“I’m making the call,” Oriana said.
“I’ll be ready.”
A quick glance behind her revealed to Oriana a display she had prepared for but one that nonetheless briefly stopped her heart. One hundred dragons, minus the couple that’d gone down in the early fighting, commanded the skies.
Beneath a partially hidden moon came an armada of scales, some the color of infectious red, others a summer green. Eyes flecked with gold and streaked with amber narrowed on Oriana like she was the keystone to this city.
What those dragons did not know was that Oriana of Liosis was but a spark of fire in a tornado of flame.
Idling before the citadel, facing the city gates, Sarpella acknowledge Oriana’s order. She tilted her head and sent a conal spray of blue gas arcing over the city skyline. Shards of ice rained onto the cobbles below, crackling like falling hail.
From balconies and beneath awnings and overhangs, chain commanders watched, a reflection of crescendoing ice in their eyes. They all withdrew into the safety of their shelters, where bevies of sorcerers awaited with bated breath.
The harbinger had been signaled. The time had come.
While Oriana had hoped the Tridents and people of Torbinen would add some much-appreciated muscle to this fight, it was the city itself that would serve as the linchpin in her strategy.
As the clutches swarmed and their shadows drew over the city like smog, sorcerers positioned themselves in nooks and between alleys. They climbed out of windows, crouched behind potted plants and beneath the shade and obscurity of umbrellas.
They filled in side roads dimmed by extinguished torches and shared space with the greenery of the queen’s garden. Any and every crook and crevice and open space blotted with darkness, there were sorcerers.
Oriana would use the clutch’s own strategy against them: overwhelm with chaos.
Only her idea of chaos was far more debilitating.
As the last of the dragons came into view and left behind the stillness of night and the carnage of charred wood and corpses, two chains of sorcerers stepped out: one onto a side balcony and the other from an alley.
The sorcerers went into a momentary stupor as they reached into their respected realms. All were elementalists, except for one oathbreaker in each chain.
Oriana only had two oathbreakers at her disposal, so wise use of them was imperative. While she wished she could shield all her people, even the custodians and horse groomers, she sadly had to pick and choose, and frankly, chains one and two were most vital.
At the precise time Sarpella banked hard, away from the incoming clutches, something happened. That is to say the world churned, upending the laws that governed it and temporarily casting aside all sense of normalcy.
From behind the clutches surged sheer vertical walls of ice and earthen crust, pillars of flame and rock. They curved around the whole of Torbinen like a primordial curtain.
Dragons screeched and pivoted in confusion, their seemingly unshakable intent to flatten Torbinen disrupted.
Sorcerers from the remaining chains emerged from stable stalls and alleyways. They climbed out of windows and crawled from behind market carts. With them came bowmen—some whose aim was true and others who hadn’t nocked an arrow before.
In the skulls of each man, woman and child in Torbinen swirled words they did not think; it felt like a hundred voices being burned into the folds of their mind.
Swath run them!
Burn the sorcerers.
Bring those walls down!
For all the strength dragons wield and the terror they impose upon their victims, they have an exploitable weakness beyond the soft tissue of their belly and throat: they are by nature solitary creatures. The alliance of the clutches had formed not out of willingness but necessity.
Necessity, however, never trumps instinct and impulse. When things go wrong, dragons revert to their individuality; they don’t play nice with others, and you can forget about them forming a coherent, agreeable remedy to their problems.
Dragons darted this way and that, a riotous mess of wings and scales. A few members of the Crimson Clutch attacked haphazardly, drenching whatever they could in flames. Their fiery breath often found empty streets and abandoned buildings.
Wryth dragons lobbed droplets of plague at archers who antagonized them, all the while ignoring sorcerers who fell deeper into their respective realms.
“Bluesoul!” screamed a sorcerer beneath an awning. He stepped forward as the dragon straightened itself low over the center of Torbinen.
Its mouth opened. Its eyes swiveled toward the third chain of sorcerers.
It swallowed the warm air and prepared to spit it back out in the form of bitter cold.
