Cloak of Dragonfire

By Jonathan Moeller

Dragons never forget a debt.

My name is Nadia, and I'm a Marshal of the High Queen of the Elves. That means I've learned all kinds of secrets.

One of them is that several dozen dragons live on Earth, disguised as famous musicians and wealthy industrialists.

Now the dragons are holding a council to determine whether or not they wish to leave Earth, and my job is to persuade them to stay.

But so many dragons in one place make a big juicy target for the High Queen's enemies.

Including the ruthless cybernetic wizards of Singularity...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Moeller
• Release date: Apr 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215743157

Jonathan Moeller

Standing over six feet tall, Jonathan Moeller has the piercing blue eyes of a Conan of Cimmeria, the bronze-colored hair of a Visigothic warrior-king, and the stern visage of a captain of men, none of which are useful in his career as a computer repairman, alas.He has written the "Demonsouled" trilogy of sword-and-sorcery novels, and continues to write the "Ghosts" sequence about assassin and spy Caina Amalas, the "$0.99 Beginner's Guide" series of computer books, and numerous other works.Visit his website at:http://www.jonathanmoeller.comVisit his technology blog at:http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/screed

Book preview

CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE

Jonathan Moeller

***

Description

Dragons never forget a debt.

My name is Nadia, and I'm a Marshal of the High Queen of the Elves. That means I've learned all kinds of secrets.

One of them is that several dozen dragons live on Earth, disguised as famous musicians and wealthy industrialists.

Now the dragons are holding a council to determine whether or not they wish to leave Earth, and my job is to persuade them to stay.

But so many dragons in one place make a big juicy target for the High Queen's enemies.

Including the ruthless cybernetic wizards of Singularity...

***

Cloak of Dragonfire

Copyright 2023 by Jonathan Moeller.

Smashwords Edition.

Cover design by Jonathan Moeller.

Ebook edition published May 2023.

All Rights Reserved.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.

***

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***

Chapter 1: A Goblin, An Orcish Warlord, And A Truck Driver Get In A Traffic Jam

My husband told me that being a soldier is a lot of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror.

Since the High Queen made me the Marshal of the Great Gate, I’ve found that to be true.

But here’s another lesson, one I learned at an early age while I was still Kaethran Morvilind’s shadow agent.

When something goes wrong, everything goes wrong at once.

Every single goddamn time.

Which doesn’t make sense, not if you think about it. I mean, if you’re going to have five problems, wouldn’t it make more sense for the first thing to go wrong on Monday, the second thing to go wrong on Tuesday, and so forth?

Nope. Everything always goes wrong all at once.

Since I was the Marshal of the Great Gate, my problems tended to be serious ones.

September 17th, Conquest Year 318, was one of those days when everything went wrong.

###

Here’s how it started.

In the year that I had been the Marshal, the Great Gate complex had become massive, and the amount of traffic flowing through the Gate increased all the time. Since the Great Gate was the only way to travel between Earth and Kalvarion and trade between the two worlds was ramping up every day, that meant more and more trucks.

I now oversaw the world’s biggest border crossing.

The logistical problems never ended. The road leading to the Great Gate had been rebuilt several times, and now a twenty-four lane highway headed towards the Gate, twelve lanes to Kalvarion, twelve lanes going to Earth. The Gate was only wide enough to allow six lanes of traffic through at once, so that created a bottleneck, and even with customs officers working as fast as they could, delays of six to eight hours were common.

When things went wrong, the delays got even longer. If a truck hauling, for example, forty tons of grain or lumber broke down and needed repairs, it blocked the lane behind it. We’ve all seen that kind of delay on the freeway during rush hour. Now imagine that it on a twenty-four lane highway filled with nothing but heavily loaded trucks.

That didn’t even consider the weather.

