Vol 8, Chapter 26, END OF VOLUME 8

A torrent of flame had pierced the dirigible end to end and lit the sky. The metal sheets had melted and deformed; the airship's lifting capacity had dropped so sharply that before long we would have slammed into the Dragon Rocks, for they were already that close. We urgently needed to climb higher and… get rid of the dragon.

"Angle all engines for vertical lift!" I ordered, climbing into the hatch at the same time.

Thanks to the internal comms, the order raced through the airship in an instant. Drives whirred, levers snapped into place, and the propellers tilted upward, buying us the extra kilos of thrust we needed.

The heat hit me in the face like a wall. Balloons exploded one after another with deafening thunder as the dragon forced its way deeper into the airship toward us. It had simply chosen to tear the dirigible apart from the inside. Although the rubber crumb and rubber‑like compounds from the Black Forest had allowed the balloons to survive bolt hits by sealing the tears, but dragon claws and fangs were tearing through them.

We had to act immediately if we didn't want to smash ourselves against the base of Dragon Castle.

And I even had an idea of what to do. I grabbed a section of the airship's load‑bearing frame and concentrated.

I felt the engines rake the air, lifting us. I felt the metal crack. I felt the dragon, scenting magic, change course and crawl straight for us, easily ripping balloons and warping the metal trusses. I felt it, but I could do little.

Damn duralumin — it hardly responded to my power at all. At that moment I regretted that the frame wasn't steel; yet if it had been steel, would we have lifted off at all?

Despite all my effort, I could only make the members bend, which did nothing to stop the dragon.

But the plan wasn't lost yet. Many mages used this trick, but thanks to my Sculptor talent I had seldom needed it.

Not until that day.

With a sweep of my claws I ripped open my hand and poured my blood over the duralumin trusses; the grey metal turned white and bent to my will.

Now the dragon was nothing but a parasite that had foolishly crawled into my perfect creation.

The duralumin ribs bent and wrapped around the scaled body. The Duke instantly understood what was happening and tried to resist, but the problem was that duralumin was barely responsive to metal‑mages' power.

The supporting structure coiled around the legs and gripped the tail. The dragon crouched like a cat and struggled to crawl on. A bite!

The last balloon between us went flaccid, hanging on a few metal ribs. The gigantic head filled the entire space, shreds of balloon clinging to its fangs. The dragon could not move or reach us, but it no longer needed to.

It opened its jaws; a tiny ember burned in the depths.

"Smoking was forbidden on dirigibles!" I spat through my teeth, and a metal pipe coiled around the creature's throat.

I pressed with all my strength, but it was no simple matter to overpower a multi‑ton, scaly monster. We hung in a fragile balance. The dragon could not set us alight, yet I could not asphyxiate it.

An elven hand touched my shoulder, and I felt a surge of power. I pulled the pipe tighter, forcing the dragon to wheeze, but the strength ebbed as quickly as it had come.

"No! Don't kill him!"

"Are you mad? He wanted to eat us!"

"He didn't want to — he was being controlled by a man. And besides, dragons were important to the world's ecological balance, the mana they produced…"

"To hell with that! Just help me."

Strength returned.

Barely keeping myself from snapping the scaly bastard's neck, I shoved him out with my metal hands. The Duke shouted something, but I had no time to listen. A tail appeared over the hull, then a scaly rear. The machine‑gun chattered, unwilling to miss such an opportunity. Most rounds ricocheted off the dragon's armored backside, but it still stung… and, frankly, it was humiliating.

The dragon growled and finally ceased to resist, hauling its bulk out.

I wiped the blood running from my nose and exhaled. That had been hard work.

Under a hail of bullets, the dragon crawled along the buckling hull, lashed its tail and launched from it, paying no mind to the Duke, who pounded its flank with his fists in fury.

It seemed the dragon had made the right choice.

A rifle thundered and the Duke stopped battering his pet. He shook his head and clutched his helm. Alas for him, his armor was so good that even Dolan's round could not pierce it; but it had given him a fine ringing in the ears.

Freed of its multi‑ton passenger, the dirigible slowly gained altitude.

Below us a narrow trail ran between the rocks where servants climbed. Ahead stood Dragon Castle, black as if molten. Truly, storming it would have been a hard task, but I did not intend to storm it.

I went down into the captain's cabin and checked the bomb sight. This was why I had wanted the glazed floor. Our airship was too damaged; we were staying aloft largely thanks to the engines. The Duke could come to his senses at any moment and interfere with us again. We couldn't afford a second pass. We couldn't give him a chance to ruin everything.

I lifted the handset and made contact with the bomb bay.

"Yes, sir."
"Set the fuse delay to maximum. Prepare for bomb release."

