The Onyx Dragon (40 page)

She led them soft-winged over the central hole, as black as the darkest night in its depths, and up the wooded mountain on the far side, following that faint trail. A trail that seemed more faith than substance, but it led them at length to a set of windows fronting underground chambers–the family quarters, she thought, judging by the number and quality of the draconic minds inside. She sensed the First Egg nearby, ever burning, unchanging.

They approached the windows with great care, taking time to seek out any potential trap. All was silent. Waiting, brooding, yet still there was no sign of detection.

Pip found her attention drawn to one particular window high up on the mountainside, a window framed in pretty hanging plants and flower beds outside, as though a person might step through it like a portal to take a few minutes’ refreshment.

She wafted up there, and saw him. Silver. Behind the crysglass he lay, brutally clamped to the same torture-block she knew all too well, and behind him stood Telisia, picking her fingernails with a dagger.

P
IP’s Dragon-Hearts
launched into wild battle-rage. The rest of her being arrested so sharply she felt as if she had flown headlong into a cliff-side.

Silent-wings,
Shimmerith roared in her head.

Pip drifted upward, observing. Silver’s chest rose and fell. He had been beaten, cruelly. Yet he lived, and that was Dragonsong to warm a new dawn in her heart. He was pasty and sweating of flesh, bruised and bleeding in too many places to count, gagged and clamped to that infernal lump of malleable metal, yet he lived.

Telisia, in contrast, looked in fine fettle. Idly, she turned the dagger over in her fingers as she stared out of the window. “Ram-freaking-bastion,” she grumbled in disgust. “Had to go annoy the Master, didn’t you? Now I get idiot-watching duty. I’m so bored, I could die.”

Don’t be shy about the dying part,
Nak encouraged her.

“Oh well, a few key changes and we should be able to slip into that Academy slick as a dagger sliding into flesh–wouldn’t you say, Silver?”

Pip suddenly realised that she was watching sound-waves through the crysglass rather than hearing sound. Weird. Why would the Marshal torture his own shell-son, if he were not a traitor? A traitor to which side, was the question.

She called,
Silver.

It’s a trap!

His shriek caused her to recoil, but immediately, a new voice intruded.
Of course it’s a trap, my son. But there’s nothing out there. The hallucinations are powerful, aren’t they?

Re’akka!

She sensed Shimmerith and Nak immobilised with alarm; she calmed them with a mental touch. She was the calm one? Hardly!

The Marshal moved into view from a hitherto unnoticed post in the room. To Pip’s annoyance, he too looked a picture of health. Better than ever. In fact, he positively glowed with magical vigour. Re’akka wore a dark, unadorned uniform with a high collar. Clasping his hands behind his back, he peered out of the crysglass window. Pip willed her wings not to whisk her away to the next Island. He could see nothing. He sensed nothing. She had to believe it.

That’s him?
Maylin said in her careful baby-Dragonish.

Now, the Marshal glared back at Silver. “I know you’re a traitor, my shell-son. I cannot prove it, but I know you are. And by my seventh sense, I know she’ll come! That girl cannot possibly resist the trap I’ve laid for her.”

Remind me to explain to him your views concerning the word ‘impossible’, Pip,
Shimmerith snorted.

Ay.
Pip shushed her as they watched, unnoticed, from a mere thirty feet outside the window. Peculiar how a Shapeshifter with the Marshal’s power could look straight through two Dragons. Freaky.

She gasped as Re’akka backhanded his son across the mouth so hard that blood splattered against the glass. “No mind. Tomorrow, if she does not come, we will go strike a bargain for your miserable life. Whatever you did to disrupt my attack five days ago, Silver, know that you failed.”

Silver had–no! Surely, a lie! Silver had disrupted nothing. It was Pip who, in a moment of blind hate, had flung the Shiver-attack right back in his fangs. She had tried to kill him. That guilt was a clutch of cold boulders lodged in her breast, immovable. Perhaps, in another lifetime, they might attempt a relationship less rife with repeated attempts to murder each other?

Silver said, “I remain your servant, shell-father.”

The Marshal spat a curse Pip did not understand. “Know that if our bargain fails, Silver, I will unleash the Nurguz on that miserable, defiant scrap of rock until every Dragon’s fire-soul is sucked out their bodies and cast into the garbage-heap of another dimension!”

He turned again, peering out of the window with a knowing expression twisting his lips.
I know you’re out there, Pygmy girl. I know you can hear this. I will kill him, Pip, if you do not yield your power to me. That is the promise of a Herimor Dragon, made on the bones of my ancestors.

