by James Maxey
Pet peeked back around the pillar, expecting the earth-dragon guards to be running toward him. They stared in his direction, but gave no sign of having overheard Kamon. Pet found himself feeling dirty for even having heard the idea.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Pet said. “We finally have a dragon king who wants to treat mankind fairly and you’re proposing we poison him? I know he sounded angry when he left the room a few minutes ago, but this is only a minor setback. I just need to talk to Shandrazel in private. Get his mind back to where it naturally wants to be. I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with moody dragons. Chakthalla could get into funks over the smallest things, and I could always cheer her up.”
Kamon’s face fell. He looked as if he’d just heard the worst news in the world.
“What?” said Pet.
“It’s true,” said Kamon. “There have been… whispers. Some have said that you aren’t the dragon-slayer Bitterwood. That you’re an imposter, who lived a life of comfort as the pet of Chakthalla.”
“Oh,” said Pet. “That. Didn’t you know that I just acted as her pet so that I could pass unnoticed among the dragons?”
“If you’ve killed so many dragons, why did a look of fear pass through your eyes when I mentioned killing Shandrazel? The men of the Free City believed you were Bitterwood because of Albekizan’s public accusation. Has it all been a lie?”
“I’m not going to waste my breath arguing with you,” said Pet. “You stood before the crowd and proclaimed me the savior of humanity. You said God had revealed the truth to you. Are you going back to your followers now and tell them God screwed up?”
Kamon looked as if he’d swallowed a bug.
Before they could resume their argument, a faint sound caught Pet’s attention. Though muffled by stone, Pet recognized the cry of a woman in tremendous pain. He remembered the musician he’d left in his chamber. This wasn’t a good morning for an unidentified young woman to be discovered in the palace. His guts knotted as he thought of the consequences of his pointless passions. If the girl was harmed, he’d never forgive himself.
Pet moved toward the exit. The earth-dragons lowered their spears to block him. Pet kept advancing, coming right up to the tips of their weapons. He couldn’t hear the girl now. Had they stopped hurting her? Or had something worse happened?
“Move back, human,” one of the guards said.
“Has no one told you who I am?” Pet said, lowering his voice to a chill growl. “Have you never heard of Bitterwood? The Death of All Dragons, the Ghost Who Kills?”
“Bitterwood isn’t real,” the first guard scoffed.
“I heard his legend years ago,” the second guard said. “You’d have been in diapers.”
“I’m older than I look,” said Pet. “Also, faster.”
Before the guards could react, Pet dove for the hall beyond them, slipping beneath their outthrust spears. Earth-dragons had many virtues as soldiers—strength, toughness, loyalty—but rapid reflexes weren’t among these attributes. Pet was halfway down the hall before the guards made it out the door. He turned the corner as a second wail of pain came from below. It wasn’t coming from the direction of his bedchamber. Had they taken her to the dungeons?
The stairs down had two parallel tracks, a broad set of steep steps for sun-dragons, and a smaller, more shortly-spaced set of stairs for earth-dragons. Pet leapt his way down the sun-dragon stairs. His long years as a companion of a sun-dragon had left him well-practiced in traversing the landscape of giants.
Soon he found the torch-lined tunnel leading to the dungeon. A crew of earth-dragons stood guard, their heads turned to listen to the cries of anguish that came from an iron door standing open at the end of a short hall. Dim lantern light spilled from the chamber, and the jagged shadow of a winged dragon danced into the hall. Pet raced past the guards before they could blink. Their reptilian brains barely realized he’d passed them before Pet reached the lantern-lit chamber.