The bay doors under the hull opened, revealing the bomb's metal casing—the size of a small dragon, though its weight… its weight was far greater. The lion's share of our payload had been taken up by that little monster: nearly ten tons of TNT and a specially hardened nose cone.

And I had waited for the coldest day on purpose, so that our carrying capacity would be as high as possible. In summer we would probably have had to take a smaller bomb.

I checked the sight again. A castle wall slid under the reticle—stout, massive. The narrow path offered no room to bring a battering ram to bear; the height made lobbed shots with a trebuchet impossible; and hundreds of warriors could easily repel any assault. Such a wall could only be breached by tactical‑level magic, and even then only if its defenders were not reinforced by theocrats or mages.

Towers—equally stout, squat. Thick masonry, numerous arrow slits, and a large ballista on the roof that looked straight at us. Fire! The cabin erupted in shrapnel, tearing at my skin. A ballista bolt had punched clean through the cabin; luckily it had not been enchanted. Damn, we had not had enough altitude to bomb safely… but we could bomb with deadly precision.

The inner courtyard, where the garrison was assembling on alarm; empty griffon stalls; the citadel, the castle's main keep—the Duke's seat of power. From its windows he had watched his ant‑servants drag supplies up the narrow path to his castle. How they fell…

Shielded by magic and by the kingdom's largest aerial forces, it was the concentration of his power. What a pity for the Duke that his magic shields had let through such a slow object as our zeppelin without registering it as a threat. Competent mages would not have made such an error in constructing a magical defense.

I pulled the release lever. The siren wailed deafeningly. The claws unclenched and the bomb dropped. The airship kicked upward and more ballista bolts streaked under us.

Two minutes.

Once we had jettisoned ten tons of weight, we rose very quickly—but not quickly enough. The Duke finally came to himself and turned his resisting dragon back toward us. He tried to give chase, not yet realizing that we were fleeing from something else entirely.

"Force the engines! Power to maximum!"

At the signal over the internal comms, the engineers connected additional batteries containing thunderstones to the engines—a barely tested, unreliable technology. Like the gunners, they had nowhere to hide if something went wrong. Within arm's reach, a machine howled in hundreds of kilowatts, revving toward maximum. It groaned and shrieked and filled men's hearts with fear... but there was no other way. If we did not get far enough away, it would be the end of us.

Ninety seconds.

The bomb's steel nose punched through the citadel floor by floor until it crashed into the throne hall. Heaps of stone buried the golden throne, and for a moment everything was still. The rustle of stones—dust settled slowly. Only a small propeller at the bomb's tail spun, each turn slower than the last. The Duke's bodyguard drew a sword and cautiously approached the steel behemoth.

One minute.

The engine windings smoked. The thunderstones in the batteries overheated. The hull's insulation burned through, and arcs danced in the air. The drone of the motors swelled into a furious keening.

"Engine three is on fire! Engine one is at the limit!" the handsets shouted hoarsely.

Thirty seconds.

Another motor flared. The blades no longer hummed; they screeched, clawing for one more meter of lift. Smoke belched from nearly every engine.

Twenty. Ten. Nine…

I left the cabin to move deeper into the airship. I did not want to test the cabin's blast resistance on myself. I grabbed the remnants of the load‑bearing structure and told the elf to do the same. I hoped the dragon had not damaged them enough and that the blast would not tear us apart. I sliced my wrist and lashed the torn pieces of structure together. There was nothing more I could do.

Three... Two... One...

Below, a Knight prodded the bomb with his sword.

EXPLOSION.

A wave of fire tore the citadel apart in a fraction of a second. The walls, the towers, everything ceased to exist. Nothing within the castle had the slightest chance of survival. From the lofty chambers to the deepest dungeons, all turned to dust. Debris scattered for kilometers, even the rocky foundation split and trembled. The force of the explosion rolled through the cliffs and surged upward.

The blast wave caught the Dragon and hurled him aside. He folded his wings instantly to keep them from snapping. Only the creature's incredible resilience kept its bones intact, but the Duke's straps were far less sturdy. He was thrown from the saddle, and only by miracle did he manage to grab the dragon's crest and cling to it. I had no time to admire the sight, for the next moment the shock wave struck us as well.

The airship shook and groaned; metal trusses snapped… it creaked at every seam, but the framework held. A rush of heated air carried us higher and higher, while the Duke fell below.

Yes, a quick glance was enough to see that the dragon, dazed by the blast, had simply thrown off his rider and was now fleeing far from that terrible place. Battered, wounded, but alive. The Duke, however…

However skilled a rider the First Duke had been, one cannot conquer the heavens without wings. He fell straight onto the servants path.

Impact!

The enchanted armor twisted and crumpled, yet the spells preserved its shape, keeping him from being flattened.

But they could hardly protect what was inside. Not even the finest enchantments could manage that.

The Duke was slain by his own armor.

