Dragon Thief (31 page)

Talon’s eyes rose. Casually, she swatted ten Academy Dragons out of her presence, sending them hurtling into the buildings a thousand yards away. She jolted the fallen Anubam into a thundering rage, forcing the beast to head groggily for the Dragons’ roost mountain. Tazithiel adjusted, closing the gap with Talon and Endurion with dizzying speed. Then, as the Dragoness’ jaw gaped open to launch her attack, as Kal began to see in strangely jerky segments of time, Talon gestured at the incoming Indigo Dragoness.

Shadow!

Monstrous power washed over them. Through them. Kal and Riika’s shots twanged off their bows and the arrows emerged from nothingness, detonating in concert against Endurion’s magical shield. The Indigo Dragoness’ lightning attack, a streak of bluish light across Kal’s retinae, struck the exact point of the arrows’ explosion and lanced straight through, blasting a cart-sized crater in Endurion’s flank and throwing the Green Dragon hundreds of feet across the pit to splatter a pile of boulders on the edge.

Roaring her mightiest battle-challenge yet, Tazithiel stormed toward Endurion.

“Anubam!” Riika shouted.

The Indigo socked herself with her own Kinetic power, tumbling high over the deadly breath of another burrowing beast as it crawled up into the golden afternoon light. Below, Talon and Endurion stirred, badly injured and smoking from various mentionable and unmentionable orifices, yet clearly still alive. What the hells? Kal’s eyes bulged. He blurted out an unfortunate word.

Riika gasped, “Stinking monkey bait, did she …”

“Aye.” Endurion’s wounds drew closed as though his flesh had sprouted a thousand worms that crawled across the bloodied wreckage, sheathing what should have been a fatal wound in new hide and muscle. Even the armour regrew over Talon’s charred thigh. Kal croaked, “We may have succeeded in annoying her. Just about.”

“Then we need to annoy her a little more.” The Indigo Dragoness cried, “Dragon-kin! Join me and slay the enemy!”

She too could work on her rhetoric, but a dozen Dragons and Riders champed at Tazithiel’s tail as she banked and dived. A rain of fireballs and Dragon acid bombarded Talon and Endurion, but incredibly, they shook off a barrage that turned the rock for a hundred feet all around them into a lake of glowing slag. The pair took to the air, flying unsteadily but implacably toward the battle above. Talon raised her fist. Tazithiel’s Kinetic power battered the Rider repeatedly, clearly disturbing whatever she had been intending. Still, Talon managed to down two of the Academy Dragons. The Indigo Dragoness increased the pace and power of her attacks, driving the pair toward the Academy buildings where many Humans manned the defences–war crossbows and catapults scattered in strategic locations around and atop the buildings. Many were of the new type, Kal saw, steam-powered multiple-loading crossbows that fired up to a dozen ten-foot metal quarrels at a time.

Hopefully they knew friend from foe.

Talon and her forces came under a withering barrage, but they drew together and began to fight back. Every time Talon landed a successful blow, a Dragon fell, its eye-fires snuffed out. In the thick of the battle, as Tazithiel rallied the Academy Dragons with fierce cries and the compelling force of her rage, Kal saw Jisellia and Jalfyrion grappling with a massive enemy Blue Dragon, an aerial bastion of magical power. Even old Yozora surged into the fray. Blind? That Dragon could fly! Kal saw him snag a hulking Green at high speed with his talons and make a slingshot around its neck, snapping the vertebrae instantly.

Talon straightened. Took in the scene. With a devious smile playing about her exposed lips, she gestured to the Anubam.
Destroy these pathetic Human nests, my Dragon-kin.

Three Anubam swam through the Academy buildings, bringing them down in a rain of bricks and tiles and timber.

