“Please,” she whispered once again. “Help me.” Her voice was thin and small.
The ice dragon turned.
The three dragons were outside of the barn when Adara returned, feasting on the burned and blackened carcasses of her father’s stock. One of the dragonriders was standing near them, leaning on his lance and prodding his dragon from time to time.
He looked up when the cold gust of wind came shrieking across the fields, and shouted something, and sprinted for the black dragon. The beast tore a last hunk of meat from her father’s horse, swallowed, and rose reluctantly into the air. The rider flailed his whip.
Adara saw the door of the farmhouse burst open. The other two riders rushed out, and ran for their dragons. One of them was struggling into his pants as he ran. He was bare-chested.
The black dragon roared, and its fire came blazing up at them. Adara felt the searing blast of heat, and a shudder went through the ice dragon as the flame played along its belly. Then it craned its long neck around, and fixed its baleful empty eyes upon the enemy, and opened its frost-rimed jaws. Out from among its icy teeth its breath came streaming, and that breath was pale and cold.
It touched the left wing of the coal-black dragon beneath them, and the dark beast gave a shrill cry of pain, and when it beat its wings again, the frost-covered wing broke in two. Dragon and dragonrider began to fall.
The ice dragon breathed again.
They were frozen and dead before they hit the ground.
The rust-colored dragon was flying at them, and the dragon the color of blood with its bare-chested rider. Adara’s ears were filled with their angry roaring, and she could feel their hot breath around her, and see the air shimmering with heat, and smell the stink of sulfur.
Two long swords of fire crossed in midair, but neither touched the ice dragon, though it shriveled in the heat, and water flew from it like rain whenever it beat its wings.
The blood-colored dragon flew too close, and the breath of the ice dragon blasted the rider. His bare chest turned blue before Adara’s eyes, and moisture condensed on him in an instant, covering him with frost. He screamed, and died, and fell from his mount, though his harness hand remained behind, frozen to the neck of his dragon. The ice dragon closed on it, wings screaming the secret song of winter, and a blast of flame met a blast of cold. The ice dragon shuddered once again, and twisted away, dripping. The other dragon died.
But the last dragonrider was behind them now, the enemy in full armor on the dragon whose scales were the brown of rust. Adara screamed, and even as she did the fire enveloped the ice dragon’s wing. It was gone in less than an instant, but the wing was gone with it, melted, destroyed.
The ice dragon’s remaining wing beat wildly to slow its plunge, but it came to earth with an awful crash. Its legs shattered beneath it, and its wing snapped in two places, and the impact of the landing threw Adara from its back. She tumbled to the soft earth of the field, and rolled, and struggled up, bruised but whole.
The ice dragon seemed very small now, and very broken. Its long neck sank wearily to the ground, and its head rested amid the wheat.
The enemy dragonrider came swooping in, roaring with triumph. The dragon’s eyes burned. The man flourished his lance and shouted.
The ice dragon painfully raised its head once more, and made the only sound that Adara ever heard it make: a terrible thin cry full of melancholy, like the sound the north wind makes when it moves around the towers and battlements of the white castles that stand empty in the land of always-winter.
When the cry had faded, the ice dragon sent cold into the world one final time: a long smoking blue-white stream of cold that was full of snow and stillness and the end of all living things. The dragonrider flew right into it, still brandishing whip and lance. Adara watched him crash.
Then she was running, away from the fields, back to the house and her family within, running as fast as she could, running and panting and crying all the while like a seven year old.
Her father had been nailed to the bedroom wall. They had wanted him to watch while they took their turns with Teri. Adara did not know what to do, but she untied Teri, whose tears had dried by then, and they freed Geoff, and then they got their father down. Teri nursed him and cleaned out his wounds. When his eyes opened and he saw Adara, he smiled. She hugged him very hard, and cried for him.
By night he said he was fit enough to travel. They crept away under cover of darkness, and took the king’s road south.
Her family asked no questions then, in those hours of darkness and fear. But later, when they were safe in the south, there were questions endlessly. Adara gave them the best answers she could. But none of them ever believed her, except for Geoff, and he grew out of it when he got older. She was only seven, after all, and she did not understand that ice dragons are never seen in summer, and cannot be tamed nor ridden.
Besides, when they left the house that night, there was no ice dragon to be seen. Only the huge corpses of three war dragons, and the smaller bodies of three dragonriders in black-and-orange. And a pond that had never been there before, a small quiet pool where the water was very cold. They had walked around it carefully, headed toward the road.
Their father worked for another farmer for three years in the south. His hands were never as strong as they had been, before the nails had been pounded through them, but he made up for that with the strength of his back and his arms, and his determination. He saved whatever he could, and he seemed happy. “Hal is gone, and my land,” he would tell Adara, “and I am sad for that. But it is all right. I have my daughter back.” For the winter was gone from her now, and she smiled and laughed and even wept like other little girls.
Three years after they had fled, the king’s army routed the enemy in a great battle, and the king’s dragons burned the foreign capital. In the peace that followed, the northern provinces changed hands once more. Teri had recaptured her spirit and married a young trader, and she remained in the south. Geoff and Adara returned with their father to the farm.
