Dragon Talker (39 page)

***

Yuri thought how crowded it was getting. Only moments after seeing Samantha run towards the field carrying Bernard and dragging Stone, he saw the town’s talker appear from behind a hut. He could barely see him, as if he was more shadow than real, but he knew it was him. He was aware enough to not look directly at Samantha as she ran past, but he was kicking himself for staring at the talker. He knew he almost gave him away.
That damn invisibility
, he thought,
must still be working, though, because this mage is sure focused on me right now.

He could feel Samora getting closer, but he didn’t know how long it would be before she got there. He also felt a different presence. It made him think of dragons, but it didn’t carry the same powerful feeling being linked to Samora did. What he could tell was that it was getting closer, much closer than Samora.

Everyone in the village turned their heads to the sound when they heard the screech of an approaching dragon. Villagers momentarily stopped running. Perante smiled. Yuri wished it were Samora. Thrinbin soared into view and high into the air, its green scales reflecting sunlight as it climbed above the village. At the apex of its climb, it seemed to hover, wings extended, for a moment before it tucked its wings in and began diving down towards the village.

Yuri pulled his eyes away long enough to see the mage smiling and looking up at the dragon. He was not going to miss this chance. He started to run towards the mage, bringing his knife out as the dragon dived towards them both. Still two hundred feet above them, the dragon extended its wings, slowing its descent, and let out a torrent of fire.

The fire reached the mage first, but instead of incinerating him, it was deflected by a protective sphere. Yuri didn’t have that kind of protection. Instead, he brought up his arms to protect his face as the fireball slammed into him. The force picked him up and sent him flying through the air. He instinctively let go of the melting knife in his hand. He crashed into a hut and the flames clinging to his body started the hut on fire.

A ring of fire burned around Perante as Thrinbin continued its dive, claws reaching out to snatch him off the ground. It pulled away at the last moment, clawed feet bending but not penetrating Perante’s protective spell. Perante looked to Yuri trying to extricate himself from the now burning hut, decided he wasn’t an immediate threat, and turned his attention back to the dragon.

Before he could move forward with his plan, though, he felt an immediate threat bearing down on him from his right. He couldn’t see Roger, but he could feel his intent to harm him. Perante had spent enough time exploring invisibility spells to know what was going on. With a flick of his wrist, he changed a gust of wind coming from the burning huts into a heated gale force burst of wind, fire, and debris sent in the general direction of his attacker. The pressure he had felt moments before was gone. He couldn’t tell if the person was dead or simply dissuaded, but he didn’t care. He was here for the dragon.

Thrinbin flew in a tight circle around the village. Spotting Winderall and his spell, he dived in to attack. Not as strong as Perante, Winderall lost control of his confusion spell but managed to stay alive, even if in smoldering clothes. Patting down his clothes, he decided observation and invisibility would be his new task and tactic.

Perante looked up and saw the green dragon spread its wings as it turned around in the air; then he looked back in the direction of his invisible attacker. In the excitement of seeing the dragon, Perante hadn’t been thinking straight. Who would be invisible but the dragon’s talker? Perante raised his hands. As he did so, a cloud of dust raised from the ground in front of him. He sent the cloud ahead of him.

Soon, he saw the outline of his invisible attacker in the swirling sand. Taking a regular dagger from inside his jacket, he used magic to aim the blade at his attacker’s heart. The knife stabbed Roger in the back as he tried to run away. His invisibility left him as he fell to the ground. He wasn’t dead, but the odds of him surviving a blade so deep into his back was not good.

Thrinbin roared as Roger went down and another blast of fire raced out to engulf Perante. Again, his spells protected him from the fire. Thrinbin was making more and louder noises and Perante quickly closed the distance between him and the talker. He pulled out the knife before rolling him over. Roger was frothing at the lips, a good sign one of his lungs had been punctured.

“What about our deal?” Roger asked weakly.

