The Dragon Circle (15 page)

“Stargod Kim,” the one-eyed beldame hailed him.

He smiled at them and took a moment from his mission to lift the heavy bronze cauldron onto the hook and swing it over the low fire. Enough distance separated the bottom of the pot from the flames to keep the metal from melting. An iron cauldron was near the top of the list of improvements for the village, as soon as Konner and his team of blacksmiths found time to forge one.

The old women returned his smiles with profuse thanks and bows and vows of eternal gratitude.

He scuttled into his cabin before they could enlist his help with something else. Everyone else who could work even a little was in the fields finishing off the harvest. A third grandmother watched the bevy of children too young to help. Five year olds helped gather the sheaves into stooks.

The perfect time for him to work in privacy without Hestiia hovering over him or Pryth clucking at him.

He did not wait for his eyes to adjust to the dim light inside. He found the basket of Tambootie by smell. As his pupils opened and he detected outlines and shapes within the shadows, he thought that particular basket glowed with an unusual aura. A corona of green mottled with pink, just like the new leaves, shone around the entire basket. He picked out two leaves, both mature, having lost all traces of pink. Oil still gleamed slickly on the fat foliage, though he'd picked these leaves nearly a week ago.

Checking once more that no one observed him, Kim licked the oils. The now-familiar taste sparkled inside his mouth. He felt lighter, freer, stronger, and more alert. The dimness of the cabin receded. Every object stood out in clear detail, as if he stood in bright sunshine. Now he could truly work magic on Taneeo's injuries, maybe speed the bone healing and swelling. Perhaps even restore the man's full eyesight.

And delve into his mind deeply enough to see if Hanassa was still there or had left booby traps for the Stargods.

He stuffed the leaves into his pocket and ducked out of the cabin. The old ladies smiled and waved at him once more. He ignored their invitation to talk to them and perhaps get snared into helping with more heavy chores. He had to act before the Tambootie wore off.

At the entrance to Taneeo's hut, Kim barely took time to rattle the strings of beads before entering. He heard the rustle of someone moving quickly. To his Tambootie-enhanced ears it sounded like a wind racing across the tops of the trees.

“S'murghit!”
Taneeo cursed.

At least Kim thought it was Taneeo who invoked the deposed winged demon. Who else would inhabit this crude circular hut?

But the voice was deeper, raspier, harsher than the young priest's.

Then Kim's eyes registered the shape of Taneeo's sparse belongings and the man himself by the light of the auras.

Taneeo seemed to be two men, one lying atop the other, each with his own separate aura, touching but not blending.

Kim blinked. The outermost halo of red and black faded to Taneeo's more usual green and blue spiked with orange pain.

What had he seen?

For a moment Hanassa's coarse features had masked Taneeo's.

Kim reached for the Tambootie in his pocket. Taneeo reached a hand to stay his movement. “Nay, friend. You need no more of the weed. I have rejected my former master once and for all.”

“I wished to try more healing on your leg,” Kim said. His mouth went dry. A dozen questions choked him.

“Do not bother, my friend and Stargod. Your magic cannot touch my wounds.”

“How do you know that?” Kim knelt beside the pallet. The hut smelled of sweat and fear and fever. He held his breath.

Taneeo's aura spiked again with red and black, then calmed to its normal colors.

“Because Pryth has filled your head with false tales of your powers. You can do nothing for me. You only think you can because you listen to the ancient harridan. Go. Leave me in peace to meditate. I will heal in my own good time.” Laboriously, he rolled to his side with his back to Kim. As clear a dismissal as possible.

Kim rose to his feet, swayed a moment. The Tambootie seemed to burn its way through his pocket, begging him to chew just a little. Already his vision dimmed back to normal limits and his ears felt blocked with the lessening of sounds reaching him.

“I have to try, Taneeo.”

“No.”

“We will never know if my magic is valid or not until I try.
I
have to know.”

