by Marc Secchia
“Emblazon, call this rabble to order,” said Nak.
With a reverberating growl between his fangs, Emblazon silenced them all. He grinned fiercely, all proud Dragon fire and a challenging stance. Behind him, an opening through the trees allowed a view of the blushing western horizon, a natural window somehow carved through the massively spreading jungle crown of this Island. Pip wondered if they camped in an ancient Dragon roost. Dragons were ever ones for the far-reaching view, for mountaintops and roosts in league-tall cliffs with dizzying drop-offs into nothingness. Maybe one day she would enjoy their lack of fear.
Nak said, “Alright. Adorable wife, please summarise.”
Oyda said, “So we’ve found seven sets of Ape Steps so far, none of which match our description from any conceivable angle. Pip?”
“I’m translating, Oyda,” she hissed between her fangs.
“Thank you. Usefully, the Marshal continues to be preoccupied with the Crescent and the Academy gains time. Less usefully, the Shadow Dragon gains victims and the Dragonwings continue to round up any remaining Dragons, leaving the South defenceless.” Oyda winked at Nak. “However, we have all of our combined brainpower and the unshakeable will to succeed, and on a positive note, I have recently taken possession of the most gorgeous husband in history.”
“Who is now rendered utterly brainless as a result of a case of swollen ego,” said Shimmerith. “Chymasion. Flip a wingtip.”
“No progress on seeing within the jungles,” he said, hanging his head. “It’s almost as if they were deliberately obscured from magical sight. I continue to fail in this task.”
“Arosia, Pip, the diary?”
“No further clues,” said Arosia, “but Emblazon suggested that the lay of the Islands may have changed.”
Pip clapped her hands in excitement. “Volcanoes or earthquakes? Brilliant, Emblazon!”
Shimmerith turned a jaundiced, smoking eye on her massively purring mate. “Males! Lost another one. Pip. Images, if you will. We did not find at least three sets of Ape Steps, according to No’otha–is that correct?”
He conferred quickly with Pip. “Ay. Three.” He held up his fingers.
“Pip call up our–” Nak’s voice vanished behind an acoustic shield.
Shimmerith smirked at him. “My peerless Rider says, ‘Pip, would you call up the images of those three sets of Ape Steps we did not find, and overlay our memories upon them?’ ” Nak gestured furiously, in futile silence. The Sapphire Dragoness said, “That’s right, Nak. We’ll let Pip develop a headache doing the hard work and you can swoop in and claim the glory.”
Nak folded his arms, looking immensely smug.
Headache was not the right word. By the time she had arranged all of their information in her mind, Pip felt as though ten Jeradian warriors were pounding away at the insides of her temples with their huge war-hammers. “First candidate.”
She shivered. Odd chill along her spine spikes, as though a rajal’s paw had stroked her spine with delicate menace.
Everyone peered at the images Chymasion projected before them as Pip cycled efficiently through days of memories. Half an hour passed. “No.” “No chance.” “Zero correlation.”
She rubbed her head in a Human-like gesture of tiredness. “Alright. Give me a second to rearrange my head.”
“About time someone stirred up that soup,” the Silver Dragon murmured.
Pip gave him her filthiest glare. “Watch your paws, Dragon. Right, everyone, round two coming up.”
Nothing.
“Hold on,” said No’otha. “There’s a legend of Ape Steps existing right next to our Island, your birthplace, Pip. They were once meant to head north, toward the volcano. Do I understand you can read thought-pictures?”
“Ay.”
“Then see this.”
No’otha’s memories showed her a meandering image of a cave-painting, viewed by the light of a flaming torch, Pip realised. He had explored the cave in his youth, finding a series of ancient paintings depicting early Pygmy life with the Ancient Dragons, which in itself was fascinating. One of those paintings he recalled might have indicated the lay of Ape Steps stemming from her home Island.
Pip, try to enhance the image like this, said Silver. What’s the matter? Tired?
Just a Dragon sense. Here we go.
Tilt the image fifteen degrees, said Shimmerith.
“That’s it!” shouted Oyda, echoing all of their thoughts.
The volcano stood partially upon the place Pip had left blank to protect the others, the place where the secret knowledge was meant to have been stored. What if all had been destroyed? No wonder these Ape Steps had been forgotten. They could no longer be travelled to their end.
