The forward edge of the dragon’s glow overtook them as they came around the final bend. Vaan navigated the long, gentle arc and sped up through the last straightaway that led to the way out. The pixie dipped and rolled wildly, and Cayce realized he was trying to anticipate or avoid the dragon’s next blast. She hoped he could do it without dropping her—or sacrificing too much momentum.
Vaan shot up to the ceiling and rolled onto his back. Cayce glanced down between her own feet, hoping to at least see her doom coming to catch her.
“Don’t look at him,” Vaan yelled.
Cayce looked anyway, sneering. There, across her relatively unobstructed line of sight, she got her first head-on look at the dragon, lit from behind by the ball of blue-white lightning forming in his chest.
“I said don’t look at him!”
“Stuff you,” Cayce muttered. The sight of the great beast in his entirety was awe-inspiring, even terrifying, but with most of his body concealed by the tunnel and the darkness, it was a far more manageable sight.
Cayce stared through tearing, squinting eyes. Was it fear or a trick of the light that made the great beast seem to flicker between two faces? One was the face she had seen delight in demolishing the farmers on the bridge: a majestic, alabaster-horned head ringed with exquisite ceramic scales.
The dragon’s other face was fleshless and black, corroded down to the bone. This shadow-image was adorned with brittle-edged scales that crumbled like rust as he came, leaving a faint reddish swirl in his wake.
She looked hard at the dragon, trying to gauge if Rus’s skull device had harmed the beast after all. If so, the damage was only cosmetic, for the dragon’s speed was undiminished.
So little of this made sense to her. Why had he put a geas on Vaan in the first place? What secrets did a lightning-spitting dragon have for a pixie slave to betray?
The dragon coughed and sent another pressure wave surging past them. They were almost at the crack in the mountain when he spat one last missile that filled the entire tunnel. Cayce fought the impulse to close her eyes.
Vaan carried her clear of the jagged opening just as the white-hot ball of energy blew the mountainside apart. Cayce was peppered by sharp rocks and grit but avoided serious injury; Vaan was not as lucky, taking a round rock to the back of his head.
The pixie grunted and sighed softly. His body went limp, his wings stopped beating, and they dropped onto the rocky ground. The poisoner’s apprentice felt two of her fingers break and a searing blast of pain rip through her knee when she landed, but she remained conscious.
Cayce hauled herself toward cover with her good hand and her good leg, inching ever farther from the cave entrance. The secret tunnel opening was no longer a secret and no longer an opening. As smoke and dust rose from the pile of boulders and debris that had been the mountainside, Cayce figured it probably wasn’t much of a tunnel anymore, either.
Cayce continued to drag herself away. She didn’t know where Vaan had landed but she wasn’t going to wait for him to ferry her the rest of the way down the mountain. She heard a familiar groan in the distance behind her and to the left, but she paid it no mind and continued crawling away from the mountain.
“Cayce?” Rus sounded dazed but his voice was strong. He rose on unsteady legs one hundred yards from the smoking pile of rubble. His walking stick was gone, and his hat was torn almost in two. A thin slash across his scalp had pasted the stout man’s thinning brown hair to the sides of his skull. He was listing as he walked, his reactions slow and clumsy. He stopped for a moment to beat some dust from his cape, and almost fell. Instead, Rus regained his balance and wrapped the edge of his elegant cloak around his clenched fist to keep it from dragging. He called out again, staggering directly in front of the mound of shattered rock.
“Tania Cayce, attend your master!” His voice was loud but unfocused, as if he couldn’t control his own volume.
Deep within the pile of boulders and debris, the mountain began to tremble. Flashes of blue light leaped from the crevices between stones.
“Run,” Cayce tried to shout, but all that came out was a shallow-lunged wheeze. She coughed into her hand then her eyes widened at the spatter of red smeared across her fingers.
“Where are you, Cayce? Did you get the teeth?”
Cayce coughed again. “Good-bye, Master Rus.” Her voice was weak and strained, barely a whisper. She did not relish what came next… well, not too much… but she watched just the same. If nothing else, she owed Rus this one final observation in hope that it would create opportunity.
Rus lurched around to face the former south face of the mountain. His eyes goggled as he realized where he stood and what the recent explosion must precede. Rus turned and started to run, and even with his injuries, he was only slightly less graceful and quick than he had been on the way in.
Two large boulders separated and rolled down opposite ends of the mound. The dragon’s sharp head slowly rose above the rubble, dust and grit glittering as it poured down his scales. The ruined dark visage Cayce had seen in the tunnel was gone. The grand beast’s ceramic scales stood on end, and energy crackled between them. He shrugged and pushed up through the pile of rock, freeing his upper limbs and his wings.
The dragon’s eyes swiveled left then right as he scanned the sloping field below. Cayce tried to shrink even closer to the large rock she had leaned up against. She needn’t have worried; the dragon quickly oriented on Rus as the stout man scaled the ridge.
The dragon’s neck shot arrow straight up into the sky, and he spread his wings wide, scattering the top half of the rubble mound. Cayce had seen parts of the beast up close, but now he rose whole and complete as he had been when she first saw him… and this time she was well within his grasp.
As was Master Rus. The dragon swam into the air, his flexible body tracing a fluid pattern up and over the master poisoner. He hovered there, gathering his coils into a series of overlapping loops as his wings kicked up a wind that battered Rus to his knees.
Cayce saw her master reach into his own mouth and rip something free. Eyes wide, voice clear, Rus raised his grisly treasure in a clenched fist. Through foam— and blood-flecked lips, Rus shouted words to an incantation Cayce could not understand.
The winds buffeting Rus suddenly changed direction. The master poisoner opened his fist. He smiled when he saw what had become of his tooth: Above his open hand floated a shard of black glass. The pointed sliver’s edges gave off an eerie purple glow that cast a garish light on Rus’s face.
Rus lowered his hand. The shard remained where it was. He pointed up to the dragon, and the crystal oriented on the hovering beast.
Mild interest kept those great swirling eyes fixed on Rus’s ritual, the dragon’s expression curious but unconcerned.
Cayce shuddered as she stared. The beast’s eyes were hypnotic, fascinating—perhaps this was how he manipulated minds? She tried to tear her gaze away but could not. She could see the dragon’s thoughts and emotions taking shape in his eyes, like a chorus assembling before they collectively sang their first note. In those whirling orbs Cayce saw that though cold interest ruled them now, boredom and cruelty were clearly asserting themselves.
Master Rus gestured emphatically. The black crystal shot toward the dragon like an arrow from a bow.
The great beast could have dodged. He had enough muscular control to move the center of his long body one way while moving his head and tail in another, and he could have slid under the attack. If his tail was as fast as his striking jaws, the dragon might have even been able to shatter the crystal or swat it aside without touching any sharp points or edges.