Dragon Mage

  Please, flease don't let him discover I've weakened the big egg. Shilo wished Nidintulugal and her father were with her, then instantly changed that thought—bad enough that she was going to die because she'd challenged Arshaka. The priest and her father didn't need to share her fate. She hoped Kim wasn't coming back, and she prayed the boy could find his way to Ulbanu with one egg and then get home.

  "I've two eggs left, worm. Two spells to call the demons to start my blessed war. Demons from the egg will be stronger than ones summoned by mere bowls. They will grow and multiply upon their hatching. Glorious!" Spittle flecked at the corners of his lips. "You've not entirely undone me!" He spit at her.

  Shilo had never been spit at before, and had never been handled so badly. The back of her head hurt from when he'd shoved her against the wall, and all over she was feverish from using so much magic. Could she use her magic to hurt him in return?

  "I will kill you," he hissed. He shook her one more time, then pushed her away so hard she flew back against the desk. The impact sent the items on it spilling and hurtling to the floor—vials of sand and ink, wooden beads that made a clacking sound like hard candies dropped on the floor of a movie theater, smaller eggs that shattered and spilled their yolks, and objects she couldn't name fell.

  "Unless . . ." He stared down at her, hands clenching and unclenching so tight his knuckles had turned white. "Unless you cooperate, Southern girl . . . Shilo ... I want to go back to Georgia. Not now, the eggs are too close to hatching. But when they're done, and when the war has started. There are some things in Georgia, in America, that I want."

  Machine guns. Shilo didn't know why that thought instantly popped into her head. Grenades. Bombs. Nuclear weapons. He wanted modern weaponry—somehow she knew that, to help foster this war he was planning.

  "I can't," she said, forcing the words out. Her throat and mouth were so sore and hot.

  "Can't ... or won't?" He loomed over her now, foot coming down on her robe, like he was pinning a bug.

  "Can't. Only the dragon can send me back. And she's certainly not going to send you back. You took her eggs!"

  He laughed, a chilling, deep sound that bounced off the floor and walls. It was like something she'd expect to hear in a horror movie, but this was so much worse because it was real.

  "Why do you need modern weapons?" Shilo pulled the warm air into her lungs. She was so uncomfortably hot. "If you have demons, why do you need weapons?"

  His eyes narrowed and he bent closer. She could smell his breath, fetid and making her gag. "Weapons and Kevlar, chemicals. Mostly chemicals, Shilo. Bottles of chemicals. Chemical warfare is far more effective than bullets, child. Think what my demons could accomplish by spreading chemicals across countries that resist me! I'll slay the people and leave the blessed buildings intact. I'll put those loyal to me in the buildings and cities!"

  "You're insane," Shilo said.

  The two men in gray skirts returned, followed by four more in similar dress, who dragged Nidintulugal and Sigmund. Shilo made a move to rise, but Arshaka planted a foot on her stomach.

  He spoke to her in English now. "Perhaps you'll change your mind, Shilo, about finding your way back to Georgia."

  "Don't take him to Georgia! Don't tell him how!" Sigmund called. He fought only feebly now, his energy sapped from struggling so much earlier. "He's from Georgia, Shilo, and he forgot how to go back and—"

  Arshaka turned. "Shut your mouth, Sig, or I'll crush your pretty friend."

  Sigmund glared at Arshaka. "I should've never shown you that puzzle, Artie."

  Arshaka gave him a lethal look and applied a little pressure to Shilo's stomach. She squirmed, grabbed his ankle, and tried to push him off.

  "The boy!" Arshaka sneered. "Him first."

  The two men wrenched Sigmund's arms up and behind him. The man with the knife pressed it against Nidintulugal's side to keep him from struggling.

  "Stop," Shilo said. "Please stop. Don't hurt him."

  Arshaka removed his foot. "Stay down, girl."

  "Please don't hurt him." She didn't move.

  "The boy will stay healthy if you cooperate."

  "You can threaten him, threaten me," she said. "But I can't get back home without the dragon. That's the truth."

  Arshaka looked undecided for a moment. "You realize you're worth nothing to me, either one of you, if you can't take me home. We didn't need a dragon to get home when we used the puzzle before. So you can't possibly need a dragon now."

