by James Maxey
There were no substantial navigable rivers on this side of the island, just cascading streams, so there were no river-pygmies. The few trees that clung to the rocky slopes were gnarled and stunted, unsuitable for forest-pygmies. That left only lava-pygmies to worry about, and since the Shattered Palace sat near the dead center of their territory, I didn’t see anything we could do to avoid them.
As luck would have it, in the chaos that followed Infidel meeting my grandfather, she’d never bothered to clean the bone-handled knife. Relic had returned it to her, and I was still free to move about. I felt like a child opening gift-wrapped presents, flitting from ruin to ruin as the others slogged slowly along narrow tracks that would give a mountain goat vertigo. The men of the Vanished Kingdom had regarded this rugged landscape as a spiritual place, carving countless small temples directly into the steep rock faces.
On my last trip through the area, I’d spotted some dark spots high up a jutting cliff that looked more like windows than natural cave openings. Infidel had been willing to risk the climb, but we’d spotted it near the end of our trip and our packs were already bulging, so we’d decided to save it for another day. As Tower’s party crept along the yard-wide lip of rock that led beneath the windows, I could see from Infidel’s expression that she remembered the place. I felt a pang of regret over this and a thousand other plans we’d made that we never got around to doing.
I fixed my eyes upon the windows and lifted toward them, as if carried by the updrafts that swept across the slope. I drifted inside, eager to discover if we’d passed up some priceless treasure.
Even before I went in, I saw clues that this wasn’t an old temple. I’d looked at enough weathered rock over the years to tell the difference between stones dressed centuries ago and relatively fresh work. These windows looked no more than a few decades old, which meant they were likely the work of lava-pygmies. Once inside, the truth was even more evident, since the ceiling was low, only about five feet high, black with soot from a fire pit lined with stones. The fire pit was still warm, and the gritty floor was covered with fresh footprints. At the back of the cave was a tunnel leading deeper into the mountain.
The whole volcano was honeycombed with these passages, carved by lava-pygmies with obsidian pick-axes. Despite all the work the little orange men put into digging these tunnels and caves, they didn’t actually live underground. They used these tunnels mainly for religious rituals. For forest-pygmies and river-pygmies, Greatshadow was a god, but for lava-pygmies, Greatshadow was the god, and these tunnels normally led to pools of lava where sacrifices would be made.
When I first discovered these areas, my instinct was to back out. For one thing, exploring them meant crawling for hours, which was rough on the knees. Plus, you never knew when you’d turn a corner and find yourself face to face with a band of pygmies armed with poison darts and a sense of righteous indignation.
Once I started exploring with Infidel, the balance of power had shifted enough that lava-pygmy temples had become targets. While the lava-pygmies lived in the same relative poverty as the rest of the islanders, their sacred sites were often decorated with a commodity too valuable to ignore: dragon bones.
In theory, there were no dragons left other than the primal dragons. A scrap of dragon hide or a single dragon tooth were exceedingly rare in the rest of the world. Yet, somehow lava-pygmies always had dragon bones aplenty, along with hides that looked like they could have been tanned the week before. In The Vanished Kingdom, Grandfather had argued that these were the remains of ancient dragons, mummified and preserved by the dry, hot air inside the volcanic chambers. I’d never liked the theory. I’d spent enough time around the volcano to know that it might be hot, but it definitely wasn’t dry. Things rotted in a heartbeat in these areas.
I may have been given a key to the mystery when the two dragons attacked Commonground. Maybe the remains came from Greatshadow’s avatars once his spirit no longer animated them. Yet, when they’d been killed, their bodies had turned into slag and stone. No bones or hide had been recovered.
Since the party was creeping along the narrow path at a pace somewhere between snail and turtle, I decided I’d probe the tunnel a little deeper. The narrow passage was pitch black, yet my ghost eyes proved worthy to the task. In the absence of true light, the walls glowed with a soft, pale luminance. I wondered if the eerie illumination was some spiritual energy I had been unaware of when I was alive.