When the first frost came, all the ice lizards came out, just as they had always done. Adara watched them with a smile on her face, remembering the way it had been. But she did not try to touch them. They were cold and fragile little things, and the warmth of her hands would hurt them.
Sobek
Holly Black
Holly Black was born in New Jersey, married her high school sweetheart and nearly got a degree in library science from Rutgers before her first book tour interrupted her studies. She is the author of the bestselling The Spiderwick Chronicles, which was made into a feature film released in 2008. Her first story appeared in 1997, but she first got attention with her debut novel, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale. She has written eleven Spiderwick books and three novels in the Modern Faerie Tale sequence, including Andre Norton Award winner Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie. Black’s most recent books are her first short story collection, The Poison Eaters and Others, and White Cat, the first novel in her new Curse Worker series. She was nominated for an Eisner Award for graphic novel series, The Good Neighbors, and recently co-edited anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns with Justine Larbalestier.
Mom had always been a little off, so I figured if she wanted to be high priestess of a cult made up of three people, then whatever. It seemed harmless. Besides, I thought it would help her get over getting fired from the superstore. Maybe even distract her from thinking about Hank, the stock guy that she talked about all the time.
Even though Mom worked mostly at the checkout counter and he was in the back, they met for lunch. Hank. At first I thought that he was the one that put the ideas in her head about Sobek the Destroyer and the no-souls, because he was at the center of most of her fantasies. She told me Hank was “born into many bodies,” whatever that means. I just figured he was trying to get in her pants with some metaphysical bullshit.
I found out later that Hank was happily married with three kids. After Mom lost her job, she took me to the s
uperstore with her—to buy milk, eggs and toilet paper, she’d said—then slipped into the back. I followed her.
Hank was a tall, gaunt guy with big glasses. Those glasses made his eyes look big, but when Mom came in, his eyes got even bigger.
“It was the no-souls,” she said. “You know how they are, always talking. It was a no-soul conspiracy that got me fired.”
He looked puzzled. “I don’t think that it was anybody’s—”
“You know it was the no-souls. You know! Did they get to you too? Does that mean you’re not going to help me, Hank?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” You could hear the fear in his voice. It suddenly occurred to me that they weren’t meeting for lunch, she was cornering him during lunch to preach all this stuff.
Now, I kind of think it was the firing that really sent her over the edge. Before that she’d had some wacky beliefs and maybe sometimes they slipped over into real life, but without the superstore it was all Sobek all the time.
She made a shrine to him in the corner of our apartment, buying plastic alligators and gluing plastic gems to their backs or painting their tails with gold. One night I looked through her books and realized what Sobek was. A demon crocodile, worshipped in Egypt. Some old myth.
“I’ve seen him,” she told me. “In the sewers.”
“Mom, he’s a crocodile god,” I said. “It’s alligators that live in the sewers. And it’s an urban legend.” She’d taken to drawing black lines around her eyes so that she looked more like an Egyptian priestess. I thought she just looked like an old goth.
“Amaya, you should pray to him. He’s trying to take the evil out of the world, but his power comes from our prayers.”
“Okay,” I said. When she was like this, you just had to go along with her.
Just like I went along with her when she kept me out of school for two weeks because she was afraid to be alone. Or how she told me that one of my friends, Lydia, was some kind of monstrous no-soul person. Mom would scream and chant when Lydia came over. That sucked, but I went along with it and never brought her by. It wasn’t like I liked having people over anyway.
Even without Mom’s job, we were mostly okay. Dad, an engineer so rational that metaphors annoyed him, paid his alimony and child support exactly on time every month—enough to cover the rent, utilities and food if we were careful. Looking back, I almost wish that we hadn’t had enough money. Maybe then she would have had a reason to try and hold it together.
“I’ve worked since I was younger than you,” she would say. “I deserve a break.”
I thought maybe she was right. Maybe she could burn this out of her system like she’d burned through a bunch of other obsessions. Like when she said that she was a reincarnation of someone my father had killed in a past life and kept calling him and shouting “murderer” over the phone until my stepmother reportedly pulled the cord out of the wall.
But hanging around the house, she met Miranda and her boyfriend, Paulo. Miranda was the super’s niece, so they lived in an apartment for free. Paulo used to walk dogs for people, but one of them had gotten away and there was some kind of legal thing going on with the owners that I never really understood. I think they were suing him, but what they hoped to get out of it, I have no idea. Anyway, Miranda and Paulo seemed to spend most of their time sitting on the front stoop, smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Sometimes Miranda cadged money out of one of her relatives.
They got way into Sobek.
To Miranda, Sobek was going to change her fortunes and show all her sisters and brothers who called her lazy that she was just different. Special. Destined for glorious things they would never understand.
To Paulo, Sobek was a warrior-god who swept enemies out of the path of his followers. To hear Paulo talk, there were a lot of enemies in need of sweeping. He was the one that changed the sobriquet from Sobek the Repairer to Rager, although it never really caught on.
Somewhere along the way, Mom decided that Paulo was Hank—that Paulo was another one of the bodies that Hank’s soul had been born into. Miranda probably wasn’t too happy about that.
