Shadow Dragon (4 page)

“Dad, there’s a Dragon in the Western Isles. I’m charged to hunt it.”

Open-mouthed in amazement, Beran scratched his beard. “By the mountains of Immadia, are there Dragons dropping from the skies these days?”

“Yes, you can catch them like raindrops.”

King Beran smiled at his tall daughter with such a fierce pride it fairly took her breath away. That was what her mother, Izariela, must have loved in him. She saw it so clearly. “So, Sparky, let’s work the counter-strategy. How will Thoralian respond? When, and where?”

* * * *

Seventeen Dragonships plus one Azure Dragon and her Rider set out for the mineral-rich Island of Gemalka that same evening. A further eight vessels were well advanced in repair. Beran ordered a second wave to depart as soon as possible in support of Commander Darron. The King would command just six of the hundred and fifty-foot Dragonships, carrying full crews of fifty warriors apiece.

Zuziana shed a few tears before her departure. “See you in a month, Aranya. Be safe.”

“Take care of that maniac monk, Remoy.” Aranya hugged her best friend as though she could somehow transfer her strength to Zip. “Work on your lightning powers. Fly strong and true.”

Zip did not say what Aranya knew–that she knew nothing about fighting other Dragons, should it come to that. Aranya’s Dragon hearts pounded in her chest. They were only juvenile Dragons. What if she or Zip ran into a Garthion-sized Red Dragon, two and a half times her size? The Sylakian forces still outnumbered them greatly. Who knew how many of Garthion’s siblings or relatives might be Shapeshifters, too? Would an Amethyst Dragon make the difference, scaring the Sylakian outposts into surrender? Beran had called her ‘the hand of justice in the Islands’, making Aranya squirm. Who was she to judge and avenge? According to the scrolls they had read back in Remoy, that was what the Dragon Riders used to do–judge disputes between the Islands. Keep the peace. Fight evil … but not all Dragons or their Dragon Riders had been good. Many had done exactly the opposite, or had simply not cared for that kind of work and sacrifice.

Therein lay another mystery. Why had all the Dragons vanished? Where to? One hundred and fifty years before, approximately, the Dragons had simply evaporated like a winter’s mist from the Island-World. The few survivors had dwindled, hunted and killed by men, or died of old age. Perhaps the Fra’anior Cluster hid the knowledge she sought. Or she could ask Nak and Oyda. Oyda was one hundred and seventy-six years old. Their long lives had overlapped with those events; surely they would remember some momentous war between Dragons, or a mass migration, or … what? She had no idea.

The following morning, having packed and made preparations all night, King Beran and his forces departed Immadia Island for the far Western Isles, starting with the Sylakian outpost of Yar’ola Island, six days flying by Dragonship. Beran ordered his Dragonship Steersmen to push hard. Hourly shifts of warriors worked the turbines manually, using the contraption in the common area fondly called the ‘back-breaker’, while they saved on meriatite.

“Otherwise we’ll hitch Aranya to a rope and she can tow us,” Yolathion teased.

Aranya took off so fast that the Jeradian’s eyes watered. Ha. She was not a pony or a water buffalo, she was a Dragon!

But she had to giggle at the sight of a hundred and sixty white ice-dragonets hanging off the gantries of one of the Dragonships, chuckling and chirping with their mouths hanging open in the breeze, bound as she had promised for Ha’athior Island in the Fra’anior cluster, and a reunion with their kin there. The dragonets had agreed to fight if called upon.

How strange it would be to travel and fight alongside her father. As she rose into the still morning air, Aranya struggled to make sense of the mass of conflicting feelings swirling in her Dragon hearts. She loved being with Yolathion. She missed Zip and Ri’arion already. She worried about her friends. Human-Aranya felt anxious about the battles to come, but Dragon-Aranya’s chest swelled and adrenalin pumped into her veins as she blazed across the sky in glorious Dragon flight. The difference between her two minds made her feel dislocated. She wished Zuziana were on her back, chattering away and distracting her, rather than the serious-minded man gazing about in awe as they left Immadia Island far behind.

Why should she be so ungrateful?

