Dragon Breeder 4

by Dante King

  Happily, I was a dragonmancer, and was able to pull the slab aside without so much as breaking a sweat.

  “Will,” I said, looking down into the shallow depression under the slab, “we’re going to have to get you a raise.”

  Will blinked slowly at me, the light he was giving off tinged slightly with a sickly green.

  “They’re not even paying you?” I said in mock outrage. “Shit, that’s unbelievable. You’re going to want to get onto your employee rights, you know? See the Department of Labor, or whoever it is that you have to see. In the meantime, I’ll put some of this aside for you!”

  I reached into the shallow hole and pulled out eight small bars of gold. I wasn’t sure what they would have been worth on Earth, but gold was gold, and I wasn’t in any sort of position to turn my nose up at eight bars of the stuff. What was more, nestled between a couple of the bars, was a diamond as big as a quail’s egg.

  “Shit, I wonder what Big Greasy would give me for that?” I said softly, grinning as I imagined the avaricious smile that would no doubt have almost split the gnoll merchant’s head in half.

  I pocketed the contents of the hole, but as I extracted the last couple of bars from the floor, I saw Will flashing in the corner of my eye, trying to get my attention.

  “What?” I asked.

  The wisp floated over the now empty hole.

  “I got the treasure, man,” I said, “and I thank you very much for the tip-off. I promise, as soon as I find out what it is that you like or need, I will get some of it for you. Now, though, we better be getting back to the others.”

  The wisp continued to hover over the hole, flashing sporadically, with a growing sense of urgency.

  I frowned. “There’s more?”

  One long, deep flash of warm yellow.

  I reached back into the hole, feeling gingerly around with light fingers. There was a thick layer of dust down there. Cold dust. Brushing this aside, my hand closed on something rough and palm-sized.

  “What do we have here?” I said, pulling out my hand.

  It was an Etherstone. A goddamn Etherstone. Just lying there in the ground, and now safe in my hand. A dull yellow in color, almost the same shade of yellow as an egg yolk.

  “Is this what you could feel, not the gold?” I asked.

  Will flashed the affirmative.

  “Definitely need a raise,” I muttered affectionately to the little glowing specter, “let’s get back to the others.”

  The others were grouped together next to the wall where Penelope was still pouring over the runes.

  “Did anyone find anything?” I asked as I approached.

  “Nothing,” Saya said.

  “Double nothing,” Tamsin agreed.

  “Just statues and dust,” Elenari said.

  “What about you, Mike?” Renji asked.

  I held up my hand, showing them the dull yellow Etherstone.

  “I found one of these,” I said. “Although, I should say that Will did. He’s a nosey little bastard, but boy does he find some goodies!”

  Will flashed happily.

  Renji, reaching out a long arm, snatched the stone from my hand and shoved it deep into one of the pockets of her fur coat.

  “I believe this is mine,” she said in a good-natured voice, which was loaded with innuendo and the promise of very good things to come.

  I laughed along with the women, but I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Hana looked a little put out by Renji’s forthrightness.

  It seemed that she had wanted the Etherstone to go to her, which I totally understood. I was sure that Hana liked me just fine—more than liked me, if I knew anything about the fairer sex or anything about the sex that we had enjoyed just before we left on this mission. I figured though that Hana would be dwelling on what it might mean for her, and the Vetruscan Kingdom, if she was on the receiving end of some of my loaded super-swimmers. It would be her child—whatever that offspring might turn out to be—that would be the hope of her people.

  Penelope called our attention back to the runes, saying that she had discovered something else in the harsh strokes of whatever language adorned the temple wall. I noticed, with a sense of foreboding, that her blue face had drained of color and was now a pale stone hue.

  “Better spill the beans and give us the good news,” I said sarcastically.

  Penelope licked lips that had gone suddenly very dry.

  “The runes also speak, or at least make a mention of - of the Bloodletting Ceremony,” she said.

  Saya whacked me on the arm. “The Bloodletting Ceremony! The likes of which that bastard Captain Cade was involved with, yeah?”

