Dragons - Worlds Afire

Unnatural Predator Scott McGough

Vaan felt his master drawing near long before there were visible signs. He had spent his entire life serving the dragon… but it wasn’t familiarity that guided the blue pixie’s eyes skyward. Duty and fear bound Vaan to his master as deeply as any magic, and he felt the great beast’s approach as a mouse feels the shadow of a hawk.

The sky throbbed as the dragon swooped down from the pre-dawn clouds. It was gigantic—over one hundred feet long—and as lean and sinuous as a serpent. Its head was as broad and sharp as an axe-blade, and its long alabaster horns jutted forward beyond the end of its tapering snout. His master was awesome—a beautiful sight even after decades of servitude, and Vaan cursed himself for being swayed by it.

And yet, what a majestic monster to be enslaved by. Its scales were an exquisite fused glass, blue-white in color and harder than steel. A small dot of light glowed in each scale’s center like a candle through a translucent ceramic jug. The dragon had wide, sweeping, batlike wings veined with subtle shades of cyan and yellow. As the great serpent flew, the colors on its wings shimmered and merged. Last night’s lingering moon glistened across the brute’s streamlined body, enveloping it in a cloud of silver sparks.

Two streams of thick smoke trailed from its nostrils, braiding together as the dragon rolled. The titan’s jagged wings carried it over the wooded countryside below, soaring east toward the rain-swollen river.

Vaan’s rush of admiration soured as he watched the dragon descend. As surely as he knew his master was approaching, Vaan also knew where the beast was going.

“It’s happening again,” the pixie whispered, surprising himself by speaking aloud. If the others heard him they gave no sign. Considering the scene that now played out before them, it was understandable how they could overlook the muttered ramblings of a small winged man hovering overhead.

Far below them all, dozens of human figures scurried across the sturdy wooden bridge that spanned the river. Four straight days of driving rain had gorged the river to the point of catastrophe, though the levees remained intact. The local farmers and villagers, wisely unwilling to risk the flood that would greet them if the levees failed, marched across the bridge and continued up the heavily wooded hills to the west. The bridge had taken three generations of hard work to complete, along with a significant chunk of the hardwood forest nearby. For decades it provided the farmers and village merchants with access to the western lands across the river. Now it provided a way for them to reach higher ground and safety.

Consumed with escaping the rising water with their families and valuables intact, the locals failed to see the even greater danger descend from above. The dragon undulated its body as it flew, swimming through thick streams of cold air and high wind, its eyes fixed on the people below.

Vaan’s tongue was a block of stone in his mouth—he could say nothing, do nothing. Nothing except stand, wait, and watch like the loyal servant he was bound to be.

The dragon’s brilliant eyes crackled, and tiny jags of blue and yellow energy danced across its face. Its gaze locked on the heavy wooden bridge and the refugees lurching across it. The beast opened its jaws and arched its back, spreading its wings to slow its descent and steady its aim. Its spiked tail curled under its feet, and the dragon hovered in place, its huge wings churning the water below.

The beast drew its long neck back, and a dull boom sounded from within its chest. Its lower neck swelled like a frog’s to grotesque, almost comical proportions, then the bulge surged up the dragon’s throat to its mouth and erupted in a halo of white light.

The dragon lunged like a striking adder and coughed out a glowing sphere of white-hot energy. The sphere coalesced into a solid ball of electric fire and hurtled down toward the western end of the bridge. Dropping like a comet, the crackling missile plowed through the bridges wet wood pilings and into the heavy clay below.

Vaan’s lips parted, but only a faint wheeze emerged. Another moment passed as the farmers stood frozen, glancing nervously at each other. Then the western end of the bridge exploded.

People, water, and debris were cast hundreds of yards in every direction. Before the first victims landed, the dragon coughed out another blast and the east end of the bridge vanished in a cloud of splinters, foam, and jagged light. Those refugees who weren’t killed outright or hurled from the bridge were trapped in the middle of the river on an unstable island of cracked, groaning wood.

Instead of pressing its attack, the brute rose higher, circled back, and cut a great, looping arc across the sky. It rolled and spun as it soared, insouciant and careless, as if it had forgotten its unfinished work below.

But the beast soon veered back toward the villagers and the bridge. It swooped so close to the river’s surface its tail carved tiny wakes in the water. The dragon stretched the rest of its body out long and straight as it homed in on the final section of intact bridge. While dozens of tiny figures remained atop the crumbling structure, very few were moving—many of those still conscious fell to their knees and covered their heads.

The wind whistled against the dragon’s scales, rasping over their razor edges with a stinging, sharp sound. The beast bore down on the bridge, its eyes glowing yellow and blue and its face fixed in a feral grin.

The dragon’s head dipped and broke the surface of the river. Ignoring the sheer force of the river’s flow, the dragon slipped under water a mere hundred yards from its target. Vaan shuddered at the beasts casual display of grace and power—the winged devil had disappeared into the raging water as smoothly as a child easing into a bathtub from its mother’s arms.

For an endless moment there was no sign of the beast. Lightning continued to slice through the clouds overhead, the river continued to rush and froth, and the remnants of the shattered bridge continued to teeter and burn, but the creature’s attack had once more stopped as suddenly and capriciously as it had started. No one was lulled by the trick a second time, but Vaan knew why the beast had played it twice: it delighted in their realization that even though they knew what was about to happen, there was nothing they could do to stop it.

Finally, a horned, scaly head burst up from below the center of the bridge, scattering planks and farmers like drops of water from a shaking dog. The dragon craned its supple neck through and over the remnants of the bridge and turned its terrible eyes on the dazed survivors. Contemptuously, the great beast hissed, shrugged, and drew its muscular neck partially back under the ruined structure.

Then, with a brutal surge of power, it forced most of its body through the head-sized hole it had made. Timbers shattered and boulders flew as the last of the bridges foundations splintered, then slowly collapsed into the water. The debris quickly broke apart and was carried away by the water, and the farmers’ screams finally gurgled to a sickening halt as the last of the bridges pilings disappeared into the deluge.

The dragon slithered onto solid ground and rose up on its thick hind legs. At its full height the beast undulated again, ripples of muscle cascading along the length of its body under its glistening ceramic armor. Its magnificent scales stood on end, quivering in the moonlight as tiny arcs of galvanic energy sparked between them.

The great beast spread its wings wide and with two powerful beats rose into the air. Two more long, languid beats took the dragon back to the edge of the clouds. It huffed and snorted as it rose ever higher, and smoke trailed from its nostrils. Vaan grimly marked the evidence of the dragon’s visit to the farmland below: three score dead, two wisps of thick smoke, and the shattered remains of an entire community.

The dragon itself made no such accounting as it soared toward the largest peak on the eastern horizon, not sparing a backward glance at the evening’s entertainment.

It’s happening again, Vaan thought, careful this time to keep silent. But soon I will finally see it end.

Tania Cayce stared after the dragon as the monster flew away. She was crouched and silent, safely concealed (they assured her) by a thick sheaf of leaves and the cold morning mist.

Cayce did not feel safe. In her mind, awe fought for supremacy against terror and self-preservation, so there was very little room for comforting thoughts of safety. Her heart beat painfully in her chest, and she was unable to remember why she had come here in the first place—or why she wasn’t running for her life. She peered at the obscene wreck the dragon had made of both the bridge and the people on it. She realized she was at least better off than the poor devils down there. She was alive, for one thing, and for another it wasn’t raining up here on the mountainside.

“That is our quarry,” the female guide said. She was huge, six and a half feet tall, and dressed as a wild woman from the forest with hide clothing and bone fetishes. Her eyes were almost vibrating in her head, and a huge grin stretched her features. Her partner, a small male pixie, hovered silent and dour beside her on dragonfly wings.

“We will test this dragon’s strength, its cunning, and its essential right to be,” the woman continued. “If we are resolute, and if our cause is righteous—”

“It is,” said a softer voice from the procession ahead, “but vengeance will be served, be we righteous or not.”

From behind Cayce and from ahead of her came the murmured assent of soldiers. Directly in front of her, Master Rus turned and beckoned her closer. Cayce scooted forward and turned her head so her ear was next to her mentor’s mouth.

“I hate working with fanatics,” Rus whispered. “Especially religious and military ones. Still,” the stout man said. “That moping blue bugger’s plan is sound. And the rewards will be well worth the risk.” He took Cayce by the chin and turned her face so that their eyes met.

“Don’t look so concerned,” Rus said. He was not warm or comforting but stern, determined to banish any chance his apprentice’s expression had of reflecting badly on him. Potionmaster Donner Rus was known throughout five kingdoms as a poisoner without peer, and he valued that reputation above all else. Three of the five monarchs he worked with kept him on permanent retainer to prevent him from using his craft on them, and Master Rus was very fond of being paid for not doing his dangerous work.

This time, however, Master Rus had accepted a massive fee for his personal attention in the matter of slaying a dragon. Cayce knew her master was unlikely to admit it, but Rus had taken this job largely to salve his bruised ego. Vaan the pixie had let fly a torrent of subtle barbs about the Potionmaster’s age and fading glory—if Master Rus wanted to redeem his reputation and save face, he had to either take the job or take offense. Cayce kept this observation to herself, of course. Any apprentice who volunteered such information would not remain healthy, sane, or in Rus’s service for long.

Now Master Rus spoke firmly, the tone of a professional talking about his business. “You know what your master requires, Tania, and you shall provide it. Stay close behind me; be quick with what I ask for; and remember the most important thing artists like us must do, with excellence, at all times.” He prompted Cayce with a tilt of his head.

“Observe and be silent.” Cayce bobbed a quick bow and felt her eyes drying. Her master had a way of looking at Cayce that made her forget to blink. Also, she was unwilling to take her eyes off the old devil for long, lest he slip her a dose of something nasty. She forced herself to blink and felt a dry, sandy pop as her eyelids met.

“Very good.” Rus turned away and continued up the trail. The stout man quickly caught up to the soldiers without deigning to visibly rush. Cayce fell in behind her master, sticking close enough to hear his asides but well clear of his billowing satin cape.

The guides led them on, approaching the dragon’s lair from the south. Both the forest woman and the somber pixie assured them that though this path was steeper and more treacherous than the northern route, it was also more heavily wooded and would be shrouded in mist until midday. They could expect to climb halfway up the mountain before the dragon had any chance of spotting them… provided the party members all kept their footing and didn’t plummet to their deaths.

Cayce shifted her heavy pack and tucked a strand of long white hair back into her headdress. She had seen and done many strange things apprenticing with Master Rus, from harvesting graveyard mushrooms by moonlight to milking spiders with tweezers. Sometimes the things she saw and did came back to her while she slept, and she awoke with a half-strangled scream in her throat.

This trek up the mountain was something new, however. Even the lurid drudgery one found as a poisoner’s apprentice could not compare to participating in an actual dragon hunt. She had never imagined such a thing in her most fevered dreams, not even in those brought on by the most toxic fumes from her master’s cauldron.

In addition to her private misgivings, Cayce felt the guides were surely the most discouraging pair anyone had ever followed up a dark mountain. Vaan, the morose blue-haired pixie, had the body of a grown man at just under half the size. Alone, he seemed perfectly proportioned, handsome even, with his white eyes shimmering like smoke, but with someone beside him to provide a sense of scale, he was stunted and absurd.

Atypically for a pixie, Vaan spoke little, brooded often, and seemed perpetually on the verge of sighing. He seemed detached from his own quest for freedom—oddly disinterested in the mission he had hired them to perform. When they asked him why he and the forest woman had formed the party and were leading it to the dragon, Vaan muttered something about his people being conquered and generations of slavery under the wily old serpent’s cruel yoke. It was a listless tale told without enthusiasm, and it was neither inspiring nor convincing.

For all his good looks and purportedly noble motives, Cayce found Vaan empty and pathetic. To her, he seemed like a sad miniature statue, an artist’s study in melancholy done in sharp-cut gems and blue-tinged marble.

The female guide was named Kula, and while she was more formidable looking than the pixie, she was no more encouraging. Kula did all the talking once the journey was underway, and she seemed to know her way around the woods that surrounded the dragon’s mountain. A braided band of tough, woody vine held her hair tight against her broad skull, almost disappearing against the backdrop of her nut-brown skin. Kula claimed to be an anchorite, which she further defined as some sort of religious hermit.

Cayce was happy to agree. In fact, she was happy to grant Kula any title, so long as the huge woman didn’t wad Cayce up like a pinch of fresh bread and swallow her whole.

Cayce wasn’t only disconcerted by Kula’s size. Kula’s hulking form was a mild amusement compared to the reverential, almost trancelike state she entered when she spoke of killing dragons. As an anchorite, Kula claimed to be a student of nature and an agent of the natural order. Her role, she said, was to enforce the laws of the jungle. Confronting the dragon in its nest was a spiritual trial she was undertaking, a holy effort made to advance her on the path to enlightenment.

This peculiar attitude seemed to make Kula cold and aloof toward Cayce and her master. Cayce was not quite sure why. Some of the most effective poisons were completely organic, derived from the natural creatures and plants that lived in Kula’s forest.

The rest of the ten-member party was rounded out by a small squad of soldiers: one officer, four infantry, and one golem. The officer introduced himself as Captain Allav Hask, and though his face was dead and waxy, his eyes burned with cold fury. He wore one sword on his hip that seemed normal enough, and one strapped across his back that was clearly for special occasions. This grander, larger sword was sheathed in a gleaming golden scabbard and wrapped in multiple layers of fresh white linen. The wrappings came loose as they hiked, giving Cayce the chance to note the powerful runes carved into the swords scabbard and hilt. What would happen, she wondered, when the captain drew that enchanted blade?

Captain Hask always kept two of his infantry close by him at the front of the party, just behind the guides. The other two brought up the rear, both to protect them all from attack and to make sure the heavy golem kept up.

Kula was massive and Vaan was as dour as stone, but the golem was literally a massive statue. The soldiers called the stone man “it” or “the golem” when the captain was in earshot, but among themselves they called him “Boom.” He was carved in the rough outline of a man with only the vaguest and most rudimentary features. The reddish granite of his body glowed softly at the shoulder and neck joints, and his heavy brow jutted out over two hollow, smoking eye sockets. When he opened his mouth to acknowledge the captain’s orders Cayce could see, hear, and smell the inferno burning inside.

Boom the golem seemed mindless—utterly devoid of a personality or independent thought. Judging from what she had seen so far, Cayce guessed he wasn’t designed for such niceties. Along the route she had watched him crush a chunk of granite to powder beneath his feet and bend back a foot-thick evergreen as though it were a stalk of corn. No military or mechanical expert, Cayce nonetheless guessed Boom was built for close-quarters combat where brute power and durability were more important than speed and tactical thinking.

