Dragonseers and Airships

by Chris Behrsin

  That caused Faso to laugh. “Special? Of course I’m bloody special. I’m the best scientist to have ever graced this earth.”

  “But you don’t truly believe it.” The elder said.

  Faso paused a moment. “What the dragonheats do you mean?”

  “You say those things to mask the fact that you don’t understand your true destiny. You pretend you’re the best, while deep inside there’s a nagging voice telling you there are people much better than you. And now you’re in the realm of another scientist whose inventions are much more superior than anything you’ve ever dreamed of yourself.”

  “What nonsense,” Faso said.

  “Is it, Faso Gordoni?” the anthropologist said. Really, I found it kind of endearing how these three men played off each other as if they were one person. “You’re the youngest male of the dragonseer line alive today, and you don’t even know yourself.”

  “The youngest male of the dragonseer line,” for a second Faso’s jaw dropped. Then he looked between the men and he erupted into laughter himself. “That’s a good one. I’ve heard a lot of mumbo jumbo from Pontopa here, but this has to be the best yet.”

  The biologist stood up and he looked at Faso, firelight dancing in his eyes. “And how do you know it’s not true, Faso Gordoni? Did you know your grandfather on your mother’s side?”

  Faso shook his head. “Just because I don’t know someone doesn’t mean they’re part of some magical, mystical heritage.”

  “You’ve seen dragons and men and women turn into dragons, and yet you have problems accepting the existence of myth.”

  “We all came from apes, not the dust of the earth shaped by The Gods Themselves and the wars between Finase and Honore. These myths are just nice stories we tell kids to get them to behave in school.”

  “So how do you explain this?” the anthropologist asked. And he turned around to indicate the writing on the wall. Now I was closer to it, I realised that the text was writing itself out slowly in pictorial representations. And my mouth and eyes opened wide in astonishment. It was as if an invisible man was sitting there and inking each new symbol using the lava of the lake.

  Faso looked over at it and his eyes went wide for a moment. Then, he shook his head hard. “I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation for it. I just haven’t had time to study it yet.”

  “Well, let me tell you,” the linguist said and walked over it. “This is the Wall of Prophecies. Part of a cave that writes out the destinies of people as it unfolds. Within this ancient language are the futures of the men and women who will change the world.” The linguist glanced over at me. “We believe this wall to chronicle the collective unconscious in written form.”

  “And I guess you’re going to just tell me what will happen in my future,” Faso said. “And then you’ll tell me that Pontopa and I are great agents of good in this world who will defeat King Cini and turn the Southlands into an absolute paradise.”

  “No,” the linguist replied. “We’re still learning to decipher it. But making progress.”

  “And how the dragonheats did you find this place in the first place?”

  “It called us to it,” the biologist replied. “Each of us saw it on our dreams. So, many years ago, we abandoned our university jobs and came right here to learn the language of the wall and the tribespeople. Coatu here,” the biologist gestured to the tribal chief, “has also been learning Towese.”

  “See what I mean?” Faso turned to me as if looking for reassurance. “Absolute baloney.”

  Now, I’d just about had enough of Faso rejecting what could have been valuable information as mumbo jumbo. Given Faso was Taka’s father by blood, this could tell us why exactly Alsie and Captain Colas, for that matter, wanted him so bad. I put up my hand to stop Faso from spouting any more of his negativity and then I looked at the three triplets in turn. “Faso might not be interested,” I said, and I glared daggers at the inventor, “but I am. How exactly, can there be a male in the dragonseer line? I don’t understand.”

  The linguist smiled. “You’ve tasted Exalmpora. Yes, I can see it in your eyes and the lines on your face. Be careful Dragonseer, because you’re on the verge of going over the edge. Take any more and you may become like Alsie Fioreletta yourself. The walls suggest great dangers…”

  I shook my head. This wasn’t getting us anywhere. “But how is Exalmpora related to all this?”