I’d lived in Wisconsin my whole life and didn’t particularly want to move anywhere else, but there’s no denying that Wisconsin winter weather is not a friend to road travel. In February, March, and April, there had been blizzards that had dumped a foot of snow over southern Wisconsin, and that caused traffic snarls at the Gate complex that had taken days to resolve. Or the day in March when it had been misty, only for the temperature to drop below freezing overnight, which had covered everything in a layer of glare ice. It kind of made me wish Morvilind had opened the Great Gate in western Texas or maybe Death Valley – someplace flat and hot that didn’t get much snow.

And that was just the normal stuff – traffic jams and engine failures and bad weather. Stuff that could go wrong anywhere.

We haven’t even talked about the theft problems yet.

See, by the end of my first year as Marshal, billions of dollars worth of trade goods went through the Great Gate every month. Every week, frankly. And some of that stuff was small, easily portable, and extremely valuable.

The perfect target for thieves.

Maybe that was my punishment for having spent so much of my life as a shadow agent, as a high-end thief. I now had to spend my time foiling attempts at organized theft ranging from imbecilic to brilliant.

The attempted hijackings were annoying but rarely escalated. For one thing, every truck driver carried a firearm, for reasons we’ll get to shortly. For another, hijacking a truck in the middle of a massive traffic jam was a terrible idea. Congratulations, you’ve just overpowered the driver and seized his cargo of electronics! Meanwhile, a dozen other drivers saw it, called it in, and my MPs are on their way to arrest your stupid ass.

That took care of the dumb thieves.

The smarter thieves used falsified records and shipping manifests to route shipments off their proper destinations. As a former shadow agent, I thought that made more sense. Trying to rob people through violence was tricky because violence was like flipping a coin and seeing what happened – it might not go the way you thought it would. The best thefts were ones where the victim didn’t even realize anything was missing until you were far away. We couldn’t always stop the clever thefts. The traffic control systems at Fort Casey were highly secure, but the computers of the various trucking companies that ran loads through the Gate weren’t always configured properly, and clever thieves could manipulate them. An entirely new category of commercial insurance had been developed in the last year – Great Gate insurance for both truckers and companies – and already the CEO of an insurance provider had been arrested and flogged on a Punishment Day video for various forms of financial fraud related to it.

The smart criminals and the various non-violent thefts were an ongoing problem but a manageable one. Technically, it wasn’t the responsibility of the Army of the Great Gate to prevent that kind of thing. If the MPs caught them in the act, sure, somebody would get arrested. But neither the dumb criminals nor the clever ones were my main worry.

Shadowlands raiders concerned me much more.

I don’t think anyone had fully realized it, maybe not even Morvilind himself, but a permanent world gate can act like a beacon in the Shadowlands. The Great Gate cast a presence into both the umbra of Earth and the umbra of Kalvarion in the Shadowlands, and a wizard of sufficient skill could track that presence without much difficulty. Navigation through the Shadowlands was tricky, but the Great Gate acted like a lighthouse.

And beacons could draw raiders.

The goblins were the biggest problem.

I hadn’t had many encounters with goblins before I had become first Tarlia’s shadow agent and then the Marshal. In fact, if I remembered right, the very first time I had ever seen goblins had been in the Shadow Waypoint during that whole mess with Lydia Valborg and Paul Rampton. A goblin tribe owned and operated the coffee shop where Victoria Carrow had suggested that I provoke Rampton into losing control and attacking me.

That had been some good coffee.

I learned a lot more about goblins since then.

They hadn’t come to Earth all that often, mostly because they didn’t like the Archons and they didn’t like the kind of orcish mercenaries the Archons had hired. Now that Morvilind had killed all the Archons, the goblins had begun traveling to Earth.

Goblins were nomadic, and better-suited for travel through the Shadowlands than humans or Elves. For one, they had a natural sense for the aetheric currents of magic in the Shadowlands, which meant they had an easier time navigating. For another, they could alter the pheromones generated by their bodies, which meant even the nastier Shadowlands predators would leave them alone since they didn’t smell all that appetizing.

The goblin tribes often worked as merchants and guides, traveling from world to world to buy and sell.

Some of them would steal absolutely anything that wasn’t nailed down.

One particular goblin tribe had been causing me problems for a while now.

