The Dark Lord's Handbook: Conquest Read online

  So it was a surprise he felt the way he did, with his pureblood dragon offspring in danger. The thought of all those dormant eggs—his progeny—being consumed in molten rock sent a shudder of concern and fear through him. Lady Deathwing would be livid. She would be apoplectic and it would be his fault. He was the one who had always said to wait before she hatched them. He’d had no desire to be a daddy. It was him who had said they should bide their time. He had tried to make it sound like a cunning plan, but in reality he had just wanted to live a life of no responsibility and wallow in depravities of the flesh. And his good wife had believed him. After their infrequent matings, when she had the urge upon her, she had gone to the cave and laid another egg. There they lay, gestating slowly, waiting for their mother’s fire to bring them to term. And now this. It was potential disaster. The cave had been chosen specifically because Firerock had been such a placid volcano, merely belching lava at warming intervals. While this wasn’t the first time Firerock had erupted, it was orders of magnitude more violent than anything that had gone before.

  The group of strangers forgotten, Deathwing shot up to catch better wind and stormed east. The eruption was magnificent in its scale. Ash filled the sky, blotting out the sun. A river of lava flowed down the side of the mountain. Morden’s fortress, clear now as he got closer, was under a bombardment of rock. It looked bad, but Lord Deathwing suspected the damage was mostly cosmetic. The fortress was made from the hardest rock. Its outer walls were thick enough to stand twenty orcs across, and the gate took teams of beasts to open. Lord Zoon had laid strong foundations and Morden had used his host to build upon them. It was as impregnable and indestructible a fortress as any Dark Lord could want. The very fact it still stood meant Morden was alive and well. The walls and towers would have come crashing down if he had been killed. The fortress defied all scale and reason. Only the will of a Dark Lord made it possible. Only by his will could such a place rise from practically nothing in a few short years. Morden was getting strong and his fortress was testimony to that strength. The lad had done well. So far.

  He was flying in darkness now. Ash was falling like rain, turning the world grey. He could feel the weight of it settling on his back. He spiralled down, flipping as he went to shake it loose. He cleared the fortress walls and headed to the base of the volcano, which was still blasting rock into the sky. Smaller fragments hit him, cutting his side and tearing his wing. He bore the pain and dove to a defile in the mountainside. At its back there should be the entrance to the birthing cave. He was in luck. He could see the cave mouth and it was unblocked. The lava flows were coming down farther along the mountainside, so there seemed to be no immediate danger. He alighted, turning fluidly into human form, with dragon scale skin for safety, and ran into the cave entrance. It was pitch black inside but he could see clearly by the heat of the rock. It was the same warmth he could see with at night when he hunted warm-bodied prey, and it formed a clear path ahead.

  The passage twisted and turned before opening into a cavern. It took a second to confirm luck was on his side. The cavern roof above the eggs looked solid. Each egg was several feet tall and ovoid. They looked like a peculiar rock formation, laid out with equal spacing. He was surprised by their number; it was centuries since he had been here, when the first egg had been laid. Five centuries, mating every twenty years or so. The sums tallied. That was a fair number of dragons. And they would all be fully formed, having had plenty of time to mature. With ravenous appetites upon birth, they would grow to full size in no time. If this lot were birthed together it would be interesting to see how they got on. In the time when dragons were commonplace, each child would have been alone with no siblings as rivals.

  Lord Deathwing considered what to do next. Beneath his feet, the floor shook as the volcano continued its fury. Small rocks fell from above and cracks formed in the ceiling. The chamber was in a precarious state. As he saw it, his options were limited. The eggs could not be moved. They were fused into the rock as part of the laying and gestation. They were invulnerable to anything other than the entire chamber collapsing on them, or being consumed by lava, either of which could happen in minutes, hours, or days. He couldn’t hatch them. Only a mother’s fire could break them from their stone shells. He had to get his wife and bring her here. It was time the Deathwings became parents.

