasant little man you are. Metal in the cranium, clearly. Shall we therefore attack?”
They shared fierce grins. “Feeling feisty, my dearest … ah, kaleidoscopic phantasm?”
“Indeed.” He had balked at trying to prod her – well, somewhere, but she managed to form an appendage that tinged his armour like a bell. “You’ve been meaning to charge a few things, haven’t you, Big Boots?”
How well did she know him? “Eh …”
“Walls feeling claustrophobic. No real, honourable battle to the fore, equals one frustrated soldier?”
“You’re imagining things,” he protested.
“When we’re down there, just start waving your axe, Boots. I’ll do the rest.”
Asturbar might have suggested something impolite about females at that point, especially Dragonesses.
Nyahi just chuckled, Hold on to your trousers, my Marshal!
Whoosh!
Preparation, soldiers claimed, was nine-tenths of the victory. They had trained for this scenario multiple times there in the Doldrums. Nothing could have primed Asturbar for the very particular experience of assaulting over two dozen Lesser Dragons ostensibly on a singlehanded suicide mission. At least, that was how the Dragons would see the matter. One large, metal-encased snack on legs was fast incoming, they clearly thought. That was, before Asturbar took a mighty sweep with his axe, which morphed into a shimmering spectral blade fully seventy feet tall, and summarily cleft three of them in twain.
Asturbar dearly hoped the purple sparks skittering off the hides of the surprised-looking Dragons – as they fell apart literally in pieces – were not anything important belonging to Nyahi. That was a foul thought, but exhilarating all the same.
“Wow … a bit dizzy,” said his girl, returning to clasp her scintillant fires about his axe. “The big one, Boots. Go for that one. See if we can’t chop off those hammers.”
“Keep this form, alright?”
“Doing my best.”
No point in clarifying, ‘We’re dead if you don’t.’ She knew that. Instead, he said, “Know when to retreat. You call it, alright?”
“No heroics?”
“I’ll settle for a few. THE MISTRALS!”
The Azingloriax warrior’s heart leaped as he sprang into battle. The joy was fierce within him, a snarling beast contained in his chest and belly, and there was wild laughter upon his tongue. The Dragons saw him coming. Some paused in shock, others raced to meet his charge.
“Club!” roared Asturbar, and swung with all his might, left to right. The Dragons blinked as her Chaos power turned normal space inside out, appearing to leap between fractions of a second to wallop their leader squarely in the jowls. Dragons were not used to being assaulted out of apparently thin air. Their reactions were incredibly fast, but remained attuned to real, physical events and forces, even in the heat and speed of battle. Thus, the Dragon was just beginning to bellow his challenge when the force of their combined strike splintered his fangs and swung the fifty-tonne beast right off his paws, shovelling him into a snarl of his fellows. One Dragoness, evading the fracas with enviable agility, sprang for Asturbar. He thrust out the axe. “Punch!”
WHOMP! The force of their strike lifted the Dragoness clean off her paws.
Snapped neck? Move!
Then they were sprinting past the smaller Dragons, around the rim of the smoking sinkhole, angling for the huge brute. On his own, the soldier knew he would barely have been able to scratch the beast. His boots pounded the tan rock dust as he pumped his arms, aiming for maximum velocity. Up a small slope. Dodge a fireball. Hit that boulder – jump! With the power of his Azingloriax frame, Asturbar hurtled twelve feet into the air as he swung his axe in an almighty overhand blow.
CLAAANNGGG!!
The shock was all wrong. A terrible pain ran through his arms and wrists as the spectral form visibly shuddered and recoiled; Nyahi cried out wildly, but then it seemed that the innards of his belly stirred and jolted back against the pain, somehow partially absorbing or shielding the impact. Asturbar collapsed to his knees, clutching his stomach. He was certain he should be vomiting blood.
“Retreat …”
“No.” Nyahi was up, facing him as her Dragoness. “Iridium flare.”
“Ah. Metal-reinforced bones.”
Her eyes whirled gently at him. “Yes. Clever of Azhukazi.”
Then, before she could possibly have seen or sensed the attack originating behind her, she whirled with a slight flaring of magic unfamiliar to Asturbar. A fireball somehow coiled about them and rebounded full into the face of an attacking Yellow Shapeshifter, who was forced to choke down his own fire as the Iridium Dragoness leaned aside like a curl of smoke. The Shifter missed his attack by tens of feet.
