Samurai

by Jason Hightman

  Aldric pushed past Simon, walking right through the flames. As the Serpent kicked at him with its great clawed feet, Aldric wrestled it down amid the flames, and he slammed his hand upon its heart. It took many tries, the Serpent slithering out of the Knight’s grasp over and over again, but at last the Creature stopped shaking, and Simon knew Aldric was reciting the words of the deathspell.

  Aldric stumbled back.

  The colorful tendrils of the Dragon, like wispy tentacles, pulled in and closed around its body, and caught fire…and the beast burned away into red ash that blew over Aldric and into Simon’s eyes.

  The Ashlover Dragon was dead.

  “Is anyone in there?” Simon yelled into the store.

  “If they were, they’re dead,” said Aldric, but up the street, Simon could see Emily’s father rushing from the post office. He’d missed the danger.

  “It’s an arsonist,” Simon yelled to him, climbing onto his horse. “There’s smoke—I think our house might have been hit, too!” Simon turned and rode with Aldric out of town, ignoring the bewildered passersby.

  Emily is safe at school, Simon thought with relief.

  But his own house was burning.

  By the time he and Aldric returned, Alaythia had drawn a massive black storm cloud to the house, and the resulting rainfall had, for the most part, ended the fire. But the castle was blackened, and much of its interior had been gutted.

  What Simon considered home was now an ugly memento of a Dragon’s evil.

  Chapter 6

  “HOW A DRAGON TRACKS ITS PREY

  “HOW DID IT KNOW?”

  Sitting at the largest of the Old Soldier Café’s tables, Alaythia twirled a tea bag in her mug, and repeated the question. “How did the Dragon find us? There’s nobody to give that information away. We haven’t told anyone, and we’d know if we were followed—we’re always incredibly careful.”

  Aldric said nothing, tapping the table nervously.

  “All my comic books,” said Simon, “my games, everything’s torched…. It was so hot it even melted all my metal soldier figures. I’ve had those since I was a little kid.”

  “None of those things matter,” said Aldric quietly.

  “They matter to me,” Simon said firmly.

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Aldric, sympathetically. “That isn’t our home anymore. It can’t be. If one Dragon can find us, then many can.”

  Simon took his remarks like a lashing. It hadn’t occurred to him how bad the situation was.

  “Maybe not,” said Alaythia, seeing how Simon felt. “If we can figure out how it found us, maybe we can take steps to make ourselves safe again—to undo the problem.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause. “There is a way,” Aldric said, avoiding her eyes. “It’s not done very often. There are dangers to it. All kinds of dangers.”

  “What are you getting at?” Alaythia asked.

  “The skull,” answered Aldric. “If it survived the blast, even just shards of it could provide answers to these questions. If you, as a Magician, were to take hold of the bones of this Dragon, its dying spirit could enter you, and it’s possible you might glimpse the Serpent’s last thoughts before the spirit faded completely. But I don’t think there was anything left of the beast.”

  They needed to find out. Simon welcomed the chance to get to Emily’s shop, and he was curious to see her father’s reaction to him. While at the café, Alaythia said she had grown calm enough to cast a spell on the street, so that all those who had seen Simon and Aldric in battle gear would forget what they’d seen.

  “You can do that?” Simon had asked.

  “Don’t be too optimistic, okay? It’s magic, but it’s not magic. The memories will be gone, but the suspicion will remain,” Alaythia said. “You may get people looking at you funny or asking questions for a long time.”

  “It’s not as if they think we’re an average, ordinary family as it is,” Simon muttered.

  A few minutes later, they were standing in the cinders before the novelty shop. Simon had seen the horror of fire before. But never in his hometown. He hadn’t realized until now the Dragons could reach so deeply into his life.

  Emily’s father was standing nearby, talking with a worried neighbor, and then her mother’s car pulled up, and Emily got out and wandered over to him, looking dazed. “My father told me what happened,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  Simon looked at her and tried to find the right words.

