over the point where the broken beam jutted into space, he changed again, taking the form of a hippopotamus.
Like most hippos who discover themselves to be sixty feet up in the air, he dropped like a stone. He hit the edge of the plank with all four of his fat, round feet expertly placed for leverage. Reeker shot into the sky, his hands clasped before him, his eyes tightly closed. His lips were moving, though I couldn’t hear him. It looked for all the world like he was praying.
The Goons’ aim was perfection; there was a reason why they were the best paid mercenaries in Commonground. The dragon dove toward the Black Swan, opening its mouth to fill its great bellow lungs with air. What it got, instead, was a damp skunk-man slapping against the roof of its mouth. Instinctively, the beast clamped its jaws shut. Instantly, a cloud of yellow-green fumes shot out from between its long, jagged teeth. Its eyes grew wide.
The creature veered away from the Black Swan, whipping its head back and forth, coughing violently, unable to breathe deeply enough to ignite its flames. Reeker clung to the beast’s tongue, hugging it with his arms and legs like it was a greased pole. Slowly, he slipped toward the tip. His entire form was hazy, as the most powerful stenches he could summon poured out of every pore. The dragon began to convulse, its nervous system overwhelmed by the chemical assault. With a final, frantic jerk of its neck, it sent Reeker flying. Before it could recover, it slammed into the waters of the bay, hard, vanishing beneath the surface in a violent boil.
Reeker shrieked like a teenage girl as he sailed through the air before he, too, hit the surface of the water, bouncing once, twice, thrice like a skimming stone before he sank, leaving an oily film.
“One down,” said Relic, casting his gaze toward the beast’s twin, who was still burning ships at the other edge of the bay. “Unfortunately, we’re running out of Goons.”
Reeker still hadn’t surfaced, nor was there any sign of a hippo thrashing about in the waters below. No-Face had run to the edge of the barge and was looking down into the water, shouting out, “Munuh! Rukuh!”
Infidel cracked her knuckles. “We don’t need no stinkin’ Goons.”
Below, there was a loud crash. I hadn’t seen Aurora in over a minute, and now her head was sticking up from a trap door in the roof. She climbed out, bearing a large wooden harpoon, nearly twice as tall as she was, with a long coil of rope looped around her shoulders.
“I’ve hunted whales bigger than these things,” she shouted, as she met Infidel’s gaze.
“Fire-breathing, flying whales?” asked Infidel.
“You wouldn’t believe,” Aurora said.
The ogress spun around as the remaining dragon roared angrily and shot toward the barge, apparently now aware of the loss of its twin. Aurora dropped the coil of rope to the deck and drew back with the harpoon. “For honor!” she cried as she hurled the weapon toward the approaching beast.
The harpoon never even got close. The coil snagged on a ragged board and the weapon jerked to a sudden halt not fifty feet overhead. The dragon inhaled deeply as it plunged straight toward Aurora. Aurora crouched down, covering her head with her hands as the dragon exhaled, shooting out a jet of flame, engulfing the ice- ogress. The dragon’s momentum carried it toward the mast upon which Infidel was perched. The flames instantly disintegrated the lower half of the mast. Infidel jumped from the crow’s nest, grabbing Relic by the cloak and hurling him out toward the bay. She dropped down, hands open wide, as the dragon’s scaly back flashed beneath her. She grabbed hold of the scales near the beast’s tail. The dragon reacted with the speed of thought, whipping the end of its tail down to shatter more beams on the roof of the Black Swan. The jolt knocked Infidel free. She bounced across the deck, flying off the edge, until a long length of chain whipped out and lassoed her ankle. No- Face jerked her back onto the roof, if it could still be called a roof. Little was left but a pile of broken boards and timbers, and half of these were on fire.
Aurora was still alive. She was crouched behind a wall of cracked and melting ice, fighting to untangle the snagged rope of the harpoon.
Infidel leapt to where the harpoon had fallen. It jutted up from the boards of the deck. She snatched it free, spinning around, racing toward Aurora, splintering the snagged board that had caught the rope. She wordlessly snatched the freshly coiled rope from Aurora’s hands and jumped over the edge, flying from the Black Swan toward a still intact piling. She landed on this and leapt again, giving chase to the retreating dragon, who now spun slowly over the area where the other dragon had fallen. The sea still boiled furiously. The dragon again cried out; this time the thunderous roar had an edge of grief to it. The beast turned its head upward, flapping its mighty wings as it steered back toward the distant volcano. The whole south slope was aflame now, the forests forming the world’s largest bonfire as the pyroclastic flow slipped through the once lush jungles.
