by Dante King
“Yeah,” I said, “I’d say that you’re right on that one.”
We were squatting in the big bush, with its bright blue flowers, which was situated at the top of a low hill. The hill rose from the floor of the forest without going above the canopy and afforded us a lovely, unencumbered view of the bandit camp below us. We had found a couple of bandit sentries making use of the bush’s cover to hide the fact that they were sharing a sneaky pipe of some pungent herb that glowed with a purple flame from their encampment. Bjorn had cut them down like a silent shadow, emerging out of the undergrowth to smack one of the men in the chest with his axe before pulling it free and slicing the other man’s head off.
“How many do you make it, Gabby?” I asked our scout and tracker. I probably had better vision than him, given that I was a dragonmancer, but I wasn’t an expert at estimating the numbers of an enemy encampment like I was led to believe Gabby was.
It was a large camp. Very large, it looked to me. There were half a dozen campfires, some fairly substantial looking huts that had been knocked up out of split logs, tree branches, and random stones, and a lot of heavily armed men.
A hiss from my right made me look. Gabby held three fingers up and then made a rough circle with his hand.
“Three hundred?” I asked.
Gabby waggled his hand and nodded.
Roughly three hundred, I thought. That’s a fair few. Even as a dragonmancer. Even with magic and Noctis on my side.
Still, I didn’t really have any options. There was no way in hell that I was going to go back to the Leprechauns and tell them that, on second thoughts, I’d deemed that taking on the vile fuckers who gutted their fellow Leprechauns was a little too risky for my taste.
Not that I wanted to in the slightest. After seeing what these bandits had done to those innocent men, women, and children…
No, I thought resolutely. Justice is coming to visit these sick sons of bitches today, and he’s got a heavy hand and no mercy.
I ran my eyes over the camp again. The bandits were dressed in a diverse assortment of gear. I figured that that was because they kitted themselves out with whatever they could get their hands on. The best fighters in their ranks probably got the best gear by right of killing better equipped men and purloining it from their corpses.
The bandit encampment was surrounded by a rough palisade, an anti-cavalry fence of sharpened spikes. Sentries lounged about and chatted amongst themselves, but they were spaced evenly around the perimeter of the fence.
As I had observed to the others before, the canopy of high trees screened the movement, configuration, and numbers of the bandits from the air. It also meant that, when the fighting started, it would be like battling inside a very high-ceilinged hall—more indoors than out because of the roof of leaves and branches above and the tree trunks that looked like the pillars in a hall.
I noticed that there was a center point to this band of misfits and murderers, a hut constructed out of neatly cut logs and roofed with turf. This building alone told me that, as casual and relaxed as this outfit appeared at a glance, there was probably a streak of cohesion running through it. A hierarchy of sorts.
It also told me that whoever was holed up in that central cabin ran a tight ship when it counted and was probably the meanest motherfucker in this who’s-who of villains. The worst in a bad bunch, as they say.
“Boss?” Bjorn whispered.
“Yeah?” I replied.
“What’s the plan, boss?” the half-Jotunn asked me.
Good question.
“We need to throw them into uncertainty,” I said. “Sprinkle enough uncertainty around men like these and chaos will bloom, I think. I doubt they have much discipline—I mean look at the dudes that Bjorn just iced. That sentry who he turned into a Pez dispenser was high as a kite on duty. If they’re all like that, we shouldn’t have a problem.”
I spoke with more confidence than I felt, but then I wasn’t going to allow myself to waver in front of the men under my command.
“Three-hundred against f-f-four is still three-hundred against four,” Rupert pointed out.
A slight shift in the scents surrounding us, an almost intangible change in the air currents, was the only warning that I got that something was different.
“Someone comes,” Noctis said in my head a second later.
“Better make that three-hundred against six, boys,” said a soft, deadly voice from out of the undergrowth to our left.
Then, the alien smell coalesced and turned into one that I recognized. Shea butter, fresh sweat, and leather—scents that reminded me simultaneously of sex and violence, somehow. Although, that might have been because I knew who the smell belonged to.
