A Cruel Tale Read online

  “Yes, you are.” Iliya Kerimov looked away from the screen. He wanted to ask the guys a hundred questions, but the main one came to the forefront: how were they able to find the world Andy was in? But he could wait a day or two for the Q and A. “But first, clean the whole place up. Alex doesn’t have to participate in the clean-up.”

  “Alex, ‘We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true,’” Denis recalled the quote from Kipling’s The Jungle Book and slapped the mathematician on the shoulder as he did.

  Leaving the youth alone to clean up their mess, Iliya Kerimov went to his office, looked at the phone on his desk for a long time, then entered a long series of numbers, and put the receiver to his ear. After a few hums, someone picked up.

  “Hello.” A strong, unmistakable feeling of irritation resounded in the person’s voice through the thousands of miles of distance between them.

  “Hello, Mr. Bratulev, this is Kerimov…”

  “Considering what time it is, you better have a very good reason for bothering me,” the unknown person interrupted the scientist. “Has your center been successful?”

  “Not exactly what we were hoping for…”

  “If not that, what?”

  “The result we got is far more serious.”

  There was a pause.

  “I’m waiting…” the voice said after a few seconds.

  “Mr. Bratulev, I can’t tell you the rest over the phone.”

  “It’s that serious?” the irritation in the voice disappeared. Now the person just sounded surprised.

  “Even more so!”

  “Alright, I believe you. Step up security and make sure as few people as possible are in the know. Remind all your colleagues of the need for confidentiality. I’ll send my chief of security. He’ll organize and ensure a level of control appropriate for a situation like this. I don’t have time to talk now; I hope to hear the details when we meet. Don’t call me at this number anymore. Goodbye.”

  He hung up without another word.

  ***

  Petrovich waved to the driver of the company car and went down the stairs to the underground crossing. The head of the internal guard of the institute came up on the other side of the road, grabbed his cell phone and pressed a button.

  “Hello?” a soothing female voice said on the line.

  “There’s been a break in the dam,” he said in a nonchalant tone.

  “Understood.”

  After he hung up, something clicked in the phone. He tossed the now useless device into a trash can, where it quickly became a melted hunk of plastic….

  Tantre. The middle of the Ort River…

  Andy flowed down the river, giving himself up to the current of the Ort. He hadn’t the strength to swim. Merchant vessels sailed by a few times, and he saw people’s fingers hanging from the sides and pointing at him. He didn’t care. He had been seen by one and all on the shooting range; a couple dozen more witnesses wouldn’t make a difference. The important thing now was to find a quiet, deserted spot to lay low for two or three weeks until he could take on human form once again. As luck would have it, there were gardens and cultivated fields all along the banks of the river, and hiding a three-ton dragon there would be problematic.

  “Ow!” Andy almost gulped down a bunch of water when he opened his mouth to cry out in pain. A piece of his wing got stuck on a snag and the dragon lost what was left of his left wing.

  Orten was getting farther and farther behind him with every passing minute and the hope of finding clues about how to build interworld gates along with it. There was no way he could go back to the School of Magic now. It was forbidden. What was worse, Frida was lying on the School shooting range that had become a battlefield. Why? Why did he bring trouble and death to those he loved? What were the local gods punishing him and them for? If he could change the past, he never would have gone to the shooting range, and Frida would still be alive….

