by Dan Abnett
Garret saw his daughter and, without any thought to his safety, ran through the posse and across the shingle that separated them from the Natives.
‘Eliza!’ he cried.
Some of the Natives raised spears and bows again, but Yellow Cloud lifted a hand to shoulder-height to halt their attack.
Garret scooped Eliza up in a huge embrace full of relief and forgiveness. He could be angry later. For now a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and he was simply delighted to see her. He held a hand out to Yellow Cloud, and the Native shook it without reservation. Then Pius Garret took his daughter’s hand and began to walk back to the posse. He just wanted to take Eliza and Jake home, and forget all about the trauma of losing them.
He was halfway across the shingle when Trapper Watkiss burst through the posse, his gun raised. Several of the men behind him also raised their rifles, and there were angry murmurs.
‘Murderer!’ shouted Trapper Watkiss, waving his gun at Yellow Cloud. ‘You tried to kill me!’ The old man tore the bandage off his face and threw it to the ground. ‘My face is proof that you harmed me!’
The rider behind Yellow Cloud lifted his spear to shoulder-height, and his shout echoed through the air. As the Native’s cry drifted away, a tense silence fell. Those were the crucial seconds when decisions might be made that could not be reversed.
‘Stop it! Stop lying!’ Jake shouted, running through the posse. He turned back to face the mob, ready to take a bullet for Yellow Cloud.
‘Twice you’ve tried to shoot the dragons, Mr Watkiss!’ said Jake so that everyone could hear him. ‘Why would anyone want to kill such amazing animals? This is the second time you’ve attacked Yellow Cloud, a good and noble man! When you had no gun, you stabbed Black Feather! If he had died, I would have killed you myself!’
Trapper Watkiss searched for some justification for what he had done, for a way to explain his fear and loathing. One or two of the men behind him took their guns from their shoulders and held them, casually, at their sides.
‘Evil creatures burned my face!’ said Trapper Watkiss when he could think of nothing else to say.
‘You stabbed one of these amazing beasts and shot another,’ said Jake, ‘and yet you’re still alive, old man!’
‘Jake,’ said Pius Garret, taking a step towards the boy. Eliza squeezed her father’s hand.
‘He knows what he’s doing,’ she said. ‘He’s not a boy any more, Papa.’
When he was nose to nose with the gun and bathed in the light of the torches, Jake turned his left shoulder to Trapper Watkiss and the posse so they could see the burns and the tattoo covering his arm. The scales of the wing danced in the flickering firelight.
‘I was burned too,’ said Jake, ‘marked by a dragon, marked as a rider. If you kill a dragon, if you kill a rider, you might as well kill me. I am their brother.’
Several of the men began to shuffle forward, craning to see what the boy was talking about. Someone gasped, and more guns were lowered.
‘You must trust the Natives and witness the wonders that they can perform,’ said Jake. ‘You must see the dragons at work. You must believe.’
Eliza and Garret walked up behind Jake. ‘He’s right,’ she said. ‘Dragons aren’t just a myth.’
‘Look again,’ said Jake, gazing up into the dark depths of the sky. The dragons circled overhead, scales glinting and gleaming in the firelight.
There was a great rumbling roar, and a flash of flames swept across the sky, as if a comet was passing close to the earth. Several of the posse gasped, and some of them raised their guns again.
There was another roar, and another burst of flames, and, as their eyes adjusted, they saw what was happening in the sky above them. Flames lit up the dragons as they wove through the sky, their great lazy circles broken with jinks and twists as they avoided the gouts of fire.
To the north, a darker, heavier, more dangerous shape was suddenly visible.
‘Yellow Cloud!’ Jake shouted.
Yellow Cloud ran to him, and they both looked into the sky as another gout of flames passed overhead. In the second or two of searing light, Jake saw what he had dreaded. He saw the great, black, riderless shape of a vast dragon. It was three times the size of any of the Natives’ beasts and its eyes sparked magenta as its face lit up with the flames that poured from its gaping maw.
