“Of course. It’s the reason you can summon dragon fire in those diminutive stones you send me. It takes fragile magic to seal away such a paltry portion of my flame into something so trifling. You think it a common practice among other Veknu Milaris to summon stones to bring forth a dragon’s flame? The others must first learn to master ordinary embers before using a dragon crystal to transform it into its fiercest form. You were able to circumvent those steps thanks to me.”
“I see. Then do you have other such delicate spells I can take advantage of?”
“You think I would withhold something worthwhile from you?”
“I don’t know. I’d earn more trust from some of these Vanguard soldiers if I told them all my tricks, but I haven’t said anything about my illusion spell. In fact, I’m having a hard time recalling if Alex knows about it. Something tells me it’s best I don’t show anyone any spell unless I have to.”
“A sensible approach for warriors who wish to keep an advantage for as long as possible.”
“And that leaves me with my last question.”
“Lest you sprout wings, a tail, or can grow scales, no, I know of no other spell I can bestow you. We must work with what we have, which is more than most.”
“Yeah, I know, but I’m sure being greedy for power never hurt anyone.”
Chapter Twenty-One
On reappearing, Eric explained that he received orders to protect the submarine from any turncoat or outlaw in the Ruts. He was to do so until a couple of Vanguard ships could send in reinforcements and submarine experts to study the machine. To expediently carry these experts and reinforcements to and from the ships and Ruts, I would have to do a lot of flying over the next few days. That was fine by me, as each summoning session allowed me improve how well to manage my prana reserve.
Two Vanguard ships arrived in the night. One of the vessels took in the turncoats, including Maya and the children. As anticipated, the newcomers Aranath transported expressed their awe in stupefied utterances and open-mouthed miens. I had no idea whether they had been informed about me beforehand, but once we were done in the Ruts, word of my existence was surely going to hastily spread the second one of the ships made port.
I figured the Vanguard leaders anticipated for the turncoat mission to occupy me longer than it had so far, giving them additional time to figure out how to deal with the visitors from another realm. However, for all I knew, maybe they had already begun spreading the news themselves to get ahead of any misinformation. The krewen head ranger would at least not conceal the information from her kind for long. From what I had been told about the speediness of conveying messages here, I hoped to get a better idea of what to expect from them and what they expected from me once I left the Ruts.
For the time being, I contented myself in pushing how long I summoned Aranath when asked to call upon him, light training with regular flame, and being taught how to handle a gun. Isabel and Svren remained my main tutors, but the arrangement didn’t stop me from seeking other perspectives from time to time. Since no one wanted to guess whether gunshots were friendly or a sign of an ambush, Alex and I still weren’t allowed to actually shoot anything. The furthest we went was pulling the trigger of an unloaded weapon.
According to the engineers, the submarine was not quite seaworthy, meaning the finished one Maya heard about must have been the one to sink the Orkan. They also determined it possessed mechanisms and structures not seen in related craft. From the sound of it, the engineers wanted to complete the submarine so they could steer it to a Vanguard base. However, such a venture would mean bringing in more supplies and manpower into a treacherous land, a land also claimed by Pleulor, a nation who might want to procure the submarine for their own military to inspect. Scuttling the discovery sounded like the only practical option.
Along with reaching my limit to how many social interactions I cared to maintain, not knowing what orders the other Vanguard squads received concerning the corrupted strangers made me hesitant to mingle with anyone outside of Eric’s team. All the same, the brotherhood of soldiers mingled with one another just fine. Several clearly knew each other and hailed one other enthusiastically, which included Doctor Saldanha and one of the squad leaders.
Finding a gramophone, alcoholic beverages, and cigarettes in a storage tunnel lifted the mood higher during the breaks. Alex drank a little, but he experienced an increasingly fonder relationship with the cigarettes. He even liked to inhale their sharp smoke while training with his shadows. Such training now occasionally involved him paralyzing one or two of the Vanguards and holding on to them for as long as he could. I convinced the soldiers to go through with it by saying it would doubtless help them strengthen their own prana reserves and resist the power of ghouls.
For my part, I desired to spar with fist and element against my brother and the Vanguards, but my obligation to keep Aranath within a predictable summon schedule precluded me from training too rigorously. Only every so often did I demonstrate how my flame melted the hardest rock warped by a caster or evaporated the coldest ice wall another Vanguard could fashion. It was during these low-pressure training sessions where I expanded my understanding of the magical state in Dretkeshna.
From what I sensed, the elemental spells here did not seem to be weaker than those of Orda. If anything, despite the smaller reserves and limited spellcasting ability, there was a distinct density to each one that pretty much matched any adept caster in Orda. I could dismiss the particularity if I only felt it in one person’s spell, but for the majority to have it to some degree hinted at an influence beyond my shallow understanding of magic.
Did this mean a Dretkeshna caster’s spell would be amplified if they stepped into Orda’s less stringent air? Might they be free to cast other spells? Or were their reserves far too hampered to benefit? Perhaps only those with fully developed reserves like me and Alex could end up using the encumbrances of this ill world to our advantage, for I expected being forced to become extra efficient with prana would carry over to a healthier world—as long as we found a way to return to it, of course.
