Draka

I had wanted my first visit to the city to be fun. Perhaps not a big, happy celebration out in the open. That wasn’t going to happen. But I’d had this hope, this vague dream of a night in the future when I could sneak into the city to meet up with a few friends, and they’d bring me somewhere we could all relax and have a good time. Maybe we could find a secluded rooftop in the higher part of the city and look out across it. Something like that.

Instead I was stalking through a stone tunnel, a broken Mak following meekly behind me. I was going to find the Herald, and I was going to kill anyone who got in my way. And when the Herald was safe, I was going to find the captivating woman who smelled of jasmine.

For me, I was showing admirable self-control. I knew myself well enough to realise that. I should have been tearing down the tunnel, mindless with fury and fear for my friend. And by rights, Mak should not be alive. When I’d seen her in that cell across from me, all I had felt was rage. An all-consuming hate like nothing I’d ever felt for anyone before.

I could only assume that my dragon wasn’t done with Mak yet, and despite everything I found the idea of her being the conservative one darkly amusing. Her, the dragon who defaulted to killing anything inconvenient, who’d wanted to kill and eat both Mak and Lalia not a month ago. And it was nice to know that, most of the time, one of us could be the responsible one.

The tunnel was not long, fifty yards at most, and unlit. At the end was a wide spiralling stairway, carefully cut from the stone, descending from above and continuing down past us. The exit would probably be up, but for all I knew this was only one level of cells, and so I went down first.

There were no cells downstairs. Instead a short passage of perhaps ten yards connected the stairways to a long natural cavern, mostly filled with water that sloshed calmly against the stone. There was a small wooden dock there, with a boat tied to it, but I couldn’t see any way out.

“What do you think about this?” I asked Mak, who had followed me silently.

“I don’t see anything across the cavern,” she said, “but if there’s nothing there the boat should mean that there’s a connection to the sea. Maybe it’s high tide, and the opening’s hidden?”

“Eh, maybe,” I said noncommittally. I hadn’t seen any sea caves except the one with the sewers when I flew by, but I had no idea what the tides had been then. Either way we’d seen everything we had time for, and I led the way back up, past the level we’d come from. Like Mak had said the staircase carried on for a while, and I felt a petty satisfaction that a couple of the bastards would have had to carry my limp ass down all those stairs. When I saw a trickle of light from above I slowed, stepping more carefully.

I looked at Mak and hissed, “Wait here,” and she nodded, stopping where she was. Her eyes grew wide and she stepped down a step away from me when I shifted. She’d have to get used to that if she wanted to remain useful to me.

I continued up the stairs until the light became too bright for me to continue, and then I brought the darkness with me, ascending to an open doorway at the end of the stairs. Someone stood in the doorway, a blur facing the brightly lit space beyond, their shadow creating a space behind them where my vision was clear and sharp.

I got as close as I could before I couldn’t handle the strain anymore, then shifted back. I threw myself at the man before he had a chance to notice me. I managed to get my feet on his hips and a hand clenching down on his throat before he could make a sound, but I hit him harder than I’d expected and he fell forward, quite loudly, into the hallway beyond. The hallway was only a few yards long, with a door at the far end and in each of the walls, and while I raked out his throat I heard steps outside and the door began to open.

I didn’t waste any more time. The man would bleed out in seconds, so I moved towards the door.

“Hey, Rosh, what was –” said a voice, and the face that stuck in through the half-open door fell back with a face full of venom, whining and coughing.

Element of surprise lost, I thought with a touch of regret.

“Mak!” I called back. “Get up here!”

I continued through the door, shouldering it the rest of the way open. The young man I’d hit was crawling blindly on the floor, but he wasn’t alone in the small room. Two others, a man and a woman, had stood from the table where they’d been playing some kind of game with a board and lots of wooden markers. The room erupted into shouting as I came in. Probably something like, “Alarm! Alarm!” or, “Gods help us, it’s loose!” but I wasn’t really listening.

