Dragon Thief (36 page)

“Great.” Kal rested his head against her spine spike.
Let us burn the heavens together as Dragon and Rider!
His shout did nothing, bar raise a slight prickle on the nape of his neck. Where was the oath-power when they needed it most?

“Kal, we won’t make it, will we? We’ve done our best. Once again, this Dragoness isn’t strong enough.”

Tazithiel did not say so, but she meant they were about to die.

He licked his parched lips. He would give all the jewels in his misbegotten kingdom for a sip of water. They had not done their assessment this morning, because there was nothing left to assess. Only … heart. The will to live. His Dragoness lacked even the strength to turn her head to look at him. Might he insult Tazithiel to stoke her fires? Or was there not a better way? His mind felt burdened by the unattainable length of such a flight; his spirit, crushed by the majestic vistas that scorned the mightiest efforts of flesh and bone. But the way of the heart was often founded upon unreason. That was its peculiar beauty and its shame.

Unclipping his buckles, Kal moved hand-over-hand down her neck. He climbed through Tazithiel’s thicket of skull spikes and onto her head.

“Kal? What are you doing?”

He knelt above her brow-ridges, on the smaller but no less multi-coloured scales, marvelling at the perfect patina they made for the extraordinary creature within.

“Kal, you’ll unbalance me.”

“I started that when we first met,” he whispered, right into one of her ear-canals.

Tazi’s wings flared in surprise. She groaned as the movement aggravated her longsuffering muscles. “Off, you buffoon.”

Lying down on her head, he reached his long arms toward her eyes. Of course, he could not reach. He shuffled forward until his forehead pressed against the bridge of her muzzle. Closer. “Shut your eyes, o lily of Mejia.”

She began to protest, but acceded with a sigh.

Kal said, “There are dreams which we have as adults, and as children, wilder, more beautiful and unrestrained dreams. But I wish to tell you about another sort of dream, Tazithiel. The kind of dream we don’t allow ourselves because it is too agonising, or too glorious, to contemplate. We deny dreams of the impossible. We learn to quash them before they form, as a storm crushes a bud before it may dream of becoming a flower. Like my dreams for Riika. I cannot bear to hope for fear that hope will play me false. I love that we dreamed this dream together before we truly knew each other. And even now, I realise I have only known you for weeks, barely a season of this world, never mind a lifetime. I wish to spend many of life’s seasons with you, Tazithiel.”

“And I with you.”

“Eyes closed?” he asked. “Right. Picture this. If our souls despair and cannot dream any longer, then we must allow others to dream for us. I have allowed Aranya to dream for me. I see Riika running toward me, laughing.”

“She’ll be flying Dragonback.”

“Shh. I see hatchlings clamouring around your skirts, at least a dozen beautiful little Shapeshifter hatchlings.”

“Three dozen,” said Tazithiel, contentedly. “I’ve my mother’s paws to grow into, after all.”

“Three …” Kal wheezed like an asthmatic grandfather. “Fine. For you, three dozen. Half of them will be girls with the most perfect eyelashes in the Island-World, and the other half will be rascally, thieving boys with holes in their trouser knees.”

“I see you have it all worked out.”

“Trust me.” Kal chuckled dryly, and the more so as she laughed in concert with him. “Did I just say that? I see us soaring up to those mountains … soaring, aye!”

“Kallion, even more than usual, you’re not making a grain of sense.”

“Magical–I know–supersonic–arc–to the heavens, oath!” he spluttered. “Great Islands, Tazithiel, do you know what this means?”

“Oddly, I haven’t a clue.”

“Well, you know how your mother became betrothed to the Shadow Dragon, don’t you? No? Great Islands, woman–no time for that. They exchanged an ancient and secret oath which is made between Dragons. Now, I’m not Dragonkind, but I did sort of read a prohibited scroll while I lived among the monks, which happened to say something very interesting and applicable.”

Tazithiel gritted her fangs, working to still her body’s trembling. Since the previous nightfall, uncontrollable tremors had begun to shake her body. Now, they came every few minutes. He knew she barely had the strength to keep her wings outstretched and glide. And a glide would take them straight to the bottom, hundreds of leagues shy of the Rim-Wall.