  Chapter 6 Swamped

  If sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, a Dark Lord’s wit plumbs the depths.

  The Dark Lord’s Handbook

  Hal thought the only good thing about the stinking swamp was that they were at the end of it. This would be the last camp they broke in the sodden miasma of the marshes. Ahead was a thin line of foothills ahead of sharply rising mountains. Ferg said Morden’s fortress was beyond those foothills, at the base of the mountain range. With an early start they may even have it in sight by the day’s end. They would be quicker on their way if Zara were to help him with the chores rather than berate him for the thousandth time about their orc guide.

  “He can’t be trusted,” she said. “It was a mistake bringing him with us.”

  “Hand me the kettle pot,” Hal said.

  Zara picked up the pot and tossed it at his feet, splattering his feet with mud. It was no matter—they were head-to-toe filthy already. It had taken them over a week to traverse the swamp, avoiding the worst of the sink bogs, predators, and hostile swamp dwellers. At the first stream they came to he would strip down and wash himself, and his clothes, to get the stink from him as best he could. He picked up the pot, wiped it with his sleeve, and pushed it into the top of his pack.

  “Have we missed anything?” he asked, scanning the ground where they had camped.

  “You’re not listening to me,” said Zara. “Now that we are through the swamp we don’t need him anymore. That was the only reason I agreed to have him along. We have the map. He’s done his job, and now it’s time we … you know.”

  “Killed him?” asked Hal. “That’s what you’re saying? Will you do it, or should I?”

  Hal tied up the pack, stood straight, and stretched his back. Zara was glowering at him. She was angry, but it would pass. He went over to where his sword lay propped against a tree. The scabbard, like everything else, was mud-covered. He would have to clean and oil the leather when he could; while they had been in the swamp it had been futile to keep anything free of filth. It caked everything. With the sword fastened at his side, he hefted the pack to his shoulder. It was heavy. It would have been lighter if he let Zara carry more, but he wanted to save her strength. It had been months of rough travel to get this far, living off the land as they went, and she needed the strength she had left for what lay ahead.

  “Kill who?” asked Ferg, coming back to the camp, something slimy still wriggling on the end of a stick over his shoulder. “Me?” An expression of feigned shock came to the orc’s face. “You can’t mean me? After all we’ve been through together? I’m disappointed. Hal. Zara. I thought we were friends.”

  While Hal wouldn’t have put Ferg on his Yule list for present giving, the orc had grown on him. It seemed a long time ago that they had crossed paths down in the docks of Xanthos. He and Zara had been trying to find anyone willing to sail east across the ocean. There had been a time when merchants risked the journey. Now, even backed by Chidwick’s promissory notes, they had been unable to find anyone willing to take the risk, no matter the reward. The lure of profit from the spices and other rare goods had been outweighed by the knowledge that across the ocean lurked a Dark Lord. He had been quiet for several years, but it was commonly believed he would be back. King Telem certainly seemed to believe so by the size of the fleet he had been building to defend his shores. Ferg had plugged them into the underground that was smuggling orcs and mercenaries east to join the Dark Lord. It was under this pretence they had made the crossing.

  “We’re not friends, orc,” said Zara.

  “Hal?” pleaded Ferg. He tossed the wriggling whatever-it-was on the ground. “You love me, don
’t you? You wouldn’t kill a poor, defenceless orc.”

  “We have the map,” said Zara. “And I would.”

  Ferg turned to grin at Zara. His teeth were sharp and hung over his lips, top and bottom. The teeth and his yellowed tan gave him away as an eastern orc, and lent credence to his claim that he had been part of the Dark Lord’s army before slinking away when the work had become too hard for his taste. The map he had been able to draw of the secret ways into the Dark Lord’s fortress looked convincing enough. He seemed to know all the details, far more than a made-up story would contain. The lure of Chidwick’s gold had sealed the deal.

