by Marc Secchia
As the young male gathered himself, Dragoness-Pip fixed the youngster’s twitching tail-tip with a burning eye. I’d think twice, if I were you.
He yowled and fled as though she had set the developing ruff of his black mane alight. For good measure, she aimed a small fireball at a boulder just beyond his bounding form. Yrrrwwwwoool! Hsss! The cat leaped ten feet in the air, hackles bristling. Pip chortled happily to herself, “I’m so dangerous I scare myself sometimes.”
Yet one indelible impression from her dream percolated to the surface of her awareness–she must not forget the laughter. It felt and tasted … special. The idea itched oddly in the back of her mind. Was this the fabled draconic seventh sense?
It seemed so long since she had enjoyed the opportunity to sit alone with her thoughts. A young Pygmy warrior had lived free, yet had been bounded on all sides by the mothering jungle, by laws and strictures and Pygmy tradition, and by the lay of the Islands themselves and the jungle ways or Ape Steps that linked them. In the zoo she had been trapped, free only to grub in the dirt or eat and sleep as she wished, the huge walls of her cage and its armoured crysglass windows unbreakable and unscalable. How her soul had rejoiced at the freedom Zardon gifted her–so free, the boundless skies brought mortal terror, threatening to crush a jungle-sheltered creature’s spirit. Yet even the skies were not limitless. There were bounds of heights or depths to which no Dragon could fly, and constraints of distance and time. Was freedom simply an illusion? A relic of childhood innocence one had to grow out of?
Some boundaries were immutable, Pip thought, or imposed by others or by circumstance. But some boundaries one chose for oneself, such as love, trust and responsibility. The last was the one that made her scales prickle the most. Elder No’otha had been keen to impress upon her the Pygmy saying, ‘A warrior’s true worth lies not in arm or spear, but in their service to the tribe.’ By the tribe, he added, he meant the whole Island-World.
She hunted again to fill her belly, then worked on trying to understand the toxins which had entered her body and how to expurgate them. Somehow, the shielding and filtering had been inadequate. If she meant to arrive in Jeradia in fighting-fit condition, she needed to do better. Back to Master Ga’am’s mental disciplines, so shamefully neglected of late.
Please, let her meet Silver and be able to turn his mind.
Please, let his love not have been a sham.
Chapter 28: Beneath and Beyond
Ensconced once more in the pocket of Leandrial’s left cheek, Pip faced the prospect of the long leagues beneath the toxic Cloudlands ocean. Land Dragon and Lesser Dragon chatted amiably as Leandrial made the initial descent through the clouds laced with sulphuric acid, describing the scent, texture, temperature and flavour of the different gaseous layers as she ran down toward Meldior Cluster’s roots. Pip would have loved to take in the sights, but even just bathing in the edges of Leandrial’s extraordinary harmonic magic was an education in its own right, a whole new way of ‘seeing’ the world. The Land Dragoness constantly produced high-pitched sound-waves, radio waves and magical emissions to probe the world around her, analysing the reflections these different communication systems returned to her ultra-sensitive Dragon senses. She spent some hours describing the science behind each technique to Pip, who had the impression that everything about Land Dragons was large, including their love of lengthy, exhaustive explanations of every possible point or viewpoint.
“You could use these methods yourself, little friend,” said Leandrial.
“I know a Dragon who does.”
“The hatchling Chymasion? I meant you. Ocular vision, as I understand it, is so limited.”
Pip said, “Every type or colour of Dragon thinks they’re the best.”
“And so we are,” Leandrial agreed.
Pip learned that Land Dragons did not possess the fire-breathing capabilities of their Lesser Dragon kin, but they were able to ignite their talons as Pip had seen, and some rarer types of Land Dragons could form lashing tendrils of fire or even create fire-phantasms, flame-born creatures that would attack an enemy with basic intelligence.
