Song of the Dragoons

Grace lost speed as soon as the alleyway took a turn. I tossed her onto my back as I passed by.

"What…!" she shouted in surprise.

"Don't want to leave you behind!" I explained. I was still just large enough to carry a single passenger, though without a saddle, Grace noticeably slowed me down. Still, at a sprint, I was faster than whoever it was we were chasing, except when our path went round a corner.

Unfortunately, they realised that at the same time I did, and suddenly their route veered and curved all over the place as they slid into narrow tunnels where the ground between buildings had given way and climbed up pipes to run across low rooftops before jumping down out of sight. I had no chance at following them directly; the best I could do was listen for their footsteps and try to pick up their scent as I ran down more open side streets.

That spring-breeze smell got stronger as we headed away from the inner wall and deeper into the Ducal Cross. I could make out that the alley reached a dead end ahead, but there was a tiny crawlspace in the hollow beneath a leaning house. I skidded to a stop, my claws scraping against the dirt and scattered stones, and leaned down to let Grace off. I glanced back to see behind us, only just now entering this alley, with Ingo hurrying along behind him as fast as he could.

I took a deep inhale, and smelled that slightly sour human scent and the same spring wind scent, both disappearing into that hollow. The person who attacked me must have fled down there.

"They went under!" I shouted. "This way!"

I had to press my belly against the ground to fit, but I could just barely make it beneath the building. Luckily, the floor dove down as it passed beneath the worryingly-sagging floor of the house above. Unluckily, it was made entirely of mud, slick with recent moisture. I struggled for a moment to dig my claws into the ground before I slipped enough to go sliding down the slope.

The walls suddenly gave way to a narrow chamber that, surprisingly, wasn't pitch black. A small wooden table sat next to where the passage continued, a tiny candle sitting atop flickering with an orange flame. It illuminated pipes that emerged from the mud walls around us, some of them leaking small droplets that kept this place extremely humid. The scent of mildew was strong in here.

A stool was laying on its side by the table, but it had been knocked over only a few seconds ago, judging by its continued rolling back and forth in a divot in the ground. A figure ran away down the tunnel. They were very short, maybe four and a half feet tall. They cast a glance back, revealing that they wore a simple mask that seemed to be made of a small brown sack with holes cut for their eyes.

"A monster!" they shouted. Their voice was too high to have belonged to most adults. They sounded like a kid. "There's a monster in the grove!"

"I'm not a—hey, slow down!" I called out. I kept at a fast walk, but stopped sprinting. If we were dealing with someone's child, the last thing I wanted to do was scare them into doing something foolish.

"Uh, I don't think we're dealing with a real fighter here, Belfry," said Grace.

"I know, I'm being careful," I said. The kid finally reached the end of the passage ahead of us and ducked into a corner where I lost track of them. I sped up, hoping we hadn't lost them.

The passage opened into a much wider chamber than the last, this one illuminated not by a candle, but by a small hole in the ceiling were sunlight spilled in. A withered, parched tree grew from the centre just beneath the sunlight, reaching up towards it as though trying to escape, and all around it was a blanket of dry, brown grass. A small block of wood next to the tree had a woodcutting axe embedded in it, and nearby was a stone circle with the charred remnants of a fire inside. At the back was a collection of blankets, all laying on a wide bed of straw. A single wooden barrel stood beside them, a collection of scents indicating slightly off fruit and cured meats wafting from inside. It didn't look like there were any more tunnels, but I didn't see the person we had followed.

I had a quiet whoosh from behind me as my only warning before a bolt of flame struck me in the shoulder. Again, the fire wasn't hot enough to hurt me, all it did was singe my robe. Then there was the much, much more worrying sound of a gun being cocked. I very slowly turned my head to look at where the fire had come from.

There were seven people, all clearly children of a few varying ages, huddled up against the rear wall on either side of the entrance. All of them wore similar masks that completely obscured their faces. Most of them were watching me with anxious, terrified eyes, even as they readied knives or small spears. One, the one that we had chased, had their hand out and a flame dancing in their palm, while another pointed a beat-up pistol at my head.

"See Lily, see!?" the one with the fire shouted. "Fire don't work on this one!"

The one with the gun, Lily, took a step forward, holding the pistol with both hands. "This will," she said grimly. I could see her finger twitching towards pulling the trigger.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" I said, desperately trying to defuse the situation. "I'm not a fiend! I'm a dragon! I don't want to hurt you!"

