Dragon Thief

by Marc Secchia

  Kal listened with his entire being. She was right. Now and again, just upon the edge of his senses, he heard a hint of evocative song, ululating and wailing, sometimes whistling or even clicking. Was this the song of the ocean? Or the song of the Water Dragons?

  “This would be a wonderful place to make a fresh start with our children,” said the Indigo Shapeshifter. “What do you think, Kal?”

  “When we have them, aye.”

  “In about fourteen months or so. A little less, now.”

  He opened and shut his jaw without a coherent word or otherwise escaping his lips.

  “I did say I was eating for four, Kal.”

  “Four?” he rasped. “Me, you, Riika and Aranya, right? That’s what you meant.”

  “Dad. Indigo-eyes meant nothing of the sort. You’re going to be a father. Snap to it. Actually, you’ve a few months to get used to the idea.”

  “A father again?” Kal squeezed Riika with his arms until the Dragoness wheezed and wriggled in annoyance. “I’ve enough trouble with the one who’s sitting on me. Four–that’s too many. Tazi, how? I mean … how?”

  The Dragoness laughed contentedly. “Kal, you daft rogue, I think you know exactly how. Shapeshifter Dragons have three babies, or eggs, at once. You know that. I didn’t know we had succeeded, but Aranya told me last night and showed me how to find their flame-souls inside my body. I’m pregnant with triplets and you had better start liking the idea, or so help me–”

  “YES!” With an enormous whoop, Kal spilled Riika off his lap.

  “Dad, Islands’ sakes!”

  He shouted, “Yes, yes … oh yes! You beautiful woman, I didn’t think you could–but I hoped, oh aye, I hoped to the heavens. And prayed, even. The monks taught me that. You definitely have been eating for four. And I made sure you had every chance, because we were so busy–”

  “Dad!” Riika tried her roar, but it was miniscule.

  “I mean, we were perpetrating all sorts of roost-love mischief, as the Dragons say, especially when you–”

  “Dad, honestly. Can we celebrate without the sordid details? Aren’t you happy?”

  “Happy?” Amazement made his voice squeak like a rusty hinge. “I could fly down over those Islands myself. I could run loops around the moons. Am I happy? You puerile pipsqueak, you golden lump of draconic detritus, of course I’m happy! Why would I be otherwise?”

  Riika said, “Because the Kal who rescued me would’ve made himself scarcer than a Gold Dragoness at such news.”

  Tazithiel loosed a thunderclap of such rage, it blasted them five hundred feet backward.

  Chapter 39: Gold Dragon

  HOLDing KAL ALOFT in her paw, the Indigo Dragoness unleashed a storm of wrath. Every phrase she spoke roared over the new world like the booming of thunder. “If you run away now, Kal, I swear there will be no place under the suns which will safeguard your miserable life, for I will hunt you down like the wretched cur you are. I will destroy you, trample you and cast your stinking carcass into the nethermost reaches of the Cloudlands. I will–”

  “Tazi, listen,” he protested.

  “I knew this would happen.” Another fireball passed a foot over his head. “Entangled with a smooth-talking thief, oh, bitter, bitter day! I’ve been such a ralti-brained dupe.”

  “Tazi–”

  “Silence! Detestable Human!”

  Kal resorted to sign language. Not me, he signed, and pointed firmly at Riika. Her idea. Hers!

  “What? Begging for your insignificant life?” sneered the Dragoness. Evidently, his command of sign language was second to none.

  Employing his Shadow power, Kal slipped out of her grasp and wafted down to the ground. Tazithiel, infuriated beyond reason, sprayed molten fire hundreds of feet in every direction.

  Kal sidestepped. Reappeared. “I’m not running!”

  GRRAAAAARRRGGGH! A fireball incinerated every scrap of air for a hundred yards behind his belly, but not an invisible instigator.

  He slipped into the physical realm again. “I’m sticking with you!”

  RAAARRRROOOOAAR! She deep-fried a few more undetectable thieves.

  “It was Riika’s idea!” Kal yelled from Tazithiel’s other flank.

  The Indigo Dragoness whirled, slashing the air with her tail. FIEND! COME OUT WHERE I CAN SEE YOU! Had Kal stayed put, he would have been pulped and then sautéed with emphatically prejudicial results.

