Dragon Talker (37 page)

Stone looked at the flames and then at Bernard, who had finished climbing down.

He threw up his hands, “What are we supposed to do? We can’t leave, can’t fight.”

Samantha jumped down off the wagon. “I know, Stone, I know. I’m as angry as you.” She looked at the chaos around her. They weren’t the only ones who were being turned back. She saw people stop running and look around, confused at how they ended up back near the center of the village. Most started running again, only to find themselves turning in circles. A few had already given up. They sat, immobile, on the ground.

“I don’t know what’s going on here or why, but I know I don’t want to die today, and I don’t think you boys do, either. This is one of those ‘live to fight another day’ situations, Stone. Whoever is attacking is too powerful. We are going to hide.”

Amidst all the noise and distractions, Stone looked Samantha squarely in her eyes. “I,” he slowly and deliberately, “can’t watch another village die without doing something.”

Samantha’s heart ached at the look on his face. In that moment, the boy had the face of an old man. She made her decision. “Okay, Stone, but I have a sword in the back of my wagon I’d like to give you.”

She immediately turned away from Stone so he couldn’t see her face and walked to the back of the wagon, lowering the back gate. Stone followed, happy to be getting a man’s weapon. He watched as she pulled out a long, silver dagger and put it in her own belt. She also pulled out a pair of gloves and put them on. Bernard had followed Stone to the rear of the wagon. Both boys stood and waited as she finished putting on her gloves and reached into a canvas bundle.

Samantha pulled out a sword and handed it to Stone. “Stay put, I have something else to use.” She jumped up and opened a trunk. She took a glass jar filled with a blue paste from the case and jumped back down.

“This is war paint. The men in my village wear it into battle. It will give you added strength.” Samantha opened the jar, setting the lid on the wagon. She dipped her gloved fingers into the paste and waved Stone forward. It felt cold on his face as she placed streaks of blue under his eyes and on both sides of his neck. As his skin warmed the paint, it started to glow.

“Ohhhh,” Bernard said at the sight of the glowing paint on his brother’s face.

“Your turn, Bernard.” She winked, “I think you should get the extra strength, too.” Bernard smiled and moved forward. She gave him the same marking as she did Stone. It didn’t take long before his paint was also glowing. Finished, she put the lid back on the jar and rubbed the paste off her gloved fingers and onto a scrap of canvas lying in the back of the wagon.

Stone asked, “What about you?”

“Me, no,” she replied, “someone has to stay awake to protect you boys.”

Stone’s face paint glowed even brighter for a moment before he collapsed; Bernard stood in confusion, looking from Stone to Samantha before his paint, too, grew even brighter and he began to fall to the ground. Samantha managed to catch him before he hit the ground. She whispered separate apologies to both of them as she loaded them on to the wagon. After the boys were safely tucked into the back of the wagon and surrounded by trunks for protection, she moved to the front, telling the horse, “Let’s find the hole in the net and get out of here.”

Chapter 52

Cormack, the boy the merchant sent to get the dragon talker, arrived at the talker’s hut. He couldn’t see anyone around, but everyone in the village knew he could make himself invisible. It made the talker very unpopular, especially with the women. He yelled, “Roger, where are you? We’re being killed, we need you.”

He ran into the hut. He hadn’t been near it in a long time and he remembered it looking in better shape. Inside was empty. “What a dump,” he said to himself as he went back outside.

He ran around the hut, just in case Roger had passed out in back. Everybody knew he drank too much at times. There was nothing there but some chopped firewood. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted again, “Dragon Talker, Vrotsim needs you.”

The air around him started to shimmer and Roger took shape in front of him. “Was that so hard? To use the traditional call? I am the Dragon Talker, not the village butcher.”

Cormack shook his head, “You are crazy. People are dying. We are under attack. You need to call Thrinbin.”

“Don’t tell me what I need to do, boy. You have no idea what you are talking about. Thrinbin isn’t some pet goat I jingle a bell and it comes running for a carrot.” Roger looked to the village. It was impossible to miss the large clouds of black smoke rising above the village.

