Heresy of Dragons

by Erik Reid

  “You extortionist monster,” I said. I’d show him fuck-all. I pulled back my arm and gaged the distance between metal bars in the grate ahead. His face wasn’t armored. I could punch this asshole square in the nose, and if he was serious about keeping this gate shut, I might just get away with it.

  Clara draped her hand atop my fist, curling her soft, pink fingers over my knuckles and exerting a gentle pressure that guided my hand lower. Her touch was calming, driving back my baser instincts for the moment. She positioned herself partly in front of me, so that I couldn’t stare down the guard without seeing her gentle presence in my peripheral vision.

  “This would reflect poorly on Dani most of all,” Clara whispered, leaning close to my ear. “There are quieter ways of settling this.”

  I didn’t want trouble for Dani, so I held my fist by my side where it was a threat to no one. I didn’t let go of my grip on the guard’s vest though. I held tight and locked eyes with him while we all weighed our options.

  “I have no choice, do I?” Dani asked. She held out a single round and placed it in the guard’s open palm. He wiggled his fingers, gesturing for more coins to pay him off. Dani sighed and placed two more in his hand, then he balled up his fist with the money.

  It was not my cue to release my grasp on his hardened leather vest. “Your turn,” I said. “You don’t leave until you make nice.”

  He gritted his teeth and turned toward Dani. “So sorry.”

  “Not good en—”

  “Thank you,” Dani said. “That will do.”

  I let him go and he disappeared into the crowd of similarly uniformed guards that swarmed the area behind the gate.

  We waited there, ignoring the draykin guards that tried to shoo us away and tensing our legs to keep our position as more and more disgruntled citizens crowded the archway alongside us, bumping and shoving with growing frustration. They spat at the guards or slammed their open palms against the metal grate that separated us from the smug bastards that tried to send us all to Yannodale — some far-flung draykin outpost none of us belonged in.

  Still, the longer we held our ground and tested our patience, the more Dani and I came to the same conclusion.

  “He’s not coming back,” she said.

  “No, he isn’t,” I replied.

  We wandered away from the entry gate then, leaving Dani’s countrymen to continue railing against their exclusion from the burning city.

  “What did he mean back there, a ‘country draykin’?” I asked.

  “Varrowsgard is the draykin capital,” Dani said. “The best teachers and tradesman come here, raise their families, send their children to the best education rounds can buy. They have a certain way about them, the city elite.

  “I’m not like they are,” she continued. “They hear it in my voice. They see it in my scars, the quality of my clothing, and the plainness of how I carry myself. I’m a bumpkin to them, no matter how hard I’ve worked to make something of myself here. The divide between rich and poor is too deep a trench for someone like me to cross with hard work alone.”

  She explained that little nugget of bullshit with the same kind patience she had maintained since I met her.

  “It’s not his off-handed insult that bothers me though,” she said. “It’s the helplessness of it all. They’ll let the south end burn while they tend to the fires closer to the castle. The ambassadors, the advisors, the tutors and blacksmithing families. They’ll be fine. Me? I’ll never recover. It took me years to perfect my little candies, and now the scraps of paper I wrote the recipes onto are as good as gone.

  “This was going to be my time to shine, I knew it was,” she said. “But now…” Her attention drifted toward Clara.

  “You regret me already,” Clara said. “You worry that I’ll require more upkeep than I could possibly be worth to you.”

  “Goddess no,” Dani said. “I’m glad you’re by my side, even if things look bleak right now. I want us both to have a chance at improving the hands we were dealt. I don’t know how to do that, trapped out here like we are. Hoping the fires end before a wave of fang-toothed monsters pounce seems like a lack of a plan.”

  “Maybe those beasts would do us a favor by showing up now,” I said. “The guards would let us in then, wouldn’t they? Not that we have a way of baiting those freaks without risking them mauling us.”

  Dani’s face lit up with a bright smile. “Why don’t we break in? Hear me out, Kyle. You said you have experience with sneaking into places you don’t belong.”