  “You can try, sister,” said Ferg, his grin widening. “It wasn’t my idea to come along, anyway. It was hard enough to escape in the first place. Blame him. I would be happy to go. You’re on a fool’s errand.”

  “We’re not going to kill you,” said Hal. “And you’re not going anywhere except with us. You’re a smart orc. Until we get inside, you stick with us.”

  “And then what?” asked Ferg. “You kill me then? You may as well kill me now. Go on.” The orc pulled his shirt aside. “Stab me in the heart. It’s what I deserve. It’s not like I haven’t kept you alive for the last months. You would have starved three times over in the jungle, died of thirst in the desert, and been Stinker bait in the swamp. No, go ahead. Kill my worthless body.”

  “Enough of this,” said Hal. “Pick up, or kill, that … thing you caught and let’s go. We made a deal. You get paid when you’ve done your part. I want to be out of this swamp and on dry ground again.”

  With dagger stares being exchanged between Zara and Ferg, the trio finished getting their stuff together and broke camp. Hal was sure if anything happened to him, the two of them would kill each other in short order. But despite the bubbling resentment between Zara and Ferg, he felt they had, if only through necessity, become a close-knit group in the last few months. When faced with fight or flight, they had acted as a group. They had fled the sand worms and fought the swamp crocodiles. It was through necessity Zara had taught them to fight, as their competence with weapons helped her survival; though there were times when she reached around him to adjust his grip that her touch was more familiar than perhaps necessary. Her touch was not so gentle with Ferg; her technique with him had been to beat on a weakness until he learnt to defend it. Both were now passable with their weapons, though not to Zara’s standard. If it came to dragon slaying with a sword, then Hal was not sure he was the right man for the job. How else he was meant to kill a dragon remained unclear. He had to admit he hadn’t thought the whole dragon slaying part through. In reality, it didn’t matter until they got to where the dragon was, and that had proved much harder than he had imagined. He’d read far too many adventures where the hero had breezed across continents to face the deadly evil and dispatch it. True life had turned out otherwise.

  Something tugged at his mind, like a feeling he was being watched. Hal looked up.

  “What’s that?” he asked Zara.

  Zara followed Hal’s finger to where he was pointing. At first Hal wasn’t sure what the black shape in the sky was, and then he recognised it. It was a dragon. High up as it was, the wings were unmistakable. It was black against the grey sky of early morning. When Ferg saw it he shrieked and went face down in the mud.

  “Down, down!” screamed the orc. “Get down. It might see us.”

  “That’s a dragon, isn’t it?” said Zara. “Do you think it’s him? Morden?”

  Hal was rooted, transfixed by the dragon that was moving so fast, high above what little cloud there was in the sky. A dragon. And he was a Dragonslayer, from a long line of slayers, but the first to have seen one for centuries. Even so high up, the dragon looked big. And it was so fast. It looked impossible to kill. By all accounts, it breathed fire and could terrify a man to the point of pissing himself. Maybe there had been a secret way to kill dragons, passed down through the Dragonslayer generations, only to be lost before he had had the chance to receive it. Surely his father would have said something. Anything. Perhaps there was a vulnerable point to strike, or a time of day when it would be in deep slumber and could be sneaked up on. Maybe it had a weakness for a riddle or some other trick. If there was a trick, he had no clue what it was. He didn’t understand why the orc was so scared though. The dragon couldn’t possibly see them from so high.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “It can’t see us. It’s lost in the cloud.” Ferg was still face-down in the mud, scooping weeds and muck over himself as though trying to bury himself in the swamp. “It’s gone, Ferg. You can get up.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” said Ferg, wriggling ever harder into the soft earth. “Tricky buggers, those dragons. You never know. They make you feel safe. You’re having a laugh with your girl, then whoosh. It sweeps in and the orc you loved is gone. A dragon snack.”

  Hal was taken aback. “Is that what happened? Ferg, I’m sorry.”

  The orc didn’t reply. He was now lying perfectly still, arms and legs splayed. Hal had to admit he blended into the swamp well. He looked up to check that there was no dragon swooping in. The sky was clear.

