I wonder if she saw any human prints along the trail? Jenka voiced.
“She only saw sign of a single colossal, but we only have four,” Rikky said, his voice betraying the depth of his worry. “We need five dragons with five riders, don’t we?”
“The poem is made up.” Clover eased into their immediate proximity lacing and fastening her shimmering girdle, over and around the mail that dangled from her pullover shoulder armor. She was looking at Rikky as if he were dense, but the idea of not having their full strength of numbers was a concern for Jenka as well.
“Made up?” Linux let loose a short, sarcastic snort.
“I thought it was written around the Hazeltine’s prophecy,” Rikky said.
“It was intended to reach your ears and help you be prepared.”
“Prepared for the Confliction, Rikky,” Jenka said. “We don’t need five dragons for a stranded guild of sorcerers and some creatures they created.”
“Never underestimate a wizard,” Clover said, and then before anyone could say anything else, she added, “Any wizard. Ever.” After a brief silence, she stepped over and gave Rikky a pat on the shoulder. “Crimzon and I count as at least two Dragoneers so you’ve nothing to worry about.”
Jenka eyed Clover and the huge fire drake laying across the field behind her. They were no doubt bigger and stronger than Marcherion and Blaze. They were older and far wiser, too. But the truth was, they were missing more than March and Blaze, for Aikira was badly injured and Zahrellion and Crystal were gone, too.
“I suppose it is time to make a plan.” Linux moved nearer to Jenka. Rikky and Clover followed the druid’s lead and gathered in as well.
Jenka cast forth his map spell and highlighted exactly where they were, then Rikky used his dragon’s senses to show them all where she’d seen the tracks.
It was at that very moment, when they were all staring at a slightly illuminated rendition of the Mainland topography and concentrating on trying to figure where a colossal could hide, that both of the remaining malformed beasts popped right into their proximity from seemingly nowhere.
With the overwhelming advantage of surprise, the wizards had brought the fight right to them. And none of them, save for Jenka, had a chance to get themselves clear of that first barrage of deadly arcanery.
Part IV
“Never Underestimate a Wizard. Any Wizard. Ever.” - Clover
Chapter Twenty-One
Rikky thought it was his end, but Clover managed to cast some sort of shielding that saved him. As soon as he could think, he started calling Zahrellion through the ethereal. He channeled his call through his dragon tear and used every ounce of his strength of will to let his voice carry to her.
I love you, he said. This might be our end.
Rise now Rikky, Silva’s calming voice came to him. Levitate and do it quickly.
Rikky followed his dragon’s instruction, almost letting her control his body through their bond-link. His whole life had just flashed before his eyes and he was amazed he wasn’t dead.
When his momentum subsided, and he started to slowly fall back toward the ravaged earth below, Silva was suddenly there, his legs sliding around her back and her strength and power carrying him forward through the sky.
The shielding wall Clover threw up and saved Rikky and Linux from the brunt of the initial spell thrown by the monster riding magi. There was a heartbeat of silence before the next mass of force trying to crush them to a pulp was pressing down on them. In that brief instance, Linux charged out of her shielding and into the roiling dust and matter beyond. Rikky, though, covered his ears and looked as if he was praying.
Clover waited until the second blast subsided, and then half-charged, half-willed herself across the unprotected high grass to mount her dragon. These wizards couldn’t know the power of a dragon tear, at least not until Rikky used two of them to heal Aikira in their hideout. She wondered why they were not afraid of them. Now that the dragons were taking to the sky, they would have total advantage. She felt as if this attack were nothing more than a distraction and wondered if the crazy looking wizard who pulled all the strings was even among them.
She saw Rikky levitate straight up out of the smoldering divo,t and then his dragon went gliding slowly by right under him. The second he dropped into the saddle, she started undulating higher in a spiraling climb.