Once again, she was winging away across the Cloudlands. Only this time, it was not in chains, but by the power of Dragon wings. Aranya stretched her flight muscles, accelerating to catch up with her father’s Dragonship. Yolathion needed to practise his airborne landings. And why, by the five moons, was she feeling so chary about Yolathion seeing her nude, as he inevitably would when she transformed?

Aranya snapped her fangs at a passing insect. There. That described exactly how she felt.

A
nts feasting on
the hole in his skull resolved into a vague itch Ardan needed to scratch. His hands jerked, but only occasioned a jingle of chains. His eyes snapped open.

He was alive, for the second time since … whenever. His head pounded as though a blacksmith had set up a blast-furnace between his temples, working the bellows until the heart roared white-hot. He should be grateful, but instead, all Ardan could do was voice a long, dull groan as his body began to catalogue its aches and pains. His skull won a fierce competition by virtue of feeling as though he still had a scimitar stuck midway between his ears.

Ardan instinctively checked his surroundings. A ceiling hung with herbs and plants and all manner of healing paraphernalia met his roving gaze. A large tallow candle burned on a rude table nearby, lighting his small alcove and not much else inside the hut.

Windrocs were not squabbling over his rotting entrails? Ridiculous. Utterly beyond the Island.

He pictured his encounter with the deadly-as-poison Warlord, smiling at the memory of their kiss. That thought would have to warm him through a great deal of slave labour to come–the chains made that much clear. For a warrior, chains represented the ultimate humiliation. Only slaves were chained in the Western Isles. Whatever fey spirit had possessed him that day, it had preserved his life. He only hoped it would not be to meet a fate worse than death.

Kylara’s blade had shattered on his head.

Ardan recalled the strange sound he had heard just before collapsing; a shattering blow to the crown of his skull, a shard of metal spinning past his eyes. Right. That settled it. This was a dream. Nobody lived through such a blow to the skull, especially not one from the victorious Warlord.

So … what was he doing chained to a bed?

Ardan’s head jerked as the door banged open. Ouch. Rotten idea.

“Time ya rise with the birds,” rapped a voice. He scowled. If he wasn’t mistaken, it belonged to the warrior who had almost decapitated him from behind, on Kylara’s order. “We’re moving out.”

He waggled an eyebrow at her. “And you are?”

“Try ya fancy words on me, boy, and I won’t hang about to cross swords with ya,” she growled. “I’m Rocia, named after the windroc. Ya remember that. Nobody bests Rocia, least of all a wretched slave from Naphtha. Lucky the Chief wants ya alive. Says death’s too good for ya.”

Rocia spared him no kindness as she manacled Ardan’s hands behind his back and hauled him out of the bed. He stumbled against the low table. “Islands’ sakes!”

Lumbering like a dazed ralti sheep, Ardan followed Rocia out of the hut. He surveyed his new surroundings, but the pre-dawn gloom did not help him draw any conclusions. Kylara’s command was mounted on the small, tough ponies beloved by the Islanders. Rocia tossed a noose around his neck and ordered him to march.

Perhaps they had forgotten he was wounded?

No, they wanted to break his spirit. Knowing this and experiencing it were two vastly different Islands. Ardan had three days of dawn-to-dusk forced marching to appreciate this, trudging along on torn and bloodied feet. Every step jolted his wounded leg. His head pounded so severely that he fainted five times during that first afternoon. They dumped him on a pony’s back for the balance of the day and gave him six lashes for his trouble. Kylara did not speak to him once. He decided that being alive had its drawbacks. There were burning skies and pain. Nothing else.

But he healed quickly. During the fourth day’s march, as they entered a region of torn-up ravines choked with dense vegetation, Ardan’s alertness returned, as did his thirst for vengeance. Nothing else could satisfy a warrior’s honour.

He gazed about, hard-eyed. This was leopard country, or he missed his mark–the cats for which Kylara’s forces were named, night hunters of legendary skill. There. Sallow, slit eyes peering at him from a branch, quickly vanishing into the undergrowth.

Kylara’s force had just crested a small rise, preparatory to diving into another thicket which these warriors all navigated effortlessly, when his keen eyes spotted a small fleet of Sylakian Dragonships skulking past a peninsula to the south. He liked the Sylakians less than these Yangan warriors, even if they intended to have him digging latrines for the rest of his days.

