Rise Of The Dragon King (Book 5) (14 page)

“What has he done to himself?” Rikky asked Linux.

“He’s changed his shape and blocked the flow of the river,” Linux answered. “But he won’t be able to keep it from overflowing, if we don’t divert the water.”

“How long do you think we have?” Clover asked the druid. “Did he get the
contamination?”

“Maybe three days, if it doesn’t rain in the north.” Linux shrugged. “Knowing Jenka, he wouldn’t have dammed the whole Strom if he wasn’t sure.”

“Crimzon has an idea, but it will take me a day or two at best to pull it off,” Clover told them. “I’ll not waste more time here. You two stay and fortify this.” She opened her arm, indicating the wide, green-tinted, scale-covered dam into which Jenka had turned himself and Jade.

“Do not let it fail.”

It was a nest of mudged dragons they found, and King Richard was a bit disgusted at having gotten his hopes up so high. Putting a controlling collar on something that was mad to begin with would do little good in the end. Sooner or later, the crazed inbred wyrm would turn on its rider, or rebel against the collar’s persuasion.

Nevertheless, he nodded and grinned and encouraged King Chad to pick his wyrm so they could lure it out of the cavern and net it down.

“That darker one,” the excited man pointed from their perch in the crags above the nest. “He’s the biggest.”

And the most mudged
, Richard thought to himself. These were not dragons;
these were feral things that resembled them. They did have red speckles running down their spinal plates, and one even had some green to its undersheen, but they were mostly so dark in color as to appear black.

There were four of them down in the bottom of the rocky crag, and they were fighting over a haunch of elk that had been under one of them while they slept. These creatures were acting solely on instinct, a wild, aggressive instinct to dominate the other and take what they wanted. Pure-blooded dragons would have reasoned out an argument over the morsel, or just went and got their own. It was an elk, and they were dragons, after all. A smart wyrm wouldn’t fight in a rocky crevice over a single bite of old food. It just wouldn’t happen.

“You, Garth, and Victir, get some meat on the end of those ropes,” King Chad ordered. “Throw two portions down to the bottom and dangle two more halfway on the lines. Over there on that flat is where we will set out his dinner.”

“What are you doing?” Richard asked. “Where are you going to get meat?”

“I won’t need the litter, or the men to tote it home, Richard.” The king of Vikaria clasped him on the shoulder like a father might his son. “They swore to serve their kingdom and their king with their very lives, and right now, they would best serve me as bait.”

Garth and Victir, two of the king’s personal guards, casually walked over and
pushed their sword tips through the throats and hearts of the six men who had carried the king on their shoulders for six straight days. One of them tried to flee, but an archer shafted him three paces into his getaway.

The man was still alive, and very, very conscious, when they tossed him down into the dragon pit. Richard almost ran to the perch to watch him be devoured. To his disappointment, the fall knocked the man senseless, but he still screamed and flailed when they started ripping him apart. Only the king’s hand on his shoulder could get him to move back when the big, black mudged wyrm started flapping and climbing up the rocky side, chasing after the human leg Garth was dangling for it.

“Come, let’s get into position,” King Chad grinned. “I developed a plan of my own, Richard. Watch.”

Garth and Victir were both clearly nervous, but as Garth dragged the litter-man’s leg up and over the ledge, he kept sipping from a flask of something far stronger than normal liquor. After every sip, he would growl and snarl at the others, as if he’d gone mad. Then the hungry black wyrm poked its head over. Richard decided it wasn’t all that big, after all. Larger than his brother’s young wyrm, but no larger than Rikky Camille’s speedy silver. Richard found he wasn’t even afraid of it.

This wasn’t the plan they had agreed upon, and the way the manic-looking king kept eyeing him from the side had him wondering if he shouldn’t be afraid of him. The king’s plan was working. It was clear he had some men watching this pit and probably throwing these inbred things meat doused with potion. Now the mudged wyrm was moving toward the two bodies Victir had sliced open in the clearing. They had been drenched in thick, gravy-like liquid that was most likely about to put the mudged in more of a stupor than it was already in.

To everyone’s surprise, though, the tide of the scene changed when two of the other feral wyrms came up over the edge. One of them, the one closest to the king, sprouted arrow shafts as if it were displaying them. It roared out and spewed at three men with a small streak of thin fire breath. None of them even died from the blast, but they were all burned and useless now.

Richard became wary then, and decided that the color of the splotches along these wyrm’s backs shouldn’t be ignored. He also decided that the smartest of these four was the one who didn’t come up.

He gave King Chad a sincere nod and a grin, and darted right under the wyrm that was engaging the bulk of the men. A swordsman screamed, and arrows thrummed. The clash of steel on scale rang out. A horse whinnied its last as the shafted dragon pulled it over the side and dropped it down. Richard snatched his
dragon collar out of the pile of gear and quickly fastened his part of the device around his neck. The Nightshade and he had commanded legions of these bat-brained mudged.

King Chad was about to have his wyrm, but Richard was about to seize the moment for himself. Settling here would be the most foolish thing he could ever do.

“What in the hells?” King Chad called as his wyrm started tearing into its offered feast.

“Collar your prize!” Richard yelled back.

