Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 24

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Chapter 24

In the center of dancing green flames, heat shimmers, and little cheery pops, the dragon smiled. I’d sliced a big, gaping notch in its skull, and the bones had some play. The back part flapped open and closed as it moved or talked. Tongues of flame licked the lips of the wound, vile green flames stained with black blood. Its scales glittered piano black, but the flames gave them a dim emerald look. Its eyes were bright as oak leaves and thick with veins. Its scales were hard and sharp. Its talons were long and broad. The dragon was an armored monster, but that wouldn’t matter if I got at its brainpan. For now, it leered at me from among the flames.

My right leg was pretty much boogered, and the soles of my feet were burned. I couldn’t run, but I wasn’t ready to anyway. This dragon and I were having a grudge match, and I carried a lot of grudges.

Meanwhile, it was lying. “Kog, my dear friend, let us come to an agreement. You want to kill Koru. I want to kill Koru. We can agree on this. I will help you kill him and take his daughter.”

I suppose I didn’t know it was lying. It might not mean me harm. Maybe trying to eat me earlier, setting me on fire, and breaking down the building were misunderstandings.

“Kog, stop thinking stupid thoughts,” said the Drowning Breath of Ogden. “It wants to kill you. Murder it first.”

The dragon smiled. “The sword, like a sword, is just looking for a fight.”

I wished they both would shut up.

I was getting my wind back. That takes a little longer than I ever expect. Exhaustion makes cowards of us all, but you never think it will happen to you. It’s not obvious, even from the inside. I felt like I didn’t want to fight the dragon because I’d been smashed, beaten, partially set on fire, and it was a dragon. Those were all good reasons.

But as I breathed, I started thinking, ‘Death on this dragon. I can take it.’

The dragon said, “Let’s talk as friends. I’ll move backwards so you feel safe.”

“Please do,” I replied. I needed the pause to get some air.

Right now Hasso’s courtyard was the area on fire between buildings. Before it had been the loading area, a recursively defined space that was where the buildings weren’t. Two forge halls, a lane in and out, kitchen, finishing hall, and supply yard made a circle in that order, starting with the one forge hall that Hoarfast hadn’t knocked down being behind me. The dragon had perched on the wagon ramps, a couple of broad, flat platforms the height of a wagon bed, each with a wide, shallow ramp down to ground level. The ground smoldered with flames as high as cut grass.

But contrary to my expectations, the dragon did move away after speaking. It shuffled to the narrow lane and retreated until its eyes were flames in the darkness. Between us burned the wide courtyard.

When I went after it, I was going to have to cross that, and go after it head-first.

Ah, death and sickness on it. Another veil of confusion got pulled from my face. I really should not have let the dragon take better position, but I’d expected it to charge. And as the fog started to clear, I realized that I had taken some shots in that fight. I had no idea how foggy I had been.

I shook my head like the dragon couldn’t. Heh. It was time.

All right, sword, I thought. We’re going to kill the dragon.

The sword didn’t say anything, which was probably for the best, but I felt its immense satisfaction.

The dragon spoke. “Now, Kog, mortal man of Koru’s house, they said you died. Astra worked your destruction. Seraphine laughed at you. They are Koru’s women, and he bid your death. When you kill him, you can take them.”

“Sounds unfriendly,” I said.

My feet were badly burned. I looked around for some means to getting over there without running across more fire. The broken forge hall’s ceiling made a pyramid of collapsed roofing, rubble, and stone, but all of it looked jagged and sharp. I took my shirt off, cut it in half, and wrapped both my feet.

“It will be what they deserve. Take them, and make them yours,” said the dragon. “His mansions are tall and filled with treasure.”

“Mansions?” I asked idly. “Are you great and powerful enough to know about the one in Hyperion?”

Koru didn’t have a mansion in Hyperion. He was a god of rats. No one wanted him in their capital city.

The dragon hissed or purred. I couldn’t tell, but it sounded smug enough. “Of course. I know all of the secret ways and the deep tunnels. I know where he burrowed to the shafts of clockwork underneath the city. I know his little pits and hidden chambers.”

“Truly, you are wise,” I agreed. My shirt had laces on the sleeves, and by cutting the shoulders open, I made little foot-bag shoes. It wasn’t good, but it was better than barefoot. “What is your name, grim beast?”

It smiled. Flame rolled out of its mouth. “I am the Fire, the Fear, and the Light.”

I looked down from the broken forge hall. “You gave yourself that name, didn’t you?”

“No. That’s what everyone calls me,” said the dragon.

