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CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
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Immortal Swordslinger
Bone Lord
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chapter 1
Stepping through a magical portal is a hairy business. Hell, stepping through any door can be a riskier proposition than you might expect, as you can never be sure what’s waiting on the other side. Stepping through a whirling vortex of liquid rainbow color that was only getting faster and faster and faster the longer you stood and gazed at it, though…
It was somewhat of a surprise when I stepped out into a dim space beyond.
I stumbled slightly as stone met my booted feet, and I took a couple of faltering steps. I blinked as my vision adjusted to the dingy light of my new environment. Compared to the scintillating face of the portal, which had twirled, twisted, and undulated in front of us, this space was poorly lit and had a dank, dingy quality to it.
Noises behind me told me that the rest of the gang had come through.
“Oh good,” came Alexander Noir’s voice, “we didn’t die! That’s an excellent result.”
“You thought we could have died?” asked Cherie Couture, our token French Canadian, her tone dangerous.
“Well, there’s no guarantee of not being shredded into a gazillion infinitesimal particles when you step through a portal,” Noir said. “Especially when you have to crack one open in a rush like that.”
“Mon Dieu,” Cherie said with quiet exasperation.
“Well, now that we have ascertained that we ain’t dead,” Lucia Sanguinoso said. In her soft Southern drawl, the Texan vampire countess continued, “perhaps we might figure out where we are.”
It was a good question.
I looked around, my eyes having now adjusted to the dim light.
“This looks a lot like the warehouse that was fronting the Necromancers’ hideout,” June said.
I turned and saw that the beautiful blonde former driver was gazing around our gloomy surroundings with a slight frown.
“Oh yeah, that’d be about right,” Jeeves Brewer griped. The faun stamped one hoof and zipped his gray hooded sweatshirt up a little tighter. He fixed Noir with a gimlet gaze. “Is that what you’ve gone and done, chief? You did all that fiddling with that portal thingamy and you turned it into a damn elevator?”
“Settle down, my cherubic friend,” Noir said.
“Hey, watch who you’re calling cherubic, will ya?” Jeeves said. “I had a cousin who was a cherub. Son of a bitch was always turning up to family gatherings dressed in next to nothing and making my Grandma feel uncomfortable. He’d have a few wines and then get his goddamn harp and—”
Cutting off what I’m sure would have been a good old Staten Island-flavored diatribe, June said, “Hey, where the hell is Aelyn and that sable-skinned demoness that apparently took such a shine to me?”
Aelyn was a forest nymph. She was about five-feet tall and as lithe and eye-catching a piece of walking, talking, green-skinned death and destruction as you could find outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The demoness was cut from a similar cloth as Aelyn, though clothed and skinned all in a stygian black, with bright golden eyes, golden war paint across her face, and teeth like slivers of gold.
“They were right behind me,” Azalea La Rouge said. Our freshly minted archmage looked behind her, as if waiting for the missing figures to appear There was only a solid-looking wall behind her, though. The merest supernatural sheen across the brickwork hinted at the portal it concealed.
“Well, they’re sure taking their sweet fucking time, aren’t they?” noted Nahlih, the former President of the Portland occult biker gang, The Girls. “You reckon they’re the only ones with any sense and have sat this one out?”
I regarded Noir as he studied the wall and then turned and scanned the room.
“I’d be more inclined to think whatever is keeping those two cuddly personifications of death from rendezvousing with us here is something to do with the Phantom Sphere itself, not the portal,” he said.
“Why do you think that?” I asked.
“A highly educated, and probably accurate, hunch,” Noir said, with his trademark modesty.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Although I would like to warn you that making such statements is only going to make you look more of a jackass if it turns out they just decided to play hooky.”
“Noted.” Noir shrugged. “As for right now though, at this present moment, I feel like it would be more worth our time to worry about what our next steps are.”
I walked a little further into the echoing space in which we now stood. There was the steady drip-drip-drip of water falling somewhere in the gloom. While the others murmured amongst themselves, I tried using my senses to sift through this new, but strangely familiar environment, for clues.
