Shadowed By Wings (20 page)

Lantern light turned the dragonmaster’s face into a skeleton’s skull, dark hollows where mouth and eyes should be.

“An apprentice damages a destrier’s forelegs by riding him too hard on the ground, I drive bamboo splinters under the apprentice’s nails. Understand? I pound ’em in deep and leave ’em to fester and abscess, and I don’t remove ’em from the apprentice till the destrier is healed. Remember that, rishi whelp.”

I shuddered and instinctively clutched my wounded hand to my chest.

He turned and walked toward a side door located in the circular wall surrounding the pool.

“This way.”

We descended down a short, dark passage. As the side door swung shut behind me, the dank smell of the exercise pool was immediately cut off and replaced by the smell of old wood and manure and the dusty scent of bedding chaff. The salty odor of dragon scale and the leathery reek of dragon hide, laced with the tang of venom, overlay everything.

Cobwebs clouded the low beams overhead. Vermin skittered in the dark. My breath sounded loud and quick. I heard the muted snort of a dragon.

The short passageway leveled, abruptly turned. A row of stalls, all empty save the last one, stood directly before me. In the last stall, an old destrier stood, her wings folded along either flank.

The dragonmaster stopped at the first empty stall. He set his lantern on the ground, turned to face me, and waited for me to stand before him. I did so stiffly.

He leaned into my face.

“Now. You will do something for me. You will do it without question or complaint, and you’ll do it the moment I ask it. Understand?”

I swallowed, knew full well what he was going to ask me to do. Knew, too, that I was eager to do it.

“Yes, Komikon,” I murmured, cheeks flaming, eyes downcast.

His face glowed with pleasure and he threw back his head and cackled. The veins in his neck stood out like rivers of tar.

“Disrobe.”

Heat began flaring in my groin. My skin pimpled with expectation. My nipples hardened.

I lifted my tunic over my head and dropped it to the floor. I stood naked before the dragonmaster, eyes closed.

“She’s old, this dragon,” he murmured. “Been long in my service, mine and mine alone. She’s practiced on many a reluctant apprentice that I’ve drugged and gagged and tormented into submitting to her tongue, apprentices who’re no longer alive to tell the tale. But you don’t need such persuasion, do you, Skykeeper’s Daughter? Because you’ve done this sort of thing before.”

His fingers closed on my chin. “Open your eyes,” he whispered, and I did so.

“Ah, yes. You can’t hide them from one who knows. I saw it the day we met at Mombe Taro: You’ve got dragon eyes.”

His own eyes glittered brightly, and his shoulders twitched. “You’re hungry for it, aren’t you?” he breathed. “You want the venom.”

“No,” I whispered, but he only grinned madly at the lie.

“You know what I expect from you, after you lie with the old destrier, hey?”

I refused to answer. His fingers tightened on my chin.

“You’ll tell me what you heard, Skykeeper’s Daughter. You’ll reveal the dragons’ mystery to me. Understand?” He leaned closer, closer, and I closed my eyes as his lips touched my ear.

“And with that secret, you’ll grant me the power to set the Djimbi free,” he hissed into my ear, and I shuddered as if he’d driven another splinter under my nail.

The Djimbi Sha. The Mottled Bellies. They are Malacar’s true natives, their lineage unsullied by Xxelteker or Archipelagic blood.

There are tales of the Djimbi Sha. Obscene tales, told behind the closed doors of mating closets during men’s parties, lewd stories whispered by children when adults aren’t within earshot. Tales of the sage-and-tan-skinned Djimbi and the undomesticated dragons of Malacar’s jungles.

Because of these tales, all races have felt at liberty throughout Malacar’s history to kidnap, enslave, and rape Djimbi women and children. Djimbi men have been slaughtered, or gelded and enslaved. With their profane chants and blasphemous beliefs, with their glottal language and uncivilized lifestyles in the jungle, with bestiality so interwoven within their culture, the Djimbi have been oppressed and reviled with a dedication that has been unflagging.

