Heresy of Dragons

by Erik Reid

  Dani leaned on the boulder and helped me push, but it was no use. Those blocked-off doorways would haunt me after this, but we were ill-equipped to pry them open.

  Instead, we stuck to the functional doors. A few led to storage closets. One held barrels of water and stringy strips of dried meat. Another held rows and rows of rusted pickaxes and sledgehammers with dense, simple heads. I grasped one by the wooden handle, but it was too heavy to lift more than an inch off the ruddy-brown rock floor.

  These little closets were mildly disappointing, but the path ahead held promise. Each step brought us nearer to the odd vocalizations that I had first heard at the complex’s entrance. It sounded like multiple voices, all whining and moaning. The volume was loudest when I stood outside one final stone door. After this, we would turn back and handle Dani’s mission.

  I pushed the door open.

  Three dozen heads all swiveled toward me at once. The room was full of red-skinned babies, each with ears that stood in tall, sharp points. Some had teeth, others didn’t yet, but all of them had open mouths screaming for attention.

  A few older kobolds stood around, helping to feed or change the babies, but even they were barely school-aged.

  One woman stood out from the others. She was closer to my own age in appearance. This girl was graceful and lithe, scooping up the babies and setting them back down again like a ballerina, unaffected by their constant mewling.

  She looked up at me for only a moment before turning sharply away, as if embarrassed to be seen.

  “Hi,” I said. “Sorry to disturb you.”

  She attended those kobold children, plugging their mouths with food and moving them around the room without looking back my way.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her skin was a pinker hue than the kids she tended to, more carnation than red. She wore a pixie cut of lighter pink hair, allowing her long pointy ears to stretch upward, past her head. A simple gray cloth covered her chest, bound with a metal ring in its center that opened a small round window to the cleavage beneath.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Me?” the woman replied, still averting her eyes from Dani and me.

  “Yes, you,” I said. “Everyone else in here is like four years old.”

  “Clara,” she said.

  “That’s a beautiful name.”

  “Kyle,” Dani said, pulling on my arm. “We shouldn’t be here.”

  “What do you do here, Clara?” I asked.

  “Kyle!” Dani whispered in my ear. “We’re not supposed to see them before they age up. Please, come on.”

  I reached for the door to pull it closed. “It was nice meeting you, Clara,” I said. The door shut and I turned back toward Dani.

  “She does not look happy here,” I said.

  “Neither will we,” Dani said, “if we don’t find Momma Jumbo before she finds us.”

  As we returned to the intersection we had come from, the sound of banging got louder. After discovering all the sledgehammers and pickaxes earlier, I understood why. Somewhere, a construction crew was hard at work extending the system of tunnels just like Dani had said.

  A clear pair of voices carried toward us from the heart of the complex, and we headed toward them now, striding deeper into the underground and following the torches’ guiding light to the woman we were there to see.

  A bright glow told us we were almost there. A draykin woman with long gray hair was just leaving the chamber ahead. She walked toward us with a two-foot tall child behind her, his skin the same bold red as the babies we had seen earlier. This little guy was taller, roughly the height of a first grader, but he wore a collar with a long rope attached to it. The woman led the boy forward by it, not bothering to look back as he struggled to keep up with the fast pace her long legs allowed.

  “What the fuck?” I asked.

  “Don’t make a fuss,” Dani said. “Momma Jumbo will throw us right out.”

  I filed that image away for a serious conversation later. I’ve met children that “belonged” on leashes before, but no child belongs on a leash. It’s just a thing adults wish they could do to the nasty little kids that act like animals.

  We emerged into the room ahead to find Momma Jumbo, and boy did she live up to her name.

  The kobold matriarch sat on a stone seat in the center of a round room. The ceiling was a smoothly carved dome supported by a dozen stone columns, and fire pits lined the room’s perimeter. The red-skinned woman that ran this place was no taller than Dani or Clara, but she was massively wider. Her whole body was a rippling pool of fat, with plump breasts sitting naked atop her oversized belly.