“Hello, Tamsin,” I said in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.
Tamsin, a fellow dragonmancer and hobgoblin, slipped out of the bushes like a red-skinned dream. Her black hair, which usually flowed freely behind her like tattered storm clouds, was bound up in a tight bun at the back of her head. She wore a black bandana pulled low down her forehead. Her face and bare arms were strategically smeared with what might have been dirt or ash to help disguise her red-colored skin. A spear was in her hand.
“Mike, fancy seeing you here,” she said in that sexy predator’s voice of hers. “Always getting yourself into trouble.”
“I’m starting to think that I always have a toe in the trouble pool to be honest,” I said.
Gabby had whirled around in a crouch at the sound of Tamsin’s voice, with his bowstring drawn to his ear. With a hissing exhalation of breath, he untensed and pointed the arrow at the ground.
“Hello, Mike,” came another voice from off to my right. “Looks to me as if you have your work cut out a bit here.”
It was Penelope. The all-blue Knowledge Sprite stepped out from behind a sapling and moved in a crouch to where I was lying prone in the bush. She had a quiver of arrows and a short bow slung across her robed shoulders.
“Hey, Pen,” I said. “How’re things?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“Excuse me for not warming up with a bit of small talk, but what the hell are you guys doing here?” I asked Tamsin.
The hobgoblin ran a finger down the thigh-length chainmail vest that she was wearing and said frankly, “Can I trust your squad not to repeat what they hear here?”
I looked around at the boys. They all nodded.
“Good,” said Tamsin. “The reason that Penelope and I were sent is a delicate one. You might say that it’s off the books.”
I shot an inquiring look at Penelope.
“Tamsin and I were approached by Sergeant Milena,” the blue-skinned Librarian said, picking up the thread of explanation. “The Sergeant pulled us aside and told us that she and Lieutenant Kaleen had overheard Captain Cade recording a messenger-drake correspondence in his office. Now, they were at pains to iterate to us that they only heard the tail end of his missive, but they said that he signed off with something along the lines of ‘that’ll teach the male Earthling upstart that there is more to being a dragonmancer than a lucky bloodline,’ or something like that. He thought that was quite funny, apparently.”
I looked at her in surprise.
“Yes,” Penelope said. “I was surprised too. It’s extremely irresponsible for the Captain to send a fresh dragonmancer on a mission that they might not be trained for. We are not commodities that are lightly thrown aside.”
“No, it’s not that that surprises me,” I said. “Cade is a cocknoggin, and I have a feeling that he’s a little bit jealous of the fact that he and I share reproductive parts, but that it’s me who is the dragonmancer and not him. No, sending a greenhorn on a possibly deadly mission seems like something he’d do. What surprises me is that he thought it was funny. I didn’t think he was in possession of a sense of humor. Did he laugh?”
Penelope frowned and said, “So Sergeant Milena led me to believe in her recollection of the events.”
“Weird,” I said
, trying and failing to picture the menacingly polite Cade cracking up.
“T-two more dragonmancers, Mike?” Rupert asked, breaking into my thoughts.
Tamsin turned to regard him with her cool, unsettling yellow and gold eyes. “You should show more reverence when addressing your dragonmancer, soldier,” she said curtly.
Rupert went bright red and looked at his feet. He looked like a six-year-old who’d just been told to put on the dunce cap and go and sit in the corner.
“M-m-my apologies, Dragonmancer Fyzos,” Rupert said to Tamsin.
“Would you quit with that shit around my squad, Tamsin,” I said. “You should have heard that I don’t go in for all that ass kissing bullcrap. I let my coterie call me Mike, so don’t let it bother you.”
Tamsin held up her hands.
“Speaking of coteries,” I said. “Where are your squads? I thought leaving school without them is a big no-no?”