Pet froze, at first unable to untangle the scene before him, the mix of shapes, light and dark. The sounds of the woman screaming echoed so loudly within the windowless chamber he couldn’t instantly tell where her voice was coming from. His nose was the first sensory organ to ground him in the reality before him. Deeply wired channels in his brain recognized the smell of urine and vomit, and the stale, acrid stench of a human body unwashed for days. Slowly, his eyes made sense of the nightmare before him. The giant moving lump in the center of the chamber was Shandrazel. Half his body was in shadow, half lit by a single bright lantern. His emerald eyes glowed in the gloom like a cat’s. Androkom stood opposite Shandrazel, his blue, shadowy shape ghostly in reflected light. The high biologian’s eyes were fixed on a limp thing in Shandrazel’s fore-claws, something pale white and shaped vaguely like a human woman. The serpentine tattoo on her scalp identified her as the assassin Hex had captured. Her limbs were twisted in ways a human body shouldn’t bend. Both her ankles were broken, and her fingers were knotted in unnatural configurations. Nonsense grunts spilled from her blue lips and tears wetted her cheeks. Her eyes were filled with terror as Shandrazel shook her.
On the floor beneath her was the map Shandrazel had ripped from the wall.
“Show me where his temple is,” Shandrazel shouted, his deep draconian voice nearly deafening Pet. “Show me or I’ll break you further! Show me!”
“Put her down!” Pet shouted, clenching his fists. “Have you lost you mind? Let her go!”
Shandrazel’s tail swept through the air, catching Pet in the chest. It knocked him from his feet as easily as Pet could have kicked aside a yapping lap dog. Pet smacked into the stone wall. His knees buckled and he slid down to rest on the slimy floor.
Shandrazel’s face was suddenly inches from his own. Shandrazel was normally such a gentle soul, Pet forgot just how big and powerful the full-grown bull sun-dragon truly was. His teeth were longer than Pet’s fingers. Pet had time to get a good, careful look at those teeth as Shandrazel growled at him.
Finally, Pet’s breath returned in a painful rush. “What’s happened to you?” he asked, his voice on the verge of tears. “You’re one of the good guys. You don’t torture women.”
Shandrazel snorted. “You self-righteous fool. I’m doing what I should have done the moment we captured this woman. She knows where Blasphet is. Blasphet is only a danger because humans treat him like a god. Why haven’t your kind stepped up to the responsibility of stopping him?”
Pet swallowed, fighting back his fear. He’d barely heard Shandrazel’s words as his attention remained focused on the white teeth flashing only inches from his face. Was Shandrazel somehow blaming humans for Blasphet?
“Blasphet was trying to wipe out humanity in the Free City!” Pet protested. “It’s insane to think I’m helping him.”
“We hadn’t accused you of helping him,” said Androkom. “Though, if you were, it would explain many things. Isn’t it odd that the Sisters of the Serpent knew to find Shandrazel in the bath while you were there?”
“What?” Pet felt as if he’d gone crazy. “The sisters were attacking at random! And they attacked me! Shandrazel, don’t let the actions of a few misguided girls turn you into a monster like your father.”
Shandrazel swooped Pet up in his fore-talons, his claws biting into Pet's biceps. He lifted Pet with no more effort than a man would expend picking up a kitten. He shouted, “I am nothing like my father!”
Pain blanked Pet’s mind and fear locked every muscle. He wanted to beg for mercy but couldn’t find the words and couldn’t have spoken them if he had.
Behind Shandrazel, Androkom craned his neck down to the face of the captured sister, who lay crumpled on the map where Shandrazel had discarded her.
“I fear Pet’s distraction has cost us,” Androkom said. “This human has stopped breathing.”
Despite being trapped in Shandrazel’s grasp, Pet felt himself stirred to rage at Androkom’s words. Suddenly, his mind unlocked, and words
gushed out of him. “Are you happy?” he shouted at the sun-dragon. “You’ve killed a helpless girl! Do you feel strong now? Do you feel like you’re the king your father wanted you to be?”
“Silence! My father will be remembered as a tyrant! I will be remembered as the king who brought an end to kings!”
Shandrazel punctuated this sentence by spinning Pet around and slamming him face-first into the bedrock of the dungeon.
Shandrazel growled again, his anger building, “History will proclaim me Shandrazel the just!”
Again the bull-dragon slammed Pet into the stone. Pet heard snapping noises echoing through his skull. With an odd sense of detachment, he realized that his front teeth were loose against his tongue. He pushed them out of his mouth and felt them slide down his chin amid the drool and blood.