In the end, what the potential of casters and their spells were meant nothing in the face of perfected dragon fire. To reach such an end, I limited my interactions with Vanguard casters to mainly Isabel and her fire spell.
With the supreme effectiveness of dragon flame in mind, Isabel asked, “Why bother training with regular fire if the one you use is already stronger?”
I brightened a floating fireball, which Isabel sometimes attempted to extinguish as a form of elemental resistance training. “Have you noticed how I conjure it? I have to summon rune stones I prepared earlier. It would be faster if I could skip that step by sparking a regular flame and feed it dragon prana from a crystal I carry. It’s also less taxing on my own prana if I can ever learn to manipulate dragon prana with real competence.”
“Oh, I get it… I think.” The fat ember shriveled. I attempted to revivify it again, but she was able to poof it out of reality. “So, what’s the difference between weaving dragon fire and regular fire? It must be pretty different if you can’t take my measly fireball away from my control.”
“Aye, it is different. From what I’ve experienced, and from what I’ve been told, ordinary fire is about encouraging its potential. On the other hand, dragon fire doesn’t need encouragement. Dragon prana makes fire into this overexcited element that really doesn’t care if someone else’s prana is mortal, holy, or profane, it’s going to voraciously feed on it until it gets cut off. I guess you can think of ordinary fire like training a pup commands. There’s work, but a pup is adaptable and mistakes don’t hurt too much. Dragon fire is like finding an old, wild dog and trying to teach it the same things.”
“Ah, okay. Scary to think you can get even better with your magic. Maybe I shouldn’t teach you how to use guns. It would make things unfair for the ghouls out there.”
“You shouldn’t joke about things like that,” said Svren, who sat nearby as he pressed my
brother to recite the parts of a rifle. “Gods praise the day we can ever make it unfair on the-”
“Hey, Mercer,” said an approaching Felicia. “There’s a Pleulor airship scouting the area. Wanna see it?”
Showing I did, I stood up. The group of us climbed to the afternoon drenched surface.
A moment of searching the sky with craned necks had me spotting a bloated, cigar-shaped silver object hovering under a thin patch of clouds. Fixed to its underbelly was a slimmer hull of maroon and honeyed yellow. While difficult to judge its magnitude with nothing to compare it to, something told me a transport with the word “ship” in it had to be comparable in size to one.
Not taking my eyes off the slowly moving machine, I asked to no one in particular, “How does a ship like that fly?”
“It’s filled with a gas lighter than air,” said Svren. “Lots of gas. I think it’s mostly helium, but some builders use different ones.”
Squinting harder when extra sunlight filtered through the clouds, Felicia said, “Well, they’re huge, and they look impressive, but they aren’t useful beyond scouting missions.”
“They can drop bombs.”
“Sure, if they get high enough to avoid being shot at. And if they do, that means their bomb dropping isn’t so accurate. Not to mention any bad weather will force them to land. And they can’t fit as many people as a train or go too much faster, so no reason to use them as transportation unless you all you want to do is boast that you rode up in one.”
“Such a downer,” said Isabel. “I still think they’re pretty neat. Maybe not as neat as boasting about flying on a dragon, but still. Hey! Mercer! You should get on your dragon and fly up to them! That will give them a mighty scare!”
Nodding up at the sky, I replied, “If it’s still up there the next time I take flight, I may not be able to resist circling it once or twice.”
I was not asked to deliver anyone that evening. Nevertheless, the arrival of the Pleulor airship seemed to signal the beginning of the end of our stay. The Vanguard activity picked up. Not that they acted indolent before, but now there was a general sense of a goal to accomplish, which mainly involved gathering, organizing, and documenting objects in the submarine and tunnels. Over the next two days, the transportable of the most notable submarine pieces were flown to the ships. The weightier pieces could only be “captured” in black and white images provided by a couple of smallish, somewhat extendable black boxes.
No one seemed to have any problem being caught in a future image of your past, or “photographs,” as they called them. I suppose it was simply a faster way to illustrate an item or person, but the colorless images of loved ones shown to me all gave me an unsettling impression, as if the images represented the fading specters of people rather than their fleshly forms. Maybe it had something to do with the lack of color, or the fact a machine accomplished the task. Therefore, I declined to be stand still in front of one of those boxes, though I may have been captured from a distance an unknown number of times.
The Vanguards did not want to leave too many intact supplies for the outlaws to take advantage of, so junk heaps formed outside the entrance. Much of them consisted of food destined to rot and ratty clothing only useful when worn in layers, but others were of crates filled with coal and containers of different types of oil. They were gradually burned into the night. Many Vanguard came out to accompany those in charge of the burning. This inevitably led to longer and longer stints of drinking and singing.
There had been several musical instruments found in the turncoat burrows. Rather than rely on the machine to croon music it memorized, some of the Vanguard took it upon themselves to recite melodies and play instruments from their own recollections. Not my type of ambiance, but the major asked me to check if anyone wanted me to burn something, so I stuck around to listen in the shadows.
