Dragon Breeder 4 Read online

  “I’ve used the crossbow spell,” I said. “I can see it coming in very handy in a combat situation. I can summon this deadly little thing with the speed of thought, right, and the weapon is only about the size of a Mac-10 submachine gun—”

  “What’s a Mac-10 submachine gun?” Elenari asked me as Gharmon dodged out of the way of a larger than average fir tree that jutted up out of the forest like a center standing amongst a gaggle of point guards.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s just a weapon that some of the gangs from the city that I’m from back on Earth make use of sometimes. My point is that it’s small. What’s more, it reloads automatically somehow. The bolt just magically appears and the string resets. Would have been damned handy to have at my fingertips when we were fighting the kobolds on that ruined fortress. Would have been perfect for thinning out the herd a little.”

  “What is its effective operating range?” Renji asked. As one of the Drako Academy’s preeminent armorers, quartermasters, and general administrators, it did not surprise me in the least that she should ask such a pertinent question.

  “It’s good up to about twenty-five feet,” I answered. “Although, that would change depending on weather, and whether or not I was firing from dragonback.”

  Renji nodded.

  “And what about the other spells?” Elenari asked me.

  “I’ve experimented a little with the Entropic Mine,” I said, “but with something like that, using the sort of magic that can, basically, crush someone into a gooey mess the size of a peach, I figured it was best to use them far away from anyone who might accidentally set them off.”

  “That’s probably wise,” Elenari said.

  “Nothing like being compressed into a shapeless glob of dog food to ruin your day,” Renji said solemnly.

  I snorted with amusement. “That’s right. So, I headed out into the woods that surround the part of the camp that has been designated a dragonmancer only zone. Summoned a few of the mines up and tossed some rocks and apples at them. They are… really something. I wouldn’t want to step on one of them. Not one bit.”

  While Elenari, Renji, and I had been conversing, Tamsin and Penelope had been chatting to one another too. Our group of five dragons, led by Noctis, had been soaring without hurry over the varied landscape below.

  The forest gave way to scrubby grassland dotted with trees. Off to our left, I could make out the roar of one of the many mountain rivers cutting its way through a gorge. Even from the height we were flying at, I could smell the land below: the fresh scent of good, rich earth, the mineral tang of melt water and rock, and the heady aroma of growing things. It was the smell of a land in perfect harmony. Where everything had its place. A land that was free from the stain of humanity—or any number of the other civilization-building races that made up this world.

  “And the other two spells?” Renji prompted me, making me open the eyes that I had unconsciously closed while I had been taking deep lungfuls of air.

  I took a leaf out of Elenari’s book and shrugged.

  “Just haven’t quite got round to testing them out yet,” I said. “I’ve been enjoying the rest and relaxation after that scrape we had with those three wild dragons. I feel like we earned it, you know.”

  “I’d say we fucking earned it!” Tamsin chimed in. “After taking down three wild dragons, a dragonmancer could probably safely say that they’re entitled to a little time to let their hair down.”

  She caught my eye, and we exchanged knowing smirks. Ever since she had birthed the latest of my dragonlings, Pan, we had spent many steamy nights together. I liked to share the love when it came to my fantastically open-minded female warrior companions. Somehow, Tamsin and I always managed to end up together at the end of the night, whether it was after an evening carousing in town or heading back after one of our dragonback rambles in the countryside surrounding the encampment.

  I licked my lips and looked away from the hobgoblin. It was best that I kept my mind out of the gutter for the present. My traitorous mind, though, couldn’t resist going back to visit the highlight reel. In particular, the afternoon we had spent in that supply tent when Pan had been conceived still stood out in my memory.

  The hiss of her skin under my fingertips, the slickness of our sweat as our bodies pressed against each other. The ragged breathing. The exquisite pain of her nails raking my back and shoulder blades.

  Yeah, that had been a good time all right.