If you’re out there, Pip,
said Silver, gazing past his father,
know that I am my father’s faithful servant. You must give up. You cannot possibly win this war, not even with your darkest feminine wiles and your jungle ways. If I must die to see my race elevated to the heavens, then may I die with honour. Let it be so.

But his eyes. His eyes said something else altogether.

* * * *

Having returned to Shimmerith and Nak’s roost that evening, Pip passed a sleepless, fretful night. Three times, she flew up to stand on the rim-wall to gaze across to the Island of Eridoon, serenely floating upon the winds just offshore of the majestic granite cliffs, which on the Academy volcano’s northern aspect, sheared five vertical miles from the rim to the Cloudlands. Above Eridoon, the Shadow Dragon fed steadily. One Dragon every half-hour, she estimated. Did the Marshal store some Dragonkind simply as fodder for his pet? Perhaps the feeding was what kept the Nurguz faithful, although Pip doubted it. That beast must be controlled by more than appetite.

She had imagined rescuing Silver, but the Marshal’s appearance, his shocking seventh-sense intuition about her presence and the trap set for her, had put paid to that. Should she be demoralised or elated he was alive? What now, Fra’anior? What Balance should a Star Dragon seek, Hualiama?

The burden of destiny was so immediate, so intense, that she feared the merest flick of her talon might destroy the future.

Where was Leandrial? What of Shurgal? And Silver? Was he truly a traitor to his father, playing out the strategy Pip had first decided upon for herself? If so, he had joined her in failure. Her mind kept gnawing at the odd emphasis he had placed on the word ‘honour’, and the flash of emotion she thought she had detected deep in his silvery eyes. Was he inviting Pip to kill him rather than submit to Re’akka? If so, he and every Academy Dragon in the volcano would be in agreement.

Hualiama and Fra’anior remained silent, allowing events to proceed without interference. Yet Pip sensed them watching. Hoping. Supporting. She looked to the eastern horizon, seeking the blue star, her heritage-mother. She did not see Hualiama there, but if she looked within to the place where imagination bordered reality, could she not hear the chiming of star-forged laughter? Pip turned to scan the volcano. Most people and Dragons would be sleeping. The infirmary and forges were awake. Engineers worked through the night to repair harnesses and weapons and fortifications, the faraway
ting-ting-ting
of hammers mingling with the muted roaring of forges. She looked over the habitation of men and Dragons, the many lives given into her heart’s care.

Had it all come to this? The plainest and most profound of choices–life or death?

On a whim Pip flew down to the library, where once she had worked under the stern eye of Master Shambithion. There she found Yaethi slumped over a scroll, sound asleep. The Dragoness padded to her friend’s side, peering over her shoulder. She had been reading one of the five precious Order of Onyx scrolls. The title captured her notice: ‘The Onyx Chose Life.’ Beneath it, penned in Yaethi’s neat hand, was one word, ‘Choose.’ Fra’anior had chosen life, to build life and to safeguard against his destructive kin. The Onyx must choose the same. Was this Yaethi’s meaning?

She paused, struck by her friend’s insight. Clumsily picking up a quill between her talons, Pip dipped it in the open ink-pot and paused, concerned about desecrating a priceless scroll. Yet, Yaethi had not withheld. She would not willingly break rules. Pip sketched a Dragon egg beside Yaethi’s note, adding a label, ‘The First Egg is life.’ There. A few words more? Beneath, she wrote, ‘I am Pip, the Onyx Dragon. I choose life.’ And she signed her name in four neat clusters of runes.

Whatever she chose, may it result in life.

* * * *

At dawn, Marshal Re’akka’s voice boomed over the Academy volcano: “I am Re’akka, Marshal of Herimor! Where is the one called Pip, the Pygmy Dragon? Let her come forth to offer full and unconditional surrender! Give her up, or I will unleash my Dragon of Shadow and end you all.”

Three times, he repeated his challenge.

The Marshal flew to the fore without his usual escort, clasping Silver in one enormous white paw. Silver appeared to be sleeping, but Pip thought she might be able to detect a heartbeat slightly faster than it should be, and the glint of a Lavanias collar encircling his neck.

