“Your Honor. Economy of force is the principle of effective application of combat power. Every part of a military force has purpose—primary or secondary. The commander gathers mass at decisive points on the battlefield, and then allocates any additional resources.”
“Excellent. We’ve established you can read a textbook. Now can you tell me, little Henry, what are the decisive points on the battlefield with our enemies?”
Mind racing, Hank recalled talk he had overheard between his parents on dragons and arachnids. “To date, decisive points have been those habitats where our enemies live and breed freely. Beaststalkers seek to deprive enemies of those habitats, eliminating their capacity to gather in numbers. Under normal circumstances, it is better to deal with an opposing force that is scattered and rudderless than one consolidated and dug in.”
“Why, little Henry, I do believe you’ve just won your limb back. How terrific for everyone that it wasn’t already detached! Let’s move on. Tell me the difference between reconnaissance and espionage.”
“Reconnaissance is the active gathering of intelligence about an enemy. It differs from espionage in that it generally involves uniformed troops moving ahead of a main force. Espionage involves more covert tactics, undertaken over a longer period of time.”
“Have you been trained in aspects of either?”
“Both, Your Honor.”
“Well, then.” The mayor’s voice was positively ebullient. “I think I have good news for you and your mother after all! I have a mission that requires doing. If your mother is amenable”—there was barely a pause as she acquired this silent assent—“you could do it. You would be helping me achieve . . . an economy of force. In return, you get an opportunity to learn patience.”
“I’m at your disposal.”
“You will be alone. In great danger. For a long time.”
Something deep inside Hank Blacktooth stirred, and he dared to look up at the mayor again. “All I want,” he told her, “is the opportunity to show you what I can do.”
“Then you will get it, little Henry. Have you heard of a town named Eveningstar?”
Hank watched his mother as they left the cemetery. There was a twinkle in her eye.
“Do you really think I can do this, Mom?”
“I think you can do anything, Hank Blacktooth. Certainly, you can do anything that spoiled brat Elizabeth Georges could do. Why the mayor chose her ten years ago, or Wendy Williamson last year, over you . . . well, it makes absolutely no sense at all. I kept trying to tell your father that. He never believed me. He never believed in you.” She grabbed her son by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. Finally, in a rare display, her voice betrayed some emotion. The wounded angel inside shone through. That was when Hank loved her the most.
(“It’s just a scratch! You’ve given me plenty like it over the years.”)
(“Is THAT your excuse for trying to hurt me?”)
“You’ll show her, Hank. You’ll show all of us.”
His mother’s unswerving conviction acted like a drug in Hank’s system; he felt her faith fill his veins and straighten his spine.
Still, he had to admit the task before him seemed daunting. No beaststalker had ever entered Eveningstar, the last and most heavily fortified stronghold for dragonkind. The mayor had given him no suggestions as to how to approach this assignment—only basic reconnaissance that suggested no one could get closer than three miles from the town’s border without getting noticed. Land, river, air—all routes were guarded.
“So, Hank.” His mother caressed his neck. “Any idea how you want to begin?”
Eveningstar is paranoid and well guarded, he told himself. No one will get in who is not a dragon, or with someone who is. I’m not a dragon, and I don’t know anyone else who is, because we’ve killed them all. Or crippled them.
The answer came to him in a brilliant rush. “Mom, I want to go to Winoka Hospital.”
Less than a week later, on a brilliant summer day, a young newolf patrolling woodlands a few miles north of Pinegrove caught a new scent. She followed it, howling a call for assistance.
She soon tasted blood on the air, and fatigue. Two more newolves were soon racing parallel. They joined together in a chord of B minor: Proceed with caution. A dozen more newolves joined them. She knew another dozen would be headed back to Eveningstar, along with any number of snakes, dragonflies, and hornets. Since it was a crescent moon, a trio of dashers would soon be out. More dragons would backfill the patrol routes the newolves had abandoned, in case this was a diversion. The inhabitants of Eveningstar took no chances.
