The Pirates of Pacta Servanda (Pillars of Reality Book 4) (27 page)

Mari looked over her weapon. “Professor, you and Master Mechanic Lukas are in charge here until we get back. Alli, help arrange a defense of the Guild Hall—”

“Alli ain’t staying here,” she replied.

“Neither am I,” Calu said.

“If Mage Asha goes, then I’m going,” Mechanic Dav added.

Mari cast an aggravated look at Alain, who gestured at her friends. “It would be wise to accept their help, Mari.”

“Stop telling me I’m wise when I do what you want me to do,” Mari grumbled. “Mage Dav, you told me that only Alain can cast fire. None of you other Mages can create that kind of destruction? There’s no sense in all of you coming, then.”

Alain shook his head. “They must come.”

“Because…?” Mari demanded.

“The path of wisdom lies in following you,” Mage Dav said.

“The path of wisdom does not lie in risking your life for no reason,” Mari insisted.

“We must go with you,” Mage Hiro said, somehow sounding insistent despite the lack of emotion in his voice.

“I thought nothing mattered and nothing was real!” Mari said.

“Nothing is real,” Alain agreed.

“It’s been a while since you said that, and I haven’t missed it.”

“But this must be done,” Alain continued, not knowing how to explain it. “No Mage would stay behind. That would mean that shadows had forced a Mage to treat the shadows as real, that the illusion of the world had frightened a Mage from taking a course the Mage would have chosen. These things would mean leaving the path of wisdom.”

Mari stared at Alain, frustrated. “It’s a
dragon
, Alain!”

“It is the illusion of a dragon on the illusion of the world.”

She threw up her hands in surrender. “All right! All right! Let’s all go out and get killed so everyone will know how wise we are!”

“Mari!” Professor S’san cried in anger and despair as Mari ran down the steps accompanied by Alain, the commons, the other Mages, and her three Mechanic friends. “This matter requires more thought!”

“No time!” Mari called back.

“We will return,” Alain called to Professor S’san.

“Is this thing flying toward us?” Mechanic Dav asked.

Mage Asha gave him the slightest of puzzled frowns. “A dragon? How could a dragon fly?”

“Don’t they have wings?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Alli asked between breaths as they ran. “If you Mages make dragons, why can’t you make one any way you want?”

“Because dragons do not have wings,” Asha said. “And they are very heavy. Wings would not fit the illusion.”

“What about fire?” Calu said.

“Do Mechanics know of dragons that cast flame?” Alain asked. “Mari asked me this as well when we were in Dorcastle.”

“Real dragons don’t breathe fire,” Mari said.

“Nothing is real,” Asha and Mage Dav said in unison.

“
I know!
”

“So what do dragons do?” Alli pressed. “How do we stop it?”

Alain considered the question. “Dragons kill and destroy. It is all they do. They are very powerful. Their scales are very strong armor. They are swift and require much damage to stop. The weak spots on a dragon are the eyes,” he advised. “The eyes are well protected by heavy, armored brow ridges, but they are still the dragon’s most vulnerable feature. The other weak points are under the arms and the inner side of the thighs, where the armored scales are thinnest. The dragon-killer weapon that Mechanic Alli gave Mari killed a dragon with a blow to its chest, though.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t have any more shoulder-fired, fin-stabilized rockets with shaped-charge warheads on me at the moment,” Alli said. She held up something that filled her hand. “I do have some explosives with short fuses.”

“How many?” Mari asked.

“Two bombs. Hand-delivered.”

“Not ideal,” Calu said.

The commons who had pled for help were running with them, gesturing and calling commands to other commons. Cavalry was dashing ahead to carry word and to clear the streets. Bells were ringing from towers, sending warnings across the city. Alain could see commons running into buildings and barring doors and windows. It was odd to think that he had once been able to convince himself that he believed as he had been taught, that those commons, and the Mechanics with him, were shadows of no consequence. Perhaps when all was said and done they were only shadows, but Alain watched them with worry and knew that for him they would always have importance.

“Where do we want to meet this thing, Alain?” Mari asked. “In the middle of a street or in one of these courtyards where streets meet?”

