Chapter 37: Something to Sneeze At
The mountain shook.
It was not the usual tremor of dungeon work or shifting stone. This was something bigger, a single massive convulsion that sent a contrasting wave of loose snow and ash cascading from the upper peaks and cracked the obsidian face of the gate. A cloud of black dust rose toward the sky in a pillar, spreading outward at the top the way smoke spreads when there is nothing left to burn.
The goblins didn't wait to find out what had caused it.
"The Queen angers!" screamed one of the Dragon Clan patrols from his post near the eastern tunnel mouth, already running, his spear abandoned against the wall behind him. The others needed no further encouragement. They scattered in every direction with the urgency of people who had learned to read the mountain's moods and act accordingly. Ash fell over the landscape in a fine, grey curtain, settling on rooftops and tree branches and the backs of goblins who were not quite fast enough.
Barjuchne sneezed.
The fire lashed across the ceiling of the hoard room in a horizontal streak, scorching a black line across the stone before dying out.
Veliah straightened up from her crouch, brushing a flake of ash from her shoulder, and turned to look at the dragon girl lying on the handwoven quilt.
Barjuchne sat propped against the heap of warm gold coins, her scales dulled from their usual dark shine to something closer to slate grey. Her eyes, which normally burnt with steady crimson light, were doing something irregular, flaring bright and then dimming in slow pulses. She looked, in the most technical sense possible, terrible.
"I've never seen you get sick before," said Veliah, worried.
She crossed the room and pressed the back of her hand to Barjuchne's forehead, the same way she always did, knowing perfectly well it would tell her nothing useful and doing it anyway because the gesture itself mattered.
"Can dragons even get sick?" she asked, more to herself than to the dragon.
"I'm fine," said Barjuchne. She sat up with the determination of someone overruling their own body through sheer will. "I need to get back to work, or this place is going to fall apart."
Veliah's hands found her shoulders. She pushed.
Barjuchne went down.
Not because the push was forceful. Because the dragon didn't have the strength to resist it. She hit the quilt with a soft, inglorious sound and lay there staring at the ceiling with the expression of someone processing a humiliation.
Veliah looked at her own hands. Then at the dragon. Then back at her hands.
She said nothing about it. Barjuchne didn't either.
"You're going to stay right there," said Veliah, and her voice had the quality it got when she had already made a decision and was simply informing the relevant parties. She began adjusting the layers of warm gold around the dragon's sides, the coins heated from below by the dungeon's passive energy. They had built the bed that morning, dragging heated gold and layering it under and around the quilt in dense banks. "Honestly." She smoothed a fold from the fabric. "What were you thinking? You should have just flown away instead of getting frozen standing there like a bird that forgot to fly south for the winter."
Veliah straightened and looked at the dragon with something between frustration and genuine worry. "Who knows what something like that can do to a dragon? What if something inside of you got hurt?"
"I'm fine," said Barjuchne. "You worry too much, Veliah."
She sat upright again.
Veliah shoved her back down with both hands. The dragon's back hit the quilt a second time.
"'Worry too much'?" Veliah's voice went sharp at the edges. She stood over the dragon with her arms crossed and her eyes narrow, a posture she had been developing for months and had now refined into something genuinely effective. "Of course I'm worried." She exhaled through her nose. "I'd ask Rou-ya to help me put together something useful, but that's no good because of someone," she said, with a very precise narrowing of her eyes toward the dragon.
Barjuchne turned her head.
Across the hoard room, a little distance from the heat bank, Rou-ya lay in a low cot with a damp cloth over her forehead and the expression of someone who had been betrayed by their own body and had not yet forgiven it.
The goblin princess was not injured. She was simply spent.
The dungeon had been drawing on her energy to produce an egg for weeks, a slow and invisible drain that had reached its peak at the worst possible moment, leaving her pale and nauseated and entirely useless.
