Aranya (Shapeshifter Dragons) (25 page)

Aranya’s eyes widened. “Um–what did you say?”

Zip put in, “She says you have a memory of a bad man in your mind. His father arranged some … killings, I think.”

“Of my mother?”

Zip questioned the girl. “She says ‘your family, maybe your mother too’.”

“The bad man is Garthion?” Aranya asked.

The Pygmy girl shrieked and spat. “Bad, bad, bad!
Eee-veel. Evil?”

Aranya shuddered. “Evil. Hurt my friend, Zip.”

Was the girl saying that Garthion’s father had arranged the murder of her family on Immadia? Or her mother’s family back on Ha’athior? Suddenly, Aranya was very afraid. Why had she chosen to travel to Remoy rather than Immadia? But her father had signed a peace accord with the Sylakians. They were brutes, but more concerned with ongoing conquests than settling old scores, surely? Had the Supreme Commander taken his revenge on King Beran so openly that even a Pygmy knew about it?

Zuziana could not obtain further clarification from the Seer. The girl shrugged and explained something about the uncertainty of Seeing. But she insisted that the Supreme Commander had killed Aranya’s family ‘long moons ago’. That could be months or years, Zip said. Aranya told herself that ‘long moons’ had to be historical. She could not bear any other thought.

But a seed of doubt lodged in her mind.

Pensively, she watched a number of Pygmy women swarming over her wing. She tried to relax, even as she watched them threading needles and making ready to stitch her skin. It was worse even than she imagined. Every pinprick was a h
ot needle stuck into her flesh; the pulling of thread an abrasion of raw nerve endings. Aranya groaned and sank her fangs into a nearby tree.

Next, the Pygmies painted the stitched tears with warm glue and carefully pasted on strips of a tough leaf, above and beneath the wing
membrane. They trimmed their work neatly with their knives. Through Zuziana they bade the Ancient One to sit still for three hours. After two hours, they dragged several dead Sylakian warriors past. Aranya hoped they were not about to make dinner, but Zip insisted that Pygmies were not cannibals.

They practised with the meriatite. Aranya swallowed the stone into the wrong stomach seven times before figuring out the correct one. Then she belched up a great deal of hydrogen without producing a single hint of flame. “We’ll try again later,” she grumbled.

The Pygmy warrior who had first met them, now appeared with a bow and two quivers of arrows for Zip. He pressed the bow into Zuziana’s hand. “Try.”

Zuziana tested the draw. “Wow, that’s a beast of a weapon. Look, Aranya. I’ve never seen a bow glued together like this, in reinforced layers. Amazing technique.”

“Good?” said the warrior, snatching the bow from the startled Princess to demonstrate the draw, right back to his ear. “Good.”

“Good enough to puncture Dragonship armour?” asked Aranya.

The warrior seemed to understand. Plucking an arrow from the quiver, he bent the bow and let fly at a nearby tree. Zip walked over to examine the shot and exclaimed in surprise, “It’s buried nearly a foot deep, Aranya. I can’t even pull it out.”

“Good,” said the warrior, showing every one of his pointed teeth.

“Good,” agreed Zip.

Aranya pushed Zip impatiently with her muzzle. “Ask him what we can do for the Pygmies in return for these wonderful gifts.”

Zuziana did not need to translate. They both broke into startled chuckles as the Pygmy mimed, with appropriate noises, a Dragonship falling from the sky.

“Good?” asked the warrior.

“Tell him the Ancient One says it is
very
good,” said Aranya, peeling back her lips to show the warrior her fangs.

This seemed to impress him. “Good-good,” he said, firmly.

* * * *

They waited in a place the Pygmies had selected for them. The dense jungle foliage hid a small clearing, a space between the massive trees large enough for a Dragon to stretch her wings. Aranya’s claws scraped on the huge boulder that formed her launching-pad. Beyond, through a gap in the foliage, she saw a vine-dense thicket followed by the promise of the cerulean ocean.

Aranya tested her wings with strong beats and growled, “Incredible. That’s flexible–it feels weird, admittedly–but I think it’ll hold. More than hold. Thank them again, Zip.”

Zuziana’s wry grin took in the row of nine message hawks being plucked for the Pygmy pot. “I believe the appropriate response would be to go and destroy a few Dragonships.”