Pip had been hovering with the Academy Dragons above the volcano for the last half-hour, watching Eridoon Island spout the Dragon Assassins. So many were they, she pictured a storm cloud Fra’anior might have worn around his neck. Had the Nurguz decimated the Lesser Dragons of Herimor before travelling north, she wondered? Might these, together, be the last of the Dragonkind above the Cloudlands? Meanwhile, a dawn of magical beauty lightened the eastern sky. Pygmies said that the closer one walked to death, the more a fragment of beauty might light the soul. Thus it was her hearts ached for splendour, in poignant contrast to the great deal that had been spoken and argued, and even shouted, bellowed and fought over, on the Academy side.

The Pygmy Dragoness pushed all of that aside. As Leandrial had taught her, she tried to listen to the Balance, to feel it, to attune herself to the song and flow of the world. Around her were Kassik with Casitha, Emblazon and Oyda, Nak with his Shimmerith, Yaethi riding Arrabon and Chymasion speaking softly to Arosia, then Blazon and all the Dragon Elders, and one thousand, four hundred and fourteen further able-bodied Dragons, many armed with Rider saddles and crossbow emplacements.

All these faced over four thousand pairs of unfriendly, burning eyes, and over the floating Island, an additional several thousand Dragons the Marshal had kept in reserve. What did numbers matter when the odds were so heavily stacked against them?

Pip stifled the urge to leap about like a jaguar kitten chasing invisible fireflies. Something was amiss. Her gaze strayed to the Cloudlands, a deceptively homely-looking tan carpet. From there? Or from elsewhere? Where was the threat, the Imbalance, perhaps a third opposing power she sensed as an itching in the back of her mind? Had the Island drifted closer? Ay, it floated perhaps two miles offshore. Her mind probed the wider environment restively. She tasted and sniffed the air. Perhaps Re’akka had a nasty surprise tucked away inside Eridoon, a novel use of the First Egg? All she knew was the last time she had felt like this, she had discovered Silver fomenting mischief with Shimmerith’s hatchlings.

With a clip of her wings, Pip flew out between the two forces, feeling like a gnat positioned between a pair of very large hands. She approached Re’akka’s position just east of the rim-wall, a mile above the three-mile-wide volcano. The Blue-White Marshal was at his physically imposing best, a clear strut in his wingbeat as he oriented himself regally to receive her approach. Since he measured seven times her length and many times her tonnage, the contest looked ridiculously unequal by any conventional measure of draconic battle-lore. Re’akka had his cold-fire, his Kinetic strength–Pip rubbed her chest, recalling the sensation of her internal organs being rearranged to the tune of the Marshal’s lively commentary–and a further giant advantage, the power of the First Egg. She should be under no illusions that she could beat him in a fair fight. Fair? She was a crafty jungle warrior!

“So,” boomed the Marshal, from five hundred feet away, “will you surrender, Pygmy Dragoness, or shall I destroy this traitor first and chew on the rest of you for leftovers? Look around you. You are outnumbered and overmatched. Why not save your lives, pathetic as they are?”

Pip amplified her voice as Emblazon had taught her. “You’ll guarantee to safeguard every life in this volcano?”

“I guarantee nothing,” he sneered. “I demand unconditional surrender. No more, no less. I hold nothing but contempt for these Academy Dragons who chose you, a member of a squalid race of mud-grubbers, cannibals and naked savages, to represent them.” The Dragon made a spitting motion. “Surrender, or I will design a death befitting of the black filth you are.”

Loathing made her body shake as she growled back, “Re’akka, you remind me of nothing more than a grub. You know, one of those grubs I used to dig up and eat in the zoo–fat, white, disgusting grubs that taste like ralti meat–”

GNNAAARRGGGHH!

So, he could be provoked! Pip smiled grimly as a chorus of approving roars and laughter rose from the Academy Dragonwing, more than overmatched by the furious thunder of the Night-Reds.

Re’akka roared, “Do not bandy words with me, child!”

“You had me in your clutches, Re’akka, and I beat you. That’s how I know you for a sad, deluded fool–”

“Answer, or your precious Silver Dragon dies!”

Her hearts crammed into her throat, but Pip forced an expression of disdain onto her lips. “Your shell-son is your lackey, Re’akka. Destroy your bloodline if you wish, I don’t care. Murder them all. You’re a cockroach, not a Dragon.”

The Marshal dangled Silver from his talons, testing her resolve. Pip crushed her emotions. He was a traitor. The Island-World would be better off without Silver or any of his brutish kin. She must believe that. She had seen nothing redeeming in him all that time Silver had tortured her. These people had killed untold citizens of the three great races. They had murdered her mother. Be strong, Pygmy girl! Be Onyx!