Dead Men Tell Tales (5566 words)
Author: Anorrack
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Hainan Island, South China Sea, March 1943
The last fingers of pink sunlight were dragged under the horizon behind us, the moon crowning the mountain range ahead. The snow-capped peaks were of little comfort to me — the nostalgia of home tinged with a foreboding malaise that crept down from the mountain top — as my kukri shivered on my belt. Something abominable was being undertaken up the trail ahead. I wasn't comforted by my new sixth sense though, as a quick glance at Alstrand's perpetually trembling hands told me enough of where that future led.
Our ragged column of six followed the game trail up the mountain, the twin crooked wagon ruts and oxen footprints guiding our way up the steep slope. We marched on in silence weighed down by the explosives Santo had stolen from the camp nearby, the only sounds coming from the clacking rocks that rolled beneath our feet and the lonely howl of the wind.
Some time during the long march, the silence was broken as a faint voice came to us on the wind from further down, speaking a foreign tongue. Without missing a beat, we scrambled into the low-lying brambles on the side of the trail, the night covering us in a cloak of shadow.
A group of ten prisoners from the work camp below, groaning under the weight of burlap sacks. They slowly followed our footsteps up the trail, ushered by guards wielding batons and rifle butts as encouragement. The Japanese soldiers were frantic, shouting in pidgin in an attempt to pick up the pace. It wasn't normal, the daily caravan already came and went hours before. This was unscheduled.
Rebekah slowly, silently unwrapped the oiled cloth from her blade as they passed, just in case. They all continued up and out of view around a switchback, except for a single straggler and accompanying guard several meters behind. The prisoner was older, hunchbacked and liver-spotted, almost defying belief with how far he had climbed.
A caught breath, a snapped branch, a rolling rock, a scent in the air. I don't know exactly what alerted the guard, but something did. His gait hitched slightly, and the whites of his eyes gleamed in the dark as he stopped abusing the old man and tried to discreetly draw his pistol.
It didn't clear leather before Rebekah closed the distance from the brambles, covering the space in two long strides and swung her blade with a force that could stun a bear, beheading the soldier in one mighty blow. She quickly reversed her grip on the sword and grabbed the body before it could fall to the ground, gently easing it down to the sitting position against the rock face, and placed its head in its still-warm lap.
The old man didn't have time to make a move before Matthews was on him, muffling his mouth with a large, soil-crusted hand. al Fine and I rushed to take the warped carrying pole off his knobbly shoulders. We all paused then, waiting to hear the sounds of gunfire and alerted soldiers, but were only greeted by the now-distant sounds of the caravan.
The Chinese man moaned, his body sandbagging and bucking in an effort to escape Matthew’s grip. The old man stared at us, bandits in the night, with a mixture of fear and the universal disdain that only the elderly can exude.
DC al Fine spoke. "Corporal Pal, check those sacks."
I gingerly opened them, expecting to see blasting charges or bombs, only to be met with a collection of oddly shaped rocks of all different sizes, jumbled haphazardly within the bag. I withdrew a large, misshapen one, looking for all the world like a bone embedded in stone.
Alstrand giggled as they played with their runes, hanging from a hemp cord on their neck. "The bones of giants that sleep under mountains. They'll be angry when they wake from this thievery."
Matthews peeled his fingers from the old man's mouth, spun him around and patted the dust off his shoulders before looking him in the eye. "Fossils. Is that what the work camp is digging up down there, fossils?"
al Fine again. "The work day was over when we were there, we didn't have time to check."
The elder looked down at the rucksacks, his toothless mouth twisted into a sneer. He spat out a phrase, and lapsed back into curmudgeonly silence.
“What did he say?”
Santo frowned. He was the group translator as well as blaster; he claimed he learned Asiatic tongues to unlock the true origin and powers of gunpowder. I half-thought he was joking when he first told me that. “He said something about a ‘loong,’ signora. Though why the Japanese —"
My hairs prickled, and Pramaada buzzed, the smell of ozone rankling my nose. It was close to time. "It's too late, we must go, now."