  Andy floated on and felt hatred towards Wood elves growing in his chest, filling the cold emptiness left after the battle. His thirst for revenge was tearing him up inside, but he wasn’t planning on getting even now. What for? It was stupid and pointless for one dragon to try to get revenge on an entire state. He had to try to find the Woodies’ weak spots and find himself some reliable allies. The Rauu, for example. Now even the hypothetical possibility of a duel with the Icicles could be crossed off the list. The Snow Elves never avenged themselves on people they’ve fought with side by side. Oh, the look on Melima’s face and the faces of his other classmates when they saw him as a dragon was incomparable. He had to think about that. Hmm, I wonder—did Miduel ever find that box? Only a couple of hours ago, he was thinking of how to build bridges towards relationship with the Rauu. Now he had to think about where to build them. It would be terrific to be able to meet with Miduel now, or… or with Rector Etran. The rector was like a Russian stacking doll: one thing on the surface, another a bit deeper inside, but if you keep digging, you’d come to a third or fourth entity. She’d trapped him so skillfully with the archives and the library. What do you need with one measly bookworm, grall Etran, Orlem countess? What do you have in mind for him? It wasn’t a good idea to try to use her as an ally, but asking her advice… although, getting the rector’s advice would be costly.

  He needed to figure out what he’d used against the elvish mages. Andy wasn’t very aware of what was going on at the moment, but he clearly remembered taking energy directly from the astral, without the astral dragon. But what happened next…. The lake of bubbling lava in the place where the mages had stood was a complete surprise to him. He’d only taken out a small crumb! Like it or not, he should conduct an experiment with the external barrier. The energy pumped through the little virtual dragon that served as a sort of plug and safety barrier was great, of course, but, as real-life experience showed, he had to train while connected directly to the astral. No two ways about it.

  The sky stretched out above him. A hard rain began to fall. He could see hillsides lit up by flashes of lightning on the horizon. These were the spurs of the southern end of the Rocky Ridge, which separated Tantre from the Patskoi Empire. Here the Ort flowed in a little hook and turned towards the Gulf of Terium. Andy started paddling towards the bank. The territory became unpopulated and wild closer to the foothills. The next city, Ortag, was fifty leagues downstream. After that, the cities crowded one after another along the edge of the river towards the sea. The mighty Ort’s mouth was covered and controlled by a port city, the impregnable fortress of Miket. Swimming up to the river bank, Andy inspected the mountain spurs, overgrown with vegetation. Perfect! Couldn’t have designed anything better for my needs! You wouldn’t find a more beautiful spot and temporary hiding place for a lone dragon. Punching his claws deep into the slippery, muddy bank, he crawled onto the shore and trotted right into the thicket without delay. The downpour erased his tracks.

  ***

  The birds’ singing woke him up as well as any alarm clock could. Andy opened his healthy eye and stared at the multicolored little bird hatching trills on an elderberry branch a couple of feet away from the dragon. He’d dreamed of Frida. They were dancing at the ball, where he was wearing a ranger’s dress suit, and she was in a low-cut green silk dress with a string of emeralds around her neck. Music was playing and they were turning round and round in a waltz without noticing anyone around them. Then they kissed…. Alright, you woody freaks. I’ll make you pay for what you’ve done….

  Ten days had gone by since he’d taken up the little nook in the little cave. After he left the Ort’s banks, he climbed up the inclines of the foothills for a couple of hours and found a cliff with a small cave near the stone foundation. By then he was wobbly with exhaustion, and as soon as he crawled under the stone arch, sleep wiped the crystal dragon off all four of his feet. He didn’t give a fart in the wind that his snout was sticking out and water was pouring on it from th
e rocks above. He just wanted to sleep, sleep, sleep. If hunters had been anywhere near him, they probably could have tied the sleeping dragon up with no risk to themselves. His protective “spider web” could have screamed to high heaven that danger was approaching—he never would have woken up.

  “Full many a glorious morning have I seen...” Andy yawned, The Bard’s 33rd sonnet coming to mind. “Well, this one’s not glorious anyway. What’s on our agenda for today?”

