Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
By Nicholas Ozment
Smoke woke to a sound he had never heard in his cave before, a very unusual sound for a dragon’s lair: he heard the tinkling of tiny bells.
A little voice near his ear suddenly screamed.
“Smoke! Wake up and protect us!”
The dragon’s eyes—black slits in smoky amber, big around as tea trays—flicked open, scanning the darkness with catlike acuity. He lurched from his belly onto his four powerful legs, tail swishing in agitation like the oar of a longboat. His massive jaws craned apart, baring gleaming rows of dagger-like teeth. His forked tongue darted from his mouth like a cobra that wants to get out of its basket and kill whoever’s playing the bloody irritating flute.
“Who…dares…disturb…MY…SLUMBER?!”
Three small lights darted about the cavern. One was ocean blue, one was aqua green, and one was teal.
“What the blazes?” he rumbled. Then he realized what he was seeing. He snorted, which sent two puffs of his namesake bellowing from his nostrils. “Fairies!”
“Smoke! Our Champion! Save us!” squealed the lights.
“I have a fairy infestation,” the dragon mumbled. “Wait—what did you just call me?”
“He is coming! Defend us!”
“Who’s coming?” Smoke smelled the answer to his own question. A troll was coming. On a breezeless day he could detect troll scent a mile off, and this troll was much closer than that.
“What are you doing bringing a troll on my mountain?!” he roared. “It will take a good rain to clear out that stench!”
“We did not bring him here! We are running away from him!”
Smoke heard the troll stomping up the steep path that wended its way to Smoke’s bluff. Then he heard a rending sound, and felt through vibrations from the earth to his taloned paws that something outside was being uprooted.
More thumping footfalls.
A voice like a semi-articulate avalanche bellowed into the cave.
“Send dem whores out! My quarrel’s not wit’ you, wyrm!”
One of
Smoke’s pet peeves was being referred to as a wyrm—a distinct species from dragon.
“Like calling a wolf a
His other pet peeve was being ordered what to do.
Smoke padded to the entrance of his den and, blinking in the light of dawn, peered out. Not forty yards from the cave stood a large troll, his head nearly level with the second vertebra of Smoke’s neck. He was wearing a dirty loincloth and a glittering vestment of chain mail—the latter part being especially unusual for a troll.
The troll was admiring Smoke’s collection of suits of armor. These were propped up on poles and arranged in a long row beside the path, like tin-man scarecrows. The steel tableau had been donated—quite against their will—by knights who had, with misguided zeal, given Smoke a hard time.
The troll scratched a warty buttock, flashed a yellow-toothed grin and pointed with his club at a suit of armor. “Dat one was a customer of mine. Him too. Oh, dey claimed to be pious, didn’t dey? Hah! Dis one offered extra if I could arrange a tryst wit’ a virgin and a unicorn!”
“What do you want?” Smoke’s voice rumbled from the shadows of the cave.
The troll spun around. “I only want what’s mine. Dem’s my property you got in dere. I’m fairly askin’ you to send ‘em on out, ‘n I’ll trouble you no more.”
“What do you want with fairies?”
“Well, dat’d be my business. I stay out of yours, ‘n you stay out of mine. Dat seems fair.”
To emphasize his point, the troll slowly thumped the club he gripped in his right hand onto the palm of his left.
The club was, in fact, a small tree, its branches just showing the first buds of spring.
Smoke looked at the tree in the troll’s hand, then at the hole in the earth where the lone tree on his cliff had grown. His eyes grew wide and his neck reared up out of the cave.
“You—KILLED—my only greenery!!!”
The troll’s grin melted into a shocked frown. His body twitched as if his instinctual hindbrain were goading him to drop the tree and run like hell. But he bit his lip and stood his ground.
“I’m not afraid of you, dragon.”
This troll was rather brash, Smoke thought, which preceded another sudden realization: the troll was standing exposed in the full light of morning, and not turning to stone.
As if in answer to his unspoken question, one of the dancing lights came up behind Smoke’s bony-ridged ear and whispered, “His armor is enchanted—protects him from sunlight. Dragon fire too, or so he claims.”
“We’ll see about that,” Smoke growled.
The dragon’s mighty chest expanded like a bellows, then he sprayed a plume of fire that hosed the troll from head to foot.
When Smoke coughed out the last few spurts of smoky afterburn, the troll was still standing.
The links of the vest, however, were melted clean through and dropping off of him. They clinked to the ground about his gnarled feet in a pile of red-hot coils.
