Call of the Dragon

by Jessica Drake

  “Also, what’s the deal with this dragon heart, anyway? Why do you need it? Does the heart belong to Tavarian’s dragon?” If it did, what kind of person would that make me for stealing it?

  Salcombe chuckled. “No, of course not,” he said. “Though I can understand why you would think that since I didn’t explain. The dragon heart you are after isn’t truly a heart—it’s actually a piece of a heart that belonged to a very large, very powerful dragon. And not just any dragon, but the World Eater himself.”

  My blood turned to ice. “The World Eater?” I echoed. “But how is that possible? The dragon god was vanquished thousands of years ago.”

  “Not all of him,” Salcombe said gravely. “His heart still remains, a great black diamond that was broken into pieces and scattered across the world. I expect that is by design, so that no one reunites them, but I suspect that Lord Tavarian, who travels quite extensively, is collecting the pieces. He already has at least one, and if he gets more, he might very well be able to resurrect the dragon god.”

  My veins turned to ice. “Why would he do that?” I asked, shaking my head. “Tavarian’s not an idiot. He has to know that resurrecting the World Eater is suicide.” I could see Tavarian going after an artifact if he thought it would give him power, but no dragon rider would want to bring Zakyiar back to life.

  “By all accounts, Tavarian seems like a logical man,” Salcombe admitted. “He is wealthy and powerful and runs several successful enterprises. But losing his dragon may well have driven him mad. Perhaps he thinks he can tame the World Eater and gain a new mount. Regardless of his reasoning, we cannot allow him to remain in control of the piece of heart he has, or to acquire any more.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, still trying to wrap my brain around what Salcombe was saying. “I guess what you’re suggesting is plausible,” I said, “but I still don’t understand why you think he has the heart in the first place.”

  “Because he and I were at a black-market auction where a piece of heart was being sold,” Salcombe explained. “It was eight months ago, and while neither one of us actually won the piece, the bidder who acquired it mysteriously ended up dead a few weeks later. I strongly suspect Tavarian may have killed him and taken the artifact for himself.”

  My stomach had turned into a ball of lead at this point, and I felt faintly ill. The trouble was, I could easily imagine Tavarian as a killer. He was a former dragon rider, after all, a warrior born and bred for battle. That stone-cold façade of his, plus that nickname, Blackheart...as much as I didn’t want to admit it, Tavarian definitely fit the bill as an ambitious guy who didn’t mind getting blood on his hands to acquire power.

  “All right,” I finally said. “I’ll do my best to get into Tavarian’s good graces and see if I can do more snooping around the estate.” Regardless of whether or not Tavarian really did have the piece of heart, it was high time I found out exactly who and what I’d pledged myself to.

  11

  The next morning, I went straight to the academy’s library, and prepared to buckle down for a long day of research.

  “I must say this is rather unusual,” the librarian—a stern, elderly man with a small shock of white hair atop his otherwise bald head—said after I’d introduced myself and told him what I wanted. “It is rare that any student willingly comes into the library on the weekend. Most of you are still at your homes, usually sleeping off excess amounts of wine, at this hour of the morning.” The tone of his voice was disapproving, but I couldn’t tell if his disapproval was directed at the other students for drinking and reveling, or at me for not joining them.

  “I can see that,” I said in a low voice, casting my gaze around the large space. It was far too cavernous for me to see everything, but there was a study area not far from us—sparsely populated rows of long, oak tables with green lamps, a few teachers, and two level-three students. “I’m a bit disadvantaged from everyone else, having grown up on the ground, so I thought I’d come here and try to catch up on my dragon lore.”

  The librarian nodded, some of the suspicion lifting from his wizened face. “A sensible decision,” he agreed. “Most riders have been listening to the tales of dragon kind from the moment they were large enough to bounce on their fathers’ knees.” He paused. “If you’d like, I can help you pick out a selection of texts.”

  “That would be wonderful,” I told him.

