A Blazing Fury

1. Abysmal lack of survival skills.

Abysmal lack of survival skills.

JAYCE

“ H ow is it going?” I ask.

“The green one has her jaw locked around the other one’s neck,” Brogan says. “It shouldn’t take long now.”

I squint toward the horizon, but all I can see are two dark shapes fighting over the mountain in a blazing fury. The sun is setting over West Hargos, turning the sky the purple color of a fresh bruise.

“It better be over soon,” I growl. “They’ve been at it for a day now.”

“Well, they are two magnificent females, evenly matched. I’m not surprised.” He sighs longingly. “What a waste.”

Brogan is a small man in his fifties who dreamed of adventure and found himself on my airship.

He’s the new dragoner I hired two weeks ago, and our sixth dragon expert in three years.

His lot enjoy reading books and writing manuscripts a little too much, and fieldwork isn’t usually their forte.

Most of them quit after a few months—or die unexpectedly from their abysmal lack of survival skills.

Sadly, we can’t do what we do without the help of an expert, and very few of them join fire scrounger crews.

“Yes, yes, magnificent,” I say. “But even more so dead.”

“Captain—” He gasps, horrified by my disrespect. “Oh, well…” he suddenly says, distracted by what he’s seeing in the distance.

“What?”

I steal the spyglass from his sweaty grasp and aim it toward the two fighting dragons on the horizon.

Both females have fallen to the mountainside, and the green one is ripping apart the red dragon’s gut with her powerful claws, spilling flaming entrails all over the rocks.

Gods or not, there is no coming back from that.

“Finally!” I say, pushing the spyglass back into Brogan’s chest. “Sound the bell, we’re moving.”

“Al—already?” he sputters. “But the other female…”

“She’ll be gone by the time we arrive. And from the look of it, the liquid-fire pouch has been pierced during the final blow; we have little time before everything combusts, and you know it. We need to get to the carcass.”

Brogan is still looking for an excuse not to do his job, so I walk to the bow of my ship and ring the bell myself. The merry sound echoes over the forest where we tied my airship, the Blunder, to the largest trees.

Kuroki—my young pilot and annoying cousin—comes out running from below decks, his dark hair unbound.

“I expect us to leave the ground in less than a minute after I ring that bell,” I say. “You should be at your post.”

“Aye, aye, captain!” He trips over his own feet. “Sorry! I was checking the engine. It’s all… all good.”

I groan. “How many times have I told you to let Wilbur work in peace?”

Kuroki disappears inside his control room at the center of the upper deck, and a heartbeat later, the burner above us spits out flames as hot as a dragon’s breath, and the hot-air balloon overhead swells.

“Cast off!” I roar. “We have a dragon to scavenge.”

Alara and Freddy—the power couple and muscle of my crew—are already untying the lines that secure us to the trees. Seconds later, the Blunder slowly rises in the air. Kuroki fires up the propellers, and we’re moving.

We leave behind the forest as we reach altitude, aiming for the mountain.

The temperature drops. In the distance, the victorious dragon is flying low, exhausted after her day-long fight.

She’ll hide in her lair to lick her wounds, with the blood of the enemy she felled still dripping from her giant muzzle.

“Poor thing,” Brogan says, standing by my side at the bow.

I snort. “She just tore up the entrails of another female in a territorial dispute. We’re lucky they don’t see us as a threat.”

He sighs longingly again, like a fool in love. The beasts are the size of a galleon—and that’s the smallest ones. “We’re undeserving of the attention of living gods,” he says.

I resist the urge to push him overboard. Brogan is one of the most spiritual dragoners I have hired over the years. A man of science, but who regards dragons as divine creatures.

To me, they’re just colossal beasts who eat, sleep, and shit like us—except on a much larger scale. And fortunately for us fire scroungers, from time to time, they kill each other.

As we get closer to the mountain, the dead dragon’s shape gets more defined.

Brogan is right; she’s an impressive specimen.

Twice the size of the Blunder , with a jaw large enough to swallow a grown man without chewing.

She fell on a rocky ledge, which will make scavenging her organic matter trickier.

Kuroki will have to maneuver the ship close to the mountainside to allow us to pull out the ramp.

As predicted, the dragon’s entrails are still on fire. The sac has been ruptured, the precious liquid leaking and burning. If we act fast, we might salvage most of it.

We’re pressed for time, and Alara and Freddy know it. The petite woman and her bear of a husband are readying the ramp.

Kuroki brings us closer with surprising skill.

The kid was only nineteen when I hired him two years ago on a whim, but he turned out to be a gifted pilot.

Especially considering airships are still fairly recent inventions.

He came all the way from the Green Isles, where we’re both from, and appeared on my deck one day, following my dear aunt’s directions on where to find me.

We share the same hair color—raven black—and almond-shaped eyes.

But the similarities end there. Where Kuroki is small and slim, I’m tall and broad-shouldered.

My mother fell in love with a northerner—a sailor.

I grab a rope, an iron stake, and a hammer before running along the deck and jumping over.

