The Onyx Dragon (25 page)

“Not a jot. Brave as the day is long.”

“I see. Brave for eighteen or nineteen hours, and then?” That deserved a rude noise and Pip gave it to him with zest. He added, “Don’t freeze me out, Pip.”

“What?”

Now, Silver’s eyes did open, his expression discomfiting, even hurt. “An Ancient Dragon touches you and you’ve nothing to say?”

“I was just about to ask …” Even to her own ears she sounded overly defensive, which served only to annoy her further. “Islands’ sakes, that’s not what I’m about, Silver. I spent most of my growing years in a zoo speaking to monkeys–can I be forgiven a little self-reliance?”

“All I ask is an open door. Just a crack.”

Pip lapsed into fuming silence. What was this? He couldn’t handle a girl who was stronger than him? Was he jealous of her powers, or of her apparent favour with Fra’anior–not understanding, clearly, how such an encounter might serve to shatter the foundations of a person’s existence, and how it added to the already overwhelming Island of expectations she must shoulder? Might she not claim a little time of her own to process the encounter? Coupled with that, there was the bewildering development of her Dragon powers in directions no-one claimed to understand, an emotional homecoming, her mother’s condition, and her feelings not knowing which Island was which over her Dragoness’ return …

“Soul-fire is a mystical expression of a Dragon’s inmost being,” Silver said, tightly. “It is said that certain Dragons, having breathed soul-fire together, are linked at levels deeper even than the Dragon-Rider oath magic, Dragonsoul entwines Dragonsoul. It forms an irrevocable and exceptional bond. Few claim to have breathed soul-fire. The most famous example in Herimor Dragon-lore is said to have been Tarquira the Turquoise Dragoness and Shendiss, a famously powerful Red Elder. Both were without peer in their mastery of draconic magic. The obvious candidate north of the Rift is Hualiama and Grandion, both Blue Dragons. Shimmerith taught me that Hualiama was the first Star Dragoness.”

“A Star Dragoness?” Pip’s mind leaped to that strange experience during her first walk of the jungle ways. The star she had imagined speaking to her. Could there be a connection?

Words welled within her, haltingly at first, as Pip described her journey between the Islands and the even stranger encounter with the star. She wondered again if she should tell the Silver Shapeshifter all her secrets. Was that the reservation he sensed so keenly? If the Black Dragon indeed claimed some numinous bond with the smallest of Dragons, should she be honoured, or terribly, chillingly afraid?

He growled, “Fra’anior isn’t enough, now you must commune with stars?”

Pip almost hit him. Silver sensed her reaction, for he was up in a flash, seizing her wrist.

“Let me go!”

“Listen, I’m sorry.”

“No you blasted well aren’t! You think it’s all attention-seeking. Silver, I never wanted this. I never asked to be a Dragon nor for this fate!” She did not pull away, but her gaze was all the frost he had accused her of, and more. “If you want me to open up, Silver, then you have to be willing to listen and accept, for if you can’t stomach the truth, who will?”

He said, “It just sounds unbelievable, that’s all.”

“More or less unbelievable than Fra’anior’s appearance, Silver? Answer me! Or did our eyes collectively deceive us?”

He did not reply. He could not.

Pip clenched her fists. “Fine! I’m going for a walk. Don’t you dare follow!”

She stormed off into the jungle.

* * * *

Far out of any Dragon’s earshot, Pip allowed herself to cry. She curled up beneath a tree and tried to think her way through all that had transpired in a few short months. School. Friends. Dragons. Powers. A world which in many ways had opened to a Pygmy, yet in others, she had been forced to fight and fight again. She laughed quietly at the memories of Kassik bawling her out on his carpet, then wept for the students and friends who had been killed. She sorrowed for brave Maylin and Emmaraz and wished dearly for their safe return. Pip tried to reason through what she had learned about the Shadow beast. There was so much. Too much. Yet she could neither hide nor run away. No longer was she the simple jungle girl, nor was she even a student. Life had chosen to graduate her.

She focussed inward, trying to apply the mental disciplines in which Silver and Master Ga’am had instructed her to the conundrums surrounding her Shapeshifter heritage and the question that constantly plagued her–even if she could by some miracle defeat the Marshal, how could they defeat the Shadow?

Later, Pip heard Shimmerith calling for her, flying somewhere overhead. She glanced up. Should she respond? Put the others’ worries at rest? Ay. This too was part of growing up.

She rose, calling,
Shimmerith.

It was Shimmerith with Oyda, no doubt sent because Pip was close to both the Yelegoy Islander and the Sapphire Dragoness. They approached rapidly through the jungle canopy, the Dragoness finding her way adeptly through the dense foliage right to Pip’s side.

