AZAOCRATZ
The comrades slip into a jungle garden beneath a vaulted marble roof, sneaking between trees sheathed in vines, abloom with azure flowers. The light, a tranquil shade of sunlike gold, ripples amid the shadows of the innumerable leaves, which nod with droplets that trickle from above. The sound of splashing is forever echoing through the chamber's vastness, for waterfalls are everywhere, flashing like sparkling pillars amid the mossy trunks of the trees, and huge sheets of ice, chilled by enchantments to encase the delicately gilded floor, are melting on this night, as the spells which kept them cold unravel. The icewater now is ankle deep, and the watering holes made for the monster's thirst are merely deeper wells within an endless pool.
Tzark, with his soft boots and silent breath, leads the comrades, sneaking in restless silence. There is a way through the ferns, a blue-tiled path winding toward a clearing between six gilded pillars, where the shafts of light slant downward at their most brilliant, and the floor rises to a low dais just above the level of the rippling water, its dry tiles radiating in fantastical patterns from a central, gold-rimmed watering well.
Near the center of that dais, curled up like a sleeping cat, lies a creature with scales as sharp and blue as sapphires.
The comrades stop short, breath driven from their lungs. The creature's aura is surging into their hearts. Perhaps it is the scent—dragon scent, acrid as rotted cinnamon, triggering ancient, instinctive dread. A warning prickle on the neck; an awed awareness of power; the peculiar rush above the stomach that is the body's reaction to nothing in nature but a dragon. The humans' fourteen eyes dilate until their irises are razor-thin rings.
Of a thousand warriors, would even one stand his ground before such abysses of ancestral fear? Each of the comrades is faced with a test: whether to back down before the dragon, or whether to fight.
Glaneir insinuates herself into the shadows, having neither the intention nor the courage to confront Azaocratz alongside the others. Tzark, a daring man who has faced death many times, and UrokYann, who will oneday pass this test, are overwhelmed by glorious terrors, and are transfixed.
But Cusáhn presses on.
And by his right side, Rokál presses on.
And Harrin, frozen like a mouse beneath the gaze of a hundred wolves, thinks of his children. He sees his stolen son before him. He sees his daughter—waiting.
Cusáhn is astonished; Harrin is advancing at his left side, keeping pace with the warriors.
Viványa trembles violently on the edge of berserking. The pirate, Vivict, is submerging, and the joyful savage is surfacing. She realizes she could harpoon the monster from here; the two-meter wings are splayed out delicately, immobile and vulnerable; but instead she stalks closer, craving the full furious trial, longing for the monster to awaken, and knowing that it will, knowing, because the scent of fear on her comrades is sharp even to her human senses, which are nothing to the powers of Azaocratz.
From the edge of a skylight above the wyvern, a vast melting icicle suddenly shivers and slips free, falling, flashing down through shafts of light, through layers of silent mist, into breathless space.
With a crash it strikes and shatters! Fragments of ice skitter everywhere, sparkling, chiming against the sapphire scales of Azaocratz.
Then the silence returns.
Sinuous, the blue neck rises. The monster snuffs the air; she has not yet turned to see the four companions where they stand agape in the jungle gloom. Rokál and Viványa are stunned by the beauty of the wyvern, as she turns glittering in the light.
Viványa is hardly sane; her eyes are filling with tears; she feels as though she were alone on some jungle island, and has come across this exquisite creature by pure luck in a grove of waterfalls.
Azaocratz turns and looks at them. Her irises are white. She spreads her wings.
The silence shatters in a simultaneous roar from Azaocratz and Viványa. Viványa charges, Rokál follows with a war cry, Cusáhn unsheathes his sword in a blaze of sparks, Azaocratz is suddenly swerving overhead, fast as a whip, water splashing from the gale of her wings as her roaring maw blasts all four attackers with an arc of fire as bright as white-hot steel.
The comrades scramble for cover, trees burst into flame, ice melts and falls, shattering, water sizzles into scalding steam. Fiercely Viványa hurls her harpoon to intercept a wing, but Azaocratz swivels to evade and strafes her with a sustained jet of fire.
Viványa flings herself backward through a waterfall, and sees flame billow against the glassy surface, setting the water boiling, as bright as the sun.
The head of Azaocratz busts through the cascade and gapes to roar out more flames but Viványa hurls her spear ferociously into the open maw. The teeth snap shut on the weapon. Spearmetal and wood shatter like bones. Viványa tries to seize her smaller opponent to grapple her, but Azaocratz, vexed by Harrin and Rokál's arrows striking her wings, whips around and is gone, cutting the warrior with a vicious parting nick across her throat—a deathblow barely dodged, dealt by the scytheblades on her lightning tail.
