Dragon’s Siege
Rise of the Horned Serpent~Part 4
Daniel Potter
Contents
The Story So Far
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Thank You to My Patreons
Also by Daniel Potter
Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Potter
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, character and events are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
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Cover by Radovan Zibkovic
Copy edited by Richard Shealy
Created with Vellum
The Story So Far
Previously in Dragon’s Run: Ishe has escaped Yaz’noth clutches and met up with Hawk, Sparrow and two other crew members from Fire Fox. To escape the hidden valley, they enlist the help of a pair of warriors from the Two Herds tribe and raft down a river infested with the Grief; undying remnants of the Ancients and anyone else who’s fallen into its clutches. Ishe almost joins their numbers after becoming infected, but rallies; tricking their contentious hive mind into battling Yaz’Noth instead when he spots her on the river. Hawk, ashamed of what she perceives to be her own cowardice, attacks the dragon with nothing more than her super human skill and an iron spear. She wounds Yaz’noth, but is struck down.
Unaware of any of this, Yaki is coming to terms with her changing body as she puts the quicksilver heist in motion, enlisting the help of Gama, Mitsuo and Simon the ratman. Distrustful of Mitsuo’s cowardly cousin who provides them with the necessary forgeries, Yaki follows the Death Panther to the his workshop where she discovers and fatally punishes his treachery. It takes all her wiles to distract Mitsuo from the murder. It works, for now. Together they break into the Foundry and sneak into the vault where the quicksilver is stored. Yaki discovers, to her horror, that death masks of Mitsuo’s cousins are being worked on in the vault. During a fight with a golem, Mitsuo deduces what happened and stabs Yaki through the eye. The very quicksilver Yaki is stealing brings her back from the brink of death and she escapes with the now unnecessary ransom after maiming Mitsuo.
As Yaki flees the city in the commandeered Dragonsworn airship, Ishe is in a desperate sprint against the elements to reach her in time. With Miss Cog and Hammer hot on her glider’s tail feathers, Ishe renames herself the Storm Coyote to pass through a sudden squall and escape her pursuers.
Back on the Scale, the situation takes a sudden turn when the captured Dragonsworn bust out the brig and attempt to escape with the quicksilver. Yaki and her crew battle them to a stalemate, only to have Ishe come crashing down into the middle of it. The sisters reunite, but the Dragonsworn managed to escape with the quicksilver.
Now Yaki & Ishe must decide what to do about the dragon about to attack the only city they’ve called home.
Chapter One
Two things spared the Seven Saved Lands from the initial wave of Grief: the sparse population and the mountains of the Spine. They formed the barrier that holds them off till this day. Now the Spine shelters everything that is rare in the world, from dragons to heroism itself.
Hon Nishamura, chief historian of the Steward’s archives
The morning sky greeted Ishe without a single cloud, a clear blue ribbon from the teeth of the mountains to the tree line. They huddled there at the foot of the mountain, in a pocket where the forest had been scraped off the rocky side and had not regrown. Yet while the storm in the sky had broken, the forest sat still and sullen, an occasional bird braving the silence to cry an alarm. All went unanswered. They waited for a different type of storm to come.
Ishe pushed her finger through bands of her binding to touch her new scar, an inch-long, diamond-shaped mark to the right of her sternum. Around her a variety of people moved with the reluctance of stiff bodies, their groans a diverse mix ranging from human to decidedly not. One in in particular, a thing that had been a pile of tentacles, now emitted a series of wet squirks as it coil around itself, twisting bundles of ropy limbs to approximations of legs and arms. They called him Glub, the least human of this strange crew her sister had fallen in with.
A tall fellow with thick spectacles pointedly sat down in front of her, blocking her view of the assembly process. Ishe gave him nothing more than a disgruntled snort and turned. Across their hastily dug fire pit crouched Yaki, hands clutching her head as if they were holding it together. Stripped of makeup, Yaki’s skin had gained a strange yellowish pallor that looked the opposite of healthy. Her once doll-like face marred by an eye that had swollen shut. Ishe knew that her sister still lurked on the edge of sleep as she wore pain openly on her face. There were things that had to be done, important words to be said. Yet, by unspoken agreement, they grappled with the morning in their own worlds.
Although in Yaki’s case, something had rendered her mute.
“Okay.” Ishe broke the silence. “Tell me what’s been going on. How did we get here?”
“It a long story,” said the guy with the glasses.
“Then start talking,” Ishe said. Yaki’s head nodded a fraction, and the guy, who introduced himself as Gama, started talking about an unpleasant bore named Mitsuo Nishamura.
Ishe’s grip tightened on her belt as Gama wove the tale, edging around precisely how Yaki had convinced the noble to go along with her plan. “Nine hells, Yaki! You didn’t need to—”
A viper’s hiss cut her off. She found Yaki fixing Ishe with a challenging stare from her single eye. It pierced Ishe’s ungrateful mouth, which Ishe shut with a click.