“Wow. It did protect you,” Smoke observed. “But it looks like that magic was a one-shot deal.”
The troll looked down in dismay. His lumpy Adam’s apple bobbed with a gulp. Then he threw the tree in impotent rage, knocking over several suits of armor.
“That scoundrel wizard Malwart—always bartering shoddy goods!” The troll turned to stone, frozen into a pose of shaking his fists up at the lethal sun.
Smoke turned back to the dancing lights in his cave. “There, your nasty troll pimp is gone, now run along.”
“But we cannot! We must stay with you, our Champion!”
“No. Your champion saved you, now do him a favor and make like fairy dust.”
“We will not,” the fairies pouted.
“Is eating a fairy good for settling the stomach?” Smoke’s tone was threatening. “I always get heartburn after breathing fire.”
“Oh, you would not eat us!” the teal fairy protested.
“You know me that well, do you? Willing to bet your life on it?”
“Blodsmear was not the only troll,” the aqua green fairy said. “He has brothers—his whole family is part of the ring.”
“The ring?”
“Their fairy prostitution ring. They capture and keep us as sex slaves.”
Smoke’s eyelids drooped to half mast, as if he were falling asleep standing. The fairies zoomed in closer, hovering around his head.
One eyelid snapped back up like a roll-up window blind and he said, “I have some friends who would be very interested to hear about that. It would get their hackles up to know someone is enslaving fairies in Liptonia. I’ll tell you where to find them. They can be your champions.”
“We want to stay with you!” The ocean blue fairy was overcome with weeping.
In a sly tone, the teal fairy said, “It is a shame that Blodsmear pulled up your only tree.”
“Nothing ever grows out here on this craggy cliff,” the dragon grumbled. “Except that one tree. The only bit of color around here for miles.”
“You have heard about fairy gardens?”
“Fairy gardens? Let me take a wild guess and say you mean gardens planted by fairies.”
“Oh, yes—we can get the most lush, beautiful flowers and shrubs and grasses and vines to grow practically anywhere.”
“Eh.”
“It must get lonely all the way up here.”
“I’m a dragon. We’re into the solitary lifestyle.”
The other two fairies had begun singing, a low, plaintive harmony.
“What are those two up to?”
“Just singing. Pretty, is it not?”
“Yeah. Not that I’m a judge of such things.”
“We could turn the cliff into a fairy garden, and sing you to sleep every night.”
The teal fairy joined the three-part harmony. The dragon was silent for several moments, listening to their haunting rendition of a song of the river naiad Ayné.
Then he cocked his head. “Well, I suppose the place could use some freshening up.”
The fairies squealed with delight.
“But this is MY home. I’m the boss. I must approve of all ‘prettifying’ that’s to be done. I don’t want visitors to forget—not that I get many—it’s a male dragon lives in this cave.”
The fairies most heartily expressed their collective agreement.
“And the first step to tidy things up around here—” Smoke cantered toward the troll and raised one foreclaw to knock it down the cliff.
“No—wait,” the teal fairy interjected. “I have an idea how we can use that in the garden. It should have a fountain.”
#
The south
tower of
Stone stairs spiraled around the inside wall of this tower, winding up to the lofty upper chambers. These were the wizard’s chambers, from which Ropespor commanded a far greater view of the walled city and surrounding land than did the king himself.
Making their way slowly up the narrow stairs was a knight and his squire. In the lead, the knight especially hugged closely to the wall. They were but two-thirds of the way up, and already the drop was dizzying.
“They really should install a banister,” the squire, Blug, observed.
The venerable Sir Roger merely grunted. He was a brave man, but Blug knew his master feared two things: the first was rats, the second, heights.
“You know what would really rattle you, Sir?” Blug, as was his habit, spoke his sudden idea without censor. “Being stuck up on the tippy-top of a high peak that was crawling with rats. Or maybe flying rats—how about rats with wings? And you’re just clinging to this thin peak.”
Roger, ashen-faced, cast a withering glance over his shoulder. “From this height, I wonder how long it would take for a fairly heavy squire to hit the ground?”
“I’ll stop talking now.”
Sir Roger was more fit than men half his age, but some men half his age were already grandfathers. He had removed his armor before ascending, but he was still sweating profusely, his thin silver hair pasted to his forehead. He could only hope that his final victorious adversary would not prove to be these stairs.
The stairs continued all the way to a heavy wooden trapdoor in the ceiling. When they attained the landing just beneath the trapdoor, Roger rapped on it. The door lifted and the knight gratefully walked up into the chamber.