"There aren't any dragons in Yorving anymore!" Lily snarled.

"We came from far away," Yura called from the passageway. "Quite far away, in some cases. May we come in? I promise we don't mean any harm, we're just looking for information."

Lily looked like she was about to lower the gun, then she steeled herself and took a step towards me. "How do I know this thing isn't just going to eat us!?"

"I swear, I'm a dragon," I said. "Not a fiend. Have you seen any fiends that talk?"

"Yes!" Lily shouted in exasperation.

I opened my mouth, then closed it, then made a mental note of that. "…Okay. I could breathe fire. Would that convince you?"

"I bet there are fiends that breathe fire," one of the other kids said.

"Shut up, George," another one reprimanded him, elbowing him in the ribs.

"Ow!" he protested at the jab. "Look, fire doesn't hurt it, maybe there's ones that can breathe fire too."

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"Is there any proof you will accept?" asked Grace. "Because if not, this conversation is pointless, and we'll just leave. We don't want to fight."

I could see Lily squinting at me from behind her mask. Her aim wavered, and then with a sigh, she lowered the gun. "Alright," she said. "Show us the fire."

I nodded, hiding my brief panic. I managed to do it in the well, could I do it again? Preferably without setting my tail on fire and scaring them? I focussed on the muscles in my throat, and exhaled.

It came naturally. I didn't burst into flames, but a small trickle of flame seethed from between my teeth, curling up in front of my nose as I held the fire in my mouth. I could smell the smoke, but the mental block that it imposed was gone. I could power through the sense of anxiety that smell induced until I ran out of breath and made the mistake of taking a sharp inhale. I felt the fire and ash go into my lungs and broke out into a coughing fit, spewing out white smoke. One of the kids snickered, and I suppressed a glare.

"Good enough?" I asked once I had control over my breathing again.

Lily stared me in the eye for a few more seconds before shaking her head. "Good enough," she said. "But I've got my eye on you all. Just because you're not fiends doesn't mean you belong here. Don't do anything funny." She turned her attention to the rest of the gathered kids. "The rest of you, get back to work!"

The small crowd dispersed, a couple of the kids pushing past the rest of the flight to exit the chamber, while the rest went to work stations scattered on tables both makeshift and purpose-built around the grove. The kid with the fire clenched his fist, extinguishing it, and stuck next to Lily as she went to sit on a knobby root that rose beneath the gnarled tree.

"This is our Grove," she said, putting on a voice that sounded unnaturally pompous and imposing coming from someone her age. "The Gardeners' Grove. What do you want?"

The rest of the flight finally stepped into the grove. Grace looked around in wonder at the strangely idyllic place beneath the city's streets, while Ingo stood stone-faced beside me. Yura took off his hat and smiled at the girl.

"We're dragoon knights," said Yura. "We're here to help keep people safe, and we heard that there's a group here that might be hurting people. We want to ask about them, but first, is it alright if I ask what happened to those people at the wall?"

Lily let out a tense breath. "You mean off the Gate Square?" she said. "Killed by hunters."

"These hunters wouldn't happen to call themselves 'chasseurs', would they?" I asked.

Lily shot me a glare. "Why?" she demanded. "What do you want with them?"

"If they're killing people, we want to put a stop to that," said Yura. "We want to restore some semblance of order to the city."

Lily scoffed, glancing up at the sunlight. "Order, sure, I'll believe that when I see it," she grumbled before turning back to us. "Fine. It was them, the hunters, the 'chasseurs', whatever. Dragged 'em out of their homes and shot them dead in the street." She growled. "Beasts are crawling out of people's skins left and right, and they go shooting the ones that are healthy and fine."

"That sounds about right," I muttered.

"Do you know if the victims did anything that would antagonise Vicar Paul Barbosa recently?" asked Yura.

"Oh, yes, they did," said Lily. "The night the burgomaster died, a whole bunch of people went out and tore up a luminary cross in the square. The hunters are Barbosa's thugs. He says he 'called them from the capital', but whatever they were trained to do, they just listen to anything he says. Kill whoever he wants dead. Like a personal guard. I bet it's worse in the Old Quarter, too. Some of my birds told me they keep bringing big old barrels down there."

"Barrels of what?" asked Ingo.

"If I knew, I would've said," said Lily. "Kind of hard to tell what's in a barrel without opening it. I bet it's powder, though. Barbosa's always hated the Old Quarter for being so dirty, I wouldn't be surprised if he decided to just blast it to hell."

