“I know what Destry did,” I said, loudly enough for Sirrahon to hear me. The dragon looked down at me. “He tore me down and built me anew.”
I raised my arm and pointed at the dragon’s monstrous face. I blinked, raising a protective shield around my body. Then I hit him at nearly point-blank range with the heaviest bolt of energy I could muster.
KRACKOOM.
Even with my magical shield, up close the explosion looked like a rainbow-sheened supernova. Sirrahon’s reptilian face didn’t have much musculature to show emotion, but I swore I saw a look of surprise and dismay as the bolt hit. His snout rocked back as if I’d delivered a dragon-sized uppercut.
The pressure around my rib cage vanished as the impact lifted Sirrahon off the ground. My eardrums vibrated painfully as he half-slid, half-rolled backwards until he fetched up against the opposite wall. Tooth fragments rained down around me like bone-sharp snowflakes.
The dragon shook his head, partially to clear it, partially in disbelief. A horrific gash ran along one side of his snout, exposing where I’d burned his flesh and shattered the teeth in his upper jaw. Where it hadn’t been cauterized by the flame, it dripped ichor that made the marble floor sizzle.
Sirrahon let out a pained series of chuffs as I got to my feet. I wiped the blood from my face and then wrapped a blue-sheened nimbus of shielding around my body. His voice sounded in my head once again.
“How are you doing this?” he wheezed. “Destarius…he turned on me!”
“Yes,” I gritted. “Just like Archer turned on you. Your allies were all false ones.”
“Not all of them. Nor did I throw away their lives, the way you did with your fayleene.”
My rage took hold as I thought of Liam’s form, lying bloody and still in the far corner. Something dark flowed through me, and I didn’t resist it. I hurled white-hot bolts at the dragon between each cluster of words I spat from my mouth.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve cost me, Sirrahon?” I snarled, as each bolt snapped through the air to hit dragon scale or stone. “DO YOU? What pain you’ve put me through? To see my friends hurt and killed? To lose those I’ve loved? To find them, and lose them again?”
Sirrahon let out a roar of pain and outrage that shook the room. He shrugged off the energy blasts and lunged at me. I barely managed to roll aside in time. The dragon’s jaws came together with a thunderous crash that spattered me with blood from his wound.
My shield blocked the droplets, but I watched in horror as they bubbled and smoked, eating into it. The smell of battery acid filled the air. A couple of the larger spatters ate through and landed on my shoulder. Now it was my turn to shriek.
The blood droplets ate right through fabric and skin. Then the pain exploded further as the acid dug into the muscle, burning down to the collarbone. The rancid odor of acid mixed with the smell of my own burning flesh. I had no choice. I diverted my power to dull the pain and regrow the eaten skin and flesh before I passed out.
Sirrahon reared up, his face and body now pitted and bloody where my blows had scored. I’d blown entire scales off his torso, bisected one of his skull-horns, and he limped as he moved. But for all this, the dragon was very much still in the fight.
He acted in that second or two where I had to heal myself. He let out a snort followed by the accelerating chuff-chuff of an oncoming diesel engine. I stood my ground and desperately raised my shield again.
Sirrahon cut loose with his fiery breath just as I did so. My world turned incandescent, as if I’d been immersed in lava. The flames danced overhead and to both sides, charring the wall behind me and turning the floor the dull red of fresh rolled steel from a foundry.
And through it all, Sirrahon’s cruel laughter echoed in my mind.
“I know your pain, human. I am the author of much of it. As you are the author of mine. Just as you are a vertice for one branch of fate, I am a vertice for mine. Our paths were set to clash. We had no say in it. It was destined from the day we were born.”
The flames around me grew in intensity, forcing me to feed more energy into the shield to counter it. Something in what the dragon just said made me pause. But I had no time to puzzle it out, not yet.
Sirrahon slowly closed his mouth, channeling the flame into a tighter and tighter cone. The energy of his breath shaded from red and into nova-white. The same trick he’d used to incinerate Grayson Archer.
