He blasted at the alien using the dragon’s tear clenched in his fist, but couldn’t seem to hit the thing. He grew frustrated and was worried for his dragon. Some gooey juice was secreting where the tentacle was touching Silva’s skin. The pewter-colored dragon was in terrible pain.
Rikky finally popped the teardrop into his mouth and pulled the bow Mysterian had given him over his shoulder. He used the foot stirrup to hold one end and pulled down on the other to allow him to string it. This was no easy task because the alien was now pulling them in toward its mouth.
Rikky got the string in place, and then pulled the bow up to a firing position, just as the alien’s weird blue-fire eyes came into view. He couldn’t believe his luck. He had the shot and there was plenty of time to make it before he and Silva were carried into that harsh alchemical maw.
He reached for an arrow and his heart fell. The quiver of fine crafted long shafts wasn’t there anymore. Now the maw was opening into an undulating tunnel of dark stains and bloody mucus. Silva’s last struggles had lessened into twitches and sudden jerks.
From somewhere below, a humming blast of powerful magic struck the alien. This stalled the thing from tossing Rikky and his wyrm into its massive mouth just long enough for King Richard’s Nightshade to streak past and use its hot sizzling eye-rays. The powerful hell-born magic amputated the tentacle holding Silva.
The tentacle was still wrapped around the dragon, though, and they went tumbling down the side of the alien like food falling from a slobbish man’s chin. Only at the very last moment did Silva shrug off the burning rope of alien limb and get her wings open. They skimmed the ground and went sweeping past the golden-helmeted ebon goddess that was Aikira.
A man was with her, and Golden was stretched down the lane warning away vermin with her growl. Aikira had been the one who blasted the alien to save them. He owed her one now, too, he decided.
“Are you all right?” he called down.
“Golden’s wing-wounded!” Aikira called back up. “There’s nothing you can do here. Get away from the Sarax, Rikky. Get away from that thing.” He was relieved when she threw her pointing finger east. “Zahrellion!” He heard her sing the name so that it was clear in his ears, and with that he and Silva were off.
King Richard came around and blasted at the ever-swelling alien again. It had grown monstrous in size. The Sarax were thinning in the sky. The alien’s tentacles were getting longer, and as the thing bloated and shifted it was feeding on more and more of them.
The Sarax had dropped the fire drake called Blaze, with his rider strapped in, to the cobbles. The black thresher-mawed things were satiated and probably wanting to cocoon, so they were becoming less and less of an immediate threat. Richard wanted to keep the master alien where it was, so that it didn’t set its unsettling eyes on the kingdom, but the ebon girl and the druid were downed in the wreckage. He decided to lure the thing north out of Delton by flying just out of its range and taunting it. Unlike the dragons, the Nightshade could do this. Something about the hell-born wyrm dulled the alien’s senses. But in turn, something about the alien filled the Nightshade with fear. Soon he had the angered thing far enough away from the golden-scaled dragon that he flew back and had the Nightshade set his mother down with them.
“Protect her with your life, Linux!” Richard shot the command. “You owe me a life, for you took my father’s from him.”
“I do,” Linux dropped his head. “I will.”
The Nightshade hissed something at Golden and the dragon’s eyes lit up.
“Gather close to the wyrm,” Richard said. “My mount gave her a spell. She will shield you from the scavengers.”
As Richard lifted back into the sky and peeled away, Linux, in Rolph’s body, carried Queen Alvazina and laid her gently next to Aikira. When Richard looked back again they had vanished.
Aikira looked and saw the Nightshade circling and agitating the alien. She could see the world just fine, but she couldn’t see herself, or the others huddled against Golden with her. She didn’t dare lose contact with the wyrm, for that would break the spell that was protecting them. She wished she could see the queen so that she could tend to her. She hadn’t looked well. She was bleeding for the few moments Aikira had seen her.
In the sky, several Sarax were attempting to harry the Nightshade into the range of the tentacles. The Sarax were under the master’s control and unable to keep from getting snatched themselves, and yet they still did the humongous thing’s bidding.