It did resemble the warehouse we had entered to make our way into the Necromancers’ underground lair. I realized after a quick appraisal that it couldn’t be. It couldn’t even be the same building, or the same industrial complex. There was no burnt out pickup truck, for one thing.
“Look at that,” Azalea said from behind me.
I looked over my shoulder and saw the mauve-haired minx was pointing off to my right. Her gray eyes and many facial piercings glinted in the light coming through the dirty industrial windows.
There was some weird shimmering neon graffiti on the wall that looked less like paint and more like magic. The color and sheen were telltale signs, but the real giveaway was the way the graffiti moved. It was a crudely painted picture of a blonde woman dressed in what I could only describe as a ranger’s garb—the sort of shit that a wanderer, woodsman, or hunter might wear in your typical high fantasy novel, before he finds out that his destiny involves becoming a king and ridding the world of a great evil. This blonde chick looked to be bending a bald dude with a big white beard and tattoos over a building and fucking him up the butt in no uncertain manner.
“That’s definitely the most obscene graffiti I’ve ever seen,” I said to Jeeves as the faun came to stand beside me.
Jeeves grunted. “Probably just about make my top ten.”
I saw something in a corner, a flash of movement which caught my eye and held it. I narrowed my eyes and followed the sound of soft scuffling, and saw something scampering away into the shadows.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
“I saw it,” Jeeves said. His answer came from behind me, where he had strategically positioned himself.
I moved a step or two closer to the noise.
“Hey, what’re you doing, chump?” Jeeves hissed at me.
I motioned with my head to the corner of the warehouse. “Checking it out.”
“You sound like every dumb kid who ever starred in a horror movie, right before they got their skin peeled off and used to upholster an armchair,” Jeeves muttered, scowling.
I thought at first that it must be a rat, but it turned out to be…
“What in the hell is that?” I asked.
“That,” Noir said, taking off his tortoiseshell sunglasses and polishing them on the hem of his emerald green duster, “looks to me to be a snotling.”
I looked sideways at the Mentalist. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“I assure you I’m not pulling your leg or any other part of your anatomy,” Noir said, replacing his sunglasses and turning away.
I studied the little creature. It was green-skinned, vaguely humanoid, and about five-inches tall. It had a bulbous head which, if I compared it to a potato, would have been doing a disservice to most potatoes.
“I think Noir is right,” Jeeves said, inching forward so he could inspect the creature. “I’ve heard of snotlings before. Orcs and goblins used to employ them as slaves for simple tasks. They ain’t the most intelligent little beggars in the world, and are nowhere near as much of a pain in the ass as gnomes. Used to be a lot of ‘em around at one point, I think.”
“Are they dangerous?” I asked, watching the beast blink at me with its big red eyes.
“Nah, they ain’t a threat to other creatures on their own,” Jeeves said. “I think they realized this a century or so back, so they formed gangs that could attack a bigger target through sheer weight of numbers. Haven’t been seen on Earth for a long time. They were meant to be extinct.”
“Cute!” came a cry from over mine and Jeeves shoulders.
I winced at the noise, Jeeves jumped like he’d just peed on an electric fence, and the snotling spirited away and vanished into a hole in the wall.
“Oh, it’s gone,” Cherie said, frowning after the snotling.
“Goddamn French Canadians,” Jeeves grumbled.
Outside the frosted and cracked industrial windows it appeared to be nighttime, but there was the flicker of neon light and the blaring of horns and the bellowing of creatures.
We reconvened over by Noir, who was standing by the enormous grimy windows on the farside of the industrial-looking space. It could have been used for anything; parking garage, an old manufacturing plant, an abandoned restaurant, it was impossible to tell.
“I suppose we should just get out there and see if this really is the Phantom Sphere, right?” I said.
Azalea looked doubtful. “I’m not sure if this is right. From everything I know about the Phantom Sphere, and there is very little to know, the place should be a void of nothingness. This doesn’t seem like much, but it’s certainly not nothing.”
