And then there was fire, a great red wave of flickering tendrils engulfing us in a flood of heat and light. Imagine a coal-fired oven, stoked to a cherry red, with a pot of oil boiling furiously upon it. Imagine plunging your head into this pot, the burning oil working its way into your nostrils and ear canals, into your tear ducts, searing every pore. My spectral teeth burned, my tongue scalded, and there was nothing to do but keep screaming, though I couldn’t even hear my own voice. Once, I’d ridden out a hurricane in my small boat and the roar of the wind had been so loud it loosened my bowels. This devouring flame howled far louder, a crescendo appropriate for announcing the end of the world.
And the smell. As a veteran explorer of volcanoes, I knew all too well the brimstone stench and the peculiar acid tang of molten rock. Add to this the stink of vaporized hair and flesh crackling on the bone and you still cannot imagine the foulness of the atmosphere.
As suddenly as it had begun, the flame passed. The pain jangling my phantom nerves collapsed from incapacitating to merely agonizing. Blinking away the ghost tears in my scalded eyes, it appeared that little had changed. The four figures who’d been present before were still there: Relic, revealed as a dragon, was unharmed, save that his staff was but a heap of white ashes at his feet. He was standing where Infidel’s clothes had been; they were completely gone. There was no sign of the bone-handled knife, though I still felt its tug… from Relic’s mouth?
The Deceiver had survived as well, crouched down, hugging the Jagged Heart to his chest, its aura of supernatural cold sparing him from the flame. Tower, too, was untouched; his Armor of Faith gleamed even brighter, as if the flames had cleansed it of the dust and grime it had gathered on our journey. Somehow, Father Ver, standing just behind the knight, wasn’t even singed even though his robes had burned away.
In fact, the only party member missing was No-Face’s corpse. There wasn’t even a pile of ash, just a small rivulet of serpentine liquid metal flowing where his ball and chain had once been.
Father Ver turned toward me. As I studied his face, I realized I could see Tower through him. I wasn’t looking at a man. I was looking at a ghost.
The phantom glared at me, and said, “You cannot be my guide.”
“Nice to see you too,” I said. “Look, you might be here for only a few seconds, so let’s get to the point: it looks like you’re still heading for the spirit world. When you get there, I need you to rescue Infidel. I mean, the War Doll.”
“You mean Princess Innocent.”
“You knew?”
He frowned deeply. “This was just one of many obvious truths I turned a blind eye toward with the goal of ridding the world of Greatshadow.”
“But how could you know? Relic was reading your mind and said you were fooled.”
“I sensed his mental probes instantly,” Father Ver said. “It was a simple matter to command him to see in my mind whatever he wished to see.”
I crossed my arms and shook my head, imitating the same pose of disapproval I had encountered so frequently in my youth. “So you not only kept quiet about things you knew weren’t true, you actively took part in a deception. For shame.”
“Your judgment matters to me not in the slightest,” said Father Ver. “Tower was my friend. I would not deny him his chance to find his lost love. In the end, the Divine Author will deliver the final verdict on my choices. Let us hope… let us hope it was His intention to write a romance.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but he looked heavenward, not caring whether I spoke to him or not. He spread his arms wide as his face was bathed in light from above. I looked to see its source, but there was nothing there.
“Ah,” he said, in a tone half joy, half sorrow. “So that’s the truth of it.”
He pressed his lips together in a wistful smile as the outline of his face wavered. Then he was gone, and all that was left were a few blackened teeth where he had stood.
My attention returned to the danger at hand. I didn’t want to be around if Greatshadow unleashed another inferno. Fortunately, while I had been chatting, Tower had sprung into action, leaping into the air and flying straight toward the dragon. In scale, it was like a bee diving toward a bear’s nose. With both hands, he slammed the Gloryhammer into the center of Greatshadow’s snout. Like a bear stung on the nose, Greatshadow winced and drew his head back. The false-matter tunnel warped and wobbled, allowing the impossibly large beast free movement as he retreated. Tower grabbed the rim of a scaly nostril with his razor-tipped left gauntlet, refusing to give the dragon a second of relief as he rained blow after blow on the creature’s nose.
As Greatshadow departed, Relic spat the bone-handled knife from his mouth into his hand. It had been completely untouched by the flames. The misshaped little dragon shouted to the Deceiver, “We must give chase! Tower needs the Jagged Heart!”
“You’re out of your mind!” shouted Zetetic. “I’d be dead if I wasn’t carrying this. And why should I listen to you? You’re a dragon!”