He jerked his attention back to the current problem. “A courtyard,” Alain said. “Large but not too large. We must have enough room to move around the dragon, but the dragon must not have enough room to move as it desires.”

“How close is it, Mage Dav?” Before Mage Dav could answer the question, another dragon scream cut through the air like a knife.

“Pretty close,” Alli commented.

“We need a courtyard!” Mari yelled to one of the nearby cavalry.

The soldier appeared to be in her early thirties, with the look and bearing of a veteran. “About two hundred lances up ahead, Lady. The Court of Dyers. There’s a plaza another six hundred lances beyond that.”

The sound of fighting came to them as the street opened out into a court a few hundred lances across, substantial but much smaller than the plaza around the Mechanics Guild Hall. Streets entered the courtyard from all four sides, and the buildings surrounding it rose for three or four stories. As in the rest of Edinton, the buildings and galleries around the court combined the clean, straight lines of northern architecture with the curves and arches of the south. The railings and balconies were draped with drying fabrics in a rainbow of colors, and the air was filled with the smell of the makings of dyes, some pleasant and some pungent. Alain held out a hand. “This should be large enough. We should fight here.”

The Mechanics took deep breaths, looking around as they rested. “I love that purple, Mari,” Alli said. “See it up there?”

“It’s beautiful,” Mari agreed. “But it’s really expensive. What do you think of those reds?”

“Nice! Mage Asha, you’d look great in that one.”

The first thing Alain had done as they entered the courtyard was to look at the stone paving to see if it matched that in the frightening image his foresight had shown. Relieved to see that it did not, he reminded himself that the vision didn’t mean that Mari could not be badly hurt or die in a different place if her or others’ decisions led her there. “Mari,” Alain said, trying to understand why she and Alli were talking about fabrics and colors, “the dragon will try to choose one target to attack. If it is confused, it will keep trying to settle on one target.”

“There’s our tactic,” Mari said. “That’s the right word, isn’t it? Can dragons see color?”

Alain hesitated at the question, looking at the other Mages. All shook their heads very slightly to indicate ignorance. “I do not know,” Alain said. “Is that important?”

“We might have used some of the colored fabrics to distract the dragon,” Mari explained. “That’s why Alli and I were checking them out. But since we have no way of knowing whether it would work, we’ll have to depend on most of the Mechanics and the Mages hitting the dragon from all sides so that it is constantly having to deal with new threats. Based on the way my pistol’s bullets bounced off that smaller dragon in Dorcastle, I don’t think our rifles will be able to penetrate this one’s armor, but maybe the impacts will still raise a few bruises and shift that thing’s attention. Alain, Alli, you two have the best chance of really hurting the dragon, so the rest of us will support you by keeping it confused and hopefully in one place. We Mechanics will try to hit the eyes or maybe the underarms, you aim for whatever looks good, and the other Mages…how do you guys fight dragons?”

Asha and the other four Mages all produced their long knives from beneath their robes.

“Are you joking?” Mari asked in a shocked voice.

“Mages do not joke,” Alain reminded her. “They will use their concealment spells to get close to the monster. A well-delivered blow to the back of the knee joint can hamstring even a dragon.”

“It is not easily done,” Asha added, her face an emotionless mask. “But it is a worthy test of a Mage’s ability to focus, to concentrate on a spell while also aiming to strike the dragon and evade its blows.”

Mechanic Dav stared at her. “Please be careful.”

Asha said nothing, but one corner of her mouth twitched in a tiny Mage smile as she reached out one hand to touch his cheek.

Mari turned to Alain, but before she could say anything another dragon scream sounded close by, this time accompanied by shouts and yells. “Over there!” Mari cried, directing Alli to one side. “You stay on this side near me,” she told Alain. “But move back a little so you’ll be able to spot a good shot at the dragon and make it happen. Everybody else, disperse along these three sides of the courtyard so we’ll have that thing surrounded when it enters.”

Everyone was still moving into position when three cavalry bolted through the courtyard from the direction the dragon was coming, the soldiers making frantic and unsuccessful attempts to regain control of their terrified mounts.

