The four explorers stepped cautiously out of the tunnel into a waiting dark that hung heavy and patient, suggesting a mammoth empty space within Shame. Jonas blinked his eyes, trying to force them to adjust to the dimmer light.
The mottled brass tunnels had been quiet and clean, smelling faintly of lavender soap. Jonas sniffed the air again, still a bit nose-boggled. It smells exactly like the soap that Mom used, the rose-shaped ones that I wasn’t allowed to touch. As they had passed through the door on the asteroid’s skin the glow and roar of the magical flames had died behind, leaving only the brass tunnel that stretched out before them. Glow-globes were set at regular intervals, providing even illumination; the walls were unadorned and showed neither rivet nor seam. It was more than a little amazing to see the same technology in this unbelievable place that could be found now in every city of the world.
After the first twenty minutes of slow, measured plodding with weapons at the ready, Sideways sheathed his gray blade and turned to the others with a shrug.
“Nothing’s bitten us yet, just this hall.” The devilkin snorted.
“Shame is miles across, and we entered near the meridian.” Xenon was doing her best to walk and sketch a rudimentary map in her journal, “Did you think the controls were going to be right inside the door?”
Sideways shrugged again. Linus leaned against the tunnel wall, his iron gauntlet scraping idly against the brass. “The center, then? You believe that would be the most logical place?”
The goblin looked up, quill dripping a bead of ink. “So far there have been no turns, only this single hallway. Let us continue on with less caution and more haste.”
And so they had, until now stepping out into the voluminous empty. Jonas could see the brass floor ahead of them was still illuminated, small footlights bored into the side rail. The path continued on, straight as an arrow, but above he could begin to make out other dim lights—red, blue, green, purple—almost on the edge of vision like the sun’s echo but growing more distinct as he and the others moved farther along in the dark.
“They appear to be ovoid pods, translucent—” Xenon spoke feverishly as she continued to scribble. “Source of illumination, unclear—nor the reason for the differentiation between the spectrum. Perhaps some form of—”
“Dragons,” Sideways cut her off. “It’s the dragons. Sleeping away in glass jars.”
Jonas squinted and saw that it was true. Hanging from nearly invisible cables and pipes, the vast glowing firmament of eggshaped pods swayed gently as if in a breeze. Dragons. Each one of those jars has a dragon in it. One. Two. Three. Red dragon. Blue dragon. Gold dragon. Four. Five. Six. Seven. There were too many to count. They were nearly a mile away across the interior dark sky of the asteroid, he could only make out vague outlines and the colors of scales. But it was enough to send his hand flying to the hilt of his sword—then uncertainly to the hilt of the magic blade Hecate at his belt. Jonas thought of Rime for no reason he could name.
“Let us proceed.” Linus’s winter voice pulled them back into focus. “The path continues, and by my estimation a half mile farther across this bay I believe I can spot a central cluster of some sort. Sideways, do you see it?”
The devilkin stood up on his tiptoes and looked farther down the path. He nodded. “The regular light definitely gets brighter up ahead; looks like a small dome of some sort.”
Xenon began to trot past the others, still furiously sketching the oval dragon containers and taking notes, all while calling over her shoulder. “Then let’s hurry! We can’t be more than an hour before Rime will try to slow the asteroid. The economy of purpose; function is supreme—all hallmarks of many Precursor relics. They built nothing that was not purposeful; they would not leave a door and a single path and a prominent central node that wasn’t in some way essential to the operation of Shame.”
Because if there’s nothing there—Jonas thought, as he was sure the others all did—we won’t have time to run back out and try another door.
The old hunter sighed and turned to Jonas. Sideways had already begun to lope after the scribbling goblin, studied disinterest in the hundreds of slumbering monsters suspended above them bolted to his orange face. When Linus placed a careful hand on the squire’s shoulder, Jonas couldn’t help but stiffen. “May I lean on you and try to keep pace?”
The squire grunted and shifted his weight so he could support some of the old knight’s. He set a quick march without a word. Rime would boil me alive if she saw this.
“Necessity,” Linus said with gratitude. “It is an ugly wool shawl that the young spurn, but the old press to their breast without shame or regret.”
Jonas did not respond at once, just kept his eyes on the path ahead. Then finally, he could not resist. When am I going to have this chance again?
“So, you’re still going to try to kill Rime when this is done, right?”
“Yes,” the hunter replied, his breathing labored.
“I know that wild mages have a bad reputation, and I know that you probably know a lot more than I know about them,” the squire pressed on, “but Rime is trying really hard to find a way to not go crazy.”
“They almost always do try,” Linus replied. “How does she fare?”
Jonas bit his lip. He thought about the boat and the lightning—and about how eager Rime had been to match her magic against the asteroid.