Shandrazel dropped him. Pet rolled to his back, staring dumbly at the towering reptile above him. His limp right arm fell against the broken fingers of the dead woman. He coughed as the blood in his mouth hit the back of his throat. Shandrazel gazed down at him with a look that was half rage, half fear.
“Shandrazel… the wise,” the sun-dragon said, his voice growing calmer. He swallowed hard as he stared at Pet. Pet could see himself reflected in the sun-dragon’s eyes. His once sharp and shapely nose was now flattened against his face. He was bleeding freely from a gash over his right eyebrow. Slowly, his vision faded. Shandrazel’s voice sounded dreamy as he said, “Most of all, I shall be remembered as Shandrazel… the merciful.”
Pet closed his eyes. He was vaguely aware of the sounds of chainmail jangling; the guards from the hall had finally arrived.
Androkom’s calm, authoritative voice said, “Cart the corpse away. This cell has a new occupant.”
Distantly, an earth-dragon voice barked out a reply, but Pet could no longer understand the words. His ears filled with a sound like rumbling surf. He felt as if those waves were lifting him, leaving him adrift, tugging him ever further away from the shore of awareness. He floated into darkness, utterly alone.
Chapter Seventeen:
Attractive Soulless Monsters
The Scholar’s Gate was a thick oak door hung on iron hinges. The door was tall enough that a sun-dragon could enter, and so heavy that Graxen feared he wouldn’t have the strength to open it. Beyond the Scholar’s Gate was the Grand Library, the domain of the high biologian, a research collection surpassing the contents of all other libraries in the kingdom. Only the high biologian and a few chosen attendants could freely enter the Grand Library. A student needed the high biologian’s consent to pass through the gate, and this consent was rarely granted.
Fortunately, Graxen wasn’t a student any more. He was Shandrazel’s messenger, and as such had permission to travel anywhere in the kingdom. What’s more, by tradition, copies of the keys to all libraries were given to the king, and as messenger Graxen had access to them. The ceremonial key was a work of art, a rod of iron over a foot long with a head shaped like a dragon’s skull, the teeth plated with silver. Silver letters were scrolled along the black shaft, spelling out a quote from the Ballad of Belpantheron. The string of syllables was interpreted by some scholars as reading, “My lord is wise according to the wisdom of an angel, to know all things that are in the earth.” The words were meant to remind kings that the battle between dragons and angels wasn’t won by brute force. Dragons had once fought only with tooth and claw, while angels fought with swords and spears. Victory came, according to the poem, when dragons stole the knowledge of angels, and learned to forge metals and create their own weapons and armor.
Graxen wasn’t certain the key would actually work, or if it was merely for decoration. To his relief, the key slipped into the lock easily. The lock clicked open. The massive door then swung away from Graxen with only the slightest push, its balance a testament to the engineering prowess of the biologians.
As he stepped within, Graxen froze at the magnificent vision before him. The Grand Library was nearly a hundred yards across, a vast open tower filled with all the knowledge of the dragon races. The roof high overhead was a giant dome intricately crafted of steel and glass, allowing the pink rays of sunset to spill into the chamber. Iron staircases twisted in elaborate intertwining helixes giving access to rings of walkways lined with tall bookcases. Looking up at the tomes that lined the room, it seemed impossible that the world was old enough that so much could have been written down. All the books he had dusted in the College of Spires might possibly have filled this central chamber, but dozens of hallways opened from each floor leading to more book-filled rooms. Graxen felt a sense of vertigo as he tried to take in the sheer scope of the information before him. Certainly, the knowledge he desired would be somewhere in this library.
