Gold Dragon Codex (21 page)

Sandon choked out, “There … is … no … hoard! Mother used it … to build the … dragon!”

“Liar!” Malaise screamed in a rage, hurling him to the ground. “That thing is made of gold! Where is the steel? Where are the jewels? No one in their right mind would trade good steel for worthless decoration!”

Focusing his eyes on the dagger Malaise waved about, Sandon struggled to catch his breath. Worthless decoration? Malaise might be looking at the gold dragon
on the ledge, but she hadn’t realized what it was! Clearly, the flight marshal thought it was only a lump of metal. “It’s the statue missing from the city square, isn’t it? Did your mother move it here to cover the vault door?”

Kicking Sandon’s sword away, Malaise grabbed him by the collar of his tunic and hurled him toward the giant golden construct. He rolled over hard stone and sharp edges, striking the construct with his shoulder as he came to a stop. “Vilfrand said that your father would give him the hoard when he stepped down from the throne. To pass it on to his son, the captain said. Tell me, boy, did he also give you that knowledge?”

Sandon looked at the construct, and then at Malaise, an idea forming in his head. “Yes.”

Malaise grinned triumphantly. “Move the statue, then, and open the vault. If you do, I may—may, mind you—consider keeping you alive. My master, Lazuli, is a generous dragon to those who properly worship and revere him. You could be a servant to him—perhaps even a soldier in his guard.” Shoving Sandon forward toward the construct, Malaise licked her lips in anticipation. “Open it.”

“I’ll have to crawl inside the statue,” Sandon protested. “It could be dangerous—I don’t know how stable that thing is, and gold is heavy!”

The draconian scowled. “Then you die in the service of the greatest lord of all—the noble Lazuli. Now move.”

Dodging her kick, Sandon crawled into the big construct. He shot a longing glance after his sword only to see Malaise hiss in pleasure at depriving him of the weapon. Not that he really cared, but he wanted to keep the big draconian off balance. As long as she thought he wanted the sword, she wouldn’t notice how eagerly he was climbing between the golden statue’s claws, opening the cagelike hatch in the lower portion of its neck, and sliding into the leather-covered chair nestled within the dragon’s chest.

“Have you found it? Is that the portal to the treasure?” The draconian chortled. Her big dark eyes glittered and her hand flexed around the hilt of her long-bladed dagger.

“This is definitely it,” Sandon muttered.

The flight marshal heard him and strode to the front of the statue to have a better look inside. “Well? Where is it?” she demanded.

“Right here.” Sandon grinned. He gripped the lever that jutted up between his legs, squeezing as hard as he could on the handle marked “flame.” “Nod-nasa!”

The dragon’s jaw opened, great cogs spinning wildly. Something inside the gold dragon made a gassy
whoof
,
and there was a shudder from tail to nose, the golden scales shivering with the force of it. The silk-covered eyes opened, revealing two massive orbs of amber. From somewhere behind Sandon, within the deep chest of the construct, a wash of heat flowed out.

Fire erupted from the dragon’s mouth, licking in torrential waves over its nose, claws, and the stone immediately in front of it. The flame engulfed Malaise utterly, consuming her in a single wafting rush. Sandon heard the draconian scream, but even that lasted only a few seconds before she was overwhelmed by the roar of the inferno. Sandon felt the seat behind him growing intensely warm, the leather steaming slightly and the metal to either side of him starting to glow. He yelped, taking his hands off the lever. The fire slowed, then stopped, trickling out in a dull yellow hiss before it stopped altogether.

A thin waft of smoke trickled out the dragon’s golden nostrils. More rose in wispy plumes from a massive black spot on the floor that stretched more than forty feet into the cave. Sandon lifted the hatch, snatching his hand back from the metal before it burned him, and stood to appreciate it. Two rows of pillars, one on either side of the dragon’s mouth, were ashy, their paint chipped and flaking from heat, and the stone floor had a
strange rippled-looking quality that was new. Of Malaise, nothing remained save the soles of her boots—twisted into curls like two pieces of bacon—and an ivory hilt sticking out of a melted pool of steel.

If she’d burst into flames when she died, like Kine had said she would, Sandon sure hadn’t noticed it.

“Swords afire,” Sandon breathed, staring at the blackened scar.

With a gasp, he scrambled back into the hatch of the dragon construct. He felt the seat and found it incredibly warm to the touch. “Gnomes,” Sandon remembered. “There’s always a flaw in the things they make. Well, here’s one, at least. If I leave that flame spout on too long, it’ll roast me too!”

Sandon took a moment to look at the myriad levers, twist handles, and buttons that were scattered almost at random around the egg-shaped compartment. He pushed his hands through two D-shaped handles, pulling them back toward him gently at the same time. It was a guess, but it worked. The handles flexed and slid smoothly toward him, long thin pipes of copper trailing behind them. He could move them back and forth and side to side fairly easily with just the motions of his hands. As Sandon did so, the dragon’s wings lifted. Its body lurched forward when he pushed both handles forward, and
when he shifted the handles up, the dragon construct wobbled and stood on four uncertain feet. Whistling, Sandon twisted the handles back and forth, discovering how cunningly they flapped the wings. With just a slight flick of his wrists, the wings flapped easily and the silken sails between the heavy boning filled with puffs of air.

“Fire … flight … I wonder what these other buttons do,” he mused. He wished he could take a moment to experiment, but he knew better. Somewhere out there, Lazuli was approaching the keep—and his father. As much as Sandon wanted to inspect each and every lever and knob, he just didn’t have the time. He’d have to learn while he flew.

