Shadow Dragon (5 page)

KAARAABOOM!

The explosion echoed off the nearby hills as the Dragonship vaporised in a massive ball of flame.

For the first time in days, Ardan smiled.

A second quarrel from the far side of the village narrowly missed its target, pinging into the cabin slung on thick hawsers beneath the dirigible’s multi-segmented hydrogen sack. Men rushed along the gantries to put out the blaze, while a Sylakian trumpet sounded the alarm, carrying with clarion sweetness up to his position.

He never wanted to fly in a Dragonship. That much highly volatile hydrogen right above his head? It required a special type of madness. One spark in the wrong place, even a touch of static … better to jump into a Cloudlands volcano.

The Dragonships rose at once, turbines whining as they spread out. Additional Sylakian troops boiled out of concealed positions east and west of the village. Now Kylara’s troops would face a true test, he saw–the Sylakian War-Hammer in charge knew what he was doing. The ambushers had just been ambushed.

The Dragonship nearest his position imploded, the sound ripping through an otherwise tranquil dawn. Ardan winced at the concussion. But the remaining three vessels rose out of range. A violent, running fight developed between the huts. The Sylakian dirigibles patrolled either end of the village, ensuring that any enemy warrior who stood still for more than a few seconds received the gift of a swift quarrel between the shoulders from the Dragonships’ massive war catapults, set on gantries fore and aft of their cabins. The Sylakian troops were first-rate. Crimson Hammers–the name leaped into his mind as though it were a bloody flag waving a warning. Sylakia’s crack troops. Killers.

The Sylakians favoured stout, two-handed war hammers over the scimitars wielded by Kylara’s warriors. They worked in groups of four, protecting each other’s backs. Kylara and her women faced them with round shields and their deadly scimitars, supported by archers hidden among the village huts. Corpses piled up faster than he could count. Ardan jerked his chains one more time, hating being left out, hating to watch the Sylakians pick off Kylara’s troops, penning them in steadily from all sides. With a high-pitched whine of its meriatite turbines, a Dragonship pressed forward, angling for a position overhead of a knot of Kylara’s warriors, including the matchless Warlord herself.

Burning oil would follow.

Kylara was even deadlier seen from afar than when she was beating his head in, Ardan decided. But fear seared his throat. She led a charge to try to break free of the Sylakian troops, but they held firm and pressed the women back–outnumbering them two to one on the ground, working with the taut discipline of veteran troops. Kylara struck out ferociously, slicing off a Sylakian’s arm and catching her blade in the ironwood haft of another warrior’s war-hammer. No mind. She grasped the hammer in both hands and swung a high-kick up beneath it, breaking the man’s neck with the heel of her boot.

“Roaring rajals,” he breathed.

The terrible hammers beat back Kylara and her troops. The women gathered amidst the huts, darting quick glances at the Dragonship menacing them from above.

Another memory seized him. Ardan remembered watching Dragonships from beneath the eaves of his hut, the world burning, sobbing over a fallen woman, screaming and shaking his fist at the sky as the cowardly Sylakians continued their assault from out of range of the warriors trapped on the ground while huge, winged shadows soared over his Island. Vengeful fires filled him up to his throat. He tore at the chains.

Ardan screamed, “Burn these manacles in a Cloudlands volcano!”

The metal slipped off his wrists. He barely noticed. All he knew was the sweet savour of freedom. Ardan sprinted down toward the village on the wings of his inner blaze, listening only to the song of wailing madness in his mind, not even hearing the cries of the warriors as he slammed, weaponless, into the back of a squad of Sylakian Hammers. He smashed two helmeted heads together. Ardan kneed a warrior in the gut and stole his hammer. Spinning from a blow to his shoulder, he struck out, crushing a hapless Sylakian’s skull.

Ardan snatched up a second war hammer. One for each hand. Fiery laughter roared out of his madness. Spinning the hammers about his head, Ardan waded into the fray. Twenty, thirty Sylakians? Who cared? They would fall. He smashed a warrior through the wall of the nearest house. He took a direct hammer-blow to his chest and guffawed at the surprised warrior as he head-butted him sharply, breaking his nose. Ardan lashed out with both hammers at once, staving in the warrior’s helmet so that it crushed his skull. A hammer ricocheted off his head. Ardan spun smoothly on his heel, using the force generated by his turn to unleash a mighty blow that launched the unfortunate Sylakian over the nearest hut.