Having learned to peek between Leandrial’s teeth each time she breathed in, Pip also discovered that the world beneath the Cloudlands was not one realm but many, as variegated as the landscapes above the Islands. They descended first through the ‘upper layers’, which Land Dragons did not enjoy due to the alleged thinness of the air and high levels of pollution and acid. Several thermal inversions later, each heralding ever greater pressures and temperatures, they passed into the ‘middle layers’ approximately four miles beneath the permanent cloud layer. Here, life abounded. Huge, avian reptiles glided through the thick, plant-rich atmosphere, slowly harvesting floating seed pods the size of Pygmy huts, which came in every shape and colour imaginable, from fire-red chilli-peppers to globular fruit-like pods that reminded Pip of Jeradian grapes, although they were a sickly yellow colour and larger than any Dragonship.
A dense layer of khaki and purple roots and vines underpinned the middle layers, forming a natural barrier to the layers further down. Aeons of massive growth had rendered this layer compact and compost-rich, a fertile ground for worms, burrowing reptiles and several smaller subspecies of Land Dragons of lesser intelligence–‘small’ denoting creatures measuring up to a thousand feet in length. The tang of loam in the air reminded Pip sharply of her jungle home.
Leandrial munched her way through this layer with relish, telling Pip that the air holes created by Land Dragons were essential for the health of the middle layers. Her little passenger ducked and shielded frantically as Leandrial shovelled plants the size of trees down her apparently bottomless gullet.
By now, the air was so dense that Pip could not easily distinguish the difference between flying, swimming and walking, her hostess apparently doing all three simultaneously. Leandrial lectured Pip about the ability of high pressures to support massive creatures such as Land Dragons, and indeed, this was a realm of behemoths, mostly plant-eaters, but also sustaining a variety of carnivores so gigantic, Leandrial snidely suggested they would simply pass Pip over for a more substantial meal. Not enough meat on her toothpick bones.
This, growled the Onyx Dragoness, was not appreciated. She could not stop goggling at every sight, however, despite the denser, bluer air making distances harder to see. Her hostess had no such problems with her eyesight, apart from the sheer quantity of floating plant matter.
Then, there were all manner of parasites and carrion-eaters and plants that moved like animals and insects and muck-fleas, Dragon lice, and an entirely separate ecosystem inhabiting, at last, the watery lakes and oceans Lesser Dragon scientists had always insisted must lie at the bottom of the world. Only, this region was apparently far from the bottom. It was not even the middle. Pip rolled her eyes as Leandrial explained how the layers extended further, the middle-lower and lower layers, then the deeps, the impossible deeps, and the bottomless rifts still further beneath it all at depths of seven to ten leagues, and legend would have it, many leagues more. No Land Dragon travelled that deep, Leandrial said. Only the S’gulzzi lived down there, in the fires beneath the bottomless rifts.
“But I thought they were bottomless?” Pip complained.
Leandrial replied, “It’s just a figure of speech. Do you high-dwellers have to take everything so literally?”
“Places need to be named properly. ‘Impossible deeps’? What’s impossible about them, apart from the impossibly bottomless rifts that do indeed have bottoms?”
This provoked a mighty bellow of laughter. “I do hope you find your bottoms, Pygmy Dragoness! The world is the way it is. How’s your shield?”
“Better than before, but still leaking,” Pip growled.
“We will mostly travel at this level through the–ah, forests and deserts of my realm, but if we want to travel directly to your Jeradia massif without taking a five hundred league detour, we will need to pass through an impossible deep–”
; “Which will, by an inexplicable twist of fate, turn out to be possible?”
Leandrial snorted a fine gust of soupy air at Pip’s interjection, “And over a bottomless rift. You will see these impossibilities for yourself. Now, let’s work on your purging of toxins. I believe we may be able to find a few critical adjustments which you have undoubtedly missed in your incurably hasty high-dwelling manner.”
This time, a fireball did light up the inside of Leandrial’s jaw.
* * * *
“That’s a tree?”
“Ay, little one. Did I mention that plants in my territory grow a little larger than those above?”
“Only fifteen times or so,” said Pip, feeling another attack of awe and wonder coming on.
