Dragonstar (Dragonfriend Book 4)
Page 21
Both girls nodded. “We promise.”
Istariela said, “We will speak of this again, when these battles have run their course. But now, I would do for you what I have never done in my life, and beg of you the chance to grant you a gift, even if that must be hard to accept from a shell-mother such as I have been.”
Again, a sense of raw, awful majesty enfolded the Shapeshifter Dragoness as her twinned soul forms regarded their mother. What was this secret that burned upon her tongue? A gift that must be given? The one gift, aside from life itself, that Istariela had ever given her shell-daughter?
The very air seemed to tremble, pregnant with doom.
Human-Lia said, unsteadily, “Only if you will promise my Dragonsoul that you will always be with us, and visit us here even if you cannot be with us in body. Upon that condition …”
Her Dragoness squeezed her fingers. Love you too, Humansoul.
Istariela nodded regally. “Insofar as my fire-life permits, I promise – gladly. Now, listen closely, for it may be that your fate and that of our Island-World depends upon how you answer. I would offer to lift a burden from your soul, that you might fight Numistar Winterborn and the Empress without taint in your light.”
“Nooo …” Dragonsoul groaned.
“Aye. You allow me to carry the burden of ruzal. Only I am strong enough to bear it. Only I have the knowledge to deal with this foul anti-magic, and only I, as your shell-mother, have the right to expunge this burden from your life.”
“NOOOOO!”
* * * *
Grandion grumbled, “What is it about Dragons that they have to play, ‘who’s the biggest Dragon?’ I ask you! Galumphing ralti sheep.”
“You broke his neck,” Queen Imaytha said mildly, stuffing a foot-wide puncture wound at the nape of Grandion’s neck with an old, wadded-up piece of sacking. She tamped it in place with her foot.
“Accident!”
“That Red Dragon was a grossly distended pustule on a toad’s greasy backside,” said Flicker. “I’m surprised you deigned to wipe your paws on his spavined carcass. Mind you keep all of Grandion’s pieces, o Queen, however unsightly or useless they might seem. Hualiama will never forgive us if we leave stray body parts lying about the Cloudlands.”
To the Tourmaline’s surprise, the Queen bowed deeply. “As you command, o stupendously highborn stalwart of the dragonet-kind.”
“By my wings!” Flicker squealed, so overcome he flopped inelegantly over Grandion’s dorsal-rear left ear canal. Imaytha’s laughter quickly set him to rights, however. He turned instantly into a bristling ball of ire. “Incompetent yokel! I imagine you hardly put those delicate hands to real work,” he sniffed. “Spineless peasant scum. Your ancestors dripped from an Immadian icicle late one summer, and as for that collection of filthy, slapped-up mud hovels you presume to call a town –”
“Don’t tease Flicker,” Grandion advised, whirling his eyes at Imaytha over his shoulder. “He’ll prattle you all the way back to Immadia.”
Eyes flashing, Imaytha rounded on the dragonet. “Mind I don’t stuff your moth-eaten pelt into this wound.”
Flicker waved a white paw disdainfully. “I see that your tolerably attractive features disguise a mind like a sulphurous fumarole, belching malodorous gases day and night.”
With her sweetest smile, Imaytha returned, “Whereas you, of infinitely less use than a quibbling quadrupedal footstool, remind me of a rat of such stupendously pustulent excrescence, you’d give an Immadian sewer a terminal case of constipation.”
Flicker gaped in open amazement. “I – I thought you were royalty?”
“Long, dark winters and a love of word games,” said the petite woman. She gave the wadding one more stamp of her foot. “Done, Grandion. Anything else of yours you’d like me to kick?”
INCOMING! bellowed Mizuki.
The temporary encampment exploded in a scramble of paws and boots.
* * * *
Being a foot-long white dragonet did not lend itself to great deeds of paw, unlike that Tourmaline hooligan, who had body-slammed his Red challenger all over the Fingers of Ferial – with only the mildest exaggeration. Flicker had never known a Dragon with strength to compare, and judging by the deferential wingtip acknowledgements of every other Dragon in their steadily amassing Dragonwing, they knew it too. There would be no more challenges.
