58: ASSAULT ON MORIOS

Atrine, Jorat Dominion, Quuros Empire. Three days since Raverí D’Lorus seriously overestimated her father’s ability to remember everyone he’d murdered

Janel watched as the portal closed and then turned to Senera. “Give me the branch.”

“What?” Senera blinked at her.

“Give me the branch. You burned through any trustworthiness I might have felt for you years ago.” She held out her hand.

“You didn’t used to be this paranoid.” Senera handed over the small twig. “Don’t break it by accident or we’ll be doing all this for nothing.”

“I’ll be careful.” Janel wrapped the twig in a strengthening spell before she tucked it into her bodice. “Now I want you to ask the Name of All Things how to slay Morios.”

“You know I hate asking anything but a yes-or-no question,” Senera protested.

The high general raised an eyebrow. “The Name of All—what?” He looked toward Emperor Tyentso for an answer.

“I’ll tell you about it later,” Tyentso said. “Prepare to be unhappy.”

Senera gave Janel a glare she promptly ignored.

Janel said, “Ask, anyway. And fast.”

Senera pulled out the small slate inkstone. She picked up the brush and ink already on the table and wrote: Don’t fight him.

Everyone stared.

“Helpful,” Tyentso said. “Extremely helpful. Why don’t we skip the ‘don’t fight him’ part since it’s not a gods’ damned option.”

“Can you distract Morios for long enough for me to put this spear through his eye?” Janel tightened her grip on Khoreval.

“I don’t see why not.”

High General Milligreest set his hand down on the table between them. “Let the army soften him up first. We have the scorpions in position.”

“Qoran,” Tyentso said gently, “that’s a good way to lose a lot of your men.”

The high general gave the emperor a tight smile. “I wasn’t asking your permission.” With that he waved a hand toward his officers. “Tell your men to begin when ready. Start with dragon fire.”

“Dragon fire?” Tyentso said.

“Coincidentally enough, we call it that, yes,” Milligreest admitted.

“What happens if they miss?” Janel said.

“I imagine they’ll hit the city,” Senera replied.

General Milligreest left the tent, and everyone followed.

Morios still played in the city. Janel shuddered to think how Ninavis and the rest of her crew were doing. With any luck, they’d managed to find the duke and rescue him. And if that didn’t work, well … there was always Dorna and plan B.¹

“Second rank—load!” someone called out.

Janel forced her thoughts back to the dragon. Putting herself in a position where she could stab him in the head would be the tricky part—he was so enormous. Unfortunately, neither Suless nor Thurvishar had ever taught Janel to fly.

It would have been so handy.

Even as Janel contemplated options, she heard one of the men yell, “Going bright!”

What? Janel looked over at the scorpions. Each catapult-like device’s driver had dismounted, bringing with them the same spheres they’d been using to steer the scorpions. But now that said spheres had been removed from their protective casings, the undersides were revealed—uncovering painfully radiant light beams the soldiers pointed straight down at the ground.

“Front rank—target!”

As one, fifty light rays converged on Morios as he rampaged through Atrine. A few lights wandered off target but were quickly and expertly corrected. Janel had no idea what that accomplished, given that they were still at least two miles from Atrine. The impossibly bright lights didn’t seem to do much more than spotlight the dragon. Maybe they hoped to lure Morios closer?

“Front rank—fire!”

Janel blinked. “That’s too far away. They’ll never hit—”

Each scorpion tail launched a small barrel up into the air on a trajectory that wouldn’t make it a hundred feet, let alone miles. Yet when each barrel reached the height of its arc, it sped away at an impossibly fast speed as if some unseen god had thrown it. Each barrel slammed into Morios at exactly the same point highlighted by its scorpion’s light.

And exploded.

Morios reared back. Yellow-white fire clung to his neck and back, throwing out sparks and globs of molten metal. The dragon’s scales glowed red hot and began to melt and drip.

“Second rank—fire!”

The Quuros army fired again.

Senera leaned toward Janel. “If you ever wondered how Quur conquered an entire continent, now you know.”

The high general smirked.

“And then remember this still wasn’t enough to invade the Manol,” Senera added.

Morios swung his head toward their position on the lakeside and roared, incredibly loud even from that distance.

Then he spoke.

“Ha!” the dragon said. “So you do want to fight!” Then in a conversational tone, Morios added, “It will give me something to do until my brother arrives.”

“Brother?” Janel looked over at Senera. “Who’s his brother?”

The witch shrugged. “Who knows?”

Morios began scraping away his melting metal scales, flinging bits of steaming death into the water and out over the city.

Then the scales began to regrow.

“Son of a—” Tyentso glared at the high general. “What else do you have?”

The high general seemed equally displeased by the dragon’s lack of dying. “The normal casket allotment—most of which won’t work. We have Argas’s fire, but it doesn’t burn hot enough to melt metal. And seeing as Morios is made of metal, that would be pointless. We have rhino caskets…”

Tyentso growled. “I didn’t serve in the damn army, Qoran. What’s a rhino casket?”

“Just metal. All it does is hit you, but it hits you hard.”

