by Dante King
I was getting better at distinguishing the many varied races that made up the melting pot that was the Mystocean Empire and the Drako Academy, and the young stern-faced woman looked to be a Naga—essentially a race of snake-like humanoids. She had a flat, oval face and sharp amber eyes with vertical pupils. I knew that she was a messenger because she wore the sky-blue cloak that denoted her so.
“Yes?” I managed to say, between labored breaths. “You’re after me, are you?”
“Indeed I am, Dragonmancer,” she said formally. When she pronounced the ‘cer’ of ‘Dragonmancer’ she drew out the ‘s’ sound, and a fork tongue flickered between her teeth. “I have a message for you.”
“Report then,” I said, waving a hand and wiping the sweat off my forehead with the back of my arm.
I had an inkling that it must have been important. Cloaked messengers were only sent by the top hierarchy, messenger-drakes saved for more mundane messages.
“Here you are, sir,” the Naga said and, instead of speaking her message as I thought she would, she handed me a tightly furled scroll that had been sealed with green wax. A single dragon talon sign had been stamped into the wax.
“Who’s it from?” I asked, but the messenger simply bowed her head, turned away, and marched off.
I turned to look at Rupert, Bjorn, and Gabby who were standing nearby and trying their best not to be nosy.
“What do you think this is all about?” I asked, waving the scroll around.
“Open the bloody thing and find out,” Bjorn rumbled, before realizing that we were in a public area and not an inn and adding, “Sir.”
I slit open the seal and unfurled the scroll.
Dragonmancer Noctis,
I require your presence immediately to discuss a possible excursion that you and your squad would be singularly suited for. Report to my quarters immediately to discuss said excursion and to receive your orders.
Captain Remington Cade
I looked up at the boys. They must have seen the excitement in my eyes because Rupert said, “What is it, Mike—I mean, Dragonmancer Noctis?”
I waggled the scroll in my hand. “I think,” I said, moving toward them until we were basically in a huddle and keeping my voice low, “that we might have ourselves our very first mission. If I’ve interpreted this right.”
Gabby raised an eyebrow and nodded inquiringly at the message in my hand.
“It’s from Captain Cade,” I said in answer.
Gabby’s other eyebrow migrated north to join his other one.
I handed the scroll to the mute scout, who was standing in the middle of my three squad members, so that each of the trio could read it.
Rupert was the first to look up.
“A m-mission?” he whispered, the light of adventure shining in his eyes like a couple of silver dollars at the bottom of a well.
“Plunder… Treasure… Scales!” Bjorn muttered, fingering his forked beard thoughtfully.
“I can hear the bartenders, innkeepers, brothel mistresses, and armorers rejoicing at the very thought of you being able to pay them back, big man,” I said to the half-Jotunn. “Not to mention Old Sleazy.”
Bjorn made a derisive sound in his throat like a mammoth pulling its foot out of a peat bog. “It’d have to be a pretty sizeable fucking haul if they all expect to get paid back,” he said.
I took the scroll back and stowed it inside a pocket of my breeches.
“Anyone know how to get to the quarters of our favorite captain?” I asked.
To no one’s surprise, Gabby nodded.
“Lead the way then, my friend,” I said.
With unerring confidence and without a faltering step, Gabby headed our little procession and led the way into the castle. As was usual, it turned out to be a mission in itself just to find Captain Cade’s offices. The Drako Academy was one of those buildings that could have taught Hogwarts a trick or two when it came to sheer size and the labyrinthine quality of its passages. The place must have been saturated with some serious magic, because I swear you sometimes ended up looking out of a turret window hundreds of feet off the ground without ever having set foot on stairs.
After about twenty minutes, tramping along through the enormous, torchlit stone corridors, Gabby cut through a section of snaking, rough-hewn passages, and we popped out into an airy hallway with massive windows overlooking the glittering sea.
“Shit, this must be where the best real estate in the castle is, huh?” I said. “With views like this.”
It was a golden autumn day. The air was crisp and fresh and coming straight off the mountains. It smelled like snow again, but the sun was shining down from an azure vault of sky.
Gabby grunted and pointed down the corridor. I gave myself a little internal head shake. There were times to stop and smell the roses, but this wasn’t one of them.
We walked down the sunlight dappled corridor. The breeze wafting against the side of my face carried with it the salt tang of the ocean and I was reminded abruptly of California, of spending evenings bumming around on Santa Monica pier.
Gabby stopped outside of a nondescript, but clearly very thick, wooden door that was banded and studded with iron. He motioned to it with his head and grunted in his throat.
“This is old Chuckles’ lair?” I asked the scout softly.
Gabby nodded.
“All right. Nice one, Gabby,” I said to the mute and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Do w-w-we come in too?” Rupert asked.
“Nah, you guys stay out here,” I said. “I’m pretty sure that that’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it?”
Bjorn nodded. “Yeah, guard the door, sell our lives dearly if enemies try and enter, and all that shit,” he said drily.
I punched him on a bicep as thick as a normal person's thigh. “Your enthusiasm is to be applauded.”
I knocked on the door.
“Enter,” came the polite, but somehow menacing, reply.
