crouching on the far side, so he wouldn’t get caught in the kill zone of the five (!) etherium drakes he had waiting for me, who would have made very short work of me indeed, supercharged or not.
I extended my power through the reality warp-into the one in front of me and out of the one fronting the gate-like a hand of lightning, and just grabbed the smug prick and hauled him back here where I could uncork another swing or two. Or five. Or eight.
However many it took until the bastard stopped moving.
My lightning hand couldn’t breach his personal shields, and I couldn’t seem to drag him into the warp itself- but that was no reason to just let him go. I’d never get a better chance to test his personal shields against the altered physics of an area where time was passing, say for example, at roughly one tenth of one percent of normal. It was worth the experiment.
I threw him at Baltrice.
He flailed wildly in the air, magic flashing and blasting out of him in all directions, seemingly at random, but some of them must have accomplished something, because suddenly everything was happening very… very… slowly… the crackles and blasts of battle deepening to a grinding, almost subsonic rumble.
Renn inched through the air toward Baltrice, and I got it: he’d thrown some sort of temporal distortion to give himself time to figure out what to do-but in his panic he’d accidentally caught me in the spell’s fringe, for which I was grateful, because I was about to be in a great deal of trouble. Those damned etherium drakes were heading into Renn’s gate.
Coming for me.
Four of them unfurled their wings with the majestic grace of schooners raising sail. The fifth, showing either better reflexes or more initiative than his comrades, had turned his wide-gaped mouth toward the reality warp and now belched forth a roiling burst of flame. I canceled the warp instantly, but my reflexes, no matter how enhanced by Renn’s spell, couldn’t force the warp to close all at once. As the ragged edges of reality gradually sewed themselves back together, I was treated to the unusual view of dragon-fire boiling slowly toward me, creeping through the warp, and unfolding like a thunderhead until it pillowed into me and blasted me backward and up into the sky.
Slowly.
The lightning from my skin protected me from anything worse than sunburn, but matters would be different when they all ganged up on me. And I was in no mood to waste my limited powers fighting e-drakes. I had a better idea.
Renn, meanwhile, stretched a hand toward Baltrice, and he must have canceled the hypotemporal field that restrained her to avoid catching himself in it like a fly in magical amber. She lurched into motion, though still (subjectively) very slowly, pitching forward over the nose of her sled, heading for the dunes face-first. Renn came tumbling glacially after her.
This looked to me like a chance to get up close and personal.
I grabbed reality between them and yanked it to within one step, arriving directly in the path of Renn’s cold-molasses tumble, which I intercepted by leaping forward to grab the back of his neck, yank his head toward me, and smash his face into my knee.
The slow-motion squash of Silas Renn’s nose was possibly the most exquisitely satisfying sensation I will ever experience.
Suddenly-though not unexpectedly-time around us regained its normal flow when my knee broke Renn’s concentration along with his nose. Back in full speed with no time to react, he and I crashed together with stunning force. His greater momentum carried us backward, and we hit the sand in a heap. Renn somehow had gotten his head into the pit of my stomach, and the impact drove all hope of breath from my lungs and made ragged patches of black skate across the cloudless sky above.
I rolled over on top of him and hooked his etherium collarbone with my left hand, which was all I could manage before I had to simply lie across him and try to force air back down my throat. Fortunately, Renn was in no better shape; he lay with only whites showing through his slitted eyelids, and his open mouth bubbled with blood from his nose.
“Tezzeret…?” Baltrice rolled over with a grunt and sat up. I was passingly pleased to note that her face, unlike the rest of her body, had no powdered glass on it-because her ear-and-eye device was still working. “What happened to me? What’s wrong with my back? What the hell’s going on?”
I tried to tell her, but could manage only a strangled croak. I gestured weakly at Renn with my free hand.
She stood up. “Well, all right, then. Get off him and I’ll take it from here.”
I shook my head emphatically and waved her gaze toward the blossoming formation of e-drakes converging on us. “Bigger… problem…”
Her brows drew together. “Yeah. I think they’re playing my song.”
Fire licked along her arms and legs and whooshed skyward from the top of her brush cut. “My back feels funny-weak. Numb,” she said, eyes on the e-drakes to gauge their approach. “And wet. How bad am I hurt?”
“Not… badly,” I managed to gasp. “I’ve got… Renn. Stop… the drakes…”
“Don’t mind if I do.” She clenched both fists, and a flaming dome of shield flared to life, sheltering Renn and me, but not her. She stepped between us and the diving drakes, and she didn’t bother with a personal shield.
All five of them went straight for her, and the blast of fire from five e-throats was so intense the dunes around us looked like the inside of a blast furnace. Embers spit into my hair and across my back even through Baltrice’s shield, and the flames slagged the dune to smoking slabs of glass for meters around. When the fire died away, Baltrice hadn’t moved. She just stood there, squinting up at them, fists on her hips as though she’d decided, in the spirit of fair play, she’d given them one free shot.
Now she tilted her head to crack her neck, and rotated her shoulders to loosen the cramping around the wound in her back. “Well, all right, then.” She sounded cheerfully businesslike. “Damn me if you sad-ass bastards aren’t right in the middle of the last stupid thing you’re ever gonna do.”
Watching Baltrice unleash her inferno of destruction, I decided she was living proof of the adage, “If you love your job, you never have to work for a living.”
The etherium drake is one of the last surviving remnants of what is very possibly the worst idea in the history of Esper. Centuries ago, the earliest rudiments of what would become the Ethersworn decided that since etherium was supposed to “sanctify and morally elevate” whatever is joined with it, they should start enhancing even the beasts, to speed the world’s transformation into a paradise. Which was appallingly ignorant in itself, but they didn’t stop there.
When these self-appointed saviors got together to figure out what species should be the first on which they’d try their Noble Work, they chose the Esper firedrake.
The firedrake was, before these chucklebrains began to meddle with it, the single most dangerous predator on Esper. Smaller than true dragons, not significantly smarter than sewer rats, and lacking the broad-based magical prowess of their draconic relations, the firedrakes made up for their genetic deficits in sheer mindless ferocity.
Sluice serpents can be avoided by staying away from the cesspits; kraken keep to the deep ocean; striges are more of a nuisance than a threat. Flocks of firedrakes, however, who have, on their good days, the temperament of rabid viashinos, might at any time take it upon themselves to flock together and wing off to some randomly unlucky spot, then attack and immolate everything for miles around. Everything. Ships. Caravans. Villages. Rocks. Each other. No one knows exactly why.
Maybe they just like to watch things burn.
The proto-Ethersworn spent a generation or two stalking firedrakes, tranquilizing them, and replacing various parts of their bodies with refined etherium. To the astonishment of no one other than themselves, the Noble Metal seemed to have no beneficial effect on the behavior of firedrakes. At all. So, in their typically clot-headed fashion, they concluded that this must be simply because the firedrakes hadn’t been enhanced enough, and they undertook to remedy this delusional problem by making a very real problem several orders of magnitude worse.
Just as it does for any other living thing, etherium made firedrakes stronger.
This was long before the days of the shortage, and so by the time any sane people realized what these moonbats were up to, there were several hundred firedrakes whose entire bodies had been replaced. They even replaced the creatures’ brains, which had no noticeable effect on their physiology beyond making them a great deal more difficult to kill, and making their moral character, if they could be said to have one, even worse.