  He said he saw someone throw a match and run.

  He and Aldric gave everyone the same story: They didn’t get a good look at the guy, whoever he was; he was small, maybe even a kid, someone who had done this randomly. But there were no real suspects as far as the police were concerned.

  Alaythia, however, had found evidence of the real arsonist.

  As Simon was being questioned, he saw Alaythia tap Aldric on the shoulder, and they moved away from the police officers. Simon saw her showing Aldric a small shard of bone she had taken from the ashes of the shop.

  It was all that remained of the beast.

  “This will not be pleasant,” Aldric told her, and he placed the skull shard back in her hands, and closed her fingers over it. Simon noticed how much older his father’s hands looked against the smooth ivory of Alaythia’s. The skull bones of the Dragon were the most useful of any fragment, but his father’s seriousness made Simon feel less than fortunate. In the ruins of the castle house tower, candlelight flickered around them, and the moon pierced the uncovered window.

  Aldric had decided to return to the castle, because it was dangerous to try this experiment anywhere else, and, after all, there was nothing left to ruin there.

  Alaythia’s face took on a deathly color almost immediately, and she closed her eyes.

  “You will be able to see into the Creature’s mind,” Aldric told her, “its most angry, sad, or deeply held memories. You will not like what you see. You may witness things you have never imagined before. Thousands of murders may pass before your eyes, and you may see them all in terrible detail.”

  There was no mistaking the skull bone as anything else. It bore red, vein-like patterns, but Simon had never understood until now what those patterns might contain.

  Simon reached out and touched Alaythia’s arm, but Aldric moved his hand away gently. “The Dragon’s spirit might enter you, Simon,” said Aldric. “I do not think you would like that.”

  The darkness in his voice convinced Simon immediately, and he backed up against the stone wall to feel safer.

  “Be careful, Alaythia,” Aldric whispered. “Its spirit may want to toy with you before it vanishes from life completely….”

  Alaythia had gone into a trance, and now she began to whisper the ancient language of magic. For an instant, her young face looked weathered with age, then returned to normal, but her voice changed as she chanted. Soon the room filled with two voices coming out of her, one of them horrible and Serpentine. Alaythia began to tremble and Simon saw Aldric tighten his jaw.

  Then she quieted, and fell back into sleep, her hands still holding the shard.

  While Alaythia slumbered, Simon roamed the burned castle, his nose filled with the musty smell of a killed fire. Because of the recent rainfall, the ground was mush and mud beneath his feet, and as he ran his hand over the blackened walls, Simon counted one blessing: that Aldric kept most of his important belongings on his ship.

  The few photographs of Simon’s mother were kept in Aldric’s stateroom onboard, hidden in a cabinet. She’d been killed by the White Dragon before Simon knew her, so those mementos were things he couldn’t replace. He didn’t have memories of his mother; as a young child, he’d been sent to boarding school for safekeeping from the Dragons. Those photographs were all that connected him to her.

  A rustling came from the darkness ahead, and Simon clutched his flashlight tight.

  Something was up there.

  Simon didn’t move. He was alone, his father ou
t of earshot in the next wing. It would be impossible to get to him fast if Simon was under attack. He’d have to face this alone.

  If it was an assassin, it wasn’t being quiet. It was moving in the muck in the blackness ahead, then suddenly, it pounced into a puddle in the hallway, spattering water at Simon, and an animal’s eyes gleamed in the moonlight.

  “Fenwick.”

  The fox smacked his lips and then gave something like a grin. Simon allowed himself to breathe.

  “What are you doing here?”

  The fox trotted through the darkened hallway and leapt to a low table that had survived the blaze, and Simon, familiar with this routine, looked straight at the animal’s eyes, which slowly darkened.

  The fox wriggled its snout at him, and Simon felt a tickling in his head as if whiskers had brushed over his brain, and then Fenwick held its mouth open, as if its breath held magic. And it did, Simon had learned.

