I shook my head emphatically and waved her gaze toward the blossoming formation of e-drakes converging on us. “Bigger… problem…”
Her brows drew together. “Yeah. I think they’re playing my song.”
Fire licked along her arms and legs and whooshed skyward from the top of her brush cut. “My back feels funny-weak. Numb,” she said, eyes on the e-drakes to gauge their approach. “And wet. How bad am I hurt?”
“Not… badly,” I managed to gasp. “I’ve got… Renn. Stop… the drakes…”
“Don’t mind if I do.” She clenched both fists, and a flaming dome of shield flared to life, sheltering Renn and me, but not her. She stepped between us and the diving drakes, and she didn’t bother with a personal shield.
All five of them went straight for her, and the blast of fire from five e-throats was so intense the dunes around us looked like the inside of a blast furnace. Embers spit into my hair and across my back even through Baltrice’s shield, and the flames slagged the dune to smoking slabs of glass for meters around. When the fire died away, Baltrice hadn’t moved. She just stood there, squinting up at them, fists on her hips as though she’d decided, in the spirit of fair play, she’d given them one free shot.
Now she tilted her head to crack her neck, and rotated her shoulders to loosen the cramping around the wound in her back. “Well, all right, then.” She sounded cheerfully businesslike. “Damn me if you sad-ass bastards aren’t right in the middle of the last stupid thing you’re ever gonna do.”
Watching Baltrice unleash her inferno of destruction, I decided she was living proof of the adage, “If you love your job, you never have to work for a living.”
The etherium drake is one of the last surviving remnants of what is very possibly the worst idea in the history of Esper. Centuries ago, the earliest rudiments of what would become the Ethersworn decided that since etherium was supposed to “sanctify and morally elevate” whatever is joined with it, they should start enhancing even the beasts, to speed the world’s transformation into a paradise. Which was appallingly ignorant in itself, but they didn’t stop there.
When these self-appointed saviors got together to figure out what species should be the first on which they’d try their Noble Work, they chose the Esper firedrake.
The firedrake was, before these chucklebrains began to meddle with it, the single most dangerous predator on Esper. Smaller than true dragons, not significantly smarter than sewer rats, and lacking the broad-based magical prowess of their draconic relations, the firedrakes made up for their genetic deficits in sheer mindless ferocity.
Sluice serpents can be avoided by staying away from the cesspits; kraken keep to the deep ocean; striges are more of a nuisance than a threat. Flocks of firedrakes, however, who have, on their good days, the temperament of rabid viashinos, might at any time take it upon themselves to flock together and wing off to some randomly unlucky spot, then attack and immolate everything for miles around. Everything. Ships. Caravans. Villages. Rocks. Each other. No one knows exactly why.
Maybe they just like to watch things burn.
The proto-Ethersworn spent a generation or two stalking firedrakes, tranquilizing them, and replacing various parts of their bodies with refined etherium. To the astonishment of no one other than themselves, the Noble Metal seemed to have no beneficial effect on the behavior of firedrakes. At all. So, in their typically clot-headed fashion, they concluded that this must be simply because the firedrakes hadn’t been enhanced enough, and they undertook to remedy this delusional problem by making a very real problem several orders of magnitude worse.
Just as it does for any other living thing, etherium made firedrakes stronger.
This was long before the days of the shortage, and so by the time any sane people realized what these moonbats were up to, there were several hundred firedrakes whose entire bodies had been replaced. They even replaced the creatures’ brains, which had no noticeable effect on their physiology beyond making them a great deal more difficult to kill, and making their moral character, if they could be said to have one, even worse.
Where before they had been ridiculously dangerous, savagely unpredictable horrors, full-body replacement transformed them into mindless, near-indestructible engines of destruction.
Sharuum, in her wisdom, commanded the moonbats to clean up their own mess, which made no appreciable dent in the numbers of e-drakes but in short order did an admirable job of thinning the moonbat population. Eventually the Grand Hegemon was forced to take a personal hand. She gathered the bulk of the land’s sphinxes and led them on a sequence of hunts over the course of a decade or two, until there were no more e-drakes to be found. Somehow, however, the creatures persist in reappearing at inconvenient moments.
Informed opinions on the reason for this are split. Optimists tend to believe new e-drakes are being created by a radical splinter sect of the Ethersworn, still carrying on their Noble Nut Job in secret. Realists are of the opinion that the creatures have found a way to breed.
Dangerous as they are, their most destructive power is the annihilating fire they can vomit at will-and to assault Baltrice with flame was worse than useless. The more flame they poured onto her, the stronger she got, and when a couple of them stooped like falcons to try their luck with fang and talon, she just opened her arms and invited them in with a truly happy grin.
The closest e-drake was clearly astonished to discover that Baltrice could herself claw and bite with the best of them. She slipped the beast’s viperish fang strike, got one arm around the thing’s long, snaky neck, and grabbed its wing joint with her free hand. In a second or two, the joint ran from red to yellow to white as radioactive milk, and dripped down through the e-drake’s ribs while the wing flopped off, twitching into the dunes.
I could happily have whiled away the whole afternoon watching Baltrice dismantle her new toys, except that this was the moment Silas Renn chose to hook his thumb into my left eye.
“Uh, by the way,” Doc said, “did I mention he’s awake?”
That was also the moment I discovered that the boiling had subsided from my blood, that the lightning crackle was gone from my skin, and that I was suddenly tired.
Very, very tired.
Not yet dead tired, though that state loomed in my immediate future.
Exhaustion, however, was not enough to stop me from twisting my head, latching my teeth into the ball of his thumb, and biting down until he squealed like a tea kettle. He got his other hand up under my chin and dug his thumb into my parotid gland until I had to let go so I could turn my head away, after which he undertook to deliver a very efficient, thorough, and professional beating, focusing on my face, my lower abdominal wall, and my groin.
This was a particularly inconvenient moment to discover that the education of scions of the House of Renn included comprehensive training in personal combat.
This was particularly inconvenient because I hadn’t been in a fistfight since I was (approximately) eleven years old, and because my lack of expertise was compounded by having only one hand I could use to defend myself. If I let go of his collarbone, he’d throw me off and roast me in roughly a heartbeat and a half.
Worse, it seemed that his etherium enhancements, in addition to being impervious to anything I could do with hands, feet, or head, also made him stronger than a rhox berserker. Each blow of his fists opened a cut on my face and shot stars across my vision, or ripped muscles and battered internal organs, or crushed my testicles until I had to vomit bile from my empty stomach, or inventive combinations thereof. “How’s it feel, scrapper boy?” he sneered in my face. “Bet you never thought I could beat you at this too, did you?”
I could not have answered him if I’d wanted to. Soon he got bored with thrashing me, and decided to break my grip on his collarbone by pinching the muscle between my thumb and forefinger with his thumb and forefinger, which was so unexpectedly and unbelievably painful that I yelped and jerked as if I’d been stabbed. But despite his enhancements, his hands were still only flesh and bone. With my free hand, I grabbed his thumb and pried it off me.