“The location was secret. And the secret was lost.”
“Maybe it was in the kind of place you might find if you operated an extensive mine?” I suggested drily. I was beginning to get a feeling about where Apeq might have found his army.
“If they were mining in the heart of a mountain,” Bataar agreed.
“And how did Kado power his army of silver wolves?”
“They aren’t golems in the story,” Bataar said. “They are actual wolves. But the legend did say that they grew stronger on the memory of the dead. That they grew stronger and increased as they defeated enemies.”
Yeah, stealing souls would do that. It would swell out those ranks.
We reached the top of the stairs and I froze every golem at the top of the tower in a single wave of mental strength.
Wow.
No time to stop and marvel, Tor. I needed to see what was happening.
I strode to the edge of the tower and looked out over the heaving, writhing city. It was impossible to distinguish streets from buildings anymore. Everything was completely covered by moving golems, their bodies flashing in the light of the morning sun.
Except for a small space cleared out at the edge of the city. In the center of it, a man with a bottle green cloak stood, so tiny from here that it was hard to see him at all. I pulled out the tube Nostar had given me from inside my pocket and took a look. In the wobbling glass I could see his face as clear as day:
Apeq A’kona.
Chapter Seventeen
“This is why you need to start singing the song of the dead,” Bataar said. “Look! He can wake them up again!”
He was right. Below us, I watched as golems I had frozen hours before came back to life. Wisps of green mist whirled out from Apeq, bringing life back to the frozen golems. Or at least, that’s how it looked to me. I was so tired that I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.
The sky was black, despite the bright golden sun. Black with bodies of golem fliers. The streets were black with creeping golems. My vision was black around the edges like it was trying to tell me something, too.
The mimic appeared, dressed in black from head to foot with a black scarf around his face and a wide-brimmed black hat.
“You had a good go of it,” he said, “but now that you’re here, you can see there’s no way out. You’ve backed yourself up a tower with no way down but to jump or die.”
Wouldn’t jumping kill me, too?
“Oh, ha!” the mimic said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
No. I wasn’t the kind of guy who gave up.
“No point in heroics,” the mimic said. “There’s no one to see them.”
The point of true heroics had never been to be seen.
“Then why do heroes wear capes?” the mimic asked.
I pushed him away. I wasn’t ready for his gloominess just yet. I still had things to try. I called to the nearest flying golem with my mind.
I was so tired. I was so tired that death almost sounded like it might be a welcome rest.
“I’m serious, Tor, you need to sing!” Bataar was saying from beside me.
“Look, I want you to know that I’m touched that you stayed,” I said to him. This might be my last chance. “It means a lot to me. I don’t know why you bothered. It’s not like you needed to fulfill that prophecy and Zin won’t even know that you did what she wanted. But you stayed and I’m thankful. We’re going to try to fly out of here, you and me, okay? It probably won’t work, and we’ll probably die trying, but we’re going to try.”
“The song, Tor.” His eyes flashed with intensity.
“And if we live, you can talk all you want about this song.”
The flying golem dipped low, skimming the top of the tower with its belly. I grabbed Bataar’s shoulder and forced him ahead of me, running parallel to the golem and then leaping onto its saddle.
Ungh! I cursed loudly. I kept forgetting that there was no give to these metal saddles, that it wasn’t at all like leaping onto the back of a friendly dragon. My tailbone was screaming.
Once my eyes uncrossed, I let go of Bataar and gripped the saddle. At least I’d kept the staff. Bataar had lost his spear in the flight.
“Here we go, Bataar. Let’s see if we can show these golems how to fly!”
I forced the golem upward as Bataar began to sing. Whatever he needed for courage was fine with me. I gritted my teeth and tried to dig deep into my own courage.
“I don’t know why you bother,” the mimic said. “You know you won’t survive this, why bother fighting it?”
I couldn’t not fight. I couldn’t stop striving. I was that kind of person – the kind of person who was born to strive and fight and ache and grapple until the end.
I gripped the saddle and my quarterstaff and forced my mind to focus on the wave of flying golems coming toward us.
I was trying to steer the flying golem east with my mind, trying to flee the city. I didn’t know if the same thoughts were attracting these other flyers, but they rose up from the east of the city, blocking our path and rising into the air to join us. There must have been a hundred or more of them, flying in small shoals like schools of fish to join the larger cloud.
I swallowed, not sure what to do next.
There were too many to dodge – they were spread out like a net – and too many to fight one at a time. I tried to turn them with my mind but as they began to turn north, so did the golem I was riding. When I turned back east, they followed that, too.
Bataar’s song cut off as he called to me, “Incoming!”
I risked a glance behind me, my hands shaking as I realized what I was seeing. A black cloud rose from the city behind us. Where hundreds of golems were ahead of us, thousands rose behind us and seated on one of them was Apeq A’kona, his green cloak whipping in the wind behind him.
“Skies and Stars!” The expression burst from my lips as all thought vanished for a moment, overwhelmed by fear and uncertainty. My expression faded to a whisper. “Skies and flaming stars.”
