Gold Dragon Codex (20 page)

“You shall not harm an innocent!” Yattak was weaving on his feet drunkenly, his hands making wide, ungraceful motions. “Have at you!”

Sandon wasn’t sure what was more unexpected, that Yattak would defend him from the draconian, or that the portly Red Robe’s spell actually worked. Malaise hissed viciously, recognizing a magical opponent, and began again. This time, Sandon guessed, she wouldn’t make the mistake of underestimating her opponents.

Kine and Vilfrand threw themselves at each another, swords flashing in the last rays of the sun. The ringing of their blades echoed from the tower, making the people in the square shift and stare like sheep looking up at a panther on the mountaintop. Vilfrand was by far the stronger, but Kine’s movements were erratic, benefiting from the hands-on training of the battlefield. Vilfrand had never gone to war, so his style was far more formal. He was predictable, chopping at his opponent like a woodcutter. Kine, on the other hand, fought like a wild animal, leaping around him, aiming at his opponent’s ankles and wrists.

Pushing at Kine’s sword, Vilfrand kept shoving him backward, pressing his guard so that the soldier had to rock back and forth with each ringing slash of their blades. Kine dug his heels in and scrabbled across the stone top of the tower. Vilfrand pressed further, taking his light sword in two hands and rolling forward with each lunge. Kine was quicker, but not nearly as strong.

Kine was losing, but he was making Vilfrand pay for every inch.

On the other side of the tower, Yattak was struggling to bring his spell together. Malaise snatched magic out of the air, forging it far more swiftly than the tipsy mage. A barrage of white pellets hissed from her hand. They
glowed like rays of the sun, pelting Yattak so painfully that the Red Robe cried out and crumpled to his knees. Umar grasped his master’s hand and pulled him up again. “Get her, sir!” Umar said through clenched teeth.

Yattak nodded and began his spell again. Malaise laughed out loud at their feeble efforts. “You’re wasting my time!” she chortled. In the sky, Sandon could see the blue speck growing closer, sailing on a leisurely path toward the tower.

The expressions of fear on the wizards’ faces jolted Sandon out of his shock. Yattak needed help—more than Kine did, though neither of them was doing well against their opponent. Sandon jerked his sword free of its sheath and dived toward Malaise. She was as quick as a cat, jerking a long-bladed dagger from her belt in the time it took him to leap. She blocked his sword squarely with the blade. With the other hand, she punched Sandon evenly in the jaw, knocking him aside. It felt like he’d plowed face-first into a stone.

Sandon landed askew and rolled to recover his balance. He lashed out with his sword, remembering the training he’d received in his father’s guard. Malaise knocked his sword away again, moving faster with her long dagger than he could with his bigger weapon. She laughed and raised a hand, and another barrage of the
light rays shot out of her palm, impacting against Sandon’s chest and shoulder. The pain was intense, searing like sharp needles through skin and muscle.

Yattak’s spell took hold at that moment. Bright flashes of light, more intense than the rays that Malaise had skewered Sandon, burst all around the draconian’s head. Sandon covered his eyes, but the draconian was not as quick to react. She screamed violently, thrashing about with her dagger and blinking blindly. Seizing his moment, Sandon thrust at Malaise again with his sword. He got through this time and slashed at her leg. The metal of his sword made a shivering sound as it slashed through the silvery scales of her flesh and into the muscle beneath. Malaise screamed and struck out with her claws, raking the side of Sandon’s face. Blood trickled down his jaw, but Sandon smiled. He’d cut her. The draconian, for all of her arrogance and power, wasn’t invulnerable. Too bad for Malaise.

Vilfrand drove Kine back again, but the soldier slipped under the captain’s guard, twisting up behind him and landing a fierce blow with his elbow on the top of Vilfrand’s shoulder. The captain staggered and fell to one knee, allowing Kine to plant his foot between Vilfrand’s shoulder blades with a ruthless kick. Even that didn’t topple the hardy guardsman, though, and
Sandon’s uncle surged to his feet with a powerful yell. Twisting, he backhanded Kine savagely, knocking the less muscular man to the side in a single blow.

Unfortunately for Sandon, Malaise’s blindness didn’t last long. Wiping the spots out of her eyes with one hand, Malaise wove the dagger before her with the other to ward off another blow from Sandon. “We have her!” Yattak crowed—a bit prematurely, Sandon thought—and began chanting the words of another spell, burping a little between syllables of magic.

With a grand sweep of his hand, Yattak released another flow of energy. Sparkling, it rushed toward Malaise in a whirl of crackling electricity. The draconian snarled, thrusting out one hand with a growled countercharm. Wind swept from Malaise’s spell, gusting out with phenomenal force. It quelled Yattak’s smaller electricity spell, crushing the sparkling arcs of lightning and rolling onward in a massive wave. Sandon was thrown back by it and rolled across the colored floor of the tower. He scrabbled at the cobblestones, catching his fingers in a particularly deep crack as his sword rattled past. Sandon reached after it, barely managing to get his hand on the hilt before it spun out of his reach.

Yattak and Umar were less fortunate. The wind caught the pudgy wizard full in the chest and lifted him
off his feet, rolling him as if he were a rubber ball right toward the edge of the tower. He slammed between two of the tower crenellations, wedged in between square blocks of stone with his backside hanging out in the air. Nearby, Umar howled in fear as he skidded toward the crenellation. He wasn’t as agile as Sandon, and although he clawed at the stones, he could find no purchase.

The wind whipped through Sandon’s hair and clothing, tugging him so fiercely that he thought it would pull him loose of his tenuous grip. He cried out to the two wizards, but the sound was lost in the rushing of air all about him. He saw Umar slam against the lip of stone protecting the edge, then flip over it, only inches from falling to his death. Yattak saw it too, and the sight of his young friend in danger did more to motivate the wizard than the feeling of his own rump hanging over a thousand feet of air.