The stairs continued up around the curve of the chamber to another trapdoor in the next ceiling fourteen feet above, beyond which were the wizard’s private chambers and, above that, the tower’s observation deck—from which Ropespor could track the stars or strategically cast spells afar.
When Blug had entered, Ropespor waved his hand and the trapdoor fell back into place.
The large, round room was cluttered with all manner of strange contraptions and bric-a-brac. Shelves—of potions, elixirs, and unguents, of eldritch tomes and quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, of strange specimens in jars—lined the walls from floor to ceiling. The room was lit by three braziers evenly spaced about its circumference, as well as a fire in the large fireplace. The chiaroscuro of dancing light and shadow eerily illuminated a large suit of armor beneath the stair and, against the wall opposite, a stuffed creature. Having been mounted rearing up on its hind legs, its head was only a couple feet shy of the ceiling. The striking beast was a pelicanbear, a strange hybrid of bird and mammal with the body of a bear and the head and plumage of a pelican. Its baggy beak was open menacingly.
Roger breathed a sigh of relief. “Now I know how you stay so fit at your age, wizard, walking up and down those blasted stairs.”
“Are you mad? Why walk when I can teleport?”
“Then why did you not teleport us up?” Roger sounded cross.
“You’re a knight,” the wizard grinned through his long gray beard, “you need to stay fit.”
“I have seen damn near seventy summers! My heart could have failed ascending those steps—then what good would I be to the Kingdom?!”
“It would be a nice ceremony.”
Blug stood in the background eyeing some of the jars dubiously, patiently waiting for the knight and the wizard to get their “pleasantries” out of the way and onto business. Two grumpy old men was how Blug once described them. But he loved both curmudgeons, and was unflinchingly loyal. Even if he sometimes wanted to strangle them.
“Why did you have us trudge all the way up here?” Roger finally broached the point of this rendezvous.
In answer, the wizard gestured toward an iron cage on an oaken table near the center of the room. Inside sat a small, yellow, demonic-looking creature, its arms folded stubbornly.
“On my
recent little reconnaissance mission into Radnoxious’s
Roger’s eyes opened in surprise. “I would indeed say! We can ply that vile beastie for information, get him to reveal all his master’s nefarious plans.”
The wizard shook his head regrettably. “Not that easy, I’m afraid. The most I’ve managed to get out of him is his name. B’rat.”
The imp, curious about the conversation of which he was the subject, stood and peered through the bars. B’rat was a bright-yellow imp with a spiked head. He was naked and hairless, about the size of a housecat, with a stumpy tail and bat-like amber wings.
“I can persuade it to talk.” Roger’s tone was full of ominous suggestion.
“I rather doubt it,” Ropespor said. “He’s an imp. He enjoys pain.”
The imp stuck out his yellow rump. “Come on, give it to me! Make me beg for mercy!”
Blug interjected. “How about we poke out one of its eyes, then threaten to put out the other one?”
“He’ll just regenerate it.”
“Oh.”
“No, I’m afraid the interrogation tactics of the Ghon Zalos will not work here. I’ve decided to pay a visit to Smoke, see if he has any suggestions.”
“Smoke—the dragon?” Roger lifted an eyebrow. “He an expert on imps?”
“Smoke isn’t an expert on anything, except laziness—a trait shared by all dragons. But he has been around longer than all three of us combined.”
“Does King Samuel know about the prisoner?” Roger asked.
“No, not yet. I was hoping you’d fill him in, while I work on the problem of making the prisoner worth our while. And you need to impress on our dear monarch that the fewer know about the imp, the better. If we do get him to talk, but Radnoxious learns we have taken him, the sorcerer will just change his plans and we’ll lose the advantage of surprise. Now, I’ll be off to see the dragon.”
“You want I should stay here and stand guard?” Blug asked.
“No, you can go with Roger. Eldoop is keeping an eye on the imp.”
The wizard’s familiar had blended in among a row of taxidermist’s mounts, perched next to an owl, a badger, and a cthulhog. Eldoop, which looked like a mad artist’s conception of the offspring of a bat and an otter, stretched out its forepaws and yawned.
Roger eyed the beast suspiciously. “Is not that like putting the cat in charge of the canary?”
“Pshaw! Eldoop’s far more intelligent than his looks suggest. He won’t eat B’rat unless the imp tries to escape.”
Without further ado, the wizard took up his rowan staff, whipped the hem of his blue robe dramatically, and vanished in a puff of gray smoke.
