Dragon Thief (22 page)

“Is this Talon slave or master?” Jisellia asked wisely.

Riika shook her head. “I’d guess master, from what I learned.”

“So, do we just pinch the scroll of whatever and thus solve the Talon problem?” Kal mused.

“Dad …” Her smile accused him of naïveté. “Perhaps. Apparently, Talon has not yet mastered this power. My informant thinks he’ll be unstoppable when he does. The final piece of intelligence was that Endurion and Talon are in the process of developing a super-weapon and are planning a devastating attack on the Academy. We have to warn them.”

Jalfyrion said, “When? When will this attack be?”

Riika added, “He seemed unsure whether they meant to simply destroy the capability of the Dragon Riders or to capture the Queen of Dragons and seize her Star Dragon powers for their own purposes.”

“Spreading rainbows of cheer and joy across the Islands,” Kal chirped. Dragonish joy involving the simple pleasures, such as the annihilation of all Humankind, and establishing a new age of Dragons led by similarly-minded draconic tyrants.

“When?” snapped Jalfyrion, rather less focussed than Kal on the return of Humans to the slavery of a thousand years before.

Riika’s squirming reached a new pitch. “The last word I heard was, ‘Next–’ and then my knife sort of, well … slipped. Before he finished.”

“Next week? Next month? Next season?” thundered the Red Dragon.

“I’m sorry! I failed, alright?”

“Sorry is not good enough!” The Red’s displeasure deafened them all.

“Jalfyrion’s right,” Jisellia said tightly. “But to seek more also would’ve been foolish. We must impart this information carefully and quickly. You cannot be the source, Kal. You’re not trusted.”

“But you and Jalfyrion have helped a renegade,” Kal returned.

“I will take responsibility.” Riika’s tone allowed no argument. “For reasons best known to her, Queen Aranya seems to trust me. I must finish my mission even if all I earn is wrath and disgrace.” She peered at Kal over Jisellia’s legs. “Now, I believe you have earned your bragging rights. How, by the heavens above and the Islands below, did you pull the proverbial sheepskin over all those Dragons’ eyes?”

Kal straightened his back. “I refuse to share trade secrets with the uninitiated.”

Jisellia said, “Jalfyrion, my beauty, I do believe it’s time for someone’s impromptu flying lesson.”

“My pleasure, noble Rider.”

“Bragging? A gigantic dollop, served without delay,” Kal shot back, pretending to quail in dread. “So, this idea of sheer, Island-shivering magnificence stemmed from the fortuitous conjunction of my towering burglarising genius and a ralti sheep fated to fly …”

* * * *

Laying low in their saddlebags, Kal and Riika returned to the Dragon Rider Academy in the early evening, having traversed the length of Jeradia’s exhibition of mountainous natural beauty in the mere matter of four hours, Dragon-speed. Ensconced in a thick blanket of sheepskin–literally, for Jisellia returned the old ralti furs in exchange for the new–they enjoyed an effortless ride down to the stores, free of charge and prying Dragon eyes. His honesty-and-truthfulness rash was definitely starting to subside, Kal thought happily, skipping through a few hallways to purloin a school application form from a locked storeroom to which he most certainly did not own any key. He locked the door afterward, of course. Politeness was surely the backbone of any enlightened society.

Following that, Kal took Riika via the kitchens to charm his favourite twin Jeradian serving-girls, buxom wenches with dimpled smiles ready for a hardened miscreant, into providing them a tasty dinner of roast buck, sweet tubers and vegetables. He ordered a twenty-sackweight haunch of ralti sheep for a ravenous, recovering Dragoness.

They ducked through an off-limits corridor, snuck along a secret route Kal was convinced the school administration knew nothing of, and exited behind a shelf stacked twenty feet high with Dragon bandages in the back of the infirmary.

As Kal and Riika approached her bed, Dragoness-Tazithiel glanced up, fire-eyes agleam with delight. “Well, if it isn’t the proverbial pair of bad brass drals. How do you do it, Kal?”