“Umar!” Yattak pulled himself together long enough to coalesce more spell energy around his hands. Chanting wildly, the words half realized, Yattak hurled the spell at his young apprentice. It was a force spell, a ray of energy that struck Umar and knocked him out of the path of Malaise’s gust of wind. Umar screeched, plowing to the ground several feet to the left. He skidded along the stone of the plaza, then bounced to a shivering
stop, eyes rolling up into his head. After one last hard bounce, the apprentice lay still.

Unfortunately, the spell didn’t stop there. Yattak screamed as the force impacted itself, shooting out toward him as well as in front of him. It popped him out of the square hole between the crenellations, hurling him like an autumn leaf into the air above the plaza. Sandon could see the horrified
o
imprinted on the Red Robe’s lips just before he vanished below the lip of the tower.

“Yattak!” Sandon screamed. He raced to the edge of the tower just in time to see Yattak cry out a single word in the language of magic. The wizard’s fall slowed, his robes whooshing out around his legs like a grandmother’s skirts. Sandon stared, jaws open, hands gripping the crenellations at the tower’s edge. Yattak looked up at Sandon as he drifted to the ground. Wafting back and forth like a strange dumpling in thick soup, the wizard lifted his thumb and gave Sandon an encouraging smile.

Sandon turned back, enraged. Malaise’s wind spell softened and died, her laughter ringing out clear and loud in the open air. She turned on Sandon, flexing her claws. “No one to protect you now, boy.”

She was right. Sandon could see Vilfrand and Kine dueling on the far side of the tower. Sandon’s father had sunk to his knees, his face covered in sweat. Malaise
stood towering between him and them, her muzzle stretched into an evil grin. The draconian hissed with glee, “Now my master will have a true tribute.”

“Sandon! There’s nothing you can do here!” Kine yelled. “Run!”

verything seemed fuzzy, slow, like it was happening at a distance. Sandon saw Kine’s sword rise and fall, Vilfrand’s great strength overcoming the soldier. He saw Malaise preparing another spell, this one to capture and hold the youth in preparation of Lazuli’s arrival.

The speck that was the dragon grew ever larger in the sky.

Sandon threw himself toward the trap door in the floor of the tower plaza. He didn’t like abandoning Kine, but the soldier was right. There was absolutely nothing he could do …

Here.

Nod-nasa. It was Vilfrand’s reason for knowing there was a secret vault. When the captain said it, he thought his victory was all but assured. Where there was a password, there was something to hide and protect, right? To Sandon, however, it was even more important
than a pile of steel or a mountain of gems. Sandon knew what the password did—and he wasn’t afraid to use it. Dragon or no dragon.

Sandon sprinted down the tower stairs toward the hallway below that would lead him to his mother’s room. He took the stairs three at a time, stumbling and falling to his knees at the bottom of the stairs. He felt blood rise through the leg of his trousers, his knee bursting into pain to match the searing wounds that Malaise’s magic had carved into his shoulder. He couldn’t let it stop him. Sandon surged to his feet again, cursing under his breath, and limped as rapidly as he could toward the bedchambers.

He threw open the door to his mother’s room and went immediately to the wall that concealed the secret passage. Unsure how Kine had opened it from the other side, Sandon began to feel around for some sort of a latch. He fumbled desperately at torch sconces and the bookcase, looked under the rug and behind the painting, and pushed on every rock in the wall. Nothing. At last, Sandon pounded his fists against the wall in frustration—and discovered that the whole thing simply sank inward if enough pressure was applied.

Kine had apparently left that door unlocked.

The portal felt sticky and wet, as it had before, sparkling against Sandon’s flesh in a strange wave of
magic. He stumbled out the other side and blinked at the sudden sunlight that illuminated the cave. Everything was as they’d left it—a broken golem of stone and copper lying in a heap near one of the pillars; the wide, glittering mouth of the cave through which the last light of sunset poured; and the golden dragon construct resting, perfectly motionless, near the lip of the sheer cliff.

Sandon ran toward it across the wide, pillared cavern. His steps were limping and labored, but the password throbbed over and over in his head. So loud, in fact, that he missed the sound of the portal activating again behind him.

“Imbas kartu!”
Malaise shouted, sending a burst of magic toward him. Sandon turned, sword again in his hand, but saw nothing.

An invisible hand of air swept him up, slamming him backward. It pressed him against the wall of the cave, into the stone. Sandon wrenched himself out of its grasp and collapsed to the floor. He rolled away from the wall and tried to stand, but his injuries finally got the better of him. With his injured leg, shoulder, and the pain in his knee, Sandon toppled to the ground.

Malaise walked toward him, eyes glittering. “So this is the cave of the great Acinyoshu, who was so very eager to go to war …”

“You knew the gold dragon?” Sandon gasped. He gripped rocky formations on the wall, pulling himself to his feet as Malaise approached. She towered over him, her glittering blue-silver scales shimmering with each step. Even the setting sun, now orange and peeping in a thin sliver above the horizon, could do nothing to warm the sivak’s steely skin.

“Too well.” The flight marshal licked her muzzle, the long tongue flickering out between sharp teeth. “He’s the reason Lazuli chose this valley.” Her eyes flickered up to the golden construct. She frowned. “That small, pathetic thing holds no value for my master. Gold? Worthless. Where is the dragon’s hoard?” Her fingers closed around Sandon’s throat, lifting him clear of the ground. In her other hand she waved her long-bladed dagger close to Sandon’s chest. “Where have you hidden it?”