“Of course.” I tested my feet on the rubble. Pain, I felt and swore, this was going to hurt in the morning. I flipped the sword to my left hand, and held the last remaining bit of shirt, the back panel, in my right.

“I agree with everything,” I said. “Come out of the alley, and we’ll go forth to wreak Koru’s destruction together.”

The dragon declined. “No. You come in here and join me. They will be so surprised to find out you live.”

“There it is,” I said to myself and took one last look at the beast. There was a pathway of rubble across the ruined building. My lungs were full and clear. It was time.

Sickness and death, I thought. Pattern spiders, hear me. I need a little more luck!

They didn’t reply. They usually don’t.

“Obesis!” I screamed, and ran up the ruined building.

The dragon blew flames that washed over the fallen building like waves taking a beach. They made fire-spouts over stubs of roof-beams. They flooded over the forgehall and climbed with a thick, waving plume of rising heat above. I took two steps on the side of a broken bit of wall, leaped up and over the leading edge, and thew the shirt down like spinning a pizza. It hit the hot air and danced.

“Obesis!” I yelled again, landed on the spinning shirt, and rode it down the hot air above the fires into the face of the dragon.

By the time I landed, the shirt was incinerated. But I landed on the dragon’s snout, sword in hand, and sank it into the dead center of the armored dome. The dragon roared and smashed the top of its head into the kitchen wall. I fell off first. Stone and rubble fell around the beast as it thrashed through the kitchen, ripping it apart as plumbing got caught in its legs.

I stood up with only my bare hands, watching the dragon thrash and destroy madly, seeming breaking the building for no purpose. The construction collapsed around it. Behind me, the fire infected the other ruined building, and the timbers and stone burned, stinking of disease.

The dragon’s head pushed aside stony fragments, leaking flames, and dribbling spittle. Its blood and fluids stank of acid.

I ran up a side of the building that hadn’t yet settled and spoke no words. The beast heard me coming, but its eyes didn’t quite work, It jerked its head sideways, trying to spot its target, and sulfurous yellow fire mixed with the vile green. It saw me when I caught the brow ridge, levered myself into position over its eye, and grabbed a chunk of broken rebar.

The dragon blinked. I spoke Ojhast, Thunder’s Lovesong, and stabbed it through the eyelid. White lightning grounded through its brain stem, its fluids, and down into the ruined frame of the building. More flowed through my arm, body, and out my feet, taking a thousand pathways like a river-mouth to the sea. Spasms threw me sideways. I hit the rubble, rolled, and crashed to the dirt of Hasso’s lane under an avalanche of building rubble and utterly destroyed food.

I drifted toward unconsciousness, but if I fell asleep now, I would die.

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 23

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Chapter 23

A shadow the size of a building watched me from outside the forge light. Hasso’s body and those of his slaughtered servants were long since gone. Sometime during my labors day had fallen into night, but the heavy overcast had let the transition sneak past me. The furnace blazed merrily, building up immense heat, and the two ruined attempted-murder weapons were beginning to run like warm butter. I held the third sword, the Drowning Breath of Ogden, that I’d taken from the agent of Fate. The shadow had eyes of green, teeth like a fireplace grate, and its breath danced with foul, green flames.

I put down the smithing hammer, took a two-handed grip on the sword, and found my hands cramped. I shifted to a single-handed grip, but I didn’t know what to do with my other hand. I’m a bare-handed fighter by training and temperament, so I wanted to put my other hand up in a guard, but that seemed stupid. The sword should be the guard. For striking, should I punch or swing the blade? Both, I guessed.

The shadow moved sideways, away from the ruins of Hasso’s storeroom. The less threatening shadow of the storeroom bulged with it. Then the strange shadow stepped into the wide courtyard, and I saw it distinctly. It was a dragon.

But it was wrong.

Dragons are long, serpentine things. They swim through the air like fish. They’re elegant, fine, and graceful. This thing lumbered. It had big, heavy shoulders on stout legs with broad claws like shovels. Its body resembled an elephant’s but didn’t rest on its legs; it hung from its shoulders. The triangular head swiveled on a thick neck, more like a rodent’s than a snake’s. Its tail flopped and lashed behind it, lying still mostly, thrashing sometimes. The whole critter looked incorrect.
“Hello, mortal man,” it said, and its voice was even worse. It was full of malice, cruelty, and greed, and the hairs rose on my neck and arms.
This thing must die, Kog. You need a sword that can kill it.

“Don’t listen to the sword. Listen to me, delightful person.”

Kill it now, Kog.

“Hush, toothpick.”

