No poetic license had been exercised in the naming of Whitewall Ravine, but the place itself was lovely enough that it didn’t need better marketing.
The ravine was much wider than it was deep; from their perch atop a rocky outcrop a short distance from its edge, the party could see most of the bottom. Kaln was no geologist—he couldn’t even identify the white stone which gave the canyon its name, though he was reasonably sure it wasn’t limestone or marble—but he thought the whole formation looked geologically young, especially considering there was a river running through it. The white rocks were stark and sharp-edged, forming crags and jagged corners rather than the smooth, rounded surfaces of stone which had been shaped by eons of water. Even the river, though it appeared to be neither deep nor fast, was stirred into occasional eddies by sharp outcroppings of stone here and there.
Now, though, the natural beauty of the ravine was overshadowed by a single spectacle—one no less beautiful, but one which clearly didn’t belong in the surrounding desert.
“Would you look at the size of it,” Isabet breathed.
It was a plant—apparently a single plant. Sprouting from a point in the very middle of the river, it was an enormous bulb of translucent red flesh, encased in a honeycomb-like lattice of beige woody growths, each bristling with fronds which quivered in the breeze. The entire egg-shaped main bulk of it was bigger around at its base than a modest house, rising to a height that looked to Kaln greater than the slender palm trees from back home, its peak a fuzzy forest of those same fronds which protruded from its wood casing.
From its base, where it rose from the water, extended its many enormous vines—green tendrils as thick around at their root as the ancient trees he’d seen in the forest of Boisverd. They had no leaves and didn’t branch off—each tendril snaked out alone from the core plant, crawling across the surface of the water or dipping beneath it, climbing up the ravine walls so that they extended out across the rocky plain to either side.
Zhiiji scooped up a loose rock from the ground, wound up her entire body and hurled it at the nearest of the plant’s tendrils. She had an impressive arm; the stone flew straight and hit hard enough that the meaty thunk echoed off the rocks.
Instantly, the vine curled up into a loop around the spot where it had struck, and huge thorns—nearly as long as a Hiiri was tall—sprang out of the green flesh in which they’d been hidden, forming a brutal encirclement that would have shredded anything caught within the coil. As the group watched in silence, that coil began moving down the entire length of the vine, back toward its base. The vine curled, and wherever it rose into that constraining loop, more of those thorns emerged into its center, growing in size as it got closer to the core.
The entire plant shivered as the loop finally reached the core, diving under the surface of the water to deposit its nonexistent burden at the roots.
“And that’s how a cactopus gets nutrients,” Naaren explained. “Some carnivorous plants are sort of clever, a few are even sentient, but not this. That’s a pure physiological reflex. Anything that disturbs one of the limbs triggers that reaction; it coils ‘em up like a snake and rolls them all the way back to the base. Along the way those spines shred the victim until it’s just a mass of torn meat being deposited at the roots, for fast and easy nutrient extraction. And the gore left along the limb attracts scavengers—and thus, more food. It’s as brutally elegant as only nature can be.”
“What’s it doing here?” Isabet asked. “I thought cactopi were wetland plants.”
“They are,” Naaren said, scowling. “And in wetlands, a cactopus is part of the ecosystem. It has competition for resources, much of its prey is adapted to evade it at least some of the time, and there are even animals that eat them, both above and below the water. In its normal habitat you’ll rarely see one with a central body bigger than…say, a pumpkin. Here, that thing is creating an absolute massacre of savanna fauna that have no idea how to deal with it. For dryland animals, anything that big and green just looks tasty. It’s already devastated the local antelope herds before they left the area, wiped out all the nearby crocodiles, decimated the fish upriver from this spot… Not to mention cutting off access to the only water source in the vicinity, and shutting down river travel. There are a couple of Hiiri tribes that live on rafts, mostly going up and down this river, and they’ve had to learn new lifestyles in a hurry. Even worse, this has ripple effects all up and down the food chain. In this area the pumas and sand monitors have gotten hungry enough to get awfully bold around caravans. This damned thing has gorged itself on basically every living creature in its environs, that’s how it got so big. But this is a dry area—this spot along the river isn’t exactly desert but it’s close—and there’s basically nothing left for it to devour. It’s already shrunk a bit from its greatest extent. The plan last I heard was for the tribes to let it starve a while longer, let it shrink and weaken, and then try to do something about it before the balance tips back the other way and creatures start coming back and getting eaten.”
