Dragonforge (48 page)

“Can I use this?” she asked, placing her hand upon it.

Zeeky handed her the ball.

To have been made of energy, it was quite heavy. It easily weighed as much as if had been crafted of iron, at least thirty pounds. Jandra reared back and shouted, “Bitterwood! You have to hit her heart!”

Jazz looked toward the shout. Jandra flung the globe with all the strength her genie-tuned muscles could muster. Whatever the ball was made from, it proved immune to the flames and flew straight and true. It collided with Jazz’s mouth in a lip-splitting smack.

Jazz staggered backward, bringing her hands to her mouth, looking dazed. Jandra reached out with her nanites and grabbed the kudzu vines behind the goddess. The vines darted out to tangle Jazz’s feet. They quickly crisped to cinders, but not before Jazz stumbled. She landed on her butt, hard, then rolled to her hands and knees. Jandra ran to retrieve the crystal globe, intending to fling it again.

Before she could reach it, Bitterwood burst from the branches of a tree above the goddess. His clothes were dripping wet. He plummeted toward her fiery form, both hands clasped around the hilt of Gabriel’s sword. The weapon glowed even more brightly than the goddess as he buried it in her back, driving her down. He used his momentum to leap away, dropping and rolling as he hit the moist grass to extinguish the fires that had erupted on his now-dry clothes.

Jandra tried to look at Jazz, but it was impossible. It was like looking into the sun. The ground beneath the goddess boiled and her glowing form melted into it. Slowly, the light dimmed. Jandra walked over to the hole in the ground. All that was left at the bottom was the burning sword lodged into a heart-shaped piece of silver metal. Blackened bones lay scattered around the pit. The soil had been turned to glass by the heat.

Bitterwood leaned over the edge of the pit and reached in with blistered fingers to grab the hilt. Instantly, the white hot blaze dimmed to a dull cherry glow. Jandra blinked, trying to clear her vision.

The leaves in the trees stirred as Hex flew overhead. He swooped down to land, dropping Poocher from his hind talons. The pig was uninjured, but sopping wet. Hex’s face was charred, with one eye swollen shut. Here and there, a gash of pink tissue peeked through his blackened scales. His tongue was covered with blisters. He lisped through missing teeth as he asked, “Ish she dead?”

Bitterwood lifted the sword and looked at the silver heart on the end. The fire hadn’t melted it, but it was split by a jagged crack where the blade had pierced it.

“If she isn’t,” Jandra said, “we’ve certainly broken her heart.”

Zeeky ran from Jandra’s side to give Poocher a hug.

“I saw Trisky dead on the beach,” Hex said, giving Bitterwood a stern look with his one open eye. “What happened to Adam?”

Bitterwood shrugged. “We’ve agreed to disagree.”

High above, the sky began to fragment and drift down as a silvery snow, leaving the rock behind it exposed. The jungle grew hauntingly quiet. Bitterwood dropped the sword back into the pit.

“I don’t sense any radio waves,” Jandra said. “I think she’s really dead. What should we do with her heart?”

“We should bury it, with the sword still in place so it will never heal,” said Bitterwood. “Then I want to eat my dinner in peace and get some sleep. I’ve killed enough gods for one day.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight:

Zing!

Shandrazel studied the
map of the world inlaid on the Peace Hall floor. This was his father’s world—a world forged with violence. All his life, Shandrazel had considered his father’s ruthlessness an antiquated relic from a less enlightened time. Violence had been necessary once, perhaps, to tame a savage world, but dragons now had centuries of civilization during which more enlightened concepts could take root. Ideas such as justice stemming not from the concept that might makes right, but in the belief that all intelligent beings are inherently equal.

Now, he found that all his high and fanciful thoughts were nothing more than soap bubbles: ephemeral, beautiful, and doomed as they brushed against jagged reality.

Word of the massacre at Dragon Forge had reached him quickly. It was said that the rebels had tried to slow the news by slaughtering innocents for miles around, but those deaths had been for naught. A valkyrie from the Nest had been sent to Dragon Forge in the aftermath of Blasphet’s invasion to warn them that the Murder God was still on the loose. She’d discovered the killing fields around Dragon Forge. The humans had tried to bring her down, but, of course, their arrows couldn’t reach her. She’d journeyed on to the palace to report what she’d found.

