Draka

There was a mostly-dead man on the floor, the source of the agonised breathing. He’d been trying to crawl away from a wooden cage, about a yard on a side, which was set against the wall. He’d been prevented from doing so, however, by the dagger that was sunk through his lower leg, held firmly in place by a long, brown arm coming out from the cage.

“Herald!” I exclaimed.

“Draga?” the girl slurred, peering out between the thick wooden bars. “S’at you?”

Herald was curled up on the bottom of the cage, other than the arm that held the dagger. She was thin, pale, and her clothes were in tatters. She was also very obviously drunk.

“You’re okay,” I said, more to myself than to Herald. “Thank God you’re okay. I’m going to get you out of here!”

“This fugger,” she said, raising the dagger and stabbing it down again. The dying man didn’t even react. “This piece-a-shit. He told me they had you. Fuggin’... Fucking gloated aboudit. Stood right there,” she said and pointed with her free hand in front of the cage, “an’ said they had you inna basement with Mak. Got so angry when I told him he was gonna die if you’re here. Tried to stab me when the noise started an’ I told’im the guards with you were dead already.” She grinned and turned to the man on the floor. “Didn’t expect me to get the knife off ya, huh? Arrogant shit! Don’t know what I can do. That stupid bitch doesn’t even hire real fighters to guard.” Then her face suddenly became concerned. “Where’s Mak?”

“She’s with me,” I said. “It’s all right. Mak!” I shouted. “Get in here! Now!”

Mak rounded came through the door almost immediately, having left the prisoner behind somewhere. It wasn’t like he’d get far.

“Thank the Mercies,” Mak said and rushed to the cage, reaching in to cup Herald’s cheek. “Are you hurt?”

“Hey, Mak!” Herald said and pointed to me. “You really did it, huh?”

Mak stiffened. “I did,” she said, barely above a whisper.

“You let ‘em use me to get her.”

“I couldn’t lose you,” Mak said, her voice pleading.

“I know,” Herald said, letting go of the dagger to take Mak’s hand in both of her own. “Jus’… damn it, Mak. I looked for you, you know?”

“I’m sorry,” Mak whispered, with tears running down her face.

“Mak,” I said coldly, interrupting the scene. “Get this cage open.”

Mak wiped her face but didn’t hesitate to obey. The cage was held shut by a thick chain secured by a robust-looking padlock. Mak studied it for a second. “Do you know where the key is?” she asked Herald.

“Uh…” Herald said, blinking between me and Mak. “Hook behind th’ door. What’s goin’ on?”

“Later,” I said. “Let’s get you out first.”

“Nah-ah,” Herald said, as Mak found the key and went for the lock. “Mak, whass with you?” Her voice became low and sad. “I know they hurt you, but…”

“Tell her,” I told Mak. “I don’t have any patience for pussyfooting around this.”

Mak stared at me, blank faced, then took a deep breath and swallowed. “Draka and me,” she said to Herald, “we had a talk after she broke us out. About… how I’ve treated her. And how I will treat her in the future.”

I snorted. “Good enough,” I said. “Will that do for now, Herald?”

She looked like she wanted to push it, then relented. “Yeah, okay. For now,” she said.

Mak finally got the cage open, and helped Herald to crawl out. “Dammit, Mak,” Herald whispered again, then grabbed her sister and pulled her in for a long, tight hug. “Thank you,” she said into Mak’s shoulder, then went silent as Mak hugged her back. They stayed like that for a while, silent. I wouldn’t even have known that Herald was crying except for the way her body would sometimes give a small shake in Mak’s arms.

“It’s alright,” Mak said. “It’s over now.”

It took a little while before Herald got herself under control, wiping her eyes and standing with some difficulty. I got my first good look at her, and was horrified. Herald had always been a thin girl, but now she was almost skeletal, with thin limbs and sunken cheeks. Between her drunkenness and her general weakness she could barely stand. Besides that her clothes were stained with blood and full of cuts.

