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  Shay rose to his knees and saw a smooth river stone before him nearly as large as a skull. With both hands, he lifted it above his head and hurled it at the slavecatcher, who was struggling to stand. The heavy rock caught the dragon in the side of his jaw. Zernex's head was knocked back to the gravel. He still wasn't dead. He lifted his long, serpentine neck, his jaw bleeding and broken, and looked toward Shay with murder in his eyes.

  In a flash, there was an arrow sprouting between those eyes, the green, leafy fletching shuddering from the sudden halt of its flight. Zernex's golden eyes crossed as they tried to examine the object between them. Then they fluttered shut, and the slavecatcher's head dropped. Shay grabbed another good sized rock and lifted it, holding it for a moment above his head, waiting for any sign of life. At last, he dropped the stone before him. Zernex wasn't breathing. The dragon would never catch another slave.

  Shay rose on unsteady feet. He was breathing hard, his heart racing. The last five minutes of his life seemed disconnected and unreal. The bodies of three dragon and two men sprawled before him, their dark blood blending with the gathering shadows. He saw the leather satchel and lifted it, slinging it back over his shoulder.

  He looked up toward the hillside, searching for any signs of movement among the black branches of the pines. The shadow he'd seen earlier was gone.

  "A-are you really Bitterwood?" he asked.

  No one answered.

  "Are you… are you going to Dragon Forge? To join the rebellion? I've read about you. You fought at the last rebellion. At Conyers."

  Shay listened hard, certain he heard movement.

  It was, perhaps, only the rustle of trees in the winter night. Shay waited for several minutes, until the cold set his teeth chattering. He knew his only hope of surviving the night was to keep moving. He turned up the collar of his coat against the breeze. He rubbed his windpipe, feeling the indentations on his throat where the slavecatcher's claws had been. When he lifted his fingers, the tips were red and wet. He turned toward the west, and saw that the clouds above the distant foundries glowing brightly, reflecting the furnaces of the rebellion.

  Shay took one last glance at the pines, shifted the pack to better balance it on his back, and walked toward the glow on the horizon. The foundries of Dragon Forge burned like an eternal sunrise. This was the hope of the slave. With numb feet he staggered forward, freedom bound.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  GOOD BOSS

  THE EARLY MORNING light coming into the loft was tinted yellow by the sulfurous plumes that rose from the smokestacks. Jandra had been in Dragon Forge for a week now and still wasn't used to the stench, the rotten-egg aroma of coal burning continuously. One of the furnaces had been transformed into a crematorium, adding a black, oily soot that coated every exposed surface and smelled disturbingly like charred bacon. The bacon-stink of the crematorium swirling together with the egg-stink of the foundry left Jandra certain she'd never want breakfast for the rest of her life. She leaned against the window, looking out through the wavy glass, her forehead touching the cold pane as she gazed toward the low hills beyond the walls of the fortress. The last of the snow had melted off, leaving the landscape a mucky, reddish brown.

  She was waiting on the second floor of the central foundry, in a high-roofed loft with exposed ceiling beams and baked brick walls. The floors were thick, oily timbers, worn smooth by centuries of constant use. Half a dozen tables had been lugged into the space and all were covered with sheets of parchment scribbled with Burke's notes and diagrams. Across the room, coals glowed cherry red in a large open fireplace. The room was chilly despite this. She sank her hands deeper into the pockets of her ridiculously large, ill-fitting coat. It was a dark green coat from an earth-dragon's formal guard uniform, designed to fit a creature three times as broad across the shoulders as she was. Beneath the coat she wore a man's cotton shirt and baggy britches. When she'd arrived at Dragon Forge, she'd been wearing a blood-stained blanket and a dress torn down the back from neck to waist. Everything she'd worn had been so ripped or filthy she'd wound up burning it all. The only things she'd kept were the large silver bracelet on her left wrist and her knee-high black leather boots.