Infidel landed on a final piling before deciding she was close enough. She dropped the coil into the water, wrapping the last few inches around her wrist. The beast was low over the waves, the down beat of its wings brushing the surface. She reared back with the harpoon, the weapon comically long compared to her. When she let it fly, it flashed through the air more swiftly than an arrow. The dragon grunted as the harpoon buried itself in its flank, but didn’t look back. It flapped its wings again and flew higher, as the rope trailed behind it. Infidel grabbed hold with both hands as she was snapped into the air. She clambered up the rope like a monkey on a vine. The dragon tilted its head back, aware of her weight. It sucked in air and exhaled a long cone of flame, engulfing Infidel. For a second, she couldn’t be seen at all in the conflagration. Then, her hand reached out of the flame, grasping onto the hind-claw of the dragon just as the rope disintegrated.
The flames faded, revealing Infidel clasped by a single hand onto the middle nail of the dragon’s hind-claw. Her clothes were mostly burned away; her skin was flushed red, like she had sunburn, and it broke my heart to see that her long, flowing tresses were mostly gone, singed down to a frizzled mess. Her eyes were set in a look of determination.
The dragon wasn’t impressed. It flexed its claw forward, bending its head toward her to bite away the unwelcome passenger. As it opened its jaws, Infidel swung her body back and forth, dangling from the claw. The creature’s mouth glowed with the fading remnants of its flame. I saw a flash of light as the well-honed blade of my bone-handled knife was revealed in Infidel’s free hand. She swung forward, leaping into the beast’s open jaws, clearing its teeth. The creature’s mouth clamped shut.
Suddenly, I was alive again. Not ghost alive; I was physically whole once more, popping into existence inches above the dragon’s snout. Unlike my previous manifestations, this time the laws of gravity applied. I slammed into the dragon’s scales, sliding down its snout, scraping my restored flesh on its raspy hide. I cut my hands trying to grab hold. The scales were like flakes of razor-sharp volcanic glass. I screamed as I left a trail of blood down its snout, but caught myself at last, my foot coming to rest on the ridge of its nostrils.
My stomach twisted as the beast lurched through the air. The ground seemed impossibly distant. I felt certain I’d been restored to life only to face a second death. But… why? How had this happened?
Suddenly, Infidel’s fist burst through the skin only a few feet down the snout from the dragon’s eyes, my bone-handled knife firmly in her grasp. The dragon’s blood bubbled on the surface of the blade, quickly boiling off now that it was exposed to air. Infidel’s whole arm tore through the skin, followed by a shoulder, then her bloodied head burst through. The blood boiled on her skin as well as the knife. The creature shuddered, then went limp in the air; whatever Infidel had done to it had apparently been too much to withstand. The beast’s snout tilted down. I could see water far below; at some point, we’d come back out over the bay. I was thrown free of the beast’s nose, my naked, bleeding body tumbling in the air. As I spun, I looked back toward Infidel, who was gawking at me, her eyes wide.
“Infidel!” I shouted, straining my hand toward her.
“Stagger?” she whispered.
Then, the last of the fresh blood vaporized from the knife, leaving only a crust of black gore. The wind once more passed straight through me. I was suspended in mid-air, no longer in the grip of gravity. Light passed through my vaporous fingers.
“Stagger!” Infidel cried, her eyes frantic as they searched the air where she’d last seen me.
Then the dragon hit the water, and I plunged beneath as well, my ghost still tethered to the knife. The sea was black as ink, full of the stirred-up silt from the tidal wave. My vision was all but useless, unable to make sense of the images that flashed past me. The dragon’s hide seemed to be crumbling, breaking apart into bits of black and red gravel. For half a second, I saw a flash of Infidel’s torso. There was something long and rope-like wrapped around it, covered with cup-sized suckers. The water roiled, and a giant eye flashed past me, the size of a dinner plate, glowing with a golden phosphorescence.
