Quirk stumbled yet again, scraped her knees yet again, was dragged to her feet yet again. The man from the pay wagons was unrelenting. His arm was a steel bar, his fist a vise that held her, heaved her inexorably upward. She had clawed at both hand and arm and achieved nothing. She had pushed the man too far, well beyond his breaking point, and she could not pull him back.
Fear thrummed through her. Her legs shook uncontrollably, threatened to send her tumbling again. She tried to breathe, tried to find her center.
They spiraled up. The path wove its way around Hallows’ Mouth, twisting through arches of heat-scorched stone, narrowing to thin precipices, weaving around vents that bubbled and belched foul sulfurous smoke. She tried to keep her free hand pressed to the side of the volcano, but as their elevation increased, the stone became too hot to touch. Above her, the sky grew darker.
She had a good view of the battlefield now, could see how paltry Will’s forces looked against those of the Consortium. Any tiny flaw in the plan and they would be utterly obliterated. And there were so many flaws.
Right now, Quirk felt like she was the largest one.
Eventually, the path twisted through an archway leading into the craggy cliff face. They were halfway up the volcano’s side. By Quirk’s estimate she had been climbing for almost two hours. Her breath was ragged, her legs shook. She was having trouble distinguishing terror from exhaustion.
The tunnel closed over her like a clenching fist.
“Like I explained, I’m completely willing to take an IOU,” she said between gasps, but the man had long since stopped paying attention to her.
The heat rose. Sweat stuck her colorful robes to her body. She felt too exposed. She should have argued with Will for the role of a soldier. At least she would have gotten some armor that way.
The tunnel sank deeper into the rock. The walls took on a twisted, jagged look, as if the path had been forced into the volcano against the rock’s will. Torches gave off a smoky red light.
A pair of doors emerged from the gloom. They were massive, painted the same black as the pay wagons. A single leathery wing carved into the surface of each. She was dragged unceremoniously to their foot. They towered over her. Doors for giants. For gods. For dragons.
The man banged hard on the door, the steel knuckles of his gauntlet booming off the wood. The sound echoed down the empty stone corridor.
There were no guards here. She supposed she knew why. She supposed she knew exactly what was behind those doors. You didn’t need guards when anyone smarter than a particularly blunt rock knew to stay away.
The man dropped her to the ground. She cried out as she struck the unforgiving stone once more. But this time he didn’t pull her to her feet. This time he walked away.
She watched him leave, too exhausted to beg anymore. This wasn’t how it had all been meant to happen. Not at all.
Behind her, the door creaked open.
She tried to take stock, to get a grip on herself. She knew what was behind that door. She knew who was behind it. They were why she had gone on this stupid gods-hexed escapade in the first place. Just two days ago she had been explaining how seeing them was one of the few important things left to her in the world. And now she couldn’t move.
She was surrounded by fire. She could feel it pulsing through the mountain. She could feel creatures defined by it waiting for her. She tried to take strength from that.
I should be as at home here as they are.
Which was great, and everything, but even if she was as at home as they were, they still outnumbered and outweighed her to a laughable degree.
“Enter.” The single word boomed out. More of a growl or a roar than a word. She felt her sternum vibrate with the force of it.
Her fear. The heat. The power of that voice. Her desire to immolate herself against the flame of a dragon, a real true dragon… It all twisted inside of her. It all came together and made that voice utterly compelling, utterly irresistible. She knew she could run, yet she found herself clambering to shaking feet, leaning on the black door for support as she pushed her way into the room.
She had to see. She had to.
The chamber beyond was vast in the same way that a mountain is vast. Quite possibly because the chamber occupied almost all of a mountain. Its ceiling arced up to the crater far above. Its walls tumbled down toward the smoking pit of lava far below. Heat clogged the room, pressed against Quirk like a physical force. She had to push through it to get into the room. She blinked her suddenly dry eyes, tried to take everything in.
Around a central column of smoke that plumed toward the distant crater, the central crags of Hallows’ Mouth had been cut into flat tiers.