  And, taking a leaf out of Bond’s book, it had all been in the name of queen and country—or, at least, Empress and Empire.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s touch down over there by that lake and give the dragons a breather. They can have a drink and relax, and we can have a picnic, maybe. We don’t have to be back at base for a little while yet.”

  “A picnic?” Tamsin said in a nonplussed voice. “We’re missing a crucial ingredient for that, are we not?”

  “We are a little deficient in the food department, Mike,” Elenari said.

  I shot the girls a grin and pointed at the lake that Noctis had started banking toward. That was the great thing about sharing a mind with another creature: you didn’t have to waste words on instructions. The other party simply knew what you wanted to do as soon as you knew you wanted to do it. That sort of telepathic shared knowledge meant that dragonmancers and their mythical steeds had an advantage over almost any foe they were likely to face.

  “How much do you want to bet that there are some fat-ass fish swimming around in that lake down there?” I asked.

  Saya smiled and called, “Scopula tells me that she can smell them from here. That doesn’t explain how you’re going to catch them though. Unless you’re secreting a rod somewhere on your person.”

  My smile broadened. “I told you that that new crossbow spell of mine was accurate up to twenty-five feet, didn’t I?”

  Chapter 2

  Half an hour later, and the five of us were sitting around a crackling campfire. Yet another advantage of being a dragonmancer: you spend less time patting your pockets looking for a lighter or a box of matches.

  The beguiling smell of cooking fish permeated the air. The sizzling crackle of fat dripping into the flames added a wholesome and homely feel to the atmosphere. Both the gargoyle Dragon, Scopula, and I had been right – fish aplenty were gliding through the crystalline waters of the mountain lake.

  The fat trout that had never learned to fear man, being as isolated as they were. They had skins that flashed like rainbows made liquid, and were far larger than any trout that you might expect to find back on Earth.

  “That was some neat work, Pen,” I said to the Knowledge Sprite as I turned one of the green sticks that we had spitted through the gills of the glistening fish.

  Penelope blushed prettily at the praise. She had acted as a sheepdog in a way, flying over the lake and herding the curious trout over to where I stood on a bank. There, I had used my new automatic crossbow spell to nail about half a dozen of the hapless fish as they swam in toward me. It had taken me a couple of attempts to hit the first one. With the way the water refracted and distorted the images of the fish, it took me a little while to get my eye in.

  Elenari, as a wood elf, had walked over to a young sapling not too far away and cut some neat, wide strips of bark from its trunk with one of her daggers. She’d used her dagger to clean and scrape the last of the wood from the inside of these strips of bark and had fashioned some basic, but quite usable, plates from them. I reached for one of the crude platters now, deftly severed the head of a trout, and passed the fish to Penelope.

  “Have you always been able to fly, Pen?” Saya asked as she accepted a fish from me.

  Daintily, Penelope used a stick to flake away the tender flesh from the side of the fish. She picked up a morsel and popped it into her mouth. She made a little noise of approval.

  “Very good, Mike, thank you,” she said.

  “I don’t think it was anything I did,” I said,
“but you’re very welcome in any case.”

  “Um, yes, Saya,” Penelope said, turning back to address the blonde warrior. “Yes, Knowledge Sprites are born to fly, though it takes us some time to perfect the skill. Just as it takes others a while to learn how to walk.”

  Pen flexed the iridescent dragonfly-like wings protruding through the especially cut slots in her blue Librarian’s robes.

  “Oddly,” she said, “ever since I have embraced the dragonmancer side of my training, and am consequently spending less time inside the Grand Library, I have found myself flying less and less under my own steam. More often I am carried on the back of Glizbe.”

  “So, you enjoy getting out to stretch your wings, then?” Tamsin asked. Her sharp, white teeth crunched through her trout’s skin, flesh, and bone with no apparent effort. She wiped the grease from her mouth with the back of her hand. I couldn’t think of any woman I had ever seen who was so stunningly savage looking.