  I followed the librarian through the maze of shelves, and in no time headed back to the study area with an armful of books. Although I had a rudimentary understanding of Dragon War history, there weren’t very many books available on the subject to ground-dwellers, since, like everything else dragon-related, they were kept hidden away under lock and key. Salcombe had a small collection, of course, but he’d always guarded those texts jealously as they were extremely rare. I’d tried to break into the vault where he stored them, but he’d caught me, and had been so terrifyingly angry that I had never dared tried again.

  I spent the next couple of hours poring over the texts the librarian had given me, looking for specifics on the World Eater and his demise. Most of what I read was about the origins of dragon riders, embellished tales about Akron the Defender and the horde of newly created riders he’d led to victory. Unsurprisingly, the texts seemed to glorify the dragon riders’ courage and prowess, but said very little about the participation and help they must have received from not only the common people of Elantia but also the other countries around the world that had joined the fight.

  But as I delved into the more obscure offerings the librarian had unearthed, I learned a bit more. One text went into more depth about the mages of that time period, and in the appendix, contained a section on mage lineages.

  “Damn,” I muttered as I traced the collection of family trees. The family trees included here were only a fraction of the families actually around during the Dragon Wars—nearly all the mage lines had been wiped out by Zakyiar and his dragons, and of the ones that had survived, most of them became dragon riders. However, ten mage families did survive, and if Salcombe was correct about the heart, five of them had split Zakyiar’s heart into pieces and hidden them across the world.

  Sighing, I pulled a notebook from my inside jacket pocket, and jotted down the names of the surviving mage families. I’d have to delve into their backgrounds more, find out if there was any difference in status, wealth, power. There wasn’t any mention of the dragon heart in these texts, but I was beginning to think that was by design, to keep the pieces that had been hidden away safe from those who might come after them. The tales all said that Zakyiar had always been able to regenerate from even the worst of wounds—limbs hacked off grew back, and one story even said that he was able to regrow his head. But his power was largely invested in his dragons, and only when most of them had been subdued had he been weak enough to be brought down.

  Even so, I imagined only the strongest of the mages would have been capable of splitting his heart into pieces. And if that was truly how Zakyiar had been defeated, then those families would still be the custodians for those pieces today.

  I wondered which mage family was responsible for the piece of heart that had been put on auction. The piece of heart Tavarian supposedly had.

  “Hey,” a familiar voice said. “Rhiannon said I might find you here, but I didn’t believe it. What are you doing cooped up inside on a day like this?”

  I jerked up in surprise, my thoughts scattering as I stared into deep green eyes. “Jallis,” I blurted. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to collect on that rain check.” He flashed me a bright smile that did funny things to my heart. As if I was the kind of girl who could be reduced to giggles by a simple smile. “Won’t you join me for a ride? Or are you too busy studying?”

  “I was just about to finish up,” I lied, closing the book and sweeping it aside. I didn’t want Jallis to see what I was up to—I couldn’t tell any of the cadets about what I was looking into, not even Rhia. “
What time were you thinking?”

  “Right now.”

  My heart flip-flopped with excitement. “I’ll meet you at the stables.”

  “Do you want help with those?” Jallis asked as I gathered the books.

  “Nope.” I swatted his hand away as he tried to reach for one of the tomes. “Go ahead of me. I’ll be there in a few.”

  The moment he was out of earshot, I let out a tiny sigh of relief. Glancing around, I grinned sheepishly as I noticed one of the teachers glaring at us—I guessed we’d been talking too loudly, but I was so excited at the prospect of flying that I hardly cared. As quickly as I could, I put all the books away except for the one I’d been working on, which I checked out at the front desk.

  “Be careful with that one,” the librarian said sternly. “We used to have two copies, but the second one went missing and I haven’t been able to replace it yet. You must return it in two weeks.”

  “I will,” I promised as I skipped out the door.

  After dropping off the library book and my notes, I hurried to the stables. I was halfway there when Kadryn burst through the front entrance, Jallis astride him. My heart thundered in time to the beat of his feet against the ground as he galloped toward me, and Jallis leaned to the side, his hand outstretched.

