The Seven Markets (36 page)

When Ellie was a girl, years before the Market came to her village of Oberton, her Papa brought her along to the city to make a delivery of goods. She rode next to him on their cart, pestering him the entire way to let her hold the reins and drive. As their horse was well-trained and the road well-maintained, he acquiesced to her wishes—probably more than her Mama would have liked.

It was only two days’ journey from their farm, but to Ellie it seemed an unfathomable distance. Would they stay overnight in the city? Where would they stay? What would they eat? Could she bring home a present for Mama, perhaps a new dress or a hat to replace the one she’d lost the past winter during a wild snowstorm?

No matter what she asked, Papa’s answer was always the same: “We’ll see when we get there, Ellie-dear.” And by the close of their second day, as the city grew closer and closer, she had so many things she was looking forward to that the girl who’d one day grow up to marry a prince couldn’t decide what she was most excited about. The city was all her dreams come true, everything she’d ever wanted plus a host of things she’d never dreamed might exist—but which she was confident she’d want as well.

And when they rolled through the city gates and Ellie saw the reality of it? That the buildings were taller than those of Oberton but still made from stone and wood? That the bread smelled like bread, and tasted like bread, no matter where it had been baked? That the bed she slept in that night was hard and lumpy and no match for her own back home? Was she disappointed?

Not in the least. Because the city she found was so much more than the city she’d imagined. It was filled with energy and a life that took her breath away. If they’d stayed a month she wouldn’t have felt she’d seen everything. A year might not have been enough, and when they rode for home the next morning, Papa’s business done, she spent the entire ride carrying on about what she’d seen. When could they go back again? Would the city change much between now and then? Could Mama come next time?

It was late on the second day, still a ways to go before they arrived, when Papa asked Ellie to hold her tongue a moment.

“Let me tell you,” he said, his voice serious but filled with an unfamiliar wonder. “Let me tell you, Ellie-dear, about the Market which comes once in a century and then only for three days . . .”

She was hearing Papa’s words again as they made their slow way through the wreckage of the high street. Joshua by her side, Cutter astride her back—somehow it felt like coming full circle. Papa had promised her a place of wonders, but she’d turned it into a battleground.

“Anthony! Anthony, come out! It’s all over!”

“You really think he’ll, what, surrender?” Cutter said into her ear.

She shook her head. “No, but I have to give him the chance, don’t I?”

The street was still rotten with debris, but Ellie was pleased to see the golden cages had all been dismissed. Where had the travelers gone? Were they hiding from the fearsome dragons? No, she decided. There was something worse here than dragons to hide from.

“Anthony! Please come out!”

Next to her, Joshua cleared his throat and snarfed a fist-size ball of fire from one of his nostrils.

“Better, boy,” Cutter said.

“Id burnth,” Joshua said, hacking dark smoke onto the street.

“Not as much as on the receiving end. Keep working on it.”

The silence was becoming oppressively loud. The street was so wide that she and Joshua could have spread their wings side by side with room to spare. It should have been teeming with people. She felt her blood run cold, thumping in her veins. If Hart was going to attack, it would happen at any moment.

“Be ready to fly,” she said, nudging Joshua. He nodded, eyes comically large as he strained to turn his inner heat into real flame.

Cutter patted her shoulder.
Patience,
the touch said.
Let it happen when it will.

The street rumbled beneath their feet. Ellie heard a sound like the sky itself splitting open and a stone as big as her head crashed to the ground, shattering into a thousand pieces.

“Fly! Fly!”

She leapt into the sky, a split-second behind Joshua, as a four-story building to their left collapsed onto the spot they’d been standing in. It toppled not as a solid building but as a shower of stone and wood, brick and glass. An eruption of dust followed the collapse, and Ellie fought to stay ahead of it as it grew and spread, covering all the high street in a shapeless gray cloud.

“Damn, almost got you!” Hart’s voice reverberated through the sky. It was impossible to tell where he was speaking from. “The old-fashioned way, then.”

