Dragon Speaker

by Mugdan Elana A.

  At one point something cold wrapped around him and purple light shone through his senseless state. That meant his eyes were glowing. The cold enveloped his body and swallowed him whole.

  When he re-emerged into warmth, the glow faded. Whatever necromagical spell had caused the reaction had been dropped or unraveled. The feverish effects of the evasdrin intensified. He lapsed into true unconsciousness.

  Later—how long, he couldn’t say, for he had lost all sense of time—he awoke to a pain in the smallest finger of his left forepaw. The pain grew, spreading from his phalanx, into his arm, through his chest, past his wing joint and neck, until it reached his brain.

  Thorion’s eyes snapped open and everything came into focus. Smoldering coals hung above him in a metal basin, illuminating a dark room. The gray stone walls were slick with trickles of water draining from somewhere above. He was lying on a cold slab of rock. He tried to rise but couldn’t move. Glancing left and right, he saw that he was muzzled and bound with iron shackles and chains.

  With a whisper of booted footfalls, two human men came into view. They wore headpieces inset with sheets of glass to cover their faces. White cloths hung over their torsos, covering their garments, and they each held metal instruments. One was a knife, the other was a mystery.

  Thorion attempted to sift through his racial memories—thoughts and information passed down from his ancestors—to identify the tool, but he was unable to access the collective consciousness of the dragons. His brain wasn’t working the way it should.

  Was that a side effect of the poison, or something else?

  “It’s awake.” One man elbowed the other and pointed at Thorion.

  “It’s not moving,” said his companion. “And it’s tied pretty tight.” He had a hooked nose that reminded Thorion of a hawk’s beak, and his beady eyes were narrowed, possibly with apprehension. If Thorion had had the opportunity to be around more humans, he might have been able to identify their expressions more accurately.

  “Yeah, well . . . let’s hurry,” said the first man, whose face was beading with sweat beneath his glass visor—that was a side effect of anxiety, wasn’t it? “What else does Tanthflame want?”

  “Blood’s the most important thing,” the hawk-nosed man replied. Thorion couldn’t understand what they were saying, but their words were hurried and urgent. “We can harvest some of its parts, so long as we keep it alive and mostly in working order. Scales are safe, so are the claws.”

  “How about the teeth?” said the other. “Some stories say if you plant dragon teeth in the ground you can grow an army of warriors.” That earned him a smack upside the head from the hawk-nosed man. “Ow! What’d you do that for?”

  “Because you’re an idiot. Hold the claw so I can get at it this time.”

  With a scowl, the sweaty man stepped closer to Thorion, raising his metal instrument. He pulled on the base of the tool and it hinged open at its middle, creating a space between the barbed ends. He bent and placed the ends on the tip of Thorion’s littlest finger, the one that had pained him. The tool tightened around the pearly claw as the human squeezed the ends of the instrument together. Then he pulled.

  Pain stabbed through Thorion’s arm again. He could see that the base of his claw, where bone met flesh, was shredded and bloody. The hawk-nosed man raised his knife and began sawing at it.

  Agony exploded in Thorion’s mind. He tried to yank his paw away but the iron shackle around his wrist kept him firmly in place, bolted to the table. He wriggled his body in a vain attempt to escape. Now that he was more alert, he could feel that his neck was shackled in two places. His hind legs and tail were clamped down and his wings were tethered.

  “Almost there,” the hawk-nosed man grunted.

  One of Thorion’s tendons snapped. He gave a violent lurch in response. He felt something in his belly, a strange coldness accompanied by a stinging throb. It was more pervasive than nausea, for it was spreading to his heart and lungs, making his breath come in short, quick gasps. All his muscles tensed. Was there more poison on the knife?

  No . . . there was a word for this feeling. Keriya had told him in the fen.

  Frightened.

  A low growl worked its way through his throat. It rose in pitch until it was a shrill, piercing cry, a long note muffled by the iron locked around his snout. He shook his head, rattling the chains that held him in place.

  “He’s going mad,” said the sweaty man, cringing away from Thorion’s fettered thrashing.

  “I’m nearly done. Just yank it out!”

  There was a new pain now, a grating, twisting pain as the sweaty man gave a mighty wrench and the talon came loose. Dark purple blood spurted from Thorion’s claw socket and spattered on the humans’ white robes, sizzling with heat.

  “Don’t waste it!” the hawk-nosed man cried, stooping and grabbing a glass jar from under the table. He wedged it beneath the bleeding paw, collecting the draining fluid.

  Another growl rose from Thorion. He wanted to rip through his iron binds and sink his fangs into the humans. He recalled the image he’d glimpsed in Keriya’s mind, the picture of Doru, Blackwater, and Shosu torn to pieces, and realized he wanted the same fate to befall these two men. He wanted to see them bleed. He wanted to see them die.

  Thorion drummed his fingers against the glass jar, jolting it from the hawk-nosed man’s grasp. It fell to the floor and shattered.

  “Gods damn it!” the human yelped.