  As Kal tiptoed around behind the Dragoness, Tazithiel continued to elucidate, “I’ll grill you slowly, you heartless bandit. I’ll fricassee your intestines with Mejian spices, following which I’ll bake your brains at ten thousand degrees and use the char to flavour my meals for the next hundred years.”

  While he appreciated his girl-fiend’s enthusiasm for cookery, he would rather she did not hone her skills on his blameless person.

  At the verbal equivalent of supersonic flight, Kal shouted, Tazithiel, stop!

  To his eternal surprise, she did.

  Magic? No mind. Hurry on! “Beloved, Riika was testing me, as is her right. We three know what it means to have lost our parents. I refuse to abandon my children. Our children. If you hurled me into the middle of that ocean, I would swim for all the years it took me to return to your side. And if you kicked me into the deepest reaches of the cosmos, as you’ve undoubtedly been tempted to on numerous occasions, I would return as a shooting star to your side. For I guarantee you this, Indigo Dragoness, that having purloined your heart, as you are my solemn witnesses, I swear I have absolutely no intention of returning it to you this side of the eternal fires of the Dragonkind! And you can just swill that in your fire-stomach and smoke it!”

  Tazithiel glanced at Riika, who shrugged, but a treacherous hiccough of laughter shook her tiny frame. Both Dragonesses burst into howls of laughter, the more so as Kal demanded to know exactly what was so comical about his declaration of love.

  Eventually, Tazithiel managed, “Beloved Kal, you stole a Dragoness’ heart. You are second to none–truly, the King of Thieves.”

  After the obligatory minute of preening, Kal said, “So riddle me this, Tazithiel. When this barrier drops down to the level of the ocean here, and the salty waters continue to flood our Island-World through this tunnel, will they eventually drown our Islands?”

  “I was wondering the same,” said Riika.

  Tazi said, “While I believe we should return to the Academy to inform the Dragonkind of Aranya’s departure–not death–I refuse to return without exploring a little, first. Who knows what we might find out here? As you rightly point out, once this channel opens fully, much will be swept through in a great wave. I don’t believe there’s any chance of us draining their ocean, but we should check. At the very least, if we find any intelligent beasts down there, we ought to warn them.”

  “Have we created a natural disaster?” Kal prodded.

  “We will simply take a pressure measurement down at ocean level and compare it to that of our own Islands,” said the Indigo Dragoness, narrowing her eyes in contemplation. “I suspect we’ll find this ocean’s level is just a touch higher than our Cloudlands.”

  “And how do you propose to take such measurements without instruments?”

  Tazithiel’s lip curled in draconic rejection of his sarcasm. “Why, I am the instrument, Kal. My clever mother taught me how to compare pressures using my draconic senses. Consequently, I am the superior creature.”

  Kal performed a veritable feast of a Fra’aniorian bow. “Yet I purloined your most precious treasure. Therefore I–”

  “Oh, go stuff it in a furnace engine,” snorted the Sun Dragoness, surrounding her own head in smoke with the force of her exclamation. She sneezed herself backward ten feet. “Great Islands, this Dragon form takes getting used to, doesn’t it, Tazi?”

  “It was the other way for me, stumbling over a pair of strange, galumphing Human feet,” Tazithiel reminded her.

  Riika said, “Those creatures out there should worry about us mighty Dragons
.”

  The Indigo Dragoness, towering over the mite with a motherly gleam in her eye, said, “Aye, they should worry. We’ll be keeping you firmly at home until you learn to behave, won’t we, Kal?”

  “Aye.”

  Ignoring Riika’s heated protests, he walked back to the edge of the golden black barrier. Kal gazed out over the new world with eyes zealous for the possibilities. Suns-shine. Glistening ocean. All was glorious, but he could not shake the feeling that something was watching.

  Reveal yourself, he whispered. I know you’re there. We’re friendly and we’d love to meet you.

  Tazithiel snickered, Kal, you null-wit. As if talking to a mythical Black Dragon wasn’t enough, now you’re …

  Mute with awe, Kal simply pointed.

