Dragon Thief (29 page)

His eyelids failed to shutter her light.

Aye? A creature of light perpetrated unutterable pleasures upon the pulse at the base of his neck. An elemental perturbation shook his being in response. Rational thought danced away through billows of white wildfire, but Kal did have to chuckle when Tazithiel murmured:

“I know someone who would be extolling his powers of seduction to the heavens, about now. Aye, Kal, you are mine, and I will so prove upon your appreciative person.”

Entertaining as that sounded, the fate of thousands did rather rest upon their shoulders. By her light, he checked their wounds. Both of them were only mildly chewed-up, it seemed. Time to break the news.

“Tazithiel, you’re glowing.”

“I find uninhibited Tazithiel-worship from my Human slave, while flattering, a touch bizarre.”

“Listen, glow-monster–can you stop kissing my ear for a second? Can’t think.” Seizing her hand, he raised it between them. “Look at yourself. I only know of two types of beings that shine like stars. One’s an angel, and those are so ancient, they predate the Lesser Dragons of this world. The other happens to be less mythical, but no less magnificent.”

Realisation introduced a swirl of white draconic flame to the depths of Tazithiel’s eyes.

“You glowed before,” he said, squeezing her hand gently. “Dearest Dragonlove, you glowed the day you tried to flatten that town to locate a jailed miscreant.”

The effulgence upon her skin faded abruptly, allowing the cold darkness to shroud them. Tazi said, “Dragonlove? Kal, do you mean that? I might have some inkling of Star power in moments of high emotion, but I certainly haven’t been able to summon the power–well, it’s a complex set of interdependent powers, Aranya says. However, I do know how we’re going to escape.”

Kal felt his eyes crinkle with his smile. “What I know is that love is the ultimate thief.”

“How’s that?”

“It steals us away to what we ought to be.”

Kissing his cheek as though she wished to imprint her joy upon his heart, Tazithiel said, “I hereby appoint you philosopher-in-chief of this woman’s soul. Kal … I …”

“Speechless, obviously,” he boasted.

“Therefore, my sagacious malcontent, you shall whisk us forth with your Shadow power.”

“Uh … water? Stuck underneath mountain? Running out of air?”

Tazi bleated briefly to underscore his ralti-brained response, and said, “Aranya of Immadia was describing Shadow power to you on the way down to Mejia. It does not merely modify perception, remember? It modifies corporeality. When you deploy Shadow, you are actually not present in the material realm, which is why the Dragons could not detect you.”

“That’s immaterial.” Kal laughed at his own pun. “You’re saying I can walk through walls.”

“Why, a miracle. The Human is teachable after all.”

“Why, she’s a beauty with actual brains.” Kal tweaked her breast suggestively.

Quick as a snapping rajal, Tazi slapped his hand away and did a little grabbing of her own. Kal yelped. “Watch out, thief, or I’ll bite off
your
brains.”

Joshing aside, the thief turned to the walls with disbelief sparring with the need swelling in his heart. The bubble Tazi had created for them was already growing stuffy. When he hesitated, the Indigo Dragoness began to list a few of the ways she might reward his success. It was neither astounding nor unpredictable how a man might be encouraged, Kal concluded. Only, what if he failed in the middle of a large boulder? Entombed would not begin to describe their fate. Instant fossilization was written in the blossoms, as the fatalistic Sylakians would say.

He had to try.

* * * *

Gasping, sweating, covered in grit and grime and panting as though he had run ten laps around a large Island, Kal emerged from the middle of a tumbled column, facing the gasping, grimy, panting disbelief of a Pygmy warrior.

“Kal?” Riika rubbed blood and dirt out of her eyes. “Must’ve hit my head harder than I thought.”

“It’s me.”

“Dad!” A small, hard shoulder almost broke his grip on Tazi’s hand as Riika leaped in for a hug.

Once again, Kal had danced across the tightrope, and reached the far side intact.

“Easy, rajal. We didn’t get the scroll, but we did find ourselves a Star Dragoness, we think, and I discovered some fancy moves for me, thanks to said Dragoness’ insights.”

Kal drew his beloved carefully out of the solid rock, meantime giving his slack-jawed daughter a madcap grin. “Razorblades, you alright?”

“Broke two fingers and two toes–what’re the chances? And I’ve a nice lump on the crown of the hardest cranium in the Island-World, according to your fond slurs.”

