Below her Senta selected another parchment dragon and repeated the process, this time crying “oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-eye.” The next was “oh-oh-oh-oh-eye-oh” and the one after that “oh-oh-oh-oh-eye-eye,” just as the foreign wizard, the one they called Taj, had instructed her.
Origami after origami was tossed aloft to shapeshift into the seeming of a dragon and rider and join the circling throng above the rock. Finally the last of the sixty-four “dragons” was launched and named. With a wave of her wand and another one-word spell, she sent the group on its way. As one the dragons sorted themselves out into squadron Vs and climbed toward the south, a non-existent armada flying straight at the Enemy’s stronghold.
If Karin was impressed by the reality of the seemings, Senta was even more impressed by the magical skill behind them. Such ruses had long been common in battle, but they suffered a fatal flaw. A magician could not control more than one seeming at a time. True, such an illusion could appear to be an army or a horde of dragons, but magically it was all one unit, with but a single true name. A skilled magician could quickly detect the fact and even the greatest of wizards could only control a few such magical entities.
This group was different. Somehow by naming them as they had been named they had become part of an entity called “array,” each separate, each with its own true name, yet all of them bound to perform collectively by a single spell. To Senta, this was high magic indeed.
She was still admiring her handiwork when Karin came sliding down the rock to join her.
“Perfect,” the blond woman said. “Now let’s get out of here before the Enemy decides to investigate this place.”
Senta looked after her creations winging south. “I wonder why they call them drones when they don’t make any noise at all?”
“Mick said…” Then she stopped, looking north. “Never mind that,” Karin said flatly. “We’ve got a problem.”
The other turned and saw a ragged line of black dots on the line where gray clouds met gray sea.
“Back under the rocks, quickly.” Both women sprinted for the shelter of the crevice, hoping against hope that the zombies’ senses were as uncoordinated as their movements.
Had the seeming been detected so quickly? It had to be an accident, Karin told herself firmly as she pressed against the spray-wet rock. Only by chance had these undead been near at hand when Senta activated the seeming.
But chance or plan, it put them in a precarious situation. They were caught on the ground, outnumbered and perilously close to the Enemy’s base. If they were spotted…
From her recess in the rock she watched as the ragged V passed perhaps two dragon lengths above the tallest point on the reef, swinging around the crag in jerky precision. For a minute Karin thought the zombies had not seen them.
Then one by one the zombie dragons peeled off and swooped back toward the island.
“Shit,” Karin breathed and pressed further back against the rear of the overhang.
Gilligan watched the second wave of dummy dragons soar aloft from the Executioner and aim straight for the City of Night. Almost immediately he saw a few ragged dots rise from the city to meet the suddenly-appearing foe.
“Okay,” he said. “They’re as fully committed as they’re going to get.” He picked up the microphone connected to the communications crystal.
“Now,” Gilligan said. Tora Tora Tora.” In the back of his mind he wondered if it had been such a good idea to let Charlie pick the code names. Then he focused on the display to the exclusion of everything else.
Charlie was in the middle of a heck of a fight. There had been perhaps ten squadrons of zombie dragons launched against him and the survivors pressed then-attack ruthlessly.
Charlie put on a display of flying that would have been the hit of any air show—and gotten his license lifted immediately by the FAA. He hauled the big biplane around so tightly the whole frame shuddered, giving his gunners belly shots on three and four dragons at once. He dived for the sea and skimmed so low that the following dragons crashed into the waves. He zoomed for altitude and then hit his flaps far above the safe maximum speed so that his pursuers overshot him and fell to his turret gunner. He used every trick in the book and a few that never made it into the book.