Missing Piece

by Robert Priest

  “Yes!” Mr. Stilpkin shouted. “Yes, you do! I felt something shift. When will there be a better time than this when the Great Kone is so close to its great turn.”

  “Can we try again?” Xemion pleaded. “I can feel it now and I want it out of me. I want my piece back.”

  Suddenly, Tharfen asked. “Xemion, is Saheli still alive?”

  Mr. Stilpkin emitted his largest sigh yet.

  Xemion froze for an instant, then said “I’m sorry, Tharfen.” He was looking right into her eyes. “She really isn’t.” He looked away to one side, hanging his head, and it looked very genuine to her and she felt no twinge of him in the piece. At that she plunked herself down in a chair and hung her head over in her hands.

  “This is very difficult,” she said.

  “Honesty is hard,” Mr. Stilpkin agreed. “Do you need a little time to gather yourself, Tharfen?” He pointed to a large wooden bowl full to the brim with big red berries. “Perhaps you’d like to have some of my fire berries. The first of the season. They will give you energy.”

  Tharfen looked at them and made a decision. There was something else she wanted to do. She’d stopped herself several times recently, but she wasn’t going to stop herself now.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll take some with me. I need some fresh air.”

  “So, we will take a little break. Let’s meet back here in an hour.”

  “Xemion, if you will come into the kitchen with me, please, our friends have brewed up an infusion for you.”

  “But—”

  “Come, you can drink it while you read a little more of the poetry. The infusion will help you against your thrall of the Great Kone.”

  “Goodbye,” Tharfen said, her gaze still averted. She didn’t want them to see her face. If they did, they might just see that she was experiencing a powerful kind of thrall of her own.

  44

  Poltorir

  “Poltorir!”

  Tharfen opened to the piece inside her and let it emanate up through her throat as she deepened her voice, trying to sound as much like Xemion as possible.

  “Poltorir!”

  She was standing in the dark, cool undergrowth beneath the black thorn canopy. She was far enough away from the dragon that if the great beast let out a blast of fire she would have some hope of getting out of the way. Being burned alive would not be her favourite way to die. She was trembling in every cell and a cold sweat trickled down from her armpits and along her ribs. But she managed to hang on by a thread to that piece of him and let it and its confidence and its familiarity radiate through her.

  “Poltorir.”

  She heard the dragon snort and a cloud of warm steam billowed up around her so thick she could hardly see. She took another step forward and another and said the name again.

  “Poltorir.”

  She said it with authority, the way she would have ordered her men at sea to do a task and expect it to be done immediately. She pictured and projected the image of the dragon lowering its long chin to the ground in front of her. There was another soft exhale that warmed her. She heard a snapping of sticks and knew the dragon had moved. She summoned all her courage and stepped forward out of the shadow of the thorn canopy and into the hollowed out area wherein the bulk of the dragon curled around the foot of the tower. The scent that had been sharp and acidic before was stronger now. There was also a slight smell of rot, no doubt emanating from Poltorir’s latest meal. The dragon had its huge snout turned away from her, but Tharfen was sure the beast was aware of her presence.

  For a second there was a flash in her mind — an image of the dragon turning quickly, inhaling, and burning her to a crisp with one terrible breath — but Tharfen spun it out of her mind and summoned up that other image of the long chin coming down to earth. With every ounce of her being she maintained that vision. She filled her palm with fireberries, took another step forward, and opened her hand. The dragon snorted slightly and dust and debris and steam billowed. Tharfen said the name again, moving her hand forward so that the fireberries were just under the enormous snout. With that, the dragon’s head came down, the thin forked tongue slipped out of the massive mouth and the fireberries were gone. She reached for another handful and another, all the while talking soothingly.