Of course, I knew the Komikon of Clutch Re had Djimbi blood in his veins.
All
knew of it, even those who had not attended the annual Mombe Taro parade and glimpsed the dragonmaster’s piebald pigmentation beneath the multitude of scars he wore like a tunic. Aside from the color of his skin, the Komikon’s infamous freakish behavior and his renowned skill with dragons all marked him as a Djimbi’s get.

Half a century before my birth, one such as he would never have been allowed to retain his testicles, let alone attain the status of dragonmaster. Instead, such a dragon-skilled Djimbi man would have been gelded in his youth and pressed into service as a stableman, his Archipelagic lord receiving the accolades due a dragonmaster in his stead.

Convention is a river that oft changes its course, hey-o.

Here stood the dragonmaster over me, the mottled pigmentation of his skin somehow highlighted by lantern light, and here lay I, obeying his will and offering my sex to a tethered female dragon. Yes. I was about to enact one of the very tales I’d snickered over as a child.

Perhaps it was fitting, that, for I was not free of Djimbi taint. My mother had been born to a full-blooded Djimbi woman who had been captured for slavery and raped in the process by an Archipelagic warrior. Mother had lived on Clutch Xxamer-Zu with her full-blooded Djimbi mother, had loved a half-blood Djimbi youth on that dragon estate, and had illegally borne his child. Unions between piebalds were strictly forbidden by Temple so as to dilute the Djimbi blood; my mother was therefore traded to Clutch Re as punishment for her act, traded along with her piebald babe, my sister, Waivia.

Or half-sister, if one insists on pedantry.

Although I’d been sired by a Clutch Re man with not a drop of Djimbi ancestry in his veins, I
did
have Djimbi blood in me from my mother, though oddly, the pigmentation of my skin showed it not.

It didn’t seem to matter. The Djimbi lust for dragons was strong within me.

“Lift your knees,” the dragonmaster growled. “Spread your thighs.”

I shivered on the cold ground and smelled the venom of the dragon as she strained against her creaking leather tethers to get at me.

“Spread your legs,” the dragonmaster repeated impatiently, and I readily obeyed. I parted my knees and let them fall to either side of me, my mouth dry with want.

I’d done this once before, in Convent Tieron.

But at Tieron, intoxicating Djimbi chants had strummed magic through me. The image of hands stroking nipples erect, of human mouths teasing belly and thigh, had shimmered like golden pollen in my mind’s eye. No such intoxicant existed for me now. In lieu of beguiling Djimbi chants singing passion through my heart, a greed to hear the dragon’s divine memories and experience venom’s fire governed my actions.

And that was more than enough to make me slippery with want.

The dragonmaster straightened with a grunt from where he’d been crouched between my legs. The grunt held no lechery in it. For him, this was not a sexual act. He had but one aim: to procure the dragons’ secrets. The impending act was but a means to that end.

That he expected me to understand the dragonish thoughts I received during the intimate exchange, and that he intended to use the secrets gained to empower the Djimbi, astounded me.

He moved toward the destrier and murmured something incomprehensible. She snorted and clawed the ground with her talons. Steel clicked as he unclasped her tethers.

She pounced at me in that sloped lunge peculiar to all dragons, and I gasped, half sat, and pushed myself away from her as far and fast as I could, but my shoulders butted against the passageway wall. The dragonmaster roared, but I couldn’t hear his words over the pounding of my heart and the breaths heaving from my chest and the snort of the old destrier as she shoved my clenched thighs apart, one tawny, slitted eye staring direct into mine.

The cleft tip of her tongue slid out and flicked over my sex, the venom-black forks of her tongue trembling like slim fronds in a wind.

“No,” I whispered.

The forked tip of her tongue dove within me.

A furious, muscled burn, hot, slick, and expansive. The venom’s warmth radiated throughout me, melted my muscles and anointed my skin, and the taste of licorice and limes bloomed in my mouth. My head inflated, turned diaphanous.

I dissolved into the hard ground beneath me.

And then I heard her. I heard her thoughts.

I heard the thoughts of her mother, of her greatmother, of the bulls that had sired them both. I heard snatches of the memories of all dragons in her lineage, was joined to that continuous, indubitable string of song-thought, was privy to the touching emotions and impenetrable sagacity of the divine beasts.

