Forgotten (25 page)

“Do you know what he planned after that?”

Judah’s eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you know any of this? Weren’t you supposed to be his advisor?”

Kaie didn’t bother thinking up a lie. There wasn’t much point in it. So he told the truth. “Gregor didn’t talk to me much about this side of things. He didn’t need my advice on military matters.”

The other man stared at him a while longer. He itched to be moving again. “That thing you do? Where you guess a person’s whole life just by shaking their hand? Is that what you advised him on?”

“Yeah,” Kaie agreed reluctantly. “He knew tactics, I know people.”

Judah nodded slowly and then climbed to his feet. “After that was after that. No plan ever survives on the field, and Gregor always was better at thinking on his feet anyway. He was going to figure out what we needed to do to take the city once he saw how everyone else intended to hold it.”

“How good are you at thinking on your feet?”

The giant’s right eyebrow lifted as he leaned against the wall to the tunnel. Kaie just hoped he would manage to stay on his feet until they were with the rest of Gregor’s brigade. “Are you asking me to take the city?”

Kaie frowned. “Not yet.” He shook his head. “This is for later. Right now, we should move. Assuming
you’re
coming with me.”

Judah hesitated a moment, then nodded. Kaie held in the sigh of relief and handed the lamp to Vaughan. The soldier’s eyes widened, like he was only now noticing the smaller man. Kaie propelled the small one forward and pulled the arm of the big one around his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Neither argued with him.
As they crossed into the kitchen, he noticed the way the soldier was looking at Peren. Kaie tried not to let it bother him. Especially when she handed Judah the shirt she used to conceal the lamp and they smiled at some shared joke he wasn’t invited into.

Vaughan was fussing over Peren’s injured leg but didn’t seem to be attempting any healing. Judah was wobbling as he tugged his shirt back on, and the Lady Autumnsong was fussing with her dress as though she expected it to be clean and whole again once all the wrinkles were out. He was dizzy and exhausted. But each one of them seemed more a mess than him. There was no helping it now. They were all looking at him to tell them where to go. It was
his own
damn fault. Kaie sighed and wondered if he wouldn’t be better off doing what Gregor suggested, and heading out into the desert by himself.

Traveling across the city with four other people was different. There was no mad dash for safety, no going by unnoticed. They attracted every eye they passed. But their number also seemed to discourage any outright attack. With some careful mummery, Kaie figured out ways to hide just how hurt and defenseless they all were. It seemed enough to make the smaller bands look elsewhere. It made the skin on Kaie’s back crawl. It was too easy. He couldn’t shake the sense that some great disaster was waiting for them just around the next bend.

Vaughan slid back into the odd trance, muttering apologies and shuffling along like a walking corpse. He wandered off in the wrong direction more than once, and posed such a tempting target for violence Kaie considered killing the man himself. It would save the trouble of waiting for the guy to draw a band of enemies down on them.

The Lady Autumnsong was quite the opposite problem. They weren’t even ten minutes out from the house before she started demanding answers and attempting to wrestle control of the situation. She did it all with a mask of neutrality that didn’t stay in place nearly as well as she seemed to think. It slipped often, each time her voice getting shrill. It wasn’t until Kaie borrowed Judah’s dagger and pressed it against the woman’s throat that she would even change out of her ruined dress. She kept insisting that the attire he found hanging on another of the cloths lines was going to put her more at risk. She clung to the notion that, as a noble, the worst she was going to face was being taken hostage and held for ransom.

Peren was torn between the two, and unable to control either one. Both responded to her attempts to keep them alive by completely ignoring them. Kaie couldn’t understand why she kept at it. She didn’t even seem to be angry with them.

Judah was a different matter. Whatever fortune placed the giant there at just the right time, it altered everything. Injured and tired and difficult as they all were, they cut a swift path through the maze of the city with the other man’s guidance. He led them without prodding and was quick to provide what help he could, including handing over his dagger without a word when the Lady Autumnsong threw her fit. But he could only walk so long as he kept a hold on Kaie’s shoulder, and the strain of moving was showing. Life seemed to be draining out from beneath Judah’s tanned skin and the soldier was covered in a thick sweat.

Kaie expected trouble. But he wasn’t prepared for the scene waiting for them just two blocks away from the warehouse. Vaughan was wandering off and the Lady Autumnsong was being shrill again, so he was paying more attention to herding them than their route. It was a mistake, but his exhaustion was making his grip on his temper tenuous enough to overwhelm his better judgment. It wasn’t until Peren and Judah gasped, almost in sync, that he noticed their surroundings.