“Tazi, would it be utterly offensive to you, religiously, philosophically or just as a member of the Dragonkind, if we tried to replicate the draconic fire-promises together?”

“Probably, it should be.”

Her shrug drew a deep groan from the Dragoness; her wings lost their form, but Tazithiel forced the joints to flex one more time. Her glide stabilised, but they were now less than a mile above the Cloudlands. He saw a carpet of gold-flecked cloud, as though they burned within, and a constant stirring that minded him of volcanic activity. If only one of those peaks would peek above the clouds! They could rest and complete their journey. But that was not to be.

Kal said, “It’s useless anyways. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“Me neither. Mejian Dragons only teach the lore about the fire-promises when the time is right, not when you’re barely a fledgling.”

“Yet it is said that Hualiama and Grandion exchanged fire-promises in their hearts without even knowing the formal phrases in old Dragonish.”

The Indigo Dragoness said,
It’ll be something about a Dragon’s fire-soul. Something like, thou, the fires beneath my wings.

Thou, my soul’s Dragonsong.

Thou, my heart-stealing vagabond.

They tried for a while longer without any success. The mountains grew taller, and the Cloudlands closer.

“I guess we can’t force it, Tazi.”

Fra’anior, Great Black Dragon, help us in our hour of need,
Tazithiel prayed.

Aye, Fra’anior, why don’t you lend us one of your seven brains to reason a way out of this disaster?
Kal thought sarcastically. Besides, the Black Dragon was hardly the arbiter of fate. Did he determine who lived and who died? Was Fra’anior a god, or merely an oversized lump of Dragonflesh?

Nay, I am no god,
said a faraway, sevenfold voice.
Merely a help to my progeny. You must bring the Shadow and the Light together, little one.

“Shadow and light,” said the Indigo Dragoness. “I heard a voice–was that you, Kal?”

“No, I think it was Fra’anior.”

“Now you’re also hallucinating. Very good, Kal. Shadow and … Kal, do you think you could climb inside my brain?”

What? Crazy, marvellous, unthinkable! “No. Too dangerous. I don’t have the strength, Tazithiel. If I fail, we’re dead.”

“If we don’t shield within two minutes, we’ll suffocate to death. I can smell the toxins.”

The Dragoness tried to flap her wings; she managed two beats before collapsing as if drowning in a river of pain. They plummeted.

“Hold your breath, Tazi!”

With a madcap grin that vanished mid-air, Kal bolted for cover inside her skull. The place where shadow and light might meet, and be one. Had Fra’anior truly spoken, and spoken truly? In his spent state, he had no way of knowing. How could he be thinking in the absence of a physical brain to process thoughts? Extreme fatigue played tricks on the mind, conjuring vivid fantasies to drive one to madness.

Suddenly, a being of pure white flame greeted him.
You said you thought of me as an angel, Kal. I’m no angel, but I wonder if you see me like this? For I see you as … this.

He was a dark man clad in shadowy robes, yet there was no hint of evil in his aspect. Rather, he saw the darkness of night skies, the substrata in which stars lived and breathed, not a darkness of absence, but of enormous, fundamental presence. This man exhibited dignity. Authority. A strength born of the dark-fires of creation, which from eternity to eternity, balanced the white-fires the Dragonkind upheld as the highest expression of creation.

Kal wept at this revelation. Not physical tears, but spiritual. The Princess of Light raised her glowing hands and touched his cheeks.
Thy tears are the water of life to my soul, o Kal.

He reached out for her burning tears.
And these waters of thy soul are the fires of my life, o Tazithiel.

They drank. The fires of eternity imbibed with them, and exploded in song so thrilling, Kal came to believe in the very magic Sha’anior had described. Water Dragons. Were they nearby, raising their voices in haunting, indescribably complex harmonies that teased the very fringes of his awareness? As his soul rocked upon an ocean of song, he questioned how it could be that Sha’anior or Aranya could enjoy insight into the future. Yet, they had no time for such meditations and delusions. They had the imperative of poisonous clouds which had closed over the Indigo Dragoness’ head minutes before.

Mentally, he performed an effusive Fra’aniorian bow to the creature from which Fra’anior Cluster took its name.
I am grateful, Great One.

