Death's Collector: Dark Lands: A Novel About Sorcery, the Apocalypse, and Cheap Beer by Bill McCurry

Author:Bill McCurry [McCurry, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Infinite Monkeys Publishing LLC
Published: 2022-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

Dragons really existed once. A cheerful young sorcerer showed me a stuffed dragon’s head not long after she murdered a nasty, even younger sorcerer and stole his collection of magical curiosities. The dragon’s head was as big as a pony, with a mouth full of teeth longer than my hand. It also had a scaly ruff around its neck and four stubby, curved horns behind its forehead.

The dragons were all killed centuries ago. My teachers said so, and I knew they wouldn’t lie to me. Over the next twenty years, I found that my teachers had lied like sweaty thieves about a mort of things. I hadn’t seen a dragon yet, but I didn’t mock the possibility.

As Gea galloped toward the cursed city and I hung on behind Pil, I didn’t spot any dragons. But in the past couple of days, we had fought monsters that looked like our families, lied our asses off to escape two gods, decapitated a nasty demigod, made friends with a unicorn, and almost killed each other because a spirit of mud and dirty water told us to.

After all that, I figured the next logical thing would be a dragon landing in front of us. My eyes throbbed and watered from trying to watch the city, so I shouted at Pil, “Do you see any dragons?”

“What?”

“Or anything else that might eat us?”

“What? No. What are you talking about?”

“Never mind, I’ll yell a couple of times if I see one.” I set myself to watch for any kind of danger, including dragons.

The unicorn ran just as fast as Gea, and neither seem bothered by this odd magic that hurt our eyes. With normal horses, I doubt we could have approached the city directly. We might have ridden all day at angles or in circles without ever reaching the place. But on these mounts, I figured we’d reach the city in twenty minutes and then do some clever, bold thing that I hadn’t yet thought of.

Yet before we had covered half that distance, I saw a lonely cloud lying on the ground ahead and to our right. As we overtook it, I spotted men marching into the cloud, which lay between them and the city.

“It’s Famm!” Pil shouted.

I nodded. “Right. Old Thad is raising fog and moving it along to protect their eyes from the city. That’s clever for a bouncy, little beaver-faced son of a bitch. The conditions are all wrong for fog, though. I bet he’s spending enough power to grow a forest. Let’s ride in a curve around them to keep the range . . . Shit, they’ve seen us!”

Gea wheeled away from Famm’s men, but a mound of earth rose in front of her. The black horse climbed halfway up and leaped the rest of the way over. Once we had passed, I glanced back and saw the unicorn spring all the way over the mound, landing as lightly as a sparrow.

I pulled two white bands and flung them toward Famm just as one of his bowmen fired.

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