Of them all, Master Rus himself was the most familiar figure, but to Cayce he was alien and strange to begin with and thus seemed so in every context. Rus was dressed as always in inappropriate finery that managed to seem both formal and flamboyant. His wide-brimmed black hat was rimmed with a curtain of golden yarn strands that hung down over his eyes and danced against the tip of his round nose. He wore an ornate ruby ring and carried a polished hardwood walking stick with a sharp-faceted crystal skull on the handle. The purple satin lining of his cape glinted in the waning moonlight when the wind whipped it open.

Rus carried nothing but his cane, leaving Cayce to bear their food, water, and dozens of arcane substances carefully organized in jars, bottles, and pouches. Her master claimed to have bested dragons before, but Rus was such a liar and a braggart that Cayce never knew when he was being sincere and when he was just selling himself to a customer. In any case, she knew he had brought along his deadliest potions and powders, and the knowledge that they were at least well-armed lightened her load considerably.

Ahead, Kula motioned for the party to stop. They were approaching the edge of the tree line and, according to the anchorite, were “about to venture into the most exposed and dangerous part of the journey.” When outlining the plan at the base of the mountain, Kula had paused before adding, “Barring its end, of course, where battle with the dragon itself may prove more dangerous.” As she said this, Kula had almost swooned behind a dreamy, unfocused grin.

Cayce despaired at the sight of the tree line. She silently cursed her own pessimism, wishing she could do as Master Rus often bade her and see advantages and opportunities instead of dangers and consequences. Cayce did not voice this thought to her master because doing so in the past had only caused Rus to lecture her, and if there was one thing Rus loved, it was lecturing.

“Great poisoners see only opportunity,” he’d say. “If you want to limit your vision to avoiding threats and consequences instead of delivering them… if you want to defend instead of taking the initiative, at least do it properly. There’s always a market for royal food-tasters, though their careers don’t usually last long enough for them to distinguish themselves. Especially when Master Rus is on the job.”

As the rest of the party gathered around Kula to hear the plan reviewed once more, Rus made a show of being bored. He wandered off a few paces, still within earshot but not part of the semicircle around Kula. Cayce watched Vaan hovering moodily behind the forest woman.

Something about the two of them together jarred Cayce from her private thoughts. The pixie seemed impatient and hesitant at the same time, both anxious to proceed and fearful of what they had yet to encounter. Kula, for her part, seemed eager to begin their mission, but there was something grudging about the way she spoke to the others—as if she were unwilling to share this rare opportunity. Cayce watched Vaan brood as Kula quietly but fiercely outlined their plan of attack. The guides’ demeanor and Cayce’s general dislike of the entire situation nagged at her until an important truth became painfully clear to her.

All one had to do was look at their faces. The guides had assembled the party and they were leading the party into action. The pixie was full of hope and dread, and the anchorite was full of anticipation and selfish longing. In contrast, the soldiers were all grim and focused, perhaps bent on avenging some attack or another the beast had visited upon their nation. To a man they showed nothing more than determination. Master Rus’s expression showed only a preoccupation with his appearance. To him it was just another job, another chance to improve his reputation and his standing among the kingdoms’ aristocrats.

Only the guides seemed to have concrete expectations about the party’s date with the dragon. What did they know that gave them such feelings? What did they know that they hadn’t shared? Whatever it was, it was something Cayce, Rus, and the rest of them did not know, and it would be unprofessional to let them keep it that way.

“Master,” Cayce whispered as she walked.

Rus slowed ahead of her, pretending to struggle as he extracted the tip of his cane from a crack in the rocks. “What is it?”

“I have been observing, as you have taught me. I think I have identified an opportunity.”

Master Rus stopped twisting his cane and cocked an eyebrow at Cayce. “Spreading our wings, Apprentice? Expanding our horizons?” Rus chuckled softly, but he was interested. “Is this an opportunity for knowledge, profit, or advancement?”

“For survival,” Cayce said. She cast her eyes toward the guides then back to her master. “Remember how you once told me never to work with pixies? They always talk too much, you said. They always give away the game and tip off the target because they can’t keep secrets to themselves.”

Rus scowled. “That was sprites,” he said. “Or faeries. I never said anything about pixies.” He quickly glanced at Vaan, then added, “Besides, I need to make that little blue turd eat what he said. Asking me if age has ‘softened my resolve as it has my belly.’ We’ll see how clever he is when Rus the dragon-slayer is a hero among his own people.”

Rus’s jaw clenched and he yanked the tip of his cane free. “Sprites. Yes, it was definitely sprites. I remember it clearly now. Never work with sprites. They give the whole game away.”

“Yes, Master Rus.”

“Sprites are smaller than pixies. And even flightier. They burst into song at inappropriate times.” Master Rus nodded knowingly, his gaze turned inward. “Pixies are fine as long as they’re in front of you. As long as you remember they’re steeped in glamour.”

“Yes, Master Rus.”

Rus worked his jaw. Cayce forced herself to blink.

“Fine,” he said. “You have Master Rus’s attention. What have you seen?”

Cayce leaned in close to Rus’s ear. “Vaan said hardly anything beyond his needling insults. And he hasn’t talked to anyone much at all since we met him. Is that typical pixie behavior?”

Rus planted the tip of his cane and swirled his cape dramatically around his arm. “It is not. You believe he knows more than he’s saying?”

“He must.”

“And so we ought to know more of what he knows.”

“That or we should walk away. You’ve taught me that much,” Cayce said.

Rus nodded. “I’m not walking away, and neither are you.”

“No, Master.”

“But I do think you’re on to something. I’ve never seen a more downtrodden pixie, even if he does bear a slavery-fueled tale of woe.”

“Shall we brace him, Master? Confront him and draw out what he’s hiding? I have an idea—”

“Not we,” Rus said. “You. Pursue your idea, Apprentice. Without my help. Brace the pixie on your own, and Master Rus will stand back and observe.” Rus cocked another eyebrow at her. “Think of this as an impromptu examination. A field test of your practical skills.”

Cayce hesitated, seeking a hidden snare in Rus’s offer. Her master gathered his cape around his shoulders and leaned on his cane.

“Well?” He tipped his hat toward the rest of the party, segments of golden yarn waving before his eyes. “Begin.”

Cayce took a deep breath and went forward. She sidled up alongside one of the soldiers and waited for Kula to pause for breath.

“Captain Hask’s golem being the last line of frontal attack. Which brings us to…” Kula looked up from the map she was scrawling on the ground and nodded to Cayce. “Nice of you to join us. If the golem proves necessary, you and your master must be standing by, ready to—”

“How do we know it’s the right dragon?” Cayce said.

Kula blinked. “What?” The anchorite’s face and voice were edged with annoyance.

“The dragon you’re leading us to. How do we know it’s the one you hired us to kill?”

“Little girl,” the forest woman said as she rose to her full height and planted her fists on her massive hips. “How many marauding dragons have you seen tonight?”

The soldiers laughed, but Cayce remained stoic. “Just one,” she said. “The one that attacked the farmers on the bridge. Is that the one?”

“Of course it is, you silly child.” Kula called out to Rus, “Master poisoner, would you rein in your student? We’re trying to—”

“What color is the dragon Vaan gathered us to hunt?”

Kula paused mid-reply. Instead of answering right away, the anchorite cleared her throat and glanced at Vaan. Then Kula said, “Blue-white, almost silver, like winter lightning. Like moonlight on the edge of a sword. What are you getting at? You saw it yourself, as did we all.”

Cayce turned to Vaan. “What color is the dragon we’re hunting?”

Vaan could only smile helplessly. After a long pause, he shrugged like a gambler who has just seen his horse come up lame.

“Well?” Cayce said. “You’re our patron and our guide, but you don’t know the answer? We’re trusting you, and you can’t even describe the monster that enslaved you and all your people?” Sensing victory, Cayce pressed on. “Let’s try something easier. What color is the dragon that wrecked the bridge?”

Vaan and Kula looked at each other uncomfortably.

“Blue-white, almost silver,” Kula said crossly.

“So it was.” Cayce nodded. “But I asked him.”

Vaan merely smiled the same helpless smile and shook his head.

Cayce turned to Captain Hask, hooking her thumb back at Vaan. “He’s enchanted,” she said. “He can’t tell us about the dragon he wants us to kill. He can’t even describe it to us after we’ve all seen it. Think about it. Has he ever said anything concrete to any of us about our quarry?”

Some of the soldiers flickered their eyes toward Captain Hask, and one even coughed, but no one disagreed with her, so Cayce went on.

“That’s why he’s so quiet all the time, and why she says so much about his job. For all we know, he works for the dragon and it’s his job to lure mice like us into his master’s hunting ground.”

“No,” Vaan said. His face was flushed, and his eyes were wet with rage.

“I can vouch for Vaan,” Kula said. “He has told the truth: He is enslaved, and he wants the dragon dead. I would know if he were lying to me.”

“So you say, but aren’t pixies expert liars? Steeped in illusion and glamour? How would we know if he fooled you? Assuming you’re not in on it.” Cayce soon regretted this last part as Kula turned her angry eyes on the poisoner’s apprentice.

“This is no trick,” the anchorite said. “Was it pretense when the dragon destroyed your garrison, Captain Hask? Did lies or sleight of hand destroy the farmers on that bridge? The beast we saw tonight is the same one that attacked your fortress, Captain, the same one that enslaved Vaan’s tribe. It is the same one that’s been upsetting the natural balance all the way from here to the far edge of my forest. Vaan sought out those of us who have the motivation and the skills necessary to kill this dragon. There will be great danger, but that is no secret. It’s also why you and your leering master are being so well paid.”

Kula stepped forward, looking past Cayce to Rus. “Is that what this is about? Are you sending in your underling to renegotiate the terms of our agreement?”

Rus started as if Kula’s call had woken him from a deep sleep. Slowly, he stretched and yawned, displaying his cape’s purple lining in its glorious entirety.

“Sorry, what?” he said. “I was lost in thought. Has my apprentice been speaking out of turn again?”

Kula glanced back at the apprentice. “She has.”

“Oh, dear. Did she say anything of substance?”

Cayce held her tongue as her face reddened. Rus was a worm, but surely even he wouldn’t just set her up then abandon her like this.

Kula’s eyes narrowed, and she looked from Rus, to Cayce, to Hask, to Vaan. The pixie lowered his face, and Kula nodded. “She raised an issue that bears addressing. Vaan is, in fact, under a geas. He is magically prohibited from betraying any of the dragon’s secrets. He can say nothing that would cause his master to be harmed.”

Rus showed exaggerated interest. “Is he, now? How fascinating. How’s that work, then?”

Kula spared one final glare for Cayce before she answered. “The dragon we hunt can exert powerful influence over the minds of sentient beings. Vaan is free to go where he likes when his master doesn’t need him, but he can not speak freely of the dragon. Not its nature, not its weaknesses.” Kula turned and sneered at Cayce. “Not even its color.”

Rus rolled his cane back and forth across his hand. “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning to the hunters you’d assembled? You don’t think someone who cannot tell all he knows might have omitted something crucial to our understanding of the stakes? Crucial to our survival?”

“I want him dead,” Vaan said. As he spoke, his four transparent wings extended from his back and began to beat. The pixie floated off the ground until he was hovering several feet over the group. “It took me almost a full year to get around the geas and enlist Kula’s aid, and only then because. she is so intuitive. I did not create this threat. I did not lure you here to be his victims. I did not assemble you for any reason but those Kula voiced on my behalf.”

Captain Hask stepped forward, between Kula and Cayce. “None of this is important,” he said. “The brute we saw tonight is the one that killed most of my men. I mean to destroy it in its lair or die trying.” The officer turned his dead eyes up to Vaan. “Do you know where that dragon nests?”

Vaan shrugged, and Hask said, “I’ll take that silence as a yes.” He turned to Kula and said, “Can you lead us there?”

“I can, and I will. There is nothing I want more than to confront and defeat this abomination.”

“Then I submit”—Hask’s glower went back and forth from Cayce to her master—“that its color is immaterial. As is its name, its place of origin, and who can speak freely about it.

“We know what it is. We have seen it in battle. We have all come to kill it. Let’s find the damned thing and get on with our work.”

Rus paused, stroked his chin, then nodded. “I suppose I must agree. This new information doesn’t really change things that much. Stand back and be silent, my apprentice. When Rus agrees to terms, he sticks to them until the job is done.”

Rus’s eyes locked on Cayce’s from behind his curtain of golden yarn. If Rus’s furtive expression wasn’t enough to alert her, the colossal lie about never changing a contract’s terms would have done the trick. She knew her master was too experienced and too professional to wink, but she recognized his need for her to let this matter drop.

Kula crouched back down over her map in the dirt and said, “We’ll reach the edge of its lair just after dawn. The tunnel will lead us all the way to the mountain’s interior. We’ll wait for the light here, just outside its sense of smell. When the sun burns off the morning fog, we’ll go forward in stages, as agreed.” She raised her head and locked eyes with Cayce. “And we are still agreed, aren’t we? Poisoners?”

“Agreed,” Rus called airily.

Cayce bowed her head and stared at Kula’s map on the ground.

“Agreed,” she said.

Cayce shuddered under the prodding hand of her master. Rus shook her shoulder, drawing her from the deep morass of sleep.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re leaving.”

“Mmm?” Cayce struggled to fully open her eyes. How had she fallen asleep? The last thing she remembered was waiting in the thick brush, just a ridgeline away from a clear view of the dragon’s cave.

Rus’s thick index finger flicked across Cayce’s nose. “Faster than that,” he said. His voice was soft and low, just above a whisper. “Let’s get what I came for and leave these heroes to their noble work.”

Her nose stinging, Cayce rubbed her eyes and swallowed a yawn. “What?”

“What, Master.”

“What… Master?”

Rus pulled Cayce to her knees and helped her keep her balance when she swayed and almost toppled.

“I was right about pixies,” he said. “Never work with ’em. This is a fool’s errand, and we’re leaving.”

Cayce’s mind began to clear. She noticed a strong sent of camphor mixed with ammonia in the air around them and the clean, sharp scent of mint from her master’s hand.

“But the job?” she managed.

“Stuff the job,” Rus said. “If they all get killed, we’ll be famous as the only survivors. If they kill the dragon, we can claim to have been a part of it. There’s no need to actually get involved.”

Cayce shook her head. “The pixie and the anchorite. Boom and the soldiers…”

“All asleep. Well, all but the golem, but he can’t make a move without his handlers. They’ll all stay asleep for another hour or so.” Rus grinned wickedly. “I made a small fire downwind of us. Tossed in a few herbs and things you haven’t learned about yet. The breeze carried the smoke right to where our party waited.” He held out a small sprig of rounded green leaves. “A whiff of this clovermint brings one right out of it. Pity I didn’t bring enough for everyone. Now get up. I want to get moving.”

Cayce felt the numbness draining out of her arms and legs. “What about our fee, Master?”

“Stuff the fee. We can offset the cost of this little outing and make ourselves a fine profit without so much as a cross word passing between us and the dragon.”

Now fully awake, Cayce felt a chill as she weighed Rus’s words. “We can?”