Then, she sensed a presence colder than any Island-World night. Pip froze, thunderstruck.
“No! Jyoss, Tazz–they’re out there!”
Before she finished speaking, Pip’s Dragon reactions had already launched her out into the darkling evening. She beat her wings to the utmost of her strength, a panicked fluttering that abruptly smoothed out into searing Dragonflight that shot her out from beneath the Island’s canopy at a speed in excess of thirty leagues per hour and still accelerating. She searched the skies for the barest millisecond before her Dragon sight latched onto a shadow that obscured the stars, hovering just above the pale form of Jyoss. Sucking. Pulsing with slow, ghastly satiation. Already, Jyoss’ fires dimmed.
JYOSS!
Here came Tazzaral, speeding toward his mate, distraught, frantic. Despite her rapidity, Pip was too far away. The moment the Copper came into the Shadow Dragon’s ambit, his eyes glazed over momentarily, then burned … differently. Transfixed. On his back, Cinti yelled and beat the Dragon with her hands, trying something with her mind, Pip sensed. She must not transform! Must not! Oh, Jyoss … oh, please, let mercy flow …
Straining so hard that she felt a wing-strut fracture as a distant pinprick of pain, Pip shot toward her friends like a dark lightning-bolt spearing up from the Island’s underbelly. Her mind wailed, ‘No, no, no!’ and her magic swelled enormously, primed for action.
She unleashed a Word of Command. STOP!
The Shadow beast did not pause. Jyoss wilted; magic rushed out of Tazzaral, vanishing into the beast’s unseen maw.
STOP! STOP!
The only response was a cold, alien intelligence turning to regard her, eyeless and irresistible. Pip sensed curiosity, recognition and an overwhelming cascade of alien magic that seemed to sing in all of her senses at once; before that song, no other melody could even conceive of existence. Time stretched and flowed in eerie ways, a kind of tunnel-vision in which Pip knew nothing but the beast’s ravening hunger for magic and its destruction of her friends and her own inanition, the inability of flesh and blood to make any response and the telescoping of time and awareness as it feasted. Could the Pygmy belief in demonic spirit-creatures be encapsulated in this apparition? It was vast, many times the size of Jyoss or Tazzaral, but its hunger was vaster still, disproportionate to its size. There was a darkness that burned as fire, a searing against her consciousness that by its very character denied all warmth, life and magic.
Before such a prodigious appetite, all must be consumed.
Pip watched helplessly, her magic spent, as Jyoss gave one final shudder. Now Tazzaral shuddered too, reduced in seconds to a lifeless, hollow husk of the magnificent Dragonsoul he had been. His nobility, shattered. Her friends were falling, failing, spinning downward with their Riders still strapped into their saddles, the grief and horror crushing her fiery spirit to ashes as she saw the reality of death engulf her friends, and she could do nothing.
She was more powerless than she had ever been in that cage.
So they died.
The Shadow seemed to consider and dismiss Pip, beginning to ripple and swell with new strength born of its engorgement on draconic life. Then she sensed another Dragon’s approach. A Dragoness. She was an effulgent yellow, like topaz infused with Dragon fire
, bugling in distress, flying raggedly yet keeping ahead of others because of strength born in insane desperation. Pip screamed at them to stay away. As the new Dragoness surged toward Pip, the Shadow-creature paused in renewed anticipation. All was reaction, not thought. Pip swooped and swung her fisted paw. One sharp, skull-rattling blow stunned the Dragoness. She tumbled from the sky and Pip with her, a close spiral of flashing wings.
The oppressive chill lifted. Pip realised that the Shadow had vanished.
Here came Emblazon, making a sound Pip had never heard from a Dragon before, a sound like a cat’s mewling, his distress cutting bone-deep. Swooping, he scooped Tazzaral into his paws. Shimmerith flashed by, angling for Jyoss and Durithion, while Cinti leaped free and transformed in a burst of magic, furling her wings to dive toward Pip. In a hasty flap of wings Pip caught her quarry and tried to back-wing, slowing her descent enough for Cinti to catch them both in her capable paws. The Pygmy Dragoness untangled herself from the stranger–from Dragoness-Kaiatha!
Pip’s jaw sagged inelegantly.