  The chain about Poltorir’s neck was the same one put there by her old cruel master, Glittervein the Nain, and Tharfen could see the rawness under it where it had left a pink scar around her neck. She could feel the terrible yearning in her, worse than a longing for mere freedom, worse than a longing for ease of pain. The longing of all her kind gathered up into one craving for the wind to fill her wings and take her out to the propagation fields, to the fireberry heights in the forests of Ilde.

  Holding the end of the chain in one hand, shaking, Tharfen climbed up the dragon’s leg and onto her bony back. Carefully she straddled the neck, clenching the high ridges of the spine tight with her knees. She had ridden horses across the steppes of Darmith with necks wider than this. There it was said that one learned to ride until one could clench the neck of the wind itself. She clenched the dragon’s neck tight and there was a corner in the dragon’s shoulder bones where her knees fit. Poltorir seemed to be almost comfortable with something on her back.

  Tharfen could have come down now if her purpose was merely to prove to herself that she was not a coward, but she had much more than that in mind. She let herself sink a little bit into the piece of Xemion, her mage piece, her dragon-riding piece, and she heard his voice in her, the way he had yelled the dragon’s name on the beach.

  “Poltorir! Up, Poltorir.”

  The dragon released another snort of steam and a sound that might have been one of complaint. She told herself she couldn’t fly, but even so her tail lashed about with a great creaking and snapping of branches as she cleared a space around her.

  “Up, Poltorir.”

  Tharfen felt a quaking beneath her far more powerful than that of any stallion. She heard the crackling of the black thorns at the dragon’s back as she coiled herself to spring. Poltorir rose so fast Tharfen’s stomach lurched and she almost fell off. Only holding on to the chain saved her as the dragon beat her wings and rose for the first time in five years. Up and across the city she soared, and then over the starlit ocean, out beyond what had been, from the tower, the horizon.

  45

  The Nightingale

  Even as Tharfen rode the dragon high overhead, Lirodello was buckling. He had held back till now on murder. But Zila had worn him away. She had split him off from himself. She had drained him and finally he had openly colluded. He had obtained her a canister of Pathan fire — the slow-burning kind. That was the easy part. It was much more difficult to obtain a poison of sufficient quality to kill a dragon. He had balked at that for quite a while. But when his Night Thrall, Sloithe, had finally provided him and the council with not only the knowledge of where Xemion was quartered, but also a map to get there, Lirodello’s resistance ended. At first Zila was so thrilled when he quietly imparted the information to her she gave him one more kiss. He had never seen so much of her face so radiant. It was so satisfying to him that he almost cried with joy. But he was also ashamed of himself.

  “Why that look?” she asked curtly.

  “What look? I have no look.”

  “That look of shame.”

  “But I have no shame.”

  “You don’t hate her like I do, do you?”

  Lirodello paused and shrugged. “She must be … Balance must be restored. It’s not a matter of hate or—”

  “I knew it.”

  He shrugged again. This was unexpected, this degree of rising wrath.

  “I knew you would let me down. I knew you would let me get this far and then just yank it all out from under me. Is my blood not good enough for you?”

  “What?”

  “I have given you
everything, and this is what I get in return?”

  “But—”

  “Well, I’m not going to let you do it. You think you own me. You think you control me. But I’m not yours. I’m hardly even my own.”

  “Please.” Lirodello trembled.

  “Maybe you need time to think about it, Lirodello.”

  “Please.”

  “Maybe you need to spend a lot of time alone to remember what you were before—”

  “Please, don’t leave me,” he begged, his voice cracking. “I do hate her. I despise her. I want her out of the world.”

  “You are such a liar. How did I ever think I loved you?”

  As unexpectedly as she’d entered Lirodello’s life, Zila now left it. She had enough substance for what needed to be done. No thing or being bothered her as she trekked through the fissures and alleyways that zigzagged beneath the upside-down roofs of the fallen houses. The certainty that comes with being compelled to do something had a tinge of extreme pleasure to it. If she’d ever had a framework of logical arguments and ethical positions such as those promoted by Elphaerean philosophers, she might have suffered trembles of conscience at what she was being drawn to accomplish. But what shadow webs of such a framework still clung to the duller edges of her mind did little but flutter. She didn’t feel them. She had no conscience. And whatever she was — whatever she was made of — none of the spell-crossed creatures who might have been nearby wanted anything to do with it. They kept a wide radius around her.