  “Abandoned places,” I said. “Places without armored guards and raging arson-fires.”

  And just like that, her smile vanished. “You’re right. It’s too much to ask for.”

  She turned her head away and let her arms fall limp to her sides. A deep breath filled her lungs, but it caught several times, as if she was struggling against the urge to cry.

  Fuck.

  “Can we fly over the wall?” I asked.

  “The city is grounded,” she said. “See those flags? When they’re blue everything is normal, but purple prohibits flight. They must worry the culprits will use their wings as a means of escape from the law. Anyone caught airborne within the city walls will get shot out of the sky.”

  I followed Dani’s finger to the flags that flew atop the castle towers. Beside them, patrolling the tower roofs, were draykin archers with crossbows in each hand.

  “Okay,” I said. “That doesn’t mean we can’t break in, just that we have to be smart about it.”

  “Really?” Dani asked. “You’re willing to try?”

  “Perhaps we could avoid—” Clara started, but her voice was quiet and the wheels in my mind were churning loudly.

  “How long can a draykin fly without tiring out?” I asked.

  “A few minutes,” Dani said. “Longer if they’re well-trained, but carrying cargo reduces that time by a lot.”

  “What about heavy armor?”

  “Same as cargo,” she said. “It weighs a person down.”

  “They’re covered in the same leathers as the guards down here,” I said. “It’s dense and must weigh a good amount. If we can force the guards on the upper levels to attend to some kind of emergency down here, it would take them time to work up the energy to fly back to their archery posts.”

  “I have—” Clara said.

  Dani cut her off. “How do we create an emergency more drastic than the flames already ravaging the city?”

  “And without putting ourselves at the center of it,” I replied. “Fine. What about sewers? It’s not my favorite option, but every urbexer knows they’ll end up knee-deep in questionable fluids at some point. Today just might be that day.”

  “The sewers are blocked by thick metal grates to prevent wild animals from scurrying inside,” Dani said.

  “Metal grates that might bend if melted down with dragon’s breath?” I asked.

  Dani laughed. “How hot do you think I can get?”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes to find out,” I said.

  “Please,” Clara said. “I don’t think we should break in.”

  “That’s innocent of you,” I said. “Look, you’ve been locked away for your whole life. I can’t expect you to understand this, but sometimes, good people have to do bad things—”

  “I stole the keys,” she said. Clara held her hand up, with a small iron ring perched on her pointer finger. Five metal keys hung from it.

  “How?” Dani asked.

  “When Kyle pulled the man up against the metal gate,” Clara said, “I pulled these off the man’s belt loop without him noticing. If my taker needs to enter the city, I will do anything I can to help. I refuse to be a burden.”

  “Clara,” Dani said, “I could kiss you.”

  “Go on,” I said. “Let Dani kiss you.” Clara leaned forward and offered her pursed lips, but Dani didn’t move in to seal the deal.

  “It’s just an expression,” Dani said.

  I shrugged. “I
t was worth a shot. But we can’t just waltz in. We need a distraction so they don’t stop us the second we swing the gates open. Stay here.”

  I pushed through the throng of angry draykin, listening to their mumbling and grumbling, parsing their grunts and offhanded remarks. They had families inside the castle walls, children with empty bellies waiting for absent parents to make good on the promise of a solid meal. It was a promise these adults too often had to break.

  These weren’t Varrowsgard’s rich and famous, they were hard workers finally bringing home the scraps of food and small pouches of coin that would keep their families fed and sheltered. The homes they worried about weren’t insured by corporate banks like the houses in my world. These homes were wood and thatch, and when they burned up they would leave nothing behind but cinders.

  The guards didn’t have those same concerns. They were government workers, which more likely meant steady work and a consistent wage. No amount of grumbling from the underclass seemed to sway their sentiment, nor would they risk their stable jobs to sneak the downtrodden through the metal bars that kept them at bay.

