Shadow Dragon (43 page)

Great Islands, what a beast! Her uncle. Another of Thoralian’s captives.

Zuziana swung her gaze forward again, depriving Aranya of a vision in which the Green Dragon turned against the Sylakians. How to break through to those Shapeshifter Dragons, the Immadian wondered? Could they succeed in stealing them from Thoralian, whose mental power seemed to hold them in a kind of hypnosis? Use Ri’arion’s power? Lyriela!

“Yes,” said Zuziana, in tune with Aranya’s thoughts. “We need a diversion.”

“I’ll be the diversion.”

“Aren’t you too weak?”

“No. I’ve a storm up my sleeve. Get me above the fleet, Zip.”

This was the only way. Aranya felt unready, but she did not want Zip to know it. Much depended on King Beran’s airship forces not being trounced by the superior Dragonship-and-Dragon combination of the Sylakian dirigible fleet, or the ground assault would quickly come under attack from the air and be overwhelmed.

Could she scare Thoralian out of hiding?

Zuziana powered upward, rising so fast that her Rider’s stomach felt as though it had retreated into her shoes. “Make yourself useful meantime, petal. I’m not lugging you about for the joy of it.”

Aranya raised the Pygmy bow. “Liar.”

The Azure Dragon adjusted her flight path with a slight flexion of her wings, curving them around a withering hail of catapult-shot while giving Aranya a clear shot to the port side. Her eye narrowed. Now.

WHOMP!
An explosion rocked them.

The Dragons closed in relentlessly, dodging the fire of their own vessels. Together, Aranya and Zuziana flowed into a change of direction, flashing between the massed dirigible balloons, corkscrewing as they climbed, a seamless harmony of thought and action. Shots taken at the speed of Dragon reactions. Adjusting their flight path to avoid a metal net flung at their noses. Mocking the fat Dragons they passed, provoking one Red into firing a fatal fireball–he succeeded only in blowing up the vessel beneath his belly.

“Moron,” giggled Zip, using the blast for extra propulsion.

Where the lithe Azure Dragoness passed, the Dragonwing could not follow. Far larger and bulkier, the pursing Dragons became snarled between the close-packed Sylakian dirigibles, running into each other, even brawling on the wing as frustration set in. Thoralian’s commands streaming upward, confused, irritated and contradictory. Aranya recalled suddenly what her father had said about him. Thoralian was a one-dimensional thinker. It made stealing his Dragons all the more essential.

As Zuziana whizzed past the uppermost vessels of the Sylakian fleet, Aranya unsnapped her buckles and gathered her feet beneath her.

“Fly true, my friend.”

“Wait. Higher, while you gather your storm.”

Aranya reached out with her mind, picturing Fra’anior’s habitual abode within a tempest, the way his voice broke over her with primeval force, the awe-inspiring connection he enjoyed with the powers of wind and hail and lightning. Pain blossomed within her breast. She trembled. Great Islands, it was too much, the hunger for storm power consuming her mind, her body, demanding all of her magic …

Her friend cried, “Wait! Command it, petal.”

Aranya tasted ozone on her tongue mingled with the moisture of incipient rain. The wind buffeting her hair as though it sought to tear her braids out by their roots. She stood Dragonback, bending her knees in concert with Zip’s passage, the act of balancing seemingly effortless when two minds acted in concert. Together, Dragon and Rider speared up into the sky above the buzzing hive of Sylakian Dragonships, stacked miles high above Yorbik Island. Zip brought them over the centre of the Sylakian formation.

The Princess of Immadia raised her arms. Crying a commanding word in Dragonish,
“We are one!”
she hurled her body into space.

The storm rushed to embrace her. Clouds raced from the horizons at inconceivable speeds, mustering, billowing, swelling with all the potential of their electrical charge and weight of hail. A titanic pressure squeezed her ears. Her rotating body drew the winds together into a screaming core. Clouds as black as night funnelled in her wake as Aranya’s fall gathered speed, intent on one purpose–to roust Thoralian out of his den, and destroy him.

She transformed.

