Dragon Thief (30 page)

And if Aranya or Tazithiel could snatch victory out of these ashes, then they were greater miracle-workers than a despairing soul who had stolen life from the fangs of a Cloudlands-spanning storm.

Was it fated that a thief should Ride a Star Dragoness? Kal did not know what to believe any more. New-Kal had thrown himself toward the fangs of a Dragoness. New-Kal neither turned his back, nor stood idly by. This Kal prepared his own noose for the gallows–but oddly, the thought cheered him. If needs be, he would go down lying and scheming, biting and stealing. He was not a nice man. He liked to threaten life’s neck with a handy garrotte and throttle it into giving him what he wanted. Somewhere there would be a key. Who better-placed to find it than a thief?

The Indigo Dragoness regarded him strangely as Kal vented a fiendish chuckle. “What, Kal?”

“I’ve an idea,” he said.

* * * *

Flying in a V formation spearheaded by Aranya herself, the Dragonwing hurtled northward shortly thereafter, riding the wings of a storm that blotted the remains of Jos city from sight, and extinguished the last of the fires which had ripped through so many of the wooden buildings. As they flew, Aranya outlined her strategy. Kal slumped in his seat. Honestly? Why not have the Dragons tie rocks to their own tails and dump themselves into the Cloudlands?

“Talon and Endurion are creatures like any other,” she argued. “They grow tired and have a limited capacity for magic. We must ensure that they use up their resources. Then even this Talon must fail. Our plan has to be a massed, sustained attack, but delivered in a Dragon-cunning way.”

Aranya certainly had thought through what she proposed. Kal had only one minor quibble. Her claver plan was doomed to failure. What kept his lips firmly clamped shut, was that he had no better ideas, save one.

Playing with shadows.

Kal voiced his idea reluctantly.

Riika threatened him with her dagger. “No, Dad.”

Aranya gasped, “No!”

Tazithiel hiccoughed a fireball that passed perilously close to Cyanorion’s wingtip. “Absolutely not, Kal!”

Mutinously, Kal said, “Look, we have to separate Endurion and Talon. There’s something weirdly symbiotic about their relationship, about the way they draw strength from each other. Disparage my intuition all you want, but that control she has over the physical realm … it’s similar to Tazithiel’s Kinetic magic, only augmented and distorted. Imagine having someone seize every bone in your body and twist it different ways at once? That’s her power. Many hands.”

“Look, we don’t doubt your courage–”

Aranya collected a filthy stare Kal used to spend long hours practising in a mirror. “But you don’t trust me. Forgiveness, aye. Trust? I know I haven’t earned any.”

“Kal, don’t say that,” Tazi protested.

“You can mistrust my presence at your Academy, precious Queen, and doubt what my warrior-accountants will do to the place. That’s fine. I’ll admit I’m a wanted man on four hundred and sixteen Islands–at least, those I know of. My heart may be irretrievably tarred, but it’s the genuine article and it burns with real fire. Right in here.” Kal thumped his chest. “I close my eyes and see the charred skeletons of children back in Jos. Don’t you?”

His cry was plaintive and raw, like the call of a hunting falcon.

“We all do,” the Amethyst Dragoness rumbled, the dark-fires of grief shadowing her eyes. “Some of us have seen more destruction over more years than you can imagine, Kal. True courage is not blind. True courage knows the blackest nadir of despair, spreads its wings, and flies once more to the heavens to take up the fight. Again, and again, and again. The Dragon-phoenix takes form amidst what seems to be only dead ashes. That is what meeting you has reminded me, Kallion of Fra’anior.”

The Dragoness’ reaming gaze measured him, flicking to Riika and Tazithiel and back. “When a soul transcends the spectres of past and present, and the fear of an uncertain future, that is when its true nobility may be measured. Do not doubt that the moment we feel most broken is the moment when we can be our strongest.”

Aranya raised a talon to point at him. “Keep that idea in reserve, Kal. Find another way. For I sense the key lies with you.”

Give the thief the keys to the kingdom? Wise move, o Queen.

