The Onyx Dragon (38 page)

“Wait, wait,” Pip laughed, throwing up her hands. “My head hurts. What’s a galaxy, Yaethi? You said something about quasi-transmutative interdimensional magical powers? And demons are real? We’re fighting a remnant of those original dark-fires, the elements of our Universe’s substance?”

Yaethi seemed on the verge of tears. “My finest scholarship–”

Shimmerith put in, “Pip’s a practical girl, Yaethi. Just tell her how to beat the Nurguz.”

Now Yaethi looked even more upset. She began to expound in excruciating detail, referring to Pip’s Shapeshifter forms, how a trans-dimensional being such as the Nurguz or an Ancient Dragon could manifest in different dimensions simultaneously and transfer fundamental energies between one lattice of existence and another, and how time flow fluctuated between the different expressions of quantum space-time and a creature might require enormous quantities of energy to materialise completely in a dimension which was not conducive to its type of life-manifestations and white-fires or dark-fires. How life could transform its essential elements to conform to a particular lattice’s constraints … half an hour later, she was still spouting in monologue; even Chymasion’s white eyes had begun to glaze over.

Pip grabbed Yaethi’s good hand. “That’s completely mind-blowing, Yaethi. Now, may I summarise what I’ve learned?”

“Bah,” said her friend, seeing right through Pip in a flash. “Don’t pretend to be stupid, because you aren’t.”

“No, but I’ve got a freaking big problem, a ruddy great Island floating out there crewed by ten thousand Dragons and … sorry, Yaethi. I didn’t mean to shout at you.”

“I understand.” Yaethi wiped her eyes with her stump. “It’s just that it’s imperative that you understand, Pip, and I’m saying it so badly. I just … there’s so much to know, so much we don’t really grasp, which has been lost …”

“Right,” said Pip, hugging Yaethi with one hand and clamping her mouth shut with the other, “just nod or shake your head, alright?” The Helyon Islander bit her forefinger. “I feel nothing, because I’ve … uh … mutated into another headache-inducing quantum whatsit.” Yaethi bit down harder. “Ouch! That definitely manifested in the physical lattice-thingy.”

“First lesson,” Arrabon piped up, making them all laugh.

Pip said, “Seriously, the Nurguz is a creature apparently designed to destroy white-fires. In effect, it is partially manifest here because our world–our lattice-energies–consist of white-fire type life, which ordinarily would be anathema to dark-fires, but the Nurguz does some clever transmutative magic which you described so beautifully and changes white-fires into energies on which it feeds, or transfers back to whichever dimension it came from. Right?”

Yaethi, Shimmerith, Chymasion and Arrabon all nodded.

Arrabon said, “And it stays here because opposites attract. White-fires are like Dragonwine to that creature.”

Yaethi’s headscarf bobbed a second time.

“You had a nice scholarly wrangle about whether or not the Ancient Dragons ever defeated the Nurguz, right?”

Pip’s finger came in for another mangling.

Wincing, Pip rattled, “Techniques of warfare against the Nurguz were vigorously debated by a glittering host of scholarly minds.” Yaethi’s lips moved in a smile hidden by Pip’s hand. “The truth is, the Ancient Dragons never defeated the Nurguz, because the Shadow does not exist physically in this dimension, nor can it be operated upon magically, because its fundamental demonic nature is immune to or eradicates our white-fire magic. The Ancients fled–no!”

Yaethi froze mid-nod.

“No,” Pip repeated slowly, gripped by a sudden insight. “They didn’t run away. They sent their
children
to a place of safety–here. This Island-World. They acted to save their children, their precious eggs, from the Nurguz scourge …”

Shimmerith bugled a heart-rending note of grief that made every Dragon in the vicinity look up; she drew her wing protectively over Chymasion’s back.

“And then a second time, perhaps two thousand years ago, they decided to try to draw the Nurguz away from our Island-World, or to hide … us, from the Shadow. Ancient Dragons are closer to that original state of the Universe, closer to the white-fires,” said Pip, thinking aloud. “That’s why they’re so powerful. The Nurguz is older still, and even more powerful, in a sense. More elemental. Yaethi, you were right. Do we conclude my job as a Star Dragoness is to shine white-fires so brilliantly that the Shadow is obliterated in the fires of its natural antithesis? And all of us, must we not save that First Egg?”

Finally released, Yaethi said, “Don’t forget your Word-power, Pip.”

“But that’s all physical or mental. What would that achieve? No, the Word is meant for the Marshal.”

The Helyon Islander added, “The Marshal’s power you saw in that original vision is a rare Dragon power called Shivers. A rapid vibration of the inter-dimensional lattice–if her Highness the Shining One can follow these very large words.”