Raising his voice, he called, “Dragonships!”

That was a way of dropping the proverbial windroc among the ralti sheep, as the Islands saying went. Ralti sheep stood six to eight feet tall at the shoulder. But windrocs could boast wingspans of up to twenty feet. With their hooked beaks and vicious talons, and tempers even shorter than Kylara’s, they were awe-inspiring predators. Ardan remembered once seeing three windrocs taking on a wounded rajal. He remembered? Perhaps his memory was returning.

Kylara galloped back along the line to where he stood, eating the column’s dust toward the rear. “Slave,” she glowered. “Had to be you trying a stupid joke. No-one in my command calls ‘Dragonship’ without cause. A dozen lashes, Rocia.”

“They’re coming along the cliff from the south,” he replied evenly. “I count five Dragonships. I’d point them out for you, my lady, if I had the use of–”

He gasped as Rocia punched him abruptly in the gut. “Not ‘my lady’, slave. Not ‘less ya made the ten promises of troth.” Silently, he added her to his ‘revenge later’ list. Ardan champed his jaw, saying nothing.

“Lost your tongue, boy?” Kylara ridiculed him.

He narrowed his eyes against the suns’ glare to follow those tiny dots–tiny only because of the great distance. The dirigible balloons were one hundred and fifty feet in length, sleek and ominous, their multiple turbines bulging like clusters of poisonous tarak-gourds sprouting from a branch. Each vessel carried a cargo of up to fifty Sylakian Hammers, the dreaded crimson-robed warriors of Sylakia–suddenly, an image froze in his mind. He saw a boy-child pierced through the torso by a burning six-foot crossbow quarrel, a Sylakian warrior laughing as he kicked the child aside. Dragonships flying overhead … cold sweat beaded his brow. He could not breathe. He had to …

“Ardan!” With a shudder, he flipped back from that cold place to the noon heat. A flicker in the Warlord’s eyes told him she had missed not a beat of his response. She said, “Speak, or be whipped.”

“Run your eyes along the cliff-top across the inlet, Chief,” he said, bleakly. “A league beyond that there’s a stand of flara-fruit trees, you can tell by the silvery leaves. Now, move to the cliff edge where you see a clump of boulders shaped like an upraised fist. Below that … I make it five hundred feet below, just off the cliff, you will see five Dragonships.”

Everyone squinted, shading their eyes. “Burn him in a Cloudlands volcano,” grunted Rocia, “I do see something. Dots, aye. Ya see Dragonships, slave?”

“Headed for that village,” he added, pointing with his chin.

Rocia swore coarsely; Kylara gave him a searching look. “You’ve a windroc’s eyes.”

Ardan said, “I see what I see.”

Every eye turned to the village. They knew the Sylakian Dragonships had set a course along the cliff calculated to conceal their approach until the last moment. There was no way, unless Kylara’s Leopards could fly like windrocs over the inlet, which sliced deeply across their path ahead if they continued southward, that they could reach the village in time.

But the far side of the inlet was a towering cliff, sheer and unrelieved, daubed with white guano from the numerous windrocs roosting there. And the chasm before it, impassable to any beast lacking wings.

Rocia spat, “Cowards’ tactics!”

“We have to try,” said Kylara.

* * * *

Smoke belched into the evening air.

Kylara and her command rode hollow-eyed into the village. Every hut was gutted. Bodies lay strewn where they had fallen–young and old, warriors and invalids alike. Black flies already buzzed about in their thousands, so sated they barely bothered to rise at the warriors’ approach. The Sylakians had even torched the great basket-weave granary, ensuring that anyone who did survive would find no food. Every pony and ralti sheep had been put to the sword. Ardan wondered if a single Sylakian had died in this uneven battle, their forces striking from the air with arrows, crossbow quarrels and burning oil. Five Dragonships against one village. These people had been trapped and slaughtered like animals.

Once more, a cold, soul-lost feeling assaulted him. Dark tongues of fire lapped across Ardan’s eyes, a second scene imposed upon his vision. He saw Islanders screaming and a hut ablaze and arrows plopping into flesh like frogs leaping into a pond, him shouting as he sprinted through an endless place, slamming his blade into red-robed Sylakian Hammers, the dull roar of battle battering his ears, the piteous cries of the wounded and the scorched, the burning and killing … he vomited.