  On today’s schedule was reading the ancient folio, memorizing the spells, and hunting. No matter which way you spin it, a big bulky guy like himself had to scarf some major grub if he were to fully recover. In ten days, his eye healed and recovered, and scales had grown back on his side where they were supposed to be. Now he just needed his wings to get back in working order. That was tougher. The membranes grew slowly, and each time they grew out, he kept tearing them again; all it took was getting them caught on a branch or twig. Only one of his several hunting excursions had been successful. On his second try, Andy found a natural salt lick, but it was the afternoon, and there were no prey around. The next day, he went out late in the evening and laid in wait fifty meters from the salt lick. He’d prepared the power construction for a fireball on the tips of his right claws. He had to wait until midnight. Sniffing the air carefully, ears perking this way and that, and constantly getting up on their hind legs, a small herd of spotted deer approached the salt lick. The dragon, who had been lying motionless for several hours on end, waved his paw. The red ball of fire was flung from his claws and hit the leader of the herd in the chest. The “earth knives” were activated by the strong blow of the fireball hitting the ground, but the small delay between the spell’s activation and its actually working allowed the rest of the deer to run away. No matter what they say, stalking and catching prey from the sky was a lot easier and more interesting. In ten days, it had become very clear by his own experience: dragons aren’t very well equipped for hunting on the ground. Today Andy decided to set up an ambush along the path to the watering hole.

  His evening hunt was a good one. The dragon caught himself an eleraff, the animal he knew from his time in Rimm, which would feed him dinner tonight and breakfast and lunch the next day. The local people called them “barls.” Tantrian barls were smaller than the ones living in the Marble Mountains and also had a different shade of fur. Andy had only just put on a scent and visual masking spell when he heard a whistling sound from the gully. Breaking through the shallow underbrush, a whole herd of the gentle giants was coming down from the mountains to the mountain stream. The dragon began to salivate, and his stomach growled in anticipation of the filling meal. Andy, unlike the sul, didn’t circle the herd and strike the chosen victim with his fangs. He simply struck a young buck he’d taken a shine to with lightning. Trumpeting loudly in expectation of a second attack, the herd formed a tight defensive circle. Without waiting for another onslaught, the great big alpha male commanded them all to leave. First, the females and the young left the watering hole undercover by the males, then the males, and the leader of the pack last of all.

  It didn’t make sense to kill more than one barl. Andy had no way to store the four-ton body, and he wasn’t about to cast and constantly maintain a preservation spell. The downside of spells like that was that the meat would be completely frozen, and he would have to wait until it thawed out…. After his kill, Andy devoured about a half a ton of the carcass on the spot, then became drowsy. Gathering his strength, he tore off a good-sized chunk of the vanquished animal and dragged it to his cave.

  Now that he had some extra provisions, and in view of the fact that after his first direct trip to the astral he was famished, he could repeat the experiment. In the depth of his soul, Andy hoped his wings would heal from it, as his body had finished healing the first time. He was beyond sick and tired of feeling incomplete, Targ take it all!

  Fighting off the desire to lie down and go to sleep, he closed his eyes and dove into settage. His internal space was flashing with all kinds of colors and tints. Against this backdrop, his wings looked like an ugly black blob. Quickly sizing up his mana reserves, he gently touched the astral dragon on his shoulder, swirled around the amulet from the hill which was blazing with a warm red flame (strange, the “toy” of the ancients that he had inherited had not done anything to make itself known in his few months of study), and began to plunge into the world of energy. This time he decided not to meld with the barrier, but to dive into the ocean of energy through the astral double. Once he made up his mind, it was done!

  The force of the raging elements almost threw him backward. The ocean of energy rushed along the energy channels with incredible power. Raw mana, sweeping away the safety barriers, momentarily filled his internal storage container and spread throughout all parts of his body. Once he set the astral dragon into motion, and using it as a lightning rod and a diverter for letting go of unnecessary energy, Andy stubbornly kept on fighting the elements. He got an incomprehensible sense inside that the energy flowing through the astral dragon wasn’t going out into the world, but was actually being transferred to someone. It seemed the being that was taking on the mana was feeling rapture, joy, pain, and a whole gamut of other emotions. Without getting bogged down in the strange reaction to the shedding of extra energy, Andy gathered up his will in his fist and formed a straight channel. At first, the energy’s uncontrolled access to the world through the internal energy channels of his organism was cut off. Then he began working on building a dam inside himself, fencing off the astral with a kind of cap which, like a faucet, could be opened and shut and regulate the pressure of the flow. The secret force that had spun him around last time in a dizzying circle dance didn’t interest him today. The tiredness he’d accumulated played its role: without leaving his trance, Andy fell asleep.