But I could not understand what they were saying.

Frustration spread throughout my body like rot through a spoiled plum.

“No!” I hissed, wanting to understand, to delve further into that compelling mystery, to comprehend the musical whispers weaving through my mind like strands of silk and spun gold.

But the destrier withdrew from me.

She stood above me a moment, head cocked to one side, her opalescent dewlaps glittering with an orange sheen in the lantern light. The eye that locked upon me—so melancholy, so wise—glowed bloodred and chestnut. She was beautiful and unattainable. She was, truly, divine.

With a snort, she back-shuffled into her stall.

“What heard you?”

The dragonmaster crouched at my head and gripped one of my shoulders.

“What heard you?” he repeated, and I tried to focus on his face, but my vision swooped and oscillated as though my eyes were swallows in flight.

The amount of venom I’d received was too intense.

Understand, when I’d but once offered myself to a dragon in Tieron, it had been to a kuneus, an infirm bull whose venom had been dilute from age and malnourishment both. Although the destrier that had just invaded me looked near senility herself, she was far from malnourished. The venom imparted by her tongue had therefore been the strongest I’d yet experienced, and despite my tolerance for the poison, built up over years of ingesting drafts of the stuff, I was reeling from the dosage I’d just received.

In fact, I was nigh on incapacitated.

My legs, my arms, my very head did not belong to me. My face was numb, my chest a block of granite. I could not focus, had difficulty comprehending the dragonmaster’s words. My surroundings heaved about me, cobwebbed timbers, stone stalls, dirt floor, all undulating as if they were seaborne.

I passed out.

When I revived, something was pressed against my lips. I thought a rat was atop me; I tried to swat it off and found that my arms were disobedient entities.

“Drink,” the dragonmaster ordered, his voice disembodied in the darkness that surrounded us, for no guttering lantern light bathed wall and stall now. Perhaps the Komikon had doused the light, or perhaps it had burned all its fuel. Or perhaps he’d carried me someplace else, someplace deep within the bowels of the cold earth.

“Drink,” he said again, and I realized that thirst raged within me, and so I drank.

Cool, clean water flowed down my throat and ran over my lips. A dragon snorted some short ways in front of me.

Ah. We were still in the stable beneath the pool, in the domed building of the training grounds.

Venom smoldered within me, flickering here and there in mind, belly, and limb like so many embers, provoking smugness and potency like showers of fire-thrown sparks.

I finished drinking and relaxed in the dragonmaster’s embrace.

“What did you hear?” the dragonmaster said in my ear, voice hoarse with fatigue.

“The dragon,” I mumbled, lips thick. “I heard her. Not just her, but the bull that sired her. Not just the bull, but the brooder that laid the egg he hatched from. Her greatmother, her greatfather. All her ancestors.”

“And what did they say?” the dragonmaster said in a voice so clotted with anticipation he was all but unintelligible. His arms about me were steely. No embrace, that, but confinement. What had I heard? Divine mystery. Indecipherable words. No, not words: Muddled music, enigmatic melody. Compelling whispers composed in an outlandish tongue. What I’d heard had been emotion subtilized, sentiment turned into sensation, ancient memory conveyed by divine passion.

The emotions those memories had stirred within me were fading. The harder I tried to cling to and define them, the quicker they faded. A profound sadness filled me.

“I don’t know,” I whispered, the hoarseness of my voice matching that of the dragonmaster’s, only mine laden with grief and not greed. “I couldn’t understand the music.”

“Music?” the dragonmaster roared, and my heart stuttered. “Are your wits addled?”

“They speak in music, not words,” I cried. “And emotion. And I couldn’t understand it, and then she pulled away from me, and then it was gone!”

Stunned by my outburst, the dragonmaster said nothing. But after some time had passed, he released me. He stood.

“Then we’ll repeat the experience,” he growled. “We’ll repeat the experience until you learn this music and unravel the words within. Understand?”

I didn’t reply. No response was necessary.

We both knew I would comply.

TEN