She was right about that. There was light and sound and solid stone underfoot.
“I would say that my opening of the portal was at least ninetyseven percent accurate,” Noir said, staring at the frosted window.
“And the other three percent?” Nahlih asked, pulling out one of her fragrant cigarillos and lighting it up.
“Well, the other three percent would have culminated with us being spread through the multiverse like molecular jam over a an infinitely wide piece of toast.”
“And that didn’t happen?” Jeeves asked.
“No, Jeeves,” Noir said. “That did not happen.”
“Fuckin’ good,” Jeeves said. “I hate jam.”
“So, it worked?” Cherie asked. “We’re in the Phantom Sphere?”
“In the immortal words of every meddling optimist who ever changed the world—” Noir said.
“There’s only one way to find out,” I finished.
Noir nodded at me.
“All right then,” Lucia said, “if that’s decided, how about we get out there to see what there is to be seen?”
“An excellent idea, Miss Sanguinoso,” Noir said.
We walked through the deserted space and stepped out of the first door we found. It put up a fight until I gave it a couple of strategic boots. Then, with a grating squeal of protesting metal, it opened up into a fetid alleyway.
Stepping through the doorway first, I noticed it was drizzling. It was that lazy, unenthusiastic kind of rain that was basically mist. It speckled my face, cooling me off after the closed heat of the Necromancers’ underground hideaway.
The others filed out after me, looking from side to side. The end of the alleyway nearest us was a deadend, piled with refuse and a flat mirror-still puddle.
“It reminds me of the grimier parts of New York or somewhere like that,” Lucia said. Her pale face was flecked with moisture. As I watched her, she closed her eyes, tilted her head up to the soft rain, and licked the wetness from her bright red lips.
I tore my gaze away from the erotic sight and tried to take in our surroundings. There was the directionless thump-thump-thump of music coming from all around us.
“Should it be night?” Nahlih asked. “I didn’t think we were underground that long.”
“It wouldn’t be night if we were still on Earth time,” Noir said. “I told you, this is the Phantom Sphere.”
“We haven’t just crossed time zones, but space-time zones, is that it?” June asked, running her hand through her short hair.
Noir smiled at her. “Well put, June.”
The alley was awash with garish lights, reflected neon, flickering strobes, and the occasional warm flash of firelight. We walked down the empty alley and stepped out into the street.
“Whoa,” I said. “Azalea, I don’t want to insinuate that you weren’t any good at that smuggling gig, but I think it’s safe to say the Phantom Sphere is definitely not empty.”
The street could have been plucked straight out of any capital city on Earth. The roar of sound that greeted us as we stepped out of the alleyway and onto the sidewalk was incredible.
“Watch where you’re fucking treading, maggot!” a lumbering hulk of a figure growled at me as I jumped backward to avoid colliding with him. I glanced up at the eight-foot-tall humanoid, but
only saw one large green eye peering down at me from under the lowered brim of a trilby hat. The eye sat in the middle of a face that could have been carved out of weathered oak.
“Was that a…” I began.
“Cyclops, yes,” Lucia said from next to me.
“Hm,” I said.
I could have said a lot more, but I was speechless as I feasted my eyes on the insanity in front of me.
It was, as Lucia had said, a scene that could have been taken straight out of the Big Apple at rush hour. That was being on the conservative side, though. It was, without a single doubt in my mind, like no place I had ever seen in my life.
Buildings soared high into the misty night sky They glittered with lights and glass, neon advertisements, and occult projections depicting all sorts of wacky shit. The lights of all these advertisements and from all the windows lit the softly falling rain, causing it to sparkle and bamboozle the eye. The street teemed with folk.
“Looks to me like the Phantom Sphere is the kind of place where people of all races, sizes, shapes, sexes, and inclinations are welcomed with open arms,” Nahlih said, the orange skin of her face reflecting the lights that shone down on us, “so long as they have ready money in their pockets, and don’t expect to hang around once they’ve been relieved of it.”
