Dragon Mage Read online

  Shilo had made it over to the final guard. She’d hardened his skirt and pushed him to the floor. Like a turtle that had been turned onto its back, he struggled to get up, but could go nowhere.

  “Two dead,” Nidintulugal told her as he continued to wrestle with a guard. “As a result of my actions.”

  “Better than all of us dead, Niddy,” Sigmund said. The boy helped restrain Nidintulugal’s opponent. “Hurry, Shilo, give him a concrete skirt, too.”

  Concrete? That’s just what she did.

  All the while Arshaka continued to holler.

  “Don’t you have a way to shut him up?” Sigmund was looking to her to solve the problem.

  “No, I—” She ripped another piece of cloth free from the hem of her robe and stuffed it in his mouth. “I guess I do have a way to shut him up.”

  Arshaka’s face was so red it looked like he was going to explode.

  “The egg—” Sigmund prompted.

  Nidintulugal was not looking at the eggs. He stared at the two downed men and the growing pools of blood. There was blood on his hands and on his robe, and a smudge on his face where he must have wiped at the sweat.

  Shilo wanted to talk him through this and console him, but the eggs were the more pressing concern. A large spiderweb crack had appeared in the top of the smaller egg, and the black writing on the bottom half had started to glow.

  “Oh, my,” she hushed. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know … Fath … Sigmund. I don’t—”

  “Well think of something!” the boy said. “You’re the one with magic.”

  Think. Shilo grabbed the egg at the bottom and squealed. “Hot!” She pulled back, but only for a heartbeat. Then she grabbed the egg again, her mind racing with prayers and thoughts of making it as thin as tissue paper. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see what was happening and not wanting to watch her hands burn.

  She felt them burning—she’d accidentally burned herself more than once trying to cook. Those incidents had been nothing. She imagined that her skin was frying away. Still, she wouldn’t release her grip. Was this a second kind of courage—courage of the blood? In the dream Kim had told her she would have to find her courage.

  Shilo threw her head back and opened her mouth to scream, but with the last bit of her will she kept quiet. And then she felt her thumb break through the shell.

  “Niddy, she’s breaking the bad spell! Look!”

  Shilo thrust all of her fingers against the shell, feeling each one break through. It was like plunging her fingers into boiling water, and she pictured her hands melting away.

  Can’t keep this up, she thought. This will kill me. But if she succeeded, Sigmund might live, Nidintulugal, too. Was that another kind of courage—being willing to sacrifice yourself. In the back of her mind she remembered something else Kim had told her in the dream.

  “And yet if you value your life and want to hold on to your father’s memories—if you don’t want to risk everything you know, you must never heed her call.”

  But Shilo had heeded the dragon’s call, and now she was risking everything. She started breaking away bits of the shell, as if she were peeling a hard-boiled Easter egg. Only this egg sizzled and popped and gave off the worst odor she’d ever smelled in her relatively short life. It was the scent of sulfur and charred flesh and things dead and rotting.

  She tried to gag, but nothing came up. Then she tried to breathe, but her chest had grown too tight. Finally, she tried to open her eyes. But all she saw was blackness. Hot and total, it swirled around her and sucked her down.

  “Demons!”

  Safe in the stifling, scalding darkness, Shilo heard the word repeated. It was Sigmund shouting, and she fought her way back to reach him.

  “Niddy, those’ve got to be demons!”

  Shilo floated in the darkness; it was syrupy, and it resisted her attempts to pull out of it. Her arms felt like lead, trying to tug free. Water, she thought. Let the blackness be like water. She pictured the water that ran in the troughs down the sides of the Hanging Gardens, and the Euphrates River. Somehow she manipulated the blackness. It wasn’t so thick anymore, and it didn’t suck her down.

  Buoyed, she felt her head breaking above it, opened her eyes, and witnessed a horror that held Nidintulugal and Sigmund dumbstruck. Emerging from the shattered egg were red-skinned demons.