  Behind her the elevator chattered. The iron cage rattled as the lift chains locked into place. The door squeaked open and Burke the Machinist rolled his wheeled chair onto the thick oak planks of the floor. Burke's eyes were bloodshot; he'd obviously worked through the night. His long dark hair was normally pulled into a tight braid, but this morning his hair hung freely around his shoulders, revealing numerous streaks of gray. Burke wasn't ancient; he was only in his fifties, in reasonably good health despite his broken leg. A member of an ancient race known as the Cherokee, Burke possessed a sharp-featured face with a strong jaw that gave him an air of authority. The symmetry of his features was broken by three parallel scars along his right cheek. Behind a newly-fashioned pair of spectacles, Burke's eyes glimmered with excitement. In his lap, he carried an iron rod, the final product of the night's work.

  "We've done it," Burke said as he handed the long rod to Jandra. He winced from the movement. Despite the mobility allowed by the wheeled chair, Jandra could tell his broken leg was a source of agony. He clenched his jaw and drew a long breath through his nose, then said, "It's a fully functioning prototype."

  Jandra took the device from Burke. The rod was four feet long and quite heavy despite being hollow. One end was open, slightly flared, sporting a perfectly circular hole almost a half-inch across; the other was fixed to a triangle of wood that served as a handle. The steel was lightly engraved with a scale pattern at the open end.

  "So this is a gun," said Jandra, turning the weapon every which way as she examined it. She stared down the shaft bored into the center of the tube. Could this weapon really change the world?

  "More specifically, a shotgun," said Burke. "And I wouldn't look down that hole. It's loaded. I've got the safety on, but there's no reason to press your luck. Going forward, I'll remember to mention this before I hand it to people."

  "So how does it work?" Jandra asked, examining the trigger.

  "It's a flintlock," Burke explained, wheeling his chair around to get closer. He pointed at the small iron hammer that was pulled back, held in tension by a spring. A small sharp splinter of flint was held at the tip. "When you take off the safety and pull this trigger, the hammer snaps shut and the flint strikes a spark into the flash pan, here. That creates a small explosion and lights this fuse, which then triggers the black powder packed into the rifle itself. The black powder is loaded into the barrel from the front and jammed tightly with the ramrod beforehand." He tapped a thin iron rod attached to the underside of the barrel.

  "Oh," said Jandra, not certain she could envision the process. She pulled out a small pad of paper from her coat pocket. "This sounds like something I should be writing down."

  "I doubt you'll have the luxury of checking your notes in situations where you'd be using this," said Burke. He showed her two white cotton sacks, each about the size of her thumb. "To speed the loading process and to keep the powder compact, I've sewed up the appropriate amount of powder into these bags. Each charge provides a serious kick. The other bag holds small lead spheres and is jammed in front of the charge bag. The explosion will produce an expanding force of hot gas that propels the spheres down the barrel at great speed."

  "How fast?"

  "The balls of lead will come out of the barrel at about ten times the speed that an arrow flies off a bow. It's going to make a crack like thunder."

  "Yowza," said Jandra.

  "Yowza?" asked Burke. "I don't think I've ever heard that expression."

  Jandra frowned. "I haven't either. It must be something she would have said."

  "The goddess?"

  Jandra nodded, then sighed. She already had enough problems connecting with other humans, having been raised by a sky-dragon. The fact that her most recent adventures had left her head jammed full of alien memories only added to he
r sense of isolation and loneliness. Of course, having the memories of a thousand-year-old woman from a far more technologically advanced society had a few benefits. She now knew the long-lost recipe for gunpowder, for example.

  Burke looked concerned. He was a member of the Anudahdeesdee, a Cherokee clan dedicated to remembering the secrets of the once dominant human civilization that existed before the Dragon Age. His people had a long history of confrontations with Jasmine Robertson, the so-called goddess, the woman who had altered Jandra's brain.

  "So, what are these scale marks along the barrel for?" She was eager to change the subject.

  "I often design my inventions to resemble creatures in the natural world, like my spy-owl, my chess monkey, the time-frog, etc. I was going to call the gun the Noisy Snake, but the scale pattern was taking too long, so I gave up halfway. It had no bearing on the function." He shook his head as he looked at the gun. "My grandfather used to scold me for being more concerned with making sculptures than machinery."