  “That’s right, Saya,” Tamsin said.

  Captain Remington Cade had been in charge of Rank One Dragonmancers at the Drako Academy. It had primarily been an administrative role, which was the reason he’d gone off the deep end. He hadn’t actually been a true Bloodletter, but he’d started some knock-off group that imitated them. The Bloodletters were a mysterious organization who captured dragons and harvested their blood from them in the hopes that they could make their followers as strong us dragonmancers were. This process was a bastardized version of the Transfusion Ceremony.

  “What do the runes say about the Bloodletting Ceremony, Pen?” I asked, cutting Saya off before she could start waxing lyrical about what a bunch of assholes the Bloodletters were.

  Penelope’s eyes ran across a section of the rustic text again. “If I’m interpreting this right, it says here that it is the Bloodletting Ceremony which creates the wild creatures, like the Frost Dragon you just took down.”

  “How can that be?” Elenari asked.

  “These wild creatures were forged through a heretical sacrilegious version of the Transfusion Ceremony, I think,” Penelope said. “I’m having to do a little bit of fill-in-the-blanks here, but it sounds like when these monsters were bled to death, there was a side-effect, a side-effect that the very first Bloodletters did not expect.”

  “Clearly,” Renji said, in a measured tone, “the Bloodletting Ceremony did not kill these creatures.”

  Penelope gave a perplexed shrug. “I guess not. According to the runes, rather than die and be reborn and seek out new mancers, these creatures became ‘wild’.”

  I looked around at all the statues that surrounded us, at the multitude of creatures that, I had to assume, the Bloodletters, had drained of blood to further their own dark magic.

  “So, these ‘wild’ creatures,” I said. “They’re zombies of a kind—neither living nor dead?”

  Penelope nodded thoughtfully. “A little on the layman’s side of things as explanations go,” she said with a small smile, “but essentially correct, I think.”

  “And it seems like that’s why these creatures, which would normally wait to form a bond with a new mancer when the time is ripe, haven’t been seeking out new mancers at all?” Tamsin asked.

  “Someone has been trapping, capturing, or intercepting them and then draining them of their blood,” Hana said. “It’s why dragons and bears are dying out. Why monsters from across all civilizations are reducing in number.”

  Penelope sighed deeply. “Yes. The runes tell us that it first started millennia ago, back when this temple was still functional. But the Bloodletters have obviously increased in their sacrilegious efforts recently.”

  I rubbed at my eyes. General Shiloh needed to hear about this as soon as possible, as did the Overseer.

  “Shit,” I muttered, “looks like the Bloodletters are mixed up with the Shadow Nations—that the fucking Shadow Nations might have actually given rise to the Bloodletters!”

  “Things are certainly pointing that way,” Renji agreed.

  “How could things get anymore convoluted and fucked up?” I grumbled to myself, scratching distractedly at my stubble.

  In retrospect, I was asking for it, really. With a comment like that, I should have known that the universe would chuck a big old metaphorical dog turd into my pat
h.

  The roar shook the hall of statues in which we all stood. It reverberated through the floor, bounced off the likenesses of unicorns, sphinxes, hippocampuses, and kappas. It was a roar of unbridled anger and resentment.

  “Another dragon?” Elenari asked.

  “If there are wild dragons, does that mean there are wild—” Saya began to say.

  With very little fuss or warning, the temple shuddered, and a bear the size of a commercial fishing boat, the size of a small house, burst through the floor.

  “That’d be a yes, then,” Tamsin said drily.

  “A resounding yes,” Saya said.

  Stone slabs slid off the bear’s bristling hide like water off a duck’s back. Its fur looked more like tightly coiled barbed wire than actual fur.

  “Hana,” I said as the bear hauled itself slowly through the chasm that it had created in the floor, knocking statues aside as if they were made of straw instead of solid stone. “Hana, you know bears. What’s this thing likely to do?”

