Samurai (19 page)

O
UTSIDE THE PALACE, THE
fire began to die out, its gold and silver mysteries instantly becoming nothing more than rumor and legend.

There had been some damage, but the real problem was the rampant fear that followed. Authorities arriving on the scene couldn’t understand how flames could take on the colors of a metal junkyard; they couldn’t see how the blaze had started nor how it had gone out. In truth, the Japanese Serpent had brought an end to his own fire—no doubt because of the Tiger Dragon.

Simon thought he had it figured out: the two were meeting in a cease-fire. If the Japanese Dragon burned down Issindra’s den, it would certainly enrage her. It was risky enough for the Japanese Creature to
be prowling and spying around the Indian palace. You couldn’t know what she would do in response…

With just about everybody chattering at once, Alaythia kept the Samurai at bay as they stared in anger and amazement at the Chinese Black Dragon. Aldric took Alaythia’s hands, pulling her away from the Dragon, not saying a word. As Simon watched them, he felt a surge of joy that she was all right, but he was soon distracted by the Samurai, who were clamoring to know what was happening. Alaythia soon quieted them, but it took some time for events and histories to be sorted out.

A few black buzzards drawn to the Black Dragon skittered and flapped about the storage room as Alaythia began to speak. It was much as Simon had thought. Back in New England, she had indeed gotten a powerful idea from her encounter with that Dragon skull: it was possible to contact a Dragon’s spirit.

While Aldric and Simon slept, she dug up an obscure Celtic passage in the Book of Saint George that she’d never understood before, a spell for speaking to a Dragon. Using it, she began calling to the Black Dragon in her mind, on a plane of communication not understood by ordinary men. And the Black Dragon had answered.

“How did you know you could trust him?” Simon asked her.

“I didn’t,” she admitted. “But in that moment, we had the same mind—thoughts and feelings passed between us, and that made me feel somehow…safer. I was desperate. I knew the Serpents could sense my emotions and track me. I had to trust someone.”

She had agreed to meet him in the Atlantic Ocean, a neutral place away from the territories of other Serpents. But the Ice Serpent
had
tracked him, and attacked them at sea. They escaped on her rented boat after the Black Dragon’s vessel was destroyed in the fight, leaving Simon and Aldric to pick up the trail.

Alaythia and the Black Dragon had found refuge on an island near India. The Dragon told her he had been following the growing tension between the Tiger Dragon and the Japanese Dragon, and he knew a major confrontation was looming.

Simon felt himself grow cold at the prospect of telling Alaythia the Japanese Dragon had tremendous new power, that he probably planned to unfurl his fire all over Asia, and perhaps create offspring with the same capability. Luckily, Simon was saved from this anxiety; Aldric told her instead, and as she stood there, shaken, he related their encounter with the Ice Dragon.

She already knew the Ice Serpent was involved from their encounter in the Atlantic Ocean. She was not sure of his plan, only that he and the Black
Dragon had grown to despise each other.

Simon began to feel they were all being manipulated by the icy Creature, one way or another. But the Hunters had to admit, they didn’t know how the Ice Dragon fell into the mix with the other two Serpents. Unfortunately, Alaythia knew little more than they did. Oddly, as Alaythia recounted her story there in the palace, no one—not a Serpent nor one of its guardians—attacked the Dragonhunters.

“They do not know we are here,” said the Black Dragon. “This is the lair of the Tiger Dragon, Issindra. She believes all that happens here is the result of her own magic. She does not suspect I am living within her very palace walls.”

They were directly above a palace death chamber, one of the feeding rooms for the Tiger Dragon. Simon could see through knots in the wood below him, a bare floor covered in human bones, and coils of snakeskin. He suppressed a shiver.

“She isn’t here,” Simon observed.

“She is searching for the Japanese Serpent in the streets now,” said the Black Dragon. “We’re safe. She’ll not find me when she returns.”

Taro eyed the Black Dragon suspiciously. “Maybe she doesn’t find you because she doesn’t want to. Maybe you and she have made a bargain.”

“For what?” Alaythia asked. “If he meant to kill
us, it’d be easy enough with one blast of fire right now.”