No time! Cinti gasped. Silver, help! Chymasion, go to Shimmerith–
They’re gone, Shimmerith moaned. Tazzaral and Jyoss have winged to the eternal fires.
The Sapphire Dragoness wailed a keening note of distress, but Emblazon called, Be still, beloved, lest we bring the enemy upon us. Already, they must have heard and seen …
Pip could not bear it. Springing free of Cinti’s paw, the tiny Onyx Dragoness winged to Jyoss. She knew the truth, but it stuck in her craw, raw and offensive and wounding. Jyoss was gone. Duri dangled from the saddle straps like a limp dishrag. Not dead. Her sharp Dragon-hearing identified his pulse, weak and rapid, but in Jyoss there was … nothing. Within Tazzaral’s flesh there was only silence, an unthinkable, echoing absence of any magic.
Such dark-fires! Grief roared over her being like the tumbling tumult of a storm, as voracious as the Shadow Dragon in its feeding frenzy. Why had it not taken her? Ignored her? There must be a reason.
I am ashamed. I blunted our attack, Shimmerith said.
No, I’m to blame, said Emblazon. I tangled with your wings, so desperate was I …
They winged beneath the great boughs that spread over them like arms seeking to give comfort, to the cavern where the others waited–Nak and Oyda, Arosia, Jerrion and the Pygmy warriors.
Pip said, No, it was I. My Word of Command washed over the beast …
You cannot blame yourself, little one, said Emblazon. We should not have let Tazz and Jyoss patrol, we should have been faster–we have failed our kin, Pip. We have all failed, and our fierce, great-hearted companions have passed on to the fires, may they burn eternal!
His gentleness stirred both comfort and anguish in her three Dragon hearts. Passed on to the fires? Or quenched, forever? If only she knew for certain. How could Fra’anior have abandoned his Island-World, the creation of his own paw, to suffer the predation of such a demon-creature? His were the greatest pair of shoulders. Perhaps pairs of shoulders; she had not rightly seen. Ay, blame the greatest. That way, so-called lesser creatures could obviate their own responsibility and ignore the consequences of their own choices and actions.
Somewhere, Pip imagined she heard those great black throats roaring in terrible, shattering anguish.
* * * *
Perversely, the following day dawned bright and cheerful.
Human-Pip turned over, and saw Kaiatha, also returned to her Human form, sitting staring at her–no, through her, unseeing. The left side of her jaw sported a spectacular bruise, Pip’s handiwork. Her eyes were haunted forest pools.
Her friend’s lips barely moved. “When you became a Dragoness, Pip, was it terrifying?”
“Ay.” Pip shivered, remembering the circumstances, the devastating imperative to save herself and Oyda before they both crashed into the mountainside, then waking as a Dragoness … “Kaia, how’s Duri?”
“Not good. Shimmerith suspects some kind of mental breakdown. He’s unresponsive. Alive, but no-one’s inside. Maybe the Shadow Dragon sucked him out, too.”
“Mercy.”
Or the oath-bond between Dragon and Rider had ensured his fate. Yet if there was life, was there not hope?
Only tears moved on Kaiatha’s face, streaming unheeded down her cheeks. “Pip, I feel … I feel so … how can I live when all is lost?”
Bleakly, Pip replied, “I imagine you must feel as if your heart has been torn from your chest and thrown to the windrocs.”
Kaiatha breathed. “Ay. All I see is shades of guilt. How can I be a Dragon when they do not live?” She indicated Tazzaral and Jyoss, lying so still near the cave entrance. To look was to know the reality of death. All muscle tone was absent. Their fires, extinguished. Flanks, unstirred with the breath of life. “And I’m afraid, Pip. So afraid. Duri will hate me. He’ll–”
“He’ll learn to love you and value you even more than we do,” Pip said firmly. No time for her own grief. Not now, when her friend needed her. “What colour did they decide you are, Kaiatha?”
“Topaz-Navy,” she sniffed. “I guess that makes me about as odd as you?”
“Odder,” said Pip, giving her a quirky grin.
Kaiatha laughed mirthlessly. “It’s ridiculous. How am I even supposed to eat, Pip? I despise meat.”
“Um, good question. Listen, Emblazon’s calling us for the final rites.”
“I heard.”
“Oh. You speak Dragonish? I’d forgotten.”