Rocia threw him a disgusted look. “Oh, roaring rajals, would ya look at this weakling?”

Whatever was the matter with him? Ardan was a warrior. If he had not known from the fight against Kylara, he knew it now. He could not even wipe his mouth.

Ardan spat, “This head wound, Rocia. I need rest.”

“Well, you’re not getting it,” said Kylara. “Move out. We march through the night. They’re headed for the next village. We’ll set a trap; give those Sylakians a taste of their own fire.”

“How do you plan to fight Dragonships?” he blurted out.

“Shut your trap and march, slave,” said Kylara.

“Watch and learn,” said Rocia.

Kylara’s Leopards, who numbered ninety-three fighting-fit women, marched until the early hours to reach the next village. Either the Sylakian Dragonships had vanished, or they were hiding in a ravine somewhere. Ardan sensed the latter. They had tracked down just one survivor from the previous village–a girl of thirteen summers. She had agreed to join the Leopards and would be sent to their secret base for training. Kylara looked after her with an expression on her proud face that he could not place. Had this been her story, once, he wondered?

The Sylakians were softening up the far Western Isles. Ardan wondered if they would bother to invade. Perhaps this was just population subjugation, or entertainment for the troops. The Isles had gold mines, which might interest the Sylakians. But they had little meriatite, the expensive rock which was burned inside the meriatite furnace engines to produce the hydrogen which both floated and propelled their Dragonships.

Compounding his humiliation, Kylara had him chained to a tree outside the village while her troops evacuated the villagers. He watched Kylara gently boosting an elderly woman onto a pony, before taking three mischievous children in hand and leading the small procession out of the village. So, the Warlord was not half as heartless as she pretended.

Ardan sat with his back against the prekki tree and considered how exactly Kylara had not succeeded in halving his stupid skull. Right now, windrocs and vultures should have finished picking his bones clean, beneath the cliff-edge tree. Something was wrong. Only a fool would think otherwise, for hers had been a killing stroke.

To his surprise, his eyelids drooped shut. Ardan dreamed.

* * * *

Slit eyes glowered at him from a pit of darkness. They spit titian flames at him, bathing his body in flame. He ran. And though he lifted his knees and sprinted until the wind whipped past his ears, there was no escaping the flames, which pursued him with the resolve of an animate, rational being. But he did not burn up. The everlasting combustion played across his ebony skin, cracking it in crazy patterns like clay baked beneath the dry season suns. Ardan opened his mouth and breathed in the flames. The sizzling of fire filled his ears.

At some dim, subconscious level, Ardan realised that the sound was real.

He leaped to his feet, ready to fight. The chain binding him to the gnarled prekki-fruit tree jerked him up short.

Panting, he stared down at the village from his vantage-point on a small, mossy hillock crowned by the tree. Five Dragonships surrounded the cluster of two or three dozen wood-frame huts which comprised the village. The sound he had heard was burning oil being dumped on the first few rooftops down at the lower end, furthest from his position, multiple bonfires roaring into life as the bundled rushes ignited like torches. He saw the red-plumed helmets of Sylakian ground troops storming between the huts, flinging burning brands this way and that. The heads of their war hammers gleamed in the early suns-shine. They kicked down doors and bellowed their war-cries. But this time, there were no villagers left for them to slay.

Kylara whirled out of a doorway, swinging her scimitar in a flat, vicious arc. Blood sprayed into the air as a man’s body and head parted ways. Bizarrely, his legs and torso kept running for several steps before the inevitable collapse.

Ardan’s eyes jumped. Three Leopards, one with a short metal tube on her back, crouched between the huts. As he watched, the warrior with the tube–Rocia–held up a piece of thick elastic cord. She locked her arms at full stretch, about two feet apart. The warriors behind her loaded a crossbow quarrel into the tube, and then stretched the cord until they formed a Human catapult. They aimed carefully, adjusting Rocia’s position. A spark-stone clipped sparks onto the quarrel, which must have been primed beforehand, because it caught fire instantly. The quarrel shot upward.