  He had, over time, earned the animal’s trust enough to be rewarded with an old bit of mother’s magic, a spell she’d left on him: Fenwick brought him things he had heard.

  First, Simon saw only darkness, and heard a group of voices, all of them boys, kids he knew from the Lighthouse School. Fenwick had eavesdropped on them, and captured their conversation in the wind, pulling it into his mouth.

  Now Simon saw them in his mind, talking about him:

  “Weird guy…”

  “Always by himself when I see him…”

  “What’s so weird about him? He’s just home schooled.”

  “You ever know anybody home schooled? It means their parents are kinda out of it.”

  “I’m not saying that, but I see him out there practicing with, like, a steel lance, riding his horse. It’s totally bizarre, and if you get close, his dad chases you away from their house.”

  “His dad is weird.”

  “That lady isn’t weird. Is that his mom?”

  “No, she’s too young…. I think she might be a stepmom, or something. She’s really nice. I’ve talked to her a few times in town. If it weren’t for her, I’d think that place he lives in was a nuthouse.”

  “He always liked playing with fire when he went to school here,” said one boy.

  Another said, “He was always building bonfires out on the beach…. It’s totally obvious he was the one who set fire to the joke shop, ’cause that girl who works there said she didn’t want to see him anymore.”

  Simon groaned. Now he was the prime suspect in town for the fire that had ruined his home. Life was interesting. Very interesting.

  He patted the fox, wondering if Fenwick felt sorry for him.

  He would have felt sorry for himself—but a scream interrupted his thoughts.

  Alaythia.

  What Alaythia saw with her dream-eyes was not a world anyone would seek out. For the longest hour she’d ever known, she had experienced life, or pieces of it anyway, as a female Pyrothrax from Brazil, the Ashlover Serpent.

  Alaythia saw herself burning the houses of the poor throughout South America; she saw herself consuming lost children, runaways on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, during crazed celebrations in the night. She heard the strange music in the Serpent’s head and contemplated the moon in the jungle with such love she was surely insane.

  When the Ashlover burned bones and flesh, Alaythia felt the fire leave her mouth, and it felt sweet in her throat, like ambrosia, like candy, like rainwater after a desert journey. The flames gave her visions and a sense of giddy joy, every time a different taste than the last.

  The memories were a clash of events, a jumble. Alaythia would see one thing happen, then another, without knowing when they had happened, but among all these events she could hear a calling, a cry, a memory of a sound in the Serpent’s head.

  The Ashlover Serpent had been drawn to New England, called there, pulled by a humming in its ears, by a force, a need, and it had followed the sound all the way through South America, north through Mexico, and up the ragged North American coast to Ebony Hollow. The Serpent had been plagued with terrible dreams. It had needed to stop these nightmarish visions. And so it had gone. It had gone to the source: the castle home of the St. Georges…and to Alaythia.

  Alaythia’s love for Aldric had sent a sound and a light and a tremor into the world that she could not control; it was true of all Magicians who fell in love with Dragonhunters. All Magicians were women, and from the Old Ages, it was always a terrible risk for them to fall in love with the Knights they protected. The Dragons could feel this power emanating from the Magician and could track it. It was as simple as following a beacon of light.

  The Ashlover Dragon had come for Alaythia.

  More would come now.

  Alaythia knew she would have to leave this house.

  Chapter 7

  HUNTING A MASTER OF DRAGONS

  “THERE IS NO OTHER way,” Alaythia’s note read. “The Serpents can find us wherever we go, they can catch the scent of our emotions the way blood in the water draws a shark. I cannot hide my feelings for you, Aldric, or for that matter, for Simon. I don’t know how to bury them. I cannot stop feeling.”

  Simon sat at the table in the dim early light, as Aldric paced the ruined kitchen.

  “Dreamer,” Aldric muttered. An insult, from his tone.

