Dragonforge

by James Maxey

  Bitterwood called out, “Jandra! Are you safe?”

  “I’m fine,” Jandra said. “The goddess and I have just been engaged in girl talk.”

  Bitterwood felt hairs rise on the back of his neck. Something about Jandra’s voice was off. And, as she stepped onto the stairs beside Gabriel, she had no visible reaction, as if the angel’s presence wasn’t worth her notice.

  He looked toward Hex, whose nose twitched as he sniffed Jandra. Hex shifted his head, glancing back toward Bitterwood. The second their eyes met, the unspoken truth passed between them.

  Whoever this woman was, she wasn’t Jandra.

  Jandra emerged from nothingness under a starry sky. The ground beneath her yielded like fine, loosely packed snow, with a slight crunching sound as it compressed beneath her feet. The landscape was a bleak, uniform gray, a fine gravel dustscape that spread in every direction for as far as she could see. The setting was curiously odorless and eerily quiet. Jazz stood with her back to Jandra twenty feet away, her eyes turned toward the sky. Jandra stepped toward her, and was startled to find herself flying. No, not flying… but a single step had somehow transformed into a long, slow jump. She gently floated back down to the gray dust beside Jazz. She turned her face to the sky, her body posture mimicking the older woman’s. She was bewildered by what she found in the sky. The moon? Only now ten times larger, and covered with wispy white clouds and enormous blue-gray oceans.

  “Where are my friends?” said Jandra. “Where are we?”

  “Your friends are still at the temple. I’ve sent ambassadors to entertain them. We’re on the moon. We’re in a prep zone that has atmosphere but hasn’t been terrascaped yet. That big ball above us? It’s our home. It’s the planet where you’ve lived your whole life. Pretty cool, huh?”

  Jandra felt queasy and lightheaded. Not just lightheaded, light-bodied. The contents of her stomach seemed to be lifting toward her throat as easily as her feet had lifted from the surface.

  Jazz said, “You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

  “We’re on the moon?”

  “I thought it would be nice to give you a little perspective. I like you, Jandra Dragonsdaughter. You came a long way and put yourself in a lot of danger to help a friend. You’ve got good instincts. We’re going to get along fine.”

  “I’ve heard legends of men who live on the moon,” Jandra said.

  “Yeah. They’re all jerks. We won’t be meeting them.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  “Look,” said Jazz, waving toward the glowing blue-white orb above them. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful in all your life? That’s an entire biosphere you’re looking at. It’s not just a big ball of wet rock. It’s the largest living thing you’re ever going to lay eyes upon. You have to understand something important: If it weren’t for me, that wonderful living planet above us would be dead. The world owes me big, but I’m not expecting any thanks. I did it out of love.”

  Jandra stared at the earth, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Icecaps and oceans and land masses green and gray and tan. It seemed unimaginably small and impossibly big at the same time.

  “I was born into a world that was dying,” said Jazz. “The world had already toppled over the brink of environmental catastrophe before I was out of diapers. The atmosphere and oceans were poisoned in order to satisfy the consumption of the wealthy. The richer nations could afford the illusion of environmental health by shipping their most polluting industries to remote corners of the globe. Except, there were no remote corners of the globe—pollute the air in Timbuktu, and eventually the poison spreads everywhere.”

  “I’ve heard that mankind once ruled the world, then fell,” said Jandra. “Did the environmental catastrophe cause this?”

  “Curiously, no,” said Jazz. “The more poisoned the world became, the wealthier people grew. It was a perverse cycle. When people are rich enough, they can afford to live disconnected from nature. What does it matter if the atmosphere is fouled when you live cradle to grave in sealed vehicles and buildings where the air is finely controlled? Sure, there were millions of people who cared and tried to save things. But there were billions more who carried on their happy lives as planetary parasites, shopping and gorging with endless appetites, forever plugged into an endless stream of distracting entertainments that allowed them to ignore the greater truth around them.”

