From exhaustion and fear, strength arose. He wasn’t a dragon, but he was a dragon’s apprentice. Master Pukje had taught him well. The Change poured through him like an ocean through a river mouth. He wouldn’t stop to talk this time. He had killed one dragon already. What were six more when his future was at stake?
The dragons roared at him, approaching on all sides. The ground quaked under their mighty feet, but he stood firm. They couldn’t all attack at once. Fire would boil water and turn sand to glass. Crabblers would shy away and clouds would evaporate to nothing.
Raising both hands, he summoned the flame that he knew so well.
A bright glow blossomed around him, and it seemed for a moment as though the sun had grown in strength. Heat rippled across his skin, and his eyes were dazzled.
But it wasn’t the sun at all. The light came from the web encasing his body. The fire issuing from his hands had set it alight. The glare grew brighter still and the heat more intense until suddenly, with a flash, his entire body was aflame.
He screamed, and the air from his lungs whipped the fire even higher. Great sheets burst from him, rising up and out to either side, and behind him, too, tasting the earth like a tongue. He felt himself lifted by the heat, even as his hair shrivelled and his clothes burned away. The flames lapped at the air, flapped once, and he was aloft.
The dragon of fire surged forward, and Ros was carried with it, inside its belly. Together they left a broad black scar wherever they passed.
“BREATHE easy, boy. This won’t take long.”
Ros recognised that voice. It belonged to the dragon he had just killed. That knowledge did little to quell his panic.
“What’s happening to me?”
“Nothing,” Zilant said. “This has nothing to do with you. It’s all about the seven of us, of which your master is the last and youngest. For sending a man to do a dragon’s job, he will pay dearly. But this was what he wanted: to wake us for a while, to remind us that our blood still boils. An insult will serve when entreaty has failed so many times before.”
Ros could barely think through the pain. Nothing, the dragon said, but it felt like everything.
“Fly with me,” said Zilant from the fire all around him, “just this once, as we pay our brother a visit.”
Ros blazed with the dragon until it seemed there was nothing left to burn. His flesh went first, then his memories, then the person he had tried to be: the student, the adult, the lover …
The only thing that wouldn’t burn was the silver pendant that Adi had given him. Not even the heat in a fire dragon’s belly could melt it. He clung to it tightly and prayed for release.
“I’D be dead if it wasn’t for you,” she had told him, once. “I would’ve run off on my own, and the crabblers would’ve got me.”
It had all seemed so simple, five years earlier. The currents of their lives had swept them together but would sweep them apart again forever if given the chance. The decision had been easy for him to make.
“I promise I’ll come back to you.”
“Well, I promise to wait,” she had replied. “Just don’t die or anything and leave me waiting forever. That could be a little annoying.”
“I’ll even try to write,” he had said, and at times he had, albeit through Change-rich means like talking parrots and their ilk.
“You’d better,” she had said, “but I guess I won’t be able to write back, seeing Pukje wants to keep everything a secret.”
Somehow she had found a way. The pages were rolled up in his pack, a testament to her determination. Too young to wed, Ros and Adi were not too young to make a vow that would bind them into adulthood. Neither of them had made that vow lightly, but neither had they realised how heavy it would turn out to be.
“I promised I’d come back,” he had told her, “and I will.”
THE chase didn’t last long: six dragons against one, one they knew as well as they knew each other, one they would follow to the ends of the earth if needed. Pukje—the dragon of flesh, crafty and wise in the ways of the earth, but so weighed down with its concerns that he taught humans the secrets of his kind—sprang into the sky the moment his siblings appeared on the horizon, boiling and burning and babbling in their animal tongues. He sprinted as fast as his wings would carry him, and they set off right after him, dragons streaking across the firmament like shooting stars, six against one, and the earth shaking beneath them.
WHEN Ros finally woke, he found himself flat on his back, spread-eagled and fully clothed. The leather of his breeches was stiff with dried water and his tunic full of sand, but no actual harm appeared to have been done to him. He swept his matted hair out of sleep-crusted eyes and looked all around him.
The sun had risen, so he could see clearly that he was back in the Divide, back where it had all started. And more than that: the pool, the patch of discoloured rock, the cloud, the steady breeze—even the web, stretching lazily above him—they were back, too, as though the whole thing had been a dream.
