by Cory Herndon
“Why don’t you just cast a hex on the place while you’re at it?” Pivlic said. “Don’t speak evil or evil comes back to you.”
“Me don’t know what that means, but—”
Something exploded inside the Cauldron, and Pivlic lifted into the air with a start when the brick and stone ground of the flats rocked beneath his feet.
“Quiet,” Pivlic snapped. “Look!”
“Another one,” one of Garulsz’s miners shouted.
“Back to work,” Garulsz shouted back, then added, “Look, imp. Another one!”
“I see it,” Pivlic said. The second dragon looked a little bigger than the first, though it might just have been a trick of the light bouncing off of its ivory scales. The albino climbed straight up to gain altitude on the blue dragon, then leveled off and flew overhead after the blue dragon. Pivlic noted no one ducked this time. They just stood and watched, awestruck.
As the albino turned to follow the blue one’s course, Pivlic caught a glimpse of the riders and almost dropped from the air in shock. The baroness and a savage Gruul sat astride the thing’s neck.
“Who that?” Garulsz said.
“Beats me,” Pivlic lied. “But I think there’s going be a fight, my friends. And you know what that means.” He turned to the ogress and her small mining crew and added, “Anyone want to place any—” his words caught in his throat when a third shape rose from the Cauldron. Of course, there had been three eggs. A silvery flash crested the center of the dome, and Pivlic prepared to mentally figure the odds if another dragon was thrown into the mix.
But this was no dragon. The translucent sphere cleared the dome and blasted off on a straight line after the albino. Just as the Pyraquin’s flame-pods engaged, the Cauldron exploded in a spectacularly volcanic display. The shock wave knocked them all about and a hot wind washed over them, even at this distance. Pivlic was blown backward into Garulsz, who absorbed most of the impact.
“That no dragon,” Garulsz said, pushing herself into a sitting position before the others. Pivlic, also sitting up whether he wanted to or not, nodded. A few more explosions went off somewhere in the Cauldron and new fires started along the structure, outmatching the flames clinging to the Vitar Yescu.
“No,” Pivlic said, and pushed off of the ogress and back into the air with a flap of his wings. “As I was saying, any of you fine ladies and gentlemen want to place any bets? I’ll extend credit to all bettors who can make their mark on a piece of parchment.” He clapped his hands together.
Finally back in something close to his element. There was a fight going on, and fights naturally drew an audience. “It’s a three-way race, near as I can tell, my friends,” Pivlic said. “The blue, the albino, or the brave souls in the crystal ball? How many can make it? Who will survive? Come now, gentlemen and ladies, do not be shy.”
Might as well make some zinos, Pivlic reasoned, just in case. He gave Kos better odds than he probably should have, but his old friend could probably use all the luck he could get.
* * * * *
The blue dragon burned a great gouge from the side of the Vitar Yescu, and Hauc was in the process of guiding the blue around for a third pass when a blazing column of white flame blasted across his flight path. He wrenched on one of the blue dragon’s horns and pulled down just in time to avoid the albino dragon—his albino dragon—as it cut through the heavy air above with a roar. He caught a glimpse of the escaped Gruul prisoner and behind him that foolish child, that self-styled Orzhov baroness who had been causing him grief since she came to Utvara.
“Down!” the magelord shouted to his less-than-enthusiastic steed. “The Vitar Yescu, now!”
The blue dragon was under his control, but there was a difference between control and command. He could feel Blue fighting him and resolved to fight right back. Hauc was the master, not the dragons. Not the blue one and not the stolen albino. Not even Niv-Mizzet. Zomaj Hauc.
Unfortunately, master or not, he was not entirely flameproof, not against the ancient, magical fire of a dragon. He told the blue dragon as much and ordered it to do its best not to endanger him. He thought he heard the dragon chuckle at that but chose to ignore it. It loosed another blue-flame blast that took out a swath of the sturdy Vitar Yescu, but still the towering tree, though completely awash in flames, refused to fall.
Just so long as it burned. The Vitar Yescu was as good as dead.