Dark and vengeful, the no-more Amethyst Dragon plunged like a meteorite into the top of the Sylakian Dragonship fleet. Hatred made an open furnace of her mind.
Now taste this, Thoralian!
Aranya unleashed her revenge. A tornado of flame ripped free from the vortex of her magic, slewing into the Dragonships, puncturing them, hurling Dragons off their perches and exploding dozens of Sylakian airships in a series of blinding flashes. Multiple branches of lightning struck from her body. The storm winds flung ashes and debris in every direction, an awesome trail of destruction left in her wake.

Aranya speared down, and down, driven on by the song of madness in her mind and the uncontrolled discharge of magic.

Her magic stuttered. Failed. Perhaps no mortal flesh could have contained such a storm. Aranya’s assault slowed. She glanced off a Dragonship’s cabin, tangling her wing in the metal cable of a grappling hook, swerving aside as blackness crowded around her already clouded vision. Her wings refused to answer her commands.

Dimly, somewhere, Aranya was aware of Dragons chasing her, of a speck of blue speeding over to King Beran’s flagship, of the Shadow Dragon’s bellow near the ground … and she crash-landed atop a Dragonship, smashing its platform with her tail. At least three metal-cable nets whipped about her, then two more, all furnished with hooks that bit into her wing membranes and nostrils and paws, just as Yolathion had once captured her.

For a moment she simply lay quiescent, trying to understand what had happened.

Karathion the Red alighted, delivering her left flank a crushing blow of his forepaw. He seized the netting and shook her fiercely.
Daughter of the Star Dragon. Slayer of my kin. We meet at last.

Bring her to me.
Thoralian, gleeful, rose ponderously into the brilliant dawn.

Instinctively, Aranya snarled,
How bravely the snake slithers out of his hole.

Her mind reeled. Where was Fra’anior when she needed him? Never present. But the visions came upon her, more vividly than ever before.

Izariela! Radiant, white-hot with anger.
Aranya! What have you become?

Mother?

Karathion ordered his kin to cut the hawsers free, but to leave her tangled in the nets. Dragons crowded around, staring, mocking, laughing fierily at her plight. Aranya smelled smoke, cinnamon and another scent, an evocative, compelling fragrance that she realised must be her mother–imagined or real, she did not know. The Star Dragon appeared to drift right through Karathion’s bulky torso. The sadness in her gaze, unbearable.

I was never there for you, my treasure. This is my fault.

I have storm powers, Mother. I must use them to win the day–surely?

And should this vengeance cost your soul, Aranyi?

Aranya gasped.
What?

They must think her mad, raving, mumbling incoherently as the net jerked this way and that.

We Star Dragons refuse the paths of evil. We seek the light, for darkness can never quell the light. I should have passed on our secret knowledge and lore, my daughter, but the lineage is broken unless you can restore it. I can do no more, for each appearing steals more from what remains. Lest I fade … seek the truth …

Mother? Mother!

The vision faded.

Had she done wrong, assuming the form of a dark, vengeful Dragon? What did she mean, to seek the truth? The truth was that Sylakia needed to be defeated, or more Islands and peoples would go the way of Rolodia and Naphtha Cluster. Izariela’s rebuke had to have a deeper meaning than the literal.

Stop bleating for your mother. It’s pathetic,
said Karathion.
Gripping the net in his four paws, he launched off the Dragonship, shadowed on the port side by Va’assia and to starboard by Ja’arrion.

Ja’arrion? Will you hear me?

I hear you,
said Thoralian.
If she struggles, Ja’arrion, put out her eyes. She will not need them where we’re going.

As you command, Thoralian,
said the Green.

Aranya could just about make out the Azure Dragoness perched atop Beran’s Dragonship. Zip had to hurry, before these Dragons delivered her into Thoralian’s vile paw. Doubtless he had more poison for her, a collar, a place where he could break into her mind and steal her secrets at his leisure.

The Amethyst Dragon rocked in the air, cocooned in so many nets she could see only fragments of the Dragonwing surrounding her, as though she saw the world through a fractured mirror. A mirror–yes! She could be a mirror of Izariela, if nothing else.