* * * *

Never had Dragons burned the skies as brightly as that day. They flew so high and fast, their wings left a puffy white jet stream of ice particles in their wake. The afternoon suns blazed through their trail, casting haloes and rainbows of luminous colours. Tazithiel, Aranya and powerful Cyanorion took turns to raise the Storm winds that drove the Dragons across the leagues of Jeradia’s mountainous interior with a speed that felt at once exhilarating and far too slow. Talon and Endurion seemed to have dropped off the edge of the Island, for all they saw of the adversary.

The Amethyst Dragoness, flying overhead to supply her strength to a slipstreaming shield over the entire Dragonwing, said to Tazithiel and Kal, “I sense her. Talon. It is odd, for in the great harmonic song of the world as seen by Star Dragons, this seems more like a void, as if I know her by the absence of harmony. And that is impossible, for be they good or evil, every creature of this Island-World will create their own song of magic. This is your heritage, my shell-daughter, the heritage of one born of the stars, and her Rider, who is every bit as essential to her labours as the canvas, paints and brush are essential to the creation of a masterpiece.”

Kal said, “Dramagon’s heritage was an absence of harmony.”

The Indigo Dragoness grumbled, “Now you’re a font of Star Dragon lore, Kal?”

“No,” said Aranya. “He quotes from the works of Hualiama Dragonfriend. She battled the accursed spawn of Dramagon, that Ancient Dragon and shell-brother of Fra’anior, whose shadow and dark-fires shroud the Islands even to this day. His hallmark was the corruption of magic. No creature better understood how to take what was good and pure, and pervert it to the works of darkness.”

“A being of pure evil?” Tazi asked.

“I don’t believe so.” Aranya projected a mental picture of the seven-headed Black Dragon. “Fra’anior spoke of Dramagon with great sadness and regret. At first it was the rivalry of shell-siblings, each endowed with unimaginable power, high intelligence and ambition. As they flew their separate Dragonflights over thousands of years, their rivalry grew bitter and malign. Even Fra’anior admits he did evil in the pursuit of what he conceived as good, and having inflicted enormous pain and suffering upon the Island-World, he chose to remove the Ancient Dragons to another time and place, to allow the lesser races of Humans and Dragons to flourish apart from the Ancient Dragons’ destructive warring.”

Kal began to formulate a question in his mind, but Queen Aranya answered it before he spoke. “Aye, Kal. There are creatures which parasitize magic. Creatures of Herimor such as the Theadurial, who enslave the Land Dragons beneath the Cloudlands, and the Shadow Beast, the creature which attacked and massacred the Lesser Dragons of this world at the time of the Pygmy Dragon.”

“We must consider how starlight can combine with shadow,” Tazithiel put in unexpectedly.

Riika chuckled, “You sound like Dad.”

The Indigo Dragoness snorted, “You chattering parakeet, what do you know of these lofty matters? Please, enlighten us.”

Far from being cowed by a Dragon’s withering sarcasm, the half-Pygmy teenager replied, “I know that shadow cannot exist without light. And light shines most brightly in the darkness.”

From her words rippled a silence at once as powerful as thunder, and as redolent of hope as dawn’s light dappling upon a tranquil terrace lake. This was great and inexplicable magic, like the binding oath Kal and Tazithiel had once spoken, which knocked them from the sky. And it seemed to Kal that seven great heads bowed in approbation.

Every Dragon and Rider in their company stared at Riika. She coloured, but that definite little chin did not budge a hairsbreadth.

Aranya’s eye-fires brightened until it seemed that stars blazed within her skull. She bugled softly, “This day, even the hatchlings sing a Dragonsong of hope.”

K
AL WONDERED how
simple words could sucker-punch reality right beneath the sternum. What manner of magic was this? Amongst all the libraries of lore written about Dragon powers and transformative Shapeshifter magic, this matter of world-shifting oaths and truths to give the suns pause in their stately course through the skies struck him as a glaring omission. He glared. The omission did not improve. So Kal did the only sensible thing.