Matthews side-eyed me, but didn't object as we released the man and ascended up the mountain with renewed vigor. I tried not to look back as the villager ran opposite our heading at twice our speed, old feet making quick work far away from our final destination.
As we crested the final ridge under a pale sickle moon, our target revealed itself to be an old Buddhist temple carved into the very rock of the mountain top. At least, that's what it was before the Japanese arrived. The trail led to a small mountain bowl, which formed a small glacial lake in its nadir. It looked like there used to be a small dock protruding out into the lake, maybe to retrieve fresh water or to fish for the trout brought to these climes by migrating ducks. But its planks had been long torn up for the fences of barbed wire and sharpened stakes that lined the perimeter, centering on the carved arches and pillars of the temple, whose architecture was weathered by age and wind.
An old copper bell tolled as the column of miners and soldiers passed through the gate and filed into the temple, the rusty chainlink rattling behind them as it closed. We skirted the edge of the rock bowl, until we came to the chainlink fence. I drew my kukri, and Pramaada lazily uncoiled a portion of her being into me, mottling my arm scarlet and heating the knife a glowing white, allowing the blade to pass through the metal like butter, cutting a hole for us to enter. I kissed the throbbing ruby in the pommel as thanks, but I knew it wouldn't satisfy her. Only the blood spilled tonight would.
The guards weren't patrolling, instead gathering in their camp pitched outside the temple listening to news over their radio, cheering and jeering in equal measure at every proclamation made by the crackling broadcaster. Most of them were already drunk in celebration or commiseration of some distant victory or loss.
Through the door, through the temple, following tracked dirt that seemed to belong to hundreds of feet relatively recently, to a secret egress carved in rock and left open for movement of materiel deeper into the heart of the mountain.
"Where are all the guards? Those schmucks out front can't be the only ones." Matthews hissed.
Alstrand gently rapped their knuckles on a wooden bookshelf, empty and splintered on the ground.
"Judging by the noise, I'd say most of them are further down." Santo jutted his chin down the rough-hewn corridor, from which voices and the sounds of industry emanated.
Rebekah hoisted her blade and rolled her massive shoulders, the sigils stitched on her heavy leather cuirass pulsing in time with her heartbeat. "Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight."
"Blessed be the incautious, and pray that I do not box their ears." Santo shot back.
Rebekah peered down at him from two extra heads of height. "Even Paul was forgiven for blaspheming out of ignorance."
"You can't say that to me, I'm Catholic, probably more than you!"
"Methinks over-exposure to nitroglycerin has eroded your faith."
I didn't understand the feud between the Gormogons and the Templars, and probably never would. Santo claimed it was because both of their holy orders traced back to Ancient Egypt, and the Gormogons' sun worship was supplanted by the Masonic pharaoh worship, but I believe that was another one of his jokes. Rebekah said Templars weren't even Masonic, whatever that meant. Their whispered bickering faded as they descended, quickly followed by Alstrand and Matthews, until only al Fine and I stood at the entrance.
al Fine looked at me, her eyes… I could never remember the colour of her eyes. The knowledge slid out of my mind as if it was greased rubber. "Are you coming?" Her accent, as well. I could never place it, first French, then maybe British, the exactitude always eluding me. She had never told me her name, either. I don't think anyone in the group knew it. When asked in Cochinchina on Christmas Day, she merely smiled and said it was classified. A question mark. She scared me.
My rifle was slung on my back, and I held a pistol and my kukri in each hand, white-knuckling each grip, as I looked into the dark maw of the tunnel. Always underground. It always had to be underground. Whether Burma or China, the monsters always had to be underground, in tight spaces of dirt and rock where you can neither take a full breath or rest under a familiar sky. Hamal, Singh, Mathi, Chand. Pramaada chanted those names and wore those faces, swirling within my mind around the mountains of my home. I took a breath, then another. I nodded, and plunged into the tunnel, DC al Fine right behind. Blocking my only escape.
