Dragon Breeder 2

by Dante King

  “Your ladyship, Overseer,” Lieutenant Kaleen said, bowing stiffly, “may I introduce Dragonmancer Noctis.”

  I stepped forward. I didn’t bow. That was a little subservient for my tastes, and I’d never really been a big advocate for positions of authority that expected you to scrape and kneel just because they were positions of authority—the Los Angeles Police Department could have attested to that. I did, however, incline my head.

  “Overseer,” I said, “it’s a pleasure. And, may I just say, that you’re a sight for sore, gritty eyes.”

  A discontented murmur ran around the table at my words. I got the feeling that I might have said something borderline inappropriate.

  The Overseer regarded me out of the lightest, brightest green eyes I had ever seen. I had thought Elenari had green eyes, but this woman’s were the same shade as your average highlighter pen.

  “Dragonmancer Noctis,” she said, and her voice was as cool and sweet as summer wine. “I have heard much about you. Many reports come fluttering to my waiting ears on eager wings. Fluttering, fluttering, fluttering from so many sources, and whispering all about our one and only male dragonmancer.”

  “I’d like to say that I hope it’s all good stuff,” I said, “but I’m a little bit too realistic to believe that.”

  “News and gossip are not good or bad in themselves,” the Overseer said. “It all depends on what side of the fence you’re sitting on when the reports and gossip come in.”

  “Speaking of reports,” I said, “I guess that Sergeant Milena has filled you in on the adventures of the most jealous Captains to ever have a stick stuck up his ass, Captain Cade?”

  The corner of the Overseer’s mouth twitched. She leaned back in her carved, high-backed wooden chair and crossed her legs. I saw that she had more black tattoos snaking down her calves and into the suede, ankle-high moccasins that she wore.

  “Yes. The Martial Council and I have heard all about Captain Cade,” she said.

  “And how he led a faction of the Bloodletters into a bit of harmless clandestine rebellion?” I said. “Not to mention his dabbling with cross-breeding?”

  The men and women of the Martial Council—there were a dozen of them, six women and six men—once more dissolved into a nicely orchestrated bit of muttering.

  The Overseer allowed them to grumble amongst themselves for a little while. Then, she placed her hands together in her lap. The carping stopped at once.

  “We are aware of everything that happened,” the Overseer said. “Or, at least, aware of everything that you and your two fellow dragonmancers say happened.”

  “It’s the same thing,” I said. “We don’t have any reason to lie, do we? Not like good old Captain Cade.”

  The muttering of the council started up for a third time. This time, despite knowing better, I couldn’t help myself in saying, “I get it, girls and boys, it’s a sore topic. You probably promoted the mad bastard to the position he was in when my dragon was forced to broil his head, so naturally you don’t want some Rank One dragonmancer reminding you about it. Still though,” and here I wagged a reproving finger at the twelve uniforms arrayed around the table, “you have been very silly sausages, the lot of you.”

  “Why, you disrespectful upstart!” yelled one of the older men, rocking a pair of salt and pepper mutton chops.

  “Do you not teach new recruits to curb their tongues these days, Kaleen?” a woman with a dangerously pretty smile and waspish face said to Lieutenant Kaleen.

  The Overseer raised a hand, and the heated outbursts simmered down. The old boy with the fantastic whiskers sat down heavily in his chair. He was staring daggers at me, but it had been a long time since anyone had been able to scare me with a look.

  “As I said,” the Overseer said to me, twirling one of her curls around her finger, “we have heard all about the late Remington Cade. Part of this council’s job tonight is to figure out just how the man managed to hoodwink us so completely. To more easily help us in this work, I would appreciate it if you would tell us, once again, how this evening developed into the fully-fledged demonstration of urban destruction that it culminated in being.”

  I sighed.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a drink is there?” I asked. “The last thing to pass my lips was mortar dust and some pretty questionable river water.”

  After I had refreshed myself from a jug of wine on the table, I launched into the tale of that night’s antics.