“A dragon maimed by Greatshadow,” snarled Relic as he wiggled his stunted wings and limped toward the Deceiver. “A dragon whose sole purpose is to see his father suffer and die for the cruelties he’s inflicted.”
“Father? You’re Greatshadow’s son?”
“Possibly.”
“How can you not be sure?”
“I’m definitely his offspring. But I’m uncertain if I’m his son or daughter. Since my genitals are internal and I’ve not yet matured, this remains-”
“Stop.” Zetetic scrunched up his face and rubbed his closed eyes. “Just stop.”
“You’re uncomfortable discussing sexual biology?” asked Relic.
Zetetic sighed. “It’s one of my favorite topics. But, maybe, right now isn’t the best time to get into this?”
“Agreed. We must help Tower.”
Tower was a fair distance away at this point, still maintaining his assault. There was little Greatshadow could do to remove his annoying assailant while he was in the tunnel, but the second he pulled his head free into the larger chamber beyond, a talon with claws longer than the Jagged Heart swatted Tower away.
The far end of the tunnel became a solid sheet of flame as Greatshadow tried a second time to melt the knight.
“Make yourself immune to flame,” said Relic, grabbing Zetetic by the arm and tugging him.
“I can’t!” cried the Deceiver, planting his feet wide to resist. “There’s no one left to believe my lies! Your reptilian mind is useless to me!”
“Lie to Menagerie. He’s still alive,” said Relic.
“What?” I said.
“What?” said Zetetic.
“No shape-shifting blood magician would neglect to include a tick among his forms,” said Relic. “I sense him now, dug in behind your knee. Nowowon’s magic has robbed him of his humanity, but the Goon is an accomplished survivor.”
Zetetic lifted the hem of his robe and bent over, using the Jagged Heart to balance himself as he twisted to see the back of his leg. Sure enough, there was a little black speck there. “Do ticks have ears? Can he hear me?”
Relic was silent as he stared at the bug.
He shook his head. “Unfortunately, his mental state has been greatly damaged. Perhaps he may recover once he has consumed sufficient blood, but, for now, your skepticism is justified. He’ll be of no use to you.”
“Do you have a second plan?” asked Zetetic.
“As a matter of fact,” said Relic, running the sharp edge of the bone-handled knife along his palm. He sucked in air as a line of bright blood bubbled up.
I was floating near him, watching with interest, a bit off vertical amid the room’s distorted landscape. I fell about a yard as I materialized, landing on the cracked black stone. I instantly leapt up with a yelp; the stone was hot as a furnace. I jumped closer to Zetetic and the Jagged Heart, and while my feet were spared a scalding, I became keenly aware of my nakedness and the possibility of losing toes and other more valued parts to frostbite. I hopped a few feet away, into a zone where the ground was more bearable.
“Stagger is a ghost haunting this knife. His soul manifests physically when the knife drinks the enchanted blood of dragons.”
Zetetic furrowed his brow. Then he shrugged, and said, “I’ve seen crazier stuff. But if I must work with a dead man, I’d rather not be confronted with his private bits. Luckily, I have the power to summon clothing from thin air.”
Instantly, I was dressed in finery; a cream silk shirt tucked into black satin britches with calf-high boots of soft leather. The whole thing was topped with a rather flamboyant red velvet cape.
“That’s handy,” I said. “Have you ever thought of earning a living as a tailor?”
“It wouldn’t work. One limitation of my art is that I can never convince people of the same lie twice.”
“There’s no time for discussion!” said Relic. “We must get the harpoon to Tower. With every passing second, Greatshadow grows closer to victory.”
Zetetic chewed his lower lip. He looked to be in genuine agony as he said, “Every fiber of my being is screaming I should run. But… Nowowon’s little hallucination trap may not have worked the way Greatshadow would have wanted. We can’t end this merely by wounding the beast, or even annoying him. Humanity may pay the ultimate price for our failure. I’m in.”
“Wait,” I said, grabbing Zetetic by the arm. “If you can’t convince people of the same thing twice, how do we get to the spirit world? How do we kill Greatshadow’s soul without Ver’s scroll, and, more important to me, how do we rescue Infidel?”
“Who’s Infidel?”
“The War Doll, formerly Princess Innocent Brightmoon,” said Relic, holding the blade in his intact claw as he allowed drops of blood to drip one by one onto the bone-handled knife. His blood boiled and bubbled, etching the steel as it vaporized, but he timed his bleeding so that another drop had fallen before the first evaporated. “By now the dragon half of her nature has no doubt consumed the last remnants of her human self. She cannot be rescued. Killing Greatshadow’s soul can be accomplished with the Jagged Heart; as Aurora revealed, it’s been crafted to slay spirits. As for getting the harpoon to the spirit world, there is a magical item in Greatshadow’s lair we can use.”
