by Devin Hanson
Andrew hadn’t thought of that. It was one thing to ride Ava as she flew above the clouds, but to ride upon a male on the ground? Would it even be possible? Even if it was, would it be a good idea? It did offer him a solution to his problem, however. One dragon traveling alone would get to Khar Bora far more swiftly than the amassing army could and hopefully buy them enough time to work out a solution to the Incantors.
“I would be grateful,” he said, wondering what he was getting them into.
“Do not thank me yet, kossirith. I can only offer the suggestion. Nerivakosso must make the decision.”
At Miranikossi’s call, the massive male Andrew had encountered earlier lumbered over. Nerivakosso was at least a foot higher at the shoulder than any of the other dragons. Every step he took shook the ground. Rocks scattered about the basin floor were crushed to powder beneath his feet. Andrew watched his approach and tried to squash the tremor of fear before it got started.
Miranikossi spoke to the male dragon, her words simple and to the point, and Andrew felt a surge of something else as she spoke, a precision of intent that lay beneath her words and conveyed greater meaning than purely what was said. The kossi spoke, but Andrew had attention only for the implied context.
The dragon spoke of the Incantors and the desperate fight of the kossirith to best them. She drew parallels between their struggles and between the threatened destruction of both their civilizations. She offered a solution, a breaking dawn of fragile hope that could prevent untold bloodshed on both sides. She reinforced that the true enemy were the Incantors, that the rest of humanity were unfortunate bystanders in this fight, like hatchling dragons caught beneath the feet of fighting adults. And she presented the plan, painted in a heroic light, of Nerivakosso carrying the humans swiftly across the broken real land.
She finished and the kosso pondered her words, his massive head tilted so one great golden eye could fix on Andrew’s face. He grunted, and Andrew picked up the ghost of meaning, an acceptance.
Andrew bowed to the enormous dragon, said, “Thank you, Nerivakosso. Miranikossi, I will tell my companions what has transpired and prepare for the journey.”
“Very well, Avandir. Be swift, Nerivakosso is not known for his patience. I will take my leave, but I wish you luck, and my thoughts will be on your success.”
Andrew bowed again before turning to face Jules and Iria.
The Speaker was mad.
Iria watched in a sort of numbed haze as the Lady Jules worked with the Speaker to gather three saddles and make alterations to them in preparation for riding on the dragons. No saddle billet made would stretch around the massive barrel chest of a dragon. Jules had improvised with a zig-zagging cut using her impossibly sharp blade to expand the leather billet straps like an accordion. They were long enough now, but so thin they would barely support the weight of a baby, let alone keep them fastened to the back of a sprinting dragon.
Jules made some scratches in the leather and assured her that they would be strong enough, stronger even than the full-dimension strap had been originally. Iria assumed there was a translation error, or this was some kind of elaborate prank, a humorous side to the Lady that Iria had yet to encounter.
Any minute now the Speaker’s face would crack into that wide smile of his and his blue eyes would laugh and everyone would have a good chuckle. But the Speaker’s face remained serious; any smile he offered to her was one of reassurance, not humor.
While the two alchemists modified the saddles, Iria put Rajya to rest. She had known Rajya for nearly her entire life. Both of them had grown up in Nok Norrah, the elder Rajya protecting Iria from bullies and giving her an introduction to martial skills. It had not taken long for Iria to take on the bullies herself and trounce them. If not for Rajya, Iria would never have joined the Rangers and become balai.
It was the way of the balai to honor the passing of one of their own with song and drink, the exploits of the fallen told and commemorated. As Iria built a cairn over Rajya, she sang the songs of remembrance with the dragons sometimes joining in on the carried notes. It was surreal, and seemed at times as though the dragons were mourning Rajya with her, not just reacting to the notes the way dogs sometimes howl.
Then the cairn was complete, and the Speaker was leading her toward a dragon that towered over her. The saddle was lashed to the dragon with those ludicrously thin leather strips, placed high on the dragon’s back between its shoulders, almost at the base of its neck. The bottom of the stirrup was so high she doubted that she could jump to touch it.
“Up you go,” Andrew said, and made a pocket with his hands. Iria placed one foot into his hand, expecting that any moment she would wake up from her dream or Andrew would burst into laughter. She jumped and Andrew heaved. The Speaker might be slender, but he was wiry and strong. Iria caught the horn of the saddle and managed to get one leg up and over.
The saddles were scavenged from the slaughtered horses of the riders and were of a military design, with strapping designed to keep the rider seated even if unconscious or struck with a lance. She scrambled to get her feet into the stirrups, glad they had been shortened to her height before the saddle had been thrown onto the dragon’s back, then busied herself with the straps.
By the time she was all strapped in and could look around, Jules had mounted with the Speaker’s assistance and he was climbing up the side of his dragon like a mountaineer. Iria had been intimidated by the size of her dragon, but the one the Speaker rode was almost a third again as large. Her dragon stood and Iria felt her stomach drop away below her as she seemed to soar upward. She braced herself for the straps to snap and the saddle to tumble to the ground, but if anything, she felt more stable than when mounted on horseback. She was so high it felt like she was sitting on the peaked roof of a building. The similitude brought a tenuous sense of familiarity and a measure of calm to her nerves. She had long since become comfortable with crawling about on rooftops. The unyielding flanks of the dragon reminded her of clay shingles and she found herself actually enjoying the experience.
