Dragon's Rise

by Lou Hoffmann

  “The laboratory, that was my work. I set it up. Mahros wanted to claim it for himself, and I let him have it. Sacrifices are no fun, and anyway he was too stupid to realize the lives he thought he was feeding Mahl-Ahmadou were going straight to the Terrathian cause. It was a pretty slick setup, if I say so myself. The blood powered the magic needed to convert the greens to blues, and the life energy went into the alien machines. But I didn’t enjoy the project. You might find this hard to believe, but I don’t like killing. I only want to kill one person—Thurlock Ol’Karrigh. And he has it coming.”

  Lucky decided to say nothing, and for a while Relian remained quiet too, though she fidgeted in a way that made Lucky think she was nervous. After a while, he decided the silence might be dangerous for him and Rio.

  “Because he destroyed the lab?”

  Her expression grew more and more disgusted as she sucked at her cheeks and tongue, twisting her features this way and that. Tension seemed to tighten her shoulders, and she clenched and unclenched her hands. Lucky thought she would either scream or cry, but she did neither. She explained.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! The lab was nothing to me. If you had been there three centuries ago, you would know what I mean. We had drought, then floods, then lightning that burned everything in the storm’s path five miles wide, flames shooting so wild, so high the sky burned red even at night for weeks. The Sunlands became one giant emergency. Some people wanted to blame Mahl, simply because they believe Mahl is behind all bad things. But anyone who knows that god knows whoever caused those things, it was someone with initiative. Like say, Behlishan!” Her chest heaved as she caught her breath. “And Thurlock Ol’Karrigh—the one wizard everybody thought could plead with that cruel god—he was nowhere to be found.”

  She went silent again, and rose suddenly from the couch and began to pace.

  Odd, Lucky thought, watching her, watching the walls of the room expand and contract to accommodate her location. It struck him as something important to his ultimate goal of getting Rio and himself free and safe away from her. Is this place… real?

  He thought about the possibility that she’d manufactured first Mahros’s red lair and now this very real-seeming building out of pure thought and a little magic. How powerful would a person have to be to do that? And create a Portal connecting such a place with a battlefield, snatch a person and bring him back, hold the Portal open for a pursuer, and then… block Ciarrah’s light! Witch-Mortaine she might be, but she didn’t seem steeped in Mahl’s Naught like Isa. She was manipulating ordinary magic and to some extent the power of Naught, surely. But Lucky didn’t think she could have managed all that manipulation—and a creation edged with human comforts like this “room”—with only those powers.

  She still uses the light—Behlishan’s light, which she claims to shun.

  Her voice, sounding laden with pain and unrequited revenge, broke into his thoughts.

  “Would you believe when I was a young girl, I idolized him. Thurlock, my oldest cousin, was the most renowned wizard in the land. Hah!” She barked a short laugh and shook her head. “When my parents discovered my talents were better than ordinary, they sent me to him, ‘for review,’ they said, in the hopes he’d take me as an apprentice. Mahros was in that group too. But he declined to teach either of us, though we both shared his bloodline. He chose instead to mentor a young woman from the north…. Well, that’s another story. I didn’t mind, then. I held out hope he’d call for me when I was older. But we hadn’t even got back to Kharravale before the Disasters struck. That’s what people called them. The Disasters with a capital D. Perfect, right?”

  Again she stopped speaking. Her attention seemed very far away, and as Lucky gazed through a window—where moments before he’d seen waving branches—Lucky thought he glimpsed the battlefield he’d been torn from.

  So, then… are we really sitting right in the middle of the battle? Can arrows find us? Swords? Bullets?

  “Even then,” Relian was saying in a voice gone suddenly, alarmingly, as calm and still as a scrying pool. “Even then Thurlock could not be found anywhere in the Sunlands. He never came to talk to those few of us who’d escaped because we’d been away. He didn’t come back, and he continued his alliance with that god of the evil sun as if he didn’t care a jot. Which—” She stopped to shoot Lucky a strange little smile. “—was because he didn’t.”