Suddenly, Kaiatha was the one hugging her. “Strangely, this Dragoness does speak Dragonish. Come. He also wants us to transform–oh, why are we telling each other what we can both hear?”
The Shapeshifters all transformed. Emblazon directed proceedings, singing fire-songs, blessings and praise-songs of mighty deeds over the fallen Dragons. Then he bade the Humans and Pygmies stand as far back as possible. Upon his command, the Dragons directed streams of fire at the corpses of Tazzaral and Jyoss. Emblazon spoke an ancient formula of soul-flight over them. The fires crackled suns-hot, consuming flesh and hide no longer protected by Dragon magic, until all that remained were two Dragon skeletons lying side by side, for all the world as though they had fallen asleep together and been overtaken by some unspeakable calamity. Copper bones lay beside the pink, the colours of an Island-World suns-set.
Then, Emblazon said heavily, “From death to life. We are reminded even at this hour of dark-fires, that life stirs amidst us. Dragoness Kaiatha, would you step forward, please?”
The Fra’aniorian Islander, normally so graceful and composed, stumbled over her paws, but Shimmerith steadied her with a motherly paw-touch.
Emblazon bugled, “We sing the eggling-celebration!”
Together, the Dragons sang:
She is born, fire of fire,
Blessed eggling, heart of living Dragon flame,
Born to fly!
Kaiatha was all draconic elegance, the sleek lines of a Dragoness enhanced by a neat, pretty ruff of skull spikes. Her hide was as glossy as snakeskin, displaying the rare quality and colouration of topaz gemstone, the scales picked out with patterns and highlights of deep blue. Every detail was exquisite. Neat, midnight-blue talons showed unsheathed as she had not yet learned to control the muscles. Muscular yet slender limbs. Lustrous wings half-unfurled, the struts, arteries and primary wing bones all picked out in her signature blue.
Pip felt slightly vindicated in that Kaiatha’s Dragoness was only a little larger than hers, perhaps twenty-two feet from muzzle to tail-tip. Of course, Kaiatha would probably grow to four times that size. What hope for a Pygmy Dragon?
Kaiatha blinked uncertainly at them as the Dragonsong faded, and all became still. Wondrously, sorrowfully still.
“I’m still Kaiatha,” she blurted out suddenly. “Don’t think this changes anything.”
Shimmerith chuckled musically. “No, little one, it doesn’t change anything. It changes everything.”
Chapter 20: The Order of Onyx
In a voice roughened by grief and a poor few hours’ sleep, quickly snatched toward morning, Nak said, “Listen, everyone. Time to fly to the Ape Steps. Full shielding, my beauty. Oyda, let’s get Durithion strapped in. Gently, mind. Kaiatha, you’re with Oyda. Take your Human form, please. We’ve enough hatchlings in this group already.”
Chymasion and Pip growled identically, then looked at each other and chuckled hollowly.
“Mount up! Let’s shoot the winds!”
They retraced their route away from Marshal Re’akka’s Island to a point twenty leagues north, where the Crescent Islands inhabited by Pip’s tribe loomed out of the Cloudlands. Silver and Shimmerith shielded the compact, deadly intent Dragonwing as they negotiated the distance in a brief hour’s flying. Pip would not have wanted to be an enemy Dragon crossing their flight path this morning. No mercy would have been granted.
Calling over to Hunagu, who by now seemed to have grown entirely comfortable flying in a net dangling from Emblazon or Kassik’s paw, Pip asked in Ape, “Hunagu smell Ape Steps?”
The Oraial’s eyes gleamed darkly at her. “Thought Pip never ask. Mighty-mighty Dragoness no need Ape?”
“Humble Pip need good-good friend. No other nose powerful like Hunagu’s nose.”
Hunagu chortled happily, his good mood restored. “Hunagu show stinky Dragons how to hunt. Dragons not know jungle.”
“Good-good,” agreed Pip.
She had identified a point approximately midway down the flank of her Island as the likely start of the Ape Steps. No’otha’s information suggested a cave. Accordingly, the Pygmy hunters and Dragons divided their numbers between the two northern ‘toes’ of the Island, some concentrating on the more easterly peninsula, others on the westerly. Hunagu, after a few sage-looking sniffs of the air, chose the easterly side for his search, at a point that would have been the webbing between a Dragon’s two rearward-pointing talons. They spread out, combing the area assiduously.