By the Islands, he could do that? Ardan ignored the warning gongs sounding in his head. No time to think. He jabbed backward with the haft of his right-hand hammer. A breastplate crunched four inches inward. Ignoring the strangled cry behind him, he waded through a knot of Crimson Hammers, crushing them as though he were a dark boulder hurtling down a cliff.

Suddenly, there were no more Sylakians left standing in his path.

Kylara caught his arm. “What’re you doing here?”

“Saving you, my beauty.” Ardan panted, before thumping her on the shoulder. “Don’t leave me in the cold when there are Sylakians to be killed.”

“You’re mad.” She shook her head as though she had a wasp in her ear. When his gaze lingered on her eyes to puzzle over their unreadable expression, her palm impacted his cheek.
Whack!
“Mind on the battle, man. What’s wrong with you?”

Ardan champed his jaw, hating the man emerging from the trackless mists of his past, feeling as shallow as a puddle left after rain. Maybe he needed a fresh start beneath another prekki tree. But having started at a gallop down this particular animal-trail, how could he find another? He felt driven by passions beyond his understanding and thoughts not his own. If he truly wanted to be the honourable Western Isles warrior the praise-songs of his people extolled to the heavens, then he had better start behaving like one.

She said, “Follow me. Rocia–another shot at that Dragonship.”

“Too high, Chief.” But the warrior bent to her task.

With Ardan at her side, Kylara almost broke the Sylakian line before a barrage of blazing oil splashing from the heavens forced them to turn back. The Dragonship crews fired each hut as it passed by, reducing the available cover. They ignited their own troops without a qualm. Smoke and fire billowed up, forcing Kylara to order the retreat.

“This is bad,” she muttered.

Ardan followed the upward-bound quarrel with his eyes. Rocia’s method didn’t have enough power. That dirigible would be overhead in seconds.

“Down!” Ardan’s shoulder knocked Kylara sprawling. A quarrel bit the earth right between her legs. Another sliced a chunk of skin out of his thigh. “Nice,” he grinned, yanking the burning quarrel out of the ground. “You boys want to play?”

Ardan hefted the six-foot quarrel over his shoulder, testing its balance. He slid his grip a handspan backward on the shaft. Taking a short run-up, he slammed down on his injured leg, using the jarring pain to fuel his scream of effort as he hurled the quarrel like a javelin, an impossible distance, over four hundred vertical feet into the sky.

KAARAABOOM!

Ardan danced and screamed his defiance as bits of Dragonship spiralled down–cabin struts and crysglass portholes and burning bits of warriors caught in the conflagration. Kylara yanked him beneath her shield, deflecting a large piece of metal away from his head.

“You’re moons-mad. Are you a berserker?”

Ardan showed his teeth in a smile that was more a grimace. “I don’t like Sylakians, my lady. You can thank me later. We need to move.” His finger jabbed upward. “Catapults.”

The Dragonship hovering at the northern end of the village was readying her catapults with a load of what looked to be naphtha, Ardan realised. A Sylakian trumpet sounded the retreat. The Hammers withdrew steadily, covering their backs with archers.

“Two left,” said Kylara, thrusting a quarrel into his hand. “Think you can repeat that throw, slave? We’ll cut you a path.”

A dense wedge of Kylara’s Leopards trotted out of cover, coming under a withering hail of crossbow quarrels and arrows. Most were caught on shields, but three warriors fell as they closed with the Sylakian Hammers. Ardan calculated the distance with his eyes. Two more paces … he bounced lightly on his toes and broke into a sprint, raising the quarrel behind his head. Ardan poured all of his fury and pain into the throw. The burning quarrel reached for the noon skies before whistling down and plugging diagonally atop the cabin of the Dragonship, right beneath the hydrogen sack. Flames licked up the shaft.

Ardan cursed. But the Sylakians up there were scrambling up the netting encasing their hydrogen sack, desperate to reach the quarrel before the fire leaped the small gap between the blazing feathers and the bottom of the hydrogen sack. It licked. It lapped. It caught …

KAABOOM!