‘That’s the beast that set fire to our wagon train!’ said Jake.
With another great roar, the huge dragon flexed its massive, ragged wings and flew off towards McKenzie’s Prospect.
‘Evil!’ shouted Trapper Watkiss. ‘It’s the devil and no mistake!’ The old man clutched his face and danced an odd, manic jig. He was terrified, almost out of his skin, holding his gun with the stock pushed into his hip.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ said Masefield Haskell, who was fed up with Trapper Watkiss and his shenanigans. The geologist thrust his hand out to grab the barrel of Trapper’s rifle and slapped the old man’s face hard. Trapper stopped shouting and jigging about, and clutched his cheeks with both hands, looking at Haskell as if he was a naughty child and the geologist was his mother.
Haskell thrust the gun at Lem Sykes, urging him to take charge of Trapper before he did any more damage. Lem Sykes simply smiled and poked Trapper Watkiss in the back with his second-best Hawken rifle.
‘Pleasure, sir,’ he said to Haskell.
‘It’s heading towards McKenzie’s Prospect!’ exclaimed Jake, pointing at the great black dragon disappearing into the night sky. He took his bracelet and swung it until the clear, high note sang out, and silence fell over the posse. Then Yellow Cloud did the same.
When the notes had drifted away on the breeze, Haskell stepped between the posse on one side and Garret, Jake, Eliza and Yellow Cloud on the other. The Native horsemen had also drawn closer.
‘I think we can all agree,’ said Haskell, turning to Yellow Cloud, ‘that you are in charge, sir.’
‘The great black Thunderbird has come from the Land of the Red Moon,’ said Yellow Cloud. As he paused, another voice began to speak, a high, light voice. White Thunder was translating for the Natives.
‘It does not belong here, and yet it comes. It burns and kills and destroys. It will soon be over your town, spreading its flames and harming your people.’
‘What can we do?’ asked Haskell.
‘We must defend McKenzie’s Prospect,’ said Yellow Cloud.
‘You heard him!’ said Haskell, raising his voice and his right arm for emphasis. ‘Put your guns away and pair up with the Native riders.’
‘Look!’ shouted Lem Sykes. Everyone turned as a burst of light hit the horizon. Something in town was on fire.
‘Hurry up!’ shouted Haskell.
The white men lost no time in pairing up with the horsemen, who steadied their Appaloosas as their guests mounted. The horses would be slowed down by the extra weight, but riding was still faster than returning on foot. Only Haskell, Garret, Trapper Watkiss and Lem were left on foot.
The horsemen began to gallop off in the direction of McKenzie’s Prospect, and another flash of light sparked off the horizon.
The dragons began to land on the shingle where the horsemen had been.
‘Oh my!’ said Haskell as he saw a dragon close up for the first time. Yellow Cloud’s mount was the first to land, and Match set down beside him. The dragon with the grazed neck landed a few yards behind them, and then all the others landed, one at a time.
‘You fly alone,’ Yellow Cloud told Jake firmly.
‘I wanted to take Mr Garret,’ said Jake.
‘I will take the blacksmith,’ said Yellow Cloud.
‘May I?’ asked Haskell, an impossibly broad smile spread across his face.
Yellow Cloud gestured to one of the dragons, and Haskell jogged over to it and took the hand the Native rider offered without a moment’s hesitation.
Trapper Watkiss stamped and screamed, and tried to run off into the night, but Lem was enjoying his role of jailer and taking his task very seriously. He had hooked a length of rope around Trapper’s hands and tied them behind the old man’s back, so that Trapper was on a leash.
‘Won’t never get me on one of those evil beasts!’ shouted Trapper Watkiss.
‘You can walk,’ said Lem Sykes, poking the barrel of the Hawken rifle in Trapper’s back again, and, with that, the young man began to drive the old man towards home.
The mercantile was locked, and the saloon was almost empty when the first strike came.