That drew a fine snarl from whichever dimension Pip’s Shifted Dragoness happened to be hiding in at the time. Did that mean Shapeshifters were trans-dimensional beings, too? Had the Ancient Dragons stumbled upon a dimension which no Nurguz could penetrate? The Pygmy girl felt her eyes widen. Could they Shiver the Shadow out of existence? Rattle his time- and space-spanning dimensional … er, apparition, into some other reality?

Shimmerith said, “Meaning that if the Marshal rises, we must at all costs prevent him from using that power of Shivers?”

“Ay,” said Yaethi, suddenly stepping into rapid-fire summarisation mode, “and, we theorise that the Marshal draws his power from the Egg. That will be a key vector of attack if we aim to defeat him. If I may just elucidate a few ideas we scholars have advanced in that regard …”

Pip listened closely, yet she despaired. Still, they were no closer to defeating the Shadow. Amongst this mountain of lore and legend and Dragon science, by Star power or by Onyx, there had to be a way. There simply had to. But was she smart enough, and brave enough, to find it?

* * * *

Half an hour before suns-set, the voice of Marshal Re’akka entered the mind of every Dragon in his service and bade them arise.

Silver nodded quietly to himself, transforming into his Silver Dragon guise in the privacy of his bedchamber. Ay. To prevent the possibility of the enemy learning their plans, the Marshal had kept the exact hour of their attack secret from everyone, including his own Wing-Commanders. Silver stepped through the doorway and rushed to the planned assembly point atop a mile-high peak on Eridoon’s eastern side–at least, the side facing eastward now. There, they awaited the Marshal’s pleasure while beneath them, within the Island, the Dragonwings formed up in the long tunnels radiating from the central hole. The first so-called shockwave of two thousand Dragons was armoured with plate armour that mainly protected the front of the chest, neck and flanks, those areas where the hearts were more vulnerable, while leaving the massive flight muscles and shoulder joints free to flex and rotate as required. A second Dragonwing five thousand strong would follow the first, leaving three thousand in reserve–mostly smaller Dragons–which would be deployed only if needed.

Few amongst his kin expected the Academy to last longer than a few hours.

The Marshal’s thirty-four family members were all huge Dragons, for Re’akka’s lineage bred beasts renowned for their size and ferocity. As a noble house, they boasted colour–colours as common as dirt here in the North, but not in Herimor. Twelve were green, fifteen Red, five a variety of pale Blue shades, close to the Marshal’s near-White colouration, and two were ultra-rare Greys notorious for their hot glue and acid attacks.

Sadly, Silver himself just topped half of the size of any of his kin. He supposed this was a terrible deficiency. Just let any Dragon breathe a word …

Where was Rambastion? And what of the Dragonwing meant to be approaching along the Spine from Sylakia? Missing in action, perhaps, but Silver was certain Re’akka would be keeping one flaming eye on the situation. He filed the information at the back of his mind.

Suddenly, the Marshal rose from the Island’s central pit, his pale white form almost ethereal in the moonlight; his wings translucent for the most part, his scales similarly so, as though formed from ice so compressed, it became slightly blue, like tinted crysglass. A giant among Lesser Dragons, Re’akka the White measured one hundred and fifty-two feet in wingspan, but his form was sinewy rather than having the muscular bulk of an Emblazon. Silver knew that musculature for sprung steel, and the scales to be almost impervious to any attack. He had once seen Re’akka take down a traitorous Red Shapeshifter uncle of his; even without the use of magic, he was as deadly as one would expect of a veteran of a lifetime of Herimor warring and Dragon combat.

Take wing!
the Marshal thundered.

There was a slight pause, as if the Island drew breath or gasped in dread. Thick torrents of Night-Red Dragons suddenly spat out of the hole, thirty Dragons emerging every two seconds, their intervals so regimented that Silver suspected the Marshal’s exacting mental control of this process. In a touch over a minute, a thousand Dragons fanned out across the sky. Fourteen minutes later, the staging was complete with the heavier, armoured Dragons taking slightly longer to deploy.

Silver knew what this must look like to the Academy. Night-Reds hovered above Eridoon in a dense cloud two miles high and five wide. Dragon upon Dragon upon Dragon, gleaming in the ruddy light of the suns-set as though their scales and talons already dripped crimson with the blood of Humans. Of course, the timing was deliberate. Marshal Re’akka was not above relishing a dramatic touch–the better to scare his enemies witless. Silver supposed it must work, although there was not much response from the Dragons above the Academy. Why not? There was a tingling deep in his bones. This was a stratagem. The wily old Brown, Kassik, was up to something. But what?

