Heresy of Dragons

by Erik Reid

  Drawing a bit of inspiration from my tussles with Lissa, I pinched a scalpel from the tray and threw it. Oscar helped propel the projectile with lightning speed, forcing the cutting implement to sail impossibly fast at the bloodhound’s chest. It sank a few inches into its flesh, forcing a slick of black blood to ooze out of the wound and stain the filthy gray rags that covered its body.

  The monster didn’t howl with pain. It coughed, hopefully due to a pierced lung, and spat to the side. A wad of black saliva thick with its own blood landed on the stone floor.

  “Should I look yet?” Kaylee asked. “I don’t want to lose myself. I’m afraid to look.”

  “Can you promise not to destroy the whole workshop?” I asked.

  “N… no,” she said.

  “Then see no evil, Kaylee,” I said. “It’s just one supercharged vampiric demonspawn. We’ve got this.”

  I kicked a wooden table leg aside and walked across the room toward the monster.

  I made the first move, but this demonspawn was swifter than most, bending backward to avoid my punch and then swinging a leg out to kick my shin. I lifted my leg in time to avoid impact, then swung again.

  We carried on like this for a while, swinging and kicking, but never making contact. Finally, I charged it, grappling with the monster in a half-tackle that turned into an awkward wrestling match.

  I kept the fiend’s face from coming too close to my exposed skin, and it kept my feet from making contact with its kneecaps or worse. I shoved it off me and prepared for one last punch, but this time, it caught my arm and halted my inertia. Its claws scratched down the length of my arm and caught on the edge of Oscar’s fabric, prying it away from my skin.

  A sudden panic welled up inside me. Until now, Oscar was molded to my body, a second skin with super powers. Sure, he was a pain in the ass sometimes, with his smug, under-informative messages and his “I’m taking control of your hand now” tantrums, but I was relying on him to keep myself alive in this strange place of flying women, magical kobolds, and demon-hunting cat ladies. Without Oscar, I was just a lost man in a world that would literally eat me alive.

  I kicked the bloodhound in the stomach, hard enough to force it off me and snatch my arm away from its grip. The second its long, dark nails left my arm, Oscar sealed his fabric against my skin again like a shadow, leaving no trace of a ridge or a lip or an edge where his dark shape ended and my bare skin began.

  “You are not fit to wear ally ssso powerful,” the monster said.

  I scrambled backward to put distance between myself and my attacker.

  “No response?” it asked, taunting me. “A man so full of useless words surely has some to ssspare now.”

  I was in no mood for banter. My hand braced against Oscar by the wrist, coddling the glove the way a man nurses an injured hand. Dani stood behind me with her wings held wide, blocking the battle from Kaylee. Her arms were held forward, claws out, and her eyes focused carefully on the bloodhound. She was prepared to jump into the fight if need be.

  I wasn’t prepared to let her. I couldn’t step aside and let her handle this creature, just because I was afraid of losing Oscar in a battle at close quarters. I swallowed hard and stepped backward, toward Benoch’s tray of surgical blades. I might need more than just Oscar to come out of this one alive.

  When I neared the tray, I glanced over my shoulder and selected a knife much sturdier than a narrow scalpel. In the second it took me to look back toward my opponent, Clara had climbed over the broken table and placed herself between me and the bloodhound.

  “You will stop,” she said. Her voice shook and her body stiffened, arms held firm by her sides and knees locked into position.

  The bloodhound laughed, a scratchy vile sound with no hint of mirth. “Take off your collar, girl. Their kind are not fit to boss you around. They are cowards, every one.”

  It spoke to Clara but looked past her, over her shoulder and toward me. It mocked me for standing beyond its reach, blocked from further attack by a slender, delicate woman in a slaver’s collar.

  “Stay back, Clara,” I said. “It’s me that mongrel wants.”

  “I know,” Clara said, staring forward at the fiend, ducking to the side to catch its eye line every time it tried to peer at me instead. “What’s wrong with me, vampire demonspawn? You sense something broken. What is it?”