“What did they do to you,” I asked, my words clipped with barely restrained rage.

“Can’t you see that?” she asked and giggled unnervingly. “They healed me. Over and over. And between that…”

She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. And while I didn’t forgive Mak, I understood why she broke.

I was starting to feel a little unsteady, so I let Mak heal me enough to at least stop the bleeding. It took a lot out of her and I didn’t dare use her more than that, since someone needed to help Herald walk.

When we left the room our captive was nowhere to be seen. He’d gotten a respectable distance, almost halfway across the atrium, when I grabbed him by the ankle and dragged him back. “If you make yourself useful,” I told him, “we may find a potion to fix your knee. Or I might at least leave you alive. But try to escape again and I’ll kill you, and it will be bad. Do you understand me?

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely, “I understand.”

I left him on the floor with Mak and Herald, neither of which looked like they would hesitate to finish him off if I let them.

The boss’ ‘office’ was finely decorated, though it looked less like a place to work than a lounge. Four low couches sat on a rich carpet, surrounding an equally low table of lacquered wood. While there was a shelf with a multitude of scrolls and books on it, none of them seemed to be ledgers or anything like that. Instead, from what I could tell with my quick flipping, they were a mix of informational texts on different subjects and fiction ranging from epic poems to outright smut. But I didn’t care about those. My nose had caught a wonderful scent the moment I opened the door. There was gold hidden here, and I wasn’t going to give up until I found it.

My first thought was that there must be a secret drawer or something in the table. The scent was stronger there, but after flipping the damn thing over it became clear that there was no room for a drawer anywhere. The legs were pretty thick and with some effort I broke them off, but no dice there, either. No hollows full of coins, just solid wood. I tore the couches open, too, but all I got for my effort was the satisfaction of destroying that woman's stuff.

"Havin' fun?" Herald asked, leaning heavily against the doorframe.

"There's gold here," I told her, tearing the stuffing out of the last couch. "I'm going to rob that bitch blind."

"Prolly… probably ain't 'er real house," Herald pointed out.

She was probably right, I thought. That just made me angrier. "Whatever she's got stashed here, I'm taking it!" I snarled, heaving the remains of the couch into a wall with a loud crash.

"Okay, okay," Herald said. I could tell that she was trying to calm me down, but it wasn't working. I wanted to hurt that woman. I wanted to feed her her own goddamn hands. But that would come later, and right now I'd have to be satisfied with taking what was hers.

Just like she did to me, a voice whispered in the back of my head. I couldn't even tell if it was me or my dragon. It didn't matter. I'd stopped pretending. The Herald was mine. Mak was mine. The rest of them were mine! And that arrogant piece of shit had stolen from me! Taking me prisoner was secondary at this point. They never had a hope of holding me. They should have killed me when they had the chance, or at least kept me sedated. Instead all that they had done was to bring me into their midst, and then they had set a handful of weaklings and goddamned children to guard me, instead of their finest warriors. The gall if it. The fucking disrespect!

I was going to make that woman suffer.

"Draka. Draka!"

Herald's shout brought me out of my own head for a moment.

"You get it all out, yet?" she asked, and it took me a moment to understand what she meant.

The room was trashed. I'd smashed the couches to pieces, the surface of the table was cracked, and I had torn down half of the shelves. Books and scrolls lay strewn across the floor, some of the bloody where they must have touched me on the way down.

"Aughta check behind the books," she said. "You've got a good start."

I wanted to snap something at her, but it was a solid suggestion. Behind the bookcase was pretty much the only place left.

I emptied the shelves quickly, but there was nothing obvious there. Fine. I leapt up and grabbed the edge of the whole damn piece, and swung myself back so that it toppled, crashing down on top of the scattered debris and exposing the wall. Something thunked as it fell.

Jackpot.

