by C. Greenwood
Our next challenge would be to move such a massive creature to the largest ship in my fleet, anchored back near the cove. There was a lot of marshy ground to cover between here and there, but we had plenty of manpower. All we had to do was scavenge ropes for hoisting and materials for constructing some sort of rolling vehicle to tow the dragon where we needed. The locals of this place could surely provide us with such things. Earlier today we had passed by a lonely shack sitting above a set of rickety stairs high atop a bank that overlooked the swamp. We could return there and take what materials we needed.
As to the future and what would happen when the dragon eventually woke aboard ship… I looked to the boy, who was crawling out of the stream. Maybe we had found one method of securing the beast’s obedience.
I ordered one of my warriors to apprehend the boy.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I awoke to find bright sunlight streaming into my face. Overhead, canvas sails flapped in the gentle breeze. I was initially confused, unable to tell whether I was in my own body, that of the Gold Ship Voyager, or that of the pregnant dragonkind woman. Then I heard Basil’s voice, as if from a distance.
“Isaura, you’re awake now? I was beginning to think you wouldn’t make it.”
At his words, memories of our ship wrecking upon the dark mountain of Zoltar came rushing back. I bolted upright, thinking of fog and deadly shoals and Basil’s hat floating in the water.
But what met my eyes was a warm and sunny morning. The sky was bright and cloudless, the turquoise sea calm and smooth. The sun cast a relentless heat over our little vessel. But it looked like Basil had concocted a slight protection in the form of a strip of canvas stretched over a portion of the deck. It shaded parts of me while the rest remained in direct sunlight.
“Where are we?” I asked. My throat felt strangely rough and dry. “How long have I been asleep? What happened after I passed out?”
Basil knelt beside me. “That’s a lot of questions,” he said. “Maybe before we talk any more you should have a drink.”
He offered me a wooden bucket half-filled with water. I sniffed the sloshing liquid. It didn’t smell salty.
“Where did you get freshwater?” I asked, after taking a long, grateful drink.
“It rained during the first day you were unconscious,” he said. “I managed to catch a good bit of rainwater in this bucket I found in a compartment in the bottom of the boat. But no such luck with food, I’m afraid. That hasn’t exactly been falling from the sky, although I did manage to trap a fish in a piece of sailcloth yesterday. Sadly, I’ve already eaten it all.”
He gave an apologetic shrug. “You weren’t in any condition to eat, and there was no sense to wasting it.”
“Yesterday,” I said, latching onto that one word. “You talk as if I have been asleep for days.”
“That’s because you were,” he said. “Right after we dodged those shoals in the fog, you fainted for some reason.”
For some reason.
I remembered the wreck on the dark mountain and my use of the crushed minute glass to push back time and save us. I looked at the minute glass now, dangling from its string on my wrist. It looked like an ordinary lifeless ornament. But I knew better. I had seen what the thing was capable of. What I didn’t understand was how it had happened. One moment the ancient relic had lain in crushed ruins, its pale sands spilled across the dark rocks of the mountain. The next, I had picked it up in my magic hand, and it had transported me back to a time just a few minutes before the wreck. It had saved us, but in so doing it had apparently taken a terrible toll on me. I recalled having stood on this deck after escaping the shoals and being overcome by a sudden weakness. I remembered the helpless feeling of slipping away into unconsciousness.
I felt strange even now. My hands trembled as I lowered the wooden bucket. I made an effort to stand but found I couldn’t raise myself out of a sitting position. My body felt light, as if it weighed no more than a puff of air. And yet it was too heavy to lift. Either that or my muscles were just too weak to obey me. What exactly had the minute glass done to me? Whatever it was, I sensed I was lucky to be alive.
I slipped the relic on its string off my wrist and dropped it into my belt pouch. I had to make sure I didn’t—even by accident—crush the ornament and release its powerful sands again. I was fairly sure I wouldn’t survive another push back through time.
I was about to explain to Basil what had happened at the dark mountain or as much of it as I understood. Having not traveled through time as I had, he obviously didn’t know how near we had come to death. But he didn’t give me a chance to speak.
“Are those biscuits?” he asked, peering into my open pouch as I replaced the minute glass.
He was right. Back on the island of the talking wall I had stuffed the hard biscuits I had found under the seat of the pirate dinghy into my belt pouch for later. I had forgotten all about them until now.
“If I’d known we had food, I wouldn’t have put myself through the torture of eating raw fish,” Basil grumbled.
I ignored his complaining and passed him a hard biscuit. Despite his occasional cowardice and his incessant griping, he had proved to be a surprisingly useful companion on this adventure.
“So where are we now?” I asked, gazing out over the turquoise waters. “Are we headed in the right direction?”
“We’re headed toward your precious mapmaker, if that’s what you mean,” he said, biting off a chunk of biscuit. “We would be there by now if I hadn’t got us off course at some point and had to correct when the stars came out.”
“We’re following the hunter’s arrow,” I murmured, remembering the directions from the woman in the wall.