Bataar’s song began again. Sounding more mournful and sad than before, like a death dirge for the two of us.
Rest, weary one,
The sun, the sun
Is rising.
In this new life,
The pain has flown, away.
Rest child of earth,
And let your soul,
Fly heavenward,
No tear to mar the eye,
Or pain the heart again.
Until one day,
When we, our hearts united,
Stand under sun,
We’ve never seen before.
Until one day,
When hope has shown her merit,
And all will rest in faith
and warm to brand new life.
Maybe I had been wrong to send Lee Estabis and Hubric and the others away. We would have stood a better chance of survival if they had stayed. We flew towards the waiting golems, seconds from reaching their grasping claws and open mouths.
“If they were here, they would just die, too,” my mimic said.
He could keep his doom and gloom to himself.
“I’m no more gloomy than you right now,” he laughed.
With a grimace, I urged our golem forward, letting Bataar’s comforting song wash over me, drifting on it as we reached the first golems. With effort, I drew back in my mind, holding a mental thought of our course and our need to plunge forward on the golem we rode in one part of my mind while another part of my mind willed the golem right in front of us to dodge out of the way.
Keeping two thoughts present at once was as hard as trying to hold a grip on two slipping eels. It made my head ache, grinding at my mind like heavy stones dragged over the scoured earth by a pair of oxen. I gritted my teeth. Someone was screaming, drowning out Bataar’s song, but despite that, the golems before me fell, one by one and my golem plunged on.
We were barely avoiding them, barely twisting away from the attack of one in
time to force the next one from the sky. And every time that I had to hold two opposite thoughts in my mind at once, my brain screamed harder and harder. I was losing my mind. I was shredding it like torn cloth.
Pain screamed through me and whoever was screaming grew louder and louder as we darted past a set of snapping jaws, plunged under a clawing foot, stopped the golem in front of us dead, forcing him to drop from the sky like a stone, and then fell in his path, taking advantage of the empty air until we had to climb over the head of a new adversary.
I didn’t know how long the desperate flight took. It felt like it had been days since we’d left Hubric and the others. It felt like months since I’d had a drink of sweet, sweet water. Eons since I could think without stabbing pain piercing my eyes and skull like iron bars driven into them.
I was a world of quick breaths, jagged pain, torn heart-beats, and sudden stabs of desperate terror.
We were falling from the sky. I fought the golem under me, forcing him to level off, but he fell again and this time when we leveled off, we were inches from the ground.
Hands grabbed the cloth of my coat, ripping me from the golem. I lost my quarterstaff. I didn’t know where it was. My world blurred – pain flooding in now that concentration was broken.
Someone – Bataar, I thought – dragged me across mossy ground. There were trees nearby. We must have made it out of the city at last. My eyes hurt too much to stay open for long.
Snarls and the snap of metal jaws echoed above me.
“It was Apeq. He stole the life out of the golem we rode,” Bataar explained. He was standing over me, I thought. Why did he sound breathless?
There was a squeal above me.
Was he fighting golems with my staff?
I tried to open my eyes but even with them open, I couldn’t see. Light seared across them and with the light, pain. I clung to consciousness like a child to his mother, but it was pulling away from me, heartless and cold.
My last thought was that Bataar was still singing.
Dragon Chameleon: Memory of Mountains
Chapter One
I woke with a pounding headache. The last thing I remembered was Bataar standing over me battling the golems as they pressed in on us. I blinked in the darkness, every blink bringing blinding pain. Aching, grinding, spiking pain filled my head making my ears and throat and teeth hurt until I wished I could just fade back into unconsciousness.
Lights flickered in the distance – bright, but small.
Fires? Perhaps.
I shivered in the cold of the night. I was lying on something hard. I felt awful.
Exhaustion swept over me and I slept.
I woke again to jostling. I felt like I was in a cart being pulled over a bumpy road. I should get up and figure out where I was and what was happening. I couldn’t seem to open my eyes, though I felt a little warmer – as if the sun was shining on me, warming my body.
I slept again.
When I woke this time, I sat up.
“Mmmph,” someone said nearby.
It was night again and the moon was faint, though many campfires dotted the land around me. I lifted a hand to my throbbing temples experimentally and blinked in the darkness.
“Tor?” Bataar whispered. There was a shuffling sound as he sat up.
Relief filled me. I hadn’t been able to admit it to myself, but I’d thought he was dead. I had no sense of Saboraak nearby. Hopefully, she had escaped and was well away.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“In a cage.”
The bars of the cage were easier to see in the dark now that he pointed them out. Who had man-sized cages lying around? Did someone think to themselves, ‘Hmm, if I catch a man, I might want to throw him in a cage. Maybe I should acquire a few of the correct size.’
The cage was on the back of a cart harnessed to a pair of wolf-golems. Of course. I was never going to be rid of wolf-golems.
“They were keeping some of the oosquer in the cage,” Bataar explained.
“How long have I been unconscious?”
“You’ve been in and out for three days.”