  Jandra smiled. "Your daughter showed me the spy-owl. I liked the attention to detail in the feathers. You're a talented sculptor. The fact that you've only needed a week to design and build a shotgun from scratch shows that you're an equally talented engineer. "

  Burked didn't look cheered by her words. "I'm putting a lot of trust in you, placing this in your hands and sending you outside the fortress. If the dragons capture this and figure out how it works, it could forever change the world. Are you certain you can get your powers back?"

  "Nothing in this world is ever certain," said Jandra. "But, the sooner I leave, the better the odds are that no one has taken the genie."

  Burke nodded. "Anza's anxious to leave as well. She says she's tired of the way this place smells. She should be here in a moment. Let me-" Before he could finish his sentence, shouting erupted outside the window.

  "Get it!" someone yelled.

  "Circle around!" a man called out. A dozen other excited voices chimed in.

  Jandra went to the window. She raised the pane and leaned out. The action was taking place only fifteen feet below her. A crowd of men were chasing a tiny green earth-dragon. The earth-dragon was the smallest she'd ever seen, barely a foot tall, obviously a child. Unlike adult earth-dragons, wingless beasts who moved in a slow plod, the earth-dragon child was darting back and forth like a jackrabbit. Despite its speed, it was pinned in by the crowd, and quickly found itself with its back to the wall directly beneath Jandra.

  The men gathered round, keeping a slight distance as the small dragon opened its turtle-like jaws wide and hissed. Its tiny claws flexed as it took up a defensive stance. Its long, skinny tail whipped back and forth like a cat ready to pounce.

  Jandra recognized the leader of the men, a white-haired, bearded fellow named Frost, a blacksmith from the foundry. His eyes were wide and he was smiling, as if chasing this young dragon were great sport.

  "Frost!" Jandra yelled. "What are you doing?"

  The crowd looked up. Whispers ran among the men. Jandra caught the word "witch" among the murmurs.

  "We found this lizard hiding in a cellar! We're going to cook it!"

  In response, the earth-dragon yelled, "No eat! No eat!"

  Jandra felt her stomach turn at the thought of what these men were going to do. A month ago, the drop to the street would have looked imposing. But, in a process similar to the reshaping of her memories, her body had also been fine-tuned, leaving her with a physical prowess that rivaled even the legendary Bant Bitterwood. She leapt from the window, shotgun in hand, and landed in a crouch between the crowd and the dragon child.

  "Back off!" she said. "The new rule is: if it talks, we don't eat it."

  The men looked wary. Jandra knew it was due to her reputation as a witch… a reputation that, at the moment, was completely undeserved. Once, she'd commanded the elements, and would have been able to summon a ring of fire to shield her, or simply turn invisible to escape a fight. Unfortunately, she required a device known as a genie to use her abilities, and her genie had been stolen. Until she got it back, her "witchcraft" was nothing but bluff.

  She stood, pulling back her shoulders. The green wool coat she wore hung down to her ankles. She hoped that the bulky coat and the thick heels on her leather boots helped hide the fact that the smallest of these men outweighed her by a hundred pounds.

  Frost was the largest of them, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, with biceps like hams. His face was speckled with a constellation of scars, pale white splotches from a life spent hammering hot metal. While some of the men looked nervous after Jandra's sudden appearance, Frost didn't show the least flicker of intimidation. He said, "Even if you are Ragnar's sister, you have no authority to declare what is and isn't food."

  Jandra put the shotgun to her shoulder, imitating the firing stance she'd seen in Burke's sketches when he'd designed the gun.

  "I think you'll find this gives me the authority," she said.

  Frost didn't look impressed.

  "Is this more of your magic, girl?" Frost mocked. "Where I'm from, we burn witches. Perhaps we'll cook the lizard over the fire we build from your bones."

  The dragon child grabbed Jandra's coattails. He cowered behind her legs and yelled, "No eat! No eat!"

  Frost took a step forward.

  "Not one more step," Jandra growled.

  Frost took one more step.

  Jandra raised the barrel of the shotgun, targeting the empty air above Frost's head. She pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. What had Burke said about a safety? She examined the intricate firing mechanism.