Brogan shouts as he watches me fly over the deadly gap and land on the rocky ledge.

Freddy does the same on his side, nimble despite his size, and we both hammer the stakes into the ground to tie the Blunder to the mountain.

It won’t hold in strong wind, but the weather has been mild so far.

Alara throws us more rope, and we pull the ramp to the ledge.

I cross the ramp back to my ship and pull on my dragonhide gloves.

I wear a long coat made of the same fire-resistant leather.

Alara, Freddy, and Brogan put on aprons, the same kind blacksmiths and metalworkers use.

We can’t risk getting close to a dragon without such precautions.

Brogan hesitates halfway over the ramp, and I know he’s about to bolt back to the Blunder , so I give him a little shove. He screams woefully while launching himself the rest of the way.

“I could have died!” he shouts as pass him by.

“Of course not. I wouldn’t have let you fall,” I say. Maybe. “Get to work. We have little time. Show me where to dig.” I gesture toward the burning entrails. “I can’t make out anything in this mess.”

Brogan’s eyes are wide as he surveys the dead dragon. Her thick skin is the deep-red color of blood. Impressive specimen or not, she’s far from the biggest beast we’ve encountered, but she’s only the second job he’s working on with us.

“Better than seeing drawings in your books, eh?” I told him last week when we tracked his first carcass.

He puked all over his shoes.

“So this is part of her large intestine.” He points toward the gory mess. “And this… this is a lung! So the sac should be somewhere over here.”

Freddy has already come to me with the contraption we use to suck the liquid-fire.

Then we’ll put it into thick glass bottles, safely stored in the cargo hold.

I lower my goggles to protect my eyes from the heat and step over the spilled organs.

I use a long, rigid pipe to pierce the disgusting pulp.

Behind me, Freddy pumps. We suck only blood. I curse, but we fill the bottle. Dragon’s blood is still valuable. Apothecaries love to use it in their weird concoctions.

Once Freddy has loaded another bottle, I try again, closer to where Brogan is now pointing.

After two pumps, a golden liquid pours into the container.

Unsurprisingly, it’s on fire. But as soon as Freddy puts the cork on, the flames die out from the lack of oxygen.

The bottle will stay hot for a day or two and will need to be stored carefully.

This bottle alone is enough to fire a steam engine for an entire month. That is why we risk our lives in the dragons’ territories. Most new inventions rely on liquid-fire to function efficiently. Coal is now regarded as a dirty fuel.

While we fill eleven bottles—not bad for a dragon this size—Brogan helps Alara with the hide.

She’s cutting a big slice through the dragon’s flank with sharp tools, her blonde hair tied in a messy bun on top of her head so it doesn’t get in the way.

We’ll store it in the cargo hold and sell it to tanners as soon as possible, before it has time to smell.

Once the bottles are safely on the Blunder , I survey the carcass. The flames are still burning high over the entrails. More liquid-fire than I thought must have leaked inside her chest cavity.

“We can’t linger on that one,” I announce. She might explode at any moment from the pressure and the heat building inside her ribcage.

Brogan nods eagerly. He can’t wait to be done with his precious ‘divine’ corpse.

I fill more bottles with blood, this time alone—blood is less volatile than liquid-fire—while Freddy pulls out a few of the dragon’s giant teeth.

They’re as tough as diamonds and sell for a good price, too.

He uses the hammer to dislodge them from the jawbone, his thick arms bulging.

Sweat glistens on his dark skin. This close to the dragon, the heat is unbearable.

The female just died; her body temperature is still high enough to bake a cake inside her throat—we might have tried it before, with a more curious dragoner.

If we had more time, we could suck some brain matter for the alchemists, too. The dragon’s carcass is still fresh enough for that. But drilling through the skull takes hours we don’t have. The dragon’s belly looks more swollen than before already.

“Okay, guys, time to scrap before she explodes,” I say. There’s a significant risk she might.

In a matter of seconds, Alara and Freddy are ready to go, but Brogan fumbles with his tools, the ones he used to take samples for his personal work. It’s the reason he took the job in the first place. He wants to write a book about the different uses of dragon organic matter. It’s a growing market.

I wait for him near the ramp, ready to take the stake off the ground to leave. But as he turns toward me, one of the dragon’s organs bursts. It’s not a real explosion, but it’s loud and sudden, enough to take our skittish dragoner by surprise.

Brogan screams and runs as if the fires of hell are behind him.

I raise my hands to warn him to slow down, but he rushes under my arms and reaches the ramp.

His foot slips, and before any of us have time to say ‘ oh, shit’ , he’s falling over the edge and into the emptiness below.

He doesn’t even scream as he falls. But seconds later, there’s the unmistakable sound of impact.

I close my eyes, defeated.

Did we just lose another dragoner?

“Oh, there he goes…” says Alara from her position on the Blunder . “He was a funny guy. That’s a shame.”

His tools are on the ground. He disregarded them during his mad escape.

I rub my forehead. “For fuck’s sake…”

I guess I’ll have to put out another job offer. To Dragonest we go.