Shadow Dragon

by Marc Secchia

  “My pate itches at the proximity of a Dragon’s fangs,” he returned. “What do you see, my keen-eyed reptilian beauty?”

  “All is still …” Zuziana scanned the spires again. A light dawn mist wreathed the dark, vine-festooned spires and the bridges between the mystical spires. Then, movement caught her eye. “Wait. Dragonships on the move–three of them. No, five.”

  “It was inevitable,” said Darron, raising his fist to signal the fleet.

  The Azure Dragoness distinctly heard the furnace doors squeak open inside the Dragonship beneath her feet. The tempo of the engines quickened, pouring power into the six great turbines. However, unlike a Dragon, the Dragonships made headway reluctantly, their great weight and volume rendering them sluggish in the air.

  Commander Darron elbowed Zip sharply in the flank. “How do you best like your Dragonships served, Lady Dragon?”

  “Lightly toasted,” she grinned, thinking that if she’d been in her Human form, the swing of his armoured elbow would have knocked her right off the Dragonship.

  “Good,” said the Commander. “Go warm up your toasting irons.”

  Ri’arion sliced his hard-edged hand through the air as though he wished he could crush the fingers of Ferial by force of will alone. “Let’s ride.”

  The Nameless Man gathered his power about him as if it were a swirling robe, mounting up with a series of sure leaps. Her Rider’s weight settled in the saddle. Zuziana, twizzling her neck, took in his frown of fierce concentration. Roaring rajals. There would be fire snorting from his nostrils next.

  “We’ll test the mind-meld, Zip,” he announced briskly.

  Zip nodded. “I’m ready.”

  “Remember, we need to disable those Dragonships if possible. No triple lightning-strikes. I could not levitate you out of the Cloudlands.”

  Zip swallowed a lump in her throat. An unexpected chink in his mental armour had revealed his true fear. A Dragon-sized chink. And now the serene monk-face was firmly back in place, his hands checking saddle straps and weapons, his mouth shaping words of magic in a language that sounded so similar to Dragonish, but was apparently unique to the warrior-monks of Fra’anior. She disguised a many-fanged grin by launching off the Dragonship’s platform, making the entire vessel lurch.

  A Dragon’s wings cleft the gilded beams of a twin-suns dawn.

  Impatience and fear quickened her Dragon hearts. But the Azure Dragoness retained the presence of mind to arrow her flight up into a wispy cloudbank. Any element of surprise was a good one. As she rose into the cool, moist clouds, Ri’arion’s mental presence solidified in her mind.

  Ready, he said.

  I open myself, she responded, following the exercises through which Ri’arion had patiently led his inadequate student. Zip sighed so hard that the air shimmered in front of her muzzle. He was just so–cerebral. Suddenly, his thoughts unfolded before her like a flower. The feedback of his weak Human senses supplemented her far richer, nuanced Dragon senses, while her Dragoness mentally scoffed at Human-Zip’s abilities in that area. See. Who was the superior beast?

  Zuziana offered him her sight.

  Watch this, Ri’arion.

  The monk gasped. His sword was half-withdrawn from its sheath before he gave a low laugh. You see like this, Zip? I’ve a Dragonship right in front of my nose. Incredible! Oh … the colours and sensations flooding his brain were simply too powerful; Zip felt the instant he slammed up a pre-prepared filter. Oh! He fought for control, subsided, opened his own conduits once more.

  Alright, Rider?

  Ri’arion could not speak, at first. He wheezed, This is the best we’ve ever melded. Well done, dear one.

  And they became two parts of one whole. The connection settled under the monk’s guidance. Jealousy mingled with temptation and admiration within him, but he held back his Nameless Man powers, which she perceived as a constellation of variegated jewels within his mind. So much magic! So fundamentally different from a Dragon’s nature. But his integrity remained intact. Human-Zip decided that alone was worth a dozen kisses. Dragon-Zip pictured turning cartwheels with him in the sky.

  His mind lit up with a smile. Kisses and cartwheels?

  Love and battle, it’s all the same to me.

  Experimentally, he thought, Bank left.

  Zip responded as smoothly as lava racing down a steep mountainside.

  Awesome, her Rider exulted, pumping his fists toward the sky. You’re awesome. Now, we’ve a job to do.

