Shadowed By Wings (45 page)

Not so me.

By means of the dragons’ ancestral memories that I’d experienced in the viagand chambers, I’d fought with my wings unfurled as a hatchling bull, my infant bones mere flexible cartilage. By dragonmemory, I’d learned to never unfurl my wings in grounded combat, lest they be broken by an opponent.

And from dragonsong, I had the memory of being a captive destrier, of being trained to go for the vulnerable wings of my opponent in battle flight and shred membrane from wing spar and fracture wrist bone with a clawed, well-aimed kick.

I had no claws; I was not dragon. But I did have Dono’s poliar.

I stumbled toward Re as he launch-glided toward me, his neck outstretched, his hind legs forward-braced for landing, his wings unfurled. With each of my footfalls, ice-shards of pain slashed across my torso; it felt as if the shredded end of one of my broken ribs was lacerating my guts from within. I gripped the poliar tighter, concentrated on moving forward, on not tripping over dust and rock, concentrated on those amber wings unfurling in the air like the sails of some great ship.

I did not stop outside the range of a tongue lashing as the dragonmaster had during his mad charge toward Re on the day previous. I continued forward, the leathery stink of Re about me, his bulk looming over me, his purple and green scales brilliant. Dust billowed everywhere, choking me, and now I was running half-blind, blinking rapidly.

Too late Re realized my intentions. Too late instinct and dragonmemory punched through the battle lust blazing through him. As his hind legs hit the ground, great talons scoring the earth and billowing up more dust, he tried to draw his wings in, tried to swing his ponderous bulk sideways from me.

Dust thick and smothering about me. Noise and confusion, flash of brilliant scales. Wing leather the color of sunlit amber before me, the ebony wing-tip claws curling in on themselves.

I slammed my poliar down hard against the pteroid bone, the peculiar wrist a third of the way along a dragon’s wing. Re roared anew, and I screamed, too, from the pain of my violent movement, and let go my poliar. Re swung about and dropped down on all fours, his injured wing dragging.

I darted in, then, moving in a lopsided, pain-drunken lurch, and began the loathsome work of a dragonwhore.

You have to make the thing move, hey! And don’t spend so long under there; you think Re’s gonna be standin’ still while you’re doin’ that? You have to get in an’ out, in an’ out, else you’ll get trampled!

Egg’s voice boomed through my head as talons shifted about on either side of me, as Re’s belly brushed the top of my stooped back. The stink of him was unforgettable: manure and musk, regurgitated crop food and semen, hot leather and licorice-and-lime venom. The stench was bawdy, earthy, savage.

I spread my arms as best I could and embraced his stinking scrotal sac and rubbed my body against his leathery warmth. Red sheets of pain washed over me; I think I screamed.

A trembling, muscled hind leg slammed down on the ground a hand’s breadth from my right foot. The force of that impact upon the ground seemed to momentarily bounce me; the back of my stooped head struck his bulging testes hard and my neck made a horrible, gritty sound from the collision and I was dizzy and disoriented.

A leathery knee slammed against me, and some wild animal shrieked in pain, and all was dust and the flash of talons, and then, abruptly, the towering mass I was stooped beneath spun away from me as Re heaved his massive form about, and I stood exposed and confused before him.

He roared: A gale of warm air redolent with the smell of venom blasted into my face. Venom misted over me; it peppered my skin with minute droplets that seemed to incandesce before burning into my marrow.

A huge maw with great fangs opened before me.

“Hey-o, bull, hey-o!” The hoarse, wild cry of the dragonmaster, followed by the crack of his bullwhip, right against Re’s snout. The maw pulled back from me; whip snapped against muzzle, hard, again. With a furious roar, Re swung his snout toward the dragonmaster, who stood hobbled and wrist-shackled, Dono’s whip in both hands.

Re would kill us both if the onahmes weren’t released soon.

Sucking in a dust-gritty breath, I ducked back under the enraged bull’s belly.

In and out, in and out. My world collapsed and became only the leathery reek of dragon hide, the sour musk of scaled scrotum, the grit and choke of dust, the flash of claw and thud of belly against shoulder, back, and head. I embraced those foul testes, was shoved and battered, jarred and bruised, and again I embraced the bull. If not for that spray of venom that had misted over me, I would have been incapable of it, but the rasp of broken bone within my rib cage and the violent slam of leathery, scaled muscle against my body was bearable because of the dragon’s poison.