Perante didn’t bother to respond. He just wanted the amulet around his neck. He yanked it off of Roger’s neck, taking time to inspect the green scale embedded in it as Thrinbin made another circle. Perante wrapped the leather strap around his hand, making sure the scale didn’t touch his skin. Kneeling down, he brought his hands together, arms straight, as he clapped the amulet between his palms. The spell he traveled across the country to use had finally been cast.

Thrinbin convulsed in the air at the same time. Its wings pulled in as it fell to the ground, crashing on its back into a hut with loud snapping of wood and a monstrous thud. The impact sent out a cloud of dust and debris in all directions. The dragon rolled over on its side, crushing what was left of the hut. After rolling over, it laid still, head on the ground and eyes closed.

Yuri had finally extricated himself from the hut he had been blasted into when he saw and felt Thrinbin smash into the hut next to him. If he hadn’t just seen it, he would not have believed it was possible, and he wondered,
if the mage could do this to the green dragon, what could he do to Samora?

Grabbing his amulet, he made sure Samora knew what she was flying into by focusing on the green dragon in front of him.

He felt a pulse of anger run through him. He knew the message was received loud and clear. He also knew she was closer, but he didn’t plan on standing around and waiting for her to arrive. Yuri saw the mage smile and start walking towards him.
Not towards me
, he corrected himself
, the dragon behind me
. He told himself,
that isn’t going to happen,
and started walking towards the mage.

He made a detour to the merchant and pried the staff out of his hands. Yuri felt more comfortable with it than he did with his knife. The boys in Mandan spend days on end practicing with staffs, both for fighting each other and different displays at festivals. He swung it one handed, twisting it so the ends rotated through a few figure eights to get the feel of it before settling into a two-handed grip as he approached the mage.

Yuri moved back in front of the mage. There was no mistaking his intentions. Perante shook his head. “You’re a persistent idiot. I’ll give you that.” Perante cast another spell with a slight motion of his hand. Yuri had the sense of a wave washing over him, and then it was gone. He kept moving forward as Perante stopped in his tracks.

He flicked his wrist again, and again Yuri felt another wave. Yuri brought the staff behind him, preparing to strike. Perante didn’t understand why this fool wasn’t dead. Twice, he walked right through a killing spell. He took a few steps back to give him room and time to think, but Yuri just increased his pace.

“Fine,” Perante seethed, sending another spell Yuri’s way. This one was aimed at the staff, and it exploded into splinters in Yuri’s hands. “I don’t know what your story is, fool, but apparently I’ll have to kill you the old fashioned way.”

Perante pulled out the knife he had used to kill Roger and held it flat in his palm for a moment before sending it out with a spell. The silver coated knife moved as if it had been launched by a crossbow.

Yuri batted it out of his way and sprinted the last few yards towards Parented. Yuri leaped the last few feet to tackle Perante. Instead of feeling the contact of hitting his body, Yuri ended up rolling on the ground and coming up with only Perante’s jacket. Perante had tricked him into tackling his empty jacket instead of him.

In the time it took for Yuri to realize his mistake and get up, Perante had taken out another knife and launched it at Yuri. This time, he saw it too late to do parry or dodge it, but he did watch it embed itself into his chest with a thud. The impact knocked him back to the ground.

“Finally,” Perante said, exasperated. Just to be on the safe side, he tried to magically shove Yuri out of the village, like he had sent the first villagers flying only an hour ago. When Yuri didn’t move, Perante’s frustration peaked. “I don’t know what the tail is going on with you, but you are annoying me!” With that, Perante raised both hands, raising two standing huts with them, and brought his hands down quickly. The magic spell he was casting sent the two huts directly on top of Yuri. In the blink of an eye, he was buried under large chunks of hut walls, roofs, and all the furniture and supplies that were left in the hut when the occupants started running.

“Now,” he spoke to the empty air, “can I go see my dragon?”

Walking towards the dragon, he congratulated himself on seeing the potential in the pendant talkers wore. He, like most mages, assumed they were some kind of enchanted stone. No dragon had ever let a pendant stay in a mage’s hand long enough for him to know otherwise. It was only when he finally found the legendary trilogy of books known as simply
The Dragon Trilogy
that he learned the truth: it wasn’t a stone but an actual scale of the dragon.