  His wings had healed. The dragon checked them as soon as he opened his eyes. But after that, things got weird. No, the inexplicable part came a little later on. First, feeling his incredible hunger, Andy ate his entire store of leftover barl, downing one ton of meat in about twenty minutes. And then…. After lunch, he started feeling very itchy and again insanely hungry. Throwing caution to the wind, he bolted towards the watering hole. The dragon didn’t notice that entire clumps of scales were falling off his body as he was running. He just wanted to get rid of the burning itch that went right down to his bones and the ends of his claws. Having driven the vultures away from the carcass and roared at a couple of mrowns, Andy began furiously tearing huge chunks of flesh from the giant herbivore. When he got to the intestines, Andy fell asleep right there by the river’s edge.

  The birds’ chirping that had now become quite a familiar sound woke Andy. Without opening his eyes, he listened to his body and slid into settage. Everything was alright. He wasn’t itching, wasn’t burning! Stretching like a cat, he lifted his wings and opened his eyes. Gee willakers, what the heck?! The ground all around him was covered in scales. He turned his head around and looked at his back, then his sides—it was all shining with a new, golden armor. The colored design on his sides stood out more boldly. The black scales on his chest had taken on yellowish blotches in the center and the plates on his chest were wider now and thicker, real armored plates. Andy took a step towards the remains of the barl carcass and froze, stunned. Considering that there were no other dragons around, and the tracks on the ground near the carcass could only be his, it was shocking to see that the new tracks were about 1.5 times bigger than the old ones! What, he’d grown up in one night? It seemed an unplanned molting had started out of nowhere and the insane itch that came along with it… Well, this was one heck of a side effect!…

  Scratching his head with the claws on his right wing, he immediately started digging a hole under the old scales. Ah, Gmar’s not here. The gnome would have strangled him for such a squandering of resources. As he was digging, Andy felt an uneasiness all over inside. All his senses told of a danger but in a strange form. The danger wasn’t to him. Abandonin
g the digging, he decided to listen to his instinct: what kind of Targ’s bad joke was this?! Someone else’s fear swept over him from head to toe. It was… a girl? He could feel the girl’s fear through his blood. Andy thought for a moment. This was some kind of nonsense—where would someone get some of my blood? Where?? Idiot! It’s Tyigu! Master Berg’s daughter! He’d fed her the blood himself.

  Andy began to pound his wings soundly and rocketed into the sky. The blood connection allowed him to determine the location of his destination and the distance thereto, just like a GPS. Ten leagues later, he looked down and saw a battle being fought below. A few warriors dressed in armor were up against two dozen armed humans and orcs. The whole forest path was strewn with bodies. The defense had sent several dozen of the attackers to Hel’s judgment already, but they’d sustained losses too. A familiar female figure was protecting a small child with her body. As soon as he figured out who the good guys were and who the bad guys were, Andy folded his wings and dove downward.

  ***

  “Stop!” Ilnyrgu lifted her left hand.

  “Do you feel something?” Berg approached her, leaving his spot at the head of the short procession.

  “Something very vague and unclear. I can’t tell what it is,” the orc answered, turning her head side to side.

  “An ambush?”

  “I don’t know. It could be anything.”

  “Come on, more concrete now. We’re not at a bazaar,” Brig the Brick roared from behind.

  “It’s as if the space around us is all in a fog. I can’t see anything with true vision! I suggest we all put on our armor and be ready for anything!” Ilnyrgu said. She flung the bag with their equipment in it down from the mule and was the first to start getting dressed. After the mage, the she-wolves[1] that obeyed her got changed as well, along with the few warriors Berg had hired.