  “Wait.” Lucky interrupted before he thought better of it. “You’re an Ol’Karrigh? Your… um, name tag? It said O’Shanadah.”

  “Believe me,” she said with a sneer. “After the Disasters, people didn’t like the Ol’Karrigh name so much. Some people kept it, like that fool Mahros. But I preferred not to be looked down on or feared everywhere I went. I took the name of my foster parents. It makes no difference. I have Ol’Karrigh power available to me, and I can end that vicious creature, Thurlock.”

  She can’t lie? I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s clear regardless, she really thinks she’s right. She thinks she can kill Thurlock, and worse, she believes it’s the right thing to do. Without a lot of experience of the world, still Lucky knew that a righteous fanatic, secure in their personal twisted truth, would prove the most dangerous kind.

  Relian picked up her manifesto where she’d left off. “I don’t believe he just didn’t happen to be around for the Disasters. I believe he made them. What a handy way to eliminate all his talented relatives from competition for the title of Premier Wizard? Well, he missed a few. He missed me, and I will see to it he pays.”

  She put her hands on her hips and shook her head, eyes closed. “He had no time for someone like me. But I have lots of time to make sure he gets what’s coming. This battle might do it. He’s spent. I could see it. The Terrathians are all but vanquished. The Earthborns and Ehstenners can’t think well on their own. But there are still the drakes to consider. I didn’t think I could count on that, though, so I brought you here.”

  She stopped and looked directly into Lucky’s eyes. “Ask yourself, boy. Why hasn’t he come for you? Maybe he doesn’t care about you either. In which case, you’re not very good bait.”

  Finally she fell quiet, sat down on the couch once more, folded her legs under her, and picked up her tea. Lucky found his voice.

  “Relian, I’m sorry you lost your family. I lost mine too, all except Han. Thurlock is a distant granduncle, and I count him in there as family too. And now I guess I have to include you and even Mahros, so I wish we weren’t enemies. Would you listen if I told you some stuff?”

  She sighed heavily and actually yawned. “Gods, boy. I suppose I will. My great flaw. I always listen.”

  Lucky told her about Thurlock’s tenderness to Isa and Liliana. About how heartsick the old man was after the incident with Hehlios, and even after the encounter with Mahros at the lab. He told her what Thurlock had said in Nedhra City about Relian herself. He told her how Thurlock had looked for him and sheltered him and sensed when he needed comfort. He told her about the tic in Thurlock’s cheek, how it always started up when empathy or compassion came into play.

  He leaned forward and took a chance on touching her hand, hoping that would help her truly hear him. “I’ve often wondered what terrible pain in his long past created that tic. Maybe it was the Disasters you told me about.”

  She left her hand lying still under his for a long minute. Then she pulled it back, using the excuse of needing to pour more tea. “He did come and see me sometimes. I… I think it might have been him who arranged for my foster parents. The home that took me in was near the Sisterhold—a long way from the valley where the Kharravale had been. I thought he might have sent me away from my home to be cruel, but maybe….”

  “Maybe he sent you there because he thought being near the ruin of your home would hurt you.”

  “No! Maybe. I don’t know. Someone paid for my schooling, and Mahros and Hehlios too, though Mahros chose not to finish university. Might have been Thurlock. He might have paid for others. Th
ere was a whole flock of Ol’Karrigh leftovers attending university over a decade or so. Little lost orphans nobody claimed.”

  “Sometimes,” Lucky said when Relian fell silent. “I think it’s really hard to know someone. And then, when you think you know them, it colors everything you see them do or hear them say. You and Mahros were children, Relian. You saw what seemed obvious, because that’s what children see. But did you ever think that if you hadn’t decided then that Thurlock was evil, you might have seen his actions differently?”

  She got up and went to the window. Lucky couldn’t tell what she saw—or thought she saw—out there, but he was looking at a red dragon. Is that the battle at the Giant’s Hand? He thought it must be, but whether a red dragon there was a good thing or a bad one, he couldn’t decide.

