Dragon Breeder 4

by Dante King

  Will flared in affirmation.

  “Good enough for me,” I said and started digging. I was half tempted to use my Forcewave spell to blast the snow out of the way, but that would have been clumsy. If there was anything under the thick layer of snow, if the relic was down there, then I risked blowing that over the parapet too.

  While I was digging, Saya landed nearby.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “Is that - Are you looking for the relic that we’ve been sent for?”

  I nodded as I continued burrowing through the mound of snow.

  Saya didn’t ask any questions. She simply came over and began helping me dig.

  The rest of the gang landed in dribs and drabs while we worked, drawn to the spot, maybe, by Will’s pulsating light.

  After only a few minutes of scrabbling around in the snow, with my fingers growing a little numb and clumsy, Saya suddenly called my name. Excitement etched her voice.

  “Have you got it?” I asked.

  “I’ve got... something,” she replied.

  The rest of the company gathered around. Above us, lost in the cloud and frigid mist, we could hear the drakes calling and shrieking to one another. They were still up there, circling like waiting sharks, but for some reason, they didn’t dive down on us. Cyan appeared at my side, and I nodded proudly before I returned her to her crystal home.

  Saya tossed the ice-encrusted object she was holding over to me, and I caught it.

  It was…

  Shit, it was hard to know exactly what the hell it was. It might have been mechanical, but then again, it might have been a single solid object. There was something definitely man-made about it, and it gleamed with a vaguely metallic sheen. It was waxy to the touch and reminded me of a miniaturized gearbox. Edges of what looked like cogs protruded through slots rimmed with gold, but there were also inlaid segments of dark wood.

  Something in my psyche opened. It was almost like I had stumbled across a sudden understanding, an answer, to a riddle that I hadn’t even realized I had been puzzling over. I felt an unexplained happiness mingled with relief.

  “This is it, ladies,” I said, in a voice dripping with excitement. “We’ve only gone and done it! Will’s only gone and delivered the goods first crack out of the damn box!”

  But no one, I saw when I looked up, was listening to me.

  From out of the mists that swirled apart like the ethereal curtain on some huge stage, the Frost Dragon emerged.

  “Ah,” I said.

  Renji and Saya were closest to the beast and were standing very still. They watched the dragon as it slowly uncoiled itself from where it had been lounging like a monstrous cat against one of the opposite battlements, where it had made a nest in the snow.

  I decided to follow suit, as did Hana, Elenari, Penelope, and Tamsin.

  I’d had cause to tread carefully around firearms when back on earth, but I had never trod more carefully than when I stood face-to-face with that loaded wild dragon.

  The wild dragon was as long as two buses. Easily. It was, as I had already observed, a beautiful white color. Now that I saw it closer, and without my eyes being clouded by awe or the storm that eddied around us, I could see that it looked a little old, a little faded, a little dirty. Set against the backdrop of fresh fallen snow and white marble, it looked far less clean and crisp a white as it might have ordinarily done. Its eyes were completely black, except for the silver vertical pupils that were glued on our company of seven.

  Even as it concentrated on us, the rumble in its chest began to rise, morphing from curiosity, to anger at having its territory encroached on, to outright rage that prey would have the gall to hang around and stare at it.

  “Ladies,” I said, not taking my eyes from the dragon, but gently pulling Saya and Renji behind me. “How about you get out of here? Clean up the rest of the drakes so that we don’t have to worry about getting an ice crystal barb through the back of the neck when we least expect it, yeah?”

  As I moved forward, trying to take the attention off my friends, I accessed, quite unintentionally, the new slot that had been opened for Pan. It was Weapon Slot A.

  A badass warhammer, flickering with crackling blue lightning appeared in my hand.

  “Stormhammer,” Pan said in the back of mind, and I knew that he was reading the description from the crystal itinerary, “a one-handed warhammer that causes localized lightning strikes when you strike an enemy.”

  “Let’s hope I get the chance to test it out, huh?” I said.