Besides which, she looked as if she had been wrestling Dragons. Not too far off the mark. Riika was too proud to say so, of course. Kal checked furtively for Falkurion, but the Green Dragon was truly dead this time. He lay crushed beneath an enormous, rectangular stone block.

He said, “I’m fine too, thank you for asking.”

Riika snorted, but Kal could tell she was happy. Well, he hoped so.

He struck a victorious pose. And then ten more poses, accompanied by silly dancing, fist-pumping and a few moves that polite company would have found highly objectionable, all the while shouting, “Yes! I am the indisputable definition of volcanic, freakish awesomeness! I am the most magnificent thief ever to walk these Islands. I am Kallion the Invisible, unfathomable and invincible; tremble, ye ladies, for I shall stalk thee tonight.”

“Anyone would suppose he’s pleased,” Tazithiel noted dryly.

Riika rolled her eyes. “Hopeless.”

I
F Storm Winds
had blown them south to Mejia, a Cloudlands hurricane blew the Dragonwing back toward the Academy. Four Dragons and two Riders had fallen. Aranya left behind two Brown Dragons with a cover of four Reds and an injured Blue to complete the work of razing Endurion’s fortress. Never mind not leaving one stone atop another. Aranya’s orders were to tip the entire monstrosity into the Cloudlands.

Now, a Dragonwing nineteen strong raced to beat Talon to her goal. For many of these Dragons and their Riders, it was likely a race to an imminent death.

Aranya had touched Riika with her healing power. “No more magic for you, young rapscallion. Please.”

“But what if I have to fight Talon?”

“Leave that to me.” Aranya’s expression suggested that she might more easily convince the moons to reverse their orbital paths. “We need time to figure out your illness.”

There was, in the long leagues, the space to think and reflect as one gazed over the spectacular natural beauty of the Island-World, at the Islands rising like primeval beasts from the everlasting realms of the noxious Cloudlands, below which plants grew leagues wide, the air was as thick as a hearty Jeradian porridge, the predators came in varieties as strange as their under-clouds realm and Land Dragons grew to the size of Islands–at least in Herimor, south of the Rift. Sometimes, Kal longed to peel back the clouds and peer at the world below. What a remarkable experience that would be.

Dragons were the original denizens of the Island-World. The cataclysmic arrival of the original comet, bearing the fabled First Eggs of the Dragons, created a world-shattering explosion, throwing up the Rim-Wall Mountains and carving out the great bowl-shaped depression that housed the Islands. Fra’anior was the first Ancient Dragon to hatch, the fabled seven-headed progenitor of the Dragonkind. He and his kin raised the Islands and, if legend spoke true, created the Lesser Dragons and Humans.

Looking around him now, at the Dragons and Riders burning the heavens together, it seemed to Kal there must be ways for Humans and Dragons to coexist in peace, even in mutually beneficial partnership. Yet Dragons were proud, and the history of Humankind’s slavery to the Dragonkind such an apparently insoluble ocean of bad blood between the two races, that the rise of a creature like Talon was no surprise. Even less of a surprise, those Humans who covertly or openly worked toward the destruction of all Dragonkind and Shapeshifters. ‘More Dragon than you’ll ever be’? What had Falkurion meant? Surely, not the old draconic antipathy for Shapeshifters–his words had been so oddly inflected.

Kal suspected that Talon’s nature was more mysterious than any of them supposed. And, as he peered ahead, he began to sense something else.

“Tazi? Is Aranya planning to stop at Jos?”

“A rapid refuelling stop,” Aranya called over. Dragon hearing. Kal pasted a smile beneath his furrowed brow, making the Amethyst Dragoness snort with laughter. “The Dragons will bolt a sheep or ten, you Humans can stretch your legs and we’ll try to formulate a defence plan.”

“O Queen, we may not have time for that.”

Aranya inquired, “Kal?”

With a stutter-flutter of her wings that communicated droll humour, Tazithiel explained, “It’s the infamous Kallion itch, shell-mother. He has these feelings and intuitions.”

“A man? Feelings?” The Queen showed off her personal cavern filled with Dragon fangs.

“And I have it on good authority that the Blue Moon is made of Jeradian cheese,” Kal growled. “Aye, o Queen. If we live through this, Tazithiel and I have agreed to pass a small secret on to you.”

“You’re pregnant?”

Had he not been belted into a double Dragon Rider saddle pilfered from Endurion’s extensive armouries at that point, Kal would have tumbled off the Dragoness’ back, which was easily as wide as a king’s banqueting table.