  A draykin man stood ahead of us, already negotiating with the lead kobold. He had one kobold with him already, as a sort of companion. The kid was a young teen, with a rope leash extending from his collar that no one held onto. It trailed down to the floor where it lay ignored.

  “Do they all get that big?” I whispered to Dani, gesturing toward the scowling middle-aged woman at the center of the circular chamber.

  “She’s pregnant,” Dani replied. “Constantly. All she does is bear young.”

  “Because when you’re as over-sexed as she obviously is, you really push the statistical limits of birth control.”

  “One hundred rounds,” Momma Jumbo yelled. “No more, no less!” Her voice was sharp and shrill.

  “Where is he?” the man asked. “What proof do I have he’s strong enough for what I have in mind?”

  “You insult me!” the woman roared. “I do not build a business on deception and I do not sell to those who distrust my word.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said, leaning closer to Dani. “He sounds like he’s buying a child from her.”

  “He is,” Dani said. “That’s how this works.”

  My back stiffened.

  “I haven’t seen the child yet,” the draykin man said. “Last time you allowed—”

  “Times change,” the woman said. “Inventory is low this time of year. I won’t have takers who turn their noses up at my children. Another litter arrives too soon for those games.”

  “This is bad news,” Dani said. “If inventory is low and takers can’t be choosy, I might end up with a lazy one.”

  “A lazy slave,” I said. “You’re here to buy a child slave for your little business venture.”

  “Shh,” Dani said. “That’s such an ugly word, and not accurate at all. I won’t own a kobold forever, just long enough to help him adjust to the world.”

  “Do you want one or not?” Momma Jumbo asked. “I have customers waiting.”

  The draykin man looked back at us and sighed. “Yes, I want one,” he said.

  Momma Jumbo leaned over and placed her face into a tube that sat permanently affixed to her stone seat. It hid her face, like she was that old RCA Records dog peering too far into a gramophone. She screeched something awful that echoed down the tube’s length, carrying her words toward the ceiling, then along the pipe’s length until it disappeared into the rock wall.

  “It’s child trafficking,” I said to Dani, returning to our earlier conversation. “Even if the kid’s mother is in on it, it’s still wrong.”

  “Why does this bother you?” she asked. Genuine curiosity radiated from her face. Her brow wasn’t furrowed in anger or a rising temper. She really wanted to understand me, and for me to understand her.

  “It’s a good deal for everyone involved,” she continued. “This arrangement has worked for centuries, and I’ve never heard a given complain. Takers have responsibilities for their givens. I’ll have to feed and teach and protect whatever little kobold comes with me after this.

  “Kobold queens don’t nurture their young. They don’t bother with nutrition or education. Half of her children don’t even survive to age seven, but the ones that do, she sells. For the next seven years, that kid has a home outside this dismal labyrinth, eats hot meals, and learns a useful trade.

  “My own parents could have sold me
off too, if they didn’t have the means to provide for me, or if they just didn’t want to. They didn’t, and I had a nice life. I can provide the same to a kobold.”

  “That idea doesn’t seem to bother you in the slightest,” I said. “You grew up knowing each day that your own parents could sell you? Like you were one temper tantrum away from being the main attraction at a draykin yard sale?”

  “What you make, you can sell,” she said. “That’s the way it is. The kobolds that aren’t bought, those are the ones I feel sorry for. Momma Jumbo keeps them working night and day, carving tunnels or cleaning up after the latest round of children she births into her brood. They’ll never see the sun or have a nice meal. They’ll die in the dark down here, one day, utterly unloved.”

  “It’s messed up from every angle then,” I said. “That doesn’t make enslaving them any better.”

  “They’re not slaves, they’re givens.”

  “They’re purchased,” I said. “That makes them slaves.”

  We cut off our conversation when Clara walked into the room, leading a seven-year-old child behind her. The kid had a collar and rope attached, but Clara didn’t use those. She led the child gently by the hand.