Hauc craned his neck to get a bead on the albino, which he’d lost when it flew straight into the eastern sunrise. It emerged, bathed in a halo of orange rays, circling around the far side of the township.
“Smart, Gruul,” Hauc said. “Give me a chance to pick another target, then strike when I do.” He could tell the albino was lost to him. He felt no connection to it whatsoever. So be it. It had to have been the baroness. It explained the Gruul’s presence—the dilettante needed a pilot, of course. Of the fools he’d left to die in the Cauldron, only the baroness could possibly have learned the ancient dragon language. It would be typical of the overeducated Orzhov.
“Blue,” he said, “your next target is the albino.”
“You would have me attack one of my own?” the dragon said. “You would do this and still expect me to serve you?”
“You will do worse than this,” Hauc said.
“Someday I will be free of this magic, Zomaj Hauc,” the dragon said, “and on that day I will burn the flesh from your bones and crush them between my teeth.”
“I doubt it,” Hauc said. “Now kill the albino.”
“Yes,” the blue snarled, a sound that bordered on a furious roar, “Mas—”
A glittering transparent ball shot from above, slammed into the side of the dragon’s head, and ricocheted off to the west, ten flame-pods blasting at once as it tumbled, slowed, then leveled off.
“The dirty thieves,” Hauc said as he struggled to keep the dazed dragon in the air. “Thieves!” he repeated, screaming. “Pyraquin! Til yin destrovo!”
Hauc spat with fury as he shouted the words. He would miss flying in the Pyraquin. But now that he had Blue, he no longer needed it. Damn those fools for forcing him to trigger the self-destruct.
The dragon recovered quickly, only a bit bloodied, from the look of it, and resumed its course for the albino, which was finally coming around and heading back toward them. He paid the flight sphere no more mind. Perhaps he would have another one built someday but probably not. It would no doubt be stolen just like this one, like his albino.
Now the albino had to die too.
* * * * *
“What just happened?” Crix demanded.
“You’re asking me?” Kos said. His arm had become entangled in cords and wires, and it was agony to keep holding on. If he let go, though, it would be worse. Crix seemed incapable of flying in a straight line. “It looked like we smacked into that dragon and bounced off.”
“I know that part,” Crix said.
“Sort of a dangerous strategy, don’t you think?” Kos said. The cuts on his hands and wrists from the rack had reopened, and blood poured down both arms as he struggled to stay in one place as the flight sphere spun around. The spinning stopped abruptly when Crix slammed her fist down on a blue switch. No, it was still spinning, Kos corrected himself, but the cockpit wasn’t thanks to multiple hulls. Nice trick. Crix leaned back in the flight chair and looked up at Kos.
“It’s not the collision I’m worried about,” Crix said. “The sphere can take it, and without weapons it’s the only thing I can think of. You didn’t suggest anything.”
“I suggested—ow—that we not do this,” Kos pointed out.
“Then we’d be dead in the Cauldron,” Crix said, “but you’re still missing my point.”
“Which is?” Kos asked.
“That switch I hit just now?” the goblin said. “I think it’s the only control on that board that’s responding, and it’s mechanical. My grandfather showed me how they worked. It’s a clamp and release, swings the interior free of the�
��”
“Never mind,” Kos said. “If you have no controls, how are we staying in the air?”
“Momentum,” Crix said, “inertia, and residual magic fields. I think we’re going to return to the surface in under a minute at this rate.”
“Thanks for at least looking worried,” Kos said. “What are we going to do?”
“There’s nothing I can do,” Crix said. “That was a risk—we knew it was his sphere. He must have used a ley command when we buzzed him just now.”
“You sure it wasn’t your brilliant ‘slam them in the head with our flight sphere’ tactic that did it?” Kos said.
“The sphere’s pure, refined invizomizzium,” Crix said. “That didn’t hurt her in the slightest. The crash probably won’t hurt the Pyraquin either. I don’t know if I can say the same for us.”
Kos cast about the inside of the sphere for something, anything, he could try. He couldn’t accept that after these last few days he was going to end up a smear on the inside of a giant ball. He saw something that looked like a crank, something with a handle, anyway. It led to a section of something pulsing and covered in tubes, connected to the flame-pods, no doubt. The flame-pods that weren’t working.
