But the dragon didn’t summon its fire. Instead, he curled his head back and rolled Kula up in his coils to smother the anchorite just as she choked him. Kula was freakishly strong, but she was dwarfed by the dragon’s body—she simply disappeared under a muscular column of blue-white scales.
“Deploy the golem,” Hask said. He gestured with his fist and said, “Battering ram, on my mark.” Boom came to life, fire and smoke belching from his mouth and eyes. Under Hask and the soldier’s direction, the heavy stone man lumbered to the far wall under Kula and the dragon. Boom planted his feet, pivoted at the waist, and slammed his right fist into the chamber wall.
The wall all but disintegrated under the golem’s heavy fist. A long, thin crack raced up the wall, and the entire chamber shook. The crack slid under one of the dragon’s taloned feet, and that foot came away from the wall in a cloud of dust and broken rock.
This slight shift in the dragon’s weight gave Kula all the opening she needed. Howling afresh, she somehow managed to twist herself away from the ceiling. Without leverage, without comparable weight, Kula pulled herself out of the dragon’s coils even as she dragged him from his perch.
Screeching hideously, the beast resisted. He clung to the ceiling with his last few toes until Kula’s strength finally overcame him. Then dragon and anchorite both fell from that great height and crashed through the chamber floor. There, unseen, they continued to thrash among a cascade of rare coins, precious jewels, and old, broken bones that poured down on them from above.
More oily dust rose from the treasure and fell from the walls as tremors spread outward from the two titans in their pit. Kula whooped again and a dread, rhythmic pounding began, shaking bits of chamber wall free as Kula and the dragon exchanged blows.
Cayce kept her footing and covered her mouth against the thick cloud of dust. Vaan had been jostled onto his side, and she reached him just as the pixies wings were helping him right himself.
Cayce grabbed him by the wrist before he could rise out of reach. “Why is he repeating himself?” she shouted. Vaan only shook her loose and flitted off, darting between falling rocks toward the relative safety of the merchant’s barge. Cayce took one last look at the unseen pounding in the center of the chamber then dashed after the pixie. The ship’s broken beams wouldn’t provide perfect protection against a cave-in, but they were better than nothing.
Just as Cayce reached the tangle of shattered planks and broken decking, a powerful shockwave sent her hurtling through the air. Cayce covered her face with her arms as she crashed through the side of the merchant ship. If the bulkhead hadn’t been so old and flimsy, Cayce might have been smeared across it. Instead she burst through the rotten wooden wall almost without resistance. She landed on her back and skidded painfully across the cave floor, bruised instead of broken.
Elsewhere in the chamber, Captain Hask brandished his special sword still in its sheath. The other soldiers fell in alongside and behind Boom as the golem trudged toward the center of the battle. Nearby, Vaan hovered over the headless dragon skeleton Cayce had spotted earlier. Beyond the pixie, Kula and the dragon emerged from their hole.
The anchorite had grown to enormous size, standing half as tall as the dragon himself. The huge chamber seemed cramped and crowded with two giants occupying it, Kula wreathed in green light and the dragon shedding showers of white-hot sparks. The forest warrior had her arms wrapped tightly around the beasts neck just behind his head. He was trying to toss her aside but could only manage to lift her off the ground. Free from their duty of holding Kula up, the anchorite’s legs slammed into the dragon’s torso. Kula kicked with her feet and twisted with her arms in a blur of furious motion, howling and screaming in guttural forest-talk.
Though nearly transfixed by the sight of Kula rampant, Cayce still noticed Vaan hovering and staring down at her. She glanced over at the pixie and saw the anguished longing in his eyes.
“What?” she said, exasperated. “If it’s important enough for you to tell me, the spell guarantees you can’t.” Vaan only smiled helplessly, and flitted a few feet closer to the combatants.
The dragon let out a roar of frustration. He lunged forward with Kula still clamped behind his skull and forced his head and the giantess deep into the solid walls of the chamber. As he drove into the crumbling rock, the dragon raised the scales on his neck so that their razor edges stood out like the quills on a porcupine. Then the beast twisted in Kula’s grip, slicing a thousand vicious furrows in her flesh.
Kula cried out in pain but never relaxed her grip. If anything, the mad anchorite clutched even tighter as the bladelike scales dug into her body. She kicked harder, and more furiously, though the sharp points of the dragon’s scales punched through the soles and balls of her feet with each blow.
At last, the anchorite’s hold faltered. The dragon wrenched himself loose in a spray of ghastly red mist. As he slithered clear of Kula, he swatted the anchorite away with his tail before she could renew her grip. The dragon’s tail spikes scored Kula’s face, and the forest woman was hurled backward. The anchorite shrank back to her original size as she fell among the tumbling boulders.
Essentially undamaged, the dragon crawled up onto the rectangular platform. He turned and hissed at Kula, ignoring the seemingly minor threat of four soldiers and a stone man who glowed at the seams. As the dragon’s angry challenge faded, Captain Hask’s voice rolled across the chamber.
“Deploy the golem. Heavy demolition, on my mark.”
The soldiers fell back from Boom, who had begun to whine and creak like an overheated kettle. Orange fire flared from the seams around his ankles, elbows, and shoulders. Boom bent stiffly at the waist and knees, and the stone man held this awkward posture for a moment. Then there was an explosion at his feet, and Boom shot into the air on a column of colorful flame.
The golem blasted into the dragon’s chest like a man-shaped cannonball. Cayce saw some of the upright scales shatter like glass before orange flame engulfed the golem with a dull, muffled thump. The dragon’s eyes widened as the same orange flames erupted from his back. Boom’s attack had punched clear through the beasts body and gone on to char the wall beyond.
The dragon staggered back and fell heavily onto his side. He still held his head defiantly aloft on his undamaged neck, but the huge pectoral and stomach muscles that anchored his neck were longer connected.
Twenty feet from Cayce, Boom’s empty shell clattered to the ground. The golem’s body was intact, but the stone form that had been filled with churning, fiery energy was now an empty, hollow husk.
“Don’t touch him!” Trooper Fost shouted from the far side of the cavern. “He’s still hot. Stay clear until he gets back on his feet.”
Cayce made a half-hearted sign so Fost would see she understood. Looking at the golem, she didn’t think Boom would be back on his feet any time soon, but she was happy to obey Fost’s injunction to stay away from the walking explosive device.
Over on the rectangular platform, the dragon stirred. His head rose over his holed torso, and somehow the torso rose after it like a fakir-charmed snake. The gaping, smoking hole in his body was beginning to close as tiny sparks of gold shimmered along the edges of the wound. The sparks seemed to be repairing the damage, rebuilding the dragon’s organs, bones, skin, and scales from the inside out. As the gold light restored the brute to fighting capacity, a strange bluish light danced across the headless dragon skeleton beside Cayce.