Had he seen Hanassa trying to invade Taneeo's body again? Or had it been a hallucination born of the Tambootie?

“Kim?” Loki's voice summoned him from outside. “Konner just commed. We've got trouble.”

Kim closed his eyes and regrouped his senses. Already he longed for the clarity Tambootie gave his mind.

Clarity or hallucinations? He swallowed deeply and kept his hands out of the pocket that held the Tambootie.

Without another word he ducked out of the hut to join his brother.

Taneeo's grunt of satisfaction bothered him more than all of his other questions.

”W
HERE ARE the IMPs now?” Konner asked, closing down his comm unit.

“The Others come closer,” Dalleena whispered. A glaze covered her eyes and she kept one hand extended toward the windscreen, palm questing outward.

“How much closer?” Konner spared her an extra few moments from his instruments.

The shuttle flew clear of the continent. The sea sparkled in the autumnal sunshine. He picked out the frolicking forms of dolphinlike creatures. The locals called them “mandelphs” and considered them warriors of old who had angered the gods. Their souls had been condemned to wander the seas for eternity. Their hunger for their lost humanity made them follow ships and rescue drowning sailors.

“Less than one third of daylight.”

“Then they will have to orbit to pick their parking spot and deploy a lander. Six hours until they home in on the beacon's last location.” He prayed to his mother's god and St. Bridget and whomever else might be listening that he destroyed the thing in time to confuse the enemy.

“Is it enough time?” she asked. At last she turned and looked at him full on. Other than wide eyes, she showed no trace of fear.

“Since I do not have to return you to the village first, we have enough time. Thank you.”

She cracked half a smile.

“You realize that once we destroy the beacon, we will have a long and hard trip back to the village. Many days, with minimal provisions.”

She nodded.

“Good girl.” He patted her hand.

“I must see the task through to completion. 'Tis part of the code.” She did not withdraw her hand from his touch.

This could get interesting.

“Whose code?” he asked, leaving his hand atop hers. “I wasn't aware there were any laws at all except for the ones Hanassa made up in the name of Simurgh to suit his own desires.”

“The code of my father and his father and grandfather before him. 'Tis part of being a Tracker, seeing the lost thing returned to where it needs to be. Your bee-kan needs to be destroyed in the fiery mouth of the volcano. I will see it through.” She looked off to their left, staring at the empty sea.

“I do not think that Sam Eyeam has the same Tracker code that I do.”

“Why do you believe that?” Konner wished he understood why she considered the freelance agent a Tracker. Now if the man was a bounty hunter, a Tracking talent might come in handy.

“He did not acknowledge the secret sign I gave him.”

“I did not see you . . .”

“I told you it is secret, passed from one Tracker to the other. Only we may know it. He does not know it. He does not follow the code.”

“In other words, don't trust him.”

They flew on in silence. Dalleena raised her free hand occasionally to sense the approach of the IMPs. As much as possible, Konner slipped his fingers around hers. Sometimes she seemed hesitant to continue touching him, then she'd sigh heavily and relax into the gentle bonding.

“My villagers welcomed you without question. They honored you. I do not understand,” he said after a while.

“Trackers are rare. We provide a service no other can. We earn our keep.” Sam Eyeam could make more than his keep if he had a true tracking talent. A lot more.

“But my people did not question your word that you are a Tracker.”

“I showed them this.” Dalleena swept her mass of dark hair off to her back, then slipped vest and shirt free of her left shoulder.

Konner's gaze rested upon a small blue tattoo of a right hand, palm out. Meticulously drawn, he could almost pick out her fingerprints on it.

He dared look no further than the emblem. Her breasts swelled nicely above their confining band. He traced the tattoo with a delicate finger, wishing he dared drop his hand lower.

“Only Trackers are honored with this symbol. I had to successfully find three lost ones and return them home alive before I could call myself a Tracker.”

She replaced her shirt and vest and raised her hand in questing pose once more. “They come. More quickly,” she said quietly. Her grip on his hand tightened.