“Do something about it,” Zhiiji scoffed. “You say ‘the plan’ as if they actually have one.”
“What is it doing here, though?” Kaln asked. “I don’t even know where the closest swamp is, but surely not within… Well, I don’t get how one even found its way here.”
Naaren’s scowl deepened. “They don’t normally grow in running water. A seed would have to have been pushed by the current up against a rock that would keep it from being swept away, but in a spot with mud—non-sandy mud, a rarity in this river—at exactly the right depth where it got some sunlight. The most plausible part is that a formation like that would naturally accumulate detritus the sapling could feed on. And that’s assuming a cactopus seed was here in the first place! It is…not technically impossible that a migratory bird or something might have dropped it. And all of that had to happen right at the start of the dry season, so it could get its first growth spurt while there was no river traffic and no Hiiri recognized what the thing was and got rid of it before it got too big.”
“Why, you sound downright suspicious,” Vadaralshi commented, bending her neck to grin down at him.
Naaren lashed his tail once, and nodded. “I am. Like I said…this is something which could, theoretically, occur by chance. I’m not one to trust incredibly specific and convenient—or inconvenient, in this case—coincidences.”
“Yeah, me either,” Zhiiji added, “but the other side of that coin is I can’t for the life of me figure out why someone would do this on purpose. This achieves nothing and doesn’t harm anybody but the Hiiri, and we don’t have any enemies. Out west in the Dells not everybody’s even heard of Hiiri and more of ‘em than otherwise were surprised to learn what we look like. What’s the point of messing with the tribes? It’s not like our land’s even worth taking.”
“The only polity in a position to seize our land would be Rhivaak,” Naaren added, “and Izayaroa has laws protecting us. Even if she changed her mind for some reason, she would send an army, not play vicious pranks like this. So no, while I’m suspicious…I don’t exactly have any suspects.”
“Wizards,” Vadaralshi said sagely, nodding her huge head. “I bet a wizard did it. They’re always just doing stuff, man. Who knows what they think? It’s like Pheneraxa’s friend, you know what a butthole he is.”
“This in particular isn’t Shadrach’s style,” Kaln mused, “but if he’s indicative of wizards in general, I could see one of them being enough of a dickhead to think this was funny. Present company excepted, of course—sorry, Isabet, no offense meant. Ah, we will not be repeating any part of this conversation to your Aunt Em, by the way.”
“Does he think we’re stupid?” Vanimax huffed at his sister, then turned his head to scowl down at Kaln. “You just think we’re stupid, don’t you?”
“Well, be fair to the guy,” Vadaralshi said reasonably. “He has met us.”
Her brother hissed at her, but it was a desultory gesture with no real heat. It caused Isabet to dive to the ground and cover her head, though.
“The issue is,” Zhiiji said, “this thing requires either specialists or overwhelming firepower to deal with, and the Hiiri in general have neither. They also tend to be—”
“Pragmatic and conflict-averse,” Naaren interrupted, giving her a pointed stare.
Zhiiji made a face at him. “That’s also how I was gonna put it, no need to be defensive. So! Fortuitously, here you guys are now! Godling, cryomancer, and heckin’ dragons!”
“I’ve gotta be honest,” Kaln said immediately, “I don’t see me being much use here. My powers are…incredibly specific in nature, and I don’t see how they’d apply to this.”
“Mine are specifically applicable,” Isabet said, still dusting herself off after getting back up. “Actually, pacifying dangerous warm-climate flora is one of the classic jobs of an ice mage. Most equatorial plants will fall dormant if not outright die if you chill them enough. The trouble is the sheer scale of that thing. I don’t have the raw power to freeze the entire river…or even the entire plant, I don’t think. But if I chill one vine at a time, that’ll clear a path to the central body…”
“Okay, whoah, hold up,” said Zhiiji, raising both hands in a quelling gesture. “Doll, I love your enthusiasm, but hang on.”
“Doll?” Isabet muttered incredulously, folding her arms.