  Penelope grinned and nodded. “Oh yes. There are a few things in this world that can trump flying. Soaring through the clouds on the back of one of our fantastic beasts is phenomenal in its own way, of course. The sense of exhilaration I remember feeling when I was a young sprite though… Well, if I had had a particularly hard day, I would go for a fly. Afterwards, I would feel so alive, so full of vitality. I’d feel as if I could breathe life into dust, if that makes sense.”

  The other four of us paused to consider this comment from the usually reticent Librarian. I was fairly certain that all of us were reliving that first time, whenever it might have been, when we had first climbed onto the back of a dragon and taken to the air and become, in that instance, the apex predators in this marvelous world we inhabited.

  “It was your wings that got me thinking about something just now, Pen,” I said suddenly. “As you were helping to drive those trout in.”

  “What was that?” the Knowledge Sprite asked me.

  “Even with my ability to access more spell slots,” I said, “I still don’t have access to my Titan or Wing slot—even with Noctis.”

  Penelope’s smooth blue brow crinkled up in thought. She loved a problem, loved a theoretical problem to unravel.

  “Does that seem strange to you?” I prompted her after a while. “That after all we have been through, and despite me being able to access the powers of four separate dragons, I still haven’t gained access to any Titan or Wing slot spells or abilities.”

  Penelope’s all-blue eyes gazed out over the lake. There was a swish and a ripple as a resident trout stirred just below the surface of the water. The Knowledge Sprite looked up at me, then said, “I'm not sure whether it's any cause for you to be concerned, Mike.”

  “You don’t?” Elenari asked, passing over another fish for Renji to eat.

  Penelope shook her head. “No, I don’t. In all the excitement of our recent adventures, we have forgotten that the attaining of Titan abilities takes most dragonmancers years to accomplish. The vast majority actually go their whole careers without attaining Titan spells or propensities.” She popped another morsel of fish into her mouth and chewed. When she had swallowed, she said, “It is a phenomenal drain on a dragonmancer’s mana reserves. Only the most powerful, dedicated, and iron-willed of our kind can do it.”

  “Dragonmancers like Ashrin and Jazmyn?” I said.

  Penelope nodded.

  “Those chicks are so fucking badass,” Tamsin said, holding out a fist to Saya so that she could bump it with her own.

  “You’re not wrong,” the ashy blonde beauty said, reaching for another one for the sizzling fish that hung over our campfire. “They’re the kind of dragonmancers that all other dragonmancers aspire to be like. If we are the blade that is affixed to the head of the spear that is the Mystocean Empire’s armed forces, then riders like Ashrin and Jazmyn—members of the Empress’ Twelve—are the godsdamned tip.”

  Saya was right in her analogy. Jazmyn and Ashrin were probably the two most capable dragonmancers that I had yet met here.

  Both were part of Empress Cyrene’s elite Twelve. These select dozen warriors had been invited to undergo a second Transfusion Ceremony and bore the Empress’s Dream Dragon brand.

  This brand was used by the Empress to communicate directly with her Twelve, enabling her to pass on orders and hear reports in real time, no matter where in the world that any of the Twelve might be. It was the call and responsibility of Ashrin, Jazmyn, and their ten fellow members of the Twelve to hunt down rogue dragonmancers and deal with them in as final a way as possible.

  “Okay,” I said, returning to the point, “the access to the Titan slot requires a lot more experience, perhaps, than I have so far, right?”

  “In a nutshell,” Renji said thickly, through a mouthful of trout.

  “I can accept that,” I said, although privately I was determined to break whatever record might currently stand and become the youngest or newest dragonmancer to gain access to the Titan slot. “But what about the Wings slot? I don’t think I have even seen anyone utilize that ability before.”

  Saya tossed the picked clean skeleton of her fish out into the lake. With her enhanced dragonmancer’s strength, she managed to heft the light collection of bones far further than she would ordinarily have been able to do.

  “It’s not very surprising, Mike,” she said.