  Thorion concentrated all his energy in his left arm. With an almighty tug, he broke free from the iron manacle. His movement toppled another glass jar, which had been standing outside of his view near the base of his neck. It rolled away, dribbling a thin trail of his precious blood along the table before falling and breaking. They had probably sliced the soft skin of his jawline to gather more.

  He lashed at the men with his free paw.

  “Go get some tronkin’ evasdrin,” cried the hawk-nosed man. The two men sprinted for a staircase in the far corner of the room, pushing each other in their haste to flee, and vanished through a door at the top of the steps.

  Thorion let a long breath hiss from between his fangs and lowered his maimed hand. The men would return. They would hurt him again. For as long as humans had existed, they had coveted power. And for as long as dragons had been the most powerful creatures in the world, humans had devised ways to take it from them.

  The flesh-rats—awful, stinking, un-armored monsters that they were—had always been innovative and resilient. In terms of intelligence, brute strength, and wielding force, they could never compete with dragons. Their power lay in their creativity. They had imagined instruments of torture to make up for their lack of claws and fangs, and they had cultivated poisons to tame superior wielders. They were so small, so foolish-looking, yet they had bent metal and stone to their will.

  Now they had bent a dragon to their will, too. Thorion realized he was going to die here, lost, alone, and frightened. He squeezed his eyes shut. This . . . what was this?

  Despair.

  The enervating emotion seeped into his bones, causing his muscles to relax and his heart to grow heavy. He recognized its touch, though it had never smothered him like this. He’d felt its dull, icy ache every time Keriya had doubted the validity—or the outcome—of her quest.

  For no apparent reason, a memory came to Thorion. It was a vision of the water slug in the dwarf tunnels. Though defenseless, Keriya had stood up to it. She had fought against all odds. She didn’t know how not to fight.

  She had despaired many a time, but her despair was always eclipsed by something stronger. It was soft enough to bring comfort, yet sharp enough to strengthen mind, muscle, and spirit: determination. The unquenchable thirst to succeed, no matter what obstacles stood in her way.

  Thorion was not alone. Somewhere out there, Keriya was fighting for him. He knew it, he could feel it.r />
  His nostrils flared as he tapped into the well of determination that had, without him realizing it, entwined itself within his soul. He gathered his wits, strained against his bindings, and cast his thoughts wide to search for Keriya.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “You are never as alone as you believe.”

  ~ Ishiro Vahari, Third Age

 

  From far away, Keriya heard someone calling her name.

 

  Who’s that? she wondered groggily.

  the voice replied to her private thought. Her attention sharpened. He was still alive!

  he observed, examining her mind.

  she insisted, though it was foolish to argue when he could see into her head.

  thought Thorion, sending her some of the happy images she had given him: her first sight of Allentria; the handsome prince charming she had invented for herself; adventuring in the Felwood with Fletcher when they’d been young, when the worst problem in her life had been Penelope Sanvire.

  She shaped the thought with intent and sent it with force. The mere touch of Thorion’s mind was giving her strength.

  he admitted, and she glimpsed turmoil through a crack in his mental strength.

  How she wished she’d had the courage to refuse Aldelphia’s quest. She had done the exact opposite of what Shivnath had wanted: she had dragged Thorion into mortal danger.

  At the mention of darksalm, Thorion’s thoughts became frenzied.

  she asked.

 

  Dread rippled through Keriya’s body.

 

  she promised.

  Time for her to wake up. Time to be a hero.

  She came-to, only to discover that she was tied up in a corner of Tanthflame’s chambers. She was back-to-back with Roxanne and facing the wall. By the sounds of things, there were guards on the far side of the room. Fletcher was bound next to her. His eyes brimmed with tears the moment he noticed she was awake.

  “Keriya, I’m sorry. I wanted to help Thorion, but there was nothing I could do.”

  Keriya shook her head. This wasn’t the time for apologies or arguments. They had bigger worries. She hurriedly recounted what Thorion had told her about darksalm.

  Suddenly Fletcher was all business. “Right. We’re not tied too tightly.” He fiddled with the rope knotted around his wrists. “If I can get out, then—ow!”

  “Stay still,” someone said from across the room.

  Fletcher yelped as a whip of solidified air, wielded by one of the guards, lashed his face. He scrunched his nose against the pain and clenched his jaw. Glancing at Keriya, he mouthed the words, ‘I’ll work on escaping.’

  “Even if we get free, we have to get past them,” she whispered, tilting her head to indicate the guards.

  “They’ve been drinking,” Effrax muttered from Keriya’s other side. “We could wait until they’re too inebriated to wield against us.”

  “You want to leave our fate to a chance like that?”

  “That’s it,” growled a guard. Keriya felt the vibrations of his footfalls as he stumped toward them. “You wanna keep makin’ noise? I’ll give you somethin’ to make noise about.”

  There was laughter in the background. The other men were approaching, looking to share in the fun. Roxanne struggled against Keriya, and there was a grunt of pain that seemed to indicate the taller girl had kicked one of their captors. Keriya craned her neck around to see what was happening.

