Dragon Wizard

  And one thing made the potential so much worse: were-dragon.

  Elhared in a dragon’s body, even temporarily, was a thought to give anyone pause.

  Maybe he’ll take so long the moon will come up.

  Yeah. That’s a good thought.

  But too soon, Elhared stopped writing and began chanting.

  CHAPTER 29

  Elhared chanted words that were not designed for a human throat. The incantations that drifted from his position on the ledge sounded as if some demonic imp with a lisp had attempted to gargle with hot coals while being repeatedly kneed in the groin: strangled, high-pitched, and as painful as a cinder in the eye. I couldn’t move this time so I could do nothing but watch the wizard and hope for something to go wrong.

  He held up the jewel on its chain, and stared at it as he chanted. By his feet the runes he had scratched in the stone began to glow. They pulsed red in time to the kind-of-words he spoke to the Tear of Nâtlac. The glow intensified as all the light around him, and around us, seemed to darken. It wasn’t just the setting sun. Something in what Elhared was doing, calling on the Dark Lord’s magic, using the jewel, prompting the fiery glow from the twisted runes around him, it banished more healthy light. The darkness crept into the world, pushing away everything but Elhared, the jewel, and the glowing runes.

  I felt the presence of the Dark Lord Nâtlac. I felt it as a thousand tiny insects crawling across my skin. I felt it in a thousand tiny splinters biting the flesh of my eyes, carving painful sigils that echoed the glowing alien script. I felt it as needles in my ears, and a feeling that I breathed air filled with broken glass.

  Frank! It hurts! It hurts . . .

  I couldn’t move, but I felt a rushing sensation, as if I flew away at great speed. My eyes involuntarily focused on the gem dangling from Elhared’s hand. In it I saw the burning sigils reflected, twisted, inverted in a million different facets as it became the whole of my field of vision, then the whole of my universe.

  “Oh crap!”

  I no longer felt Sebastian’s grip holding me. I could talk, and move, for all the good it did me. I floated in space, Nâtlac’s hellish script reflected and refracted through an infinite number of facets surrounding me.

  “Lucille!”

  I no longer heard her voice.

  I looked down and I could see myself; my old self, my original, long-dead self. I no longer wore the body of a virgin princess. My heart sank as I knew—not guessed, knew—that I no longer inhabited that body.

  I could feel Nâtlac’s laughter like a knife slicing into my soul. A knife coated with acid, salt, and children’s screams.

  I was back in Nâtlac’s realm, bodiless. I knew it by how the heavy warm air carried the smell of decay, and how the omnipresent red light never carried far enough to illuminate a wall or ceiling. Through the sigil reflections I could see pillars, and below a plain made from living cobblestones, cobblestones that stared, that screamed, that wriggled tongues and fingers at me.

  And I understood.

  The gem, the Tear of Nâtlac, was created, according to legend, by a soul escaping from Nâtlac’s grasp. This one in particular had apparently been formed in the wake of my own escape from the Dark Lord’s clutches. The gem had properties, when worn, to swap souls between two bodies.

  Again, legend had it that death would end such a transfer.

  But legend was somewhat vague as to how.

  “Oh you bastard!” I shouted into the ruddy darkness. “You unholy evil bucket of ogre spit!”

  This gem wasn’t a gift, or a reward. It was a trap.

  This thing had been sitting around waiting for me to die, just so it could suck up my soul like a goblin shucking an oyster. Even if I never used it, I suspected—no, again I knew—the moment that something other than the gem itself separated my soul from my body, I would have ended up here.

  I didn’t think I had much chance negotiating with the Dark Lord this time. I didn’t have another Queen Fiona to negotiate with.

  I felt despair descend over me, a fatal realization that it was over.

  Wasn’t it?

  Something itched in the back of my brain, and it wasn’t just the ambiance of the Dark Lord’s domain.

  He’d never been shy about terrorizing me every time I set foot anywhere near his realm. Why wasn’t he already facing me, expounding upon my eternal doom? It seemed like something he’d do.

  Why was I still floating between the reflected sigils of Elhared’s spell? What exactly was the droning rumble that seemed to slowly oscillate as the alien runes dimmed and brightened? It wasn’t the unnerving insect-like buzzing I associated with this place.

  It reminded me of the elves, partly frozen around us, but not really frozen. They’d just been moving very slowly.

  Because time ran differently there.

  Time ran differently here.

  Under the hill time seemed so slow, minutes there could be hours or days in the realm of mortals.

  Here, where the Dark Lord dwelled—wherever the gods dwelled, in fact—hours could be mere seconds in the mortal realm.

  It wasn’t over. Elhared still chanted. That was the drone I heard. It was why I still saw the flickering sigils of his spell. The spell was still proceeding. I floated somewhere between the mortal realm on that mountainside, and the realm of the Dark Lord. I still had a chance to do something.

  Yeah, just like when I was trapped in Lucille’s skull.

  Even if I had another dagger, or a broken sword hilt, I didn’t have anywhere to throw it. Elhared’s rumbling chant was everywhere around me. I also wore my old body, and the real physical body of Frank Blackthorne was buried and rotted to bones by now.