“We’re specifically gonna need you to conserve that mojo for the end of the operation,” Zhiiji continued. “Remember, bag of holding? Securing monster meat? Cactopus flesh is crazy good stuff—depending on how you process it, it’s both edible and useful for fibers. Makes ridiculously strong rope and fabric once dried out, or it can be cooked up fresh for a tasty and nutritious meal! Just gotta separate the fibers from the meat and pull out the spines. But those vines curl up and sprout spikes as a reflex, remember? They’ll still do it even when severed. So they gotta be chilled before we can safely store ‘em. Luckily, we won’t need you to actually take the thing out, because, y’know…”
She half-turned and made a broad gesture at the two dragons, grinning.
“Hm.” Vadaralshi stepped away from the group, trotting out in a wide arc toward the outer edges of the nearest cactopus tendril—which was nowhere within range of them, Naaren having selected their vantage point with caution.
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“Be careful,” Kaln called out as she bent forward, extending her neck toward the tentacle.
Vadaralshi looked over at him, then rolled her eyes so ostentatiously it tilted up her entire head. Then she lunged forward, snapping her jaws closed on the end of the tentacle.
It instantly went rigid as it tried to curl up, but was unable—the dragon holding the other end dug her claws into the ground and pulled backward with all her strength.
Since she was a dragon, the fact that it was an immediate stalemate alarmed Kaln.
Vadaralshi growled, all four legs braced and hauling back against the cactopus, looking for all the world like an enormous dog refusing to relinquish a toy. The cactopus limb vibrated along its whole length, still trying stubbornly to coil up in response to the disturbance. For a few tense seconds they were locked in that struggle.
And then, abruptly, Vadaralshi was yanked forward as the sandy ground gave out under her weight. She slid a few paces, scrabbling furiously to regain her footing, before the tentacle broke off in her jaws with a snap clearly audible to the nearby onlookers. Apparently the combination of intense tension and dragon teeth was too much even for tough cactopus fibers. Immediately Vadaralshi jerked back, barely catching her balance by pumping her wings before she was tipped over backward, and the rest of the tentacle whipped into a huge coil. As before, the loop traveled swiftly along its entire length back to the plant’s center, bristling with spines as it went.
“Bah! I coulda had it if the ground wasn’t so loose,” Vadaralshi complained, trotting back to them. “Still, though, damn! You weren’t kidding, Zhiiji—about the toughness or the taste. I wouldn’t mind chewing on some more of that.”
“Well…yeah,” Zhiiji said, nonplussed. “It’s…think of it like a snake that size, except proportionally stronger. You’re talking about wrestling with a python big enough to swallow you, which…don’t do that. If you were just a big critter with claws I wouldn’t have suggested it. What were you trying to do there, exactly? Just breathe fire at the thing.”
“Oh?” Vanimax drawled, arching his neck. “And what about the rest of your plan, to preserve the tentacles for harvesting? That’s hardly an option if we burn the entire thing to a crisp.”
“Well just…don’t burn the entire thing, then,” Zhiiji retorted in mounting frustration. “Come on, look at the size of it. The only thing that needs to get taken out is the central part, and that’s the least useful anyway—hit that and spare as many tentacles as you can, and boom! Done, profit. Hells, you wouldn’t even need to blast a path to it, can’t you just roast the thing from above?”
“Well, that’s hardly anything at all,” Vadaralshi protested. “That’s, like…cheating.”
“You know what’s cheating?” Zhiiji shouted. “Being a dragon. Why complain about it now that there’s actual stakes on the table?”
Vanimax silently invoked some complex and powerful magic and Kaln whirled to face him in alarm, but the dragon was just accessing some kind of interdimensional storage—like a personal bag of holding except not tied to a physical bag. He made his preserved flower garlands disappear into it, then stretched, flicking his wings once and rolling both shoulders.
“What do you think?” he rumbled, turning to Vadaralshi. “Pick opposite ends to approach, first one to get to the center and tear it up?”
“Better be adjacent ends,” she said, “that’ll mean less wasted booty. Remember we’re doing this for the Hiiri! And to help Kaln and Isabet impress Hii-Amat.”
“Hii-Amat is the patron deity of a pragmatic culture,” Naaren interjected. “She won’t be impressed by anyone clowning around when there’s serious work to be done!”
“Save your breath,” Kaln muttered.
“Right,” Vanimax agreed, disregarding the mortals entirely. “No fire breath, no magic.”
“You’re on!” Vadaralshi crowed. In unison, both dragons turned and gamboled out in a wide arc to approach the cactopus’s zone of control from relatively even starting points.
