Breaking Ties (7 page)

“Yeah, I heard about that. So are you going to go get lunch or what?” She waits expectantly, tapping her foot, and I shrug. “What, you want my order?”

“You're
ordering
me to take a lunch break, sir?”

“More I was wondering, since you're so loaded, and if you have enough liquid assets, could you get me something? I didn't have time to stop for breakfast, and I'm mostly running on magic. I'd conjure food but it's all empty calories.” I smile beatifically. “Please?”

She fights off rolling her eyes, but nods. “At least you said please. Mother used to tell tales of the ways the Ra'keth would enforce discipline. The Munificent says you may be different. For now I will trust her judgment. What would you like me to bring you, then?”

“Burger and fries? Small on the fries. Ask for the burger rarely legal.”

She furrows her brow at the term, but I explain. “Rare as legally allowed. Only a couple places in the City know the term, mostly because the phrase hasn't gotten around yet. Obviously, get whatever you want for yourself.”

She smiles at that and just before turning to leave says, “I'm a vegetarian. When I'm in this form, at least.”

Well. Learn something new about dragons every day, I guess. It's a damned sight better than the first thing I learned from living with Dave. The best way to put it is this: Dragons snore like chainsaws having angry sex.

I have to admit that she's likely correct about the flying practice. “Flies like a dropped egg” sounds like an insult, to be sure, and since I'd rather not deal with her condescension, I might as well get in a little practice on my lunch break.

I put out my sign that'll direct patrons to the main desk and tell my supervisor I'm taking my lunch, and head to the roof.

It's clear up here, a little bit of a breeze, though the abundance of cigarette butts flips all the wrong switches in my brain, reminding me that attempt number twelve to quit smoking is not going as planned. I can conjure my own smokes, and I won't get lung cancer. But it's a habit I picked up while I was with Heath, one of the last vestiges of my life with him, and I'd prefer to cut it clean, nice and neat. Or jagged and sloppy, as long as I don't need any of these damned things anymore.

Suffice it to say, it takes me a couple minutes to clear my head and focus. I'm always surprised at how easy this is, considering that polymorphing is a midlevel spell in Dungeons & Dragons and can maybe be cast a couple times a day. But with Sigil, it's just a matter of exchanging one Name for another and keeping a minimal level of concentration.

Still, it involves taking the name Slartibartfast.

Damn Coyotes.

A flash of light later, I'm beating my wings and ascending into the air, feeling the cold winter wind gliding over my body, and since I'm a Snow Dragon, it's like sinking into a perfect bath. It's a good thing there isn't anything shiny around, otherwise it'd be a little difficult to suppress all the instincts that come with this body. A bit of advice about turning into a dragon? If you decide to eat a cow whole, when you change back you'll be sick for four days. Almost went full Gollum on my diamond pendant, considering it's priceless and would make for a hell of a hoard.

Changing forms isn't like changing clothes, after all. Slartibartfast isn't a different entity, he's the me I'd be if I'd been hatched a Snow Dragon instead of born human, which makes him a handful.

But times like now, when it's cold and I'm in flight, the instincts just flow and I feel like I know what I'm doing, no matter what some bitchy blue-scale says. Bunch of bullies. At least Parivian was nice to me, and I think I like drakes. Maybe, if I asked, he'd come flying with me and I could find out if he likes drakes too and…

Hold on.

Why am I mad about failing an intelligence check, again?

Something about a Lightning Rod and…

Oh.
Oh.

God damn it, this is why I hate shifting. If only it were as simple as occasionally rolling some dice to keep from losing myself.

I run through the usual litanies in my mind, mostly all the memories I have, to assert my identity and convince myself that I'm a human sorcerer in a draconic form, not a Snow Dragon who occasionally disguises himself as a human sorcerer. And apparently has a little crush on Parry.

Once I'm in firm control, my flight wavers, the instincts not as strong. But this is practice, and I'm sticking to the open air around a nearby cathedral where I'll be high enough to not hit anything and I'll be able to hear the church tower chime that my lunch break is over. After that, it's back to work with some lunch and studying my translated notes on enchantment.

Nice, easy day.

“
DRAGON!”

That can't be good.

I look down, my eyes focusing on a figure standing on the library's roof, my sight zooming in, disorienting me as I see he's wearing a tabard and holding a crossbow, his voice thundering as he fires. “
Meet thine destiny!
”

The bolt punctures my shoulder, and I roar in agony, frozen breath streaking through the skies to flow into the clouds overhead, snow beginning to fall. The pain shears through my focus, my identity getting muddled as I dive toward the roof, wanting to bathe my attacker in frigid anger. He drops the crossbow as I land, drawing a sword from inside his tabard.

A crusader's tabard, signifying a Knight of St. George.