Shandrazel looked up from the map as Androkom entered the hall. The high biologian looked grim. “When Charkon learns of this, he’ll demand swift action. This rebellion must be crushed if you are to prevent a civil war, sire. After the Blasphet debacle, any further show of weakness will cause your fellow sun-dragons to turn against you. The Commonwealth will shatter.”

“Agreed,” said Shandrazel. “Summon everyone.”

“Everyone, sire?” Androkom asked.

“Gather the aerial guard. Dispatch them to the far reaches of the Commonwealth. The sun-dragons who control their various abodes are bound by a pact of mutual defense. Gather them at Dragon-Forge within three days. These humans were offered a chance at peace. They’ve chosen war instead. It is time mankind is reminded that sun-dragons are the undisputed masters of war. We must strangle this rebellion it its cradle before it can grow any further.”

“Of course, sire,” said Androkom. “Overwhelming force is the swiftest path to returning security and order.”

Shandrazel nodded. “Before you go, send Charkon in. I owe it to him to deliver the news personally. If I’d allowed him to return, perhaps his leadership could have prevented this.”

“We can’t know that, sire.”

“I know,” Shandrazel said, looking up to the tapestry of his father devouring the army of humans. “It haunts me just the same.”

The air of Dragon Forge
stank of smoke and death. Pet stared at the thick black smoke that rose from the third chimney. Immediately following the fall of the city, Burke had taken control of the three central furnaces. Two were now dedicated solely to the production of weaponry. The third had become a crematorium, and it was this furnace that provided most of the oily black soot that drifted down onto the town. There wasn’t enough time or manpower to bury the dead. Burke had reluctantly cut his production capacity by a third due to the fear of disease. He’d seen the plagues that followed in the aftermath of slaughter. Clearing the dead and all their attendant gore from the water supplies and sewage was the task of half the available men. Burke had said there was no point in creating weapons if all his soldiers were dropping dead from fevers.

Pet turned his attention from the furnace back to the wall of wood before him. Pet had been placed with a team of men tasked with closing the gates of Dragon Forge. It was difficult, backbreaking labor. Digging a trench to free a gate whose bottom edge was buried in centuries of dirt required the use of muscles Pet hadn’t known he possessed. He found himself working alongside men with faces rough as leather from years laboring in the sun. Their hands were thick, calloused masses immune to blisters and splinters. They were tough men of the earth who worked stoically, uncomplaining of the cold. Pet wanted to grumble about the pain of his broken nose, or the way his legs were still chapped from the ride, or his fingers still raw from the bowstring, but he held his tongue. These men wouldn’t be a sympathetic audience.

It was their second day of labor. Pet joined the rest of the crew in putting their shoulders to the gate and pushing. The legs of a hundred men strained against hinges long locked by rust. Burke had given the foreman a special oil to penetrate the rust and release the gates, but if it had had any effect, Pet couldn’t tell. They may as well have been pushing a stone wall.

At last the foreman shouted for the men to stop. Pet collapsed to the dirt, certain that all their efforts had been for nothing. But, as he rested, he watched the foreman at the far edge of the gate measuring scrapes in the ground with a length of ribbon.

“That’s five inches!” he shouted.

The men around Pet grumbled, but Pet rolled to his back and thrust his fists into the air, feeling triumphant. Five inches was much further than no distance at all.

“Only twenty feet to go,” the foreman said.

After a short rest where Pet shared a drink from a bucket of soot-flecked water, the men once more put their shoulders to the gate.

“Push!” the foreman shouted.

Pet strained with all his might, feeling as if the bones in his legs might snap. The gate groaned as the hinges loosened further. The wall of wood crept another inch, then gained speed for nearly a foot before grinding to a halt once more, cutting into the hard-packed earth. The door was sagging as it swung. There was more digging to do.

Pet passed beyond all exhaustion as a long day gave way to a long night. He’d hoped that when darkness came they would be allowed to sleep, but word was that Burke had given the decree that the gates must be closed before dawn. The men chattered among themselves. Was an attack immanent? How many more hours would they have before the dragons tried to retake the forge?