It was a big plaza, too large for a trap-door. Kaie never went to the market days, but he could easily imagine such an event taking place in the space. It was the size of two or three blocks. It wasn’t living people filling the plaza now. Bodies were strewn around, looking like they were tossed aside by a great wind.
Fifty of them, maybe sixty.
Each one more broken and blood than any creature could survive. But that wasn’t what drew the sounds of surprise from his companions.

Across the plaza, in the process of shaking the life out of a woman in
uniform,
was a dragon.

The thing was massive, easily the size of any but the tallest buildings in Hudukul. It held a limp ragdoll, only recognizable as a soldier because of the gold star flashing on her shoulder, between its jaws. It was covered in gleaming scales and Kaie couldn’t say for certain what their color was. They seemed to draw out what little light was left in the city and twist it into a thousand different colors. They were horrifying in their beauty, even where they weren’t spattered with the blood of the bodies in the plaza.

A fucking
dragon
.

They were supposed to be legend.
If that.
The stories said that, if they ever existed at all, they disappeared with Rokvor. Rokvor, the land where the gods walked and sat at the High King’s table, where life itself was born and all magic came into existence. A land populated by people with great wings, cows that walked on two legs and talked, and dragons. A land where everyone, even the men, were counted as equals; where every slave whispered they would be free if only they could set foot on the mythical soil.
Which they couldn’t.
According to stories, Rokvor
vanished
millennia ago. Kaie wasn’t sure it ever existed.

Of course, he was looking right at some pretty convincing evidence that dragons were real.

He couldn’t fathom where it came from. There was no hiding something this large. He didn’t know enough about magic to know if it was possible to conjure such a creature into existence, but he couldn’t imagine someone thinking such an idea was wise, no matter how desperate. For every dead soldier in the plaza, there was a Huduku body to go with it. The devastation the beast was unleashing was without the bias of race or empires.

Its head swiveled around in their direction and it dropped the woman. Her body made a soft thud as it hit the paved street, which was quickly followed by a roar issuing out of the monster’s open jaw. Kaie threw his hands up over his ears and dropped to his knees under the weight of that sound. The dragon wasn’t satisfied. Its tail lashed back and forth, colliding with a building without slowing at all. The wall of the building collapsed, though Kaie could hardly hear the boom over the ringing in his ears.

The explosion.
It wasn’t an explosion at all. It was the sound of the dragon ripping apart this small section of the city. And the soldiers, the way they vanished after the noise distracted them, it made sense that they were running from this. Maybe they were with the first group of the battered and broken bodies he could see in the plaza, and were lucky enough to escape the carnage. Or perhaps they saw what was happening from a distance
and realized just how easily the creature was going to tear through their comrades. Either way, Kaie didn’t blame them. He wanted desperately to run too, but his feet were rooted to the street.

The beast came at them. It didn’t seem to be running, but the sheer size of its stride cut across the distance of the plaza at a dizzying speed. The cobbles crunched and cracked beneath its feet, sending small chips of the stone flying in every direction with each step. As the dragon drew close, Kaie felt the sting of some of them hitting his legs and chest.

A great head
dropped,
nostrils big enough to climb into blasting hot air against him. Kaie’s clothes flapped around him, trying to escape his frozen body. The smell was awful. Blood and sulfur and rot, concentrated into a truly potent mix that made his stomach heave and his vision waver. Then the dragon breathed in, and Kaie was nearly pulled into its snout.

This was his death, breathing in the scent of him. It was ancient, unmovable, and
beyond him
. Kaie supposed he should be mollified somewhat. Being killed by a creature like this was no small thing. If even one person in Hudukul survived, stories would be told about this for centuries.

It didn’t make him feel any better. In fact, the whole thing filled Kaie with a fury that made his body shake in a way the terror never could. This was not supposed to be his end. The gods owed him more than this. They owed him vengeance, at the very least. And he wasn’t going to accept any death – no matter how fantastic – as substitution for that.

“Damn you to the Abyss!” The words burst out of him so violently they left his throat raw. He swung his fist into the monster’s enormous snout. It hit hard, he felt the force of it all the way up his shoulder, but the impact did nothing to the scales beneath it.
All the
blow won him was a bloody and shattered hand. “You owe me!”

The head shifted again, twisting on a sinuous neck until one giant orb was level with Kaie’s head. He stared into it, teeth clenched tight against his rage, reaching behind him with some vague notion of taking Judah’s sword and planting it deep enough to hit the creature’s brain.