  Frost reached out to grab the gun. Jandra slipped aside the metal latch that kept the flint from falling. She pulled the trigger again as Frost's fingers closed on the barrel. The hammer clicked down. For half a second, there was a flashing light and a sizzle, plus a lot of smoke.

  Lightning struck.

  At least, it seemed like lightning, with a bright flash, a thunderous boom. The butt of the shotgun slammed into Jandra's shoulder, knocking her into the wall. Everyone in the crowd jumped in unison, wide-eyed.

  Frost released the gun and spun away, cursing. He raised his hand to his right ear. Jandra had meant to aim above his head, but the gun had fired in a more or less random direction after Frost grabbed it. When Frost lowered his bloodied fingers, his ear was gone. Only a few shreds of bloody flesh dangled where it had been.

  Jandra was disoriented. She hadn't expected the gun to be so loud. She looked around, uncertain where the dragon child had gone. Her arm was numb from the impact of the shotgun.

  She couldn't help but wonder why the goddess had worked so hard to rid the world of guns. Of what use was a weapon that crippled its user?

  The crowd grew deathly silent as Frost recovered his wits. He narrowed his eyes in anger.

  "Witch," he snarled. Jandra could barely hear him over the ringing in her ears. "The last time a woman scratched me, I tore her nails out!" He lunged toward her, arms outstretched.

  Before Jandra understood what was happening, something human-sized dropped down from above, landing between her and Frost. The crowd sucked in its collective breath.

  There was a loud SNAP. Frost shrieked.

  Jandra blinked her eyes. The person who had jumped in front of her was Burke's daughter, Anza. Anza was dressed in black buckskins and had at least a dozen blades strapped to her body. It was said that Burke had trained Anza in the art of combat from the day she'd learned to walk. Frost fell to his knees in front of Anza. Anza shifted her body slightly and Jandra could see that she had Frost's middle and ring fingers in her grasp, bending them back much further than unbroken fingers could possibly bend.

  Anza pushed Frost away and stood between Jandra and the crowd, drawing a long slender sword from the scabbard slung over her back. The razor-sharp edge gleamed like a mirror in the smoky light.

  Men at the back of the mob looked around and wandered off, as if suddenly remembering other appointments. Some of the nearer men looked down
at the ground as they, too, walked away. Only two men remained behind to help Frost back to his feet.

  Frost looked as if he were on the verge of spitting at the two women. Then, his eyes flickered upwards. Burke was at the window above, looking down sternly.

  Frost growled, "Wait until Ragnar learns of this!"

  "Why don't you go tell him?" said Burke. "He can come to me if he wishes to discuss the proper punishment for a man your age threatening teenage girls with violence. I'm disappointed in you, Frost. You're one of the best fighters I know. But there's a fine line between a fighter and a bully. I would advise you to learn where that line is."

  Frost glared as he turned away, leaving the two woman alone.

  Anza gazed up at her father, a smug look in her eyes.

  "Don't feel proud," Burke scolded. "You just ruined the hand of one of my most experienced blacksmiths. And Jandra, that was a damned stupid thing to do. Why didn't you let them eat the varmint? It may be small and cute, but it's still an earth-dragon. We killed them by the thousands to take Dragon Forge. What's one more dead lizard?"

  "This is only a child!" Jandra protested. "He's innocent! He's more frightened of us than we are of him."

  "Where'd the lizard go?" Burke asked. He was still in his chair, and couldn't look straight down.

  Jandra studied the area. Had the dragon slipped away while she was distracted? Finally, she noticed a shadow on the wall, and a peculiar outline. She knelt and reached toward the shadow.

  The outline on the wall shifted color slightly. The eyes became visible as they looked at her. The chameleon-like camouflage vanished as the dragon shifted back to a deep green hue, almost black. It held a skinny arm toward her, the claw at the end outstretched like a human hand, though it had only three fingers. These digits ended in claws that any bobcat would have envied.

  "No eat?" the dragon child asked.

  "No eat," said Jandra, taking his hand. "I'll protect you." She lifted the dragon child up and hugged him to her chest.