She greeted the pair with a wry grin. “Oyda, if I don’t return you right now, Nak’s never going to forgive me for spoiling his nuptials.”

“That old cliff-goat can wait,” Oyda said acidly. “More importantly, how are you, Pip?”

Pip said, “Afflicted with nothing that cannot wait for the morrow, Oyda. Silver and I fought. I’m exhausted and besieged by everything that has happened, but I just need time to think it through and try to reach some conclusions.”

Oyda regarded her with that quirky grin Pip had grown to love. “I knew you’d fought. Silver said otherwise, but that boy’s emotions are an open scroll.”

Shimmerith engulfed Pip’s shoulders with her forepaw.
The Silver Dragon worships your wingtips. Be cunning, Pip. Allow him to pursue, to close with you. Allow him to think he’s winning. Males like that. He will pursue you the more ardently for your astute fire-craft.

Relationship advice, Dragon-style! Pip wrinkled her nose at the Sapphire.
Is that what won you Emblazon, Shimmerith?

Oyda said, “Are you quite sure you’re alright, Pip?”

“Ay. Let’s walk back. I’ll tell you more, if it’ll put your mind at rest. Especially regarding Silver, Oyda. Boys are so complicated.”

“Boys? Complicated?” Oyda snorted, rolling her eyes. “Great Islands, have you got a lot to learn, Pip!”

Pip chuckled brightly. “That’s what I’m hoping for, Oyda.”

The Dragon Rider began to wave her arms as she launched into a speech which appeared to have enjoyed recent polishing, “Complicated? Nonsense, you silly ralti sheep. Leagues off the Isle of Truth. Boys are a harp with one string. They’re the same meal morning, noon and night, every day of the week. Why, boys even …”

S
ilver woke Pip
with a posy of flowers and a bold kiss on the tip of her nose. Oyda was wrong. He was no one-stringed harp, she decided instantly. He was the intricate melody of her heart. Pip rewarded him with a kiss that startled them both with its intensity–draconic passion ruling them both, momentarily, before a soft remark of approbation from Arosia turned both Shapeshifters into overheated puddles of embarrassment. Pip touched her tingling lips, staring at Silver with huge eyes. Her first kiss. And it was a sizzler.

Silver clasped her fingers briefly. “There will be more of those, my Pip.”

“Now,” she said, and made good on her words. And a glob of windroc spit for anyone who cared to watch.

An hour later, the Dragonwing made ready to depart, once Nak and Oyda had been extracted from their love-nest and Tik had finished thanking them all for her rescue in piping, earnest tones. She was so happy. Sometimes Pip wished to be a child again, just to experience that precious, fleeting innocence. The kind of innocence Re’akka had no qualms in destroying with fire and sword. Today was about finding the Ape Steps. Today, Elder No’otha and five Pygmy warriors, including Pip’s father Fiò’tí, flew with the Dragonwing to assist with their jungle craft.

Her father flew Dragonback with Pip. “Better your mother did not see this,” he said quietly in the Pygmy tongue. “Storm clouds obscure her mind, Pip. My sadness is as unbounded as the Cloudlands oceans.”

“I rend my face in blood-grief, father,” she bugled back.

“Ay. Now teach this proud Pygmy father how to fly, daughter-of-my-heart.”

Dragons wept tears of fire.

Oceans. What a peculiar word. Pip knew the concluding double-trill signified water, but the word indicated a body of water far larger than a terrace lake. That was a different word in Ancient Southern, with a completely different etymology. She should ask Cinti or Silver. Perhaps there were oceans in Herimor.

Once aloft, Pip used Chymasion and Silver to show the layout of the Islands they required from her memory, but she elided the crucial details of where the Ape Steps commenced and concluded, as agreed. No-one else would hold that knowledge in their minds. Safety first.

Four days, they searched. Four days, they hid in fear and frustration below Island or shielded as the Marshal’s forces crawled all over the Islands, conducting their own search. Only Shimmerith’s mastery, Cinti’s knowledge and Silver’s power kept them from being discovered. That third day, Marshal Re’akka’s Island finally appeared from the mists of its concealment, less than fifty leagues south of their position. Ay, he had been hiding, too. The game grew deeper, the stakes higher.

Pip eyed that forbidding hulk pensively. The Island was perhaps three leagues in diameter and a league and a half tall, shaped like a thick ring with a hole in the centre, hidden from view on the horizontal plane, from which dozens of Dragonwings issued or returned on a regular basis. The Island seemed to breathe Dragons. It looked like a flying vessel, an Island-Dragonship hovering there over the deeps in bleak defiance of any law of gravity or magic. Otherwise the Island was unremarkable. Its khaki-green, moss-covered flanks gave it the appearance of a vast boulder wrenched from a damp swamp, but the moss had been scarred in many places. The Rift storms, Silver noted. Its heights were bearded with a thick layer of deep purple coniferous forests, which made more than one Dragon stare in amazement.