  “So what—”

  “Double, triple, quadruple whammies,” Jazz said, anticipating her question. “Atomic warfare in Asia was followed quickly by big bioterrorism attacks in the world’s largest cities. Seventy percent mortality in London and New York, almost ninety percent in Hong Kong. The biggest earthquake ever seen flattened California and set the world ringing like a bell. Tidal waves, volcanoes, earthquakes; it was a lousy year. Economies collapsed faster than consumers could shop them back to health. Megamolds evolved and ate half the south. Then, right in the middle of this mess, Atlantis showed up.”

  “You keep talking about Atlantis like I should know what it is,” said Jandra.

  “Well, you should, girl. You’re using Atlantean tech.”

  “Vendevorex mentioned it but didn’t go into detail. Who are the Atlanteans?”

  “The Atlanteans are us,” said Jazz. “Just people. But Atlantis isn’t us at all. Right around the time that the world was falling apart, the Navy built a fancy piece of equipment called a warp door. It functioned using the concept of spooky action at a distance—entangled particles are able to communicate information instantaneously no matter what their distance, as if they are connected via some higher space. The Air Force built a very fancy and very expensive portal that connected a room in Dover, Delaware to a room in Houston, Texas. The two sides of the warp door were separated by over a thousand miles on the map, yet occupied the very same space due to the higher dimensional nature of entangled particles.”

  “I don’t understand a thing you’re saying to me,” said Jandra.

  “Don’t worry about it. The important thing is, use of the warp door created ripples through underspace, and an alien intelligence came to earth to check us out because of this.”

  Jazz pointed to a gleaming silver snowflake in the center of an ocean. Jandra’s enhanced vision could see that the snowflake was actually an island, covered with gleaming spires miles high.

  “That’s Atlantis. I don’t know who designed it, but it arrived as a tiny seed of intelligence and grew into a city searching for inhabitants to care for. It’s nearly godlike in power, and almost limitlessly altruistic. It was going to share its advanced technology freely with mankind—until I crippled it.”

  “Why would you cripple something you say was altruistic?”

  “Because mankind had done so much damage with its primitive tools, I could only imagine the horrors unleashed if every man had the power of a god. Fortunately Atlantis was, at its heart, a machine intelligence. I was the FBI’s most wanted cyberterrorist. So, when I met Atlantis, I hacked it. I wasn’t able to destroy it, but I was able to give its omnipotence some boundaries. Its altruism ends at its shores now. The people of Atlantis live in bliss, but Atlantis withholds its blessings from the remainder of the world. The Atlanteans are mostly blind to the rest of the planet. The passage of a thousand years has proven I made the right call. As the rest of mankind has fallen back into barbarism, the earth has slowly begun to heal.”

  “I have so many questions I don’t know where to start,” said Jandra. “I feel like I only understand every other word you’re saying.”

  “Yeah,” said Jazz. “I suppose I could patiently explain the entire history of mankind to you over a long course of lectures. Or, I could do this.”

  Jazz reached out and touched a finger to Jandra’s forehead. Images splashed through her mind, like the pages of a million picture books being flipped at blinding speed. A city of gleaming spires; a small reddish dragon attacking a marble angel; a black doorway that opened into emptiness; an apple; a
starry sky; a silver key. She dropped to her knees, dizzy, stirring up a cloud of fine gray dust. She saw a dead man walking even though he was plainly disemboweled. She saw emaciated monkeys dropping down from rainbows. She brought her hands to her scalp. Her temples throbbed. It felt as if her brain were swelling against the confines of her skull.

  “What are you doing to me?” she gasped, as tears blurred her vision.

  “I commanded the nanites to physically rearrange your synapses to give you some of my memories. You won’t be able to understand them instantly, but as we talk you’ll discover you have the context to understand me. You’re going to have the mother of all headaches for a while, but in the long run you’ll be much more pleasant company.”

  “I don’t remember agreeing to be around for the long run,” said Jandra, certain she was going to vomit. When had she last eaten? All she could think of was that unidentified jerky that Adam had offered her. Salty and tough, the way it kept growing in her mouth as she chewed. Her body spasmed, yet, somehow, she held it all in. Trembling, she said. “I-I just want to find Zeeky and her family and take them home.”