“How do you know this?” I asked.
“Even in my egg, I could read minds. I was hatched with many of Greatshadow’s memories. From the moment I first breathed air, I already had a full command of language and a deep understanding of his mystic arts.”
“Precocious little scamp,” said Zetetic. “Let’s hope you know what you’re talking about. Hurry!”
The two of them set off at a fast jog down the tunnel. I hung behind for a second, staring at the spot in the air where I’d last seen Infidel, and decided my only chance of seeing her again was to cast my lot with these two.
About a hundred yards down the tunnel, we were all knocked from our feet. A wave of lava swept into the far end of the passage, rushing toward us in a glowing river. Fortunately, since I was behind the Jagged Heart, I was spared from the heat, which rolled toward us as a shimmering wave, but stopped the second it reached the air around the enchanted weapon. The lava stopped flowing as well, freezing into a low wall about three feet tall. Behind it, the molten rock began to drain away, back into the chamber beyond.
I strained to see, missing my power to just float around and look at whatever interested me. As we climbed onto the wall and rushed forward, with the ground cooling and crackling as we advanced, what I could catch a glimpse of interested me greatly. I saw Greatshadow stumbling, bleeding profusely from the side of his head, his blood coming out in great surges of liquid fire.
We arrived at a large ledge on the inner lip of a volcanic caldera open to the sky. Before us was a bubbling lake of magma stretching off as far as I could see, which wasn’t all that far due to the haze of sulfurous smoke. Greatshadow had dropped to all fours, shaking his head to clear it. His eyes had a glassy look. His sheer size was almost impossible to comprehend; not even whales were this large. He was more like a landmass than a living being, though the muscles rippling beneath his crimson hide revealed the truth of his animal nature.
Above us, beyond the sulfur clouds, the sun blazed brightly. Only I quickly realized that it wasn’t the sun; the light was moving far too swiftly across the sky. Suddenly the glowing object burst through the clouds. It was Lord Tower, blazing down with the speed of a shooting star. He slammed, hammer-first, into the dragon’s head. The addition of speed turned Tower into something more dangerous than a bee — he was now like a bullet shot from the sling of an expert marksman, and his momentum was enough to drive his invulnerable armor deep into the dragon’s skull.
The blow flattened Greatshadow, driving him down into the burning mire. He unleashed a low, mournful howl as he struggled to rise. Magma-like blood bubbled from a series of holes near the fringe of spikes along the ridge of his skull. His eyes seemed unfocused as his limbs jerked spastically.
“Plainly, we’re not needed here at all,” said Zetetic, turning back toward the tunnel.
“Die!” Relic shouted. It took me a second to realize he wasn’t shouting at the Deceiver. Instead, he was shaking his bony fist at Greatshadow. “Your suffering is like wine to me! I drink in your agony as you die! Die! Die!”
Tower clawed back out of the hole he’d dug into Greatshadow, covered in flaming gore. He rose into the air, twirling, throwing off a halo of muck. When he stopped spinning he was clean again, his silver armor a dazzling light show reflecting the Gloryhammer, the lava, and Greatshadow’s pulsing blood.
“Your final page has been written, Greatshadow!” Tower shouted, his voice echoing from the walls of rock surrounding the battlefield. “Your name shall vanish from the One True Book!” Tower shot into the air, vanishing into the haze as he rose toward heaven to summon speed.
“Do it!” screamed Relic. “Kill him! Kill him!”
The resentment I felt toward my own negligent father suddenly seemed rather mild.
Zetetic’s retreat had halted only a few feet into the tunnel. He was looking back at Greatshadow. Apparently, the opportunity to witness the death of a primal dragon was overriding his desire to flee.
Greatshadow’s glazed eyes suddenly focused on the ledge we stood on. With a voice like a rumbling earthquake he growled as he spotted Relic, “This was your doing!”
“Yes!” screamed Relic, spittle flying. “I’ve plotted your demise since the day you tossed my twisted body onto the volcano’s slopes! Once you die, I shall become the new primal dragon of fire! No one will deny me my destiny!”
“Indeed?” said Greatshadow, his voice firm despite the fact he still flopped helplessly in the lava, unable to rise. “You’ve shielded your mind from me, but your dead companion has no mental defenses. I’ve just learned that the knight’s armor is made of prayer.”