  Hana didn’t answer right away. For a moment, I thought she couldn’t hear me over the din the giant bear was making as it excavated itself out of the chasm. Each of its claws was about as big as a bowling pin and twice as long. They were good for digging. Probably good for impaling intruders too.

  Red eyes gleamed in the car-sized head. Mammoth, crooked teeth as yellow as antique ivory were covered in ropes of thick saliva.

  “It’s a female,” Hana said abruptly.

  “How do you know?” I asked, instantly regretting voicing such an inane question. Who gave a fuck how Hana knew?

  Hana was thinking along the same lines.

  “Doesn’t matter how I know, just that I do!” she told me curtly.

  “And the reason she’s so pissed?” Saya asked.

  “Because… she’s been hibernating, I think,” Hana said. “We’ve woken her up! With our scent or the noise we’ve been making.”

  The she-bear, big and angry, managed to drag her huge ass out of the rubble. She stood, for a moment, glaring at us as we backed slowly away toward the exit.

  “So, we woke her up and she’s cranky,” Tamsin hissed. “I feel her pain. But now what do we do?”

  The she-bear bellowed, spraying saliva and chunks of old rotten meat. The noise was such that the cracks shot out from the already weakened floor and half way up the walls. A few of the stone effigies shattered.

  I hefted my Chaos Spear in my hand, and my Onyx Armor materialized over my body. I was ready to throw my spear at the bear should she attack, but I desperately hoped she wouldn’t. After learning what these twisted wild monsters were, and how they had come to be, I felt more than a little bad about taking one down. It sounded like the creature had not known too much peace in its life—or afterlife.

  The cracks in the walls shot quickly upward toward the ceiling, like lightning in reverse, and the whole structure started to crumble around our ears.

  “What do we do?” Tamsin asked again, more urgently.

  “Run!” I yelled.

  We bolted for the door, Will leading the way. Dust and snow rained down, but the wisp’s glow was strong and steady, and we were able to follow him out of the growing madness that was the collapsing temple.

  “Go! Go! Go!” I heard Hana yelling from behind me as I led the way after the wisp.

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw the Vetruscan bearmancer chivvying the rest of the company through the ornate doors. Through the dust and snow, I could see Hana firing a couple of golden spells back at the bear in an attempt to slow it.

  There was nothing I could do that would not compromise us all, so I turned and hurried after Will.

  We all made it outside. Just.

  I counted the company as they burst out into the open air behind me; Tamsin, Elenari, Saya, Renji, Penelope, and…

  “Come on, Hana,” I muttered. “Come on, come on!”

  I could see the Vetruscan running through the collapsing temple, through the hall into which we had initially entered through a crack in the exterior wall.

  I reached out a hand and wrenched her threw the gap in the wall, with enough force to send her flying fifteen feet through the air to land in the snow behind me. Then, I dived backward as a massive paw reached through the gap, missing me by an inch or two.

  The wall, already shaky and broken as it was, buckled under the impact of the giant she-bear throwing herself against it and fell inward.

  “Get back!” I shouted. “It’s going down!”

  The wall fell as we scrambled back through the snow. Dust and snow and ice filled the air, setting us all to coughing and choking.

  When it had cleared somewhat, we could see that the whole side of the temple had caved in.

  “I wonder if the bear—” Penelope began to say.

  A deep, bass roar echoed out from the rubble. It shifted a little. Then the roar sounded out again, coming from a little further off.

  “Sounds like she is satisfied that she has seen us off,” Hana told us, her dropping back briefly into the snow before she rolled up to her feet. “I think that she saw us intruders in her den. Now that we are gone and she has peace once more, I don’t think she’ll pursue us.”

  I let out a little disbelieving laugh. “Look at us, meeting a monster that we didn’t end up killing.”

  “First time for everything,” said Saya, helping Pen to her feet.

  Now that we were outside, I noticed that the weather had cleared a little. A few fat snowflakes still circled down from the lowering clouds, but it looked like the storm had abated. The sun was even making a feeble attempt to shine a little light through the layer of wooly clouds.