Death to the enemies of true-fires!
Re’akka’s bellow rolled over the Dragonwings.

On cue, most of Silver’s family launched into the warm, still evening, spearing in a single colourful line to the battle-front, the Reds lining up in front of their heavily-armoured shockwave, the Greens and Blues commanding the second wave and reserves.

Silver stood alone.

Shaking Jeradia Island with the massed thunder of their challenge, two thousand heavily armoured Night-Red Dragons stormed across the league separating Eridoon Island from the Academy and its defenders, now ascending to face the challengers.

The Silver Dragon’s hearts thundered in his throat, chest and stomach as the shockwave closed with the Academy’s defenders. With perfect synchronisation, they blasted the defenders with two thousand combined fireballs, lighting the Academy volcano as though a new sun had risen overhead, and the report of that first detonation rolled back like distant thunder to the Marshal’s awesome Dragon army. The defensive line folded and scattered; the Marshal’s force raised a deafening roar of approbation.

Silver was not convinced. As the Night-Reds dived over the rim-wall to rake the Academy’s defences with fire, he thought it was simple. Far too simple.

K
ASSIK SCRUTINISED THE
incoming Dragonwing from the upper slopes of Roost Mountain, saying quietly to Casitha, strapped into his saddle, “We’ve one chance at this trick.”

Beside him, Pip stood in her Onyx Dragon form, her talons unconsciously furrowing the rocky ground as Dragon Assassins occluded the roseate evening sky, a total eclipse of hope. To her right flank Chymasion stiffened, quivering perceptibly as he channelled the efforts of thirty Blue Dragons including his shell-mother Shimmerith through his unique augmentation ‘filters’, as he called them. Pip shored up his strength with her Onyx power, husbanding her own resources carefully–Kassik’s fire-snorting, talon-wagging orders. The Jade Dragon spared a tiny mental nod of thanks for her help. Pip only hoped this would be enough to protect that crazy-brave, fragile first line of defenders. The bait in the jaws of Kassik’s trap.

GRRAAARRRGGGHH!!

Flames exploded across her field of vision, causing Pip’s secondary nictitating eye-membranes to cycle perceptibly, dimming a potentially damaging flare. The huge wave of fire, comprised of bright Dragon flame mixed with yellow-hot lava, washed over and around the Academy Dragons, drizzling with deceptive, glowing gentleness over the outlying Academy buildings and field. Flames smouldered despite earlier efforts to damp everything down with water.

The defenders broke and fled, making convincing cries of alarm and distress. She knew how much argument that action had cost Kassik! A tidal wave of wrathful Night-Reds chased them down into the caldera.

The Brown waited till they swooped toward the buildings … and gave his signal.

At once, concealed entrances to artificial caverns and tunnels riddling the upper sixth of the rim-wall cracked open. Camouflage netting ripped away. One hundred and ten massive twenty-foot Dragon crossbows, a weapon borrowed from the legendary rebels of Merx, fired a snarl of metal-reinforced netting and grapnels attached to cable-hawsers over the enemy Dragonwing.
Snap! Crack!
Snarled, hundreds of Dragons fell or slewed into their fellows. Lighter crossbows and catapults fired point-blank into the mass, using shrapnel for shredding wings and six-foot metal bolts designed for penetrating Dragon hide or downing Dragonships. An indescribable bellowing rose from the chaos. Pip flinched. Mercy, oh …

Courage, little ones,
growled Kassik.
Hold firm. This is battle-reality. Your Silver spoke true, Pip. Let us pray his hearts know love’s true-fires … or that you can turn him. Ready?

A third round of shot and nets crashed into the massed Night-Reds.

With a mighty roar, Kassik the Brown launched into the air with his slim Dragon Rider on his back, backed up by four Jeradian Hammers manning mobile crossbow emplacements strapped to his saddle-harness.

Academy Dragons erupted out of the rim-wall caves and the upper echelons of Roost Mountain to fall upon the Marshal’s beleaguered advance force. Hundreds of Assassins were already grounded on the field, their wings helplessly snarled in netting or ropes, but more than half remained unscathed. The clash made Pip recoil a second time. Why was she chary now? She was Dragonkind! Yet the slaughter grieved and angered her. So unnecessary. So wasteful. Driven into the crucible of the Marshal’s overweening ambition, many Dragonkind would join the eternal fires this evening. Kassik’s forces pounded the stricken Dragon Assassins, picking first on their Wing-Commanders, then the thronging Dragons. Melees formed at the speed of thought, wheeling and snapping through the air. Catapults and crossbows picked individual targets. On the ground, dense wedges of Jeradian Hammers supported by Academy fledglings and the older Dragons raced across the field, finishing off fallen Night-Reds.