I pushed open the door and braced myself to step into the noxious, faintly disquieting office of the creepiest person that I had met since arriving in the Mystocean Empire.
Instead, I entered an airy, brightly lit studio filled with the smell of the sea coming in through a doorway that led out onto a balcony. The room was as large and well-appointed as you might expect of the hierarchy. Where I had been expecting a sort of dank, dark sex-dungeony set up, there was a suite of shiny, comfortable-looking Chesterfield-style couches set around a fireplace of clean, sandy stone. There was an enormous table in the middle of the light-filled space and on it a proper 3D map of what I assumed was the Mystocean Empire was carved.
“That,” I said as I closed the door behind me, “is fucking beautiful, sir.”
It was too. Every mountain range was carved in intricate detail. Veins and pools of silver marked out the rivers and lakes. Each town, city, and village was represented with a collection of tiny houses of a castle—depending, I guessed, as to how big each settlement was. A stick of crystal represented the Crystal Spire, of course, and a block of carved emerald represented the Empress’ palace in the capital, Wyverngarth. The truly incredible part of the map though was that, moving slowly about and above the giant wooden thing, were a series of blinking, fluttering lights.
“I respect your appreciation for my little project, Dragonmancer,” the Captain said, “but I would warn you that that sort of uncouth language will not be tolerated while you are standing within the sanctity of my chambers. Despite how other officers might deign to talk to one another and their troops, I endeavor to cultivate an air of decorum and genteel hospitality in these quarters. Is that understood?”
I refused to let this little show of power rankle me. Instead, acting as if I barely heard the waspy-looking guy, I said, “Yes, sir. What are those lights, sir?”
Captain Cade moved forward. Those cold, gray eyes of his were as fathomless as the ocean that I could just spy through the open balcony door.
“They are
simple spirits that I have had enchanted to mirror the movements of those dragonmancers who are out on scouting assignments at the moment.”
“The Storm Riders,” I said, the name coming back to me from Preceptor Tang’s first Combat Theory lesson.
“Quite so,” Cade said curtly. I might have imagined it, but I thought a wistful look passed over his face.
I looked at him then, a little more scrutinizingly. The man’s appearance was perfect and pristine. His beard was so neat that it looked like he stuck it on every morning. His gray hair, with its streaks of gold running through it, was swept carefully back on his head and there wasn’t a strand out of place.
“You sent for me, Captain,” I said.
“Yes, I did indeed,” the Captain said.
His thin face was turned toward the window, as if he were momentarily lost in thought, or else weighing something up in his mind.
Then he turned to face me once more.
“Sit,” he said, indicating one of the immaculate leather couches.
I did as I was commanded. The leather squeaked softly under me as the sofa took my weight.
The Captain remained standing and began to pace slowly up and down.
“Have you any thoughts as to why it is I sent for you, Dragonmancer Noctis?” he asked.
I decided that there was nothing to be gained by beating around the bush or playing the dummy.
“Me in particular?” I asked.
Captain Cade glanced at me. He gave me a thin-lipped smile. I don’t think I’d ever seen a smile that looked less at home on a face in my life.
“You have discussed the note with your squad already?” he asked, and there was the ghost of a smirk in his voice.
“That’s right,” I replied, allowing just a touch of ice into my voice. I didn’t like the slimy prick’s tone. It spoke too much of a guy who held the ‘lesser’ troopers in contempt. “They’re waiting outside the door, in case you wanted us to carry out the mission at a moment’s notice. Sir.”
“Very good. Ready to depart at a moment’s notice, eh? Very good. I approve most heartily of your keenness.”
A slight frown creased my brow. I looked at the Captain, trying to discern his thoughts in his face, but the axe-blade face was turned toward the window and all I could make out was the silhouette of his profile.
“What were you thinking that you might want us to do, sir?” I asked.
“Straight to it, is that it, Dragonmancer? That’s the spirit,” Cade said.
What the fuck else do you think I came here for? was what I wanted to say. A fucking game of chess and a cozy catch-up?
“Better to get cracking, sir,” I said. “At least, I suppose I might as well hear what you have to say, and then I can let you know whether or not it’s something that I think my squad and I are capable of tackling.”
Captain Cade gave me another one of his cold, mirthless smiles.
“Oh, I don’t think you’re going to have to scratch your head for very long over whether or not you and your men will be able to handle it,” he said. “It will be more about whether or not you feel it is beneath you, I think.”
I couldn’t be sure, but what with this whole unnatural-feeling heartiness and the slight sense that this senior officer was playing up to my vanity, I felt like Captain Cade wanted me and the boys to accept this mission far more than he was letting on.
“I better hear what it is you want us to do, sir,” I said.
In response, Cade pointed at a spot on his beautiful carved map some little distance east of the Crystal Spire.
I stood up and walked over to stand on the opposite side of the large table. At a glance, the spot that Captain Cade was indicating was a village or a town that was situated at the side of a lake, behind a belt of woodland. There didn’t seem to be any other settlements nearby.
“The village of Swanside, located next to the idyllic Swan Lake,” Captain Cade said.
