by Dante King
My heart leaped in my chest. “And they accepted, the Vetruscans?”
“You bet your ass—I mean, yes, Dragonmancer Noctis, they did,” said the General, her teeth clamped around her pipe stem.
“Tanila and Dasyr will enter the Vetruscan Kingdom and perform the Transfusion Ceremony,” the Overseer told me. “They will need to be guarded heavily, as befits such powerful and valued mancers. The Vetruscans have never betrayed us, but…”
“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, is that it?” I said.
The Overseer nodded and clasped her hands in her lap.
“And you and the Lorekeepers are happy for me to go on this little expedition onto Vetruscan soil?” I asked tentatively.
“It was those negotiations that have been taking up so much of our time over the last couple of damned weeks,” The General said.
“You are the only one who can find the relic, Mike,” the Overseer said.
“I don’t know how that can be,” I said honestly. “Especially if the Vetruscans themselves don’t know where it is.”
“The Vetruscans don’t know where it is precisely, but they know that it can be found using the same method of locating the Etherstones, as they reverberate with the same magical frequency,” the Overseer said.
“And seeing as you found the Etherstones…” General Shiloh said.
I had to admit that I had never really learned how to locate those crystals that were so vital in producing dragons. If I was honest with myself, I had stumbled across them. Actually, it had been—
“Will!” I said aloud.
The General, who was midway through tapping out her spent pipe on her boot heel, looked up and said, “Will what?”
I realized in a flash that I couldn’t possibly say that it had been Will, the ghostly little will-o’-the-wisp, who had located the Etherstones. If I divulged to the Overseer and General Shiloh how I had been led to the crystals then, then I’d suddenly be out-of-action and superfluous to requirements. Not only that, but I would also be put on a fucking Lorekeeper’s operating table to be dissected, fiddled with, and milked.
Not an idea that I was particularly keen on.
“Will… will I be able to take anyone with me?” I asked, recovering from my misspoken word. “That’s what I meant to ask. Who will I be able to take?”
I caught the Overseer’s eye and looked quickly away. I was fairly certain that she had the Dumbledore-like skill to be able to read a person’s heart as well as their mind. I only hoped that the Overseer would be partial to letting those with strong hearts forge their own path.
“You may bring any man, woman, or entity that you think will be able to aid you,” the Overseer said with a knowing narrowing of her eyes. “The expeditions into the Subterranean Realms will be put on hold until after you return.”
“What about the Bronze Citadel?” I asked. I was excited to see off on another adventure, but I couldn’t shake the looming menace of that massive Subterranean stronghold from my mind.
“While you’re away, scouting parties will continue to examine what they can of the Bronze Citadel, do not fear on that score, Dragonmancer,” the Overseer said.
She exchanged looks with General Shiloh, and then got to her feet. It was, as I took it, a motion of dismissal.
As we made our way to the exit of the General’s capacious tent, the Overseer slipped something into my palm. Looking down, I saw that it was a deep amber Etherstone.
“What is this?” I asked as General Shiloh bowed the Overseer out and we stepped into the pre-storm gloom that had descended upon the Galipolas Mountain camp.
“A little help,” she said.
“Help?” I replied, stowing the crystal in a pocket. “How did you get hold of this?”
“There are more women and men, beasts and spirits at work within the Empire than you, Mike Noctis,” the Overseer said simply. “You are merely one cog in the mighty machine that is the Mystocean Empire—though, admittedly perhaps, one of the more important ones.”
And with those final words, the Overseer pulled up her hood and moved away. Her Overwatch guards, who I had noticed standing unobtrusively in the few shadows and cover that surrounded General Shiloh’s tent when I had arrived for the meeting, flanked her on all sides as she made her out of the circle of command tents.
I was left standing outside General Shiloh’s tent, feeling the warm press of the Etherstone in my pocket.
“Penelope or Renji?” I muttered to myself as I made my way back toward the dragonmancers quarters that I shared with the others. “Pen has been waiting far longer…”
I felt that good old familiar smile pull at the corners of my mouth. It was the smile that heralded unknown danger and adventure.
First though, I had another baby dragon to make.
Chapter 6
I marched back through the top part of the camp, the cleaner and tidier end where the tents, armories, and sleeping quarters of the more senior officers were located. This area, where most of the important decisions were made by General Shiloh and her staff, was far more well-kept and orderly than the town proper. It was also located on top of a hill, a slight hill but a hill nonetheless, that looked down on the growing assortment of mudbrick and wooden buildings that made up the main body of the encampment.
Even in the short space of time that I’d been here, the camp had flourished and expanded. It now covered what must have been a full acre at the base of Galipolas Mountain, spreading like some western-style fungus around the ornately carved entrance to the mine that led into the Subterranean Realms.
As I strolled my way through the more generously spaced tents of the command sector of the army, I looked out at the township below; at the thin streams of smoke rising from the myriad chimneys like a collection of skinny pencil shadings. There was more than a little of the wild west here, more than a little of the great frontier. It was an exciting place to be. There was danger, yes, but there was also an indisputable sense of standing on the edge of something new, something exciting and adventurous.