Yaki snatched up a small journal that had been lying by her feet and scratched words in it with hurried, jerky strokes. Then she held it up so Ishe could read.
1st: Fuck you.
2nd: The sex was the best part of whole iron tithed plan. Pity me for that and I will light you on fire sister.
“I didn’t—” Ishe started.
Yaki’s eye narrowed.
“Sorry. I just wished I had gotten here sooner. Then— Ah!” Ishe jerked as something popped her in the back. She twisted to find Drosa glaring up at her, who had not sat up from her patch on the sloping ground.
“Nothing make ship come faster. You here now. Good enough.” Drosa’s stern expression flashed into a bright smile.
Ishe admitted defeat with a deep sigh. Yaki pointed at her journal and jabbed her fingers at Gama, making sure she included him in the sentiment. He quickly apologized.
“Can we jump to the end?” Ishe asked.
Yaki turned to a new page.
Mitsuo Nishimura stabbed m
e through the eye after I stabbed him in the back, it read.
“Please say the bastard is dead, then,” Ishe spat. “Or write.”
Yaki gave a snort, then winced. She wrote: Sadly the back stab was metaphorical but I did break his leg afterward. A shrug followed.
“You let him live?” Ishe found herself snarling.
“She got stabbed though her eye!” Gama’s voice turned heads in the camp. “We’re all lucky she’s alive at all.”
“That’s not the point!” she snapped back. “The point is...” She trailed off, groping for the words. Aimless anger bubbled through her veins. “... I should have been there,” she added quietly.
“Stupid. Ishe not god or wind.” Drosa tempered her words with two encircling arms and warmth that penetrated Ishe’s flight suit.
Everyone laughed except Ishe, including Coyote, whose laugh poked like a finger on the wrong side of her ribs. Still, the warmth of their companionship took out the bite of her embarrassment. No matter how fast she had moved, she had gotten there. Allowing herself a moment of contentment, she leaned against Drosa.
A wet cough sounded; Ishe snapped open eyes that she had no realized she had closed. No time for resting. Beyond the ring where she sat, Sparrow spat red into the dirt. Blinky had draped himself over his legs, all of the spider’s eyes closed as Sparrow’s hand drifted over his fuzzy back.
The majority of the crew Yaki had gathered huddled around a second fire pit a little ways off. She had never seen so many crystal-touched in one place before. They were staggeringly diverse, in size, shape, and even origin. From Grim, the skeleton with skin who would look Hawk in the eye, to tiny Sparks, shorter than even Simon, with her slick electric-blue skin. Cursed to live beyond the sunlight. Most had their hoods back even as they huddled in their thin black cloaks. Smiles flashed around their fire, covered up grimaces. The majority of them were injured, the metallic tang of stale blood on Ishe’s tongue like a foul lozenge.
None of them looked down at the skiff that sat farther down the slope, where five comrades who had been too injured to move rested. Ishe recognized the mood, the post–close call. The celebration of life when others were not so lucky.
The celebration was premature.
Ishe could hear what Mother would tell her; maybe she was whispering it as she dug through the bones of her own murders. “Leave them. Take your sister and get her safe.” Yet that wouldn’t solve anything. Yaz’noth would find them eventually: he wanted Yaki, wanted to see the results of his experiment.
Only one way would keep Yaki safe: to live and maybe reverse whatever been done to her. Only one thing would stop him. Death. Her own ancestors had failed to do it three hundred years before.
To do that, everyone needed to be moving.
First, she got herself moving. Standing up, she twisted her torso until her spine begged for mercy with a cascade of pops and cracks. The weight of eyes fell on her as she continued to stretch out her limbs and realigned her joints. She hoped it would get everyone’s attention in the same manner of a coyote’s yawn. Although as she turned around, the eyes on her were more quizzical than awed. It would do. Ishe pulled off her flight cap, ran her fingernails through her sweat-grimed hair and smiled at everyone. “I need everyone’s attention.” She heard her mother’s steel in her voice.
More eyes drifted her way, more than a few narrowed to suspicious slits. At the very edge of the gathering she spotted a man with a too-large grin. She ignored the god and focused on the gather of crystal-touched around the second fire.
“I am Ishe of Madria. And I owe all of you lot a debt. Even though the rescue didn’t go to plan.” Some nervous chuckles of agreement sprinkled through out the crowd. “Mostly on the account that I actually escaped a week ago and I’ve been desperately trying to get here since. My mother would tell me at this moment that important things have happened, I’m free, and we have a ship.” She pointed down at the small skiff that everyone had packed into the night before. Cautious snorts followed with the crossing of arms.
Yaki squinted up at her sister, the slash of her mouth a sharp punctuation. What in the nine hells are you up to, Ishe? her face said.