Each and every one dripped with absurd wealth.
She scrubbed at her eyes several times waiting for the heat-induced mirage to fade away, but it did not. It stayed resolutely, stubbornly there. And for the first time, Quirk truly understood why Lette and Balur would go to such great lengths to try to steal this wealth.
In Tamathia, the university was considered one of the wealthiest institutions in the country. It had an endowment that would last it generations under even the worst financial climates. It owned significant parts of large cities, and counted as the largest landowner shy of the emperor.
All of the university’s wealth would perhaps have counted for one of the tiers she could make out now.
As she watched, a small cascade of coins tumbled from the edge of one tier. They crashed and clattered down onto the one below, dislodged a small mountain of necklaces. They went spilling down toward the edge. Enough gold to feed a midsize village for a year spilled into the volcano’s burning magma.
Quirk tore her eyes away from the obscene waste of wealth and back to the movement that had started it all. Slowly, uncoiling at a leisurely pace, the dragon emerged.
It was sixty yards long from nose to tail. Its body was jet black, sinuous. Golden eyes glittered in a fine-boned, elegant head. Nostrils flared red, then yellow, then blue. Flames jetted out as it stretched wings like silken expanses of midnight. It opened its mouth slightly and a bright red, forked tongue tasted the air.
Quirk was frozen. Mattrax and Dathrax both had been majestic, titans of the air, but this creature, this was… was…
“Beautiful,” she whispered.
It beat its wings once, twice. The swirling thermals from the volcano caught it and bore it up easily. As it rose into the air, other dragons appeared. A bloodred beast with a white underbelly, wings disproportionately short against the vast tube of its frame. A sinuous yellow dragon that moved in writhing coils through the air, barking and yipping in a curiously canine manner. A majestic green creature with golden horns that preened its way through the air. And finally a squat, dirty brown creature who appeared as ungainly and uncomfortable in the air.
One by one they landed, the black coming down last of all, circling twice about the column of smoke above the heads of all the others before deigning to grace the earth with his presence.
Quirk would have staggered back if she could. Would have dropped her jaw open. But she could do nothing. She was paralyzed, overcome by the enormity of the moment. They were so close to her, so massive. Fear and desire tore at her in equal measure.
She could touch them.
They could kill her.
She could ask them everything she could think of.
They would roast her alive long before they gave an answer.
But what it would be to die that way, to be immolated in the purity of their fires.
She shook her head. She was the enemy of these creatures. They were selfish and brutish. They wanted to kill everyone.
She was a scientist, a thaumatobiologist. This was everything she had ever dreamed of.
They were killers.
She was here to deceive them.
And if they discovered that deception… then their nature would take over and they would kill her.
Her thoughts turned to every other thaumatobiologist who had left the safety of their academic towers to study the beasts of which they dreamed. She thought of their corpses. Of the plaques in the hall of remembrance listing out their demises.
Edmondel Allaband—Speared by Unicorn
Carped Metheril—Trodden upon by Giant
Robart Pondra—Head mounted upon wall by Wyld Huntsman
Fettrick Battar—Wished away by Djinn
She didn’t want to be another memory, another failure.
“So,” said the black dragon in the same titanic voice that had brought her into the room. It was the voice she imagined Lawl used to call dead warriors from the Hallows into battle. It crashed through her, left her body feeling scoured clean. “You are the spy the prophet has dared to send. His saboteur.”
She and Will had talked about this. There were things she was meant to say in this scenario.
Quirkelle Bal Tehrin—Hubris and dragons
Gods, as selfish and ugly as it was, she wanted to live. She wanted to write of this moment, of all the moments and scraps of information she had gathered. She wanted to teach all the world of these creatures. And she wanted to see the world learn from her.
Ten thousand lives had been placed on her shoulders.
Will’s life. Firkin’s. Balur’s. Lette’s. All the rest.
She knew what she was supposed to say.
She made a decision.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am, and I want to tell you everything I know.”