The Dragon Emperor of Another World: Awakening of a Legend

CHAPTER 4: Shadows

Somewhere past midnight the little brazier in the corner had burned down to a red eye, and it threw just enough light to show the slope of the ceiling and not much else. Neither of them had slept.

Celestia stood at the window with her eye to the crack in the shutter. The glow caught the scales along her jaw each time she shifted her weight, and the long silver braid down her back, and the line of her shoulders, which had not come down once since they got in.

Ethan sat on the edge of his cot working the buckle of his gauntlet open and shut, open and shut. He kept looking at her. It was easier than looking at the door.

"You keep staring," she said, without turning.

"Just appreciating the view while I've got one."

She glanced back over her shoulder, and the corner of her mouth moved. "Careful. Flattery won't help you when trouble comes knocking."

He opened his mouth to answer—

Trouble didn't knock. The chair he'd wedged under the handle went to kindling, and the door went with it, torn off its top hinge and slammed flat against the wall, and dark shapes came through the gap one behind another with bare steel in their hands.

"Finally," said Celestia, and the grin she turned on them was all teeth. Black light curled up out of her fists like smoke. "I was getting bored."

Ethan had the sword off the table before he'd decided to stand. His back found hers. Three of them in the room: two with short swords, one with a dagger in each hand, masks over the lower halves of their faces and nothing at all in their eyes.

The first came in low at his ribs. The short sword struck the Godslayer breastplate with a dull, flat thock and skated off, and the man's face registered that he had put his whole weight into a blow that should have opened Ethan up and had instead done nothing at all. Ethan swung, badly, from too close. The edge caught the man in the side and threw him across the room into the washstand, and the jug on it burst.

Behind him, Celestia moved like smoke. Two whips of darkness spun out of her hands. One wrapped the knife-man's ankle and yanked; he went up, not down, and his head met the ceiling beam with a sound like a dropped melon. The other whip took the second swordsman around the throat. She pulled. His shout turned to a wet clicking, and she let him go, and he folded to the floor, clawing at his own neck.

Boots on the stairs—more of them. Three more shapes jammed the doorway, and behind them, in the corridor, a man in a hooded robe had begun to chant. Green light crawled up his fingers.

Ethan saw it gathering and knew exactly what it was—a caster channeling a big one, the bar filling—and knew that there was nothing whatsoever he could do about it from here.

Emerald lightning split the air with a hiss and a smell of burned copper.

He threw his arms up over his face—

THOOM.

A wall of light stood in front of him, a hand's breadth from his gauntlets. The lightning hit it and broke apart into sparks that rained on the floorboards and died. The wall flickered once and was gone.

Ethan looked down. The satchel on his belt was glowing, faintly, the way coals do when you blow on them.

He had not done anything. He had put his arms over his face.

Celestia didn't waste it. She went through the doorway like something fired from a sling, straight at the caster before he could start again, and a spear of hardened darkness left her hand and took him through the shoulder and nailed him to the corridor wall. He hung there. His chant ran out.

That left two swordsmen in the room with Ethan, and no time to think. He parried one cut and ducked the next, which went through the air where his neck had been. He drove an elbow into a stomach and heard the breath go out of it, and brought the pommel around into a temple, and that man went down and stayed down.

The last one looked at the room—at his friends on the floor, at the man pinned in the corridor—and made a decision. He feinted at Ethan and then went for the window, shutters and all, and got halfway through.

"Oh, no, you don't," said Celestia.

A cord of darkness shot out of the shadow under the window and speared through the back of his thigh. He screamed and stuck there, half in and half out, hanging over the street. She flicked her wrist; he came back in through the frame and hit the boards like a sack of meal. She kicked him once in the head, neatly, and that was the end of it.

It was very quiet after that. The brazier ticked. Somebody was breathing in wet little hitches on the floor.

"Five minutes," Ethan heard himself say. He was panting. "We cleared them in five minutes."