A dragonslayer.

Chapter Seven

James

December 19, 12:25 pm

I shouldn't be up here. A rooftop isn't a good place for someone my size to fight. The knight will have the advantage, and with my shoulder hit, I can't take to the air again. I could climb down the building, but there are too many people and cars, and despite what this dragonslayer thinks, I don't want to kill or eat anyone. I'm not on
that
side of the alignment table.

Whatever that means.

I take a swipe at the knight, my claws pulled in to keep the damage blunt, just knock him back. But he rolls expertly out of the way and swings his sword as he comes up, the blade cutting cleanly through the scales on my foreleg and spraying the pavement with crimson. The sight of the blood gives the knight pause as I screech in pain, pulling away from the blade.

I breathe hard at him, and he again rolls away from the blast, the exit door taking the brunt, now barricaded with ice. He's too damned fast, and I've never fought anyone before, especially not someone who's trained for expressly this. A Red could probably bathe the roof in fire and burn him out. A Blue could take advantage of the fact that a human standing on a roof, holding a five-foot piece of metal, makes an excellent conductor for electricity. But I'm just a Snow Dragon. All I have is ice and…

Ice. There's something about ice.

I don't have time to complete the thought as the knight charges at me and I scramble over the side of the building, my claws digging into the stonework to keep me aloft. I scrabble along the side of the library to an opposing corner, my claws surprisingly agile in my panic, causing very little damage to the building proper as I move around to the opposite side and poke my head over the ledge, and duck just in time to avoid another crossbow bolt that whistles through the air, shattering a window in the building across the street.

With a burst of ingenuity, and probably stupidity, I rear my head back as I climb back to the ledge of the roof and find the knight waiting for me. While I do expend probably the last of my ice for now, I don't aim it at the knight, who I know will simply dive out of the way. Instead, I bathe the loose gravel on the roof, ice spreading over the surface, and while he does avoid his legs getting frozen in place, he's unable to regain his footing. The sight is almost comical, but I don't have time to enjoy it, my body exhausted.

I climb back over the ledge onto the roof and slap the exit door lightly with my tail, loosing it from the ice without breaking it. Probably a good idea to take a human form and escape through the library, or at least hide for a while. I focus through the steady pain in my arm and shoulder and exert my will, taking the name of my human form and after a flash of light—

“Mother
fuck
! God
damn
it, ow…”

Pain is a great way to remember you're actually human, not a dragon. I'll bitch about failing intelligence checks later. Right now I need medical attention or at least a Dumpster full of garbage to convert into energy to heal my own wounds. My right shoulder luckily doesn't have a bolt stuck in it, but it's still bleeding, as is my left forearm, not to mention I have one hell of a headache.

I stagger through the entryway to the stairs as the knight makes his way toward the door. As I head down to the third floor, I mutter a simple spell that I learned from a source I'd rather not think about. “
I am a Child of Man.
”

Sorcerers can be pointed out by their Mark, and as centuries went by and worlds ended and began anew, sorcerers also found that, evil or not, belonging to a group of people responsible for killing gods, creating creatures both awe-inspiring and terror-inducing, and generally oppressing their fellow man into servitude meant that discretion was often the better part of valor. Over time, sorcerers learned that with the right spells, they could cloak themselves. So instead of being noticeable to anyone with a pair of functioning eyes, I'm the least interesting and most easily ignored person within a five-block radius, which is handy both if you don't want a Knight of St. George finding you or anyone freaking out about you leaking blood on the carpet.

Also, no one notices if you pull the fire alarm to better conceal your escape.

With the crowd exiting the building in an orderly fashion, it's easy enough to slip out with them and vanish into the huddled masses rubbernecking outside, to go find an alley with a Dumpster that the Department of Sanitation hasn't gotten to yet. I'm not sure if the knight made it out, but other than tripping and falling on his ass on an icy roof, I don't imagine he got out of the fight worse than I did.

I'm also a little happy that Slartibartfast didn't kill him, because the urge was there, and I don't know if I personally would've been able to resist. Or if he would've been or…

Damn it, I
really
need to quit polymorphing until I get my head on straight.

It's better to focus on finding a source of energy, considering that my diamond is at the diner, bolstering Dave's hoard as the diner doesn't make that much in the way of profit.

I stagger into an alley, not caring whether it's occupied or not, to check the first Dumpster I see.

No Dumpster, but there are a couple huddled people in the shadows of the buildings, tucked in next to large garbage heaps. I can only hope they're asleep as I extend my hand toward the mounds of bags and push my will at the trash.