Blug coughed and pinched his nostrils shut. “Doeth he realize how bad that thmellth?”
“Like eggs gone bad,” Roger grumbled. “And why didn’t he teleport us to the king’s chambers first?!”
“Ahhh, a most pleasing perfume.”
Roger and Blug both turned to the imp, who was sticking his nose through the bars of the cage and sniffing.
#
For a moment Ropespor thought his teleportation had gone awry. He stood on the rough-hewn mountain path that terminated, a hundred yards on, at the entrance to Smoke’s lair.
But the cliff was transformed. It was surrounded by a hedge and trellises of ivy and creeping rose. Flowers of a hundred hues flourished everywhere, and the wings of hovering butterflies gave the impression the blooms had taken flight. The fragrant odors were near-intoxicating. There was a sound of trickling water: in the middle of this garden was a large stone-lined pond, at the center of which stood a fountain.
The piddling fountain with the never-empty bladder was not your typical waif or clichéd cherub.
“Ghastly,” Ropespor murmured.
He walked past the troll-fountain and toward the cave, from which floated female voices singing.
When he stepped inside and lifted his staff, illuminating the cavern with magical light, he was for a moment struck speechless.
The cavern was decorated wall-to-wall with arrangements of cut flowers. On the walls grew a species of clinging ivy that seemed to thrive in darkness. Smoke lay on his belly, a wreathed garland draped around his neck. Three fairies lounged on his back, filling the cave with song while they braided more garland.
“Smoke, you’ve been domesticated!”
The dragon reared his head and practically jumped, the sudden move shaking the fairies off him. The singing ceased and they hovered in the air behind him.
“You’ll have a hard time saying that after I eat you.” Smoke looked slightly embarrassed to be caught thus. He reached up one curved talon and snapped the garland off his neck.
Ropespor tried to suppress it, but his sudden chuckling fit got away from him and his whole body was soon shaking with laughter.
“Do you come visit me just for a good laugh, now?”
“No—no—no I’m sorry Smoke. Of—ha—of course not.”
“No, of course not. You’d never drop in just for a visit, so you must be in some kind of trouble you want a dragon to bail you out of. Funny way to elicit my help, that, showing up unannounced and laughing at me.”
“It’s just…unexpected.” The wizard managed to regain his composure. “Who are your guests?”
“Lily, Rosemary, and Honeysuckle.”
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to them?”
“Does that mean you’ll be staying?”
“Not long. I just have a question, really. I came to solicit your advice.”
“Now it’s my turn to laugh. Ladies, this is the wizard Ropespor.”
Lily, the fairy surrounded by an aqua-green aura, spoke up. “We have heard all about you. Smoke said you are one of the Champions who can help us!”
“Is that so? Help you with what?”
Smoke interjected. “That fountain out there used to be Blodsmear, their pimp.”
“Their pimp? I’m not familiar with the term.”
“He was part of a family of trolls running a slave prostitution ring.”
Ropespor’s beard bristled. “Slavery? When King Samuel hears of this, he’ll wipe out the whole stinking lot of them.”
“Seems one or two of his knights are regular customers.”
“What?! They’ll be de-knighted and thrown in the dungeon!”
“So what’s your problem?”
“Eh?”
“For what did you come seeking my vast wisdom and keen insight? And if you start laughing again, I’ll forget we’re friends.”
The wizard looked around the cavern, eyeing the flowers with renewed interest. He then turned his sly regard back to the hovering fairies. “I think I may have found my answer. I have an idea, and I think I would like to borrow your guests.”
#
The following day, Sir Roger was again summoned to the wizard’s tower. As he and Blug ascended the stairs, the knight periodically uttered curses at again having to climb the hundreds of steps.
Last time he had made the mistake of wearing the leather garments that padded his armor; this time he wore only a short jerkin of thin wool dyed blue. It exposed his arms and legs, which were still taut with tough, thinly-corded muscle beneath his wrinkled, age-patched skin.
When they were near the top, they could hear faint strains of singing from the room above.
Such a fair sound had never before caressed their grimy earlobes.
“What does he have up there now—harpies?” Roger wondered as they attained the top landing.
“How could such a lovely sound come from a thing as hideous as a harpy?” Blug asked.
“During the Virgiomer War, I was on a ship that ran aground when the crew was overcome by the songs of a flock of harpies nesting in the sea-cliffs.”
“How did you escape?” In all his years of serving as Roger’s squire, Blug still had not heard all the aged knight’s adventures—though he had endured the retelling of a choice few dozens of times.