The tunnel was slick and smooth, worn down by the weary trod of a thousand pilgrims. Some parts looked natural, while others showed signs of hammer and chisel where the tunnel had been widened to accommodate foot traffic. A slight trickle of snowmelt escorted us, doing its small part in the expansion of the tunnel.
The stone throat eventually opened into a massive cave, a granite gullet that stretched into the darkness, at least twenty meters wide and tall. The tunnel was positioned at the midpoint of the cave's height, with stalactites and wooden scaffolding ramping down to the cave floor below.
We hid among the slimy rock outcroppings to observe the operation on the ground floor. I handed my binoculars to Santo and unslung my rifle, peering through the scope to get a better look.
At one point, this cave had been a sacred place, a rock formation in the shape of a bodhisattva dominating the chamber, decorated in wax-sealed papers carrying prayers of the faithful. But not anymore. There were perhaps a couple dozen soldiers below us organized in rigid formation, with a stiff-jointed general at its head, his chest half-covered in medals. He was overseeing the scientists and engineers as they adjusted whining generators and aligning support beams, all for the support and lighting of a large paper cylinder, taking up much of the room in the spacious cavern.
No, not paper. Goldbeater's skin, made from layers of processed ox intestine, if the discarded crates in the corner were anything to go by. It was decorated as well, with chained painters finishing the final touches of dazzling emerald scales, a dandelion-yellow mane, a large mythic serpent, perhaps ten meters in length. If it were attached to some sturdy rope, I would've said it was the largest kite I had ever seen.
The bones from the rucksacks were unloaded and sorted. Brightly robed Buddhist monks daubed scripture onto the bones with brushes coated in a substance sourced from two large bubbling vats, the faint odor identifying it as molten tar. Still more prisoners carried the prepared bones up the scaffolding and placing them inside the painted envelope, hidden from sight. Judging by the rustling of the material from within, the Japanese were constructing a skeleton from the inside. Like a stone ship in a organic bottle.
Two Chinese men emerged from the gloom holding a large pitted stone. It pulsed with a green, sickly light, and the men winced with pain as purple lesions grew and spread across their naked arms and torsos. My stomach clenched at the sight of the stone for reasons didn't understand, and averted my gaze. The workers carried the rock up the scaffolding and carefully loaded it into the head of the strange construct. A rolling peal of thunder deafened us, even so far underground, as the painted beast began to twitch.
I swiveled the scope to the painted teeth, the flowing mane. Stubby stone legs emerging from folds in the fabric. Curling horns. The lizard was not to be found in my village's faith, I struggled to find a word to —
"A dragon," Matthews breathed. "They made a damned dragon?"
al Fine nodded to herself. “Santo, go rig the explosives to the entrance. Make sure it can collapse the tunnel and then some. And for the love of God don't blow it with us inside.”
Santo passed the binoculars to Rebekah, issued a crouched salute and scurried as fast as he could up the slope, dragging the bags of dynamite behind him. He showed a worrying lack of concern as the bags caught glancing blows from the rough-hewn floor.
I grabbed al Fine by the elbow. "What about the civilians down there?"
Matthews hissed. "Leave them be. If we collapse the entrance there's no way the Japanese and their pet Frankenstein can get out, less of a mess to deal with."
I set my jaw, and shook al Fine's arm. "The civilians."
She stared down at the work below, narrowing her eyes. "We won't blow the entrance until the civilians are evacuated, and bury the rest of this science project under the mountain."
The shaking of the dragon effigy became more pronounced. The goldbeater’s skin seemed to stretch and warp as the bones underneath moved and rolled of their own volition, trying to escape their mummified hell. Faint screams were quickly silenced as the holes and gaps in the material were sealed with ghostly muscle and sinew, trapping the workers still inside. A viscous, glowing substance oozed from underneath the wrappings, congealing around the protruding fossil limbs and solidifying into massive spectral claws. The painted eyes opened, and the dragon roared, born anew.
I unsheathed the kukri and the sacred words were about to leap from the tip of my tongue, before Alstrand grabbed and pulled me back down again, their lapis eye glittering blue in the faint light. "No use. Wait. Don't do work that doesn't need to be done."
