I could not hear a thing. That is where this one starts. Jurge’s roar had gone through the lot of us and left me standing in a silent garden with my ears full of blood and my arms hanging at my sides, able to walk and able to think and able to do precisely nothing else. Everything I know about the end of that fight I know because Momen kept talking in my head.
The argument we had over the bond, while none of us could move, was whether to kill Jurge quickly or to keep something back for Ursus. The Professor’s worry was reasonable: we had watched that purple wretch unmake a man into dust on the spot, and the whole reason we had come down here was to carry Jurge’s carcass home with the blood still in it. Lose the body and we lose the cure and every one of these men dies for a wind-up toy and a grudge. But I had a look around at the state of us, and I told him plainly that we did not have the luxury. Drag this out and there would be nobody left standing to argue over the corpse. He took the point. Kill Jurge, and keep away from the other one.
Tittlin was somewhere under the collapsed gatehouse with a mountain of stone across his back and no air left in him, and his solution was to put his head inside the bag of holding and breathe out of that. I want it understood that this worked. He lay there half-crushed in the dark with his skull in a bag and chatted to us the whole while, as cheerful as a man at a bar, because whatever Friar Zeckus built him out of does not seem to include the part that panics.
Then Jurge did us the single greatest favour of his life. He turned from us, saw Ursus hanging in the air above his garden, and bellowed at him — and the ceiling of his own hall came down. The stones did next to nothing to the purple dragon. The fall did. Eighty feet onto the flagstones with a mountain’s worth of rubble on top of him, and he stayed pinned there for a good long while, thrashing.
My own hearing came back a moment later, and I have rarely been so glad of anything. One of the mind masters was less fortunate; he had gone down senseless in two feet of standing water and never came up. A miserable way to go, and it cost us nothing.
And then Opera ended the matter, more or less. He caught Momen’s eye, nodded once — the only piece of tactics I have ever seen him agree to in advance — and went straight up, ninety feet, turned over at the top, and came down on Jurge’s back with the whole weight of himself. It drove the adamantine dragon flat into the ground and ploughed a crater through the garden, tumbling the dead aside like leaves. When the dust settled Opera was simply sitting on him, riding him, and tearing chunks out of the back of his neck. Then he spun in place and light came off him in a wheel, and every man of ours standing near enough felt their wounds draw shut. That is the part I still cannot get used to. He wounds them and he mends us with the same gesture, and he enjoys both.
Ursus got himself loose about then and did what he always does, which is go after the thing that can hurt him. He reached for Opera’s mind. I watched Opera’s head come up and his eyes go blank and Momen said the weave was buckling around him — and then a golden light burst out of the dragon from the inside and threw the whole working off. Ursus read that correctly, decided we were going to finish Jurge with or without him, stepped sideways out of the world, and reappeared at a safe distance with his cannon on his shoulder. He put a ball straight at Jurge’s skull. It bounced off one of the plates above his eye and went spinning away into the dark.
So it was not Ursus who killed him, and it was not Opera, and it was certainly not me. The Duke’s veterans had been emptying cannons at that dragon for a solid minute and hitting nothing but garden. One of them lost patience with the lot of them, threw down the gun, drew his longsword, and ran screaming at a creature the size of a house. He swung twice. The first went wide. The second went into Jurge’s eye to the crossguard.
The Lord of the Underground shuddered, got out one last roar — and I will say this for him, it was a good one — and his head came down onto the stones of his own garden.
What happened next I have no explanation for and Momen has three. Something came out of him as he died and went through all of us. A surge, like a full night’s sleep poured into you between one breath and the next; every wound I was carrying closed, the ache went out of my shoulders, and the magic I’d spent came back as though I had never spent it. One moment we were a handful of exhausted men standing in a ruin and the next we were fresh and dangerous. It caught Ursus too, which Tittlin, still under his rocks, was very quick to point out.
The Duergar who had stayed loyal to Jurge simply stopped. They put their weapons on the ground and stood there and wept, openly, in front of everyone. I have seen soldiers break before and this was not that. Their god had just been stabbed in the eye by a man with a sword.
I said as much to Opera over the bond. I told him I did not know whether it was wise, but that those people needed something to look at that wasn’t a corpse, and that he was — whatever else he is — the shiniest and most persuasive creature any of them had ever seen, and that he might give them something to work toward. He thought about it for exactly as long as it takes to be flattered. Yes. That’s a good idea. I could become the first dragon to convert the duergar to good. Then he turned his head and looked across the garden at Ursus and said, quite pleasantly, that there was of course one large obstacle to that.
I went and got Tittlin out of the rubble first — reached out with a shove of gravity and pulled him bodily up out of the stones with his head still in the bag, which is not a sight I will forget — and he got himself unbagged and upright just in time to miss the whole thing, because a heartbeat later I could not see either.
Opera took his light back. That is the only way I can put it. The golden glow he had laid over all of us went out at once and came flooding back into him, and he grew brighter, and brighter, and then brighter than anything I have ever stood near, until the spines along his back were standing straight up and burning. He jumped off Jurge’s corpse, ran at Ursus, leapt, and let out everything he had at once. The flash took my sight clean away for half a minute. When it came back there was no purple dragon. There was a scorch mark on the flagstones in roughly the shape of one, and there was Opera standing over it, smoking, visibly hurt by his own doing, and entirely pleased with himself.