It wasn’t long before the source of the scent was found. He was off the road, but clearly wasn’t trying to hide. In fact, the young man seemed dead. He was lying on his stomach, blood seeping from a wound high on his back and several puncture wounds on his arm. Torn flesh on his face made it impossible to tell which were surface cuts and which were more substantial.
He held a blood-encrusted sword, though not as one who knew how to wield it. His knuckles were fiercely white in their grip around the blade. There was no sheath, and the newolf deduced quickly that it was the boy’s own blood on the blade, and no one else’s.
She tried licking the boy’s face to wake him up. He stirred but did not open his eyes. That inspired a chord of E major from her and the others around her: Still alive.
The scent of dashers relaxed her. They would come to take this strange boy, give him aid, and solve this puzzle. Before the dragons landed, she was already heading back to her patrol route, hoping to recapture the scent of wildflowers and squirrels.
So the boy who called himself Samuel Blackwing went to Eveningstar. He recovered in the hospital from his wounds, caused by the sword he carried and similar blades like it. He soon told his caretakers the heart-wrenching story of his arrival.
He had been on his way to Eveningstar with his parents, having undertaken his first morph the day before. It was a proud occasion for his family, and they wanted to celebrate by going to Eveningstar. Now that Samuel was old enough to change, maybe they would scout out properties and consider moving here.
Their plans had come to a crashing halt—literally—during the flight south. They had unknowingly ventured too close to Winoka, and a young beaststalker performing his rite of passage shot his mother down from the sky. He and his father followed the body down, and there they found the bowman responsible, along with four other young beaststalkers. Each was hacking away at Samuel’s mother’s body like vultures. A fight ensued, and Samuel’s father killed three of them before an arrow through his throat ended him.
Samuel, unfamiliar with dragon skills beyond flying, could barely generate enough flame to keep the young murderers away. He took flight, hoping to make it to Eveningstar for help. The last two youths pursued him, driving all-terrain vehicles over rolling farmland. One of them would stop and fire a BB gun periodically. Samuel could not fly fast, and every shot that grazed his wings brought him lower. Soon he was flopping along the ground.
They caught up to him and knocked him down with their vehicles. One of them drove a sword into his back. The pain was terrifying, and he felt himself changing. With his last remnants of dragon strength, he reached back, yanked the blade out, and swung it hilt out with all his might. He drew blood and knocked his aggressor unconscious. The sight of this half dragon, half human with deep wounds, miraculously still moving and swinging his friend’s sword, finally unnerved the last youth. He pulled his friend onto his ATV and drove away. From there, Samuel walked until he collapsed, holding the sword that had ruined his life.
By the time Samuel told his hosts this tragic story, their scouts had already reported evidence to support it. The second ATV was sitting less than a mile from where they had found this boy. There were two sets of tracks coming south and only one north (toward Winoka), and someone else’s blood was at the site where he claimed to have smashed his enemy’s jaw. The pieces fit, the boy was obviously a heroic innocent . . .
and with no other family to turn to, there was nothing left for the elders of Eveningstar to do but adopt him.
Hank sipped his soup and scribbled notes in his journal. He had learned a lot today.
It had been several months since he first arrived in Eveningstar. The town’s elders had arranged for him to stay with an aging creeper who lived alone in a substantial house. There was an apartment above the garage with a bed, bath, and small stove. At Eveningstar High, Samuel Blackwing was nearly as famous as Hank Blacktooth had been at Winoka High.
Despicable things crept through the halls of that school. On crescent moon, studies inexplicably continued. Virtually every junior and senior of the school, along with some sophomores and the entire faculty, crawled about on their bellies and talked and laughed and studied and shot yearbook photos and otherwise pretended they were not loathsome creatures. Among them was a smattering of actual humans who had come to tolerate, possibly admire, the town’s infestation. Hank tried to befriend them, but he found these sheep less bearable than the monsters, and they taught him nothing.