He dreamed nefarious, thieving daydreams.

As the Academy volcano crested the northern horizon, Kal’s scheming mind gnawed at the question of how he could wrest this power to his advantage. For it seemed to him that the form of an utterance must matter far less than the intention of the heart that spoke it, and that intention must rise from a person’s soul as adamantine purpose, refined in the crucible of great need. If oath-power acted upon the physical realm, how much more must such a potential act upon the emotional, spiritual and magical realms? And if he thus could influence the realms of material and immaterial existence, could he not by dreaming greatly cause some impossible cosmic alignment to transpire, stealing as it were from a fate written in the stars, a new, most singular outcome?

Who would have presumed to steal a Star Dragoness’ heart? Only a crazy dreamer.

They
needed
to reach the Academy before Talon. They must. They needed to be there an hour ago. They needed not just a pretty rainbow slipstream. They needed to truly burn the skies. Surely, any Star Dragoness worthy of the name could become a falling star?

Before he knew it, Kal muttered the Dragon Rider oath,
Let us burn the heavens together …
his voice choked off as the Shadow power pictured in his mind morphed into a new, cunning design. What if he modified her shield to create a leading vacuum, shaping the flow of Shadow-stolen volumes of air and depositing them behind her tail? Blasting them backward? Kal wrestled with the output, narrowing it down to the equivalent of a turbine engine’s exhaust.

Without warning, they shot ahead as though fired from a Dragonship’s war crossbow.

The Indigo Dragoness gasped,
Kal?

Suffering lava lakes … shields, Tazi!

The Dragoness’ body stretched out beneath the force of her sustained acceleration, as lustrous and sleek as one of Riika’s flechettes, and her wings drew backward almost to her sides, yet they fluttered in the tiniest wingbeats Kal had ever seen a Dragon make, so rapidly that her wingtips became a blur, almost invisible. He could not tell whether his Shadow magic propelled them from behind or sucked them into a vortex, but where he expected to hear the wind howling, instead, Tazithiel’s shielding was so flawless that a hallowed silence descended upon the world about. There was the awareness of inconceivable velocity but scarcely any accompanying sound or vibration. Even the sensation of being crushed against her spine spike faded. He heard Riika’s bubbling laughter and the tiny popping of vertebrae in his neck as Kal swivelled to view the Dragonwing left literally in their dust, the Amethyst Dragoness’ jaw sagging in decidedly un-queenly perplexity–no, not dust, but haloed in a perfect white corona of what his startled mind identified as draconic white-fires, the magical fires of the original creation within which Dragons believed, all creatures and all reality existed.

Tazithiel blazed a comet-trail across the sky. Faster. Faster!

Kal popped his ears frantically as the pressure escalated. He saw Riika yawning repeatedly, doing the same. Tazithiel whipped past an Academy patrol so fast it appeared as if the Dragons were flying backward. The Indigo Dragoness yelled at them as she hurtled past, but before Kal could see if they had responded or not, Tazithiel was already a mile away and still gathering speed. Glancing back, he saw the Dragons buffeted so severely by her shockwave that two male Reds collided mid-air, an unthinkable insult in draconic circles.

BOOM!

The mountains of Jeradia resounded to the sonic boom of a Dragoness streaking for the Academy volcano.

Leaning forward in his saddle, Kal whooped, “This is incredible, Tazithiel!”

“This is madness,” she yelled back.

“A good sort of madness,” Riika put in. “My only question is, how do we stop?”

The Shapeshifter gasped, “That concussion we heard was us accelerating to a speed faster than sound. I’ve read the Dragon research. Sometimes a meteorite will travel so fast that people or Dragons hear an explosion.”

Kal eyed the looming volcano, rubbing his eyes in disbelief. If they struck it at this speed, that would make a pretty smear on the rocks. “How fast, exactly?”

“Something in excess of two hundred and twenty leagues per hour.”

“What?”