"Too long." Celestia let the dark drain out of her hands. Her shoulders came down for the first time all night—not much. She looked past him at the stairs, where the innkeeper had come up far enough to see, a lantern shaking in his fist, his face grey.

Ethan lowered the sword and held up his free hand, meaning it's all right, which it wasn't. "Sorry about the mess." He dug out a purse, heavy with silver from the prize money, and tossed it. The man caught it against his chest without seeming to notice he had. "For the damages. And for not having seen us. You didn't see us."

The innkeeper nodded, and nodded, and went back down the stairs.

Ethan turned back to the room.

The man by the washstand wasn't moving. Ethan crouched beside him. There was water from the broken jug all around him, and it was pink. His eyes were open. They were a very ordinary brown, and they weren't looking at anything, and Ethan knelt there in the wet trying to work out which blow it had been—the first, the swing from too close—and couldn't, and that seemed like something he ought to be able to do.

"Leave him," Celestia said quietly.

She had crouched by the caster in the corridor and pushed back his sleeve. On the inside of the wrist, inked small, was a scorpion curled around a dagger. She let the sleeve fall. Then she stood and pulled a plain canvas cloak on over her wings and horns until she was nothing but a tall shape with a hood.

"We go now."

Ethan stuffed their few things back into his pack. The minor lord's invitation card lay face-up on the table where he'd dropped it from his belt, the wax still unbroken. He left it there.

---

Dawn found them a long way east of Feya on a dirt road that got narrower every mile until it stopped pretending to be a road at all. By mid-morning the town was a smudge behind them, and then it was nothing, and ahead the Suya Forest stood up out of the land like a wall.

The trees were enormous—so old that their roots had heaved up the ground into ridges, and their branches had grown into one another overhead until the light that got down to the forest floor came through green. They stopped at the edge only long enough to look at it. Then they went in.

Birds sang. Small things rustled away through the undergrowth. Shafts of sun came through the canopy at a slant and lit up patches of moss so bright it looked wet, and clusters of mushrooms that glowed a soft blue even in the day. It was beautiful. Ethan found the tension going out of his neck and let it, a little, and kept his hand on the hilt anyway.

He kept hearing the hiss of the lightning. The sound it had made in the half-second before the wall of light had caught it. He flexed his right hand, open and shut, as he had worked the gauntlet buckle all night.

At a stream as clear as glass they stopped to drink. He splashed his face and scrubbed at it and the water came away grey with smoke and something darker. "They'll follow," he said. "We embarrassed them."

"Let them." Celestia's eyes had gone hard as garnet. "We could use the exercise." But she laid her palm flat against the trunk beside them, where their passing had scraped the bark, and muttered a word, and the wood crawled closed over the scar like skin knitting. She did it at the next tree, and the next.

Around noon they blundered into a meadow full of small blue flowers that burst into clouds of glittering spores when anything touched them. Ethan touched a great many of them. He sneezed for ten solid minutes, eyes streaming, while Celestia stood a safe distance off with her hand over her mouth and her shoulders shaking.

Danger came in the late afternoon, in a rocky ravine that cut across the forest floor.

The ground ahead of them heaved and split, dirt and leaves spraying up, and something climbed out of it—lion-shaped but scaled instead of furred, with a scorpion's tail arched up over its back, dripping. Then another one came out of the bank to their left. Then another. In a few breaths there were five of them spread around the two of them in a loose ring, hissing, each one wrong in a different way: one with a goat's slotted pupils and a snake's body from the waist down, one with two heads that snapped in turn like a pair of shears, one with the leather wings of a bat folded along its sides.

"Chimeras," Celestia said, very quietly. Her back was against his again. "Right flank."

He saw it: two of them edging around to the right, keeping his eyes busy, while the others gathered themselves.

"Ready," he said, which was a lie.

The one with the lion's mane and the snake tail sprang from the front with a scream.