The man in the dress military uniform stiffly approached the writhing monstrosity. The scaffolding that had been supporting it was now speared through its new flesh, pinning it in place like a butterfly in a bug collection. A large metal collar flashed and blinked on top its flowing paint mane, connected by cable to a generator. The commander clicked his heels as he stood eye-to-eye with the creature in front of a control panel, and spoke in slow, painfully pronounced Chinese. Before he could finish, the reanimated dragon interrupted with its own raging cry, its crystal teeth and stone maw somehow making human speech.
让我与泥土、石头、昆虫一同长眠1
The commander was undeterred, pressing forward and repeating himself, more insistent and irritated. The dragon screamed again, its dislocated bones roiling beneath its scaly hide and dislodged stalactites rattling off the scaffolding.
请终结我的痛苦2
The man clicked his tongue in disapproval and reached down for a lever on the control panel. The collar stopped blinking and administered a shock, which made the serpent writhe in pain and bellow that much more. It was an unearthly cry that made the ears cringe and curl, and the very muscles tense and ready to run. In its earth-shaking movements, the scaffolding groaned and bent, bringing the dragon closer to the ground, until its claws touched stone.
The dragon suddenly halted its cries and blinked. It snuffled, furrowing its fabric snout, and rattled its claws on the floor one by one, leaving greasy trails of ectoplasm where they scraped against the ground, the broken scaffolding moaning as its muscles twitched. The commander threw the switch again and barked an order, but the dragon didn't react beyond a single shudder, sparks playing off its long beard and impaled metal poles, the excess energy draining into the cave floor. The Japanese soldiers shifted in place, nervous. The commander looked to the scientists, who were as pale as sheets. The air felt heavy with dread, as if the whole cave held its breath, waiting for the massive serpent's next move. I fingered the trigger of my jungle carbine.
Cold mist played in the titan's jaws as it breathed, intestine-lungs pumping ragged air like giant bellows.
我会强迫你们把我消灭3
And all hell broke loose.
The dragon moved like a eel in the water, defying gravity and twisting in the air faster than any bird-of-prey as it carved through the rank and file. The gunfire that filled the cave punched the ears in staccato, and I could do little but add to the cacophony. However, I wasn't aiming at their target.
Line up. Bang. Scientist, shoulder blown out by .303 round.
Line up. Bang. Guard, jaw dissipated into mist as he was dropping his well-used baton.
Line up. Bang. Commander, his heart turned into a scarlet blossom, head cracked to pieces on the stone.
The dragon, too, was making light work of the Japanese infantry, their guns as effective as if firing in the face of Allah. Five soldiers disappeared into the serpent's gullet before it twisted away towards other prey, its flank peppered with bullet holes as the soldiers ventilated its body. The Buddhist monks, hands stained with petroleum and blood, attacked the serpent head on with fist and faith and steel, their hands crackling with the power of their very souls. Acting in sync, two moved as one, grabbing the jaws of the dragon as it attempted to consume them, and twisting, sending the creature sailing into the stone Buddha, cracking the sacred rock in half.
The dragon let out a piercing scream, its spine bent at an unnatural angle, the prayers of the penitent scorching its belly and contorted pylons tearing holy putrid intestines.
烂猴子，快杀了我4
The ragged Japanese infantry marched towards the incapacitated dragon, leaving their dead and dying behind, pouring modern lead into the ancient beast, its cloth-and-scale hide sealing wounds as fast as they were created.
Rebekah hauled me up. "Now, while they're distracted. Matthews, cover us."
With that she pushed me down the scaffolding, clambering down the bamboo close behind. I unsheathed my kukri. Pramaada. Aid me.
My skin sizzled with a pleasant pain as Pramaada caressed my chest with her four arms, her raven hair smelling of smoke as she leaned on my shoulder, murmuring into my neck. I thought you would never ask.
