Dragon Thief (33 page)

“Hidden depths, secret Dragon hoards and extravagant piles of treasure,” he corrected. Ever so humbly.

“Snooty man. Buckled up? I’m hungry.”

“Again? We can hunt in the Western Isles. Let’s go burn … uh, that is, let’s go quietly and not wake everyone up with our impractical profligacy in the magical realms.”

Walking sinuously through their short hallway to the roost’s front ledge, Tazithiel said, “I can see that the flight won’t lack for–huh?”

Kal had been looking to the skies to see when they could expect first light. His eyes dropped; shock knotted his gut into a fine tangle. “What in the name of …”

Fire-eyes. The entire slope of the mountain below their roost was carpeted in the fire-eyes of Dragons, from the greatest to the smallest, and below, by the pinpoint brilliance of a White moon, he saw thousands of people gathered around the gleaming green lake. Upon the Rim-Wall itself, draconic sentinels perched at intervals, brooding over the scene.

“So much for a quiet exit, my beauty. Did you know about this?”

Tazi bugled softly, “No.”

Launching from the mountaintop above, the unmistakably vast shadow of the Amethyst Dragoness occluded the stars. “Friends of all races!” she boomed. Her amplified voice rolled over the volcano like breaking thunder. “We gather this morning to thank a Dragon Rider team for saving us from the paw of the aggressor, Rhadhuri of Remoy, and her minions and monsters. Rhadhuri was once a student of this Academy. She was dismissed for multiple murders in which she sought to steal magical powers from Humans, Shifters and Dragons alike–she had no scruples, and no limits to her ambition. She broke ancient magical taboos to raise the Anubam against us; through your courage, those monsters have now been destroyed.”

“I grieve to inform you that as of this morning, the death toll now stands at one thousand, two hundred and sixty-four, including Dragons, Shapeshifters and Humans. Many were children and hatchlings, dear to our hearts.”

Kal sucked in his lip. So many!

“Fifty-two persons are still missing. Seventy-eight Dragons of Rhadhuri’s force recanted their oaths to her, oaths extracted under duress and psychic torture. They have joined us. We welcome them as our own.”

Circling slowly overhead, the Amethyst Dragoness cried, “The death toll would have been much greater had it not been for the courage of one Dragoness and her Rider! You know of whom I speak!”

A wave of sound rolled across the volcano to assault Kal’s ears, the cries of Humans mingled with the carolling joy of the Dragons. Tazi stood tall and proud; Kal came within a rajal’s whisker of invoking his Shadow power to hide his burning face from public view. Bah! He hated being picked out. Public scrutiny made his neck itch as if he were allergic to the fibres of a hangman’s noose.

Again, the Dragoness’ thunder pitched her voice across the miles of the Academy volcano. “Tazithiel and Kal fought with great courage to penetrate and destroy Talon’s lair. Having learned of her perfidious plan, as we strained wing and muscle to race back to the Academy, these two blew the Island-World’s mightiest Dragons into the dust as they flew faster than any Dragon has ever before to reach us and warn us to start the evacuation. Ten minutes later, and the deaths would have numbered tens of thousands. On behalf of every soul present, I, Aranya of Immadia, thank you for our lives, Dragon and Rider.”

Under cover of the roaring, Kal muttered, “Great Islands, can we leave already?”

Bowing regally, the Indigo Dragoness said, “Where’s my pompous little poser, then? Smile nicely for your admirers, Kal.”

“Bah.” He smiled and flapped a hand briefly. “There. Happy?”

“Ecstatic.”

Tazithiel slipped into the air with that nonchalant ease of the Dragonkind that had always screamed to a ground-dweller, ‘Master of the air!’ Born to fly. Born to race and aspirate words etched in fire. As she winged languidly toward her mother, the Amethyst Dragoness summoned even greater volume, if such a feat were physically possible.

“Now Kal and Tazithiel fly to the West, to realms never before explored by the Dragonkind! They travel to the Rim-Wall Mountains in search of a way through to the world beyond. We wish them fair winds and clear skies!”

Her voice shook the volcano with the power of an earthquake. The sentinel Dragons took off, quickly orienting themselves to form a guard of honour, their scales glimmering red and orange, yellow and green, blue and grey in the faint moonlight. The Dragons cleared their throats. Obeying an instinct Kal could not understand, every single Dragon in that volcano roared with a single voice, while hundreds of fireballs razed the skies, enflaming the watching draconic and Human faces. Aranya produced a spectacular fireball of her own, which exploded high above in a shower of glittering blue sparks.

“That’s our cue,” said Tazithiel, pumping her wings.

“Wretched wench, you tear my stomach apart every time you do that,” Kal gasped. The Dragoness seemed to enjoy accelerating so powerfully that her Rider developed an old hound’s sagging jowls at the gravitational forces she generated.