"Now—"

He met it. He stepped off its line as its claws came down and swung the sword at the tail as it whipped over, and the blade went through the stinger clean. Venom sprayed out of the stump and hissed where it hit the rocks. The beast howled and reeled away.

Celestia had turned right. She threw out a hand and suddenly there were two of her—one of her, a copy made of shadow and air, veering left—and the two chimeras on the flank both went for the copy. In the half-second it took them to find nothing, she was among them. Her claws, sheathed in dark fire, opened one throat to the bone. She ducked under the second one's wild swipe and drove her knee into its chest, and something inside it broke with a crunch he heard across the ravine, and it lay down wheezing.

The tailless one came back at him with its whole weight and bowled him over. He got the sword up crosswise just in time, the flat of the blade jammed under its jaw, and held it there—its breath hot and rotten in his face, its teeth snapping a hand's width from his nose, venom drooling off the stump of its tail. His arms shook. It was heavier than him and it was winning.

"Get—off—"

He twisted the blade and bore down with the flat across its throat. There was a gristly creak under the steel. The chimera's eyes bulged. He heaved, and it went over onto its side, thrashing, and couldn't get its breath, and he got up on his knees and put the point down through it to stop the noise.

A shriek from above. The bat-winged one had climbed a tree while he wasn't looking and dropped off it now, straight at Celestia's back—"Above you!"—and her wings snapped open and threw her backward in a gust that flattened the ferns. The chimera hit the rock where she'd been. Before it could get up she came down on top of it with both palms flat against its skull and said a word in Draconic, and dark fire went into its head. It jerked once. Thin black smoke came out of its ears.

The last one, the misshapen thing that was half wolf and half lizard, looked at the ravine and decided that it was not hungry after all. It bolted for the ferns.

Ethan raised the sword. Cold gathered along the edge—he didn't say the name, this time, only thought it—and he swung, and the crescent of violet light left the blade and scythed through a stand of bracken and a sapling behind it and found the running thing among the roots. It stumbled. It fell. It didn't get up.

Then the forest came back: leaves moving, the ravine's own small echoes, a bird that had started up again.

"Is that all of them?" He was bent over with his hands on his knees.

Celestia listened for a while. "For now."

Five bodies on the rocks. Some of them still moving a little. These weren't small things, and the two of them had put all five down in the time it took to boil water. He waited to feel good about that. What arrived instead was the rest of the day, all of it at once—his arms, his legs, his back—until he could hardly keep his head up.

"I need to stop," he said. "Just for a bit."

She opened her mouth to argue and closed it again. "A short one. The ravine funnels anything else toward us from one side, at least." She jerked her chin at a hollow under an overhang of rock. "There."

He sank down with his back against the cool stone. She sat beside him and dug dried fruit and the waterskin out of her pack and split the fruit in two. He noticed she was still watching the ravine even while she chewed; and he noticed, looking properly, that there were shadows under her eyes, and that she was holding her left arm slightly away from her body, and that she hadn't said a word about either. He took the bigger half of the dried apple out of her hand and gave her his smaller half, and she looked at it and at him and didn't say anything about that either.

"If the Syndicate catches us while we're tangled up with things like those," she said eventually, "it'll get messy."

He didn't answer. She wasn't wrong. Back the way they'd come, over the tops of the trees, a column of black smoke had begun to rise—thick and oily and leaning in the wind. Someone was burning something where they'd left the chimeras. Or burning their own dead from the inn. Either way, it was a signpost, and it was pointed at them.

A muscle jumped in Celestia's jaw. "They don't give up."

"Then we don't either." He pushed himself up the rock. "We just have to be a bit cleverer about it."

---

By twilight they'd put the ravine and a good few miles behind them. The forest had grown older and denser. Roots big as fallen walls jutted out of the ground; fireflies wandered in the dusk under the canopy, very slowly, as though they'd forgotten what they were looking for.

