Dragons & Dwarves Read Online Free

mask.
    So I glanced, noted the rotund figure of Adrian Phillips, chairman of the Port Authority, and didn’t think anything about it until much later.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    O NE of the thirty-two dragons known to be resident in northeast Ohio died sometime between three and four in the morning today, police said. The dragon had been in flight, eastbound over downtown Cleveland, when it struck the ground on the west bank of the Flats about a quarter mile north of the Hope Memorial Bridge.
     
    “According to police sources, the suspected cause of death was the so-called ‘Icarus Effect,’ the name coined by Dr. Newman Shafran of Case Western Reserve University to describe the often fatal side effects when a magical entity strays too far from the Portal . . .”
    The words glowed up from my laptop, fairly stunning in their banality.
    “Icky-eff,” O’Malley had said. A much more evocative term than “Icarus Effect.” The latter sounded like a cheap thriller novel, the former was something you scraped off the sidewalk.
    Five times I was tempted to use the cop slang, but I didn’t because it seemed disrespectful—which was a damned odd reaction from someone who’d covered Cleveland City Council for nearly a decade.
    Whatever name you used for it, the event described by Dr. Newman Shafran would have been catastrophic for a dragon.
    I was one of about a half-dozen reporters in a small meeting room in the Justice Center, waiting for the press conference to begin. No one was making statements on-site, for the obvious reasons.
    I had started my wait by trying to run off a draft of the piece on my notebook computer. When that effort stalled, I followed an impulse to start getting some background on what it was that killed the dragon. My third call directed me to Dr. Shafran, the professor who’d written the first academic paper that described what our dragon had gone through.
    Shafran had been in and, to my surprise, was a source obscure enough to not yet be inundated by calls from other news agencies.
    “Icarus Effect,” he had repeated my words in a thick Eastern European accent. I couldn’t help picturing Bela Lugosi as he talked.
    “Yes, the police believe that’s the cause of death.”
    “Interesting. So close to the source, in fact. Odd.”
    “Is it possible?”
    The doctor chuckled and said, “Why, yes, anything is . . . possible.”
    “Can you describe how it could happen? I thought the Portal’s influence extended halfway to Canada.”
    “Oh, indeed, even farther. But mana, magical power you understand, it is energy—but not like light, or gravity, or any so-called force. It is a fluid. Like the air, or the sea, it seeks its own level, subject to eddies and currents.”
    “So how high up does it go?”
    “It completely dissipates at about three miles up over the Portal itself.”
    “So this dragon had to be flying up pretty high, right?”
    He paused. “Not necessarily.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “As I said, the power ebbs and flows. The victim of the effect might be safely within the boundary—they can sense where they are, where the power is—but the power might suddenly shift, quicker than the victim can react. A point in space that was saturated with mana can abruptly become dead. Like an air bubble in the sea. Such volatility is much more likely at the edges of the Portals’ influence, but is theoretically possible anywhere.”
    “How long would it take . . . ?”
    “Before death?”
    “Yes.”
    The picture that the doctor painted for me, in his bad Transylvanian accent, was less pretty than the scene at the river, if that was possible. Without the magical infrastructure to hold its body together, the sheer mass of the beast would tear it apart. The loss of magic would be as severe for it as the sudden loss of a skeletal system would be for a human being. Combine that with the probable speed the dragon was going when this happened—dragons have been known to break the sound barrier—and