Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 10

Damn it!

The high priestess of doom was not much for bewailing her fate, unlike the increasingly unhappy Irene, and was quite determined in the appropriate Deseret manner to die face first against her enemies and go out in a blaze of zealot glory. Again my posse, she'd likely have cleaned house. She'd definitely have rung Bel's bell, so to speak and given the old 'normal' Adept Zak far more than he could have hoped to have handled. I had her pegged nearly at once as one of their better talents, a high noble-woman sorceress of the Third Circle or a really talented flunky of the still powerful Fourth Circle. Folks usually too powerful and important for most out-of-town business trips. This was absolutely one of their more important operations, perhaps even their main distribution place for all stolen and smuggled weapons from the entire US. This was a much bigger operation than the one I'd helped shut down back home and this made me wonder if we'd just missed the big fish there... maybe even some senior bent BMA folks, just like here. It's shit like this that keeps me awake at night!

Right here in the now, I let the enraged Deseret sorceress do her worst for probably much too long. I needed to get into that house right away but yet I really wanted to semi-scientifically digest the talent that this apparently 'expendable' wizardess was capable of, and what I discovered disturbed me. Her skill in battle magic, really subtle but powerful and direct stuff, was above anything that I thought we taught to our own wizards back home. Necromancy and dark-spirit stuff and lots of it. I had my shields turned up to eleven on the power knob and some of her sneakier stuff almost found a way through!

Given enough rope, that bitch would find a way to hang me, so I reluctantly hit her with non-stop lightning until her shield failed and her corpse quite totally smoked. I gave her another blast or two to make sure that she wasn't faking. If I'd had to have handled her other two bosses also at the same time, I don't what I would have done... probably something extremely excessive like refocusing that storm once again!

Now that Irene was all on her own and she recognized that she was just another speed bump, her more than adequate sense of self-preservation began to kick-in. She called out that she'd surrender and held her hands up high while she walked over to me but I wasn't fooled. Bel had warned me before that she was a poisonous cockatrice. She made an all-or-nothing mental lunge to seize control of my will once she'd almost come within arm's length, but I was more than ready for her. The battle of wills, if you want to call it that, was over in about a tenth of a second.

Irene was one of the most talented Mentalists I'd ever met, but her raw power level was strictly mid-level Adept. Catching another more powerful magician by surprise, she was skilled at the sneak attack, like the spider pouncing on a trapped fly, but I was ready for her tricks. The real trouble now was, I just couldn't at all trust her as a captive. She could mind-snatch any of Jerome's gunsels easily, even with a blindfold on and she'd be certain to do it. Still, I just couldn't bring myself to torch the bitch right on the spot, although she undoubtedly deserved it.

While tying her up, Irene tried just this, pouncing upon the mind of the nearest of our mob soldiers but I put the kibosh on that fast. I gave her a fast mindjab, about the only bit of offensive spirit magic that I was comfortable using and then for good measure physically punched her, just about knocked her senseless.

"No, you can't leave that little snake loose behind your back." Sean whispered. "It's time I think you put of the fear of god into her, so that she'll never be a nuisance again."

I wasn't quite sure what Sean had in mind, but it did involve me taking her head into both of my hands and grasping her mind. As I've mentioned, I've really got no talent for mentalist magic and my main objective was to just doing something in my usual manner, and brute force her brain into some sort of shutdown. The brute force, I was certainly capable of mustering, but once I was inside the tangled dark cobwebs of her thoughts were way beyond my understanding, but fortunately not Sean's. No, he didn't actually do any of the work, but I felt him prodding me along into her maze of memories, and while I didn't have a clue where I was going or why, he seemed to, so I just concentrated and went along for the ride.

The memory Sean had chosen for me to loop was a suitably appropriate one, namely being the captured memories from Irene's childhood of a time when she had been significantly abused. Nasty vicious stuff, and just the sort of thing would have used to torture a captive victim, which Sean later assured me she had done. With a hint of will, Irene was now reliving her own terrible and sordid past... endlessly apparently. She was going to now scream her life away in some sanitarium and the world was already a much nicer and safer place without her.