He did have seven hundred and eleven white-pawed cohorts in crime, however.
Thus, as a ragged flight of several hundred Ice-Raptors screamed down toward the Dragonships moored above the southernmost finger of rock, the dark spires that resembled nothing more than a clawed Dragon’s paw reaching for the sky with its talons outstretched, he summoned his brethren. One of mind, they were the quickest to rise and respond.
As they winged aloft in a single white flock, lightly linked into the community-mind-bond, Flicker rapped, Eyes, ears, wing surfaces. Mind the ice breath and protect each other, as we drilled.
They were his wings, his fangs and his thoughts. They were pinpricks of sensation against his mind, like a beast with a single hide that communicated sensory feedback to a super-brain that shared, processed and replied to each subordinate consciousness. The flock angled upward into the heavily overcast evening sky. A chill wind blew steadily from the Northeast, but had not broken up the scudding cloud layer. Below, due to the lack of moons-light and starlight, Ferial’s many fingers seemed to reach upward out of the gloom, a disembodied appendage linked by thin traceries of Human wood and rope bridges, which spanned the deep-cleft gaps between the ‘fingers’ like a patch of ethereal, silvery cobwebs approximately a mile below the flat, barren upper surfaces.
Flicker’s lip curled. They had moored up top due to politics. Far be it from the clannish denizens of Ferial to offer any substantial help. Supplies, aye. Contracts of payment, even more so. Still, negotiation at talon tip had its advantages. Grandion had been keen to start with a few fireballs, but the desire to include the local Dragonkind of Ferial and Helyon – more truthfully, not to start a minor side war – had led to more measured dialogue, and the single combat challenge which the Tourmaline had won with spectacular proficiency.
Pretty-winged ruffian.
Paws off my girl! Flicker snarled, leading his flock into battle.
The dragonets responded with wrath tinged with surprise; still, their intersecting path brought them across the noses of the dense wedge of Ice-Raptors at high speed, a mile above the encampment and a quarter-mile ahead of the nearest Lesser Dragon. Here came the patrols, responsible for not letting exactly this situation develop.
Flicker rubbed his paws. The late evening promised entertainment – doubtless, Grandion would discipline a few more Dragons after they tidied up this minor muddle.
No cold fireballs? They think we’re birds! he snapped. Make them pay!
The Ice-Raptors rode the winds like a dense, undulating white beast, their fur flowing in the blast-speed of their passage, perhaps touching thirty leagues per hour. Lacking the heavy forelimbs of the Lesser Dragons, they resembled overgrown, honking water birds, Flicker decided, sharing the derisive image with his flock, but what they lacked in strength and stature, they made up for with manoeuvrability and snappish tempers.
Effortlessly, he divided his flock by dozens. Take them!
The dragonets shot into the formation at high speed, twisting and jiving amidst the much larger Wyvern-kind. They mobbed the broad white heads in teams, slicing into unprotected eyeballs and quarrying at the highly sensitive, nerve-rich ears with their talons. The dragonets were quick and tenacious, like ants swarming their prey to deliver a death of ten thousand bites. In a split second the formation imploded as the blinded, smarting Ice-Raptors turned upon each other. The killing began.
Flicker clipped his wings, knocking a larger dragonet aside from a fatal bite, before standing almost on his tail to hack at an Ice-Raptor’s left eye in passing. His talons came away wet and steaming with ichor. Now, his mind-link sensed dragon
ets falling away, speared or bitten or deep frozen by the inadvertent expulsion of cold fireballs. Twenty. Thirty gone in the flutter of an eye membrane. His group had flung the Raptors’ advance into chaos. Many of the Lesser Dragons, led by Grandion and his Dragon Riders, spread across the speckled black granite campsite, protecting the moored Dragonships and camping Humans from a relatively low elevation.