“You make it sound like some kind of theme park,” Cherie said.
Nahlih put a hand on Cherie’s shoulder and squeezed. “Come on, girl, can’t you smell that? Can’t you smell the freedom? Can’t you smell the fucking possibilities?”
I zoned out, distracted by the river of traffic that flowed along the road in front of us. I shook my head. There were horses and carts plodding along, as well as wagons that were being pulled by animals that might have been oxen, though I had never actually seen
an ox in the flesh. That would have been odd enough, maybe, but then there were folk riding on the back of creatures that lived in story books; sphinxes, flaming hounds as big as horses, griffins and unicorns.
“Um, was that a gang of centaurs I just saw ride past on the other side of the street?” Cherie asked. “Over there? The ones in the leather jackets that resemble fifties greasers?”
I shaded my eyes from the light shimmering in the moistureladen air. The individuals Cherie was alluding to were dressed, as she had noticed, in shiny leather jackets, liberally studded and torn. They wore their thick hair in styled twists that weren’t at all uncommon from the way old John Travolta wore his in Grease.
“Yep,” I said, “I think they were centaurs.”
“Oh,” Cherie said, her eyes reflecting a flash of flame from the heavens above. “Oh, right. Good. Just checking.”
She sidled closer to my side.
The swirling mass of humanity—I used that word loosely— roared past us. Curses, shrieks of laughter, heckling, cries of dismay, the measured calls of peddlers and purveyors, and whistles mixed together to form a cacophony that would have put Beijing to shame.
The persistent sounds of horns echoed from the myriad of vehicles that thronged the roads. I saw one red-skinned woman with a pair of huge wings on her back, who I thought might have been a harpy, sitting at the helm of a flying carpet. She was gesticulating wildly at a train of giant boar being ridden by a bunch of robed figures whose only distinguishing features were enormous mustaches, who had trotted out in front of her.
While this harpy carpet driver berated the boar riders for cutting her off, the four small passengers she carried on the back of the carpet giggled and passed a pipe back and forth amongst themselves.
“That’s got to be against health and safety regulations,” June said in a detached voice.
“The smoking of the pipe in a moving vehicle?” Jeeves asked. He was looking at the floating carpet with an envious eye, as though he might decide to steal one for himself.
“I think June is referring more to the fact that those guys sitting at the back of the carpet have blue flames on the tops of their heads instead of hair,” I said. “You’d think that the driver of a flying carpet wouldn’t let a bunch of stoners with fire for hair onto such a combustible vehicle.”
I looked at Noir. The ageing Mentalist had taken off his fedora and was feeding the brim in circles through his fingers. He looked just as dumbstruck as the rest of the gang, and as taken aback as I felt. Making sure that I didn’t step too far out into the jostling crowd of pedestrians, I shimmied over to where he was standing.
“You okay there, Noir?” I asked.
Noir ran his fingers through his salt and pepper hair and jammed his fedora back onto his head.
“My goodness gracious, man, but have you ever seen such a place?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said. “I can tell you that unequivocally. Absolutely not.”
“It’s… It’s…” Noir said, struggling for words as his tortoiseshell sunglasses reflected two miniature versions of the chaos.
“Trouble waiting to happen?” I supplied.
“Glorious,” Noir said.
I watched the street theater happening in front of us, as well as all around. It was like we had been dumped into a nest of irate ants, each of which was out on their own mission, rather than working toward some larger team goal. Men and women drank, partied, and gambled on the street, slinging back all sorts of food from carts that shoved through the masses. Music and the sounds of fighting blared from open doorways.
There were a few people whose race or species I could guess at, but mostly there was just a mass of bodies. There was no way that you could have been racist in the Phantom Sphere—you were just too spoiled for choice.
“It’s something,” I said. “It’s definitely something.”
“I just don’t get it, I don’t get it at all,” Azalea said.
“What don’t you get, hon?” Cherie asked.