A goblin named Krathamyn headed up the tribe, and his warriors specialized as mercenaries. When mercenary work wasn’t to be found, they turned to banditry and kidnapping for ransom. A while back, Tythrilandria and I had stopped Krathamyn from abducting a particularly annoying Elven noblewoman. Since then, he had stepped up his efforts to steal stuff from the Great Gate.

His men hadn’t hurt or killed anyone, I’ll give him that. No doubt if pressed, Krathamyn would claim that it was because he was noble and merciful, but the truth was that his warriors were such good thieves that killing people would have been an inefficient hindrance to their process. They had it down to a science. A rift way popped open, the goblins poured out, and their wizards cast a spell that summoned a sleeping gas. Everyone for about a hundred meters fell asleep for a few minutes, and the goblins opened their target truck – usually filled with small, valuable items – grabbed as much as they could carry, and retreated through their rift way to the Shadowlands. They did it so fast that I was never able to catch them. A couple of times I opened rift ways to the Shadowlands and chased them with my Quick Response Force, but the goblins were good at vanishing into the Shadowlands, and given how dangerous that place was in general, I wasn’t about to risk my soldiers’ lives pursuing stolen gems and electronics.

That was the thing that nagged at me.

How did Krathamyn’s goblins know which trucks to target? Because, as I’ve mentioned, thousands of trucks moved through the Great Gate every single day. We needed a very expensive computer system to keep track of them all. How did Krathamyn target a truck carrying something expensive and easily portable every single time?

The answer, of course, was obvious. Krathamyn knew because he was somehow using our very expensive and elaborate computer system to target the trucks.

Cloak Corporation found the answer. The whole point of owning a shadowy private security agency was to do this kind of thing, and Neil Freeman and Fell Warren tracked down the cause, assisted by Nick Ridley, a new soldier in Fort Casey’s cybersecurity division. Krathamyn’s agents in Milwaukee had been paying one of the soldiers who worked in Fort Casey’s IT department. The soldier handed over shipping manifests and tracking information in exchange for a tidy kickback.

I would have been within my legal rights to inflict any punishment I wanted. I could have discharged him dishonorably after a public flogging or sentenced him to a long term of penal servitude and handed him over to the Elven nobles. Or I could have simply executed him on the spot, right there at his desk, as an object lesson to everyone.

That’s probably what Morvilind would have done.

It really bothered me that I had that much authority to do as I saw fit.

But a spy who doesn’t know he’s been found out is far more useful than a spy executed as an object lesson.

So we left him alone, and Nick Ridley and Fell Warren set a tap into his personal computers and phones. The spy couldn’t sneeze without us knowing, which meant we knew the next time he sent shipping information to Krathamyn. An armored truck loaded with rare and valuable ores from Kalvarion was passing through the Great Gate on its way to the Elven free city of Camytharia in the western United States.

Krathamyn wanted that ore. He could sell the ingots in places like the Shadow Waypoint or in the domain of Grayhold in the Shadowlands. The Knight of Grayhold’s mission was to protect Earth from the Dark Ones. It was not to prevent illegal commerce, so the Knight had no problem with smugglers moving through his domain.

Much to Tarlia’s annoyance, but she really couldn’t do anything about it.

Or maybe Krathamyn would sell the ingots to my old enemies in the Deathless Society.

The ore truck would move through the Great Gate on September 17th, Conquest Year 318.

That was a problem.

Because the High Queen was scheduled to make a royal visit that afternoon.

I couldn’t call up Tarlia and ask her to postpone. For one thing, that wasn’t the sort of request that anyone made of the High Queen.

For another, my appointment as Marshal of the Great Gate had pushed the Elven nobles into factions.

Wait, that’s not quite right. The Elven nobles had already been drifting into factions. A human becoming Marshal just gave them something else to take sides over. One group of nobles was content to remain on Earth, keeping the political arrangements the High Queen had made over the last three centuries. Those nobles supported my appointment as Marshal.