“The sergeant and the lieutenant told us to make all possible haste here,” Tamsin said. “That means flying on dragonback, not by longship. Our squads are coming behind, but I’m thinking that we’re probably going to have to move on these bloodthirsty gentlemen before they get here. I did some reconnaissance of my own while you were perched up here, and it appears that they are heading on another raid shortly. We take them in their camp, where they feel the safest, we could have our very own slaughter.”
The hobgoblin smiled, and her yellow eyes flashed.
“Who doesn’t like a good challenge though, hm?” she asked, in her melodious and seductive voice.
“Right,” I said, “now that there are six of us against three-hundred odd, let’s come up with a plan. I’m thinking that we make it a nice simple one so that there’s less potential for disappointment when we find ourselves up shit creek.”
“What are you thinking, Mike?” Penelope asked.
Despite being far more powerful than the average soldier, I could tell that the Knowledge Sprite was nervous. That was unsurprising, really. She didn’t strike me as someone who’d enter into battle with a smile on her face and a spring in her step.
“I’m thinking that the three of us dragonmancers take one side of the camp each,” I said. “We start off my firing in a bit of magic to stir this nest of assholes up. Make sure we’re not on opposite sides of the camp, just to prevent any friendly fire. Gabby, you come with me. Bjorn, you’re going to accompany Penelope. Rupert, you’re backing up Tamsin.”
Rupert’s gulp was audible even over the rustling of the leaves. Tamsin glanced sideways at my squad member, then at me, then back at Rupert. She grinned, showing off her sharp, white teeth.
“Don’t worry, Rupert,” she said. “I don’t bite. Well… not you, at any rate.”
“Gabby,” I said, addressing the mute, “I want you to hang back out of sight and pick anyone you can off with that bow of yours.”
Gabby nodded. Once.
“Once the camp is nicely mixed up and trying to figure out what the fuck is going, then we run in and slaughter every last one of the pricks,” I said.
I gazed around at the five determined faces that were looking in my direction.
“Do we give quarter if it is asked for?” Bjorn rumbled, running a thick thumb across the blade of his axe. His beard was splashed with blood from one of the men that he had killed just a moment before.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Give them as much quarter as they gave the kids in the village.”
A chilling smile spread across the big, scarred warrior’s face. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Tamsin sighed and stretched her neck from side to side.
“Now, this is all very entertaining,” she said, “and very strategic, but can we go and be dragonmancers now?”
I looked through the branches of the bush we were hiding behind, peering past the sweet-smelling blue flowers.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go and do our fucking jobs.”
Chapter Seventeen
Now that my muscles were enhanced with dragon blood, it was surprisingly and terrifyingly easy to break the sentry’s neck. In fact, I was a little overzealous and ended up twisting the bandit’s head so far around that it almost ended up doing a full three-sixty.
From off to my right, a soft gurgle told me that Gabby had slit his man from ear to ear—or possibly from chin to cock. You never knew with Gabby.
I dropped my sentry into the bushes beside me and peered cautiously around a tree trunk. I was right on the edge of the enemy camp. I reckoned that there was only a matter of seconds before we kicked off and things got wild.
Gabby materialized out of the forest. There was a splash of arterial spray across the sleeve of his mail hauberk that had not been there a few seconds before.
“All good?” I asked him.
In response, the mute drew a thumb across his throat. I didn’t need to be fluent in ASL to know what that meant.
“You stay here,” I said. “I’m going to creep around a bit further and then light this place up.”
Gabby gave me a thumbs up before he crouched behind the trunk of a tree, an arrow in his hand and ready to nock should the situation require it.
I moved silently through the undergrowth, wondering how long it was going to be before Tamsin got bored and—
A dragon—a deep, honey yellow, with a triangular head stuck at the end of a medium-length neck, black wings, and a unicorn-like horn standing out from its forehead—burst out of the trees and flew low toward the middle of the encampment. On its back, was Tamsin.
“Not long at all,” I muttered.
I summoned Noctis into my Right Arm slot, drew a careful bead on the base of a mammoth tree limb that stretched out over the edge of the camp. Then I released a carefully considered Shadow Sphere.