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Now only the two great wizards were left to deal with, but I'd given them nearly five full minutes to make their escape plan and they'd taken full advantage of it. The ground floor of the burning house was now entirely empty, with no signs of the bastards... or Bel and Janice!

***************

My posse was beyond livid, and mostly at me. They knew that I'd done my best and fought two significant battles that the lot of them could never have handled on her own, but there was a touch of the 'we should have done something! ', meaning 'I' should have done something faster and sooner. Yeah, something like bring down another tornado when Bel and Janice were both helpless and unable to protect themselves! Even I knew better than that!

In order to make a closer search for our escaped foes we really needed to put out the big bonfire first and that ate up another fifteen minutes of time. Most of my remaining companions were half hysterical and waving about their hands or guns, a menace to both friend and foe... if we could find any more foes. The scarecrows hadn't left many walking wounded but Jerome's gunsels had the surviving elite Harrison boys under guard. The wounded Deseret zealots, soldiers and minor magicians both, all suicided when they realized they'd been captured. Some sort of nasty built-in necromancy that I'd never seen before and couldn't figure out how to disarm. No Deseret wizard had ever been taken captive... and their streak still stood unblemished. Their secrets died with them of course.

I put what was left of my posse to work clearing out scorched and fallen debris from the farmhouse so we could make a more effective search, but most of them were beyond being either helpful or particularly useful. The entire lot of them were quite ready sit back on their heels and wait for the reinforcements to arrive.

Not so Miranda. She clung to my shadow like glue and in fact it was her keen eyes that spotted the faint outlines of the trapdoor right in the main hallway. This being the Midwest, nearly every home has a combination root cellar/tornado shelter, but admittedly very few of them are trapped to the eye-teeth with nasty magical protection spells. With luck, our nasty boys were cringing downstairs, fearing my very footsteps and eager to release their captives.

Who was I fooling? The remaining greater Deseret wizard would fight to the death... the fuckers always did, and probably kill the girls first in some excessively nasty magic ritual designed to help them either get the hell out of dodge or give them a possible edge against me a firefight. My bet was on the latter.

Since I was in absolutely no mood for anything resembling subtly, I decided that my usual bull in the china shop approach to problem solving would be the best (and by far the fastest) means to penetrating the intricate layer of overlapping USDA Grade-A protection spells covering the cellar door. I ordered everyone out of the house and to get as far away as possible and I have no doubt that a few of the more timid minor magicians stayed running until they met up with the slowly arriving police and federal reinforcements. I cranked up my shield to eleven and yanked open the storm cellar door.

It was a nice medley of protection spells, I did have to admit, that quite covered all of the usual basics and few extra maliciousnesses just to make sure. One particularly severe shock wave blast from a ruptured protection spell sent Miranda and I flying through the air for a good fifty yards and gave my brain cells a good shaking that they didn't really need. Then, returning to the house, or the debris field that was left of it, it was once again time to face another pair of summoned Fire Lords. This time, they had my number.

"Fuck! It's the god-damned Zyphyr! We're gone!" And with that, they were. This wasn't the exact same pair of major league Plane of Fire nobility, but they'd gotten the advisory memo.

Oh the fun that having a reputation can give you!

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Back again at the now open and defenseless doorway down into the darkened abyss, I could immediately sense that we were not alone. The ever astute teen grasped the situation quickly as well.

"I feel something really, really awful down there and I don't want to see it, feel it or face it... but I'm coming with you!" She wasn't just whistling Dixie; it did feel bad down there, something absolutely terrible and menacing, like some proverbial monstrous evil that never slept... and she was right. If anything it was even worse, if possible.

Somehow, the magnificent gawdamned bastards had summoned a dragon!

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It goes beyond saying that there are no dragons on our world... anymore. Several millennia of magii and great wizards made it their lives' work to roust out the last of them and either slay or banish the lot from our world. The malignant beasts suck up magic like air and they're so innately magical themselves that it's virtually impossible to fight them one-on-one (or even a hundred against one) using just magic.