The volcano became a living deathtrap.

Pip tracked Shimmerith with her eyes. She felt and saw Chymasion reaching out to help his shell-mother as she danced gracefully through the fracas, her amplified powers allowing her to shoot twenty-foot bolts of ice right through Dragon scale or armour. Shimmerith picked off three Wing-Commanders, while Emblazon finished two. Kassik tangled with a huge Night-Red, forcing him down toward the beautiful green lake now dotted with struggling Dragons and limp carcasses, its waters laced with gold and crimson.

Yet the carnage was terrible to behold, the casualties on both sides multiplying at a dizzying rate. Everywhere Pip looked, the white-fires of her vision focussed through Chymasion’s unique sight seemed to weep golden Dragon blood. Rivers of blood. She could not know laughter here. Pip knew only the inner storm of Dragon hearts moved to weep for her world, as though Fra’anior himself wept through her and in her, for the diminution of his original creation.

Quick as a flash of lightning, Pip turned to Chymasion.

He began to say,
You promised …
but then he, and Arosia with him, bowed their heads as though the force of her heartache robbed them of any right of refusal.

I’m sorry,
said Pip. She had to be a promise-breaker.

* * * *

An invisible paw punched the air out of Silver’s lungs. He whirled, as did the Marshal, staring from the Island’s elevation of a mile higher than the volcano’s rim as the battle over the Academy changed character. It subsided.

Pip! Three hearts leaped like ungainly fish within him. What had she done?

Second wave,
ordered the Marshal.
Burn them all!

Winds generated by Dragons’ wings rocked the island slightly as the five thousand proclaimed their battle-readiness, roaring like an angry volcano in full spate. The suns burned into the western horizon, yet from Silver’s perspective were almost completely obscured by the onslaught of sooty black wings upon that gleaming beauty. There was something fearfully awesome about their collective purpose, the way the great wings beat and the spiky reptilian muzzles faced the gleaming light, some passing through the volcano’s long shadow, some burnished as coals glowing in a fire. The massed growling which seemed to feed on itself, amplified by the collective gathering of Dragon powers and fires in such an enormous battle group; the suns bowing away as though unable to bear the onslaught of such a surfeit of draconic majesty.

Come, shell-son.
The Marshal beckoned imperiously with his wingtip.
This is the hour of our victory. Let us crush the Onyx . It shall require but one fell strike. Then, these miserable specimens of Dragon excrement will bow before my mastery.

Silver beat his wings, rising into the last suns-set upon the Dragonkind.

* * * *

Staggering to her paws, Pip eyed the confusion with inordinate satisfaction and a headache so almighty she imagined Leandrial had just cuffed her around the earhole. Her inner ears rang with a celestial song–tinkling, soul-penetrating laughter? Hot, aromatic Dragon blood filled her mouth. She sensed the magic in her body adjusting, already redressing the Balance and healing, for she was hypersensitive to everything within and without her body in the wake of that Island-shivering Word of Command.

Be changed!
She shivered. Even the thought-echo of a Word seemed to exert magical influence.

Beside her, Chymasion groaned as he pushed up off his knees. Pip’s gaze fell on Arosia, standing between the two Dragons, hands on hips in a pose copied straight off Mya’adara’s scrolleaf, slim, handsome and madder than a nest of hornets shaken and tossed to the ground. She was so angry, she could barely speak.

“You … promised! We all did!” Arosia yelled. “What the volcanic hells … what’s the matter with you, Pip? One simple order. One!” Abruptly she laughed, even as she rubbed her temples with a groan. “Blazon and Kassik are going to shred us. Well. I’ll just have to defend you two rascals.”

Chymasion vented a pained snort of mirth. “Thank you, noble Rider.”

Defend a Dragon? Pip tried not to let her silly grin loose to aggravate Arosia, but failed. “We changed the Balance, didn’t we, my friend?”

The girl thumped her on the flank with her fist. “You are trouble with a Dragon-sized ‘T-rune’ picked out in gold-plated calligraphic script, as our Yaethi would say. No. This is–”

“Magnificent!” shouted Yaethi, riding Arrabon out of a nearby cave-mouth. “Stupendous work, Pip and Chymasion. Arosia, no teasing a scholar about calligraphy. Or have you been taking trouble- provoking lessons from our Pip?”

Arosia blushed fiercely. “No!”