“Um, the Phantom Sphere is supposed to be freaking ghostland,” Azalea pointed out.
“Reputedly,” Lucia said.
“What?” Azalea said, her eyes reflecting the light of the towering skyscrapers, many of which were festooned with gargoyles —live ones, I realized.
“Reputably a ghostland,” Lucia said in her light Texan drawl. “I don’t believe there has ever been anyone who has visited the Phantom Sphere and returned to report on it.”
“Maybe,” Azalea said, “but I used to monitor parallel worlds and channels for the smuggling operation I was involved with. I told you guys that.”
“You couldn’t have, you know, been wrong, could you?” Nahlih asked through a cloud of cigarillo smoke. “It’s been known to happen to me once or twice in my life.”
Azalea shook her head, frowning. “Everyone who is in the smuggling game knows that the Phantom Sphere is just a big old bunch of nothing,” she insisted. “Every supernatural scanner, every cabbalistic monitoring device, every shamanistic artifact that I have ever used to monitor the thaumaturgical, cross-dimensional frequencies has never shown anything that so much as resembled life.”
She shook her head again and puffed out her cheeks. “There is supposed to be nothing here. Everyone knows that.”
“That’s one of the incongruities of life that you experience more and more as you get older,” Noir said.
“What’s that, Alexander?” June asked.
“How often what ‘everyone knows’ turns out to be about as much use as a cock-flavored lollipop at a lesbian convention.”
We stood there for a little while longer, staring mutely at the havoc and tumult that was happening all around.
I tried to boil down what made the sight of the Phantom Sphere so overwhelming and so captivating. After about a minute, I concluded that, for me, what was so mind-boggling about it was the fact that there was no cohesion to… Well, to anything.
Glowing globes of eldritch light hung in orderly lines down the sidewalks, while in the alleyways smoky torches burned in brackets. Magic carpets and broomsticks sat bumper to bumper with 1959 Cadillac Series 62 convertibles and three-wheeled auto rickshaws. Minotaurs stumped down the streets with their heavy hammers and axes slung over their shoulders, mixing it up with the kind of slick, leather clad individuals that could have walked straight off the latest Matrix movie.
“It’s the old school magic meeting the modern era, is what it is,” I said to myself.
A sudden gusting of air, a swirling of mist, and a break in the rain falling on us, made Noir let out an exclamation.
Nahlih yelled out as well, pressing herself back into the mouth of the alley we had just exited.
A dragon dropped out of the air and landed on the road. A full-on, presumably fire-breathing, dragon.
“Dip me in duckshit!” Jeeves cried, scrambling to get his rotund form behind the far skinnier figure of June as the massive beast, easily as long as a school bus, touched down.
Piercing, yet intelligent, bright scarlet eyes sat gracefully within the creature’s long, scaled skull. They scanned the eight of us standing near the mouth of the alleyway as pedestrians muttered under their breath and cursed us for getting in the way.
Two small horns sat atop its head, just above the thick, scaled ridges that protected its eyes and must have, and I thought this in a detached way, served some aerodynamic purpose. Several rows of small horns ran down the sides of its jaw and down the middle of its snout.
Sharp teeth protruded here and there from its massive, closed mouth, and it had two long, slitted nostrils. Two small horns protruded from its chin. Calling the head end of the creature a living weapon would have been an understatement, especially when I remembered that it also included a giant flamethrower as standard.
A lean neck ran down from its head and joined its colossal body. Its top and flanks were covered in narrow scales that slotted together and moved as seamlessly as the most exquisitely crafted mail. Rows of small spikes, each of which looked sharp enough to impale any bird that happened to perch on its broad back, ran down its spine.
When the dragon lifted its leg, crushing a newspaper machine as it adjusted its position, I saw that its bottom was covered in thicker, more massive scales, which were a slightly darker color than the rest of its body. That color was strikingly familiar somehow. It was a lovely pearlescent blood orange. It rang a few bells, but I was too distracted by the creature to heed the ringing of those bells.