He made a lewd gesture at his side, hidden from Riika, but hurt his recovering wrist in the process. “With remarkable flair and immodest Islands-full of skill.”

Riika punched his shoulder anyway. “Save it for the pillow-roll, Sticky-Fingers.”

Reaching out, Tazithiel snaffled the Pygmy girl into her paw for a Dragon hug, which involved the miraculous transformation of a nut-brown Pygmy into a straining, groaning impression of a purple prekki fruit. “Hey, Razorblades. The old man treating you alright?”

“No, he stuffed me into a saddlebag,” Riika returned pertly.

“I suppose you do come conveniently packaged for ease of transport,” the Dragoness grinned.

“Shut it, fang-face! And I was just about to say something nice about scaly princesses. How is royalty treating you, o newly promoted scion of Immadia?” Aside, Riika added, “How was that, Kal? I practised for hours.”

Kal said, “Royally pontificating.”

Tazithiel snorted, “I never asked to be tarred with that brush. Does my mother have to feature in every conversation? Honestly, it’s enough to turn one’s stomach. Besides, I’m an ordinary princess enamoured with a magnificent, mighty and marvellous king.”

“Of thieves,” Riika put in.

“Of adjectives,” said Kal, thinking this distinction far more important.

Later, when Riika had recounted her tale and they had discussed the matter of Talon’s powers to death and beyond, the girl curled up in Tazi’s right paw and promptly fell asleep. Kal spread a blanket up to her neck, touching her cheek gently. Hollow. Riika’s skin stretched like delicate silk over the loom of her bones. He must go to Aranya and beg her to pour out her healing power.

When he observed Tazithiel watching, he grunted, “Aye. Soft as duck-down, eh?”

“Why are men always embarrassed about showing tenderness? Kal, you’re a wonderful parent. Heart firmly on the right Island.”

“We can’t chase our dreams to the Rim-Wall Mountains, Tazi. Not now.”

“I know.”

Kal pressed his forehead against her upraised left paw, wishing for fire and strength to fill him. How could the daughter of the Empress of Dragons profess to be enamoured with a common crook? “I’m sorry. I’ve always laughed at death, Tazi. Cheated it. Connived, scraped, escaped. Yet this is not an arrow in the darkness. I’d liken this to grey swamp waters creeping slowly, insidiously, toward snuffing out her life, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Nothing.”

Tazithiel bowed her muzzle, curving her paw to press his body against the smaller scales of her neck. “We’ll do what we can. Speak to Yozora. You will consult the Amethyst Dragoness. We will tap the knowledge of the Dragonkind and consult the lore-library here …”

“While I’m trapped in this infirmary, forced to skulk about a school, Islands’ sakes!”

“No. No more skulking. Well, only when necessary.” Way down in her great body, fiery laughter chuckled like a boiling spring tumbling over boulders. Tazi said, “May I make a proposal?”

“Propose away.”

“Move in with me, Kal.” He made a favourable sound. “Let’s have our own roost. A family roost, with Riika, at least for this time. If you’re agreeable, I’ll ask for one.”

“Mmm. Private space with thee, which is not in the midst of a busy infirmary? Tough choice.”

Tazi flexed her talons against his back. “Choose well, or it shall go ill with thee, my little larcenist–how was my evil-Dragoness voice, Kal?”

“You’ll never make a con-artist,” he said, shaking his head sorrowfully. “Listen. ‘Come to my roost, pretty girl.’ That’s how it’s done.”

“Ooh, you made my fires shiver!” she laughed. “Now, who do we speak to?”

Kal drew himself up. “My dear Dragoness, o sweet and innocent walking brazier of my heart, please leave the doing to the experts.” Over her rumbling laughter, he explained, “Why ask, say I, when a roost is ours for the taking? I shall make all the arrangements. Watch and learn.”

“You’ve corrupted the school administration already?”

Affecting an air of mystery, Kal declaimed, “When you have a messaging system driven by monkeys, what do you get? Monkey business.”