But Archer had been a wizard. I was a sorceress, and that meant I’d learned and practiced differently.
My mind went back to the endless practice sessions on the island. The endless weeks spent trying to lift and hold a tiny green glass marble. Holding it steady in my mind. Balancing it on a knife’s edge of concentration.
It paid off now. Even as Sirrahon’s cone of fire tightened, I focused my shield to compensate. I felt the dragon straining as his breath weapon reached its limits, and that freed me up to try something else. Once again, I squinted to see the lignes that ran through the room.
I spotted the gray-black lines running through the slabs of marble that made up the floor. While I couldn’t shoot them off into space, I could try a variation of what I’d used against Destry. With a downward slash of one hand, I sent a ripple through those lines.
The floor to the dragon’s side erupted in a rolling wave of cracked marble. Sirrahon’s breath cut off as it smashed him in the flank with several tons of force. The wave crested, carrying him along until he hit the pillars along the far wall. I was rewarded with a snap as several of his spinal scales broke in half.
Sirrahon shook his head and righted himself. I’d hurt him, but this fight still wasn’t over. And worst of all, I’d started to feel tired. Drained. Destry had given me all his power, but it wasn’t infinite.
The second limitation of sorcery – that my power was of limited duration – was coming back to bite me.
Just my rotten luck.
Chapter Sixty
If Liam hadn’t already neutralized Sirrahon’s magic, then I wouldn’t have stood a chance. But as it was, my sorcery only stalemated the dragon’s physical abilities. I fought down a feeling of panic as I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to carry this battle by force alone.
Then some of Destry’s final words came back to me.
Go outside what you have learned. Find what is inside your foe to defeat him.
Those words came back to me, because of something the dragon had just said.
I know your pain, human. I am the author of much of it. As you are the author of mine.
What was inside of Sirrahon that I could use?
With one of my brain’s weird clicks, I knew what I had to do.
I dropped my shield. I’d need all my remaining power to pull this off.
The dragon turned and readied his charge. He saw my magical nimbus wink out.
“So you have accepted your fate,” he rumbled. “This fight is mine.”
“No,” I corrected him. “I’m just taking our fight to a different level.”
Sirrahon claimed that our paths were destined to clash. Because I was a vertice. Because I was a Hero. That meant I could bend or break whatever fate had in store.
Even if it was Sirrahon himself.
I reached out with my concentrated Will. Unlike my vingladahir practice with the sooty terns, I wasn’t gentle. I slipped around and through the bony plates of the dragon’s skull and dove into his mind before he could stop me.
Sirrahon went berserk.
He fell back, roaring and screeching like a mad thing. He snapped his jaws and thrashed his limbs, turning the Royal Court’s furniture into so much kindling. I ignored the reptile’s tantrum as I dug in with my own mental claws, using all I’d learned from a pooka’s tutelage to push aside the mental barriers he threw up.
Images washed over me. I watched at a distance as a group of griffins let loose a rope-wrapped boulder to plunge into the ocean depths. I tramped through a mass of loose earth and snow that filled a ruined valley. I rec
ognized the wide curve of a sluggish-flowing river, its banks muddied by hundreds of hoofprints and a nearby crossing strewn with dead centaurs.
In each scene, one thing was the same: Sirrahon had been mourning his loss.
These were the times I’d managed to strike back against the dragon’s plans. When the Old Man of the Mountain had been tossed into the sea. When I’d buried the race of the Seraphine. When I’d helped bring Bonecarver’s defeat on the banks of the Oxine.
I’d actually hurt Sirrahon. The thought both thrilled and sobered me.
“How long have you had your friends?” Sirrahon roared defiantly. “A year? A decade? A century? Mine spanned millennia, and you took them away!”
I caught a glimpse of another emotion buried under the rage. It was fear. I sought it out. Followed it back to the source.
What was Sirrahon really afraid of?
