Chasing the Dragon

by Jason Halstead

  The lizardman kicked Alto hard enough to send the armored warrior skidding across the sandy floor. Alto finished in a roll and ended up in the bottom of a pile of three splisskin warriors. He thrashed and got his knees under him, and then rolled up so he could smash one of the lizardmen with his shield. Another he ran through with his sword but the third leapt onto his back and bit at his throat.

  Alto fell back on the clinging snakeman. His weight, combined with the armor, caused multiple cracks from the bones of the splisskin beneath him. Alto rose up to his knees again and saw the leader staring at him with undisguised hatred. He put one foot on the ground and pushed himself up to his feet, ignoring the blood that ran from the side of his neck.

  The battle was thinning as more and more of the splisskin ended up sprawling on the sandy floor. One of the wizards was clutching its entrails that Patrina’s axe had spilled. The other continued to weave their magic against Kar but the wizard blocked their spells aside almost before they had even thrown them.

  The splisskin leader saw Alto’s gaze and he turned his head to take in his surroundings. He snarled, realizing his followers were losing against a smaller force. He rushed towards Alto, surprising the warrior. Alto managed to duck back out of the way and block a swipe of the splisskin’s claws with his shield. He still felt himself blasted as the snakeman twisted away from him and used his suddenly massive tail to swat Alto and knock the man back into a wall.

  "Stay on your knees, weakling!" the splisskin spat at him.

  Alto picked himself up, his shield having fallen as he’d dropped to his knees after bouncing off the wall. He shook his head and looked up at the snarling lizardman. Alto drove his feet into the ground and raised his sword. He noticed his blade had begun to give off its distinctive green glow again. It could smell fear.

  "You’re afraid," Alto taunted him. "Finally found some people with spines who you can’t turn into slaves and you don’t know what to do about it."

  The splisskin’s hands clenched into fists and he stomped his foot hard enough to make the ground tremble beneath them. Behind him, Garrick and Patrina approached. Mordrim smashed the head of his last opponent into the wall and then turned to join them. Carson drew back his bow and sighted it on the leader.

  "You’ve lost," Alto said. "Now tell me what you’ve done with my sister."

  The splisskin bellowed out the awful hissing and hacking noise that was his laughter. "She’s fulfilling her destiny, you fool. She lives at my whim, to do my bidding."

  "Liar!" Alto shouted. "Kill him!"

  The splisskin drew in a breath and let it out, blasting the ground at his feet with flames that sent the superheated sand blasting in all directions away from him. When the companions could see and breathe again, he had disappeared.

  "Damn!" Alto cursed. "Where’d he go?"

  Patrina lowered her axe to the ground and leaned against it as her legs wobbled. Alto started towards her but she shook her head even as she clutched at a deep gouge that bled freely on her hip. "No, I’ll be okay."

  "Only one way out of here," Kar said as he stared at the only open doorway the splisskin could have escaped through without running over one of them first.

  Alto hesitated as he stared at Patrina. She nodded. "Go. I’d only slow you down. Just this once, though. Don’t be thinking you can run off and have your fun without me."

  "Never!" Alto promised.

  "We’ll need to be careful," Kar said. "He’s no mere splisskin."

  "I gathered that," Alto said. He reached into his pack and pulled out the potion Thork had given him. "Garrick, Mordrim, come with me. The rest of you stay here and keep Namitus and Karthor safe."

  The two unlikely friends glanced at each other and then reached to grab their own potions. They drank them down and shuddered before looking to Alto. He picked up his shield and tapped the front of it, adding its light to the light the lamps in the walls already provided.

  "Hoping for a bit of Leander’s light to guide your way?" Kar asked.

  "I’ll take whatever help I can get," Alto said before he started down the hallway. After a few steps, he broke into a jog and then started a full-out run. Garrick and Mordrim followed him down the hallway.

  "Well then," Kar said as the sounds of their heavy feet faded. "Back to the jail. We’ve lost a door but it’s better than waiting out in the open."

  Carson moved to the princess and slipped his shoulder under Patrina’s to help her limp after the retreating wizard.