  His thoughts filled with a torrent of calculations and vectors and scenarios for destroying and disabling Dragonships, a plethora of spells to repel and destroy … Zip had to shunt his deliberations to one side simply to hear herself think. Mercy, this was harder than she had imagined.

  The suns burnished her flank as she angled her flight path, trimming her wings for the deadly, attacking swoop. Ri’arion’s sword rasped free of its scabbard.

  Let’s burn the heavens, Dragon.

  Would that I had the fire to do so, Rider, she replied.

  Then thy very scales shall blind them with thy glory, he said, but with a certain underlying grimness that Zuziana neither enjoyed nor understood. She felt chastened, very much the diminutive Remoyan, indistinguishable amongst her many siblings–and when had she started to think of her family in this way? Disgust soured upon her tongue.

  Abruptly, Ferial’s Dragonships loomed in her sight. Alarm gongs crashed and catapults creaked, taking their aim. Ri’arion rose upon her back to prepare for his leap onto the first Dragonship.

  Wait. Through the mental link, she helped him choose the instant she had side-slipped between their first shots, when her flight path would help him most.

  The Azure Dragoness rocked under the force of his thrust. Zuziana’s long throat choked out the roar she had thought should stun them, but it sounded like a kitten’s meow compared to Aranya’s storm-powered thundering. However, her speedy pass ripped a jagged, fifty-foot rent in the side of her chosen target.

  Simultaneously, she was with Ri’arion, darting along the top of the next Dragonship, slanting his huge blade first downward into the hydrogen sack, then veering as a crossbow crew aimed at him, fleet of foot, spinning his weapon to sever the crossbow’s tensioning arm in conjunction with the hand that operated it, now lifting his eyes to check her position, thinking:

  We’ll catch at the edge; swing over to the next vessel–

  She pulsed back, Three more Dragonships east half a league, incoming–

  –leaping–

  –I’m here, beloved–

  Landing lightly, perfectly synchronised on her back, Ri’arion said, Where are all the archers?

  The Azure Dragon banked rapidly, but the mental forewarning of her action allowed him to adjust as though he were standing on level ground. He did not even attempt to grab a handhold. She slipped beneath the overhanging cabin of a Dragonship, bringing her Rider to his next target. Ri’arion sprang free, flying sixty horizontal feet to a safe, two-footed landing on the side of the Dragonship. Although he flew well, she sensed the output of magic required to levitate was a significant drain on his resources.

  A slight change in air pressure was enough to warn her. Suddenly, the air above their heads was thick with dark wings and feathers. Coal storks! Ambush! Zip raced to claw and bite her way free, driven by Commander Darron’s assessment that the storks would immediately attack any Dragon–but that was a mistake. She broke into clear air.

  Zuziana! Ri’arion’s shout rang in her mind. Too many …

  Hacking, spinning, whirling that great sword about him as though he sought to surround himself with a wall of flashing death, the monk kept the mobbing birds at bay. Ten feet in wingspan, with leathery skins and beaks so tough they were able to deflect his blade, the entire flock of coal storks besieged the Nameless Man. Understanding flashed between them. It was the monk they wanted; he was the font of magical power, and they hated it with a passion that communicated itself in the set of every beak and claw
.

  Where had they come from? Zip’s frantic glance, as she flipped over in the air with a desperate change of direction, took in the open cargo bays beneath two of the Dragonships. The Ferial Islanders had modified their tactics. Each Dragonship concealed a deadly cargo. Even as she watched, doors swung open beneath the Dragonship just below her. Black feathers boiled free, cawing hungrily.

  WHOMP! His magic flared, searing the air around him, burning the Dragonship’s sack. She responded instantly.

  Zuziana flung herself at Ri’arion at the utmost speed her wings could produce. No time for a magical attack. He dived over the edge of the Dragonship, surrounded by birds jabbing at him with their beaks, and before she could cross the hundred-foot gap between them, an agonising pain stabbed into her shoulder. The Dragoness jerked as the birds gored her Rider. His mind-meld transmitted the pain of each and every puncture wound with perfect clarity, as if they struck her very soul with fear and pain. She floundered, thrashing as desperately as a hooked fish.

  Even mid-air, the monk defended himself grimly.

  KAARAABOOM!