“Blues!” Yaethi yelled, helped along by a low growl from Arrabon in Dragonish. “Pay attention. Healing over here for these two.” Shading her eyes, she gazed up at Kassik rapidly briefing the massed Night-Reds, milling about above the Academy buildings, evidently confused. “You un-imprinted what, five hundred Dragons, Pip? Changed their minds? No, Night-Reds exist in a state of Imbalance and you just set the scales right. Clever little Dragoness.”

Fire leaked from Pip’s nostrils, along with a trickle of blood. She shivered. Just for a second then, her Dragon brain had been roaring, ‘Kill the insolent Human,’ while her Human-brain shrilled a warning at this bloodthirstiness …

“Second attack-wave incoming,” said Chymasion. “Time to get under cover, Pip.”

Up above, Kassik said something to Casitha, who quickly pulled out two white signal flags and waved them in a wide circle around her head. Up on the rim-wall, Pip saw the signal repeated in five places.

Oh … mercy. If mercy existed on a battlefield littered with the dead and dying, and too many wounded Dragons to count.

The Marshal intended to finish them quickly. And now, she must face Silver.

A rushing of wind passed over the Academy. The skies darkened with draconic wings. There was a moment’s profound stillness, as though the world held its breath. Then, the hammer fell. Clouds of Dragons rained fire upon the defenders, blasting the rim-walls with such sustained aggression that it seemed to Pip that the volcano had erupted. Waves of searing heat rolled over the battlefield, shimmering and smoking. Sheets of flame roared into the sky, but the Dragons simply tore through, bathing in the conflagration, growling and snapping as they tangled with their adversaries. The awesome aerial bombardment shook the volcano concussively, echo building upon echo in that enclosed space, until the very Island-World seemed to be roaring in outrage at the slaughter developing over the Academy.

Yet she had eyes for one Dragon alone–for the Marshal, winging slowly and majestically into a position from which he could personally oversee the battle. She shifted her gaze fractionally to Silver, following meekly in his shell-father’s wake. How well he served that monster! How the son nosed his heels like a spineless lap-dog!

By now, the twin suns had dipped beneath the horizon, thus as the Marshal spiralled lazily upward to a height of four miles above the volcano, he became the lone actor on a golden stage, furnace-gilded to a resplendent sheen.

He gathers his power,
said Chymasion. Through the Jade Dragon’s eyes, Pip saw feathery tendrils of fire reaching into the Marshal’s being from the suns and the skies and the earth and most especially, thick and beautiful, from the First Egg itself. Yet his power was not white-fires. As the magic coalesced in his breast it changed character, becoming dark and malign–a different darkness to an Onyx power, Pip realised, although she did not understand it. His wingtips flicked.

Here it came.

* * * *

Watching his shell-father narrowly, Silver was perfectly poised to anticipate his next move.

Shield me, Silver,
ordered Re’akka.
Add your strength to mine.

There was rage in his hearts. Anguish. The certainty that this special attack of his shell-father’s, the cold fireball which had so ravaged fortresses and cities, would sound the death-knell for all within the Academy. Yet Fra’anior had ordered him to stand firm, to withhold his paw when this moment came rather than striking prematurely. What did the Ancient Black Dragon intend, bidding him to strike Pip with all his strength? Silver did not understand. Twice already, he had tried to kill her. She would not stand for a third.

Ablaze with power, Re’akka dove.

Already, the five thousand-strong Dragonwing had silenced Kassik’s cunningly-placed defences. The Academy Dragons were scattered and dismayed, powerless to intervene–but they tried, bravely fluttering up in their droves to attempt to stop or sway the Marshal’s course. Silver slapped them aside with a cone-shaped shield as he dove parallel to his father and half a Dragon’s-length behind, protecting them both.

The Marshal’s voice rose, clearing their path of Night-Reds.

One mile. One and a half. The volcano blurred closer. Open magma cracks snaked along the caldera floor in places. The beautiful green lake beckoned him, the lake into which Pip had dumped him after crushing his attempted usurpation of the Academy and all its Dragons. That would have been a coup worthy of the son of a Herimor Marshal. Instead, it had provided the impetus for a meeting of souls which had rocked Silver’s life like storms battering the floating Island-flotillas of his native Herimor. Nor would he forget Telisia’s attempted assassination of Pip. The disbelief in her eyes as a crossbow bolt punched right through her body.

Now he would do worse.

Wind rushed over his scales, hot and foetid with the stench of destruction. Burning flesh. Charred buildings and vegetation. Soot and grit tingling in his nostrils. Silver’s hearts sang wild battle-Dragonsong, the bloodthirsty rage that primed his body, magic and reactions for the speed and ferocity of all-out Dragon warfare. Rend. Bite. Slay! These words were the trumpet-blasts of his hearts.