  "He's forgotten how to travel, Shilo. That's why he needs us," Sigmund cut in.

  Shilo gave Arshaka the coldest stare she could muster. So he had used the puzzle before, maybe was from Sigmund's neighborhood, maybe had snuck into the old man's house.

  Arshaka steepled his fingers under his chin. "You'd best remember, Shilo, Sigmund, how to travel, or you won't be getting any older." He brightened, smiling wide and warmly, and he rubbed his hands together. "These eggs are not far from hatching, and if the dragon whelps survive, they'll be hungry." He paused and stared at Shilo. "The demons most certainly will be hungry."

  The Hand turned to the two men who'd originally accompanied him into the chamber. "The Old One should have arrived by now. He was to finish inscribing two eggs; now he must fully inscribe only one. Siighi, retrieve the Old One and Belzu-Mar. Perhaps they do not know the eggs are so close to hatching."

  Arshaka watched the man grab up the unlit candle, light it at the brazier, and leave. Shilo sucked in a breath. He left the way Kim had with the egg; he'd discover the men trapped in the tub.

  "It's so hot," Shilo whispered. Arshaka alternately watched her and Sigmund now. She propped herself up against the leg of the desk, and with one hand grabbed the front of her robe and fluttered it, as if trying to cool herself. She was worried for Kim . . . and for Sigmund and Nidintulugal and for everyone if the demons arrived.

  "The heat is for the eggs," Arshaka said. "And because the coming demons enjoy it warm."

  "Of course demons would like it warm," she whispered.

  Arshaka didn't see her other hand snake forward and touch the hem of his robe, didn't know she was working her magic.

  She thought about the clay in the other room that she'd hardened around the two captured men, and thought about the nuts she'd melted and the eggshell she'd made more brittle. She felt herself growing even warmer, and she held her breath and coaxed Arshaka's clothes to become like steel and the hem of his long robe to meld with the dirt of the floor.

  "All of it steel," she breathed.

  "What?" The Hand felt his clothes stiffen around him, and though he tried to back away from Shilo, he wasn't fast enough.

  She concentrated harder, and within the passing of a few heartbeats Arshaka was effectively trapped. His right arm was bare, and so he could move it. He tried to turn his head, but the swath of yellow material held it like his neck was in a cast. He flailed his arm furiously.

  "Kill them!" he shouted. "The priest first! Make it hurt!"

  Only one of the men had a weapon, and this was the knife that had been taken from Nidintulugal. The man drew his arm back, then thrust it forward. But Nidintulugal reacted quickly. The priest dropped, his weight pulling at his captors and ruining the man's aim.

  The knife found flesh, but the wrong target. The blade buried itself in the side of the other man. The grip on the priest loosened, and he extricated himself by springing up and jumping back.

  "Kill the boy!" Arshaka spat. "Break his neck!"

  30 Bad Spells

  ' NO! DON T HURT HIM! DON T TOUCH HIM! SHILO SCREAMED AND pulled herself up on Arshaka's immobile arm. "I'll kill your beloved Hand if you touch that boy!"

  This made the two men holding Sigmund pause.

  Behind them, the man who'd been stabbed clutched at his side, blood spilling out from between his fingers. The other pulled the knife out and swung it again at Nidintulugal. This time the priest grabbed the man's wrist and brought his knee up, cracking it against the man'
s arm. The knife clattered to the floor. Nidintulugal kicked at the man, sending him away, and grabbed the knife.

  The man who'd been stabbed collapsed and stopped breathing.

  "Three of you left in here," Shilo said. "If you want to keep living, and if you want the Hand to live, you'd best listen to me."

  "To me!" Arshaka shouted. "You'll listen to me! She won't kill me, you fools. She's just a girl. She's—" His eyes widened.

  One of the eggs, the smaller one with the complete spell, started to crack.

  "Kill the boy!' Arshaka repeated. "Do it now, I say!"

  Nidintulugal rammed the knife into the back of one of the men holding Sigmund. He tried to pull the blade free, but it was wedged too tightly in a rib. Releasing the handle, the man fell, gasping and twitching. The priest turned to the other man holding Sigmund and grabbed him below the shoulders. He fought hard, and Nidintulugal could barely hold him.