“Of course. You didn’t really think I would come along on this suicide mission for a handful of pixie’s gold and the ephemeral promise of sharing the big serpent’s treasure? Which, by the way, we’d never live to spend?

“No, Tania, what I have in mind will keep clients and royalty alike begging at our door for years to come. Now, stop asking questions and attend me.”

Cayce struggled to her feet. “Yes, Master Rus. What do you require?”

“Grab your pack and follow. I’ll explain on the way.” Rus hummed a breezy tune as he swept out of Kula’s makeshift camp, nimbly stepping over and around sleeping soldiers. Boom the golem stood and smoldered, perhaps unaffected by Rus’s sleeping vapors but unable to take action without direct orders to do so. Both Vaan and Kula dozed among the roots of a scrawny ash tree.

Cayce wrapped her still-clumsy fingers around her pack and hoisted it onto her shoulder. She was trying to make as little noise as possible, but her master had done his work well. From their placid faces and softly rising chests, she reckoned the dragon could burst from the ground beneath the hunting party’s feet and they would not even stir.

Master Rus moved quickly when he wasn’t posturing for clients. Recently woozy and burdened as Cayce was, she actually had to struggle to keep up with her rotund mentor. By the time they cleared the final ridge before the dragon’s cave, Cayce was red-faced and out of breath.

Rus was waiting for her, crouched behind a jagged boulder. The stony spire jutted from the ground among a dozen similar rock formations. The spires were broken and charred as if by lightning, and the ground below them was flat, cracked, and hard. Rus motioned for Cayce to crouch beside him, his eyes fixed on the hollow depression where the blasted ground met the sheer south face of the mountain.

Cayce crept behind Rus’s boulder and lowered her pack. The ground sloped down toward the depression and into a ragged hole that lay almost hidden in the shadows. According to Kula and Vaan, the hole led to a tunnel they could follow right to the edge of the dragon’s innermost sanctuary. Both the opening and the tunnel were big enough to accommodate a large serpentine dragon, so they could certainly handle a small party of warriors bent on destroying one.

Cayce looked up to where morning sunbeams glittered through the snowmelt. Ascent up the south face would test the most experienced mountaineer, but a climb was never part of the attack. Kula’s plan had been to creep in and confront the dragon head-on, but that plan was asleep with Kula and the others. Now only Rus knew what Rus planned to do. Or rather, what Rus planned for Cayce to do.

Still fixed on the mountainside, Master Rus said, “So you really believed I let that pixie goad me into joining this farce? You must think me an awful fool, my apprentice.”

Here it comes, Cayce thought. She expected Rus would chastise her for correctly citing his own advice about pixies, especially since the only retort he had was to claim he had meant sprites. She had no idea what he would put her through for this, though—for assuming he was every inch the overstuffed, egocentric child he played in front of clients.

But there was no malice in Rus this time. Instead, there was a lilt in his voice and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. Still just above a whisper, he fell into the practiced cadence of a master delivering a lecture. “It is good to be thought a fool by one’s enemies, Tania. It makes them careless and overconfident.”

“But it is less desirable to be thought so by one’s students.” He grinned. “Especially in the field. So watch and listen as Rus demonstrates why he is Master. I knew the pixie’s story didn’t smell right. I also knew it didn’t matter, not a jot. That little blue weevil and the wild-eyed giantess could have told us we were going to pray the dragon away and I would have cheerfully come along. I am always happy to follow the client’s lead… at least from the time I accept the retainer to when my own ends take precedence.

“No, all I ever wanted or expected from this engagement was free guide service and an armed escort to the dragon’s nest. This created an opportunity, see? There’s that word again. An opportunity for someone like you to perhaps harvest certain rare and hard-to-acquire ingredients? Ingredients that someone such as me could perhaps put to especially good use?” The poisoner chuckled, his belly shaking in concert with the shimmering yarn on his hat.

Cayce remained silent too long, and Rus snapped, “Remember your lessons, Apprentice. How many rare and exquisite poisons are derived from dragons?”

Cayce’s mind whirled, and she blinked. “Dozens,” she said “Dragons blood can be brewed into a tasteless, odorless—”

“I said remember your lessons, not recite them. We don’t need anything as precious as blood. If we wanted blood I’d have gone along with that forest woman’s attack.” Rus shook his head. “Blood,” he said derisively. “Why don’t we just try for the dragon’s living heart or both its eyes? No. Scales, teeth, and claws will do for us. Dragons slough off and replace them regularly. If we can collect even a small handful of these from the mouth of the cave, we’ll be among the most feared and well-compensated poisoners in the world.”

One small fragment of Rus’s earlier oration stuck in Cayce’s mind. “Master,” she whispered. “Someone like me will collect the ingredients?”

“Someone like you, yes. Someone exactly like you. You, in fact.” Rus’s eyes twinkled merrily. “You, precisely you, exactly you, and only you.”

Rus lifted his cane and pried the crystal skull off the end with a wheezing grunt. “I’ll loan you this, of course,” he said. “If the dragon or one of its minions comes for you, crack the crystal and toss it to the ground between you and the enemy. It releases a miasma that melts living tissue on contact, so if they come any closer they’ll dissolve.”

Cayce dully stretched out her cupped hands. “Minions,” she muttered.

Rus tilted his palm so that the skull rolled into Cayce’s outstretched hands. She closed both fists around the grinning purple totem.

Rus presented his gloved fist to Cayce so that the bright red ring was mere inches from her nose. In a flash of motion he opened his hand and plucked the jeweled ring off. “This”—he held it out for Cayce to accept—“is for you personally. If it comes to close quarters, punch this stone into the dragon’s body. Anywhere will do. It delivers a toxic jolt powerful enough to kill almost anything. That’s the theory, at least. It’s never been properly tested, but I have seen it work on a medium-sized hill giant.

“If you can’t get in one good punch, put the gem in your mouth and bite down.”

Cayce took the ring. “What will that do?”

“It will make your body so toxic that the dragon will keel over after a single bite. A single taste with the tongue, actually, or a single sniff.” Rus dusted his gloved hands against each other. “At the very least it will make him sick long enough for me to escape.”

Cayce stared at the ring suspiciously. “Thank you, Master.”

“Not at all. It is a sacrifice I am willing to make for you, my apprentice.” Rus’s eyes grew stern. “Put on the ring.”

“Yes, Master Rus.” Cayce nodded grimly. She slid the ring on to her thickest finger, where it spun freely. “Master?”

“Mmm?”

“Afterward? If I survive biting the ring, when does the toxic effect wear off?”

“Afterward?” Rus shrugged. “At that point ‘afterward’ is not really a practical concern, believe you me.”

“Now. Duty calls, and you do not have time to waste.” Rus pointed at Cayce’s burden. “Empty your pack and leave the gear here with me. Go into yonder cave and scoop up as many scales as you can. I expect at least one full load before I’ll be ready to leave.”

“Yes, Master Rus.”

“As for the claws and teeth, I don’t expect you to find any this far out. If you survive long enough to collect and deliver a full pack of scales, we’ll know it’s safe to venture in deeper. I’d say one… no, two hundred yards. Two hundred yards, or two claws, or one tooth. Achieve one of these milestones and you can return.” Rus smiled. “I won’t make you delve any deeper to see if there are eggs. Dragons are notoriously defensive of their progeny. We could live off the proceeds of a dragon egg for ten lifetimes, but I’d rather have a small fortune and a long life than a huge fortune and no life.” Rus pondered a moment. “Though if you see any eggshells, by all means pick them up.”

Cayce leaned closer to her master, staring over Rus’s shoulder at the long stretch of flattened ground between them and the cave entrance. She felt her heart pounding, not faster but louder with each booming beat.

How bad things gotten worse? Now, instead of backing up an armed attack on a dragon, Cayce was charged with sneaking into one’s lair—alone—and pilfering its dustbin. She was no warrior and had no experience with thieving. All she had was a pair of lethally toxic baubles that were as likely to kill her as any dragon was.

“It’s not danger you face,” Rus said quietly. “It is an opportunity.”

Cayce nodded to herself, her eyes locked on the tunnel entrance. “And I will seize it, Master Rus. But first… could you build another fire, downwind from the cave? And could you put some more of the herbs and things you haven’t taught me about in it? I’d like to fan the smoke into the tunnel before I venture in.”

Rus beamed. “I’d be happy to, my apprentice. I assume you’ll want a pinch of clovermint to sniff as well?”

“A generous pinch, Master, if you please.”

“Done.” Rus clapped her lightly on the back. “I approve of this newfound boldness of yours, Tania Cayce. Great poisoners must be bold.”

Cayce nodded but said nothing, staring expectantly at her master.

Rus blinked, then bowed with an exaggerated flourish. “Great poisoners must also be alive, I’m told.” The stout man straightened up, dipped a hand into the pocket of his waist-coat, and dropped a clump of green clover into Cayce’s hand.

Rus tipped his hat. “I’ll get started on that fire.”

Twenty minutes later, Cayce stepped into the dark recesses of the dragon’s cave. She held a cluster of clovermint tight against her nose and lips. A clear gem in the center of her headdress glowed softly, casting enough light for her to see while leaving her hands free for the task at hand.

There was a faint stale breeze flowing out of the tunnel, so the waft from Rus’s fire was not penetrating far past the entrance. Cayce waved her empty pack in front of her as she walked to help make sure that anything inside the cave would meet Rus’s sleeping agent before it met her.

Not that she needed to go very far to collect the first part of her payload. Rus was correct, there were plenty of old scales here. The floor was littered with them and the outward flow of air had heaped them into piles along the lower lip of the cave entrance. Cayce forced herself to ignore the steady pounding of her pulse and crouched down on one knee. She placed the open pack on the cave floor with one hand while the other kept the clovermint filter over her face. Her eyes grew more and more accustomed to the dank interior as she carefully swept old dragon scales into her pack.

Many of the dried, brittle scales cracked and shattered as she touched them, crumbling to a fine powder that glinted in the low light. They seemed as if they could have been from the vivid blue-white dragon she had seen earlier, but only if they had been sloughed decades ago. There was a palpable sense of age about them, the kind of heady sensation she sometimes got from examining one of Master Rus’s most ancient scrolls.

She wondered exactly how old this monster was. It had begun marauding in Hask’s and Kula’s territories roughly one year ago, but it was clearly a full-grown adult. Why had it suddenly decided to expand its hunting ground? It had been happy to sit in its mountain and torment Vaan’s people for decades, according to the pixie’s story. It struck Cayce once more how dangerous it was that their client-guide would not or could not tell them everything he knew.

Something stirred deep within the mountain. Cayce felt it in the walls of the cave, in the gust of fetid air that blew past her, and in the cold terror-sweat that broke out along her spine. She quickly shoveled one more armload of scales into the pack, hoisted it onto her shoulder, went back to the entrance, and crawled out.

The sun had fully risen, and the rocky bowl was blindingly bright to Cayce. Squinting, she held the pack out straight in one hand and took several clumsy steps forward.

Someone grabbed her by the arm and hauled her down. Cayce struggled for a moment under the heavy weight of an unfamiliar body until Rus’s voice hissed, “Lie still, girl. I’ve come to relieve you of your burden.”

Cayce’s eyes adjusted to the light and she let go of the pack. As her vision cleared she saw Rus on his knees, rummaging through the mass of dried-up scales.

“Not the halest or healthiest specimens I’ve seen,” Rus said. “But perfectly adequate for my needs.” He looked up as if noticing Cayce for the first time. “Ready to go back in?”

“Something’s in there,” Cayce said. “I heard it moving, coming toward the entrance just before I came out.”

Rus tilted his hat back. “Well, it’s a good thing I gave you the ring and the skull, isn’t it? Back to work, my dear. You can’t quit with the job half-done.”

“Except when you’re working for pixies,” Cayce muttered.

“A-ha. Very funny and very true. Now…” Rus emptied the pack into a collapsible lock box he had retrieved from the gear Cayce had lugged up the mountain. “Go collect some of those oh-so-valuable teeth and claws.”

Rus withdrew from the mouth of the cave as Cayce prepared to go back in. She bit down on the clump of clovermint, freeing both hands, and cinched the pack around her waist. She reasoned she would be beyond the sleeping draft’s effect within ten or twenty paces of the entrance, but she still wanted to keep the antidote handy. She also wanted both hands empty to find and collect her treasure as quickly as possible.

Cayce slid back into the darkened cave and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim light from her headdress. She breathed in clovermint through clenched teeth and felt her way past the drowsy scent of camphor until she could see rough outlines of rock formations and stalagmites. Then Cayce crouched and went on, trying to remain as silent and unnoticed as one of the discarded scales.

Fifty paces in she saw the last glimmer of sunlight disappear around a gentle bend to the right. Cayce reached out once more to the damp wall and used it to guide her forward. The darkness was somehow thicker here, heavier and more impenetrable. The light from the gem in her headdress seemed diminished, less bright and squeezed closer in around her.

One hundred paces in took her into a pocket of hot, still air. She no longer needed the clovermint to keep her awake, but it freshened the air she was breathing. Cayce almost swooned in the heat but kept her balance by leaning harder into the damp cave walls.

At one hundred fifty paces, Cayce felt a gust of cool, ozone-scented air. The entire tunnel rumbled around her, and her hand came off the wall as she lurched forward. Her empty pack became tangled on a cone of rock, and as she pulled it free she fell flat on her face with her arms stretched out over her head. The gem-light in her headdress cracked and flickered out, leaving Cayce in almost total darkness.

A low, dry chuckle rolled down the tunnel. It started somewhere ahead of Cayce and echoed past her, bouncing off the walls all the way back to the cave entrance. Cayce listened to that sound escape and envied it.

“Another unexpected guest gains entry to my home.” The voice was smooth, cultured, and confident. It seemed a pleasant, conversational tone, though it was so loud in Cayce’s ears she was sure she felt blood dribbling from them.

Cayce got her arms beneath her and lifted herself up onto her elbows. She was almost entirely unhurt, but she could not get to her feet. Her legs felt paralyzed, cold and beyond her ability to control.

The voice continued. “Am I so wretched a host? So unfriendly that no one thinks to solicit an invitation before dropping by, for fear of rejection? Are my manners so coarse, so vulgar that visitors feel they have to impose upon my hospitality in secret, rather than risk a formal introduction?”

Where Master Rus used elevated language and affected manners to mislead and disarm his clients, this voice came with an undeniably authentic pedigree. The speaker sounded as if he’d been living among scholars and poets all his life. As if a bit of easy, self-deprecating banter such as this was as natural for him as exhaling.

“Perhaps you did send word of your impending arrival,” the voice said, suddenly bright. “Perhaps you weren’t being presumptuous. Perhaps you are instead a victim of some courier’s indolence. Is that it, my new young friend? Did you send word that you’d be coming, only to precede the herald who would have announced you?”

Cayce willed her legs back to life. They twitched and smarted, but eventually they obeyed. She brought her knees up under her chest and rocked back onto the soles of her feet, still crouched with her palms on the ground. She kept her face turned toward the sound—toward the interior of the mountain—as she prepared to turn and bolt back up the tunnel.