Then, he turned to his Star Dragoness.
Stars are born to shine, Tazithiel. I will help you to be that star. This is my solemn oath.

The light smiled.
To you alone shall this star fly, Kal, for you are my dark heavens. This I swear.

Power suffused them. In that instant, the Cloudlands split asunder as a shooting star launched itself toward the heavens from whence it came.

A
Few Moments
into their flight, Kal realised that the ending would not be as glorious as the conception. Tazithiel’s flight path soared in a wide arc, yearning first for the Jade moon which appeared to perch atop the Rim-Wall peaks, but steadily levelling out as their last gasp of magic hurled them across the skies. No sonic boom. Just wind tearing across Tazithiel’s scales and the juddering of her wings as she wrestled unimaginable forces to regulate her aerodynamic shape. He hoped a Dragon’s wings could not tear off. That would be ugly.

After cresting the peak, Tazithiel controlled her glide as best she could, essaying the occasional flurry of wingbeats to keep them on track.

Pretty rough,
she apologised.
Can you keep to Shadow, Kal?

Just about. Glad you didn’t leave me behind there.

The Dragoness coughed out a weary laugh.
Not even slightly tempted. Not when it would be much more fun to splatter ourselves against those mountains. Here, Kal. I’ll show you what I see.

Mountains this size did not rush up on one. Instead, they loomed by steady degrees, cutting off half of the Island-World world with their vast stature. The greatest cliffs of all. No mere Island could begin to compare, for the Rim-Wall stood twenty-five times taller than his native Fra’anior. His brain knew the numbers; his response was numbness. Disbelief. Looking ahead, Tazithiel’s Dragon sight picked out for him rivers and vertical forests of emerald and lilac and orange hues, and the colourful specks of many birds playing amidst the dense foliage. The hunting would be good here.

Oh, are those dragonets? Green dragonets?
she cried.

Kal could not tell. But he smelled warm, rank vegetation. Richness. Fertility. Somehow, he had feared this place would be as grim and bitter as the forbidding peaks above. Aye, the Cloudlands lapped right up to the base of these cliffs, and neither he nor Tazithiel detected any discernible pattern or break in the spectacular fountains of crimson-and-gold foliage in this area, but there must be something. Some clue.

Yet they had to endure six more hours of stiff, excruciating gliding before finally approaching solid ground.

“No place to land,” panted Tazithiel.

“Just pick an overhanging tree,” Kal advised, unable to keep from sounding like a child drooling over a handful of sweets. “They’re big enough for Dragons. And I expect a landing that will sound good in the ballads, alright? No crashing and bashing.”

Tazithiel told him pithily where he could shove his benighted ballads.

After that, the Dragoness executed a pinpoint-perfect landing on the horizontal trunk of a tree broad enough to house a banquet for hundreds. The wallop of her tonnage shook the flame-hued foliage violently, but the roots did not tear loose from the cliff face.

Kal decided that the matter of Tazithiel fainting five seconds thereafter would be conveniently overlooked in the annals of history. He refused to spoil their inevitable glory. After all, they had conquered the unconquerable, and their boasting rights would be unequalled. He would brag up a storm, but he did need to educate Tazi in the finer points of the fabulist’s art. She really was much too modest for a doyenne of draconic delights.

Bah. Enough self-congratulations to make a man nauseous. He had work to do.

* * * *

Descending the recumbent Dragoness’ hind leg via a swift shimmy down the curvature of her rump, Kal hopped onto the tree-trunk. That was his mistake. The noble Dragon Rider sprawled on his knees, imitating a monkey drunk on fermented prekki fruit. This, the ballads would also gloss over.

When his knees returned to good behaviour, Kal walked along the massively gnarled trunk, which had foot-deep cracks in the bark perfectly suited to twisting an ankle. To reach solid ground he had to clamber over a clump of roots as fat as Aranya’s Dragon-thighs–he filed that line away for ribbing the slender Queen of Immadia at a later, unspecified date–and alighted on a narrow ledge. He knelt and applied his lips to a hitherto innocent patch of stone.

“Thank you.”

Right. Food, drink and a hundred years of sleep.