  Shilo had made it over to the final guard. She'd hardened his skirt and pushed him to the floor. Like a turtle that had been turned onto its back, he struggled to get up, but could go nowhere.

  "Two dead," Nidintulugal told her as he continued to wrestle with a guard. "As a result of my actions."

  "Better than all of us dead, Niddy," Sigmund said. The boy helped restrain Nidintulugal's opponent. "Hurry, Shilo, give him a concrete skirt, too."

  Concrete? That's just what she did.

  All the while Arshaka continued to holler.

  "Don't you have a way to shut him up?" Sigmund was looking to her to solve the problem.

  "No, I—" She ripped another piece of cloth free from the hem of her robe and stuffed it in his mouth. "I guess I do have a way to shut him up."

  Arshaka's face was so red it looked like he was going to explode.

  "The egg—" Sigmund prompted.

  Nidintulugal was not looking at the eggs. He stared at the two downed men and the growing pools of blood. There was blood on his hands and on his robe, and a smudge on his face where he must have wiped at the sweat.

  Shilo wanted to talk him through this and console him, but the eggs were the more pressing concern. A large spiderweb crack had appeared in the top of the smaller egg, and the black writing on the bottom half had started to glow.

  "Oh, my," she hushed. "I don't know what to do. I don't know . . . Fath . . . Sigmund. I don't—"

  "Well think of something!" the boy said. "You're the one with magic."

  Think. Shilo grabbed the egg at the bottom and squealed. "Hot!" She pulled back, but only for a heartbeat. Then she grabbed the egg again, her mind racing with prayers and thoughts of making it as thin as tissue paper. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see what was happening and not wanting to watch her hands burn.

  She felt them burning—she'd accidentally burned herself more than once trying to cook. Those incidents had been nothing. She imagined that her skin was frying awray. Still, she wouldn't release her grip. Was this a second kind of courage— courage of the blood? In the dream Kim had told her she would have to find her courage.

  Shilo threw her head back and opened her mouth to scream, but with the last bit of her will she kept quiet. And then she felt her thumb break through the shell.

  "Niddy, she's breaking the bad spell! Look!"

  Shilo thrust all of her fingers against the shell, feeling each one break through. It was like plunging her fingers into boiling water, and she pictured her hands melting away.

  Can't keep this up, she thought. This will kill me. But if she succeeded, Sigmund might live, Nidintulugal, too. Was that another kind of courage—being willing to sacrifice yourself. In the back of her mind she remembered something else Kim had told her in the dream.

  "And yet if you value your life and want to hold on to your father's memories—if you don't want to risk everything you know, you must never heed her call."

  But Shilo had heeded the dragon's call, and now she was risking everything. She started breaking away bits of the shell, as if she were peeling a hard-boiled Easter egg. Only this egg sizzled and popped and gave off the worst odor she'd ever smelled in her relatively short life. It was the scent of sulfur and charred flesh and things dead and rotting.

  She tried to gag, but nothing came up. Then she tried to breathe, but her chest had grown too tight. Finally, she tried to open her eyes. But all she saw was blackness. Hot and total, it swirled around her and sucked her down.

  "Demons!"

  Safe in the stifling, scalding darkness, Shilo heard the word repeated. It was Sigmund shouting, and she fought her way back to reach him.

  "Niddy, those've got to be demons!"

  Shilo floated in the darkness; it was syrupy, and it resisted her attempts to pull out of it. Her arms felt like lead, trying to tug free. Water, she thought. Let the blackness be like water. She pictured the water that ran in the troughs down the sides of the Hanging Gardens, and the Euphrates River. Somehow she manipulated the blackness. It wasn't so thick anymore, and it didn't suck her down.

  Buoyed, she felt her head breaking above it, opened her eyes, and witnessed a horror that held Nidintulugal and Sigmund dumbstruck. Emerging from the shattered egg were red-skinned demons.