I followed the winding passageway long enough to get bored. Just as I decided to turn back I heard faint whispers ahead. I willed myself more swiftly along the corridor, in pursuit of the sound. The feeble, colorless spirit light gave way to a red glow. The dank tunnel air began to stink of smoke and rotten meat. I floated out of the narrow passage into a relatively large room, a rough circle twenty feet across, with a ceiling high enough that I was able to stand up straight again, assuming standing means anything when your feet can’t actually touch the floor.
A dozen pygmies were gathered near a jagged crack in the floor, casting long shadows from a dull red glow. Lava bubbled at the bottom of the crack. A shaman dressed in feathers was tossing sticks into the hole, where they exploded into bright flares. The smoke had the sweetness of eucalyptus.
They pygmies jabbered excitedly; I think they were discussing the patterns of the smoke, reading them for omens. My lava-pygmy vocabulary wasn’t all it could be. The only phrase I ever heard directly from lava-pygmies was “Yik! Yik! Yik!” which loosely translates as, “It’s a long-man! Kill him!” Still, as best as I could piece together, the shaman was telling the men that the fire-giver had once again blessed them. The pygmies were standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle, looking down at something other than the smoking lava. I peered over the short wall they created and gasped.
A dragon lay before them.
Unlike the beasts that had attacked Commonground, there was no question this creature was flesh and blood. It was quite dead; its burst belly revealed entrails writhing with white maggots. The pygmies leaned down and began cutting into the scaly hide with obsidian knives. I’d used these blades before. They didn’t hold an edge well, but when they were fresh, there wasn’t anything sharper.
The pygmies peeled the flesh away from the skull. I winced as I saw that the left half of the skull was bashed in. That would certainly hurt its market value.
In size, the dragon wasn’t much bigger than a goat. Its leathery wings had already been hacked off and were folded up along the edges of the lava pit. The snout had a bony horn similar to ones that baby lizards have to help chop themselves free of their eggshells.
Off to one side, a team of three shamans dressed in parrot feathers were scraping bright red scales from the hide into a large stone bowl. One of them grabbed a stone pestle and started grinding up the jewel-like scales. All three men spit frequently into the bowl, until it turned into a dark orange paste.
I’d always wondered what lava-pygmies used to dye their skins. Mystery solved.
Sadly, the dragon was decayed well past the stage where it had anything that could be called blood. I remembered my brief return to corporeality when Infidel had hacked into the dragon in Commonground, and my ability to touch Ivory Blade’s ghost blood. What would happen if I could put my hands onto some fresh dragon blood?
Hoping that Relic might have some insight on the matter, I surrendered to the ever-present tug of the bone-handled knife. A second later, I shot out into bright sunlight and hot, gusty winds, where the others still inched along the rugged path.
I flitted down to Relic. “I just saw a dragon. Not a flame drake like Reeker let loose, but an actual corpse that was probably alive as little as a week ago.”
Relic nodded. I see it in your mind.
“I thought all ordinary dragons were dead.”
And that is all you saw. A dead dragon.
“Yeah, but freshly dead. Well, not fresh, but recent.”
Relic didn’t respond as he kept hobbling along the path.
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br /> “If human blood can restore my ghostly body, could dragon blood bring me back to life?”
Relic shook his head.
“But when Infidel-”
Regaining corporeality isn’t the same as regaining life.
“I had a heartbeat. I was breathing. I was solid enough to get cut by the dragon’s scales. If it wasn’t exactly life, it was still better than what I’ve got right now.”
Relic dismissed my reasoning with a wave of his gnarled hand. Dragon blood possesses more life energy than human blood, but it is far more volatile. Human blood will dry on the knife, sustaining your phantom form indefinitely. Dragon blood will vaporize in seconds. The illusion of life will be powerful during those seconds, but it will be unsustainable.
“In theory, if I had a herd of dragons to stab, I might stay alive for a long time.”
Relic rolled his eyes.