They made camp under the roots of a toppled tree whose upturned base, still crusted with earth, made a roof over them. Celestia walked a wide circle around it, laying wards—thin threads of magic that would prickle down her spine if anything crossed them. Ethan, who could not have laid a ward to save his life, dug a pit and built a small fire in it that didn't smoke, and was prouder of it than he let on. Celestia had snared a hare just before dark. It went into the pot with some roots she'd found, and in time the pot turned into something you could call stew.

They talked, because not talking would have meant listening to the woods.

She told him, with a slow and dangerous smile, about a nobleman in a city a long way to the west who had once laughed at her tail in front of his friends, and whose carriage she had then set on fire with him standing next to it. "He stopped laughing," she said, and Ethan snorted stew up his nose.

"Remind me never to get on your bad side."

"You've been on it plenty," she said, "and you always talk your way off it again."

He told her about the time he'd glitched through a wall into a raid boss's chamber, alone and ten levels under, with nobody in voice chat awake to help, and had stayed there all night exploiting every bug he knew until the boss finally went down at five in the morning.

She shook her head. "Only you," she said, "could make a win out of a disaster by being too stubborn to die."

He laughed. She didn't. She'd said it lightly, and then she sat looking at the fire as though she'd heard it again after it left her mouth, and she did not laugh at all.

Something moved at the edge of the firelight and his hand went to the sword—two green eyes, low down. A fox, thin and curious. It considered them for a moment and then went away into the bracken with its brush held very straight.

"We need a plan," Celestia said, when the pot was scraped clean. "We can't keep running from one thing into the next. We should pick where we're going for once."

He'd been thinking about it since the inn. His fingers found the satchel on his belt and traced the stitched runes on it.

"That lightning," he said. "Last night. It saw it before I did."

She waited.

"It saw it before I did," he said again, "and it stopped it, and I just stood there with my arms over my face." He looked at his hands. "The armor, the sword, the ring—all of it is the best gear there is, and I'm using it like somebody who found it on the floor. There's someone who might be able to help with that. Back in the game—in this world's lore, I mean—there was a forge-mage. Eileen. They called her the Techno-Artificer in some of the quests." He could hear how that sounded. "She can rework anything, supposedly. If she's real, she could make all of this work together. Faster than me."

Celestia was quiet a moment. "I've heard the name Eileen in a tavern or two," she said. "If she's real, she'll be in—"

"Dasi." He nodded. "The city of inventors. Other side of this forest, and across the Amber Sands. We were going east anyway."

"I'd like someone who knows what they're looking at," Celestia said slowly, "to look at that armor."

"To upgrade it?"

"To look at it." She was turning a twig over in her fingers. "It knocked you flat and blew up a temple, and neither of us knows what else it does."

He hadn't thought of it like that. He wasn't sure he wanted to.

She tossed the twig into the fire. "You know Dasi is half guilds and half gangs, if you believe the stories. We'd be walking out of one nest of trouble into another."

"Sounds perfect for us." He grinned. "At least in a city full of mercenaries, we won't stand out."

That got a real laugh out of her. "Fine. Dasi."

He held out his hand. "Partners?"

She took his forearm instead of his hand, the warrior's grip, her claws closing firmly around his wrist. "Partners."

They banked the fire to embers. Celestia took first watch from the top of the fallen trunk, where she could see a long way into the dark. Ethan lay under the roots with his hands behind his head and a thin slice of stars showing through the canopy.

An owl called. Far off, faint and thin, a hunting horn sounded twice and stopped—somebody who had lost a trail, and wanted everyone to know they were annoyed about it. Ethan put one hand on the hilt beside him and the other on the satchel and left them there.

Above him Celestia had started to hum. It was a low tune with no words to it that went down at the end of each line instead of up. A tune for putting something to bed. He tried to place it and couldn't, and listened to it trying, and was asleep before it finished.