“Still, I don’t think Thrin would like someone torching our village. I’ll see what I can do, but I wouldn’t expect anything soon. The village might be completely destroyed before it even gets here, if it decides to come at all.”

Cormack didn’t say anything; instead, he simply stood and waited for Roger to do something. When Roger realized the conversation was over as far as Cormack was concerned, he let out his breath in a huff. “All right, I’ll see what I can do.” He moved over to a stump in front of his hut and pulled out his amulet.

Cormack could not believe how slowly and calmly Roger was moving. Didn’t he know that people were dying? At this moment, he believed every negative thing he had ever heard about the talker: that he drank too much, that he spied on the women when they bathed, that he would use his gift to steal food, that whenever he won a game it was because of the dragon’s gift, that he thought he was better than everyone else, and that he was crazy.

For the briefest moment, he even wondered if the talker was actually doing anything. At this point, he seemed so detached from the village that Cormack believed he really could watch it burn without any feeling. The talker’s body tensed, leading Cormack to believe the talker was in contact with the dragon. Only a moment later, Roger opened his eyes.

“Done.”

Cormack was surprised, “That fast?”

Roger sounded annoyed when he answered, “It doesn’t take long to say someone is burning down the village.”

Cormack couldn’t argue with that. “So now what?”

“We wait.”

“But,” Cormack was starting to wonder how Roger ended up as the dragon talker and why his apprentice had to be out of the village on some dragon errand at this time, “the village is under attack.”

“Which is a good reason to stay out of it.”

“But you can turn invisible. You could stop this.”

Roger thought about that, “Well, I don’t know about stopping it, but you’re right about being invisible. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt me to go down and check.”

“Yes, please do.” Cormack thought about his parents and little sister. He hoped they were far from the village by now.

Roger shimmered again and disappeared without saying a word. Cormack listened and heard his feet head down the path. He even saw little puffs of dust as his feet hit the ground. Using them as his guide, he ran around Roger and shouted, “I’ll tell them you’re coming.”

He heard Roger’s voice come out of thin air, “You do that.” Cormack was quickly out of his sight as Roger continued to slowly walk back to the village.

***

After killing the first villagers, Perante deliberately stayed put. If his plan was to work, he had to make sure this took a while. If he simply wiped out the village before its dragon arrived, the dragon may decide it doesn’t need to come at all, which was the entire point of Perante’s attack. As long as Winderall did his job, no one would get away, ensuring that he had plenty of people to endanger until the dragon arrived.

He always planned to kill the first people he met. He knew doing so would panic the village, which was what he wanted. He cast a fire spell causing small explosions on the outer walls of the three closest huts. The dry wood readily burned, sending up a satisfying amount of smoke. Perante wanted to make sure the talker, wherever he was, knew his village was in danger.

He looked forward to meeting the talker. Based on what he had read in his private books, he thought he might be able to use the talker’s amulet himself. That alone, he thought, would almost make the trip out to this forsaken village worthwhile. His real interest in the amulet, though, was the dragon scale itself. No mage had ever been able to keep possession of one for more than the time it took for the dragon to fly out and repossess it. These repossessions never went well for the mage. To date, Perante knew of only one mage who stole an amulet who wasn’t killed, and what the dragon did instead of killing the mage was, to Perante, much worse. From what he could decipher, the dragon had flooded the mage’s mind with so much power that overwhelmed everything but the most basic functions. The mage was reduced to a drooling imbecile that had to be taken care of in every way to survive.

Before he started across the field, he had cast a harmful intent spell. With it, he could tell which villagers were on the move or frozen out of fear and which ones were lying in wait to attack him. It never ceased to amaze him how such simple and overmatched people would actually try to stand against him. For some, he understood the drive to protect their families, but he could never understand the unattached men who stood up to him.
Why?
He thought.
What idea did they carry in their heads convinced them to put their lives up against a mage?