Beside her, in an adjacent cot, Ei lay with all four arms folded over her chest. Her compound eyes were at half-aperture, their usual shimmering quality reduced to a flat, dull glow. Her antennae drooped against the pillow in a way that communicated suffering.
Ei had the same condition as Rou-ya.
The ant princess turned her head at the sound of Barjuchne looking her way.
"My Queen," she said, her voice carrying its usual precision even at reduced volume. "If we die here together, we can finally leave all of these other nuisances behind." She blinked slowly. "Just the two of us."
"Fat chance," said Veliah, looking at Ei with the particular expression she reserved for statements she was not going to dignify with a full response. She looked back at Barjuchne. "I'm going to Jaesowen. There's an alchemist there."
Barjuchne sat upright immediately.
It was faster than the previous two attempts, driven by something that had bypassed her physical weakness entirely and gone straight to instinct. "Like hell!" The words came out rough and commanding. "Veliah. You are not to leave where I can keep you sa-sa-sa…"
The sneeze hit her before she could stop it.
Fire lashed across the ceiling in a second scorching arc. The candles on the far shelf went out, the others on the nearby shelf melted as the wash of fire ran over them. The shelf went up in flames. Veliah dropped below the level of the coin bank and came back up with singed hair at her left temple.
She looked at it. Then at the dragon. Her expression said several things without choosing any of them.
"It's in your territory," she said, with the patience of someone who has decided to be patient as a deliberate act. "Just down the mountain. I'll be fine. I'm going." She turned to gather her pack from the side table. "Don't always be so stubborn."
"What if you get lost?" asked Barjuchne. Her voice had shed its commanding register entirely, arriving at something rawer underneath. "What if you decide to run away?" She paused. "What if someone tries to steal you from me?"
The room was very quiet.
Veliah stood with her pack half-lifted and looked at the dragon girl lying in her heated bed of gold, grey-scaled and dim-eyed and genuinely frightened about something she would never say directly but had just said anyway.
She set the pack down. Crossed the room. Leaned over the dragon and kissed her forehead, her lips warm against the dulled scales.
Then she pushed Barjuchne back down a third time. "Don't be stupid," she said gently. "You'll be fine and I'll be fine. Let me help you."
She straightened and looked across the room. "Hey. You can come in."
Movement came.
The twin saintess priestesses approached, their footsteps quiet and synchronised, which they always were. Each of them carried a thick, leather-bound volume pressed against her chest with both arms. The books were old. The covers were cracked and the pages were yellowed at the edges and there were coloured ribbons marking what appeared to be dozens of specific passages throughout each volume.
Their eyes were bright with something that Barjuchne had not seen on their faces before. It took her a moment to place it.
Excitement.
Veliah nodded toward Barjuchne. "She's all yours."
The dragon looked at the twin priestesses. Then at Veliah. Then at the books.
"What is this?" she asked.
"My scheme," said Veliah pleasantly, "to get you to do what I want for a change. I decided you needed a sitter while I'm away."
"We have been waiting for this opportunity," said the first priestess, settling onto the edge of the gold bed beside Barjuchne with composure.
"For quite some time," said the second, sitting on the other side, already opening her volume to the first ribbon.
"Wait," said Barjuchne.
"It is time for you to learn scripture," said both priestesses excitedly, in unison. Barjuchne's face fell flat.
"The Book of First Flames, chapter one, verse one," began the first priestess, her voice shifting into the clear, practised register of someone who had been trained for public recitation from childhood. "In the beginning, before the mountains were set and the deep places were carved -"
"Veliah," snapped Barjuchne, overspeaking the rest of the line.
The elf was already shouldering her pack. She did not turn around.
"Verse two," continued the second priestess, her finger tracing the line with focused devotion. "And from the fire came the first breath, and the breath was given shape, and the shape was given purpose-"
"Veliah!"
Barjuchne tried to sit up. Two hands, one from each side, pressed her shoulders back down with gentle but non-negotiable firmness. "Verse three," they said together.