  “Right,” said Jazz. “That won’t be happening.”

  “W-why?” said Jandra. The pain in her grew worse. Her head was being stabbed at its core by a million sharp knives. Her intestines knotted. She fell as her strength fled. It seemed to take forever to fall to the gray dust. “W-what d-did you do to them?”

  “You won’t understand yet,” said Jazz.

  “That h-hasn’t s-stopped you so far,” Jandra said, her fingers digging into the moon soil. She clenched her jaws and closed her eyes, trying to calm the storm within her. She wanted Jazz to keep talking. Her voice was a welcome distraction from the cacophony within her own skull.

  “True,” said Jazz. “Those rainbows that got us here pass through underspace. When I go through them, there’s nothing in between. I step in one side, I step out the other. But a thousand years ago, I met a man who got lost between the rainbows. His name was Alex Pure. He was the first human ever to use the door, and he survived in underspace for years. He told me that being inside was akin to being omniscient. He said you see anything you want from inside: the future as well as the past. It’s possible he was delusional, but I’d like to find out. I’m already immortal; omniscience would be a nice bullet point on my godhood résumé.”

  “What does Z-zeeky’s family have to d-do with this,” Jandra said. She felt on the verge of insanity as a thousand years of unearned memories found purchase in her mind. Only the conversation was holding her in the here and now.

  “When any normal person passes through underspace, they don’t experience it. Artificial beings like Gabriel don’t record anything. But if you send a monkey in, it doesn’t always come out. Alex Pure had fried his brain with thirty years of substance abuse; something about his damaged cerebral cortex allowed him to perceive the imperceptible and get lost in a place that isn’t a place. I’ve been carefully tweaking Zeeky’s family for generations, breeding a new kind of human with a functional form of autism that bridges the higher human thought world and the more primitive monkey mind at its core.”

  “Y-you’ve purposefully damaged the m-minds of an entire village?” Jandra asked, as sweat dropping from her face darkened the soil beneath her. “What gave you that right?”

  “Rights are a philosophical myth,” said Jazz. “I do it because I can.”

  Jandra wanted to summon the Vengeance of the Ancestors to consume Jazz in flame, but her aching brain couldn’t remember how. She wasn’t even certain she knew how to stand up again. Her own thoughts seemed to be in the wrong place inside her head, roughly shoved aside by Jazz’s memory bomb. How long would it be before she recovered?

  “Are… are you going to throw Zeeky into the rainbow?” she asked.

  “No. The little girl passed through underspace without getting lost. But her mother and a few others didn’t. They’re still inside and I don’t know how to guide them out. Zeeky, however, somehow can hear them inside. She’s my key to retrieving them. Once they return, I’ll take their brains apart and discover the secret to getting inside.”

  Jandra struggled to control her limbs once more. In the fractional gravity she rose, lifting her chin, summoning the most defiant gaze she could manage.

  “I w-won’t let you hurt Zeeky,” she said.

  Jazz tilted her head back and laughed. “Nice,” she said. “I like this side of you. The resistance. I haven’t had a lot of challenges lately. It’s been, what, three hundred years since I tracked down the last person who knew how to make gunpowder? Things have been a little dull since. I mean, I keep busy, but I need someone like you from time to time to keep me feeling human.”

  As Jazz spoke, Jandra mentally reached out to touch the nanite swarm surrounding the thousand-year-old woman. Slowly, the invisible dust settled on Jazz’s skin, too faint to arouse her attention. Then, Jandra willed the machines to ignite and engulf Jazz in flame.

  Nothing happened.

  “Good try,” said Jazz, walking over. She lifted her hand to brush the hair from Jandra’s face. Jandra wanted to slap her fingers away, but found she once more had no control over her arms.

  “That look in your eyes right now,” Jazz said, looking deep into Jandra’s eyes. Jazz’s own eyes were shockingly human; dark blue verging on gray, the faint traces of crow’s feet at the corners. There was nothing within her gaze to suggest her age or power. “I love it. Everyone else I’ve talked to in recent centuries just looks at me with awe, or terror. You’ve got higher emotions in your eyes. Sure, there’s anger and fear. But I see curiosity as well. You want to know what I can teach you. I think you want to be my friend; you just don’t know it yet.”