Garbage is a nice, if small, source of energy. It lacks emotional resonance, so the energy is relatively clean and neutral, and it's meant to be used within a few hours, as garbage doesn't really imply permanence. Plus, this stuff would end up in a landfill anyway, so at least it's a green way of powering my magic. The garbage evaporates, revealing the people sleeping underneath it, and I funnel the incoming energy into one simple word in Sigil.

“
Heal.
”

I immediately scream, because extending the middle finger of magic at reality has its price. Forcing your shoulder to knit itself back together, your wounds to close and your marrow to pump out replacement blood in record time… Well, the human body isn't designed to do all of that in several seconds. That mass overload of signals to my brain? It's interpreted as pain.

A lot of pain.

The sleeping homeless are awoken by my shrieks, and they rise, groaning as they do so, their faces pale, rotting…

Fuck.

Zombies.

Thank God Spence isn't here, what with his irrational fear of a “zombie apocalypse”, but it appears I've already set them off, and considering that it's during the day, I can't let them out of the alley and into the crowd. There only appear to be a couple of them, and thankfully no vanilla humans are in the mix, so no worries about innocents being caught in the crossfire.

Then again, zombies aren't brain-chomping monsters. They're actually pitiful if you know their story. Imagine losing something you know that you need and having no idea where you left it. That's the state that zombies exist in all the time, with no one to give them any assistance. I have to guess that the zombies will calm back down, and since it's December, there's at least one kind of magic that should be easy and won't draw too much attention.

“
Ice!
”

The snow and slush on the pavement solidify, the temperature already below freezing. I focus on drawing what little heat I can out of the advancing zombies as I chant “ice” again and again, which slows their progress and bolsters my own body temperature, even works up a bit of a sweat. The snow freezes around their feet, keeping them in place, their movements sluggish while I feel like I'm standing in the desert in the middle of July.

I'm a bit drained, all the energy from the transmuted garbage expended now, the working starting to nibble on the rich energy that remains, which would be my soul. I cut the spell soon afterward, the zombies slumping against the brick buildings and returning to their day's slumber, and I'll admit I lean against the wall, exhausted, as well.

“Impressive.” Coda appears from around the corner, holding a brown paper bag with grease stains. “For a Keth, at least. I would expect something grander from the Ra'keth, but you possess a reputation for preferring subtlety in your magic.”

I catch my breath, still sweating, though the December air is nipping at my exposed skin. “Now you show up? That knight could've killed me, you know. You didn't notice him coming in?”

She shrugs plainly. “Knights of St. George are only threats to dragonkind, not sorcerers. You did not announce you would be practicing your flight while I was gone. If you had, I would have been able to offer my services.”

I narrow my eyes at her. “So this is my fault? I thought you were supposed to be my protector.”

She smiles, an edge to it. “But, my liege, you made it
quite
clear that you do not want a protector. You gave me an order to…” the dragon sets her jaw, “…fetch your lunch. I was only obeying your command. You would prefer insubordination?”

I glance at the frozen zombies, thankful that my cloaking spell is still intact, despite all that happened. “I would think that if your senses are as acute as dragons claim, you'd have heard me doing battle with a knight and come to help me out.”

“So you do wish for me to occasionally…circumvent your orders?”

“If my life is in obvious danger, yeah, if you want to sell me on my requiring a protector.” I'm starting to shiver now, the frigid temperature evident. “How about we carry on this conversation somewhere warmer?”

She bows. “Of course, my liege. You have been weakened, after all. And you are in danger.” Her gaze shifts behind me, and she reaches into her coat. This gets my attention, and I turn around to check on the frozen zombies. They've returned to their previously huddled state, and shouldn't be any threat so long as no one makes any loud—

I'm paralyzed, pain seizing my muscles as an electric current races through my body. Just because I'm the Lightning Rod, doesn't mean I can just shrug off…

I can't move.

“So I will take you somewhere warm.”

Everything's fading to black.

“And safe.”

I slump to the pavement, the cloak still up, preventing any of the passing crowd from seeing what's going on. I'm picked up, slung over Coda's shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

“Since you seem intent on endangering yourself, I have no choice but to exercise the insubordination you have allowed me and take you into formal protection until it is determined by the Ra'saar that you are capable of limited autonomy.”

I hear the pop of a car trunk, and I'm placed inside with care. Luckily, I feel my strength returning, at least enough to mount a resistance. Coda stands over me, one hand on the trunk. I raise a finger at her, concentrating my flagging will. I'll have to draw on my soul for this, but I don't have much choice, as the trunk is empty, aside from me, and I've never converted something as big as a car. “
Ligh—
”

I'm socked hard in the face, the blow enough to speed my consciousness away.

“Apologies, my liege. But this is for your own good.”

My eyes slowly close as I strain to focus on her face, which is set, determined.

“The council will stand. May the Ra'saar forever retain his throne.”