This response was troubling. Alysand seemed to think the same, for he stared down at his boots a moment and sighed before looking up again. “Do you serve him?”
“I serve none but myself,” the wyvern answered quickly. Then he ground his teeth, as if tasting something foul. “Yet he has promised me much. This lovely pile of ore is but a tithe of what he will pay. Soon, gold and gems will fill this cavern as well. But iron holds heat so well, I might just keep this instead.”
“And what have you promised him in return?”
The creature laughed again and leaned his head out closer, stretching toward Alysand’s lonely figure. “The aid of my kindred. They will fight with him, and my sister and I get to bask in wealth. It is a pittance. The Fafniri squabble and fight anyhow. What does it matter who they fight for?”
Alysand’s response was morose. “It matters, for your kind were not always evil. I will have to end you here, then, and make sure that enough of your kin survive to recover from the war to come.”
“End me?” the wyvern bellowed, his head coming ever closer. The scene was absurd: Alysand, a dapper, middle-aged man was facing a wingless lizard with a head bigger than a bull’s, its two powerful legs bunching below its sleek form as it inched closer. “And how might you do such a thing? No doubt, the mighty Alysand might slay one of my brood. But me? I think not.”
Then the creature stood and darted out its head, rows of sharp teeth glinting in the torchlight. I didn’t pull my axe free, and Hana stood by, mute and powerless as well. We stared on in hopeless terror.
Alysand moved. A cloud of smoke and fire blasted out from his hip. No whistling this time, no humming, no song at all, but a flurry of bullets fired so quickly that their roar combined into one. The rounds crashed into Anwar Flamestar’s mouth, each exploding with the power of a grenade.
And as the beast reached the gunsinger, it fell dead at his feet, blood pouring from the gaping hole in the back of its skull.
Alysand stood there for a strained minute, gun still smoking, and when he turned to us, tears streaked his face.
Though it visibly pained the man, he agreed to let Hana loot the wyvern of its scales. We each loaded our packs with them. Each scale was a hand wide and around a foot long, yet not thicker than a piece of leather and just as light. Alysand put dozens of them in his abyss bag, and the rest we placed in Pachi’s bags. Hana tried to cut out the huge fangs, but none of her knives could penetrate the skin.
“How did you manage to do that?” I asked the gunsinger, pointing at the wound in the back of the wyvern’s head. “And why did it call you fire singer and mage?”
“The Fafniri wyverns are an old line that remembers the origins of the gunsingers. They have many names for us, and as our craft involves magic and fire, the two he used are as fitting as any.” Alysand paused, wetting his lips and considering. Then he gestured to his waist, where he’d placed the God Bone Bullets. Only four remained.
He took one out and held it up for us to see. “These are powerful beyond all compare. Fired from a normal gun, they are accurate and deadly. But…” He scanned our faces, taking some measure of our worth. “Did you notice the quality of my song as I fired? Did you hear it?”
Hana shook her head, and I answered the obvious. “You were silent.”
His smile was strained and filled with pain. For some reason, he looked like he had aged ten years or more, like some wind had swept in and pulled away the better part of his life force.
“Just so, Madi. The first song we learn, the one we will only ever sing once, is called the Silent Hymn. The absence itself triggers a deep and ancient magic. If you saw the bullets when they were given to me, you might remember they had a locked ability. Study them now and you will understand.” He held the bullet in his upturned palm.
God Bone Bullets
Quality: Legendary
+100% max damage of gun. +100% Accuracy
Causes the Rupture effect if the following requirements are met: Bard must be fighting a god, demigod or elder creature; bard must invoke the Silent Hymn, sacrificing a portion of their own power in the act of destruction. Rupture: Penetrates all armor, scales, or skin and explodes shortly after. Single use item.
“Holy crap!” was all I could manage, and Alysand nodded.
“A fitting response, I suppose. Now let us leave this place.”
The gunsinger told us to move far away from the tunnel’s entrance, and we watched at he pulled out several sticks of what looked like old-fashioned dynamite and placed them in cracks that ran up the walls.
We crossed most of the distance before he turned back, and, whistling a tune we hadn’t heard before—drifting and airy like wind over tall grass—he fired a single bullet and collapsed the tunnel leading to the fallen wyvern. I thought of all the scales that had been buried and the ore as well. Hana had the courage to ask him.
“We should have given the same honor to Marduk, but she had bled the town, and her body has given us all much,” Alysand said. “The scales you took will make a fine armor that you can use to fight the scourge that caused all of this. It was fitting. But wyverns as old and powerful as Anwar do not rot away like other creatures. They either bless or curse the land they die upon. His heart had turned foul, so I would rather not have the good people of Benham rooting about in there, searching for treasures that would cause more harm than good.
