End Times in Dragon City (19 page)

“I’m flying.” The captain’s tone left no room for argument. I scooted back to sit between Belle and Kai, and an instant later we were in the air. 

I peered down into the crystal ball again and saw that the Ruler of the Dead had begun some kind of incantation. She’d set white candles all around the Dragon’s corpse, and each of them burned with a black flame that seemed to suck the light from the glowglobes that lit the scene. She’d planted each one of them in the open mouth of a guard that had been stationed there to protect the imperial corpse. They now stared up at the black sky above them with unblinking eyes. 

As the Ruler spoke, I was glad that the crystal ball couldn’t let me hear what she was saying. I feared the words would have made my ears curl up and turn black. As she spoke, she drew back her papery lips to expose a mouth filled with fangs that dripped with fresh blood. 

“We’re not going to make it,” Kai said. 

“We have to try,” said Belle. “We’ll never have a better chance.” 

“At getting our heads handed to us?” 

“At putting an end to her forever!” Yabair said, calling back over his shoulder. 

I ignored them all and watched the Ruler instead. She stood there before the Dragon as we raced toward them, moving with a fluid determination that spoke not of grace but inevitability. She seemed like she might have cast this spell a thousand times before — or at least rehearsed that often for this moment — and she knew nothing could stop her from completing it. 

The wind whipped at us, cold and harsh, as Yabair pushed the carpet toward our target. It felt not so much like flying as a loosely controlled fall. I glanced up and saw the palanquin still in front of us, a tiny box that would reach our goal first. I hoped they might make it there in time, and that if they were too late we caught up with them fast. 

We were about halfway down the mountain when the Ruler of the Dead completed her obscene ritual. As she did, she walked up to the Dragon’s corpse, drew a tremendous gasp into her ill-used lungs, and then blew it directly into his cracked-open maw. The breath she expelled was black and filthy, and it burrowed its way into the Dragon’s chest as if it had a will of its own. 

The Ruler stepped back then and raised her arms high as if she were pulling a puppet’s strings. When she jerked her left hand, the lid on the Dragon’s one good eye fluttered, then flickered open and gazed out at the world once more. 

As the great beast who had once been the Emperor of Dragon City lumbered to its clawed feet and raised its half-destroyed head, the Ruler of the Dead threw back her head and cackled in triumph. 

Too late
. Spark’s claws dug into my shoulder as he trembled against me.
Too late!

The Dragon’s corpse had lost all its internal heat, without which its scales had lost their glowing luster. They’d faded from a fiery reddish-orange to the colors of a vicious bruise and the ashen tones of cooled magma. The creature’s teeth and claws seemed as sharp and dangerous as ever, and it wings beat at the air like great sails made of leather. A black, horrible gas curled around its snout, even as the undead beast looked out with its lone, whitened eye at the city it once ruled. 

Kells must have spotted the Dragon’s corpse pulling itself up as Johan plowed the palanquin headlong toward it, still hoping to get there in time. He opened fire with the machine-gun right away, at the outside limits of its range. 

Bullets stitched their way through the wreckage of Goblintown and toward the Ruler of the Dead, but the necromancer moved the Dragon forward to protect her with but a sweep of her wrist. The Dragon lunged into the bullets’ path, and the machine-gun’s slugs pinged and panged off its armored hide. The great beast didn’t howl in protest or flinch in pain. It just let the rounds bounce off it as if they were no more trouble than raindrops on a gentle spring day. 

The Ruler of the Dead spotted the palanquin then and gestured toward it. The Dragon stared up toward the hurtling ride and stretched its bat-like wings wide. With a mighty leap, it flung itself into the air and climbed toward its incoming attacker. 

“We need to get down there,” I said to Yabair. “Now!” 

“This carpet can’t fall any faster,” he said with a snarl. “Unless you’d care to get out and push.” 

If it would have helped, I would have done it. I considered lightening our load by kicking the guard off the front of the carpet instead. 

We were close enough I could hear the steady stutter of bullets leaping from Kells’ machine-gun. I tore my gaze away from the crystal ball to watch the Dragon rise toward the palanquin with my own eyes. 