  Chapter 32

  The three warriors ran past several doors and a few intersecting passages. Alto felt pulled ahead, as though he was being guided. He'd lost count of the doors and hallways that flashed past when he became fixed upon a larger corridor ahead of him. The hallway was twice as wide and half again as tall as the one he was in. He slowed as he approached it and turned without thinking to the left. Alto jerked his shield up just as flames raced down the passage and engulfed him.

  Over the roar of the fire, Alto heard his name being called. The flames died away and Alto raised his head as he lowered his shield. Smoke and vapors drifted up from the floor and from around him but he was unharmed. The splisskin stood in the middle of the hallway and stared at Alto.

  "You're alive!" Garrick blurted out from the passage he'd just left.

  Alto ignored the barbarian and charged the snakeman. He brought his sword across as he closed, putting every last bit of his strength behind the blow. The scales on the splisskin's arm grew larger as he raised it and knocked Alto's strike aside. The lizardman's other arm thrust out and slammed into Alto's shield with enough power to drive it back into Alto's chest and knock him back to the ground.

  The splisskin snarled at him, his mouth and nose elongating to protrude from his face as he looked down at Alto. He pulled the arm back that had blocked Alto's sword and was about to strike again when a hammer sailed over Alto and slammed into the snakeman's chest.

  "Got a grudge I been meaning to settle for forty years," Mordrim shouted as he and Garrick ran down the hall after Alto. "This looks to be the year I set things a-right!"

  The splisskin hissed at them and grew larger in the tunnel until he couldn't raise his hands over his head without hitting the ceiling. His hands and feet grew beyond proportion, dark claws emerging from his fingers and toes.

  The blue flames that raced up and down Garrick's sword didn't reach towards the heavens anymore. They leaned towards the splisskin, searching for him as though they longed to touch him. Garrick thrust his great sword out, anxious to help the flames fulfill their destiny.

  The snakeman swatted Garrick's blade aside. Flames wrapped around his forearm and tried to race up his arm but he glared at them and they winked out of existence as though they'd never been. Garrick's eyes widened in shock but he still managed to leap back from the counterattack the leader of the snakemen launched at him.

  Alto climbed to his feet and kicked Mordrim's hammer back towards the dwarf. He raised his shield and rushed forward, veering around Garrick and driving his shield into the side and hip of the enlarged splisskin. He bounced off, staggering to keep his balance. He launched a lazy swing as he stumbled away, glancing off the lower back of his opponent without any apparent damage.

  Mordrim swung his hammer in a two-handed blow that should have crushed the splisskin's thigh. Instead, it bounced back and left the dwarf reeling from the recoil. The splisskin took a step and turned to glare at the dwarf, and then raised his hand to strike him down.

  Garrick returned to the fray with a strike designed to cleave the splisskin's raised hand from his arm. He knocked the massive clawed fist down but failed to dismember him. He thought his strike useless until he saw the flaming blue spots across the floor from where the splisskin's blood had spattered.

  "He bleeds!" Garrick cried out triumphantly.

  "Then he can die!" Alto growled as he jammed his sword forward.

  The splisskin swung his uninjured arm around to knock Alto's strike aside but the wa
rrior had already reversed his feint and then spun around in a complete circle to add momentum to his blow. It struck his foe in the back of the thigh and Alto felt his blade bite home before he yanked it free.

  The snakeman hissed in fury, his elongated mouth becoming more pronounced.

  Mordrim raised his hammer for another strike but received a slap from the man's tail that knocked him into the wall. He crumpled to the floor and was slow in picking himself up.

  The splisskin kept turning and swiped at Garrick, only to check his strike when both combatants looked on in shock to see that Garrick's sword, which had been thrusting towards him at the same time, was impaling the splisskin's palm. Blue flames poured up the sword and engulfed the stricken hand before both warriors yanked themselves free of the other.

  Garrick's eyes narrowed as he prepared to drive his sword forward again. The splisskin clenched his wounded hand into a fist, putting out the flames. Before Garrick could strike, he spat out a stream of fire from his mouth, knocking the barbarian back from the force and sending him rolling across the floor of the hallway as he was engulfed in them.