  I had heard enough.

  “Has anyone seen Bunbury?” I asked. A few men and women gave me a strange look. I kept yelling the name, drawing more attention to myself. “Bunbury, sir, where did you go?

  “He’s my taker,” I said to anyone that would listen. “He was here a minute ago. Bunbury, sir, where are you?”

  It only took ten minutes of weaving through the crowd and sowing the idea of a missing Bunbury before my message had reached most of their ears. With that, I was confident I had poured enough gasoline onto the tinder of an angry crowd. In the spirit of the day’s arson inside the city, it was time to light a match on the outside as well.

  I pushed my way closer to the metal gate and stood on my toes, thrusting a single pointed finger toward a small gap between the guards’ shoulders. “Bunbury, there you are! I knew they would make exceptions for a man of your stature. He’s inside, everyone. Bunbury is safe. Thank goodness Varrowsgard favors men of means.”

  “Hey,” someone yelled, knocking me to the side with the thrust of a thick, blue wing. He pressed his face against the metal bars, spittle escaping his blue-tinted lips as he yelled in a guard’s face, his cheeks reddening with rage. “You lettin’ filth like Bunbury in, but not us?”

  “They want our houses to burn!” a woman screeched.

  The crowd condensed into a thick cloud of bodies, blowing in toward the metal gate like a menacing storm. I squeezed out of the way in time to avoid getting swallowed up by a riot of angry wing-backed citizens. A few guards rushed toward the rowdy group, but with the metal bars standing firmly between them, they only had the occasional curse and wad of angry spit to contend with.

  The guards were barely inconvenienced.

  Dani and Clara watched for my next move as I skirted around the edge of the draykin rioters. Kobold givens shifted from one foot to the other while their takers raged against the guards. Wooden carts sat still, tethered to the horses that had pulled them this far.

  I looked up at the city. The skies were empty, but the archers maintained their posts. They eyed the mob only in passing, glancing past the entry gates as they surveilled the city below.

  I untied the reins of a horse and released it from a wooden cart. It took a step forward and whinnied, cutting short my time to think. I couldn’t afford a noise that would draw attention while I pondered the effect of this next gambit. I smacked the horse on the ass as hard as I could.

  Now a louder sound erupted from the equine beast. It was pissed. The horse galloped ahead to escape the sting of my palm and lifted its legs high into the air. It practically soared, kicking off its powerful hind legs as it approached the city’s defensive wall.

  Another cart sat at the wall’s base, with a sturdy carriage and a flat roof. The horse leapt onto it, then leapt again, jumping clear over the stone wall ahead and landing inside the city.

  The guards all flinched as the horse landed in their midst, some forced to scurry away to avoid being trampled. The rioting mob silenced and watched, all eyes trained on the archers high overhead.

  Crossbows snapped into an upright position as the tower guards noticed the horse lift into the air, but they lowered their weapons again, dismayed by the animal’s disruption but not prepared to shoot down a creature that hadn’t — technically — broken the city’s no-fly rule.

  When the archers lowered their bows, all hell broke loose. The draykin at the gates suddenly realized that arrows would only rain down on those guilty of actual flight. They started climbing the walls, boosted by the folded hands of other citizens that helped propel them over the stone barrier. Bodies perched atop the stones, then leapt into the crowd of guards.

  The balance of power shifted. The guards were outnumbered.

  Swords emerged from scabbards. People grunted and screamed. Draykin that once stood angrily by the other two entry gates now rushed toward the riot, eager to help their people and be helped in return.

  Dani, Clara, and I slinked away from the mob and trekked toward one of the smaller entry arches. We waited until the last guard behind it was forced to join his comrades at the central gate. With the coast fully cleared, Clara slipped her key into the lock and turned it.

  The gate swung open and we stepped inside.

  CHAPTER 8

  The metal security gate clicked closed behind us as we set down a cobbled street that led deeper into the city of Varrowsgard.