Ishe continued. “From all your faces, I’m going to guess that not what you were imagining when you took over Scale. Am I wrong? Anyone here content to sit here and lick their wounds on this hillside and wait for rain?” No one answered with more than a subtle shake of their heads. “Do you want to try your hands at piracy with a skiff that hand cannons could blow a hole through?” Worried glances exchanged with that prospect, although Grim shrugged and nodded as if he could make it work. “Neither do I.” Ishe let her voice rise. “We’re not done. The only reason that we don’t have a dragon the size of a Behemoth-class ship on the horizon at this very moment is that the greatest warrior in the Seven Saved Lands gave her life to injure him. That is the only reason we have a shot to do something about it. Now, I’m guessing you may not love Golden Hills, but I’ll tell what I do love and what we will need: a safe port of call. Who gets a safe port of call? Not pirates but heroes. All we have to do is stop a dragon.”
That got murmurs, a burbling of excitement and bewilderment. “You want us to take out an elder dragon that’s stupid enough to charge the walls of the city with a single skiff?” Grim the skull-faced man said above the whispers.
Ishe looked directly into his dark, empty eye sockets. “He took out an Odin Sphere right in front of me, ripped it in half, and stole its shield crystal, and now he has the quicksilver, whatever that does.”
The man flinched, in the way that only a sailor who’d seen a shield crystal in action could.
“Heeeals,” Yaki said, her lips contorting as if she were searching for the right position, “ass,” then shook her head, pressing her lips together as she tried again. Finally, with a frustrated growl, she opened the journal and scratched a word. She flipped it around so everyone could see it. FAST!
“It even seals holes in the wings?” Ishe asked.
Yaki nodded.
Gama handed it back, his eyes blinking in confusion behind the lenses of his glasses. Ishe could tell that the majority of her sister’s crew were experienced sailors, because they went still. After giving them a moment to imagine the havoc even a smaller dragon could wreck if their wings weren’t vulnerable, she said, “Running won’t work either, if that’s what you’re thinking. He caught Fox Fire. That’s why my mother is dead.”
“BUT!” Ishe barked out, startling everyone who had been staring at the prospect of a huge, invulnerable dragon. “We’re not going to let him win. You didn’t come all this way simply to rescue me or help my sister because of her pretty smile. You came to because we are the daughters of Admiral Madria, who died rather than be caged! We defeat this dragon, we save the city and the skies are free to roam. No more dark tunnels, no hiding from the sun.”
That got their attention; grins spread.
“This what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get medical crystals and get everyone on their feet.” Several sat up at that.
“SECOND! We are going to figure out a way to shove an elemental lance right through Yaz’noth’s heart. It’s not going to be easy. But he won’t see it coming. Whether we mount it on that little skiff down there or hijack a Behemoth, I do not care, but we will do it. Then imagine what will change when they have to credit a crew of Enshadowed with saving the city and killing a legend!”
A single “Woohoo!” split the air, and everyone turned to small Sparks, who quickly slumped down and covered her mouth.
“That one I have on board.” Ishe pivoted to survey the rest of the crowd. “Who else?”
“Simon says two.” The ratman sitting next to Yaki stood. The crowd shifted expectantly, and he turned his head to look over everyone with his one eye as the other remained resolutely closed. “Simon not here for to escape Golden Hills. Simon here to sail. Not here to dig in dirt. We all dug in dirt.” He gave a little stomp. “Enough digging, Simon say.”<
br />
Small yeahs rippled through the crew.
“We not Enshadowed no mores!” He tugged at his cloak, pulling the fabric away from his chest. “We not need the night cloaks no more! Simon would take it off and burn it, but then everyone see him naked and nobody here ready for Simon naked...” Everyone snickered. “…yet!” he added rather hopefully while eyeing a cluster of female sailors.
As the laughter grew, he quieted the chitter. “But but but but. Anyways! Not point. Point is, we want to work in sky under the sun that does not burn us. For that, Simon will leap on dragon’s back and pry out his eyeball with teeth. And Simon know you all; he tell you sailing from Golden Hills not be easy.”
“You didn’t mention slaying a dragon, either,” Grim boomed back.
The ratman showed his four incisors as he turned both his palms up in a shrug. “Maybe Simon just figure that no big deal for great Grim.”
Ishe stepped into the opening as Grim declined to rise to Simon’s jab. “That’s two. This is the eye of the storm. Any way you go, it’s through a storm. How ’bout the rest of ya?”
The silence that answered her was a considered one. Heads bobbed as they considered the possibility that maybe they were all crazy enough to kill a dragon.
A smaller task than that: she had to get them moving. “Good, then everyone is on board,” Ishe announced; no one objected. “Then, first thing we need are medical crystals. If we’re where I think we are, there is a township maybe ten miles east. We can get everyone through the forest for a few of those before we hit crop land.”
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