My eyes took in the four thick limbs that carried its musclebound body and allowed the creature to stand illustrious, proud, and towering over the milling traffic. Each limb had four digits, each of which ended in a talon seemingly made of onyx and that would have made a samurai sword look like a toothpick.
Beautiful and elegant wings sprouted from joints located just above its shoulders. They were folded as neatly as any birds to the dragon’s sides. The wings looked angular, the outsides a beautiful deep black. The wing joints themselves were covered in more of the armor-like scales growing on top of them.
My eyes skittered along the massive body and down the long tail, which ended in a large, sharp tip covered in many smaller
spines.
“Sweet mamaloosa,” Jeeves said, peeking out from behind June, who looked like she was doing her utmost to stop Jeeves disappearing up her ass.
It astounded me that not a single person ran screaming for their lives. There wasn’t a soul who thought that flinging spells at the gigantic monster and then making a dash for it was a good idea. There were a few yells and curses and horns, much like there would be if some rude asshole cut into a lane of traffic without signaling.
As much as the other road-users might have resented the dragon dropping out of the sky, they got their asses out of the way pronto, too. After all, it is one thing to shake your fist and rail at a live dragon for making you late, but another to have one sit in your lap.
“That’s… That’s a, um… That’s a fucking dragon!” I said in a voice that was a little loud but devoid of emotion in my own ears.
“I see your powers of observation remain undiminished even after passing through the portal,” Noir said with his habitual dry condescension, which I usually appreciated on a comedic level, though not when a live dragon sat in front of me. “Don’t wig out, Pat.”
“Firstly, let me say how I appreciate your dated fifties colloquialisms,” I said.
“Dated?” Noir said, looking offended.
“Then let me thank you for telling me not to wig out. For a second there, I thought you were going to give me some useless and arbitrary piece of advice.”
“My point is you can’t keep going about the place with your bottom jaw dragging across the ground, gawping at every personage or creature who may or may not have played a pivotal part in the history or crafting of mythology in the mundane world. You always hear the old schtick about stereotypes stemming from reality, yes?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Well, so do myths and legendary people.”
“So what, you wouldn’t be surprised to bump into Hector of Troy or, I dunno, Baba Yaga, or a gorgon, or Odin on the street?”
“I’d love to bump into Odin,” Noir muttered. “The bugger owes me twenty bucks.”
“What?”
“Nothing, nothing, my point is that magic has existed for a long time and, as such, there have been many notable magic users who have gone down as, quite literally, legends. There are many creatures and beasts that are now considered fanciful that once roamed the lands freely.”
I pointed up at the skyscrapers with their ranks of grim-faced, stony gargoyles. Even as I watched, one snatched a bat from midair and shoved it into its mouth. “Like those guys, you mean?”
“Exactly,” Noir said. “You can’t go getting all starstruck, dewyeyed, and weak at the knees just because you catch sight of Medea, or a three-headed dog, or Apollonius of Tyana at a crosswalk.”
“I have literally no idea who those people are,” I said.
Noir sighed.
“You can’t start giggling like a schoolgirl if you were to cross paths with Gandalf the Gray is what I mean,” he said.
“I could cross paths with Gandalf the Gray?” I blurted.
“Well… no, I mean, Gandalf was just the guy’s stage name, you know? Anyway, he did the smart thing and got in on some computer stock early and retired to an island off the coast of Belize,” Noir said. “But you get my gist.”
“You’re telling me to act as if dragons are all par for the course?” I said.
“Right,” Noir said. “We faced a basilisk just the other day in downtown Portland didn’t we?”
“Yeah,” I said, “and it almost killed us all, hence why I’m a little cagey around this goddamn thing.” I jerked my thumb at the dragon. It was still looking down at us. It might have been my
imagination, but I thought it was giving us all the vaguely appraising look I gave a deli counter when I was famished.
“Speaking of which, why is this guy still giving us the gladeye?” I asked.
Noir frowned at me. “You mean you don’t recognize her?”
“Her? Recognize?” I said. “Why would I?”