I jerked my head from beast to blade, because suddenly I could hear the sword talking and a whole bunch of things I hadn’t known I hadn’t known made way too much sense. But the hesitation was an opening, the dragon took it, and the beast charged across the courtyard and struck through the forge door.

It struck like a ferret, I dodged sideways, its squat shoulders slammed against the door frame, and the thick head swung sideways to bite at me. I ran towards it, climbing up one of the small woodpiles inside the furnace, and got to about its ear level where I was behind its jaws. This made the beast retreat to get an attacking angle, but that pulled its head outside the room. It smashed sideways, trying to bite with the side of its mouth. The door frame shuddered. Bits of brick and mortar fell. I climbed up the woodpile and wedged myself into the corner of wall and ceiling. The heavy, green eye followed me, and the critter retreated.

For a moment the room was quiet except for the blaze of the furnace. Fire is a lot louder than I ever expect.

“You didn’t attack!” yelled the sword, and it wasn’t me thinking! The sword was talking to me! “Kog, kill the dragon! Stab!”

It was silent and it was inside my head, but the sword was yelling. The dragon burst through the wall.

The beast smashed brick and stone, but Hasso had reinforced his walls with steel frames. Part of the building folded down, throwing me with it. I hit the ground, bricks hit me, and the dragon’s jaws snapped above my head, grabbing rafters and pulling down the ceiling. The building groaned.

It snapped, snapped again, and twisted its head. It couldn’t really see down without turning its head. I dove for another woodpile.

The dragon pulled back and appeared in the doorway again. This time it didn’t stick its snout in. It pointed its head sideways to the door so it could peer in with one eye. Between us the furnace blazed. I had hid by the back wall, while the woodpile wasn’t perfect cover, there was a lot of brilliant furnace-light between us. The dragon cocked its head up and down. It looked up at the hole it had smashed in the wall and tried to figure out if I was up there. It shuffled around outside to get a look with both eyes, but then it had to pull back even further.

The sword whispered about murder, murder, murder. Against a dragon, it seemed like it had a point. While charging the dragon would take me straight into its jaws, there was that big, beautiful hole in the wall over its head.

I grabbed a handful of wood dust, tossed it, and screamed, “Obesis!”

Running up the stairway of dust motes while the echoes of the word still hung in the air, I passed right before the open doorway. The dragon darted in to strike, but I shot through the wall while the dragon’s round shoulders slammed into door frame. I had an instant of a beautiful opening on its head before the beast unfurled its wings. The left one hit me in the guts, knocked the sword away, and trapped me against the wall.

I spoke Raln, and all things were blades, even my hand. I cut its bat-like wing from bones to edge.

The dragon tore itself out of the building and took half the wall with it. Hasso’s steel reinforcements screamed and rent. Bricks fell on the forge. I dove for the sword, artlessly dodged a shovel-like claw, and the dragon’s head swung around again. It bathed the ground in fire but aimed too low, entangled by the skin of the breaking building. Dragon-fire blasted courtyard stone, old metal fragments, and bits of plumbing. The forge fires turned green and evil as dragon-fire infected them. I got the sword.

“Obesis!” and I ran across ripples of searing heat as dragon fire burned the courtyard. The dragon lost me when I went up, and I landed on its head with the Drowning Breath of Ogden. The sword bit dragon-skull to the hilt.

The creature screamed, jerked sideways, and threw me. I tried to lobotomize it on exit. On hitting the wall I muffed the landing, but the beast couldn’t capitalize. It stumbled backwards, spasming, and from its skull poured green fire and black blood. The creature shrieked. Its skull hung open and soft tissue jiggled. I thought of a cracked egg with the yolk not yet poured into the frying pan.

But the dragon was not yet dead.

It lumbered backwards. I got up.

I’d hit something in that fall. I had no idea what. My right leg wouldn’t hold my weight. After standing for a moment, it buckled underneath, and I’d slumped against a wall like a drunk. I flipped the sword to my off hand, between the beast and me, and pushed myself off the wall with my right. The blade dripped with dragon blood, sizzled with dragon fire, and started talking.

“Finally, you blister, you’re getting work done,” said the sword.

“The filth can you talk!?” I yelled.

“I’ve been talking to you for days. Why are you so surprised?”

“Because…” I had no idea what to say. “Death!”

And the dragon whispered, “Come now, mortal man. Lay down the sword, and let us speak as living beings.”

“And death upon you too!” I yelled at the dragon and most-definitely, absolutely, positively, DID NOT lay down the sword.