Get cooked. That thing killed Tittlin in a pharmacy over a toy and wore his cloak afterwards to be funny about it. I am not sorry.
Then Opera climbed up onto a fountain, took a very large breath, and annexed the town. Hear me, oh people of Jurgetown — or should I say formerly Jurgetown. You are all now citizens of the Opera House. Your leader has been defeated, crushed beneath my radiance. There was a good deal more of it. There was a passage about how everyone loves all that glitters and nothing glitters more than he does, and a promise to explain everyone’s new positions under his benevolent rule in the coming days. The weeping duergar looked up at him. I think it may actually work.
Tittlin, who had been dead a month ago and buried under a ceiling ten minutes ago, was gone before the speech finished. He found Jurge’s hoard — a hall of it, floor to rafters, mostly hard coin — and came back with his bag of holding visibly bulging and his arms full and his trousers falling down. He also got his own things back out of it: the two birds sling, the cap of water breathing, the cloak of elvenkind, the periapt of wound closure, his bag of tricks, and that chocolate egg he refuses to explain. His scrolls had burned. His pirate hat is still gone. And he found the Wind-Up Merchant — the actual toy, the errand that started all of this and killed him once — and I watched him pick it up and look at it for a moment with an expression I could not read.
Momen worked his way across the field with his hands on the dead, laying Gentle Repose over each of them so they’d keep and so nothing could stand them back up, and put coins on their eyes to hold the lids. Then Opera raised an eyebrow at him and asked whether the corpse was not, in fact, the entire point of the expedition, and the Professor had to go back and do the dragon as well. He also went and knelt by the scorch mark, rubbed the ash between his fingers, found nothing left of Ursus worth having, and scraped the lot of it into a little earthenware jar he pulled up out of the ground. I did not ask why. I am fairly sure I know why.
We could have teleported the body out. Momen wanted to walk it down to the barge instead, on the grounds that hauling a dragon home by river is a great deal cooler than making it vanish, and I could not fault the reasoning. So we loaded our men and the Lord of the Underground onto the barge and poled ourselves out of the cave and up the river into the Imperial Plains, and spent eight slow hours dragging a dead god behind us. People came down to the banks to stare. Children asked their mothers what it was. We came into Elkenalden at half past four in the afternoon with that thing in tow, which I think is the single most impressive thing I will ever do.
They were ready for us. A guardsman waved us to a dock on the north side and there were wagons waiting — a fleet of them — and they carried Jurge up to a workshop full of people in leather aprons holding knives I have never seen the like of. They knew their business. Momen took charge of them anyway and told them where to cut and what to leave whole for his own work. The blood all went to the palace, which is the whole reason any of this happened: the plague has a cure now, or the beginnings of one. What came back to us was ten teeth, six bones, a horn, the breath pouch, the scales, both wings, and near seven hundred pounds of dragon meat, all of it packed into a trunk twenty feet by ten. Goras is going to be insufferable about the meat.
Then up to see the Duke. Lt. Baggins had already filed his report. Oberstein looked us over, noted the coins falling out of our pockets, and said he took it the hunt had been a success. We told him it had — and I was careful to say, in front of witnesses, that TM Opera O had not killed one dragon down there but two, that he had done it of his own free will and at cost to himself, and that the pardon is owed and had better be paid. I also told him that the duergar are no longer Jurge’s, and that the place is called the Opera House now, and that in my judgment a fundamentally good dragon sat on that throne is a better neighbour than whatever would have crawled into the vacancy. We lost a few men. Not many. Baggins says it could have been far worse and he is right; it would have been, without Opera’s light holding our people together.
We split what we’d taken out of the hoard on the workshop floor. The ring of invisibility came to me, on the argument that I am the one least likely to already be invisible. I took the sovereign glue as well, which is a jar of something that bonds two things together forever and can only be undone by a wish or a solvent nobody has, and which I intend to use for something both absurd and extremely important. I’ve got the potion of cloud giant strength too, so if Tittlin ever needs lifting out of a building again we have options. Momen took the fire resistance and the spell scrolls, on account of being the only one of us who can copy them out. The gold dragon scale mail is magnificent and none of us can actually wear it well, so it goes into storage at the CCMB until the next time somebody picks a fight with a dragon, which at our present rate is a fortnight. There is a set of horseshoes in the bag that make a horse float four inches off the ground and never tire, and no horse to put them on, and Tittlin has spent a great deal of the evening trying to convince us to nail them to a boat. The art pieces go home to hang on our walls. The rest is coin, and there is an obscene amount of it.
So. Momen went to the bank before he collapsed under his own purse, and bought three sets of chalks and inks for teleportation circles at a hundred gold each, since the only shop that sells them cheap is on the other side of the world. That is the next piece of work: Atlanta’s buildings. We are rich enough now to simply hire men to build the whole thing at once rather than scraping at it, and rich enough to talk seriously about a proper garrison down there, and about a wall of sending stones you could sit a clerk in front of like a switchboard. Momen also wants a second company of hands at the CCMB to take all the gear we keep hauling home and don’t use. And I have said out loud, more than once now, that I want to stop by Knight Faire on the way, just to look in on the Wyrmwood business, even if nothing comes of it. Katya is still out there. So is the lich.
But that is tomorrow’s ledger. Tonight we are all alive, both dragons are dead, Tittlin has his cloak back, and I spent a good hour of this evening not entirely convinced any of that was going to be true. It was looking very grim for a while there. We turned it around.