  “Because, seven generations ago,” the biologist said while he threw a piece of firewood into the fire, “a dragonseer decided to experiment with Exalmpora when pregnant. And it changed the makeup of the baby within. The baby was born male and with that, the rules of dragonseers left behind by the Gods Themselves were broken. And instead, arose the first male dragonseer heir.”

  I looked at him in astonishment. “And then?”

  The biologist smiled, and then reached down to pick up a wooden bowl. He scooped some of the porridge into it and offered it to me. I nodded, thanked him and then tasted it. It tasted salty – just what my body needed right now.

  The biologist offered a second bowl of porridge to Faso, then took another ladle of porridge for himself and sat down again. “The child was no longer a dragonseer,” he continued. “But someone else. It transpired that he could have as many children as he pleased. But still he had dragonseer blood inside him, and he also became a serial womaniser with no knowledge of birth control. So he ended up sprouting many offspring. That man, Faso Gordoni, is your distant ancestor. And the male gene gifted through the Exalmpora was always dominant. Every single one of those offspring turned out to be male. And the same applied to the generation after that. And the generation after that. And the generation after that.”

  I put my hand to my chin. One thing still didn’t make sense. “So you’re saying that Faso and his ancestors and all his cousins however many times removed can only have male offspring?”

  The anthropologist nodded. “I spent my life studying the ancestry of dragonseers. Commissioned, at first by Gerhaun and the other dragon queens to scour the chapel and town hall records across the globe for relevant information.”

  “But there’s one thing I don’t understand in all this. How come Taka was born a female?”

  Faso smiled and stood up himself. He’d already wolfed down his porridge, and the bowl now hung limply by his side. “Aha, I was going to say the same myself. Well, Pontopa Wells, maybe you’re smarter than you look.”

  I cast Faso another hard glare and then turned to look at anthropologist. But this time it was the biologist’s turn to offer his input. “It took us a long time to dig up the records for this one, given that Taka’s birth wasn’t officially registered and Cini did his best to hide this fact. But it turns out that through the entire male dragonseer bloodlines, Faso and Sukina was the only instance of a male dragonseer heir uniting with the true dragonseer line. Taka was born out of this union and it seemed the dragonseer gene once again proved dominant. And so, we presume Taka was born a dragonseer.”

  “You presume?” I asked.

  “Yes. I personally worked for the king a while so that I could study the young child. I wished I had enough power to stop what Colas and Alsie did to him with the Exalmpora. And, unfortunately, I couldn’t get enough data on Taka before the Exalmpora changed his gender.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I thought the king kept Taka’s origin a strict secret.”

  “We were commissioned by the dragon queens, remember. And they already knew who Taka was. I only worked for the king in disguise.”

  “And what happened to the dragonseer who birthed a male heir? There were always eight female dragonseers before Cini II started exterminating us, surely?”

  “The natural order of things somehow corrected itself,” the anthropologist said. “and she birthed another female dragonseer. This was the original ancestor of Alsie Fioreletta. And, since that point dragonseers, have only ever had female children, or at least as far as we can tell from our records.”

 
; Now, my head was spinning and I don’t know whether this was so much from that strange Exalmpora solution I’d taken earlier that day, the knocks from when I’d battled the panther automaton, the concussion during the storm on the Saye Explorer, or the fact that all this genetics stuff was just so damn complicated.

  Faso sat there scratching his chin as if he didn’t believe a word of it. Over the last few days, he’d started to grow a bit of stubble, which I must say suited him a little better than that clean baby-faced look he liked to tout.

  “Baloney, baloney,” he said.

  “But you suspect it to be true,” the biologist opposite me said.

  “What I know,” Faso said, and he looked back at the rucksacks that the guides had propped up against the back wall of the cavern, just underneath the magical text, “is that I need to fix Ratter to give us a chance of getting out of this situation alive.”

  He placed his bowl on the floor walked over to the rucksacks, his posture in a little bit of a slump. He seemed to know exactly which one Ratter had been placed in, despite the fact that they all looked completely the same, or at least to me. He opened the pack, took hold of Ratter, splayed the six-legged automaton out on the floor, and then took hold of a screwdriver that he’d placed inside Ratter’s hatch. With this, he started to work at fixing the automaton.