I had cut open the dragon’s head. Part of its skull was missing on the left side, and another part was flopping around. I must have missed the brain but had come close. The dragon sidled sideways to face me while protecting its wound. One huge, green eye stayed on me. Flame escaped its snake-lips every time it spoke. Between us Hasso’s courtyard burned, and the dragon stood back, leaning against the wall of the supply yard.

“No, no, no, mortal man. Do not listen to the sword. I mean you no harm.”

“The sickness you don’t!” I said.

“I only want us to be friends,” said the dragon.

“Kog, it’s lying.”

“Of course its lying– you, shut up!” I said to the sword.

“Kog. It called you that before,” said the dragon. It smiled. “Ah Kog. I know you now. Koru has spoken of you. I hate him too. Put down the sword, let us be friends, and we will work Koru’s destruction.”

Its voice bubbled and sparked. Soft consonants flowed, hard ones popped. Flame licked out of its wounds, and the beast winced. Then it smiled. “Friend.”

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 4

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Chapter 4

I didn’t want to die.

I did some fast but simple thinking in the seconds while falling.

I didn’t want to die.

I had nothing else. I didn’t know what I wanted to live for now that everything had ended. I didn’t know what I would do. I didn’t know where I mattered or to whom.

I didn’t want to die.

But that was enough.

I fell from the high tower toward the river below and thought of rivers.

The River Alph had three daughters: Astras, Aelof, and Azenath. Astras you’ve met. Aelof never really left home. A high aqueduct met the Hundred Ribbons falls as the Alph came over the ringwall, and siphoned a small stream away. This stream, Aelof, ran across the arch that connected the Hakan to the wall, and once within the Hakan, drove wheels and turned vanes to power the city. When I’d first come to Shang Du on an errand, she and I had been introduced while I was waiting for Koru. Within thirty seconds, she was lamenting how much harder she worked than anyone else and how no one else helped. She did and nor did anyone else help, but we’d just met and I didn’t really want to hear about it. After doing all the work in this place, her words, the river vented through a hundred-headed rat sculpture on the south side of the pillar.

Azenath or Zeni, left her father shortly after Hundred Ribbons. An oxbow of the river branched off and filled a narrow, deep fault between black basalt and pale granite. The fault’s shape resembled a funnel. A stairway carved into the fault spiraled down until being lost in deep shadows. One could walk down the spiral until exiting to the other place and there read the meaning of dreams. Koru had bragged about it when giving me the tour.

I’d met Zeni last night. The river carried a great deal of brown silt, but by moonlight, the pool had cleared. I could see the stairway descending across white and black stone until it met the reflection of the moon and there vanished. She’d worn gossamer and spider silk, waited at a platform round as the moon itself, sitting on a round bench around a round pit, everything pocked with black shadows against white marble. There was no marble in the earth around Shang Du. We’d talked for a long time, but my dreams had been full of glory and thunder. She’d had little to say.

I was going to hit the Aelof’s outflow.

In my second year of Northshore, after I’d dropped out of my Sorcery major but before I’d started Unarmed Combat, a rumor had circulated that if you spoke Obesis at exactly the right moment, you could fall from any height and live. Right as you hit the ground, provided you were falling feet first, you could ghost-step onto the ground and walk away. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had done it. A freshman tried.

He died.

The faculty brought everyone together and explained you can’t actually do that. Hitting the ground happens really, really fast, hence the problem, so speaking Obesis at exactly the right time is basically impossible. Furthermore, that isn’t really what Obesis does. Obesis lets you stand on things, not survive getting hit by them at terminal velocity. I felt badly for the kid. We hadn’t been friends, but I’d known him. He rode a skateboard. His name was something Unnish, Franz or Frens.

I hit the Aelof’s outflow, and it was more like a thick mist than a waterfall. It rumbled but didn’t roar. I spoke Obesis as my foot found a trickle of falling water.

The impact wrenched my foot. My knees felt like breaking. My foot plowed through the stream, throwing dovetails, and I stepped onto them, shouting Obesis again with more power. My other foot went sideways beneath me, and the knee did break. The mist fell thick, and the spray made rainbows. I inhaled to try again, hoping to land on the mist itself when I hit the water.

The water of Alph, even in a deep pool with the surface agitated by the Aelof’s outflow, hit like nothing else. I’ve never eaten canvas on the mats like that. It was getting hit with everything, all at once, and there was nothing to slap or break-fall.

And then I was underwater in the dark, and I couldn’t breathe, but at least I had been inhaling to yell so I had good air in my lungs. My head was foggy. I couldn’t figure out why I was floating but felt like I was going down. The world was dark, and the black rocky bottom of the pool looked the same as shadows.