The Indigo Dragoness shot him a glint of wicked orange eyeball over her shoulder. “Why don’t you give us a proper send-off, Rider Kal? Something memorable?”

From below, Aranya’s shout chased them,
Go burn the heavens together, Dragon and Rider!

Aranya was in danger of tearing down her under-construction buildings with her thundering, Kal thought smugly. But her declaration filled him with fire. Mischievous, dancing fire. He held off a moment, concerned for all the hatchlings down there. Well, wouldn’t it take them a few minutes to quicken to top speed? Tazi could rest in the Western Isles before they leaped into the great, wild beyond.

What harm in perpetrating a little friendly mayhem?

With a wild yell, he slapped Tazithiel’s shoulder as hard as he was able.
Go blast the heavens, Dragoness!

His girl blew past the honour guard like a burning boulder jetted out of a volcano, climbing at a phenomenal pace into the early morning sky. Kal wanted to whoop to incite her to greater speed, but the howling windstorm stuffed the words back down his throat. She was heading in the wrong direction, east … no, the crafty Indigo Dragoness described a wide arc against the blushing dawn and rocketed back toward the open peak with a trumpet-call of infectious joy barrelling from her throat and thankfully, a touch of protection for her Rider. In Dragonish, Kal set about listing every complimentary adjective he could dredge up, finding that their utterance was akin to feeding the Indigo Dragoness’ fires.

Compliments, insults–Dragons could never guzzle enough of them.

But she needed to speed up. Kal opened the spigots of his strange power. What a quickening, making the acceleration sit upon his chest like a giant Jeradian warrior! Now he could not have moved had he wanted to. The world turned deathly shades of grey, blurring into the corners of his vision as Kal struggled to maintain his concentration. Roaring rajals! How did she keep flying under this strain?

Right above the Academy, Tazithiel attained supersonic speed.

BOOM!

Well, that rattled their gizzards, Kal thought in satisfaction. At the same screaming velocity, Tazithiel aimed her muzzle at the stars still speckling the north-western horizon.

Westward, ho!

D
AWN CHASED DRAGON
and Rider across the sky with torrents of fire. It burnished the empty Cloudlands as though a forge door stood open in the East, casting ruddy beams across the endless, gently billowing cloudscapes. Toxic beauty. Ever-changing, multi-coloured, like the gleaming scales of a polychromatic Dragoness that stormed above them; for the first time, Kal drew the comparison between Aranya’s rainbow Shapeshifter hair and Tazithiel’s scales. As Tazithiel sang out her first sighting of Ur-Malka Cluster on the horizon, the first of many ‘Ur’s’ of the sprawling Western Isles, Kal examined his Dragoness as his basic Dragon Rider training had taught him.

Not that he was much of a Rider, nor had he been much enamoured of learning theory together with a gaggle of giggling preteens. The Dragoness, having been thoroughly scrubbed in a strange machine consisting of huge, bristling rollers–while Tazithiel purred under its ministrations Kal had gleefully pictured shunting one of those rollers down Endurion’s miserable gullet and doing a dint of hearty scouring of his own–had been oiled and then buffed to an exuberant shine. All about reducing wind resistance.

However, was she tiring? It was hard to tell, but if he listened carefully, Kal thought he detected a lowering in the overall tenor of Tazithiel’s belly-fires, and the crazy-hummingbird fluttering of her wings had a slightly ragged edge.

Tazithiel, how’s my best Dragoness-girl doing?

This is crazy fun, but I do need to slow down.
She eased into a narrow gliding configuration; the wind still whistled over her scales, however.
Aranya coached me in the art of monitoring my magical output–forty-nine factors in all. Despite your help, whatever your Shadow power’s doing to abduct the air ahead and shovel it behind me … aren’t you tired, too?

Not too tired to abduct my favourite Indigo Island-shaker and whisk her away to a cosy roost sized for two.

Kal. Seriously.

Seriously? I feel like a Dragoness is grinding my temples between her paws. Now, you’re not shaping your shield properly. Your bullet-form has slipped, Tazithiel, and the orientation of your wings is canted several degrees to the vertical.

Fussy fusspot,
she growled, making the adjustments.

Concentrate, o aerial goddess.

If some pillow-god wasn’t bent on constantly distracting me, I might fly better.

If he could have died just then, Kal would have entered eternity with a smile so broad it cramped the muscles in his cheeks. And he would have looked peculiar for the rest of time.

Two hours later, they reached the teeming mass of Islands that was Ur-Malka Cluster. “Three hundred and eighty-seven leagues in two and a half hours,” Kal crowed. “Travelling seven leagues per hour, a fast Dragonship would take fifty-five hours to make this same crossing.”

“Aye, and I’m puffed.”

“What you are is the sleekest, most gorgeous flying machine that ever raced across the face of the suns.”