Humming happily to himself, Kal turned and bumped into the largest rodent he had ever laid eyes upon. “Gaah!” he shrieked. The stubby-tailed monster seemed rather less bothered by him than Kal was by a light brown, hyrax-like beast large enough to brush past his thigh. It ambled off a little ways to snack on a patch of flame-red bushes.

Lunch.

Kal palmed a dagger and stalked his harmless, tame prey.

A leap and a slash later, and the squeamish business was done. Kal was just about to climb off its back when a substantial weight slapped down atop his shoulders. He writhed and slashed with strength born of terror.
Hiss!
Kal, thankfully, did not freeze. With another scream that would have served a vapid maiden most proudly, he stabbed the reptile squarely in the top of the skull. Ha! He had destroyed a python that put the sizeable denizens of his home Island rather in the shade.

“Mighty hunter Kal,” he muttered drolly. “Apparently, the ballads will suffer a tad more elision concerning the screaming incident.” Squirming out from beneath the phenomenally heavy snake, Kal shooed a curious dragonet away. “Paws off, you flying rat.”

The jade-green dragonet chirped,
What manner of animal are you?

Its accent was dreadful and its tones snootier than snoot itself, but Kal caught the gist of the sentence.
What? You speak?

Naturally I have the power of speech, for I am the superior being. Give me food, lowlife.

With a snort of laughter, Kal carved off a sizeable chunk of python.
All yours, your majesty.

Snatching the offering off the palm of Kal’s hand, the dragonet zipped away into the undergrowth.

Oho. Was that the sound of water? He stumbled off to refresh himself, returned, and found three green dragonets squabbling over his dinner.
Oh no you don’t,
Kal shouted, flapping his arms. A few insults and some high-speed negotiation later–given as they all possessed razor-sharp talons and the will to use employ them to a Human’s detriment–Kal found himself three python steaks the lesser man.

He glared at Tazithiel.
You. Princess sulphur-burps. Wake up. You’re losing your lunch.

The Indigo Dragoness sighed and imitated a sleeping jewel.

Sawing off a five-foot length of python, Kal heaved it over his shoulder and staggered up to the tree trunk. He rolled the hunk of succulent snake meat over the top of the roots and kicked it down toward Tazithiel’s nose. “Lunchtime!”

The Dragoness did not so much as bat an eyelid.

Kal prodded her lip with his toe and declaimed in his courtliest tenor voice, “Arise, thou sonnet of the dawn.”

The sonnet purred in her sleep.

With a dint of further butchery, Kal sawed off yet another steak and, manfully heaving her lip open, stuffed it between her fangs. The instant blood touched her tongue … growl! Snap!

“Down, girl,” he yelped.

She snarled, “Give me more.”

“Seeing as you ask so nicely, I’ll just go chase those dragonets away.”

Following the direction of his finger with her gaze, Tazithiel’s brow drew down.
PESTS!
Bellowing in bloodthirsty outrage, the genteel Immadian Princess leaped over to the ledge and took absolute, tyrannical possession of the spoils. Throwing back her head, she bolted the entire rodent in one gulp, and started on the python just as greedily. Suddenly, mid-chomp, she paused and eyed Kal uncertainly.

He bowed. “I provide nothing but the finest dinner table for her royal majesty.”

“Kal … I know how this must look.” Slicing off a chunk of meat, she speared it on the point of her talon and grilled it carefully with her flame. “Peace offering?”

“Honestly? I’d rather have fire-and-brimstone Tazithiel.”

“Shouldn’t take long with some meat inside my abused insides. Kal, we did it!”

“Aye, we did.” Her gleeful jig brought a tired half-smile to his lips. “Can you blow on this? Too hot. One hundred and twenty-six hours aloft, my beauty. Can’t say I had much to do with the flying. You were awesome.”

“Only, when I fell, you bore me up on wings of shadow.”

Bah. Emotional fiddle-faddle. Kal desperately wanted to cry. Instead, before the dragonets returned, Dragon and Rider fell into the dreamless slumber of those who were in equal measure speechlessly grateful, and as worn-out as old shoe-leather.

* * * *

Situated at the base of the Rim-Wall Mountains, the cliffs received a whisker more than a half-day’s suns-light, making the afternoon a twilight time, and nightfall far earlier than Kal had ever experienced. They woke around dinner time to bathe, drink and consume another of the tame rodents which literally wandered over Tazithiel’s paw. The Dragoness was so amazed she almost allowed the creature to escape, but her stomach’s paroxysms won the day.