  She didn’t need the map. She knew just where she was going. The same unerring sense of destination that had guided her from the bog to the Great Kone guided her now. Every once in a while when she reached one of those clearings in the fallen architecture where she could see the sky, she would look up and see the tallest tower — Vallaine’s tower. As she drew near, she took the poison from her pouch and held it securely in her hand. But when she arrived, there was no dragon guarding the door at the foot of the tower. She knew what she had to do. She returned the dragon poison to her pouch and began to climb.

  She had no fear of thorns, though they were long and pointed like daggers and razor-sharp. A cut would be nothing. Blood was secondary to this need to get to the window. Bent almost double, she twisted and turned and tugged and yanked herself up the thorns till she got to the shuttered square on the seventh floor. Such strength; she held on to the ledge with only one hand and nudged the shutter open. That was when she smelled the dog.

  She peeked in. It was a big dog, but very old — a war dog with something black and curved like a crescent moon jutting out of its back. She reached into the pouch again and dropped her special treat inside. Hanging there now, straight-armed, she heard the rattle and jingling of the dog’s collar, the clack of the dog’s paws on the floor as he sniffed his way over to the window. She heard the soft inquisitorial sniff at the treat and then that quick gulping decision as the treat was swallowed down whole. It wouldn’t be long now. She rested a foot at the base of a thorn for a while, easing the pull on her arms as she listened. Soon the dog whined, and she smiled.

  Bargest began to whine. But the poison was powerful and the end came quickly. She had already pushed the shutter open farther and before the light went completely out of his eyes he saw her and he saw that he had failed.

  Finally she stood at the foot of the bed where Saheli had lain for five years, neither dead nor alive. She did not repress her full smile. She gazed triumphantly at this figure, this filth that would very soon be ashes, and she marvelled at the power she had to undo. She prepared to release the Pathan fire, but first she wanted to examine her more closely. She looked at her from one side and then she walked around the bed and looked at her from the other, and when she saw what looked to be a pout, she was seized with jealousy. So much so that she could almost have plunged her knife into the girl right then. But someone had beaten her to this act of violence long ago and it had not done the job. She reached down and pushed the collar of Saheli’s shirt to one side. She wanted to see those wounds. How beautiful they were. They seemed to go right through the whole world and out the other side. She wanted to touch them.

  Slowly her index finger descended toward that place in Saheli’s chest where the two cuts intersected, but at the last moment before touching it she drew her hand away in horror. She had to get this done! She reached into her bag for the slow Pathan fire, and now that she had returned to the task at hand she began to grin. She was just about to flick the flint wheel when something seemed to flutter through the window. It whirred its wings so fast she could hardly see it at first, but it was brilliant red. She watched it in amazement as it settled down on Saheli’s chest. Now this was a nightingale! Not like those poor, half-starved specimens Lirodello had dared to bring her. She reached out to grab it, but the bird flew off at the last moment and her hand grazed the wound in Saheli’s chest.

  46

  The Red Hand

  When he realized that Tharfen wouldn’t be returning, Xemion ran out of Mr. Stilpkin’s hospital in a panic. He bolted to the wall and wound his way through the black thorn forest with all the speed he possessed. Now that he had opened a little to the piece of Tharfen inside him, he was beginning to have suspicions about her that frightened him. These increased when he saw that the dragon was no longer guarding the tower. Looking up, he saw that the black shutters had been swung open. Then a terrible crackling shrieking sound emerged from the window. He dashed up the flights of stairs, but as he threw open the door at the top he was buffeted back by an explosion of blue light from within the room.