The other group, led by Duke Vashtyr of Venice, wanted to abandon Earth, return to Kalvarion, and reestablish serfdom over the commoner Elves there. The nicest possible way I could describe that idea was idiotically delusional. I don’t think the nobles in Vashtyr’s faction realized just how much the commoner Elves of Kalvarion hated them. I had thought my friend Tythrilandria hated Elven nobles, but she mostly just held them in disdain. Elves from places like Castaris, the free city just on the other side of the Great Gate, really and truly hated the Elven nobles for abandoning them to the Archons. If Vashtyr got his way, he would set off simultaneous catastrophic civil wars on Earth and Kalvarion.

And like it or not (and I really didn’t like it), I had become a point of contention between the two factions. If I asked Tarlia to postpone the royal visit, it was a public enough event that Vashtyr would complain about it. He would go on and on about how this was proof that a human shouldn’t have been appointed as Marshal of the Great Gate, that the time had come for the High Queen and the Elves to abandon Earth and humanity and return to Kalvarion. I knew everything Vashtyr would say. Anytime any damn thing went wrong at the Gate and it affected the Duke and his allies in any way, I heard about it immediately via a formal letter. Vashtyr had written enough of them that he could probably publish them in a book – The Duke Complains Yet Again About Nadia MacCormac.

So postponing the royal visit would probably be more trouble than it was worth. But I knew Krathamyn and his men were coming for the ore truck that morning. I could catch him in the act and force him to stop raiding the Great Gate, and I might never have the chance again. I suppose I could have let Krathamyn steal the ore, but if that happened on the morning of a royal visit, it would be something else for Vashtyr to complain about.

No, the best plan was to foil the robbery in the morning and be ready for the High Queen’s visit in the afternoon.

Just another fun-filled day for the Marshal of the Great Gate.

Which meant on the morning of September 17th, Conquest Year 318, I sat in the passenger seat of a van, heavily armed Elven soldiers from Castaris filling the vehicle behind me. I wore tactical fatigues, heavy boots, and a coat of armor, which was a mixture of chain mail, bulletproof fabric, and strike plates to help deflect both bullets and claws, depending on what you were fighting. It was part of the standard armor for men-at-arms going into the Shadowlands, and my husband had to order it custom because most men-at-arms were a lot bigger than me.

Riordan sat in the driver’s seat, likewise dressed in tactical fatigues and armor. Unlike me, he wore heavy wrap-around sunglasses, the sort you often saw senior citizens wear after eye surgery. An M-99 carbine and a sword were propped up next to him, waiting for his hand.

Behind us, a half-dozen Elven soldiers filled the back of the van. Technically, they were militia soldiers from Castaris, the Elven free city on the other side of the Great Gate. All the Elves could use magic to some degree or another. Despite what human children learned in public school, most Elves weren’t actually all that good at magic, and the degree of talent the individual Elves possessed varied wildly, though the nobles were generally (though not always) more powerful than the commoners. The dozen Elven soldiers were among the most powerful wizards from Castaris.

Specifically, they were very good with the Seal of Shadows spell, which we would need shortly.

We were driving south. Well, I say driving, but maybe it was more accurate to say that the van was pointed south. The traffic coming through the Great Gate was always heavy, but it was thick today, and the van had progressed maybe a third of a mile in the last half hour. I wondered if Krathamyn deliberately picked days with projected high traffic to launch his raids, since it meant his target couldn’t escape.

Someone coughed, and I looked back at the half-dozen Elves waiting in the back of the van.

You guys okay? I said.

We are ready for battle, Marshal, said Harmathyr, the leader of the Elves. Specifically, he was the Consul of Castaris, which was kind of like a mayor, if the mayor was expected to personally lead soldiers to defend the city from marauders. Harmathyr had the gaunt, ragged look shared by many of the Elves of Kalvarion, a consequence of long-term childhood malnutrition. He had a shock of gray hair and vivid green eyes that were usually bloodshot. Today he wore the same fatigues and armor as the other militia soldiers from Castaris. The Consul was joyless, grim, and kind of a pain in the ass, which was tolerable once you learned that he had seen his entire family executed in front of him by the Archons.