“Did they really put the Sylakians in the cave of warriors?”

“Yes, Aranya.” Zip buckled herself in with an impatient hand. “Not in the place of honour, however. That place is reserved for Pygmies
and Ancient Ones.”

Aranya raised her head. “Here comes a Dragonship now. No, two Dragonships.”

“I’ll light up,” said Zip, striking her spark-stone.

“Let’s go burn the heavens, Rider
.”

With the excitement of three hearts pounding blood through her flight muscles and into her ears, Aranya launched herself through the foliage. Leaves slapped her face. Her Dragon mind took care of the details, adjusting her wings and calculating angles between the vines, flying sideways, a complete roll even, bringing them right out beneath a Dragonship. She thrust hard, rending the air, closing the gap before the Sylakian warriors had a chance to react. A crossbow ground on its moorings as men tried to bring it to bear. Aranya crunched into the bottom of the cabin and hung on, upside-down, with the claws of all four paws–Zuziana’s idea, gleaned from a scroll. The lowest Dragonship of a group was always vulnerable from beneath.

The first man to peer beneath the gantry jerked back as her teeth snapped an inch from his face.

“Ready?” she growled to Zip. “One, two, three!”

Aranya sprang sideways and rolled simultaneously, bringing Zip into a firing position. The Princess of Remoy fired perfectly in time and reloaded even as Aranya continued her roll, twisting them away from the fireball blooming in the afternoon sky.

KAARAABOOM!

Debris shot past them. Aranya jerked as something hard and heavy crashed into her legs.

“Crossbows above,
” Zuziana warned. “Two ships.”

She saw the quarrels coming slowly, her senses alive, her body and wings responding before any thoughts had time to form. Aranya folded her wings and twisted mid-air, flying right between the converging
quarrels. One shot from each Dragonship, she calculated. That one above had four crossbow emplacements, a true monster of a Dragonship. Two at the fore, two aft and possibly several above, she suddenly thought. The structure surrounding the hydrogen sack was unusual. The men manning the catapults showed real discipline, holding their fire even though she was in range.

Why?

Dragon-Aranya’s danger sense prickled along her spine.

“Zip, I’m switching targets,” she warned over her shoulder, and executed a dramatic
twist in the air.

Zuziana held onto the spine ahead of her as she called, “What’s the matter, Aranya?”

“Danger sense. Something’s different about that large Dragonship. I think I’d want to get above it and take a look first.”

“But it has three of the small Dragonships above it,” Zip pointed out. “You’re right–is that a gantry on top? Get your muzzle over here. I want you to try something.” Zuziana put a lump of meriatite onto Aranya’s purple tongue. “When we attack the next Dragonship, think of fire. Try to make yourself really, really angry.”

“But I’m not angry. Just worn out.”

Zip laughed in a way that made Aranya frown. “That one. Let’s pick the topmost of the group
. We then fly on past, northward. We need to find a place where we can rest properly. Seven days on the wing is killing us, Aranya.”

She was right. Three or four
hours on the ground with the Pygmies, with no sleep at all, had not made for much of a rest. Her flight muscles trembled with fatigue.

As Aranya arrowed in on her attack run, she chewed up the meriatite and swallowed it down into what she had labelled her gas stomach. Immediately she felt a swelling down there, a building pressure
. She clenched her muscles to deny it egress.

That was when Zip leaned forward and said pleasantly, “You woolly excuse for a flying ralti sheep, what do you think you’re playing at? Don’t come bleating to me with your excuses. Call yourself a Dragon? You couldn’t burn rock inside an erupting volcano. Where’s your fire, Dragon? Remember Garthion? Remember what he did?”

With a terrible roar, Aranya surged forward, descending upon the Dragonship with her neck held straight. A blast erupted from her belly. Fire shot out of her throat, funnelled between her pursed lips, flaring a hundred feet and more. Flames licked the Dragonship, eating its armour and finding a violent companion to her rage within the hydrogen sack. One second it was there, the next, a detonation rattled their eardrums and the world flashed white. The concussion-wave punched them sideways in the air, but her Dragon instincts took them clear. Aranya bugled her triumph to the skies as she skirted the top of the flaming fireball and wheeled into a vertical dive on the far side.

“Go, girl, go!” shouted Zip. She had an arrow nocked to the string.

