by Matt Forbeck
We hadn’t spoken much since. Despite that, I found myself worrying about what might happen to him now. Would the rest of the council find some way to lay the blame for my actions at his feet, no matter how unfair that might be? Would he join the fight against the Ruler of the Dead’s army of the unliving, or would he figure out a way to get ferried to the coast instead? Not that it would be much safer there in the long-abandoned seaside village of Watersmeet, but with the Ruler rallying her forces around Dragon City, there might be a chance to find a half-rotted boat there and escape.
What kinds of plans would the Wizards Council explore? Would they stand and fight? Would they reinforce the Great Circle with their might? Or would they send a desperate plea for help to one of the rare skyships that sometimes brought visitors and trade from distant lands to our ravaged shores?
Could they amass a shred of hope in their collective heart, or had they already given up?
Either way, it seemed the fates of both Danto and my father would remain a mystery for now. Frustrated, I decided to do what I’d been trying to avoid ever since Alcina had left me alone with the crystal ball. I turned my attention to the Dragon’s corpse and the Great Circle just beyond.
CHAPTER FIVE
I found the Dragon’s body right where I’d left it, the massive corpse sprawled out across the lip of the gash that he’d torn into the city’s flesh. The Guard had set up a perimeter around the cadaver and marked it off with extra-bright glowglobes, defying the shroud of night that would have otherwise enveloped it. From above I could see that it covered more than a city block, which even down in Goblintown made for a lot of ground for a single creature.
The Guard had roped off the Emperor’s corpse with a silver chain I’m sure was enchanted from one end to the other. Maybe it was there to keep the Ruler of the Dead from taking over the Dragon’s corpse. Or it could have been some kind of elf idea of funeral decoration.
I don’t know the last time anyone had tried to bury a dragon. Of course, we hadn’t had any burials in Dragon City ever, as far as I knew. It had been all cremations or — as I’d recently discovered — a spot on the Dragon’s dining table for centuries, ever since the Imperial Pact had been forged.
We were in new territory here, at least for most residents of Dragon City. The Dragon Emperor had ruled over the city since its founding, and we knew little of any kind of life without him. Some of the elves here were old enough to remember what the proper thing to do with a dead body was, but even they probably hadn’t had a lot of experience with getting rid of a corpse that must have weighed several tons.
I don’t know if the Dragon was unique or not. The existence of the dragonet pointed to not, of course, but I’d never seen or even heard of another dragon of any kind outside of the legends parents told children to scare them into staying in their beds all night. There were other eggs besides the one the dragonet had hatched from, I knew, but I didn’t have any idea who had them or what could be done with them.
Then the real reason the Guard had fenced off the body with a silver chain struck me. The Dragon was the greatest source of dragon essence in the entire city. A single scale from his armored hide was worth more than most people made in a year. If you added up the value of his corpse, it might be enough to purchase the entire rest of Dragon City, and it was just sitting out there in the open.
Worse yet, it lay in Goblintown. Every bastard who’d ever felt the Dragon had done him wrong not only had a chance to literally get a piece of the Emperor’s hide but also to make a fortune out of whatever he could carry away. The fact that the corpse wasn’t swarming with goblins stunned me.
Then I remembered the zombies gathering against the Great Circle, right there in easy earshot of the Dragon’s corpse. Anyone who got close enough to the cadaver to pluck a scale from it wouldn’t be able to escape the rising tide of groans and moans and ever-more-insistent scratching and pounding and wailing washing up against that massive wall. That might be enough to scare even the greediest ogre away — at least for now.
I was about to turn away when I spotted something come flapping in from the moonlit sky. For a moment it hung framed against the silvery sphere itself: bat-like wings spread wide, lizard-like head darting forward, prehensile tail arcing down below it. I knew it in that instant.
The dragonet had arrived to check on his father’s corpse.
He dove down out of the darkness and pulled up at the last moment to perch upon his father’s shoulder. Some of the guards turned and pointed at him, and one of them raised his wand at the dragonet. Another guard slapped the weapon down and with a single disgusted glare shamed the would-be attacker into putting his wand away.
They didn’t take their eyes off the little guy though, watching him with as much curiosity as me as he crept sideways along his father’s massive shoulder. Once the dragonet reached the hollow of the Dragon’s neck, he dropped his head forward and nuzzled up against the cold and still corpse as if he might somehow manage to rouse the Emperor from a long and dreamless sleep. He kept at this for a long while, flames dribbling from his nostrils as he snuffled against the cadaver’s scales.
In the end, frustrated with the lack of response from the Dragon, the dragonet drew back his head and breathed fire at the Emperor’s neck. He bathed the Dragon’s throat with golden blazes, sweeping his flames back and forth, but the corpse didn’t respond with even the slightest twitch.
The dragonet threw back his head then and hurled himself up into the sky. Once he was a dozen yards above his fallen father, he snapped his snout back down and unleashed every bit of fire he had in his belly at the Dragon’s chest.