  Alto's sword crunched into the lower back of the splisskin again, stopping the flames and earning a grunt from the splisskin as his scales cracked. He turned around, spinning so quickly that Alto couldn't leap over the tail as he'd planned. The warrior crashed to the ground and tried to rise up, but a foot in his side sent him across the hallway to slam into the hall. He shook the stars from his head and tried to get his feet under him in spite of feeling as though he'd left his lungs and stomach behind.

  "I'm not done with you!" Mordrim cried out.

  Alto looked up and saw the splisskin had taken a step towards him but Mordrim had wrapped an arm around the man's tail and held on tightly to it. The splisskin turned to regard him with its cold reptilian eyes when Mordrim's hammer flew the short distance through the air and cracked against his head.

  The splisskin stumbled back a step and shook his head. The shake continued down his entire body, even to his tail. Mordrim was thrown free from the sinuous appendage but he kept his feet. He pulled a knife from his belt and bared his teeth.

  Garrick stepped up beside the dwarf, looking none the worse for wear. The rug and other combustible objects in the hall behind the barbarian still burned, but Thork's potion had spared him the agony of a fiery death.

  The splisskin backed up a step away from them and then turned. As he turned, his torso lengthened and his arms and legs grew thicker and longer. His neck stretched out while his face took the full shape of a dragon's head. The splisskin's shoulder blades bulged and began to emerge as lumps on his back. His front feet hit the ground and he started to hurry down the hallway.

  Alto stabbed his sword down, his grip reversed on its hilt. He speared into the miniature dragon's thigh and parted not only scale and flesh but he felt the tip of his blade grate against bone. The creature threw itself to the other side of the hallway, ripping free of Alto's sword. Alto tried to follow but the tail struck again and hammered him back into the wall and made his ears ring from the impact.

  Mordrim and Garrick gave chase, though the dwarf had to stoop to pick up his hammer as he ran past. The lumps on the small dragon's back grew longer and thicker and turned into miniature wings. With each passing step, they grew fuller until it was obvious that if the dragon tried to extend them, they would be confined by the passage they were in.

  "There's an opening ahead," Garrick warned.

  "Damned thing's too fast, even lamed as he is!" Mordrim panted.

  Alto ran along behind them, though he careened twice off the walls of the passage as he tried to sort himself out. His armor dug into his side and chest from where the splisskin-turned-dragon's strikes had dented the resilient metal. "Stop him!" Alto called ahead to them. "If he gains the air, we're done for."

  Garrick reached down for the hand axe at his hip. He pulled it free of its sheath and threw the magical weapon. The weapon tumbled end over end until the edge bit into the dragon's hindquarter and earned a roar from the still growing beast.

  The dragon swayed to the side and crashed into the wall, breaking through the stone into another room. After stumbling a step, it picked itself up and pulled ahead, though the creature's wings and back were scraping the ceiling of the passage now and it was having a harder time moving ahead. Garrick and Mordrim caught up to it but the beast's tail struck out and sent Garrick crashing through the rubble into the side room. Mordrim ducked under the tail and leaped up so he could drive his hammer into the dragon's rump.

  His hammer struck the barbarian's axe by accident and drove it in deeper. The dragon let loose a howl and another blast of flames, though this one cooked the few remaining feet of passage ahead of him. The beast's right leg collapsed, forcing the creature to drag its hindquarters ahead of it. Garrick’s axe fell free, dislodged by the impact.

  Garrick emerged from the rubble as Alto staggered past him. The warrior clenched his teeth to fight past the stabbing pain in his ribs. Garrick grunted and caught up to him, and then pushed ahead. They watched the dragon spread its wings as soon as they were free of the passage and they looked to be growing faster as they beat through the air.

  Garrick stabbed and hacked at the hindquarters of the dragon, breaking scales and hewing at the flesh beneath. Mordrim's hammer's cracked against the dragon's hide four times before it succeeded in finally pulling its injured posterior free.