The posse had been gone all day, and the oldest and youngest men, and the women and children, were all that remained in McKenzie’s Prospect when the first ball of flames shot through the air.
No one saw the first strike hit Merry Mack’s cottage on Main Street. She cooked for the saloon and sold eggs out of her little house. She was feeding the chickens and dropped the dish of grain on the ground as the shingles on her roof lit up and then began to burn.
Within minutes, Main Street was full of people.
‘Lightning strike, that’s what Merry said,’ one woman told another as they pumped water into the horse trough outside the saloon. A long line of mostly women passed buckets of water to Merry Mack’s cottage. Then they passed empty ones back to be refilled.
Nathan McKenzie walked up and down the line, leaning on his walking stick, trying to take charge of a system that was already running perfectly well without him.
‘Douse the passage,’ he shouted. ‘We must safeguard the mercantile!’
Merry Mack’s cottage stood next to the emporium, with a wide passage between them, and McKenzie was determined that the fire shouldn’t spread.
‘Douse the passage?’ one woman whispered to the old man beside her. ‘I’ll douse him if he says that one more time.’
The man grunted his approval as they exchanged buckets for the twentieth or thirtieth time. There was no time to light torches, and no need while the roof was burning. As the flames fizzled out, the townspeople worked by the light of the moon.
Suddenly, the moonlight was gone. Several of the people, wiping their brows and taking a breath, looked up to see why. They expected a thundercloud had come in behind the lightning, but there was only blackness above. Then a great trail of fire lit up the animal that had produced it.
Above the roofs, spreading its wings in a steady hover, hung a great black dragon, spitting fire down on the saloon. It had great flaring nostrils and a maw like a dog’s, full of sharp white teeth. Its eyes flashed magenta in the light of the flames.
Nathan McKenzie leaned heavily on his stick, which bowed under his weight. His chest felt like solid rock as he tried to exhale the fear away, but he only managed a sigh.
‘Arm yourselves!’ he shouted, thrusting a key into the nearest hand. ‘Unlock the mercantile and arm yourselves.’
Scared and horrified by the sight of the monster hovering, the old men could think of nothing better to do than follow Nathan McKenzie’s instructions. They armed themselves with the guns in the mercantile and loaded them from the boxes of ammunition under the counter. Then Nathan McKenzie lined the men up on the steps of his emporium and urged them to fire up at the beast.
‘My God!’ he said. ‘The boy did see a dragon!’
The great black dragon banked and turned, before pausing above the saloon, hovering like a mythical beast on some ancient shield. Then it breathed a bolt of flames at the shingles on the saloon roof, and the dry, grey wood caught fire as if it was tinder.
‘Kill the wretched beast!’ shouted Nathan McKenzie at the top of his lungs.
Several of the old men began to take potshots at the dragon’s belly, but any that hit their target ricocheted off the glossy black and grey scales, as if off plate armour.
‘Shouldn’t we douse the fire?’ asked one of the boys, who had never been a very good shot.
‘We must guard the mercantile,’ shouted Nathan McKenzie.
Merry Mack’s cottage was left smouldering and the firefighters turned their attention to the saloon. It was a big two-storey building, and the women and children carrying the water were already tired. Half a dozen sleepy bodies tumbled out of the saloon, coughing and wheezing, and one of the women that served at the counter vomited on the boardwalk. Some of the firefighters dropped their buckets and went to help lead the survivors clear.
It was soon obvious that the saloon would burn to the ground, despite the best efforts of the townswomen. Some of the men on the steps of the mercantile, their useless weapons raised against the beast, slipped away to help to douse the wooden boardwalks so the fire wouldn’t spread down Main Street.
‘Keep shooting!’ McKenzie shouted at the remaining band of riflemen on the steps of the mercantile.
Still hovering, the great black dragon turned away from the saloon, twisting its neck and turning its body. It was backlit by the flames that licked up and down the walls of the saloon, and looked fiercer and blacker than ever. Its magenta eyes glinted brightly.
