Трой Деннинг: The Veiled Dragon

What is happening to you? Cypress demanded. Where is the oil?

Ruha made no reply, allowing the dragon’s words to crash through her mind with such force they shattered the walls of the hall she had envisioned.

The ruse worked. Cypress’s hand suddenly pulled away, and the cacophony in Ruha’s mind quieted as he sniffed out the ylang oil. Her hand obeyed when she tried to move it; even the dragon could not focus his attention in two different places at once. She pushed the bottom of the wick into the mixture of brimstone and alcohol. The flame quickly returned to its steady blue gleam, but the witch forced herself not to think about her sun spell. The dragon was still inside her head, and he would feel the effort of summoning the incantation from her memory.

Ruha had to wait only an instant before Cypress’s head shot through the hole, his nostrils flaring as he tried to sniff out the fading scent of Hsieh’s oil-soaked body. The witch hurled her bottle at an eye socket. The dragon flinched away, and the glass shattered against the side of his head. The burning wick instantly touched off the mixture of alcohol and sulfur, filling the chamber with a searing blue-yellow flash.

Cypress bellowed in shock and pulled his burning face out of the chamber. Ruha stepped over to the hole, summoning her incantation as she went. She saw the dragon’s head more than two stories above, shaking madly from side to side, trailing long tails of sapphire and amber flame. The witch thrust her hand toward the fire and spoke her incantation.

The blaze erupted into a blistering orb of white-hot flame, as brilliant as the sun in the sky and twice as large. The dragon wailed in anguish. When he raised his claws to his face, they caught fire and started to burn with a flickering yellow flame. He started to dance about, and Ruha heard a tremendous crash in the next room as one of his heavy feet came through the ceiling. Burning scales began to flutter off his head and touch off fires on the floors above. Cypress raised his wings, then roared in fury and launched himself into the air.

The witch turned away from the conflagration and saw the astonished apothecary standing behind his counter, his rheumy eyes fixed on the fiery hole over his head. She pulled him from behind the counter.

“Come along. We had better leave this place,” she said, dragging the old man toward the hole in the wall. “Perhaps you would be kind enough to guide me to the Jailgates?”

Deep in the Jailgates’ thick foundations, Ruha caught herself staring at Yanseldara’s cataleptic face. The Lady Lord lay in an infirmary bed, a honey-haired beauty with the slender face and sharply delicate features of a half-elf. Save for the amethyst circles beneath her eyes, her skin was as pale as pearl. Her cheeks were hollow from the lack of eating, her lips as gray as ash, her brow lined by the strain of a wicked and endless nightmare. She could easily lack the strength to carry a message to Lady Feng, even if Vaerana would agree to try Hsieh’s potion.

Ruha turned to the Lady Constable who, despite having been knocked through a mud-brick wall by Cypress’s tail, sat in a chair next to Yanseldara’s bed. A priest had already examined and straightened the swollen purple mass that had once been Vaerana’s knee, but Minister Hsieh had volunteered to sew up her many deep cuts. He was sitting beside her now, smiling contentedly each time he pushed the needle into a long gash along her jawline.

Ruha said, “Vaerana, I am sorry to interrupt while you are being attended to, but we have something to discuss.”

“Please to wait until I finish here,” said Hsieh. “Or scar will be most unflattering.”

The mandarin’s voice was hoarse and raspy, no doubt from breathing the dusky smoke that pervaded even the fortress’s underground chambers. Elversult was burning—a good part of it at least—and there was no escaping the acrid murk. The fumes hung over the city as heavy as a fog, creeping past shuttered windows and seeping under barred doors to fill every room in every building with a choking gray cloud.

Perhaps that was a blessing, given the battle stench upon which Ruha would surely have been gagging if her nose had not been so clogged by bitter soot. With wounded Maces sprawled on the floor as thick as rats or holding each other upright on wooden benches, the chamber looked less like an infirmary than a crowded tavern after a vicious and bloody brawl. Through the smoke haze, the witch saw bandaged stumps where there should have been limbs, melted flesh bubbling up between the links of scorched chainmail, and a hundred more wounds too terrible to look upon for long. Many of the warriors had suffered their injuries when they rode with Vaerana to lure Cypress away from Ruha and Hsieh, but many more had been hurt in cult ambushes. Even now, with Elversult’s loyal citizens struggling to fight the fires Cypress had set in his flaming panic, more than a dozen patrols of Maces continued to battle the marauding bands.

Given the mild severity of her own wound, Ruha would have felt guilty for the healer’s attention she had received the moment she walked in the door—save that her battle was far from over. Her sun spell had driven Cypress into one of the city’s many lakes, but it had not destroyed him. Until the dragon was finally, utterly annihilated, the witch knew better than to think either she or Yanseldara would ever be safe.

Minister Hsieh looped his needle through the last stitch on Vaerana’s jaw, then cut the suture. “You may speak now.” He stood and began to cut the hair away from a long slash in her scalp. “But I advise you not to move head.”

Vaerana scowled at the cascade of blood-matted tresses tumbling past her shoulder. “Are you going to cut it all off?” she growled. Then, to Ruha, “Well?”

Ruha glanced toward Yanseldara’s slumbering form, then reached into her aba and removed the potion Hsieh had given her earlier. “If we are to finish this battle, we must contact Lady Feng.”

Vaerana shook her head, then hissed sharply as Hsieh’s needle dragged across her wound. “You can see for yourself she’s in no condition to be carrying messages.” She gestured at the bed beside her. “Besides, we’ve got Cypress well in hand, thanks to you—though I wish you hadn’t helped him burn down a quarter of Elversult.”

“One does not destroy great evil without great sacrifice,” Hsieh remarked.

“We have not destroyed anything,” Ruha corrected. “Surrounding Cypress while he hides in Hillshadow Lake is not having him ‘in hand.’ It is offering up Pierstar Hallowhand and his men to appease the dragon’s rage.”

Vaerana frowned at the witch. “Didn’t you listen to the last report, Witch? Cypress lost his wings, along with his hands—and underneath that baby sun you made, who knows what’s happening to his head? Pierstar has ballistae and wizards waiting on every shore. As soon as the dragon shows himself above water, they’ll blast him to pieces.” She glowered at the witch, then added, “And they won’t burn down the city.”

“It would not matter if they did,” Ruha replied. “You gain nothing if Pierstar destroys the dragon’s body. Cypress will simply take another; then we will not know where he is until he returns as he did before. To truly defeat our enemy, we must allow Minister Hsieh to contact Lady Feng and ask her to smash the dracolich’s spirit gem.”

Vaerana set her jaw. “Yanseldara’s too weak. I’m not going to risk her life. And even if we only destroy Cypress’s body, at least we’re buying time to find his lair.”

“But what of Lady Feng? Perhaps she has no time.” Hsieh stopped sewing and glanced at the bed next to them. “Perhaps Lady Yanseldara has even less. If Lady Feng uses oil from evening-picked blossoms, love potion does not last long. When it wears off, her spirit must do battle with the dragon’s.”