S
TALKING INTO THE
infirmary, Riika uttered an obscenity that made Human-Tazi’s eyebrows crawl and Kal yelp, “Riika! Do you even know what you’re saying?”

She began to gesticulate before the movement collapsed in sheepish realisation. “Not really, Dad. But Kal–”

“But nothing. Bad, bad word. No.”

“They won’t listen! And they won’t take my application.”

When Riika had finished ranting, which involved a good ten minutes of shouting, flinging tears of exasperation in all directions, storming around Tazi and Kal like a thundercloud hitched to a spinning-wheel, making Yozora hiss in annoyance and several patients on the far side of the infirmary bury their heads under their blankets for a modicum of peace, Kal held up his hands. “Right. Leave it with me, Riika.”

“I hate it when you take charge, Dad! I can do this!”

“Listen, Razorblades, I am most unequivocally not taking charge–more precisely, I am taking charge of
giving you a chance.
Taking that chance will be up to you.”

Riika’s eyes were huge, black pools, sodden and enervated from all her emotions. She coughed; licked blood off her lips. “Alright. But I do the talking.”

Kal enthused, “Done and bargained for, and a fine deal it is! We need to check your dosage. While I’m away making a few arrangements, will you go speak to Yozora? Did you fill in the application scroll?” Her curls bobbed in the affirmative. “Excellent. Apparently the Queen of all creation has departed on a critical mission, but when she returns I suggest you go bat your pretty eyes at her and beg her to find whatever miraculous healing powers the ballads–enough already. Back in an hour.”

Precisely an hour later, according to the graduated hourglass on the infirmary wall, which was turned once a day at noon and poured black volcanic sand from one bulb to the other with a gentle hiss that Tazithiel claimed kept her Dragoness awake at night, Kal stole back into the infirmary through an alternative secret entrance. Tazithiel and Riika awaited him near the stores, looking in the wrong direction. The thief snickered softly. Amateurs.

The image of an Indigo Dragoness whirled, followed by her Human manifestation. Kinetic power seized Kal and dragged him toward the two white-clad women, but for the first time, he resisted with his own magic. Kal slipped through her grasp.

A second later, he was picking a startled Shapeshifter off the floor.

“What did you just do?” she demanded.

“Dropped a beautiful woman on her exquisite behind,” said Kal, partly occupied with dusting off said derriere with more than due care, and partly wondering what on the Islands he had just managed to pull off. Dodging her Kinetic power by slipping through another … realm? What power was this?

He looked them over. Riika and Tazithiel wore full-length, matching white Mejian
inkaliar
dresses, belted at the waist, with cork platform sandals and white water-lilies in their hair.

His girls, outshining the very stars.

“Come. You look perfect.” More than perfect, but he did not trust himself to say more. “Let’s hustle.”

“Hustle?” Tazithiel slipped her arm into his. “When’s Riika’s entry interview?”

“A slot has unexpectedly opened up with Master X’atior, head of the Academy, who has final word on all admissions. We have twenty minutes.”

The Shapeshifter did not hide her sarcasm. “Remarkable.”

“Twenty minutes?” yelped Riika. “I’m not ready!”

“Kal, do you plan to walk through the heart of the Academy in broad daylight?”

“Watch and learn.” Kal bowed, and had his hairstyle rearranged by Tazithiel’s roar of frustration. He straightened up. “Good. Now they definitely know we’re coming. Let’s move.”

Leading the group via yet another secret tunnel, Kal exited at the third level of storage in a wine cellar which he had already taken the liberty of sampling. From there they took a spiral staircase up into the Masters’ and Journeymen’s kitchens, which served the teaching staff, and tiptoed along a gantry above a cavern filled with terrace lake-sized oil vats and thence to the foundries and smithies that produced the Academy’s Dragon armour and weaponry. By the time Kal had been cheerfully greeted by name for the eighth time or patted on the shoulder, Tazithiel wore a windroc’s scowl. Popularity. How could he help it? They borrowed a messenger-monkey staircase to shortcut the students’ main dining hall, which was watched by soldiers, and trotted thirty-two stories upward to the next major level of the Academy buildings.