“What is your name, child?” The voice lost its conversational timbre, smoothly becoming the voice of a lord who is not accustomed to waiting for a reply.

“Don’t answer.” An unfamiliar voice came from directly behind her, but Cayce knew there was no one there. She stretched out her hand and waved it through the empty air, wondering if the dragon was toying with her. Kula said he could influence his victims’ minds. Maybe he was trying to confuse her, to spook her into running.

“Little girl.” The cultured voice sounded much closer now. “I asked you a question.”

Two flashes of blue light temporarily lit up the entire tunnel. Cayce’s eyes did not adjust quickly enough for her to, see anything in detail, and then she was blind in the dark once more, alone with disembodied voices and the smell of electric sparks.

“I am Tania Cayce,” she called loudly. Maybe if she were as polite as her host he would refrain from devouring her.

“No, no!” The second voice’s anguish helped Cayce recognize it. Vaan the glum pixie had shaken off Master Rus’s sleeping potion and followed her into the mountain. He seemed on the verge of panic now that his plan wasn’t being followed.

“Vaan,” the elegant voice said. “Is that you among my guests? Have you been plotting against me again?”

This will not go well for the pixie, Cayce thought. But she didn’t need him and had already worked out a plan to save herself.

“I am apprenticed to Potionmaster Donner Rus,” Cayce called. It wasn’t much to work with, but maybe if the dragon focused his rage on Vaan he would be more lenient with her. “He sent me here to request a simple boon. It is a small thing, something you would never miss. May I speak with you?”

“No.” The cultured voice lost its lilt and became as sharp as broken glass. “I think you have already told me enough.”

Blue light flashed again, and Cayce felt something hard and warm slam into her left shoulder. Childlike arms wrapped tightly around her waist and bore her off her feet. She dimly realized Vaan had tackled her.

The pixie’s momentum slammed her against the opposite wall. Cayce twisted as she hit to shunt some of the impact onto Vaan’s head, and they both grunted before dropping heavily onto the cave floor.

The mountain shook again, and Cayce heard a gurgling cough. The apprentice’s ears popped as a wave of pressure surged up the tunnel. Fast behind the pressure wave came a crackling ball of blue-white energy that charred and scarred the stone walls as it came.

Vaan threw his entire weight onto Cayce’s shoulders, forcing her head down behind a stalagmite. She struggled but stopped when she felt the burning heat from the energy ball wash over her. As the parts of her not covered by Vaan’s body tingled and burned, she quickly lost interest in casting him off.

She stayed motionless for a few seconds after the ball passed by, then started to gather her strength to wriggle free of the pixie. Vaan tightened his grip, however, and his small arms were like iron bars wrapped around her shoulders.

“Go limp,” Vaan said in her ear. “If you don’t I can’t save you.”

Cayce stopped struggling except to raise her clenched fist to display Rus’s red gem. “This ring,” she said.

“Won’t work,” Vaan said. “Whatever it’s supposed to do, it won’t work.” Cayce heard a strange buzzing sound as the pixies wings lifted them both off the floor.

For a delirious second she was nauseated and exhilarated by the sensation of weightlessness. Then Vaan pivoted in midair and shot up the tunnel. His grip was firm and confident, but he was only a small thing, and Cayce’s long legs flapped crazily behind them. With nothing to hang onto and no control over their momentum, all she could do was clench her teeth and try to stay calm.

It was no mean feat. All around them the tunnel shook and rained pieces of rock in their path. The dragon’s laughter had become a feral roar that somehow seemed to be right behind them but also gaining on them all the time. On several of the sharpest turns, Cayce saw glimpses of the dragon’s face, his teeth snapping and his long horns striking sparks from the rock. Though they were going out ten times faster than Cayce had gone in, to her the aerial trip took one hundred times as long.

Impulsively, Cayce drew Rus’s crystal skull and dropped it in their wake. If the fall wasn’t enough to crack it and release the caustic cloud, the dragon’s heavy body would certainly do the trick. As the beast slithered up the tunnel in pursuit, flashing jags of energy licked across the scales on his neck like bright, savage tongues.

Cayce stared hard as Vaan bore her on. She focused below the flashing teeth and sparking horns as they passed over the spot where she had dropped the skull. The head and neck came unerringly forward, and the sparking body followed behind, heedless and unaffected by Russ purple crystal.

Unaffected? Cayce peered back intently, shoving the distractions of their headlong flight to the back of her mind. The arcane glow around the dragon seemed to flicker, flaring from searing whiteness to a cool, muted blue. With each change in the light’s intensity, the monsters face rippled and rolled as if under water.

The forward edge of the dragon’s glow overtook them as they came around the final bend. Vaan navigated the long, gentle arc and sped up through the last straightaway that led to the way out. The pixie dipped and rolled wildly, and Cayce realized he was trying to anticipate or avoid the dragon’s next blast. She hoped he could do it without dropping her—or sacrificing too much momentum.

Vaan shot up to the ceiling and rolled onto his back. Cayce glanced down between her own feet, hoping to at least see her doom coming to catch her.

“Don’t look at him,” Vaan yelled.

Cayce looked anyway, sneering. There, across her relatively unobstructed line of sight, she got her first head-on look at the dragon, lit from behind by the ball of blue-white lightning forming in his chest.

“I said don’t look at him!”

“Stuff you,” Cayce muttered. The sight of the great beast in his entirety was awe-inspiring, even terrifying, but with most of his body concealed by the tunnel and the darkness, it was a far more manageable sight.

Cayce stared through tearing, squinting eyes. Was it fear or a trick of the light that made the great beast seem to flicker between two faces? One was the face she had seen delight in demolishing the farmers on the bridge: a majestic, alabaster-horned head ringed with exquisite ceramic scales.

The dragon’s other face was fleshless and black, corroded down to the bone. This shadow-image was adorned with brittle-edged scales that crumbled like rust as he came, leaving a faint reddish swirl in his wake.

She looked hard at the dragon, trying to gauge if Rus’s skull device had harmed the beast after all. If so, the damage was only cosmetic, for the dragon’s speed was undiminished.

So little of this made sense to her. Why had he put a geas on Vaan in the first place? What secrets did a lightning-spitting dragon have for a pixie slave to betray?

The dragon coughed and sent another pressure wave surging past them. They were almost at the crack in the mountain when he spat one last missile that filled the entire tunnel. Cayce fought the impulse to close her eyes.

Vaan carried her clear of the jagged opening just as the white-hot ball of energy blew the mountainside apart. Cayce was peppered by sharp rocks and grit but avoided serious injury; Vaan was not as lucky, taking a round rock to the back of his head.

The pixie grunted and sighed softly. His body went limp, his wings stopped beating, and they dropped onto the rocky ground. The poisoner’s apprentice felt two of her fingers break and a searing blast of pain rip through her knee when she landed, but she remained conscious.

Cayce hauled herself toward cover with her good hand and her good leg, inching ever farther from the cave entrance. The secret tunnel opening was no longer a secret and no longer an opening. As smoke and dust rose from the pile of boulders and debris that had been the mountainside, Cayce figured it probably wasn’t much of a tunnel anymore, either.

Cayce continued to drag herself away. She didn’t know where Vaan had landed but she wasn’t going to wait for him to ferry her the rest of the way down the mountain. She heard a familiar groan in the distance behind her and to the left, but she paid it no mind and continued crawling away from the mountain.

“Cayce?” Rus sounded dazed but his voice was strong. He rose on unsteady legs one hundred yards from the smoking pile of rubble. His walking stick was gone, and his hat was torn almost in two. A thin slash across his scalp had pasted the stout man’s thinning brown hair to the sides of his skull. He was listing as he walked, his reactions slow and clumsy. He stopped for a moment to beat some dust from his cape, and almost fell. Instead, Rus regained his balance and wrapped the edge of his elegant cloak around his clenched fist to keep it from dragging. He called out again, staggering directly in front of the mound of shattered rock.

“Tania Cayce, attend your master!” His voice was loud but unfocused, as if he couldn’t control his own volume.

Deep within the pile of boulders and debris, the mountain began to tremble. Flashes of blue light leaped from the crevices between stones.

“Run,” Cayce tried to shout, but all that came out was a shallow-lunged wheeze. She coughed into her hand then her eyes widened at the spatter of red smeared across her fingers.

“Where are you, Cayce? Did you get the teeth?”

Cayce coughed again. “Good-bye, Master Rus.” Her voice was weak and strained, barely a whisper. She did not relish what came next… well, not too much… but she watched just the same. If nothing else, she owed Rus this one final observation in hope that it would create opportunity.

Rus lurched around to face the former south face of the mountain. His eyes goggled as he realized where he stood and what the recent explosion must precede. Rus turned and started to run, and even with his injuries, he was only slightly less graceful and quick than he had been on the way in.

Two large boulders separated and rolled down opposite ends of the mound. The dragon’s sharp head slowly rose above the rubble, dust and grit glittering as it poured down his scales. The ruined dark visage Cayce had seen in the tunnel was gone. The grand beast’s ceramic scales stood on end, and energy crackled between them. He shrugged and pushed up through the pile of rock, freeing his upper limbs and his wings.

The dragon’s eyes swiveled left then right as he scanned the sloping field below. Cayce tried to shrink even closer to the large rock she had leaned up against. She needn’t have worried; the dragon quickly oriented on Rus as the stout man scaled the ridge.

The dragon’s neck shot arrow straight up into the sky, and he spread his wings wide, scattering the top half of the rubble mound. Cayce had seen parts of the beast up close, but now he rose whole and complete as he had been when she first saw him… and this time she was well within his grasp.

As was Master Rus. The dragon swam into the air, his flexible body tracing a fluid pattern up and over the master poisoner. He hovered there, gathering his coils into a series of overlapping loops as his wings kicked up a wind that battered Rus to his knees.

Cayce saw her master reach into his own mouth and rip something free. Eyes wide, voice clear, Rus raised his grisly treasure in a clenched fist. Through foam— and blood-flecked lips, Rus shouted words to an incantation Cayce could not understand.

The winds buffeting Rus suddenly changed direction. The master poisoner opened his fist. He smiled when he saw what had become of his tooth: Above his open hand floated a shard of black glass. The pointed sliver’s edges gave off an eerie purple glow that cast a garish light on Rus’s face.

Rus lowered his hand. The shard remained where it was. He pointed up to the dragon, and the crystal oriented on the hovering beast.

Mild interest kept those great swirling eyes fixed on Rus’s ritual, the dragon’s expression curious but unconcerned.

Cayce shuddered as she stared. The beast’s eyes were hypnotic, fascinating—perhaps this was how he manipulated minds? She tried to tear her gaze away but could not. She could see the dragon’s thoughts and emotions taking shape in his eyes, like a chorus assembling before they collectively sang their first note. In those whirling orbs Cayce saw that though cold interest ruled them now, boredom and cruelty were clearly asserting themselves.

Master Rus gestured emphatically. The black crystal shot toward the dragon like an arrow from a bow.

The great beast could have dodged. He had enough muscular control to move the center of his long body one way while moving his head and tail in another, and he could have slid under the attack. If his tail was as fast as his striking jaws, the dragon might have even been able to shatter the crystal or swat it aside without touching any sharp points or edges.

The dragon made no effort to avoid Rus’s black shard, however. The toxic dart punched straight through his outermost scales, extinguishing the blue sparks that danced there. It disappeared under the dragon’s armor and into the meaty muscles surrounding his rib cage.

Yellow-white light crackled across the dragon’s face, then cascaded down his body like melting snow. A wave of glittering distortion and gemstone facets seemed to envelop the great beast.

In the midst of this patch of eldritch fog, Cayce saw the dragon clearly. He was not covered in exquisite fused glass or ceramic but in rough black metal still smoking from the forge. He did not have small jags of azure lightning dancing between his scales, but flexible ingots of pale, muted yellow dotted the length of his spine like glowing vertebrae. Smoke and sparks vented from his shoulder joints and from where his wings joined his back. He was not the graceful, awe-inspiring predator that attacked the bridge; he was a smoking, soot-encrusted nightmare that dropped flakes of rusty black with each clang of his jagged metallic teeth.

The horror stood rampant and roaring in his glittering cloud of amber light and crystalline sparks, his neck stretched high and his wings spread wide. The dragon was undiminished, proud and utterly defiant in the face of whatever effect Rus’s toxic crystal was supposed to produce.

Earlier, Cayce thought she had seen the dragon in all his fury, that she had seen his true face. Only now did she understand his true might, only now did she know what the stunning mystery the great beast’s outward appearance was designed to conceal.

Then the monster hitched and shuddered, sending a wave of muscular force rolling along his body from top to bottom. He blinked. The arm closest to the wound left by Rus’s attack stiffened and shot out straight, but the dragon calmly regained control of his limb. As he brought the forelimb back to his side, the beast clenched his fist. The glittering nimbus around the dragon faded, and he appeared as he had before: an awesome, beautiful beast clad in polished blue-white scales.

The dragon lowered his arm and flexed his neck muscles so that the scales around his face stood on end. He snorted contemptuously then coughed a tiny bulge through his long throat. Barely opening his jaws, the brute spat a melon-sized sphere of crackling energy that flew straight into the center of Rus’s broad torso.

Her master’s scream barely sounded over the explosion. Cayce turned her head away from the blinding flash and pressed herself flat against the rugged ground behind her rocky shelter. When the noise and the dust settled, Cayce opened her eyes and looked.

The dragon was overhead, circling the small smoking crater that marked the last stand of Potionmaster Donner Rus. He hissed disparagingly and spread his wings. The wind from each beat sent a fresh cloud of grit against Cayce’s face, but it also carried the monster farther away, off into the cloud-thick morning sky.

Cayce slumped back against the ground and exhaled. Her breath was returning. Her broken fingers throbbed, and her knee was swelling painfully, but she had made it. She was alive.

A shadow passed over her eyes, and Cayce opened them. She saw Vaan’s melancholy face and a small, blue-tinged hand offering to help her up.

“Come with me,” the pixie said.

Cayce took his hand. “What for?”

“You must tell the others what I cannot.”

Cayce got to her feet then cast Vaan’s hand aside. “I’m not staying on this dungheap any longer than I have to. I’m leaving.”

“You cannot just leave. You must tell them what you have seen.” He locked eyes with her, almost pleading. “I saved your life.”

Cayce scouted the rubble between her and the path to the ridge. “I’ll write you a note for them,” she said. “Look, I’m grateful you got me out of there in one piece. But I’m really scared, and I don’t want to be here. So I’m going.”

Vaan’s wings buzzed, and he stood directly in front of Cayce. He crossed his arms and said, “You can’t just go. You must come with me.”

It was somewhat comical, the miniature man trying to physically intimidate her, but Cayce remembered the power in those tiny arms and wings. She considered testing Rus’s ring on the pixie, but the fact that it was her ex-master’s made it suspect and unreliable.