His body rolled and tumbled farther down, crashing from the cliffs just as thousands of servants had fallen throughout the Dragon Castle's history. Long minutes of descent, and at last the ruler came to rest among the decayed remains of generations of slaves. His armor was crushed and battered; only with effort could one recognize in it the old symbol of power.

A crack snaked along the Dragon's Cliff. Slowly and majestically, thousands of tons of rock collapsed toward the base. Among them, black, formless, half-molten chunks, the remnants of the Dragon Castle's foundation. All of it came crashing down.

No armor, however strong, could withstand such force. The ruins of his own castle became the First Duke's sarcophagus.

Tyranny had fallen. There could be no clearer signal for all than the shattered myth of Dragon Castle's impregnability. After this, not one local lord would be able to cling to power. I could only imagine the surge of hope among the rebels, if, of course, they could see that the castle had fallen, for the mountains of dust stretched for leagues, veiling the land.

But sooner or later the dust would clear, and all would see that the First Duchy no longer existed. And what would rise in its place… who could say?

Through the shattered glass of the cabin the wind howled in. The air grew thin, hard to breathe even despite the altitude's relief. The mission was accomplished, and we were alive; what could be better?

"Good thing the dragon survived," the elf said cheerfully out of place while I checked the telephones. "They're very important for the magical balance of this world; without them the barrier would weaken."

But every phone was silent. The cables were likely severed, or perhaps the entire internal system had failed. I grabbed the rope ladder and climbed up to the navigator's gondola. Maybe the connection still worked there.

Pulling myself inside, I helped the elf girl up and saw a very agitated Naik. The former smuggler navigator was vainly trying to reach the fire mages. Apparently, the communications there weren't working either.

"Captain? Can you relay a message? We need to reduce altitude; we've climbed too high," he said, worried.

"Don't panic. The thinner the air around us, the weaker our lift becomes. We'll slow down naturally soon enough, except... the engines aren't responding either?"

"All communications are dead. Nothing's working."

"All right… we—"

I didn't have time to finish before a violent jolt threw us all to the floor.

A crunch! The shriek of metal, the crash of propellers striking something. It felt as if we had slammed headlong into an obstacle at full speed, only there was nothing above us but sky.

No sooner had I found my feet than I felt something wrong. Extremely wrong. Through the navigator's porthole I couldn't see everything, but even what I could see made me freeze.

The engine above us was barely turning; its propeller screeched and spat sparks into something invisible up in the sky. And that invisible thing parted before it like fabric cut by a knife.

"Shit..."

There was something behind it. Or nothing... Or perhaps something after all? The moment I closed my eyes, images of tentacles slithered into view, forcing their way through the rents to coil around the airship. But my eyes saw nothing, only an unbearable blackness hiding behind the illusory picture of the sky.

The world lost color. I felt a hunger issuing from the rift and the way the remnants of my magic were literally ripped from my body.

"Astarot?" I asked, but received only a funeral silence in reply. The demon had burrowed in terror to the farthest depths of his mind.

We smashed against an invisible dome like flies against a taut ceiling. But unlike a ceiling, the dome stretched and became riddled with slashes from our sharp propellers. Before my eyes a blade that had crossed its edge simply vanished, as if it had never existed. The now propellerless engine whined uselessly, spinning up out of control. A wave of cold licked the airship as if it were a delicacy. Snowflakes, where they had come from I could not say, whirled through the air.

It felt as if we would be pulled through to the other side any moment: to a place where even a demon would not wish to be.

Then our ship plummeted like a stone.

I could hardly believe I was thinking it, but for the first time a shipwreck brought me a strange relief.

Through the hatch I saw every balloon shrivel and frost over; no, this was not the work of whatever hid in the sky behind the illusion. I could distinguish Asha's sorcery from that Lovecraftian paranormal filth any day.

Without information about what we faced, the girl still made the only sensible call.

Descend as fast as possible.

All right, had she wanted revenge because I'd locked her up with her father? Fine; I'd ride her around the castle on my back for that!

"Thank God I don't recruit idiots into the crew..." I said, smiling with relief.

Naik clasped his hands in prayer to the One, not realizing that we had nearly ended up on His table as food.

"At least usually," I added, casting a sideways look at Lariel.

But she wasn't fooling around. On the contrary, she was in primordial terror.

"I-I-is the Barrier that weak? I... we must fly to the Council. I'll secure you an audience immediately!"

Naik and I exchanged a glance; even we felt uneasy at the sight of the panicking elf, but after a moment Lariel exhaled and added:

"Well, maybe not immediately... but at least within a week... or two... probably."

The airship, hollowed and bitten by the void, slowed its fall. The balloons filled again under the action of the warmed air, and the Barrier above our heads slowly closed, concealing and restraining the hungry emptiness behind it.

...

But for how long?


END OF VOLUME 8