He cast his gaze skyward as Tower reached his apex, the brightest object in all the heavens.
Relic’s waving fist froze in mid-air. A sudden look of horror filled his reptilian eyes.
“The monks would be too disciplined to light a candle,” he mumbled, sounding almost as if he was speaking to himself.
“I’m pretty sure none of them smoke,” I said.
“They don’t even cook there,” said Zetetic. “All their food is prepared in a nearby village and brought to them daily.”
“In that village, there is a bakery, with an oven that never grows cold,” Greatshadow said, sinking deeper into the lava as the light shot back down toward him. Tower punched through the clouds, his speed so great that a thunderclap sounded in his wake. Yet, as impressive as his speed was, he suddenly had no target. Greatshadow vanished completely beneath the bubbling rock with little more than a ripple. Tower punched into the glowing surface, throwing up a white-hot splash of magma.
For ten seconds, everything was quiet.
Then, the Gloryhammer shot up into the air, pulling Lord Tower from his blazing bath. Tower spun to clear his armor then surveyed the lava beneath him, searching for his foe.
His foe found him first, as a flame-wreathed talon punched from the surface and snapped around the knight like a man snatching an annoying fly. Greatshadow rose from the syrupy rock with a growl and slammed his talon down on the stone ledge we stood on, knocking us all from our feet. Tower was pinned beneath the impossible bulk of the massive lizard as Greatshadow brought his head to the platform and said, in very satisfied tones: “Embers rise constantly from the furnace of this bakery. They dance above the chimney like turbulent stars. A few may travel far, holding their heat until they land. Sometimes, such embers set roofs aflame.”
“Rrraahhhhg!” screamed Relic, as the bone-handled knife dropped from his talon. He fell to all fours and charged the larger dragon. He opened his jaws wide, to almost a perfect ninety-degree angle, before he sunk them into Greatshadow’s knuckle.
He shook his head from side to side, tearing at flesh, though in scale, he was doing about as much damage to Greatshadow as Menagerie was doing to Zetetic. “Da! Da! Da!” he raged. I think he meant, “Die! Die! Die!” Though, considering the relationship, perhaps not.
“You annoy me,” said Greatshadow, flicking Relic with his talon and sending him flying far across the lava.
Around this time, the last of Relic’s blood bubbled away from the bone-handled knife and I faded from existence. I watched with despair as my hands once more turned to mist, though I was slightly intrigued that, for some reason, this time I wasn’t naked. Zetetic’s clothing had made the transition with me back to the ghost zone I dwelled in.
Tower had grabbed one of Greatshadow’s nails and was bending it back. He said, in booming, heroic tones, “You’re bleeding, dragon. Your strength wanes with each heartbeat. Death is near!”
Tower was right. For the primal dragon of fire, Greatshadow didn’t look so hot. He had big, gory holes in the side of his face, and his blood gushed out by the bucketful. His vitals fluids no longer glowed like flame, but were now a thick brown-red stream that spilled down onto the knight’s face, splattering across the platform. I looked to where the knife had fallen, to see if there was a chance any of the drops might hit it.
The knife was gone.
I spun around.
Zetetic was nowhere to be seen.
“Your allies… have abandoned you,” said Greatshadow, his voice strained.
“A pure heart may face evil alone,” said Tower, defiant, as the strength of the Armor of Faith snapped the nail he wrestled with. He reached out and sank spiky fingers into the stone and began to drag himself free of Greatshadow’s weakening grasp.
“You aren’t… alone,” said Greatshadow. “Three hundred monks pray… for your victory.”
“Which is why I cannot fail!”
“The monastery has a library with ten centuries full of ancient books, dry as kindling,” said Greatshadow, as his eyelids drooped. “There is an open window. And now… there is fire.”
“Die!” screamed Relic as he rose from the lava near Greatshadow’s hips, climbing the dragon like a mountain, pausing every few feet to take a nip from his hide.
The prayer-driven gears within Tower’s armor purred at a louder pitch as he finally kicked himself free of the dragon’s failing grasp. He lifted the Gloryhammer above his head and shouted, “This ends now!”
At that moment, the metallic ring that covered the thumb on his left gauntlet vanished.
“One of the faithful… has abandoned his post,” said Greatshadow. Suddenly, a bolt popped out of the plate covering Tower’s left kneecap. “He is not alone in loving books more than duty.”