Springing into the air and soaring between the trees, Azaocratz surveys her battlefield. The jungle is a crackling furnace, green foliage and blue ice disintegrating before her devouring sunset flames—veerry satisfying.
She spots those vexing archers—one in red armor and a horned mask behind her—the other with a scarf that has not yet burned, standing beside a tree to dive behind in case of flame. Slyly, Azaocratz swoops toward the masked one but shoots fire at the other, aiming her jet between him and the tree, and then raking it over him, setting him ablaze.
Harrin flings himself down in the icy pool and rolls to quench the flames, but his bowstring is gone, cinders.
Azaocratz rams against Rokál. She disdains to evade his mighty counterstroke, preferring to mock him by allowing his crescent blade to ring harmlessly against her sapphires. Then her tail-scythes slam his chest, rending his armor and sending him crashing down.
She prepares to kill him with a blast hot enough to melt steel, but a piercing pain tears through her wing, worse than any arrow. Shrieking with fury, she leaps into a burning tree and twists to see the wound. A harpoon is hooked through her wing close to the shoulder, within the reach of her jaws. She grinds down on the shaft and—despite its steel reinforcements—snaps it in two, and is rewarded with a howl of fury from the red-haired javelineer. The irksome barbed head, Azaocratz shoves through the gash, and it splashes down, no longer a threat.
Leaping back into the air, she finds she can still fly. The pain in her wing only sharpens her wrath.
Meanwhile Cusáhn, lying in ambush behind the tree next to Harrin, grits his teeth in frustration that Azaocratz has not come their way. "Fire again," he whispers, and tosses Harrin his bow.
Harrin, charred and breathless but stouthearted, nocks an arrow and sights at Azaocratz. His first two shots fly wide from swollen hands, one skimming over the water, the other tangling in Viványa's braid.
Viványa and Rokál are struggling to resist Azaocratz within a cataclysm of battle, branches cracking and falling, flaming, the icewater frothing with fire and blood, some of it draconic but most of it human. Harrin fires once more, and this time he pierces a wing.
Azaocratz, infuriated at being stung by one she already felled with flame, breaks off from destroying the two difficult warriors and streaks toward the archer.
Harrin leaps back and draws his sword but Azaocratz swoops hawk-like and catches his wrist! Viciously she grinds down. Harrin, instead of struggling, locks an arm around her muzzle and holds it shut on his injured wrist, crying out, "Cusáhn! Cusáhn—now!"
The guardsman sprints from his place of ambush, spark-edged sword arcing high. Azaocratz twists and slams Harrin against the tile beneath the water, trying to shake free to fight Cusáhn, but Harrin clings doggedly, and by the time she shoves loose, Cusáhn's sword is cleaving down.
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A storm of frenzied stars explodes from the monster's chest as the blade shears into her sapphires. There is a roar of fury, a heartbeat of smoking blood, and Azaocratz, gashed but alive, unleashes all her flame, to the last particle, against the terrible blade, blasting forth fury as a searing pillar of blue-white fire. Instantly, the blade glows red—yellow—white! Cusáhn is forced to dive away from the heat, leaving the sword to splash into the sizzling pool. Azaocratz pours her pillar of flame down onto it, vaporizing the water, incinerating the hilt, melting the guard, destroying her way up the length of that hateful human blade, not relenting even when every last sliver of it is boiling wildly on the blackened floor.
Cusáhn sees only the roiling smoke of their greatest hope being melted, the whole view shrouded by a black eruption of smog, shining from within with the fiery, lightning-blue radiance of Azaocratz' wrath.
Harrin is fallen and bleeding; Cusáhn is weaponless; the harpoon of Vivict is broken. The battle-plan of Mathras and Cusáhn is ruined—destroyed by the draconid's might.
The blue glare flickers out. Azaocratz' fire is at last exhausted. What remains of the sword that injured her is fused into the floor, lost beneath water and steam.
With a thundering shriek of triumph, she leaps into the air, shedding blood from her wounded chest, and finds that she still has strength, that she will not die, and that her wrath now holds an edge of desperation, for these warriors are deadly, and will slay her if she fails to slay them first.
She flies a rapid circuit through the smoke-filled chamber, scouting for further ambushes. Where are the red warriors, the horned-mask and the blood-hair?
She glimpses them through the smog, working feverishly in the shadow of a blazing tree—a tree that looks ripe for the toppling. Despite growing exhaustion, she dives and slams into the trunk. The blackened wood cracks. The huge weight tips and plummets. The red warriors scatter, but the heavier, armored one takes a blow from a massive limb. The blood-haired one spins clear and hurls a javelin. A piercing shock shoots through the far end of Azaocratz' wing; ignoring the insignificant wound, she flies onward to circle around again—
Her wing snags.