“Purple forests?” Emblazon snorted. “What next, flying ralti sheep?”

Arosia asked, “Silver, if Islands float in Herimor as a matter of course, what’s so special about Marshal Re’akka floating an Island across the Rift?”

Silver gestured toward the Island with his fore-talon. “Ordinarily, it requires the action of multitudes of
ragions,
our gas-producing bottom-dwelling Dragonkind, to float an Island. You would normally see them clustered in a thick, living layer beneath the Island, the nine-toed talons of each of six legs immovably affixed to the native rock, or gripping each other. However, I believe that the
ragions
would be utterly destroyed in the fire of the Rift-storms. The difference is, Arosia, that the Marshal floated this Island with his own Kinetic power and shielded it from the storms of fire from below and chain lightning above.”

The citadel of evil. Almost, they flew beneath its shadow. Pip had steeled herself–well, she did not know for what exactly–only to find the Island had no outward features that might warn a watcher of the malevolence lurking within, but she did sense a vast, ominous magic emanating from its belly. And … Imbalance. She had been trying to teach herself to see with the eyes of Balance, mimicking in some small sense the magic of harmonic inference which Leandrial had taught her. If she was not mistaken, she detected an Imbalance somewhere in the Cloudlands below the Island–Shurgal? Did she sense the presence of the rogue Land Dragon? Yet not even Chymasion’s unique magic could penetrate the Cloudlands, and it did seem that the Shadow Dragon also could not penetrate that gloomy demesne, from what the Land Dragon had told her before. If only they could hide all Dragons beneath the Cloudlands. Not that any Lesser Dragon worth their wings would ever take kindly to hiding from any danger. That was regarded as the worst form of cowardice after outright treachery or acting contrary to the survival of the Dragon race.

Maybe the Cloudlands were the key, possessing some property or element that could defeat the Shadow Dragon? Unusual speed or strength could not be enough. There had to be a different, more intelligent answer.

Four days of hunting high and low brought them no sign of the Island outlines that would indicate the Ape Steps they sought. Pip was frustrated, Emblazon snappish and Silver philosophical. As they gathered deep beneath the jungle boughs that fourth evening to evaluate their progress, in a hollow created by five intertwined jungle giants so massive they created a woody cavern between their roots sizeable enough for multiple Dragons, Jyoss and Durithion flew out on patrol with Tazzaral, who had Cinti aboard. Kaiatha was sick, laid low with a fierce jungle fever.

“Emblazon, call this rabble to order,” said Nak.

With a reverberating growl between his fangs, Emblazon silenced them all. He grinned fiercely, all proud Dragon fire and a challenging stance. Behind him, an opening through the trees allowed a view of the blushing western horizon, a natural window somehow carved through the massively spreading jungle crown of this Island. Pip wondered if they camped in an ancient Dragon roost. Dragons were ever ones for the far-reaching view, for mountaintops and roosts in league-tall cliffs with dizzying drop-offs into nothingness. Maybe one day she would enjoy their lack of fear.

Nak said, “Alright. Adorable wife, please summarise.”

Oyda said, “So we’ve found seven sets of Ape Steps so far, none of which match our description from any conceivable angle. Pip?”

“I’m translating, Oyda,” she hissed between her fangs.

“Thank you. Usefully, the Marshal continues to be preoccupied with the Crescent and the Academy gains time. Less usefully, the Shadow Dragon gains victims and the Dragonwings continue to round up any remaining Dragons, leaving the South defenceless.” Oyda winked at Nak. “However, we have all of our combined brainpower and the unshakeable will to succeed, and on a positive note, I have recently taken possession of the most gorgeous husband in history.”

“Who is now rendered utterly brainless as a result of a case of swollen ego,” said Shimmerith. “Chymasion. Flip a wingtip.”

“No progress on seeing within the jungles,” he said, hanging his head. “It’s almost as if they were deliberately obscured from magical sight. I continue to fail in this task.”

“Arosia, Pip, the diary?”

“No further clues,” said Arosia, “but Emblazon suggested that the lay of the Islands may have changed.”

Pip clapped her hands in excitement. “Volcanoes or earthquakes? Brilliant, Emblazon!”

Shimmerith turned a jaundiced, smoking eye on her massively purring mate. “Males! Lost another one. Pip. Images, if you will. We did not find at least three sets of Ape Steps, according to No’otha–is that correct?”