Instead, Cayce smoothed an imaginary strand of her ghostly white hair under her headdress. Gingerly holding her broken fingers at her side, Cayce ran her good hand along the edge of her headdress, probing the inner seam of the long wrap where she concealed her needles. Each of the three short spikes was tipped with one of Master Rus’s more powerful sleeping agents, and Cayce expertly slid one of the needles between her index and middle finger.

Careful to keep her fingers pressed together around the thin metal spike, Cayce raised her palms to Vaan in an apparent effort to calm him down. As she’d hoped, his eyes were drawn to the broken fingers on her free hand and not to the ones pressed tight around the needle.

“There’s no need to get agitated,” she said. “I was panicking and forgot how important this is to you. Of course I’ll come with you. I’ll tell them everything I know.”

Vaan relaxed. The bluish tint of his skin seemed to shimmer, and his ice-white eyes glittered. “Thank you, Tania Cayce.” Vaan offered her both hands and said, “With your permission I will carry you down to the others.”

Cayce nodded. “The quicker, the better.” She stepped forward and, as Vaan took flight to circle around her for the best possible grip, Cayce curled her fingers into a fist and lightly punched the needle’s sharp tip into the pixies neck. Cayce smoothly withdrew the thin spike from Vaan’s flesh and hopped back to watch him fall.

Small, powerful fingers dug into her shoulder, and an iron hand clamped onto her fist. Vaan was still standing in front of Cayce, but he was also behind her somehow, forcing her fingers open so the needle dropped to the rocky ground. He took hold of her shoulder and spun her around, latching on to her headdress as he sprang into the air. The long, turbanlike garment unraveled as Vaan shot upward, giving Cayce’s spin an extra unwanted boost of torque.

The headdress ripped free just as Cayce’s legs twisted beneath her. Awkwardly, she fell, and her hair splayed out crazily across her face. Cayce was blinded and choked by an inescapable cascade of white. Worse, her scalp seared and stung in a hundred different places that until recently held the healthy and firmly rooted strands of hair now dangling from the headdress in Vaan’s tiny fist.

The pixie’s wings buzzed and he was behind Cayce once more, one strong arm around her throat and the other clenched around her waist. He held her motionless until her equilibrium returned and her view was unimpeded.

Before her the Vaan she had stuck, the false Vaan created by pixie glamour, faded from sight.

“Don’t try anything else,” the true pixie muttered from behind her. “And don’t struggle like you did in the cave or I’ll drop you. I swear I will. You can still talk if both your legs are broken.”

“Wait,” she started, but a powerful buzz rose from Vaan’s wings. Cayce’s stomach dropped as he carried her over the side of the ridge. The ground quickly fell away, and Cayce found herself flying too high and too fast to do anything but cradle her broken fingers, clench her teeth, and endure the ride.

At least she was moving away from the dragon’s lair. Once she told the others what she had seen, perhaps they would let her go.

They returned to find Kula and the soldiers waiting. Vaan explained what he had seen then turned away, unable even to tell Cayce to tell the others the dragon’s great secret. It really was a very good geas, she thought.

Though he couldn’t actually compel Cayce to talk, Vaan’s angry glare effectively conveyed his intentions. He stayed close behind or above her, always within easy reach if she tried to run.

Cayce considered her situation. Lying was an option, but she didn’t see how that would help her any more than the truth. Also, Vaan had said something earlier about Kula’s ability to distinguish fact from falsehood. Cayce wasn’t eager to test Kula’s magic without knowing more… like exactly what an anchorite was and what one could do.

So, under the forest woman’s broad shadow and Captain Hask’s empty stare, Cayce told them exactly what she had seen.

“He’s a machine,” she said. “The dragon we’ve been hunting is a huge machine of some kind. He spits out sparks and reeks of burning oil. He’s a machine.”

No one responded at first. The soldiers all stared blankly at Hask. Hask himself tilted his head, lost in thought.

Kula stood angrily with her fists on her hips. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“He’s a machine,” Cayce repeated. “Some sort of robot. A desiccated, rusting robot.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “That or a zombie. He shook off two potentially fatal injuries and came back for more as if nothing had happened.”

“This is too much.” Kula glared, fuming, though Cayce didn’t think the anchorite was angry at her. “Is he a robot or a zombie?”

“How should I know?” Cayce held the angry woman’s eyes. “He’s a zombie-robot. No! He’s a robot-zombie!” Cayce shrugged sarcastically. “What do you want from me? I can only tell you what I saw. I can’t tell you what it means.”

“I’ll tell you what I saw,” one of the soldiers said. “I saw a real, flesh-and-blood dragon attacking our fortress. And those farmers.”

“That’s pixie glamour,” Cayce said. “Vaan and his people must be responsible for it. That’s what they’re enslaved for—to make this thing look like a live dragon.” Cayce held the soldier’s uncertain gaze then turned to face Hask. “I also saw glimpses of it when he chased me up the tunnel. And outside, when he killed my master. He doesn’t look like he’s in good repair. I think he might be breaking down.”

Kula muttered to herself. Then she said aloud. “That would explain why his behavior suddenly became aggressive and unpredictable. A malfunctioning construct… but if he’s actually a machine, who built him and why? Why does a machine want enslaved pixies to make him look like a real dragon?”

“He’s a weapon,” one soldier said. “Like the ones the old soldiers describe. A living siege engine like the ones that attacked during the Machine Invasion. The Phyrexians used all sorts of tricks back then, including camouflage and infiltration.”

Captain Hask’s stern voice cut the other soldiers off just as their voices were rising to contribute.

“Whoever built him and whatever for does not matter to this mission at all,” Hask said. “Nothing changes because he’s a machine. He still attacked us. He’s still raiding your forest, Ma’am. And we still have to destroy him. The fact that we know he’s mechanical gives us an advantage—we know what he is, so we know exactly how to kill him.”

Kula nodded as she continued to stroke her broad chin. “Something still bothers me. It’s as if… yes. Captain,” she said, animated. “You and your men have experience in this area, don’t you? You’ve been in combat against machines before.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Hask said, his voice hollow. “Two years ago we held off an entire battalion of refurbished Yotians for a month. Man to man, artifact warriors are unstoppable, but we found ways to kill them in large numbers.” He nodded toward Boom the golem, and several of the soldiers chuckled.

Kula nodded. “As an anchorite I abhor all forms of machinery, especially those that mimic natural life. I know ten ways to render a machine useless just by focusing the forests power against it.” Kula turned to Cayce.

“Then there’s your master,” she said.

“Former. Master Rus is deceased.”

“Your former master, then. Could he have successfully used that abominable stuff you bore for him? Used it against a machine dragon?”

Cayce hesitated, remembering Rus’s final failed effort to save himself. “Probably. He tried something extraordinary when the dragon came after him, but it didn’t work. Also, I think I hit the dragon with a caustic cloud of something, but that didn’t really do any harm either.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t be sure. My guess is Rus didn’t know what he was up against, so he wasn’t using the right substances or incantations. Most poisons can only kill something that’s actually alive to start with, but there are ways to stop a machine creature—as long as you know that’s what you’re dealing with. You can foul fuel lines, clog gears, or short circuit power supplies.” Cayce shrugged again. “The more lifelike something is, the quicker you should be able to find the substance that’ll kill it. Just focus on the life function the machinery is mimicking, and stop the machinery the same way you would stop the living organ.”

“Charming.” Kula sneered. She looked to Vaan, hovering just over Cayce’s shoulder. “I should congratulate you again, my friend. You got around your geas and convinced me to help you, but you also managed to trick me into assembling a squad of artifact-destruction specialists.”

Vaan could only smile and shrug.

“So,” Kula continued. “I say Hask is correct: Nothing has changed, except in our favor. We will confront the beast according to our original plan, but we will be all the more ready for him now that we know his true form.”

Hask nodded. “Agreed.”

Vaan shoved Cayce forward.

“Hey,” she snapped. Her knee was still dicey and her fingers throbbed. Loosed, her long hair was becoming a handicap. She cleared a few locks away from her face, cursing Vaan again for taking her headdress. She paused. The entire group was staring at her expectantly.

Kula raised one heavy eyebrow at Vaan. The pixie shrugged then turned away.

“And this one,” Kula said, “will lead us in.”

Cayce spun to face the anchorite. “What? Why me? You two are supposed to be the guides.”

Kula bent at the waist, thrusting her massive round face into Cayce’s “My guidance is for us to keep you in front of us, little poisoner. You and your master haven’t proven to be the most trustworthy members of our expedition. And you have been inside the dragon’s tunnel. Vaan can’t show us where the dragon came from when the beast pursued you two. You can.”

Cayce swallowed her next reply. Even if she could get by Kula physically and verbally, she would never escape. The entire party had her surrounded, and none of them looked the slightest bit interested in letting her walk away.

“Besides,” Kula said, “Now that he’s out and a-hunt, there’s absolutely no danger inside his lair. We will be waiting for him when he returns. I plan to have a proper and richly deserved ‘welcome home’ prepared.”

The soldiers laughed. One of them tapped Boom with the handle of his sword and sent a dull, stony thud across the clearing.

Cayce sighed. There was no opportunity here, only cold, hard, infuriating consequences.

“I’ll take you,” Cayce said. “If we survive, I hope in return you won’t hold me accountable for Master Rus’s ill-considered actions.”

Kula smiled. “If we survive, little girl, I’ll personally carry you down the mountain on my shoulders at the head of the victory parade.”

Captain Hask grunted. “We will survive—all of us. The beast will not.” He reached around and touched the linen-wrapped sword on his back. “I swear it.”

Unnerved anew by the officer’s strangely intimate reverence for his weapon, Cayce turned away. She was immediately confronted by the sizeable figure of Kula. The anchorite was breaking off a segment of her live-wood hair band with one hand as she reached out for Cayce with the other. The poisoner’s apprentice yelped as Kula’s massive palm closed over her shoulder.

“Hold still,” the anchorite said, “and relax.” She held the section of brown, woody vine close to Cayce’s head. The braid twitched and slithered from Kula’s hand to Cayce’s scalp, encircling the girl’s forehead like a crown. When its ends met on the far side of her head, the wood tightened, pulling Cayce’s long white hair away from her face and pinning it tightly to her skull.

A tingling sensation spread out from the wooden band. Cayce could feel it sizzling through her skull and down her spine. It radiated out toward her damaged hand and her swollen knee. Her crushed fingers straightened with cracking sounds that were even louder in Cayce’s ears than the original breaks. The knee popped violently back into place, and the swelling deflated like a punctured bladder of air.

The pain of Kula’s healing magic was also more intense than the original injuries, but when the searing agony faded Cayce found herself with two good legs and ten working digits. She resisted the urge to flex them, as Kula was clearly waiting for her to do so.

“Consider that a gesture of good will,” Kula said. The giantess’s face darkened. “And a friendly warning: Don’t betray us again.” Kula raised and lowered her thick eyebrows, and a rich green glow shone behind her eyes. In response, Cayce’s new headband contracted painfully around her skull but quickly eased off to leave a dull throbbing ache.

Overwhelmed and almost numb, Cayce shook her head. Kula had made her point: Cayce was now thoroughly obliged to help them reach the dragon. Master Rus had been correct in his dislike of military and religious fanatics. As clients they were like pixies—best avoided.

“If I do this for you,” Cayce said. “If I lead you there and you get in position before he comes back… will you let me go?”

“That’s a big ‘if.’ And even if, I wouldn’t count on it if I were you.”

“But it’s possible?”

“Anything is possible,” Kula said.

Cayce sighed. It wasn’t much, but it was the only option she had. “Let’s go, then.”

With Vaan hovering close behind, Cayce took the lead and began marching up the ridge. Never work with pixies, she thought, or fanatics. Not following his own good advice had cost Rus his life, but Cayce was determined it would not cost her hers as well.

Vaan stopped her just before she reached the top of the ridge to give the others time to gather behind them. As planned, the dour pixie then soared up and over the ridge to make sure the way was clear.

Huddled on the rock between a soldier and Kula, Cayce felt a rush of confidence that had nothing to do with her fellow party members. She had seen how high the dragon had flown after killing Rus, how fast and how far he went without so much as a glance back for his mountain home. Cayce was sure Vaan would find nothing—right now, this was where the dragon definitely wasn’t, and that was always the safest place to be. Whatever was going to happen to her, to them all, wasn’t going to happen here.

Indeed, Vaan’s “all clear” signal came whistling over the ridge in a matter of moments. Hask ordered two of his soldiers to stand watch over Cayce, then he, Kula, Boom, and the other soldiers went over the ridge. They were silent as they moved, quickly surging across the rocky ground. Boom fell behind, and one of the soldiers eased up to keep pace, but the others moved straight to the pile of rubble the dragon’s exit had created. Cayce watched as they climbed to the smoking crater halfway up.

Kula dived into the crater with her fists clenched straight out in front of her. Hask quickly pushed his soldier clear just as a massive boulder flew out of the pit. Kula whooped triumphantly from the rocky mound’s interior. Soon more great stones and more loud whoops flew from the hole as Boom and the other soldier finally rejoined their comrades.

Hask stood and peered down into the hole. Nodding, he turned and signaled the men guarding Cayce. Without hesitation they each took hold of her and hoisted her into the air. Vaan’s strong arms hooked under hers, and Cayce was borne up toward the mound, her feet barely skimming the tops of broken stones as she went.

Without pausing at the lip, Vaan carried Cayce through the hole and into the darkened interior of the mound. The dragon’s body and Kula’s magic-enhanced might had cleared a wide path through the pile of rocks that led straight back to the original tunnel. Marching feet followed Cayce as she soared along, but they fell far behind as Vaan took her back into the intact section of the tunnel.

The pixie brought them up short, furiously beating his wings to hover just shy of Kula. The anchorite blocked most of the path just by standing in it, deep in meditation with her hands folded. She had smeared some sort of luminescent moss on the cave walls, which bathed the entire tunnel in a low, emerald-green light. Tendrils of the moss quickly spread along the tunnel walls, stretching deep into the labyrinthine depths of the mountain itself.

Cayce spoke. “What are—”

Vaan tightened his grip on her, and Kula grunted warningly. Annoyed, Cayce tried to shrug herself free and earned an angry hiss from the pixie.

“He is not here.” Kula opened her eyes and grinned. “Or perhaps his unnatural life is so alien that even I cannot sense him. It hardly matters which. We are going in.”

The soldiers’ feet were very close now. Vaan let Cayce go, and she stepped up to Kula.

“You don’t need me any more,” she said. “I want you to let me go.”

“Not yet. Not until we reach the dragon’s nest and you yourself have triggered any traps.”

“What? Why? I mean, why me?”

Kula closed her eyes again. “You still have an aura of secrets about you, my dear. You’re afraid, as are we all… but there’s something else in you, too.” The huge woman opened her eyes. “You smell like scheming to me.”

