by James Maxey
Menagerie raised his hand. Reeker looked instantly chagrined. No-Face’s spooky chuckle went silent.
“I apologize for the insensitivity of my colleagues,” the tattooed man said to Infidel. “Stagger was a beloved brother in the larger family of Commonground. I, for one, shall miss him.”
“Yeah,” said Reeker. “I kind of liked the guy. There going to be a funeral? I’ll send flowers.”
“The funeral was private,” said Infidel. “And I don’t want to talk about Stagger any more. I want to talk about the dragon hunt you boys are going on. I want in.”
“As do I,” said Relic, hobbling up beside the women.
Menagerie looked down at the hunchback. “Who the hell are you?”
“Infidel calls me Relic. This will serve.”
“Uh-huh,” said Menagerie. “I can’t help but notice that you look, um... less than formidable. While I can’t confirm the existence of any upcoming dragon hunts, may I ask what, exactly, would you bring to the table?”
“Knowledge,” said Relic. “I’ve survived Greatshadow’s lair before. My experience may provide the difference between success and failure.”
“Is that so?” said Menagerie.
The hunchback nodded.
“Be that as it may, I am not in charge of hiring for any missions that may or may not be occurring soon,” said Menagerie. “The Black Swan may have been conducting transactions of this nature, but to reiterate, she’s now closed to all business.”
Aurora clenched her fists. “Menagerie, who do you think you’re fooling? You know I know all about the mission. Get the hell out of my way. I’m talking to the Black Swan.” She stepped forward, looking ready to push the mercenaries aside.
Reeker spit a gob of pale green phlegm toward her eyes. The wad crackled as it froze inches from her skin, bouncing harmlessly off her cheek, its foul payload neutralized. She punched out with an ice-gauntleted fist, sending the skunk-man flying toward the edge of the dock. He landed on his feet with inches to spare, but momentum was against him. He stumbled backward, and vanished over the edge with a splash.
No-Face swung his chain-draped fist and caught Aurora beneath the chin, hard enough that the frost coating her face flew off in a spray. She went down, landing flat on her back, as snow danced in the air where she’d just stood. She started to rise, but before she could sit up, Menagerie leapt toward her, taking the form of a huge, black-horned ram. His head smashed into Aurora’s tusks with a loud, sharp crack. Aurora’s arms flopped to her side as she stared up into the pale morning sky, cross-eyed and dazed.
Infidel grinned. This was her oh-good-there’s-a-fight-and-I-was-wanting-to-hit-someone grin. She punched No-Face right where his mouth should have been. He staggered backward, stopping when his back slammed into the locked door of the Black Swan. Infidel kicked him in the gut, shattering the wood behind him, knocking him inside.
Infidel spun to face Menagerie, who’d leapt into the air as a ram. In the span of a heartbeat, his body flowed into a fifteen-foot-long shark, his mouth stretched wide enough to clamp onto Infidel’s face. She raised both hands, shielding herself with her forearms as the toothy jaws snapped shut. There was a loud crunch. Bright fragments of white teeth showered onto the docks. For half a second, the shark hung there, clamped onto Infidel’s unbreakable arms. Infidel head-butted the shark in the snout. The big fish flew off, and Menagerie was once again human as he landed ass-first on the dock, blood streaming from his nose.
“Ouch,” he said, spitting out broken teeth.
Infidel loomed over him, fists clenched. “Had enough?”
From inside the jagged hole that No-Face had left in the door, there was a confused grunt.
Menagerie looked toward the hole, and his face went slack. Infidel turned toward the noise as well. Her brow furrowed as her eyes adjusted to the shadows before her. Aurora rose up on her knees, shaking her head. When she finally followed the others’ gazes, she whispered, “This is unexpected.”
The main room of the bar was completely transformed. All the gaming tables were gone, as were the paintings on the wall. No-Face was sitting up, rubbing his skin-flap, dust swirling around him. “Whuduhfuh?” he mumbled as he looked around.
Cobwebs clung to every corner of the room. The grime was so thick on the floor that No-Face had left a little dust-angel where he’d fallen. Behind the bar, the shelves were empty, save for dirt. There was no evidence that the place had been a thriving business full of people only moments before.