“I have talked to you about this before,” the hunter went on, as if Jonas had responded. “Not you, young squire. But people like you. Friends, lovers, companions of wild mages. They all think that this time it will be different. That their friend can beat it, can find a way out. I told you then, and I tell you now. She cannot beat it. There is no way out. She will go mad, and with the Magic Wild unfettered and screaming in her hands—you of all people have seen what she can do while she is in control. Do I need to say the rest . . . again?”
Jonas bowed his head, then shook it. “Well, we’ll see. We’ll see about that.”
Linus smiled, an empty reflex. “I will wear the shawl, young man. You wear whatever cloak suits you as long as you can.”
“Jonas! Sir Linus!” Xenon called from a few hundred paces ahead. “Come quickly!”
The knight and the squire trotted on until they joined their companions. Jonas could immediately see the source of the goblin’s alarm. A long section of the path ahead, perhaps a hundred feet, was completely dark. After that blank section, the path continued and the dome of the purported control room was a quarter-mile distant.
“What happened to the path lights?” Linus demanded. “Some malfunction?”
“’Fraid not, boss.” Sideways was kneeling at the edge of shadows. He activated the belt lantern he carried and pointed it forward.
Long, thick gouges had been torn out of the Arkanic metal, cruel grooves nearly a handspan across. The assassin doused his lantern with alacrity. “Something got loose, I think.”
“But this asteroid, the architecture and technology of the Precursors!” Xenon protested. “The unbelievable prowess to create a vessel of this size, suspend the dragons, keep them in some sort of magical slumber—all of it, it’s just so perfect.”
“All it takes is one nail out of place to throw a horseshoe,” Jonas said, and looked down to see his good steel was already in his hand.
Sideways nodded his approval and flipped his own gray blade back out into his hand. The white sword rasped against Linus’s breastplate as he drew it free.
The goblin turned to the three swords and jammed her journal under her arm, quill behind her ear. “Okay, let’s not panic. Shame has been flying for thousands of years. This could have happened days after it was launched and the dragon died hundreds of years ago from starvation.”
The devilkin cocked his head at the archaeologist, then chuckled as he stepped out beyond the path lights. “Yeah, I just don’t see us getting through the evening without fighting a dragon. It’s just that kind of night.”
Jonas and the old hunter followed, keeping Xenon in the space between them. Sideways will be best hiding in the dark; Linus and I can protect Xenon and keep moving.
The cavernous dome of the asteroid became all the more oppressive as they navigated the gap between lights. It was easier to see the dragon-planets up above in what Jonas realized he was thinking of as the sky. One seemed almost close enough to touch, pulsing a lambent purple, but the squire knew it was just a trick of perspective.
“Have you ever fought a dragon before?” Jonas asked in a low tone.
“I’ve seen a couple. Traded Sarmadi prayer-daggers with one. The other was wild, a venom spar down near Seroholm; just saw it from a distance and was able to avoid it.” Xenon’s voice was a nervous clatter of syllables. The squire spared a glance and saw that she was still attempting to record in her journal, using the carefully hooded light of her own bull’s-eye lantern.
Linus said nothing. Jonas began to ask the question again, when the purple dragon-jar caught his attention again. Is it brighter now? Wait, no darker? Wait—no—!
With a coruscation of air, the glass pod he watched blazed a fervent honey gold. He had only a moment to register what was happening before the creature was upon them. It was wrapped around the jar, blocking the light!
In the river of darkness, between roads of brass and light, the dragon landed before them. A great volume of air, strangely gentle like a breath, and they could see it outlined in the uncertain light coming from the central dome beyond. It was thirty feet high at the shoulder, wings wide and enveloping—half butterfly, half unraveling cloak. Its scales seemed to be a dark purple, and a fierce magenta light burned from its eyes and mouth and along the ridges of its sternum. Jonas opened his mouth to scream but saw the empty stone of Linus’s gaze and the startled curiosity in Xenon’s, so he gripped his sword’s hilt tight until his knuckles popped and did his best to remain calm.
“Caro don ves,” the dragon spoke, brightly colored vapor escaping its nostrils.
Linus kept the white sword high and his eyes on the dragon. “Scholar Xenon. I do not speak this tongue, do you?”
“Uh!” Xenon took a stuttered step forward, pushing the fingers of one hand into her temple as if they might force out the lore she needed. “Only three words. Could be related to High Valerian; that’s supposed to be a bastardization of the old dragon speech. But it could also maybe be Dwarven? Lots of consonants and monosyllabic structure. I need it to talk more!”
“Ves par mondat? Ves par Sondenai?” the dragon breathed again.
Jonas swung back to Xenon, hope growing in his breast.