From the corner of one eye, through a cloud of dust, I saw Re’s venomous tongue meet its mark upon the dragonmaster’s chest.
Slam!
The dragonmaster sailed through the air and landed hard,
thud,
flat on his back in the dust.

But instead of lunging forward to scoop the fallen Komikon into his mouth, Re reared up on his hind legs, neck craned to the sky, and suddenly I stood exposed again, right at the very feet of this fanged tower of might. His great dewlaps inflated above me like opalescent sails, and he trumpeted. His lusty cry vibrated right through me; for a moment, I heard dragonsong.

And then something wet and hot shoved me in the chest, and I was staring direct at the red-mottled pink of Re’s forked phallus. I staggered back, revolted, then turned and loped away from him, stumbling as the ground reverberated from his triumphant bugle.

I had succeeded. I’d aroused the bull.

The iron gates to the holding corral of the trumpeting, pheromone-fragrant onahmes were winched open. I looked blearily about, trying to orient myself, saw the apprentices’ tunnel door I’d come through, then staggered toward it.

Pain turned my vision blotchy. I lurched, wheezing, eyes locked upon that dank tunnel. Behind me, the onahmes flooded the stadium, the flood-rush of their wings a tempest. The inhuman roaring of the crowd warped further.

Something struck my shoulder, a rock, a sandal, I don’t know what. I stumbled. Something else struck me, and a third thing. I fell to my knees. Swaying, I stared drunkenly at the tunnel exit, still so far away. White figures floated from its depths.

Auditors.

I tried to get to my feet. My legs would not obey me and pain from my ribs exploded throughout my body. I fell forward, onto my hands. Head hanging, I sucked in air that was too hot, too cruel for my lungs. A hail of objects bounced off my back.

White before me: the hem of a gown.

I raised my head, followed the gown up, up, to where the veil-mask of an Auditor wavered and swooped. Beside the faceless creature stood another. One of them held an axe. I thought, for a moment, that he held it backward, so the sharp end pointed not at me, but at the sky. But then the axe came crashing toward my neck, and I knew no more.

Blackness.

Through the blackness, a roar. The blood-fevered roar of a crowd.

Ah, I thought. I’ve heard stories of how the decapitated experience sound and vision for several heartbeats after the head has left the shoulders.

The two Auditors picked up my corpse and dragged me, head dangling upon my chest from half-severed neck, across the talon-scored Arena ground to the tunnel.

I foggily remembered how Prinrut had been dragged out of my life in the viagand chambers, remembered how her bare feet had rasped along the ground even as mine did now.

Blackness again.

Then light.

Firelight, guttering from a torch. I looked about me blearily, confused, aching, nauseated.

I was in the dank gloom of an Arena tunnel. The muted bellows of the crowd outside swelled and ebbed, and onahmes bugled. Two Auditors lay upon the tunnel floor, the necks of their white gowns rapidly turning red. Beside them, two Arena guards, eyes glazed, blood flowing heavily from slashed jugular veins; I recognized the sinuous cicatrices and the gap-toothed grimace of one of the guards.

Bleerily, I looked up.

Before me, draped limp between two standing Auditors, hung the dragonmaster, the welt of venom across his chest as thick and long as my arm. He was slur-muttering, saliva hanging from his slack lips in ropes, head lolling. He jerked rigid and his eyes snapped wide.

“They demand Nashe,” he shrieked; then his head dropped against his chest again. He began to convulse.

“Get it off him, blood-blood,” one of the Auditors barked, and he tore off the hem of his gown, wrapped it swiftly about one hand, then quickly scraped the tarry toxin from the convulsing dragonmaster’s chest.

“That’ll do. He’s survived worse. Pick up the girl again and let’s be off, quick. We’ve not got much time.”

I stared at the Auditor as he shook the venom-thick swathing from his broad hand. It was not chalked white, that hand.

And I was not dead, my neck not a bleeding stump. The Auditor bent over me. I cried out as he and his twin lifted me upright.

“Conscious already? After the blow I gave you? Great Dragon, Babu, you’ve got steel for muscles!”

“Daronpu Gen,” I gasped.

“Don’t say the name aloud, girl. Not till we’re elsewhere.”

“You came for me.”

“’Course I did. Sorry about that clout with the axe.

Had to make it look real, hey-o.” He touched the back of my neck gently. “Don’t think I hit you too hard. But you’ll have a throbbing head for days anyways, I’d wager.”

Wager.

I remembered then.

“Xxamer-Zu?” I gasped.