I smiled fiercely to myself. I was thinking of the unknown adventure yet to come, and the thought of Penelope waiting for me up ahead. The thrill and elation of new horizons yet to be crested and old appetites yet to be sated.
Pausing briefly in the lee of a stack of crates containing fresh longbow arrows and some magic-based grenadoes, I pulled the little sack of dragondust from my pocket. If I was going to knock up Penelope, my manjam needed to be at full potency. Failing to impregnate Penelope on the first try would have only meant that we’d have to try again—but I felt that every hour mattered these days.
I poured a generous measure of the glittering pearly white dust into my mouth. I took a hearty pinch up my left nostril and felt the unbridled vitality and clarity of mind and purpose flood through my every sinew and cell.
“Godsdamn,” I said, staring up at the sullen gray sky, “but it’s a beautiful fucking day!”
As befitted our rank, the dragonmancers had been allotted tent space on the hill alongside all the other high-ranking officers. We shared spacious and luxurious tents, more pavilions than tents really. When we were not out running exercises, sparring, or flying, the dragonmancers could be found around the tents, relaxing or studying.
It was amazing how much more pressing studying the history of the Mystocean Empire and its conflicts with the Shadow Nations had suddenly become, now that we were up to our eyeballs in ratfolk, wild dragons, and kobolds.
Whereas before we had journeyed to Galipolas Mountain, these enemies had merely been words on a page, foes with names but no faces, but now we knew them. We had gone sword to sword with them, smelled the reek of their blood and shit as we had cut them down by the score.
But all that fell to the back of my mind. I had more pressing matters to deal with today.
I found Penelope huddled down by one of the campfires in a fur blanket and sipping from a mug of something steaming. The beautiful and whip-smart Knowledge S
prite, with her exotic blue skin and shy eyes, was poring over a scroll. There was something very sexy about the concentration and dedication that she applied to her task. A faint frown creased the space between her shapely eyebrows, and every now and again, her lips moved as she silently sounded out a word in her head.
I crouched down next to her and observed her for a little while. She was so caught up in what she was reading, that it was only after I coughed gently that she looked up at all.
“Mike,” she said, the frown fading to be replaced by a shy smile, “what are you up to?”
“I just got back from a little chat with the General,” I said. Lowering my voice so that only she and I could hear, I added, “And the Overseer.”
Penelope’s eyes widened.
“So, the soldiers’ gossip was true,” she said.
“For once,” I quipped.
“What did they want to talk to you about?” the Knowledge Sprite asked me.
I motioned at the scroll in her hands. “Care to take a study break with me? Come for a walk in the woods.”
Penelope looked up at the cloudy sky and snuffed the air. “But it might rain.”
“That’s why I suggested the forest,” I said, nodding the direction of the tangle of fir trees that backed the dragonmancer part of the camp and descended down to the open grasslands beyond. “There’ll be less chance of anyone overhearing us or following us in there, and we’ll be sheltered from any ugly weather that blows in.”
Penelope tucked the scroll carefully into her blankets and rolled them up with the fastidiousness of a housemaid.
“Okay,” she breathed excitedly, “lead the way!”
We exited the encampment and went into the trees behind the dragonmancers designated area. As soon as we were under the eaves of the smaller outer trees, the intoxicating and relaxing scent of fallen and bruised pine needles rose up to greet us.
“Mmmm, I love that smell, don’t you?” Penelope said as we meandered like water, taking the path of least resistance. “It smells of pure sentience and creation, don’t you think?”
I breathed deeply and smiled. “It does, yeah. I don’t think you can beat a forest for shutting out the problems that might face you in the outside world. You can hear the wind huffing and puffing up there in the upper boughs, but it can’t touch us down here. It’s like slipping into some secret world full of secret sounds.”
The two of us stopped and listened to the clandestine movements of little, unseen creatures, the snap and rustle of dead branches falling occasionally, and the never-ending soft sigh of the wind moving through the thickly needled branches overhead.
“So,” Penelope said, after a moment, breaking the spell of peace.
“So…?” I asked, momentarily forgetting what it was that had even brought Pen and I here. “Oh, shit, right, yeah, the Overseer. Okay, here’s what happened…”
I then relayed the condensed version of what had gone down in General Shiloh’s tent while we continued moving deeper into the belt of fragrant and sleepy woodland. When I reached the part of my account the dwarf, Jaghilda, would see if she was suitable to bond with Garth, a distant, deep roll of thunder rocked the sky from the south.
“Sounds like the gods are tussling upstairs again,” Penelope said, shooting me a mousy smile. I had a feeling that she might have been quoting something back to me that I had once said.
“Sounds like it might escalate into one hell of a brawl, huh?” I said back.
“So, what happened next, then?” Pen asked me. “Did this Jaghilda and Garth take to one another in the initial touching of the crystal? It is rare that the Lorekeepers would put forward a candidate that was not practically a shoo-in for an Etherstone.”
I grinned. I should have known that Penelope would have been the one to touch the nub of my story with a needle.
“That’s just it,” I said. “There was no reaction whatsoever. Zip. Nothing. I could tell that it took the Overseer aback.”