The eye was as big as he was. It was
like a cats
, with little white and a great vertical gash down the center. Like the scales, it didn’t seem to be any one color, but instead all of them in succession as the light of the moon reflected in it a thousand different ways. Kaie knew stabbing it was going to do little. It was too big. Even if he shoved his entire arm through the thing, sword held out in front of it, there was little chance of doing enough damage to kill the beast. But he was not going to let it steal his life away without making it as costly as he could manage.

Judah wrapped a hand around his wrist, stopping his questing fingers. A second later, the press of a leather-wrapped hilt pressed into his palm. Kaie smiled viciously, beginning to understand why Gregor liked the soldier so damn much. He swung the blade forward, preparing to thrust it as deeply as he could.

Before he could, the lid dropped over the eye like the shutter of a great castle slamming closed. The hide was at least as thick as any of the armor the Twelfth wore. He could break through it, certainly, but by then the beast would know his intentions and undoubtedly swallow him sword and all.

The lid opened again. Kaie nearly laughed, thanking whatever god gifted this creature with so little intelligence. As he readied his thrust again, he realized with a start that the eye was changed. It was human now, though on a massive scale.
Human, and green.
And familiar.
He knew it. It was impossible, but he knew it as surely as he knew Peren’s piercing blue ones.

“Maal?” He whispered.

Kaie often wondered, in the quiet of night when the fear overtook his anger, what madness felt like. Looking into that eye, seeing the old man staring back, he knew. The sword slipped from his fingers with a clatter that echoed through the silence that fell upon them.

The dragon made an odd sound in its throat. Laughter, he realized. It was the sound of thunder.

The old man warned him, Kaie recalled.
Told him to stay out of the market.
Because the stooped grandfather intended to transform into a dragon and lay waste to the city?
It was beyond insanity. And why stop now? Because of the boy
Anton,
and the favors owed?

Fifth promise.
Or warning, if you see it that way.
I like them better as promises, though.

The head moved, hovering over Kaie. The tip of the snout brushed against his forehead, in the exact spot the old man touched him earlier. He felt the same coldness as before. After a moment, the head drew back far enough for Kaie to take in the whole thing. Then, gods help him, the damn beast winked.

With another snort, the dragon turned around and walked into the center of the plaza. It threw out wings that Kaie didn’t even notice before. They were the same leathery hide as the eyelid, and shaped by bones much like a bat. Even the thinnest of the bones was larger than his arm, but they looked almost dainty compared to the rest of the animal. Each wing was as long as the creature, and pushed the boundaries of the plaza while they were completely unfurled. Then the dragon shoved itself upward.

The blast of air from the wings toppled them all to the ground. Kaie narrowly avoided impaling himself on the sword. By the time he scrambled back to his feet, the dragon was already high enough that was blending into the night. He blinked after it, wondering if he
hallucinated
the whole thing.

Peren threw herself at him, wrapping her arms around his ribs. He let her hold him, because he couldn’t think of any reason to shove her away. He patted her back absently, taking in the scene around them without the dragon as a distraction.

He was wrong, when he estimated how many dead belonged to the beast. It wasn’t obvious at first. The longer he looked, the more certain Kaie was that at least half owed their deaths to the many blades littering the marketplace. Many of the wounds were too clean for teeth, and few of them were punctures. They were too scattered for a true investigation from where he stood, but Kaie began to suspect something entirely
different occurred
than what he first thought.

“It was an ambush,” he murmured. “The Huduku weren’t killed by the
dragon,
they were killed by the soldiers. Slaughtered, it looks like.” He glanced behind him, hoping for conformation from Judah. That wasn’t what waited, though.

All three of the others were gaping at Kaie as if he just sprouted a third head. His hope that his exchange with the dragon was all part of his fun new madness evaporated. He shoved Peren away in irritation and grabbed Judah’s arm, jerking the soldier upright.

“We don’t have time to gawp,” he growled. “Where in the Abyss is that damned warehouse?”

To his credit, Judah shook himself free of his disbelief and fell in with Kaie’s will without any more prompting. “Two blocks up, like I said before all… this. Past that building it knocked over.”

Kaie didn’t wait for the other two to get to their feet. He shoved the sword back into Judah’s hand, wrapped the man’s arm around his shoulder, and all but dragged them both forward. He didn’t care if everyone else followed. He knew he still needed them, but in that moment he would be quite content to let them all die in a fiery blaze if it put an end to this march of death.