Dancing dragonets, not ten minutes passed and she was off to hunt again!

Six days remained until the solstice. For five of those days, Tazithiel and Kal scoured the cliffs for every hour given under the moons or the twin suns, north and south, high and low, and found enormous quantities of nothing. Well, they found sprawling empires of unfamiliar but spectacular foliage, including a range of purples that would have had the Immadian royal house dancing in rapturous approval, but the search proved utterly, frustratingly, fruitless. Truth be told, they were not certain what they sought, only that should there be a westward passage, an ‘opening of the suns’, it should be obvious and Dragon-sized, if not Ancient Dragon- immense. There were more dragonets than the entire known population of the Island-World and plenty of prey which had clearly never known the fang or arrow of a hunter, and innumerable species of unfamiliar birds, rodents and snakes, but no help and no clues.

Tazithiel ate like a starving rajal, packing on the muscle mass she had burned during their marathon flight. Kal imagined he could see her shoulders bulging and flanks filling out before his eyes.

The evening before the solstice, Kal plopped himself down beside a small fire he had built mostly for boredom’s sake, and sulked over the scroll of
Ernulla-kul-Exarkin
. Many hands. Why not many paws? Why not a leagues-long arrow pointing at the spot, marked with fluorescent Dragonship paint, screaming, ‘Look here, o intrepid explorer’?

A Human finger curled around the scroll. “I’m bored, Kal.”

If he were honest, which was as likely as the suns moving backward in the sky, Kal would have admitted he was in a mood as sour as a sackweight of haribol fruit dipped in vinegar. “Hmm?” He read further.

“Distract me?”

He made a noncommittal noise.

Tazithiel moved around to blow in his ear. Her hair caressed his arms. “I’m very distractible right now, Kal. I’m frantic for your kisses. And I’m wearing only the thinnest of night air.”

Great Islands, his body knew to be distracted even if his mind was floating somewhere in orbit with the five moons. If he could just tease the meaning out of this stupid, meaningless prophetic drivel! Find a key, a clue, a penetrable point …

A pouty lip brushed his cheek. “Fine. I’ll show you the power of
no
hands, you cold, slithering reptile!”

That was his last rational thought for a long while, because the Indigo Shapeshifter did indeed proceed to seduce him with no hands, which she kept folded across her chest, resorting instead to the impassioned caresses of many strands of hair. Suddenly, amidst a great deal of random sparking, an idea of subtle genius flashed into his feverish brain.

Kal cried, “That’s it!”

“This?”

Nefarious enchantress. He forgot all about ‘it’ until the night was old.

Human-Tazi slept upon his arm, her body curved against his as she had once lain lithe upon her Dragon hoard. He regarded his beloved fireflower Dragoness tenderly, tracing the White moonlight’s ethereal kisses upon her long, shuttered eyelashes, which delicately overlaid patterns he had never quite noticed beneath her skin, a delicate tracery of–star trails? Runic writing? Surely not. Kal wanted to shift closer to examine this phenomenon, but felt chary about waking her. After her unstinting efforts, the Shapeshifter more than deserved her rest. He, on the other hand, had discovered one of her hidden secrets by the light of the White moon, which would wax to its miniscule but star-like maximum tomorrow evening, on the night of the solstice.

Kal’s heart leaped into his throat and began a wild war-dance.

Reaching out with his free hand, he snagged the scroll and held it up to the moonlight. Thank the Islands he had surreptitiously substituted the original for the copy before setting out. On the back he found nothing. Trying to see through it, he saw nothing. But on the front in the margin, Kal found a brief phrase inked in the faintest possible script, which he eventually made out to read:

Speak to the White moon,

Of the seventh rune.

The seventh rune? Dragons regarded seven as a mystical number. Something about the seventh rune … he quickly scanned the text. Pick out the seventh rune. No, perhaps the rune commencing each seventh line. Backwards? Nothing made sense. Being a thief, he had a certain facility with encoded messages and inks which only appeared under the right type of light or chemical treatment–those techniques were as old as the Islands in a world where messages, especially those sent by message hawk, necessarily passed through many hands.