Spear of Destiny James Baldwin (free romance novels .TXT) 📖

of my newer arcane items, the Bangle of the Master Thief. It gave +5 to Dex, +15 to lockpicking and safecracking skills, and—most importantly—darkvision. To gain darkvision, I had to charge it with high-grade liquid mana. I searched my Inventory for it and frowned when I only turned up one small vial.

“Weird,” I said. “I’m sure I had more mana than this.”

“Did you leave it at the castle, maybe?” Karalti stepped carefully, following her nose in the absence of sight.

“Must have.” I scanned my inventory a second time and noticed something I’d missed in the first pass. Not the mana: it was another artifact. The Heart of Memory, a device Rin had made for me that could preserve some of my memories when or if I died. The ruby mana core glowed with a pulsing red light.

“Huh.” I frowned. “That gadget Rin gave me has a recording.”

“Ooh.” Karalti craned her head back. “What’s on it?”

“Dunno. It might have recorded what happened with Oral-Gel the Wonder King. But we’ll have to wait until we get back to Kalla Sahasi to watch the playback.” I uncapped my only vial of mana and attached the vacuum-sealed end to the spigot on the bracelet. The artifact sucked the liquid out of the vial with a small hiss, lighting up with a pale blue light. Suddenly, I could see. The cavern depths expanded out like a sonar pulse, revealing the interior of the cavern for the next fifty feet or so.

“We’ve got darkvision for an hour. Let’s make the best of it.” I stood up on the saddle to look past her neck. “It looks like maybe the floor stops up ahead, and... oh jeez.”

The cavern ahead of us narrowed into a dragon’s nightmare: A tunnel, barely wide enough to permit a dragon to open her wings. It was lined with countless rings of massive spines, huge angled columns of lethally sharp crystal that pointed away from us into the darkness. It reminded me of a fish trap. Fish could go in, but they couldn’t get out.

“Don’t worry,” Karalti said, firmly. “Like you just said: we’re the best dragonrider team in Archemi. This tunnel’s made for dragons bigger than me. We can do this.”

“We’re going to have to time your wingbeats just right,” I said. “Push back and build up some speed. We don’t know what the rest of the obstacle course looks like.”

“Right.” She lowered her chest, lifted her tail, and used her hands to back up without turning around.

“Can you get a visual on the tunnel through the Bond?” I asked.

“Yeah. As long as your eyes are open.” She stood up straight and weaved her head like a falcon, tuning her internal gyroscope. “Hold on... and stare straight forward.”

Karalti spread her wings and beat them stiffly, loosening her shoulders. I felt her second heart engage and fall into sync with the other. Dragons had two hearts: one that pumped blood like a normal heart, and a larger one that drove the mana-infused lymphatic fluid that magically lightened her body and pressurized her limbs. It was my cue to kneel down and brace.

The dragon roared a challenge as she broke into a lumbering charge. She built speed, almost a run, and launched herself from the very edge of the ravine. I ducked as the spines grew uncomfortably close. There was barely fifteen feet of clearance on all sides, a gap which narrowed sharply up ahead.

“Burst flight!” I thought.

Karalti read my mind, or maybe I read hers. She brought her wings in toward her flanks, teetering as the tunnel narrowed into a one-way squeeze chute just barely big enough to permit a dragon’s body to pass. She shot forward like a missile. Just past the choke was a space for her to gain a single wingbeat, and then she had to do it again.

“There’s no room to gain lift!” She struggled to keep a smooth trajectory as entropy set in. The hair on my arms stood on end as my stomach rose, and I had to cling with all four limbs as her body curved into a high-speed dive, right towards the spikes. “

“Just hold on and don’t stall out! There’s a wing space just past this choke!” I stared ahead at the cored out sections of rock to either side.

The connection between Karalti’s mind and mine intensified, as powerful as I’d ever felt. Karalti’s concentration was absolute as she shot into the open space, blindly snapped her wings out, and drove herself forward and up. There was only room for two wingbeats before she had to swallow-dive again.

“There’s another space ahead!” Adrenaline pounded through my bloodstream. My mouth was dry, hands sweaty, eyes tearing up as I forced them to stay open. “One, two, now!”

Gasping for breath, Karalti beat her wings in the small gap, barely keeping herself out of terminal velocity... and then the roof opened up, and the tunnel curved sharply to the right. The dragon threw her wings open and used her tail to swing into a fast, soaring arc around the corner. Gravity bore down on my back, crushing the air from my lungs before she swung back, and we burst out of the gauntlet into a massive lava chamber.

“We did it!” She cried. Even her telepathic voice was breathless. “But there’s nowhere to land!”

There sure wasn’t. Titanic streams of magma seethed below us, belching from the walls into a great river of molten rock. Six monolithic statues loomed from the walls to either side of the rumbling lava. Dragons, each one standing with their hands cupped around a different item. At the other end of the canyon was the entry to a cave, sealed by a great metal portal.

[Warning: Temperature is dangerously high!]

[You are overheating!]

My dragonrider mutations gave me resilience to extremes of temperature: up to fifty degrees Celsius, which was about