Cyanorion!
Thundering his challenge, the stalwart Blue collided with Endurion’s shield at a fantastic speed, rattling Dragon and Rider. Cyanorion spun away, dazed. Jalfyrion headed off a marauding Yellow Dragon with a cunning spin that allowed Jisellia to drive her mounted Dragon lance into the Yellow’s left eye. A terrible screech cut across the din.

ARANYA!
The massive Amethyst shot volley after volley of violet fireballs so rapidly she appeared to hose the enemy Dragons with a river of fire. Kal saw several enemy Dragons literally sliced in half as shield and Dragon imploded simultaneously. He took the opportunity in the chaos to land a few shots of his own, picking off a startled enemy Green as it flashed into his line of sight. Flesh and flame spurted from its shattered eye.

“Nice shot,” Tazithiel snarled. “Shall we help my shell-mother?”

Aranya was doing something fantastic with ten coruscating lightning bolts that crackled against Endurion’s shield from every direction, both freezing Dragon and Rider in place and trying by main force to shatter their defence. Yet, incredibly, they endured. Talon struck Aranya with her invisible power, shuddering the huge Dragoness. Again. At the third almighty blow, the Star Dragoness appeared to wilt.

“Get them!” Kal roared.

Tazi poured all of her strength into a lightning attack, but Endurion simply shook her off, raking her left flank with a blow that came perilously close to slicing off Kal’s foot.

“How the blazes does she do that?” snarled the Indigo Dragoness.

“It’s as if she gets stronger the more she’s attacked,” Kal mused. “Is Aranya alright?”

“She’s back.”

Back hardly covered it. Blazing like a sun in its glory, the Amethyst-turned-White Dragoness speared into the enemy with such power, Kal could not even watch. The resulting concussion shook every Dragon present. When the smoke and blaze cleared, Talon and Endurion drifted a ways off, watching with identically sly smiles. Kal could not believe what he was seeing. Teleportation? Absorption of another Dragon’s powers? For as Aranya tried to lash out again, her fire stuttered. The black-cloaked figure made a grand gesture, slamming the mighty Amethyst Dragoness into a spinning dive toward the green lake beneath the Dragon roosts.

The Amethyst Dragoness landed heavily between the lake and the field, folding up as though her body had grown too weighty for her wings to support.

“So, Aranya!” Talon’s booming cut effortlessly across the roar of battle. “How does it feel to be defeated? My Anubam will flatten this little hovel you’ve chosen for your fortress, and my Dragonwings will hunt down and destroy every single one of those pathetic hatchlings that fled my presence.”

Talon waved her hands, appearing to grow stronger and more confident by the second. Dragons began to rain from the skies, friend and foe alike. “You and your precious Riders can never stand against the power of true Dragons. Long years have I waited to wreak my vengeance on this wretched den of Human-lovers and sycophants. And this scroll, the precious Scroll of
Ernulla-kul-Exarkin
, gives me the means to destroy you.” She waved a very large, intricately-tied scroll to all quarters, as if asserting her right to rule. “Today, there will be no weeping and gnashing of fangs, for I shall silence them all!”

Aranya said, “You …”

“You don’t even remember who I am.” Landing a few hundred feet from the felled Amethyst Dragoness, Endurion and Talon stalked her. There was no questioning who was mistress now.

Jalfyrion and Cyanorion formed a small Dragonwing with Tazithiel, staring at the scene with growing horror as Endurion strutted and Talon postured, spewing vitriol about her time at the Academy and how she had been banished by Aranya herself. Talon roared, “Now you respect me. You only respect my power when you’re brought to your knees. See, o false Queen? I have come to take my revenge, and I’ll have it served fiery, in the inimitable style of the true Dragonkind.”

Her outstretched hand appeared to grip the enormous Amethyst Dragoness as Tazithiel had once been held helpless. The woman’s massive, gauntleted fist clenched slowly, with relish, raising such a cry from Aranya as Kal had never heard a Dragon utter. Golden Dragon blood flooded from her mouth.