  “You disgust me,” it said. “Something putrid runs through you, I can smell from here. I would not stoop to drink your blood. Flee, while you can, or I’ll kill you as well.”

  The bloodhound stalked forward, and Clara took a half-step to match.

  “Clara,” I said. She didn’t glance back to gage my distance. Her fingernails clenched so tightly in her fists that her palms started to bleed, sending a slow trickle of fresh, red blood down her fingers. It dripped slowly from her knuckles, leaving tiny splatter marks on the floor.

  “Please,” I said.

  The bloodhound feinted, lunging its face toward her with its spiral fangs bared. It issued a loud hiss from its mouth, but Clara stood her ground. When the monster leaned back and refilled its lungs, it coughed again and spat.

  Clara took another step forward. “I don’t just disgust you. I terrify you. Tell me why. Tell me what I am.”

  The creature snarled, then took a swipe at her with its long, sharp claws, but never struck her. Even as it backed away, pacing in reverse around the wreckage of Benoch’s work table, it lashed out at her in feints that stopped short of her skin. I followed behind, closing the gap between myself and Clara so I could snatch her away from a serious threat, but the bloodhound wasn’t posing one.

  She was right. It was afraid of her.

  It growled and leaned forward, lunging into another slashing attack that was meant to miss Clara’s skin, but she leapt toward it with one arm held across her body. She rushed into the attack, only to block it, landing her arm against the bloodhound’s nails and leaving a scratch across her pink skin that quickly bled.

  Something unintelligible erupted from the bloodhound’s throat, a guttural, bestial sound that conveyed a visceral pain. It clutched the hand that had touched Clara’s skin, and it burned as if on fire. Steam and smoke wafted upward; its skin sizzled and bubbled up, pulling away from the muscle and bone beneath; a scent like sulfur and tar filled the room.

  The monster was in such pain that it stopped searching for a route to avoid Clara’s approach and simply hunched over itself on the floor, resting on its knees as its breathing came in quick, sharp breaths that ended with fitful coughs.

  Clara knelt before it and placed her hands on its cheeks. Her palms were bright red with blood, smeared across her skin after her nails had pierced her palms.

  “My blood is death to you,” she said. “Because I myself am already dead.”

  “No,” it cried. “Release me!” It tried to thrash to the side and shake Clara loose, but she held firm, turning the monster’s face to meet her own. I watched in horrified fascination as Clara — the quiet, unassuming kobold girl that withered under Momma Jumbo’s verbal assault — trained her attention on this lethal creature and burned it alive with the touch of her delicate hands.

  The monster’s facial features sagged as its skin melted from the bone. It swiped at Clara with its claws, but they only grazed her, its efforts half-hearted as its body broke out in boils. They blistered and burst open, releasing the noxious fumes of its disintegrating body.

  I dipped low and reached my arm around Clara’s waist, spinning with her to pull her away from the defeated bloodhound. At this proximity, the scent of its decay was overwhelming. I covered my nose and mouth with Oscar and looked down at the monster’s body, turning into a puddle before my eyes.

  “The heart!” Benoch yelled. “You must remove the heart!”

  “It’s dying,” I said. “The danger has passed.”

  “I need the heart or this was all for nothing!” Benoch yelled. His voice cracked and his face flushed red.

  If
it hadn’t been for what I saw Lissa do with a bloodhound’s heart earlier, I would think Benoch was messing with me.

  With a long surgical blade still clutched in my hand, I reached down and stabbed the monster in the chest. The knife sank into its body easily, like its insides were as melted as its outer appearance. The creature’s back arched in response to the stabbing pain that must have added to its overall agony, but then it relaxed against the floor again, whimpering while its skin sizzled.

  “Oscar,” I said. “This one’s all you, buddy.”

  I plunged Oscar into the central cavity of that decaying bloodhound and felt around for anything solid enough to call a heart. My fingers curled around something curiously hard and I yanked it free of the bloodhound’s body.

  A stone shaped like a human heart sat in my hand, but it was heavy and hard, like a hunk of black onyx. Maybe it was coal, left behind by an angry grinch who stole all the hearts from the bloodhounds in Whoville.