A blast of energy shot from within the cloud, closing in on Ellie with a lazy sort of certainty. She dodged it, flying directly into a pair of smaller, faster moving blasts. One hit her leg and it exploded in a burst of pain. The second caught her right wing, tearing a tight hole in the membrane. She cried out in pain, struggling not to fall out of the sky.

Joshua flew up in front of her, placing himself in Hart’s line of fire. “He’s shooting from within the cloud!”

“Genius your man is,” Cutter said, growling, leaning up as far as he dared to peer over Ellie’s shoulder. “Wait . . . okay . . . there!”

She felt him tugging on her line, pulling her off to the left. She followed his direction, hoping Joshua would follow their lead as another slow blast came at them from within the dust cloud. Again, several smaller shots followed in quick succession; she had no problem evading these blasts with Cutter’s help.

“Do you see?” he said.

“I think so. What’re you thinking?”

“Let’s draw him out.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No—I’m going in. Coming?”

She couldn’t see it, but Ellie had no trouble imagining the hungry smile on Cutter’s face.

“Hell, yes,” he said. “It’s about time we went on the offensive.”

Ellie beat her wings to increase her altitude. She called over to Joshua. “Wait here. We’ll flush him out.”

Then she lowered her head and dove straight into the dust cloud after Hart. She expected to find herself fighting through the shroud of darkness cast by the cloud, but her dragon’s eyes were well-suited to the poor visibility. She couldn’t see fine details—if she had to read a road-sign to find him she would have been out of luck—but shapes stood out clearly through the dusky haze.

She glided down through the dust, past a pair of good-size buildings. Ellie opened her wings, slowing her descent, trying to place her location within the Market from memory. She knew the landscape well enough but one of the buildings didn’t seem to belong. It was tall and broad, but otherwise had no distinguishing characteristics.

The building moved.

She rolled away just in time to evade Hart’s blast. It was one of the big ones and would have grounded her with even a glancing blow. He followed it with a fresh volley from his smaller cannons, crisscrossing the air right in front of her nose with a steady stream of projectiles.

“Cutter! He’s right here!”

“Hit him, then!”

She slashed out with her claws, raking the face of the building. The searing pain that found her a moment later was exquisite in its depth. It felt to Ellie as if the ends were melting off from her claws. She recoiled, narrowly avoiding another barrage of shots from Hart’s smaller cannons.

“His armor! I can’t touch him!”

“Then don’t!”

Realization was swift, action swifter. She let herself drop to avoid the next, inevitable discharge from his cannons. A sweep of her wings and a flick of her tail brought her up and around, circling past where Hart stood in his tremendous suit of armor. It had been anthropomorphic earlier, with a head, arms, legs, and a torso. She didn’t know if that was still the case or if he was as she saw him: a building-size block piled high with cannons and blasters. Either way, she reasoned if Hart was in there somewhere, he’d be roughly at the armor’s center of mass.

She reached to the burning at her core and hawked a giant lungful of acid down onto Hart’s armor.

The dark, stinking smoke instantly began cutting through the cloud of dust. Ellie pulled back, confident it would be several seconds at least before Hart fired again. An idea struck her and she acted without consulting Cutter, beating her wings as fast and hard as she could while holding her position steady.

The dust cloud began dispersing.

“Again! Hit him again!”

She wasn’t able to muster as much acid this time but what she brought up proved more than sufficient. Hart wailed and for a moment Ellie thought her acid had gotten to him, boiling him inside his own armor. She paused and peered into the haze for some sign of him. If it wasn’t too late to help, she was ready to go in.

A giant, spiked fist swung out at her from within the darkness. She avoided the bulk of it but caught a glancing blow as she dodged out of the way, afraid he would follow up with another of his great, paralyzing blasts.

She lost control. Her wings went limp and she began falling, twisting as she fell, struggling to catch some air. She ended up knocking into the side of a building and rolling several times when she hit the ground.

“Was that a fist?” Cutter said.

“I think we’ve got his attention, at any rate. Ready for more?”

He dug his feet in, bettering his position. She could feel him strengthening his grip on the line around her neck. “Let’s take him apart.”