Dragons are apparently native to at least half a dozen unpleasant to visit worlds in the multi-verse and conventional wisdom is that there are no 'good' dragons. Even the benignly uninterested ones are mighty enough to rule whatever little bit of the universe they want to occupy at any given time. My teachers spent a full week covering dragons and their kin fairly exhaustively, and it went without saying that anyone caught summoning one could (and would) receive the nastiest punishment that BMA could devise. As for banishing dragons, the technique was advanced and highly theoretical and probably involved gathering at least a hundred of the most powerful wizards available to gently encourage the creature to return home and pray that force wouldn't be necessary in case it was feeling contrary.

Dragons come in all sizes and colors, like snakes... and like most lethal reptiles the smaller they are, the nastier they seem to be. This one was small.... not much larger than size of a big dog. That meant either good news, the creature being a relative benign member of the dragon-kin family or more trouble than the entire Austin BMA could have ever handled, on their best day, and with a very long and extremely magical pointed stick.

Since you're all familiar with how my luck runs, you can guess which of the options it was. The creature turned its terrible golden-green eyes on me and wave of unspeakable terror flowed over us. Miranda quite pissed herself as the legendary dragon-fear overwhelmed her, but even whimpering now on her knees in terror she clung on to me. Whatever on earth she thought that I could do now to save either of us was quite beyond me.

When Sean clearly cringed upon my shoulder and muttered "Oh Saints preserve us!" I knew that this was a serious major ratfuck that I was going to be unable to fight my way out of.

Seeing that this aura of fear would not be quite enough to send us packing, and that I was clearly a mortal of less than any usual common sense, it gently sighed and opened its unspeakably awful mouth and breathed its flame upon us. No, not all dragons do breathe fire, but it's sort of traditional for the nastier sorts to do so. Not just magical fire, but legendary dragon's-breath; quite at least as hot as the sun itself. It ripped though my shield as if it wasn't even there and covered me, but fortunately I was covering Miranda or else something of our shields together combined in desperation saved her. Or else I was his only target, and it's flame was unusually surgically precise.

By this time, the novelty of discovering that I was quite entirely fireproof now was slowly ceasing to be a major novelty item. I blinked, let out my held breath and put out the last sparks from my singed eyebrows and hair. My dustercoat was pretty much a bonfire now but a fast extinguishing charm did put the flames out. My suit, already previously ruined with three bullet holes was quite past any hope of mending.

Fact #1 -- I was not going to win any magical battle here, even with Sean's help, and at the moment, the way he was cringing behind me, I wasn't sure the little bugger could help. This had 'magically irresistible force' meeting 'magically immoveable object' written all over it.

Fact #2 -- when the little terror realized that I couldn't hurt it, it would eventually get bored enough to come over and bite my head off.

Fact #3 -- It had relatively small wings, true, but I had no doubt that if it wanted to it could fly. If we took off screaming and tried running away, there was a better than average chance that it could catch us... quickly, easily and extremely violently. Those claws weren't just for show either!

Fact #4 -- Aunt Millie's favorite (and only) nephew was in serious deep shit!

Oh well, if you can't convince -- then confound! I was the god-damned Zyphyr, and even if I couldn't do jack shit about it, I could at least pretend. Maybe the horrific little fucker didn't play poker.

Just to show it that I wasn't afraid (much), I took two steps closer to it. The dragon stood in front of an open portalway, blocking my access to it. Obviously it had been summoned to guard it... and I would have given any number of month's pay to discover how the evil geniuses had done it!

"I am the Zyphyr, master of all fire and imperator of the Dux-Ignus, who quail at my might. You have not yet earned my displeasure and I give you my freedom to depart, to leave this realm in peace and without malice."

Not in the least impressed with my speech the little bastard breathed on me once, to the final destruction of my leather duster coat. I tried to look unimpressed and I must have succeeded because the scaly little bugger actually brought up a forepaw to scratch its chin in wonderment. This gave me a moment to sift through the smoldering wreckage of my coat to gather up my magical reagents and other useful goodies before it decided that I was worthy of addressing."

"I have been properly summoned and am under a geas at the peril of my true name, under which my service was unwillingly impressed. While I bear no consideration for my master, my geas is a significant one and I much feel compelled to obey, err my imprisonment shall become yet more dire."