“Is that how Master Rus smelled before he put you all to sleep? How is it you didn’t smell that?”

Kula shrugged, unperturbed. “Your wretched master always smelled of trickery and deceit. It was hard to separate the lies he told us from those he continually told himself.”

“Look.” Cayce lowered her voice, rasping like a cauldron hag. “I smell like scheming because I am scheming. I’m scheming to get away from here alive. That’s all.”

Kula laughed, her deep voice musical and rich. “Now that I believe. There’s no lying in you when you say that.”

“Then why won’t you let me go?”

“Because you have secrets.” Kula’s tone was patient, implacable. “And my life—all our lives—might depend on what those secrets are, if and when they are revealed. It’s only right that you help reap their bounty. Ah, here’s Captain Hask.”

The officer and his squad came over the jagged rocks into the tunnel. The stones almost gave way under Boom’s weight but the golem was easily able to keep his balance and take his position among the soldiers.

Kula gestured at Cayce, and the apprentice’s headband squeezed her temples.

“After you,” the anchorite said. Vaan floated up, his white eyes wide and intense, and he hovered alongside Cayce.

Cayce screwed up her courage and faced the interior of the mountain. The tunnel looked very different with a green glow illuminating it, but the way was clear. There weren’t that many branches in the main path, and it was a simple matter to backtrack the dragon’s course. They truly did not need her to lead them anymore, and Cayce cursed the anchorite’s suspicion. No matter how well-founded it was, it was still going to get Cayce killed.

She also knew she was on the right track when she found the remains of Rus’s crystal skull. The caustic agent inside had definitely been released, but it had not affected the dragon. The skull in here and the black crystal outside: That made two of Rus’s best efforts utterly wasted and without effect. Was the dragon somehow proof against poisons in general?

The tunnel angled down sharply, and the temperature of the surrounding walls began to rise. The heat had affected Kula’s moss, causing much of it to wither and brown. The part that remained still emitted light, but the light had an angry reddish tint.

Though it was still a wide space and roomy enough for all of Hask’s troops to march side-by-side, Cayce felt uncomfortably closed in. She pressed on, dimly realizing that it wasn’t the feeling of an entire mountain bearing down on her that unnerved her. No, what got to Cayce was the very clear sensation of an enormous open space nearby, a hollow pocket in this otherwise unbroken wedge of solid stone. Was it an instinctual reaction to something that shouldn’t be there, she wondered? Or was it a rational reaction to the party’s arrival at their foolish destination?

The air grew cooler, and the glowing moss recovered its green-hued vigor. Vaan faltered behind her, hesitating just as Cayce stepped into the wide, open chamber. Thus she was the first to see the dragon’s nest, eerily green in the light of Kula’s magic.

She had seen treasure troves before, but none on this scale and none as cluttered and disorganized. Huge mounds of coins stamped from gold, watersilver, argentum, and other precious metals were all around the chamber, heaped against the walls or scattered into irregular piles. Precious gems were sprinkled among the coins without regard to color, size, or quality. There were hundreds of pieces of polished armor and thousands of fine weapons, all carelessly cast around a raised rectangular platform at the far end of the room. Expertly carved statues were piled roughly atop one another, each marred by cracks, scorch marks, or broken limbs.

Cayce peered closer and took an involuntary step backward. There was more than one kind of trophy in this hoard. The dragon’s chaotic expanse of wealth and treasure was also rich in the bodies of its victims—the nest-trove was salted and seeded with an uncountable number of humanoid bones.

Vaan joined her then, followed by Kula and the soldiers. Cayce did not look back but instead continued to scan the grisly fortune. There were more than people bones here. Some were big enough to belong to ogres, others small, numerous, and twisted enough to represent an entire goblin tribe. Oddest of all, there seemed to be an entire dragon skeleton nestled among the rotting wooden remnants of a merchant’s barge. In the dim green light, Cayce could make out a complete monster: spine, ribs, wings, limbs, and tail. The only thing missing was the skull.

“That standard.” Captain Hask was staring through red-rimmed eyes. He pointed up at a gleaming white stone statue of a two-headed eagle affixed to a polished birch pole. “That was bestowed upon my garrison by the king himself. Trooper Fost!”

The oldest of the soldiers snapped to attention. “Sir!”

“Retrieve the eagle standard at once.”

“Sir!”

But Vaan fluttered in front of Trooper Fost before the soldier could take a single step.

“We should stick to the plan, Captain.” Kula stepped smoothly in between Vaan and the officer. “The beast could come back at any moment. We want to be standing by and ready to strike when he returns, not reclaiming stolen property. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Hask glowered, but he nodded and ordered the soldier to stand down.

“Sir?” Trooper Fost asked. “Where do you want to position the golem?”

A low, dry chuckle rolled down from the upper reaches of the chamber. The sound was smooth, cultured, and confident.

Cayce’s body went cold. Nearby, Vaan’s apprehension seemed to physically weigh him down as he nervously descended to the tunnel floor.

“Better decide quick, Captain,” Cayce said.

The shadows high above were undiminished by Kula’s glowing moss and were as solid and as impenetrable as the mountain. The dragon’s voice rolled down, lush, warm, and playful. “Another unexpected guest gains entry to my home.”

Kula’s eyes grew wide, and her face twisted in raw anticipation. Beside her Hask loosened the sword on his back and began unwrapping the white linen shroud. With a few flicks of his eyes and jerks of his head, he sent the soldiers and Boom hustling across to the closest chamber wall.

The dragon spoke again. “Am I so wretched a host? So unfriendly that no one thinks to solicit an invitation before dropping by, for fear of rejection? Are my manners so coarse, so vulgar that visitors feel they have to impose upon my hospitality in secret, rather than risk a formal introduction?”

Cayce turned to the pixie, but Vaan only offered his customary helpless shrug.

“He’s repeating itself,” Cayce hissed to Kula. “That’s exactly what he said to me when I came in alone.”

“So what?” Kula did not take her eyes off the expanse of darkness above them.

“So it must mean something. Maybe something we can use.”

“Maybe.” The anchorite shrugged and her lids drifted closed. “Maybe not.”

“Perhaps you did send word of your impending arrival,” the dragon said, his voice precisely as bright and genial as it had been before when he said these words. The sound echoed off the walls of the broad chamber, and it proved impossible to fix on the eloquent beast’s location even as he bantered on.

“Perhaps you weren’t being presumptuous. Perhaps you are instead a victim of some courier’s indolence. Is that it, my new young friend? Did you send word that you’d be coming, only to precede the herald who would have announced you?”

For Cayce, there was no longer any doubt: note for note, these were the exact same words said the exact same way. She was unable to see what this information meant, however, or how she could use it to escape.

The hidden serpent skipped a line, but otherwise kept to his earlier script and said, “Vaan? Is that you among my guests? Have you been plotting against me again?”

Vaan whimpered at the sound of his name on his master’s lips. The pixie clapped his clenched fists over his ears and sank to his knees.

“Stop him,” he moaned. “Now, damn you, now!”

Kula’s wide eyes slammed open. Her hair bulged outward, shattering the wooden braid that restrained it.

“Done,” the anchorite said. With a full-throated roar, Kula sprang up into the darkness and vanished from sight.

Something crashed loudly, and the dragon let out a startled half-roar. A flash of blue light flickered, revealing the monster’s position: He was clinging to the far side of the chamber ceiling, his long neck twisted around so that he was leering down at them from almost directly overhead. He was polished and perfect again, gleaming blue-white in the dank cavern air.

Kula’s leap had carried her within grappling distance of the sinewy coils, and she had wrapped herself around the dragon’s throat. Both arms and both legs were squeezing as hard as they could.

“Ho, vile machine!” she howled. “Unnatural beast! Let loose your lightning now and let’s see how you fare when it gets caught in your throat!” She squeezed harder still, compressing the dragon’s neck into less than half its normal size. “Fire, you coward, fire!”

Cayce was no anchorite, and she didn’t understand forest magic, but she knew a losing strategy when she saw it. Even if Kula could hold back the dragon’s blast by kinking his throat like a water hose, what would protect Kula? She was right on the site of the blockage. When this hose ruptured, she would take the brunt of the dragon’s white-hot blast full in the face.

Cayce’s scalp itched under the wooden braid. Without Kula, what would control the headband that was controlling Cayce? Maybe the anchorite sacrificing herself to kill the dragon wasn’t such a bad result for the poisoner’s apprentice.

But the dragon didn’t summon its fire. Instead, he curled his head back and rolled Kula up in his coils to smother the anchorite just as she choked him. Kula was freakishly strong, but she was dwarfed by the dragon’s body—she simply disappeared under a muscular column of blue-white scales.

“Deploy the golem,” Hask said. He gestured with his fist and said, “Battering ram, on my mark.” Boom came to life, fire and smoke belching from his mouth and eyes. Under Hask and the soldier’s direction, the heavy stone man lumbered to the far wall under Kula and the dragon. Boom planted his feet, pivoted at the waist, and slammed his right fist into the chamber wall.

The wall all but disintegrated under the golem’s heavy fist. A long, thin crack raced up the wall, and the entire chamber shook. The crack slid under one of the dragon’s taloned feet, and that foot came away from the wall in a cloud of dust and broken rock.

This slight shift in the dragon’s weight gave Kula all the opening she needed. Howling afresh, she somehow managed to twist herself away from the ceiling. Without leverage, without comparable weight, Kula pulled herself out of the dragon’s coils even as she dragged him from his perch.

Screeching hideously, the beast resisted. He clung to the ceiling with his last few toes until Kula’s strength finally overcame him. Then dragon and anchorite both fell from that great height and crashed through the chamber floor. There, unseen, they continued to thrash among a cascade of rare coins, precious jewels, and old, broken bones that poured down on them from above.

More oily dust rose from the treasure and fell from the walls as tremors spread outward from the two titans in their pit. Kula whooped again and a dread, rhythmic pounding began, shaking bits of chamber wall free as Kula and the dragon exchanged blows.

Cayce kept her footing and covered her mouth against the thick cloud of dust. Vaan had been jostled onto his side, and she reached him just as the pixies wings were helping him right himself.

Cayce grabbed him by the wrist before he could rise out of reach. “Why is he repeating himself?” she shouted. Vaan only shook her loose and flitted off, darting between falling rocks toward the relative safety of the merchant’s barge. Cayce took one last look at the unseen pounding in the center of the chamber then dashed after the pixie. The ship’s broken beams wouldn’t provide perfect protection against a cave-in, but they were better than nothing.

Just as Cayce reached the tangle of shattered planks and broken decking, a powerful shockwave sent her hurtling through the air. Cayce covered her face with her arms as she crashed through the side of the merchant ship. If the bulkhead hadn’t been so old and flimsy, Cayce might have been smeared across it. Instead she burst through the rotten wooden wall almost without resistance. She landed on her back and skidded painfully across the cave floor, bruised instead of broken.

Elsewhere in the chamber, Captain Hask brandished his special sword still in its sheath. The other soldiers fell in alongside and behind Boom as the golem trudged toward the center of the battle. Nearby, Vaan hovered over the headless dragon skeleton Cayce had spotted earlier. Beyond the pixie, Kula and the dragon emerged from their hole.

The anchorite had grown to enormous size, standing half as tall as the dragon himself. The huge chamber seemed cramped and crowded with two giants occupying it, Kula wreathed in green light and the dragon shedding showers of white-hot sparks. The forest warrior had her arms wrapped tightly around the beasts neck just behind his head. He was trying to toss her aside but could only manage to lift her off the ground. Free from their duty of holding Kula up, the anchorite’s legs slammed into the dragon’s torso. Kula kicked with her feet and twisted with her arms in a blur of furious motion, howling and screaming in guttural forest-talk.

Though nearly transfixed by the sight of Kula rampant, Cayce still noticed Vaan hovering and staring down at her. She glanced over at the pixie and saw the anguished longing in his eyes.

“What?” she said, exasperated. “If it’s important enough for you to tell me, the spell guarantees you can’t.” Vaan only smiled helplessly, and flitted a few feet closer to the combatants.

The dragon let out a roar of frustration. He lunged forward with Kula still clamped behind his skull and forced his head and the giantess deep into the solid walls of the chamber. As he drove into the crumbling rock, the dragon raised the scales on his neck so that their razor edges stood out like the quills on a porcupine. Then the beast twisted in Kula’s grip, slicing a thousand vicious furrows in her flesh.

Kula cried out in pain but never relaxed her grip. If anything, the mad anchorite clutched even tighter as the bladelike scales dug into her body. She kicked harder, and more furiously, though the sharp points of the dragon’s scales punched through the soles and balls of her feet with each blow.

At last, the anchorite’s hold faltered. The dragon wrenched himself loose in a spray of ghastly red mist. As he slithered clear of Kula, he swatted the anchorite away with his tail before she could renew her grip. The dragon’s tail spikes scored Kula’s face, and the forest woman was hurled backward. The anchorite shrank back to her original size as she fell among the tumbling boulders.

Essentially undamaged, the dragon crawled up onto the rectangular platform. He turned and hissed at Kula, ignoring the seemingly minor threat of four soldiers and a stone man who glowed at the seams. As the dragon’s angry challenge faded, Captain Hask’s voice rolled across the chamber.

“Deploy the golem. Heavy demolition, on my mark.”

The soldiers fell back from Boom, who had begun to whine and creak like an overheated kettle. Orange fire flared from the seams around his ankles, elbows, and shoulders. Boom bent stiffly at the waist and knees, and the stone man held this awkward posture for a moment. Then there was an explosion at his feet, and Boom shot into the air on a column of colorful flame.

The golem blasted into the dragon’s chest like a man-shaped cannonball. Cayce saw some of the upright scales shatter like glass before orange flame engulfed the golem with a dull, muffled thump. The dragon’s eyes widened as the same orange flames erupted from his back. Boom’s attack had punched clear through the beasts body and gone on to char the wall beyond.

The dragon staggered back and fell heavily onto his side. He still held his head defiantly aloft on his undamaged neck, but the huge pectoral and stomach muscles that anchored his neck were longer connected.

Twenty feet from Cayce, Boom’s empty shell clattered to the ground. The golem’s body was intact, but the stone form that had been filled with churning, fiery energy was now an empty, hollow husk.

“Don’t touch him!” Trooper Fost shouted from the far side of the cavern. “He’s still hot. Stay clear until he gets back on his feet.”

Cayce made a half-hearted sign so Fost would see she understood. Looking at the golem, she didn’t think Boom would be back on his feet any time soon, but she was happy to obey Fost’s injunction to stay away from the walking explosive device.

Over on the rectangular platform, the dragon stirred. His head rose over his holed torso, and somehow the torso rose after it like a fakir-charmed snake. The gaping, smoking hole in his body was beginning to close as tiny sparks of gold shimmered along the edges of the wound. The sparks seemed to be repairing the damage, rebuilding the dragon’s organs, bones, skin, and scales from the inside out. As the gold light restored the brute to fighting capacity, a strange bluish light danced across the headless dragon skeleton beside Cayce.