  He landed on his back with great force halfway down the stairs and lay there a moment groaning, the hot blue force shrieking over him like a hurricane. His head hurt and he had cracked his elbow badly, but he pushed himself up and got to his feet again. Determined, shouting Saheli’s name, he bent forward, his hair streaming back, and again pushed himself up the stairs to the top. There he grabbed hold of the door frame, hardly able to breathe with the pressure of the blue light against his chest. Clinging there like a leaf in a gale, still screaming Saheli’s name, hardly able to hold on let alone enter the room, he witnessed a strange transformation.

  Some kind of ghoulish figure was standing over Saheli, one arm extended, the index finger touching that crisscross place in Saheli’s breast where Montither had stabbed her. It was this figure who was doing the shrieking, but there was something happening also with Saheli. Her throat was trembling and her lips were moving as if she, too, were shrieking. Her face was like a face beneath water, slowly coming to the surface. Inexorably, though, the ghoulish woman was struggling against it, her arm was turning to black dust that was being sucked into the nexus of the two cuts in Saheli’s chest. The woman struggled and tugged, trying to withdraw her hand, but it couldn’t be stopped. And now, for the first time, Xemion saw the outline of another hand, a red hand, gripping the woman’s upper arm, tugging her down deeper and deeper into Saheli. Soon the whole arm and the shoulder had been sucked into the cut and one side of the woman’s head, even as she shrieked, was turning into black dust. Almost all of her looked more like shadow now than matter. She began to flap like a black flag. The red hand dragged this fluttering remnant down, feeding it into Saheli’s wounds until there was no more screaming, no more body, and the figure and the red hand were gone entirely.

  Finally, the blue light stopped its chaotic crackling and sparking. Xemion rushed into the room and grabbed Saheli’s hand. It was warm.

  “Saheli!” he cried, and she opened her eyes.

  47

  Over the Still Sea

  Just before Poltorir rose through the clouds, Tharfen saw that they were heading seaward. She kept her intent sharply projected out to the horizon. She imagined as strongly as possible the sails of the Cyclopean flotilla. Sometimes her connectedness to Poltorir seemed so fragile, she feared it might snap. It was all she had right now.

  After a ti
me, the heavy humidity dissolved away beneath them and they emerged from the billowing clouds into a clear, starlit seascape. Her shadow and that of the dragon were cast onto the glassy stillness of the waters below by the light of the moon. Far ahead she saw the vast curve where the seas grew rough again. And just inside that curve, becalmed, was the Cyclopean armada, perhaps a hundred ships, motionless. Way out in front of the others was a smaller boat with a pointed sail. As she approached, Tharfen saw the princely insignia on the side and realized she had before her another member of that same family from which she had already taken five brothers.

  Almost simultaneously, the prince with his telescope spotted the dragon approaching. Even through his fear, he noted with a scientist’s eye the features of the dragon’s face. He did his best to assign them to memory for later description, and perhaps a drawing, but there was no time now. He had a harpoon catapult to load. This was a she-dragon, he was sure of it. And he also knew that female dragons were less able to generate fire at this time of the year. But he was not going to take any chances.

  The harpoon clicked into the barrel and he began to turn the crank that lifted it. Aiming through the crosshairs of the telescopic lens on the end, he spied for the first time the shadow that sat huddled atop the dragon’s shoulders. With his other hand he adjusted the lens, pulling into focus a freckled face, the head bound in a red cloth. He couldn’t tell if it was male or female. It was so hard to tell with the two-eyes. His nervousness subsided a little. Whoever it was did not look very fierce.

  He got behind the harpoon and tracked the dragon as it flew. He was so glad now that he had invested in this very new invention. With it, he had killed more whales than he knew what to do with. Now he would slay a dragon. It was so close he could see a crisscross of scars on its flank. A little closer and he would have a good shot at the creature’s unprotected underbelly.