  Forty or fifty miles from their position, a monstrous darkness shadowed the serene ocean. The waters seethed briefly before parting over the bulk of the creature surfacing from the deeps. All they saw of it was the head, Kal thought, but that was enough, for it dwarfed the Islands between them as if a mountain had broached the tranquil waters. In the flank of that dark mountain he saw a single great eye, apparently lidless, of a piercing, pellucid azure that even across the distance, struck him speechless with its intelligence and great age.

  He had the impression of being weighed on enormous, unfathomable scales.

  Beside and behind him, Kal sensed Tazithiel and Riika standing a-tremble, transfixed by the terrible majesty of that gaze.

  An alien song washed over them, outlandish and untamed and poignant, a song that hearkened to a lifetime spent gliding through the endless blue, of migrations spanning tens of thousands of leagues and faraway underwater palaces filled with secret treasures, of the restless ebbing and flowing of the tides, and an existence nourished by the surging, life-giving currents. Then the song changed to a stormier cry, a warning; a declaration of turbulent, motherly love that spanned the oceans and protected its own. Kal did not know if the creature was warning them off or warning its own kind from exploring the passageway which would one day lead to the Cloudlands.

  Then, the creature began to sound with a stately surge of its giant body, mile after mile of black, glistening flesh mounding out of the briny depths to occlude the horizon beyond. Briefly, they glimpsed a colossal flipper eddying the water near one of the Islands. After an interminable time, the waters closed and the creature vanished in the same manner as it had appeared.

  “Water Dragon,” Kal gasped.

  Tazithiel shook her muzzle slowly. “It’s as big as the ballads suggest the Ancient Dragons ever were, Kal. The queen of this ocean.”

  “Yet not unfriendly,” he said. “Not convinced, but not unwelcoming either.”

  The Sun Dragoness stood four-pawed on the ledge, surveying the waters with unexpected vigilance. She said, “Aye, it was a Water Dragon. And I am destined to meet that creature, one day.”

  Riika made an interrogative trill of Dragonsong. Her melodious vocalisation seemed to carry an inordinate distance across the restless waters.

  Kal listened for a reply. Soon, he smiled.

  The End

  Thus the worlds of IsleSong and Dragon were joined,

  Water and Cloud became one.

  Appendix

  About the Speed of Sound

  The speed of sound is not a constant, but depends on the temperature at a particular altitude. For ease of calculation, Dragon Thief uses the Wikipedia reference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_sound) of dry air at 20 Celsius:

  Speed of sound = 768 mph = 222.61 leagues per hour

  To view a table of the effects of altitude/temperature on the speed of sound, please see for example Fighter-planes.com (http://www.fighter-planes.com/jetmach1.htm).

  Dragonflight Record Breakers

  2151 leagues. 126 hours aloft, or 4 days and 13 hours of unbroken flight. This is the record the Indigo Dragoness and her Rider set en route to the Rim-Wall Mountains. Kal and Tazithiel disregard boundaries that for centuries the Dragonkind have regarded as inviolable, by employing a combination of Kal’s Shadow power and magical resources, and Tazithiel’s unique ability to enhance her flight with aerodynamic shielding and Kinetic power.

  Typically, Dragons are capable of flying 6–8 leagues per hour over long distances (174–232 leagues per day), sustaining flights of between one and two days for the strongest Dragons. These speeds can be considerably enhanced by use of upper atmospheric jet streams called Dragons’ Highways. Especially in combat situations, Dragons can accelerate to speeds of over 40 leagues per hour (138 mph / 222 km/h). The gravitational forces generated by their manoeuvring are comparable to those experienced by fighter pilots.

  Early on Dragon scientists identified a natural kinetic damping mechanism which allows Dragons to defy natural laws of momentum as they hurl their tonnage about in joyous Dragonflight, and current theories point to this mechanism extending to the linked Dragon Rider during combat, which explains why Riders rarely black out during combat flight, except for reasons of direct physical impact. However this remains unproven as Dragons and Riders are usually more preoccupied with avoiding fireballs and acid spit than measuring blood flow during battle.

  Kal and Tazithiel achieve supersonic Dragonflight for the first time in history. The key is Kal’s ability to charge an already perfectly-shaped shield with Shadow power, reducing wind resistance and drag to almost zero, and the Indigo Shapeshifter’s musculature, which produces hummingbird-like wing speeds, although she keeps the flight surface extremely small to achieve this effect.