  I remembered the dream I had, Elhared—or the Dragon Sebastian-as-Elhared—digging up my skull, Frank Blackthorne’s skull.

  “The gang’s all here.”

  Yes, they were.

  “Digging up a wedding present.”

  Not an anniversary present, a wedding present. The gem, the Tear of Nâtlac, had been a “wedding” present from the Dark Lord.

  Why was I thinking of this?

  “I don’t think this is going to work,” as he tosses me the skull, “I think it’s broken.”

  Why does that seem relevant?

  My dreams had seemed odd for a while, at least the vivid ones. More like visions. The one about Timoras and the shattered mirror had inspired my plans with Robin, our half-elven camp follower. Not just to lead my people to escape the mountainside, and not just to lead Sir Forsythe to Dracheslayer.

  When I had made my deal with Timoras for Lucille’s freedom, I had also extracted a promise from Timoras. A promise and a mirror.

  I think I had understood that dream.

  Could the dream about faux-Elhared digging up my skull, could that have been about this? The “wedding present” that would not work? Because I was dead? Because Elhared was dead?

  Because we both were?

  The idea clicked in my mind as the consequence of a series of unsupported and tenuous assumptions that had solidified in my mind as unambiguous fact. Either I had tapped into a stream of deeper understanding, or I had just declared the world of the Dark Lord my home and as my first step in making myself comfortable, I had gone insane.

  But if I was right that the Tear of Nâtlac was a trap for souls that had escaped the Dark Lord’s clutches, then it had to be as much a trap for Elhared as it was for me—more so, since Elhared had been unquestionably deceased, dead, and gone, absent from the mortal coil for over a year. As far as I could tell, my own person never counted as actually dead, or if so, my current trapped situation was as close as I’d come.

  So if I’d shown up here—in this faceted prison wrapped by the burning sigils of Elhared’s spell—then it was only a matter of time before—

  Several things happened.
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  The rumble of Elhared’s slow-motion chanting ceased.

  The reflection of the burning runes all around me flared red, obscuring the details of the disturbing alien lines until all was just a flat red glow.

  All except a white crack that formed between some of the facets just ahead of me.

  The white expanded, pushing the glowing red facets aside until it seemed the mouth of a tunnel.

  A shadow, human-size, floated in the tunnel drifting toward me and picking up speed.

  I had nothing to push against, as if I floated in an endless ocean that buoyed me but gave no purchase with which to swim. I spread my arms. Despite the knowledge that the body I wore wasn’t physical, I hoped that it might still act as if it was a physical body in a physical world. I prayed to every god aside from the Dark Lord Nâtlac that the newcomer’s path would intersect the point where I floated.

  The newcomer kept accelerating, as if he fell toward me from a great height. His body language began showing the distress from falling, flailing arms and legs, cloak flapping in winds I didn’t feel. At the speed he fell, I only had a moment to read his expression. For only the briefest fraction of a second, he was close enough for me to see his face in detail.

  I saw wide-eyed confusion.

  I grabbed for his arm as he passed me. That pulled me backward, but also started us spinning around the point where I had grabbed him.

  His back struck the faceted wall opposite the white tunnel. I let go of his arm and slammed both feet into his chest, springing off of his body—

  Okay, not his body.

  His body still stood on a mountain ledge back in the mortal world.

  Where I was, my soul, cloaked in the form of the one and only original Frank Blackthorne, placed both booted feet into the apparent chest of Elhared’s spirit hard enough to crack nonexistent ribs and send his undoubtedly spiritual form into a wall of nonphysical semiprecious stone only symbolically solid enough to stop his imaginary descent and break his nonliteral neck while I rebounded into the whiteness from which he’d come.

  My last sight of him was as a tiny ragged form lit by a fading ruby light as I fell upward, away, into the light.

  CHAPTER 30

  I blinked my eyes and focused. I held up the Tear of Nâtlac at the end of its chain, suspended in front of my face. As I watched the gem flared red and faded to a dull black that reflected no light. A bit of foul smoke curled up from it.

  My hand shook and the chain slid from my fingers, the dead black gem falling to my feet.

  Elhared’s feet.

  I fell to my knees and felt old bones creak. I shook my head, unable to take my eyes off the horrible alien runes that the wizard had scratched into the stone. They no longer glowed, but the scorched stone still steamed slightly. I felt the throbbing disorientation and headache that always seemed to come after the transition of bodies.

  Despite the sense I had taken the sacrament of the God of Hangovers, what sickened me and made me tremble was the sense of age, six or seven decades plowing into me in less than a second. I felt like Nâtlac’s evil jewel, burned out and smoldering.

  I stared several seconds at my wrinkled, bony fingers, and gathered what was left of my will.

  Not completely unexpected.

  There were still things that needed to be dealt with, and Sebastian was one of them.

  I turned and saw the black dragon watching me with his head cocked. I was—Lucille was—wrapped in a double fist before him, feet dangling over the stone ledge.

  You’re smart, I thought at her, even if she couldn’t hear me. Follow my lead.

  “Elhared!” I yelled, even though it made my head throb. “What have you done?” I pointed an accusing finger at Sebastian’s fists.

