Dragonforge (32 page)

Above him came the sound of giant wings flapping. It wasn’t Hex—even with his eyes closed, Bitterwood could sense the sun-dragon looming over him.

Bitterwood opened his eyes and looked up.

A bare-chested angel in black pants dropped from the sky toward him, his descent slowed by gentle flaps of gleaming golden wings. The angel carried something in his arms: a human form, judging from the legs jutting out—a girl? Jandra? No, the legs were too small and spindly.

As the angel landed on the steps of the temple, Bitterwood at last caught a flash of blonde hair as the girl lifted her head from angel’s breast.

“Zeeky!” Bitterwood cried, his heart swelling to discover she was alive. He experienced a strange and unfamiliar sensation. Could this be joy he felt, after so many years of knowing nothing but hatred and regret?

“Mr. Bitterwood!” Zeeky shouted as she dropped from the angel’s arms and ran toward him. “You’re okay!”

Bitterwood caught the girl as she sprang up to hug him. Her arms around his neck stirred memories of his own daughters, now dead. Yet somehow the memories were altered by the presence of Zeeky, becoming bittersweet rather than simply bitter.

“Where’s your pig?” Bitterwood whispered.

“Poocher’s okay,” Zeeky said. “We gave him a bath.”

Hex cleared his throat. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

Bitterwood lowered Zeeky to the ground.

“This is Zeeky,” he said. “She’s my… friend.” The word felt foreign to his tongue. It had been many years since he’d used it. “Zeeky, the dragon is Hex. The man on the long-wyrm is—”

“Adam!” Zeeky said, waving. “You made it back!” She ran down the steps and hugged the snout of the long-wyrm. “Good to see you, Trisky!”

Bitterwood looked up from Zeeky to once more study the angel. The creature had long white hair and stood as tall as the statue that had just attacked Jandra. The angel’s wings folded in an elaborate origami, the feathers tinkling musically as they furled up behind his broad shoulders until they vanished. The angel took the long piece of black cloth draped over his shoulders and shook it, revealing it to be a coat. He pulled the coat on and from somewhere within its folds a hat appeared in the angel’s hands. It was broad-brimmed and black—exactly like the hat Hezekiah used to wear. Indeed, Hezekiah and the angel were almost identical in stature and garb, with only hair coloring and tones of skin to differentiate them. Bitterwood tensed. The only thing he despised more than dragons was the prophet Hezekiah. Of what relation was this angel to him?

The angel smiled once he was done adjusting his garments.

“As long as introductions are being made,” he said, “call me Gabriel.”

After a brief
second of nothingness, Jandra was pulled into blinding light. She couldn’t see a thing as two strong hands grabbed her shoulders and slammed her up against a wall. Her helmet striking the surface caused her head to ring like a bell.

“I run the show down here,” a throaty female voice hissed, inches from her face. “If you were told I’d let some Atlantean skank waltz in here and piss all over my territory, you’ve been sadly misinformed. Who sent you? Cass? It was Cass, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know who Cass is,” Jandra protested, her eyes struggling to adjust to the light. The woman before her was little more than a dark outline, taller than Jandra by several inches, and judging from her grip, much stronger.

The woman slapped her hard. Jandra sucked her breath as the pain followed an instant later.

“Don’t lie to me! My sister has ruined one plan after another and I’m sick of it. I’m going to use you to send a message. There won’t be enough of your DNA left for her to clone your turds when I’d done with you!”

Jandra rubbed her cheek and cringed as she said, “I probably can’t stop you from killing me but would you please stop cursing while you do so?”

The woman chuckled and released her shoulders. “Really? That’s your big problem with me? My potty mouth?”

“No,” said Jandra, straightening up. “My big problem is you pretending to be a goddess and letting my friend humiliate himself. Bitterwood may not be a saint, but I don’t want to see him grovel in front of anyone.”

As she blinked her eyes, Jandra slowly began to see the woman more clearly. She was tall, with broad shoulders and sharply chiseled facial features. With her big hips and ample breasts, she was obviously the model for the goddess statue. Thankfully, she was clothed, wearing a loose white cotton blouse tucked into tightly-fitting blue pants. She was barefoot and her toenails were painted green, matching her hair, which had a dark, grassy hue. The woman was staring at her intently. Her eyes softened from anger into thoughtfulness. She chuckled again, and backed away.