“No! Sondenai! That’s Tonic—really archaic Tonic, but I recognize the proper noun! It means ‘Sun Child’! It’s what they called the Precursors! Okay, okay, okay—” Xenon covered both eyes with her long green fingers as she concentrated. “It’s been a long time, but I think I can cobble together a rudimentary sort of conversation. I think it just asked if we are mortal—if we are Precursors? I’ll tell it that we are mortal, but not members of the Lost—because that’s pretty obvious, I would imagine.”
Xenon took a slow step forward, pulling her journal free and pressing it tightly between her hands for comfort. “Nego Sondenai! Uh—ves par rogollo . . . ?”
The shadowed dragon breathed out another fume of vapor, this one a bright red. Jonas leaned in closer to the archaeologist. “What did you say?” he whispered.
“I told it we are explorers . . . I think.” Xenon frowned, then looked up as a strange sound filled the dark heavens inside the asteroid.
This sound needed no translation. The dragon was laughing. More vapors of dark blues and vicious greens escaped its jaws as it spoke, a long stream of the forgotten language. Xenon did her best to keep up with a translation.
“Uh—it slept, then it dreamed. Then in dreams it heard—something—a horn! The horn of—the dark. It woke but still dreamed? It knelt before the—I think—queen, maybe—of the Dark and swore to serve her. I am the second servant? Or is it messenger? The second servant of the Dark. It traded its name to awake and found itself here, in the Sun Child’s prison. It—began to feed—on its brothers and sisters to survive—blech. It saw in dreams—or it dreamed it saw—little men, little mondat—mortals!—like us who would bring the prison back home. Zero! It means Zero! And it has come with a message. This is it! This is the “thing with no name” that awoke! The Node woke this dragon and somehow it made the asteroid return!”
Xenon stumbled to a halt, but the dragon had been silent for a long moment. It spoke one final time. “The Circle will Break. The City will Fall. There is no Power to Prevent, nor Song to Preserve. Kneel before the End.”
Jonas had just enough time to realize he understood the creature’s words before he saw the rainbow vapor ignite and a vast plume of energy come screaming out of the dragon’s jaws. He surged forward, hoping to pull Xenon back from the assault, but Linus and his white sword were already there. The hunter stepped in front of her, and the patchwork energies of the dragon’s breath were absorbed into the blank metal.
“Scholar Xenon, fall back,” Linus commanded. “Squire, you guard my back. I didn’t spot a tail on this creature, but it seems agile enough. We will keep its attention firmly fixed on us, understood?”
“Yes!” Jonas stepped into place, keeping one eye on Xenon’s retreat as she hurried back toward the lighted pathway behind them.
The dragon howled with a rage that teetered on the edge of delight and breathed more of the ramshackle energy upon them. The white sword again devoured it. “The creature is mad. It’s been feeding on the life force of its brethren for who knows how long. Its breath is some bizarre mixture of different elements.”
“I’m just glad it breathes something the sword eats,” Jonas grunted.
“Yes, well—” Linus shifted his grip on the white sword. “It appears he has grown bored with that tactic. Here he comes!”
“Does your magic sword happen to kill dragons with a single touch?” The squire spun to cover Linus’s right flank.
“I don’t know. Does yours?” the old man shifted his stance, keeping his elbow high.
Oh yeah. Sir Pocket’s sword. Jonas looked down at his belt at the hilt of the silver sword. A small, tender part of his heart had almost hoped to see it blaze like moonlight in his hands when he brought it up from the well, but it had remained lifeless and cold. Will it even work for me? Did I break the magic when I broke the curse? Or is it that I’m not . . .
“Move, boy!” Linus’s voice cracked like an autumn twig.
The dragon’s shape twisted and furled like a flag in the wind, its weight seeming to evaporate and vanish as it curled in upon itself. The phosphorescent eyes boiled as they advanced, leaving trails of lollipop vapor behind. Jonas dodged right, and the older knight heaved himself into the darkness to the left as the creature whipped past like an angry, hissing piece of the night sky. The dragon pulled up sharp and fluttered above their heads, laughing among the faintly gleaming planet containers.
“Okay. We need a plan. Some sort of dragon-fighting strategy,” Jonas panted, picking himself up off the floor. “What’ve you got?”
The old hunter was already on his feet, white sword ready, and his eyes following the creature’s languorous descent. “The plan remains; we keep its attention focused on us and we wait.”
The Messenger, if that was the creature’s name, landed lightly again a dozen paces away. It spread its long, ragged wings wide and reached out to envelop both the squire and Linus. Jonas held his sword up and slashed out at the approaching purple-black. The simple steel rebounded, nearly nicking his cheek—but the dragon howled in sudden anguish. He looked at his plain sword in amazement and then up toward the beast’s lantern eyes, and his mouth dropped open.
“We wait for that.” Linus nodded.