  The boy looked up at his birth mother with fear in his eyes and hugged Clara’s leg, hiding behind her to avoid Momma Jumbo’s scowling glare. Clara smiled down at the boy and patted him on the head. “It’s a good thing,” she said. “The draykin will take care of you.”

  “You take care of me, Miss Clara,” the boy said.

  “Clara,” Momma Jumbo said. “Pry your brother loose and count the man’s money.”

  Clara took a small sack of coins from the draykin man and picked up the kobold boy, setting him down in front of his new owner — or “taker,” as slave masters here seemed to like being called — and emptied a series of round black coins into her hands. She held them out one by one and put them into small stacks on the floor.

  “Hurry up about it, you insufferable sloth,” Momma Jumbo said. Clara’s shoulders slumped forward and her hands began to shake as she focused on her work. “I swear sometimes, the Goddess took more than she gave when she touched your empty head.”

  Clara worked deliberately at her task, counting the coins with painstaking care. Eventually, she looked up at her mother and nodded.

  “The child is yours,” Momma Jumbo said. “Get the little bugger out of here and make room for his new siblings. Go!”

  The draykin man took the rope attached to the child’s collar and led the boy away, along with the older given he had brought with him. The smaller kobold looked back at Clara and started crying, but the man yanked him forward until his voice was small and distant. Clara left the way she had come, through some side corridor that led directly away from her mother’s side and deeper into the stone hallways of this subterranean complex.

  “Next!”

  “Good day, Momma Jumbo,” Dani said. She elbowed me and bowed.

  “Yes, good day to you,” I said, bowing just enough to keep Dani from elbowing me again.

  “My name is Daniana Weyforth,” Dani said. “I’m here to accept a given.”

  “Daniana Weyforth,” Momma Jumbo said, drawing out the name as she said it. “You are a first-time taker here.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Dani said. “That is why I brought my dearest monkey man, Kyle.”

  “Very well,” the woman said, looking at me. “Monkey, has Dani treated you kindly in all the time you’ve known her?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What does that have to do—”

  “Has she fed you when you hungered?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said.

  “Did she teach you about the ways of the world with patience and truth?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Very well,” Momma Jumbo said. “In that case I will sell you a child, Daniana Weyforth. Two hundred rounds.” She leaned over and squealed something into her speaking horn.

  I turned toward Dani and leaned close. My nostrils flared out as I spoke through clenched teeth. “You brought me here as a character witness so you could buy your first slave?”

  “I didn’t make you say a single thing that wasn’t true,” she said.

  “You used me,” I said.

  “I helped you,” she replied. “And now you helped me.”

  “No. When you manipulate a situation so that someone helps you without realizing that you’re getting something out of it, that’s using a person. And people don’t like that.”

  “Please, Kyle,” she said. “I have another problem now.” She looked up at Momma Jumbo. “I believe the last customer paid one hundred rounds.”

  “He took a boy,” Momma Jumbo said. “Only girls left now. Little girls are worth more.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Why do you think?” the pregnant cow replied. She arched an eyebrow and implied something that made my stomach churn.

  “Dani here has no interest in whatever you’re alluding to,” I said.

  “Someone will,” Momma Jumbo said. “Feeding these runts is expensive and I have a business to run. I know the worth of my product.”

  Dani started shifting from foot to foot. She held a velvet bag of coins in her hand, but her grip on it was tight. “Momma Jumbo,” she said. “I only came prepared to purchase a boy.”

  “Are you trying to chew me down?” the kobold queen asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Dani said. “I know you don’t stand for haggling. I’m only being honest.”

  “You assess my prices as unfair, Daniana Weyforth?” Momma Jumbo asked. “You dare come inside my kobold hole and displease me this way?”

  I fought so hard not to smile, but my face just wouldn’t cooperate.

  “Something funny to you, monkey?” Momma Jumbo asked.