“What’s wrong with this idea?” I asked. “That baby dragon can’t be the only one. It must have parents, uncles, aunts, cousins. I mean, what are the odds that I just happened to stumble on the very last one of its kind?”
I admire your reasoning, but it is deeply flawed. The dragon you saw had but one parent: Greatshadow.
“This wasn’t like the slag or fire dragons we’ve seen. It had entrails. It was meaty enough to rot.”
Judicious provided you with the solution to the puzzle.
I scratched my ethereal scalp. What was he talking about?
Greatshadow is among the more physical of the primal dragons. Just as he hungers for meat, he also still possesses sexual urges, and has the magical abilities needed to satisfy these instincts.
“You mean Grandfather wasn’t joking when he said that Greatshadow can make extra bodies with female aspects?”
Judicious also told you that the primal dragons pay for the vast scope of their powers with a loss of identity. The female bodies Greatshadow creates sometimes become so confused they believe themselves to be true dragons, separate from Greatshadow. They unconsciously use the magical energy that sustains them to shape their bodies further, to the point that mating with Greatshadow is capable of producing fertilized eggs.
“That is just disturbing.”
Greatshadow isn’t pleased by the consequences either. Some females are wily enough to conceal the eggs; once or twice a decade, an egg actually hatches, and a new dragon is born. Despite being born with a portion of Greatshadow’s own memory and intelligence due to their inherited telepathy, they never survive long. Greatshadow eventually discovers them and kills them. Lava-pygmy shamans harvest the remains.
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
He again tapped his forehead. Maybe he’d read the thoughts of lava-pygmies. For all I knew, he’d read the thoughts of Greatshadow himself.
He looked up the slope and thought to me, We are near. I smell it on the air.
He was right. In another mile we’d leave the worst of the cliffs behind and have a clear path along the relatively tame terrain leading to the Shattered Palace. It was still ten miles away, but once we were off these goat-tripping pathways, we’d make good progress.
I glanced back to Infidel, who’d fallen once more into her War Doll role. Her face was utterly blank as she inched along the narrow stone, the oversized pack balanced upon her shoulders. A single misstep and she’d be over the edge; it might be a mile before she stopped rolling. Of course, Tower would probably swoop in to save her.
“So… have you been keeping track of her thoughts? About Tower?”
Yes. Would you like to know her true feelings?
I stared at her for a long moment. When I’d been alive, I’d lacked the courage to ask about her feelings. Now, I was going to learn them in the most cowardly way possible.
I turned away from both Infidel and Relic. “Not yet,” I said.
And maybe never. Because, if there was even a sliver of hope that I might be briefly reunited with her, I wanted to be able to look into her eyes without shame.
We arrived at the Shattered Palace barely an hour from sunset. I hadn’t visited these ruins in years; they hadn’t gotten any less spooky in the intervening time. The entire area is surrounded by a stone wall that used to be sixty feet tall, but most of it has collapsed into overgrown mounds. A few lone towers still stand, leaning at precarious angles, the stones held together by their corsets of vines. Beyond this was the grand courtyard, a quarter-mile of barren, pitch-black stone rumored to be cursed. The fine ghost hairs of my arms rose as I followed Infidel across the ebony earth.
The palace itself had once been carved into the side of the mountain. In classic Vanished Kingdom style, it had been adorned with high, narrow pillars, large stone heads, and numerous windows and balconies. At some point in the distant past, the palace had collapsed in on itself. The columns were broken, the stone heads split in two, and the walls shattered into gravel. If you scrambled over the rubble, there were passages leading into the mountain, but these, too, were mostly filled with broken stone and more bat guano than any sane man would want to crawl through.
Of course, men who came this far into the jungle were seldom the model of mental health. In any tunnel, you could find evidence of previous explorers — lanterns with broken glass, block and tackles locked with rust, various spikes and pinions draped with the rotting remains of rope.