  “Here’s a feisty one,” said a broad-shouldered Smarlindian, massaging his shin. “We like fighters, don’t we lads?”

  He unsheathed a blade from his belt. At first Keriya thought he meant to hurt Roxanne, but he merely cut the rope that bound them. The ghostly touch of an invisible air spell replaced it, confining Keriya, Fletcher, and Effrax once more.

  “Let me go!” Roxanne’s weight against Keriya vanished as the men pulled her away.

  “Shut your pretty little mouth,” said the Smarlindian, his voice full of menace. “Or don’t. We might have some use for it, eh?” His cohorts chuckled darkly.

  “Leave her alone,” Keriya cried. She kicked at the wooden wall behind her, but all that did was make her feet hurt.

  Shivnath, help! she prayed. Let me use your powers!

  The wall splintered with a loud crack. Keriya froze mid-kick, gawping at the damage. Had she done that?

  There was another cracking noise and Keriya flinched as the wall exploded inward, showering her with debris. Wooden boards split apart and fractures fanned across the floorboards. The air-threads around her dissolved and she scrambled upright.

  Roxanne stood alone in the middle of the room, trembling head-to-toe. The guards lay at her feet, knocked unconscious by heavy pieces of the wall—the evasdrin had finally worn off.

  Keriya stared at the wreckage. Erasmus had always said it would take a powerful wielder to manipulate the magicthreads in deadwood. Maybe Roxanne was stronger than any of them had given her credit for.

  Fletcher had managed to free himself from the rope that bound his hands. He helped untie the cords around Keriya and Effrax’s wrists.

  “Right,” said Effrax, rising with a groan. “If we’re all alive, let’s find Thorion.”

  “What about the darksalm?” said Fletcher.

  “They won’t have it here,” said Roxanne. Her face was ashen, though whether that was because she’d overextended herself wielding the wood or because she was afraid, Keriya didn’t know. “Didn’t what’s-his-eyes say something about the palace? They’re planning to do it at the palace.”

  “No,” said Effrax. “Tanthflame said he needed an alibi.”

  “They brought Thorion to the waterfront,” Fletcher reminded them. “They’re probably keeping him wherever the darksalm is. That means we’ll be facing a ton of guards, and we won’t be able to fight them all.”

  “What do you propose we do?” asked Effrax. Fletcher gazed around for inspiration, and his eyes fell on the black-robed men on the floor.

  “I think I have an idea.”

  A short while later, Keriya and Roxanne were marched out of the old house with their hands tied behind their backs, escorted by two cloaked, hooded guards. A group of Imperials barred their way, standing watch at the front door.

  “Those prisoners are supposed to stay here,” said the foreman, drawing his sword.

  “Stand down, soldier,” said Roxanne’s guard. “Commander-General Tanthflame sent word to move these two and infect them with the darksalm.”

  None of the soldiers recognized Effrax’s voice, and the hooded cape he’d stolen from the Smarlindian hid his face.

  “Everything alright in there?” asked another guard. “We heard a disturbance.”

  “If everything wasn’t alright, do you think we’d be moving them?” Effrax snapped.

  “Weren’t there four of them?” said the first man. “What happened t
o the others? The fire wielder and that smallish one?”

  Keriya’s guard made an insulted sound under his hood. Fletcher disliked anyone commenting on his height.

  Effrax flicked a careless hand. “We left them. They’re not as important as the rheenar.”

  On cue, Keriya looked up so the Imperials could see her eyes. That did the trick. They stood aside, allowing Effrax and Fletcher to shepherd Keriya and Roxanne past.

  As soon as they rounded the far corner of the street, the girls shucked off the ropes they’d held around their wrists and the four of them broke into a run.

  “Which way is the waterfront?” Keriya panted.

  Effrax’s eyes lit up. “Wait—The Waterfront! I bet they’re talking about the inn, not the lakeshore. Come on, it’s on the border of the upper district.”

  He wheeled sharply and pelted down a twisty alleyway. As Keriya followed him through deserted corridors and across rickety bridges, she cast her mind out for Thorion in an attempt to pinpoint his location.

  His thoughts were stronger now. He was working to free himself, but still in considerable pain. The iron shackles around his legs burned his scales. Something was wrong with his left front paw.

  he thought. Indeed, they rounded a corner and saw a decrepit inn sitting in a pool of flickering light cast by a lone street lamp. Its windows were shuttered, but the rotted wooden door, recessed in the wall to create handy shadows in which people could hide, was open. Perhaps this was an attempt to be inviting, though Keriya didn’t think she’d ever seen a more uninviting building in her life.

  “This is it,” Effrax whispered, slowing to a walk.

  “You come here voluntarily?” asked Fletcher, pulling a face.

  “They serve the best rice ale in the empire. Plus, there’s always a game of dice to be had, and it’s easier to cheat if you’re playing against drunkards.”

  “You’re just a model citizen, aren’t you?” muttered Roxanne.