Tazithiel hooted with laughter. “Aye, Kal. You’re to blame. If I could sustain this magical output–which is a huge drain–we’d fly from here to Immadia within a day. Easily.”

“What?”

“Could we try an intelligent question?” Riika goaded.

“What?
Right, Tazi. We need to sound the alarm. Thunder away.”

“Poor Kal,” continued the irrepressibly mouthy girl seated ahead of him on Tazithiel’s back. “Don’t you understand what flying faster than the speed of sound means?”

Between gritted teeth, Kal mangled a sentence involving an apology and simultaneous throttling and defenestration, whichever worked quicker. The Indigo Dragoness roared up to the Academy volcano at the same terrifying speed, before relaxing her wings and extending the shield, generating instant wind resistance. Kal and Riika both protested as the deceleration mashed their noses against her spine spikes, but Tazithiel ignored them, opting to bugle the alarm instead.

“All clear down below,” she panted, between bouts of producing an unbelievable din.

“No sign of Talon?” asked Kal.

“Another ralti-stupid question, Dad?”

He swatted Riika’s head from behind. “No smart comments from you, young lady.”

Tazi said, “Not yet. Why aren’t they responding?”

Kal peered across the volcano. “They are, it just takes time to mobilise that many Humans and Dragons.”

Hovering a few hundred feet above the Academy’s topmost buildings, the Indigo Dragoness and her two Riders surveyed the scene as Master X’atior’s readiness drills swung into operation. Minutes began to tick by. Kal sweated impatiently. Nurseries emptied as Dragonesses herded neat clusters of hatchlings aloft, while others transported nets bulging with child-sized Dragons’ eggs. The smaller fledglings formed a Dragonwing which winged eastward under the watchful supervision of a dozen adult Dragons. At the speed of telepathic Dragon speech, Tazithiel kept up a running briefing of every Dragon who approached them for information. Many were the gnashing fangs that greeted news of an imminent attack.

Dragonwings of Riders and Dragons gathered aloft, taking up defensive positions, while the Human staff and students assembled beside the main hall and began to file away section by section, through the secret caves and tunnels which would eventually lead out into the maze of ravines and forests outside the volcano. Kal only prayed the Anubam would not choose that route for their assault.

Suddenly, the afternoon seemed unbearably hot. Kal fidgeted. How could one fight Anubam? How could they neutralise or destroy Endurion or Talon? Perhaps Aranya’s strategy was sound. Over two hundred Dragons joined together above the slate tiles of the Academy buildings and the Dragon roosts a quarter of a mile beyond, until the afternoon’s partial eclipse of the suns behind the Yellow Moon took on an ominous, shadowed aspect, and the lava runs criss-crossing the active parts of the volcano glowed like bloodied cracks in the skin of a slumbering beast. His eyes kept leaping to the South. That speck of Amethyst was fifteen minutes away. Ten. Making her utmost speed.

Out of time.

Aranya and her Dragonwing were still leagues distant when Kal saw the wide field fronting the Academy buildings begin to judder. The careful exodus turned into a stampede.

Riika palmed her bow. “A dozen explosive arrows left, Dad. You want a couple?”

“Aye.”

“Make them count, Sticky-Fingers.”

“Like a pack of tiny but toxic Pygmy warriors,” he agreed, accepting four arrows. “Keep sharp, girls, and we’ll get through this.”

“By my wings, you’re the worst liar that ever lived,” snorted Tazithiel. “Here’s the plan, Kal. Let these other Dragons deal with whatever’s down there. We deal with Talon, no other. Understood?” But she softened her words with an oddly Human-sounding laugh. “If you’re planning to target any other aspects of reality and rob them blind, you scurvy, apostate son of a kleptomaniacal spider-monkey, then don’t wait for my permission. Endurion certainly won’t.”

Kal laughed, “Great Islands, how many hours did it take you to figure out that insult?”

“Been polishing it for weeks.”

In ominous silence, half of the field dropped away into a black void.

The thief patted his Dragoness fondly. “Today, we win back your honour, Tazithiel.”