"You're a monster," said Barjuchne, watching Veliah go.
"They say that couples adapt their personalities to match each other," replied the elf, lifting one hand in a brief farewell wave without turning around. Her voice carried back down the corridor as she walked away. "I'll be back soon."
Something cold and round pressed against Barjuchne's cheek from above.
She turned her head.
Blibli's face hovered six inches from hers, compressed against the rim of the coin bank, her expression luminously cheerful and her googly eyes at maximum diameter.
"I'm also here!" said the slime princess, Blibli, just happy to be anywhere at all by the sounds of it. "Hello!"
The mountain air was ice cold to her after weeks inside the stone.
Veliah took a deliberate breath of it, her pack settled on her shoulders, and allowed herself one moment of simply being outside before continuing down the path. The sky overhead was pale blue and high and entirely indifferent to everything happening beneath it.
She began to walk.
The lizardmen appeared at the edges of her vision almost immediately, two of them pacing the tree line with silent, unhurried steps. They didn't approach. They simply moved with her, maintaining their distance.
Barjuchne's doing. Obviously.
The mountain shook once behind her.
Jaesowen Vale arrived around the last curve of the mountain road, and Veliah stopped.
"...Oh wow," she said quietly.
She had been gone for months. She knew, intellectually, that time had passed and things had changed, because Rou-ya's territorial reports mentioned growth figures and tribute numbers and population shifts in the language of administration. But numbers on paper were a different thing from standing at the edge of a place she had known as a modest village and finding something else entirely in its location.
The streets were full. Not the comfortable fullness of market day, but the dense, layered fullness of a place that had added many titanic waves of people to its population and was figuring out how to absorb them in real time. Merchant stalls lined the main road two deep on either side, their sellers calling over each other's voices. Carriages rolled past each other. Children ran through the gaps between adult legs. Adventurers moved through it all.
Barjuchne's governance had done this.
The roads were safe now, so merchants used them. The roads were safe, so people travelled them. People travelling meant coin moving. Coin moving meant this.
Veliah adjusted her pack and walked in.
Some of the older villagers recognised Veliah from the tributes. But the alchemist woman didn't seem to know her.
The alchemist's shop was where she remembered it, set back slightly from the main road behind a hanging sign that had been repainted since her last visit. New business, maybe. Or just paint.
She spent an hour inside.
Her story was that she was accompanying a travelling noble who had a large exotic reptilian companion from the distant lands. It was sick. The alchemist had not visibly reacted to any of this. In days like these, surely far wilder stories than this one had come across her counter.
She came out into the evening air with her bag rattling and clinking from a mass of stopped vials and wrapped compounds. The sky had moved toward the amber register of late afternoon. The streets were still busy, merchants beginning to pack up the day's remaining stock, children being called toward doorways by voices from upper windows.
Veliah looked at the mountain's peak in the distance. It sat dark and sharp against the warm sky, its upper edges catching the last of the direct light.
Quiet.
She assumed the dragon was either asleep or otherwise occupied, and either way it was probably fine.
"Time to go home," she said and began making her way when a voice suddenly caught her attention.
Veliah froze.
"Princess?"
The word hit her somewhere between her shoulders and her spine and stayed there like a dagger.
"Veliah? Is that you?"
She turned her head slowly.
The street was busy, bodies moving in both directions, the ordinary evening motion of a working town. And across it, standing at the edge of the opposite side, was a man she recognised.
He was older than she remembered. Travel-worn. His clothes were not quite right for the weather, the kind of clothes you pack when you leave quickly rather than when you plan. His eyes, which she had her mother's version of, were fixed on her with an expression she couldn't immediately name.
Her father.
The man who had decided to sell her to that horrible knight, the man who had decided to abandon her to what might well have been a flesh-eating monster, for the sake of his gold.
Veliah stood on her side of the busy street and looked at him and he looked back at her.