The wind whistled past them, snuffing out the flames on her arrow. She dipped it in the pot of burning oil and took aim. Aranya concentrated on holding still, watching for crossbow quarrels, but the men on the Dragonship below had lost her behind the fireball above. They were all looking in the wrong direction when Zip’s flaming arrow pierced the armour atop the hydrogen sack.

Then Aranya realised they were plummeting straight into the middle of the fireball. There was no time to pull out of her dive.

At the last instant she folded her wings over Zip’s head and prayed for a miracle.

T
o their amazement,
Aranya and Zuziana survived the burning Dragonship at the expense of little more than Zuziana’s eyebrows and eyelashes and a sharp crysglass window strut that punctured a neat hole in Aranya’s hide in the lower belly region.

The hunt continued.
Day after day they twisted and hid in the Crescent, snatching an hour of sleep here and a quick bite to eat there, as Yolathion’s group harassed them more intently than ever before. One day, Zuziana developed a cough and a high fever. She sickened dramatically in the course of the next twenty-seven hours. “I’ll be fine,” she kept insisting, but she was not. Aranya’s healing magic, so potent against wounds and burns and bruises, seemed helpless against whatever tropical jungle disease had attacked her friend. Aranya knew they were in trouble the following morning when Zuziana tried to mount up, and slipped and fell from the top of her thigh.

The vomit that flooded out of her mouth was green and foul, and flecked with blood.

“Pick me up,” Zip whispered. “Fly, Aranya. Find Oyda.”

Her friend’s
tiny body was like a rag, limp and wrung out, with little substance left to her after so much running and hiding. Aranya was appalled at her frailty as she used her paws to lift Zip onto her muzzle. Twisting her neck, she boosted her up into the saddle and dropped her as carefully as she could into the seat.

“The buckles, Zip.”

She pawed at them. “Oyda,” she said. “Sorry …”

Aryana raised her forepaw and tried to help with threading the buckles, which was nearly impossible in Dragon form. “We’ll get you right, Zip, don’t you worry. I’ll stop on
Tyrodia and find you some help; some medicine.”

“No. Too dangerous.
Oyda.”

But Zip had not seen what Aranya had seen. They were hiding in a cave on the next-to-last Island of the Crescent. A dozen or more hawks worked the Islands nearby, searching.
As yet just a set of specks high in the sky even at the fullest magnification of her Dragon sight, Aranya saw a whole new fleet of Dragonships drifting down on the breeze from the direction of Tyrodia Island.

The pursuit was about to reach a new pitch.

“When I ask, can you feed me meriatite?” asked Aranya.

“Um,” said Zip, lolling against the straps.

Great. Dragon-Aranya felt fury churn in her belly as she considered her route. There was only one option–the long journey to Telstroy Island, followed by the hard haul to Sylakia and over the mountains to Nak and Oyda’s dell. And then? Would she bring the Sylakian hammer down on them, too? She could not transform, could she? How would she ever get Zuziana back in the saddle, or the saddle on her back, for that matter? Some things about being a Dragon were not so easy. Had they come so far only to be defeated by some stupid disease?

She wriggled out of the cave, taking great care not to brain Zip on the rocks as she had done that previous time. She spread her tired wings and launched into the air. This time, they would truly test the endurance of a young Dragon.

Aranya flew toward the orange clouds above the setting suns, which burnished her scales to a coppery amethyst sheen, despite a dusting of travel-grime, soot from Dragonship fires and green stains where they had flown between the trailing vines and bulled through overhanging branches. Her body ached. Her wings felt ready to drop off. Slowly, she climbed, seeing the Dragonships spread out before and behind, shifting orientation to follow her path, made indefatigable by the power of their engines and the efforts of their soldiers.

Alone, she could have escaped by flying beneath the Cloudlands as she had done before. Not that she remembered much of that first flight, just the same kind of bone-deep pain that racked her now. Alone, Aranya could have flown upward until the air became so thin that even a Dragon would struggle to breathe. But she worried about Zip, slumped in the saddle. At least she seemed to be sleeping.