  Relian turned suddenly, catching his attention. Her eyes were wet, but she looked angry, not sad.

  “He came to my graduation,” she said, her voice heavy with emotion. “I spat on him. That tic in his cheek—it started up, and I thought it was hatred.”

  “Can you lie, Relian? I mean without getting sick?”

  She smiled, though it was a twisted expression. “No, boy. I can’t lie any more than you can. I know what you’re thinking. Yes, I see you might be right. I might have been wrong about Thurlock. But—” She threw her hands in the air and shook her head. “No. I see now it could not have been Behlishan behind the Disasters, could it? What happened to me that I should become so deluded?”

  She sighed. “Three hundred years, I think I’ve wasted it all. Well, never mind. It is over now.”

  Her youthful face gained wrinkles and blotches. Her spine curved. Her hair turned gray and then white. She stood slowly, painfully, her joints creaking audibly. Lucky, shocked, stood up to help her.

  “No, boy!” she said. “Mahl is leaving me, and taking my magic with him, which he can do because I gave it to him when I undertook to serve him. I’ll die now, but that is peace dearly bought.”

  She started to shiver, and then shake. Her skin turned blue and ice formed on her breath. Her eyes clouded over and her chest rattled with every breath. She fixed those rheumy eyes on him, and made a last gesture, like a benediction.

  The room around them began to flicker and fail; the nothingness of Naught seemed to be trying hard to take its place. Lucky grabbed hold of Rio and thought hard, not of “home,” but of Thurlock and Han and K’ormahk. He pictured, of all things, the battlefield.

  And then he was there, in the mud, with Rio clutched in his arms and coming awake. K’ormahk’s black wings reflected dark rainbows as he swooped in, racing toward them, and the valley floor shook when his mighty hooves hit the ground only ten feet away.

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Dragon’s Rise

  L’ARIA FOLLOWED Bayahr south along the line of dark power, which hummed disturbingly and tunelessly in her ear. The annoying sound was at least useful, as it made it much easier for them to stay aligned with its path. Although they descended along an ever flatter sandy trail that twisted and turned, the humming power shot straight and level from the hill until they could only catch glimpses and glints off its surface against the backdrop of moving clouds. By the time they had descended to just above the height of the waves crashing into the rocky shore, they’d lost sight of the beam in a darkening sky, but it didn’t matter.

  They spotted the second wizard, a man, down on the beach directly in front of them, raising a towering pillar. It seemed obvious to L’Aria he was trying to raise it high enough to reach the beam crossing overhead. Up the beach about another hundred yards, they could see another pillar, with the distant figure of a woman raising her arms nearly in unison with this man.

  Bayahr said, “Sal, old girl, I may need some rest after this. Be ready to carry me.” With that, he picked up a pebble and sent it flying toward the nearest wizard with a small breath. At the same time, he pointed his staff toward a stone the size of a large dog. The large stone flew at the wizard and knocked him to the ground, skull smashed, clearly dead. The four Westonians who’d been guarding him panicked and ran in four separate directions in sudden confusion.

  “Oh goodness,” Bayahr said. “Messy. Don’t look, L’Aria.”

  The other wizard—the third and last—either saw or sensed the disturbance Bayahr had created and turned to look their way. She raised her staff, pointing it at Bayahr, and began a chant, but she never had a chance to complete it. Bayahr swirled his staff around him, creating a whirlwind, and then pointed it toward the woman. It picked up stones as it traveled, and in what seemed to L’Aria like an instant, enveloped the wizard and pummeled her with the rocks until she fell where she’d stood, bloody and quite dead. The guards near her backed away from the vicious twister, and now, free of the wizard’s spells, they ran for the hills.