  Zuziana’s eyes cycled through black. A shockwave punched her body, but that was nothing compared to how it struck Ri’arion. He shot sideways, away from the knot of birds, thankfully colliding with the soft sack of a flanking Dragonship. Smoke billowed around them. Charred birds and Dragonship parts rained from the sky.

  She wailed inwardly, No wonder they hid the archers. No need.

  Help me, Zip!

  Hundreds of coal storks and one frantic Dragon dove for the Nameless Man, who had shielded himself from the hydrogen explosion with his magic. His daggers flashed as he slid downward; Zip forced herself to ignore the flashes of pain in her arms and neck as the birds gouged and clawed the monk, seizing and shaking his boots, goring his thigh to the bone. She tried to sever the connection, but that made white agony flare within her skull.

  Tooth and claw! That was what a Dragon did best. Zuziana snapped and clawed and burrowed into the falling mass of bodies, a haze of rage consuming her mind, spitting feathers and bones and crackling now with an electrical energy all of her own. He would die. One beak sliding into the wrong place, between bone and muscle, and her beautiful monk’s eyes would shutter forever. Hearing on the edge of her awareness yet another cargo bay creaking open, she bellowed in despair. Where was he? Why could she not win through to him?

  Aaaaah! She arched in agony as a beak speared Ri’arion near the kidneys. He had to stop the meld. She could not fly properly.

  The Azure Dragoness vented a primal shriek. Careless of life or limb, she smashed her way into the incoming flock of coal storks. Wing edges, claws, the whiplash of her tail, she did not care. But Ri’arion had fallen free of the Dragonship now, tumbling into the open air above the Cloudlands. The coal storks chasing his magic were so thick that she could barely see the man.

  She needed Dragon fire. Ri’arion held that secret.

  Give it to me! The Azure Dragon delved into his pain-crazed mind. Despite his resistance, she tore from the soft inner parts the knowledge she needed, from his memories of the time he had forced Aranya to produce Dragon fire. Don’t hide it–finally! Now I have it.

  A song of fire exploded in her mind, in her belly. Zuziana gulped as the fires finally ignited within her stomach. Heat rushed through her body, a sensation so exquisite and consuming that it threatened to set her scales ablaze. She bathed in the fires, crooning as if to a long-absent lover.

  Zuziana … please! he moaned. I need you. Give me your powers.

  No! This was what she had feared. Appalled, the Zip’s wingbeat stalled. She had violated the man she loved.

  Then, her neck extended. Her tongue rolled into a new shape.

  He was shielded by his magic, now. It sucked up all the strength he had left. The coal storks attacked zealously, but could not penetrate his defences–not for the vital second it took her to summon her Dragon fire for the very first time.

  Her hearts thudded: boom-boom-boom.

  A cone of fire scorched the beautiful dawn. It passed perfectly around the falling body of her monk, igniting everything it touched.

  Keening tenderly, the Azure Dragon reached through the drifting ashes to catch him in her paws.

  Chapter 10: Thundering Caverns

  Dragon and Rider winged toward the setting suns, making over twenty-five leagues per hour. Murky cloud battlements dominated the south and south-western horizons. Aranya’s nostrils identified a metallic yet noticeably humid tang on the air. A big storm, her Dragon senses warned. That strange tension returned, taking up residence behind her breastbone, a dull ache as heavy as a misplaced boulder.

  A storm such as those Fra’anior loved to frequent.

  Pushing thoughts of the storm aside, Aranya scanned the scenery from half a league above the Islands–all the height that Yolathion’s still-healing ears could tolerate. Her eye gladdened at the wild, unspoiled majesty of Ur-Yagga Cluster’s eleven Islands, the tangled forests, deep ravines and monumental cliffs. Never mind hiding just one Dragon in here! Fra’anior could have hidden an army of Dragons and she’d have little chance of winkling them out.

  To think this was the westernmost Cluster in the world, the edge of nothing. Breathtaking!

  But Aranya had no time for sightseeing. How did one track down a Dragon? She tried to focus on that tiny tendril of magic she had detected from Naphtha Cluster, but it was either absent or so far away she could not detect it. Ask around the villages? What welcome might a Jeradian and a Northerner find? Could she ask after Kylara and find out if she knew of a Dragon?