Menagerie stepped into the room. Aurora and Infidel followed.
Menagerie muttered something to himself I couldn’t quite catch, save for the word ‘time.’
“Oh no,” said Aurora, who’d apparently caught what he was saying. “She was too old to go back more than a day or two. She’d never survive a longer trip. She—”
“You aren’t blind, Aurora,” said Menagerie.
“Is this a private conversation, or would you care to fill me in on what’s happened?” asked Infidel.
Relic hobbled into the room. “They won’t betray the Black Swan’s secret. I, however, am not bound by their oaths of loyalty. The Black Swan owes her power and influence to a rather tragic curse. She—”
“Guys!” shouted Reeker as he rushed into the room, water streaming from his clothes. “You gotta come look at this.”
The whole building shuddered as he spoke. The air took on the stench of rotten eggs, but Reeker didn’t seem to be the source of the odor.
Menagerie furrowed his brow. “Did the barge just hit bottom?”
“All the water’s draining out of the bay!” said Reeker, waving his arms for emphasis.
“Luhguptaruh,” said No-Face.
“Good idea,” said Menagerie. “To the roof!”
Before he finished speaking, where the man had stood there was an owl gliding forward. He flapped his wings once and shot toward the cobwebbed spiral staircase in the far corner of the room, vanishing as he tilted his wings and flew up to the second floor.
No-Face and Reeker followed without hesitation.
Aurora grabbed Infidel by the arm. “You took my side,” she said. “Thank you.”
“What?” asked Infidel.
“In the fight with the Goons. You defended me when I was down.”
Infidel shrugged. “It was three against one. I always side with the underdog. It’s nothing.”
Aurora nodded. “Still, I owe you one.”
Relic sighed as he hobbled across the room toward the staircase.
“You women can bond another time,” he grumbled. “Right now, we should follow the owl.”
CHAPTER FIVE
ALL MUST BURN!
THE ROOF OF the Black Swan was a broad, flat deck with four large stained-glass dome skylights and a sixty-foot mast that jutted up from the middle, with smaller masts fore and aft. It had been many years since the bar had actually been moved with sails; the masts now served mainly as flag poles to fly the barge’s banner, a field of pure white with a black swan in the center. Menagerie stood in the crows nest atop the tallest mast, peering out at the bay, his hand raised to shield his eyes from the morning sun. Infidel leapt, grabbing the rigging, and in seconds reached his side.
Ignoring the main reason we’d come out here, her gaze was instead drawn to Menagerie’s face. It took me half a second to understand why it was so interesting at this particular moment.
“You have your teeth back,” she said.
“Owls don’t have teeth, so when I changed back, I grew new ones,” said Menagerie. “Can we focus on the problem at hand?”
The water was flowing out from the bay so swiftly that fish were left flopping in the mud. The Black Swan was anchored in water ordinarily twenty feet deep at its lowest, but it now sat flat on the bottom, the whole structure shuddering as it slowly sunk into the muck. As far as the eye could see boats were stranded across the bay, except, I noted, the ships of Wanderers. These had been the ships that had gone missing during the
night. They were now far out at the mouth of the bay, dozens of them, riding on a ridge of water that bunched up near the gap leading to open water.
“You ever see anything like this?” Infidel asked.
Menagerie shook his head; he was the oldest of the Goons, a resident of Commonground for over forty years. He pointed toward the bright blue forms of river-pygmies running out on the mud flats, snatching up the stranded fish. “Maybe they know what’s going on.”
But before Infidel could leap down to speak to a pygmy, a mountain of bright blue-green water rose from the sea just beyond the Wanderer’s ships. It kept rising, as other bulges formed around it. It vaguely resembled, from a distance, an enormous sea-turtle, assuming one could grow to be several miles wide.
Suddenly, the impossibility that this was a giant turtle changed into reality as the beast’s eyes snapped open. Its vast maw yawned wide, a mouth several hundred yards across. The Wanderer ships were pulled toward it by a fierce suction. Yet, these expert seafarers proved the match of the turbulent white water, guiding their schooners across the ship-studded waves as agilely as a river-pygmy steering a canoe through the pilings of Commonground. In moments, all the vessels had ridden the flow of water into the mouth of the great beast.