Grating shrieks battered the shared consciousness. Together! He gritted his fangs. A touch of Hualiama’s mental discipline slewed his groups toward the fringes, where dozens of Ice-Raptors had escaped the central snarl. Tougher. Forewarned. White upon white, the dragonets laced the evening with their fury, shredding the wing membranes and combining aerial acrobatics with tail-whip manoeuvres to slice through eyelids shuttered in an attempt to deny tiny talons.
Flicker darted aside as Grandion’s massive ice shard skewered an Ice-Raptor two feet in front of his nose. The creature spun away, dead before its talons finished clenching about the dragonet’s body. Wings! He somersaulted over the leading edge of a wing strike that slammed Gracewing away from his flank before he could blink. The battle blurred into Dragon reactions. Jinking. Tearing. Feral snarls. Chasing Gracewing’s falling form.
Crying out … Makani!
The Grey Dragoness punched the air beneath him, upside down as she seized a Raptor in her forepaws and kicked a disembowelling trench across its belly with a single, convulsive thrust of her hind talons. Amethyst fire sizzled past his wingtips. Arrows. Makani snatched up Gracewing and flipped her into Isiki’s lap. Softly – amidst a battle! He summoned the dragonets, seeing Raptors ice-bombing the encampment and a huge snarl developing around Grandion. Aye, they knew the Tourmaline. They hated him with a fierce and undying passion.
Well – a dying passion. Hiss! Sizzle! Lightning backlit the hapless Raptors as the Tourmaline cut loose. Corkscrewing his body past an Immadian arrow, Flicker grinned briefly as Grandion heaved his way out of the snarl like a gleaming leviathan breaching lake waters, sheeting amethyst fires and dazzling, blue-white streaks of pure Blue Dragon lightning. In that instant, the Dragon’s battle rage sheeted over Flicker. The dragonet immediately felt an unfamiliar knotting sensation in his belly. Something unleashed, or changed … his mouth gaped as he floundered briefly in the air, feeling powers coalescing inside of him, and … Amaryllion Fireborn’s dry tones crackled unexpectedly in his memory:
Dragon powers may arise spontaneously out of great need, Flicker. Our lore posits that these potentials always exist, but not all potentials may be realised. The precise timing and processes of awakening of magical potentials is a subject of much fiery debate, as you may imagine.
To his great startlement, lightning buzzed off his wingtips to jolt a marauding Raptor. The furry white beast missed his bite by a whisker.
Flicker found himself haloed in pure white electricity. I am gorgeous! he blurted out, ineptly frazzling a clutch of the Raptor’s passing tail-hairs. Naturally, he had been irresistible before. This was rainbows over Islands, outshining Hualiama’s auroral shenanigans by ten thousand leagues. Just wait until he showed the dancing girl this new trick!
Twizzling the play of pure lightning around his talons with a delighted chuckle, Flicker promptly zapped himself in the nose. Hey! Behave yourself!
Then, a tenfold, linked psychic discharge jolted him to the marrow.
To his enormous shock, he saw Grandion’s Dragon form waver under the Raptors’ amplified assault, before it snapped into nothingness and a roaring, cursing man appeared in his place.
Ralti … excrescence!
* * * *
Hualiama awoke within the lattice with the distinct sensation that invisible talons had plucked her heart out of her chest, rearranged it with prejudicial intent and jammed it back inside again. Ruzal. It knew her weakness. The magic knew she plotted against it. Could she inveigle the inveigler? Tempt it toward – no. Fate had chosen her to bear this misnamed Scroll of Binding in her flesh. No matter how deeply she despised Istariela for abandoning her clutch, could she ever wish that this vile magic should infest another? No. This burden was hers alone to bear.
Except, what if Istariela was right? What if her attitude was simply hubris? Fettered by the ruzal, could she ever hope to defeat Numistar? It would just be another factor in a conflict that was already ridiculously stacked against them.
Aye, thirteen-foot Star Dragoness hatchling fights monstrous exemplar of legendary, ancient evil.
With yet more evil trapped inside of her.