He conferred quickly with Pip. “Ay. Three.” He held up his fingers.

“Pip call up our–” Nak’s voice vanished behind an acoustic shield.

Shimmerith smirked at him. “My peerless Rider says, ‘Pip, would you call up the images of those three sets of Ape Steps we did not find, and overlay our memories upon them?’ ” Nak gestured furiously, in futile silence. The Sapphire Dragoness said, “That’s right, Nak. We’ll let Pip develop a headache doing the hard work and you can swoop in and claim the glory.”

Nak folded his arms, looking immensely smug.

Headache was not the right word. By the time she had arranged all of their information in her mind, Pip felt as though ten Jeradian warriors were pounding away at the insides of her temples with their huge war-hammers. “First candidate.”

She shivered. Odd chill along her spine spikes, as though a rajal’s paw had stroked her spine with delicate menace.

Everyone peered at the images Chymasion projected before them as Pip cycled efficiently through days of memories. Half an hour passed. “No.” “No chance.” “Zero correlation.”

She rubbed her head in a Human-like gesture of tiredness. “Alright. Give me a second to rearrange my head.”

“About time someone stirred up that soup,” the Silver Dragon murmured.

Pip gave him her filthiest glare. “Watch your paws, Dragon. Right, everyone, round two coming up.”

Nothing.

“Hold on,” said No’otha. “There’s a legend of Ape Steps existing right next to our Island, your birthplace, Pip. They were once meant to head north, toward the volcano. Do I understand you can read thought-pictures?”

“Ay.”

“Then see this.”

No’otha’s memories showed her a meandering image of a cave-painting, viewed by the light of a flaming torch, Pip realised. He had explored the cave in his youth, finding a series of ancient paintings depicting early Pygmy life with the Ancient Dragons, which in itself was fascinating. One of those paintings he recalled might have indicated the lay of Ape Steps stemming from her home Island.

Pip, try to enhance the image like this,
said Silver.
What’s the matter? Tired?

Just a Dragon sense. Here we go.

Tilt the image fifteen degrees,
said Shimmerith.

“That’s it!” shouted Oyda, echoing all of their thoughts.

The volcano stood partially upon the place Pip had left blank to protect the others, the place where the secret knowledge was meant to have been stored. What if all had been destroyed? No wonder these Ape Steps had been forgotten. They could no longer be travelled to their end.

Then, she sensed a presence colder than any Island-World night. Pip froze, thunderstruck.

“No! Jyoss, Tazz–they’re out there!”

Before she finished speaking, Pip’s Dragon reactions had already launched her out into the darkling evening. She beat her wings to the utmost of her strength, a panicked fluttering that abruptly smoothed out into searing Dragonflight that shot her out from beneath the Island’s canopy at a speed in excess of thirty leagues per hour and still accelerating. She searched the skies for the barest millisecond before her Dragon sight latched onto a shadow that obscured the stars, hovering just above the pale form of Jyoss. Sucking. Pulsing with slow, ghastly satiation. Already, Jyoss’ fires dimmed.

JYOSS!

Here came Tazzaral, speeding toward his mate, distraught, frantic. Despite her rapidity, Pip was too far away. The moment the Copper came into the Shadow Dragon’s ambit, his eyes glazed over momentarily, then burned … differently. Transfixed. On his back, Cinti yelled and beat the Dragon with her hands, trying something with her mind, Pip sensed. She must not transform! Must not! Oh, Jyoss … oh, please, let mercy flow …

Straining so hard that she felt a wing-strut fracture as a distant pinprick of pain, Pip shot toward her friends like a dark lightning-bolt spearing up from the Island’s underbelly. Her mind wailed, ‘No, no, no!’ and her magic swelled enormously, primed for action.

She unleashed a Word of Command.
STOP!

The Shadow beast did not pause. Jyoss wilted; magic rushed out of Tazzaral, vanishing into the beast’s unseen maw.

STOP! STOP!

The only response was a cold, alien intelligence turning to regard her, eyeless and irresistible. Pip sensed curiosity, recognition and an overwhelming cascade of alien magic that seemed to sing in all of her senses at once; before that song, no other melody could even conceive of existence. Time stretched and flowed in eerie ways, a kind of tunnel-vision in which Pip knew nothing but the beast’s ravening hunger for magic and its destruction of her friends and her own inanition, the inability of flesh and blood to make any response and the telescoping of time and awareness as it feasted. Could the Pygmy belief in demonic spirit-creatures be encapsulated in this apparition? It was vast, many times the size of Jyoss or Tazzaral, but its hunger was vaster still, disproportionate to its size. There was a darkness that burned as fire, a searing against her consciousness that by its very character denied all warmth, life and magic.