“Yes, heal yourself, you pathetic purple slug. Heal yourself so I can do this again! And again!”

“Let them go!” screamed Aranya. “Deal with me!”

Talon’s hand unclenched, releasing the stricken Dragoness. “Aye, well do you wonder what power this is, o Aranya, which can destroy even a Star Dragoness. I have the power of
Ernulla-kul-Exarkin,
granted me by Dramagon himself, that most ancient of Dragons and the wisest of all. And with it, I am destined to restore the Dragonkind to their rightful place of dominion over this Island-World, heralding a bright new age!”

That fist-pumping, wild cry was enough to decide Kal about Talon’s state of mind. She was as cracked as an Island spilt asunder by an earthquake. The tone of voice, her gestures, the spittle spewing unheeded down her chin … and just look at how Endurion’s facial expressions mirrored hers! What did that mean? Were they bonded like fraternal twins sprung from a single womb?

Dominating the scene now, Talon’s Dragons raised a chorus of snarling, thundering approval. She looked up, smiling. “Ah, isn’t the voice of this world’s new draconic tyrants a song so beautiful, it outshines the very stars?”

The Queen declared, “You’ll never win, Talon–or should I call you Rhadhuri of Rolodia, the banished murderer of students?”

“I needed their blood. Their power.”

Talon’s laughter crackled over the massed Dragons, seeming to infect them with her madness, at least from what Kal deduced of the tenor of their eye-fires. She controlled these Dragonkind? Did the scroll grant that ability? Perhaps the scroll was the true target.

Aranya seemed unfazed. “I have powers you cannot begin to imagine.”

And as they exchanged insults, Kal shivered with the realisation that somehow, Aranya’s words were meant for him. How did he know? Only by a peculiar itch in his mind. They had to do something crazy. Something akin to his original idea of isolating Talon. Separate her from Endurion and they might stand a chance.

“Riika,” he whispered, echoing the words in his mind for the benefit of Cyanorion, Jalfyrion, Tazithiel and Yozora, who had now joined them. “Go to Jalfyrion. I’ve an idea.”

“I’ll take her,” said Cyanorion, unexpectedly.

“Before you complain, Razorblades, I need you lot down with Aranya, healing her. I’ll need the best ruddy backup money can’t buy, alright? And I can’t tell you what I intend because I suspect Talon or Endurion reads minds.”

“What the hells?” snapped Jalfyrion. “Trust you? We all know–”

“Shut the fangs before you start bleating like a sheep,” Yozora cut off the larger Red effortlessly. “Only a thief can snatch victory from the jaws of that beast.”

Kal was grateful Yozora or Tazithiel could not read his thoughts just then. Fancy a Dragon calling a Human a beast? No, she was not Human. She was some kind of Shapeshifter. She had to be. Tazithiel’s supposed shell-father had revealed that little gem. Talon was not quite the true Dragonkind she wished to be, was she?

With that, Tazithiel flicked Riika over to Cyanorion’s paw. “Fly strong and true, little one.”
Now, you two-timing son of a slug, what Dragon powers shall we summon to defeat these imposters?

We’re going to pelt them with a few stones,
said Kal.

W
ITH A HANDY
touch of Storm amplification courtesy of the most gorgeous Shapeshifter in existence–with due respect, Tazithiel
just
shaded her mother and the thought of any kind of liaison with a woman of over three hundred summers’ age made him imagine gagging on a mouthful of worms freshly scraped from a grave–Kal delivered an eloquent soliloquy, indeed, a poetic masterpiece majoring on Endurion’s extraordinary resemblance to a regurgitated glob of snot swilling about on the surface of a foetid swamp. Tazithiel landed safely between Talon and Aranya.

Job done? Liar. Islands’ sakes, but the familiarity of lying through his pearly white teeth was a great comfort to a man of his severe moral ambivalence.

We need a stony battleground,
he breathed to Tazithiel, as intimately as he could manage.
And we need to get close to Endurion. Challenge him.