  “Grab hold!” he shouted. “We’re taking off!”

  “What?” I shrieked, but there was no time to argue. I seized his hand, and in one fluid motion, he pulled me up in the saddle in front of him. As I lurched into the saddle, nearly slamming my forehead into one of Kadryn’s spikes, a lance of fear chilled me to the bone.

  “Jallis,” I yelled over the wind roaring in my ears. “Jallis, I’ve never done this before!”

  The dragon launched into the sky, and I screamed as we hurtled through the air. Jallis’s strong arms tightened around my waist at the same time the dragon’s wings snapped out, catching an updraft that pushed us higher, higher, until the academy was the size of a dollhouse, the trees on the ground mere pinpricks. The moment I realized that I wasn’t sliding off the saddle, that I was secure in my position in the sky, the tension slid off my shoulders, and I laughed.

  Jallis laughed too, a warm chuckle in my ear that heated my skin. “I know you haven’t done this before,” he said, pulling me a bit more snugly against him. “That’s why I wanted to take you up here. I wanted to be the first.”

  There was something intimate in the tone of his voice that burned my cheeks, and I did my best to shrug it off. “Sorry I screamed earlier,” I said, genuinely embarrassed by my outburst. “It’s just, I remembered the balancing lessons everyone was doing last week, all the drills, and I didn’t know how to do any of this.”

  “You’ll learn in time,” Jallis assured me. “For now, just sit back and enjoy the view.”

  I did as Jallis said, leaning into his strong chest as I stared at the landscape. Dragon’s Table sprawled beneath us, a glistening city of towers and turrets, mansions and palaces, gardens and groves. Boutique shops and restaurants lined those meticulously maintained streets—streets I hadn’t walked since I’d stopped working for Barrigan. Streets I now avoided because I felt I didn’t belong.

  After a few minutes, Kadryn landed on a tall cliff overlooking Zuar City. Jallis hopped down, then helped me to the ground so we could stand at the edge and stare.

  “It seems so far away, doesn’t it?” Jallis asked. “Like a whole other world.”

  “It is a whole other world,” I told him. “The way you live up here, surrounded by comfort and luxury and puffy clouds…we don’t live like that down there, in the real world.”

  Jallis frowned. “It’s not always perfect up here,” he said. “I won’t deny that our lives are infinitely better—I’ve visited the ground plenty of times—but we have our fair share of problems too. We might live up in the clouds, but that also puts us closer to the storms.”

  I knew there was a metaphor there, but my attention snagged on something else Jallis had said. “You say you’ve visited the ground ‘plenty of times.’ What for?”

  I expected Jallis to tell me he went down to the city for cheap thrills, just like the other upper city jerks who liked to frequent the clubs and brothels on the ground so they could go back up and tell their buddies they’d lived dangerously by rubbing elbows with us ground-dwellers.

  But instead Jallis sighed a little. “Before I got Kadryn, my father used to drag me around on business trips a lot. He handles economic relations between Elantia and other countries, which as you can imagine requires quite a bit of travel. My father wanted me to see the world, to not be as isolated as the other dragon riders, so he took me everywhere.”

  “Oh.” I blinked. “Where have you been?”

  Jallis gave me a crooked smile. “It would be easier to ask me where I haven’t been.”

  We sat on the cliff and he told me stories of his travels. Jallis was far more worldly than I’d thought. Although I’d visited more cities, he’d traveled to more countries and was fluent in an impressive array of languages, even more than me.

  “That’s pretty impressive,” I said when he was finished. “But I bet I can take you to a few places that are nothing like where you’ve been before.”

  “Oh?” Jallis lifted an eyebrow. “Like where?”

  I smiled. “Are you up for a jaunt into the forest?”

  We took to the skies again, and with Jallis’s permission, I gave Kadryn directions on where to go. Wanting the location to be a surprise, I didn’t tell him exactly where we were heading, but gave him step-by-step directions, having him fly to one landmark along the way, and then the next.