  The chittering, writhing mass oozed out of the nest and onto the floor. Each creature was roughly the size of a softball, and each was a little different—one had a broad face and a wide nose with four nostrils, Mr. Spock ears, and no lips, but plenty of teeth. Another had a heart-shaped face with wide blue eyes and nostrils, but no nose. And one had two heads, one of them malformed with only one eye and ear. Some o[ them had wings, others webbed fingers and toes and gill slits on their necks. They had some things in common—scaly skin the shade of fresh blood, curved talons on their hands and feet, gleaming white teeth that looked needle-sharp.

  The man on the floor, trapped by his concrete skirt, could not scream as they flowed over him; he had no tongue.

  But Sigmund screamed. The boy threw his hands over his mouth and stumbled backward. The demons swarmed over the corpses of Arshaka's other men, and Nidintulugal reached into the mass and retrieved his knife. One started climbing the priest's leg, and he stabbed at it. The demon howled shrilly, the noise hurtful, then it withered and disappeared in an oily puff of smoke. Nidintulugal started stabbing at more.

  Sigmund tried to shake off his fear, jumping and coming down on a demon. "They can die!" he called to Shilo. "But there's so many of them."

  She risked a glance at Arshaka, who was futilely trying to spit the gag out of his mouth. He could, control these demons, she thought. He knows the spell and knows how to order them around. He can stop this slaughter. She stepped toward him and raised her arm to pull the cloth out, saw the relief in his eyes and instantly stopped herself. Arshaka would order the demons to continue the slaughter.

  Shilo looked back to the broken egg. The form of a small dragon, its stomach missing, sickened her. She started stomping on the demons too, crying out when one tore at her robe and bit deeply into her leg.

  "Hurry! We've got to kill them before they get out of this room!" Shilo wrinkled her nose when she crushed one of the skulls of the two-headed demon. "If they get out into the city, who knows what'll happen." A glance back at the shattered egg. More demons were emerging from where the dragons stomach had been.

  She fought her way toward the eggshell, even as she fought against the bile rising in her throat. She'd never been in a more disgusting, horrid situation. The stench pounded at her senses, so strong she swore she could taste it. She managed to reach the baby dragon corpse, where more demons continued to emerge. These monsters were only the size of golf balls. But as she watched, they started to grow.

  Shilo placed her hands on the dragon's body ... it was just an object now, no life to it, just a gate the demons were coming through.

  "Sigmund, the other egg—the big one with the writing on it. Break it!" She hated the order, knew doing so could well kill the baby dragon inside. But she couldn't risk that the egg would break on its own an
d that demons would spill out. The monsters clearly could exist without a bowl being intact. "Break it now!"

  She bit hard on her lower lip to keep from crying out and returned her attention to the baby dragon corpse. The tiny demons emerging from the carcass swarmed up her arms, chewing and clawing at her. She wanted to brush them off, but didn't budge. Instead, she did her best to ignore the pain and focused on the dragon corpse. It was a thing now, she told herself again. An inanimate object. Like the nuts and the clay and the garments, it was something that could be manipulated.

  "Melt," she said. "Run like water." As the tiny demons continued to bite at her, the corpse did just that—it melted. A silver-gold smear, it trickled into the nest. "No more demons coming out." She stepped back and started plucking the tiny demons off her arms, hurling them to the floor and stomping on them.

  Shilo was engrossed in the grisly task, but she took a quick peek to her right, seeing Sigmund repeatedly strike the large egg like it was a punching bag. The egg cracked, but she couldn't hear it; the demons were making too much noise. Finally scraping the last one off her, she spun to see Nidintulugal struggling with one that had grown to the size of a basketball.

  How hig could they grow?

  "Did any get out of this room?" she shouted.

  The priest shook his head. "I do not think so."

  "One at least!" This came from Kim, who stood by the brazier, holding the broken body of a demon who'd grown to half the boy's size. "Caught him in the clay room, chewing on the face of that Belzu guy. Had to deal with a guy without a tongue, too." He dropped the dead demon and started stomping on the red wave surging his way.

  "Don't let any more get out!" Shilo called.

  "Eww . . . gross!"

  Shilo turned her attention back to Sigmund. He'd broken the egg and peeled the shell off the baby dragon. It struggled to live, mouth opening and closing, neck flopping around and feet twitching. Its belly roiled, and Shilo likened it to a pan of Jiffy Pop.