Just as Clover was situated and Crimzon began his leap, one of the colossals came charging right at them. It had been nearly impossible to see as it was the same color as all the dust swirling around them. Crimzon launched himself, but wasn’t fast enough to avoid being gored by one of it horns.
Clover was nearly thrown from her saddle when her wyrm’s momentum jerked taut, but she held on. The spell she was throwing went wide though, missing her mark and allowing one of the wizards to hit her with a hot fist of energy that would have scorched her raw were she not as fire-blooded and heat-craving as the dragon she rode.
It did singe her strawberry hair, which made her seethe. She allowed Crimzon to yank free of the beast’s horn and snap at it. His huge jaws forced his fangs in deep and he was just heavy and strong enough to hold his bulk in place while slinging the creature over on its side. Golden swept by and melted the creature’s rider and a good portion of its skin with her liquid molten spew. And then Linux sent down a spell that caused a huge blue colored inferno to erupt around its head. The hissing, popping sound of the massive druid fire was succulent to Clover and her wyrm, and Crimzon limped over to it, climbed right into the middle of the scorching heat, and let out a dominant roar.
Crimzon scratched one long terrible furrow down the floundering creatures side, then another. When it started to roll to its feet, he bit down and twisted its neck until it crunched.
Jenka, Clover called out across the ethereal, sense where the crazy bastard is. He isn’t here. I’d wager this is just a distraction.
Clover saw that Golden was trying to drench the other colossal now, but she didn’t see Jenka or Jade anywhere. She was suddenly searching the pummeled earth where the initial strike happened. Not seeing any sign of them was better than the other option.
North and west, Jenka finally said. I am going to—
Just then the earth quaked. It was enough of a shift that it threw the dragons out of their senses for a moment, but they righted themselves when it was over.
Now, though, there was a two hundred foot tall version of the strange wizard standing there among the flying wyrms, and he was grinning triumphantly.
“We have achieved our goal here, brothers,” he said in a booming voice. “The battle is over.”
“How so?” Rikky Camille yelled at the apparition from Silva’s back. His dragon was hovering at head height to the wizard’s casting, and he was still looking down around him at the few wizards on foot and the other colossal.
“To put it simply, I have poisoned your water supply and only I have the inoculation to survive it.”
He’s bluffing, Linux warned through the ethereal.
No he’s not, Clover knew. She always knew when someone was bluffing, and this wizard was as sure of himself as any man ever had been. Then she saw a dragon tear dangling at his neck. One that appeared ten times as large as hers because of the illusion’s current proportions.
“Thatsss is mine,” Crimzon hissed aloud.
You are sure? She asked.
Yesssss.
And Clover knew it to be true, for she’d heard rumors of it her whole life. How this numbskull had gotten a hold of the little tear Crimzon had cried at his mam’s death was a mystery, but he had it, and that was almost enough to make her blood run cold.
Jenka found the strange ceramic jars the wizard had dumped into the Strom River and estimated the time it had been since they were poured in. Lingering particles of used energy left as the wizard’s protective spells fed themselves gave away his movements. Jenka’s alien mind calculated the speed of the flow and the width of the river and even scanned the f
orward terrain from Jade’s back as they flew south trying to get ahead of the tainted water.
By flying at hyper speed, it wasn’t that hard, but the only place narrow enough to block the flow was a few miles north of Demon Lake’s headwaters. Jenka understood shapeshifting now and had tried it some on his own. It was the nature of the alien’s anatomy, and not nearly as easy for one made of bone and muscle to achieve but Jenka could do it. Especially now that if he didn’t the Strom would carry its tainted fluid right into the lake the supplied most of the Mainland Frontier its water.
Jenka, not knowing if he would be able to undo what he was about to do to himself, called out across the ethereal to Zahrellion.
Make sure they know I loved them with all my heart, Aas I once loved you.
Then to the others, he told them briefly what he was doing, and did it before the chance was beyond him.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“What are you after?” Clover screamed at the enlarged wizard, doing her best to take in what Jenka was voicing through the ethereal at them all.