Kells kept up a steady stream of fire, and Cindra joined in with her pistols, cracking out explosive bullets that tore tiny holes into the Dragon’s hide. Moira stuck her head out one of the side windows and blasted away with her own pistol, while Danto emerged from another window and let loose a spell that unleashed a massive explosion smack in the Dragon’s chest. 

Kai pumped his fist to cheer on our friends, and Belle joined him with a whoop of her own. Yabair didn’t say a word. He just concentrated on pushing the carpet forward as fast as he could. 

Me, I pulled out my wand and waited to see what happened. 

Danto’s explosion enveloped the Dragon in a cloud of black smoke not even the crystal ball could see through. I couldn’t tell if the beast had been knocked from the sky or just blown to pieces. Or neither.

Johan didn’t leave anything to chance. He kept gunning straight for the cloud as if he could ram through it and smash the Ruler of the Dead flat beneath it. He howled in utter defiance of death the whole way down. 

Then the Dragon emerged from the smoke. The beast already had its head cocked back, and as it lined up with the palanquin, it snapped its snout forward and let loose with a blue-black stream of decay. 

I stared into the crystal ball and brought its vision around so I could see what was happening to my friends. The Dragon’s deathly breath enveloped the palanquin and bathed it in its lethal magic. 

Exposed as they were atop the palanquin, Kells and Cindra took the worst of it. Cindra reached up to grab Kells, perhaps in some vain attempt to protect him, or maybe to embrace him one last time. 

When the viscous gas touched them, it withered them away, aging them decades in an instant. Their skin wrinkled up and flaked away in the torrential wind, taking their whitened hair with it. They were dead before they had a chance to scream. 

In the front of the palanquin, Johan didn’t fare much better. The Dragon’s breath caught him full on and aged him a full century all at once. His beard transformed into a snowy white, and wrinkles dug furrows into his flesh. He fell forward, in shock, and the palanquin banked with him, falling out of the sky. 

Moira and Danto had ducked back into the palanquin, the interior of which had been screened against scrying. I couldn’t tell what had happened to them. I could only hope they’d fared better than the others, or they were doomed for sure. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” Kai said. 

He was talking to Yabair, who had pulled the carpet into a steep bank to the right. “Away from that,” the guard captain said. 

“You coward!” I punched the elf in the back. I couldn’t believe he was turning away from facing down the Ruler of the Dead. If we didn’t stop her here and now, we would soon run out of any chances at all. 

Yabair ignored me. “We cannot take on the undead Dragon in an aerial battle,” he said. “As your friends just proved, it’s suicide.” 

As if to punctuate his assessment, the palanquin crashed into the inside of the Great Circle at that moment. Built sturdy as it was, it bounced back instead of splintering to pieces, rolling over onto its roof as it fell into the pit where the Dragon had once been. 

I stuffed the crystal ball into my pocket and readied my wand again. I was prepared to use it on Yabair if I had to. 

“We can’t run away from this,” Belle said. She had her wand out and ready too. 

“The Dragon’s breath ages the people it hits,” I said to her and Yabair. “You’re elves. You should be fine.” 

“You and me would get turned to dust, but the elves would be just fine?” Kai shook his head in disgust. “Just as fair as the rest of our lives, I guess.” 

“I’m not leaving you,” I said to Belle. “I won’t let you take on that abomination alone.” 

“I’m not giving you a choice,” she said. And with that, she kicked me off the carpet. 

I flailed around, windmilling my arms, desperate to find some way to hang on. The only purchase I could find was on Kai’s jacket. He’d spun around to try to catch me as I fell, which put him off balance too. The addition of my weight and momentum threatened to pull us both from the ride. 

Then Yabair dipped the side of the carpet we were on, and Kai and I tumbled into the open sky. 

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-N
INE

I spoke the words to my fall-slowing spell as fast as I could and tapped myself on the chest. The trouble was the spell had been meant to keep me aloft — just me — and I had Kai to think of too. Whether I liked it or not, he had a death grip on me, and his extra weight hauled us both down hard. 

Spark tried to help. He dug into my jacket with his claws and flapped his wings as hard as he could. He was just too small to do much good. 