  The chittering, writhing mass oozed out of the nest and onto the floor. Each creature was roughly the size of a softball, and each was a little different—one had a broad face and a wide nose with four nostrils, Mr. Spock ears, and no lips, but plenty of teeth. Another had a heart-shaped face with wide blue eyes and nostrils, but no nose. And one had two heads, one of them malformed with only one eye and ear. Some of them had wings, others webbed fingers and toes and gill slits on their necks. They had some things in common—scaly skin the shade of fresh blood, curved talons on their hands and feet, gleaming white teeth that looked needle-sharp.

  The man on the floor, trapped by his concrete skirt, could not scream as they flowed over him; he had no tongue.

  But Sigmund screamed. The boy threw his hands over his mouth and stumbled backward. The demons swarmed over the corpses of Arshaka’s other men, and Nidintulugal reached into the mass and retrieved his knife. One started climbing the priest’s leg, and he stabbed at it. The demon howled shrilly, the noise hurtful, then it withered and disappeared in an oily puff of smoke. Nidintulugal started stabbing at more.

  Sigmund tried to shake off his fear, jumping and coming down on a demon. “They can die!” he called to Shilo. “But there’s so many of them.”

  She risked a glance at Arshaka, who was futilely trying to spit the gag out of his mouth. He could control these demons, she thought. He knows the spell and knows how to order them around. He can stop this slaughter. She stepped toward him and raised her arm to pull the cloth out, saw the relief in his eyes and instantly stopped herself. Arshaka would order the demons to continue the slaughter.

  Shilo looked back to the broken egg. The form of a small dragon, its stomach missing, sickened her. She started stomping on the demons too, crying out when one tore at her robe and bit deeply into her leg.

  “Hurry! We’ve got to kill them before they get out of this room!” Shilo wrinkled her nose when she crushed one of the skulls of the two-headed demon. “If they get out into the city, who knows what’ll happen.” A glance back at the shattered egg. More demons were emerging from where the dragon’s stomach had been.

  She fought her way toward the eggshell, even as she fought against the bile rising in her throat. She’d never been in a more disgusting, horrid situation. The stench pounded at her senses, so strong she swore she could taste it. She managed to reach the baby dragon corpse, where more demons continued to emerge. These monsters were only the size of golf balls. But as she watched, they started to grow.

  Shilo placed her hands on the dragon’s body … it was just an object now, no life to it, just a gate the demons were coming through.

  “Sigmund, the other egg—the big one with the writing on it. Break it!” She hated the order, knew doing so could well kill the baby dragon inside. But she couldn’t risk that the egg would break on its own and that demons would spill out. The monsters clearly could exist without a bowl being intact. “Break it now!”

  She bit hard on her lower lip to keep from crying out and returned her attention to the baby dragon corpse. The tiny demons emerging from the carcass swarmed up her arms, chewing and clawing at her. She wanted to brush them off, but didn’t budge. Instead, she did her best to ignore the pain and focused on the dragon corpse. It was a thing now, she told herself again. An inanimate object. Like the nuts and the clay and the garments, it was something that could be manipulated.

  “Melt,” she said. “Run like water.” As the tiny demons continued to bite at her, the corpse did just that—it melted. A silver-gold smear, it trickled into the nest. “No more demons coming out.” She stepped back and started plucking the tiny
demons off her arms, hurling them to the floor and stomping on them.

  Shilo was engrossed in the grisly task, but she took a quick peek to her right, seeing Sigmund repeatedly strike the large egg like it was a punching bag. The egg cracked, but she couldn’t hear it; the demons were making too much noise. Finally scraping the last one off her, she spun to see Nidintulugal struggling with one that had grown to the size of a basketball.

  How big could they grow?

  “Did any get out of this room?” she shouted.

  The priest shook his head. “I do not think so.”

  “One at least!” This came from Kim, who stood by the brazier, holding the broken body of a demon who’d grown to half the boy’s size. “Caught him in the clay room, chewing on the face of that Belzu guy. Had to deal with a guy without a tongue, too.” He dropped the dead demon and started stomping on the red wave surging his way.

  “Don’t let any more get out!” Shilo called.

  “Eww … gross!”

  Shilo turned her attention back to Sigmund. He’d broken the egg and peeled the shell off the baby dragon. It struggled to live, mouth opening and closing, neck flopping around and feet twitching. Its belly roiled, and Shilo likened it to a pan of Jiffy Pop.