“Yeah, what do you want?” Rikky added.
“For each chest of gold you deliver to the ship I have taken over, I will give you enough of the inoculation to keep the people on this side of the world free of the claiming disease for a full year. For one hundred chests full of gold, you can have the cure.”
“Where in the fargin hells are we going to get that much gold, man?” Rikky asked in a huff. “There isn’t that much gold to be had.” He looked at Clover, then at Linux who still looked as if he were ready to attack the remaining ill-formed colossal from Golden’s back.
The wizard laughed, and Clover wanted to smack the younger Dragoneer. He should have never been considering making a bargain with this loon.
“I do not care.” The wizard chuckled. “With the skills you Dragoneers possess, I imagine you can just go take it from wherever you like. There are kings in other lands with enough gold to fill the sea.”
“You are insane—” Clover started, but his voice easily drowned hers out.
“You have approximately ten days before your people start feeling the effects. Soon after, the claiming will spread like a wildfire across your populace.” He moved his hands about as he cast another spell and, with a shimmering of fading particles, he began to sparkle away. “There will come a point when neither the inoculation, or the cure, will save them. That would be a pity.”
And then the wizard was gone. His men, and the remaining colossal, started gathering their fallen and moving away as if there was no threat left to them at all.
The three dragons carried their riders to where Jenka had told them, but he didn’t respond when they hailed him through the ethereal or with their voices. When Linux saw it, he pointed, and then they all gasped. Not one of them could speak until after they dismounted.
“What has he done to himself?” Rikky asked Linux.
“He’s changed his shape and blocked the flow of the river,” Linux answered. “But he won’t be able to keep it from overflowing if we don’t divert the water.”
“How long do you think we have?” Clover asked the druid. “Did he get the contamination?”
“Maybe three days if it doesn’t rain in the north.” Linux shrugged. “Knowing Jenka, he wouldn’t have damned the whole Strom if he wasn’t sure.”
“Crimzon has an idea but it will take me a day or two at best to pull it off,” Clover told them. “I’ll not waste more time here. You two stay and fortify this.” She gestured, indicating the wide green-tinted, scale-covered damn Jenka had turned he and Jade into.
“Do not let it fail.”
It was a nest of mudged dragons they found, and King Richard was a bit disgusted at having gotten his hopes up so high. Putting a controlling collar on something that was mad to begin with would do little good in the end. Sooner or later, the crazed inbred wyrm would turn on its rider or rebel against the collar’s persuasion.
Nevertheless, he nodded and grinned and encouraged King Chad to pick his wyrm so they could lure it out of the cavern and net it down.
“That darker one.” The excited man pointed from their perch in the crags above the nest. “He’s the biggest.”
And the most mudged, Richard thought. These were not dragons, these were feral things that resembled them. They did have red speckles running down their spinal plates, and one even had some green to its undersheen, but they were mostly so dark in color as to appear black
There were four of them down in the bottom of the rocky crag, and they were fighting over a haunch of elk that had been under one of them while they slept. These creatures were acting solely on instinct, a wild, aggressive instinct to dominate the other and take what they wanted. Pure blooded dragons would have reasoned out an argument over the morsel, or just went and got their own. It was an elk and they were dragons after all. A smart wyrm wouldn’t fight in a rocky crevice over a single bite of old food. It just wouldn’t happen.
“You, Garth, and Victir, get some meat on the end of those ropes,” King Chad ordered. “Throw two portions in and dangle two more half way on the lines. Over there, on that flat, is where we will set out his dinner.”
“What are you doing?” Richard asked the man. “Where are you going to get meat?”
“I won’t need the litter, or the men to tote it home, Richard.” The king of Vikaria clasped him on the shoulder like a father might his son. “They swore to serve their kingdom and their king with their very lives, and right now they would best serve me as bait.”