We raise our hands high, and split the kukri in twain, twin golden talwars taking their place in two of our hands. The Enfield warps and shifts into a glittering bow and arrow, with shafts of iron and fletching of lead. As one body we leap past the rest of the scaffolding and plummet to the ground, lightly skipping to a stop in front of the prisoners, huddled in a corner.
They shiver, beleaguered, frightened, shocked to their core by the dragon and now us standing before them, wielding flame and blade. We try to smile, to calm their nerves, but our curved sabre tusks seem to scare them all the more.
Don't attempt to placate them, Kiran. Pramaada's voice buzzes in our head. Mortals tremble at the feet of gods.
I am not a god, and neither are you.
No, but together we could split the sun and step on the moon.
We shake our head, cleansing ourselves of thoughts to focus at the task at hand. With the two arms unoccupied by weapons, we hoist the prisoners to their feet, and shove them towards Rebekah, who escorts them up the scaffolding. We make to follow after, but are interrupted by a boulder flying at the speed of thought, crushing us again the granite wall.
We split the rock with our shimmering blades, stone melting at the touch, to see the dragon slaughtering the monks to a man. Every effort they make to slay the beast is rebuffed, and every attempt they make to safeguard their own lives is futile, from tooth or claw or flying boulder. One monk is crushed by the head of the Buddha, another's torso dangling from the dragon's teeth. One more burned to a smoking crisp by lightning summoned from places unknown. The last is a barrel-chested mountain of a man whose robes are fit to burst, his stance an immovable pillar and his concentration like a still pond. In a flash his body is eviscerated by jagged claws, his distilled energies exploding outwards to shower his forces with gore.
虚弱5
"Kiran, distract the damned thing while we evacuate!" Rebekah's voice bellows from the scaffolding, but is almost lost among the screams of the dying.
"Gladly."
With three hands blazing with divine fire we seize chunks of the cleaved boulder and spin, setting the stones ablaze with Hiḍimbī's fury and throwing them, the boulders tearing through the dragon's serpentine torso. It screeches as the massive wounds cauterized by fire leak holy blood. Its eyes lock on ours, eyes as blue as a mountain lake and as piercing as glacial ice. It pulls itself off the shattered Buddha, its spine snapping into place and jaw re-aligning. It spits and speaks, its language the divine tongue of the Gods, its voice full of pain and want.
小生灵，速速赐我一死吧6
Our mouth curls, and our retort is spoken as one.
तुम्हारी मृत्यु न तो शीघ्र होगी और न ही दयालु7
The serpent corkscrews toward us, roaring a challenge that shakes the mountain to its roots. We nock an arrow and let it fly, another appearing in our grasp. The arrow shatters its glacial eye, and yet still it come, the second arrow doing much the same, its horns crackling white lightning and zapping the arrow from the air. The dragon is almost beautiful, but something about it seems eerie. A hitch in its stride, a twitch of its head. Its one remaining eye is wide and glowing, not with anger, but with fear.
The dragon looms above us and dives— a screeching banshee from hell— its jaws snapping at our feet as we dance around the beast, our curved blades flashing as we carve scarlet furrows in its bejeweled flank. It is large, yes, but unwieldy, its body unsuited to the cramped confines of the skyless cave.
Its glittering guts and viscera spill through the gaping maw we created, but before touching ground, pause. The entrails reverse their course, pouring back into the slit and sealing the wound behind them. The dragon trumpets and curls towards us, its flashing claws sparking ectoplasm as they are parried by our blades.
How do you kill the divine?
With a large sword, and the strength to cut with it.
We plant our feet on the ground, the stone softening from the heat of godly fury. We roll our wrists, our talwars' tips tracing lines of light in the air. As they accelerate, the sabers begin to blur, morphing into solid disks of metal, and we pivot, the disks leaping from our hands and flying through the air, carving through the dragon's neck and embedding in the opposite wall.
