The Confliction (Book Three of the Dragoneers Saga) (Dragoneer Saga) (14 page)

King Blanchard snarled up at them irritably. “It already got what it wanted.” He let the words out like a sigh. The depth of unease he was feeling as he recalled the sensation was clearly evident. “It’s loose now, and it’s not one of those foul flying alien things that’ve been attacking. Those things are just this’n’s food. This is their master. Now, get me out of this druid’s skin, Mysterian, or I will haunt you and your kin until the days cease to turn. We have to save those that Richard left behind. We owe these Outlanders nothing.”

“Not yet.” She grinned at his grit. Her eyes were wild, and red from sniffling over Herald. “We need Linux’s knowledge of the ways of Dou, and we don’t want him falling under that sort of influence. I can’t swap you back just yet.”

“They extracted blood from the Sarax we held captive,” Rolph lectured to no one in particular. “They used it when they brewed the vat of pigment for the sacred ink because it changes tones as different levels of self-acceptance cause brain fluids to change paraximia. All of the acolytes are tattooed as they enter the Order. They—”

“Shut it, man,” King Blanchard snapped. “Use those muscles and get these fargin’ witches away from me. You stole my fargin’ me, man! You owe me loyalty at the least.”

Linux, in Rolph’s able body, couldn’t help but comply.

The gigantic thing that emerged from the open drawbridge-type door of the star ship was ready to stretch its legs. It had many of them at times, some retracting completely inside its bulk, while others extended like tentacles. Most of the limbs ended in three opposable claws, but a few looked like barbed spikes. Blue and purple veins showed through the alien’s thin milky skin, as if it were parchment thin. The thing was hairless, and its blood so cold that it was comfortable in the late winter, deep-mountain climate. As it moved about, it pulled and stretched itself until it was formed into a massive pug-faced canine shape, as tall as four men at the shoulder, and twice as long, with two lower fangs jutting up over the upper part of its snout on either side. It had studied this world through the eyes of its drones. It was seeing it now through huge orbs as shiny as a polished steel shield reflecting the sunset, and full of sparkling shimmers of scarlet and ruby. It knew the humans were vulnerable, but it had a deep fear of the High Dracus, so it was wary.

The Sarax, as man called them, were in truth only this super-adaptable monster’s self-regenerating food source, but once they entered this world’s atmosphere and morphed, they somehow began to draw the lesser bipeds to their will, and grew harder to control. The master alien had some control over them still, but not nearly as much as it had over the things in their first stage of being. The master alien had been content in its ship, living better in the controlled climate than it would in the long summers of this land. The planet’s magnetic pull powered the star ship well. After it made the girl let the Sarax loose, though, there was no choice. It had to come out and feed.

Exercising what proximal control it had over the Sarax, the alien began thrumming out a deep, resonant buzz. Soon a Sarax was circling close. The alien waited patiently. When the Sarax was about thirty feet away, a long sticky wad of gray-green tongue shot out of its mouth. It snatched the buzzing morsel and retracted with a snap. A moment later, the alien spat a grisly steaming chunk of wing-skin and cartilage into a snowdrift before bounding away, feeling somewhat excited to be uncooped after so many decades.

The alien had no terrible designs for man. Not yet. It was well entertained by the things they did to each other, though, and it longed to taste them. The sheer joy the Sarax felt when they ravished a human body was intense, so much so that the alien often intruded into their minds and savored the feelings that assailed them when they were feeding.

Human nature was harder to control than other things, but not by much. The men who worshiped the planet and marked their skin with injected fluids were wise, inquisitive, and careful at first. It was only a matter of time before one of them came along who was weak enough to break. After that, it was just a matter of persistence.

The alien loped south, in long ground-eating strides. It leapt and hopped and jumped through the mountainous terrain as if it had lived there all its life. Soon it came to the valley that sheltered the place the humans called Kingsmen’s Keep. There were men outside standing guard, but they were nothing. Neither was the thick, half-buried block structure that formed the place.

The alien commanded its unseen followers with a shift in the pitch of the noise it emitted. Soon the men outside the keep were battling with a Sarax, and then a band of trellkin came out of the forest and joined in. Not far away, a pair of ogres were attacked where they were halfheartedly standing guard over the human stronghold. It was a rout. The three men who didn’t make it into the closing doors were killed by the Sarax and then consumed. Antlered trollish creatures came wandering around aimlessly, with little idea how to get at what was inside the manmade structure.

Inside the keep, there is an elevated lookout loft. From outside the mostly underground structure, the position is undetectable. From inside, Ranger Malvin Woodholm, the sentry on duty, could see in the cardinal directions and across the valley. Malvin was pressed to the viewing slot as he tried to see what was happening outside. The commander was yelling, the old Camille mother was yelling at him, too. They wanted to know what was outside, but he couldn’t see what the men were all riled up about. Then a Sarax swept past his limited rectangle of vision and a cold gust stung his eyes. He blinked and ignored the chaos in the room below, and then looked again. At first he thought a giant snow ball was rolling at them, or perhaps it was an avalanche. Then a long thin strand of whatever it was shot out and latched a hold of something. A moment later, Malvin saw an ogre go across his field of vision as if it were flying. The big green-skinned thing was pulled into a huge undulating maw. He realized then that the massive white bulk he was seeing was no bank of snow. It was something terrible. He would have rung the alarm bells, but they were already ringing on their own. This stopped him cold for a heartbeat. The ground was shaking.

He looked around and called down to the commander, but the ranger captain and the old Camille woman were moving away. He looked back out the embrasure and all he could see was the white, milky behemoth; then the whole keep began to quake, and a sound so low and terrible that it shook his guts wailed forth.

Part of the keep went tearing away in a sky-revealing crumble. Bitter-cold air came rushing in. Men screamed, and the few women left at the keep huddled in fear. Below the lookout, people were scrambling about trying to avoid the falling blocks and masonry.

Nothing had ever breached the keep before, and now it was only half there. Above, a massive bulk of pale-fleshed monster looked down with bright, fiery eyes that reflected the clear blue of the sky in their depths. Then it began to feed. Like leg-thick vines, tentacles came reaching into the opening and plucked squirming men right out of their tracks.

Mother Camille stepped back into view and Malvin felt a bit of hope as he remembered her boy was one of the Dragoneers. Surely they would come and put an end to this. The old woman called up at him. “Get on, man. The keep’s not a safe—” Then a stark white rope wrapped around her face and she was lifted and twisted violently into the sky by the neck. Malvin watched helplessly as she was crushed, and then thrown into the terrifying thing’s great mouth. Malvin crumpled to his knees as the trolls and Sarax came storming into the opening. He reached for a weapon, but it was no use. He knew that in a matter of moments, he too would be consumed.

As it munched down the remains of Rikky’s mother, the master alien decided that human flesh tasted far better than Sarax meat. It wanted to seek out the centers of population now. It wanted to satiate a centuries old hunger. It wanted to gain control of man, as it had the Sarax, and harvest them. It stayed there at the keep, pondering these things, and how to go about them, as it fed long into the night.

When word came to Delton of a massive Sarax attack on Indale, Aikira was overcome with grief so powerful that she was unable to function. Everything and everyone she had ever loved, save for her dragon and her fellow Dragoneers, was there. Only after Rikky urged her out of the city proper, and they were mounted on their dragons, did she start to get a hold of herself.