The sheer scale and scope of the ruins called out to any treasure hunter. I’d come here long before I met Infidel. I’d turned back when I found the crushed remains of an earlier explorer. There’s a chance the guy had been someone I knew; the stench of the corpse, if corpse was the right word, was still relatively ripe. The reason I hesitate to use the word corpse is that it implies there was a body, and, really, what remained was best described as a smeared paste, vaguely man-shaped, coating a smooth stone wall. Whoever he’d been, he’d had a shovel, and whatever had smacked into him had caught the blade on the edge and folded it up like an accordion. After two days of wheezing in the ammonia rich air, slipping in the guano, the sight of the flattened body had dampened my curiosity and I turned back.
“This is a good place to set up camp,” said Tower, touching down in the center of the courtyard.
“I respectfully disagree,” said Relic. “Lava-pygmies conduct rituals here. If they find us on their sacred ground, we’ll have to fight.”
“They already know we’re here,” said Menagerie, in the form of an ocelot, scanning the mounds of stone surrounding the courtyard. “I’ve spotted a few dozen, but they seem wary. My gut tells me they’ll keep their distance. They may not be as kind to the others.”
“Others?” asked Tower.
“Explorers. Tomb looters. They have a camp about a half-mile down the mountain. I can smell them.”
Zetetic raised an eyebrow. “You can tell they’re looters by the way they smell?”
“In this case, yes,” said Menagerie. “I know those scents well. It’s Hookhand and his Machete Quartet. They always fence their stuff at the Black Swan.”
“Of all the people to survive the tidal wave,” I said, giving Infidel a knowing look. Hookhand and I had a rivalry that ran back twenty years. More than once I’d gone off chasing the rumor of some newly discovered ruin to find the bastard had beaten me to it.
“I don’t think the pygmies pose a serious threat,” said Lord Tower, rising up to survey the area. “The walls may be in ruins, but they’re still formidable barriers. To attack en masse, the pygmies would have to come through the gate. We’ll simply post a watch there, and frighten them away with a show of force if necessary. Aurora and Father Ver can start the night. No-Face and Menagerie will follow them. The War Doll and I will take the final shift to see us through until dawn.”
Aurora winked at Infidel, though I don’t think anyone else saw it. Infidel simply stared straight ahead, still playing the emotionless machine.
Without the steady winds of the north slope to shield us, the mosquitoes came on strong that evening. Father Ver was particularl
y afflicted by the buzzing bloodsuckers. He was in a foul mood as he waited at the gate, his scowl lines and bald pate covered with red welts.
Aurora had little to fear from the insects. They froze stiff the second they touched her pale skin, tumbling into an ever growing pile around her.
“I can soothe those if you’d like,” Aurora said as Father Ver scratched his face.
“I want no part of your pagan magic,” said Father Ver. “Under any other circumstances, I would have already banished an abomination such as yourself.”
Aurora leaned back against the stone pillar. “Is there something in your holy book that demands that you be nasty to people?”
“You don’t qualify as people,” said the Truthspeaker. “Ogres, along with pygmies, mermen, and the shadowfolk, are merely distorted reflections of true humanity, lies given substance by the false beliefs of fools. When the Omega Reader opens the One True Book, your kind will vanish from this world like a nightmare fading from a waking mind.”
“Whatever,” said Aurora. “You know, I hope I’m around when your book is finally opened. It would be priceless to watch your face fall as you discover everything you believe is wrong.”
Father Ver didn’t respond.
Aurora kept talking: “You Truthspeakers spend the majority of your life hidden in a remote temple, purposefully set apart from the real world, so that you can be brainwashed into a ‘truth’ that has nothing to do with reality.” Aurora looked up at the sky. There were very few stars shining through the tropical humidity. “I come from a land where truth is stark and tangible, a landscape white as paper for as far as the eye can see. You quickly come to grips with what is real, or you die. Spend a single week out on the tundra, old man, then come back and tell me if you still believe reality is found in some book.”
Father Ver slapped a mosquito on the back of his hand. “I find discussions with unreal beings tedious. Let us pass the guard shift without further attempts at conversation.”