  Dragon and Rider cannot sustain the extreme magical output required to break Mach 1 (the speed of sound) for much over one hour at a time.

  Distance, World Size and Sight Considerations

  1 league = 5.556 kilometres = 3.45 miles

  How far can the Human eye see under ideal conditions? With his scientific approach to marathon Dragonflight, Kal works out that the scholarly equations for calculating sight distances rely on inaccurate data; he theorises, perhaps originating on a smaller world. He calculates that the ‘other world’ must be 4.209 times smaller than his world–in other words, the Island-World is much larger and therefore flatter in curvature.

  The Human eye’s visual acuity is indeed astonishing. The stars are millions of light-years away, yet we see them. The problem always relates to what we’re looking at–how large or bright it is, from where it is seen in relation to ground level, and the atmospheric conditions under which the phenomenon is observed. Larking about on Dragonback, a Human can safely ascend to heights of 1.75 leagues (6.04 miles / 32000 feet) above Cloudlands level. With a Blue Dragon shield protecting the Rider with warm, oxygenated air, an intrepid Dragon Rider may brave higher altitudes. The extraordinarily clear atmosphere of the West, the 25 league height (86.25 miles) of the Rim-Wall Mountains and the Island-World’s very large size allows Kal and Tazithiel to see the mountains from over 1200 leagues (4140 miles) distant, given perfect viewing conditions and an extremely large target object.

  In volcanic areas such as Kal’s native Fra’anior, the constant venting of particles and gases leads to diminished sight distances, but accordingly more beautiful suns-rises and suns-sets as light is reflected and refracted by the airborne particulate matter.

  Island-World Timeline

  The ending of Dragon Thief brings the reader to the point where the worlds of Dragons, for millennia circumscribed by the uncrossable Rim-Wall Mountains and the oceanic world of IsleSong (The IsleSong series begins with The Girl who Sang with Whales) intersect.

  In IsleSong, Zhialeiana is a young Island girl gifted the ability to sing the songs of sea-creatures. Powerful Bard-Navigators sing to the great Whales, magically binding them to protect their ships during their dangerous crossings between the Atolls and Islands of the World-Sea. But the great Whales harbour unimagined secrets, and what of the Sea-Dragons which maraud unchecked? What is their origin?

  311 years before the events of Dragon Thief, the Princess of I
mmadia’s world-shaping exploits are recounted in the Shapeshifter Dragons series (Aranya and Shadow Dragon, part three forthcoming). Aranya’s courage and irrepressible fire pit her against Thoralian, Emperor of Sylakia and conqueror of the Island-World north of the Rift.

  152 years before Aranya, the Pygmy Dragon rocked the world with her extraordinary heritage and powers as she battled the all-conquering Marshal of Herimor and his legions of Dragon Assassins, confronting a peril which threatened to extinguish all Dragon life in the Island-World. This two-book series concludes with The Onyx Dragon, coming in 2016.

  Still deeper in history, just a legend by the time of Kal and Tazithiel, is the tale of the first Dragon Rider, Hualiama Dragonfriend. Born in an era when Humans have barely shaken off draconic rule, Hualiama is a woman whose fierce love and bravery will set her against every taboo and law of Humankind and Dragonkind. For when a woman loves a Dragon, that love will change the world. This series consists of three volumes–Dragonfriend, Dragonlove and Dragonsoul (coming in 2016).

  About the Author

  www.marcsecchia.com

  Marc is the bestselling author of over a dozen fantasy books. Born in South Africa, he lives and works in Ethiopia with his wife and 4 children, 2 dogs, a rabbit, and a variable number of marabou storks that roost on the acacia trees out back. On a good night you can also hear hyenas prowling along the back fence.

  When he’s not writing about Africa or dragons, Marc can be found travelling to remote locations. He thinks there’s nothing better than standing on a mountaintop wondering what lies over the next horizon.

  If you enjoyed this story, please consider leaving a review on Amazon.com, or reading one of my other works. Every review matters and I read them all!

  Where you can find me:

  Amazon Author Page