“Perfect. Order your men to load that up and hit Morios with all of it at once. I’ll buy them time. Red Eyes, what’s your name again?”

“Janel.”

“With me, Janel. Morios is bringing the fight to us.” Tyentso ran down the slope toward the scorpions as the high general ordered one of his men to relay the orders.

Janel looked back toward Atrine. She’d assumed Morios’s sword wings would never support him in flight, but she was wrong; Morios had finished his grooming and now flew straight toward his attackers, and anyone else on the hill. And he flew fast.

“All ranks—casket change rhino.”

Up and down the line, men hurried to change out their ammunition. Janel ran after Tyentso in time to see her run up to one of the scorpions and demand one of the caskets. The soldiers blinked at her, probably because it took both of them to load the ammunition, which clearly made it too heavy for two women to lift.

Janel just tucked Khoreval under one arm and picked up the casket with the other. “Where do you want this?” she asked Tyentso.

“On the ground in front of me.” As Janel set it down, Tyentso asked, “So you’re Qoran’s daughter, right?”

“Going bright!” the caller shouted.

As Janel stared at her, wide-eyed, Tyentso grinned. “Process of elimination. I’ve been stuck in this too long not to know a few of the prophecies. Cover your eyes—”

“All ranks—target!”

Janel covered her eyes just as the soldiers aimed their lights at Morios once more. They were angled much tighter this time: he was nearly on top of them.

“All ranks—fire!”

Well over a hundred rhino caskets sprang up into the air and then shot straight at Morios. Tyentso bent down and touched the casket at her feet and then raised the Scepter of Quur above her head. A shimmery rainbow force field sprang up, blocking the hail of metal blades that rained down from Morios’s mouth and wings.

But another thing also happened: the metal casket Tyentso touched vibrated and then slammed into the nearest metal scorpion, making its operators curse in surprise. A split second later, Morios jerked downward, as the hundreds of caskets Tyentso had linked to hers slammed into his body. The rhino caskets then stuck to his body as though glued in place.² When the targeteers returned their spotlights to their normal position—pointed at the ground—the caskets obediently tried to follow orders and slam into the earth as well, taking Morios with them.

“I’ll ground the bastard, you—” Tyentso cut off as both women saw Tyentso’s sharp silhouette highlighted against the ground, so black it was as if something had set a piece of the sun behind her.

Or was targeting the emperor with a scorpion’s aiming light.

“Behind you!” Janel yelled.

Tyentso threw a portal down under Janel’s feet even as a green glass casket slammed into Tyentso and broke, flooding the area around the emperor with acid.

Janel fell through the portal and landed farther up the hillside, giving her a perfect view of the emperor’s protective shield flickering out and dying. The dragon had been busy trying to resist the pull of all those giant magnets, but when he saw the shield fail, he must have seen his chance. He breathed out again, nearly horizontal with the scorpions. And this time, his deadly rain of blades found their mark as they slammed into equipment and men with equal vigor. Unlaunched caskets stored on the scorpions’ backs exploded, setting off a chain reaction. Impossibly bright aiming crystals fell to the ground, pointed in every direction.

Morios screamed as different parts of his body were pulled in a hundred different directions, but with the magnets no longer working in concert, no single direction exerted enough force to control him.

“Run!” Janel was screaming, heading toward the dragon. “Everyone run!” She bent down to help Senera stand on her feet, but the witch seemed undamaged except for grass stains.

Morios landed on top of the Quuros war camp.

He raked a wing along the shore while bending down to scoop up a giant volume of earth, men, and equipment into his mouth. As far back as she was, Janel still found herself leaping out of the way to avoid being split in half by a wing feather shaped like a giant sword two feet wide.

Tyentso stood, acid spilling off her as though she were made of glass. She threw a spell at the dragon, but whatever it was, it seemed to have little effect except to draw his attention. Then Janel realized the emperor had done something to those few caskets that had landed on Morios’s neck, pulling the dragon’s head toward the ground.

The dragon’s head would never be closer to the ground than it was at that moment.

It might well be her only chance.

“Senera! Help me reach him!”

Senera snapped out her hands and gestured—and the ground next to Morios surged forward, making a ramp.

Janel sprinted up it and leaped, both hands on Khoreval. She aimed the spear straight for Morios’s eye.

Her thrust hit true. She felt the quicksilver metal of his eye give, then shatter as the spear drove deep. Morios roared, the sound loud enough to send a nightmarish stab of pain through her skull. He began tossing his head backward, ripping away chunks of scales and whatever passed for flesh on his body.

Janel faced a choice: either hold on to the spear and let herself be tossed a lethal distance into the air, or let go and fall a much shorter distance to the ground. Tyentso might be able to catch her. Maybe.

She chose the latter.

Janel felt her leg break as she landed, a searing snap of pain.

The dragon roared, and then roared again, and then kept making the noise, rhythmically.

Morios was laughing.

“Brilliant! I love it!” Morios pulled Khoreval from his eye. “This is the most fun I’ve had in millennia!”

Then the dragon snapped the spear in two.