The blast pounded Ardan to his knees. Heat rolled over his back. Kylara and her troops slammed into the Sylakians at a full run, with their Warlord right at the spearhead of that tight, well-organised wedge of warriors. Scimitars flicked hungrily, like the many claws of a ravening metal monster. They sliced through the Sylakian line. Ardan sprinted to catch up. Almost as an afterthought, he snatched up a war hammer to brain a couple of Sylakian troops on the way past.

Now, this was the type of work he enjoyed.

A
ranya’s thunderous roar
reverberated over the tan hills of Yar’ola Island. Below her, all activity in the Sylakian outpost ceased. She could almost smell the Dragon fear drifting up on the breeze. King Beran’s Dragonships, which had approached the Island low over the sickly yellow Cloudlands, now raced their engines to a full-throated growl as they rose rapidly above the fortress walls. One Dragonship peeled off to the south, aiming to intercept any message hawks that might be despatched in a twenty-eighth hour attempt to warn the Islands further south.

“Stop where you are!” shouted Yolathion, waving his large bow aloft. “Ground the Dragonships!”

When there was no immediate response, Aranya boomed, “Surrender or die!”

Her Rider rubbed his ears. “Islands’ sakes, girl, it sounded as though I was sitting on top of a thunderclap, there.”

“It’s storm power, so the thunder’s real enough,” she said over her shoulder. Down on the ground, the Sylakian troops fell to their faces in abject surrender. “I’d thought of getting Zip ear-plugs. What do you think?”

“Can’t hear you.”

Yolathion smiled at his joke, but Aranya wondered if she could genuinely hurt her Rider with power of that magnitude. Dragon ears adjusted automatically, unlike Human ears.

Dragon and Rider had prepared for battle by shooting arrows and fireballs at passing clouds as they crossed between the Islands, making two or three flights each day, so that Yolathion could familiarise himself with buckling the Dragon Rider saddle in place, mounting or dismounting rapidly, and the mechanics of fighting Dragonback. The Jeradian warrior was a fair archer, but not as skilful as Zip. Aranya had not realised how close she and the Remoyan Princess had come in understanding one another until she tried to line Yolathion up following a roll or a dive. He took many seconds longer than Zuziana to orient himself, which in battle, would likely as not spell a crossbow quarrel between the teeth.

Well, he was new. She had to grant him a little grace.

“Set me down, Aranya,” said Yolathion. “I’ll help your father round them up. You keep a Dragon’s eye out for trouble.”

“Four’s a good haul,” said Aranya.

But the Dragoness was left drifting on the winds as the men negotiated the peace and freed the King of Yar’ola Island, locking up the Sylakian contingent and their Third-War Hammer instead. Aranya turned lazy and she hoped menacing circles over the fortress at the edge of a small town of perhaps two or three thousand citizens. She compared Yar’ola unfavourably to Immadia in her mind. Tan hills and wide pasturelands compared to soaring mountains and forests? Grr. She knew which Island she preferred. Aranya spotted a fleet of small, swift trader Dragonships moored at the far end of town. They could be useful.

She should hunt. She wondered what Yolathion would think of his girlfriend tearing into a ralti sheep or better still, a deer. Raw venison was so much tastier than mutton. On cue, a blob of drool escaped the corner of her lip. Aranya grimaced. Perhaps Dragon manners were not for princesses.

Later, having transformed, King Beran introduced her to King Urdagal, a dark, dapper man who took possession of her proffered hand and kissed her palm sixteen times, once for each summer of her life, he declared with an oily smile. Aranya found herself grateful for Yolathion’s dark glower which she caught from the corner of her eye. She even forgave Yolathion a jest about women taking part in strategy discussions, but smouldered as he patted her hand patronisingly when King Beran asked her opinion about which Island they should invade next.

Urdagal suggested she might go sit with his wife and five children.

Aranya countered by politely asking him where she could hunt and kill a wild sheep or spiral-horned buck for her dinner. Ha. These men had better wish they did not end up on the wrong end of an irascible Dragoness’ claws.