I started to say the spell again, for Kai this time, but glanced down as I did. The ground zoomed up at us fast — too fast. I gave up on the spell and shouted at Kai instead. “Brace yourself!” 

Spark let go at the last instant. Kai and I slammed into what had once been the roof of a badly built apartment building in Goblintown. My spell and Spark’s help had slowed us down enough to make sure the landing wasn’t fatal, but it hurt. Kai’s injured arm meant he took it worse than me, and I expected him to howl out in pain. He remained silent. 

Are you alive?

“I think so.” I had to work to croak out the words. Every bit of me ached, but at least I could feel something. “Kai?” 

He still didn’t answer. When I managed to scrape myself off the collapsed rooftop, I saw why. He wasn’t moving. 

I hauled myself over to him to make sure he was still breathing. I didn’t have time to be gentle about it, so I smacked him in the face. His eyelids fluttered open. 

“What was that for?” he said with a snarl. 

“Can you walk?” 

He winced as he tried to push himself up on his injured arm, then stuck out his good one for me. I took it and hauled him to his feet. “That’s another I owe Yabair,” he said.

Spark circled down out of the sky then and landed on my shoulder. “They were just trying to save us. If the Dragon hit us with that breath, we’d shrivel to dust.” 

“Who was planning to get hit by its breath? It wasn’t any easier to survive the flaming version of it, was it?” 

“Good point.” 

I looked up and saw Schaef’s carpet zipping through the air, spiraling around the undead Dragon, keeping it off-balance. Alive, the Dragon would have roared with fury at his prey. His zombified corpse only groaned in frustration as it lumbered through the sky. 

Belle peppered the Emperor’s corpse with spell after spell. None of them seemed to be doing spectacular harm to it, but each blast chipped away a bit more of the creature’s cadaver. Over time, she might have been able to wear the beast down enough to dispatch it, but I didn’t think the Ruler of the Dead would give her and Yabair enough of that. 

“I got a plan,” I said, feeling my bones creak as Kai and I clambered across that rooftop and toward the pit from which the Dragon had risen. 

“What’s that?” 

“We find the Ruler of the Dead, and we kill her.” 

Isn’t she already dead? 

“We take her apart. Grind her into dust. Whatever it takes.” 

Kai clapped me on the back. “I fully endorse this plan.” 

I gave him an odd look. That was just the kind of thing Danto would have said, not Kai. He smirked at me. “I mean, ‘Right behind you.’” 

I couldn’t help but laugh. Kai joined in for a moment, his hand still on my shoulder for support. Then his fingers clamped down hard enough to hurt. 

I glared at him but didn’t cry out. We’d been in enough tight spots together that I knew better than to make noise when he got tense. “What?” I whispered. 

“The Dragon isn’t our only problem,” he said. 

Oh, no.

A low moan started nearby and grew. I glanced back and saw a pile of corpses that had somehow made it down from the top of the Great Circle start to move. They pushed themselves up on their hands and then got to their knees. From there, they climbed to their feet and began to shuffle forward again, their mouths open and emitting horrible groans. Every movement looked like it would have been agony had the creatures who made them been able to feel a thing. 

I looked up at Spark. “I could use some reconnaissance.” 

What? 

“Fly up high and be my eyes in the sky. Let me know what’s happening.” 

He leaped off my shoulder and wound himself into a spiral that led straight up into the air.
That I can do.

I had no idea how far Spark could get from me and still speak into my head, but I figured there was no better time to find out. As he moved higher, Kai and I picked our way over the rubble as fast as we could, heading toward the place we’d last seen the Ruler of the Dead. 

A part of me screamed at me that we were going in the exact opposite direction of the way we should. It informed me that it was only natural — smart, even — to run as far away from the Ruler as we could, but that was just the fear in my gut yammering. My head knew the real trouble was that there was nowhere we could escape to. 

Zombies awake on the wall, sliding down into city
. 

I looked over my shoulder to see that he was right. The creatures had no fear of heights or death. They slid straight over the edge of the Great Circle, landing with sickening, wet crunches. If the first few dozens were destroyed in this way, I supposed they would only provide cushioning for those who came after them.