  Aranya spotted a charred village from the air. There, that was Dragon work, surely?

  But when she touched down at the edge of a massive inlet, she recognised her error. Scarred carcasses of Dragonships lay at either end of the deserted village. Much had been burned, but she had seen these patterns before. Sylakian destruction. There were no bodies left. Perhaps the Sylakians had visited a second time to remove their dead. She wondered what had become of the villagers.

  Yolathion agreed quietly with her assessment. He said, “This must be the village the Sylakians mentioned. They said a madman attacked them here, a madman who fought alongside Kylara’s troops. I can’t see the Warlord allowing that, can you?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s keep scouting. Kylara’s hideout can’t be far.”

  Aranya asked, “Any tracks?”

  The tall Jeradian walked back through the village, examining the signs with the eyes of a trained warrior. “Strange. If Kylara’s force is as strong as they say, I’d expect to see boot prints or pony prints, like these ones here between the huts. I’d say someone’s swept them away. We’ll do better airborne, Aranya.”

  Rider and Dragon swept southward along the spectacularly jagged cliff tops, sighting a family of black rajals from the air and tangling briefly with a lone, feral windroc.

  “There must be a thousand caves along here,” Yolathion groaned. “This Island is as riddled as yeast-bread.”

  “I wonder what’s out there to the west,” Aranya said, gazing to the horizon. “Surely the Islands don’t just end?”

  “Mind on the job, Dragon.”

  She bared her fangs at the emptiness. Yolathion!

  With darkness closing in, Dragon and Rider camped on the cliff-top in the lee of a massive clump of boulders. Curled up, Aranya thought she must look like just another boulder, albeit a decidedly purple one. Yolathion slept where Zip had always preferred to sleep, in the crook of her neck. Surreptitiously, she tried slipping a paw around his body, but that made Yolathion moan and stir. She touched him with her healing power anyway. She poured healing into her Dragon-body, before sleep sucked her irresistibly into its embrace.

  She dreamed of fleeing from storms that behaved like female rajals on the hunt, stalking her from all directions.

  Come morning, the approaching storm covered half of the sky in a portentous green-black barrier. It engulfed the ra
ys of a clear, burning suns-rise in the east as though a vast Land Dragon’s mouth had risen from the Cloudlands, intent on swallowing the suns. After taking to the air, Aranya spotted King Beran’s Dragonships moored at the eastern periphery of the Cluster, as planned. They must have arrived during the night.

  Even at this distance, Aranya’s Dragon sight identified how the freshening breeze caused the Dragonships to strain at their anchor hawsers. She resisted an urge to scowl at the storm, or to think ralti-stupid thoughts about omens and premonitions. She had a job to do. The Black Dragon demanded no less.

  Aranya and Yolathion followed the imposing cliffs southward. They were a league above the Cloudlands here, a jaw-dropping vertical plunge worthy of the Last Walk, where Yolathion had once thrown Aranya off a cliff, expecting her to die.

  Instead, she had learned to spread her wings.

  Aranya squirmed at a strange prickling sensation along her spine-spikes. She probed the terrain with every sense alert, from the rolling, densely tangled hills of the interior to the dagger-slash of a cliff at her right wingtip. They passed over an enormous sinkhole–at least, what she took for a sinkhole, until Yolathion said:

  “Slap me over the head with a windroc, Aranya, that’s Cloudlands down there. That hole goes right through the Island.”

  Her hearts gambolled fitfully in her chest as she passed over the great hole. Now, there was a place Dragons would love to roost, she thought. But a tiny trickle of awareness drew her onward, just a teasing on the breeze, a thought more unconscious than conscious … and growing stronger? Aranya trimmed her wings, bringing them lower.

  “Found something?” asked Yolathion.

  “Not sure what, though,” said Aranya. “It’s more of a Dragon-sense.”

  “Follow it,” he ordered.

  Yolathion was supporting the idea of Dragon senses and magic? That was novel–and encouraging.

  Instinctively, the Amethyst Dragon slowed. She drifted away from the cliff, flying over the Cloudlands now. They passed cave after cave. After a while, the trail faded again. They agreed to double back. Aranya drew close to the cliff. She was almost certain something was holed up nearby, perhaps a Dragon in a cave.