The guard who’d had his wand out before went for it again. This time the guard who’d stopped him before slugged him across the jaw, knocking him sprawling away from the pit. None of the other guards did a damn thing to stop him.
The dragonet’s fire brought the scales on the Dragon’s chest to a glowing-hot broil. Once the little guy let up with his incinerating onslaught, I could see that the Dragon’s scales there had fused together under the tremendous heat. Despite that, they still held.
And still the Dragon lay dead.
I saw the dragonet spiral away up into the air then, unleashing a howl that chilled my blood. At first I wondered how I could hear such a plaintive wail through the silenced crystal ball. Then I realized that it had been so loud that it had reached my cell’s window from all the way down the mountain. A moment later, I realized the sound of that anguished cry had also echoed through my mind.
It’s all right, I thought as hard as I could. It’ll be all right.
I didn’t know what I was doing. The idea that I could speak to the dragonet telepathically was too new. We’d only managed it once, and that was right before I’d shot the Dragon dead. I wasn’t sure I hadn’t just imagined it.
Right after that, the dragonet had disappeared. I’d been too busy not getting killed by Yabair to be too bothered by it at the time. I had assumed the little guy could take care of himself. If he could survive getting backhanded over the wall by the Dragon, he could handle anything the Guard could throw at him. It wasn’t until I’d been brought up to the Garrett that I’d started to wonder just where he’d gotten off to.
I tried to follow him with the crystal ball, but the night was too dark and he was too fast. He disappeared before I could even track the direction in which he might be headed. I scanned the sky for him for a few moments but soon gave it up as a waste of time.
Since I had the crystal ball’s point of view already up in the air over the Dragon’s corpse, I turned it away from the city instead. The Great Circle stood there before me, the crenellated parapet that topped the high stone wall lit up from one end to the other. The bright, glowing line cut through the darkness like a magical border someone had drawn on a map, separating Dragon City from the encroaching dangers beyond.
On most nights, the guards on top of the wall would patrol the dimly lit walkway that stretched along it — wh
ich was wide as any road in town — keeping an eye out for the random creature trying to mount it. Most times a sharp-eyed lookout in the Night Tower to the west or the Day Tower to the east would spot any such creatures before they got even halfway up the high, sheer wall of the finest dwarf-cut stone. The snipers there often made a game of seeing how many shots it took to knock such a damn thing away. They got extra points if their targets died — well, ended — before they hit the rocky ground below.
Tonight, though, every guard from both the Imperial Dragon’s Guard and the Auxiliary Guard had been called to arms. They lined the wall from one end to the other, fixed at posts overlooking the drop to the foothills beyond. Most of them carried rifles, but some of them had bandoliers of grenades strapped across their chests as well.
Others — mostly elves — bore wands out and ready in their hands. A few of these flew in two-guard teams flying chariots or carpets fitted with straps for tight aerial maneuvers. One of them took the controls while the other zapped spells down at the creatures threatening their city.
Not that they were doing much good.
In the beams of magical light that swept down from the parapets and towers, I could see thousands of the walking dead massing up against the wall. From this height, they moved like a creeping rot oozing toward the city, threatening to surround, envelope, and devour it. The attacks the Guard hurled at them caused the edges of that ooze to recoil where they struck, but the mass of creatures only pulled back for a moment before advancing again.
I zoomed down to get a closer look at this filthy disease that threatened to swallow the wall, the exposed bits of which glinted like the shaft of a sword in the moonlight. It was composed of bodies in various states of rot and disrepair, each and every one of them long dead. They crawled over each other like ants, using their collected bulk to build ladders from their bones and shredded flesh that the ones that came after them could use to climb higher and higher.
It seemed impossible that the lands outside of Dragon City held so many corpses, but I’d heard the legends of the thriving civilizations that had once sprawled there. They’d been filled with millions of souls before the Ruler of the Dead had triumphed over them. As far as we knew, Dragon City was the only holdout of life on the entire continent.
That put all of those dead bodies at the Ruler’s disposal. Something about her magic, her control of them, must have kept the creatures from falling apart. Otherwise, they should have all rotted away to bones and dust long ago. Instead, she’d preserved them in their horrifying state of undeath for untold centuries.
Given enough time, I had no doubt that the Ruler’s army of the dead would be able to surmount the wall, and soon after that happened, the city would be theirs. I wondered if the Ruler of the Dead had tried something like this before, in the city’s early days. If so, I imagined that the Dragon would have taken to the air and swept the wall clear with his cleansing flames. After enough failures, even the Ruler of the Dead would have given the assault up as a bad job and contented herself with lying in wait.
Now that the Dragon was gone, though, there was no reason for her not to try her luck again. Without our great protector, it fell to the Guard and the people of Dragon City to stop the advance this time — if we could.
The way the dead kept crawling up the wall, clawing their way higher and higher over each other, I had to admire the Guard and their resolve. I could only hope that their leaders had some other plan in the works instead of just trying to hold the wall with rifles and wands. Otherwise, those brave people would be the first among us to die — and join the Ruler’s ranks.