“Fly!” roared Asturbar.
Iridiana took off right across the nose of the brutish non-Dragon, before being forced to about-face as a trio of powerful Orange Shapeshifters tried to swipe her head off her shoulders. She left them clutching mauve smoke once more as her power wriggled them past fangs and talons, with only a momentary scrape upon her left flank to show for it. Asturbar found himself clasped in her paw, and it seemed to him in the heat of that instant that they drew closer than ever before, for he could sense the drive of her thoughts and anticipate her responses; his apprehension of the creature’s dim-witted surprise as the mosquito-like Dragoness flitted across his nose once more caused fiery laughter to seethe in her Dragoness-hearts, and her readying of her powers brought a corresponding sense of drawing upon both of their reserves. He saw an arrow-like whiteness flaring inside of her throat – how, he had no idea – but the pull of it upon his person was as if a fey note had been plucked upon his heartstrings. Her fire flared incandescent, and sliced through the behemoth’s upraised right paw, passing cleanly through both the hammer part and the wrist behind it.
Then she was crying out, falling, recovering with an ungainly, desperate flurry of wingbeats, and she took several heavy blows before a gasping chill surrounded them. Azhukazi’s unseen attack! Iridiana landed with bruising force on the rough stone edge of the sinkhole, skidded along upon her belly, and with a low wail toppled into the hole. “No!”
“Yes!” Asturbar yelled. “Down! Find cover!”
Perhaps what Azhukazi could not see, he would fail to touch with his power. Why did he have no Browns in his service? That was an oddity.
To her credit, his Dragoness was deft of wing and paw, if not well-versed in the art of manoeuvring in tight quarters. She took numerous blows on her wing bones, paws and tail as she threaded through the blackened devastation to what had been the central staircase. From there she forced her way downward into the relative safety of the below-ground levels. Much had collapsed, but there was enough cover to make targeting the compact Dragoness, a quarter to a third of the size of any of Azhukazi’s troops, extremely difficult.
Yuaki. Yuaki, she gasped.
They bumpily negotiated five floors in record time.
He called, Here. To the side where it’s thinner … was she reading the terrain from his mind? Or how could she possibly be navigating this fast and accurately, with barely a few gasped instructions from him?
A hole! Asturbar cried, pointing. Smart Brown. As Nyahi arrowed for the hole in what had been the side wall of the main living quarters abutting the defensive front battlements of the fortress building, which included space within to facilitate the movement of soldiers, she became incongruously smaller, as if seeking to fit the narrowing s
pace … the dangerously narrowing hole … squinting into the gloom, he made out the deviously grinning form of the Brown Shapeshifter – in her Human form. What? Why? Magic for Shifters was so much easier in the Dragon manifestation.
Dragoness and Azingloriax jolted as one with realisation. Danger!
Contrary to common Isles sense, Iridiana accelerated. She seemed to penetrate the rushing air at an impossible speed, as though she alone passed like flour through the sieve of reality. The Shifter’s face whitened. A dagger upraised, tipped with some creepy crimson fire – me first! Asturbar shouted. Squeezing through the ten-foot thickness of wall, Iridiana’s form elongated bizarrely into one of her plants as she shuffled him along her length in a desperate contortion of protodraconic limbs, and then he popped back to full size! Asturbar crashed into Yuaki, grappling for the dagger which struck his plate armour full-on and skidded aside, but the Shapeshifter rebounded with uncanny speed, and then darted away into the darkness.
He wanted to pursue. He had to.
Instead, Asturbar found himself fading. Too much magic …
Chapter 22: A Killing Mood
“THAT WAS NOT me!” roared the Brown Shapeshifter. “Anyone will tell you – everyone – I was down on level thirty shoring up our final defensive positions!”
Asturbar massaged his pounding temples. “Please. Whisper.”
“It was not!”
“I’m just trying to understand.” He groaned, gagged and then vomited bile into a bucket Bantukor had helpfully placed next to his Marshal’s boot. “Gaah, I feel as if I swallowed one of those luminous Asjujian slugs butt first!”
“Marshal Asturbar,” Iridiana clucked primly, apparently not warming to his Sub-Commanders’ appreciative chuckles.
“Seems we might have a Chameleon infestation in the House, sah,” Bantukor offered.
The Marshal made to answer, and instead had to dive for the bucket again. He had nothing left to throw up, but his stomach insisted on making a variety of noisily creative attempts.