Witchbreaker (Dragon Apocalypse) (9 page)

“Of the Cooper Barrelworks?”

“The same.”

“Forgive me for being dubious. Grand Cooper is one of the wealthiest men alive. Why would his children be wandering the world as coinless vagabonds?”

Brand chuckled. “That’s kind of a long story. But who needs coins when we have dragon bones?” He held up a blackened rib.

Sorrow’s eyes opened wide. She hadn’t even thought of the fortune scattered around them. Dragon bones were worth their weight in gold at blood houses. Even bones burnt black would bring a good price.

“Since we all worked together to kill this dragon, I assume we split this treasure three ways?” he asked.

Yesterday, she would have argued. Their verbal contract said that anything they dug up would belong to her. But Brand had delivered the final killing blow. The division seemed fair. She nodded in agreement.

“This will buy us passage back to the Silver City,” he said. “Hell, it will buy our own ship.”

“If you’re Grand Cooper’s son, I’m surprised you don’t already own a whole fleet.”

Brand shrugged. “I do, technically. But it’s been a long time since I’ve been back home to enjoy any of the trappings of my wealth. My father... he’s something of a perfectionist. When Bigsby was born, he couldn’t bear the thought of his first son having stunted, malformed limbs. So he commanded the midwife to take the baby away and kill it. He buried the body in a closed coffin so no one could see the freak he’d produced, and told the world the child had been stillborn.”

“That’s awful,” said Sorrow.

“Fortunately, the midwife didn’t kill the baby. Freaks are a valuable commodity. She sold the child to a circus.”

Sorrow shook her head. “It’s a sign of this world’s corruption that such things can happen. How did you learn of his fate?”

Brand fed a new log into the fire, coughing at the smoke it stirred up. When he caught his breath, he said, “The midwife spent her money a bit too freely. My father thought she was stealing from him, but soon learned the truth of what had happened. He kept the secret for almost thirty years. During this time, I was born.” He sighed. “I tried to be a good son, but sometimes he just seemed so unhappy. I didn’t know that every time he looked at me he was almost paralyzed with guilt.”

“He deserved his guilt,” said Sorrow. “Though he failed, he’d conspired to commit infanticide. I can only imagine how much you hate him.”

“No. I don’t hate him. He made a mistake, but he’s not evil. Four years ago, he suffered a stroke. His body was half-paralyzed. On his sick bed, he confessed everything to me. Said he’d been a fool to expect perfection from mere human flesh. He begged me to find his lost son and bring him home.”

He looked at the sparks that rose from the fire. “The ensuing years have been a pretty wild adventure. I’m a different person from the naïve kid who left home. It’s going to be strange going back. Stranger still when I tell Dad that his long lost son isn’t only a dwarf, but also completely flipping insane.”

“You could...” Sorrow shook her head.

“What?”

Sorrow ground her teeth together. “It causes me almost physical pain to say this, but a truthspeaker might be able to help you.”

Brand’s face brightened. “You’re right. They could command Bigsby to remember who he truly was. It’s an excellent idea.”

He rose, picking up a branch from the fire. He used his makeshift torch to aid him as he gathered up dragon bones into a pile next to the warrior. “Maybe we’ll run into a truthspeaker on the journey home who’ll be amenable to a bribe.”

“I think they prefer their compensation to be referred to as offerings.”

As Brand turned his back to her, Sorrow allowed herself the luxury of scratching her itching thighs. Her stomach tightened as she felt how hard and stiff her skin was beneath the fabric of her britches.

Brand wound up near the pit the dragon had first erupted from. He crouched down, and held out his torch.

“Look at this,” he said, sounding excited.

Sorrow welcomed the distraction and walked to the pit. To her surprise, Brand doused his torch on the broken ground as she neared. She held her hands before her as her eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness.

Now she saw what Brand saw. The pit was glowing faintly. She carefully crept across the uneven ground to gaze into it. Thin beams of pale light seeped up through cracks in the slate lining the bottom of the grave.

“I got so swept up in the fight and saving the mystery man’s life that I never stopped to think there might be something else in the hole,” said Brand. “I mean, I glanced in here while I was gathering firewood, and all I saw was rock. But what if that thing was meant to guard something?”

Sorrow slid down the dirt wall into the pit. She grunted as she pushed one of the large flat stones aside. More light seeped up from below. She kept moving stones until she nearly fell through the widening gap. Carefully removing more stones, she revealed the opening to a set of spiral stairs. She was looking down the center of the spiral, and though this was the source of the glow, she couldn’t make out anything beyond the stairs.

Brand asked, “Should we wait until daylight to—”

Sorrow didn’t wait for him to finish. She swung her feet forward, then slid into the gap.

“Let’s think this through,” said Brand. “We’re both exhausted. I don’t have it in me to fight another dragon.”

“I’m just going to peek,” said Sorrow, placing a hand on the stone wall as she stepped gingerly down the stairs. She knew Brand was right. The smart move would be to wait until she could build a new golem and use it to explore the space. But she’d come to the Witches’ Graveyard expecting her life to change forever. She felt certain she’d arrived at a pivotal moment of her quest.

The steps opened into a circular chamber twenty feet across and six feet tall, the walls, ceiling and floor hewn from a single piece of slate. A glorystone was set into the center of the slate floor, no bigger than a pea yet sufficient to fill the chamber with light. Alas, the chamber appeared to be completely empty. There wasn’t even any dust. Her heart sank, disappointed that such a promising lead had come to nothing.

She clenched her fists. This couldn’t be all there was. There must be some hidden passage. She moved to the nearest wall and rapped the stone with her fingers, then turned when she heard footsteps on the stairs. Brand crept down, with a dagger drawn.

“It’s safe,” she said. “Give me your knife.”