Another flood of images now. A battle from the Old War, filled with cries as creatures of the Dark were sealed into stone or beneath the earth. The throwing down of a wyvern queen before a throne of marble. The screams of a demon as it was consumed. A stripling of a dragon, his side half-charred by flame, wailing next to the bodies of his family.
“You’re the last of your kind,” I breathed, as the revelation washed over me. “You sought to bring back the Creatures of the Darkness, to rekindle the Old War…because you were alone.”
“The strong must rule the rest! It is only right!”
I ignored his desperate words.
“But you don’t care about ruling anyone. That’s why you didn’t smash Teyana or the human settlement that’s grown up around it. You only care about finding those missing eggs. If they are of Dragonkind, they won’t hatch into the mindless ferals that Andeluvians ride into battle. They’ll be sentient. And you won’t be alone anymore.”
Sirrahon’s rage turned into a seething mass of roiling emotions.
“Your knowledge of my past does not matter,” he finally said. “We shall finish this fight. I shall crush you and have my world back.”
I was running on magical fumes by this point. No way I could keep this up, let alone go another ten rounds with Sirrahon. I pulled the only trick I had left. I pushed all my remaining chips into the pile and bluffed.
“No, you won’t,” I said coolly. “I am stronger inside your head than out of it.”
A snort of contempt. “You cannot shape my thoughts, human. I am too old, too wise to fall for tricks of the mind.”
“Maybe not. But I can smash what thoughts and memories are in here like so much glass. I can mindbreak you so that nothing sentient remains.”
That shook him to the core. I knew it would. Sirrahon was closer to Nagura than I’d dared hope, which helped give me the edge.
The wyvern queen had dealt with her existence as the last of her kind so very differently. Yet I knew that she and Sirrahon shared one characteristic from their ancient past. Their identities were centered around being thinking beings. About having been creatures Raised by the Hearts of the Mother.
“I may no longer be able to win,” he finally admitted. “But neither can you. Mindbreak me if you must. Dragons do not go quietly. In my insanity, I can pull this palace down around me and kill what friends you have left.”
I peeked into his brain and saw that he was telling the truth. At best, he’d revert to a dragon’s feral nature. Even if he didn’t tear the palace down, he’d be in a perfect spot to take on and likely wipe out King Fitzwilliam’s dawn attack.
But I wasn’t going to accept it. I was a Hero, wasn’t I? A vertice, no less than Sirrahon himself? And I had a power greater than magic at hand. The part inside me that said: This is not how my story will end.
At the very end, I embraced this idea. And something occurred to me.
“There’s nothing that says we both have to lose,” I said. “You said yourself that the strong rule. The weak bend, or the weak break.”
“You are the stronger, I am the weaker,” Sirrahon said grudgingly. “But you shall gain nothing from breaking me!”
“Fine. Then you shall bend.”
I felt a spark of something deep within him that felt very much like surprise. And hope. I could work with that. I thought of Queen Nagura, asleep in her healing slumber below the palace, and the answer came fully formed to my mind.
“You want those eggs,” I declared. “And I want you gone. So leave this place without harming anyone else. Leave the kingdom and do not return. Consider the eggs hidden beneath this palace hostages of the Kingdom of Andeluvia.”
“When they are found,” he spat, “they shall be smashed.”
“No, they shall not. Upon my word as a knight of Andeluvia, I won’t allow it.”
The dragon wavered. “You have that power?”
My voice rang against the throne room’s burned and scorched roof.
“I am the woman who has bloodied you and brought you to heel. I am the woman who has drowned your friends in the sea, slain them on the field of battle, and buried them alive under rock and ice! Do you think I lack that power?”
Sirrahon said nothing for a moment. He flexed his talons before he answered.
Chapter Sixty-One
“So be it,” Sirrahon said heavily. “I shall leave the field burnt and scarred, but I shall remember your words. I shall know if those eggs are harmed, and my wrath shall turn all who wronged me to ash.”
“You’ve made a wise decision.”
A sharp chuff of a laugh.