Sideways was swinging from one of the Messenger’s long, crenulated horns with one hand, the other plunged his gray blade all the way to the hilt into the dragon’s flesh. It screamed again, vomiting energy of a half-dozen hues as it tried to dislodge the devilkin. Sideways methodically hooked his arm around the horn and wrapped his legs around the dragon’s neck—then began to plunge Chet again and again into the open wound. White blood that sizzled and smoked pulsed forward, giving off its own sick pearl light.
The Messenger began to flap its ravel-wings in desperation, and then Linus moved, as if he had waited for a signal. With surgical cuts, he sliced through the dragon’s wings until they tore and peeled apart. Jonas took a step forward, then realized he had absolutely no idea what he could do to help. He looked back over his shoulder and saw Xenon standing in the distant path light, her eyes wide and her journal and quill dancing.
In maddened frenzy, the dragon reached up—Jonas at last saw the almost fragile claws at the end of its wing tips—and plucked the devilkin off its neck and hurled him away into the darkness. Sideways rolled his body in some manner of gargoyle-grace and landed lightly on his hands and feet, Chet held between his teeth. He threw Jonas a wink and trotted back toward the dying beast. Linus lunged and drove the point of the white sword deep into the Messenger’s torso. Bleeding and burning and its wings unthreaded, the strange dark thing curled forward, its jaws still puking prismatic death. The squire dashed to Linus’s side and bodily hauled the old man and his weapon free; they had become caught in the tangle of flesh and twisting muscle. The two humans made it out of the way just shy of the dragon’s crashing head.
The Messenger wheezed and bled and light dripped out of its jaws. It was dying but not yet dead. Sideways sauntered up, Chester held loosely in one hand, its blade leaned against his shoulder. “Aww, and you had all those hundreds of years to prepare the big scary speech.”
“Sideways,” Linus said with quiet reproach.
The devilkin held a theatrical hand up to his ear and leaned over the wheezing dragon. “What was that, Cosmos Dragon? Blah, blah, I had time to workshop my backstory in between eons of masturbation and eating roaches?”
“I hate when he does this.” Linus carefully checked the white sword for any remnants of the dragon’s ichor before sheathing it again at his side. “It’s tawdry.”
Jonas sheathed his own sword, not knowing quite how to respond to the devilkin’s elation. The squire tapped the silver hilt of Hecate; it was cold to the touch.
Sideways chuckled. “You want the honors, young sir? Not many can claim the title of dragonslayer in this day and age.”
“No, that’s okay,” the squire said, waving to Xenon as she approached breathless.
“Whatever.” Sideways shrugged and stabbed his gray blade adroitly between the Messenger’s fading eyes.
The goblin leaned in close over the devilkin’s shoulder, filling a full page with her sketch of the dragon’s head. “Never seen anything like this in the fossil record; there’s no record of such a creature. Do you suppose they were all taken by the Lost on Shame, or perhaps did this specimen mutate over the centuries as it fed off the other dragons?”
“Something to ponder later,” Linus instructed and pointed toward the illuminated dome ahead. “If there is one.”
The four explorers left their questions and the dead dragon behind. “How much time do we have?” Jonas looked up over the brass dome. It echoed the overall structure of the entire asteroid, a perfect circle. But set in one side was a triangular doorway where the illuminated pathway terminated.
“Uh—maybe thirty minutes before the mile limit?” Xenon said. “Kind of lost track a bit back there!”
“Marks on the dome, claw marks.” Sideways pointed.
The devilkin was right; more of the Messenger’s claw marks could be seen around the triangular door, like a drunkard’s key scratching at a lock. As they approached, they could now see above the curve of the dome signs of bubbled and melted metal, burn marks from where the dragon’s breath had finally eaten its way inside.
“Why did it want in?” Jonas asked nervously, but the other three were already running forward into the dome. He followed, his heart thick.
The doorway led to a small room that was unsurprisingly circular. Jonas joined his companions where they stood speechless, looking around the room.
The walls were covered with Precursor sigils, etched into the metal. In the center of the room was a low console, about hip height on the squire. The console’s material was clean white, and its face was covered with row after row of square buttons. On each button was a different sigil, and they glowed in more colors than even the Messenger’s fire. A table of jewels, just as the king said!
All of this was a lot for Jonas to absorb, but the most striking feature of all was the vicious black punctures in the trim perfection of the Arkanic console. Some of the buttons were cracked and scattered, or hanging by the most slender of glass cylinders that apparently suspended all of them.
“It reached in here and changed the course,” the goblin said. “I’m making a leap, I know—but we don’t have time to ponder. Zero sent the Node here, it woke up the dragon, and then it clawed its way in here until it could reach the console. Somehow it turned the asteroid around.”
Linus nodded, his eyes still making a careful inventory of the room.
The devilkin sheathed his sword. He patted the goblin on the shoulder and moved to the side of the console and settled himself comfortably on the edge.
“Well,” he said, not unkindly to Xenon, “we got the dragon. You’re up.”