“Crix,” Kos said, “is that tank or generator or whatever—is it supposed to look like that?”
Crix craned in her seat to see what Kos was looking at. The color drained from her reddish face. “Oh no,” she said. “He didn’t just switch off the controls.”
“What? What did he do?”
“That’s the pyromana tank. It’s feeding back in on itself, and it’s going to ignite. Now, see that hatch over our heads?” Crix said, pointing.
“Sure,” Kos said.
“Open it,” Crix said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“I know, but how are we going to—”
The explosion of the pyromana tank cut off Kos in midsentence. To his relief, it exploded outward, jolting the entire vessel into another tumbling spin. It failed to immolate the occupants, hardly did more than heat them up a bit. He couldn’t believe his luck and reached up turn the manual crank that would open what looked like an exit hatch. That was when he noticed the pain.
His arms would not move. He looked down at his chest and saw a bent mizzium cylinder protruding from the tank housing, still blazing hot from the explosion. It had entered his right arm just below the elbow, passed clean through his abdomen between his ribs, and, he gathered from the oddly numb feeling in the left half of his body, punctured his spine along the way before pinning his open hand to the inner surface of the cockpit.
“Help,” he croaked. Warm blood began to pour from Kos’s mouth, and he could not lift his jaw.
“Great Niv-Mizzet,” he heard Crix say, her voice receding as his consciousness started to fade.
“’Drop,” Kos managed. “Belt.”
“What?” Crix said, echoing dreamily in the old man’s brain.
* * * * *
“He’s watching us,” Golozar said, “circling.” He took them near the edge of the western Husk and guided the dragon northward. Her nose swung round to face the blue one.
“It looks like the others are out of it already,” Teysa said. “Dragon, do you have a name?”
“‘Dragon,’ so far,” the albino replied.
“How do you feel? Can you breathe?”
“I am managing,” the dragon said.
“Can you hit the magelord without hurting the blue dragon?” Teysa said.
“Why would she do that?” Golozar said.
“Why would I do that?” the dragon echoed. “He is another dragon. This is my range, is it not? If he will not flee, he will die. Unless you tell me otherwise.”
“I thought—You want to kill the other dragon?” Teysa said.
“Indeed,” the dragon said. “I am no sentimental male. Shall I do it?”
Teysa only considered the question for a moment. “After them,” she said through clenched teeth, then wrapped her arms around the Gruul’s waist as he spurred the dragon with his heels and jolted forward on a collision course with Hauc.
She let one hand slip from Golozar to turn halfway around and scan the sky for the flight sphere. Teysa caught a glimpse of a trail of black smoke and a flash of something that might have been the Pyraquin still above the horizon. Then it was gone as Golozar guided the dragon around an outcrop of exposed mizzium infrastructure, bent by time and volcanism.
When she whipped back around, the blue dragon was much closer than she’d expected. Hauc bellowed commands from his perch, but his dragon seemed to be slow to respond. The blue one turned to face them, and she saw why—a sliver of translucent invizomizzium from the hull of the sphere had driven into its skull behind the right eye, which had gone from golden to scarlet, filled with blood. That must have been what sent the sphere off course, and it was probably going to kill the blue dragon on its own, in time.
Unfortunately, she didn’t know how much time. It looked mortal, but who knew with a dragon? The blue dragon roared, its baritone bellow tinged with a scream of pain and a little confusion as it tried to comply with its rider and its instincts simultaneously. Finally, Hauc won out and the beast belched another blast of blazing indigo flame.
The jet missed them, but clipped the edge of the albino’s right wing and burned it away to ash. The dragon roared in pain and, without being ordered to do so by Teysa, fired a return shot that caught the blue dragon in the neck and might have hit Hauc as well. They went past too quickly to say for sure.
“Dragon,” Golozar said, “your injury. Can you stay in the air?”
“He burned my wing!” the albino roared. “My wing! I will stay in the air as long as that coward does. Count on that.”