The shoreline of the Great Bay smudged the horizon.

A quick glance at his instruments confirmed the presence of a ship near parking orbit. Had they found and boarded
Sirius
? Had they left his ship intact? Or did they simply follow the beacon?

“They didn't stop to take in the sights, that's for certain,” Konner quipped. But then, they'd had the beacon to follow and didn't need to do full surveys before making decisions about landing. How did they make it through the blasted asteroid belt so quickly? “We'll beat them to the volcano. Just.” He boosted speed, heedless of the sonic boom he created and the vast amount of fuel he consumed.

Within a few moments,
Rover
's instruments lost track of the IMP cruiser. “Damn. No satellites to bounce signals!” He slammed his fist into the console. He couldn't even tap into the more extensive sensors aboard
Sirius
. He'd parked her over the horizon to keep the locals from noticing a new “star” in the firmament.

The IMPs would not be so careful. They had no vested interest in keeping the locals ignorant of the outside and tied to a self-sufficient agrarian economy.

“Where are they?”

“They have not yet launched a . . . ‘lander?' ” Dalleena made the last word a question.

He jerked an abrupt nod that she had remembered the word correctly. Then he eased his speed up a notch. Inwardly he cringed at the thought of the noise his passage must create for the inhabitants below.

The Southern Mountains loomed ahead. Konner shed altitude and speed. The butterflies in his stomach grew to the size of bats.

Dalleena's knuckles turned white where she gripped her seat. Her sensing hand came up once more. She'd checked on the IMPs a lot since they had left the sea behind. And removed her hand from his, leaving him isolated and alone. “The . . . ship splits. Two pieces. One very large. One smaller. Moving fast. The lander?”

Konner gulped. Moving fast could mean any speed to Dalleena who had grown up expecting paces no faster than the hybrid horses domesticated by the tribes.

“Faster than us?” he asked, not expecting an answer.

“Much faster. Spiraling through the air. Aiming for us.”

“Damn.” After a few seconds' thought he half smiled. “I'm not the pilot Loki is, but I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.”

Dalleena cocked her head in question but said nothing. If she did not understand the phrase, she'd figure it out soon enough.

He liked that.

Abruptly he changed course and dropped altitude. Mountain peaks now rose above him. His magnetic readings began to spin. He let his mind go blank a moment before looking out the window. Spidery blue lines flickered in and out of sight. Lines of unexplained energy akin to transactional gravitons. Pryth and the dragons called them ley lines. They dribbled away to nothing in the foothills of the blown-out volcano. The eruption must have exploded with massive power to disrupt magnetic forces and the ley lines.

Konner could use the disruption to lead the IMPs a merry chase.

He popped up above the mountain peaks and the electronic magnetic fluctuations or EMF disruption long enough to give the IMP sensors a glimpse of him, way west of his target. Then he dropped down again and wove a serpentine course back north. When he judged himself far enough away from the volcano, he rose up again, briefly. Only long enough for the sensors to blip before he dove back down again.

If this IMP captain was even a degree less perceptive than the last one who had chased the O'Hara brothers, he should plot a trajectory based upon the last two sightings and look for the shuttle along the line of mountains running north and south to divide the continent nearly into two equal parts.

Konner circled around and took the fastest course toward the volcano, as high as he could, giving himself sufficient distance from the ground, but not to be out of the mask of EMF.

Dalleena bared her teeth at him in a half grimace half smile. “Is this what living in your world is like?”

“Pretty much.” Konner suppressed a laugh of exhilaration as the broken mouth of the volcano crater came into view. He did not bother with finesse. He did not bother with comfort. He needed to set the shuttle down within the confines of the crater as quickly as possible.

Rocked and jolted by rapid changes from the VTOL jets he barely secured the vehicle before grabbing the beacon out of Dalleena's lap and diving out the hatch. She came right on his heels, not even wrinkling her nose at the hot dry air stench.