  Lucille’s mouth was covered, but I still heard something like muffled curses. Sebastian glanced down and uncurled one finger from in front of her face.

  “Sebastian, you dolt! Put me down.”

  I held back a grin as I said, “You are going to pay for this, you misbegotten—”

  “Elhared?” Sebastian said, glancing from Lucille, back toward me.

  “Who else? What do you think the point of this exercise was?”

  Sebastian set her down on the ledge before him. She gave a very masculine “harrumph!” and made a show of brushing dust off her chemise.

  “So it worked?”

  “Obviously! And it would have worked the first time if you had kept that annoying thief restrained.”

  The grin I held back vanished of its own accord. I watched her straighten up and look at the dragon next to her with thinly veiled contempt, and I wondered, what if Elhared’s spell had worked? What if everything I had just experienced had been some sort of meaningless dream?

  It had felt real at the time, but the longer I looked out Elhared’s eyes, the less real it felt.

  “So now I can kill him?”

  “Why bother? He’s irrelevant now.”

  “Irrelevant? After what he did? He deserves far more than—”

  “Leave it. You’re a prince now and we have a kingdom to take over.”

  “Leave it? You aren’t sounding like Elhared.”

  “Priorities, Sebastian.”

  “Yes, yes.” Sebastian the Dragon turned his head and lifted it so he looked almost straight down at her. My doubts about successfully defeating Elhared were fading, but it didn’t make me feel any better to see Lucille’s deception slipping. “There are more important things than punishing the man who left me to rot with the elves.”

  “Yes, we—”

  “After all, that was only the whole point to giving that addled prince your scroll.”

  “But the bigger picture—”

  “And you said he killed you.”

  “What’s important now is—”

  Sebastian swept his forearm back and swatted her toward the stone wall of the cliff. I saw her petite body rise up and slam into the stone with bone-breaking impact. She dropped to the ledge like a rag doll that had lost half its stuffing.

  “You aren’t Elhared.”

  Oh crap.

  I fought the disorientation and sprang to my feet. As I did I felt like something literally jolted loose from my knee. “Wait! Sebastian! We still need her!” I tried to sound like the evil wizard I knew, but all I got was a sidelong glance from the dragon.

  “Enough second chances,” he grumbled through a roll of brimstone steam. “I don’t care if you’re Elhared or the thief. You I finish next.”

  “No!” I called out. “Stick to our plans!”

  Sebastian didn’t listen to me. He turned his head to face the fallen Lucille.

  But she wasn’t fallen anymore.

  Sebastian did a double take when she wasn’t where she had fallen. He swept his head around and finally caught sight of her. I squinted and saw her standing on the far end of the ledge, facing the dragon. She wiped blood from her lip with the back of her hand and spat at the ground. “You have to do better than that.”

  “How?”

  The answer came to mind unbidden: were-dragon.

  “You’re pathetic,” Lucille said to Sebastian.

  “What?”

  I think both Sebastian and I were equally stunned by Lucille’s bravado. Yes, I’d berated an angry dragon before—but that was when the dragon was Lucille and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be roasted.

  “You heard me,” Lucille continued. “You have the gall to be angry when this was all your doing?”

  “Francis Blackthorne—”

  “—should have put you out of everyone’s misery. You indebted yourself to the elves, which was incalculably stupid to begin with. But instead of dealing with the consequences, you conspire with Elhared? An unstable wizard? Are you insane?”

  “That had been a good plan.” Sebastian actua
lly sounded slightly cowed.

  “It was an idiotic plan. You’d give up everything you are, all that power, and hide from the scary elves as a princess for the rest of your life? Married to Elhared?”

  “He would have found me a new body afterward.”

  “And you believed that treacherous ass?”

  Why was she taunting him like that? Did she want him to attack her? I saw an amber glow leak from between Sebastian’s teeth, and his next words came in a cloud of steam. “You’re making me angry!”

  Lucille laughed. “The only thing making you angry is that I was ten times the dragon you ever were.”

  Sebastian reared and vomited a stream of flame.

  “Lucille! No!” I screamed impotently from the ledge where I stood.

  I watched the jet of flame tear through the air to saturate the half of the stone ledge where Lucille had been standing. I felt a blast of hot wind by my face, despite the distance. My heart sank. I couldn’t see Lucille through the flames, but whatever capacity for healing Lothan’s gift gave her, I couldn’t imagine it would save her from being reduced to ash.

  After ten or fifteen interminable seconds Sebastian stopped and the flames subsided, revealing nothing but cracked and blackened rock and the shimmer of heat in the air.

  I called up to him, past caring. “She was right! I should have slit your throat when you wore this body!”

  The dragon turned to face me. I could see steam and flickers of flames dancing around the edges of his mouth.

  “Whatever the elves planned for you is too kind!”

  “Big talk for someone so flammable.”

  “She was a better dragon than you. I was a better dragon than you.”

  “Nice try, but you aren’t going to go as quickly. You, I’m going to make last.”

  From behind Sebastian, someone grunted. I saw the dragon’s eyes widen as he turned his head back around. I ran to the side to see around the dragon’s bulk, and yelled at what I saw.

  “Lucille!”