She peered between her sarcastic ride’s flat teeth, feeling as if she were lurking inside a decently-sized cavern. By her reckoning, Leandrial measured over a mile long from those peculiar barbels on her chin–additional olfactory organs, apparently–to the tip of her tail. That made her one absurdly monstrous slab of Dragon-flesh. Worse, she was not even the largest of her kind. Some types of Land Dragons were apparently actual Islands who moved through the middle layer like millipedes gliding on thousands of stubby paws, while their breathing spiracles reached far into the air above. Pip could not shift that image from her mind. Island-Dragons. Slow-moving, three thousand year-old Dragons who spent over ninety percent of their lives sleeping. They breathed actual, clean air! Did people honestly mistake living Dragons for Islands? Mercy!
And if those were trees, she was a purple-headed parakeet.
Leandrial ran-swam down a long ochre slope dotted with Dragon-sized boulders covered in tufts of lilac moss toward the faraway forest, an endless sweep of purple, serpentine trunks reaching a full league from the white, sandy forest floor to brush against the middle layer above. The top third of each trunk was leaf-blades, gently waving in an apparent breeze, emitting a surprisingly bright purple light from light-cells speckled all over their surfaces and in swirling patterns down each trunk. Each trunk terminated in a root-ball, a substantial outgrowth of roots which tore into and clumped up the substrate.
As she scooted along on her squat, massively powerful legs, Leandrial used her magic to casually swat away a marauding school of Borers. “Pests,” she said. “Won’t bother a healthy Land Dragon, but they’ll plague us in the forest.”
Pip eyed the insects pessimistically. They looked like hundred-foot earwigs, only these were armed with oversized pincers on one end and an equally attractive selection of nasty-looking, serrated mandibles on the other. She imagined they were brutish enough to eat whole Pygmy Dragons for breakfast.
“Which reminds me,” said Leandrial, “last night was the second time–”
“Night? I thought you said there was no real night down here?”
“I’m using concepts familiar to you suns-loving high-dwellers in order to impress you with my sensitivity to our budding friendship,” said Leandrial, so blandly that Pip knew she was tugging the smaller Dragon’s wings. She encouraged Leandrial with a small chuckle. “It is night above, the fourth day we’ve been under the Cloudlands. I should teach you about all the varieties of bioluminescent plants, plant-Dragons and other forms of life down here. It really is fascinating.”
“I’m sure it is,” Pip chirped back. “You were reminded of what exactly, Leandrial?”
“Twice while you’ve been sleeping, you’ve chuckled and mentioned a star. Why is that, Pip?”
Hmm. And now she talked in her sleep? She began to summarise, but then remembered how much Leandrial loved a story. Perhaps spinning out a tale would take her mind off her nausea and general sense of malaise. And so they entered the great forest of the deeps, with Pip helping Leandrial shield so that the Land Dragoness could continue to concentrate on her healing. And she told her story, right from the beginning.
Unlike Pip, Leandrial saved her comments for the end. By then they had wound their snakelike path deep into the peculiar purple forest. The Pygmy Dragon retreated inside her companion’s mouth, the better to cope with the pressure and poisons, and the acid which itched her scales. All was poison down here–the plants, the animals, the atmosphere itself. Leandrial said the toxins and acid were increasing in potency, just as the Rift had grown more powerful. Now, it was almost uncrossable, even for the mightiest of Dragons. The Rift was the source. From those hundred league-wide volcanic upwellings, capped by world-spanning storms, came the toxins and the Cloudlands, she said. Much of the territories near the Rift were already dead. Desert. League upon league of barrenness, where life had once thrived.
The Land Dragon said, “Tell me about this creature you called blue-star. Why that specific description?”
“It seemed to fit.”
Leandrial said, “Here’s the connection you’ve missed, Pip. In the oldest dialects of Dragonish, the word for blue-star is Hualiama.”
“Uh … but that’s imp–” Pip clenched her jaw. What? “Are you telling me …”
“There’s an old legend which tells of a blue star which appears at daybreak on the eastern horizon. Her name is Hualiama. It is said that Star Dragons never die, they just travel to the heavens and become a new star. From the heavens, they watch over us.”
“You’re saying I talked to a dead star? An alive star? A star?”
Judging by the bounce of her step, Leandrial shrugged. “You enlighten me. You’re the one with the mystical connections stemming from your Shapeshifter heritage, the one who derives her power from the great Onyx Fra’anior himself–not forgetting, I wielded that power with my own paw when we defeated Shurgal. It is as real as your soul-fires and mine. Isn’t this wonderful?”