“Wow, that’s not even ignoring us,” Zhiiji said, deadpan. “It’s like they just selectively stop hearing.”
“Isn’t that what ignoring is?” Isabet asked.
“Take an aristocrat,” said Kaln, “an archwizard, and an average teenager, multiply them by each other, and that’s roughly the amount of ‘not listening to sensible advice’ you get in a young dragon. Well…I guess I’d better go supervise this. They are sort of my responsibility, after all.”
“Okay, cool,” said Zhiiji, still deadpan. “And do…what, exactly?”
“Gods, I hope I don’t have to figure out an answer to that,” Kaln grumbled, stalking off after his monstrous centigenarian stepchildren.
----------------------------------------
They hunkered down behind an outcropping on one of the surrounding mountain ledges, able to see nothing but stone and a few errant patches of lichen. This little patch of Dragonvale was so desolate one could almost forget the huge, verdant valley spread out just beyond the immediate rock wall—well, usually verdant. Masour didn’t know whether its current half-burned state was significant, but that was not his job. He was here to document more specific information, and that was not going well.
“Is it not working?” his mission leader asked calmly. Leaders always projected calm; the Sovereign had very specific ideas about leadership and overly emotional people did not tend to rise in the ranks in Shamissar.
“I…think it should be?” Masour said, mastering his own mounting frustration with effort. The object in his hands resembled an abacus with a slab of mirrored bronze replacing the racks of beads, currently projecting strings of numbers. “I’m sorry, sir, I’ve never worked with one of these before. As far as I can tell it’s working, but what it’s telling me is nonsense. Neha, I don’t suppose you know…?”
The other mage shook her head apologetically. “Sorry, not my specialization.”
Well, that was fair enough. Masour hadn’t worked with either of these individuals before: the mission leader, Nashar, was from the capital, Neha was a portal mage stationed in Rhivkabat like himself as part of the diplomatic messenger and emergency transit relay system, and he was an enchanter who also worked at the embassy. He had seen Neha around, but not spoken to her; Masour was perhaps overly conscious of how it would look for a portly middle-aged fellow like himself to go around chatting with attractive younger coworkers. If he didn’t know how this thing worked, a portal mage wouldn’t.
“It’s supposedly state of the art, which I suspect is the problem,” Nashar said, patting his shoulder. “Sorry, it’s not your fault. Equipment should always carry documentation and not be issued to people who haven’t been trained on it, that’s policy. Somebody above my head decided this was urgent and pulled out all the stops, and…here we are. What problem are you having with it, exactly?”
“Well, I’m trying to get it to document the local life signs, as you requested,” Masour explained, hunching over the enchanted device again and frowning in concentration. “I’ve done two scans: the first one insisted we were in a lifeless desert, and the second recorded a population that would fit a metropolis. As far as I can tell, everything should be working perfectly. I’ve checked the enchantments on it and while I don’t know exactly how they were laid, I can tell they’re stable. You can always tell that, malfunctioning enchantments always cause splash effects of some kind—usually they’re noticeable even before you have an enchanter dig into the workings. If we were back in my office at the embassy I could figure it out, I’m sure, but on the fly… I don’t know why it isn’t working. It looks like it’s working, but what it’s doing…”
“You have it miscalibrated.”
“What?” Frowning more deeply, he raised the device till his nose was almost touching it. It was always easy for him to lose himself in an interesting job; that was why he normally worked in an office rather than the field. “How? I checked for controls first thing, it doesn’t look designed to be adjusted.”
“It was probably designed with general circumstances in mind. ‘Life signs’ are not an actual thing in any of the magic systems that went into that thing’s creation, so it’s extrapolating from ambient magic. There’s an ancient lair of dragons right across the valley, there, so the ambient magic is very different from whatever its designers intended.”
For some reason, Nashar began tugging on his sleeve, but Masour was already lost in magic analysis and paid the gesture no mind.
“Oh…oh, oh! I believe you’re right! Hum, this does present an interesting problem. Now, if this were a gadget I’d built I’d know exactly how to fix that. I’m afraid to tweak its spell matrix without that kind of familiarity. It looks expensive.”
“Yes, that seems like a task for a laboratory. Now, in the field, you can often compensate for flawed data by comparing it to another reference point. For example, set it to analyze ley lines instead of life signs and you’ll be able to see a depiction of how magic is flowing in the valley. A specialist like yourself can doubtless use that to make educated guesses concerning the population count you were looking for.”