About waist high on a human there was a cubby in the wall. I looked at the back of the bookshelf, and from here there was an obvious panel which could be slid up to expose the cubby. At the bottom corner of the cubby was a metal tube, and a small bolt was embedded deep into the back of the bookshelf. A trap! Cute. I wondered if it would have gone through my scales if I'd opened the panel, but probably not.

I looked into the cubby, and smiled.

"Mak," I called over my back. "Go to the kitchen. Bring me a bag."

Twenty minutes later we walked out the front door into a courtyard. Mak had proven her usefulness by finding not only a decent sized bag, but some food for Herald and herself, and they both looked a little better for it.

Herald, apparently feeling merciful in her drunkenness, had convinced me not to kill our captive by pointing out that he could carry the bag with our loot while Mak supported them both. She’d even talked me into letting Mak pour some of a healing potion we’d found on his knee, to start the healing, before using the rest on my wounded wing-shoulder. So it was that three humans, all looking the worse for wear and two of them supported by the smallest in the group by far, stepped out into the wide street in front of the property. They had discarded their weapons to avoid drawing more attention than necessary, with my presence being enough for the captive to promise to behave. They moved slowly, since one of them still had a ruined knee and another was staggering, barely on her feet. With no obvious observers, and any hidden ones likely to be focused on the three humans, I snuck out and disappeared into the nearest shadow.

The smart thing might have been to go back down into the depths and make my escape through the water, or on the boat. What I wanted to do was to wait in the shadows of the house until the woman showed up, and make her watch as I tore out her entrails. But in their states I was not going to let Herald or Mak out of my sight, and secrecy was secondary. I'd prefer not to be seen, but anyone who tried to get in the sisters’ way as they headed to the Grey Wolves' quarters would regret it.

So, there I was. I was finally in Karakan. I wasn’t exactly strolling down the streets, but I was there. It was something. We were in the western part of the city, on the hill, and while we weren’t as high as you could go I still caught glimpses of the lower city between the buildings every so often, and the view was great. Most of the city was a mix of stone and wood, but almost all of the roofs were red tile, so that I looked out across a sea of tans and greys, browns and reds. Trees poked up here and there, and laundry and colourful awnings hung in the still air. I would have loved to take a minute to just get up somewhere my view would be free, to take it all in, but instead I was scurrying from shadow to shadow, moving deep into alleys, shifting back and forth and pushing whenever I could to merge two shadows and let me pass without showing myself.

While there weren’t many people on the street, there were some. I had to move in bursts, letting the others go ahead while I waited for an opportunity and then catching up. It wasn’t perfect by any means, doing this in the middle of the day. I was sure that I’d been spotted, and that there would be people who weren’t sure what they’d seen, and rumours of a monster living in the shadows of the upper city. The idea didn’t bother me. The slavers had known about me, and they had vastly underestimated me. Maybe this would make them, and others like them, think hard about trying something that stupid again. Hell, maybe I should have piled the corpses I’d made by the gate and declared myself openly, showing what happened to those that fucked with me and mine.

But, no. My rage was still there, but it remained cold, not hot. I would stay in the shadows, where I belonged, and while the average citizens of Karakan would hopefully never notice, I would go to war. I would bring down such pain and terror on the organisation that had imprisoned and tortured my people that any survivors would never sleep in the dark again. I was going to find out who the woman who smelled of jasmine was. I was going to find out what she loved, and take it from her. I was going to find out what she feared, and give it to her. And when she was alone and broken…

Well, idle musings aside, I hadn’t gotten that far yet.

Downhill, ahead of my humans, a group moved. They were jogging up the near empty street, and as they got closer their uniform appearance became clear. They were city guards, armed and lightly armoured, and there were a dozen of them. Mak stopped and searched for me anxiously in the shadows until I showed myself for a moment and she relaxed, turning back to the approaching guards.

Their leader, a man distinguished by a red sash worn diagonally across his chest, stopped his group thirty feet in front of the trio. “Citizens,” he said, raising his hand palm up, “a disturbance has been reported on Cloud Street. In the name of the City, I require your cooperation.”