Dragon Thief (4 page)

Kal groaned, “I hurt you? Tazi, I’m so–”

“No. My fires weep at your tenderness. While I lay in wait with the intent of killing you, slowly, with the most lingering and unspeakable tortures a deeply lonely, scorned Dragoness could devise–that was when you stole my heart.”

* * * *

Three evenings later, Kal sat at his ease on a rough slab of granite jutting over the westward-facing suns-set Cloudlands, bare feet dangling over the edge. Idly, he strummed a battered old hand-harp which travelled everywhere with him. The drop from his toes to the Cloudlands was a half-league of sheer, unrelenting grey-black cliffs, pocked with tenacious tufts of tan, windswept vegetation. The cloudscape blanketed the world to the horizon in every direction, unbroken, unrelenting. What wonders lived beneath the clouds, only one person living had ever seen–Aranya, Dragon-Queen of Immadia, the legendary woman who broke the Sylakian Empire’s back and succoured the Lesser Dragons from extinction.

Ancient Dragons had raised the Isles from the toxic Cloudlands, and set their habitation upon them. He could believe that. Surely no natural process could raise miles-tall spires of rock out of nothingness? He could also believe Humans had once been the slaves of Dragons–those creatures of unrivalled power and majesty, who roamed the cloud-oceans at whim and roosted upon the high places of the Island-World, who under no circumstances played at the pillow-rolls with men of his deceitful character.

Should he be a poet? He strummed a plaintive chord. The rhyme of his life might be:

Silver and gold were my bread and water,

These were the treasures I sought-o!

Nothing else mattered, nothing else gleamed,

Cold useless things, these my heart reamed,

Yet I dreamed …

Kal’s senses had always been attuned to his surroundings. Other thieves laughed when he waxed wistful about the lure of the long leagues, or spoke of capricious winds in his face and the twin suns hot upon his brow, or yearned for those unbroken silences found in the gulfs between the Isles. Perhaps it was only those yawning gaps which kept men from being at each other’s throats more often.

His lip curled. Men were useless, vain creatures. Sometimes he could not bear their company. Was he born to wander forever, a restless, roaming breeze that served only to stir leaves before it hurried on? Sometimes he could bear nothing else. He threw himself at relationships, at social settings, with alarming abandon. Dissatisfaction gnawed termite-like at the roots of his soul.

A man should not establish his soul upon rottenness.

Kal sensed her approach. Tazithiel brushed not a grain of sand with her foot. She walked, he had slyly observed, upon a miniscule bed of air–a thief’s dream of utter silence. Ceaseless power. It flowed through her veins like the finest ale, golden and alluring. She moved, in his mind’s eye, with the sleek grace of the greatest of cats, called rajals, only a Dragoness was a creature more magnificent by far.

The Indigo Shapeshifter came to stand beside him, her right hand resting lightly upon his nape. The breeze stirred her night-blue tresses, the colour of an evening sky just before the suns give up their last toehold upon the day, surrendering to the darkness. The waning suns writ golden sonnets upon the flawless planes of her face, the sculpted cheekbones and generous lips, a dusting of freckles upon her straight nose, down to the lissom heron’s-neck bent of her right leg, which touched his shoulder.

Kal stirred restlessly. He grew faint with soppiness in his dotage. What manner of thoughts were these?

Tazithiel said, “I keep expecting to wake and find you gone, Kal.”

“I only come out here to play.”

“And to seek answers?”

Already, she read him like an open scroll. Another alarming aspect of her nature. Aye, he had contemplated taking flight–a ridiculous notion, given her draconic power. Torn as he was, Kal found himself tarrying. Tazi had that effect upon every scintilla of his universe. She enthralled without trying; burned without ceasing. Enthralling.

He said, “Sometimes, answers are only plucked from perfect stillness.”

“My contemplative monk,” she chuckled sweetly. “Shall I bring our meal out here?”

Reaching for her hand, Kal rested his fingers lightly in hers. “I apologise. I’m not much used to the company of others. I’ve been a solitary animal, Tazi. If I am any judge, trust must be difficult for you–as difficult as it is for me.”

Her nod exposed to Kal the pensive curve of her lip, and an underlying tautness in her jaw.

“I remain here, with you,” he said.