But their favorite activity was talking about the no-souls. No-souls look like people, but they’re rotten on the inside. And they control everything. No-souls are the reason things are so screwed up in the world. Mom and Miranda and Paulo loved naming people they knew who were probably no-souls. It was their favorite thing.
Paulo and Miranda started calling our apartment building Arsinoe, after a town that Sobek was really fond of, but after a while they forgot that and just started calling the place Crocodopolis. I called it that too, because it made me laugh.
Look, I didn’t know that this is how these things start. They don’t warn you in school and I guess didn’t watch the right kind of television. Even the fact that I was nervous most of the time—scared of the way they were acting, scared of how quickly my mother got angry—didn’t tip me off.
After Mom and Paulo and Miranda filled the whole place with glittery, adorned plastic alligators and nothing happened, they started looking for Sobek. First they went back to the place where Mom said she’d seen him in a grate. The manhole was impossible to pry up, but they would throw strips of bacon down into the darkness.
Then, somehow, Paulo bought a manhole cover removal tool off of craigslist and they were wading around in the shallow water, making their devotions. Most of the time they came back defeated and dirty, but once or twice they claimed to have seen a tail or something.
My mother was always the one that saw him and soon he started talking to her. Visiting her. Slinking into her bedroom when she was alone at night. Demanding that Miranda and Paulo prove their loyalty.
She had scratches all over her body in the morning, long and dark, like some kind of claws scraped over her soft flesh. Holy scars to mark a priestess.
I wondered how she faked them. I knew why, even if she didn’t. She was afraid of losing her disciples. I guess it was just a matter of time before they stepped up their game and decided that they needed to give Sobek something in order to get something. A sacrifice. Me.
They had lots of reasons. For one thing, I was in the way. I cost money to feed. Plus, I made fun of them. When my best friend Shana came over, we would look through their notebooks and laugh so hard that we were in serious danger of peeing our pants. They would make up prayers like, “Sobek, whose sweat became the Nile, let this lottery ticket drenched in our sweat bring us enough cash to venerate you properly.”
I think it bothered them that I could tell there was some sexual tension bound up in all this praying. They closed the door to the living room to finish their rituals and came out sweaty and half-dressed. I knew it bothered Paulo and Miranda to look me in the face afterward. So they didn’t like me. And having a kid around made my mom seem too ordinary to be a prophet.
But the last reason is the reason I hate the most, even if it is true. They took me because I was the only one dumb enough and trusting enough to go down into the sewer with them.
I was afraid of them, sometimes, when they got really weird. But I wasn’t afraid enough. I thought that if I kept going along with things, they’d get better. My mother was slipping into some other reality from which I had no idea how to get her back, so my plan was to wait it out. When they told me to pray to Sobek, I prayed. When they told me that soon everything would be different and they would be rewarded, I nodded. Mostly, the results of going along with things were just boring.
“You go on down this time with your Mom,” Paulo said, once he’d removed the manhole cover. “I’ll look out for the cops.”
“It looks dark.” I could just see the glint of ripples of water moving many feet below where I stood.
I’d always been the one to watch for cops when they went into the sewers. I would stand in the mouth of the alley, looking down at the shine of the streetlights on the murky water and then back toward traffic. Sometimes I would stare down the manhole for so long that my mind would get occupie
d with thoughts of other things—school and friends and plans for how I could maybe someday make it to college and from there to engineering school—and my eyes would play tricks on me. Once I thought I saw a tail dragging through the water. Another time I thought there was a flash of golden eyes the size of tennis balls. I nearly shouted for my mother, but by the time I opened my mouth, whatever trick of the light that messed with my vision was gone.
Either way, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to go down there.
“I’m good,” I told Paulo. “I don’t mind watching for the cops. I don’t get bored.”
My mother laughed and kissed me on the forehead. “That’s right. Only boring people get bored.” It was one of her favorite sayings.
Paulo put his hand over his stomach. “I don’t feel good, Amaya. Go on with your mother and Miranda this time. Maybe you’ll have more luck than us. You’ve got young eyes.”
“No way,” I said. “This is your thing. I’m just here to help.”
“Just take a quick look around and you can come right up if you don’t like it,” Mom said. “You don’t have to even get off the ladder.”
That filled me with so much relief that I did it. Gingerly, I got down on my hands and knees on the asphalt and slipped one sneakered foot onto whatever rung it reached. The metal felt slippery and I hesitated before I grabbed the first rung and started climbing down. The air was hot with decomposition and smelled rancidly sweet.
“We know why we can’t see him, Amaya,” said my mom. Gold-toned bracelets jangled on her wrists. “He needs a virgin.”
Miranda leaned down and stroked my hair back from my face. “You are a virgin, aren’t you?”
I pulled away from her the only way I could, stepping down several more rungs. “Don’t be so gross,” I said.
There was a heavy clank and darkness. I screamed, really screamed, so hard that my throat hurt.
“Shhhhh, my mother called from the grate. “Wait for your eyes to adjust.”
Wings of Fire Page 5