She flexed her body, driving upward even as the twin suns touched the horizon. How strange, that as a Human she had only ever distinguished the twin-ness of the suns when one or the other was eclipsed by a moon or two. With her Dragon sight lidded and protected against the glare, she clearly made out one sun a little above and behind the other. Some Island cultures gave them individual names. Immadians simply called them the Twins. The world spread out before her, its Islands made small by the height she had gained. The Cloudlands were an unbroken textured carpet several leagues below. The pursing Dragonships were but dwindling dots in the gloaming. The world was immense.

What futility, one Dragon and her Rider trying to change all this.

Aranya tilted her head forward, beginning the very long, gradual descent toward Tyrodia Island, visible as a smudge on the horizon. She was too tired to focus her eyes properly. She rested a little on the wing. As she left the Dragonship groups behind, she even dozed for the first time, safe in the unending immensity of the sky’s dome.

It was three
hours before dawn when Aranya reached Telstroy Island. She realised that the Dragonships she had spotted had been northwest of the Island, en route from Sylakia itself, just sixteen leagues farther. Just sixteen leagues. Aranya laughed hollowly as she dragged her aching body through the air. She was probably flying at half her normal speed.

Dragon-Aranya tilted her wings and dove for the thickest patch of forest she could see. She landed in clearing, and hid herself among the trees, moving quickly and stealthily away from where she had set down.

“Zip? Zip?”

Her friend did not answer.

Aranya found a stream. She took a mouthful of water and tried to squirt some of it down Zuziana’s throat, but her friend did not revive. She tried her healing power, but that seemed to change little. She tried to cry, to produce Dragon tears, but her hearts seemed made of stone. She rested for longer than she had intended.

A
cruel nightmare woke her. From another clearing, Aranya observed the movement of Dragonships in the gleaming almost-dawn sky. Her keen eye saw Yolathion’s standard of the black rajal almost above her. Already? How long had she slept? Another vessel flying the same standard converged with it. Ignathion, she thought. At the greatest magnifying power of her eyes, Aranya saw father and son conversing from gantries perhaps thirty feet apart. After an hour or so, Ignathion’s vessel hurried on, and many of the Dragonships with him. Was he bound for Remoy; taking command of the invasion fleet there? She watched as Yolathion transferred to one of the larger Dragonships, one of the three-hundred-foot monsters with the overhead gantry–the vessel which gave her the shivers.

Then
she learned she had not seen all. She heard Dragonship engines approaching from the other direction, low over the forest. Suddenly, the air was thick with hawks trying to spy her out.

Yolathion had sprung his trap.

Aranya knew she had to get help for Zuziana. She did not delay, despite the danger. As she rose from the forest, she saw Dragonships all around Tyrodia Island, encircling her, and a group of three small Dragonships, fast and manoeuvrable, converged upon her. Aranya pushed hard for the northwest. The huge Dragonship lumbered after. The three smaller ones wound up their single war crossbows and steamed on her tail, their turbines whining loudly in the still morning air.

She curv
ed her head back to the saddle and used her fangs to snip through the ropes holding their half-full sack of meriatite. Aranya gulped it down.

The reaction was immediate. A pain developed behind her breastbone. Too much gas, Aranya thought, angling her flight to intercept the Dragonships ahead of her. She needed to attack.

Crossbows spoke, criss-crossing the pre-dawn moonlight with angry quarrels. Aranya whispered between them, moving as easily as a dancer, yet feeling the strain of her weariness in every muscle. Extending her neck, she blew flame over the Dragonships. Two exploded. She side-slipped at once, trying to find airspace clear of Dragonships. The small vessels harried her from different angles, cutting off her escape. The air filled with sprays of catapult shot. She could not avoid it all. Aranya bellowed as a shot struck her inner right wing, shredding a patch of surface instantly. She twisted mid-air and dove, surprising a small Dragonship. Her flame licked out again.

Rage and sorrow bloomed in her breast. This was the final battle, she sensed. Hemmed in on all sides, she twisted and turned and spat fire and destroyed
many Dragonships. The meriatite ran out. A quarrel glanced off her left flank and another bit a chunk out of her left hind leg. She did not bother to count the number of arrows that pinged off her hide or chipped her scales.

Aranya fought with all her cunning. She fooled two ships into crashing together. She dropped atop another, shredding the hydrogen sack. She hid beneath a Dragonship, upside-down, while Yolathion’s command struggled to find a clear shot at her.