She nodded. “Aye.”

“Besides, would I sail a league before a Dragoness came roaring out to drag me back to her Human’s lair and perform acts of unspeakable hedonism upon my grateful person?”

“I’d let you go.”

Kal drew breath sharply. “Don’t say that.”

“You’re meant to be an immoral, grasping thief, you silly man.”

“Ooh,” he growled playfully, laying a hand upon her thigh, “I’m incurably immoral, especially around flagrantly unclad maidens. Now fetch my meal, o shameless perfection, before I succumb to my baser cravings and perform some intentional grasping to boot.”

With a bright trill of laughter, Tazithiel danced out of his reach. “You need to eat before you faint–again. Don’t move.”

Over a simple meal of nuts, green tinker banana and flame-roasted rock hyrax–eaten from plates of solid gold–and cool cave water sipped from the finest jewelled crystal goblets of her Dragon hoard, Tazi said, “I was thinking about the dreams you shared with me.”

“And here I prided myself on driving all rational thought out of your mind,” suggested Kal, in his deepest wastrel-of-the-bedchamber voice.

“That was earlier.” She beamed at his glowing pleasure. Kal, grinning like a fatuous courtier, failed to imagine what he would not do for that smile. “Now, I demand intelligent conversation, if that is possible for a Human male.” He quickly rearranged his features into an ugly leer, while Tazi ticked off on her fingers, “See the world. Gather knowledge. Attempt the impossible. Do something actually worthwhile with your miserably kleptomaniacal existence.”

“Roaring rajals, that was just loose talk. I have not admitted a single dishonest, light-fingered tendency. So there. Toast that on the point of your fifty-third fang, Dragoness.”

“You stole my heart, beautiful thief.”

“Fie, dangle me from the gallows, woman.”

“Easily arranged.” Tazithiel’s grim statement caused Kal’s hand to fly involuntarily to his neck before he took in the amusement sparking from her eyes.

He grumbled, “Nor do I faint.”

“No, you only screamed–like a girl.”

Kal yawned exaggeratedly. “Can we move on? This conversation bores me.”

“You’ve the attention span of a newborn gnat,” said she, with a flash of her indigo eyes. Kal was quite convinced that one day, Dragoness-Tazi would leap at him from those eyes and then he really would faint. “So, referencing the ‘what shall I do with my life’ moment of soul-searching you briefly had between bouts of energetic diversion with yours truly, o Kallion, what are your thoughts now?”

“I’m not the lightweight you take me for,” said Kal, aggrieved at the tenor of her question, “with due respect to the muscled tonnage of your Dragoness-self.”

“And?”

He squirmed and prevaricated, but Kal could not deny the undisguised hope that fired his reply. “Have you ever dreamed of crossing the Rim-Wall Mountains, Shapeshifter-lady?”

To his delight, her jaw popped open and Tazi came within a millisecond of spitting out her mouthful of nuts. “What?”

“You heard me. I dream of scaling or finding a way through the uncrossable, insurmountable, twenty-five league tall Rim-Wall Mountains which surround our Island-World, and discovering what lies on the far side. Can we be alone in this world, Tazi? Why did the Ancient Dragons confine Dragonkind and Humankind alike in a bowl half-filled with toxic soup, in which we cling like flies to our rocky perches and wage war upon each other? Why deny us the rest of the world?”

The girl continued to stare.

“You’re fishing for flies, beautiful one,” he said, chucking her chin with his forefinger.

Tazi’s teeth clicked together, nipping his skin. Kal snatched back his hand. Great Islands, she was fast! She demanded, “How did you know? Did you look?”

“Er … look? At what? Your unspeakably enticing bosom?” He pretended drooling confusion.

“You are incredible.”

Kal switched at once to outrageous preening, making it perfectly clear what he hoped she meant. “How astutely you determine the truth.”

“No! Come!” Seizing his hand, Tazi leaped to her feet, making Kal dump his goblet of water in the lap of his trousers. As he clucked in annoyance, she cried, “Here. Look. Before I brought you the meal, look at what I wrote on this rock. This is my answer.”