At least as long as he kept the company of dragons, he could do the reconnaissance he was here to do. Playing the role of a curious, sad, hobbled soul, he easily won the sympathy of young dragons all too eager to demonstrate the skills they were learning and show him around town. From them, he learned the basics of the town’s defenses.
Today, he was recording what he had learned about newolves, the mysterious canines that had found him on the outskirts of Eveningstar. A senior girl he might have found attractive, had he not known what a revolting beast she was inside, had taken him into the woods to spend some time with a pack her family knew.
“You can communicate with them,” she told him on the walk there, rolling her hair over a finger and eyeing his torso. “They use a soulful, musical language.”
Communicate with them? Hank couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less. Despite the fact he had initially fooled these wild dogs, they made him nervous. They were stout, had huge teeth, and sniffed him a lot. Nevertheless, he kept focus, learned all he could, declined the girl’s advances during the walk home, and came straight upstairs to record everything:. . . they sing in chords, to communicate basic needs and observations . . .
. . . there is a culture among dragons of bringing these wolves on hunts . . .
. . . some hunts happen near Eveningstar, while others may happen elsewhere . . .
. . . I’ve heard talk of a Crescent Valley. None of the dragon calves know much about it . . .
. . . these dogs do not like bright light and employ no apparent mystical powers.
When he was done writing, he closed the leather journal and placed it carefully on the bookcase next to his small desk, next to the other books he had written. His landlord had asked him about the journals once; Hank was ready for that. He told the geezer that since he could never become a dragon, he wanted to connect to his kind. Documenting the townspeople and history would pay homage to the future he’d never have. He didn’t overplay it with tears or anything, though he did manage to stutter once or twice. The matter didn’t come up again.
A knock on his door distracted him. “Come in.”
It was the landlord, a creeper with a slight stoop on his aged reptilian frame and deep, soulful eyes. “Wondering if you want to join me for dinner. Got steaks on the grill.”
Hank shifted so the man couldn’t see his eyes roll. “Sure. See you at six, Mr. Coils?”
“Call me Smokey, son.” The door gently closed.
Hank got up and walked over to his dresser. On top of the nondescript chunk of particleboard furniture was a large terrarium, with cypress mulch and tropical plant branches filling most of the interior. The terrarium housed the offspring of a monkey-tailed skink, a single female born shortly after Hank acquired the pregnant mother from a supplier in the South Pacific. He had needed to be specific with this order: Monkey-tailed skinks were virtually alone among lizards in their tendency to care for their young.
And a lizard that cared for its young cared if the young died.
“Mom will be home soon,” he muttered to the small lizard as he opened the cage and spooned some pureed sweet potatoes into the feeding dish, waking up the creature. “We’ll see when she gets here whether this is your last meal.”
The discovery that dragons used lizards as furtive scouts came as an early and welcome surprise to Hank. He had a simple-minded local trampler by the name of Ned teach him their language, which involved mainly head shakes and tongue protrusions, and then arranged for his own scout. The terms of her servitude were straightforward: She told no one else what he was using her for, and she came back with the names and addresses of every elder in the town. In return, her daughter (“Is THAT your excuse for trying to hurt me?”)
(“I’m not trying to—”)
(“Hank! Thank goodness you’re here. Your father just hurt me. I don’t know if he—”) would live.
In the weeks since, she had come back with a few names each day, which Hank recorded on a town map he kept hidden inside the sixth volume of his journals. From his discussions with Smokey Coils and others, he figured he had two-thirds of their “Blaze” mapped out.
Another week or two of this, he promised himself, and I can blow this zoo and go home. It would feel good to be in Winoka again, where he wouldn’t have to look over his shoulder every day . . . and where he would finally get his due from Mayor Seabright and her two protégées.