“It’s Abyss,” said Menagerie, his voice hushed in awe.
Abyss is the primal dragon of the sea. His consciousness spreads through every wave and ripple in the world’s vast ocean. Due to his pact with the Wanderers, he’s one of the few dragons who still intervenes in human affairs. Most of primal dragons don’t even notice mankind, any more than an earthquake notices the cities it topples, or a tornado notices the villages it smashes to splinters. To witness a primal dragon personify itself, taking on at least an echo of its original form, was something few men would ever see in their lives.
With the last of the Wanderers swallowed, Abyss closed his mouth and spun, heading back toward the open ocean. The mound of water that had been heaped up by his arrival collapsed, sending a wave fifty feet high surging back into the emptied bay.
“Brace yourselves!” Menagerie shouted, before changing into an eagle and launching himself into the air. He could barely be heard as the roar of the water reached us, a thundering wall of sound that made the timbers of the Black Swan tremble. The tidal wave hit the far end of the docks, sending boards and pilings flying high into the air. The boats of slavers, pirates, and pleasure seekers splintered as they were crushed by the rushing water.
The wave hit the Black Swan. The barge was solidly built, but still the timbers cracked and snapped as the water lifted it, spinning it sideways, carrying it up over the docks and gangplanks, crushing everything in its path. Infidel clung to the railing of the crow’s nest; the mast groaned, but didn’t topple. The barge began to bob in the relatively smoother water behind the crest of the wave. The tsunami kept moving, reaching the normal boundaries of the shore, then beyond, carrying debris and corpses up over the marshes, into the forests.
Infidel looked down as the barge settled on the remains of docks and boats trapped beneath it. Relic was nowhere to be seen. No-Face had wrapped his ball and chain around the mast and was still on his feet, completely drenched. Reeker dangled in his hammy grasp, his normally well-groomed mane now tangled with a mass of brown seaweed. Aurora stood on the water next to the barge, seemingly walking on the waves, until the current calmed and revealed an ice floe beneath her.
The ogress shouted to the eagle circling overhead, “This is what she saw! This is why she went back!”
Infidel shouted down, “Would someone tell me what the hell is going on?”
Relic cleared his throat. Infidel spun around. He was standing right behind her. I never saw him climb the rigging, though, admittedly, my attention had been focused elsewhere. His rags were drenched; steam rose from them as if they’d been soaked in boiling wash-water rather than the tepid waters of the bay. He smelled vaguely of brimstone as he said, “On the day that the Black Swan was to be married, her groom was killed in a horseback accident. It was a senseless, pointless, random tragedy; the world is full of such moments. Unknown to her fiancé, the Black Swan was a Weaver, a member of a secret sect of witches with the power to rend the fabric of reality and knit it back into something more to their liking. Yet, even Weavers lack the power to restore life to the dead. In her grief, the Black Swan sought out Avaris, Queen of Weavers, and asked her for a boon. She wished for the power to go back in time so that she might avoid these random tragedies.”
Infidel looked around at the devastated mishmash of broken ships and crushed docks that had once been Commonground. “She didn’t do a very good job of stopping this.”
“I didn’t say she could stop tragedies,” said Relic. “I said she could avoid them; the Black Swan isn’t here. She’s lived through this tidal wave, then traveled back in time to abandon the barge and relocate elsewhere before the destruction occurred.”
The eagle lighted gently onto the rail of the crow’s nest. Then, in a twinkling, Menagerie stood next to Relic.
“How do you know this?” he asked.
Relic shrugged. “Is it important? You know it’s the truth. You and Aurora have experienced the time shifts enough to recognize them and remember them. I know what’s happening due to... certain talents.”
Menagerie scowled. “Who are you again?”
“The only name I’ve ever been given is Relic.”
Infidel said, “You’ve also been called Lum—”
“Relic,” said Relic.
Menagerie looked down as Aurora formed a staircase of ice to walk back onto the deck of the barge. The water was swirling all around; the mast swayed as the barge bumped along the bottom.