Kal read. Read again. Aye, he could read, nine days of any given week, but he was having difficulty processing the implications of this conundrum. She had written a poem on a flat quartz boulder, in flowing runic script, with the use of a stick of charcoal:

To Jeradia shall I fly, with my sweet thief,

A map I require to stimulate belief,

For to fly beyond an impassable mountain-wall,

For to return, victorious, if at all.

K
AL Eyed the
armoured wall of Tazithiel’s flank apprehensively. Unbelievable. What female in her right mind would simply purr when he blurted out, ‘Great Islands, woman, your backside
is
the size of an Island’? Memorable line, that. Eloquent. And how she loved it!

He leaned back, shielding his eyes from the twin suns’ glare. “You expect me to climb to which mountaintop?”

“My shoulders.”

“And to impale a rather delicate part of my anatomy upon which spine spike, exactly?”

A rumbling began deep in her belly, a forge blazing behind closed doors. She said, “You will be seated between my spikes in a comfortable Dragon Rider saddle.”

“Wearing this outlandish suit of armour.”

“Kal.”

“I’ll probably fall and crack my skull on–”

“Kal!”

“Somehow, I imagined myself piloting my trusty Dragonship, pillowing my head upon your luscious hillocks–”

GGRRRAAARRGGGH!
Tazi thundered. As the echoes faded and Kal made a show of popping his ringing ears, she growled,
Do I or do I not make myself clear, little Human?

“Abundantly.”

“I find your lack of trust in a Dragoness … disturbing.”

Not half as disturbing as Kal found trying to measure up to his Shapeshifter girlfriend, who was so mind-bogglingly humungous, his eyes began to water in disbelief before they had traipsed halfway to her hind legs. Kal cracked what he liked to call his signature grin. Aping a thick Sylakian accent, he drawled, “Island boy, I like my women big. Real big. I mean, seriously
heee-yooooge
.” Tazi’s muzzle jerked in surprise. “I swoon to think I mistook her snoring last night for an earthquake. I like it when her haunches obscure the Yellow Moon, and her dulcet tones would flatten the average Sylakian fortress. Boy, I fancy my woman so big, when I hear her booming tread a-coming from the next Island, I get the shivers and the quivers right up to my withers.”

“You are a buffoon!” she guffawed.

“Word to the wise. Don’t encourage me.” He bowed floridly. “I missed my true vocation–”

“What, court jester?”

“Wordsmith, if you please. Occasional comedian. Conversational harpist.”

“And what, by my wings, is a conversational harpist?”

Kal shrugged briefly. “Who knows? It sounds good.”

Fixing him with the mesmerising gleam of her eye, Tazithiel rumbled, “You will sit on my back or I will sit on you. Your choice, clever thief.”

“I’d prefer it if you sat on my … er, I sense the hour is not ripe for a wisecrack?”

Tazi’s foreclaw, the size and sharpness of a decent sword alongside his neck, slid smoothly back into its sheath. “How frightfully perceptive you are, Kal, for a man.”

“It’s a point of pride. Tazi, are you a mind-reader? I’ve heard Blues can do that.”

The Dragoness blinked. “A falling-star-swift change of subject–oh, you must mean our strangely coinciding desires to attempt an impossible journey?” He nodded. “No. Not that I know of. Don’t shake your head, you grubby excuse for a Sylakian sweet-tuber farmer. Had I been able to read your mind, I would’ve tossed you off the Island before you ever set foot in my lair.”

“Forsooth, woman!”

“Who says ‘forsooth’ in this day and age? And will you stop worrying at that scab on your lip? It’s healing nicely.”

Kal pouted. “It itches.”

Puckering her lips, the Dragoness swung her muzzle toward him. Even though her jaw touched the ground, her nostrils reached the level of his chest, and the tiny spikes adorning the top of her muzzle topped his shoulders. She blew a flame-ring toward him. “Kiss better?”

The scurvy scavenger fended her off with a yelp. “I am not kissing that fire-hose! Show off. Flaunting your fires so brazenly.”

“I’m a Dragoness. Shocking, isn’t it?”

“My exceptional powers of intuition have indeed ascertained this fact. And, toss me off the Isle without forethought? I’m hurt. Cut to the quick.”