  “Just, the wording of that. It caught me by surprise. I mean… no, nothing funny, your queenship.”

  The round woman never seemed all that content, but I think I made her a little angrier. She turned back toward Dani. “If you do not complete your transaction, why should I have any future dealings with you whatsoever?”

  “Maybe it’s not the worst thing,” I said quietly to Dani. “You don’t need a slave child to make candy in the city. You’re a capable woman, I’m sure you can handle it on your own.”

  “Not when the other shop owners all have dozens of kobolds under them,” she said. “Even one isn’t enough, but I have to start somewhere. I’ve saved up so long for this.”

  Clara returned then with a young girl. The child’s long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she looked around with wide, fearful eyes. Clara bent down to soothe the girl while the rest of us finished our negotiations.

  The kobold matriarch stared down at Dani, whose fingers probed at her coin purse while she lost herself in thought. I watched Clara handle the small child so tenderly, despite the long years of neglect she herself must have endured.

  “Momma Jumbo,” I said. “Is it true that the children you don’t sell to takers are kept here to work for the rest of their lives?”

  “Of course,” she said. “If no one wants them, what more can I do? A child of seven is the perfect age for sale. Seven years of servitude follow, and seven years of apprenticeship after that if they prove themselves. At that point, they may earn equal citizenship in any land.

  “No country wants an adult kobold that was never civilized through a taker’s care.”

  “Yet,” I said, “the one you called Clara seems perfectly civil.”

  Momma Jumbo laughed so hard she choked. “Clara is a special case, and I don’t say that with pride. She is too stupid to speak half the time. She cannot read, barely count. I won’t have my daughter die on the streets a starving beggar. What reputation would I have if my offspring were seen to be so weak? I’d never sell another one. Instead, I have to tolerate her here until she does me the favor of expiring.”

  “Would you sell her today?” I asked. “If you found a taker willing to
feed her, and teach her with… what was it… patience and truth?”

  Momma Jumbo leaned forward. “Are you offering me rounds for a witless old girl like her?”

  “You do have a business to run,” I said. “We could take her off your hands for ten rounds.”

  Dani stood very still throughout this exchange. She could always disclaim my offer. After all, I was just a silly monkey man. But if the queen here liked what she heard…

  “You came prepared to spend a hundred,” Momma Jumbo said. “I would accept that sum.”

  “I’d rather you accept ten,” I said. “Anything more than zero is a price you never expected for Clara.”

  “I do not haggle!” she said.

  “You’ve already begun to haggle. Clara was never for sale, and now she is. Her price was not pre-set the way your precious seven-year-olds are. And at any rate, I don’t believe a hundred would be the going rate. Not for a full-grown woman.”

  “Girls are worth more, don’t forget,” she said.

  “Little girls are,” I said. “For whatever sick reason that is. Twenty might be fair, but a hundred is out of the question. Oh, well.”

  I put a hand on Dani’s shoulder and started to spin her toward the exit. A flash of panic swept across her face and I worried she might destroy this whole ruse, offering to hand over her full sack of rounds in exchange for Clara just when we had mommy dearest on the ropes.

  I pinched my lips together and gave Dani a look. It was enough to keep her quiet.

  We took our first few steps away from the kobold’s lair, and Momma Jumbo did nothing to stop us. If this gambit failed, we’d leave Clara to a life of darkness and verbal abuse. Momma Jumbo made it pretty clear Dani wouldn’t be welcome here a second time if we didn’t drop some cash on the way out.

  Dani’s neck muscles tensed and her head started to turn. We were almost at the arched stone frame to the door of this inner chamber. Once we hit the corridor beyond, we couldn’t come crawling back, not without losing any hope of bargaining on fair terms.

  “Wait!” Momma Jumbo yelled. “Twenty-five.”

  “Deal,” Dani said, spinning on her heels so quickly it even made me dizzy. I wanted to press our luck for twenty, but I still felt like we had struck gold. We turned a slave auction into a good thing. I hoped.