“I stuffed seaweed in my ears and decapitated every last harpy in that shite-befouled roost. Ahh, those were the good old days.”
“I wish I could’ve been there.”
“Oh, you would have had a ball—“
The knight’s reminiscence was cut short by the opening of the trapdoor. The wizard peered down at them with one finger pressed to his lips.
“Shhhh. Come up, but be quiet. We’re interrogating the prisoner.”
“Did you douse the room with perfume?” Roger whispered as he walked up. Then he fell silent.
Multi-colored arrangements of flowers in vases of ceramic and fine crystal filled the room. The room’s normal fixtures rose out of this cacophony of colors—the pelicanbear mount, the suit of armor, the various stuffed beasts and fish and fowl—giving the impression that they were peeking out from a sea of blossoms. The flowers were piled up all around the imp’s iron bars. Hovering around the cage were three dancing lights. The enchanting vocals emanated from them.
B’rat, the imp, was lying facedown in the bottom of the cage with his arms folded over his head. He seemed to be writhing in agony. His little tail lashed the way a worm does when you grab one end of it.
“What in Grog’s name are you doing?” Roger whispered. Blug merely stood speechless, dazzled by the lights and entranced by the hauntingly beautiful voices.
“Killing him with kindness,” Ropespor whispered back with a chuckle.
“That is…brilliant?” Roger sounded unconvinced.
“Just wait and see. I do believe our little yellow friend is close to cracking.”
Sure enough, a minute later the imp leapt up, rattling the cage, and squealed in a high-pitched voice, “A’right--a’right--a’right already! Shut them up and I’ll blab! Whaddaya wanta know?!”
“That’s better,” Ropespor grinned through his beard. “We’ve finally figured out how to inflict pain on an imp.”
He approached the cage, arms folded.
Behind him, Blug warned, “Careful what you believe, Ropespor—prisoners are like to say anything to make the torture stop…Or, in this case, the lovely music.”
“Thank you,” the teal light said.
“Could you maybe sing some more for me later?” Blug asked the dancing light.
“Shhh,” Sir Roger waved to his squire. “Quit flirting with the fairies.”
“Do not fret about the trustworthiness of the imp,” Ropespor said. “I have made it pleasantly clear: should anything he tells us prove false, it’s more flowers and fairies!”
B’rat’s stubby little fingers tightly gripped the bars. “Clear out them odious bouquets and I’ll talk!”
Ropespor clenched his teeth. “Not one petal will be removed until you tell us what Radnoxious is up to. What is his secret nefarious plan?”
B’rat hacked, then spit on the floor of the cage. “He’s about to summon up a moon dragon.”
“A moon dragon?!” Blug exclaimed. “I thought they were the stuff of fables.”
Ropespor cast an ominous glance over his shoulder and said, “Sometimes fables are the stuff of truth.”
“Why does he want a moon dragon for?” Sir Roger asked.
The imp rolled his eyes. “You routed his advance army with your dragon.”
Ropespor paced around the table, stroking his beard. “To compensate for our having a dragon, he plans on obtaining his own: a moon dragon!”
“It’ll eat you and all your fairies!” the imp cackled.
“That’s not very nice,” Ropespor wagged his finger. “Talk like that and they just may start singing for you again.”
#
An hour later Ropespor, Roger, and Blug stood atop the wizard’s tower, staring pensively out over the ramparts. The sun was setting, painting the clouds vermilion, a reminder of the blood spilled and perhaps a portent of the bloodshed to come.
They could see all the way to the Ruetooth mountain range. Nestled somewhere up in their misty heights rose Darkhue, Radnoxious’s Tower Terrible where the twisted man-fiend plotted his overthrow of kings.
Ropespor broke the silence. “In six days the moon will be full. That is when Radnoxious will be at the Secret Moon Pool to call forth the dragon.”
Roger punched his sword-hand into his palm. “And we will be there to stop him.”
Blug sighed. “Oh, bugger.”
“We’ll bring Smoke with us.” Ropespor tried to sound reassuring.
“Smoke?” Roger lifted one gray eyebrow. “How do you know he’ll agree to come along?”
“I’ll bribe him. If that doesn’t work, I’ll threaten to tell everyone about his new décor.”
End
[1] The Parvuan exorcist Dreuf infamously claimed that this resemblance was why kings built their towers so tall. When someone once pointed out to him that it was just harder to hit a person in a tower than a person near the ground, Dreuf merely shrugged and went on to lecture about lances.