The Queen of Death

50

The red dragon snorted at Kandler. The justicar felt her sulfur-scented breath envelop him, burning his eyes. He fought the urge to cough, instead clearing his throat with a low grunt.

The dragon snarled, and Kandler wondered if his knees would give out on him. Instead, he wiped his eyes with his off hand and met the creature’s gaze. He weighed his fangblade in the other hand and wondered if he could leap high enough to drive it into one of the beast’s great, yellow eyes.

“He is my guest,” Greffykor said, “as are his companions. They are under my protection.”

The red dragon rumbled out a hoarse, bleating noise. Kandler realized she meant it to be a laugh.

“You may be a queen in your own land,” Greffykor said, “but this is my domain. Mine alone. You hold no sway here.” The red dragon rumbled again. As she did, she raised herself up on her rear haunches and spread her wings until they blotted out the bit of sky that Kandler had been able to see through the tower’s top. She arched back her neck and bared her teeth, preparing to strike.

Greffykor bent his own neck forward and down, showing deference to the larger beast. As he did, the crimson creature’s spiked tail came whipping around on the side opposite Kandler and smacked into the silver dragon’s face.

Kandler jumped back at Greffykor’s head lurched toward him. Hot blood from the silver dragon’s slashed face splattered along the floor and across the justicar’s legs.

Greffykor flinched as the blow struck him, causing him to close his eyes. When he opened them, he saw Kandler standing right there before him, his fangblade held high in his fist.

The silver dragon grunted at the justicar, and Kandler felt the creature’s frigid breath wash over him. Then Greffykor straightened himself up and glared at the red dragon.

“You have made your point,” the silver dragon said.

Kandler cursed himself for not taking the opportunity to strike at the red dragon when he’d had the chance. Now, with the thing looming over him like a building, he had no hope of harming it. He would have to bide his time and keep looking for the right chance to attack.

The red dragon turned its attention to him again and growled.

“She wants proof,” Greffykor said in a brittle tone.

Kandler gaped at the silver dragon. “Of what?”

“Your dragonmark. She wants to see it.”

Kandler grimaced. “Tell her she can pry it off my hairy ass.”

The red dragon drew back her lips, and her long, sinuous tongue flickered out from between her rows of terrifying teeth.

“She can understand your language,” Greffykor said. “She refuses to sully her mouth with it.”

Kandler pursed his lips. If he could get the creature angry enough that she would incinerate him with her burning breath, she would never know if he really had a dragonmark or not, but to do that, he would have to get her closer.

“All right,” Kandler said, tugging at the collar of his shirt. “She’ll need to come closer to see it.”

He slipped his hand with the fangblade in it behind his back. He hoped the red dragon would see it as some form of deference to her.

The monstrous creature folded her wings back against her body and lowered herself onto all four legs once more. Kandler’s arm tensed behind him until it felt as taut as a loaded catapult. He ached to unleash it, to let it whip around and bury his deadly blade into the dragon queen’s flesh, but he forced himself to wait.

The red dragon squinted down at Kandler, and he realized that each of her eyes stood as tall as Esprë. They seemed like such large targets that he didn’t see how he could avoid them, much less miss them, but they still hovered just out of his reach.

“It’s not very large,” Kandler said as he tugged at the edge of his shirt, pulling it down past his collarbone. “You’ll have to get closer.”

He tried to keep his voice even, dull, even flat. He just needed the dragon queen to get a few more feet closer. If he tried to leap for her now, he might slice her across the end of her nose, but he wanted to plunge his blade into her eye. Half blinding her would trigger the kind of rage he needed to inspire in her. Nothing less would do.

The red dragon’s head stopped moving downward. Her tongue lashed out toward Kandler’s face. Only his combat-trained reflexes prevented her from flicking out an eye.

The silver dragon opened his mouth. “For a human, you are a terrible liar.”

Kandler whipped his sword around in a vicious arc. It caught nothing but air.

The red dragon sat back on her haunches and rumbled at him again.

Then she threw back her head and roared.

Fire erupted from the dragon queen’s snout and billowed up to the tower’s open top like fireworks exploding into the sky. Kandler backpedaled, nearly stumbling as he went, keeping his sword before him like some sort of talisman that could ward off such all-powerful evil, even though he knew it would be exactly that useless.

A cry of triumph went up from behind the dragon. Kandler peered past the creature and spied Sallah and Xalt racing away from the creature’s rear as fast as their legs would carry them. Sallah’s fists were empty, but Xalt tried to cover their retreat with a crossbow aimed at the dragon.

The dragon queen thrashed her tail, slamming it to the left and right, howling in pain as she did. Even with the thing moving so fast, Kandler could see something was wrong. The end of the massive tail bent at an odd angle, dangling downward.

When the tail swished in his direction again, Kandler saw that the tip of it had almost been chopped off. There, stabbing out of the top of the tail, hung the culprit: a bright-bladed sword that blazed with a silver light.

Kandler halted for a moment. If Sallah had managed to harm the dragon, then maybe he could hope to as well. As he adjusted his grip on his fangblade, he watched the dragon queen pound her tail on the floor, trying to dislodge it.

Greffykor turned to the justicar and spotted him standing there, just before the hole that led down to the lower level. The silver dragon shook his snout at Kandler and gestured him away with a quick sweep of one claw.

Kandler understood. The dragon queen hadn’t been hurt—not really. To it, Sallah’s sword felt no worse than a thorn in a lion’s paw.

The observatory’s floor shook with the force of the dragon queen’s throes, but Kandler saw that these came not from a creature that was wounded but angered. The red dragon’s outburst was little more than a tantrum thrown by a beast used to getting its way in all things—instantly.

Greffykor growled something at the dragon queen, and the red dragon froze. She glared at the silver dragon with hate-filled eyes then swung her tail around to her right, the side closest to Kandler.

He could see now that she could not reach the end of her own tail—at least not without undergoing some back-bending contortions. The blazing sword sat there in her tail, crackling away but not burning her scales a bit. A rivulet of blood trickled down from the wound, but it clearly seemed more of a nuisance than a threat.

The dragon queen snarled at Greffykor. Keeping his head low, the silver dragon crept toward the crimson tail, the talons on one of its hands extended toward the offending piece of burning metal. Greffykor snatched the blade free from the dragon queen’s flesh with one sharp move, and the red dragon howled in pain and relief.

Kandler reached for the rope that down the hole, and he began to lower himself down it. As his eyes became level with the floor, though, he stopped and watched.

The dragon queen growled at Greffykor, and the silver dragon nodded in response. “Of course,” he said, “you are both gracious and wise in your mercy. I do not wish for you to have to trouble with destroying my home to find these vermin. I will roust them out for you and present them to you as my gift.”