Fra’anior had told her to seek the onyx. But Izariela’s way was to seek the light. Her mother’s Dragon form was light. Suddenly, her insight crystallised.

Tiny wavelets of magic rippled over her scales, into her neck, setting her hearts a-quiver. Aranya looked along the length of her muzzle. Her hide was still pockmarked, but it was as white as the driven snows of Immadia, with just a tracing of amethyst around the edges of each scale. Her fire was pure and new. And there was Dragonsong in her hearts, welling from a place she had never known existed, an echo of what her cousin Lyriela was capable of with her music.

Karathion lurched.
What the …

The Star power waxed rapidly, colouring Aranya’s world white, blinding her with a purity so intense, it burned like a star’s innermost fire.

Yeeeaaaah!
The Red Dragon howled, releasing the net, but it was too late. The star-fire had incinerated all four of his paws, only the bone remaining, crumbling and charred. Molten metal boiled off Aranya’s scales. She shook herself free of the nets as though they were ropes of wet weed.

* * * *

“Catch her, you idiots!” bawled Thoralian.

The Yellow-White Dragon was half a mile below, but his roar carried over the clash of Dragonships and ground troops. Aranya realised that the fleets had finally engaged, largely because the Sylakian dirigibles had been scattered far and wide by her storm attack. Powerful mental strikes rocked her, but her focus on an image of Izariela kept Thoralian at bay. The other Dragons did not dare to touch her after what she had done to Karathion.

Her white flame guttered. Exhausted of magic, Aranya knew she still had her willpower to draw upon. Pumping her flight muscles as hard as she could, the Amethyst Dragon took off with the speed of a frightened bat.

Thoralian had other problems demanding his attention. He directed some airships and Dragons to support his ground troops, while barking out orders for his far-flung forces to reassemble. The well-disciplined Sylakian troops drew together, holding their lines and supporting each other. His Dragon-toting Dragonships moved to the front line. And a new Dragonwing emerged from the depths of his pit, Dragons too fat to fly well. They fanned out to engage Kylara’s combined ground forces, which had seized control of more than a third of the shipyard.

Aranya searched the skies for danger, fearful of the dark patches on her vision, light-headed because of the burning in her inadequate lungs. Quarrels buzzed past her head, startling her. Two bolts skittered off her scales, while another passed through her right wing membrane with a sharp tugging sensation. She could not see enough. How could she fight this battle?

Petal, over here,
called Zuziana.
I’ve got Lyriela and Jia-Llonya. Now what?

She skidded into a turn, almost slewing into the Azure Dragon.
Sorry. Not seeing well. I … thanks, Zip.

At Zuziana’s mental touch, the scene leaped into focus. Her relatives rushed toward them, hot on Aranya’s tail, claws outstretched, fire flickering inside their nostrils. How many could be family? She had no idea.

Lyriela, any time now!

Those a-are my p-parents?

Lyriela!
Aranya stifled her snarl. She had every right to feel intimidated. Aranya hoped Zip had her shield up, because Lyriela’s father was on the cusp of making an acid attack. His stomach gurgled horribly. Va’assia, claws hooked, angled in for an attack on the Azure Dragoness. Seconds separated the groups of Dragons from their clash.

That was when Lyriela stood up in the saddle to wave to the Dragons.
Mom. Dad. It’s me, Lyriela.
With a horrified shriek, she slipped and fell. Jia-Llonya, one position behind her in the saddle, shouted too as she snagged the edge of Lyriela’s trousers, but the fabric tore out of her fingers.

Mom!
Lyriela bounced off Zuziana’s flank, wailing for help.

Aranya back-winged frantically, searching for Lyriela in the slipstream generated by Zip’s speed, but the mother Dragoness was faster by far. Shouldering past Aranya, she clasped her paws around Lyriela’s torso before the girl had a chance to fall more than a hundred feet.

Lyriela, baby, is it truly you? Ja’arrion, look, she’s perfect …
the Red Dragoness howled at the sky, the note in her voice so poignant, it made every one of Aranya’s scales vibrate.