The green-haired woman moved to a metal table that sat in the middle of the cluttered space. The room they were in was long and relatively skinny, filled with tables and shelves. There were no visible doors or windows. The most eye-catching items in the room were the multitudes of frames lining the walls, filled with strange paintings that seemed made of light and motion, showing creatures and landscapes of countless variety.

The surface of the metal table was covered with hundreds of sketches, most in gray pencil, a few inked and colored with washes of faint pigments. The woman picked up a white cylinder of paper and put it between her lips. She raised a finger, its nail also painted green, but chipped from heavy usage. She touched the finger to the paper cylinder and a small puff of smoke rose from the point of contact. The woman took a long slow drag, bringing the embers at the end of the cylinder to a bright cherry red. She then opened her mouth and released a long stream of smoke. The acrid fumes stung Jandra’s eyes.

“You know why I keep the human race around?” the goddess asked.

“I didn’t know you’d been the one to make that decision,” said Jandra.

“Tobacco,” the goddess said. “I can build an exact replica of this cigarette molecule by molecule using nanites. Under a microscope, no one could tell the difference. But the taste just isn’t right unless the tobacco has come through the whole process; the growing, the drying, the rolling. So, I decided to let humanity live, as long as they kept planting my favorite drug.”

“I see,” said Jandra. She had known that the goddess would be fake. She hadn’t considered the possibility she might be insane. Jandra backed away from the smoke, trying to get a feel for her surroundings. Instinctively, she felt they were still underground. Her eyes were drawn from one flickering image in the frames to another. Was that Shandrazel? In another frame, she saw sky-dragons conversing in a room filled with tapestries. Something was odd about them… were they female? The valkyries? Jandra had never seen them before. Finally, Jandra felt her heart leap as she spotted the island temple in one of the frames. Hex and Bitterwood were on the steps, looking as if they were shouting at Adam. Even if she didn’t know where she was, it was comforting to know they were still okay.

“You seem easily distracted,” said the goddess.

Jandra brought her attention back to the woman.

“What are all these pictures?” she asked.

“I like to keep watch over my various projects,” the goddess said.

“Your projects?”

“Little social experiments I’ve nudged along over the centuries. Living for a thousand years means you have time to follow a lot of different plotlines. I like to tune in from time to time. They’re like my soaps, you know?”

Jandra didn’t know. She couldn’t see any correlation between the images and something you would use to bathe yourself.

“Judging from that glassy stare, you’re not getting my jokes,” the goddess said, crossing her arms. “Which clenches it that you’re not Atlantean. Know what first tipped me off?”

“No,” said Jandra.

“Your accent. Dragons speak a variant of English, but they do it without the benefit of lips, so the sounds are all shifted. They fake sounds like ‘b’ and ‘p’ by pressing their tongues against the roofs of their mouths in a slightly different location than ‘d’ or ‘n’. You do the same thing despite having perfectly serviceable lips. I could hear it when you said, ‘big problem.’ It sounds like ‘dig drodlen,’ sort of. Which gives me a good clue who you must be. You’re that dragon’s daughter. Jandra, I think it is? And your father—for lack of a better term—was Vendevorex?”

“Did you know him?”

“Maybe,” said the goddess. “It’s not important. What is important is that I’m not going to tear you apart atom by atom and scatter your component parts out in a long smear through underspace. You didn’t know what you were doing. Punishing you would be like slapping a retard for breathing through her mouth. It’s not something a socially conscious ex-hippy such as myself is comfortable with.”

“Are you an Atlantean?” Jandra asked.

“Lord no.” The goddess rolled her eyes as if it was an absurd suggestion. “I’m the exact opposite of an Atlantean. An anti-Atlantean, if you will. I crippled the damn city when it first came to earth. If the Atlanteans ever figured out how badly I screwed them I’ll be the one who ends up as a skid mark in underspace. I’ll be… You don’ t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you?”

“I confess, I’m having a difficult time following what you’re saying. Your accent is odd to me. And you really expect me to believe you’re a thousand years old? And you kept the human race alive to grow tobacco?”

“1174, with a birthday just around the corner. The candles on the cake will be seen from Mars. Just kidding. About the cake. God, you have the glassiest expression when I’m talking over your head. You should work on that. Make your default listening face kind of a grin. Seriously, you’ve got good teeth for a girl living in an era without dentistry. Show them off.”