  “This is turning out to be quite the trip,” Jallis said as we flew over yet another town. “Are we going to make it back in time for curfew?” His tone was teasing, but I could sense he was growing a little uneasy.

  “We should,” I said, turning my head to grin up at him. “But there’s always a chance you’ll be so enamored when we get there that I won’t be able to convince you to leave.”

  Jallis laughed. “You’re certainly building up a lot of anticipation.”

  After nearly two hours of flying, I directed Kadryn to land in the large clearing in the middle of a lush forest. As I hopped off the dragon’s back, looking around at the familiar clearing, I marveled that we’d been able to travel here so fast. It had taken me four days to journey here on horseback, and another six to come back with all the plunder I’d taken.

  “This way,” I said, waving for Jallis to follow as I headed into the forest. Normally, birds twittered and animals scampered as I walked the path, but the presence of Kadryn had silenced the forest creatures, making Jallis’s footfalls extraordinarily loud.

  It was a good thing we weren’t trying to sneak up on anybody.

  We trekked a good mile inward before we came to the spot I was looking for—a large, circular hole in the ground, opened up by an earthquake sometime in the last ten years. The giant cachewa trees with their bright yellow leaves and orange trunks shielded the site from view, but here on the ground, it was impossible to miss.

  Jallis’s mouth dropped open as we came to the edge. “Is…is that…”

  “A ruin.” I swung my legs over the side. “You coming?”

  “Wait!” Jallis called, but I had already dropped down through the hole. I’d left a rope ladder hanging directly inside and quickly climbed down to the ground. Jallis gave me an exasperated look when he realized that I had not, in fact, dropped straight to the ground, and followed down the ladder after me.

  I pouted. “I thought you were going to show me that fancy falling trick.”

  Jallis arched an eyebrow. “I generally try not to risk breaking my ankles if I don’t have to.” But his annoyance quickly faded as he looked around the cavernous space. The dome above us was coffered, and the walls and floor were pure marble. The barest imprint left behind from a carpet, long rotted away, ran the length of the long hall to our left, and off to the side were broken chandeliers I
had moved when I was clearing away the debris.

  “Is…is this a mansion?” he asked. “Someone’s home?”

  “A palace,” I corrected as I walked down the hall. “Golden Age. I suspect this place is hundreds of acres long. It’s kind of my pet project.”

  “Your pet project?” Jallis asked as we passed through an archway. “What does that mean? Are you some kind of explorer? Archaeologist?”

  “I’m not quite so noble as all that,” I said. “I’m a treasure hunter. It’s how I make my living.”

  As I gave Jallis an overview of what I did for a living, I also gave him a tour of what I had deemed ‘The Grand Palace’—an absolutely bewildering maze of rooms and halls that seemed to be solely devoted to pleasure. Banquet halls, salons, courtyards, kitchens, gardens, baths, bedrooms—there was a room for every function I could think of, as well as ones I couldn’t have imagined on my own. Many of the rooms had themes, the glass mosaics on the floors retelling old myths and legends.

  “This is incredible,” Jallis said as we walked into an octagonal courtyard with five rooms branching from its center. In the middle of the room was a fountain crowned with a statue of a man riding two dolphins. A loose robe only partially covered his muscular body, and a crown of seashells wreathed his head. One hand held a trident, while the other held the reins of his mounts, and each of his massive legs were braced atop the backs of the dolphins. Above, a concrete dome that had likely once been completely covered with glass mosaic tiles—I could still see a few sparkling up above—and frescoes, faded with time, covered the walls, a shadow of the brilliant scenes they had once been.

  I grinned at Jallis. “It almost sounds like you’re impressed.”

  He shook his head. “Impressed seems like an inadequate word,” he said as he sat down heavily on a stone bench. “How is it that there isn’t a team in here working to excavate this place? You said you suspected it was acres long…I can only imagine the marvels that have yet to be discovered!”