  “Kill it, Sigmund!” She cursed herself for saying it, but she knew the demons were going to erupt. Perhaps their only chance of stopping the demons was to kill the dragon host, which was going to die anyway. “Be quick!”

  Nidintulugal, covered with blood, pushed Sigmund aside. “I will do it.” The knife in his hand flashed once across the baby dragon’s throat. The priest and Shilo watched as the writhing in the dragon’s stomach slowed, then finally stopped.

  Behind them, Sigmund and Kim kept stomping. They were making a game of it and trying to keep score.

  “Do you think it’s over?” Shilo looked at Nidintulugal. She hoped all the blood on him belonged to the demons and the man he killed, and wasn’t his own. She felt blood on herself, too, and saw that Kim and Sigmund were splattered.

  “I do not know if it is over, Shilo. Must we break open this one, too, and kill the dragon inside?” He pointed to the last intact egg.

  “I don’t want to. I hope not. The spell is off it. So let’s just get it out of here, put it on the cart, and get it out of Babylon.”

  “The other egg’s by the back door,” Kim said. “I left it there, just like you told me. Oh … was that a person?” The boy stared at the Hand of Nebuchadnezzar’s stiff clothes.

  “Oh.” Shilo felt weak and rocked back against the blood-drenched nest.

  Only the hardened robe and scarf remained of Arshaka. All trace of the man was gone.

  “The demons must have swarmed him.”

  “And feasted well, Shilo,” Nidintulugal said.

  “Ewwww,” Kim said.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here.” This came from Sigmund.

  The floor was covered with a red pulpy mass that had been the demons. Shilo slogged through it to make sure none were still alive. She bent and searched through the goop around the base of Arshaka’s robe, coming up with eight gold, bejeweled rings and a thick gold bracelet. She put them all in her pocket.

  Then she touched the stiff robe and willed it soft again, ripped it in half and passed one section to Nidintulugal.

  “To wrap that egg in,” she told him. “Don’t need the common folk seeing it.” She gave the other piece to Kim. “For the egg by the door.”

  Then she sloshed toward Sigmund and put her arms around him and hugged him tight. He returned the embrace, neither talking for a few moments.

  “Yeah, let’s get the heck out of here,” she said.

  31

  The Dragon Mage

  They had little trouble getting out of the city. Shilo used Arshaka’s smallest ring to trade for a change of clothes for each of them and for a bag full of nuts, which she used to color Sigmund, Kim, and herself. She used her magic to strengthen the cart, and to smooth the wheels so they might travel faster, and she gave up Arshaka’s bracelet for a small crate of food and a big jug of goat’s milk—all of them were terribly hungry and thirsty.

  They ate along the road, Kim and Nidintulugal walking on either side of the ox, leading it. Only once did they go off the road—this when they heard voices ahead. They hid in the tall grass until a dozen men passed, led by Ekurzakir. From the conversations, Shilo could tell they’d been looking for her and the priest, and that the Hand of the Hand was terribly angry.

  For most of the rest of the way, Shilo and Sigmund walked behind the cart, chatting endlessly about Georgia and baseball, Neil Diamond songs, and history. It was like they were old friends.

  “So where do you live in Georgia?” Sigmund finally asked.

  “I used to live in Marietta.” There was a touch of sadness in her voice. “I loved it there. I really loved my father. Now I live in Wisconsin with my grandparents. They’re good people.”

  Sigmund dug the ball of his foot into the ground. “Wisconsin. Ugh. From time to time my folks talk about moving there. Cows and snow.” He let a silence settle between them, before he added: “Wisconsin, huh? Maybe I’ll see you there sometime.”

  They swung wide around the village of Ibinghal, fearing that a guard or two had been left behind to look for them. Then they hid the ox and cart in the foothills and carefully carried the eggs up to Ulbanu’s cave.

  Shilo marveled that the egg she toted felt just about as heavy as that bolt of cloth.

  The dragon was pleased to see them. And Sigmund and Kim were awed in Ulbanu’s presence to the point their knees shook.