After her private dinner, however, the giant Jeradian appeared to escort Human-Aranya on a walk around the royal lodge’s gardens. They tarried in an arbour covered in the last climbing roses of the season, the fragrant bouquet drifting around them on the barest hint of a breeze, and together watched the Mystic moon as it sailed above the Cloudlands like a stately Dragonship. Yolathion caressed her cheek with his thumb until she tilted her head upward to meet his deep, consuming gaze. Aranya’s inner fires simmered and morphed into a different form. But just as they were on the cusp of kissing, a messenger appeared to request that they board the Immadian Dragonships, for Beran planned to fly overnight and surprise the Island-Cluster of Haffal at dawn.

King Beran looked up as Yolathion and Aranya entered the forward navigation cabin of his Dragonship. His sharp gaze noted their entwined fingers. Aranya stopped herself from releasing Yolathion’s hand, despite the flicker in her father’s eyes.

“Urdagal offered us four hundred warriors, Sparky,” he said.

“Good,” said Aranya. “I’ve been thinking. You told me this sector is complicated because the next three Island Clusters lie relatively close together, each having a Sylakian fortress–the Luda, Rabbal and Haffal Clusters. It’ll be difficult to take all three without alerting the Sylakians somehow.”

“Aye, this is where the proverbial message hawk flies loose,” Beran agreed.

“What’re the distances on the map, Dad?”

“Ten leagues and about eighteen, I believe–oh?” His eyebrows danced. “My next question is, ‘How fast can a Dragon fly’, right?”

“You’re slow, but you’re catching on, old man.”

Beside her, Yolathion stiffened at her disrespectful quip, before he squeezed her arm with a low chuckle. “More Immadian understatement? This gives a Jeradian a headache.”

“Then by all means, go cool your head in a water barrel,” said Aranya, more cheekily than she had intended. Perhaps Zuziana had rubbed off on her more than she thought? “Dad–flying fast, I can cover ten leagues in less than a quarter-hour. My vote would be to try to capture all three Islands before the twin suns break the horizon.”

Beran exclaimed, “Ah, sparks flying from my Sparky. Right, you two, let’s figure this out. Which cluster first? How quickly do you think you can get them to soil their trousers–I mean, surrender?”

“I underestimated you, Aranya,” said Yolathion, his hand warming her back. She loved it when he touched her like that, but frowned inwardly at the disapproval hinted at by the set of her father’s mouth.

“You underestimated me from the beginning,” she said.

“It won’t happen again.”

He always sounded so definite when he made his pronouncements. Aranya hid her smile beneath a courteous little cough. He had a great deal to learn about the powers of an Amethyst Dragon. That said, so did she. How exactly did she expect him to know what she did not even know herself?

Aranya said, “Help us, Yolathion. Which Island Cluster of the three should we attack first?”

As Yolathion bent to the map, pursing his lips, she caught a queer glint in her father’s eyes. Why did she sense his disapproval? After all, she had cleverly deflected Yolathion’s evident discomfort at a woman being involved in strategizing, by appealing to his wisdom. But his grey eyes seemed more hooded than usual.

Beran was not called the Immadian cliff-fox for nothing. Nor was he a rajal, all bluster and roar and posturing. No, her father was more of a leopard, cunning in the hunt and stalking his prey with great skill. But it also meant that he never said the first thing that came to his mind. His Island’s roots ran deep. Whatever was bothering him, she would either have to wait for him to make up his mind on the matter, or be even wilier than he to tease it forth.

Meantime? This Princess of Immadia was going to enjoy getting to know everything about her leopard-man. It was time he answered a few questions about his past.

* * * *

The Immadian Dragoness scared the living pith out of two Sylakian garrisons the following morning before dawn, handing them both a swift defeat. Aranya screamed over to Haffal Cluster at once, passing over a small sea of beryl and ochre Cloudlands before sighting the low Cluster half-hidden by its own layer of mists. The Islands were so different, again, to what she had thought to find. Whereas Immadia or Sylakia loomed massively out of the Cloudlands, a half a league or more of sheer cliffs above the deadly turmoil of clouds, these Western Isles were tiny and low-lying, covered in a thick beard of scrubby bushes rather than tall trees. She saw few villages, but rather what looked like tiny tent-families–animal-hide tents cleverly concealed near streams or caves, usually half a dozen in group, and always, her Dragon sight would pick out two tireless sentries standing guard. They were dark, muscular warriors, in the vein of the Warlord of Ur-Yagga she had once had acquaintance with in the Tower of Sylakia.