As it happened, Bregman expressed one of the finer voices of the lot, though he warbled the higher-pitched he went. And to my ears, Felicia played her lute-like instrument the best. Her quick working fingers plucked the hardy strings with exacting precision and endurance in the faster portions, yet could patiently wait their turn when the pace slowed. She sang a little to aid the story another singer sang, and while not unpleasant, it did not sound like she had the range to do much more than lend support to superior vocalists.
The songs themselves proved quite different from the music I heard on the gramophone. The machines and the throats in them played measured, grander themes that touched on innocuous subjects, whereas the soldiers tackled hasty, amusing, impolite stories about train robberies, loose women, and killing ghouls. Well, that last one was half impolite to me, anyway. Another difference between the machine singers and the amateurs came in the way they respectively suppressed and accentuated their accents. The latter had a tendency to make a sad song sound happy and a happy one sad.
Since no one knew I stood in the entrance, no one bothered me. In that case, it wasn’t such a bad ambiance to witness and listen in to. Though nothing inside me desired to become an active participant in social gatherings, there was something inspiriting about beholding a festive function. I suppose it was always good to feel the tension in the air slacken, something especially rare for active warriors to experience. Perhaps that sentiment explained why I never sought to relax around jovial groups in the first place. All it did was tighten my mind and muscles, so why subject myself to that stress when training and fighting did the opposite?
The next morning, I pulled Eric back on Aranath’s saddle after he came back from a visit to the now Vanguard occupied town.
“They finally ordered us to scuttle the sub.”
“So we’re finally leaving the Ruts?”
“I’m sure they would have preferred to keep you and us up there indefinitely, but Pleulor is getting too high-strung about the whole thing. They’ll have us do all the work and take all the risk while they build the sub for themselves. Best to take away the temptation for anything stupid to happen.”
“And then what?”
“My squad will have to be reassigned. That could take any number of days. As for you, I don’t know. I’ll give my report, but I’m not sure how much weight that will carry.”
“Can your report state that I wish to stay allied with your squad?”
“May I ask why?”
“Don’t take offense, but I don’t trust your leaders yet. I met your team by accident, so there’s little chance you’re secretly opposing my aims. On the other hand, if anyone with power has any designs against me, they’ll put me around people they trust to do their bidding, people who have yet to see how foolish it would be to fight against me.”
“Then I’ll jot it down.”
Over the next two days, I moved the Vanguard soldiers to the shore while they scrapped the submarine and anything else that might be used by outlaws. Of course, seeing as we had yet to find the elusive third entrance, we likely missed a storage area or ten. That hopefully meant the outlaws would have as much trouble as we did trying to uncover it. An obstacle we put in their way was destroying the main entrance’s tunnel using the same melting method Aranath implemented after our first infiltration.
Overseeing our withdrawal was the Pleulor airship. After dropping off the last of the Vanguard and my brother on the shoreline, I insisted for Aranath to take to the skies again, all for the purpose of flying at my leisure and getting a closer look at the airship. I used superfluous spins, flips, climbs, and dives to close in on the companion fliers. I was told to keep some distance from them as they could shoot out their windows if they really wanted to. However, once I got to be higher than their big balloon, they would not be able to aim at me.
The inflated structure grew to an implausible size the closer I got. It truly was a marvel to stare at something larger than a traditional ship soaring so high above the ground. It also implemented its mechanical magic to drift faster than my earlier impressions suggested. Strangely, the nearer my approach, the harder it beca
me to view it as a daunting menace. Likely because I knew a few rips from the dragon’s claws could bring the whole thing down. For now, I solely had the dragon fly and cast his shadow mere feet above the ship.
Back to the sea, I jumped on to the deck as Aranath glided over it. A parting roar enforced the idea to everyone on board that they were equally as protected by the dragon knight as imperiled by him. The new-to-me sailors and ship sailed us to Durnmere. I spent most of that time sleeping and recovering in the krewen quarters. Like Ishree, the two krewen on this ship were its warrior healers.
During my sleep, one of these healers noticed part of the fiend’s tail poking out the worn wrappings. They asked me about it when I awoke. I showed them a little more, explained its origin, and how I could feel a few of the “teeth” embedded into the muscles of my forearm. I suppose this was also the first time Alex had seen or heard about the fiend’s tail spiraling up my limb. He didn’t say anything, but he glanced at the wound once or twice. The doctors offered to try and remove some of the teeth with their surgical instruments, but I declined.
The ship ultimately docked at Durnmere. Like before, I wasn’t allowed to leave the ship. However, this time I didn’t have to be relegated to the brig. The major granted leave for his men, though some elected to stay to learn what would happen to me. Among a few others I was not too familiar with, these included the lieutenant, both krewen, Bregman, and the twins. I suspected Felicia wanted to leave, but with Isabel sticking around, she felt obliged to remain behind as well.
My brother and I waited until early in the morning for the instructions to head for the mess hall. We followed Svren and Ishree there. Along with Eric, Bregman, and the twins, we found six armored and armed men clustered entirely on one side of the tables. The krewen saluted their superiors and went to join their comrades. Alex and I were signaled to take our seats at about the midway point of the tables. Everyone except for Bregman, the krewen, and the twins sat down.
The Dragon Knight and the Steam World Page 27