Cayce blinked, her dry eyes popping. The dragon wasn’t just a machine, he was a self-repairing machine. And whatever magical method of self-repair he was using, it was somehow tied to the incomplete pile of dragon bones lying forgotten under the wreck of the wooden ship.

Outside the ship, Kula leaped back into the battle. She was again human-sized, but her hair had grown wild and long, extending around her head like a thorn thicket. Her hands glowed with green eldritch light, and she seemed to be doing a complicated dance, carving intricate shapes in the air as she glided toward her foe. Kula shouted something in the language of anchorites then extended her hands toward the dragon. The green glow leaped from her body to the dragon’s, enveloping him in verdant light.

Thick reddish rust spread across the dragon. Then this scabby coating faded to a dusty brown. As with Rus’s toxic crystal, however, the dragon was merely inconvenienced by this subtle attack. Damn, Cayce thought, he’s already leaving crusty flakes of his own all over the chamber. How would another layer of corrosion make any difference?

It was pointless. Neither their carefully planned assault nor their special anti-machine tactics would work until they solved the dragon’s ultimate secret. He was impossible to kill if he instantly recovered after each of their attacks.

If Vaan could tell them the answer, they’d be laughing. But how could you get someone to say what they simply could not say?

Thinking quickly, Cayce turned to Vaan and said, “You use glamour to make us see things. Things you pixies want us to see.” Cayce dashed in front of the hovering blue man, locking eyes with him. “Show me,” she said. “Highlight everything in here that’s valuable to the dragon.”

He didn’t understand at first, but Vaan’s eyes widened when he realized what Cayce had just made it possible for him to do. He grinned as tears welled up in his eyes.

“Done,” he said.

Vaan concentrated, fixing his otherworldly white eyes on Cayce. She blinked again, and when she opened her eyes she was treated to the exact same scene, only now the treasure trove was a collection of bright, gleaming lights. Every coin, every jewel, every broken bit of statuary was shining silver-white, as if the coins and rubies and polished steel had been replaced with solid energy. Gold, silver, and white brilliance sparkled, scintillated, and gleamed throughout the chamber.

Around Cayce, beams of solid light crisscrossed among piles of coins that sparkled like stars. Lustrous tapestries, statues, and plate-sized discs competed for her eye against fine-cut gemstones that gleamed like the sun on shards of a mirror. The radiance wrinkled Cayce’s eyes as it hit her from every angle. Even the old bones and bits of armor glowed and shone as valued symbols of the dragon’s victorious past.

As Cayce expected, showing her the dragon’s proudest possessions wasn’t a violation of Vaan’s geas. After all, there was nothing secret or dangerous in knowing dragons valued wealth and conquest. Her heart pounding, Cayce turned to the headless skeleton.

There was no glow around this particular item. In fact, there was a black emptiness among all that shining treasure, a skeleton-shaped hole in the avalanche of dazzling brilliance. Aside from the odd broken stone and the rotting timbers of the merchant ship, everything else in the cave had been tagged by Vaan’s magic. To Cayce’s eye, everything but the skeleton was clearly marked as valuable, shining with importance as if each reflected the pride it inspired in its owner.

Cayce stopped. “Thank you.”

“You’re welc—” Vaan’s words were cut off mid-syllable, interrupted by a wet slashing sound and a spray of blue-black liquid.

Smiling helplessly, Vaan cast his white eyes down to his own chest. Cayce followed his gaze to the bladelike tip of the dragon’s tail, which now protruded several inches from the pixies breastbone.

Cayce glanced into the stricken pixie’s eyes. Behind him, the tail curled and looped all the way across the chamber to where the dragon was getting the best of Kula. He had her pinned against a massive column of rock with one disdainful, clawed hand. The beast let Kula up then butted her aside with a long thrust of his neck. Eyes glittering, the dragon twisted his face back toward the little blue morsel skewered on the end of his tail.

“Vaan.” The dragon leered through narrow eyes, his lips pulled back into a cruel smile. “Is that you among my guests? Have you been plotting against me again?”

Instead of looking to his master, Vaan lunged forward and grabbed Cayce by the shoulders. Fortunately, the pixie’s arms were long enough to keep the tip of the dragon’s tail from stabbing Cayce as well, especially with her own arms pressing him away.

“Listen,” Vaan said. “Listen… to me… now….”

Across the chamber, the dragon roared. He jerked his tail away, whipping Vaan out of Cayce’s arms. With the pixie still flailing on his tail, the brute stood tall, blue sparks churning and glittering across his completely restored chest.

Near the opposite wall, standing on a shelf of broken rock, Captain Hask held his special sword aloft. As he had when Rus launched his last-ditch effort, the dragon paused and watched as Hask prepared to unleash whatever he had held in reserve. Hask was ranting, wild-eyed, and Cayce quickly counted three dead soldiers scattered around the captain’s feet. Without Boom or Kula, the soldiers were little more than grist for the mill.

“Behold,” the crazed officer shouted. “The Twice-Drawn Sword, the Hand of Righteous Retribution. Blessed by the High Primate of Angelfire and the Serran Mother Superior alike, it will burn you to slag and ashes, unclean thing.”

“Captain Hask,” Cayce yelled. “Over here!”

“The sword is drawn only in the cause of holy justice,” the officer wailed. As he spoke, Hask undid the bindings that kept the sword sealed in its scabbard. “Any who stand before it shall be smitten. It can only be drawn twice.”

“Hask! Listen to me!”

But the soldier paid no heed. “First,” he bellowed. “In anger, and only anger, as outrage is the true spark that becomes the fire of retribution.” Hask slid the scabbard an inch up the foot—wide blade. Piercing white light spilled out and curled to ash the officer’s eyebrows and the ends of his sweat-soaked hair.

Recognizing the tone and cadence of a powerful incantation, Cayce slid back behind the timbers of the ship. Hask’s trump card was his to play, but she feared the noble captain was as doomed as her ignoble master had been. Battling the dragon head-on was futile; the skeleton was somehow the key.

Hask drew the sword. Light poured from the blessed blade, consuming the captain, the dragon, the hoard, and the cavern. The last thing Cayce saw before the Hand of Righteous Retribution consumed her as well was a small, winged, blue-tinged figure that positioned himself between her and the advancing wave of white.

Cayce awoke on the rounded peak of a grassy hill. The sky was blue and full of clean white clouds. A floral-scented breeze wafted by.

“This is an illusion,” Cayce said. “Pixie glamour. Vaan? Are you doing this? Or have I defied Master Rus’s predictions after all and gone to paradise?”

A healthy buzzing sound accompanied the pixie as he descended from above. Vaan was no longer dour and drawn, no longer pierced by a dragon tail, but healthy, whole, and relaxed.

“Thank you, Tania Cayce.” Vaan hovered just over the top of the grassy peak.

“What for? I think we’re both dead.”

“You are neither dead nor dying. And because of you, my perpetual life-in-death can finally end.”

“How? What do you mean?”

“You have correctly guessed the dragon’s weakness: the skeleton and that abhorrent metal shell must both be destroyed together. In one fell swoop.”

“Well, I can’t do much about it now,” Cayce said. “Hask may have already done it. He probably also destroyed himself, you, and me in the process.”

Vaan shook his head. “Hask did extraordinary damage to the impostor’s body, but that will never be enough. You must use the Hand of Righteous Retribution to finish this once and for all.”

“Me? How? I don’t know any of the ritual he was performing to make it work. And didn’t he say it could only be drawn twice?”

“Hask is a fool,” Vaan said bitterly, “but I needed him to bring the sword—it truly is powerful enough to slay the beast if properly employed. Yes, the Hand of Righteous Retribution has been drawn once, in anger as the ritual demands. Hask believes it can only be drawn once more, in wisdom. For anger is the spark that begins retribution, but wisdom is the only path to true justice.”

“I don’t have wisdom,” Cayce said. “I hardly have anger, to tell you the truth. All I feel right now is fatigue and fear. Plus, I haven’t been righteous in a long, long time. Somehow I don’t think I’m the one to summon the full power of the sword.”

“The Hand is a weapon that anyone can use at any time, provided they allow its enchanted energy to build up between uses. The restrictions Hask follows are merely an ancient ruse perpetuated by priests and generals to prevent the Hands wielder from running rampant with it.”

Cayce paused. “It’s a lie?”

“A long-held and well-guarded lie. But I was able to learn the truth behind it… as you have done. This counts as wisdom, Tania Cayce, which should put your mind at ease when you take up the sword. Listen to me now: I will give you more wisdom, complete wisdom, and you will set me free.”

“I will?” Cayce was growing increasingly uncomfortable. “I don’t even know where we are right now.”

“We are still in the cave. I have taken you here to tell you the dragon’s final secret, the one that will destroy him once and for all.”

“So, we’re actually lying unconscious in the cave, cooking in the light of Hask’s vengeance sword.”

“In a manner of speaking. You are in no mortal danger, but time is precious. I must tell you how to defeat the machine beast.”

“How can you do that with the geas still in place?”

Vaan smiled helplessly. “Behold: the origin of our misery.”

The hilltop shimmered and ran like melting wax. When the scene solidified, Cayce was back in the dragon’s treasure trove, only now it was well lit, meticulously ordered, and immaculately maintained.

“My people were enslaved,” Vaan’s voice said. In the vision, Cayce saw the familiar form of a huge blue-and-white scaled dragon. He sat regally on the chamber platform atop a carefully constructed mound of diamonds and platinum coins. Dozens of tiny pixies danced in the air around the great beast, showering him with reflective dust.

“Zumaki of the Bottomless Pool was not a harsh master,” Vaan said. “He was an old dragon, and he had already amassed enough treasure to sustain him and entertain him for the rest of his long life. In his dotage, however, he found a new kind of bauble to delight his eye: pixie glamour.”

Silent as a sleepwalker, Cayce watched as a score of tiny blue men and women circled the great dragon, singing a joyful song as they filled the air with illusory magic.

“But glamour and wish fulfillment can be a burden on the strongest of wills,” Vaan said. “As the mind is indulged, the body and spirit suffer. Grander, more absorbing fantasies become compelling, even compulsory. The longer you indulge your innermost desires, the harder it is to live in the real world.

“Zumaki was an old dragon, and a powerful one. He had the power to imprint his mind on lesser ones, to force his will upon the weak and undisciplined. So his mind was especially resistant to the corrosive allure of glamour. If the machine dragon hadn’t come, Zumaki would have probably lived another hundred years and died of old age before he ever felt the negative effects of our magic.”

The scene before Cayce changed. The glowing lights of the treasure trove dimmed as a half-wrecked, smoking horror dragged itself into the chamber.

“It was a fak mawa,” Vaan said. “A living engine of destruction in the shape of a dragon. They came by the hundreds during the Machine Invasion, and this one came to us bearing wounds from some titanic battle. During that battle, its opponent had torn it to pieces and seared almost half of its body away. We never knew how long it wandered after sustaining its terrible injuries. Months? Years? Decades? It was never truly alive, but by the time it reached Zumaki’s mountain it was more than half-dead.”

The pixies fled from the broken, sputtering machine. Zumaki, his expression dull as if he’d just come out of a deep sleep, hissed at the metal horror. Power sparked in his eyes, and Zumaki focused on the machine’s half-ruined head.

“I believe now it was some kind of infiltrator,” Vaan said. “Designed to get close enough to living things to infect them with its machine virus. Once infected, it could absorb their bodies into its own.”

Zumaki’s throat swelled, and he spat a jagged ball of energy at the machine dragon. The impact blasted the metal monstrosity across the chamber. Zumaki crawled up the walls of his treasure trove and skittered across the ceiling, closing in to finish his opponent off.

“My master could have survived,” Vaan said. “If he had simply burned the fak mawa to cinders from a distance or brought a piece of the mountain down upon it to mash it flat. But Zumaki was an intellectual being, and a curious one. He decided to try his power on the machine beast to see if its mind could resist his.”

The vision of Zumaki fixed his eyes on the twisted metal hulk and slowly extended his head down. As he approached, a cloudy stream of blue energy rose between the two dragons, linking the live beast’s eyes to the fading machine’s. The connection completed itself, and Zumaki drew glittering blue light from the mechanical dragon into himself.

Suddenly Zumaki stiffened. The flow of arcane energy shifted from the ceramic-scaled beauty to the fak mawa. A tendril of black metal with a vein of gold through its center stretched up from the machine dragon’s body. It curled above Zumaki’s head then plunged down into the top of the live dragon’s skull.

The blue energy flowing from the fak mawa was now mirrored by a steady stream of black metal and golden oil surging up into the live dragon’s brain. The two great beasts struggled at either end of this dread circuit, each trying to consume the other while resisting his own consumption.

Vaan continued. “Even in defeat, Zumaki triumphed. Though the machine dragon destroyed my master’s beautiful mind, Zumaki’s power and personality imprinted on the fak mawa. My master’s brain became black slag and glistening oil, but his mind endured.”

The vision expanded so that Cayce’s entire view consisted of the fak mawa and Zumaki of the Bottomless Pool. The machine dragon twitched and sputtered, casting sparks and gobs of golden oil across the treasure trove. Its body began to unravel and molten pieces of black metal flaked off and fell to the floor, dissolving the stones below.

Above the horror of the disintegrating fak mawa, Zumaki sighed and closed his eyes. The great old dragon listed backward, but tethered as he was to the machine, his body could not fall. Cayce heard an awful grinding noise that quickly became unendurable, then the poisoner’s apprentice winced as Zumaki’s head exploded, leaving a blood-black smear across the cavern ceiling.

“In death, they defeated each other.” Vaan recited his tale’s end as a dolorous prayer. “In death, they became one, both more and less than each had been. In death, they combined to become something far more terrible.”

“But they are still linked. Even in this life-death—perhaps because of it—they are still connected, still vulnerable to each other. Destroy Zumaki’s skeleton with the same stroke that destroys the fak mawa’s body, and I will be free. My people are all gone. Only I remain. Only I was spared to preserve the hybrid beast’s vanity, to preserve the fiction that he is still the master I once served. He will never allow me to leave, for I would take that illusion with me.” Vaan’s voice grew low and haggard. “Go I must, one way or the other. Anything is preferable to an eternity of servitude to a mindless impostor.”

The vision of the long-ago struggle between two dragons began to fade. Cayce called out, “Wait, Vaan. Why didn’t you tell anyone this sooner? Why did you save this vision for now, for me?”

Vaan’s voice was sad and helpless, the perfect accompaniment to the smile Cayce could hear but not see. “The geas,” he said, “prevents my speaking freely while life remains in me.”

“So how are you telling me now?”

The vision went completely black, but Vaan’s voice lingered. “Life remains,” he said, “but barely. As it fades, so does the power of the geas.”

Alone in the dark and cold, Cayce finally understood. For the first time she felt a twinge of real sympathy for the sad little pixie.