Our muscles flex and we leap over the serpent's flailing body. We alight on the cave wall, gripping the stone with hands and feet like a fly on glass as we pluck our burning swords from their rocky scabbards. The dragon's skin roils and froths as it expands, reconnecting the severed parts with tendrils of sinew before its head has a chance to fall. The skin moves like a living thing, but through its motions I can see the rock of its fossilized skull, and a putrid light that lances through its cracks.
Kiran.
I see it.
Thin traces of ethereal web cling to the limbs of the beast, as it blindly swipes its claws. The string trace a path up the dragon's body and enter the cracks in its skull, anchored to something inside. The webs tighten and pulse with a sickly light, and the limbs follow. The webs are thin, so thin to be imperceptible to humans. But in this moment, I am not a man.
The stone in its skull, I think it is controlling the dragon.
Then let us cut.
The serpent shakes its head and snorts, its breath that of sea and storms, crackling with the scent of lightning and death. It is ecstatic.
对，你很近，了结我8
We push off from the wall and leap onto the dragon's spine, sinking our talwars in its flesh to secure our footing, connected to our hands by cables of flame. The dragon rears into the air, undulating and bucking from the burning acupuncture as we climb up its back, sinking blade after blade into its meat as we ascend. The dragon slams into the floor, walls, and ceiling, fighting both us and its own unwanted jockey to just let itself die.
Its curled horns act as handholds as we affix ourselves to its skull and prepare to cut. A talwar morphs into a ram-dao, a wretched chunk of iron used for executions. First flaying skin, then hacking muscle, carving through its stone skull to get inside. As we pry open bone, we are blasted by putrefying rays from the otherworldy rock, our divine flesh bubbling and oozing from the unholy light. The rock had spun a spectral web to nest within, microscopic twitches preceding the dragon's thrashing. The bones may have belonged to the dragon once, but they were not controlled by it anymore, the pitted meteorite both giving the dragon life and puppeting its constructed corpse.
We raise a talwar high, the metal warping into a golden gada, the heavy head lurid with etchings of battles past, engraved skulls splintered and sundered.
चकनाचूर हो जाओ9
The dragon's rotted body is willing, but the spirit is weak, the pulsating parasite from an eternal heaven not yet ready to die. Its roar is tinged with sadness as a string tightens and it throws its head a final time, the weight of the gada catching us off balance and pitching us from the skull and into its maw.
The bite of the crystal teeth is a deep pain, that past what words can describe and the mind can comprehend. The teeth bite deeper than meat and between selves, separating Pramaada and I particle by particle, the kukri falling from my grasp to the ground below.
The vise of the hateful stone jaws tightened around my chest, with only the heavenly essence flowing through my veins keeping me in one piece, though that wouldn't last for long.
Pinned in place, I had no choice but to look up at the gloomy ceiling, and saw massive stalactites, pointed down like a hundred dangling blades.
"Pramaada, lend me your bow!"
Her body was quickly discorporating as it was slowly separated from mine, but she saw my target. Her transparent arm still held the bow, though it now flickered between string and steel as it tried to revert to a normal Enfield. She jerked her arm over, and laced our fingers together. It took both of us to draw the bow, and I used my teeth to nock the arrow, almost dropping it as the vise tightened even further, sparking and screeching as my still-metal skin resisted.
Her green eyes bored into mine, full of an emotion I didn't understand. "Let your arrow fly true, Kiran."
I exhaled and closed an eye. Snow-capped mountains. Hamal, Singh, Mathi, Chand.
I loosed the arrow.
It was a beam of pure sunlight, illuminating the cave like day as it shrieked upwards, and struck true. Crack.
The dragon blinked.
啊10
The largest of the stalactites fissured and splintered at the base, the holy lance destroying its connection to the roof, allowing it to detach and plunge downwards, spearing through the dragons' skull and through the floor.
The serpent collapsed to the floor, the shock throwing us from his jaws. I painfully landed on some knobbly stone, Pramaada fully dissipating into the kukri next to me, so close to the lashing, shrieking dragon. It wasn't quite dead yet.
Rebekah leapt down, her sanctified armor absorbing the blow. "Kiran, we need to leave now. The charges are set and the prisoners are evacuated."