  Bayahr did nearly collapse after that. Salvatohr kneeled for him, and he mounted and lay forward over the donkey’s neck for a moment. Slowly, he raised up to a sitting position and then, like wizards do, turned it into a teaching moment. “Poor planning on their part,” he said, still panting and sweating from exertion. “If they’d arranged the pillar up there”—he pointed to where they’d come from—“to beam at a downhill angle, they would have completed the job by now. The pillars down here would have relayed the power and formed a circuit, and inside it would be a massive Portal—temporary, but at least as big as the Suth Chiell’s gateway. And we would have been too late. As it is… hmmm.”

  With that, Bayahr retreated into private contemplation again, and L’Aria took advantage of that to search out the song of the tormented drakes and follow it to its strongest origin. A few of the drakes flew overhead—she could both see and hear them. But the rest… were gathered into one place… underground… underwater.

  “A sea cave!”

  Bayahr and everyone else looked at L’Aria in surprise at her exclamation, so she explained. The drakes—more than a dozen, she thought—were penned up in a sea cave almost directly beneath where they were standing.

  “Listen, Bayahr. I need help. I mean, I think it’s unkind to let the drakes live. It’s dangerous for people and that’s important, but it’s also cruel to them. They have every misery and nothing of joy in their existence.”

  “I don’t disagree,” Eldos interjected. “Even the wolves keen quietly for them.”

  Bayahr only nodded, but he was wearing a worried look.

  “I can go to them and make them sleep with a song,” L’Aria said. “But I don’t think I can… end them. Can you do it?”

  “Possibly,” Bayahr said, then dismounted and started scratching his big belly, leaning against the ever patient Salvatohr while he thought about the problem. “Okay. You make sure all the drakes are there, and once they’re asleep—I assume you want them to sleep so they won’t endure unnecessary pain or fear?”

  “Right! I can do that. I can even sweeten their dreams. It might be the only good moment of their lives. Can you do what you need to do without waking them, without scaring them?”

  “I’m sure there are other drakes…. I suppose there’s no help for that, but at least we can deal with what’s in front of us. You do your part, child, and I’ll do mine. You’ll have to get well clear of the cave before you send me a ready signal. What will that signal be, by the way?”

  “Uh… I’ll make the water shoot up, like a geyser, there in the cove.” She pointed at a little corner of the inlet to the north of where they stood.

  “Right. Well, let’s get to it, then, shall we? I feel a pressing need to get back to the march north for these wights and their people.”

  L’ARIA HAD no trouble finding the sea cave full of blue drakes—she simply found a tide pool, made her Portal from the water it held, and followed the song. She found more of the poor beasts than she’d expected; some were quite small and huddled together.

  What she truly hadn’t prepared for was the blast of vicious hunger that erupted in the cave when she entered. The beasts charged her as best they cou
ld, and some were surprisingly fast. She dodged, cutting a Portal quickly from one part of the cave to a space protected by piles of shells and tide-worn rocks, sea stacks, and a ledge. She could still see and focus on the creatures, but except for the smallest, they and their snapping jaws could not reach her.

  As for the smallest—there were two who slithered into her protected spot—she didn’t have to do anything to protect herself, as in their ravenous confusion, they attacked each other. In seconds, one lay dead and the other lay bleeding profusely from a torn neck, one wing ripped completely free.

  L’Aria had not been prepared to fear for her life, or to witness such savagery. The first made it hard for her to focus on the calming song she needed to create for the drakes. The latter added a heavy layer of grief over the pity already threatening to overwhelm her soft heart. The injured drake lying at her feet bleeding out was no bigger than a mink, and though L’Aria wasn’t bent toward violence, all she could think of to do was end its hopeless suffering with a rock to its skull.

  That action broke something in L’Aria. Maybe, she vaguely thought, she’d never be the same, never be whole again. It wasn’t simply the act of taking a life—she was a river otter shifter, as she’d recently discovered, a carnivore. But this didn’t feel the same as fishing and hunting when shifted. That was nature, and purposeful, and clean. This killing—even though she knew it to be the right thing—felt like the violent act of a peaceful girl, and it left her feeling sick and dirty. L’Aria might have an alternate form that hunted to live, but in her human shoes, she knew now she’d never be a killer.