by Scott Meyer
A disappointingly small number of people raised their hands, fifteen at most. The majority of the villagers had hightailed it for cover at the first sight of dragons. Gibbons pressed on.
“Okay, and of those of you with your hands up, how many of you agree with Seth that the wizards were trying to help us?”
About a third kept their hands raised. The other two-thirds fidgeted in their chairs and made doubtful moaning noises.
“And how many think I’m right?” Honor asked.
The hands that had been up went down, and a roughly equal number came up hesitantly, accompanied by more fidgeting. All in all, five people out of well over a hundred publicly agreed with Honor, but she used child math. Having any adult agree with her meant that she was definitely 100 percent right.
Gibbons looked less convinced than ever of Honor’s opinion or anyone else’s, including his own. “But, Honor, why? You say that the wizards wanted the dragons to attack us. Why would the wizards want that? And if they did, why use dragons? We’ve seen what they’re capable of. They’re more than powerful enough to destroy the whole town themselves if they want.”
Honor thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t know.”
If this gave Gibbons any satisfaction, it did not last long.
“But,” Honor said, “if the wizards are as powerful as you say, why weren’t they able to chase off the dragons any faster, or just kill them?”
It was a good question, and Gibbons thought about it for a bit too long. The crowd got restless and started talking among themselves. Honor heard bits and pieces of many conversations. “Just made them madder,” “Called them idiots,” “Turned into a dragon himself.”
Gibbons said, “Okay. If we’re honest, the best thing we can say for the wizards is that they helped us, but not very well.”
“And that they cast a sleeping spell on anyone who tried to fight their dragons,” Honor said.
“They said it’s a healing spell, and we don’t know that the dragons were theirs.”
“The healing spell put them to sleep and made them stop fighting, and I know that the dragons are theirs because I’ve seen the pen where the wizards keep them!”
Her statement affected the crowd in ways both profound and predictable. Honor had their undivided attention, and yet she had to shout to be heard.
“In a clearing, deep in the woods, north of our pasture. I saw the dragon pen, the biggest pen I’ve ever seen. The fence stretched into the sky like a roof to keep the dragons from flying away.”
Gibbons asked, “And how do you know the wizards built this dragon pen?”
“Because there was a wizard there.”
“In the clearing, deep in the woods, next to a great big pen full of dragons.”
“Yes.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Tracking down one of our ewes. The wizard had stolen it.”
Gibbons laughed. “One of your ewes came up missing and you assumed that an evil wizard had stolen your sheep?”
Many other adults laughed along with Gibbons. There are certain crimes that are not only wrong, but are also so ignominious that the act of accusing someone of them is laughably unrealistic and insulting. The idea that someone with magical powers would lower himself to sheep rustling didn’t seem reasonable.
“How many ewes did the wizard take?” Gibbons asked.
Honor said, “One. For a while. I counted later, and it seemed like he put it back, or tricked me with his magic into thinking he did.”
Gibbons laughed again. “Young lady, why would a wizard use his powers to steal one of your ewes, then give it back?”
Honor said, “I thought he meant to feed it to the dragons, but I didn’t see that. I saw him with the sheep. I don’t understand what he was doing. He was yelling and chasing it. It seemed like he wanted to wrestle it. He was abusing it, I guess you might say.”
The laughter in the room stopped, but only after changing drastically in tone. There are certain crimes that are not only wrong, but are also so ignominious that the act of accusing someone of them makes them appear guilty, because, all joking aside, one would never accuse someone of that unless they were certain.
Gibbons said, “These are serious accusations, girl. We’ll need to investigate for ourselves. Can you tell us how to get to this dragon pen you saw?”
“I’ll take you there! Let’s go!”
“Gracious, no, dearie. We’ll get a few of the men to go. I’m sure nobody’d ask you to go along.”
“You don’t have to ask,” Honor said, “I’ll go. I can take you straight there.”
“No, I’m sorry. There’s no way to know what dangers we’ll face.”
“I know what dangers you’ll face. I’ve faced them.”
“Well, if you were able to make it on your own, a group of men should have no problem. You’ll only slow us down. We won’t have the time or the energy to take care of you. Do you understand?”
Honor’s face turned bright red. Her knuckles went white.
“Yes,” Honor said. “I understand, Mister Gibbons.”
Gibbons nodded, making the common mistake of thinking that understanding and agreeing were the same thing. “Now, we’ll round up a party of volunteers, and then, after you’ve given us directions, we’ll be on our way. We’ll want to enter the woods before we reach the Bastards’ encampment. The dragons and the wizards are bad enough. We don’t want Kludge on our hands as well.”
Honor looked around the room, at the adults who had dismissed her, then listened to her, then dismissed her again. They all listened to Gibbons now, all except one. Across the inn, standing just outside an open window, Hubert, the dung sifter, stood looking at Honor.
He saw that she saw him. He smiled weakly and shook his head.
* * *
“Oh no! Kludge! Kludge!” the voice shouted.
Kludge smiled. Few things pleased him more than the sound of someone in distress, shouting his name, hoping for help that would probably not come. He stretched and yawned contentedly.