“Maybe you have made a foolish one. Your word is only good for as long as this kingdom stands. When this realm fails or falters, I shall return. And when I do, I shall make those here tremble and wish they’d never lived to see the destruction that shall follow.”
With those words ringing in my ears, Sirrahon snatched up the Scarlet Crypt in one set of scorched talons. Then he turned to painfully climb the wall behind Fitzwilliam’s wrecked throne. The dragon made his way up through the smashed skylight window.
A slithering sound echoed through the room as Sirrahon left. I held my breath as the sounds of his grew fainter, along with the diminishing red pulse of the crypt. Finally, the sounds vanished, along with the hellish glow cast from the giant ruby.
The clack of approaching hooves rattled off the ceiling, the rhythm uneven, halting. I caught a whiff of marsh gas as a blue sphere of weirlight bobbed past the charred and broken set of antechamber doors.
Though the weirlight barely managed to illuminate half the throne room, I stumbled towards the light, feeling as bone-weary as if I’d run a marathon. The Court Wizard hobbled through the doorway, his face creased and covered in sweat. His broken rear leg had been roughly bound, and he put much of his weight upon a length of wood he’d made into a makeshift crutch.
“Galen!” I cried. He looked at me in surprise as he took in the utter wreckage of the throne room. “It’s over, it’s over!”
“Dayna?” he said, astonished. “What happened here? The dragon, the Scarlet Crypt…the air lies so heavy with the spoor of cast magic that I can barely breathe!”
“It was Destry,” I said, as I made my way towards him. “He turned on Sirrahon, gave me the power to fight the dragon!”
“Destry gave you the power? I don’t understand–”
“It’s hard to explain,” I said, as I struggled to hold my emotions in check. “But I wouldn’t have stood a chance if Sirrahon had also been able to cast magic. Liam’s sacrifice saved us all.”
A look of pain crossed Galen’s face. A second set of clacks, and the Protector of the Forest stepped out of the centaur’s shadow. His neck and torso were dotted with the rusty red of fresh cuts and punctures. Particles of broken glass gleamed from where they stuck to his dun-colored fur.
“It wasn’t my sacrifice,” Liam said softly.
For a moment my brain couldn’t accept what it saw. I looked between Liam and the fayleene form that lay in the nearby corner. I used the very last glimmer of power within me to view the ligne
s around the throne room. Right before my magic winked out for good, I caught a wisp of green indicating the tiniest trace of life energy.
Heart pounding in my throat, I ran to the fallen figure. Liam and Galen followed as quickly as they were able to in my wake.
My feet made horrible, wet sounds as I stepped across marble slabs made slick with blood. The white-tailed stag lay on his fawn-spotted side. His legs lay sprawled where he’d fallen, his wound gaping, his entrails spilled. But his eyes opened, and they weren’t Liam’s mismatched set of brown and emerald.
They were golden. Griffin’s eyes.
“Shaw,” I whispered, as I knelt by him. “Oh, God.”
“Thou doth recognize me,” he breathed. “I knew thou wouldst, Dayna.”
Galen limped over to stand next to me. His voice shook. “Liam and I were still trapped. You had left to throw your life away against the dragon. I realized that we had one more source of fey magic we could use to neutralize the dragon’s demonic powers. The pendant that Liam and I had created.”
“What did you do?”
“I reasoned that Sirrahon could be goaded into using up his death magic…if he were presented with what he thought was one of the fayleene.”
“You transformed Shaw into one of Liam’s people? The way you transformed me that one time?”
The Wizard shook his head.
“If I had, then he would have been slain by that same lethal magic. I used a shaping spell. To give him the appearance of a stag. So that he could get close enough to invoke the pendant’s magic.” The centaur’s voice failed as his eyes brimmed over. “It was my idea, Dayna. I changed him. It is all my fault.”
All too late, the rest of the unicorns’ prophecies played through my head.
The centaur who shall change one of his friends for the worse.
The fayleene one thought was dead but still lives.
The griffin with the spotted flank.
Shaw let out a pained cough.
Dragon with a Deadly Weapon Page 30