“I’ve got you,” the sorcerer said, eyes creased, jaw set. A torrent of gaseous ice came then, on a course toward an awning full of sorcerers.
Twenty feet per second. That’s how fast the average breath from a Bluesoul dragon travels. The sorcerer had three seconds to act. Three mere seconds to rip from his realm of sorcery a blessing. A prayer.
Two and a half seconds later, a blazing torrent met the frozen one. There was a sizzle. A mushroom cloud of steam erupted over Torbinen.
The dragon cried—initially out of anger and then pain. A sheet of glittering ice encased its tail and expanded over its haunches. Sarpella glided above, a proud Oriana looking below as one of two Bluesoul dragons on the battlefield sunk lower and lower, flailing and failing. It smashed into an apartment. Its head drove through partway, but its bottom half stuck out, limp and sagging.
And then only one Bluesoul dragon remained.
“That’s worth at least twenty pounds of mutton,” Oriana told Sarpella.
The dragon swooped down, toward a still-standing conjured wall of earth and rock, then ramped upward at an almost complete vertical angle.
Oriana felt the blood drain from her face. She’d commanded Sarpella to go higher, but not in such dramatic fashion. “Fine! Twenty pounds of fish. Haddock, just for you.”
Sarpella straightened and slowed to a lolling drift. Haddock was her favorite.
With a bird’s-eye view, Oriana took stock of the fighting below.
Pits of fire erupted throughout Torbinen, some from the breaths of the Crimson Clutch, others from sorceries that’d gone astray. Elementalists worked to douse most before they spread.
Pools of plague bubbled and festered, most harmlessly boiling the sand and stripping paint from walls. Some, though… well, they were the sources of screams Oriana very much wanted to forget. She knew what the breath of Wryth dragons was capable of. It took flesh from bone, and slowly too—you felt every inch of skin peeling away.
Several sorcerers felt that pain. Oriana knew their voices; she wished she hadn’t.
Dragons in freefall distracted her from her sorcerers’ cries. Lances of ice and fire had struck the winged beasts, puncturing their hearts. Their skulls. Their dragon-baby-making-parts. Elementalists didn’t exactly aim for specific areas; they simply tried to hit center mass and hoped for the best.
In a moment of panic, a young member of the Wryth Clutch attempted to flee. The elemental walls surrounding Torbinen did not take kindly to that.
“Ori!” Davok hollered, swinging by on his dragon. “Evanescences, in the rear.”
Oriana nodded and pushed Sarpella that way. Beneath her, more dragons fell. Some were victims of force sorcery; intact battlements had been broken off from the walls and flung through the air as blunt weapons. Others—most—discovered death by way of the elements: boulders of ice raining from the sky, fiery knives emerging from the ether and stabbing through scales like a knife cuts through soft butter.
“Right there,” Davok said, pointing at three Evanescence dragons inhaling deeply, preparing to bend time and space.
Oriana saw them, but she had difficulty pulling her eyes away from the perimeter of Torbinen. The walls of earth and rock and fire and ice—they were failing. Either the oathbreakers in chains
one or two had been overwhelmed, or—and far more likely—the sorcerers in those groups had reached the point of lethal exhaustion.
A cursory survey revealed less than half the clutches remained. But with the containment walls coming down…
We have to hurry, Oriana thought.
She and Davok descended on the Evanescence dragons. Together, they… well, they did nothing together. Oriana had intended on Sarpella spraying the three with ice while Davok’s big boy burned them with fire. In other words, she wished to bake them in a bath of steam.
That didn’t work. Sarpella was gassed. Spent, done, and shot. She had no breath left to give except a warm exhale.
She heard a passing shit as Davok screamed by, but not for the reason she thought. An Iron dragon was nipping at his heels. Or, more accurately, at his dragon Jarom’s talons.
The Evanescences paid them barely any mind, focusing instead on their escape. If they managed to breathe into existence a gateway out of Torbinen, the remaining clutches would undoubtedly flee as well. Oriana couldn’t allow that to happen. Not again.
