The Dragon Emperor of Another World: Awakening of a Legend

CHAPTER 9: Savage Crown

The wind was howling across the cave mouth when they came out of it, and the first of the growls came up the rock to meet them—low and guttural, so deep Ethan felt it in the stone under his boots before he heard it.

Celestia's claws were already out.

"They're not only hunting," she said. "They're talking to each other."

He had the Void-Cleaving Blade in his hand without having reached for it; the pouch had simply put it there. He was still not used to that. "Six, you said."

"Six."

"That's not a pack," he said. "That's a family."

They went up. The bluff above the cave broke into ledges and chimneys, and they climbed it in the half-dark with the wind pulling at them, until they were crouched on a lip of rock over the valley with the whole floor of it spread out below. A thin moon was going down into the mist on the far side. By its light, and the first grey of the day, they could see them.

Four grown chimeras moved along the valley floor in a loose line, lion-headed and heavy-shouldered, their scaled tails lashing, stumps of misshapen wings twitching on their backs. Two smaller ones trotted between them, clumsy and eager, the size of big dogs. And at the front of them, larger than any, walked the one the others followed: a great beast with three heads on three thick necks—lion, goat, and something reptile, all of them turning, tasting the air.

Ethan let out a slow breath. "This isn't a fight," he said. "It's a siege."

"Then we choose the ground," said Celestia. "And we've chosen it."

They opened from the cliff.

Eileen's pouch held arrows now, and a bow that folded out of nothing, and when Ethan drew he found the arrows came into his fingers already fletched with the glyph he'd been thinking of. The first one he loosed was fire. It struck the valley floor in the middle of the pride and burst into a ball of flame that sent the four adults scattering, roaring, and the two young ones yelping for cover.

Celestia went down the cliff face like a stone thrown from it.

The Darkmoon armor woke as she fell. Sigils ran silver across her back; when she hit the valley floor she was already moving, and there were suddenly three of her, then five—ghosts of her sliding off in different directions, wing-shadows that went left while she went right. The nearest chimera lunged at a shadow and bit down on nothing. She opened its side as she passed.

Ethan came down the rock the slow way, sliding and cursing, and dropped the last ten feet onto the scree. He reached down through the pouch for the thing Eileen had told him about and found it—a thin cold awareness spreading out from him across the valley, and in it the shapes of the beasts, and which way each one's weight was leaning. The alpha was turning toward Celestia. Its lion head came around. He loosed without thinking about it, and the arrow went into its left eye.

It screamed with all three mouths at once.

Celestia used the moment. She wound black fire around her arm into a spear and threw it point-blank into the chest of the chimera in front of her, and it staggered—and a second one came at her from the side, from her left, her bad side, the burned wing side, its jaws wide.

The ward on her back went up before she'd seen it. A pair of wings made of shadow snapped open out of the armor and the jaws closed on them and slid off, sparking.

The third one had been coming at him. He got the sword around late. It wasn't the teeth that hit him but the shoulder behind them, the whole weight of the beast, and it lifted him off his feet and put him down on the scree ten feet away with no air left in him anywhere. He lay there with his mouth open, waiting for it. It came back. All the way down. He rolled, and got up.

"Still breathing?" Celestia called, not looking.

"Ask me later," said Ethan, ducking a swipe.

They fought. It stopped being thought and became a sequence of things that happened—the Void-Cleaving Blade going through scale and sinew as though the chimeras were made of wet paper; Celestia's breath coming out black and eating into their hides like acid; a tail going past his face close enough to feel the wind of it. The two young ones tried to get around behind them. Ethan pulled a sphere of green glass out of the pouch—one of Eileen's trap orbs—and smashed it on the scree at their feet. Vines erupted out of the ground and threw themselves over both, pulled tight, and held them down, squalling and snapping.

Celestia leapt off a boulder and came down on a chimera's back with both feet. It flattened. Ethan put the point of the sword through its heart before it could rise.

Then the alpha came.