“This was worth guarding with a dragon?” he said, crouching as he entered the room to hand her the dagger. “I mean, the glorystone will bring a good price, but—”

“This isn’t about treasure,” she said, tapping the wall with the hilt of the dagger as she held her ear close to the stone.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking for hollow spaces,” she said.

“Right,” he said, drawing another blade. He started tapping the ceiling as she worked the walls.

They worked for ten minutes, not speaking, just tapping.

“Wait,” she said, holding up her hand.

“You got something?” he asked.

She tapped the wall, pressing her ear to it. There was a definite hollowness to the sound. “I think so.” She ran her fingers across the slate. “This stone is perfectly smooth. No mason could have finished it to this precision. It has to be the work of a weaver with command over stone.”

“How do we open it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never even heard of a slate weaver. It must be a lost art. A witch with power over slate could simply will the stone to move aside.”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” said Brand. “Wait here.”

He darted up the stairs. Sorrow scraped at the slate with her dagger blade, marring the finish, then began to hunt for another space behind the stone. Three minutes later, Brand came panting back down the stairs with a pick-axe in hand.

“Where was it?” he asked.

She pointed toward the mark she’d made.

He lined himself up. In the low space, he had to swing sideways. The pick-axe struck sparks and bounced off the wall. The force of the blow caused Brand’s back to straighten and his head bumped the ceiling.

“Ow, ow, ow,” he said, rubbing the top of his scalp. He ran his fingers where he’d struck the wall. “Barely even a scratch.” He sighed. “The pick is more of a digging tool than a smashing tool. We need a sledgehammer.”

“Go get one.”

“I couldn’t find it. Your golem was carrying it when the dragon tore him apart. Maybe it’s under the tree.”

“Give me,” she said, grabbing the pick-axe. “I can’t mold stone, but I’m an artist with iron.” The rigid metal turned as soft as clay between her fingers. Brand looked impressed as she squished, squashed, and sculpted the relatively slender arms of the pick-axe into a sturdy hammer-head.

When she handed the hammer back to him, he said, “This should do the job.”

This time, he got on his knees, shifting his grip on the hammer to allow for an overhead swing. The hammer hit with a thunderous
CRACK
and the slate splintered into a dozen shards.

The space revealed was no bigger than a breadbox. Within was a glass bottle, lidless and seamless, inside which was a rolled-up sheet of parchment.

“A message in a bottle,” said Brand.

“A message only a witch can open, as there’s no stopper,” said Sorrow as she carried the jar into the light.

Brand snatched it away from her. “I think you may be overlooking a more direct approach.” Before she could react, he smashed it on the ground, then bent down to pick up the parchment.

“Give me that,” she grumbled. He offered it to her with a grin on his face. It was closed with a small band of silver. She could have used her powers to remove it, but decided to simply slide it off the end.

She unrolled the thin leather sheet. From its color and texture, she had the uneasy feeling the scroll might have been made from human skin. Brand looked over her shoulder at the looping script written upon it.

“I can’t read a word of it,” he said.

Sorrow frowned. “It’s weaver script. Unfortunately, I can only read a little.”

“They didn’t teach you the secret code in weaver school?”

“I’m mostly self-taught,” she said. “I’ve picked up bits and pieces of the script here and there, but never studied with anyone fluent in the language.”

“Can you make out anything?”

“I recognize this symbol,” she said, tapping on a small mark that looked like a sword or dagger. “It’s the symbol of the Witchbreaker.”

“The knight?”

“Either the knight or his sword. His sword was almost more feared than the man.”

“Why?”

“Legend has it that the sword was forged from iron stolen from the gates of hell. Supposedly, this gave the sword the ability to open a direct path to the underworld for the soul of anyone it killed.”

“That’s worthy of a legend, I guess.”

She traced her fingers over the symbols adjacent to the sword. “This is the symbol for death. I think... this symbol here is
rejoice
, or
celebrate
. And... hmm. I think this reads, ‘Rejoice, sister, the Witchbreaker is dead.’”

“Maybe that was him buried in the grave,” said Brand. “You might have spent the better part of the night saving the life of your greatest enemy.”

“Maybe. But probably not. I can’t understand why they would have saved his body.” She furrowed her brow as she tried to puzzle out more symbols. “‘In the midst of defeat, we have,’ um, cooked? Tasted? Feasted on victory? I think it says ‘we have feasted on victory.’” She ran her finger further down the page. “‘But... they must abandon...’ uh, ‘abandon the... weapon’?”

“The sword?”

She shook her head. “No, I know that symbol. This is kind of a blend of the symbol for tool and the symbol for war. I’m reading
war-tool
as weapon. The symbol after it stands for ‘man.’ Maybe
war-tool man
is the way they wrote ‘warrior’?”

“Keep reading,” he said. “Maybe it will make sense in context.”

“The... um. Hmm.” She scratched her scalp. “The first one? ‘The original is ours’?”

“The original?” he asked. “The original what?”

She sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m lost. I got off to a good start, but I’m guessing at three out of four words. I think these are instructions to leave the ‘war-tool,’ whatever that is, and meet up at the ‘dancing castle,’ wherever that is.”

“Dancing castle?” asked Brand. “That sounds kind of fun.”

“I’m probably reading it wrong. But one thing I’m sure of is that I know this mark.” She touched a skull-like symbol at the bottom of the parchment. “This was signed by Avaris herself.”

“The old Queen of Witches?”

“Maybe the current queen,” said Sorrow. “It’s common folklore that Avaris is still alive, made immortal by her powers, living in a hidden castle until her enemies eventually perish. I guess if you’re immortal, you can just wait people out.”

“Immortal or not, she’s got a long wait. The Church of the Book is still anti-witch, and it’s not going anywhere soon.”

“It will if I have a say in it.”