“I want no more of warfare,” said the Black Dragon wearily. “There shall be no more battles for me. I am old, I have no children, and the only legacy I leave behind will be this help I bring to you. I have thought long and hard on this. There will be a place in the history books for me, perhaps, in
your
stories. Otherwise, as you say, I am ashes and dust.”

Akira would have none of it. “You turn your back on your own kind?”

“That is the way of my kind. Always in struggle and hatred. But, it seems, even a Dragon can get old enough to desire peace and quiet.”

“Peace and quiet is not what awaits us,” Akira snarled.

“No. The Japanese Dragon’s newfound power will plague us all. He stole that secret from my very own den. I am too weak to use the scroll’s firespell, but I consider it my fault that it still exists. I should have destroyed it. I will do what I can for you now. That is all I can do.”

Taro tapped nervously at his scabbard. “The Tiger Dragon cannot sense you? Cannot find you here in her own domain?” he asked the Black Dragon.

“Not even at this moment,” said Alaythia. “It’s this magic that I’m seeking from him. The ability to cloak
a presence. I’ve been learning it slowly.”

Alaythia told them the Black Dragon had allowed the tiger feeding to go on because he knew Simon and the others could fend for themselves and would be drawn to him. The servants of the Tiger Dragon put on this kind of spectacle regularly, and the Black Dragon had always saved the victims by putting the tigers to sleep. Simon could tell the Samurai did not seem willing to believe any of this yet.

“You trust this Thing?” said Taro sharply.

“I trust
her
,” said Aldric, nodding at Alaythia.

Simon looked at the Dragon. “He helped us before. He’s not like the others.”

“How good is this hiding-magic?
We
seemed to find him without trouble,” said Akira unhappily, staring at the Chinese Creature.

“I had hopes you would.” The Black Dragon returned their gazes meekly, his tiny canary wriggling at his shoulder. “If I tried anything else to draw your attentions, that might have been overheard, detected. It was the best I could do.”

“I didn’t want you to come,” Alaythia admitted to Aldric. “Dragons in a turf war is too dangerous for anyone. I wanted to handle this myself. But you kept poking your nose around.”

“Your fear for me is what’s dangerous,” Aldric said, “to yourself and to all of us.”

Alaythia frowned at him. “Guess what. I get to decide what’s dangerous for me. I even get to decide if I want to put
you
in danger or not.”

“Can you tell if she’s trustworthy?” Taro asked Sachiko. She looked Alaythia in the eye, measuring her truthfulness, and Simon sensed the raw power in the air, two Magicians together for the first time in decades. The hair on his arms tingled.

“I can’t be sure,” Sachiko said. “She’s powerful. If she wanted to, she could’ve struck us hard the moment we entered.”

The Samurai were on edge, but for the moment they were appeased. They kept their weapons at the ready, watchful of the Black Dragon. But in the end, Simon felt they realized everyone had the same goal: to eliminate these two powerful Serpents before they joined together and created an army from their offspring.

“The riddle and the problem,” said the Black Dragon, “is how to strike at the Serpents now.”

“What do we know?” asked Aldric.

He and the others huddled around the small Black Dragon in the dark room. The Japanese hunters never took their eyes off him. Sidelined, the boys hung back together and listened without drawing attention to themselves. According to Alaythia and the Black Dragon, who had eavesdropped on the palace for
some time, the Tiger Dragon was now planning to meet with the Japanese Serpent to discuss how territories all over the world might be carved up. But Serpents never trust each other, and the situation could easily erupt into conflict.

“The Tiger Dragon may have the upper hand,” Alaythia pointed out. “Now is the time for her to produce offspring; she’s been ready for this her whole life.”

“Her advantage is the sleep chamber,” the Black Dragon explained. “At the top of this palace. It is as old as India itself. The jungle still lives within its walls, growing unnaturally. The room is covered in vines and overgrown trees, alive since the time when Issindra’s grandmothers ruled the continent. The chamber was built to kill rivals. Exactly how it works is her great secret. I have read in rare journals of the Old Age that the room was built of pillars of carved-stone snakes, and that any outside Dragon who enters becomes hypnotized by the sounds the stone Serpents make, and can never leave again.”