  The guards at the center of the draykin riot clamored to detain any of the people that climbed over the wall and ran deeper into the city ahead, while the single horse that made it inside the capital’s walls trotted to a stop. He dipped his head low, seeking out a small rain basin for a quick drink of water.

  He was oblivious to the tumult that surrounded him. Up and down every street we could see, men and women carried buckets toward buildings that churned out dark smoke, relying on that water to help keep their city intact. He just sipped at it, slaking his animal thirst.

  The city, meanwhile, was astounding. The front doors to every commercial storefront were wide enough for a man or woman to pass through without having to tuck their wings in behind them. Each story had a perch and a door of its own, allowing patrons and visitors to fly in avoidance of stairs, or to leap from one building to another without having to travel by sidewalk each time.

  I wanted to marvel at the stonework, the odd patterns etched onto window frames, the red fibers that formed a thick thatch that draped past the frames of each roof like Spanish moss.

  There was no time for those details though. Clara and I sprinted behind Dani, trailing through a winding series of curving roads that looked onto narrow, diagonal alleyways. The whole city was sprawling, but also knit very closely, with buildings leaning against each other for support and streets so small at times that even a small cart would struggle to squeeze through. It was like a draykin-built version of medieval London.

  Which also, now that I thought about it, didn’t stand up to fire very well.

  The castle hovered in our peripheral vision. It was the tallest structure in Varrowsgard, an imposing fortress of gray stones that formed high walls with very few windows. Only the highest tiers of each tower had landing pads, or perhaps they were only perches for guards to launch from, the distance up being too exhausting a trek for the quick-to-tire wings of the draykin people.

  As we raced further into the city’s depths and toward its south end, the smoke grew thicker. It hazed the air and made distinguishing one block from the next a difficult affair. Dani buried her face inside her elbow and started to cough, but never slowed. Her stamina was impressive. She ran with the perfect form of a skilled athlete, her thighs and glutes tightening and rippling while she pumped her arms. She was like an Olympic sprinter, and tough to keep up with.

  The city blurred as I focused forward. To each side, resting against walls or just lying on the street, were occasional draykin m
en or women. I couldn’t imagine what a toll this fire took, or how hard these people had pushed themselves to fight it. Smoke in their lungs, deadly heat and dehydration, overexertion — even without burns on their skin, they might die of the fire indirectly.

  I sprinted behind Dani despite these distractions, but at one intersection I made the mistake of stopping short. Two dark shadows caught my eye, scurrying down the narrow alleyway and vanishing between buildings just a moment before a burst of flame engulfed one of the houses on the small block. Draykin men and women ran from the front door, screaming just a moment later.

  “Kyle!” Dani yelled. She was two blocks ahead now.

  “I think I saw the arsonists!” I yelled.

  Another fiery explosion erupted a few buildings behind Dani, but there was no way the two shapes I had seen could have covered that distance so quickly. I ran ahead and caught up with the girls as we pushed past another newly-on-fire edifice. We covered our faces and ran through a wave of heat and choking smoke.

  A few guards charged in either direction as we made our way into the city’s south end. Some had buckets of water, while others just seemed to be running away from the fire. None stopped to offer help to the exhausted draykin citizens that lay out on the ground or slumped against the outer walls of burning buildings.

  As the neighborhood changed, the number of guards plummeted. Dirty men and women in torn clothing stood in the streets, watching the city burn with awe on their faces. Here, on the poorer side of town, the residents accepted the fire with resignation, as if it was only a matter of time until this species of tragedy added itself to the list of their lives’ other woes.

  Finally, we paused before a three-story building. It was already ablaze.

  Dani raced in first, bounding up the stairs two at a time. Narrow hallways held wooden doors set close together, as if this boarding house held a dozen rooms on each small level. Dani stopped at a door on the building’s top story and fiddled with a key in her shaking hands. When the key missed the lock, it slipped from her hand and clattered against the wood-slat floor.