“All yours, girl. All yours. Malaban Bri came through, as did Ghepp, in the end. I imagine Ghepp’s collecting his land deed from Roshu Xxamer-Zu even as we speak.”

I closed my eyes. Swallowed. Swooped in and out of consciousness, the pain in my broken ribs like serrated knives, the nauseating throbbing where Gen had struck me with the dull end of his axe immense.

I had done it. Without the haunt’s powers, I’d survived Arena.
And
I’d secured myself a Clutch.

“Give me a little venom from that swathing,” I begged. “Please.”

Daronpu Gen hesitated. Grunted. “A little only, for the pain. A little only.”

The burn of it in my mouth was the fire of the Realm. It coursed through me, made me mighty with dragon strength, with otherworld hope.

I remembered my mother’s haunt, remembered seeing Waivia upon the Cafar Re balcony of Arena.

How had my mother’s haunt found my sister? And why hadn’t she found her years earlier?

I didn’t know.

Nor, too, did I know what the bizarre reunion between mother and daughter would herald for the future. That my sister was the Wai-ebani of Waikar Re Kratt—a man driven by a need for power and causing pain in others—and that Waivia now had access to the powers of the haunt, boded ill for Clutch Re. But Waivia wouldn’t stand by the sadistic lord’s side with the might of the Skykeeper behind her. Surely.

And even if she did, it wouldn’t affect me, living safely and anonymously in Clutch Xxamer-Zu.

Surely.

With a weary sigh, I nodded at Daronpu Gen. “Let’s go to Xxamer-Zu, then,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

Turn the page for an excerpt from the thrilling conclusion to the Dragon Temple Saga

FORGED BY FIRE

Available in trade paperback from Roc

O
ur dying brooder brayed.

The mournful sound reverberated off the mudbrick huts ahead of us and rolled across the savannah beyond. Seated men rose from the dusty ground. Women stopped scrubbing pots and plaiting grass fibers and nursing babes. Children ran to their mothers.

Daronpu Gen slipped from our cart bench and walked swiftly down the grass path whence we’d come moments before, his robes billowing about him. In the west, the setting sun was a huge crimson ball, staining his flapping robes the color of old blood.

Panic fluttered rigid wings inside of me. True, Gen
had
warned me that once we reached the cocoon guardian clan of Xxamer Zu, he’d leave the dragonmaster and me. The foreknowledge didn’t prevent the dismay I felt at watching him head toward the white temple dome at the center of the lutch … and his treacherous future as a renegade Temple warden.

The dying brooder harnessed between the shafts of our cart brayed again. The kerosene stench of the death wax she was secreting intensified and mingled with the sweetish reek of the decaying dragon cocoons stockpiled in the brick warehouse to our left. I hastily started to draw a corner of my bitoo cowl across my nose, but pain knifed across my torso and I gasped and froze.

Broken ribs dislike sudden movement.

The dragonmaster scowled as the arbiyesku gathered about our cart. All of the cocoon guardian clan members had the pitted teeth, canker sores, and black-stained lips and tongues of the rishi we’d passed en route through Clutch Xxamer Zu. Gen had said it was from the slii fruitstones they’d sucked, to dull their hunger. Like all the other serfs I’d glimpsed thus far in Xxamer Zu, the clan members of the arbiyesku were also barefoot, weathered, and ribby.

Instead of bitoos, the women wore strange garments of plum-colored cloth, ragged and worn, wrapped from bosom to thigh, and, after being drawn up through the legs, knotted behind the smalls of their backs. They carried their babes not in cowls upon their shoulders—for they wore no cowls—but strapped lengthwise across their chests or backs in slings. I was amazed by how much of their bodies the women exposed: shoulders, arms, legs—all completely bare. Never would such exposure be publicly tolerated on Clutch Re.

I decided that their brazenness didn’t displease me.

I was hard put not to gape at the women’s mode of dress, nor at the variation amongst the color of their skin, for I’d never before come across so many folk in whose veins ran Djimbi blood. Under the crimson-streaked sky, some folk gleamed like polished mahogany, the weird whorls upon their skin the color of patina on old bronze. Others had an umber pigmentation mottled here and there by dull olive. Still others were chestnut, their piebald markings a cinereous green, like verdigris bleaching gray in the sun. Not a single rishi had skin the color of mine, that tan that’s referred to as
fawn
when describing bayen, but is called
aosogi,
poorly cured hide, when describing a rishi.