I tried to stand, but my entire body cried in pain, a line of searing heat bisecting my body at the waist, bruises and bubbled burns covering the rest of my form. My muscles felt like a collection of burning, twisting screws, I was unable to move of my own volition. "I can't walk, it… hurts."
She quirked her lips. "All that lightshow, and its the fall that kills you?" She nevertheless scooped up my body and rifle and made haste towards the scaffolding.
"What about the rest of the Japanese?"
Her answer was curt. "Matthews took care of them." The American. Armed to the teeth with guns and blades and scurrying things lurking inside of his jacket. I didn't want to think about it.
The cave was once more plunged into darkness, with the generators all damaged beyond repair, though some lights tried to stay on. The flickering lights made the dragon all the more horrifying, showing snapshots of its writhing, mutilated form, boiling dragon's blood showering the entire cavern like the incoming monsoons of summer.
It was in one of these snapshots that I saw the dragon free itself, accompanied by a protracted crunching and snapping as it split its skull down the middle freeing itself from the stone spear. Its jaws were sliced into four bloody segments, and cracks in its skull let loose the uncolourful light in bright lancing rays, setting both metal and wood and corpse alight.
我们事还没完11
"Rebekah!"
Rebekah lunged up the crooked scaffolding, her empowered armor making her movements superhuman, her stride double that of a man's. Perhaps it would have saved her, if not for me weighing her down.
We just reached the top of the scaffolding, Alstrand, al Fine, and Matthews there to help me up the tunnel. Alstrand's face was that of sadness and resignation. They clutched the runes to their chest like a drowning man to rescue. They knew what would happen.
The dragon lunged at the scaffolding, snapping his quad-jaws at the bamboo and wood, tearing them to splinters in a blind fury, its jabbering slurred by its mangled mandibles.
别就这样离我而去12
Rebekah's foot slipped as the wood gave way beneath her, inches from safe footing. She scrabbled at the edge, but the glacial melt betrayed her, the stone too slick to hold. A stray ray of light lanced through her, melting skin like wax and shattering her sacred armor.
She looked at me from behind sloughing sheets of flesh. "Go."
And she dropped thirty feet onto the rocky scree below
I lunged for the ledge, but Matthews grabbed my wrist and fixed his sights on me. “The cave is about to come down around our ears, and you can't kill that damned thing. Rebekah—” He licked his lips and swallowed. “We can do nothing. Leave her to rot.”
I felt bile rise when he said that. I looked him in the eyes that were filled with so much intent, and saw how dry they were. Twin dry wells with brown mud at their bottoms, sunken deep into a once-handsome face. So dry that a fly grazing them would be instantly sucked of all moisture. Pits filled with darkness instead of water, shaded by a furrowed, heavy brow. Eyes that had seen too much evil, and nothing good. A warrior’s eyes, Pramaada whispered to me.
Warriors are supposed to be heroes.
At one time. But that time is no more. He is right. You saved who you could.
The bile threatened to touch my teeth, but I swallowed it back. I nodded, acceding to Pramaada’s and Matthew’s wisdom, as wretched as they were. I grabbed his arm, and he flung me over the shoulder, fleeing up the tunnel together away from what was once Rebekah in the dragon's den.
As we raced out of the tunnel, Santo wasted no time, pushing the plunger, and igniting the dynamite he wired in the middle of the throat. The dragon's roar was overpowered by the collapsing of a million tons of rubble, and the shotgun blast of dust that billowed out of the tunnel. What was for a short time the dragon's lair, had now become its tomb, alone but for itself and its cosmic parasite.
Santo looked around, his brow furrowed. "Where is Rebekah?"
No one answered. Alstrand fingered their runes.
Santo opened and closed his mouth, his lips compressed into a thin white line. He stood and faced the wall, his shoulders shaking slightly. He stood there for a long while, silent.
Matthews dumped me on the ground and stalked away, preparing to deal with the rest of the camp. Before he exited the antechamber, he turned to look at me and the rescued prisoners.
"I hope they were worth the trade."
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