“Wonderful? What does it all mean, Leandrial?”
The great Dragoness’ jaw-muscles moved, forming a smile Pip felt rather than saw. She wished the Dragonkind would not hint at mysterious truths, ever so condescending. Obviously she was meant to work it out for herself. Obviously, Leandrial meant her to recognise a lesson was being taught.
As for what she insinuated … impossible!
“Flying fruitcakes and backwards bats!” Pip snorted.
“What?”
“It’s too high and mighty for me–honestly, Leandrial. I’m just a jungle girl. A Pygmy. Mostly, a troublesome pest with an exceptional talent for flying Dragon-swift into the nearest, deepest jungle mud-pool of mischief I can find, and wallowing in it.”
“Wait, let me memorise that exact phrasing for the lore-scrolls!”
A howl of outrage burst from Pip’s throat. The fact that Leandrial apparently found this so hilarious she started to hiccough great, fruity-smelling gusts of thick air, did not help in the slightest. Ugh, open mouth and insert foot, or paw, or wingtip–who cared what the saying was? She was no Star Dragoness and that was final! In fact, her colour was the opposite of starry, unless she was planning to be the darkness of night around a nice bright star. Hualiama! What under the heavens had she been hinting at–and Fra’anior, refusing to speak for fear he would somehow invoke a more terrible future?
A Pygmy’s laughter is of the stars, but her strength is Onyx. Fra’anior was the Onyx. What then was the power of laughter? What use did laughter serve when the Dragons of war swept across the Island-World? When sorrow rained upon sorrow, when the altars of the Marshal’s greed flung their smoke to the heavens in defiance of all that was good, and worthy, and true, Hualiama advised laughter?
It took Pip an awfully long time to simmer down after that. She would have words with that giggling star-girl, oh ay, she would!
* * * *
Pip, sealed up to the eye-fires in pressure-defying, oxygen-permeable, poison-filtering quadruple concentric layers of shielding that would have made Shimmerith drool in pleasure, peered over the edge of an impossible deep toward the allegedly bottomless rift which she could neither see the bottom of, nor for that matter the rift itself, and scowled. Well. Nothing impossible out there in a cerulean void which deepened almost to
black at the limit of her vision, save the astounding profusion of predators parading about in schools numbering thousands, even millions of animals, all pursuing each other with toothy and destructive abandon. Half of the muck floating out there was probably blood and regurgitated body parts.
“Carnivore city,” she muttered.
The air-ocean, we Dragons call it, said Leandrial. Air so dense, it acts and flows like water.
It’s a bit overcrowded.
Don’t worry, I’ll give you a fang’s-point view of the action, the Land Dragoness said. Pip muttered how invigorated she felt. What do you Dragon Riders say–buckle up?
For a bottom-dweller, she knew far too much about the ways of the races living above the clouds, Pip decided. How long had these lizards been spying on Humans and Lesser Dragons?
Without further discussion, Leandrial charged into the depthless blue.
Her methodology was simple. The same magic and sonar which acted to inform her about her environment, changed and waxed considerably more complex as it homed in on the weaknesses of the different animals and chased them away in a great, ripping bow-wave of startlement. Mayhem! A chorus of yipping, snarling, clicking and wailing cries accompanied her unheeding charge. Predators flicked their fins and tentacles and other appendages, whipping out of her way, tangling with each other in their haste to escape the powerful beam of magic sweeping out of her single eye. Those too slow or lazy to move fast enough, Leandrial simply trampled or shouldered aside.
Those massive talons now truly came into their own, spearing deep into the blue-black organic muck to provide leverage to power her long, serpentine body across the viscous surface. By evening, signalled in this location by a gentle darkening of the atmosphere overhead, they arrived at the edge of a rift, and looked out over a fifty league wide canyon of such depth, the cobalt simply faded into darkness. To their left, a waterfall which was apparently small by Land Dragon standards–half a mile wide, Pip estimated, although she was having a beastly time trying to estimate distances in this strange atmosphere–poured with peculiar slowness over the edge and into nothingness.
