The Crucible of the Dragon God

Mike Wild The Crucible of the Dragon God

Chapter One

This is how Kali Hooper would have escaped the things that had slaughtered four men before the first of them could scream. The same things that were coming to slaughter him.

That huge, seemingly unscaleable rock, there, the one just ahead? That she would have scaled with ease. And that frozen vine beyond? The one ready to snap? On that she would have swung without thinking twice. The vine would have snapped at exactly the right moment, of course, and she would have soared with it over the abyss. This would not have worried her, though, because that ledge further on and down — yes really, that one, way over there — she would have flailed towards, rolling like some circus tumbler to soften her impact as she came in to land. And she would not have stopped there — oh no, though she might be grunting now — kicking up scree as she ran on and threw herself towards that crumbling ledge, and then the one beyond that, flipping, twisting and spinning, stretching all ways to grab the next small lump of salvation that would save her from a plummeting, broken death.

She would have made it, too, though rocks might have fallen in her wake — knowing her, perhaps there might even have been an accidental avalanche that would have destroyed half the mountainside — but, as usual, she would make it because she had to succeed. There, dangling from that last ledge, she would take a moment to catch her breath before her piece de resistance, a full body flip that would take her up and over until she could climb the rockface to safety. Her flight would have been done then and, from her refuge on the clifftop, she would have turned, bitten the cork from a bottle of flummox and downed the beer. And then, with a smile and a burp, she would have spat the cork at her pursuers. If she were feeling particularly mischievous, she might even have shown them her -

No. He did not want to think about that particular part of her anatomy. It seemed, now, somehow… disrespectful. Because this is how Kali Hooper would have escaped the things, had Kali Hooper not been dead.

That's right, he thought. Dead. Gone. Twelve hands under. The desperately running, blonde-maned archer had struggled to accept it but had come to realise that it had to be true — had to be given the facts. Hooper had been missing for weeks now and in that time there had been no sightings, news or contact other than that over which she'd likely had no control — the return to the Flagons, alone, of a half-starved and agitated Horse, and the discovery, washed-up as jetsam on a Nurnian beach, of her equipment belt attached to a blood-stained piece of her dark silk body suit. Where she had met her end he could not — might never — know, because she had left the tavern with a frown, telling no one what her destination was. But what he did know was that under no circumstances would she have missed the rendezvous she was meant to keep with him eight days before, at the base of the Drakengrat Mountains. He knew that because he knew she knew how important to him this expedition was. No, without doubt Hooper was gone, and whether she had met her end in the Razor Ruins of Rarg or the Blood Bogs of Bibblebobble or whatever other malignantly named hellshole had peaked her interest this time, it seemed the secret history of the peninsula she had worked so hard to unearth had, ultimately, buried her instead.

The painful truth was that he missed her like hells but it was what he, Killiam Slowhand, did that mattered now, and frankly, as far his imagined escape for Kali went… well, there wasn't a chance in the hells.

There'd be no impossible leaps up the rockface, no suicidal swings on snapping vines and no fairground acrobatics to leave his pursuers stymied. Because he wasn't Hooper. No, he was just her sometime lover, sometime sidekick and — oh, by the way, mere mortal. If he didn't spot a way out of this that was within his capabilities he wouldn't even be that. All he could do was run for his life. Oblivious to all but the pounding of his feet beneath him and the mountain winds that whistled around him, all he could do was keep moving and hope that something provided him with a means of escape.

The k'nid, he reflected as he ran, spinning occasionally to fire a volley of arrows in their direction, hoping to slow the blurry, crackling things down. Named by a Malmkrug baron after the local term for bogeyman, they had begun to appear near the town about the time of Slowhand's arrival there. Already a number of its inhabitants had fallen victim to them, lost to their sheer speed. They were not only fast, they were deadly and seemingly impervious to harm — and they seemed to be growing in number. People in Malmkrug had already shored up their homes in defence against them and their attacks on the town were as sudden and inexplicable as their origin was unknown.

Or, at least, had been until now.

For as he had ascended higher and higher into the mountains and seen the trails of more of the unnatural creatures — though most, thankfully, from afar — Slowhand knew something those below did not. That the k'nid, whatever the hells they were, seemed to be coming from somewhere around here.

It was typical. Pure Slowhand luck. To have fetched up in the apparent spawning ground of a plague of the deadliest things the peninsula had ever seen — and he had no one but himself to blame.

Over the past few months he'd put out a number of fresh feelers regarding his sister, and while the vast majority of them had returned nothing, the one that had led him here had shown promise. He had learned from a trader in Malmkrug that some two months before, a party of adventurers had purchased sufficient supplies for a prolonged ascent into the Drakengrat range. Despite the fact they seemed to have gone to considerable length to disguise themselves, their attitude, bearing and general demeanour very quickly gave them away as Final Faith. There was nothing, apart from the obvious, wrong with them being Faith, but the fact that they'd felt the need to disguise themselves meant they had to be up to something clandestine. That in itself was worthy of investigation. What was more worthy of investigation, however, was that the trader had said the party was led by a woman — a woman whose description he had found achingly familiar.

Jenna.

Slowhand still felt a burning rod of anger inside him every time he thought of what those bastards had done to his sister — recruiting and forcefully indoctrinating her into the Faith — and the thought that she was involved in something they found necessary to disguise their involvement with, made him as concerned for her safety as he was angered by her involvement in it. Unfortunately, that anger had had more than enough time to cool, the lead that had seemed so promising a week ago turning out to be as much of a wild frool chase as so many had before. Because if Jenna was up here, then she had discovered some chameleon spell that had transformed her into just one more of the endless snow covered rocks. No, there had been no Jenna, not even a sign of Jenna, and her presence had been supplanted by the k'nid, and all he could do now was cut his losses and run.

Slowhand's chest felt leaden now, and his breath was hot and rasping; symptoms not only of the altitude but of a speed and distance covered that he had not attempted since what his army passing out class, impressed and more than a little jealous, had dubbed the 'Night of a Hundred Wives.' And that had been quite some years ago. He was maintaining his lead on the k'nid, though, if only because one of his volleys of arrows had caused a rockfall on the narrow mountain path along which he fled. The rockfall hadn't harmed the k'nid, or even slowed them down, but it had forced them to take a detour, which was good enough for now. As he continued onward and upward, struggling more and more, he was even starting to think that he might lose them. But that was when he ran out of ground.

Slowhand came to a skidding, skittering stop, gasping with exhaustion and frustration, watching in disbelief as stones pushed by his sliding soles tumbled away only a few inches in front of him over a precipice. What made his predicament a hundred times worse was that not only had the terrain come to an end ahead of him but, unnoticed until now, to his left and right as well. In fact, there was little more than a half foot of rock on either side of him before -

Slowhand's focus zoomed in and out at the same time, and there was a vertiginous rush in his ears.