Could it have been? Frowning, he relived the confused moments of the chase: wide jaws and clutching talons; tails whipping and wings slapping all around him. He and Zilant—for an immeasurable time, there had been no distinction between them.
By daylight, though, the dragon was invisible. The web was just a web, swaying in the breeze.
With a shaking hand, Ros reached out to pluck the nearest strand.
Seeing the scars on his skin—thousands of tiny lines, crossing and recrossing like a road map of the Haunted City—he thought, No, best not.
Instead, Ros clambered to his feet and considered his options.
The nest of dragons, it seemed, was sleeping again. Several crabblers clung unmoving on the parallel cliff-faces, watching him come to his senses with no more than their own intelligence. Not far away lay the wreckage of the strand beast, its legs intact but the bottles, the source of its motive power, completely destroyed.
What should he do now? He couldn’t leave without understanding what had happened to him. Dream or no dream? Free or trapped forever?
Did the answer depend entirely on how one looked at the question?
A blackened, hunched thing that Ros had taken for a rock raised its head and looked at him.
“I release you,” said Master Pukje, “from my service.”
Ros ran to him. The fallen dragon’s skin was burned to a crisp, but the eye that inspected him shone with a familiar, incisive light.
“Are you all right? Who did this to you?”
“You did, I think.”
“No, master, I wouldn’t—”
Pukje croaked a laugh at the expression on Ros’s face. “All right, then. It was Zilant.” His crisped wings twitched. “Does that make you feel better?”
Ros recoiled, unsure if he was being mocked with affection or contempt, or both. “I don’t understand. I did exactly as you told me—”
“You did.”
“I found the dragon. I destroyed the web.”
“You killed him. I know. Then the others came, and you went to burn them. The web caught fire, and Zilant returned.”
Ros nodded. “How is that possible?”
“He burns and lives again. Don’t ask me how. We’re dragons. We’re different from you. We find our own ways to survive the world. You were caught up in all that for a while, but you’re free now. You’ll have to find a way to survive on your own, and that flame is a harder master than I ever was.”
Ros squatted down and rested on his haunches. Pukje’s breathing was laboured. Raw pink patches were visible through the crisped skin.
“You expected this to happen,” Ros said, meaning more than just their injuries. “This was the proof you were waiting for.”
“Proof; punishment. Tell me the difference, and you can be my teacher.”
“You sent me to stir them up, to remind them of—what? That they were still alive? That you were?”
“Solitude is bad for the soul.” The hunched spine lifte
d, then fell. “Perhaps I knew that I would be lonely when you were gone. Perhaps I wanted to be with my family for a little while.”
Ros stared at the injured dragon, appalled for both of them—until a raspy, painful sound revealed that Pukje was laughing at him. Again.
He supposed he deserved it.
“Change to your human form,” Ros said. “I’ll carry you back to Laure, where you’ll be looked after.”
“No need.”
“I can’t just leave you here.”
“Why not? After a short nap, I’ll wake refreshed. Go live your life, as my siblings and I cannot.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re ready to wake from the dream of your youth. Be reborn and engage with the world. Fighting fire with fire gets you nothing but ashes, no? Most important of all—” Here Pukje coughed, long and hacking, releasing clouds of soot from his lungs. “Remember never to tangle with a dragon while it’s dreaming.”
Ros stood, remembering the colours of his wild flight across the land with Zilant. It had been like diving into a living sunset. The feeling had been liquid and furious, joyous and terrifying at the same time. He had been fire, and would never use it the same way again.
But the scars on his hands and arms weren’t burns. They were left by the dragon’s web, where it had touched and clung to him, leaving stigmata that all could see. Perhaps he wasn’t quite the dragon-killer he had imagined himself to be the previous night, but there were worse things, such as being deformed by someone else’s dream.
He squarely confronted the fear that Adi might be having her own doubts. The letter she had sent wasn’t just a testament to determination. It exposed her own uncertainty, too. Thinking of the words she had used, he could see all too clearly now that she was as nervous as he, and taking shelter in conventions alien to both of them.
That both dismayed and encouraged him. He was aware now that the emotional pitfalls he had been skirting during his quest arose from feelings of love after all, not the absence of it. He had refused to reveal his desire to Zilant because he was afraid of what it meant. Fear, reluctance, uncertainty, dread—they were all part of the experience, along with joy, wonder, surprise, and delight. He would need to get used to all of them now he was free to pursue an uncertain conclusion.