Tower answered by swinging the Gloryhammer with all his might toward Greatshadow’s mocking tongue. Greatshadow’s front teeth splintered with a wet sound that made me cringe. The dragon drew in a shallow breath as his mouth closed around the Gloryhammer and Tower’s hands.
The dragon’s scaly cheeks puffed out as he exhaled. A jet of white flame shot thirty feet out from Tower’s left kneecap, quickly fading into a stream of oily black smoke.
Greatshadow spit out the Gloryhammer and stared at the smoking husk of armor standing before him. With a creak, the armor tilted to the left, then toppled, landing with a clatter as it broke into scattered pieces. The interior was covered with soot half an inch thick.
Relic was now almost to Greatshadow’s neck. The larger dragon grabbed the annoying assailant gingerly between two claws and placed him on the ledge amidst the scattered armor parts.
“Die! You must die!” screamed Relic.
“I sense I may have — in some fashion — offended you,” said Greatshadow.
“You discovered me fresh from the egg and snapped my bones between your talons! You tossed my half-dead body from the caldera onto the slopes for the pygmies to scavenge! I was nothing but the unwelcome waste of your perversions, tossed away like trash! You will suffer! You will pay!”
Greatshadow rolled the tiny dragon between his talons, turning him to his back, taking a misshapen wing and snapping it once more. Relic screamed in agony as Greatshadow twisted the flesh back and forth, until a sharp bone punched through the surface.
“Little Brokenwing,” said Greatshadow, tossing him onto the platform so that he bounced near the mouth of the tunnel. “Let the pain you feel at this moment linger. You have cost me dearly today. Nowowon required four centuries of incantations to properly enslave as my watchdog. You took him from me. I’ve worn my original body for thirty centuries, but the damage done by the knight may yet rob me of it. I saw your cowardly ally in possession of the Jagged Heart. You would dare bring her weapon to my lair, knowing what you know of our history?”
“I dare any price!” Relic hissed through clenched teeth. “Beginning with the pygmies who came to butcher my corpse, I have left a trail of death and destruction in my wake. My hate for you is a fire that can never be quenched!”
Greatshadow’s mention of cowardly allies made me wonder where Zetetic had gone. Assuming he had the bone-handled knife, I felt for the familiar tug, and instantly found it. I flashed down the tunnel only a few yards. Zetetic was pressed to the wall, his face drained of all color; the red D tattooed on his forehead looked pink. He was shivering, and not just because he had both arms wrapped around the Jagged Heart, hugging it like he was a frightened toddler. He had the bone-handled knife clutched in his right hand and what looked like a shard of glass in his left. He stared toward the opening of the ledge where Greatshadow busied himself with tormenting his overly ambitious offspring.
Greatshadow’s blood seeped and bubbled across the stone like a dark river.
Setting his jaw, Zetetic leapt from the shadows, diving toward the stream of boiling ichor. He slapped the flat of the knife blade into the fluid. Instantly I was on my ass before him, meeting his frightened gaze. From the corner of my eye, I saw Greatshadow turning toward us, drawing a breath. The Jagged Heart had saved Zetetic before, but the dragon was so close that Zetetic’s long, frazzled ponytail fluttered as the beast inhaled. This blast was coming at point blank range.
With a voice squeaking with terror he gazed deeply into my eyes and announced, “I understand the interspatial geometry of the ancients!”
He snapped the gleaming glass in his left hand, which I now saw to be a mirror.
At that second, Greatshadow breathed, a great blinding gush of fire licking around me in all directions. Yet, I wasn’t burned. The flames danced behind me, swirled above me, spun before me, but I remained safe in a bubble of cool air.
The conflagration died away. It seemed to me that Greatshadow, in his weakened state, had lost much of the power of his flame. He looked odd as I stared at him, distorted and wavy. Then I realized I was seeing him through a wall of pure ice at least a yard thick.
The wall of ice had materialized from the tip of the Jagged Heart. The Jagged Heart was being held by a humanoid figure nine feet tall, broad across the shoulders, wearing a long black walrus-hide coat. I looked up and saw the mostly bald, blue-white scalp and the curve of ivory tusks. Never had I been so happy to see a woman whose last words to me had been a not so subtle threat of butchery.
Aurora looked down at me. As usual, her expression was one of utter coolness; she seemed unflustered that she’d just emerged from some unfathomable extra-dimensional prison to find herself face to face with a primal dragon. “I’ll ask later what you’re doing here,” she said, shifting the shaft of the harpoon from her right hand to the left. “Right now, it’s time for Greatshadow to meet someone who knows how to use this thing.”