“If Mom could do it …” Sandon gritted his teeth, twisting a few knobs until he found the combination that caused the dragon’s wings to flap in rhythm. Slowly, careening from side to side, the great construct lifted off the ground. Sandon turned the nose of the golden dragon toward the opening of the cave and pushed the handles forward.

he ground dropped away, leaving Sandon’s stomach feeling as if it were lurching toward his feet. One minute he was above the cliff, and the next he was in open air, with nothing but his trust in the lurching golden construct keeping him from screaming his head off. Sandon looked out through the protective cage at wings that flapped in broad strokes and the trail of several years of dust behind him. The constructed dragon stretched many horse lengths long, its wedge-shaped head cutting through the wind, the silken frill of sail along its neck fluttering wildly with the force of takeoff.

Something near the rear of the dragon snapped, and Sandon heard a high-pitched
ping
. He leaned forward in the cage that comprised the gold dragon’s chest, trying to see past the forelegs that were curled beneath him. The dragon shifted in the air, wings automatically compensating for whatever had gone wrong. Gulping,
Sandon stared down at the levers and dials in front of him, wishing that his mother—or the gnome builder, for that matter—had thought to label more than half of them. He tried to keep his mind off the fact that fields were sweeping past beneath his feet like patchwork on a quilt, and stared at the various knobs. One was marked “claws” and another “roar.” A third had a sort of squiggle on it that in Sandon’s best guess looked like a person screaming, and a row of five small, brightly colored levers had no writing at all.

“Great,” he muttered. Sandon twisted the levers to gain altitude, gently testing the construct’s ability. Flying turned out to be a relatively easy skill he picked up swiftly. All he had to do was twist and pump the D-shaped handles that wrapped around his hands, and the machine did as he asked. “Those gnomes are amazing!”

There was another jolt from the rear of the construct, and the magical engines that thrummed along somewhere within the dragon’s belly twanged out of tune. “Great.” Sandon found a big iron wheel with a handle on it and spun the crank curiously. The dragon shook from side to side and the front legs extended gingerly, cogs catching here and there as the levers released. On a hunch, Sandon pushed the knob marked “claws” and saw the long, swordlike claws at the end of the forearms
open and close, rotating at the wrist as he twisted the knob back and forth.

“Claws, fire and flight. This is going to be fun!” He looked ahead cheerily, feeling the twilight wind toss his hair … and all of his cheer drained away, leaving him with nothing but a small, hard knot in his chest.

Ahead of him in the sky, turning away from the keep with a lash of a long, royal blue tail, flew Lazuli. The blue dragon was nearly twice the size of the construct, his dark scales absorbing the reddish orange of the skies. Lazuli’s eyes fairly flowed with anticipation, so wide and so clear that Sandon could see the golden speck of his construct’s reflection deep within them. The Blue was massive, larger than Sandon had imagined. His jaw could open wide enough to swallow a man whole—or encompass the entire neck of the construct in which Sandon rode. There was an eagerness within the Blue that blazed in his every movement, from his wide-stretched claws to the lolling tongue that hissed out of his mouth into the wind.

From a distance, it almost seemed that the blue dragon was laughing. He threw himself gleefully into combat, leaving behind the gray tower where he had been about to land. On that tower, beyond the blue dragon’s lashing tail, Sandon could see the shadows of
men moving about—Kine and Vilfrand, he guessed, still locked in swordplay. He glanced toward the floor of the plaza, trying to see if his father was still standing, but he didn’t have a chance to see anything more in the flicker of time before the mighty blue dragon’s body blocked all sight of the tower.

Lazuli must have thought that the smaller gold dragon was real, for he yelled out in a booming voice, “You dare invade the territory I have claimed?”

Shoving the handles down, Sandon twisted the construct to the right, feeling the bottom fall out of the world again as the construct dived. Lazuli gave chase, roaring in glee.

That didn’t make Sandon feel any better. In fact, it made him feel worse.

Swifter than the Blue, Sandon’s golden construct flitted up through the bigger dragon’s claws. Lazuli roared in frustration as he clamped his forepaws together on empty air. Once above them, Sandon felt the gold dragon shudder again, off balance in a sudden gust of wind. He frantically tugged at levers and twisted knobs, wishing he had some idea what to do—or some kind of magic to help him keep the construct afloat.

All he had to do, he reminded himself, was get Lazuli’s attention and draw him away from the keep.
The moment he left the valley, the ancient spell would take hold again, and Lazuli wouldn’t be able to go back unless he was invited a second time. “Fat chance,” Sandon growled. “If I have to, I’ll destroy the horn forever before I do that!”

Lazuli closed on the construct, his powerful wings carrying him forward in half the time of the contruct’s swift, precise beats. He couldn’t maneuver as well, but he had more thrust in the air, and worse—he knew what he was doing. The blue dragon hissed, lightning crackling around his mouth. Sandon could have sworn that Lazuli smiled when he opened his jaws. A bolt of lightning as thick as a wagon was wide came snapping out. Sandon yelped as he caught sight of the bolt from the side as he turned the construct in a tight spin. The lightning was by far faster than he, and the air around him steamed and hissed with the stench of burning ozone. Sandon rolled the dragon construct to the side, struggling not to flip it over—he had no idea if the construct could fly upside down, but he rather doubted it.

The lightning bolt screamed past only inches away from the construct. Sandon felt the electric charge of it race along the construct’s metal frame and into his fingers. Jolting sparks shot brightly along the metal
plating holding his seat in place. It snapped in brilliant blue arcs from lever to lever, and he heard distinct pops within the metal body behind him. “Aiee!” Sandon yelped, shaking his numbed hands.