  “And, as so often is the case with megalomaniacs,” I said, “Cade didn’t just try to kill me again like he ought to have. No, he and I traded a bit of snappy banter, which gave me the time I needed to communicate a plan to my dragon. It was he who ensured that Cade’s head was served up well-done.”

  The Martial Council, as was its MO, apparently, had a little mutter to itself.

  “Thank you, Dragonmancer Noctis,” the Overseer said. “An entertaining, if not highly troubling, account it proved to be.”

  “Dragons, monsters, good-looking women, a villain with an ego you could moor a warship to—just call me George R. R. Martin,” I said lightly.

  “I don’t follow you,” the Overseer said.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “Ending on that final note, where your dragon carbonized Captain Cade’s head,” the Overseer said, as flippantly as someone might mention what kind of sauce they’d had with their fries, “this was the dragon that you bonded with during the Transfusion Ceremony, is that correct?”

  “No,” I said. “This is the dragon that I mentioned before, the dragon that freed Amara and her dragon from their chains. I bonded with him, I guess, through natural channels.”

  “Impossible,” said one of the men, a rather short guy with a spare tire around his midriff. “Codswallop.”

  “Well, I’ve never walloped a cod and don’t really see what the hell that’s got to do with anything,” I replied levelly. “But, with all due respect, that’s the truth. Who are you to say it’s impossible?”

  “I am a member of the Martial Council, boy,” the man said, “and I’ll have you know that in two hundred years, I have never heard of anything so ludicrous as that. A dragonmancer bonding with two dragons! I ask you, Overseer, are we meant to believe that?”

  I didn’t bother to respond to the corpulent gentlemen—some people are just too pompous to be helped. I turned my attention back to the Overseer.

  “That’s the truth of it, Overseer,” I said. “I don’t know how to explain to you how I came to be able to bond with Garth, but I was.”

  The Overseer tapped the table a few times with her beringed fingers. Then she said, “I won’t ask you to explain how you bonded with this Pearl Dragon. However, I will ask you from whence this dragon came. We have no record of it having ever been bonded to any other dragonmancer before you.”

  “I, uh…” I said.

  I guess the secret is out, I thought.

  “Well, the thing is, Overseer, I share a room with a couple of other female dragonmancers,” I said.

  “I am aware of your lodging situation,” the Overseer said.

  “Right. Well. I’m sure you know how it goes, being a beautiful woman yourself,” I said, trying to ingratiate myself a little before I dropped the bomb into her lap. “Well, in a nutshell, the three of us ended up, you know…”

  No one said anything. The Overseer’s face remained as impassive and unreadable as a piece of rock.

  “You know,” I said, “we… served up a course of chicken noodle soup together… No? Did the Devil’s dance? Shellacked the old canoe? Got to know each other in a Biblical sense? Hung twenty toes out the bottom of the bed?”

  A few of the members of the Martial Council were looking increasingly confused.

  “You mean,” the Overseer said, the corners of her mouth most definitely creeping northward, “that you engaged in sexual intercourse with these female dragonmancers.”

  I snapped my fingers. “That’s the one,” I said.
“Exactly.”

  “At the same time?” one of the women on the Council asked.

  “No ma’am,” I said. “Well… not that first time anyway.”

  Before we could get any deeper into the details, the Overseer said, “All right, so you slept with these two women separately—”

  “The first time,” I added in automatically.

  “—initially,” the Overseer said. “And then what?”

  “They became pregnant,” I said. “In fucking record time, I might add. Bit of a shock to the system I can tell you.”

  “Both of them were pregnant?” asked the guy with the mutton chop sideburns.

  “Correct,” I replied.

  “And?” the Overseer prompted.

  I took a deep breath. Best to just rip the bandaid off.

  “Then, within just a few days, they gave birth,” I said. “They gave birth to dragonlings.”

  The uproar was as predictable as I had imagined it would be, and the roar stayed elevated for quite some time.

