CHARLIE
There were benefits to traveling with a young dragon. I ate well. Parthar had become quite the hunter. Rabbits, geese, deer—the little dragon would not only catch them and bring them to me like a proud barn cat, he’d also roast them to succulent perfection with his own fire. Quite handy.
“Kid, if the mess hall at the airbase had a cook like you on staff, we’d get a hell of a lot more recruits,” I told him at one point as I polished off a delicious venison steak.
But there were dangers, too. As we came nearer to Issastar, we began encountering settlements.
A farmstead here. A temple there. I couldn’t risk being seen wandering about with a dragon, not when Skrathan were now considered rebels.
What if some local alerted a regimen of Lacunae? So, we started traveling at night.
Fortunately, we’d reached the end of those cursed moors. Groves of trees had begun to spring up, crisscrossed with small streams and punctuated by low, rocky hills that provided some cover for our movements.
After the wisps, I was on edge everywhere we went.
Maethalia was a magical and unruly place, and I knew from my talks with Essa that Lacunae, Gray Brothers and golenae weren’t the only menaces creeping around the countryside.
But aside from the occasional whisper coming from a stream or the glow of pixies in a treetop, no magical beings accosted us.
The only enemies I faced now were my impatience to get to Essa, and my blood thirst… It grew worse with every passing hour, rising like a clamor of chattering voices in my head, twisting my guts with hunger pangs, making my hands tremble and my forehead drip sweat.
Several times, Parthar paused to give me a quizzical, concerned look. The first few, I ignored. Finally, I muttered, “I’m fine,” and kept walking.
We continued like that until, as twilight settled in, my heightened vampyre senses picked up a sound on the wind.
The clanking of chains. Parthar and I both stopped and looked at one another, then departed from our path, following the sound.
We came upon the source some two hundred yards away.
Many figures were milling around in a clearing, and Parthar and I crouched and crept toward them through the underbrush.
Sitting on the ground at the center of the clearing were some fifty children.
They were dirty, their clothes stained and ragged, and many of them were barefoot.
Shackles glinted on their wrists, and they were all chained together to form one long line.
A half-dozen Lacunae knights in their black cloaks and armor, and about the same number of Gray Brothers, stood guard over them.
The sight made my heart beat faster with outrage.
The children made not a sound, not a whisper, not a moan.
And the Gray Brothers and Lacunae were silent as well.
But I did hear a pair of low voices, and when I looked, I spotted two noble knights among the company.
They stood nearby with their backs to us, their attention on their prisoners, and with my keen vampyre ears I was able to hear their whispered conversation.
“What do you think he wants with them, eh? The young ones?”
“Give them to the Sylph Lord, I heard.”
“But what would he do with them? Don’t they have children in Koratain?”
One knight leaned closer to the other, his voice lowering. “I overheard Kortoi saying he tests them, finds the best ones, and clones them.”
“Clones?”
“You know, copies ’em. Haven’t you heard of the Sylph Lord’s clone armies?”
“I thought the Sylph Lord’s guards were goblins.”
“That too,” the first knight nodded.
“Goblins eat kids, I always heard. Seems to me we’re bringing that Lord a pile of snacks for his generals.”
“Might be, at that,” the first knight shrugged. When he went on, his voice was even lower. “Either way, they’ll be better off than here with Lady Cecily.”
The other knight grunted in agreement. “Never a truer word spoken than that, brother.”
The knight had no sooner gotten the last word out than a whip crack echoed across the clearing, followed by the squeal of a child.
“Speak again,” came a shrill voice. “Utter one sound, and by all the queens of the void I’ll have your flesh hanging like pennants!”
I craned my neck to see who was speaking now and caught sight of a girl wearing the dark robes of the Gray Brotherhood. She was small, no older than thirteen, with short, pale blonde hair and eyes so blue they were almost clear.
“You there!” she called to one of the Lacunae. “Feed these whelps. One bite of bread and one gulp of water each. No more than that, mind you, or the next thing they’ll be eating is your own flesh roasted up.”
Despite her size and her age, she seemed to be the one in charge, for she barked orders with such ferocity that it would have made General Peckham hop to.
“Yes, Lady Cecily,” the dark knight answered from behind the visor of his helmet.
He bowed, then hurried over to take a half loaf of bread from a cloth sack.
As we watched, he began going down the line with it, letting each kid take a single bite while the girl mage—Lady Cecily, apparently—followed, her whip dragging ominously in the dirt behind her like the body of a dead snake.
When one of the children tried for a second bite, the whip lashed out, leaving a gash on the poor little boy’s neck.
My stomach turned—whether with disgust at the abuse or with hunger at the sight of the blood, I didn’t know. Either way, I’d seen enough.
“Bunch of goddamned monsters,” I muttered, shaking my head as I turned to go.
But something grabbed my ankle before I’d gone two steps, almost making me fall. I looked down to find Parthar’s tail wrapped around my leg. The look in his orange eyes was firm and admonishing at once. I turned to him, hands on my hips.
“Listen, I don’t like seeing that any more than you do,” I hissed. “But this is a country in a civil war, alright? Bad things happen.”
The little dragon snorted his displeasure.
“I have to get back to Essa!” I said, my voice rising to a dangerous volume. “We can’t let ourselves be waylaid by every sad orphan and damsel in distress we come across. And by the way, did you see how many of them there are?”
I didn’t want to admit my other reason for wanting to leave—that blood hunger had my head buzzing so badly I could barely think. The nearness of all those beating hearts, along with the sight of fresh, young blood—had me distrusting myself.
The whip cracked again, followed by a wail, then sobbing, then a sudden silence. I couldn’t quite see what was going on through the underbrush and the deepening dusk, but I could imagine it, and it set my teeth on edge.
I shouldn’t let myself be distracted. Essa needed me. She was surrounded by enemies. And if I was too late…
But Parthar had already turned and was stalking through the underbrush, toward the clearing. I didn’t need simnal to get the message. He was going to fight them, with or without me.
“Parthar!” I hissed after him.
He ignored me.
I sighed. Well, hell—I was the Silver Wraith, wasn’t I? I was a damned national hero. Could I really be a hero if I skulked away when little kids were being chained up and tortured?
Parthar was so far ahead now that he was almost out of sight in the underbrush.
“Damned little dragon,” I grumbled.
And I drew my sword and pistol and followed.