by Scott Meyer
“Those dragons are close,” Martin said. “That’s good news.”
“Is it?” asked Phillip.
They continued walking, following the trail as it meandered through the woods.
“I’m glad we got this map,” Martin said, rolling it up and placing it in his robe pocket. “We might have been looking all day.”
They heard a rustling in the distance, coming from the trail ahead, not nearly loud or violent enough to be a dragon approaching, but loud and violent enough to give the wizards pause. They stopped in their tracks, held their staffs forward, and prepared for whatever was headed their way.
After a few tense seconds of ever-intensifying noise, a man ran around the bend. He was a short, stout, older man in new leather breeches and a woven tunic. He had fear in his eyes and a sword in his hand. He looked like he had much more experience with the fear than he did with the sword. He skidded to a stop, looked at Martin and Phillip, and asked, “Are you wizards?”
Martin tensed a bit. Phillip said, “Yes, we are wizards.”
The man said, “Oh, thank the heavens!” He dropped his sword, stepped toward them, and in a beseeching voice said, “I need your help!”
Phillip asked, “What’s troubling you that you need a wizard’s help?”
“Dragons! I’ll show you! Follow me!”
Martin said, “Huh. Maybe we didn’t need the map so badly after all.”
The man feared dragons, but he didn’t seem concerned that the dragons would hear him. He talked the entire time he led the wizards to the problem.
“Look, gentlemen, what you’re about to see, it’s, um, look, it’s going to surprise you. I need your help, no two ways about it, but I’m trusting you to be men of honor. I’m not averse to paying a fair wage for fair work, and greed is a sin, but I hope we can all agree that what’s mine is mine, and to take it away would be stealing.”
Martin and Phillip exchanged an amused but weary look. Phillip said, “My good man, I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
“Kneath.”
“Kneath, we are wizards. We can bend, shape, and manipulate the very fabric of reality as if it were so much . . .” Phillip trailed off, looking for the right word.
“Fabric?” Martin offered.
“Yes. I promise you, we have no interest in stealing whatever it is we’re about to see.”
Kneath said, “I’m glad to hear that. Because we’re almost there. It’s just inside this cave.”
The path had led them to the side of a steep hill. Set into the hill they saw a dark, gaping hole. It resembled what Martin imagined a giant’s upper lip and mouth would look like when viewed from a giant spoon. Kneath disappeared into the cave without stopping to make sure the wizards were still following, which they weren’t.
Phillip and Martin looked at the cave, dubiously.
“Martin, can you think of a single example of someone finding something in a cave that they were happy about afterward?”
“No, but maybe we’ll be the first.”
“Martin, can you think of a single example of something pleasant happening to the two of us first?”
Phillip walked into the cave, not waiting for an answer. Martin followed.
Martin muttered a spell to turn his staff into a flashlight, then said, “That’s better.”
The inside of the cave looked exactly as Martin had expected it would. Rough rock walls curving seamlessly into a rock ceiling over a bed of wall-to-wall dirt, all enlivened by the decorative flourishes for which bats are well-known. The cave stretched out ahead of them, remaining surprisingly roomy as it curved out of their view.
Phillip stopped him. “That fellow, Kneath, he didn’t need a torch.”
“Maybe he knows the cave really well. He might spend a lot of time here.”
“We’ve been lured into a cave by a man who spends lots of time in said cave. Splendid. I only hope we don’t come to regret his home-cave advantage.”
Kneath emerged from around a bend in the distance, begging them to hurry. Only when they had him as a visual reference did they realize that the cave had maintained its full height. Also, now that they looked at it critically, the cave seemed far too long and straight, and the radius of the curved ceiling was too regular for a naturally occurring geological formation. The cave appeared man-made, or more likely, wizard-made.
They followed the man around the bend and into a large chamber the size of a small basketball arena—filled with gold. Not the large, loose heaps of gold, like comic-book artists and theme-park-ride set designers are fond of creating, but countless tall, neat, orderly stacks of gold objects, carefully sorted, organized, and stored in their assigned places, with large golden signs specifying what went where. And the items were not coins, goblets, and crowns, as one might expect. The sign next to several rectangular stacks of thin gold plates said shingles.
Looking around the room, they saw many rectangular stacks of a variety of solid-gold slabs, marked with signs saying tile-floor, tile-wall, tile-ceiling, siding, paneling, and flashing. They also saw golden bins full of golden nuts, bolts, nails, and screws, and stacks of solid-gold I beams, railings, balusters, and posts, all of it illuminated by the kind of lights one would expect to find hanging from the ceiling of a Home Depot, only they were floating in midair, and made of gold.
Phillip said, “Jimmy!”
Martin was rendered speechless by the sheer amount and strange forms of the gold before him, and by the sight of the four sleeping dragons draping themselves over the stacks of priceless building materials like cats making themselves comfortable in a room full of cardboard boxes.
Phillip said, “We all knew that Jimmy went somewhere to make materials for Castle Camelot. It’s not like you can pop down to the lumberyard for a solid-gold two-by-four.”