It turned out he was very good in a fight.

Also, he really loved hot pretzels, so I always had some prepared when he came to Fort Casey on business.

Great, I said, turning back to look out the windshield as I pulled on my helmet.

The armored truck holding the ore was two semis in front of us. I couldn’t see it from my vantage point, but I saw one of the other vans. That one held soldiers from my Quick Response Force. In front of the truck would be another van holding men from the Wizard’s Legion. We had the truck surrounded so when Krathamyn and his guys showed up, we could trap him. Elves were immune to bullets made from the metals of Earth. Goblins were not, and between that and the wizards, I hoped to persuade Krathamyn to surrender.

If not, well…

Back when I had been Morvilind’s shadow agent, I had known that if I screwed up badly enough, death would be my reward. Of course, Morvilind would have killed me remotely if I threatened to expose his various activities, but a lot of the danger had been the intrinsic risk of undertaking thefts.

Krathamyn and his men might be about to learn that the hard way.

Even as the thought crossed my mind, the radio in my helmet crackled to life.

The sphere is glowing, said a voice. Repeat, the sphere is glowing. Please acknowledge.

Acknowledged, I said. The ‘sphere’ in question was a magical device from the Inquisition. It was a crystal sphere about two feet across resting on a stand of wrought iron. The sphere started glowing whenever someone opened a rift way nearby, and a clever arrangement of carefully calibrated lenses projected the light onto a map of the surrounding area. The Inquisition had a network of those spheres to detect whenever rift ways opened on Earth, and since the Great Gate had become vital to the economies of both Earth and Kalvarion, Fort Casey had gotten one.

It really came in handy.

Incoming rift ways detected about five hundred meters south of the Great Gate in southbound lanes, said the voice. Any second now.

Get ready, I said.

The Elven soldiers adjusted their weapons. But I didn’t need them for their weapons, I needed their magic.

Colonel Nash? I said into my helmet’s microphone.

Ready, came the gravelly voice of the man commanding my Quick Response Force.

One last reminder, said Riordan, speaking for the first time. The Marshal wants to force Krathamyn to surrender. Don’t start shooting until they do.

But if they do, I said, don’t hesitate to shoot back.

Here they come, said Riordan.

Gray light flashed a short distance to the north.

It resolved into the shimmering gate of a rift way. Through it, I glimpsed the plains of the Shadowlands, dark grasses waving in a nonexistent wind.

Goblins spilled from the gate.

Goblins and orcs were related in some obscure way that no one had ever been able to satisfactorily explain to me, which meant they looked a bit similar. Goblins were shorter than either Elves or humans but wider in the shoulders, with blue skin, craggy features, pointed ears, and thick black hair. And mouths full of fangs since meat was their preferred diet.

I had heard that they weren’t above eating their enemies in a pinch.

About fifty goblins came out of the rift way, and I spotted Krathamyn himself leading them. The goblins wore dark armor, a mixture of chain mail and ballistic plates designed to stop both blades and bullets. Krathamyn’s armor was a bit more ornate, and gold rings glittered in his large ears and his nose. I had seen him from a distance a few times before and once close up when he had tried to kidnap that Elven noblewoman.

Multiple contacts spotted, came another voice in my ear. Permission to engage?

Negative, said Riordan. Wait until they surround the truck.

The goblins surrounded the armored truck. One of them produced a cutting torch and went to work on the cargo door.

It was time.

A strange mixture of tension and calm fell over me. I had used to feel this way in the old days, before Tarlia, before Riordan, when I had spent weeks planning a theft for Morvilind, and the moment to act had come. Except now I wasn’t trying to steal something.

Go, I said.

All units, said Riordan. Go.

A lot of things happened at once.

I jumped out of the van as the back doors opened and Harmathyr’s soldiers boiled out. Riordan ran around the front of the van to join me, and he did it so fast that he must have been drawing on his Shadowmorph for speed. I heard shouts from the other side of the armored truck, and the goblins froze in place. Krathamyn looked back and forth, and his gaze swung towards the open rift way north of the armored van.