I’ve been waiting for this.

By this time, Kal’s far-reaching slurs had the Green Dragon foaming at the mouth. When Tazithiel bellowed her challenge, demanding an all-claws-in duel, the Dragon patently could not believe his good fortune. He practically begged Talon for the opportunity.

She bowed magnanimously atop Endurion’s shoulders, so huge that she overshadowed his spine spikes. “Why not, noble Endurion? You’ve earned your fun. I’ll enjoy seeing you crush this blue worm once more, as long as you ‘correct’ her publicly this time, for all to enjoy.”

And this was the so-called solidarity of women?

Provoked beyond tolerance, Tazithiel tore into the Green in a spectacular frenzy of claws and lightning. Kal knew that lightning would gain her little purchase, but there was no taming the beast beneath him–or was there? As he caught flashes of Talon’s laughing face opposite, his anger mushroomed. Clearly, she thought him no threat at all. A Rider along for the ride. Kal tried to plant a cheeky arrow right in the middle of her gaping mouth, but she swatted it aside with contemptuous ease. Bah. What was the point? Better to concentrate on Endurion’s demise.

This time, Tazithiel gave better than she received. She fought as a Dragoness in a primal fury. Kal could not imagine what she had been through, for her rage to burn at a pitch greater than any volcanic hell. But when Talon subtly restrained the Indigo Dragoness to furnish Endurion with an opening to shred a twenty-foot portion of her left wing, Kal’s blood boiled with positively draconic wrath. Right. Enough was most certainly enough.

Tightening his mental communication as best he could, Kal whispered,
Let him roll you and when you do, grab a boulder in each forepaw. Nice, big ones.

What? I won’t be able to fight.

Just do it.

Tazithiel proceeded to cuff Endurion so venomously, Kal saw stars on the Dragon’s behalf. She pretended to slip. Endurion roared, rushing in for the same manoeuvre he had tried before. In the flip of a wingtip, he trapped Tazithiel beneath his huge paws. She squirmed, preventing her Rider from being crushed beneath her back. The Green Dragon’s fangs gaped. “Prepare to taste my majesty, Shapeshifter filth!”

Kal …

Second and third hearts! Hit them!

The Indigo struck instantaneously with her forepaws. Each held a boulder wider than Kal was tall. As she struck, Kal triggered his Shadow power. Her paws passed cleanly within the Dragon’s torso. In perfect concert with his next command, she released the boulders.

Her paws emerged empty. Kal sighed. Nice gamble, thief.

Endurion halted as though he had flown into a mountainside. A perplexed, emphatically sheepish look entered his eyes. “Rhadhuri? I …” He crumpled.

Talon gasped, “What? Shell-brother–what the hells did you do to him?”

Kal said, “I’m afraid your brother’s feeling a bit stoned.”

Oh, the joy of a spiteful pun! Malicious pleasure flooded his heart, tinged with grief. Aye, the killing did not much please him, even if no creature had ever deserved it more than Endurion. He should not feel guilty. Yet the pleading look Endurion cast him did tug for an instant at one stray heartstring. Kal snapped it callously.

For once, the powerful figure upon Endurion’s back seemed confounded. Her screams split the golden afternoon sky, increasingly desperate, as she hurled her power into her shell-brother, but this was an obstruction not even Shadow power could have resolved. Kal knew that. Granite irretrievably entombed the flesh of two of Endurion’s three hearts. His hearts would be as stone-cold in death as ever they had been in life.

Talon reached into the Green Dragon and tried to rip the boulders free.

She screamed at the horror she produced. Two huge, bloody boulders trailing veins and bone and gobbets of flesh crashed down beside Endurion’s lifeless carcass.

Kal said, “If he wasn’t dead before, lady, he certainly is now.”