  I offered her a smile, and she nodded at me as she took the device, her expression grave.

  “What are you going to do, Mike?” Hana asked me, her voice taut with apprehension.

  I waved the flickering, crackling Stormhammer backward and forward. The silvery white and black lighting that licked and coiled around the haft of the weapon and jumped playfully up to the beautiful head made the snowflakes that landed on it spit and sizzle. The Frost Dragon’s eyes were glued on the warhammer, though whether that was because it was the only thing on the top of the turret that was moving or because it could sense the power of another dragon within it, I couldn’t say.

  “What am I going to do?” I asked, moving slowly toward the Frost Dragon, the hand that was not holding the Stormhammer brushing the parapet to my left. “I’m going to distract this thing so that we can get on with the job!”

  The tension between the Frost Dragon and I built with every step that I took toward it. Then, when all that tension was bound to unleash with the next step, I scooched down, picked up a handful of snow, and threw it at the dragon.

  That was it. That was all it took to bring down a good few tons of fire breathing fury on my head.

  The dragon belched a streaming cloud of ice crystals, very much like the kind the drakes had produced. However, where the drakes had only been firing a dozen or so crystals at a time, the Frost Dragon let loose a deluge of hundreds and hundreds of the missiles.

  They chewed up the stone work between it and me, sending chunks of mortar flying in the same way machine gun fire would.

  In answer, I threw myself over the side of the low parapet and, for the second time in less than half an hour, found myself falling earthward.

  Only this time, of course, I was equipped with wings.

  The Frost Dragon lurched after me and flung itself into space, snapping open crystal-clear wings in a shower of icy shards. The six women threw themselves to the deck as the great creature lumbered past, intent on me as its prize.

  My wings buzzed into life when I was about twenty feet from the ground, and I shot off across the tundra. The dragon followed, spewing ice crystals in my wake and churning up the snow behind me so that it fountained upward and obscured me from its view.

  We played cat and mouse for a time, while I tried to figure out how the hell I was going to take this thing down. It looked old, tatty, and derelict, but it was still a fucking dragon.

  The snowy peaks disintegrated and shattered around me as the Frost Dragon fired burst after burst of its icy breath at me. Rocks and snow disintegrated all around me, ice sheared away from the mountainsides under the dragon’s onslaught.

  I tried to distract the massive beast by skewering it with some bolts from my repeating crossbow, trading it in for the Stormhammer. The bolts found their marks, striking the Frost Dragon square in the head, but the magical quarrels simply ricocheted straight off the beast’s slick, icy scales.

  Then, abruptly, the dragon pursuing me pulled up into a frost fog bank and vanished.

  The Stormhammer appeared in my hands once more. I gripped the haft of the weapon tightly, my eyes scanning all around.

  “Where the fuck did you just g—” I started to mutter to myself.

  The dragon appeared out of the clouds and swept its tail sideways. It missed me, thanks to some dexterous flying on my part, but caught an unlucky drake in the chest. The smaller dragon was flung through the air and crashed into a small snowdrift that explode
d in a pretty puff of white and arterial red.

  The Frost Dragon roared in frustration and rage. It spewed out another burst of ice shards, but its shot went high due to me going low. The shards struck a boulder, causing it to explode, sending earthen shrapnel everywhere.

  Seeking cover, looking for just a few seconds to gather my wits, I zipped through a collection of naturally occurring rock columns that stood up like fingers from the snowy slope.

  Deciding to test whether this relic was the real deal, I attempted to transfer Noctis into my Right Arm slot. There was a mental click, and my wings were still working as they should. I lifted my right hand and conjured a Shadow Sphere.

  And in that single moment, I understood the power I now wielded. I could use Noctis in two slots at once. I then placed him inside my Chest slot, and the Onyx Armor rippled into being, its shiny black plates enveloping my body. It seemed that this relic allowed me to use three slots at once. At least. I grinned as realization settled in my mind.

  I was a fucking god among mancers.