I ignored the man choking on the floor. He wouldn’t be a problem. The other man had the bad luck to be the closer of the two still on their feet, standing between me, the table, and the woman. It meant that, instead of taking the time to make sure that I killed him, I just disabled him quickly. I aimed past him, raking his knee with my claws as I passed, tearing muscle and ligaments. He went down with a scream as his leg folded, while I hit the table hard with my shoulder, sending game pieces flying and knocking it into the woman, who bent forward as it caught her in the gut.

I kept pushing, the table dragging the woman along until it smashed her against the wall and stunned her, then leapt on top of the table and tore her throat out. The human neck really is ridiculously vulnerable, I thought. At least the chest has a bunch of bones to protect the vital parts.

The man, not much more than a boy, really, had fallen on his back and was facing me. Come to think of it, the woman I’d just killed had been pretty young, too. I probably should have been disgusted, but I suspected that my dragon was keeping a lid on everything except cold, calculating rage. The man was screaming something, one word, over and over, while crawling backwards on his hands and his good leg trying to get through a doorway leading to another hallway. He had a sword on his belt but he hadn’t even bothered to draw it. I took it as a surrender. That was good. I had questions. The man I’d sprayed venom at was still on his hands and knees, but all he could produce were small, whistling sounds, so he didn’t have long. Maintaining eye contact with the young man I'd crippled I grabbed the other one by the back of the head and smashed his face into the stone floor, hard, then again for good measure. He became still and quiet.

“Be quiet,” I growled at the man as I advanced on him, but he kept screaming. “I said: be quiet,” I repeated, close enough for him to feel my breath on his face, and his screams stopped with a strangled squeak, replaced with rapid, pained breathing. I heard footsteps from the way I’d come, and Mak came through the door, looking sick at what she saw. I turned back to the man on the floor.

“Where is the Herald?” I asked.

“I don’t… I don’t know…” he panted.

I wrapped my hand around his knee. “If you scream, you die,” I told him and squeezed. To his credit, he didn’t scream, though I could hear his teeth creak as his jaw clenched and his other leg kicked convulsively.

“Where is the Herald?” I asked again. “The tall Tekereteki girl. Her sister.” I gestured toward Mak with my head.

“I don’t know,” the man sobbed through his teeth, and then he really looked like a boy. “I’ve seen them take her towards the boss’ office. Maybe there. Please, my leg…”

"Do you understand what I am?"

"You're… you're the dragon," he said. "The others were talking but I didn't know! I swear, I didn't know you were here! We were just supposed to keep anyone from going down without the boss! Oh Sorrows. Berek. Ava…"

I ignored his babbling. “Mak,” I said, turning to her. “Take his sword, then get him up.” I turned back to the man on the floor. “Mak is going to help you show me to your boss’ office. I want you to know that Mak means nothing to me. Trying to take her hostage is useless. Obey, and you may live. Do you understand?”

“Yes!” the man said, hissing as I released his knee.

Mak came forward carefully, but did as I said, taking the man’s sword from its scabbard and then helping him up and supporting him, resting the point of the sword in the hollow of his throat. “I don’t recognise you,” she said. I got the feeling that it was a good thing she didn’t.

“How many more people are in this place?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said, quickly adding, “I really don’t!” when Mak pushed the point of the sword into his skin. “Could be two, could be ten or more. It depends on if the boss is here or not, and what she has them doing.”

I looked down the hallway that he’d been crawling towards. It looked cut from the stone, like everything I’d seen so far, and ended in a shut wooden door.

“The office is that way?” I asked, and the man quickly nodded.

“There’s a shelf behind the door that slides away,” he said, “and then you’re in a storage room in the house. It’s a normal house but, like, big. Fancy.”

“Alright. Mak, bring him. If he tries anything stupid, kill him.”

“Yeah,” Mak said uncertainly. “Okay.”

Not wasting any more time I walked quickly through the short hall. The door opened smoothly inwards, and then there was a wooden wall in front of me, with a recessed handle. With some effort it slid to the side with a grinding noise, revealing a dark space beyond full of boxes, barrels and amphorae, with shelves of jars and baskets along the walls. I passed them all, going straight for the door set in the left side of the opposite wall. I did, however, notice that the far wall was made of stone brick, where the near one was cut from the bedrock.