Granted he did sound apologetic, but his butt wasn't going to move!

"I can assume your master has just recently departed via this portal which you appear to be guarding? You should be aware that he is of a particular evil bent, and his wickedness and dishonor here has been discovered and he shall never return."

"Nevertheless, by my oath, I shall abide."

"I would assume if I decided to leave you in peace for the moment that you would feel compelled to complete your instructions, to smite all that shall appear save by his word, and chase after us?"

"In exactness! You understand my charge well. Indeed I would welcome the relief of a break from this solitary place for it is long since I have been well fed. It has been at least a month since I was last given an animal, a sheep the wizard said, for my hunger, and should you flee I would be quite within my instructions to hunt for additional sustenance, once your flesh has served my needs."

"Optimistic, aren't you? Indeed, it is yet quite uncertain whether I shall punish you soon for your admitted ill-will towards our arrival, for our presence concerns one of the greatest honors, being the noble rescue of the two noble captured women at vastly superior odds to ourselves. A worthy, principled undertaking of honor, should you decide to ignore the indignities done to you and seek some appropriate justice yourself."

That was laying it on a little thick, but my old teacher had told me that (most) dragons tended to have a perverse sense of honor and justice themselves, and now I was hoping to appeal to this code of honor.

"Under other circumstances, perhaps. You interest and amuse me. However, until my duty is done, I am defeated or my master is slain, or slightly less than a hundred of your years have passed, my geas binds me to this chamber, and perhaps a less than honorable duty, but the upholding of one's duty, even under unpleasant circumstances is nevertheless worthy and itself honorable."

Ok, the honor game wasn't going to work then. Time then for my final ace in the hole!

"Well, we cannot avoid our duties, for I must go to attend to the smiting of your ignoble master and shall indeed do so with considerable relish and delight. Still, I am impressed with your devolution to duty and feel that I should offer your some slight respite, as you are a most worthy opponent whose sense of duty and obligation I must respect. I have naught but a slight morsel to offer you, but it is freely and willingly given, without expectation of repayment or obligation, if you would accept it."

"Free of any obligation other than mutual respect, I shall accept!" The dragon stated and as I harmlessly tossed the food item towards it, it was snatched by its jaws in mid air and swallowed whole without a single bite. No, it wasn't a hand grenade! That would have been extremely dishonorable indeed... and probably pointless!

In the remains of my coat, I had found the remaining majority of that infamous corned beef sandwich that I had unwittingly almost eaten weeks ago on board the airship. It was just as fresh as ever, without a hint of mold or staleness. In other words, it was as vile as it had even been and was utterly still just as toxic today, to the extent that even bacteria or mold couldn't consume it!

The poor bastard had no sooner eaten the nasty thing but then its own digestive tract went into sudden and immediate revolt. The next bolt of fire it launched at us was pretty half-assed and didn't even singe me and the next two bolts weren't much more than violent burps. A moment later fire erupted from both ends of the creature, and if the looks on the dragon's face were to be believed it hurt just as much as it looked, like the revenge on a toilet the next day after a hot chili eating contest.

The next intestinal eruption was much more piteous and even Miranda had to look away in dismay and slight disgust. I'm not sure where the dragon normally did its bodily waste removal functions, but I didn't think it was usually right there in the middle of the cellar floor. A second louder and more liquid eruption filled the cellar with a ghastly smell that almost made the aura of dragon-fear amusing in comparison. Miranda lost her recent diner and I almost added my own contribution to the growing mess on the floor. The next blast was purely aromatic in effect only, but it still cost me my sense of smell for the next two weeks.

The once fierce dragon now crouched in a pitiful heap onto the floor and more clearly audible stomach rumblings hinted that more acute intestinal distress was on the way. I've heard that dragon's blood and even scales are extremely useful and valuable to magicians, but I had never heard any rumors about dragon shit. At the moment I could corner the entire market for it... if it wasn't so insanely corrosive that it wasn't already eating its way through the concrete floor. Perhaps specially magically treated Pyrex beakers would work?