School Nathaniel Hardman (the best ebook reader for android txt) 📖

teeth; this was not a gamble he would have chosen, but there was nothing he could do about it now, and he let his feet continue beating time to his hoarse chant.

The heat of the spell spread through his belly, then his chest, then down to his thighs. He began to scream as it incinerated its way through his shoulders, up his neck and throat to his mouth. Even his scream was to the words of his spell.

“Juoy!” shouted half-a-dozen of his men, and the spells hit all over his body, buckets of ice to the consuming fire of Zchig’s spell. “Every dragon,” he gasped out, “Every plane.”

The relief was unfathomable, and as he kept on pounding his feet, he realized how much stronger he felt. He still might kill Zchig for it later, but the gamble had worked.

 

On the second night of the dance, billions watched. Those without a screen found themselves staring to the horizon, to the Great Magic they sensed in their bones.

Hundreds of thousands fled, driving, flying, running from the pull, the fishhook in their souls reeling them back toward the king’s dance. They looked back as they ran.

Millions more flocked, summoned to the castle by the pull. Police and army held them at bay. Police and army ran with them. Spells of pushing, spells of freezing, spells of sleeping rained down from the king’s men into the roiling mass of humans that surrounded the castle.

 

In the great cliff city of Moshojuquyo, capital of the Chushr Empire, the dragons were uncontrollable. They could feel the pull of the magic, itching under their scales, burrowing through their ears. They screamed and belched flame. They flew in every direction, feeling for the source, flying back, and feeling no closer. It came from every direction and none, and their blood boiled with the need to end it.

Tuynomosh didn’t notice the brightening of the sky for some time. For one thing, his men were hitting him with spells almost constantly now, alternately electrifying and reviving him, and he barely had capacity in his brain to keep his legs and mouth going.

But also, the light from the pattern below was brilliant beyond a dozen sunrises. The image was blazing, searing his eyes, blinding him to the soft glow of the horizon. He only looked up because he noticed the smudge on the line ahead of him.

The king’s first muddy thought was that he must have marred this spot one of the many times he had vomited during the night. But he didn’t see vomit. He saw chalky footprints over a fiery white line. Had one of his men done the unthinkable and stepped on the pattern?

He looked up and saw the sunrise. He looked down. Like the growing fire on the horizon, understanding dawned.

Tuynomosh lifted his wand over his head with both hands, filled his lungs, and croaked out the words of his spell one last time. His voice raised to a cracking, broken crescendo, and he shouted the last words as his feet pounded out the last inches of the line, completing the pattern, “Earth to Uoshn, Uoshn to Earth, switch!”

For a second, he paused with the power filling him, consuming him with light and heat and pressure, until he thought his body would burst holding it in. Once more, he visualized the spell, gouging invisible channels through which the power would flow. Then he couldn’t hold it a second longer, and he screamed, “Oqur!”

The power exploded out of him like an atom bomb.

The shockwave ripped out from the king’s body in every direction. The masses below would have run for cover, but it hit them too fast. It blasted through them, without physical force or sound, and yet stealing their breath away and making them stagger and reel.

Then it was passed, and they were staring around in confusion, and a billion people watching on TVs and computers simultaneously asked, “What did it do?” as the crowd at the castle turned to squint at the shimmer moving to the horizon.

It took only seconds for the spell to hit its first target flying overhead, but almost no one noticed. But then within one minute, the ripple hit the Atlanta airport, and they couldn’t help but notice.

Every airplane in the sky – every plane approaching to land and every plane leaving the runway, every plane soaring peacefully through the clouds – was suddenly gone. In their place, flew dragons.

The spell rippled on. Within one hour, there were no more planes flying over the United States. Some managed to land before the spell hit, and they were saved. Some took off after the ripple had passed; they were changed.

At two hours, the Heathrow Airport began to burn, victim to the wrath of a throng of crazed and disoriented dragons.

Helicopters were untouched by the spell but seemed to drive any dragon within sight into a frenzy.

Within six hours, dragons ruled the skies of the planet Earth.

With dragons exploding into the skies around the world, and with the draw of the king’s magic now gone, few even noticed as the alien soldiers reverently collected the fallen body and gently, solemnly, retreated into the castle.

FORTY

It was morning, and Suzy was feeling optimistic.

The last two days had been horrible, restless days. Beyond restless. And it was more than the confinement of the classroom – the guards had been furious when she and Jeff had arrived so late from fertilizing their wands, and as punishment, they had been confined to the school ever since. But it was more than that.

It wasn’t even the promise of her wand, now fertilized with the power to send them back home. That definitely made her anxious, but she had felt something else, too, some indefinable charge in the air.

Shen turned from where he had