"So it's a massacre he's planning," Grace summed up.

"That's my guess," Lily agreed.

"Do you know if the hunters have a place they operate from?" asked Yura. "Somewhere we might be able to find their supplies, or perhaps their orders, so we can stop whatever plan they have from working?"

"They've got a place somewhere in the Parapets," said Lily.

"That's it?" demanded Ingo. "No more detail than just the district?"

"It's not like we can spend all our time spying on people who'd kill us on sight," said Lily, her defenses instantly raising again. "Besides, I try to keep us out of the Parapets if we can manage it. The air there is thick enough to drown you on land."

I fidgeted nervously. The Parapets was the city's mining and smelting district from what I could tell, and she wasn't kidding about the air. The whole thing was covered in a cloud of smoke so black, it was like someone had filled the air with ink. I just hoped the thing about drowning was hyperbole.

Yura gave a shallow bow. "The Parapets, eh? That is extremely useful information. Thank you, greatly, for your aid. Is there anything that we can give you in return? I'd hate to feel like we gave you a bad deal."

Lily chuckled. "Well, making sure the hunters never come back here would be great," she said. "Maybe find the one that shot Ms. Prestor and make 'em bleed a little while longer than the rest."

Grace grimaced. "Hey, we can't just—"

«Shh!» I hissed through our bond. «Don't mess this up now!»

«She's asking us to torture people,» Grace protested. «We can't do that!»

«We don't have to,» I pointed out. «She'll never know one way or the other. But they're violent, and they threatened to shoot us! I don't want her to think you're sympathising with the chasseurs, it might throw us into a life-or-death fight. A life-or-death fight with children. It won't end well, no matter what. Just stay quiet, and let Yura talk.»

Grace stifled a grumble and pointedly looked down at the grass, but she didn't speak any more.

"If we have the ability to determine that, we'll try," Yura said with a brief, slightly confused glance at Grace. "But are you sure there isn't anything more…beneficial to you that we can give? Food, water, money, items or artefacts?"

Lily leaned back against the tree's bark. The mage kid next to her wrung his hands thoughtfully. "Lily don't you think we should…?"

"Yeah, I was thinking about it," Lily ambiguously agreed. "I dunno if you 'dragoons' have the power to do this, but if you're offering, we need water."

Yura nodded. "That shouldn't be too difficult a task," he said. "The river isn't terribly far away, we could find a few buckets and—"

"No," interrupted Lily. "By 'we', I don't mean us Gardeners." She gestured to the room of other children. "The Tree here does need some, but we're not the only ones. I mean this district. The Ducal Cross is lucky to have the one well, seeing how most of the water here gets plundered by the mines in the Parapets, farms in the Cascades, and all the bloody churches on the south cliff. And after that poison rain the other night, that well's polluted. I'm sure I don't have to tell how getting us water isn't something the vicar'll do."

"You don't," agreed Yura. "That one may be a little more difficult. Ordinarily, I'd say a job like that belongs to the city's own workforce, but seeing the situation…I can say, with confidence, that we'll do what we can." He glanced at me for approval, and I gave a nod.

"Good," said Lily.

"Okay. So…" I said, taking a step back towards the exit tunnel. "I guess we should be off to find those chasseurs."

Lily held up her hand. "Not so fast." She pointed at the kid next to her. "Walter, you're going with them."

The mage blinked once, then shook his head in shock. "What!? I—why?"

"I need someone to watch them. Make sure they don't just run off and tattle on us to the guard. You're the one I trust most to make it out if they turn on us."

"Not to try and overrule your leadership," I said, "but this is going to be extremely dangerous. All of us have already almost died a few times in this career, and I doubt the hunters are just going to stop murdering people after a nice chat."

"Everything is dangerous," countered Lily. "Staying here with them on the loose is dangerous. It's either we wait for them to find the Grove, or get rid of 'em. Besides, Walter can handle this. Can't you?" She nudged Walter with her elbow.

"Uh, yeah," agreed Walter, quickly getting the hint. "If you say so."

"Right." Lily pushed him forward towards us. "Off you go now. The rest of you, if you don't take down the hunters…don't bother coming back."

Yura nodded. "Of course. Thank you again for all your assis—"

Lily loudly and pointedly cocked her pistol again. "I said go on!" she shouted. "Gideon's blood, people are dying, I don't have much patience."

The four of us didn't need any more convincing to scramble out of the grove and out into the tunnel.