What’s this?
he interrupted his own thoughts. He could tell there were men by the three burning huts in front of him that were planning some sort of attack. He knew he could kill them all where they waited, but he did have to drag this out until the dragon arrived. “Oh my,” he said in mock fright, “I’ll have to walk past this burning hut. I hope I’m not in danger.”

There was little Perante had to fear, little that people hadn’t tried in the past to kill him, and he was still here, doing what he wanted. He assumed the people farther out were archers.
If not
, he thought,
whoever set up this ambush was a fool
. The ones by the center seemed to be lying down. He hoped they really didn’t think he was so stupid as to miss them.

He was right about the archers. The archer to his left was obviously terrified of his approach, because he let go of an arrow as soon as Perante rounded the burning hut and at the farthest distance possible. Perante closed his fist, he didn’t need to in order to make the magic work, but he liked the feel of it. The arrow snapped in mid-air. The arrow halves spun to the ground. Something about the way the head of the arrow went down interested Perante. He called it to him.

“Silver,” he said out loud as the arrow head and forward section of the shaft landed in his hand. “I do like your peasant general.”
For a simple villager
, he thought,
this shows some foresight
. He slid the shaft through his belt, letting the tip catch and hold itself in place.
Unlike these villagers
, Perante congratulated himself,
I know how to use silver to kill a mage if I wanted to.

“You can get up now and attack me,” he said to the two men on the ground. “A little smoke…” another arrow from the left and then support from the right flew at Perante. He snapped them both in the air like he had before. “…and a few arrows are not going to stop me.”

The merchant and Yuri stood, each moving to a different side of Perante. “By the looks of your staff, I think you also have notions in your head of killing a mage today, but pray tell, how can you use it if you can’t move?”

The merchant’s look of grim determination changed to confusion as he tried to move forward but found that he couldn’t. Magic kept him immobile. Yuri felt a weight come down on him, too, but it wasn’t so heavy that he could move. In fact, with each step forward, Yuri felt the weight get lighter. Within three steps, Yuri was running.

Now, it was Perante’s turn to be confused. No one, not even a mage, had been able to overcome a stillness charm so fast, if at all. It only took a moment for him to get over his shock and reach for his sword, but Yuri’s speed made that enough time. He tackled Perante before Perante could draw his sword.

The force of the tackle took both men to the ground, with Yuri landing on top. He pulled Perante up off the ground by the front of his coat with his left arm and brought back his right to punch Perante. As fast as Yuri was, Perante’s magic was faster. His body took on the weight and texture of stone, and Yuri’s punch hurt his hand much more than Perante’s stone face.

“You are an interesting young man,” Perante said through a smile. “And I thought I knew everything about this day.”

Yuri looked over his shoulder at the merchant, who still was not moving.

Perante saw the look, saying, “Oh, I am more than capable of holding that old man still and fighting you at the same time. How many things can you do at once?”

As soon as he said it, Yuri felt heat on his back and knew his jacket was on fire. Letting go of Perante, he rolled on the ground, smothering the fire before it could get started. As he rolled over, Perante stood up. Even his clothes now seemed to be made out of stone.

Perante asked, “Are you going to tell me how you beat my spell or will you make me tear the truth out of you?”

“Why don’t you just go home, instead?” Yuri countered, looking from the merchant to Perante and the surrounding area to see if he could see anything he could use as a weapon.

“Home, as if I’m some simple villager off to hunt rabbit,” Perante sounded disgusted. “The world is going to be mine, you idiot.”

Unable to find anything better, Yuri pulled out his knife.

Perante laughed, “You truly are an idiot.” Perante’s eyes had narrowed as another set of arrows flew through the air. Like the previous ones, they snapped in midflight, broken pieces landing to the sides of Yuri and at the feet of Perante. Perante’s hand flicked, which Yuri assumed meant he had just cast a spell because immediately after Perante did that, he heard screams off in the distance. Yuri knew not to expect any more arrows in support.