  I took a step back and let the council yell at each other for a while. I thought a couple of the members might have fired a query or two my way, but I chose to ignore them and wait until the bedlam had died somewhat and they’d got all of their incredulity off their chests.

  When the volume had started to decrease somewhat, I decided to take the unicorn by the horn and get a word in first.

  “Before any of you say something as hackneyed and unoriginal as ‘do you expect us to believe’ or ‘are you trying to tell us that you created baby dragons’ let me just say this: if you’re registering a bit of disbelief and shock, just imagine how I felt!”

  I took a breath and then plowed on.

  “Yeah, I know it sounds like my brain has gone fishing, but that is what happened. We had sex, Elenari and Saya got knocked up and gave birth in about a fifth of the time that it takes a chicken egg to hatch, and two dragonlings were born. Boom. Just like that. What’s more, by chance, I found a crystal on a thief that Saya, Elenari, and I had killed, which turned out to be one of those crystals that dragons need to consume to mature and tether themselves to this world.”

  “And that dragonling that matured…” the Overseer said, her voice surfing over the babble of voices emanating from the Martial Council like a seagull bobbing over a tidal wave.

  “Was Garth, the Pearl Dragon, yeah,” I said.

  “So, this new dragoon that you organically bonded with is, in actual fact, of your blood?” the waspish woman said.

  “That’s right,” I replied.

  The woman ran a hand through her short, faded pink hair and said, “Hm, well, that would decipher the mystery around the organic bonding somewhat, I suppose…”

  What followed after that reveal was what a court scribe might have labeled as a “heated debate.” It could more accurately have been described as a shitshow. I stood listening as the ladies and gentlemen of the Martial Council jabbered and pointed and gesticulated at one another and the world in general. I took a few more steps back to blend into the background.

  “They’re taking it well, aren’t they?” said a voice in my ear. It was Lieutenant Kaleen.

  “Yeah,” I muttered back out of the corner of my mouth. “Yeah, it would’ve been a real shame if they’d gotten all in a twist and lost all sense of dignity and decorum.”

  The word “decorum” was almost lost in the din of the little fat guy slapping his porky hand on the round table and bellowing, “He should be taken for extensive probing and interrogation!”

  I sighed inwardly.

  Why is that civilization’s first response to anything out of the ordinary—whether it be a guy who involuntarily knocks up girls with dragons or a questionable mole on their asscheek—is to probe it?

  “Because creatures such as you fear that which they do not understand, and seek to contain it so that they can study in a way that does not scare them,” Noctis said sagely.

  “And dragons don’t fear the unknown?” I thought back.

  “Dragons fear nothing,” Garth said, butting in.

  “The youngling is right,” Noctis said. “Dragons fear nothing. Fear only hampers. It is not worth the time it takes to feel it. Dragons see something, and then they either choose to kill it or they don’t. Either way, there is no fear.”

  “That’s all very well and good,” I said, “and would probably make a great bumper sticker—or in your case a slogan that we could tattoo on your ass—but I don’t think that’s going to help me getting out of a probing.”

  “Do you realize the implications of what this means, if the lad is telling the truth?” one of the other men was saying exasperatedly.

  “Of course I know what it means, Andar, I’m not an imbecile,” one of the women retorted sharply. “The implications are huge, both for us and the Empress.”

  “The potential benefits to our military might be stupendous!” the little fat guy said. “Just think… this dragonmancer could repopulate dragons. We could grow our army tenfold!”

  “We could become the undisputed powerhouse of our world once more…” one of the women said.

  Only the Overseer said nothing through all of this hubbub. She remained completely silent, sitting upright in her chair with her legs crossed, one foot bopping in time to a music that only she could hear.

  The talk was turning a little bit too much towards the whole ‘greater good’ theme, which I always found unsettling. How many times had things almost gone sharply downhill because some giant idiot had decided that they didn’t like the way the world was and had to sort it out, for the better of all mankind obviously, by destroying most of mankind.