  The dragon appeared again, and I tossed the Shadow Sphere at it. The ball of Chaos Magic zoomed toward the dragon but was easily dodged. The sphere crashed into a rock column, vanishing it in a puff of smoke and sending snow tumbling down. I swallowed. I didn’t want to create another avalanche, so I’d hold off on casting any more Shadow Spheres just yet.

  “Father!” came the voice of Pan from out of my mind. “Father, use the Stormhammer. It is a powerful tool! Channel my mana into it!” he insisted, his voice urgent.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “All of it! Dig deep!”

  There was a huge crash of cascading rock and an acerbic hiss from the Frost Dragon as it burst through the fingers of rock that I had just weaved through. The impact sent pillars toppling, crashing away down the mountainside and out of sight.

  The Frost Dragon suddenly filled all my vision. It was like coming face-to-face with an IMAX screen.

  I raised the Stormhammer high, reached deep down into Pan’s reserves, and opened the conduit that would allow me to use the mana that was native to him. Lightning danced and jumped across the hammer’s head, down the handle and along my arm. I felt the hairs on my arm stirring, felt my heart pick up its pace as it was suddenly flooded with the power of the storm.

  “I guess you haven’t heard of me,” I growled through gritted teeth as the Frost Dragon flew toward me, the light of victory in its eyes. “Allow me to enlighten you.”

  I dodged to the side as the Frost Dragon’s jaws closed on the empty air that I had so recently been hovering in, rising up a touch and swinging the hammer up and over my shoulder. I brought the hammer down with as much force as I had in my human body, with as much power as I had been given through my dragon bond.

  The hammer’s head struck the Frost Dragon right between the eyes with an impact that sounded like a single booming crack of thunder. One lonely, concentrated lightning bolt, pure white and blue, dropped from storm-tossed clouds above and made contact exactly where the Stormhammer hit.

  There was a flash and a small cloud of black smoke.

  The Frost Dragon stopped in midair, like it had just run into a girder. Its expression was still furious, but somewhere, in the very depths of its eyes, there was a modicum of surprise too.

  It dropped out of the sky like a train into a gorge in one of those Western movies. It plummeted down, turning slightly as it went and smashed into the snowy slope below. Its wings, its beautiful icy wings, shattered on impact. Its long neck was bent backward at an obscene angle.

  The dragon’s massive corpse flopped and rolled a few times down the mountain slope until it was arrested by a scattered collection of boulders.

  Then all was still.

  Even the weather seemed to relax. The wind ceased its relentless gusting. The snow eased, becoming less like the snow you’d expect to find in the Antarctic at wintertime and more like the snow you might see inside of a snow globe.

  I hung, hovering in the air, looking from the Stormhammer thrumming in my hands to where the dragon had fallen. I knew that I could gather dragondust from wild dragons, but there was no way I’d risk going down there to get it. I would have just have hope that what we currently had back at the Galipolas camp would be enough. Either that, or we could organize someone to come up here and harvest the dragondust from the Frost Dragon’s corpse. I didn’t like their chances, though.

  “Mike! Mike!”

  I pulled my gaze away from the devastation of the mountainside, noting that there were dozens and dozens of smaller corpses lying everywhere; those of the drakes. It was Elenari, rushing up from the castle toward me on the back of Gharmon. I could make her out quite clearly now. Could make out the castle itself and the rest of the crew gathered at a doorway set into the tower’s roof.

  “Yeah,” I said, somewhat dazed by the sudden quiet and calm more than the fight with the wild dragon. “Yeah?”

  “You’ve got to come quickly, before more drakes come,” Elenari said.

  I looked around at the craggy heights surrounding us. I couldn’t see any more drakes. The survivors had fled after the fall of the Frost Dragon and the subsequent clearing of the weather, but they could always come back.

  Chapter 15

  The castle was eerily calm and quiet on the inside. Once we had gone further into the main body of the massive white stone building, past the broken exterior walls and into the cavernous rooms beyond, the howling din of the merciless wind almost totally disappeared.