“Ahhhh! Kludge!” the voice continued.
That’s right, Kludge thought. Let everyone know that you’re afraid, and who’s made you that way.
Slowly, Kludge realized that he wasn’t actually threatening anyone at the moment. He was lying on the pile of cowhides he used as a bed, under another cowhide he used as a blanket. His eyes snapped open. He saw the underside of the cowhides thrown over a wooden frame that he used as a tent.
The voice called out again. “Kludge! Where’s Kludge!”
Kludge sat up and pulled on the cowhide he used as a shirt. He vowed to find whoever had woken him up, and put them to sleep. He liked distressed voices, shouting his name, looking for help, but not when they were looking for help from him.
Kludge stepped out of the tent and nearly collided with a Bastard. He wasn’t a bastard literally. Not as far as Kludge knew, or cared. Kludge led a group of young men who called themselves the Bastards. To become a Bastard you only had to do whatever Kludge wanted, which mostly meant calling yourself a Bastard, telling Kludge how tough he was, and playing a musical instrument.
The last part was the easiest. Making any loud noise to a predictable rhythm counted as playing, and drums qualified as an instrument. Kludge’s definition of a drum included anything that made a noise when struck, including people who had gotten on Kludge’s nerves.
Like any group that accepts pretty much anybody, the membership of the Bastards was made up entirely of young males who felt worthless and powerless—guys who look at the creatures wriggling around in the mud and think, He thinks he’s better than me.
The Bastard who was risking getting “drummed out” this morning was Stretch, one of the older Bastards. Stretch hadn’t gotten his nickname for
being particularly tall. Kludge gave him his name in honor of something he’d done to another man’s ear during a fight.
Stretch said, “Kludge! Kludge! You’re up! You’ve gotta—”
Kludge punched Stretch in the face. Stretch flew backward and then rolled in the dirt, clutching at his nose and moaning. In truth, Kludge hadn’t hit him that hard and they both knew it, but Kludge had standards, and giving him the impression that his initial attack had been anything less than devastating would be taken as an invitation to try harder.
“I’m thorry thoo dithturb you, Kludge,” Stretch said through his hands, “bud you godda thee thith!”
“What is it?” Kludge asked. “I don’t see anything.”
Stretch pointed behind Kludge’s tent.
The Bastards had claimed a broad, flat space that sat along the side of the main road through the woods as their domain. It was wide, treeless, and overgrown with tall grass, but beyond that grass were several tents, the ash pile of a near-nightly bonfire, and a barren, muddy patch the Bastards had trampled. The grass provided a buffer zone between the camp and the road and gave the Bastards something to hide in when attempting to ambush passersby.
Kludge’s tent, like all of the tents, faced away from the road and toward the woods. Stretch pointed behind the tent, toward the expanse of wild grass, the road, and the rest of civilization. Kludge sneered, stepped around the tent, and froze.
Three dragons were just standing there, eating the grass, oblivious to the world around them.
When Kludge snapped out of the shock, he could see that all of the other Bastards had already noticed the dragons.
Many young men from the nearby villages would turn up each night for the bonfire and the music. They thought of themselves as members, and Kludge didn’t say anything to make them think otherwise. Someday they might come in handy. But the real core of the Bastards consisted of Kludge and six other guys: Stretch, Gripper, Pounder, and Heel-Kick, all of whom were named for things they had done in fights, and L.L. (L.L. stood for Long Lobes. He’d been named in honor of something Stretch had done to him in a fight.) The youngest member of the group was Only Donnie. He got his name when another member named Donnie quit.
Kludge could see the guys huddled behind trees and hunched down in the mud at the edge of the tall grass. Heel-Kick shouted, “Kludge! We need Kludge! He’ll know what to do!”
Kludge proved him right, by threatening Heel-Kick with grievous bodily harm if he didn’t shut up. Then Kludge stared at the dragons for a good long time. Their shoulders were about half again taller than his. Their wings folded back on themselves, and their front claws pressed into the grass, supporting the front half of their bodies like legs. Their necks hung low to the ground as they ate their fill of the wild grass.
As peaceful and docile as they acted, they radiated menace. Their skin was made up of thick armored scales. Their teeth looked like ivory daggers. One of the dragons took a step forward, briefly lifting one of its rear feet above the height of the grass. It was the single most terrifying foot Kludge had ever seen. What on any other animal one might have referred to as toes, on these monsters looked like a mass of small, very muscular arms tipped not with hands, but with toenails that were semi-translucent short swords.
The sight of them filled Kludge’s heart with fear. He had spent years trying to convince the people who knew him that he had neither a heart, nor fear to fill it with, and had nearly convinced himself. If these things had this effect on him, he could only imagine how the Bastards felt, or how ordinary villagers would react to the sight of them.
Stretch said, “They just showed up. What are we gonna do, Kludge?”
Kludge studied the look of fear on Stretch’s face, looked at the dragons again, and said, “Find some rope.”
12.
The rest of the wizards were taking a break when Jeff and Roy materialized in the clearing next to the cage dome. There had been seven dragons in the cage before. Now there were two. The weapons team needed to try out their prototypes on something, and creating new dragons would be far too dangerous, so Jeff’s original seven got the job.