Too late.

Harmathyr gave an order to his men, and half of them stepped forward, casting spells.

Specifically, the Seal of Shadows.

I had learned the Seal of Shadows from Morvilind, and it had the useful effect of keeping any summoned Shadowlands creature from entering the Seal’s circumference. As an added bonus, a rift way wouldn’t function within a Seal.

And one that had already been opened would collapse.

One of my ongoing projects at Fort Casey had been to layer the fort in low-power Seals of Shadows, putting them underneath buildings and into the walls. The combined effect of hundreds of Seals with overlapping areas of influence meant it was extremely difficult to open a rift way within the base. Not impossible, but you needed a lot of power and skill, and even then, the rift way wouldn’t last all that long.

Why not do the same thing on the highway leading to the Great Gate itself, you might ask? The trouble was that the sheer power of the Great Gate made it impossible. The same magic that acted as a beacon and allowed guys like Krathamyn to find their way here also made it difficult to create a permanent Seal of Shadows nearby. The Gate would disrupt and finally collapse any Seals within a mile or so.

But the process took a few hours, and the Seals that Harmathyr and his men had cast would work just fine.

Soldiers rushed around the idling vehicles, weapons in hand. Krathamyn and his men looked back and forth and started to draw their own guns. He had quite a few wizards with him, and they started to cast spells, summoning fire and lightning.

Krathamyn! I shouted, stepping forward.

I was holding my own magic ready. I had already cast a Shield spell, and it shimmered before me, a barely visible ripple in the air. I held only a trickle of power into it, but if anyone attacked, I could flare it to full power at once. It was a trick I had learned from Sir Trandor (well, one of them, anyway). The old Elven knight didn’t have that much more raw power than I did but wielded his spells far, far more efficiently, creating greater effects with a minimal expenditure of magical power.

Which was why he could do things like summon an illusion of Kyramar that was large enough and detailed enough to turn the tide of the battle at Red River.

Krathamyn looked at me, the rings in his ears and nose glinting against his blue skin. More of my soldiers ran around the armored truck, carbines raised. The goblin chieftain drew himself up, and tension crackled in the air. We had the goblins surrounded, outgunned, and pinned in place. But they were all armed, and their wizards were strong enough to put up a hell of a fight before they went down.

Don’t do anything stupid! I called in Elven, which I was pretty sure Krathamyn spoke. I didn’t know if he actually knew English or not. No one needs to die today.

I congratulate you, Marshal, said Krathamyn in the same language. A well-executed trap. Though, of course, we could fight our way out. Some of your men will fall before the shooting is done. Perhaps you shall meet your fate here.

Maybe, I said. Riordan shifted a little next to me. I really hoped he didn’t decide to shoot Krathamyn for that. He didn’t like it when people threatened me.

Especially after that business with Michael Durst a few months ago.

Or maybe not, I said. Because there are more of us than there are of you, and we have better weapons and more wizards. If you try to shoot your way out, some of us will be killed…but I’d bet that none of you are going home. That a chance you want to take?

If you kill me, said Krathamyn, then you will earn the eternal enmity of the rest of my tribe.

Which wasn’t a terribly worrying thought, given the enemies I already had, but he did have a point.

Sounds like we have a basis for negotiation, I said. We…

Right about then, I felt a surge of magical power.

The surge came from the north. I shot a quick glance in that direction, and despite the morning sunlight, I saw a flare of gray light.

Another rift way had opened.

At the same time, a dozen of Krathamyn’s goblins looked to the north, and a voice crackled through my helmet.

More contacts, said the voice on the other end. Multiple rift ways opening, I repeat, multiple rift ways opening.

I swung my gaze back to Krathamyn. How many reinforcements did you bring?

But the goblin chieftain looked just as confused as I felt.

No, no reinforcements, said Krathamyn. We’re here to steal metals, not attack your fort. We…

Gunfire rang out.

Contact! came a voice over my helmet