The Chaos Magic spell hit where I wanted and vanished that segment of the tree in a burst of silvery-sable mist. Suddenly, the branch found that it was unsupported.
It must have weighed ten tons.
There are few things more distracting to a bunch of professional criminals than a dragon turning up. I can state that one categorically.
With the appearance of Tamsin and her dragon, Fyzos, all eyes in the camp were turned up. There was a deal of yelling and pointing, a mass of sudden confusion.
The gigantic tree limb fell to the earth as Tamsin swooped her yellow dragon downward. It landed, just where I thought and hoped it might do, in the middle of a cluster of soldiers that had been gathered around a campfire and gnawing on sticks of meat. At least ten men were flattened or maimed as the great limb landed. A fresh chorus of screams joined the general clamor.
I fired a few more Shadow Spheres at likely looking tree limbs, sending them crashing to earth. One crushed a tent, another landed on a pyramid of stolen beer barrels. The barrels exploded under the impact, sending beer and shards of oak wood flying in all directions. Splinters scythed in all directions as the barrels burst, and I saw one punch through the face of an elvish-looking dude, while another took the top two inches off an orc’s skull, exposing his slimy brain to the air. The orc reached up, poked at his exposed brain, and fell in a heap.
Meanwhile, Tamsin steered her dragon downward, ignoring the arrows that leapt up to meet her. If I had wondered what a Force Dragon was, then I didn’t need to wonder much longer. The rhinoceros-sized beast flew in low, pulled back its head, aimed at a cluster of bandits fiddling around with their crossbows, and let loose with a deep, reverberating roar that felt like it shook the ribs in my chest loose. Up close and personal, it seemed like the weird, supersonic roar did more than that. The bandits burst apart like half a dozen ripe tomatoes. Blood and viscera misted the air.
Arrows started looping in from the forest in two spots, fired with deadly skill by Gabby and Penelope. As I hesitated on whether to join the fray, or maybe fire off a few more spells, I saw one bandit stiffen in mid-stride as a shaft went through one ear and burst gruesomely out the other. An enemy archer, aiming up Tamsin and Fyzos as they
passed over again, fell lifeless with an arrow through the top of his head. Another toppled with a shaft sticking from his throat. For just the two of them, Gabby and Penelope were putting on a show that would have had me thinking there were two dozen archers hidden out in the woods.
It does not take your average soldier that long to get over the element of surprise and start getting their shit together. I could see, now that the initial shock of the dragon and the attack in general had passed, that the bandits were an experienced crew. There was no standing around looking dumbstruck, no panic, no crying and wailing at the sides of dead friends. They grabbed their weapons and started hunting for the enemy that had dared to raid their base.
And boy, did they get a sight of the enemy. More of an eyeful than many of them wanted, I imagine.
Bjorn came roaring out of the trees on one side, his huge axe in one hand and his other raised in a fist of defiance.
That’s my cue, I thought. I couldn’t let the big man go out there alone. There were just too many of the enemy for even him to last long against.
I dashed out from my hiding place, firing a full-bodied Shadow Sphere that vanished some bastard from the waist down and left him briefly screaming in utter terror as his guts spilled neatly out of his torso. I quickly shifted Noctis into Weapon Slot A in my inventory, and the Chaos Spear appeared in my hand.
Shit, but it was a joy to fight for real with Noctis’ dragon blood thrumming through my veins. It made me so fast, so strong, so fucking deadly. I felt like the apex predator, like a fox that had been let into the chicken coop.
Although, it was worth bearing in mind that these chickens were armed with swords, clubs, maces, and all those other heavy, pointy, and very sharp things that I had only glimpsed in movies.
As I sprinted like a racehorse across the open ground dividing the edge of the forest from my enemies, I saw Rupert jump out of the bushes and ram a knife into the base of a bandit’s skull. He ripped the blade free and threw it overhand at a svelte, athletic bandit with dull green skin who was running in my direction. It caught the green dude in the temple and sent him crashing into another bandit running in the opposite direction.