  “No? Why’s that?” I asked, flaking off a wedge of trout and putting it into my mouth. The meat was absolutely delicious – melt in the mouth moist and with a lovely clean flavor that came from the pristine water and whatever it was that they fed on.

  “Because,” Saya said, “more often than not, it’s far more effective to simply use your dragon to fly rather than to give yourself wings.”

  ”I see what you’re saying,” I said. “Most of the time, if flight is required, it pays to be sitting on a creature that has a battering ram for a tail at one end and a flamethrower at the other.”

  Elenari smiled and flicked a trout’s head at me. “You sure know how to lay out the layman’s terms, don’t you, Mike Noctis.”

  With reflexes that went beyond the normal, I plucked the flying fish head out of the air with my thumb and forefinger. With a casual flick, I sent it flying out over the lake. It splashed down not far from where Saya’s fish bones had.

  A sporadic flapping and splashing from just under the surface sent silver spray into the air as the surviving trout chowed down on their former brethren. It was a poignant reminder that, although the wilds might be beautiful, they were still the wilds.

  “You know that I’m a simple man, you hot elven goddess you!” I said. “I like to have things laid out in my head as simply as possible. It gives me clarity. It means that there is less chance that I’ll misunderstand something and unintentionally throw a wrench into the works.”

  Elenari smiled and shook her head. She turned to Saya. “Can you believe this man?”

  Saya chuckled. “You are many things, Mike, but stupid or a layman is not one of them.”

  “I talked with Ashrin and Jazmyn the other night about the Wing slot,” I said. “They confirmed that the Titan Slot is meant to be harder to attain, but the Wing Slot is rarer to witness.”

  “Did they say anything else?” asked Tamsin. She was leaning forward with interest, her elbows resting on her knees.

  “Basically, they just reiterated what Penelope just told us,” I said. “They told me that just because I haven’t seen it does not mean, obviously, that the slot or skill does not exist.”

  “They didn’t go into any more detail about what the Wing slot actually enables you to do?” Renji asked in her slow, thoughtful voice.

  Something in the djinn's tone made me think that, perhaps, she already knew the answer to that question. She was a savvy woman and had been in the Drako Academy for longer than any of the rest of us.

  “I can tell you that it enables one to fly, it’s as simple as that,” said Penelope. “It channels your dragon’s mana so that you sprout physical
wings out of your back.”

  This is what I loved about this world that I had been thrown into. People came out with these outrageous sentences, sentences that would have seen them locked up in a padded cell back on Earth sentences, but here were simple statements of fact.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, “they just make wings pop out of the back of your torso. Nothing to write home about, really.”

  Penelope gave me that special blank look that geniuses reserved for those who are, perhaps, a little less intelligent than them.

  “As rare as the Wing slot might be,” Renji said, “I can imagine a few scenarios in which it might prove advantageous.”

  “Recon work?” I suggested.

  “Quite so,” said Renji.

  “Stealth work,” Saya said, picking at her teeth with a small knife.

  “Infiltration missions,” I followed up.

  “And such an ability could prove highly useful for impromptu escapes,” Penelope added.

  Tamsin nodded sagely. “Yeah, it would be nice to know that if you had to throw yourself off a castle wall or something, to escape a pack of ravening kobolds say, you wouldn't be resigning yourself to a short freefall and a very long future spent as a stain on the flagstones below.”

  We all laughed at that.

  “Yeah, I can see the benefits in that,” I said.

  That incomparable silence that can only be found in the very remotest, the most desolate, most beautifully pristine spots in the world fell after our laughter died. The sound of our mirth was replaced by the sound of quietude, which is not so much a lack of sound as a collection of specific noises that only emphasized how remote and alone the five of us were out here.

  There was the soft rushing breath of the wind moving through the long dry grass. The occasional soft splash of a fish moving in the lake. The high, clear call of some hunting bird riding the thermals high above us.

  And then, there came a sound entirely alien to that landscape. It was a low, droning noise, like something akin to a giant bumblebee.