“Hmmm. That’s…well, it’s an idea. It would be terribly imprecise, but I’m afraid we might have to settle for that. Ow, Nashar, what are you—”
Nashar was now squeezing his arm with increasing force, until the point it had begun to hurt. His concentration broken, Masour now belatedly realized that the voice with which he’d been conversing was not Nashar’s, or Neha’s.
Slowly, he raised his head, and turned it. Both his compatriots were staring upward in frozen terror.
Emeralaphine the White Wind had arrived in utter silence, clinging to the mountain face above them, her enormous triangular head lowered enough that she looked like she could flex her neck and snap them up in her jaws. They were big enough.
“Let me see if I can extrapolate from incomplete data,” she said, grinning. Masour felt the blood rush from his head and was quite proud of himself for not actually fainting in such proximity to all those teeth. The dragon reached out with one enormous claw and, with absolutely astonishing delicacy, tucked its razor tip under the insignia on Nashar’s uniform, subtly tilting it. “Shamissar. I surmise that my ill-behaved offspring created some manner of spectacle when visiting one of your cities? Her or one of her silly little friends. If Savasmittar has some manner of grievance to raise, he can come do it with me in person. I am reasonable enough to make my Pheneraxa pay for her own mistakes, and I should think my reputation makes that clear. If he has none, and was simply curious what she was up to, I will reassure you now that she was simply there to shop, and the business is now concluded.”
The white dragon flexed her neck, shifting her head so that one side was positioned in front of them, close enough to touch—which, needless to say, they did not. The single, slitted blue eye now studying them from up close, like a laboratory student examining the contents of a sample dish, blinked its horizontal inner lid once.
“And it had better remain concluded,” Emeralaphine continued. “Savasmittar is running some kind of country—he should expect people to visit. And when people visit and do nothing but drop some coin into his economy, he has no cause to get tetchy with those people’s parents. I am an altogether different sort of dragon, as are all those who reside here. We like our solitude, and our privacy. I am giving you this message to convey to your master as a courtesy between dragons, with this addendum: if any more of his playthings come creeping about my back steps, he will not be getting them back in the condition in which I found them.”
She raised her head again, now gazing down upon them with a supercilious expression from the height of a minaret.
“Should there then be a third abrogation of my privacy instigated by Savasmittar, I will take it upon myself to personally give him some pointers on draconic etiquette. And this discussion will occur in Shamissar, not Dragonvale. I, just for your reference, am not my daughter. I do not wait in line at the customs office.”
The scrying device suddenly leaped from Masour’s numb fingers, flying into her grasp.
“I am confiscating this, obviously,” Emeralaphine said primly. “At a glance I can see a dozen ways this design is a failure, but the underlying principles appear to be quite state of the art, and I shall gain some hours of entertainment from analyzing them. Sufficient that I believe I shall forgive this trespass, provided there are no repetitions. Give Savasmittar my regards and my message—unless you’re not actually his pawns and this was some manner of false flag exploit meant to implicate him. In which case, good luck.”
Magic roared around them, and all three found themselves forcibly jerked through a world which suddenly blurred to oblivion.
Mansour landed painfully on his shoulder and hip, skidding across what proved to be a polished marble floor. Shouts and stomping feet were everywhere, followed within seconds by alarm bells, the hiss of blades being drawn, and a familiar guardsman’s whistle.
“Ow!” Neha complained. “Adding horizontal velocity to a simple teleportation? Bloody impressive and not bloody necessary!”
“Identify yourselves!” barked a voice which was clearly in no mood for nonsense. Masour managed to roll onto his back, wincing; he had definitely done something worse than a bruise to his shoulder in that landing. He could see the ceiling now, and some of the walls—
This was the throne room. The Sovereign’s throne room, in Shamissar. She’d flung them halfway around the world, straight through several of the most thorough ward networks in existence.
“I am Nashar Palmutta of the Fourth Bronze Corps,” his team leader said. “Apologies for this breach in protocol, Lieutenant, I’m afraid it was not within my power to halt. I request medical attention for my team. And, ah, if someone would kindly notify Princess Nashma of our arrival, I’m afraid I must report a rather disastrous failure.”