  All at once, twin shadows blotted out the weak sunlight. There was a rush of massive leathery wings, and the snow all around us kicked up like it had been caught in the downdraft of a helicopter’s rotors.

  “Dragons!” I heard Saya yell out.

  There were two giant dragons, in fact: Jazmyn and Ashrin in their Titan forms. They came to rest in the snow, not far from us. The one that I recognized as Ashrin turned to look at the ruined temple.

  “We came as soon as we were told the storm was brewing again in the Pass,” Jaz said, and her words came out of her dragon throat in a deep growl.

  “What news?” Tamsin called, voicing the question that was also on my mind. “I doubt this is a social call.”

  Ashrin swung her reptilian head back to us and spoke in the soft and poisonous voice that so suited her Toxin Dragon.

  “Hrímdale is currently under siege by the rebel forces,” she said without preamble.

  Hana let out an inarticulate sound of shocked fury.

  “After word got out about the Transfusion Ceremony and the deal Queen Frami brokered with the Mystoceans,” Ashrin purred, “the renegade Vetruscans were able to enlist many more soldiers to their cause, including more bearmancers.”

  “No!” Hana cried, looking wildly about her, looking for something to hit, maybe.

  “Why are you here?” I asked Ashrin and Jazmyn. “Why aren’t you at Hrímdale, helping them out?”

  Jazmyn pushed forward her Crescent Dragon, Meoko’s, head forward.

  “Queen Frami and the Vetruscans are not Mystocean,” she said in her rumbling growl. “You, however, Mike Noctis, are. And you are of far more import and value, I’m afraid to say, than these foreigners.”

  It was harsh, but it was also true. To her immense credit, Hana only looked like she wanted to bitch-slap Jaz’s dragon in its bright blue-silver face for a second. Then she nodded.

  “She’s right,” Hana said in a strangled voice. Turning to me, she said, “She’s right, Mike. You hold the key to creating more dragons, but you could also hold the key to creating far more than just that. Your safety is paramount, but I must get back to try and help my Queen.”

  I was sure she would have summoned her bear there and then and taken off running, but for the hand I cupped her cheek with.

  “Wait,” I said. “Just
wait.”

  I turned back to Jazmyn and Ashrin. “We’re going to go and help Queen Frami.”

  Ashrin snorted a hot gust of wind that blew my hood back, but I ignored it.

  “The Overseer wants the Vetruscans help in the Subterranean Realms, right?” I said rhetorically. “Well, she and General Shiloh are not going to get that if Queen Frami is dead, are they?”

  Ashrin and Jazmyn exchanged glances. Although they were in control of Alzad and Meoko’s bodies, I could see the dragonmancers thinking from behind the huge reptilian eyes.

  “This will be a risky thing, going to help Queen Frami at Hrímdale, Mike,” Jazmyn rumbled.

  “It will be a direct contravention of General Shiloh’s orders,” Ashrin hissed.

  “Not if you turn those orders ninety degrees and look at them from a slightly different angle,” I said with a slight grin. “You need to keep me safe, right? And I’ve been ordered to find this relic and to help cement the relationship between us and the Vetruscans. Queen Frami and her loyal Vetruscans are our new allies. We can’t have a rebel faction going and killing them now, can we? It’ll be hurting the Mystocean Empire.”

  Jazmyn and Ashrin still didn’t look convinced, but that didn’t matter. I was fucking convinced. Hana was my friend, as was Queen Frami, and you didn’t leave your friends to hang out to dry.

  “I can use a dragon in multiple slots simultaneously, ladies,” I said, looking up at the two dragoons with steel in my gaze. “I’m more powerful than I have ever been. More capable, in some ways, than a dragonmancer has been in—in how long, Pen?”

  “Eons,” Penelope said, blushing a little as the attention was focused on her. “For ages.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’d been hoping for a little more of a specific number, but eons is a damned long time.”

  Ashrin let out a long-suffering sigh, and I knew that I had beat them down.

  “How long do you think we’ll have good weather for?” I asked as I stared up at the sky.