The night sky was black as tar. The foundry smoke and the thick clouds blotted out all traces of the moon. A chill drizzle began to fall over Dragon Forge, turning the ground to mud. Pet’s teeth chattered even as his body sweated. At some point he was given a wheelbarrow. He couldn’t even recall who’d charged him with the duty. He mindlessly set to work carting away the mounds of earth that others broke free with picks and shovels. Pet dumped the heavy, damp dirt at the base of one of the rust mounds. He coughed from the effort. His head felt full of rust and dust and burnt bone ash. The mucus he wiped from his lips onto his once fine shirt was pink, not from blood, but from the red clay grime that clung to him.

In the moonless, starless night, he lost all track of time. He felt as if he were only dreaming; trapped in a nightmare where he struggled through the darkness, soaked by rain and sweat, pushing heavy heaps to and fro for reasons he could no longer remember.

“Okay men,” the foreman shouted at last. “Dawn is only an hour away. Get your shoulders into the gate. Move it. Now!”

Pet dropped his wheelbarrow where he stood. He slogged through the now ankle-deep mud to take his position.

“Push!”

Pet fell instantly. The mud gave no traction. He clawed his way upright again, digging his broken nails into the grain of the ancient, weathered wood. The gate was built of logs thicker than his torso, bound by iron bands with rivets as big as his fist. He pressed both hands against one of these rivets and burrowed down into the mud with his feet, seeking purchase.

“Push!”

Everyone was groaning now. The mud slurped and sucked as men dug their feet into it, churning it into an ever-worsening muck.

And yet, the very mud that made their movements so frustrating was proving to be an aid. The gate slowly began to swing, no longer obstructed by every little rock or bulge in the packed earth that had halted it earlier. The damp ground gave way to the mass of the gate, and the more the gate moved, the easier it was to push.

Then, the gate ground to a halt once more. Tears welled in Pet’s eyes.

“Move!” he shouted, straining with every last ounce of will within him. “Damn you, move!”

The gate didn’t budge.

Slowly he realized that the men around him were standing back from the gate, looking up in amazement. Pet staggered away from the logs, his legs trembling.

The gate was closed.

The gate had stopped moving because it had met its matching neighbor for the first time in centuries, the two pieces fitting together as neatly and nicely as a man could want.

Pet dropped to his knees in the mud.

He wiped a tear from his cheek as the men around him began to cheer.

He’d heard men cheer like this before. They’d cheered him like this in the shadow of Albekizan’s castle, when he claimed to be Bitterwood, claimed that he would lead humanity to a new era.

Those unearned cheers had tortured his sleep ever since.

In this cold and damp predawn hour, the cheers weren’t directed at him. He’d not led a single man on this project. He hadn’t given them a vision to rally around, or even said an encouraging word to his fellow laborers.

No one would sing a song about his labors today. No one would ever weave it into a tapestry, or write it in a book. Yet he felt as if this were the first truly worthwhile thing he’d ever done in his life.

Pet coughed himself
awake. He sat up, feeling as if his lungs were being scoured by the cold air and ever-present smoke. He was in a large room that had been converted into a makeshift barracks and slept on the floor with scores of fellow soldiers, all curled beneath tattered blankets. The far end of the room possessed a roaring fireplace, but any heat the fire put out was sliced apart by icy drafts that cut through the room from innumerable gaps in the walls.

Pet rose on stiff legs and carefully stepped across his sleeping brethren to reach the main door. He wondered what this room had once been that it was so shabbily constructed. He opened the door and found a familiar figure in the street beyond. It was Burke, carrying a large wooden box slung over his back. His daughter followed close behind, a large bundle wrapped in burlap held in both arms.

“Ah,” said Burke, his head turning toward the sound of the opening door. “If it isn’t Bitterwood himself.”

“I told you it isn’t,” Pet said.

“You look like hell, Pet,” Burke said over the rims of his spectacles. “I could still tell that was a silk shirt when I met you. Now it looks like something I wouldn’t let my dog sleep on.”

Pet looked down at his torn and mud-caked clothing. Burke and his daughter gleamed in comparison. Anza looked especially immaculate, dressed in soft buckskin, her jet-black braid showing not a single stray hair. If there was a bathtub somewhere in this hellish city, she must have taken possession of it.