With a round of battle challenges that resounded in a single, continuous peal of thunder, the earth spewed Dragons.

* * * *

Talon was one for the grand gesture. Kal added this to the picture forming in his mind. Megalomaniac? Probably. Despot? Doubtless. But this assault was not being made without purpose and structure. The hole was seven hundred feet wide. Tens of Dragons at a time erupted from the hole, shielded by Blues emerging at planned intervals. The Academy Dragons’ opening salvoes expired against strong shields, save for a trio of Green Academy shell-sisters who, by some mysterious sleight-of-paw, managed to slip a volley of rajal-sized acid spit-balls into the enemy ranks. Four opposing Red Dragons fell, squirming and screaming, back toward the hole from which they had emerged. But they never passed ground level.

With a volcano-shuddering roar, a great Anubam thundered up from the depths, engulfing the four Reds in its vast maw. Kal made a much smaller swallow of his own. If that feral freak was not related to the Anubam he and Tazithiel had scared up in the Island-Desert, then he was the son of a spider-monkey. At once, fifty Academy Dragons took up the challenge, bombarding the monstrous burrower with a range of Dragon powers–molten rock, Dragon fire, acid spit, boiling glue, shaped lightning bolts and shards of ice the size of trees. The Anubam twisted and collapsed in a landslide of flesh, venting a scream that chilled Kal to the bone. Its breath, able to pulverise rock, did the same to any Dragon who strayed into its path.

Kal saw an elderly Red Dragon lashing an enemy Green with tendrils of fire which appeared to erupt from his talon-tips. Dragon clashed with Dragon, chest against chest and fangs grinding against fang. Their growls and roars made the entire amphitheatre of the volcano vibrate to the spine-tingling tumult of the melee. Beneath him, Tazithiel trembled with readiness to join in. The battle began to drift apart. Meantime, the Academy Dragons worked in teams, making significant headway even though they were outnumbered two to one. More Academy Dragons slipped low across the remains of the field, trying to ambush the attackers from beneath.

Suddenly, Kal sensed the presence he had feared.

Endurion rose from the pit.

The Green Dragon wore a second hide of black, segmented Dragon armour in a style Kal had never seen before–not that he was an expert in Dragon armour. It gave him the air of a Western Isles millipede, a carnivorous pest which grew up to three feet long. But the Rider on his back mesmerised Kal. Set aside her standard ‘evil overlord’ attire–black velvet cloak, crimson armour and gauntlets with matching black trim, crimson helm and snarling-rajal faceplate, her malevolently stylish outfit finished with the customary gleaming black boots–that woman was a freak. A giantess. Kal had always thought Dragon Riders looked improbably diminutive perched atop their hundred-foot lizards. That mutant, or whatever she was,
fit.
She was taller than him, sitting down.

How had Talon grown so large since last he shivered at the sight of her?

Kal groaned as his stomach seemed to bounce off the underside of his throat. The Indigo Dragoness plummeted, furling her wings, corkscrewing through the thick of the battle. Kal and Riika both yelled as dozens of massive draconic bodies surged toward them and a Green Dragon’s fangs clipped off a few stray hairs near Riika’s left earhole, but Tazi’s phenomenal Dragon-reactions sped them through unscathed, save for shaving off a few years of a thief’s piddling life and a fireball that set Tazithiel’s tail aglow.

“Arrows!” Riika screamed.

Oh. He was meant to be part of this cheerfully explosive little family. Kal whipped out his Dragon war bow. He growled, “Right, Endurion. Time to suck up a dose of death.”

The Pygmy chortled, “Sticky-Fingers, you desperately need help with your lines.”

Tazithiel sucked in a huge, everlasting breath. Kal sensed the potentials building within her. Lightning attack. Compressed somehow within the organ misnamed a stomach, which Blues used to generate their electrical attacks, the power sizzled at a staggering pitch of fury. Aye, scorned women were weapons of unknown destructive potential. A scorned Dragoness? Kal wanted to duck or hide his face from the coming destruction, but in truth, he was having far too much fun.