I thought about making some allusion to the famous ballet, but only for about half a second. What I knew about ballet you could have inscribed on the back of a toothpick, and Captain Cade wouldn’t have known what the hell I was saying anyway.
“How far is that from here, sir?” I asked. “I don’t really have a gauge as to distances when measured in dragonflight.”
Another one of those quick little spasms of discomfort rippled across Captain Cade’s face at the mention of dragonflight. I began to suspect that the thin, severe bastard might be as sore as a sunburned ass when it came to all things dragons. He was, after all, not a dragonmancer.
“Perhaps, as a fellow humanoid male, he is sensitive to the fact that you alone of all males in the Empire are able to be bonded with a dragon—and an Onyx Dragon at that,” Noctis communicated with me.
I grinned inwardly. “Even if you say so yourself, huh?”
Noctis imprinted a nonplussed sort of vibe on my consciousness.
I wasn’t really surprised he didn’t get the sarcasm; dragons were cunning, dangerous, and wise, sure, but they were nothing if not proud.
Still, he might be onto something, about dear old Captain Cade.
“I am onto something,” Noctis assured me, with the assertiveness of a being that was centuries old and had seen a thing or three.
“Might be that the poor bastard has fallen prey to the green goblin, you reckon?” I said to him.
“I saw and sensed no green goblin,” Noctis said matter-of-factly. “And one with my senses would have. They reek worse than the dead.”
“I meant Envy,” I explained. “He’s envious of me. Of dragonmancers in general.”
“Yes. I think that could be so,” the Onyx Dragon said.
“It is not far from the Crystal Spire when traveling by air,” Captain Cade said, cutting into mine and Noctis’ telepathic conversation. “About an hour’s flight.”
I nodded. Any excuse to travel by air was all right with me. “And what would we be doing at Swanside, sir?” I asked.
Captain Cade gave one of those airy waves of his long hand. “It’s a small Leprechaun logging village. Apparently, some of their woodcutters have spied what they believe were bandit scouts out in the woods. They fear that a raid is imminent, and they have asked for us to send a dragonmancer out to investigate.”
“Is there a likelihood that things will get bloody, Captain?” I asked.
Captain Cade gave me a vaguely amused look. “This is the Mystocean Empire, Dragonmancer Noctis,” he said. “There is always a chance that things will get bloody. The Empire itself floats on a sea of the stuff like an island.”
“I just meant, should we go expecting a fight, sir?” I asked, checking a rising impatience.
“No,” Cade replied, running a finger along the side of his surgically exact beard. “No, I shouldn’t say so. I think it more likely that all you’ll have to do is walk about and make your presence known. That should be enough to appease the worry of these rustics.”
I sighed inwardly.
Rustics. He makes it sound like people who live simply and mind their own business are in some way inferior to everyone else. Hasn’t the stuck-up prick ever read The Lord of the Rings or The Sword of Shannara? It’s the rustics that usually have to step up and save the motherfucking day.
It didn’t sound like the sort of mission that was going to result in me and the boys being covered in glory and finding ourselves up to our eyebrows in treasure, but if it meant getting out of the Drako Academy for a spell, then I was all for it.
“I’ll fly out there straight away, sir, and check it out,” I said, casting another glance at the map. It looked, if you left the castle from the side that faced the sea, that all you had to do was take a sharp right and then fly straight east until you saw Swan Lake below you. There was an island in the middle of the lake, which would make identifying it pretty straightforward.
Captain Cade rubbed his hands together, then folded his arms behind his back and paced slowly over to the desk that sat at the back of t
he room near the balcony door.
“Good,” he said. “I think this will be exactly the sort of five-finger exercise that a new dragonmancer needs to get under their belt before they embark on harder assignments. I’ll send word to your instructors and superiors that you and your squad have been deployed on a mission.”
He began to rifle idly through the scattered papers that littered his desk. He did so in a manner that I interpreted to mean that I could make a move and get out of his immaculate hair.
“Shall I report when we get back, sir?” I asked.
“Oh, don’t concern yourself with that, Dragonmancer Noctis,” he said. “I doubt this will be an assignment worth reporting on.”
I left the room, shutting the door crisply behind me.
Chapter Fourteen
As soon as I left the captain’s quarters, Rupert, who looked like he was about to burst if he didn’t hit me with about fifteen questions, opened his mouth to speak. I held up a hand and motioned for my three squad members to accompany me down the hallway.
When we had rounded the far corner, I turned to them.
“Swanside, a Leprechaun village about an hour’s ride east of the Crystal Spire,” I said, preempting Rupert’s inevitable query. “Next to Swan Lake. Anyone know it?”
All three of the lads shook their heads.
“What’re we doing?” Bjorn asked, cutting straight to the point.
“I wouldn’t get too excited, man,” I said. “So far as I can figure, it sounds more like we’re going out there to play at soldiers, rather than fight. Saying that though, grab all your shit and meet me outside the gate of the Upper Bailey in an hour.”
The three men of my squad made sounds of agreement.
“One hour,” I said. “I’ll see you then.”
My squad hurried off down the way we had come while I, using the sense of direction that I was quickly coming to nickname Noctis Maps, went a different way and headed for the Armory.
