Maybe you are a demon and maybe not. Whichever it is, I waste my time here. If you want the black staff, go out and find it yourself! I am going back to my father. Find someone else to do your killing for you!”
He started to turn away, but the demon reached out and touched his arm. Just the brush of those fingers against the fabric of his tunic was enough to cause Arik Siq to stop and turn. “Let me go.”
The demon nodded. “I intend to. But I want to tell you something important first.”
The Drouj gave him a look. “What is it?”
The demon crooked one finger, beckoning him to come closer. Warily, Arik Siq leaned in. One hand held a dagger not ten inches from the demon’s throat. “Be careful that you don’t cause my blade to slip.”
The demon smiled. “I am always careful.”
His hand whipped out, and he disarmed Arik Siq so quickly that the other barely knew what was happening. In the next second that same hand was closed about the Troll’s neck, squeezing. Arik Siq tried to free himself, but all of his strength had gone out of his body, leached away like water from a dry streambed.
The demon brought his face—Skeal Eile’s face—close to Arik Siq’s. “I am tired of you.
There was little enough reason to keep you alive in the first place and no reason at all now. You asked me to let you go? Very well. I will fulfill your wish. Good-bye.”
He brought his other hand up and placed it on the Troll’s head, fingers tightening. A jolt went through Arik Siq’s strong body and his arms and legs began to shake. He thrashed momentarily, and then steam began to leak from his eyes and nose and mouth and ears. A terrible look of anguish crossed his rigid features, twisting them into a grotesque mask. The demon kept smiling at him, increasing the pressure. The Troll’s thick skin resisted his efforts far better than the soft skin of humans, but in the end it only prolonged the agony.
He took a long time to die, but in the end his heart gave out and he collapsed at the demon’s feet. The demon looked up and saw the other Drouj watching him in shock, either unwilling or unable to intervene in what they had just witnessed.
He shouted at them. “Get out of here! Go back to his father and tell him what has happened to his son!” He used his boot to roll the body away from him. A strange sense of rage filled him. “Tell him I’ve decided I will keep for myself the valley he wants so desperately!”
The Trolls hesitated and then quickly began moving away, glancing back at him in fear and loathing, causing him to smile. Stupid creatures, like all their kind. Beasts.
He surveyed the carnage anew, and then he sat down to wait.
THERE WERE MOMENTS OF PANTERRA QU’S LIFE THAT were frozen in his memory, perfect crystalline pictures made bright and clear, capable of recall as if they had happened just seconds ago. He never planned on keeping them. He didn’t even choose them.
They chose themselves, embedding in his consciousness and reappearing and fading on a whim. Some lingered because of their emotional impact, and some found a home for reasons he knew he would never fully understand.
But a special few were there simply because it was impossible to forget them, and he would not have chosen to do so if he could.
Such was the case with that singular moment in time in which the dragon descended from out of the bright blue of the afternoon sky and settled to the earth directly in front of him.
The weight of the creature surprised him. The dragon caused the ground to shake and clouds of dust to rise not only from the beating of his huge wings, but from the broad splay of his feet, as well. Pan took uncomfortable note of the size of the hooked claws, each as big as one of his legs. He watched awestruck at the complex way the leathery wings folded in on themselves and then a second time against the armored body. His eyes roamed across the staggered blankets of scales that covered the great body, aware of how they grew uniformly smaller toward the ends of its forelegs where they joined to the great claws and to the places where the neck joined to the head. The dragon’s skull was encrusted with knobs and horns, his eyes buried deep beneath jagged brows, and its massive jaws studded with clusters of broken teeth that protruded from blackened gums.
But it was the sheer size of the beast that overwhelmed him. The dragon was too big to take in all at once, and he could not seem to bring himself to believe that such a massive creature was possible. Even though Pan had seen him once already. Even though he was standing right there in front of him, looming over him like some great cliff. Even so.
The dragon held himself perfectly still for long moments, his eyes shifting between Panterra and Phryne Amarantyne, as if deciding which to eat first. It was a terrifying thought, but an inescapable one. Dragons ate meat, the legends said. So why wouldn’t he think about eating them? Yet he didn’t seem interested in doing that. He studied them in a way that suggested he was looking for something else.