Penelope halted and leaned against the rough bole of one of the wood’s giants. We were in the very center of the belt now, so far as I could judge. Even with my dragon-boosted hearing, I could make out no sounds from the direction of the Galipolas Mountain camp.
Penelope, as General Shiloh had done, looked mildly discomfited at this news.
“Like I said,” she muttered, looking me in the eye, “that is a rare outcome. What was the upshot of this?”
I told her, leaning against the tree trunk opposite hers, how the Overseer had devised her other plan. I told her how this new plan involved myself and a selection of my companions heading into the Vetruscan Kingdom to hunt for the relic that the Vetruscans had put forward as their half of the bargain.
“A relic?” Penelope asked, her face suddenly shining with scholarly intrigue. “What kind of relic?”
“The Overseer said it was a thaumaturgical device,” I said, recalling the term.
Penelope nodded. “Very old magic. Ancient. The oldest,” she muttered. “Did they incline to tell you what it would do?”
“It sounded to me like it was the key to this back-up plan that the Overseer had cooked up,” I said.
“The plan that is, essentially, about making an individual dragonmancer far more powerful than any single dragonmancer has ever become—potentially in the history of the Mystocean Empire?” Pen asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “From what I gathered, it’s a magical apparatus doohickey that opens up the mana reserves of the one that it’s used on. Opens them up wide, so that they are, as the Overseer said, without end and bottomless. Or something like that. Have you ever heard of anything like that? You haven’t come across any artifact of that sort mentioned in any of the books, scrolls, or folded paper planes in the Grand Library?”
Penelope shook her head. “No,” she said, “and something like that, if it were a thing that was publicly known, would be woven about with myths and legends and tales and… and—”
“And all sorts of other bullshit that would make it hard to find, right?” I said.
“Yes,” Penelope agreed. “Tittle-tattle, whispers, and scuttlebutt would make locating a powerfully magical object like that all but impossible. It would have every treasure hunter and historian, every villain and hero of any note, flocking there like—”
“Drunks to one of Old Sleazy’s all-night barbecues,” I said, not being able to resist.
“Precisely,” Pen agreed with me seriously.
I continued with the retelling, although there was not really much else to say after that.
“How it is all going to pan out is beyond me,” I said, after I had finished with my recount and took a seat on a moss-covered fallen trunk half buried in the soft, redolent forest floor.
Penelope came and sat close beside me. Her eyes looked forward, into the plantation of ruler-straight trunks that made up our surroundings. They looked like they were gazing through the holt of firs, out toward the hazy future, trying to discern what might happen there.
“Well, as the griffin said when it had its tail chopped off, it won’t be long now,” the Knowledge Sprite said.
I gave a soft snort of amusement at that. It was not often that the Knowledge Sprite came out with lines like that.
“That’s a good one, “ I said, nudging her gently with an elbow. “I’ll have to use that one myself.”
Pen turned to me and flashed me a pearly white smile. “I read it,” she admitted, “in that scroll I was perusing when you came across me at the campfire. Professor Fidget’s Guide to Ice-breaking for the Acutely Intelligent.”
I laughed and put an arm around her. “I have to say that you delivered it with a guileless naturalness.”
We sat there in companionable silence for a little while longer, while over our heads, past the pinnacles of the forest giants surrounding us, the sky grew a little darker and the thunder came a little more frequently.
The way that Penelope seemed completely ignorant to the raw sexuality at her fingerti
ps reminded me of the Overseer’s parting gift.
Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the amber Etherstone. It was warm in my hand and almost seemed to vibrate with the life-force held within it.
What kind of dragon will this stone produce? I wondered.
The Overseer had told me nothing before she had left.
I shrugged internally. Hell, what was life without a few surprises?
“She—the Overseer—gave me this before she went on her mystical way,” I said, with a small grin. “An Etherstone.”
“I know what it is!” Penelope said in a hushed voice. “What kind of dragon will it bring forth when it is paired with a dragonling? Did the Overseer say?”
I shook my head and slipped the warm amber stone into Penelope’s hand.
“I guess you and I will just have to wait and see, won’t we?” I said.
“We?” Penelope asked, looking puzzled, as she held the Etherstone tight in her fist. Then light dawned across her face. She blushed that special shade of royal blue that told me she had been profoundly moved. A splendent smile spread across her face, crinkling up her button nose.
“You mean…?” she asked in a voice gone suddenly a little husky with the flaring of the desire in her all-blue eyes.
“Yeah,” I said, “I mean…”
Without warning, Penelope kissed me full on the lips. Through my half-closed eyelids, I could see the dull light of the moody sky interwoven over the top of the branches of the fir trees. The swaying branches looked like cracks against the woolen background behind. The sound of the slowly gathering wind moving through the heavy, feathery branches was like the constant breathing of the Pacific Ocean.
Our tongues explored each other’s mouths; the pioneers of the bodies of two pioneers about to head off into the relative unknown of the Vetruscan Kingdom. Penelope’s lips were warm and eager, her kisses hungry, her breath already coming in little snatched gasps from between her teeth and blue lips.