  “Whoa, whoa,” I said, raising my hands above my head. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I’m hearing some pretty awkward talk of probing being bandied about. Locking me up so that you can run whatever kind of experiments you’re thinking of would be a stupid idea.”

  “Why is that?” the woman with pink hair asked bluntly.

  “Well, not to put too fine a point on it,” I said, “my… my seed is, apparently limited as far as firing out baby dragons left, right, and center goes.”

  “I believe that a dragonmancer that professes to be able to sire dragonlings,” the little fat fellow said, “would be able to sire them whenever he damn well pleased!”

  “Well, I could be polite and say that I agree with you, pal,” I said in a tone of voice that was so rich with scathing that the man flinched, “but then we’d both be wrong.”

  The Overseer uncrossed her legs. As if someone had cracked a whip, the rest of the Martial Council quieted and sat down.

  “How do you know this?” the beautiful, curly-haired woman asked me, cocking her head to one side in her interest. “Elaborate, if you would be so good, Dragonmancer Noctis.”

  I took a couple of steps closer to the round table.

  “What I know,” I said, “is that my seed is limited in its power to create dragonlings. I can’t just spend all my time fucking female dragonmancers and churning out a procession of dragons, as some of these fine, moral folk seem to think.”

  I looked brazenly around the circular table. My eyes moved from face to face. I didn’t really care who these people were. I took comfort in the fact that I was, in this world at least, as rare as hen’s teeth, and that would probably protect me when I inevitably said something they didn’t like. Clearly though, they were not used to having subordinates get all up in their grill. Not one of them could hold my eye for longer than a few seconds.

  “How do you know this though?” the Overseer said politely. She alone seemed to be completely unmoved by my obvious growing annoyance.

  “Because I told him it was so,” said a familiar voice from behind me.

  Claire, the Seer, floated serenely into the room. She bowed low to the Overseer but did not really even acknowledge the rest of the Martial Council.

  “Seer,” the Overseer said, “you received my summons then. It’s a pleasure to see you here once more. It has b
een many moons since last you descended from Augury Grove and visited us.”

  “Too long,” Claire agreed. “Although I find that, as I get older, these fierce debates of this council hold less and less enjoyment for me. I like the quiet.”

  “Well, it’s lovely to see you here again,” the Overseer said. “Doubly so, if you can shed some mystery on Dragonmancer Noctis’ claims that he has sired two dragonlings.”

  “It is no claim, but a fact,” Claire said promptly. “I have seen them.”

  Any doubts that the Martial Council might have had that I was lying were instantly dispelled with these words. It was apparent that no one would dare contradict the Seer.

  “He is also correct when he says that his seed has lost its potency—” Claire started to say.

  “Just the dragon-making part of it, you understand,” I said quickly, not wanting anyone to get the wrong idea. “The machinery is working just as it should be still…”

  Claire raised an eyebrow at me, and I shut up.

  “He speaks the truth with regards to that matter,” she said again.

  “So, what? He’s spun us this fine yarn for nothing? This knack of his is gone, used up, is that it?” one of the women from the council asked.

  “I need to find a crystal—certain crystals—to house the dragonlings in,” I said, looking at the Seer who nodded encouragingly at me. “I also need to find a kind of substance in the subterranean realms before my fucking magical sperm will be magical again.”

  There was some grumbling from the Martial Council at my use of profanity, but the Overseer said, “What kind of substance?”

  I shrugged.

  “All I know is what Claire has told me,” I said. “That we need these materials to secure the future of the dragons of the Mystocean Empire and to be able to house the dragonlings’ power once they are born. The other dragonling, Wayne, I need to find him a crystal as soon as possible…”

  The Overseer stood up. She was a tall and majestic woman, who would have been equally at home on the cover of Vogue as she clearly was running the Drako Academy. The rest of the Martial Council followed suit at once. When she spoke, it was with a decisiveness that brooked no argument or gainsay.