Several more shots ricocheted off its chest as Nathan McKenzie shook his stick and berated the beast and his men for not being able to kill it. Almost as if he was answering McKenzie’s shouts, the dragon bellowed a low, grumbling roar. Then the beast opened its mouth and exhaled another blast of searing yellow flames.
The men fled from the steps of the mercantile as the dragon aimed its fiery breath squarely at the front of the building, in utter defiance of the man who owned it.
‘Get back here and kill that damned beast!’ shouted McKenzie.
The front of the mercantile was on fire, and the door was open, so a great gout of flame began to set fire to the contents of the store.
Nathan McKenzie suddenly remembered that he kept a couple of barrels of gunpowder in the back of the mercantile, and he stopped shouting. His jaw dropped, and the flush of anger drained from his face, leaving it pale in the yellow light of the flames. All his instincts screamed at him to run, but, for a long time, his body wouldn’t listen. When the message finally got through to his legs, his damaged limb failed him, and he fell sprawling to the ground.
As Nathan McKenzie fell, the mercantile store behind him began to spit hot rounds like firecrackers as the stock of ammunition lit up. Bullets cracked and popped and ricocheted around in the building. Several flew out over Nathan McKenzie’s head as he lay in the dust, clutching his hat over his head and praying for all he was worth.
Then the entire store rocked with a roar and a bang so fierce that the townsfolk clutched at their ears to try to shield them from the deafening noise. A thousand burning splinters flew out of the mercantile. All the windows exploded with a crash, and shards of glass flew in all directions, tinkling to the ground yards away. The roof was shredded, lifting off the building in one piece, and then dropping back down, buckled and broken.
The creature dropped several yards, so that it hovered one storey above the ground. The townswomen huddled together, clutching their children and watching the devastation in fear and wonder. The beast beat its wings, fanning the flames that poured out of the mercantile, but it seemed to be concentrating its energy on the man lying at its feet.
It tossed its head and roared again, and McKenzie lifted his face just high enough to look into the dragon’s purple eyes and great open mouth.
As Nathan McKenzie waited for his life to fl
ash before his eyes, suddenly the dragon’s head bucked and its neck twisted.
In that moment, he saw that the beast was not black, but dappled, black, grey and even white, like the Appaloosa horses that the Natives rode. He saw that it was covered in glossy, interlocking, iridescent scales, like a fish taken out of fresh water. He saw two rows of sharp, pointed teeth below a pair of perfectly round nostrils that exhaled curls of yellow smoke. He saw huge eyes of a colour that was neither pink nor truly purple. McKenzie’s gaze was drawn deep into those eyes, and he thought that he saw something there … Something or someone.
The huge dragon didn’t breathe fire, and McKenzie wondered why it hadn’t killed him. Then it tossed its head and broke its gaze with McKenzie. It yowled and thrashed, and McKenzie saw the rash of arrows jutting out of the dragon’s long neck, where a crest of blue-black, oily-looking feathers stood proud.
The burning mercantile lit up the night, and Nathan McKenzie saw half a dozen more dragons ducking and weaving intricate patterns in the sky as their riders loosed their arrows at the beast.
Another hail of arrows hit the dragon everywhere that its feathers grew, around its neck and feet, and at the joints of its wings. Its movements in the sky became crabbed and awkward. It tried to dodge the other dragons diving and wheeling around it, but couldn’t. It roared one last almighty roar and then flattened its wings, extending them as far as they would go. It darted up through the posse of smaller dragons and emerged above them.
Haskell and Garret saw what the Natives had begun and aimed their guns at the beast’s neck, hoping that bullets would do more damage than arrows. The great beast moved too fast, however, covering acres of sky, weaving around the smaller dragons and chasing them down.
The dragon that Trapper Watkiss had wounded was the first to fall. It was chased out of the sky by the heavy wing beats of the larger beast, sending the little dragon tumbling. It landed clumsily, but its rider was soon off its back and firing at the black beast.