The brain-machinery started clicking again, and the first thought in line for processing was ‘Pain and death, that hurt!’

The second was ‘Swim sideways, then up.’

That was more useful.

I broke the surface, breathed, and groaned. “Oh, wow. Oh, wow.” Oh, that hurt. But the pool seemed still outside the falls, deep in the Alph’s canyon. The black rock of the valley floor reached together overhead. I couldn’t see the silvered domes of Koru’s palace. Spirals of bubbles turned lazily on the water surface like the river spiraled about the valley floor, and they spun me in gentle circles. I tended distinctly toward one side.

The canyon was more of a series of connected pits than a single long trench, and at the end of it, the Alph vanished under the Hakan, a drop from which no one or no thing returned. This one place in the valley held none of Koru’s children. Rats can’t make it out once they are taken by Astras, the final plunge at Alph’s end, and I think I’ve mentioned that rats are strong swimmers. I wasn’t. I paddled to the side, found a bit of ledge, and slithered out.

I felt terrible. Oh, biscuits.

But I lived.

#

Several long, circuitous miles of crawling on hands and one knee brought me to Zeni’s oxbow. Her father had not appeared in flesh or foam. That had worried me, for the rats that did not see me avoided this place because they feared his drowning grip. Alph served Koru in exchange for being fed. Yet the river did not take form nor reach out to drag me down. I thought of so many reasons he should or shouldn’t be gone that I realized I was thinking in circles. I crawled in circles too as Alph spiraled in, and when I crawled up-stream, I spiraled out until I came to Zeni’s branch. The trip consisted of unpleasantness that cannot be described. Yet we had feasted on honeydew and ambrosia to watch the killing, and now, I endured.

The Sun set, the Moon rose, and I crawled to her pool and down. The winding stairway lead around and around, and I could breathe the water as if it was air. Soon I met her as she climbed to greet her visitor, and she greeted me like an old friend.

“Stop bleeding on my stairs!”

“We’re underwater!”

“So?” she demanded.

“Let the water wash it off.” I waved a hand.

“Who do you think the water is?” asked Azenath in a tone that didn’t imply she wanted a response.

When I need help with the ladies, a little sex appeal always gets me through. If that doesn’t work, I try flattery. If that didn’t work, I’d need a desparate plan C.

“Oh lady Azenath, fairest and most beautiful of your sisters-” I paused to think of something to say next.

“Yes,” she replied.

I hesitated.

She waited.

Boils and blisters on plan C. “Since I met you, I have thought of no one else.”

“Good.”

“You have stolen my heart. I yearn for you. My eyes see nothing but your face, and the blood in my veins beats to your name.”

“I do that to people.”

She smiled, facing upward at a slight angle, nodded, and waited.

“My love, I need your help.”

Azenath snorted. She made bubbles. “Oh, there it is. Why would you bring that in? You were doing so well.”

“It’s my leg.”

“I don’t care about your leg. Talk more about me.”

“You’re probably right. It’s for the best you don’t cure my leg, for if I could run, I would chase you, catch you, carry you down to the bier in the pool’s dark nethers, and have my way with you.”

Azenath stopped scowling at the distant sky. She looked down. “What now?”

“I dare not say it again.”

“Oh, you should.”

“It’s my leg.”

She licked her lips and stretched her eyebrows. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Technically speaking, it’s broken.”

“I can see that. You’ve got bones sticking out.”

“You did ask.”

“Don’t get fresh.”

“I’m trying to get fresh. That’s why I’m here!” I insisted. “If you cure my leg, I’m going to get even more fresh, and that’s something too impure to be conceived.”

Azenath cocked her head sideways but did not immediately reply. Nor did she cure my leg. She was a river-goddess in her place of power, so I wasn’t asking for the Moon here.

“Besides, it would be wicked. Your father wouldn’t approve.”

She shook her head. “He’s not here. Koru sent him off for something.”

Interesting. It explained why I’d survived, but I’d been involved in every step of planning the attempt, and Alph didn’t have any part that I knew of. Koru couldn’t have sent Alph out already. There was no time. That meant Koru had sent Alph out before. I couldn’t guess why.

I could guess I was about to lose consciousness.

“Zeni, may I tell you how beautiful you are?”

“Please do.”

“Your face is like–” and I dropped like a bag of soup.

Blissful, perfectly-timed unconsciousness. That’s the secret to women. Say enough to get them interested, then pass out.

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