  The second the black organ was removed, the monster fell limp and lifeless along the rock floor. Benoch raced over to me and took the heart from my hand. A thick trail of black blood stretched from my fingers to that dark heart.

  The old draykin ignored the slime that covered it and raced toward his tool tray. He took a chisel and hammer, then placed the heart on the floor and chipped a small piece off it. He tossed the larger chunk toward me, then took his small piece and headed toward the rear of his workshop.

  Oscar’s fingers tightened around the solid heart in his palm. His thumb grazed the fine edges of the stone, searching out every contour and giving it a light, exploratory touch.

  “It’s creepy when you do that,” I said. “We have to share this hand, Oscar. Cool it.”

  Benoch threw open the double doors to the large cabinet at the rear of his workshop. Inside was a complicated metal framework with dozens of pegs sticking out from a backboard. Exposed metal wires wrapped around many of those pegs, sometimes overlapping, other times splitting and snaking in different directions only to splice into other wires in a complicated web of copper, silver, and gold. Some knots of wire were coiled around crystals at the end, while a few dead ends dipped into small beakers of colorful solutions.

  The only empty space was at the center of a metal ring, mounted at the pegboard’s highest rung.

  A tray at the base of the cabinet held a glove propped up by a wooden stand that allowed each of the glove’s four fingers to stand at attention. The thickest, shiniest pair of wires led from the glove’s palm toward the empty metal ring at the framework’s apex.

  The glove itself was a simple white cloth, though a few strips of fabric just as black and flexible as Oscar were stitched down the length of each finger, connecting to a thin band of black that ran around the wrist. The rest of the glove looked like a coarse cotton frame meant to keep those strips in place.

  Benoch’s hands trembled so violently that he lost his grip on the notepad and quill he had carried toward the cabinet, but he ignored them clattering to the floor. It was the chipped-off piece of bloodhound heart that held his full attention now. He climbed a small ladder and placed that onicite shard inside the hollow metal ring.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Benoch’s face morphed from an expression of hope and excitement to one of disappointed impatience.

  Then a gloved finger twitched.

  Benoch gasped and leaned close to the glove. Over his head, the small chunk of heart began to glow with a bright blue aura. The wires seemed to conduct that glowing energy, drawing a mist of glacial blue that surrounded the wires, pulling life from the dead black heart and funneling it toward the glove.

  A second finger twitched, then a third. Soon all four fingers stretched and moved, testing out their range of motion in a constant effort.

  “It worked!” Benoch said. “Do you know what this means?”

  I looked back at Dani. She had lowered her wings, and Kaylee leaned against her, holding Dani’s arm and resting her cheek against Dani’s shoulder. Clara still knelt beside the melted corpse of the bloodhound she had destroyed with only a touch of her blood, though I wasn’t sure how she could tolerate the smell of its rotting cadaver. Her fingers glowed pink while she poked at it.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know what it means. Are you asking us because you don’t know either? It’s okay, you can admit it.”

  Benoch took a deep breath. “This means we can, eventually, construct new gauntlets in Oscar’s mold. Ones fit for draykin hands. We’ve unlocked the ability to harness the power trapped within the onicite!”

  “So this blood-slicked rock is onicite?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Benoch said. “And it is the reward I promised for your errand. I assume Oscar has been agitating a bit?”

  “He has.”

  “You may allow him to feed,” Benoch said.

  “By crushing the onicite heart so Oscar can absorb the power it releases,” I said.

  Just like Lissa did, but she didn’t have a fist of Oscar, so what did demon hunters know that we didn’t? I decided not to mention any of that to Benoch. Demon hunters and draykin had conflicting views about each other, and I wasn’t sure I trusted either version of their self-professed histories.

  I clenched my hand, tightening Oscar’s fingers around the onicite ore we had mined from a dead demonspawn. The stone cracked down its center, then a series of smaller cracks webbed outward from there until the whole thing collapsed inward.