  “Hang on,” said Zara. She walked over to Ferg and prodded him with her foot. “You said dragons. Not dragon. Those dragons. Not that dragon. I know your common is bad, but …” She kicked the orc again, harder this time. “Hal, he said dragons.”

  Zara was right. “Ferg?” asked Hal. “Dragons?”

  The orc turned his head and opened one eye. It scanned the sky. He turned his head the other way and repeated the action. Seemingly satisfied, the orc stood up. “Two,” he said.

  “Two dragons,” said Zara. “Great. Can I kill him now? Two dragons. Fantastic. As though one for a baker’s son wasn’t bad enough.”

  “Baker’s son?” asked Hal. So that’s what she thought. “You think I’m just a baker’s son?”

  “Oh Hal, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way,” said Zara.

  She looked mortified, but her comment had hit home. “I’m just a baker’s son on some wild adventure. Is that it?” he asked. “A fool’s errand? What were you planning? For me to lay eyes on a dragon and then give up? Why did you come anyway? And don’t say Chidwick. You could have left any time. If it’s such a hopeless cause, why come at all?”

  “Hal …”

  He could see she was sorry. He didn’t doubt that, but now he knew the truth. Now he knew she thought he was no Dragonslayer at all. He was an idiot. And she was right. He had a name and that was it. He could make a plaited loaf and the best iced buns, after his father, but a dragon slayer? What was he thinking?

  Then Ferg started to laugh. “Priceless,” said the orc, a huge grin across his face. “I thought I was dense but, Hal, you take the biscuit. Maybe because you’re a baker.” The orc laughed again. “Too much. Really. Too much.”

  It was too much for Hal. After Zara’s burning condemnation, now an orc’s ridicule.

  “Shut up! Or maybe I will let her kill you. Two dragons? When were you going to tell us? You think I’m a fool too?”

  “Not a fool, no,” said Ferg, regaining his composure. “Just blind. Can’t you see?”

  “See what?” asked Hal.

  The orc’s eyes flicked over to Zara. “If she’s not going to say then maybe I should.”

  “Don’t you dare,” said Zara, and her hand went to her sword hilt.

  “She loves you, you idiot,” said the orc. “That’s why she would follow you halfway across the world. I thought it was obvious. Those sponge baths together to save water? Give me a break.”

  Zara’s sword was half out of its sheath. “I’m going to cut that miserable tongue out, you worthless piece of orc shit.”

  “Is it true?” asked Hal.

  His question stayed her hand and she looked at him, mortified. “Yes, it was to save water …”

  Zara seemed to blush at her lie. So it was true. She had feelings for him. And now he felt equally bad. She was like a sister to him, a sister he
had never had. He felt comfortable around her, even naked, because that’s how he saw her. It was true she was beautiful, and every inch a woman—he had seen her naked often enough to know the truth of that—but he had never thought of her in that way.

  Until now.

  “Enough of all this,” said Hal. “The mountains are that way and there’s two dragons that need killing. You can come with me or turn back, it’s no different to me.”

  He hefted his pack, wriggled it onto his shoulders until it was comfortable, and strode off towards the mountains. Behind him he heard a slap, an exclamation from the orc, and then two sets of feet following behind.

  The dragon was lost to sight but clear in Hal’s mind when the ground began to shake violently, bucking hard underneath him. He managed to keep his feet. Zara waved her arms around to maintain balance, while Ferg dropped and hugged the ground.

  “Earthquake,” managed Hal. In the distance, over the mountains they were heading towards, Hal could see the top of a rapidly mushrooming cloud of ash, split through with flashes of lightning. Fiery rocks launched through the cloud as it climbed to the heavens. As he watched, the shaking stopped. Zara reached out an arm and clasped Hal to steady herself. He too felt oddly unbalanced, like those times as a child he had been spun around and then let go, only to fall over. Ferg remained cowering on the ground.