  Jandra’s skin crawled as Jazz ran her fingers along the line of her jaw. She felt sickened by the fragrance Jazz wore: faintly floral, yet corrupted by the scent of tobacco.

  “We’re going to be best friends, Jandra Dragonsdaughter. You’re so pretty, you’re like a little doll. I’ll dress you like I want to; we’ll play games together. You’ll always lose, of course. And you know what?”

  Jandra couldn’t answer. Even her tongue was no longer her own.

  “One day,” whispered Jazz, bringing her lips to Jandra’s ear, her hot, dry breath stinking of ash. “One day love will be the only thing I see in your eyes.”

  Bitterwood had met the gaze of many dragons over the years. In his hatred of the beasts, he’d come to know them intimately. He could read the finest subtleties of thoughts that crossed the visage of a dragon as it lay dying: the futile hopes, the unrequited angers, the remorse over promises unkept, even the last faint flicker of peace as a beloved memory swept across a fading mind.

  At this moment, however, looking into Hex’s eyes, he experienced something he’d never felt before: camaraderie. Suddenly, in this strange and terrible paradise, the two blood enemies became the only ally the other could truly trust.

  Hex gave a slight nod of his head. Bitterwood nodded back, his hand falling to the sword he’d taken from the long-wyrm rider, still tucked in his belt.

  Hex lunged, his reptilian muscles uncoiling with the speed of a rattlesnake striking. With his powerful jaws he clamped down on the marble torso of the goddess, biting her hard enough to send cracks spiderwebbing through her body. He whipped the living statue around, slamming her head straight into the center of Gabriel’s chest. The angel was knocked from his feet by the blow, landing on his back on the grass at the bottom of the steps.

  Bitterwood leapt, raising the sword overhead with both hands, and then driving it down with his full weight into the angel’s belly. To his relief, the sword penetrated the angel’s flesh. Bitterwood’s momentum drove the sword deep. The blade sank into the earth beneath the angel. Bitterwood sprang away before the angel could recover sufficiently to grab him.

  Gabriel didn’t look so much hurt by the attack as embarrassed to have been pinned like a bug. He grasped the hilt and started to withdraw
the blade, when suddenly Hex struck again with the living marble, driving the ten foot statue down onto Gabriel’s head like a hammer. The goddess shattered from the blow. Gabriel was suddenly obscured by dust.

  Bitterwood spun around as the false Jandra leapt toward him. He caught her in mid air with an uppercut to her jaw that left his whole arm numb. Jandra was knocked back but seemed unfazed by the blow. Where he’d punched her, the flesh of her chin peeled away, revealing a steel jawbone beneath.

  So. This, too, was a machine, just as Hezekiah had been.

  He danced backwards as she charged him, swinging her feminine fists in rapid punches that would have killed him if they’d connected. Suddenly, she fell, tripped by something long and serpentine—Hex’s tail! The false Jandra looked up as a shadow passed over her. Hex’s open jaws shot toward her. Bitterwood cringed as the sun-dragon’s jaws snapped and Jandra’s body was suddenly headless. Sparks flew from the neck as Hex spit out the feminine head, the hair now wet with saliva and blood. Bitterwood could see that several of Hex’s dagger-like teeth had snapped from their sockets. Bitterwood was familiar with the ache of freshly missing teeth, but he had no time to express sympathy for the dragon.

  Suddenly, the jungle itself came to life. The tree branches jerked toward Hex, throwing out long lassos of vines. Hex snarled and kicked, leaping from the ground, his powerful wings beating. Bitterwood was nearly knocked over by the force of the wind.

  Hex’s attempt at flight proved futile. The vines continued to shoot from the trees, wrapping him in a net of green, dragging him down beneath their weight. Bitterwood turned to run, aiming his flight toward Zeeky. Adam and Trisky still stood frozen, no doubt in shock at seeing the goddess shattered to dust. Zeeky was only inches from Trisky’s jaws; if Adam recovered, he could make things unpleasant.