C’mon, girl, Oriana pleaded. Everything you have left, use it.
As the walls of swirling blue ice and menacing orange collapsed around Torbinen, the sole remaining member of the Bluesoul fight, only five years of age, chased down a much older, significantly more experienced and far stronger member of the Iron Clutch.
With the gumption only the youthful possess, Sarpella strained and stretched and flapped her wings fast and hard. She opened her mouth, lunged and chomped down on the Iron dragon’s ankle.
The dragon arched its back and bellowed a roar so deep and loud Oriana had to momentarily release the saddle horns to plug her ears. Davok’s eyes met hers and without a word, without so much as a gesture, he understood her intention. He circled back around for a swath run at the Evanescences while Sarpella raced Oriana back toward the center of Torbinen.
Oriana sat straight and high in the saddle. She peered below, hoping to catch the attention of a sorcerer, then glanced back. That was when she felt her heart leap into her throat and her guts become twisted in knots.
The Iron dragon wasn’t catching up to her. He was on her. Not on Sarpella. Her.
She saw a spool of slime drip from its serrated teeth. She saw the pink of its throat and the blackness beyond, where her head seemed destined to go.
All the dragon needed to do was dip its head and bite. And Oriana of Liosis, the girl who wanted to change the world, would find herself on the pages of history, in the cluttered section of unremarkable persons.
Something happened then. From Oriana’s point of view, it seemed to have happened suddenly, but on the eastern parapet, behind the lone surviving catapult, a pair of eyes had been tracking her for several minutes, ensuring her safety. That safety had been jeopardized.
That meant Rol had to kill his first dragon.
Oriana didn’t hear it. She didn’t see it. She felt only hot blood spatter her face.
The Iron dragon croaked. Its wings unraveled, and its underside turned up toward the night sky, a two-foot arrow protruding from its belly.
Above Torbinen’s east shore, three Evanescence dragons fell like meteors, a trio of burning, writhing soon-to-be corpses.
Above central and western Torbinen, arrows found their targets and the violence of conjured elements welcomed the Wryth and Crimson Clutches to their death.
Soon after, the earth reclaimed its mud and rock, its fire and ice. The wall of elements was no more.
Sweat pouring down her face and mixing with dragon blood, Oriana flew beneath a sky washed of wings and scales, and above a smoldering city of buildings and corpses, of dragons and sorcerers and innocents.
Oriana did not know the queen’s fate. She did not know Rol’s fate. Hell, she didn’t even know Avestas’s fate—there were another hundred dragons out there, somewhere. But she was, for the moment, safe. Her purpose in life intact.
The world was one step closer to her taking.
Chapter Forty
Lavery huddled in a cavern, trembling knees pulled up to his chin. He chewed the flesh of his thumb, ripping into the nail bed. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He should have been out there, standing as a proud commander and issuing orders, not in here cowering and sulking.
Laythe had told him they should make way toward the Roost, that convincing Bastion Rook to offer assistance in the matter of dragons would be considerably easier with fifteen thousand risen standing before his walls.
Shortly after the break of dawn, one hundred miles from the Roost and in a gully of snow and ice, he spotted a smattering of blackness blotting out the hot pink fingers of a rising sun. To say he and Laythe found the dragons would have been somewhat accurate. To say the dragons found them would have been more so.
Lavery had screamed for his army of the dead to fall back. They didn’t listen. Instead, they formed ranks all around Laythe.
The blackness approached, unraveling from a blob of imperceptible silhouettes into a clear outline of wings and broad heads. Lavery pointed to the several caverns that bored into the mountainside, urging his bony, empty-eye-socketed soldiers into them.
That was when he realized they were no longer his bony, empty-eye-socketed soldiers. He still wore the crown, but the dead no longer cared about him. They marched in lockstep with Laythe.