Less than a half-hour passed before the mother skink returned through a hole in the floorboards. Her pale green head drooped with fatigue. Skinks were generally nocturnal creatures, but Hank had decided a day schedule was more convenient for him. He took out the journal, being careful not to disturb the sword that lay across the top of the bookcase, and flipped open the cover to pull out the Eveningstar map.
“Get over here,” he told the skink as he spread out the map in front of the bookcase. It ambled over with a morose gait, and began to relay its findings of the day.
“Ned . . . Brownfoot. Trampler. Yeah, I know him. Where does he live?”
The skink surveyed the map, crawled over to the southwest corner, and tried to lick a spot where a local road met the state highway. The tongue lapped over too broad an area. “Be more precise.” He pulled a quarter from his pocket and put it in front of her. She moved the quarter with her nose until it was clearly in the southeast corner of that intersection.
“All right.” He uncapped a green marker—green was for tramplers, blue for dashers, black for creepers—and moved the quarter aside to make a small X at that location. “Who else? Atheen . . . Whisperwind. Dasher. Where’s she? No, don’t waste time looking up at your kid. She’s fine. She’s eating sweet potatoes. Focus on the map, you little shit.”
They went on like this for a few minutes. The skink had five more names, and Hank marked them all carefully. Then he recapped the markers and stood up, flipping his servant and the quarter off the map and folding up the document. He was about to stick it back inside the journal when he saw something shift.
The movement was to the left of the door, next to the un-decorated window. The window was ajar and he could feel a breeze. Why is it brushing my face, when the opening is waist-high?
He took a step forward and noticed something else weird—the glass of the window was uneven. It was an almost imperceptible difference, but it was there—the bottom third of the window looked about two feet closer than the top two-thirds. Which could only mean . . .
His blood chilled as the dragon dropped his camouflage, revealing a dark rainbow of scales. Hank expected to die. You fool. You knew he could do this. You knew all creepers could. You should have swept the apartment after he closed the door. A single mistake, and
(“Your father just hurt me. I don’t know if he—”)
(“Dawn, calm down! Hank, it’s nothing; don’t let the blood fool you; your mother and I were just practicing, and—”) now you die.
But
the old creeper didn’t attack. He seemed confused. “Sam, I don’t get it. Why treat that skink so badly? Why terrorize it? If you have questions, you could ask me. I’d tell you. Animal cruelty . . . that’s just not right, Sam. That’s not for dragons. I agreed to take you, Sam, when you had no one . . . I felt I owed you. I owed my daughter, little Jada, whose mother I left on her own. But I can’t watch this. I can’t let you stay here, Sam . . . no, not anymore . . .”
During this speech, Hank wasn’t listening. He was trying to calm his racing mind into devising a strategy for escape. He doesn’t get it. All he saw was you, and the skink, and the map. He hasn’t figured out what you are, or what you’re doing here. Move. Move! MOVE!
He grabbed the sword off the bookcase to his right and stepped forward with his left foot, turning to bring the sword in a slashing motion across the body of Smokey Coils. The dragon reared back, taking only the tip of the sword across the belly.
What happened next was never entirely clear to Hank, and his memory became more clouded with time. At that moment, however, he saw a fierce glow surround the creeper. Around them both, the entire room pitched to the left. The walls burst and bristled with millions of legs—millipedes, he guessed. Worst of all, his sword bent and sprouted scales, until the blade was a hissing viper.
It’s not real, he told himself with a certainty he did not feel. It can’t be real.
He had no evidence to back this theory up. It all seemed real. He had never heard of a dragon creating any sort of illusion like this. It is the dragon, isn’t it? The skink he had left on the floor tripled in size and began to drip with orange slime. Its secretions burned the floorboards, and the stench of
(“Don’t let the blood fool you; your mother and I were just practicing, and—”)
(“We weren’t practicing; he came after me with that sword of his! He’s not himself—please, Hank, protect me!”) sulfur and burning wood invaded his nostrils.
Seraph of Sorrow Page 34