CHAPTER SIX
I was still staring at the surging tide of death threatening to top the Great Circle when I heard the sound of wings beating at the window of my cell. I dropped the crystal ball, and it clanked away from me, the vision it had brought me falling with it. I rushed to the window and spotted him there: the dragonet.
He gave a little, high-pitched roar of glee when he saw me, and he perched there on the sill of my window, clutching at the bars with his upper claws. I reached through the bars and stroked his head, and he nuzzled up against my touch.
Voice, he said in my head. My Voice.
I knew instantly what he meant. His words were less like words and more like wholly fleshed concepts. I couldn’t have misunderstood him if I’d tried.
“No,” I said out loud. “I’m not your Voice. For one, I can’t wear a burning robe, right?”
I am the Dragon.
That one shocked me a bit. I pulled my hand away from him, then reached out and raised the end of his snout so I could look him in the eyes. “No,” I said. “The Dragon was your father.”
That word “was” felt strange in my mouth, but I knew that he would understand me completely.
The Dragon is dead. Long live the Dragon.
I shook my head at the little guy. “It doesn’t have to be that way. You’re too young to be an emperor. You’re not ready for it.”
The city needs an emperor. It needs the Dragon.
I nodded at that. Having just seen the Ruler of the Dead’s army massing against the city’s wall, I couldn’t deny the truth of the dragonet’s thoughts. “The Dragon’s gone. We can’t rely on him anymore. We have to defend ourselves instead.”
Is the city ready for that?
“I honestly don’t know.”
Then I must be the Dragon. You must be the Voice.
“The Dragon and his Voice are dead. We aren’t them. We can’t replace them.”
We must.
“It took the Dragon decades to grow to his full size. Maybe centuries. You’re not even two weeks old. And me, I’m no ancient elf.”
Who am I if not the Dragon?
“That,” I said, more to myself than to the dragonet, “is an excellent question. I’m looking forward to figuring that out with you. Maybe someday you’ll be like your father. Maybe you’ll be something entirely different. All I know is you’ll be you.”
Who am I?
“You’re you.” I knew what he meant. I just didn’t have a better answer for him.
What’s my name?
I rubbed my chin and looked at the little guy. The moonlight streamed in around him, silhouetting him in the window and against the bars that kept him out of my cell and me in. He snuffled at me, and fire edged from his nostrils, casting him in a warm and golden light.
“I don’t know how that works with dragons,” I said. “With most people, parents name their kids right after they’re born.”
My father never named me.
“Do you have any idea about your mother?”
He shook his head at me, his snout wobbling back and forth. Not at all. She might be dead too.
I reached through the bars and scratched him behind his ears. “I’m not your parent,” I said.
You’re all I have.
“Did the Dragon even have a proper name?” I asked. “He couldn’t have always been known as ‘the Dragon,’ right? I mean, that’s more of a title or a type than a name.”
That’s all I knew him by.
I shrugged. “I suppose we have lots of names in our lives: child, parent, purpose.”
You are Freelance?
I smiled. That’s what had been stenciled on the door of my office before it had been destroyed. I wondered how he knew that. Could he read my mind? Did he somehow see that while he was still inside his egg? Or had someone just told him?
“I am,” I said. “Still.”
What is Freelance?
“It means I work for myself, and I hire my services out to others as I like. I make my own decisions. I take responsibility for my actions. I’m my own boss.”
Not the Dragon?
I sighed. “Not anymore, for sure.”
Give me a name.
“I don’t know if I should. I don’t know if that’s my place.”
The Dragon is dead. You are all I have.
I couldn’t help but grimace at that. I’
d killed the little guy’s only parent. I suppose if I hadn’t felt responsible for him before, I’d earned every damn bit of it now. His imprinting on me had been an accident, after all, a case of serendipitous timing, but with the death of the Dragon he had no one else left in his life. No one he could trust.
No one but me.
“All right.”
I stepped back and looked at him in full. He was a handsome creature in his own way, a tiny version of his father, a creature of ineffable power. Although he wasn’t the Dragon, he held that potential within him. He was not the great conflagration, the unstoppable fire. Not yet.
“You’re the spark,” I said. “Not the fire but the fire starter.”
Spark. The dragonet moved his long head from side to side as he contemplated that, as if he was rolling the thought around inside his brain. I like that. I am Spark.
Through the bars of my cell, I leaned forward and put my head up against his and held it there for a moment, smiling the entire time. “Hello, Spark,” I said. “I can’t tell you how good it is to know you.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
After the dragonet — Spark, I mean — left, I finally managed to grab some shut-eye. I stuffed the crystal ball into my jacket pocket, curled up on my warmed-up spot on the floor, and did my best to ignore the sounds wafting through my window from the battle slowly being met below.
By the time morning came filtering in through my window, the stone slab below me had cooled, and the chill from it had crept into my bones. I rose shivering to the sound of another bowl of cold gruel being shoved through a slot at the bottom of my cell door. I ignored the pasty slop but got to my feet and began pacing my cell in an effort to restore some circulation to my limbs.