  Barely awake, Simon ran a hand through his hair and stared at the letter again. He’d seen it first, but he still couldn’t quite believe it, and he found himself reading aloud in a whisper, “If there is a magic I can learn that will disguise my feelings, to hide them so no Serpent can find us, I do not know what it is. The hope I have is that I can find the Chinese Black Dragon, and bargain with him for help. He is no ordinary Dragon, and if he helped us once, perhaps he will again. Forgive me for leaving. With all of my love…Alaythia.”

  “We’ve tried that, Alaythia,” grumbled Aldric, speaking to the letter as if she could hear him. “We weren’t able to find him, what’s different now?”

  “Maybe she saw something in her dream,” said Simon, quietly remembering her expression in the trance. “Something from the dead Serpent that gave her a clue about where the Black Dragon went.”

  “Then why didn’t she tell us? We could’ve helped her.”

  “Well, I guess she doesn’t think so. I mean, anywhere she goes with us, the Dragons sense exactly where she is,” Simon protested.

  “You’re being pretty bloody reasonable, aren’t you?”

  “You think I like this?”

  “Why didn’t you see this coming?”

  “If you didn’t see it, how am I supposed to know what’s going on in her head?”

  “You’re closer to her,” grumbled Aldric, and Simon felt himself turning red.

  “Everything was going fine, we had it all set right, didn’t we?” Aldric muttered on. “It was all working. We could’ve got our minds round this together…”

  “What’re you talking about?” said Simon, getting angry now. “Everything’s back the way it used to be. You get to yell and scream at me, and there’s no one to tell you you’re wrong. There’s nobody here on my side.”

  “I’m on your side.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You want to have a row right now? Fine. But you can’t blame everything on me. You’d like to, wouldn’t you?”

  I’d like you to shut up, Simon was thinking.

  “You’ve got nobody here on your side? You’re a loner, Simon; you like being alone. You don’t have friends, and you want it that way. Stop blaming me for every little thing in your life, for your own good.”

  Aldric’s eyes hardened and Simon cowered inside as his father went on. “I know what you’re thinking. Why don’t you say it outright, then? I drove her away, is that it?”

  Simon stared back. “Not on purpose, but I think, yeah, you wanted her out of here. Everything was just getting way too normal for you to stand it.”

  “That’s a bunch of rot. Tell me where the note says anything like that,” Aldric retorted. �
�She was happy. I gave her a good place to hone her talents. I was always here for her.”

  “You’re so here for her, she’s not here.”

  “Well, I’m going to get her back.”

  Silence. It took Simon a second. “We’re going to go after her?”

  Aldric fished around for his pipe on the charred table. “I don’t see any other way,” he said. “She’s the only Magician on Earth. We need her to forge our weapons, give us help. Lord knows we need all of it we can get.”

  Aldric was tapping his pipe on his teeth the way he did when he was deep in thought, a habit that always annoyed Simon. “But figuring where to start won’t be easy,” Aldric said, fumbling for a plan. “She could be anywhere. The Black Dragon hasn’t been seen since London. And Alaythia has a head start on us.”

  “A big head start,” said Simon, looking at the clock on the wall. It had a small cutout for the date in its face, and if the clock was right, Alaythia had left a bit of spellchant behind. “We’ve been asleep for three days.”

  “What?” Aldric followed Simon’s gaze to the clock. Alaythia had put a spell on them that kept them out of commission long enough for her to get anywhere in the world.

  “I thought I felt stiff when I woke up,” said Simon, “I thought it was ’cause I had to sleep on the floor.”

  Aldric made a sound at the pit of his throat like some kind of angry animal. “That deceptive little genius.”

  The Ship with No Name set sail as quickly as possible, loaded with every possible weapon, device, scroll, and book they could salvage from the castle. Simon had ridden to Emily’s house for a fast good-bye, but she had acted strangely, seeming not to trust him, and he feared the rumor that he was the fire-starter might have gotten to her.

  But when he looked back, he could see her in the doorway, still watching him go, and he could not read her expression.