Noir frowned deeper, and then let out a laugh of disbelief. “That gorgeous female specimen of dragonkind there, Pat Bane, is none other than Daisy.”
“Daisy?” I looked up into the dragon’s semi-equine face. “Daisy? As in Daisy the…”
Then it clicked.
“This is Daisy the Datsun!” I said. “The color of the scales… Shit, that’s a dead giveaway! I should have remembered what Big Sal Barlow had said to me when she sold us Daisy.”
Big Sal was the enigmatic and exotic extramundane vehicle dealer from whom Noir had purchased our magical Datsun 250Z.
“What did she say?” Cherie asked, her eyes glued on the massive dragon.
I racked my memory. It took more racking than it might ordinarily have taken had there not been a mythical creature sitting parked at the curb and looking at me like a Red Sox fan eyeing a hotdog.
“‘As subtle as a nun in a brothel,’ were the words that spring to mind,” I said. “Yep, I believe they were the exact words. But she also told me that the car we chose would have a true form, one that the vehicle itself would reveal in time. I guess that this is the time.”
“Were those the only words she vouchsafed to you?” Noir asked.
I scrolled back through the timeline of my memory. “Yeah, as far as I can recall,” I said. “I don’t think she said anything else that might prove to be surprising in the near future.”
“So, Daisy is ours?” Cherie asked, nodding toward the dragon.
“I would say that Daisy is very much her own,” I said.
“Agreed,” Noir said. “But, I believe that yes, she will be lending us her services while we are in the Phantom Sphere.”
“Speaking of the fucking Phantom Sphere,” Nahlih interjected. “How the hell did she even get here?”
“Dragons have the ability to pass through the barriers between realms,” Lucia said. “It’s how they managed to survive being wiped out by mundane humans during the Dark Ages. Dragon hunting was all the rage back then. Apparently, nothing showcased how big your balls were in those days, and how tiny your brain was, like slaying a dragon.”
“You’d need a pretty big fireplace if you wanted to mount a head that size over it,” Jeeves said, eyeing the dragon. He was still hiding behind June.
“Being some of the most proud and powerfully magical beasts in existence they care little for so-called barriers,” Lucia said, her eyes wide and gleaming. “Dragons can conjure portals and slip through space and time as easily as we walk through a door.”
I was struck by a sudden thought. “Hey, wouldn’t that also mean, hypothetically, that she could open a portal for us to escort the Agents back through, if we find them?”
Lucia shrugged. “I wouldn’t bank on it, Pat. But she might be able to. Then again she might not be able to bring all of them back at once. Crafting portals out of nothing takes a great deal of energy and mana. We will have to see. In all honesty, dragon lore is something I don’t suppose too many people know much about.”
Noir clapped his hands. Due to the noise filling the bustling street, it didn’t sound as loud as usual.
“Well, now that we have a ride sorted, it seems to me we should start pushing along, yes?” he asked.
“Sounds good to me.” I scratched the back of my neck and looked up and down the street. Then I looked at Noir. “And, ah, where exactly do you want to start pushing along?”
Noir considered this. “Well,” he said, with the air of a man who is making it all up as he goes along, “I suppose we should see about getting a hotel room or some other sort of accommodation. Then we can figure out our next step.”
“That strikes me as being a sound plan,” Lucia said.
“All right,” I said, “in that case, just how does one go about mounting a dragon?”
Jeeves sniggered into his neck beard but shut up when Daisy turned her lambent eyes on him.
Chapter 2
Jeeves made a show of coughing once or twice, cleared his throat, and looked hastily at the ground. “Well, I guess if we’re going to be moping around the city, then we might as well do it on dragonback and save our hooves, eh?”
“Uh, I have a question,” Nahlih said. She took a last drag on her cigarillo, flicked it away, and breathed out a plume of smoke that enveloped her black hair that was shot with gold.
“Fire away, Nahlih,” I said.