Then, over the edge and down into the pit he went.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

T
he dragon watching him slide down the rope did have a green sheen to it, but it wasn’t the dragon Richard wanted to collar. He’d seen a cave that extended off of the pit and knew in his heart there were more formidable draci in this hole, maybe even a high dracus. The simple fact that he could cast spells and use the knowledge he’d gained from his years of association with first Royal, then the Nightshade and Gravelbone, took away almost all of his fear. Even now, as he dropped the last few feet to the cavern floor, he was holding the wyrm still with his stare.

Richard adjusted the dragon collar around his shoulder and continued to stare at the transfixed mudged as he moved into the shadowy darkness of the cave.

Rather than create light, he cast a spell that allowed him to see better in the darkness. Agitating a nest of mudged would get him eaten faster than he could blink. But by moving cautiously, and not acting like prey, he knew he could find a more worthy wyrm than King Chad’s.

He with the biggest dragon wins
. Richard sent his random thought through the ethereal, as if his long dead dragon could answer him.
Isn’t that right, Royal?

A protective spell, and a spell cast to make him harder for the dragons to see, came next, and then he was beyond the entry pit and easing deeper into the mountain.

He saw the flash of an eye blink here, and a glimmer of scale there, but he knew there were more dragons than he could see. He didn’t care, though. Dying here was not much worse than dying on an island alone. In fact, it was a better end, and even though he probably could have played the coward and spent his life making children with his new wife, he was choosing to face his fate, to either rise or die, right here among the very beasts who ruined his humanity by making a simple life no longer worthy as an existence. Richard was a dragon-rider. He would ride again, or he would die trying.

Just then a blast of fire breath, far more potent than the mudged that attacked the king’s men, revealed that Richard was in a shaft that was lined with sleeping mudged. They were mostly horse-sized, but those were the ones that would pick a man apart. They were everywhere on the walls and ceiling, all hunkered down in their leathery wings.

The wyrm that had let loose the flames was watching him now. It could see
his heat, he knew, and he could see its every scale with the gray-tinted sort of sight his spell allowed him. It was twice the size as the dragon King Chad was probably collaring this very moment, but it was not a dragon, for it was as black as pitch.

A bit of illumination flickered again ahead of him. It wasn’t from any wavering flame, either. It was lightning he saw, and his heart raced into an excited rhythm because of it. He stared off the half-attentive mudged and moved with more confidence and purpose toward the lightning flash. It didn’t take long to find him after that. The wyrm he wanted was in the process of eating another wyrm while defending its kill from a handful of smaller dragons.

Richard’s skin prickled when he saw the bright blue speckles down his dragon’s spinal line, and he was even more pleased at how deftly it took a bite of its meal and chugged it down while clawing and batting its competition away with its tail, and then blasted at any that got through with quick streaks of its liquid lightning breath.

Richard watched it, and settled into a place between two rocky nubs. His wyrm would be sated soon, and would sleep deeply. That is when he would make his move. Until then he would lie there and be invisible, and dream of what carnage was about to come.

Rikky was not having an easy time of it. He and Linux were afraid of doing anything that would cover or pin Jenka’s transformed body between their spell and the sides of the ravine he was blocking. The dam Jenka had created was holding back the Strom, though, and the upriver side was getting deeper and deeper against their friend’s side.

“We have one more full day at best,” Linux observed after casting a spell that held firm support in the middle of the green-scaled span, where the water was causing it to bulge. “After that, the river will find a way past us.”

We need to relieve the flow in the north
, Zahrellion’s voice carried through the ethereal to them.
Golden, go get your rider. She is too stubborn to stay put, and for undoing this mess, we will need her
.

Yesss
, the old, gold-scaled wyrm hissed with a bit of excitement in her tone.

But first, come help me
, Zah said.

You’re here?
Rikky’s heart raced.
What do you need?

I need Golden and Silva to help Crystal place these boulders, so we can make another dam above you. This should slow the flow and relieve the pressure against him
.

You were always my best student
. Linux nodded as he imagined what she
was intending.
Clever, clever girl. It never crossed my mind to use the dragons in such a way
.

The dragons leapt into flight, leaving Rikky and Linux there.

“What will we do about the poisoned water?” Rikky asked. “We don’t have a hundred chests of gold.”

“If we can obtain some of the wizard’s inoculation, I think we can replicate it.” Linux made to stroke at his long, thin beard. When his hand grasped air and found the stubble-faced, beardless jaw of the guardsman whose body he had stolen, he shook his head and huffed in frustration. “But the water coming from the mountains is clean, and the water already in Demon Lake is clean as well. It is all this water we have to remove.”

Has it lessened any?
Zahrellion asked them.

Rikky scanned the sky to the north of their position, looking for any sign of Crystal’s white scales.

It is impossible to say
, Linux answered as he looked intently at the reservoir building up north of Jenka.
Wait, the water level isn’t rising nearly as quickly now. Look, Rikky, are you seeing this?

It was true. They had made marks in the rocks on the water side of the dam, and the river wasn’t rising nearly as quickly as it had been.

We only slowed the flow
, Zahrellion said dejectedly.
I hope Clover does whatever it is she is doing soon
.