“Oh, you poor man. Are you not a profligate philanderer and a worthless thief?” There was far too much of his life’s story encapsulated in that sentence for Kal’s liking. He was just beginning to complain when Tazithiel clapped his left shoulder with her paw, summarily flattening him. “Step into my golden boudoir, o most talented tearaway, and finish explaining that trick you were trying to teach me before.”

“I thought we succeeded?”

At least fifty gleaming fangs framed the Dragoness’ smile as she released her wheezing captive. “Oh? I must’ve slept through that unconvincing, lackadaisical excuse for a pillow-rolling.”

Brushing off her paw, Kal stalked off in high dudgeon, yelling for the rocks and birds to hear, “Fickle woman! Feckless Shapeshifter! Despicable Dragoness–whatever you are!”

* * * *

Since both parties became hopelessly distracted in the course of making apologies thereafter, Kal and Tazi delayed setting off until the following morning. Dawn found a certain malefactor taking his leisure upon the same barren outcropping above the Dragoness’ lair, waiting for the fussy fire-breather to gobble down her fiftieth rock hyrax, besides the four banded rock-deer she had swallowed whole, three fat adders that Kal was overjoyed to see disappear down her gullet–he hated snakes–and all the baskets-full of eggs he had collected for her the previous evening, making his already aching back–well, ache more.

“I do admire a girl with a healthy appetite,” Kal sniped.

“I need to keep my strength up in order to lug you and your extra padding between Islands.”

“Worn you out, have I, Dragoness?”

Tazithiel regarded him coldly, jaundiced of eye and clenched of talon. “Do you know why Dragons enjoy men in armour? We like the extra crunch.”

Kal groaned, “Ooh, it’s too early for jokes like that.”

“Moreover, the metal is good for our scales.”

“Please. Save your feeble attempts at scaring me for someone who cares.” Swaggering around her enormous right forepaw, Kal kicked Tazi’s ankle. He bit back a grunt of pain as he almost broke a toe. Bad idea. “Ho, mighty fortress. How may I scale thee?”

Tazithiel vented a fiery snort of amusement. “Teach a thief how to climb? I think not.”

“Told you, I’m not a thief. I’m a security arrangements penetration tester, hired by kings and nobles the world over for my legendary expertise.”

“Let me guess,” the Dragoness snarled. “Do I detect a tasteless quip forthcoming, such as, ‘and I certainly penetrated your arrangements, lady?’ ”

Exactly. More elegantly put, of course, but she was on the right Island. Judging by her thunderhead expression, Kal decided, the better part of dignity might be to start climbing. Fast.

He did enjoy a good stint of scaling fifteen-foot castle walls by hand, or prancing about on rooftops, but this beast would overshadow the average inn. How did she even fly? Magic? A creature of her bulk should just plummet into the Cloudlands, well, like a seventy-foot boulder.

Maybe he should turn his thoughts to less troubling paths.

He had never ascended a living wall so stuffed with draconic muscle and fire that a little of both practically leaked out of her ears. For that matter, where were her ears? He glanced curiously over the jagged ruff of skull spikes to her reptilian muzzle. Tazi’s multi-coloured scales were smooth and surprisingly warm to the touch, layered over each other like the excellent tiled roofs of Sylakia Town, which he could navigate like the palm of his own hand. Kal learned to the tune of a sliced thumb, however, that the downward-pointing scales were fearfully sharp. A neat row of spine spikes adorned her back, running from her tail all the way to her neck, but unusually for a Dragon–so she said–she had two parallel rows of smaller spikes offset by about three feet either side of her spine.

Kal strode up her back, fourteen long-legged paces, to the place where she had settled the Dragon Rider saddle and equipment salvaged from her hoard. Actually–Kal grinned–he had two saddles of his own back home, several Dragon lances, and a set of golden armour far finer than the more functional, well-used kit he wore now.

Kinetic magic, the same Dragon-power which had divested him of his trousers with such facility, had enabled Tazithiel to position his seat and saddlebags perfectly, and to fasten the saddle girth without the use of any hands whatsoever. All was arranged. Food supplies, several handy sacks of coin and gemstones, even a formidable -looking Dragon war-bow complete with four-foot arrows. They’d pack a punch. What did Tazi expect to encounter out there? Other Dragons? Feral ones? He shivered. He was not a brave man–not if bravery entailed charging into hopelessly one-sided battles brandishing a sword or war-hammer. Kal would rather calculate the odds, and win on his terms. It was a trait which had kept him alive when many of his fellow professionals already owned their personal patch of fireflowers in a nameless Island graveyard.