Rokál had suggested it—to lash the two halves of the broken harpoon to a javelin, just as a broken bone is lashed to a splint; and Viványa, learning from failure, had thrown the makeshift weapon through the very tip of the wyvern's wing, beyond the reach of her teeth.
Viványa hurls her weight against the line. Immediately, she and Azaocratz are snarling and straining against each other, battling for leverage, the wyvern digging her foreclaws into tree-limbs, the warrior wrapping the line around herself and heaving with the strength of wild rage, grinding both their bones and dragging the wyvern, inch by inch, out of the trees—then suddenly ripping her tumbling into the open air!
Instantly Azaocratz spins and flashes down for the kill, but Viványa springs away onto the central dais, keeping the rope taut and leaving the wyvern to splash into icewater.
Azaocratz, alarmed at finding herself grounded and tethered, twists in search of ambushers, while Viványa circles swiftly to the far side of the widest and deepest of the dais's watering wells, an azure pool fed by waterfalls and rimmed in gold.
Azaocratz hesitates, her white eyes slitted. The blood-haired one has put drowning water between them, and now braces and hauls on the rope.
Rokál, staggering but undaunted, joins Viványa at the line. Together they ply their strength, wrenching the monster by one stretched wing nearer and nearer to the well. Rokál's voice rasps with pain as he asks Viványa a question.
But Viványa cannot hear him, cannot understand him; her blood is pounding in her ears, her attention rapt in Azaocratz, who stares at them eagerly, giving no impression of fear, but of ferocity, cunning, readiness. Her talons gouge deep into the buckling tile, resisting only to waste the warriors' strength, allowing them to drag her strenuously until her forelimbs reach the edge of the pool, her claws digging into the soft golden rim.
Cusáhn, who has run to re-arm himself with one of Tzark's knives, now stalks up behind the monster on the path of shattered tiles.
Sensing him, Azaocratz shifts as if to spring at the red warriors, and Rokál rasps, "Come, dragon!"
Azaocratz cannot understand his words, for she knows nothing of speech, but the language of the blood-haired one is more ancient: Azaocratz understands the challenge in her eyes, a glare both thrilling and thrilled, violent and rapturous, feverishly bright.
The sapphire wyvern and the blood-haired warrior—two of a kind—are feeding on each other's ferocity; and the pain, blood-loss, and exhaustion that wrack them seem to fall away, forgotten. After the complexity of the battle thus far, both are now faced with a brute, head-on, monstrous struggle to the death, and they are on the edge of going mad with the joy of it—on the edge of berserking.
Azaocratz cannot stand to hold back any longer. One instant, the line is taut and the red warriors are heaving on it; the next, the wyvern is a sapphire streak. Viványa, who had been leaning harder than Rokál due to her lesser weight, tumbles backward, while Rokál surges forward and smashes into Azaocratz, and for four full seconds, the injured, exhausted warrior battles the monster alone.
Azaocratz falls upon him with screaming fury, claws and teeth gouging-seizing-smashing, attacking with all the hundred knife-points of her ferocious form, his armor shrieking as it tears apart. Viványa tries to rush in, but Azaocratz' tail-scythes whiz and thrash, invisible with speed, holding her at bay.
Rokál slams the wyvern's skull with the halberd, but Azaocratz snaps off the crescent blade and flings it spinning. Rokál hammers her with iron fists, bruising her through her scales; she tackles him, slams his head against the edge of the pool, sinks her teeth through his iron mask, tastes the great warrior's blood, and screams in triumph!
But before she can seek to crush the cursed mask, a grappling hook whips around her neck and wraps tight, and Viványa wrenches her backwards. Azaocratz whirls to kill her—it will be easy, unarmored as she is—but Cusáhn crashes into the monster and drives a dagger at the wound left by the spark-edged sword.
Cusáhn and Azaocratz lock and grapple! The strength of all their limbs is poured into Cusáhn's dagger arm, save only the whizzing tail that keeps Viványa snarling and impotent.
Viványa throws a second loop around Azaocratz' mighty foreleg, and—as the wyvern rears to bite through Cusáhn's helm—she heaves on the line, wrenching the monster's arm and head back at right angles, giving Cusáhn an opening!