“Place is a warren,” said Kal. “Usefully, they keep comprehensive schematics in the Master Architect’s office.”

“Oh, is that so?” Tazithiel’s tone suggested fireballs simmering in her gullet.

At the end of a further interminable staircase frequented by the albino messenger monkeys which conveyed messages or carried out small errands around the sprawling Academy, Kal halted his charges and slipped two concealed blowpipes out of his left sleeve. “The main administration building lies just ahead–patience, Indigo-eyes. Answers come to those who wait.”

“Indigo-eyes? Is that my new nickname?”

“Riika, I trust the use of this weapon is familiar to you?”

Riika accepted a blowpipe from Kal with a gleeful hug. “A Pygmy blowpipe? Kal, you’re the best dad ever!”

He smirked at Tazi over Riika’s shoulder. “Watch and–”

“Lose a limb to an irate Dragoness?”

“Ah … step lively now,” said Kal, triggering a lever that opened a section of wall behind a tapestry.

Popping his head out, the irrepressible saboteur took aim with his weapon.
Pfft! Pfft!

With that, he walked right up to the pair of hulking Jeradian guards stationed at an inner entryway to the towering red sandstone building. Both men stood half a foot taller than him, and bore war-hammers that looked useful for demolishing buildings. Kal danced a vulgar jig beneath their noses. “I believe we may proceed.”

The Dragoness stared at the glassy-eyed pair.

He said, “Do hurry, o clawed sweetness. We’ve less than a minute. Don’t want to be late.”

“How did you …”

Tazithiel scurried after Kal and Riika, shaking her head in bemusement. By the third set of guards, she had worked it out. Poisoned thorns. “It’s a unique type of thorn which grows only in the Crescent Islands,” Kal explained. “The innate poison will paralyse a giant Jeradian warrior, as noted, for approximately one minute, following which they resume normal function as if nothing happened. They don’t remember anything bar what seems to be an insect-bite.”

Riika exclaimed, “What I could not have done with this as an assassin! Never thought of it.”

“Which makes me the wise mentor and you the naïve youth,” Kal suggested, earning himself a look that suggested retribution would crush his miserable life like an Island dropped from the sky. “Right, this way to Master X’atior’s office.”

Four soldiers guarded the massive jalkwood doors at the entryway to the Master’s office complex, which housed a dozen administrative scribes and no less than seven full-time assistants led by the formidable Mistress Harrion, a Sylakian warrior built in the solid-as-a-Dragoness mode, and as officious as a cartload of sharpened quills. Shapeshifter, Kal noted. And less than pleased to spy Riika in her office, once the guards’ attention had been diverted.

“You’ve the nerve to return?” she greeted the half-Pygmy girl.

Riika bobbed her head and said sweetly, “I brought my parent and my sponsor as requested, Mistress Harrion. My sponsor is Tazithiel the Indigo Dragoness, Princess of Immadia, and this is Kal, my legal guardian.”

What about Kallion the Magnificent, King of Criminals? But Kal, watching the Mistress closely, was less than impressed with what he observed. Why the poorly-concealed aversion to a Pygmy girl, unless it had to do with his status in the school? Riika had only mentioned that the woman had rejected her application, not why.

“You’re too young for this school, child. And how did you get him up here, past the guards?”

Riika’s fingers twitched as though she wished to apply red-hot daggers to Mistress Harrion’s eyeballs. “I am of age. We have an appointment with the Master.”

“So I see. You’re one minute late.” Kal almost laughed in her face. Was that her best? “The Master is expecting you.”

Making no effort to hide her contempt, the Mistress indicated the way.

Master X’atior was a very large Fra’aniorian man who gave the appearance of becoming jolly with a flagon of wine just a little too often, but Kal noted the stillness of his hands, the stark emptiness of his wide desk and the depth of his gaze. Aye, magic. A Brown Dragon Shapeshifter shimmered briefly beneath his notice, as though woken by Kal’s scrutiny, and when he perceived the other occupant of the office, who thought herself hidden by magic, he nodded despite a spurt of adrenaline-laced fear. This was right. Right for Riika, at least.