The goddess walked closer to her again. Jandra started to back away, but found herself paralyzed. She couldn’t move a muscle as the green-haired woman came to within a few inches of her.

“Know what I’m doing?” the goddess asked.

Jandra couldn’t speak.

“Oh, sorry, let me give you back your jaw.”

Jandra’s mouth returned to her control. “Why can’t I move?” she asked.

“You haven’t put any locks on your genie, sweety,” the woman said, reaching out and rapping Jandra’s helmet with her knuckles. “You really don’t know how to use this thing at all, do you?”

“I’ve survived this far,” Jandra said, straining to even wiggle her fingers. The same tingling sensation inside her skull she’d felt fighting the statue returned, only now a hundred times as intense.

“For starters, wearing it as a helmet isn’t terribly flattering. You have nice hair. Don’t hide half of it.” The goddess ran her fingers through Jandra’s locks. Jandra’s head felt suddenly lighter. The helmet seemed to be melting off her scalp and dribbling down her spine.

“Reconfiguring it to run along your spinal column will make you modestly faster and stronger,” the goddess said. “The real benefit is appearance, though. You have a lovely face; this will let people see more of it. I like the natural, no make-up look. Fresh and healthy, almost virginal. Still, you could benefit from a little tarting up. Lower the neckline on that fancy blouse of yours. Show some cleavage and you could make men stupid.”

At the mention of the word cleavage, Jandra couldn’t help but think of Pet.

“The men in my life are stupid enough, thank you,” she said.

“Heh,” the goddess chuckled. Suddenly Jandra felt free to move again. “Yeah, a thousand years of evolution has really improved the brains of dragons, but I can’t tell a damn bit of difference in men. Of course, humans haven’t benefited from my benevolent intervention like the dragons have.”

“Now you’re claiming to have created dragons?” said Jandra, feeling her hair. Her helmet was gone; only a few thin fingers of metal ran along her scalp beneath her hair line. The rest of the metal had turned flexible and clung to the back of her neck, trailing down to the tip of her spine beneath her clothing. She again felt her senses altering ever so slightly. What had the goddess done to her?

“I didn’t create the dragons. I just tweak them from time to time. When Atlantis triggered the great collapse, there were only a few dozen dragons around. My friends and I helped them survive those rough early years. Then the sky-dragons diverged from the sun-dragons and started that brilliant eugenics program. Following the ninth plague of the humans, the dragon population really exploded. After that, the earth-dragons showed up and… You following this, honey? Am I talking too fast? Maybe you should start taking notes?”

The goddess shuffled through the papers on her desk. Jandra spotted a sketch of a long-wyrm with a cryptic note penciled in the margin—mutagenic expression of multiple limbs. The goddess found a sheet of blank paper and held it out to Jandra, along with a pencil.

Jandra shook her head. She’d had her fill of note-taking under her tutelage of Vendevorex. “I didn’t know there was going to be a quiz,” she said.

Over the goddess’s shoulder, Jandra noticed that Bitterwood and Hex had been joined by a tall man in dark clothing, and a smaller, blonde figure. Zeeky?

“So,” said the goddess, “I want you to understand something. Your genie? Since it’s unlocked, I could wiggle my fingers and it would crumble into dust. I’ll completely destroy your mojo if you mess with my toys again. We clear on that?”

“I understand you. I think,” said Jandra. Was genie another name for the helmet? She could only guess what a mojo might be. Despite the unfamiliar words, she was certain she understood the main point. Now, she had her own terms to deliver. “I don’t care what you tell Adam or anyone else about your powers. If you want to pretend to be a god, fine. However, I don’t want you to make any further claims of godhood to Hex, Bitterwood, or Zeeky. They’re my friends, and under my protection.”

The goddess took one last drag off her cigarette, her eyes fixed on Jandra in a cool calculating stare. She stubbed the remnant of the cylinder out in a ceramic plate that sat on the edge of the table. Her expression remained inscrutable for a moment, then, suddenly, she smiled.

“You’ve got balls. I like that. I have a feeling we can be friends.” The goddess leaned forward and held out her hand. “Put her there, Jandra Dragonsdaughter.”