The hell-born wyrm went too low and close to the alien. A new appendage shot out, this one more like an arm. It slapped the Nightshade down even farther, causing it to skim the rooftops and then tumble to a halt right before the beast.
In a matter of seconds, several tentacles wrapped around Richard and his mount. The Nightshade screeched out with psionics. This hurt the alien, but it squelched the call with a powerful squeeze.
Sticky goo that hissed against Richard’s armor oozed forth. The chemical smell burned his eyes and stung his skin. He tried to squirm away but couldn’t. The Nightshade roared out in a keening, pain-filled wail. The juicy digestive sap was eating through its hide.
Richard roared out as well, only his was a roar of frustration. This was not the end he had imagined. He should have flown east and gathered more mudged. He sucked in a breath and gritted his teeth as his armor melted away enough that the slime could start eating into his skin. The tentacles were shifting now, tearing flesh from bone as they did. Suddenly, one of them closed over Richard’s head and his face began to burn as he was suffocated.
He tried to make peace with himself, but he couldn’t find it through all the pain.
As he succumbed to the bile, he hoped that Jenka, his brother, would find a way to end this thing. This confliction of wills to survive, he knew, would be a battle to the end. Then he felt as if he were being ripped apart.
Part VI
Climax
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Andoal, the Mountonian earth elemental, rolled through the ground like a wave. Jade carried Jenka, alongside Crimzon, through the sky above. Crimzon had surprised Jenka when he leapt into flight at the sight of Andoal and perched on the Mountonian’s shoulder like a sailor’s bird. They had wasted no time. Only hours ago they had left Clover’s castle.
The alien was about to feed on something large in the northern part of Delton. The elemental’s flowing surge of earth swept right up to it and rose into its Mountonian form. Like a man throwing an object over hand, Andoal’s punch hammered down into the alien creature. The master alien was blubbery and the Mountonian’s gigantic fist sank halfway into the thing, causing it to jiggle and move back. It dropped the gooey, slime-covered meal it was about to chug down and opened a mouth big enough to swallow Andoal’s head. Slime flew like spittle from the undulating maw, and Jenka had to heel Jade away to avoid the rusty alchemical stench that threatened to gag him.
The master alien formed quickly into an eight-legged thing, its back half shaped like some sort of ox, its front half clawing forth with four terrible limbs. Above them, two giant eyes, flaming orange and blue, dominated the alien’s spherical head.
Andoal knew this thing wasn’t of this earth, and that he had to destroy it, but he didn’t know quite how to attack something that absorbed his might so easily. Then, what was blubbery a moment ago was stiff and sharp, and now raking into his middle. Andoal didn’t feel the damage as pain, but the sensation of having part of himself gouged away was no less agonizing.
Andoal slapped his humongous stone-formed hands together, in an attempt to squash his opponent’s head. His hands impacted substance this time, and the way the alien’s unsettling eyes nearly bulged out of its melon, he knew it took injury.
The alien stepped back as if to retreat, but then lunged forward, this time wrapping its upper body around the Mountonian. A score of tentacles protruded from the alien, like swiftly growing vines, and came wriggling around. In less than a moment, Andoal was
completely entangled.
Jenka was watching the battle, but only halfheartedly. His pulse was racing, he couldn’t find Zahrellion, or any of the Dragoneers, and it scared him. There! He cranked his neck around. It was just a dark, stunted mudged lifting from its meal. He kept searching and searching for any sign of the Dragoneers. He saw none of them; nor did he see Crimzon.
His attention was brought back to bear on the battle between the two gargantuan beings.
Andoal spread himself outward, first with his elbows, then, as his arms tore through the blubbery stuff, with his forearms and hands. It was almost like watching a man pull a shirt off, the way the Mountonian reached over his shoulders and peeled the alien’s tentacles from his back.
It was hard to say which creature was bigger, for the alien kept shifting forms.