Martin said, “Yeah. It makes sense that he’d create a stockpile so that work could go on without his supervision. He probably set up a portal into this cave for his workers.”
“Yes. And when the castle was done, Jimmy wouldn’t have destroyed the surplus material. It’s gold. For all we know, he went looking for this cave when we exiled him.”
“Nah, you’re giving Jimmy too much credit.”
“You don’t think he’d have remembered where this cave was?”
“No, I don’t think he could have ridden from Argentina to Wales on a bicycle.”
“Good point.” Phillip tapped Kneath on the shoulder, distracting him from staring in anguish at his gold being used as a bed by dragons.
“How long have the dragons been in here?” Phillip asked.
“A little over two days.”
“How did they get here?”
“They were drawn to the gold.”
“Really?” Martin asked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Absolutely. I was out for a walk, coming to check on my gold, and in a big clearing on the way, I saw the dragons. I thought to myself, They’re clearly after my gold. So I tried to shoo them off, but they wouldn’t leave. Then I ran all the way here to try to protect my gold from them.”
“And they followed you,” Phillip said.
“No, I outran them.”
“All the way into the gold chamber,” Martin said.
“Yes,” Kneath answered, proudly.
Phillip asked, “And you say they haven’t left this room once since they got here?”
“No, sir, they haven’t.”
Phillip turned to Martin and said, “Good. Seems these four are neutralized. We can just throw a goal up in the cave leading out, go destroy the other two dragons that’ve been assigned to us, and with any luck these four will have taken care of themselves by the time we return.”
“Wait,” Kneath said. “What do you mean, destroy the other two dragons? You two are her
e to destroy the dragons anyway?”
“Yes,” Martin said.
Kneath said, “Oh. Could I trouble you to please take care of these four first, since you’re here already?”
Phillip shook his head. “I really think it will be easier if we leave them for later.”
“But I’d rather have them gone now. If you’ll kill them first, I can make it worth your while.”
Martin asked, “How?”
Kneath said, “I can pay you in gold.”
“We’re wizards,” Phillip said. “We can make our own gold.”
“But if I give you gold, you won’t have to.”
Martin shook his head. “But you don’t have any gold. From where I’m standing, the dragons have the gold, not you.”
“Yes,” Kneath said brightly. “So the sooner you get rid of the dragons, the sooner I can pay you!”
16.
Somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, Brit and Gwen hovered slightly above the eye of the dragon storm. They attempted to count the dragons, which was a challenge, since they were mostly identical. Two had horns; the rest didn’t. Aside from that, they were essentially ten of the same animal, flying in a circle. Just when they both thought they had a handle on the dragons’ formation, and a general idea of where to start counting and where to stop, the dragons broke their pattern, diving to the ground.
They had focused so fully on the dragons that neither of them had bothered to look directly down at the ground. They finally did look, just in time to see a clump of people huddling beneath large wooden shields while being periodically doused in flames.
The dragons couldn’t turn quite sharply enough to stay permanently within fire-breath range of the poor people on the ground, so instead they each chose an orbit that brought them in close enough to attack, then took them far enough afield to be out of the path of the next dragon. Each dragon could muster about three good puffs of flame, and between them they kept the poor saps with the shields under constant assault for nearly fifteen seconds, which might not sound like a long time, but to someone attempting to fight back fire with a piece of wood, fifteen seconds is an eternity. The intricate, looping pattern the dragons traced as they wove in and out of range while staying out of each other’s way seemed almost mathematically perfect.
Brit and Gwen knew that the people under the shields had to be terrified and in agony, but were not in any direct danger from the dragons. Also, the realization that the dragons were attacking something, then the shock at what they were attacking, then the surprise at how they were attacking, all came in such quick succession that it would have left any witness momentarily stunned.
“Such an interesting mix of animal instinct and computer precision,” Brit the Younger said. “It would be fascinating to keep a few to study, if it didn’t mean risking all life on Earth.”
“The age-old lament of the scientist,” Gwen said.
The dragons had done their worst, and ascended to regroup for another run. As the dragons flew back to a safe altitude, Brit and Gwen noted that the lead dragon and the last dragon were the two with horns.
The mound of shields rose as if a single piece of wood, then the individual shields tilted, lowered, and virtually disappeared, revealing four large men. They all looked like variations on the same theme, as if they had been assembled at random from the same assortment of available parts: long hair, trim beards, thick muscles, and kilts.
They stood back-to-back, unaware of the sorceresses directly above them, instead focusing on the dragons. A man with flowing blond hair lifted his sword, looked at the surface of his shield, and shouted, “The shields held again, my friends! I doubt they can withstand another pass, but take heart, for we shall die protecting those we love! I regret that I’ll never see my beloved Coira, nor little Effie and Nessa again, but knowing that they will live is enough!”