She ran a few steps and launched back into the air, separating the dust cloud before her. Hart’s armor was almost in full view now. It had the same basic shape of the thing she’d swooped in and saved Cutter from but it was bigger now. In a funny way it resembled a Shivari warrior with its long body, multiple legs, and the innumerable cannons mounted on its shoulders, torso, and limbs.

“Time to go.”

She climbed away, thinking she could put some distance between herself and Hart and avoid his ranged weapons. The air filled with buzzing golden projectiles. She wove and ducked away from the worst of it, suffering several hits on her back, chest, and tail.

Joshua was hanging above her position, hovering in place. As they passed him, Ellie heard Cutter shouting, “Let’s see some fire, kid!”

As she turned, unable to look away, Joshua roared a holocaust of flame down onto Hart in his monstrous armor. It absorbed the damage, but dragon’s fire would continue burning a long time on the iron-imbued light.

Cutter slapped Ellie’s back in celebration. “Did you see that? Your fella’s a natural!”

She didn’t respond. Instead, Ellie dipped low and spat a fresh gout of acid across Hart’s chest. His armor sizzled and cracked in a dozen places. The acid, coupled with Joshua’s fire, had to be making life quite uncomfortable for Commander Hart.

Unless it wasn’t, of course. She’d boned up to refresh her memory, but most of the tech was beyond her understanding. Ellie was a natural with computers. Remembering how the air-conditioning system inside a soldier’s armor worked, especially when the soldier swapped out his armor for a better kit, was a different matter entirely.

She hovered in place, watching Hart stumble as his armor melted around him. “I see him! Look, there!”

At the center of the golden machine was a dark blur that had to be Hart. She swooped in low, too close for any of his cannons but not for his arms, and tore at the armor’s skin right where the dark spot was. It was agony, but it was working . . . until the wounds she’d inflicted sealed up again while she paused to adjust her position.

“I can’t do enough damage!”

“I’ve got an idea,” Cutter said. She dropped low to avoid another blow from Hart as Cutter described what he had in mind.

“Oh, I love it. Hold on.”

She waved for Joshua, who had continued his fiery assault while she and Cutter went in close. Ellie realized she didn’t feel the heat from his flames and hoped the same would hold true for her acid’s effect on him.

“Come down!”

Joshua caught her eye and nodded to show he’d heard her. Ellie dodged another swing of Hart’s arm, and then bolted under it and around his back. She fastened herself to his armor’s skin, digging in with her claws as hard and fast as she could.

She ignored the pain, ignored everything but her claws and the work she’d put them to. She could see Hart in there, a dark blur against the translucent golden metal. How far did she have to go? How far could she go before it healed up around her?

“Give it a shot,” Cutter said, peering over her shoulder.

Without stopping her claws’ furious digging, Ellie unleashed a wide spray of acid into the trench she’d created in the skin of Hart’s armor. It flashed white, and then copious amounts of dark gray smoke began pouring off the wound.

“Let’s see,” Cutter said, pulling back on his line.

Ellie separated herself from Hart, beating her wings, waiting for the dark smoke to clear. She felt Joshua by her side but could not drag her eyes away from the smoldering hole.

“A little fire if you will, son.”

Joshua paused to inhale, then arced a narrow line of fire directly into the source of the smoke. It broke through the darkness, revealing what Ellie hadn’t dared allow herself to hope for.

The wound was not closing. The acid was holding back the repairs and now, she saw, Joshua’s flame seemed to have cauterized it.

“Incredible,” she said. “Captain, I could kiss you.”

He patted her back. “Okay, you two kids, get to it.”

Joshua pushed past Ellie and took a stab at widening the hole she’d made in Hart’s armor. He was larger than her and had not suffered her injuries, but he was also unprepared for the blinding pain of the iron’s touch on his dragon’s flesh. He raked Hart’s skin once and then fell back, yelping in pain.

“How can you stand it?” he said.

“I have to. Here, let me.”

Joshua’s mouth narrowed to a thin, determined line. “No, I can do it.”

He returned to Hart’s armor with renewed vigor, digging deep furrows with blinding speed. Ellie hung back, watchful for fresh tricks from the old soldier. When she sensed Joshua’s attack losing steam, she dipped in and fired another spray of acid all over his handiwork.