Besides the books, the library featured an impressive collection of fossils and sculptures that showed the ancestry of the dragons. An enormous skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex dominated the center of the room, its huge jaws dwarfing even those of sun-dragons. High above, sculpted recreations of pteranodons hung from chains, seemingly frozen in mid-flight among the stacks. He’d long heard the argument that the winged dragons were descendents of pteranodons, but it was a claim he found dubious. While the torsos and wing limbs held an undeniable similarity, he found their stubby hindlegs almost comic, and had always felt the primitive beasts must have been horribly clumsy in the air with no tail to serve as a rudder. Of course, bats flew gracefully without significant tails, so he knew intellectually it wasn’t barrier to flight. Still, when he was in the air, his tail was as important to the fine tuning of his maneuvers as his wings. On a gut level, it didn’t make sense that these ancient reptiles led in a direct path to him.
Graxen moved across the smooth floor, passing through the shadows cast by the replica reptiles above him. As much as the sheer scope of the library stirred his hopes, it also filled him with a sense of despair. No two libraries were ever organized the same. Centuries ago, clans of biologians had engaged in armed conflict to impose a standard system for categorizing information. The War of Words had ended with hundreds dead and left libraries throughout the kingdom vandalized, with countless books stolen and restolen by marauding colleges. In the aftermath, all hope of a standardized system was lost. Each library was organized via secret and unshared systems that helped protect the knowledge within them from predation, theft, or destruction by competing scholars. Unfortunately, it meant that Graxen would now need to find one of the few dozen biologians who directly served Androkom to act as his guide, or he would have to figure out the organizing principal of the library on his own, wasting hours, perhaps even days, in his search.
Still, he wasn’t quite willing to walk up to a stranger and announce, “I seek a manual that will instruct me in the art of procreation.” There was the chance that, if Androkom learned of his presence, so would Shandrazel. While Graxen was deeply in Shandrazel’s debt, he couldn’t afford the distraction of checking in with his employer and risking a new assignment. So, trusting to luck, he ventured down a nearby hall. He chose his path it because it was the most poorly lit of all the halls leading from the main room, and he guessed that forbidden knowledge would be entrusted to the parts of the library most enshrouded by shadows.
Using this guiding logic, when the hall he traveled forked, he chose the darker of the two paths, and then repeated this again at his next choice. Now, however, the futility of this search method became clear. Randomly lifting a book off the shelf, he found the lighting too poor to discern the title. Perhaps he would need to find a guide after all. The biologians who knew these stacks could no doubt maneuver through them in total darkness. It was said that the former high bioligian, Metron, was able to navigate through the maze of books with his eyes closed and unerringly lay his claws upon any tome he desired.
“Ah, Metron,” Graxen sighed. “I wish you were here now.”
“Truly?”
Graxen spun around, searching for the source of the voice. It seemed to have come from a narrow gap betw
een two shelves. It was difficult to tell, though, if there was a chamber beyond, or if the shadow merely gave the illusion of such. He crept forward.
“Who’s there?” he said, keeping his voice low.
“Metron. The one you seek,” the voice said. Graxen found that the gap between the shelves was filled with a tall stack of books. The chamber stank of dust and aged paper.
“You don’t fool me, stranger,” Graxen said, listening for any further noise. There was a scrape on stone. Behind the shelf? Or on the same row he was on, in the darkness at the end? The long tall rows of books baffled sound, and confused his senses. “Metron was banished. Who are you truly?”
“I am Metron,” the voice said. “And, I am banished, a tatterwing cast out into the wilds.”
“These aren’t the wilds,” said Graxen.
“True,” the voice said. “Fate has led me back to my long time home. No one knows the hidden chambers of this library better than myself. I could elude detection for the remainder of my days. Yet, this is not why I’ve returned. I’ve come seeking an individual dragon.”
“Who?” asked Graxen. Then the answer seemed obvious. “Androkom?”
“No. Androkom and I didn’t part on good terms. The dragon I seek, as difficult as this may be to believe, is you, Graxen the Gray. I’ve returned to the palace to speak with you, since I’ve learned you now reside here in service to Shandrazel. I entered through a passage that only I know of. I didn’t expect to find you in the library, however.”
“This does give me reason to be skeptical of your claims,” Graxen said, straining his neck to try to see over the top of the stack of books. Only dim shadows lay beyond.