The look that Talon turned upon him was unalloyed hatred. Snapping her saddle straps like wet scrolleaf, the giantess leaped to the ground. With each step, her body appeared to swell. Her armour groaned and snapped as Dragon hide encased her still-Human limbs and torso. In seconds, a giant half-Dragon half-Human monstrosity confronted them. Her hide was lava orange and her eyes, filled with crimson Dragon fire.

Rhadhuri bellowed, “Look at what Dramagon’s power made me! I can shift into any form I please. Tremble before my might, all who hear.”

Out on the remains of the field, Kal saw a smattering of the downed Dragons stirring, recovering their strength. Many must have sustained terrible internal injuries. Closer, he could see broken limbs and wings. Beyond them, the Anubam tore heedlessly through the Academy buildings, destroying any structure that stood or any Human who had foolishly remained behind. He risked a glance at Aranya. Aye, Yozora and Cyanorion were there, together with Riika, flanking the mighty Amethyst Dragoness. Cyanorion essayed a tiny nod. Ready.

Striking a powerful stance, Talon addressed the Queen of Immadia, still waving the three-foot roll of scrolleaf about as though it were a baton of command, “So, this is your shell-daughter? How precious. She can watch you die like the cowardly cur you are.” Seizing Aranya, Talon shook her as a rajal might shake a hapless deer. She twisted the Dragoness’ wings until the Dragon-Queen groaned, almost a draconic sob. “Does it hurt, you pitiful excuse for a Dragon? You’re not worthy of the name, and the eternal fires will never accept your tainted fire-soul!”

Kal racked his brain for a solution. Shadow and light, the gap between light and shadow …

“Or perhaps, the reverse would be more satisfying.”

The many-handed power seized Kal and Tazithiel in its relentless grasp. He wanted to invoke his power, to enfold them in Shadow so that they could escape, but even his thoughts seemed imprisoned by Talon’s mental hold. He strained to reach the Dragoness, but failed. He could not think in Dragonish.

From the corner of his frozen vision, Kal saw a dark distortion pass by. Riika! Moving at an inhuman speed, the Pygmy warrior assaulted Talon. Throwing daggers sprouted in her eyes and throat. A silver blur sawed at the giantess’ ankle as if a demented woodpecker had sped up its work a hundredfold, hacking through the scale-armour and into underlying bone. Talon plucked out the daggers and healed herself. Poisoned flechettes thudded into her back. Ten. Twenty times. Talon lashed out, but the girl moved so fast, she was less than a blur now. Riika materialised next to Kal, on Tazithiel’s back.

“Hey Sticky-Fingers. Borrow these?”

He wanted to speak, but the sight of her bleeding gums arrested him. Blood leaked from her fingernails. It trailed from the corners of her eyes in a ghastly parody of tears. With a tiny, knowing smile, Riika absconded with the last of the explosive arrows.

Riika knew what she was doing. Dying to save her family. Dying for love.

Kal would have wept, save Talon’s grip prevented even the upwelling of his emotions.

The Pygmy girl popped up on the far side of Talon. “Surprise!”

Boom!

She popped up in another place. “I love my family, ugly-face.”
Boom!

And again, as Talon flailed in the wrong direction.
Boom!
Bits of flesh fountained from a hole in the giantess’ abdomen.

The grip on Kal slackened almost imperceptibly. Never had he felt more powerless as his daughter exhausted the last of her health to purchase time. And he could think of nothing. Nothing at all. Talon had apparently taken Aranya’s best shots and turned them back on the Star Dragoness. Then again, his joke about Pygmies and one cut at a time was playing out before his disbelieving eyes. Talon could not heal herself fast enough. She could not catch the Pygmy as Riika attacked her with the zest and persistence of a mosquito seeking sweet flesh in a darkened room.

Dragon powers would not prevail. A thief must steal what hid in shadow and bring it into the light. But just as light alone stood no chance against whatever legacy Dramagon had gifted Rhadhuri, so too a disciple of shadow could not hope to defeat such power.