He presses the knife-point in; Azaocratz bears down on his arm, intent on breaking it; the guardsman's bones creak, warning him that she will soon succeed, but he does not pull back to save his arm, instead pressing forward against her strength, the knife digging into her at a distorted angle, piercing away from the heart, but piercing nonetheless, sinking inward until no part of the blade can be seen and his gauntlets are steaming with draconic blood, and then, as he seeks to twist the dagger toward her heart, the lethal tail, with the speed of panic, whips forward and coils around his arm and snaps it with a shattering crack, and in his momentary shock, the monster beats him, mauls him, and hurls him down as Viványa slams into her back!
The reaction of Azaocratz is instant—she spins to shred the unarmored warrior to bloody pieces. But Viványa, clinging to the ropes on the monster's throat and foreleg, spins with her, and then, with a war cry and a kick against the golden edge, she topples them both into the pool.
They plunge deep, a thrashing storm of bubbles and blood. In that sluggish, blue-lit world, beneath the glassy surface with its rippling glow, their exhausted lungs struggle for air, and Azaocratz, her wound streaming bubbles from a punctured lung, finally goes berserk.
At the sudden increase in the wyvern's ferocity, Viványa, despite controlling the back, head, and arm of her enemy, feels frenzied rear claws hook and dig into her shins; so she kicks free and dives for the bottom, rope-ends in hand, seeking a place where she can knot the lines to drown her tethered foe beneath the surface. But the bottom is a circle of pure marble, any hooks or protrusions obscured by dancing threads of deceptive light, and she does not see the one sturdy root protruding through the wall.
Meanwhile Azaocratz is flapping and clawing for the surface, and finds herself again in a battle for leverage against the blood-haired warrior, pitting strength against strength. But for all the desperate convulsions of the monster's wings, Viványa has gravity on her side, and Azaocratz is beginning to die.
Viványa too is yearning to breathe. Yet when she sees her enemy spin and dive toward her, silhouetted in blue and gold and streams of blood, diving away from air itself to come and kill her, Viványa's throbbing heart brims with exquisite love, and a furious hunger for blood.
Not yet! she thinks. Not just yet, glorious beast, but soon—Live for me! Live!
Viványa spots the one sturdy root, a place to tether the lines and let her enemy drown, but turns from it now with contempt. Instead, as the wyvern arrives, she kicks off from the bottom and races for the light.
Breaching the surface, she rolls out over the golden rim, then scrambles to her feet. The scimitar, her last real weapon, she tears ringing from its sheath; and in her other hand she grips the ropes.
The pool erupts. Azaocratz gasps, heaving smoky air into her burning lungs. But already she has eyes only for her terrific foe.
Wolf-howling, hair unwinding, braid ripped free in battle, Viványa launches herself onto the scales of the monster's back.
And now both are berserk, gasping and snarling in the water, frenzied, snapping, hissing, laughing, writhing, a brace of tussling dragons, crimson and sapphire. Azaocratz—wounded and exhausted to the point of death—is now the lesser fighter, and the red warrior traps limb after limb in coils of rope and hair, binding tail to forelimb, neck to wrist, controlling the claws that even now could slaughter her in a heartbeat. And Azaocratz, berserking beautifully to the end, beats the warrior savagely against the golden rim.
Viványa gasps at the force of the blows, awed that her enemy still has strength. But she can taste victory. The thrashing of the monster's wings is barely enough to keep her muzzle above water, and she is slowing down. Viványa has her glorious foe bound well enough now that she can spare her sword-arm from the grappling. She raises her scimitar high, point downward, and presses her whole weight onto the monster's neck. Azaocratz sinks. Azure water rises over the sharp teeth, blocking off the last trickle of breath.
Suddenly the wyvern surges half out of the water, gasping desperately for air and biting at the warrior's neck, quick as a whip; but Viványa is quicker, and Azaocratz swallows a pound of scimitar before her teeth snap shut.
The entangled warriors crash back into the water.
Azaocratz is dead.
Slowly, panting, Viványa bears her enemy out of the pool.
She lays her on the dais and kneels down at her side, crying out in victory and heartbreak. Without pausing to pull off the ropes, she clasps the fierce enemy to her chest, and weeps.
As she cries, the others slowly gather. Taking their cue from Viványa, their manner toward the foe is one of reverence. Their feelings, as they stare at the scene of blasted carnage before them—the broken burning trees, the shattered ice, the slaughtered beast, the berserker crying her heart out, the wet red hair lying in the grooves between sapphires, like bloody rivers—their feelings are of awe, and of dazed triumph, and there is a sensation of heightened reality, a sense that they have taken part in no merely physical fight, but in some mythic rite or more-than-mortal act.
And then the sense of loss and glory strikes Viványa in full, and while the others are still benumbed, she feels enough for all, sobbing, as she bleeds, with raptures of grief and joy.