  Me, the three elder men, and the tribal chief watched him while the other tribespeople stood back inspecting their fingernails and picking at the dirt underneath them with toothpicks.

  “It’s the dragonseer line that Faso gets his intelligence from,” the man on the left told me. “The males lost their abilities to communicate with dragons, but instead gained superior intellect, and an astounding ability to focus on the most intricate of details.”

  I smiled. “I wouldn’t tell him that. Unless you want to inflate his ego to the size of an airship’s balloon.”

  “On the contrary,” the man said. “I think it might settle him a bit to begin to accept this. The reason that he behaves the way he does is that he doesn’t truly trust his abilities. Call it imposter syndrome, if you like.”

  “But he’s always talking about how great he is.”

  “Because he seeks validation for that fact. If he truly believed it, he wouldn’t have a need to say it to anyone.”

  I nodded. It made a lot of sense in a way, and it made me see the man in a new light, and perhaps even have a little sympathy for his behaviour. I mean, Faso had shown many moments of genius and had saved many lives through them. Maybe I was a little harsh on him sometimes, but he just tended to rub me up the wrong way.

  My bowl was now empty, so I placed it down on the floor. “So where do I come into all this?”

  “What do you mean?” the biologist replied.

  “I mean, I have dragonseer blood and all that. But I wasn’t born from a dragonseer’s womb. So, I can never be as great as a dragonseer, right?”

  “There’s no evidence to suggest that. Your first set of genes were most likely dominant over those of your second.”

  And I thought back to my own mother, the one I’d grown up with, not the other one who had died before she could even give birth to me. If it wasn’t for Doctor Forsolano’s genius, and his idea to artificially plant me into Versalina Wells’ womb using some proprietary technology, then I would never have been born in the first place. “So you’re telling me I have no traits of my mother at all?” Surely, I at least had her curly blond hair.

  “I’d need to take blood samples of both you and your mother to know exactly.” The biologist said. “Maybe we could travel back together once you get Taka back and work it all out?”

  I nodded. “This is a lot to take in. But yes, I’d like you to run the tests once we get out of here.” And I swallowed back the thoughts that we might not. I had to believe that we would, even though I didn’t have a clue what we were up against.

  “Good,” the biologist said. And he pointed over to one of the mattresses. “Now, you should get some rest. For we rise just before dawn to climb before the sun rises.”

  “You’re coming with us?”

  “Why not?” the linguist said and nodded over at the tribespeople. “Surely, it would be good to have someone to translate the language.”

  He had a point. Although I did remember how that the tribal chief had become much more eloquent after drinking Exalmpora. Or maybe that had been just my imagination. Perhaps, along with other traits, Exalmpora could traverse across languages. I felt at my skin, noticing the rougher texture than before. I’d forgotten to bring moisturiser up with me, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to use it to get rid of this scaly feel. And then, when I bent down to inspect my ankles, I noticed that the bites from earlier that day had vanished far faster than they should have done. Something was changing about my physiology, and I didn’t like it one bit.

  At that point, I noticed we were missing someone. Faso, the three academics, and the seven tribespeople were here, but there was no sign of Lieutenant Wiggea. I thought I’d go for a little walk to see if I could find him. And I only needed to turn the corner along the path from which we’d arrived here to find him.

  He stood at the edge of the precipice, staring out at the brilliant dancing display of fire in the chasm below. I walked over to accompany him, feeling the magnificent heat rising from the lake as I approached.

  “Lieutenant,” I said and stood next to him.

  “Maam…” He turned to look at me, a smile on his face and his expression confident and relaxed.

  “You know, I just had the most fascinating conversation. You know, these three older men have worked with Gerhaun and have met her before. Oh, and there’s porridge.”