“There are stories of this chamber in our writings,” said Taro.

Aldric raised an eyebrow. Simon knew there was no such information in the Books of Saint George. “How is it,” Taro went on, “the Japanese Serpent doesn’t know of this?”

“He is arrogant,” Sachiko conjectured. “He believes he can overcome her power.”

The Black Dragon nodded at her. “Your attack seems to have delayed their meeting,” he said, “which is all to the good. We were not prepared to take them on alone.”

“We’ve got a lot more to tell you. We’ve been gathering what information we could about her,” Alaythia said. She pulled from a mess of boxes a map of Bombay. Parts of it were circled. “Her businesses, her system of operations, her haunts.”

Simon wanted to see, but the Hunters crowded the boys out.

Aldric looked at Alaythia. “Would she go to one of these places?”

“Possibly. She might be monitoring them, making sure they were untouched by the Japanese Dragon, that he wasn’t trying something behind her back.”

“We should try to find a television, get some news reports,” offered Sachiko. “It’d be the fastest way to find her trail in the city. We can’t let them reach each other. Their children would be more than we could ever handle.”

“Too many Dragons in one place,” the Black Dragon murmured, “will send nature into a rotten fine chaos. We will find the two of them soon.”

Did they think I was stupid?
thought Issindra, the Tiger Dragon.
Did the Serpentslayers really believe they could take me on inside my own territory, right in Bombay? Did the Japanese Dragon really think he could lead them to me, and allow the humans to do his dirty work?

She knew they’d entered her city, but she was not aware the Dragonhunters remained in her home at that very instant, in a forgotten part of her Tiger Palace, hidden by the Black Dragon’s magic so that she could not even sense them.

Issindra, appearing as a flawlessly beautiful woman, was working her way through the dreary crowd, hoping to catch the scent of the Japanese Dragon and follow his movements.

That crippled, germ-obsessed Japanese Serpent had sent the Dragonhunters right to my lair
. She was no one’s fool.
You don’t get on the cover of
Vogue
by being nice to people. There is calculation involved. Strategy.

Her anger called to her; she wanted to blast a throatful of fire across the street in rage, but she could do nothing. With several Dragons in the city, one could never be sure how the flames might behave, what disaster they might bring. The living fire was a constant burden.

As it was, Bombay was being rocked by earthquakes.

Storm clouds were gathering fast, a strange heat
engulfed the city, and fat white worms had emerged from cracks in the pavement, carpeting the streets.

A summit between Dragons was not going to be a tidy affair.

She cursed the fact that somewhere in Bombay the Ice Dragon was adding to all this, as he jotted in his book, observing, pointlessly.

But there were stranger undercurrents than she had ever before known. The nails of her claws had begun growing at a shocking rate, lengthening, twisting together, warping her beauty. She gnawed at them to try to control the growth. Meanwhile, her skin was shedding right off her, leaving ugly raw patches. Her lungs needed more air. It was as if there was some unusually powerful force involved in bringing the Japanese Creature closer to her. What would this mean, if she were to have children with him? She refused to think about it.

This changes nothing,
she thought.
The Japanese Serpent and I are going to face each other in my own palace, and I am going to win him over to my way of thinking. His life will be forfeited. The Dragonslayers will take time to find us, and by then, they will be ensnared in my trap. I will burn them, one and all. And I will get what I want, down to the last detail.

I am not going to spend the rest of my life alone and childless.

While the Tiger Dragon hunted the streets for her Japanese counterpart, and the Dragonhunters considered their options, the Ice Dragon stroked his goatee and surveyed the city from the wide window of a grand old Indian hotel.

He licked at his little friends in his mouth, toying with the beetles in a quiet tussle at the edge of his jaw. He needed that extra bit of comfort. The decadent warmth of Bombay was doing him no good.

The pillar, and the hotel room around him, slowly dripped with white and black ice, fingers of crystal filled with grime and insects.

The heat in his veins was no match for that eternal frost upon him. Particles of ice crackled under his feet. His teeth ached from the cold. His age had brought a sickness he was finding it harder to fight, a winter that came inside his bones, and iced his very blood.