Could she set Dramagon against Numistar? No, that way lay madness. They’d either destroy the Island-World in a lethal Dragon brawl, or carve it up first, before destroying their respective pieces. Not the most enticing prospect.
But if her shell-mother could somehow bottle up the ruzal, destroy it or remove it from the equation … she was stronger. She knew more. The ruzal must know Istariela was the superior target.
Now she was protecting her shell-mother in the most ironic twist of fate she could ever have imagined.
Abruptly, Shill’s warning cry lanced through her reverie.
Tens of the dark shadows poured toward the First Egg, not flitting like bats, but moving with a pulsating, oozing motion that struck Hualiama as otherworldly. She saw the lighter, sandier-coloured lattice components stretching under the enormous stress as the Egg slowly tumbled along in a river of magma laced with the darker, malignant fires she had identified. The S’gulzzi must assault her for the ruzal now. Hualiama hovered in Flow space in the tiny scrap of openness which was all that was left of her glued-in-place tomb, but Shill was still trapped in the lattice material. She’d be torn apart! She’d be – Lia screamed as the lattice material shattered, peeling away from the vast, curved surface of the First Egg. Torrents of magic spilled over her as great filaments of light, spearing into the molten rock. Bubbling. Churning like a violent, exothermic chemical reaction run amok.
Alive? Shill would find her? How?
Density. She could Flow through this material, but it would be difficult indeed. The pressures built massively as the antithetical branches of magic continued to react, the effects reaching miles deep and wide in the eerie underground world. Dark shadows mobbed the Egg but recoiled, or were repulsed. The only factor that prevented a world-shaking explosion, or an earthquake beneath the crust, she realised, was the presence of all this rock. That dampened the reaction somehow. Slowed it down. It allowed the S’gulzzi to swim the underground river like lava fish, joining the chase with those hungry cries she had learned to recognise.
Through it all, the First Egg sang to her, a tremolo paean of magic that was as much a plea as it was a celebration of life and vitality, and she knew at once that a Dragon lived inside – perhaps existing in a form she could not as yet comprehend, but clearly alive, vital and incandescent.
She saw another presence approaching. A draconic presence, hale and huge. She … recognised it? Something about that mental imprint was familiar, like an oft-remembered itch. She searched, and searched …
Of course, a Magma Dragon could not hear Flow speech. He was far mightier than she remembered, a being restored to his full health and glory, she assumed, trying to make sense of the leaping light flames of his existence, and failing. The way his innate magic curled about and grasped the molten pathways of his being, the streams of living, magic-imbued stone cascading through proto-limbs and wing-like appendages was at once not undraconic, yet alien in the extreme. Not as far removed of form and function as the S’gulzzi fire spirits, she supposed. The Magma Dragon appeared to be hunting for – no. Surely not. Could this be Fra’anior’s promised help? A Dragon of
lava? Perhaps he could help her find a way to lift the First Egg from beneath the Island-World.
Many more surprises, and she was convinced her brain would sizzle in its own juices from sheer wonder.
Hualiama summoned her constructs.
Crackle, is that truly you?
She estimated that the Magma Dragon had to measure six hundred feet from the denser head parts to his long, serpentine tail, and from what she recalled, he possessed a temper proportionate to that great size. Still, they had parted as friends, but the surprise of a disembodied draconic voice caused his entire being to stiffen and wax incalescent.
At once, the S’gulzzi took notice. The darkness shifted. Cleaving together. Intensifying with murderous intent. Lia’s every fire fluctuated as she came within a millisecond of embodying herself, likely fatally. Null-fires idiot! She had just awakened the fire spirits to –
Hualiama! Placed my fire-life in mortal danger, have I; coming to aid you at Fra’anior’s behest. But first, you must shield me from these dark-fires fiends – right now!
She gasped, Oh no …
* * * *
Grandion felt his face and neck pop strangely with indignation as his unfamiliar Human form burst forth, finally unable to resist the bone-shaking cries of the Ice-Raptors.
Queen Imaytha caught him about the waist. “Again?”