After introductions, the Master bade them take seats in the semicircle of carved hardwood chairs facing his desk, which was fifteen feet wide and so highly polished, Kal saw a nick on the Master’s chin reflected there. Riika sat in the middle seat, her legs unable to quite touch the floor. Massive crysglass windows behind X’atior framed a panoramic view of the caldera, resplendent in the full late-morning suns-shine. The two-mile sheer cliffs opposite gleamed with lodes of minerals threading the rock and exposed blood-red crystal formations, several of which stood on display around his tastefully decorated office. Master X’atior clearly had as much an eye for luxury as he had for his guests, whom he scrutinised with shrewd, draconic care.

The Master spread the scroll of application before him. Ominously.

“An unusual document,” he said. “Ignoring the fact that applications should be closed for this year, I see we have a most uncommon candidate before us, intriguingly, sponsored by the Queen’s own daughter. And the father is my fellow-Islander, one Kallion of Fra’anior, of whom scant record is to be found in our very extensive archives. A man under death-warrant, who nonetheless breezed past my security as though it did not exist.”

Kal drawled, “Your so-called security, sadly, is pervious to a blindfolded toddler wandering about aimlessly wailing for his mother.”

X’atior’s knuckles whitened against the edge of his desk. He did not appear capable of any answer that would not involve seeing how far he could hurl someone’s head across the caldera.

“I could offer my services as a security consultant.”

“More an insecurity consultant,” noted the Master, making Kal laugh in startled concert. “Or a security insult-ant. I will consider your proposal, o Kallion of mysterious past, for I sense your enmity would be detrimental to our Academy, but your skills put to right use might benefit us all. Curiously, I appear to have approved the assignment of a family roost to you in a most favourable location. I also approved a rash of lavish interior decoration works, with the highest priority. Apparently, I am exceedingly generous.”

Tazithiel’s left eye twitched, but Kal sensed her Dragoness’ underlying laughter.

He said, “Thank you, Master X’atior. We do not wish to take up valuable space in the infirmary. Your understanding of our situation is greatly appreciated.”

“But this interview is not about you, Kal,” the Master riposted. Ooh, a worthy opponent. Delight very nearly made Kal wriggle on his seat like a schoolboy being taken to task for playing truant. “Riika. I have read your application with interest. Why did you have to come here in person to deliver it?”

“Because the woman out there refused me,” Riika said. “I thought this school provided people like me with a chance, and a chance is all I ask.”

“Mistress Harrion refused your application? On what grounds?”

“She made it clear that my application was unwelcome. I am not too young, Master. I’m fourteen, although I look ten. I’ve skills and qualities–”

X’atior’s eyes had a curious blend of hardness and sympathy about them. “What did she say, exactly? My motto is honesty, Riika.”

“She said, ‘Get the hells out of my office, you little brown turd.’ ”

“Riika!” Kal gasped. Just outside the door, something crashed to the floor. Crysglass.

“Sorry, Dad, I–Aranya!”

The door slammed so hard behind the Amethyst Shapeshifter that a painting fell off the wall, cracking the frame. It sounded as if a muffled war had just broken out in the next room. A very one-sided war.

Leaning across his desk, Master X’atior said, “I am sorry you had to endure that, Riika. But I can disclose this–the last time a person of your heritage sat opposite a Master in this office, she did this school enormous and lasting honour. Now, let’s leave my ancestor to chastise that bigot. Always did loathe the woman. Tell me about Riika. What will this scrap of scrolleaf not tell me about this potential student?”

The girl stared into his benevolent yet astute eyes, and said, “I am the kind of person, Master, who will sail alone into enemy territory to secure intelligence regarding Talon and the Green Dragon Elder, Endurion. Intelligence which your Academy administration also refused to accept.”

Kal clenched his right fist, the only outward sign of the Dragon-fiery pride burning within him. Riika! He dared a glance over that curly mop at Tazithiel, who allowed the corner of her mouth to quirk upward in response.