  My fist lit up in a bright blue flash, like a cool flame erupting into a spherical ball of raging fire that snuffed out a moment later, filling my nerves with a sense of cold, but also the tingle of electric energy. When my fingers opened, all that remained of that stone was a pile of black silt that slipped from my hand and dusted the floor.

  Energy Reserves Up: 1.4%

  “It worked,” I said. “Oscar recharged by just under half a percentage point. And that means every bloodhound we come across from now on has an Oscar battery-booster thumping away inside its black, wretched heart. Imagine what Oscar could do for us then.”

  “Yes,” Dani said, “depending on how many of ‘us’ even remain. Right this very moment A’zarkin could be preparing to wipe my people from the face of Silura.”

  “That is not happening,” I said. “No one is going to erase my Dani from all existence. I won’t let them.”

  Benoch cleared his throat.

  “Oh, Benoch too,” I said. “He’ll survive chrono-genocide as a side consequence of me saving Dani.”

  “Our selfless hero,” he said.

  “Besides,” I said, “that bloodhound — A’zarkin’s mouthpiece. He was full of nonsense, right? Using magic to wipe an entire race from time?”

  “The heretic witches sought to connect the realms,” Benoch said. “This was against the Goddess’s wishes, but they labored at their magics anyway. To breach the veil, they first had to master time.

  “I cannot fathom the true nature of their spells, but the fact that you stand here among us is proof enough they worked. If A’zarkin’s magic has evolved along the same path, we should take his threat seriously. Every draykin in Silura will not just cease to exist. They will cease ever to have existed. Every draykin life will be erased from history.”

  “And no one will miss me,” Dani said, “because I will never have lived.”

  “But the dead shall stop being dead,” Clara said. “There is a tranquility that hangs in the balance as well. All the suffering anyone in your race endured would vanish. A psychic weight lifted from the land.”

  “Clara,” Dani said. “Erasing Gretna’s life does not undo her death. Please forgive yourself. No one blames you.”

  “Gretna must,” Clara said. “I said I was a healer, after all. How mistaken I was in that.”

  Dani and I shared a concerned look.

  “I do not understand why so little contact with this vile creature was enough to cause such agony,” Clara said. “Maybe Kaylee is not the only one carrying a curse withi
n her.”

  “Or,” Benoch said, “what you carry is a blessing, and what the Goddess touches the demons may not.”

  At that, she looked up at us and smiled. “What a peculiar blessing to bestow.” After brushing dust from her knees and smoothing out her short skirt, she clasped her hands before her and seemed to radiate a sense of calm she hadn’t shown since we first plucked her from the kobold underground.

  “Tonight happened for a reason,” she said. “To teach me why the Goddess touched me the way that she did. I will use her gift to heal, but not petty wounds. I am meant to heal the balance of her creation. I will confront the forces of darkness, even if I sacrifice my chance to walk in the light. In a way, I welcome what she has in store. Good night.”

  She strutted toward the exit, stepping over the heap of broken work table and the debris that had scattered across the room during the fight.

  “Clara?” I asked after her. She didn’t look back, so I turned to Dani next. “What’s gotten into her? She was so eager to heal and help people just a few days ago, and now she thinks her magic is some terrible burden.”

  “She’s been through a lot,” Dani said, “and this has been a very long and difficult day. I’m out of noxyweed candies, but I should cook something up for her if I can. She hasn’t slept soundly since we lost Gretna.”

  “The kitchen is the door with the shiniest handle,” Benoch said. “All those grubby guard hands wore the metal to a crisp polish. You’re welcome to any ingredients you find in there. As we discussed earlier, some will help you hone your recipes into something your future customers will find extraordinarily unique.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Tucking her hair behind one pointy ear, she flashed me a warm smile and walked off.

  “Will you take me to my room?” Kaylee asked.

  “Of course,” I said.

  She breathed a sigh of relief and reached down for a long stretch of rope that we had untied from the bloodhound before everything went berserk. “We’ll need this.”

  “Well, okay then,” I said. “Let’s not waste any time.” I hooked my arm out and Kaylee looped hers inside it. I began escorting her toward the door.