With a triumphant screech, Talon slapped Riika a hundred yards past Aranya and her retinue. Almost simultaneously, the Amethyst Dragoness reared and lunged, a blue-white conflagration bursting from her throat to wash over the freakish Shapeshifter. Aranya had withheld for Riika’s sake. A deafening thunderclap rolled over him as their powers clashed. Smoke, ozone and reeking sulphur choked his lungs.

Talon’s hold slipped.

In that fraction of a second, Kal bolted for a refuge. Tazithiel’s mind.

Here, he sought the light.

Time blossomed before him. Kal swam in an ocean of strange beauties and stranger tides, in the alien yet familiar surroundings of the mind of the woman he had come to adore. Here were many secrets; great chests and treasuries of the powers and potentials gifted by her heritage, yet they were locked and bound by dark, smoking chains. A many-headed beast guarded her treasures, a Dragon of pain and suffering, strengthened by years of self-loathing and despair.

Before he could blink, the Dragon savaged him.
You have no right!

Kal threw back his head in agony. But that was nothing compared to the torture of his spirit. He wanted to take the pain as he had before. But this was different. Unimaginably different. This pain had festered and grown malignant, and its touch burned like dark fire.

He challenged the monster,
I may not have the right, but my need is unequalled.

No.
A soft hand slipped into his. Kal did not know whether he felt or imagined that touch, but he did know the presence of an achingly gentle spirit, with a heart of fire and spirit of diamond, at once untainted and indestructible. Tazithiel said,
I thank you, Kal, but this beast is mine to devour.

Perhaps not as gentle as he imagined!

Tazi nodded at the chests.
Make yourself useful, thief, and crack a few of those open for us.

Permission deprives stealing of all its fun, Tazithiel.

I suspect your amorality is equal to the task.

* * * *

The man of Shadow pressed down through the iron-hard flight muscles of his Dragoness’ back. All the Island-World lay frozen at Talon’s command, the Dragons scattered across the field as though they were flies trapped in amber, awaiting the passing of aeons. For him, those aeons moved like the silence between heartbeats. In the spaces, in the silence, he discovered his power just as the Amethyst Dragoness had suggested he might.

Monks and Star Dragons. They saw the world with different eyes.

Kal drifted down Tazithiel’s gullet to the source of her new fires. Star power, she called it. The unique, elemental capability of a Star Dragoness, which the shell-daughter of Aranya had known only for the briefest of moments in her life. Shadow hands passed through that organ, examining the microscopic magical imperatives which held her powers captive. Oh, Talon was cunning. The fine control of her Dragon powers, to allow the hearts to beat while subduing the primal magic of a Dragon–that skill could only be the product of centuries of study and experimentation, the kind of time a malign Ancient Dragon had enjoyed. He would not have believed it, had Kal not threaded Dramagon’s constructs between his own shadow-fingers. Incredible science. Dazzling complexity.

Perhaps he should be more thankful for possessing the most dexterous, most fearsomely sticky fingers in history.

How far a scurrilous thief had come from that Dragon roost, from a bungled burglary to a seat upon a Star Dragoness. Life had become laughter over the Islands, the newness of a storm’s aftermath, the prismatic light refracting the suns’ brilliance in fused arcs of crystal-clear radiance. How quickly that first flush of happiness had been stolen by the circumstances of Riika’s infirmity and the horrors of war. How he wished for a return to those blithe days–no. Shadow-Kal firmed his jaw. Steal from a thief?

Certain laws of the Island-World ought to remain immutable He could ensure that.

Just … steal something back. Redeem the balance.

Kal reached out to wreak a thief’s most elegant work. Released, the fires intensified to a white so brilliant, he could no longer sense his own shadow. He panicked, fled and arrested the movement within the breadth of a single thought. Aye, Riika had not mentioned this danger in her pretty speech. How was it that she could be so young yet so infernally wise?