Jeff and Roy looked at the two remaining dragons, then at the wizards, sitting and lying in the grass, not talking. A new structure sat next to Jeff’s original dragon pen: a large, rectangular cage, about a quarter of the size of the original dome, and a caged path large enough for a dragon led from the one cage to the other. A large stone wall blocked the dragons in the domed cage from seeing what happened in the smaller cage.
Roy said, “Simple math tells me that you’ve been productive.”
“We’ve learned a lot,” Phillip said.
“Yes,” Martin agreed, lying on his back, staring at the sky. “For instance, I’ve learned that testing weapons on caged animals makes me feel like a monster, even when I know the animals aren’t real, and they look like death with wings.”
Brit said, “Hear, hear.”
Jeff looked at the ground and said, “Sorry. Still, it looks like you came up with something.”
“We came up with many things,” Gwen said. “Not all of them worked the way we’d hoped.”
Tyler stood and walked toward the domed cage.
Jeff said, “Anxious to show us what you’ve got, eh?”
“Not in the slightest,” Tyler said, “yet there are some things you don’t want to deal with, but you just have to grit your teeth and get through it.”
Roy asked, “Learned that from working on ranches, did you?”
“No, from growing up as a black man in Butte, Montana. Hey, Gary, help me out here.”
Gary shrugged, hoisted himself up off the ground, and followed Tyler.
The two wizards climbed through the fence, then managed, through a combination of running and shouting, to maneuver one of the dragons into the chute. Gary and Tyler followed, and the cage section that acted as a door rematerialized behind them.
The rest of the wizards moved behind the wall, to the second, smaller cage.
Martin said, “Force fields don’t work on the dragons. Neither do missiles, direct physical force, or sarcasm. We tried Gwen’s macro, with the fabric that entangled the dragons, and Gary’s stupid spiderwebs, but without you there, Jeff, to deactivate the dragons when you think they’ve lost, the dragons just tore right through them. Same goes for Brit’s asphyxiation bubble. So, we had to invent some new stuff.”
“All right,” Tyler said. “Shall we start with the ray?”
Gary nodded.
Tyler pointed the chrome hood ornament on the head of his staff at one of the two dragons and said, “Radion drako unu.”
A white bolt of light shot from Tyler’s staff and hit the closest dragon in the hindquarters. The beam faded and disappeared, as did a portion of the dragon. A small portion. The specific part the beam had hit—a triangular chunk of the beast’s rear flank. The rest of the dragon remained perfectly intact. The spot where the triangle had been was now an open hole, revealing the inside of the dragon to be an empty void, as if the dragon were a statue made of sheets of plywood. The dragon showed no pain, or even any sign that it had noticed a problem.
Phillip said, “As you can see, our first attempt at an anti-dragon ray didn’t destroy the dragon, but only demonstrated that they are hollow, which is a nice metaphor for life’s problems, but isn’t particularly useful beyond that. Our theory is that the dragons are made up of polygons, and that each polygon, for whatever reason, is treated as a separate object. Then we took the obvious next step; we widened the beam and deleted more of the dragon by hitting more polygons.”
Tyler nodded at Phillip, then said, “Radion drako du.” Instead of a thin beam, a cone of light shot from the head of Tyler’s staff, bathing half of the dragon in its harsh white glare.
When the beam dissipated, half of the dragon had vanis
hed. The remaining half was a hollow shell, like half of a broken chocolate bunny, only much larger, and dragon shaped. Instead of falling over, the half dragon remained suspended in air, as if the rest of the dragon was still there, just invisible.
Phillip said, “So, you see, it doesn’t kill the dragon. It merely renders parts of it invisible. Bathing an entire dragon in the ray wouldn’t destroy it. It would only make it more dangerous.”
“They somehow have access to the instincts and intelligence of an animal,” Brit explained, “but they still have the body of a video game character. When you damage that body, instead of killing it, it glitches out.”
Gary pointed at the flailing half dragon and asked, “Are we done with this one?”
Phillip said, “Yes.”
Martin said, “I’ll go get the last dragon,” and jogged toward the original holding pen.
Gary said, “Krei duono ringego,” then tilted his head back and shouted, “Gooooal!”
At the end of the rectangular pen, a metal arch, easily thirty feet tall and sixty feet across, appeared. A thin, iridescent blue membrane, like soap film, stretched across its inner circumference. Tyler and Gary spent several minutes chasing and dodging, and harassing the half dragon until it tried to escape by running through the arch, into the blue membrane. Its leg and wing continued to move under their own power right up until the second they disappeared.
Tyler said, “Forigi duono ringego goooooal!” The arch disappeared. Then, as if on cue, the final dragon ran into the ring, slid to a stop, and breathed fire at Gary and Tyler, both of whom yelped and hastily created force fields to keep the fire at bay.
Martin ran in behind the dragon, then made a hard right and squeezed through the fence to rejoin the group.
Brit said, “We got to thinking that if it has the instincts of an animal, maybe we should try to kill it the way we’d kill an animal, instead of trying to delete it like a computer-generated character. Gentlemen?”