All the while, Zuziana dangled from the straps like a rag doll.

Yolathion loomed above her, always Yolathion, directing the battle with signals from his great Dragonship. Aranya’s fires rose in her belly, the fires which had burned her throat before, but this time it was no surprise. Smaller, she thought. Perhaps smaller fireballs would hurt less. Maybe she’d save one of them for Yolathion; blast it right in
to his smug, unfeeling face.

Aranya made a break for the north
, for a moment, springing clear of the pursuing Dragonships. They were over the Cloudlands now, she saw, battling lower and lower in the air as her strength faded–even now, as a swarm of the little Dragonships overtook her from behind. She doubled back. Time for Yolathion to feel her fire, she decided. Her flight was slow, her wing beats laboured, her breath rasping in her lungs. A different type of fire burned through her muscles. Aranya clenched her throat. Quick shots. She no longer cared for avoiding the quarrels. She could not think of them.

Her mouth gaped open
. Fireballs seared the morning air–one, two, three, almost quicker than she could aim them. Two of the small Dragonships exploded. She twisted, firing at new prey–the flanks of Dragonships too near to avoid her shots. Debris rained about her. Black smoke filled the sky, drifting in veils across the brightening dawn. Her final two fireballs, aimed for Yolathion’s large Dragonship, splattered against a smaller one that swooped unexpectedly between them.

Aranya veered off, avoiding the fallout without jerking Zuziana about too much.

Pain lanced into her side near the base of her tail as she closed with the huge Dragonship. Catapult shot hammered into her body and wings. Crimson splashed across her vision. Maddened, Dragon-Aranya summoned a fresh burst of speed and rose above the top of Yolathion’s vessel, ready to swoop down upon it.

S
he heard a new sound on the wind, a low hissing sound.

Four hidden catapults atop the Dragonship
had fired at once, filling the sky with rope. Netting, she realised, covering such a swathe of sky she stood no chance of avoiding it. Dragon-Aranya howled as the netting and ropes snarled her wings. Furnished with metal hooks, the nets clung cruelly. The ropes were tough, reinforced. Although her paws clawed madly, she only succeeded in fouling herself further. She fell.

The ropes jerked. The net drew painfully
tight about her body, snarling her wings. Aranya coughed out a fireball in surprise, burning a small hole in the net. It splattered against the huge Dragonship’s cabin, setting it alight. Sylakian warriors leaped to douse the flames.

Aranya bit and fought and struggled until her lips bled, but found little purchase against the entangling nets. She could not get them between her teeth. Her claws sliced against what felt like metal. She tore several talons off her feet in her madness, before the pain registered on her senses.

The Sylakians began to reel in their catch.

Nets and winches, she realised. Perhaps, if she had been faster or smarter, or thought to use her Dragon fire to burn the nets, she might have escaped. But she had nothing left. Her fright seemed to have robbed her of the fire. Her neck
twisted frantically, thrashing the net from side to side, as she was dragged unwillingly to the side of the Dragonship, and up it. Her claws splintered the cabin and shrieked against the armour protecting the hydrogen sack. All her vaunted power, all the ability to slice through the air in glorious Dragon flight, was lost now. The aerial fisherman had snagged his catch.

“Quick, get the Rider,” she heard Yolathion shout. “The beast will surrender once we have the Rider.”

Hands, many hands, reached from the gantry to attack the leather strap binding the saddle to her back. Aranya screamed. Not Zip! No, not Zip! Several warriors climbed the netting, working Zuziana loose through holes that fit her small frame. Aranya knocked one of the men off his perch. He fell shrieking to his death in the Cloudlands.

An awful pain drove like spikes into he
r right wing–one of the joints. Three men smashed their hammers down on her wing-joint, over and over again. Aranya bellowed, pitching two of them off the Dragonship. The winches lurched and groaned against their moorings.

“Stop that!” Yolathion roared.

The winches resumed, creaking beneath her weight, drawing the Dragon up and over the bulge of the armoured hydrogen sack to the platform where Yolathion stood. His men cheered at the sight of her. Yolathion stood there, tall and grim. His dark eyes glittered as the soldiers reeled her in. Aranya flapped and fought, twisting and snarling, but it was useless. She lacked the strength to break the layers of ropes or tear the winches loose of their footings.