The Dragon's Rogue

Chapter 17

I frowned down at the tiny glob of foaming slime at the bottom of my bowl. The light in the workshop had faded rapidly toward evening, forcing me to improvise lanterns and wicks from the materials surrounding me. I had finished milking the frogs, though that alone had eaten up most of my time, and I still did not have nearly enough of the poison to perform as a mass weapon. For all that effort I had filled a palm sized phial nearly halfway. More than enough for my own purposes, but no where near what would be needed to supply warriors with poison for their blades.

I couldn't even add my own supply to the amount, since it was among the phials that went missing.

A spike of concern slithered along my spine at the remembrance and I looked to the door again, willing Cillumn to return so I could warn him of whatever in the Six realms was happening.

I looked back once more to the small bit of poison, the mucus from the last frog to be milked. This bit I wanted to experiment with. I carefully lifted one of the fat fleshy thorns that I had sliced open and folded the flesh so that the gel inside plopped into the bowl on top of the glob of frog slime. Then I spread the gel with a long slender stirring stick I had found protruding from one of the provided vessels, ensuring the viscous material covered the poison completely. Denying it access to the air. That should prevent it from going inert.

But that was only half the problem. A gob of slime covered with a gob of gel was not any more useful unless it provided a benefit that both materials alone could not provide. With that in mind I stirred the substance, meticulously keeping the poison from reaching the top until it had been integrated thoroughly with the gel. There.

Now what?

The result looked viable. Given the way it clung to the stirring stick it had solved at least my adhesion problem. But what about the potency? I held the stick up and then looked around the room for the first time in hours. My eyes ached a little from the concentrated effort on my work. Now I needed to test the results, preferably on something living, but unimportant.

Logic insisted there was no such test subject in my workspace, and my eyes confirmed the fact.

I was going to have to ask Cillumn, or whoever ran the livestock for the Aerie for a chicken...or maybe a cow would give a better indication of potency. If the poison could bring down a cow, it should bring down one of the creatures as well.

Of course, there was still the problem of the creatures not actually dying from the poison. The possibility of recovery bothered me. What if one of the warriors was battling several of the beasts, like the group that had chased me up the tree? In such a situation they wouldn't have time to behead every possessed Shifter as they fell. Having enemies one counted as dead coming back to life could be catastrophic. And what about the bite that the outsider Alpha had mentioned? Not that I was sure I believed her nonsense. Yet, if all the creature had to do was nibble on a passing leg or foot that posed a greater danger still.

I nearly leapt from the table when the door burst open without a warning knock. I blinked up at the portal, expecting Cillumn. But it was Gayriel who burst in, her black hair curled into ringlets and piled on top of her head. She wore a pair of tight black pants and a shimmering silver top that looked...complicated. Strips of fabric were missing from some places, and in others extra loops of beads caught the light from my lamps.

The woman paused her face contorting.

"What is that smell?" She blinked at me. "And what have you done to that skirt...is that strips of it burning in those pots?"

"Ah..." well, I had to work with what was available to me. I stepped closer to the table to hide the remains of the tattered skirt that I wore. It had occurred to me to change before I started. But it seemed that my clothes had gone missing along with my poisons. Unease crawled its way through me. I hadn't thought much about the clothes while I was working, caught up in my attempts to make the poison the Archon requested.