Garth and Victir, two of the king’s personal guards casually walked over and pushed their sword tips through the throats and hearts of the six men who had carried the king on their shoulders for six straight days. One of them tried to flee but an archer shafted him three paces into his getaway.
The man was still alive and conscious when they tossed him into the dragon pit. Richard almost ran to the perch to watch him be devoured. To his disappointment, the fall knocked the man senseless, but he still screamed and flailed when they started ripping him apart. Only the king’s hand on his shoulder could get him to move back when the big black mudged wyrm started flapping and climbing up the rocky side, chasing after the human leg Garth was dangling for it.
“Come, let’s get into position.” King Chad grinned. “I developed a plan of my own Richard. Watch.”
Garth and Victir were both clearly nervous, but as Garth drug the litter-man’s leg up and over the ledge, he kept sipping from a flask of something far stronger than normal liquor. After every sip, he would growl and snarl at the others as if he’d gone mad. Then the hungry black wyrm poked its head over. Richard decided it wasn’t all that big, after all. Larger than his brother’s young wyrm, but no larger than Rikky Camille’s speedy silver, Richard found he wasn’t even afraid of it.
This wasn’t the plan they had agreed upon, and the way the manic looking king kept eyeing him from the side had him wondering if he shouldn’t be afraid of him. The king’s plan was working. It was clear he had some men watching this pit and probably throwing these inbred things meat doused with potion. Now the mudged wyrm was moving toward the two bodies Victir had sliced open in the clearing. They had been drenched in thick gravy like liquid that was most likely about to put the mudge in more of a stupor that it was already in.
To everyones surprise though, the tide of the scene changed when two of the other feral wyrms clambered over the edge. One of them, the one closest to the king, sprouted arrow shafts as if it was displaying them. It roared and spewed at three men with a small streak of thin fire breath. None of them even died from the blast, but they were all burned and useless
Richard became wary then, and decided that the color of the splotches along these wyrm’s backs shouldn’t be ignored. He also decided that the smartest of these four was the one who didn’t come up.
He gave King Chad a sincere nod and a grin and darted right under the wyrm that was engaging the bulk of the men. A swordsman screamed an
d bowstrings thrummed. The clash of steel on scale rang out. A horse whinnied its last as the shafted dragon pulled it over the side and dropped it down. Richard snatched his dragon collar out of the pile of gear and quickly fastened his part of the device around his neck. The Nightshade and he had commanded legions of these bat-brained mudged.
King Chad was about to have his wyrm, but Richard was about to seize the moment for himself. Settling here would be the most foolish of things he could ever do.
“What in the Hells?” King Chad called as his wyrm started tearing into its offered feast.
“Collar your prize!” Richard yelled back. Then over the edge, and down into the pit, he went.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The dragon watching him slide down the rope had a green sheen to it, but it wasn’t the dragon Richard wanted to collar. He’d seen a cave that extended from the pit and knew in his heart there were more formidable dracus in this hole, maybe even a high dracus. The simple fact that he could cast spells and use the knowledge he’d gained from his years of association with first Royal, then the Nightshade and Gravelbone, took away almost all his fear. Even now, as he dropped the last few feet to the cavern floor, he was holding the wyrm still with his stare.
Richard adjusted the dragon collar around his shoulder and continued to stare at the transfixed mudge as he moved into the shadowy darkness of the cave.
Rather than create light, he cast a spell that allowed him to see better in the darkness. Agitating a nest of mudged would get him eaten faster than he could blink. But by moving cautiously, and not acting like prey, he knew he could find a worthier wyrm than King Chad’s.
He with the biggest dragon wins, Richard sent his random thought through the ethereal as if his long dead dragon could answer him. Isn’t that right, Royal?
A protective spell, and a spell cast to make him harder for the dragons to see came next, and then he was beyond the entry pit and easing deeper into the mountain.
Rise of the Dragon King (Book two of the Royalty Trilogy): 2017 Modernized Format (Dragoneers Saga 5) Page 9