The moment he read those words, written in chapter one of Book Two, he knew it was the key to ultimately controlling or killing all dragons. To all modern mages, the books were a myth, an impossible repository of knowledge about magic by a man who couldn’t exist: a dragon talker who was also a mage. If the books ever did exist, the theory went, they were most likely the ramblings of a mad mage. Still, more than one mage set out on a journey to find them. It became a personal rite of passage for some.

Perante spent ten years gathering clues and tracking down leads. With all the evidence to the contrary, he felt in his bones that he was destined to find the books. This confidence fueled his paranoia. Knowing he would find the books, he didn’t want a mage to follow him and snatch them from his deserved grasp at the moment of discovery. As he searched, he developed his own written language to take notes only he could read. His notebooks were further protected by enchantments. Simply opening one could kill an unaware mage.

Perante became a master of disguise, both magical and mundane. The more power he collected, the better he became at hiding it. While engaging in stealth in his search, he believed in overwhelming force as the best method of attack. He didn’t make a major move until he believed he was undefeatable. In one night in Perantium, which wasn’t its name at the time, of course, he had the city totally under his control. Seven years led up to that night.

For the last five years, he had been developing his plan, gathering the necessary equipment, and exploring the magic he would need to bring the dragons under his control. In addition to the castle cage he had built, he had sent mages out on hundreds of missions they didn’t understand completing tasks that made little sense alone. Only Perante, as the center, understood the web he was building.

The journey to this point raced through his mind as he approached the dragon. The dragon’s chest moved slowly up and down as it took shallow breaths. The blow to its scale in the pendant had been magically enhanced to create a massive shockwave that would run to and through the dragon’s brain. Perante didn’t know if it would be enough to kill the dragon, but he had plans for either case.

He walked right up to the dragon’s head, placing his hand on its forehead, the space between his thumb and first finger curling around one of the dragon’s small horns that lined the ridge between its eyes. “You are mine now, and no one can stop me.”

Chapter 55

Samora, resting under Lake Verlevski, first felt Thrinbin’s annoyance. She could tell Thrinbin was angry when she also felt Yuri’s call from the same area. This got her moving and she burst through the lake’s icy surface with powerful strokes of her wings. Water dripped from her wings as she climbed higher. Light passing through the water made it appear as if diamonds were falling from her as she flew east towards Vrotsim.

Intermixed with the drops of water were drops of black blood, both from her nostrils and between the new scales that had grown to replace the ones she had given to Yuri for his protection. The blood dried, forming a black tar-like residue between the scales and under her nostrils. Rejuvenated by her time spent at the bottom of the lake, her wings pounded the air as she raced towards the village. With the incredible vision dragons have, she could see smoke rising from it and Thrinbin circling in the sky, making diving attacks at someone on the ground.

Then Thrinbin disappeared, and the connection between them was broken. Samora was confused. Never before had a connection to another dragon been broken like this. A dragon might push another out of the connection, but this was if Thrinbin had disappeared. Samora increased her already fast pace.

***

Perante was savoring the moment. Only the legendary mage/talker had been this close to a dragon before and lived. Here before him stood a symbol of the only force in the world that could stop Perante. A force that kept mages in their cities. As opulent as he had made Perantium, the idea that his control ended at the city limits was a personal limit he was not willing to bear another minute.

No one had ever killed a dragon. It seemed clear that they were immortal, but even that bedrock thought appeared less certain to Perante as he stood in front of the unmoving dragon. Perante didn’t want to end the dragon’s power, though; he wanted to control it, use it for his own purposes. This, and only this, would make him the greatest mage that ever lived.

He unbuckled and pulled off the leather belt that was wrapped around his waist. Because of its length, it had been wrapped around his waist twice. He flung one end over the dragon’s neck, holding on to the buckle end. The band slithered like a snake around the dragon’s throat and Perante let go of his end as it cinched itself tightly around the dragon’s neck. That ability was one of many enchantments. Once on, it was not going anywhere by any magic Perante knew of.