  “My dragon … Fafnir … was not near so big as this,” Sigmund said. His voice cracked, and he leaned back against Shilo for support. “Wow. Double wow.”

  “Triple wow,” Kim added. “Everything in the world was worth seeing this. All the hurting and the demon-killing. It was all worth it.”

  Ulbanu wrapped her tail around the eggs and pulled them close to her.

  “Are they—” Shilo didn’t quite know how to phrase the question.

  “The dragons inside the eggs live. No demons beat in their hearts. They are but a few days from hatching. And they owe their lives to you.” Ulbanu purred. “I shall name them Sigmund and Shilo.”

  “Neato-keeno,” Sigmund gushed. “I’d like to stick around and see them hatch, but I better be getting back. My mom’ll be worrying.”

  “Mine, too,” Kim added. “Four times wow.”

  “But maybe we’ll come back sometime,” Sigmund said. “If you don’t mind.”

  Ulbanu let out a breath, warm and dry, sounding like sand being blown by a strong wind. It fluttered their robes and threw their hoods back. “I would relish your company, Kim, Sigurd Clawhand.”

  “Neato-keeno,” he repeated, raising his hand and waving. “Be seeing you then.”

  “Wait a minute.” Shilo grabbed him. “The dragon has to do something to send you back, to send all of us back!”

  “Nah,” Sigmund said. “Artie … Arshaka … the Hand of Nebuchadnezzar, he forgot how to use the magic. I figure he stayed here too long, didn’t travel enough, was too far from the puzzle. See, there’s this puzzle that’s a magical focus. Anyway, Artie just forgot how. But me and Kim, we just learned it. So it’s still fresh.” He gave her a wide smile. “So I’ll be seeing you, Shilo. Hey, if I ever have any kids, I’ll name one of ’em after you … just like Ulbanu’s doing.”

  He started to fade. Kim, too.

  “I love you, Sigmund … Sigurd Clawhand.” She prayed he heard her before he completely disappeared. Shilo stared at the empty space for several minutes, listening to herself breathe and the dragon purr.

  “So they could travel on their own.” She raised her gaze to stare into one of the dragon’s massive eyes. “Did they come here on their own?”

  “I did not bring them. I merely asked if they would help.”

  “And me?”

  “You do not need me to send you home, Shilo.”


  Shilo’s face reddened.

  She intended to berate Ulbanu for implying that the dragon would send her back, that she couldn’t get back on her own. And that for the dragon to do the sending, Shilo would have to retrieve the eggs. There were a dozen mean things that flitted through her mind. But she dismissed one after the next, dominoes in a line she knocked down.

  The dragon wanted her eggs saved, and wanted dragonkind helped—so any deception could be forgiven. In the process, Shilo stopped a wave of demons and found three kinds of courage.

  “So I can get home on my own, Ulbanu?”

  “You always could. It is inside of you, the magic. You only need to look for it.” The rumbling of the dragon’s voice sent pleasant vibrations against the bottoms of Shilo’s feet.

  “I guess you’re right,” Shilo said. “I can feel it, the magic.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out seven of the heavy rings she’d retrieved from Arshaka. She pressed them into Nidintulugal’s hand. “Nidin, these ought to be worth a lot around here.”

  He looked at them and felt their weight. “Worth a great deal, Shilo.”

  “What are you going to do?” She looked up into Nidintulugal’s eyes. “Not going back to the Temple of Shamash, are you?”

  He shook his head. “I do not know—”

  “I would wish him to stay here,” Ulbanu said.

  Nidintulugal and Shilo turned to again face the dragon.

  “There is magic in you, Nidintulugal of Shamash. More even than in Shilo and the one called Sigurd Clawhand. You have felt it before. It drew you to follow her the first time to my cave. And it compelled you to help her and to fight the demons.”

  Nidintulugal didn’t say anything; he just kept staring. Shilo noticed a sheen of sweat forming on his face.

  “I can teach you, Nidintulugal of Shamash. And in exchange you can help me raise my young. Together, we will watch for demons.”

  “A mage,” he finally said. “Myself, a mage?”