Maybe there was something to alchemy, Iria thought as she swayed with the dragon’s stride. If she was going to be beholden to the Speaker, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to learn a little of it herself.
Andrew finished strapping himself into his saddle and glanced toward Jules and got a thumbs up in response. He turned toward Iria and she waved. As long as things stayed like this, she could actually be comfortable on this trip.
The Speaker leaned forward and spoke a few words in the rumbling dragon tongue. His mount gave a thunderous bellow, echoed by the other dragons in the basin and reverberating off the cliffs. Then, quick as a cat scrambling up a board fence, the Speaker’s dragon leapt at the cliff face and surged to the top.
Iria had time to clamp her teeth about a yelp before her own dragon darted forward and launched itself at the cliff face. Iria hung onto the saddle horn as her dragon’s claws sank deep into the sandstone and powerful legs threw them up the cliff face. She heard the Lady Vierra whoop behind her then she was up over the ledge of the cliff.
The dragons moved as fast as a galloping horse, but they moved through the peaks and gorges of the terrain in the straight line, leaping the gaps between cliffs and sprinting up and down ragged cliff faces as if it was the packed earth of a race track. She quickly discovered that the best approach was to lie as flat as possible against the dragon’s neck and just hold on for dear life.
They hit a flat part of the terrain and the dragons settled into a ground-devouring stride that was surprisingly smooth after the lurching and lunging of the previous hour. Iria sat up and tried to get her bearings. It took her longer than she expected, until she suddenly placed the peak they were passing on the left, then she made out the sheltered overhand where she had planned for them to sleep… tomorrow. In a little over an hour, they had traveled what the horses following the winding trail would have taken two days to reach.
Iria hadn’t taken the side route to Khar Bo
ra more than a few times, but she knew the route wandered a bit, as it was forced to travel from spring to spring. Where normal riders would have taken a sharp turn after the peak to the left, the dragons continued in their straight path. She tried to figure the time they were saving, tried to compare the winding path the horses were forced to take and match it against the direct route of the dragons and was only able to come up with estimates.
Even the longest estimate she came up with shocked her. The horse route, if it was followed with no delays, took fifteen days. Assuming the dragons didn’t need to stop for water, at the rate they were going, they would be in sight of Khar Bora’s city walls before sunset. Today. They would be reaching the capital city before Colonel Mohandi and the maroon-robed Incantor could. The central passage through the real lands took eight days. Assuming that the Incantor and Mohandi had left Nok Norrah immediately after the failed attempt at the warehouse, the dragons would reach Khar Bora a full day before the Incantors.
A full day… to do what, though? For the first time since the Speaker had laid out the situation, Iria had some time and her attention wasn’t being completely occupied by trying to stay on the dragon’s back. This miraculous sprint across the real lands would buy them time, but what could they hope to accomplish?
The Speaker had been frustratingly vague. She wanted to know the time they had down to the minute, but all he was able to provide was what the female dragon had said. A few days. They had a day before the Incantors arrived from Nok Norrah and a day after. Two days to somehow root out and destroy a corruption that was as old as written history.
That same corruption had brought about the destruction of ancient civilization that humans had, in the height of their power, been unable to eliminate.
To work this impossible task, they had one balai lieutenant, slightly worse for wear, a Salian noblewoman, fierce in combat and possessing the esoteric power of alchemy, and a Speaker just coming into his powers. Against them was the arrayed might of the Maari Rangers, the balai, rotten with corruption in its core and the unseen Incantors with their fingers at the throat of the Emperor.
If they failed, an unstoppable army of dragons would sweep down upon the city and destroy it down to the last man, woman and child.
Iria wasn’t prone to fits of despair, but at the moment she did not know how they were going to succeed. If Andrew was able to pull it off, he would earn her allegiance a dozen times over.
Chapter 14
The Real Land
Iria was exhausted. The blistering afternoon sun hammered down on her unrelentingly and her clothes were crusted with dried sweat. She felt the symptoms of a low-grade heat stroke, but she was down to her last skin of water and the lifetime of living in the desert made her loath to waste it on cooling herself.
They had been riding without stop ever since they first mounted. Any expectation that they would stop when the sun rose was quickly banished. The dragons had seemingly endless stamina, and she suspected the few times they had dropped down to a rolling walk was at the Speaker’s request, not because the dragons needed a break.
The real land was all about them, endless shelves of cracked and shattered granite where nothing grew. Earthquakes here were common, a daily occurrence, often more than one a day. It was thought that the real lands were a mountain range being born, the granite spars and shelves were the bones of the earth being thrust upward through some titanic force.
As far as Iria knew, no one had ever traveled the path the dragons were taking through the real lands. There was no water, no trail, not even any flat surfaces. The dragons moved through the shattered terrain in surges and bounds, their talons tearing trenches through the stone as they clawed after purchase. The wind was constant, a gale that stripped the rock of sand and whipped it through the air, making Iria thankful for the protection of her sand mask.