Andoal did something different, something that surprised the alien, and Jenka as well. As if being poured out of a giant mug, the Mountonian sank back into the earth. Behind the alien, an arm and shoulder rose up out of the ground and snatched a hold of the thing. Houses, corpses, and a pair of feeding Sarax were all suddenly falling into a giant pit as the earth began to crumble away underneath the suddenly shapeless creature.
White-skinned wings stretched forth and tried to hold the massive alien in the air, but Andoal’s grip was true and the alien joined the Mountonian in the pit. Using the displaced ground itself, Andoal began slowly pulling the earth back over the two of them, thus burying the alien deep.
Jenka saw a flash of red scale, and his heart leapt. Jade darted that way and Jenka took in the fact that darkness was creeping up on them. There was no doubt that it was Blaze. He could see the shortened end of the fire wyrm’s tail.
The battle in the now refilling hole was being fought in rubble and shadow. What buildings the vermin hadn’t destroyed were being rattled, crumbled, or just plain overturned as unseen violence took place beneath the surface of the earth. Jenka hoped that Marcherion and Blaze were alive. Not long ago the whole city had been overrun with trellkin, orcs, and Sarax. The arrival of Andoal, and the earth-quaking battle, had frightened nearly every living thing away. There was no movement in the wreckage below, and Jenka’s heart was sinking as he approached Marcherion’s stilled fire wyrm.
Andoal was starting to realize that this thing was far more capable than he’d imagined. The alien was emitting harsh pulses of sound. The frequency, the vibration that the wavelengths produced, began to loosen the fibers of the Mountonian’s being.
Suddenly, Andoal couldn’t get out of the earth fast enough. As if he were a swimmer struggling to reach the surface, Andoal pulled himself upwards through his domain. When he came bursting out of the rubble, he found that the alien’s vibrations had grown deeper and stronger. The huge slabs of solid rock and compressed earth he was formed of were crumbling away.
The Mountonian called upon the wind and water to aid him in this fight, but they didn’t respond. The alien’s drone most likely drowned out the call. Andoal roared in aggravation and reached out, launching at the blobbish alien form. Before he could grasp hold of it again, his physical form came completely apart and fell to the earth in a heaping pile of scree.
Aikira, Golden, and Linux watched the parts of the battle that took place above ground to the north of them. The presence of the massive entities and the violence that was taking place had driven all the vermin away from their part of the city. Even from such a great distance, where they were huddled and invisible, they felt unsafe as the earth around them rumbled and shifted.
Golden had spotted Jade and Jenka in the sky, and started to roar out to them, but Aikira hushed her wyrm. If she could have communicated with him, she would’ve pointed Jenka toward where Zahrellion went down, where Rikky had gone to see about her; but she didn’t dare make her dragon vulnerable by breaking the spell. Golden couldn’t fly, and until there was another dragon there to protect her, Aikira knew they should stay unseen. She grew excited, as did Linux, when Andoal pulled the alien into the earth. For a few long moments it seemed as if the otherworldly monster might just stay underground.
Then the thing began humming, turning bedrock into gravel. Andoal emerged and crumbled into a pile of rubble. For those watching, hope seemed to crumble with him.
When the alien shifted into a long, loping feline form and raced away southwest along the road to Pvurn, Aikira realized that this battle was just beginning. She pulled herself away from her dragon, causing them all to become visible again.
A strange hissing pop sounded. She wasn’t paying attention as she was concentrating on her spell. She cast a streaking yellow flow high into the air toward Jenka and Jade. When she knew he had seen the display and was coming their way, she dropped back down to the cobbles and wiped away the tear running down her cheek. If that thing made it to Pvurn, it would feast on twice as much life as it had consumed here.
“You have to go after it, Jenka.” She sang out the words in a sorrowful wail that carried up to where Jade had just come to a hover. “You can’t let it get to all those people. There are thousands upon thousands of them.”
“Marcherion is down, just over there with Blaze,” Jenka yelled down excitedly as he pointed. “Neither of them was moving much, but both were drawing breath. Have you seen Zahrellion or Rikky? She wasn’t at the castle.” He looked around the wreckage and then back to the ebon girl below. “Tell me it didn’t get her.” His voice choked as he said it.