“Well, I was thinking, I don’t know how popular we’re going to be in this place once we start asking around about where those Agency fuckwits have got to. No offense,” she added to June.
“None taken,” June said with a soft snort.
“What makes you think any of these people give two shits about anyone we’re looking for?” I asked. “Looks like every busy metropolitan area I ever saw on Earth times by one hundred. I get the impression everyone here is out to get theirs, whatever that might be, and everyone else’s interests can go jump in the lake.”
“Exactly,” Nahlih said. “That was my first impression, too. These are my kind of people. Folk look out for themselves via any and every means possible. The kind of folk who say, ‘If I have to choose between you and me—I like me better.’ Miss Sanguinoso over there knows what I’m talking about, don’t you, girl?”
Lucia considered this. She took a couple of deep sniffs of the misty, rainy air through her perfect nose.
“The notion that a vast gulf exists between ‘criminals’ and those of us who have never served time in prison or been hauled in by the police is a fiction, in my experience, sweetie,” she said in her soft Texan accent that always lured me, momentarily, into forgetting
that this southern belle was more than capable of twisting my head off with her bare hands. “All of us have done wrong to some degree. Heck, chances are most mundane and extramundane beings go through their lives repeatedly breaking the law to some small degree. That bein’ said, I’d be inclined to trust the sylph’s initial judgement of this place; I can’t imagine many here are of the mind that helping track down Earth’s foremost supernatural law enforcement agency is something worth their time.”
“Trust me, I’m a criminal,” Nahlih said, tapping the side of her nose.
“There’s a hell of an oxymoron,” I said, “but I get your point.”
“I’m glad,” Nahlih said. “So, what with most of this fine, eclectic bunch of petty criminals probably being more predisposed to shank us than help us, don’t you think we’re going to stick out like a sore thumb, riding around on the back of this fucking dragon?”
In answer, Noir pointed up and drew our attention to the fact that there was just as much traffic flying above us as there was on the street.
Through the misty rain, we could see all manner of creatures gliding and flapping between the finger-like buildings that loomed up and disappeared into the foggy heights.
The low, dense clouds rolled around the buildings. A shadow swept down out of the mists. It was a creature with the body of a deer and the wings of an eagle. On its back was a figure wrapped in what looked like bandages. It had pale green skin, which emanated with a soft, eerie green glow.
“A ghoul riding a peryton,” Cherie whispered. “Unbelievable…”
“Peryton?” I asked.
“Perytons were said to have lived in Atlantis until an earthquake destroyed the civilization and the creatures escaped by flight,” she told me. “A peryton was supposed to cast the shadow of a man until it killed one during its lifetime, at which point it cast its own shadow.”
“Sounds mystical, but slightly pointless,” I said.
The peryton soared down with a croaking cry and swept around a corner and out of sight.
“I have a feeling,” Noir said as we all gazed up with our mouths open and watched the airborne traffic, “that it would take something particularly reckless and spectacular to excite notice or comment here.”
“Well,” I said, still looking up at the craziness taking place above us, “give us time. We’ve only been here five minutes.”
I had seen and experienced some wacky shit in the short time June and Noir had come into my life. I had met creatures and beings that I had, until a couple of months before, only ever seen in movies and read about in fantasy novels. I had found out that I was an Aether Mage, and had come to terms with what that meant. Primarily, that magic existed and I could absorb all different kinds of the stuff and recycle it for my own uses.
Even regarding all that, even after having seen what I had seen and fought in the intense magical battles that I had fought in, even after discovering that the extramundane world and magic existed, riding on the back of a dragon was more like an acid trip than anything else.
It was incredible. It didn’t feel real, even as it was taking place. I didn’t know how to react after we had climbed onto Daisy’s back, she had crouched, and then launched herself into the air with a great uncoiling of massive muscles. It was simply too bizarre. I didn’t even cry out in amazement. I just sat there like a stunned mullet for thirty seconds and gazed down at the retreating street below.
We were flying on the back of a dragon as casually as if we had caught a cab and, despite the ridiculousness of that, none of the