Without the dragons, it would be perfectly impassable. Ledges the dragons climbed in seconds would have taken human climbers hours to traverse; yawning crevasses the dragons leapt in careless bounds would have taken engineers days to span. Horses would be useless here: their hoofs would find no purchase on the treacherous slopes. Every minute they traveled distances that could only have been covered in weeks of grueling effort.
It was deadly land, inhospitable, merciless and terrible. But it also had an austere beauty that stung at Iria’s heart and made her wish they were not in such a hurry so she could stop and take in some of the sweeping vistas or climb one of the towering monoliths of bare rock and shout from the top.
As the sun settled lower in the sky, the howling wind slowed and the land softened. Sand cushioned the dragons’ steps and Iria started seeing vegetation again. First tufts of forlorn grass, then the odd tree, gnarled and stunted. On the edge of the horizon she started catching glimpses of reflected sunlight; the shores of the Silent Sea.
They had passed through the real lands in a single day.
Still the dragons ran at a pace a galloping horse would have strained to maintain. She suddenly felt foolish, remembering her advice that dragons would not be able to keep up with a horse after a short sprint. Even over level ground, she could have ridden a string of horses to death and failed to match the pace of the dragons.
She started seeing landmarks she recognized and on the horizon, the smudge of smoke that marked the location of Khar Bora. The Silent Sea was close on their left, near enough that she could smell the tang of salt in the air and catch glimpses of the still waters from hilltops.
The dragons were slowing and Iria saw Andrew leaning forward, speaking to his enormous mount. His dragon slowed down and allowed Iria to draw level with the Speaker.
“How close are we, do you think?” Andrew called over.
Iria looked around until she got her bearings, squinting against the glare of the sun growing low in the sky. The ghostly specter of Maeis was peeking over the horizon to the east. “Two hours by horseback. Maybe a little more.”
Andrew nodded, thinking that over. “Too far to walk, still. How close can we get before we risk being spotted?”
“At this time of day, almost to the walls. There will not be anyone about for fear of dragons.”
“What about farmers, herders, that sort of thing?”
Iria shook her head. “No, that is not a problem.” She threw her arm out, gesturing across the arid desert. “There is not land to be cultivated this far from the Silent Sea. So long as we stay far from the shores, we will see no one.”
“Fair enough. We will get closer before we bid our companions farewell.” The Speaker called out to his mount, and the three dragons returned to their ground-eating pace.
The smudge of smoke turned into a high, drifting haze, and when the wind shifted Iria could smell the fish oil used in the street lamps in Khar Bora. They saw nobody, but the stamp of civilization was visible on the land. For a while they ran beside a road paved with enormous, fragmented flagstones that rose from the sand for two hundred yards before sinking back beneath the again, a forgotten relic of the past.
The sun was still a hands-breadth over the horizon when Iria called, “Speaker, we grow close. On the far side of the next hill, we will see the city.”
Andrew called to his mount and the dragons lumbered to a halt. The dragons weren’t breathing hard at all despite their marathon sprint.
“We’re close enough to walk?” the Lady Vierra asked.
“We will arrive before the sun sets,” Iria confirmed.
Andrew started undoing the straps holding him to the saddle. Iria hastened to do the same, spurred by a sudden and irrational worry that once Andrew was dismounted the dragons would race off back to the real land whether they still carried balai or not.
She finished with the strapping and swung a leg clear of the saddle horn, then gasped as blood rushed to her head and threw her off balance. She recovered, turned the near-tumble into a controlled slide down the dragon’s flank and landed in the sand with a jar that snapped her teeth together and buckled
her knees.
Grateful that the bulk of the dragon was between her and her comrades, Iria pushed herself to her feet, and scowled her dragon when he swiveled his head around to look at her, his golden eye watching impassively as she shook the sand from her clothing.
From the ground, the precarious saddle seemed impossibly high and the leather straps holding it in place laughably insufficient. She examined the leather and found it to be showing no sign of strain or wear after the abusive ride. If Iria hadn’t examined the straps with her own fingers and made the trip herself, she would not have believed it.
She unbuckled the straps and pulled the saddle free with a yank. Immediately, the dragon moved off to join Andrew’s mount. The Speaker was talking to his mount again, and Iria could tell he was repeating himself though the sounds he made held no meaning for her. Finally he bowed and the dragon grunted before lumbering off back into the desert.
Iria stood with Andrew and Jules as they watched the dragons retreat until the ground no longer trembled from their footsteps.
“Well,” Jules said with a wince as she stretched her legs, “that was a trip I’ll never forget. And never want to take again.”
Andrew agreed, laughing, but Iria was not so sure she felt the same. There was something about riding the dragons that was exhilarating and powerful. Even now, with her thighs still sore from the saddle, she thought about the deep places in the real lands and yearned to return. Next time, though, she would like a saddle with proper billet straps and maybe a back rest.
Iria bent and gathered up one of the long leather strings Jules had fashioned and tried to break it with her hands, then put her foot in a loop and strained against it using the strength of her back until it cut into her hands and she gasped for breath. Finally, she drew her curved blade and tried to cut through the leather.
