Witchbreaker (Dragon Apocalypse)

WITCHBREAKER

BOOK THREE
of the
DRAGON APOCALYPSE

JAMES MAXEY

SOLARIS

First published 2012 by Solaris

an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

Riverside House, Osney Mead,

Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

www.solarisbooks.com

ISBN (ePUB): 978-1-84997-464-6

ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-465-3

Copyright © 2012 James Maxey

Cover Art by Adam Tredowski

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Also by James Maxey

Books of the Dragon Age

Bitterwood

Dragonforge

Dragonseed

The Dragon Apocalypse

Greatshadow

Hush

Witchbreaker

For Joy, Gina, and Joseph

fellow wanderers

CHAPTER ONE

A CONVERGENCE OF DRAGONS

S
ORROW SHIVERED AS
she opened the blanket clasped around her shoulders long enough to feed the last shards of the kitchen table into the stove. Commonground was a tropical port, and Menagerie’s houseboat had been ill-stocked to deal with the blizzard that had settled over the city for the last week. The small stove had been designed for cooking, not for heating, and Sorrow had quickly exhausted the firewood Menagerie had stocked; so when the mercenary failed to return after leaving to speak to the Black Swan days earlier, Sorrow had started burning his furniture. This was perhaps crossing a boundary as a houseguest, but the shape-shifter struck her as being practical. She was certain he’d understand.

The room was pitch-black save for the glowing red square of the open oven door. Yellow flames danced as she slid the table-legs onto the coals. She paused a moment in the improved light to study her feet. She’d returned from the Great Sea Above with her ankles covered in hard black scales. They had grown and spread in the intervening days, leaving her shins covered in overlapping diamond-shaped plates that felt hard as iron.

Despite this unexpected physical change, she didn’t regret her decision to hammer a fragment of Rott’s tooth into her brain. Doing so had opened a portal within her that allowed her to tap the primal dragon’s power of decay. She’d made generous use of his abilities when she’d fought to keep Hush, the dragon of cold, from killing Glorious, the dragon of the sun. For most of her life, she’d pursued the power she would need to change the world more to her liking. Gaining control of a fundamental force of nature was more than she’d dare to dream.

Of course, none of this was going to matter if she froze to death. She wanted to be anyplace other than here, in a snow-covered floating shack miles from civilization. Her desire to be elsewhere felt physical, as if an invisible rope was wrapped around her soul, with a team of horses dragging her elsewhere.

She reached to close the oven door, and a red claw thrust out of the flame and grabbed her by the wrist. She jerked her hand back, gasping, her eyes growing wide as the red claw retreated back into the dancing flames.

As she stared into the fire, twin yellow eyes formed in the swirling incandescence to stare back. The last table leg she’d added split along its length, like opening jaws lined with teeth of jagged blue-white jets.

The crackling fire spoke to her: “Rott has been summoned to the convergence. It’s rude that you keep him from answering the call.”

Sorrow swallowed hard. “But I—”

She was unable to finish her thought as the red claw once more shot from the open door. She tried to scramble backward, but the talons closed around her face. She felt something tear and suddenly she was floating above herself, watching her limp body collapse on the floor. It was shocking to see herself from this perspective. She wasn’t unfamiliar with her own face; she shaved her scalp daily, and was well used to seeing herself in a mirror. But the body that lay upon the floor looked quite different now that it was soulless. It was still breathing, and Sorrow was vaguely aware of a heartbeat, but she still was repulsed by how much her shell looked like a rather ill-kept doll made of skin and bones and meat. She was only twenty-five, but the frown lines and furrowed brow of the meat-mask that covered the skull before her looked much older.

“There’s no time to study your human aspect,” the flames crackled. “It’s the dragon within you that’s required. Come.”

Suddenly, the sensation of a rope tugging her soul became fantastically real. Only instead of a rope, it was a cord of braided silver. The silver stretched down through the floor of the houseboat. The material world faded before her spiritual eyes and she found herself falling through a cloudless blue sky.

She now saw that the silver cord stretched taut beneath her for what looked like miles. At the other end, Rott tumbled lifelessly toward a green ocean far below. When she’d encountered Rott in the Sea of Wine, his body had been half submerged, and all that she’d seen was his serpentine spine, miles in length. She’d not realized he had limbs, or tattered wings that fluttered uselessly as they fell.

At last, he splashed into the emerald waves. She was dragged down until she was nearly submerged herself. At last, the huge corpse floated back to the surface. The water around him turned white with what she assumed was foam, until she realized it was maggots boiling from beneath his scales.

Repulsed, she willed herself to fly away. She was high in the sky before the silver cord snapped tight, whipping her around to look back at the scene below.

A chain of islands formed into a rough circle directly below her. Though mostly equal in size, the topography and climate of each island was radically different.

The northernmost island was a deep blue mountain of crystalline ice, surrounded by gusting snow. The upper edge of the ice was a saw-tooth ridge that looked like a dragon’s spine. Avalanches spilled down the slopes as the mountain lifted her head. This was Hush, the primal dragon of cold, and she looked out toward the other islands with unveiled contempt.

The stony island to her east was wreathed with a rapidly churning circle of storm clouds. The hurricane swirled into a serpentine mass. A dragon’s head emerged, opening its massive jaws to lick the land beneath with a tongue of lightning. Thunder rolled across the green waves, forming a voice, shouting, “Who dares summon Tempest, Lord of Storms?”

To his side was an island of granite. The earth grumbled and cracked and quaked as the dragon stirred from his repose. Dirt slid from a hill-face to expose two enormous diamonds, which narrowed into angry eyes. Sorrow knew enough dragon lore to deduce that this was Kragg, the dragon of stone.

On the island beside Kragg, lava spilled down the slopes of a steep volcano until all the land was ablaze. The smoke and flame snaked together as it stretched into the sky, curling into a dragon’s neck and face.

“I have issued the call,” roared Greatshadow, the primal dragon of fire.

The bone-white cliffs of the island next to Greatshadow began to crack, releasing rivers of blood. A thousand animals jumped free of the red torrent, multitudes of beasts, from common house cats to lumbering elephants, from swarming ants to slithering boa constrictors. The menagerie marched together, sinking their teeth into the flanks of their neighboring beast, digging their claws deep into flesh, until the writhing, shrieking mass formed a dragon, a towering creature part lion, part snake, and part eagle. This was Abundant, the dragon of animal life. She shrugged her long back as she looked out upon her brethren.

She was beside Rott, who floated belly up in the water, looking like a long chain of tar-covered islets that smelled like a city dump. Rott’s unblinking eyes were half submerged, his jaws agape, his yellow teeth cracked and broken.

The dragons glowered at one another, then one by one glanced toward the heavens. Sorrow wondered if they were looking at her, until she looked up to see the sun high in the sky, looking for all the world like a huge disk of gold floating above them.

“What’s he doing here?” Abundant asked, with a voice formed by wolf-howls and baboon yowls and the chorus of a thousand robins.

“The sun still respects the pact we made long ago,” Greatshadow said. “No primal dragon may ignore the summoning.”