The hand of Sylakia did not lie heavy on these Islands, she thought. Or did it?

Southward of their flight path to Haffal Cluster, Aranya saw many more clusters of Islands, appearing conversely to rise toward the horizon. Was there an unseen land mass pushing these Islands toward the sky? Or a creature akin to what she had seen travelling beneath the Cloudlands en route to Immadia Island? One thing was for certain, King Beran’s invasion had barely brushed the edge of these Western Isles.

Where would she find the Dragon? How? She shivered.

Deeply mired in her thoughts, she did not recognise the enemy’s readiness until they were less than a league distant.

Five Immadian Dragonships puttered over the Cloudlands, making directly for Haffal. A squat stone garrison stood atop a lonely peninsula, isolated from the rest of a larger Island–perhaps half a league in diameter–by a narrow spit of dark rock. Eight Sylakian Dragonships hung in the void, facing them. Warriors stood ready at the catapults and war crossbows. Their engines’ exhausts smoked slightly as the turbines held them against a light westerly breeze.

“Light up, quickly,” Aranya said to Yolathion.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “You sleeping, Dragon? I thought you had fantastic eyesight?”

The Amethyst Dragon’s belly fires surged at his tone. “Sorry.”

“No time for apologies now.” His spark-stone clicked as he lit the oil-pot beside his right knee. “Take us in, Dragon. Do your bellow; see if they’ll surrender. If they don’t, let me take out a Dragonship. Once we’ve burned a few beards, we’ll have them singing like parakeets.”

She smarted. He was so attentive to her Human form, but now she felt like a fancy Dragonship taking orders from its navigator. Maybe being in a romantic relationship with her Rider was not as easy as she had assumed.

Aranya cleared her mind with an inward snarl. She had a battle to win.

Her bellow achieved precisely nothing. The Sylakians neither responded nor ran up the green pennant of surrender. But they did try to slap her in the teeth with a round of catapult-shot when she swooped closer.

Yolathion grunted as his ride swirled in the air, changing the angles. Aranya had her fireballs ready, but held back. “Take the one on the end,” the Jeradian ordered.

“I obey,” she said, before biting her tongue. She obeyed? Did she mean that?

Aranya lined him up for a shot with smooth ease. Yolathion’s first burning arrow plugged in a hawser, but his second exploded the Sylakian vessel. Heat and smoke boiled around them. Just let her Rider taste what she knew, Aranya exulted. Her hearts sang wildly as she surged through the air with oily menace, coiling into a sharp turn as they passed over the fortress, constructed of black stone. Power surged through her veins. Instinctively, she shot a fireball at a departing message hawk.
Pfft!
The deadly, bright spot whizzed off to their port side. Direct hit. Aranya’s neck twisted. Catapult. She missed it narrowly with a second shot, but sent the catapult engineers leaping for cover anyway.

“Nice work,” said Yolathion. “Let’s see if they’ve changed their minds.”

Six more hawks shot away over the Cloudlands. Probably every hawk they had, Aranya thought. Her father’s Dragonship was almost in fighting range. White dragonets and the single, shimmering blue form of Sapphire crowded around the vessel like a buzzing cloud of wasps disturbed from their nest, only a hundred times deadlier. They were as eager as she was for battle.

She had no need to roar. Crossbow quarrels hissed hungrily through the air as they approached–a hint as subtle as her Dragon roar.

“Destroy another?” she suggested.

“Stick to the plan.”

“It’ll be dangerous. Keep sharp, Jeradian warrior.”

Aranya swirled in her flight with deft corrections of her wings, throwing the Sylakian warriors off their aim, before folding up her body, almost touching her nose to her tail, as she flipped over into a nosedive. Her wings drove her downward. Yolathion gasped as air punched him in the mouth. He could not even yell. Aranya crashed full speed into the soft top of a Dragonship’s hydrogen sack, striking so powerfully that it split open like a melon dropped from a height. The Dragonship sagged. Heaving herself free of the sack as it began to fold toward her from both ends, Aranya clawed at two more of the multi-compartmented sacks before realising that there was no need. The power of her attack must have blasted the hydrogen back into the engines and damaged them or snuffed them out, because the turbines fell silent.