A man with dark red hair and a bright red face hoisted his sword and bellowed, “Aye, Jock! I, too, take great solace in knowing that my sacrifice has made possible the escape of my dear wife and our wee baby daughter, for I love them far more than I love life itself! I only hope they know it!”
A noticeably stouter man with brighter red hair and a darker red face switched his battle-axe to his shield hand, and used his now-free hand to grasp the other man’s shoulder. “Morag knows, Kyle. Morag knows. And when Rut is old enough, Morag will tell her. That woman adores you beyond the ability for words to express it. I know this, because while I am here fighting for my betrothed, the lovely Donalda, a good, good woman, far better than I deserve, the truth is that I, too, love Morag, and have since we were all wee. I would never act on it, for I love you like a brother, but I cannot help how I feel, and now that we face certain death, I want you to know the truth.”
Kyle put his hand on the other man’s as it clutched his shoulder and said, “Leslie, I know. I’ve always known. Everybody’s seen the way you look at Morag, even Morag. But we knew you were far too good a man to ever say a word, no matter how painful it was, and we respect you all the more for it!”
Jock laughed, “Truth be told, all of the men in the village have been in love with Morag at one time or another!”
Kyle shouted, “Don’t I know it!”
All of the men laughed, save for one, a black-haired hulking figure clutching a battle-axe with both hands as he surveyed the sky with murder in his eyes. “I’ve never loved Morag,” he said, in a somber, determined tone. “Bonnie though she is. No offense, Kyle.”
Kyle said, “None taken, Mungo.”
Mungo shook his head. “Before I knew what marriage, or love, or even my own name was, I’ve known who I wanted. She was skinny, and pale, and had hair like a thicket bush, but the first time I laid eyes on her, I knew she was for me. The five greatest days of my life are the day Grizel agreed to be mine, the days that Seonag, Jinny, and my boy Torquil were born, and today.” The man turned to face the others, and held his battle-axe high above his head. “For today,” he nearly screamed, “I die! I die, fighting! I die fighting for a good cause, with good men by my side! Today we give our last, here on the ground our fathers left us, to defend the lives of those we hold most dear! It’s a good death! The best death possible! I’m proud, so proud to share it with you, men I love like brothers! The dragons may kill us, and burn us, and eat us, but we will fight back their fire, and we will dodge their teeth and wrestle with their tongues, and kick them in the tonsils on our way past. And if they swallow us, by God, we will do our best to give them indigestion while we’re in ’em, and the trots on our way out!”
The men all shook their weapons in the air and let out a blood-curdling shriek that echoed across the landscape.
Gwen said, “Yeesh! After all that, it almost seems like a shame to save them.”
The dragons had circled several times during the men’s heartfelt pre-martyrdom chat, and were just starting to descend for another coordinated attack. Gwen threw herself wand first into a steep dive, got just ahead of the lead dragon, and created the destructive portal they’d taken to calling the goal directly in its path.
The first dragon never had the time to even try to avoid the goal, and sailed through it like a perfectly executed free throw. The second dragon attempted to pull up far too late, and only managed to run headfirst into the rim, then flop limply through the goal, carried by its own momentum.
The third dragon spread its wings wide and flapped them furiously in a desperate effort to keep from flying into the goal. Of course, it didn’t know that the goal would kill it. The dragon had no idea what the goal even was, but that alone was a good enough reason for any creature with an instinct for self-preservation to want to avoid flying into it. It flailed in the air, attempting to maintain its altitude, like the world’s largest hummingbird. The seven dragons behind it all had time to simply adjust their dive paths to avoid both the goal and the panicked
dragon, which they did, neatly zipping past on every side.
Because the dragons had been in a dive when Gwen placed the goal, instead of being in front of the third dragon, or even beside it, the goal was actually beneath it, canted at an angle like a ramp. The dragon managed to avoid it, arresting all of its momentum, and actually started to inch away, before Brit flew directly in front of its face and emanated a blinding flash of light that stunned the dragon just long enough for it to lose altitude and fall through the goal.
Brit said, “Three down.”
Gwen started to respond, but got distracted by the sound of the men below cheering. She looked down at them and managed to smile for nearly a full second before shouting, “Crap!”
The destruction of three of their number had thrown the dragons into disarray. They reacted by each flying in a graceful arc, redirecting their momentum into paths that all converged back on the men on the ground.
Gwen and Brit knew that the dragon’s false fire would hurt, but couldn’t kill the men directly. Indeed, the men had survived a direct assault while they watched, but the men had anticipated that attack and braced themselves. This time, they had their shields down, and didn’t seem aware that the dragons were converging on them with intent to try to turn them into brisket. When the fire hit, the men would probably panic, and Brit and Gwen knew from recent experience what could happen when armed men in tight quarters panic.
Gwen dove toward the men. She watched as the looks on their faces transitioned in quick succession from elation, that two sorceresses were helping them; to fear, when one of the sorceresses shot toward them without warning; to confusion, when they felt their weapons strike the inner wall of the invisible force field she had created. Then she couldn’t see them at all, because of all the fire and dragons in the way.