Beyond the door was a kitchen, warm and brightly lit. It was occupied by a middle-aged woman who screamed and cowered when she saw me. “The office?” I growled at her, but she either didn’t understand me or was too frightened to function, and only pressed herself harder into the corner where she’d sought refuge.

There were two doors besides the one I’d come from, but my choice was made simple. A young man came through one of them, probably drawn by the cook’s scream. Another damned kid, I thought. He wisely turned and ran the moment he saw me, wide-eyed and shouting an alarm as he went. I followed.

The door opened into a large, open room with a small pool in the centre, and brightly lit by the sunlight coming in through an opening in the ceiling above the pool. Beyond that I didn’t take much in, being focused on my prey. Humans were faster than valkin, and I couldn’t run him down, which was frustrating, but in the open space of the atrium we’d just entered I could use my wings for a boost to close in on him. The large double doors he was headed toward opened partially, showing another man looking in with surprise and annoyance. He'd had the presence of mind to grab one of the short swords I kept seeing, wide and tapering smoothly to a point.

"Go back! Go back! Run!" the young man I was hunting shouted, but the man in the door hesitated and raised his weapon, which cost them both.

As the running man slowed down to squeeze by his companion I caught up, barrelling into them both and smashing both doors open the rest of the way as I did. I felt the blade punch into my wing's shoulder joint. Clever bastard. Or maybe he was just lucky. The way my scales lay I was almost impossible to hurt from the front, but they were smaller and lay differently around the joints.

One day I would have to learn to fight, to really think about what I was doing, but shock, fear, and overwhelming, unthinking violence had served me well so far. In this case he still went down, but he had a good grip on his weapon and I pushed him with that as much as with my body.

Unfortunately for him I didn't need my wings to fight. The room was open enough that I might have been able to use them to batter my opponents, but they'd always been an afterthought as weapons. Instead I whipped my head down and tore my teeth through the guy's forearm. He screamed, and his hand went limp as my teeth scraped bone. His other hand punched uselessly at my jaw a few times, but he jerked and went limp when my foot raked him from sternum to groin.

My mouth was still clamped down, but in the corner of my eye I saw my prey trying to escape. We were in some kind of entrance hall, and he was half crawling towards the doors that no doubt led outside. His hand closed on the latch just as mine closed around his ankle.

I met Mak and the captive as I dragged the two torn bodies back into the atrium. I threw them both in the central pool. I didn't have a reason, at least not a conscious one. Maybe I was making a statement. The sword had been wrenched out at some point, and the pain was catching up to me even through the adrenaline. I was sure that I was bleeding pretty bad. Must have some big veins and arteries running there, I thought distantly.

As the bodies splashed into the water I locked eyes with Mak, and she didn't hesitate. She left the injured man she'd been supporting to balance best he could and approached me, sword carefully pointed down.

"Hurt," she said softly in her halting Tekereteki. "Make better?"

I looked at her. She was half starved, and both physically and mentally exhausted. Healing me was difficult for her, much more than healing a human. So, as much as I wanted her to take the pain away, I couldn't risk it. I'd trust in whatever magic made me what I was.

"Wait," I said, speaking simply. "Herald."

She nodded and returned to our captive. "The office," she said coldly as she put the tip of his own sword under his chin, then slid in under his shoulder. The man was shaking with pain and fear before my little display with the pool. Afterwards he became still, complying with Mak's instructions with a detached calm. If I were to guess I would say that he'd given up hope completely, and only wanted to prolong his life for however long I allowed it.

The man led us to a door at the back of the atrium. I opened it and went through, making sure that no one was waiting on the other side. “Second door on the left,” our captive said, softly and very carefully. “That’s the office. But I only saw them take the girl through this door.”

“Stay here,” I told the humans, then continued inside silently. When I listened carefully I could hear ragged breathing. The second door on the left was closed. The one on the right was open.

I had thought that the smell of blood was just me, but as I approached the open door the smell grew stronger. I began to feel a fear that grew stronger the closer I got, and when I saw the red stain on the floor of the room I rushed the last few yards to get inside.

I didn’t know what to expect in there. I didn’t want to imagine. But whatever I expected, a body on the floor and Herald with a knife was not it.