“I’ll thank you not to slaver over me like men slaver over fine engineering.”

“Mmm.” Kal considered this, to a hiccough of amusement from his mount. “Aye, I can definitely see myself drooling over your fine, oiled chassis.”

“Pervert.”

“And as for the lovingly-crafted details of your peerless undercarriage–”

“Kallion, you’ll make these Islands blush!”

“I simply must undertake a meticulous appraisal of your inmost workings.”

“You are an irredeemably depraved manikin. And before you entertain any ideas, I must not Shift forms too often, Kal.”

“For the Shapeshifter transformation process consumes large amounts of magic,” said Kal, in a lilting Immadian accent. “And do not be confused by your passion for that deplorable delinquent from Fra’anior, my darling fireflower petal. For all women secretly yearn to be clasped in the arms of a tall, dark and ineffably handsome villain.”

“Hardly!”

“Did I, Aranya of Immadia, not show you the way by falling madly over-the-Islands for a dusky Western Isles Shapeshifter?”

“Ardan of Ur-Naphtha was an honourable warrior.”

“Not entirely, from what the legends hint about their first encounter. Have you asked Aranya about your father?”

Tazithiel clamped her fangs shut, but her belly-fires blushed up a telling storm.

Far below, numerous Isles spread to the horizon. These wild, jumbled landscapes and stubby, roughly-formed Islands hosted some of the most dangerous wildlife in the Island-World, including the formidable warrior-tribes of the West. They were famously factious, wrestled rajals for amusement and were especially fond of feasts involving enemies’ brains served chargrilled with seventeen herbs and spices, Kal understood, on a bed of wild saffron rice. Furthermore, slow-roasted leg of foreigner was a local delicacy. Of course, all foreigners also counted as enemies. That rather put the brains at risk as well.

Aranya had spoken fondly of Ardan. Gigantic, scarified Western Isles pugilists must make good Dragons, Kal decided. Although, that canvas of the Shadow Dragon he had seen in Aranya’s quarters did rather paint him as a beast wider in the shoulder than the average mountain.

Perhaps he would sleep between Tazithiel’s paws this night. No, a fearless Dragon Rider might sleep right beneath her paw. Perhaps even inside her mouth?

Perfect.

* * * *

For Kal, after their rocketing start, the following two and a half days passed like a slow, impossible-to-scratch itch. Dragon and Rider headed for Yanga Island, five points north of west, where the ballads alleged Aranya had discovered the Shadow Dragon. Yanga was the westernmost known landmass, and the place from which Kal and Tazithiel intended to launch their assault on the great emptiness that stretched to the end of the Island-World. Not that Kal believed in omens. Not so much as a jot.

Rather than isolated, large Island-masses, these territories consisted of many hundreds of smaller Islands and Islets, often so packed together they appeared to rub shoulders with comradely goodwill. The Western Isles warrior-peoples had developed gliders and the stomach-churning habit of hurtling from cliff to cliff three miles above the Cloudlands. Clearly, fear of death was of little concern. In comparison, riding Dragonback was as safe as sitting in a cart snacking on a ripe green tinker banana–apart from the fact that his conveyance grew increasingly grizzly and snappish the further west they flew, unlike a cart or a glider.

Then again, Kal’s itch would not settle either. To assuage their minds over the impending leap into madness, he spent several hours reading aloud through the Scroll of Many Hands, and regaled the Indigo Dragoness with colourful tales from his past.

Judging by the Cloudlands shadows cast by the Islands of Ur-Yagga Cluster, Kal realised his suspicion had been correct. The entire Island massif lay canted upon a slope, rising steadily to the westernmost escarpment. Ur-Yagga was craggier and harsher than he had dared imagine, a place of dizzying contrasts, ravines etched against impossible drops, vegetation clinging by miraculous, rooted power even beneath overhangs, and many arches and steepling towers of stone sculpted by aeons of harsh winds and inclement weather.

Kal startled when Tazithiel spoke. She had been so withdrawn. “Do you see what I see, Kal?” Her foreclaw traversed the Cluster ahead of them. “That’s the Dragon’s hind leg–there, follow those Islands with your eyes. Now, the wings, flaring northeast by southwest. And that Island must be Yanga. The Dragon’s forepaw.”

He fidgeted against the light saddle. “Suffering volcanic lava-spit, Tazithiel, do you have to put the freakish trembles into my stomach like that?”

Kal eyed the recumbent Island-Dragon with great unease. Tazi was right. Yanga looked exactly like a Dragon’s paw, its talons the roughhewn, deeply divided isthmuses that ended in a sharply-delineated line, as though the claws had been hacked off by some unimaginable sword-stroke or Ancient Dragon battle at the dawn of time.

“I only do it to hear you concoct another Kallion cauldron of linguistic licentiousness.”

“A what?”