“M-m-mother!” Tazithiel spluttered fire between her fangs.

Aranya laughed happily. “I’m waiting for news. Now, what’s this little secret?”

“Have you learned nothing in three hundred years of life?” Riika interrupted, evidently not as fast asleep as her fake snoring a minute before had suggested. “That’s why it’s called a secret.”

“Ah, the sweet innocence of youth,” said Aranya.

“Want to be my new sparring partner at school, o Queen? I seem to be running short.”

“Is that a threat, o pestiferous Pyg-monster? I think you need a vigorous spanking, which your sensitive father over there is clearly too unmanly to deliver.”

They had the oddest relationship. More than three hundred years of life’s experience separated them, but Riika seemed to bring out a younger, more carefree Aranya. Perhaps she evoked happy memories of times with the Pygmy Dragon, for the sassier Riika acted, the greater the Amethyst Dragoness’ delight appeared to wax. This clearly nonplussed more than a few of their draconic escorts.

Quietly, Kal said, “I hope there is nothing to this feeling, o Queen. For I fear that not all is well at Jos.”

“You sense a disturbance in the Balance?”

“I sense trouble,” he said bluntly. “Trust me, Aranya, I’m only alive today for the very reason that I possess an itchy nose.”

The Queen of Immadia poured like silk through the air for a long, long moment, the fluidity of her Dragonflight causing Kal’s breath to snag in his throat. Aranya’s beauty was suns upon gemstone scales, the rainbow play of light through the almost-translucent wing membranes, the majestic power of the Dragonkind magnified to an unimaginable degree. The air itself seemed to make obeisance, and the twin suns to greet her as the third member of their triplet.

And his Tazithiel matched her shell-mother for brilliance.

Softly, for Tazi alone, he said,
Tazithiel, did you ever look at the stars, and wonder …

It’s broad daylight … oh. Kal, you remember a girl’s silly dreams?

Silly? Some relative of the lesser blue-spotted grasshopper, who happens to be seated upon your back, was heard to mutter the word ‘weird’ in response to what was clearly a prophetic utterance on your part.

If I had a clue how to summon my alleged Star power–you can’t steal that knowledge out of my subconscious, can you, Kal? Walk through walls, walk through brains?

I hope I respect you better than that,
he said stiffly.

As Aranya led the Dragonwing in a long, swift swoop from the great heights of a league above the Islands, they broke through a thin layer of ice-crystal cloud and the Dragons, who had been debating how best to nullify Talon’s powers, fell silent.

Smoke blanketed the region of Jos Town.

Tazithiel said, “It’s as if a farmer ploughed his field, Kal. The city is destroyed.”

Long minutes passed as Jeradia grew rapidly in their sights, the Dragons achieving velocities of over thirty leagues per hour. At this speed the air crowded into Kal’s lungs and made his eyes water. He wished for the secondary nictitating membranes of a Dragon to protect his eyeballs, but Tazithiel, like many of the other Dragons, formed a small shield about her Riders to protect them. Another Aranya trick. Properly shaped and applied, the intrinsic magic of Dragon flight could be extended to reduce wind resistance, allowing Dragons to increase their range up to fifty percent, and flying speeds by up to a third. Much depended on the Dragon or Dragoness’ innate abilities and magical control. Aranya, Jalfyrion and Cyanorion shadowed Tazithiel at the Dragonwing’s spearhead, while a cluster of Reds, Greens and Browns had fallen leagues behind.

Calling out in telepathic Dragonish, Kal said,
The enemy has departed, noble Dragons. We must fly on.

We should help these people,
said Jalfyrion.

What caused such destruction? Surely not Brown Dragons?
Cyanorion asked, fury and despair lending his words a wildfire curl of flame in Kal’s mind.

No. Cyanorion, an oddly gentle, scholarly Dragon–as far as Dragons could ever be accused of gentleness–was right. The town seemed to have been attacked from beneath by explosions of rock, giving it the air of a smashed anthill. Buildings slumped into holes. Smoke rose from too many fires to count. Bodies lay scattered in the streets; people wandered the rubble dazedly, searching for loved ones. The destruction was total, and recent.