  The dragon twisted about on the balcony, snapping at the air and sweeping across the three of them with a final blast of flames from its maw. When the flames died down, Alto was gasping for breath and feeling as though he'd stuck his face in a campfire. His armor was smoking and burning him wherever it touched his flesh. He blinked his eyes and wondered if his eyes had been burned until he realized the bright spot in his vision was the sun in the sky. They'd emerged high on the side of one of the Havara Mountains

  Garrick sprang forward and hacked at the right forelimb of the dragon. His sword bounced back but blue flames leapt up the creature's shoulder. The claw lifted up and out and struck Garrick, one talon ripping into his thigh and cutting deeply all the way to just above his hip. The barbarian left a trail of blood across the stone floor as he fell back and rolled away.

  Alto rushed forward, ignoring the burns and the pain of broken ribs. He let his shield fall to the ground and gripped his sword with both hands. The blisters on his fingers popped against his gauntlets but all he felt was the rush of the moment. Alto's boots slipped across the stone that was slick with Garrick's blood. He fell forward even as he'd already begun the downward plunge of his sword at the dragon's side.

  Alto slammed into the dragon as it jerked away from him. He finished falling forward and lost his grip on his sword. The dragon beat its wings and lifted off the ledge of rock. The blue flames from Garrick's sword climbed up the creature's leg and spread from its shoulder, some burning into the hole in its side Alto's sword had made while others raced up the dragon's wing and enveloped it.

  The dragon roared as it began to gain altitude. The triumphant bellow died away as it shifted to the right in mid-air and then began to turn in a spiral. In seconds, it circled down and began to plummet to the ground hundreds of feet below.

  The mountain beneath them trembled as the dragon crashed to the ground far below. Alto looked up and saw his sword laying a few feet from him on the rocks. He crawled forward and wrapped his burned hand around it, and then gasped as a feeling of strength surged through him and pushed the pain back to where it was bearable.

  "Damn thing's still growing," Mordrim muttered from where he peered over the edge of the balcony. The mountain rumbled again beneath them, long and low this time. "That's not good," Mordrim said.

  The dwarf hurried over to Alto and helped him rise to his feet. "You look a sight, lad. Don't worry, the hair will grow back."

  "My hair?" Alto said. He started to reach up and winced as he felt his ribs grate against each other.

  "We
killed a dragon!" Garrick proclaimed. He'd managed to pull himself so he sat with his back against a wall in a pool of his own blood. He clutched at the gash on his leg and looked pale, but even his white cheeks couldn't mute the strength of his grin.

  "Dragon might have killed you, too," Mordrim told him.

  Garrick shrugged. "It died first. My name will be sung around fires. I might even earn a star in the northern sky."

  "That's your retirement plan?" the dwarf asked. He shook his head. "You're daft for sure. Come on, ugly, I can't let you up and die if that's all you've got to leave behind."

  Alto peered over the edge and felt his jaw fall open in awe. The dragon had bounced and rolled off the steep mountainside and then landed, at last, amid a village. What remained of that village was a few buildings at the outskirts. In the midst of it, there was nothing but a hole in the ground. Out of it the reflections of a thousand lights shown, each the reflection of the dragon that was burning in the midst of the sacred underground chamber they'd passed through.

  As Alto watched, the rocks around the edge crumbled and fell in. The buildings went next, falling in a few stones at a time at first, until the ground beneath them gave way and they crashed in on top of it. After several moments, the rumbling stopped and the great chamber was filled with stone. The dragon was buried beneath thousands of tons of rock.

  Chapter 33

  "Are we safe?" Alto asked after the rumbling finally stopped.

  "Safe?" Mordrim repeated. He chuckled and glanced up at the pale face of the barbarian whose leg he was bandaging. "Aye, as long as no more snakes try to kill us, no dragons roast us for dinner, the Shazamir army doesn’t show up, and we stay out of the rain and any strong breezes."

  Alto smirked and reached around to his side to unbuckle his cuirass. His arm was hung up by the damage done to his pauldron, prompting him to remove that first instead. A few minutes later, he stood bereft of most of his armor. His sword was sheathed and he very carefully bent over to pick up his magical shield. He looked at the carved image of the crown over a mountain on the face of it and smiled. Something had survived the dragon unscathed.