“It took control of her again,” Linux said from Rolph’s body. It took Jenka a moment to realize who he was talking to. “She was struggling, and Crystal carried them east. If it did to her what it did to my true body, then... then...” He shook his head. “Rikky went after her.” Linux sucked in a breath. “Let him deal with her. You have to stop that thing. If it feeds on any more people it will grow so much more monstrous as to be unbeatable.”
“Is that the queen?” Jenka asked, thinking that if the alien were confined on the mainland then it would eventually run out of food. He suddenly understood Richard’s harsh actions then. He’d been protecting those who could be protected, not running to the islands to save his skin.
“King Richard left her with us.” A fire in Aikira’s eyes was threatening to overcome her sadness. “That thing caught him just before you arrived.”
“It tossed him, I think,” Jenka called down, as Jade went banking away.
Jenka looked like he wanted more than anything to race off after Zahrellion. He didn’t, though. A terrible glaze of resolve filmed over his eyes and he and Jade began climbing in the sky while working their way to the south and west after the alien.
It looked like they might have a coffin chore to do.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Rikky saw Crystal as the light of day sank away. She would have blended into the shadowy snow-covered field around her had there not been a long dark gouge from where she’d slid across the ground to try and protect her rider when they crashed. Rikky spotted Zah then, and his heart swelled up into his throat. One of her legs was bent over her body, and her heel was touching her cheek. She was dead.
He had Silva land, and after unbuckling himself from his seat, he slid the short distance his wyrm left him to the ground.
Pulling his muck-sucking peg-leg along as he negotiated the soft ground wasn’t easy.
When he arrived at her side, Crystal groaned with sorrow. Behind Rikky, Silva eased over and began comforting the big frost dragon.
Rikky unfurled Zahrellion’s body and then spat his teardrop from his mouth into his palm. He clenched it tightly and called out to the gods as the rush of Dou filled him to bursting. Whether they answered or not, he couldn’t say, for he was inside her body now, knitting her frame, reducing her swelling and repairing her battered innards. The organs were lifeless, but he tried to coax them. He remembered that Prince Richard had extended Royal’s life with the power of his teardrop. He didn’t want that. He wanted Zahrellion to be alive again and whole, not tethered to the power of a d
ragon gem.
Rikky tried to make her heart beat with massages and even frustrated thrusts, but it wouldn’t. He clenched his eyes and fought the tears. He willed with all his might to make her live again, but nothing happened. Then, in a moment of silent despair, he heard the single surge of a pulse. Probing her body, he found the source of it. He was as shocked and amazed as he was terrified at what he found. There was a child forming in her womb, tiny and indistinct, but with a heart that was struggling to beat again. It was Jenka’s child, he knew. At that moment Rikky promised his being, his whole life, to the gods, if only that the child and its mother might survive.
The gods looked on, and the fact that Rikky was willing to let go of the rush, and the pain-relieving power the teardrop filled him with, to save her and the unborn was as selfless an act as ever was committed. That teardrop was the only thing keeping Rikky from an abundance of daily agony, and he began to feel the hurt as the magic was drained from the droplet into the restorative spells he was again trying to cast.
Rikky felt Zahrellion’s body shiver once, and she might have taken a breath, but she remained still otherwise. Before he knew if his effort had been effective, Rikky collapsed into a heap in the hardening mud.
Jade rose high and then dove steeply to the west. As they built up speed, a sort of inner radiance began to connect him and his wyrm. They were both resolved to end the alien and their ethereal link began to overpower the deep droning that had almost become ordinary in their half-ruined ears. Maybe it was the added Dou Clover’s teardrop lent them. Or maybe it was Jenka’s undeniable will to prevail. Even if they had to fly down the thing’s gullet and let the power of the two teardrops loose, they were resolved to do so.
It wasn’t long before they saw it. Its pale flesh reflected the moonlight well. It was loping along, looking like some living marble plains cat that was bigger than three ships.
The Confliction: 2016 Modernized Format Edition (Dragoneers Saga Book 3) Page 13