Anubam. Kal beat his thigh in fury. Of course. There, in the centre of town, was an unmistakable, yawning black tunnel leading into the earth. This was why Aranya’s forces had not detected Talon. She had travelled underground–clearly controlling the Anubam, having stolen one or more of the creatures from the Ancient Dragon’s corral in the Island-Desert. They had blasted up from the depths and, as Tazithiel had pointed out, ploughed a town of thousands back into the earth it had risen from. Blasts of Dragon fire and acid had immolated any structure left standing.

A volcanic eruption could not have been more devastating. He swallowed back bile. This was why Humans feared Dragons.

They slowed as several Dragons met them above Jos. Kal recognised them as Academy Dragons, the sorry, battered remnant of the Dragonwing Aranya had asked to scour southern Jeradia for sign of Talon’s advance.

He said,
Aranya, this is the work of Anubam, impossible as it seems. Talon travels underground.

What?
The Amethyst fixed her enormous eyes upon him, her eye-fires burning so darkly, Kal felt her pain and fury lash his soul.

Suddenly, a shining presence eased his pain.
Kal’s right, noble shell-mother,
Tazithiel agreed.
We saw Anubam-sign when passing through the Island-Desert. We must question these Dragons with all speed, call in our forces and sprint to the Academy. That is Talon’s next target.

Aranya inclined her muzzle.
Thank you, Kal.

Raising her voice, the Queen called, “Dragons. Riders. Ten minutes on the ground. Take what you require from that flock of ralti sheep. Tazithiel and I will debrief these Dragons. Focus on how we will defeat Endurion and Talon. We’ll strategize on the wing.”

The Dragons’ report confirmed Kal’s worst fears. Talon and Endurion had attacked at dawn from the hole in the centre of town, the very hour Kal, Riika and Tazithiel had penetrated the fortress. After four hours of relentless butchery, the Lesser Dragons and four huge Anubam had disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. Kal looked to the suns and calculated Talon’s force was now five hours ahead. Disaster. Worse than disaster. He did not need to see Jisellia’s distraught reaction, or hear Cyanorion’s muted, elegiac Dragonsong to know what they all dreaded. Yet, how fast could an Anubam swim through rock? What had they seen in the desert?

Observing all the long faces and muted belly-fires about him, Kal knew he must speak. Even if he lied, these Dragons and Riders must have hope.

He grabbed Riika’s arm. With an overabundance of volume and cheer, he cried, “Tell me, Razorblades, how many Pygmies does it take to slay an Anubam?”

His variation on a common joke made her double-take. Then she grinned fiercely at the listening Dragons. “Just one.”

“One village?”

“No. One Pygmy, one tiny cut at a time.”

Jalfyrion snorted with laughter. “Aye, ‘tis the death of a million cuts.”

Riika slapped the Red Dragon on his flank. “How many cuts are you going to take, Red? Tell you what, I’ll leave you as many as a dozen.”

The Red’s brow-ridges drew down in fury, but then understanding ignited his eye-fires with swirls of blazing yellow.
Dragon-kin, listen. JALFYRION!
His impressive challenge belled over the broken town.

TAZITHIEL!
Although the Indigo Dragoness aimed her thunder at the sky, she still managed to send a couple of the younger Dragons into a wing-fluttering panic.

With a prodigious fountain of fire also aimed aloft, Cyanorion belted out,
ANUBAM-STEAKS!

Fiery laughter, wild and ruthless and fey, erupted from the massed Dragons. Suddenly, belly-fires rumbled and fulminated. Fire backlit their fangs as inner infernos surged into throats. Their belligerent mood infected the Dragon Riders. Weapons winked in the afternoon suns-light. Fingers checked saddle girths and Dragon war bows. Chatter rose.

Tazithiel clasped Kal’s shoulders with her paw. “Noble Rider.”

Aye, gleaming fire-eyes or none, she should know better than to trust a worthless thief. What right had he to ride with these men and women who had worked, fought and lived for the chance to become Dragon Riders? Kal concealed his unease with a rakish smile. Opposite, Aranya inclined her head in a draconic bow. He could barely meet her gaze. Noble bucket of windroc vomit, he was. Bah. Where was his courage, his indomitable spirit? Kal knew fear. Squeamish, gut-clenching, sweat-inducing fear. Did none of these feel as he did? Did they not know many would die?

Every instinct developed over three and a half decades of survival urged him to flee in the opposite direction, but for one thing. Talon would not stop at Jos, nor at the Academy. She would scatter bodies like chaff upon the winds. Even now, the stench of charred flesh choked his nostrils. This was not war, not the death of soldiers killed in glorious battle. This was wrong. Butchery.