It came blind on one side and furious, all three heads roaring, straight across the valley floor at them. Ethan thought chain, and there was a chain in his hand, a length of it with a hook at the end glowing violet. He swung it and threw it like some cowboy in a half-remembered film, and it went wide and rang off a boulder. The alpha didn't even look at him. It was turning toward Celestia—toward her left, the burned side, the one she'd been favoring since Arask. He hauled the chain back hand over hand and threw again. This time it wrapped the beast's foreleg and bit. Celestia threw a blast of black fire into all its faces at once.

It shrieked and reared.

"Now!"

She went up—straight up, a hard beat of wings—and turned at the top of it and came down spinning, her claws lit with runes. He went low, running, and slid across the scree under the thing's belly with the sword held flat and swept up with everything in his shoulders.

One blow from above. One from below.

The alpha came down in a heap that shook the valley.

After that, it was quiet—just the wind, and his own breathing, and the small shrill noise the two netted young ones were making in the vines.

He leaned on the sword. His left side, where the beast's shoulder had caught him, had begun to announce itself on every breath. "You all right?"

Celestia was scratched and bloodied along one arm and had a split lip that she kept touching with her tongue. She nodded. "I think that's all of them."

He turned around to look at the alpha.

It lay where it had fallen, a heap of scale and fur, steaming in the cold. And at the center of the ground beneath it, where the earth showed bare between its sprawled forelegs, there was a mark.

It had not been there when the beast went down. He was certain of that. It had been burned into the dirt—black, the edges crisp—and it was not a scorch or a claw-rake or anything a beast had done. It was written. Lines that curled and crossed and came back, in a flowing, deliberate hand, one continuous stroke. And it was warm. He could feel the warmth on his face from where he stood: a faint violet glow coming off the lines into the cold dawn air.

"That wasn't us," Celestia said behind him.

He looked back. She had not come closer. She was standing several paces off with her hand closed around the ruby at her throat and her claws curled, and she did not move toward it.

He crouched down over it.

The violet in the lines pulsed—once, slowly. It was exactly like being looked at. As if something very far away had felt him lean close to it, and turned its attention toward him, unhurried, and was pleased.

He was still crouched there when he heard it behind him: two short, soft sounds, very close together.

He stood up and turned.

Celestia was standing over the vines. Her claws were dark and wet. The two young ones inside the net had stopped making any noise at all.

"They were babies," he said.

"They were four months from being that." She tipped her head at the alpha. "With no pride, they'd have starved in a week. Or come down on the first farm they found, and learned what farms are for." She crouched and wiped her claws, one hand and then the other, carefully, on a tuft of grass. "Either way, they'd have taken a long time about it."

"You could have asked me."

"Yes," she said.

She didn't say anything else. When he turned back to the mark, the violet had gone out of it. It was only char now, black lines in the dirt, already starting to look like something that could have been there a hundred years.

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They took what was worth taking. Fangs, long as his forearm. Plates of armored scale. The venom sacs, which Celestia cut out with a delicacy that made him look away. And the hearts—the adults' hearts, which were intact and still glowing faintly from inside, like coals in ash, when she lifted them out.

"There's enough here to buy passage across a region," she said, turning one of the alpha's talons over in her fingers. "Or keep half a guild in ale for a year."

"We'll need someone who knows what it's worth." He was stowing the hearts in the pouch, which swallowed them without complaint. "Someone who won't cheat us."

"There was a merchant in Dasi who talked about the Crimson Caravan. They trade in beast parts and reagents." She dropped the talon in after the hearts. "They run the road north from here. To a city called Avelline."

He thought of the folded square of paper in his belt, with its watermark of a tower on a harbor wall.

"We were going to have to go there anyway," he said.

Dawn had come up while they worked. The cave they'd slept in was still in sight, a dark notch in the bluff, and it seemed a long time ago. They shouldered their packs and took the path out of the valley.

Ethan looked back once. The char under the alpha. The two small shapes in the vines.

Celestia didn't look back. She was already a dozen paces ahead of him, walking fast, her back very straight. He caught her up, and neither of them said anything about either one.