To the hillsides they scuttled, hoisting themselves onto jags and plateaus, climbing higher and higher. When the dragons arrived, they came not with the bluster of invincibility that Lavery had expected, but with a fragile confidence that unraveled into frenziness and disorganization. It was as if they’d encountered a crow midflight and received a message that something terrible had happened, or was going to happen, to their species.
The beasts descended haphazardly and in a formation that could at best be described as scattered and at worst anarchic. Half of them—more than that, even—remained idle high in the sky while the others threw themselves at an army of fifteen thousand risen.
Something quite unexpected happened then. So unexpected that Lavery found himself on his feet, mouth agape.
The dragons that were dawdling and hovering suddenly swooped downward. They coiled their talons around the throats of their attacking brethren, ripping at the soft, unprotected underside.
As if the sky had birthed a well of blood, droplets of the red stuff—and then a fountain of it—rained down. The snow drank what it could and froze all else into a thin sheet of bright red ice.
That ice cracked and shattered as it received the corpses of plummeting dragons. The dragons who had betrayed their own settled on the mountainside. One with violet scales and a face of ancient leather came before Laythe. Lavery heard its voice echoing in his skull.
We knew you were coming.
“I’m aware,” Laythe said. “Your scout flies high, but I never sleep. I saw him six nights ago.”
Imagine my surprise to learn that the peerless necromancer Gynoth has risen once more. Had I known…
“You would have stayed where you belonged. You’re fortunate to surrender; I would have brought your clutch down with disease and rot, birthed it anew and used it as my own weapon. I would have beat you with your own hand, essentially.”
Take us, the dragon said. We do not wish to leave this world. They—the dragon fluttered a wing toward his slain kin—wished to face what lies beyond rather than to be reborn. But we do not want that. We want to remain in this world, forevermore.
Laythe crossed his arms. “You will share only a semblance of your prior existence. You will serve me. Your wishes are mine, your desires are mine. Understand this.”
We would rather cling to a crumb of our prior life than face the mystery of eternal death. Take us, I beg you.
Laythe flicked his hand. And Lavery gasped.
A horde of risen pounced on the violet-scaled dragon with impossible strength and vigor, tearing away its armor and riving the hot red flesh beneath. It took all of thirty seconds
before it bled out, its limp legs crumbling beneath dead weight.
Laythe knelt before it, and after a short time, the dragon picked its head up from the snow. Its remaining scales rather fell away. Its skin sloughed off. The leather of its face unwrapped itself like a tightly coiled spool coming undone.
Also, its eyes and the goop along with them spilled out of their sockets.
The same series of events occurred with each dragon systematically, beginning with the disassembling of their scales and flesh and finishing with the arrival of its risen, cadaverous self.
He is a necromancer, thought Lavery.
Laythe departed from that mountainside, behind him his army of fifteen thousand corpses and over fifty dragons with bones white as the falling snow. Lavery knew his presence was no longer welcomed and that following the necromancer would mean… well, he didn’t know what it’d mean. Possibly death. Possibly something worse. But curiosity tends to yank and pull and shove you toward the inhospitable and the treacherous.
Lavery emerged from the cavern. He crept along the crags for hours, far enough away from the risen that he figured they couldn’t see him. Day turned to night and fatigue settled in. He wished to sleep. He was hungry too; he’d eaten the last of his dried mutton strips hours ago.
Fortunately, he still had a skin of water in his satchel. Unfortunately, he’d parted with that, too, by noon the next day. Parched, famished and utterly exhausted, Lavery stumbled along beneath clouds the color of silt. He fell far behind the risen after having gotten his feet tangled several times and greeting the hard, compact snow with his face.
The last thing he remembered before his eyes involuntarily closed was feeling very, very cold and wishing he had never disobeyed Maren O’Keefe by venturing into the mausoleum.
When he woke, he felt like he was falling. He threw his arms out like a startled newborn and gasped. After blinking away the fog of sleep from his eyes, he realized he was not falling but rather being set gently down. Onto… rocks? No, pebbles. He was in a tunnel.
The Dragon Thief (Sorcery and Sin Book 1) Page 39