Basil had turned out to be a decent sailor and navigator, for all his claims that he couldn’t do it. He had sailed this ship alone for days, a vessel we had once thought too much for the two of us to handle. And if he had cost us time by getting off course, I couldn’t blame him. At least we were moving the right direction now.
I tested my legs again and managed to stand this time. Shakily I crossed the deck to lean against the rail and gaze toward the horizon ahead.
At first I thought the pale blur in the distance was only the sun reflecting off the water. But gradually it resolved itself into a shoreline, a white beach behind which I could see green trees and hills. As we drew closer, the shore curved inward into a cove, one shaped like the mouth of a skull.
We were doing it. We were coming back to the mapmaker.
I only hoped we weren’t too late. Wispy memories of my dream returned to me. Skybreaker was somewhere near here, and he was in danger. The mysterious Gold Ship Voyagers who had followed us from Port Unity were determined to take him. Would we arrive in time to help? And even if we did, what could we do against such powerful enemies? The shackle clamped around my wrist still blocked most of the magic from my hand. The minute glass now riding safely inside my belt pouch couldn’t be used again to buy us more second chances—not without a likelihood of it killing me in the process. Basil and I had only ourselves to rely on.
With a renewed sense of urgency, I watched the cove coming closer. We couldn’t land on that sandy shore soon enough.
* * *
Anchoring our ship in deep waters a little ways off from shore and figuring out how to cover the short distance from there to the beach was a new challenge. In the end, lacking a shallow-bottomed dinghy to carry us, we simply threw ourselves overboard and swam for land. Still weak from the draining power of the minute glass, it was all I could do to paddle after Basil and keep my head above water. I was exhausted by the time I dragged myself onto the white sands of the beach.
But I didn’t lie there in a soggy heap for long.
“What’s that?” Basil asked, drawing my attention to a rising plume of smoke in the distance.
We trudged toward the black curls of smoke and arrived at the little village we had seen from a distance the last time we were here. The loose collect
ion of native huts was burned out now, the remains of the homes lying in blackened piles of charred wood. There was no one around. If anyone had survived the tragedy of their village, they had fled inland.
“What happened here?” Basil muttered as we circled the remains of the village.
“Gold Ship Voyagers,” I told him grimly.
I recalled my glimpse into the mind of their leader, remembered that he had “questioned” the villagers.
“Voyagers?” Basil looked startled. “Gold Ship Voyagers wouldn’t be interested in a place like this. The locals have nothing valuable enough to plunder.”
“I’m certain it was them,” I said. “I saw it in a dream.”
“Oh? So now we’re having visions.” He nodded as if humoring an idiot.
I didn’t need him to believe me. I knew what I had seen.
“We have to get to Skybreaker,” I said. The sight of the burned-out village only increased my fears for the mad dragon. The last of his kind and crucial to my quest, I could let nothing happen to Skybreaker.
Basil took off his hat and scratched his head. “I thought you were in such a hurry to get to the mapmaker.”
“He can wait,” I said. “Skybreaker and the boy come first.”
“Boy? What boy?”
I didn’t answer. I was already hurrying off toward the near trees as quickly as my weary legs could carry me.
* * *
Skybreaker was gone when we reached the clearing where we had left him only days ago. I knew he hadn’t strayed from the spot while we were away. My dream told me so. This was the place where he had been when he met the boy, the same location where the party of Gold Ship Voyagers had attacked him. The churned ground and the blood of the warriors who had been killed gave evidence to what had occurred here.
But the enemy must have been successful in their efforts to take away both dragon and boy, for neither was to be found now.
At least Basil could no longer deny my insistence that the Voyagers had been here.
“Should we keep looking for the dragon?” he asked uneasily.
I could tell he was eager to be away from this place with its signs of recent violence.
“No,” I said. “Skybreaker will be long gone from these shores. They were planning to take him aboard their ship.”
“Take him?”
I understood the skepticism in my cousin’s voice. It was difficult to imagine anyone taking a beast as large as Skybreaker anywhere he didn’t want to go. Even injured and unconscious, his massive weight would prevent a problem in moving him. But everything I had seen of the Gold Ship Voyagers told me they were capable of unexpected feats.
“We should go to the mapmaker,” I said. “Maybe he can tell us more. If nothing else, perhaps he has finished our map by now.”
My thoughts went to the dream I had experienced days ago, in which I had seen the mapmaker instructing the boy on the creation of maps.
Yes, he would have continued the commissioned work in our absence. His obsession with the living maps would drive him to complete this one.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I sensed something was wrong as we neared the mapmaker’s home.
We had traveled overland this time, approaching from the rear instead of through the swamp waters. That had lengthened our journey, so it was growing dark by the time we reached our destination. Patches of starry sky were visible through the overhead canopy of leaves. Night birds screeched in the trees. A cool evening wind blew away some of the humidity and the buzzing insects.
The crudely built shack encircled by porches looked much as we had last seen it on the night the pirates dragged us away. But something was different this time. The back porch sagged heavily, its roof partially collapsed where supporting timbers had been ripped away. Had the pirates been responsible for that damage? Certainly they had destroyed the inside of the cabin, but I couldn’t remember them tearing apart the porch.