Teysa was a little concerned at how quickly the dragon’s vocabulary was growing. It had been able to speak as soon as it was out of the egg, and was hatched with knowledge it couldn’t possibly have gained personally. There was strong, ancient magic here she couldn’t even begin to understand. She wondered how strong, really, a secondhand, repeated spell could be and what, if anything, she could do if she lost control of the creature while they were so high above the ground.
“Back around,” Teysa said to Golozar. “Dragon, kill the human first. Then the blue mount he rides.”
“We’ll see,” the albino growled.
* * * * *
“’Drop,” Kos managed. “Belt.”
“What?” Crix said. The blasted pipe had completely impaled the old human, and blood poured from Kos’s wounds and mouth. No one could survive this, not without medicine like—
“There’s a ’drop!” she said. “On your belt!”
Kos blinked, his head lolling to one side.
“Hold on,” Crix said. She undid her restraints and spun the seat around, then climbed on top of it. She reached around Kos’s waist and found a lone leather pouch against the small of his back, and her fingertips revealed the telltale shape of a teardrop. Careful not to fumble it in the spinning flight sphere, she pulled it out of the bag and gripped it tightly in her fist. She leaned up so Kos could see her face and said, “This won’t work unless you get free of this pipe. I’m going to pull you free, then administer this. I imagine it’s going to hurt. Are you ready? Never mind, don’t answer. Just get ready.”
Crix hooked her arm around him, still clutching the crystalline teardrop of concentrated magic, placed her feet on the chair at an angle she hoped wouldn’t do any more damage to Kos’s insides than necessary, and hauled back with all the leverage she could gather and strength she could muster.
Kos let out an agonized, gargling wail as he slipped wetly from the pipe and toppled over onto the flight chair. Crix maneuvered around behind him, snapped the tip of the teardrop off with her thumb, and jammed it into the gaping hole in Kos’s side.
The goblin risked a look down through the transparent floor at the rapidly approaching ground. Thirty seconds if they were lucky. She willed the medicine to heal the old h
uman quickly.
As if in response to her silent plea, the ’drop shrank in her palm, pouring into the wound and rapidly accelerating the healing process. In another few seconds it was gone, and Crix pulled her hand back.
The skin had sealed almost completely, but there was no telling how much damage remained. It was only one ’drop, but one ’drop could work wonders. They were powerful, but still Kos lay slumped over the chair, unmoving. The flow of blood from his mouth had stopped, at least, but was that because he was healed or because he was dead?
Crix checked on the ground. Fifteen seconds.
Kos coughed, spitting more blood. “Heart,” he said. Then he looked up and blinked. “Crix? Am I—”
“Abandoning ship,” Crix said. She hopped up to the armrest of the chair, gave the hatch seal a twirl, and slammed her palm against the transparent metal. With a hiss and a pop the hatch opened through three layers of hull, exposing open sky. She looked down at Kos, who pushed himself up from the chair. “Hold onto my waist,” she said, “facing me. Don’t want you to get burned.”
At that moment, another small piece of the Pyraquin exploded. Crix was thrown back against the console and slumped face-first into the pilot’s chair.
Kos hooked one hand over the rim of the hatch and pulled his aching body up, panic taking over as the ’sphere filled with greasy smoke. Yet he still had the presence of mind to spare a look over one shoulder at Crix, who had saved Kos instead of leaving him behind. The contrast was immediately and shamefully apparent.
His conscience did the rest. If Kos got out of this, he’d get out with the goblin.
“Crix, wake up,” Kos said. “Wake up!” He reached down without losing his grip on the lip of the hatch and slapped the goblin across the face, then pulled her up by the collar. “We have to leave.”
“Right,” Crix said, still quite dazed. “Leave.”
Crix hooked her arm under Kos’s and closed her eyes. Four seconds. Fire the pyromanic lifts. Two seconds. Firing.
A half-second before the Pyraquin’s final flight ended with an abrupt stop that created a brand-new crater in the middle of the Utvara Flats, goblin and wojek blasted from the center of the sphere and into open space on a column of sputtering smoke. A second after impact, the remaining flame-pods on Hauc’s vessel detonated in a series of accelerating chain reactions that carried the pair much farther than Crix’s feet could have.