The shouts were rapidly growing louder. Alain saw common soldiers racing into the courtyard as well, some running all out like the panicked horses and others supporting injured comrades. Some of the soldiers still carried crossbows, but many had lost theirs in the retreat.

Behind them came a larger group of soldiers still under the control of their officers, who were yelling commands as the soldiers fell back fast. The rear rank formed a line just inside the courtyard, the soldiers aiming and firing their crossbows as their comrades staggered back.

Mari waved her Mechanic weapon over her head, her shout carrying over the commands of the officers and the thudding sound of steps from something very large that was very close. “Get behind us! We’re going to stop that thing!”

The formation of soldiers paused in disbelief, then a quick-thinking officer began crying out commands to send them to the sides of the courtyard. “Fall back!” he called to the lone rank at the entrance to the courtyard, who were reloading their crossbows.

The rearguard loosed a final volley, then broke and ran for all they were worth.

Alain heard the dragon’s scream again at the same moment he caught sight of it. It towered high enough for its head to rise above the surrounding buildings, wicked rows of teeth as long as a person’s arm catching the light of the rising sun. Long claws gleamed on the end of its forearms. Crossbow bolts bounced off of the dragon’s scales with dull thuds as the monster bent to slash at the fleeing soldiers.

One small group of soldiers was flung in different directions as the dragon’s blow swept through them. Moving with amazing speed for something so large, the dragon entered the courtyard, one massive, clawed hind -leg raised to squash a wounded soldier who was lying stunned on the paving.

“Fire!” Mari shouted to the other Mechanics. The booms of the Mechanic weapons echoed from the buildings around the courtyard, startling the dragon so that it fell back one step. Bullets sparked from the dragon’s head as the Mechanics tried to hit its eyes, flying off with high-pitched keening sounds instead of bouncing away as the crossbow bolts had.

All of the Mages except Alain disappeared as they used concealment spells, under cover of which they would be moving in to attack the dragon as well.

Standing slightly back, Alain felt like an observer to the fight rather than a participant. It frustrated him because he wanted to be among those in front, but he understood the wisdom of Mari placing him far enough back to be able to act immediately if a good target presented itself.

But as the dragon shook off the first volley of Mechanic rifle fire and refocused on the fallen soldier, Alain was too far back to stop her as Mari suddenly ran forward.

She was firing her weapon as fast as possible, but something appeared to stick on it. Mari wrestled with the rifle for a moment, then hurled it away, drawing her pistol. Standing over the fallen soldier as the dragon bent to strike, Mari unleashed a stream of bullets that caused the dragon to flinch up and back.

“Somebody help me here!” Mari cried as she reloaded her pistol.

Mage Dav appeared next to her, dropping his concealment spell to grab the soldier by one arm and pull him quickly back to where some of the soldier’s comrades were forming ranks behind the Mechanics. Mechanic Alli dashed out to help get the man to the small relative safety that existed behind the screen of the other soldiers.

Alain knew he should not waste strength on an attack that could not seriously harm the dragon, but it had recovered from the shock of Mari’s attack and was now fixing on her. He imagined the heat above his hand, using the power available in this spot along with his own strength to feed the illusion. Not waiting for the illusion to build to the maximum he could manage, Alain imagined the heat no longer above his hand but next to the dragon’s head.

The dragon screamed again, the sound deafening so close and confined in the courtyard. It sidestepped, its huge tail sweeping around to strike at Mari, who was running backwards. Alain’s distraction, on top of that caused by the Mechanic bullets continuing to strike the creature, slowed the beast enough that the tail barely missed striking Mari. She was able to make it back among the others so that she no longer stood out as a target for the dragon.

“I am angry at you!” Alain yelled over the cacophony of combat.

“Save it for later!” Mari shouted back. “Get that thing!”

“I cannot see a place to strike!” The dragon twisted and lunged, making abortive strikes that kept breaking off as hits from other directions caused it to forget its original target.

The common soldiers had formed up behind the very thin screen of Mechanics, those carrying pikes which looked ridiculously small against the dragon planting their weapons to protect the remaining crossbow wielders, who were shooting out bolts as fast as they could. But every crossbow bolt glanced harmlessly off the dragon’s scales.