A memory came to me then. In my head I revisited the thoughts of the lead Gold Ship Voyager who had taken Skybreaker.
The man had wanted to scavenge ropes for hoisting and materials for constructing some sort of rolling vehicle to tow the unconscious dragon away. Planning to procure the items from locals, he had thought specifically of a lonely shack he had passed before, one that sat above a set of rickety stairs high atop a bank that overlooked the swamp. He had meant to return there and take what materials he needed.
I knew in a rush that the mapmaker’s home was the place he and his men had raided. With a sickening fear in my stomach, I broke into a run and rushed up the front steps of the shack. It was difficult to make it through the door, because of the partially collapsed roof.
Inside, I found the body of the skinny little mapmaker, killed no doubt by one of the curved swords of the Gold Ship Raiders. I knelt next to his white head and picked up his crushed spectacles where they had fallen to the floor. His death was so unnecessary. He was no threat to the Voyagers. Why couldn’t they have taken what they’d needed and left him alive?
I tried not to ask myself if this was my fault. I knew it was. If not for me, they never would have come here looking for the dragon.
“We should leave,” Basil said soberly, taking in the scene from the doorway. “The people who did this could come back.”
It was like him to suggest it. Even after all we had been through, his first response to everything was still to run.
“The Voyagers won’t be back,” I said. “I told you, they’re long gone from this place.”
If it was typical of Basil to want to flee, maybe it was typical of me that I now crossed the room to the mapmaker’s worktable. I needed to know if he had completed the map before he died. I had seen him working on it in my dream and retained a flicker of hope that he had managed to finish before it was too late.
There it was. The item we had struggled so hard to get. The parchment was laid out flat across the table, a scattering of stoppered bottles and quill pens arranged around it. My heart stopped at my first glimpse of it. There was the likeness of rolling turquoise waves rippling across the paper, more detailed than any of the others I had seen. White seabirds were shown swooping above the glittering surface of the waters. There was just one problem.
“What’s wrong?” asked Basil, watching my face. “Isn’t it the right map?”
“It’s the right one,” I said. I wasn’t sure how I knew that but I did. “Trouble is, it’s not…” I searched for the right word. “It’s not alive.” I couldn’t think of a better way to explain.
It was true. Although amazing as a piece of art, nothing on the map actually moved the way the mapmaker’s other maps had done. The rolling of the ocean waves was only an illusion. The birds were actually still, not circling. Whatever magic had made the other maps the way they were had yet to be applied to this one. Maybe because it was unfinished?
And there was another difficulty. “It has no land,” I said to Basil.
Although the sea had been lovingly filled out, the mapmaker had yet to sketch in any landmasses or coordinates. Without lines or means to chart a course, the map was just a pretty picture of water. There was no way to identify where it was in the world. Certainly there was no sign of the legendary mountain where I could obtain another magic Sheltering Stone.
Basil took off his hat and scratched his head. “Well, I guess that’s the end of your quest,” he said. “No map, no mountain.”
I didn’t answer. I was already rolling up the map carefully and looking around for something to carry all the stoppered bottles and other implements in.
“What are you doing?” Basil asked as I picked up a dirty canvas sack from the floor and began stuffing all the mapmaking tools inside it.
“We have to go after Skybreaker and the boy,” I said. “We get the boy, we get a finished map. But he lacks tools to complete the work. We’ll bring him what he needs.”
“Slow down,” Basil protested. “You keep mentioning this boy. Who is he, and why is he s
o important?”
“He has the ability to become a mapmaker,” I explained. “He’s sort of an apprentice to the old mapmaker, knows the secrets, and can finish what our friend here began.” I waved toward the corpse on the floor behind us.
“And you’re mad enough to chase after the Gold Ship Voyagers to try to rescue him?” Basil asked disbelievingly.
“I am,” I said. “And you’re mad enough to join me.”
I ignored the protests I knew were coming. It didn’t matter what my cousin said. In the end, he would help me. I would find a way to make it happen, just as I had found a way to get us this far. Only one thing worried me.
I looked at the shackle around my wrist, still blocking my magic, and thought of my dream. It wasn’t the boy or Skybreaker I was remembering this time but the woman. The dragonkind woman carrying what may well be the last surviving child of our race. The young mother-to-be had escaped the sinking of the Ninth Isle and had managed not to drown as she floated out on the ocean. She had made it to shore where she now faced a new kind of danger. She might be dead already, killed by the orange-striped beast that stalked her.
But something told me she wasn’t. Somehow I knew, even if she didn’t, that she was waiting for me to come and rescue her. That was my duty. If it wasn’t, the dream would never have shown her to me. For a long time I had thought I was the last dragonkind. I had imagined the most I could do in memory of my people was to raise up the Ninth Isle again—and in the process maybe restore the Three Hopes, the last dragon eggs. But now I knew my kind had yet another hope for the future. I just had to find her and install her in a safe place.