“A brain-frazzling twist of phraseology.”

“A how much? Will you stop embezzling my abilities, woman–Dragoness?”

“Forsooth, thou rapscallion.”

Kal rolled his eyes, knowing she could sense it if not hear the fluid swizzling about in his eye-sockets. “I fear you’ve been bitten by a silly-bug. Find us a place to rest, o startlingly imposing paragon of inter-Isles haulage.”

“I know just the place,” she winked back over her shoulder at him, twenty tonnes of draconic immodesty.

She did. Kal’s jaw hung open and remained so as the Indigo Dragoness speared through the early afternoon sky to a landing on the southern aspect of the largest sinkhole Kal had ever seen–only, he soon realised, this was no sinkhole. It was a hole of unmistakably draconic origin quarried right through the base of the Island, revealing that they stood upon a gigantic overhang perhaps a half-mile thick. Some beast capable of carving a hole over two thousand feet wide had happily chewed its way right through the bedrock. Kal decided he would rather not exchange pleasantries with said beast. They would be more akin to un-pleasantries, and terminally brief.

Wishing for a pair of wings as he peered over the edge, Kal said, “I see trees growing down there. It’s so lush! At least five streams tinkling down from the top. Now, I also know this place, from the scrolls at least. It’s where Aranya met Ardan, right?”

She made a noncommittal rumbling sound deep in her chest.

“Everything suitably fiery on the inside, Tazithiel?”

“Hungry.”

Kal frowned. Aye, his sizzling princess could eat for Immadia. She had already devoured two wild ralti sheep and four small antelope since leaving the Academy. Still, she did not waddle. Tazi seemed sleeker than ever, even a touch on the lean side for a Dragoness.

She sighed. “I’m a lost egg, Kal, just searching for my roots. I don’t expect to find anything Island-shivering here, but it means something to see this place. Do you understand?”

“Aye.”

“Truly?”

“I know what it means to touch something–anything, no matter how trivial–of a parent you barely remember.”

Wafting Kal down from her back, Tazithiel clasped him momentarily in her paw. “Thank you, Kal. Would you mind if I left to hunt? I’ll bring you something tasty.”

“I’ll make camp in that little ravine back there, next to the waterfall.” He shrugged, and turned a quirky grin on the Indigo Dragoness. “Take as long as you need, my bright flame. I’ll wash off the travel stink and the bug-splatter. Make myself suitable for an Immadian Princess.”

Her eyes held a tracery of shadows, despite their constant flame. “You know how uncomfortable I am with that title.”

And she hurled herself off the cliff-edge with a sound like wind keening across forsaken Islands.

Hours passed in solitary pursuits. Kal carved himself a small reed flute and, sitting right on the edge of that great hole, played for a long while, mingling his melancholy tootling with the sound of the wind sporting amidst the rocks. While he played, he remembered the boy he had so fleetingly been, before life stole his childhood and forged a care-me-less thief and a brutish bandit, and later, a suave King of Thieves. Now he was Kal the influential Dragon Rider, noble as a steaming clod of windroc droppings.

Bah.

Kal strolled back to the ravine and stripped down. He stank in more ways than he had ever accused Riika of stinking. As he stood thigh deep in a small plunge-pool beneath an overhang, playing dance-with-the-droplets with a waterfall barely worth the word ‘trickle’, he tried to summon anger at Aranya for forcing him to leave his ailing daughter behind and embark upon a madcap quest to satisfy a Star Dragoness’ existential itch. He could not. In his heart, he knew how badly he had misjudged her. Aranya had more than proven that the same love which had driven her across the Island-World to save her beloved Immadia from annihilation at the hand of the Sylakian Emperor, Thoralian, nigh three hundred years before, still burned fierce and proud in her chest. All Kal had seen was arrogance.

Ralti-stupid fool.

Kal returned from a place of unseeing abnegation to feast his eyes upon the unexpected pleasure of his ablutions being appreciated by a dozen-strong troop of fetchingly unclad Western-Isles warrior maidens.

Double-bah. Should he not admit his heart had just climbed his throat like a hasty dragonet tearing up a vine, claws bared, and the warriors were somewhat clad, and clearly discontented to stumble upon a handsome exemplar of muscular thief-hood standing stark naked beneath a waterfall?

Life could not all be roses, could it?

One of the women, a scarred brute with a blacksmith’s biceps, who stood at least half a head taller than Kal and probably outweighed him by ten sackweight, all of it muscle, gestured curtly with her scimitar. “Out.”

Kal’s feet decided obedience was better than pomposity.

“Cover the snake.”

Where on the Islands was a nice chunk of jealous Dragoness when he needed one?
Tazithiel?

Silence.

Kal wondered how one charmed warriors such as these. Stooping for his trousers, he said, “I shall wrestle the python back into his lair, ladies, if it pleases you.”