  Wiggea looked over his shoulder towards the alcove. “Thanks, I’ll get some later. And I think I remember seeing them around when I first started as a rookie soldier. Gerhaun left me instructions to leave you alone should you encounter them on your journey. She told me that they had secret knowledge that could help you learn a little more about yourself.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You knew about this Wiggea? And you didn’t think to tell me?”

  “Gerhaun thought it unlikely that we’d encounter them, Maam. There was only a tiny chance we’d be in exactly the same location as them. East Cadigan Island is a big place.”

  That made me worry a little. Colas had said only to bring two escorts up, no more. “They want to accompany us. Do you think that’s okay?”

  “I can’t imagine Captain Colas would consider them much threat, Maam. Although, in all honesty, I don’t know the man. They seem to know the mountain and might be useful as extra guides, but I’m not sure they should come all the way to the top.”

  “But Colas is okay for the guides to accompany us?”

  Wiggea shook his head. “I don’t know, Maam,” and he turned to look back at the raging lava below.

  I looked down as well, marvelling at the patterns the flares made as they leapt across the fiery lake, like fish flopping out of water.

  “You know, Maam,” Wiggea said without turning around. “For a moment, with that battle with the panther, I thought we’d lost you. I’d swore to Gerhaun on my own life that I’d protect you, and you were so close to falling over the edge.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry. I guess I took an uncalculated risk.”

  “Well, maybe the decision was rather rash. But you won in the end. I just felt… I mean, we lost Sukina, Maam. And I lost Hastina before her… I didn’t want to lose you too.”

  I shrugged. “I guess I’m the last dragonseer.”

  “If we can’t retrieve Taka, yes.” And I was actually happy to hear that someone else believed in Taka’s abilities as a dragonseer. But something told me Wiggea wasn’t only just concerned about the fate of the dragonseer lineage. This seemed like something much more personal. Almost as if he’d taken a liking to me.

  And to be honest, I’d taken a bit of a liking to him as well. So, I reached out, and I took his hand. I guess it was worth te
sting if there was anything there. He looked down, a startled expression on his face. But he didn’t retract his arm. “Maam?” he said.

  “Just forget about your duty for a moment, Lieutenant. Let’s just admire the view.”

  He turned back to the lava pit. His hand was dry and warm. Meanwhile, mine must have been so clammy with the heat coming off the lava pit adding to the humidity. How was he not sweating up here? Soldier’s training perhaps. But then he had said that he had grown up in a desert climate.

  Wiggea said nothing, so I thought it best to break the silence. I glanced over my shoulder a moment to check Faso wasn’t spying on us. I could just imagine him breaking an intimate private moment between my loyal lieutenant and I.

  “You know, Lieutenant Wiggea…”

  “You can call me Rastano under the circumstances, Maam.”

  I smiled. I’d been so caught up in the rules of Fortress Gerhaun, following military procedures, I’d never even thought to call Wiggea by his first name. “Very well. Rastano when we hold hands and Lieutenant Wiggea when we’re on duty.”

  “Yes, Maam,” he said. And he scratched the back of his neck with his other hand.

  “Do you feel uncomfortable, Rastano?”

  He blushed a little, still staring away from me and out at the lava. “A little. I’m sorry, I don’t want to offend you. It’s just, you’re my…” He hesitated.

  “What? Your superior.”

  “Yes, Maam.”

  “Please. If I’m going to call you Rastano, then remember I’m called Pontopa.”

  “Pontopa…”

  “Lieut – I mean Rastano. Look at me a moment.”

  He turned his head towards me, a nervous tic shaking the corner of his lip.

  “You’re a brave man. Kind, sensitive, honest, loyal. I’ve admired you since the very moment we met.”

  “I admire you too, Maam… Everything except your sparring abilities. But you are getting better…” He had a cocky smile across his face.

  I laughed. “I guess you had it tough with your sergeant too when you first started training?”

  “I did, Maam, I mean Pontopa.” And I found myself surprised for a moment that his first superior was her. But then I why should I be? There were plenty of women in Gerhaun’s forces, many of them with high ranks.