“She was too old,” Aurora called out, looking around at the wreckage. “She’ll never survive going back.”
Infidel shook her head. “Has everyone but me lost their minds? You’re seriously expecting me to believe the Black Swan is some kind of time-traveler?”
“Yes, but only in one direction. She can jump backwards in her own timeline to pivotal moments. She moves forward in time at the same speed as the rest of us,” said Menagerie, apparently no longer seeing a reason to protect the secret. “Her curse is that, when she goes back in time, she doesn’t regain her youth. If she lived through an event at age forty that she could have changed by making a different decision at age twenty, she can go back to that event, but she’ll go back as a forty-year-old, not a twenty-year-old. Only twenty-nine years have passed since the Black Swan was born, but physically, she’s almost a hundred and twenty. The husband she loved so dearly rejected her, disgusted that she turned into an old crone while he was still a youth. The Black Swan only cares about wealth now; everything else she regards as impermanent.”
“A fat lot of good all her money will do her if she’s dead,” said Infidel.
Menagerie shrugged. “So far, her money has allowed her to purchase the potions needed to keep her alive. I’m in no position to disapprove of her priorities. I’ve made a sizable fortune from the Black Swan’s business acumen.”
“Really?” said Infidel. “The only thing you seem to own is that loincloth.”
“Even a Goon may have a family,” said Menagerie. “My loved ones are very comfortable.”
By now, the bay was slowly starting to return to a normal level, as the water flowed back from the forest. The air smelled horrible, like every outhouse in the world had been overturned at once. All over the place, men were climbing out the water, clinging to overturned boats and the few strips of dock that had somehow survived.
Aurora shouted up, “There are people trapped in all this rubble. I’m going to help who I can.”
Menagerie nodded. “A wise suggestion. We should all help out. We can... can....” His voice trailed off as his eyes were drawn toward the mouth of the bay. Seven large ships were sailing through the rocky gap. Their sails were a pale blue-white, catching the morning sun like silver. Flags fluttered from the pinnacles, showing a g
reen dragon against a sky-blue field.
Infidel followed his gaze toward the ships.
“It’s King Brightmoon’s fleet,” she said.
“Some of it, at least,” said Menagerie. “Rather bold of them, just sailing in during broad daylight. Aren’t they worried that Greatshadow might notice?”
Suddenly, the sky darkened. Everyone looked up, back toward the peak of Tanakiki. A mile-high jet of solid black smoke mushroomed up into the air, swiftly turning day into night. Bright red sparks shot through the atmosphere as the rim of the caldera crumpled, sending a white-orange river of molten lava spilling toward the bay. Trees exploded into flame ahead of the lava as a shimmering wave of heat spread outward.
The smoke and cinders swirled until they took on the shape of a dragon, spreading mile-long wings of black smoke. Two smaller dragons shot out of the folds of the wings, flying toward the bay. Smaller, in this case, is a relative term. These were huge beasts, a hundred yards long tip to tail, with glowing red scales edged in black. Their wings were larger than the mainsails of the king’s ships. They had long tails that ended in tufts of flame. They looked as if they swam through the air, surfing the wind as they sailed down the slopes, aiming toward the king’s ships.
Greatshadow himself remained in the caldera, a beast composed of flame and smoke, who roared, in a language I’d never heard yet instantly understood: “ALL MUST BURN!”
“He noticed,” said Infidel.
These were the first living dragons I’d ever seen, even though I’ve handled a lot of dragon bones in my time, and seen more than a few depictions of the beasts carved onto walls or woven into tapestries. Dragons used to be numerous, until the Church of the Book nearly wiped them all out.
The survivors are the primal dragons. These beasts were so fluent in elemental magic that they eventually became the elements themselves.
Of course, if there are no more ordinary dragons, I had to wonder just what the hell was flying toward us. The creatures looked exactly like they did in the books in the monastery; big serpents, with a long neck and serpentine tail, and a short, thick, pot-bellied torso with four legs a bit too small in proportion to the rest of its form. What they lacked in legs, they more than made up for in wings. The wings were easily as wide as the body was long, huge membranes of drum-taut flesh that reminded me of the limbs of jungle bats.