  “What’s with this stone?” I asked, reaching out a hand to brush my fingertips across the smooth white rock that comprised the entire building.

  “What do you mean?” Renji asked me in a muted voice.

  I gestured around us. “There are no windows. It should be pitch dark in here—or pretty close to. The light is emanating from out of the stone itself.”

  It was true. The light was soft and subtle, and my eyes hadn’t needed to adjust at all, even after stepping out of the flat, snowy glare from outside.

  “Deep magic. Intrinsic, I think, to the stone,” Penelope whispered by my side. She ran her blue hand gently across the surface of the stone, like a blind person reading braille.

  I noticed how everyone, myself included, was speaking in a hushed voice. The kind of tone that one usually reserved for libraries or hospitals or churches. I wondered about this. Was it because it was so quiet in here? Was it because we didn’t know what might be lurking around the corner? Or was it because, somewhere in a deeper subconscious, something told us that we were standing in and about to explore some holy place?

  I gave my head a little shake. This was no time for a philosophical bit of introspection on the human condition. Making a mental adjustment, I conjured the Chaos Spear into my hand; Noctis’ power selected in Weapon Slot A. The thrum of the Onyx Dragon’s mana in my hand and the flickering black and silver of the flames running along the spear shaft were a comfort to me in that weird place.

  “Any reason why we should go poking around down here?” Tamsin asked. The hobgoblin’s voice was taut with tension.

  “Any reason why we shouldn’t?” I asked in return. “We found one relic here. Maybe there’s more?”

  Tamsin flashed me one of her very white, very sharp smiles. As was often the case, there was very little humor in it, and what humor was present was black humor. The special variety that people who spend a lot of time in life-threatening situations learn to see in things that ordinarily wouldn’t be funny at all.

  “You already have the relic that we came for, yes?” she asked me.

  I nodded and patted the pocket of my breeches, where the strange little doohickey that might have been man-made or might have been organic resided.

  “Yeah, we’ve got it,” I said. “Everything okay with you?”

  Tamsin shrugged. I could picture how her lithesome body would be moving under the thick fur coat that she wore. As it was, due to the thickness of the clothing that we were
all obliged to wear, I barely saw that she moved at all.

  “I’m fine,” she said, “it’s just that there’s some... threat here. Some shadow that lies on this place. An uneasiness that sets my teeth on edge.” She bared her pointed predator’s teeth to emphasize her point.

  “I feel it too,” Hana said. Now that we were out of the weather, the Vetruscan had cast back her fur-edged hood to reveal her shaved head. She was glancing around the massive, bare room, wearing a slight frown. “This place is shrouded in the memories of dark deeds, I think, although I can’t put my finger on why I feel like this.”

  “Are we tempting fate by exploring here, do you think?” Elenari asked. “Now that we have the relic, should we not be heading back to Hrímdale?”

  “We’re dragonmancers,” I said, “tempting fate, pushing the envelope, blazing the trail etcetera etcetera, is what we do.”

  In truth, I had only been half listening to the conversation. Most of attention had been fixed on the little glowing spectral figure of Will.

  The will-o’-the-wisp had been bobbing around the vast hall. He reminded me so much of some breed of ghostly dog that I couldn’t help but smile to myself as I watched him.

  There were multiple doors leading out of the chamber, leading off to only the gods knew where. Will had drifted casually from one to another, but now he stood at an ornate double door, carved out of the same stone that made up the rest of the structure. He had stopped there, as still as could be, but now began to pulsate steadily with a faint blue light.

  I wasn’t sure how I knew, or how Will did it, but I couldn’t help but interpret that color and that rate of pulsation as being the visual equivalent of curiosity, or a golden retriever standing with its tail out dead straight and one foreleg off the ground.

  “Ladies,” I said, not taking my eyes off the wisp, “I think we should go and take a little look this way.”

  I set off across the preternaturally quiet floor of the blank chamber. My booted feet echoed loudly on the stone floor, the last of the snow that I had dragged in from outside falling away from my boots and the hem of my long fur coat.