Then what was he doing standing on a Dragoness’ back?

“Fishing for trout, noble Rider?”

Noble Rider? Well! Kal squared his shoulders, blithely ignoring the snide look the Dragoness cast him. Now, her head snaked back to take a proper look. She said, “Don’t forget, I can reach you back there to snap your head off should you misbehave.”

“Oh, no misbehaving, not me, noble sky-beast,” he retorted. “Obedience and deference to authority are–”

“Glaringly absent in your psychological makeup and upbringing?” she cut in, punctuating her words with puffs of smoke. “Strap in, little man, unless you’d like to play with me in the air?”

He pursed his lips. “If you’re suggesting finding sundry wicked uses for your levitation powers, aye. But somehow I fear there might be a little too much tumbling and screaming involved for my taste. Feeling a touch squeamish this fine morning. A few tummy-wobbles and suchlike. Nothing a healthy whiff of fresh air shouldn’t cure.”

“If you wobble anywhere near my scales, I’ll teach you the true meaning of Dragon fear.”

Roaring rajals. Dragon-Tazi certainly knew how to intimidate. Kal sat down with a bump on the finely-crafted, moulded leather saddle perched between her spine spikes, and secured the leather thigh and waist straps. Great. Now he was firmly fastened to the spit. All she needed to provide was a blaze. Not a problem for most women, let alone a cantankerous Dragoness.

Kal clutched his seat as Tazithiel stepped forward. “Ready, thief?”

“No.”

His mount lurched, approaching the cliff’s edge. Beneath her forepaws, the granite cliff sheared away in a single, seamless drop to the Cloudlands two and a half miles below. The place had an awfully final, edge-of-eternity look about it. In a breathless instant, he developed a healthy respect for people of faith and prayer, such as the monks of Ya’arriol Island, although why he trusted an insanely magical flying reptile less than a Dragonship built of wood, metal and cloth, he could not fathom.

They planned to fly southwest to the Southern Archipelago, nicknamed the underbelly of the Island-World for the sprawling curve–a thin-lipped smile, Kal had always imagined–the countless Islands described right across the world to the Western Isles, thousands of leagues distant. On the way, they would pass Yin’toria Island, heart of his business ventures and home to a special someone he could not wait to introduce Tazi to–if only he could devise a plan whereby they might not murder each other at first sight.

Before the famously harsh Western Isles loomed the mountainous fastness of Jeradia, their eventual destination. On the Isle’s northern flank stood the famed Dragon Rider Academy, where Tazithiel hoped to find information that should help them in their madcap quest.

His lips quirked. Plenty of opportunity for dalliance along the way.

With a leathery rustling, the Dragoness spread her wings. Kal’s smile vanished like smoke in a storm. He squeezed his eyes shut, offering up a heartfelt plea as Tazithiel hurled them into the abyss, and his stomach made a many-clawed assault upon his throat.

Wind pummelled his eyelids. It tousled his hair and played with his clothing in a reminder of Tazi’s startling ability to divest a man of his coverings with unseemly efficiency, overriding any protests to the contrary. Overriding. He scowled. An apt word to describe a Dragon’s power of persuasion. The notion of being subjugated by any person–or creature–made a certain scoundrel’s legs itch to be fleeing over the Islands with the alacrity of a cliff-goat attacked by a hive full of black flame-wasps. No. A beatific expression replaced the frown. Truth be told, he was a man ruled by passions that blazed like the belly-fires boiling audibly within the Dragoness, enamoured with an indigo-eyed enchantress who had the most alluring eyelashes …

“Kal?” She interrupted his reverie. “How does it feel to fly Dragonback?”

“Stomach-wrenchingly wonderful.”

“And the view?”

“Spectacular.”

Sulphurous smoke puffed into his face. “The insides of your eyelids must be marvellous indeed.”

“Sherwibble,” said he, cracking open his left eye.

A fiery orb greeted him, filling his field of vision with the knowledge of a Dragoness’ irritation. “Where’s the trust, Kal?”