Cayce awoke. Vaan was dead but still warm on top of her as her mind returned from the vision. The little pixie still carried the broken tip of the dragon’s tail in his torso, where it poked painfully into Cayce’s sternum. Vaan was badly burned and his head hung at a distressingly peculiar angle, but his face was a study in calm tranquility and blessed, peaceful release.

Gently, she shifted him onto the cavern floor. She felt the folded remains of her apprentice headdress tucked into the waistband of his breeches, and she reflexively pulled it free. Cayce stood and yanked Kula’s tight wooden braid from her skull. It came away easily: Kula was either unconscious or dead, but either way she was no longer holding the leash she had placed on Cayce. With practiced hands, Cayce quickly wound her long white hair back under the headdress.

The remains of the dragon they had come to kill sat atop the rectangular platform. He was almost completely unrecognizable, little more than a pile of half-melted bones and ragged razor scales. Beside Cayce, the headless skeleton sat silently, unobtrusive and almost forgotten. It had lost its special blackness when the pixie magic died with Vaan, but the bones still stood out to Cayce.

Back on the platform, the blackened remains stirred as golden bits of light danced across their surface.

Cayce watched as the golden glow rebuilt the machine dragon’s glowing yellow eyes. The glassy orbs ignited, casting an awful light across the cavern as the creature’s head slowly reformed around them.

Cayce sprang to her feet and ran to where Captain Hask had unsheathed his sword. She had to find the Hand of Righteous Retribution and wield it again. Vaan had said it would work for her as long as it was fully empowered after Hask’s first blast. She could end this if she were quick and if she were just a little bit luckier than she had been so far.

A groan caught her attention, and she sprinted toward the sound. She found Captain Hask under a broken segment of column and debris with his face and hands blistered black. The handle of the foot-wide sword was still clenched in his fists. Either through Hask’s heroic effort or more probably due to its special enchantments, the scabbard had reappeared and the Hand of Righteous Retribution was once more safely sheathed.

“Deploy the golem,” Hask muttered, feverish with delirium.

“Boom is gone,” Cayce said. She reached for Hask’s hand and tried to pry his fingers open. “But I can finish this for you. Give me the sword.”

Hask groaned and tightened his grip. “Can only be drawn twice,” he said. “Once in… anger.”

“Then in wisdom. I know. I have the wisdom, Captain. Let me have the sword.”

Behind them a smoking, sparking head rose up on a serpentine tower that was growing longer, stronger, and more complete with each passing second. Garbled and broken, a wretched mockery of Zumaki’s smooth, cultured voice rolled out of the still-forming throat.

“Another unexpected guest gains entry to my home,” the beast said. “Am I so wretched a host?”

Cayce turned to Hask. “Give me the sword, Captain.”

Hask cursed her. “Never. I must… must avenge…”

The dragon’s neck was now complete, and his shoulders were emerging from the pile of formless debris.

“Vaan,” he said, his voice fuzzy and distorted. “Is that you among my guests? Have you been plotting against me again?”

Cayce flicked the officer across the nose. The wounded man stirred, grumbled, and fully opened his eyes at last. They focused up on Cayce.

She flicked him again. “The sword, Hask. Give it to me.”

“Get away.” Hask seemed to recognize her, but that only made him less compliant. “Give the Hand over to the likes of you?” He spat derisively.

“Suit yourself,” Cayce said. With a smooth, practiced motion she slipped a needle out of her headdress and sank the tip into Hask’s neck. The officer’s eyes rolled up in his head, and his body went limp. As his fingers relaxed, Cayce seized the Hand of Righteous Retribution and hauled it free.

The sword was even heavier than it looked. Cayce was barely able to keep her end off of the cavern floor. Moving with it was even more difficult, as its tip dragged across every crack in the floor and snagged on every broken rock.

The dragon extended one newly grown arm off the platform to balance himself as he leaned toward Cayce. Struggling, Cayce tried to circle away from. the dragon’s reach while continuing on toward the skeleton.

“What is…” the machine’s voice squawked and screeched pure static. “What is your name, child?”

Cayce threw herself forward, the sword scraping powder from the cavern floor even through its scabbard. She was now only twenty feet from the remains of the merchant ship and the all-important cargo it concealed.

The dragon sent his other, incomplete arm clutching after Cayce. She circled wide again, staying well clear of his metallic grasp. The dragon’s entire body hummed and seethed like a swarm of metal bees.

The beast hauled his regenerating bulk off the platform and flopped forward. Cayce spun to the side, hoping to lunge around the monster, but she was too slow with the sword. The dragon stretched his neck forward so that his head blocked Cayce’s path, the merchant ship almost completely hidden behind it.

Cayce stared steadily into the half-formed nightmare’s lifeless eyes. She planted the tip of the sword in the broken cavern floor and stepped up onto the hilt, balancing like a child on a pogo stick as she brought both feet up under her. Fortunately, she didn’t have to balance this way for long.

“Vaan,” he said again. “Is that you among my guests? Have you been plotting against me again? What is your name, child?”

“Vaan’s gone,” she said, holding his eyes. “My name’s Tania. And I must thank you, you stupid, broken bastard, for giving me this wonderful opportunity.”

Still perched on the swords hilt with both feet, Cayce leaned back. The Hand of Righteous Retribution toppled, and as it fell Cayce pulled up on the handle as hard as she could while pushing down on the scabbard with her legs. The sword hopped up from the cavern floor as Cayce pulled and pushed. The scabbard’s tip popped out of the broken rocks and slid free, and Cayce felt a surge of pressure and heat.

It was easy now—once drawn, the sword became almost weightless. Cayce leaped up, pulling the blade completely free of the sheath and pointing the tip at the mechanical dragon’s leering head.

Cayce hung suspended above the cavern floor, frozen in place by the swords magic. The dragon opened his mouth, blue-white energy sparking deep inside it. The Hand of Righteous Retribution glowed more brightly and Cayce felt pure power surging up the blade, through the handle, and into her arms.

The Hand beamed a plume of purest white light toward the dragon. It slammed into the machine’s head, blasting him backward into the rotted remains of the merchant ship. A white veneer of energy surged along the dragon’s neck, stretching all the way back to the platform where it completely enveloped the shuddering mass of twisted black metal.

The searing white beam also continued straight on, burning through the hull of the merchant ship as Cayce had intended. It cut a swathe through the rotten wood and scoured a wide smoking hole before it struck the headless skeleton. A second skin of blinding white light covered Zumaki’s bones from the ragged neck all the way down to the needle-sharp tip of his spiked tail.

The sword’s beam expanded then, spreading horizontally as well as vertically until the entire cavern was lost once more in a flood of blinding light. Cayce felt herself slipping away from her body as the Hand of Righteous Retribution slipped from her fingers. Darkness took her, and she thought, that’s all for me. That’s all I’ve got, and it had better be enough.

As she fell she reached for the last needle in her headdress. It wouldn’t make a dent in the mechanical beast’s hide, but she wanted to go to the next world saying she had done everything she could to delay her arrival.

Cayce awoke several seconds before her eyes could open. She was lurching left to right and back and forth, as if she were sailing in the belly of a storm-tossed boat. This might have made her nauseated if there weren’t also something huge and heavy pressing into her stomach.

There was a cool breeze on the back of her neck. Her arms and legs flopped freely below her and she felt her long hair hanging straight down past her face. Cayce realized she was being carried, not on the sea but on dry land. Had someone tossed her over the back of a massive pack animal?

“She’s awake.” Kula’s voice came from under Cayce’s left arm. Cayce blinked and opened her eyes. Through the curtain of her own white hair she saw the anchorite’s broad arm swinging below her and Kula’s thick brown mane blowing carelessly in the breeze.

“Well done, little one,” Kula said. “I promised I’d carry you down the mountain if we survived, didn’t I?”

Cayce groaned. “You did. You’re a woman of your word. Please put me down now before I return your kindness with a spray of sick.”

Kula laughed. With distressing ease, she tossed Cayce off her broad shoulders. The anchorite caught her burden in midair then gently lowered Cayce to her feet.

Unsteady on cramping legs, Cayce staggered a bit. She stood breathing deeply as she recovered her balance and her strength. When her head and stomach stopped swimming, Cayce finally looked at the remnants of the hunting party.

Kula stood nearby, as smiling and as steady as ever. Behind the anchorite came Boom and one of Captain Hask’s Soldiers. The golem was dragging a makeshift sled they had lashed together with long branches and pieces of vine. Hask lay on the sled, unconscious, motionless, and badly burned… but alive. Farther down on the sled were three bundles of tightly bound linen in the shape of human beings.

“Fost?” Cayce said to the upright soldier, but the man shook his head.

“Fost didn’t make it,” he said. “Captain Hask and I are the only survivors.”

“And Boom.”

“And Boom.” The soldier stepped forward to Cayce. “I don’t suppose you saw what happened to the big sword, did you? We couldn’t find it in the wreckage.”

Cayce shook her head. The soldier seemed about to say something else when Kula called out, “Leave her be about that sword, soldier. If not for her, you wouldn’t even be alive to ask. And if not for me, you’d still be under a thousand pounds of gold and rock.”

The soldier demurred, falling back into formation alongside Boom. Cayce watched him for a moment, then turned and walked alongside Kula.

They went on for several minutes before the anchorite spoke.

“Vaan?” she said.

“Dead,” Cayce said. “But he showed me how to beat the dragon. Even with the geas, he found a way to make me see.”

“Pixies are crafty folk,” Kula said. “You should have seen the extended pantomime he had to go through to convince me to help him.”

They walked on. Cayce said, “Do I still get paid for this?”

Kula laughed. She thumped Cayce affectionately on the shoulder, almost knocking the smaller woman off the path.

“There was no way to carry our casualties and the treasure. Not that much survived.” Kula pulled from her pack a melted, twisted ingot of fused gold and silver, which she tossed to Cayce. “You’ve earned every bit, however,” she said.

Cayce hesitated then tucked the irregular lump of precious metal into her waistband. “Thanks.”

“You should give some serious thought to your future, young lady. Since you no longer have a master poisoner to apprentice with, I thought you might consider coming to live with me in the forest. An anchorite needs to pass on her knowledge to the next generation, after all. It’s nature’s way.”

Cayce walked a few more paces in silence. “No,” she said. “No, thank you. First I’m going to sleep for a month. After that I’m going to be very careful about who I let make decisions for me.”

“A sound policy.” Kula grinned broadly. “But you did me a great service today. You did us all a great service. If you ever need my assistance, just whisper my name to the nearest tree. I’ll be there shortly.”

“That’s almost comforting,” Cayce said.

“Almost?”

“Almost. It’s mostly disturbing, the thought of all three hundred pounds of you waiting around for a message from me so you can come running. But thank you, anchorite. I can think of a lot of places your help would make a big difference.”

Kula thumped Cayce again. “Let me know if you get tired,” she said. “I could carry a little wisp like you for a year without noticing.”

“Again,” Cayce said patiently, “thanks. But I’ll try to stay on my own two feet from now on.”

It was several hours before they reached a real village, during which Boom said nothing, Kula sang softly to herself, and Cayce wondered how much the local pawn brokers would pay for a poisonous ruby ring.

The shattered floor of Zumaki’s treasure trove lay covered in black ash and metal slag. The cavern was silent but for the odd boom of settling rock and the occasional stream of dust and pebbles.

Something stirred in the center of the black field. Thin cracks ran along the surface of the brittle crust as a small humanoid figure broke through. It was featureless, charred beyond recognition, but it stood firm on its tiny legs. Across its edges, a golden glow scintillated and sparked.

The brittle black sea split again, this time near the great rectangular platform. A huge skeletal head rose from the carbonized debris, its yellow eyes gleaming in the darkness.

“Vaan,” a horrid croaking voice said. “Is that you among my guests? Have you been plotting against me again?”

A small blue pixie stepped forward out of the golden cloud that had surrounded the first figure to emerge from the black crust. His blue skin was incomplete, revealing the wires, cogs, and gears within his torso. His black eyes flashed then sparked to life, lit from within by intense white-blue light.

“No, my master,” Vaan said somberly. “I have been awaiting your pleasure, as always.”

As the dragon’s features filled out, the creature peered down at his attendant. “What are you saying, Vaan? You make less and less sense as the years go by.”

“Yes, my master.”

“Now, then. I’m feeling house-bound and restless. How long has it been since I ventured beyond the walls of my mountain?”

The pixie’s face was slack and dead, as if the muscles had been numbed with ice and then cut with a surgeon’s scalpel.

“A matter of hours, my lord.” Bitterness crowded all other emotions from the pixies tone. “You destroyed an important bridge then were almost destroyed by a band of intruders.” Almost, he repeated privately, hatred choking his thoughts.

The dragon cocked his head quizzically. “Your jests are puzzling, as always. I’ve hardly been out of this chamber for decades. But no matter. Come sunset I will take in the evening air. Survey my kingdom, as it were. I imagine I’ll find a town worth baiting or a small army to play with. Attend me until then, and afterward you may return to the bosom of your people.”

“Until sunset. Thank you, Master.” Vaan turned his head away and swallowed burning tears to the back of his throat. The people of his tribe, all two hundred of them, were stored far below his feet in the deepest recesses of the mountain. Their remains were stacked up like cordwood, mummified by time, as powdery and fragile as a moth’s wings. It had taken the machine impostor several months to figure out that Vaan’s people couldn’t come back after mortal wounds the way the dragon could. By the time the dragon had perfected a solution to this problem, Vaan was the only servant left.

The morose pixie clenched his teeth and shut his eyes tight, hot tears running down his finely formed cheekbones. He had been so close, so very close. What had gone wrong? He had hand-picked agents that were trained in artifact destruction. He had lured the Hand of Righteous Retribution into the impostor’s lair, and it had worked as effectively as he had hoped. Why was he still alive, still enslaved?

“It’s happening again,” he muttered, surprised by the sound of his own voice. Absently, Vaan rubbed the sore area in the center of his chest. He couldn’t remember being injured there, but it seemed as if he bore a special wound that was especially slow to heal. The sore spot was numb around the edges but still seethed at its center, as if something had forced itself free from his torso and left this sharp-edged scar behind.

It’s happening again.

“Vaan,” the voice was smoother, richer, and more musical as the dragon’s throat completed itself. “Attend me.”

The little blue man concentrated. Magical light swirled from his eyes and encircled the dragon’s evolving shape. When the liquid blue brightness completely covered the mechanical horror, the monster shimmered and took on the outward form of a magnificent blue-white dragon with translucent ceramic scales and long alabaster horns.

“Excellent,” the abomination said.

Still weeping, Vaan waited for the sun to set. Perhaps this time he would assemble a party that could finish the task he set for it. He had put every last bit of his cleverness, wit, and intellect into making his false master’s demise foolproof. He could see no flaw in his plan, but yet it hadn’t worked. He would simply have to try again and play closer attention when he led the next hunting party up the mountain.

Until then he could do nothing. Nothing except stand, wait, and watch like the loyal servant he was bound to be.