Three days? That wasn’t a good thing.
“Thank you for defending me,” I said. “That’s the last thing I remember. You were standing over me, defending me.”
“Maybe that’s what Zin’s prophecy was about. You needed me to keep you alive.”
“Or maybe it was just you being a good guy. You have a self-defeating tendency to do that. Where are the guards?”
“They don’t bother to guard us,” Bataar said. “The lock is strong and there is nowhere to go. Do you want water? They left a skin of it behind. I bandaged your injuries and cleaned you up a bit. Got rid of that old sack. I couldn’t do anything about your hair, but the rest seems to be okay.”
“My hair?” in a panic I reached up to feel my head. I still had hair. I sagged in relief and then snorted a laugh. I was worried about hair when I was in a cage captured by my enemies? How vain did that make me?
“It’s silver over your temples. It looks like an extension of that crown.”
“I don’t care. I’m unlikely to survive to old age and get grey hair naturally.”
“Well, you’ve made it this far. You might surprise yourself.”
We were quiet for a while.
“Are we headed east?” I asked.
“Yes. Through the mountains toward Questan.”
“I hope they were warned in time.”
I hoped that Sabroaak and the others with her had warned them and then flown far, far away. I hoped that they weren’t planning any wild rescue missions. I didn’t hear her in my head. She must be far enough away.
“Apeq leads the army and the golems, but you knew that,” Bataar said.
“And you were trying to tell me something about a song.”
He sounded surprised. “Yes. I thought you weren’t listening.”
“I was a touch preoccupied. But I heard you. What were you trying to say?”
“The song I was singing – it’s the song the Kav’ai sing to our dead. A way to send their souls to rest.”
“It was fitting to sing it over the city. Thank you.” If I was going to die a captive, I could at least try to be civil and thoughtful to Bataar. It was the least I could do.
“It releases the souls of the dead – or so we say.”
“That’s nice.”
How were we going to get out of this cage? Perhaps there was a way to pick the lock. Or to trick Apeq into letting us out. Or something I hadn’t thought of yet.
“Remember how you could freeze the golems but Apeq could reanimate them?”
“It’s something I was hoping to forget.”
“He reanimated every golem that wasn’t too badly damaged in the battle.”
“Great.”
Bataar was just full of good news.
He laughed wryly. “I thought I could send their souls to rest so that the frozen golems couldn’t be reanimated.”
I froze.
Wait.
I looked at him, looking so serious in the faint light – like always.
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I could hardly say that I’d thought he was being silly and wasting time. I could hardly say that I thought he was a superstitious fool at the time, and I was only just now realizing he’d actually been trying to help.
“It didn’t work. I have a feeling that I don’t have the power to release those souls.”
“It was a nice try.”
“I think it has to be you,” he said, his eyes bright in the moonlight. “I think it might be the role of the Ko’roi. I mean, you are the one who controls the World of Legends, who is supposed to recreate it and fill it with the heroes of this world. Maybe you have the power to release these souls back to there.”
“I’m not sure there still is a World of Legends. It was burning to the ground the last time I saw it.” His theory kind of made sense. Especially if you were Kav’ai.
“There’s an easy way to find out.” He pointed and through the dark, I saw another cart hitched to wolf-golems. The cart that held the mobile doorway. “If we can get you to that door, you can try it out and see.”
“If we get out of these cages, I can’t help but think I might have other priorities,” I said. “Escaping, for instance. Or maybe stopping Apeq and Eventen – should I assume Eventen is here?”
“Yes. And a Magika named Ambrosia who makes this Eventen seem like a newborn puppy in comparison. But the World of Legends is a priority. If it needs to be rebuilt, then that has to be our first priority. How can you stop an army that can just be revived? We need a way to permanently stop them.”
I clenched my jaw. He had a point.
“And only you can do that,” he reminded me.
How pleasant.
“Why did you stay with me when you could have run, Bataar?” I asked. “I know that you wish you were the Ko’roi. Maybe you could be if I had died.”
He shuffled uncomfortably. “I don’t wish that. You know I didn’t want to lead my people.”
“Then why do you stiffen every time you see me?”
“Because it shouldn’t have been you. It should have been someone worthy who knows and treasures our people. Someone who understands our ways and wants to preserve them. Someone who would protect us from the ever-growing power of Ko’Torenth. Someone like me, even if I didn’t want it to be me.”
“Then why did you save my life?”
He laughed. “Well just because you’re a terrible choice for the Ko’roi doesn’t mean that you aren’t the one with the job. I’d die to keep you alive. For the sake of my people. For the sake of the world.”
Heavy.
“Would you feel better if you knew that I plan to live in Kav’ai when all this is over?” I asked.
He looked surprised in the dim light. “You do?”
“Actually, Saboraak and those other Green dragons you saw are all planning to come with me. They want to establish a dragon city there. Don’t look so horrified. Dragons will protect your people. They’ll live at peace with you.”
“I’m not horrified. I’m in awe.”
Dragon Chameleon: Episodes 9-12 Page 13