Pukje was indeed a dangerous dragon, but he knew better than Ros did who his master was, ultimately. There was no use railing against the people he had chosen to play important roles in his life, not when he himself had invited them in. It did them a disservice to imagine lies and treachery at every turn, just because he nursed doubts he barely acknowledged to himself.
Ros looked up at the crabblers. You cannot turn back now, he had heard the monstrous denizens of the Divide telling him yesterday. Take it how you will. He had done exactly that, and very nearly tangled himself in a net from which he couldn’t escape—because it wasn’t escape he wanted at all, in the end.
We are closer than ever, Adi had said in her letter.
The mouth parts of one of the crabblers clattered the same brief message as before.
“We know you, Roslin of Geheb.”
“Better than I do myself, it seems,” he clacked back.
“All right, now, go,” Pukje told him in an irritated voice. “Live. Be wise. Stay out of trouble.”
“I will,” Ros said. “If you’re sure?”
“I am. You know your road now.”
Pukje’s eyes closed, and he returned to looking more like a stone than any living thing.
Ros removed the pendant from around his neck. Placing it on the sand next to the wounded dragon’s beak, he said, “Thank you, master. I believe I do.”
Stooping to pick up his pack from the wreckage of the strand beast, Ros walked to the base of the cliff and began the long climb northward.
A Stark and Wormy Knight
TAD WILLIAMS
Here’s a sly and playful take on what history might look like if it wasn’t written by the winners …
Tad Williams became an international bestselling author with his very first novel, Tailchaser’s Song, and the high quality of his output and the devotion of his readers have kept him on the top of the charts ever since as a New York Times and London Sunday Times bestseller. His other novels include The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, To Green Angel Tower, the Otherland books—City of Golden Shadow, River of Blue Fire, Mountain of Black Glass, Sea of Silver Light—as well as The War of the Flowers and Shadowmarch. His most recent books are a collection, Rite: Short Work, and a novel, Shadowplay, the second in the Shadowmarch series. He lives with his family in the San Francisco area.
“AM! Mam!” squeed Alexandrax from the damps of his straw-stooned nesty. “Us can’t sleep! Tail us a tell of Ye Elder Days!”
“Child, stop that howlering or you’ll be the deaf of me,” scowled his scaly forebearer. “Count sheeps and go to sleep!”
“Been counting shepherds instead, have us,” her eggling rejoined. “But too too toothsome they each look. Us are hungry, Mam.”
“Hungry? Told you not to swallow that farm tot so swift. A soiled and feisity little thing it was, but would you stop to chew carefulish? Oh, no, no. You’re not hungry, child, you’ve simpledy gobbled too fast and dazzled your eatpipes. Be grateful that you’ve only got one head to sleepify, unbelike some of your knobful ancestors, and go back and shove yourself snorewise.”
“But us can’t sleep, Mam. Us feels all grizzled in the gut and wiggly in the wings. Preach us some storying, pleases—something sightful but sleepable. Back from the days when there were long, dark knights!”
“Knights, knights—you’ll scare yourself sleepless with such! No knights there are anymore—just wicked little winglings who will not wooze when they should.”
“Just one short storying, Mam! Tale us somewhat of Great-Grandpap, the one that were named Alexandrax, just like us! He were alive in the bad old days of bad old knights.”
“Yes, that he was, but far too sensible and caveproud to go truckling with such clanking mostrositors—although, hist, my dragonlet, my eggling, it’s true there was one time …”
“Tell! Tell!”
His mam sighed a sparking sigh. “Right, then, but curl yourself tight and orouborate that tale, my lad—that’ll keep you quelled and quiet whilst I storify.
“Well, as often I’ve told with pride, your great-grandpap were known far-flown and wide-spanned for his good sense. Not for him the errors of others, especkledy not the promiscuous plucking of princesses, since your great-grandy reckoned full well how likely that was to draw some clumbering, lanking knight in a shiny suit with a fist filled of sharp steel wormsbane.
“Oh, those were frightsome days, with knights lurking beneath every scone and round every bent, ready to spring out and spear some mother’s son for scarce no cause at all! So did your wisdominical great-grandpap confine himself to plowhards and peasant girls and the plumpcasional parish priest tumbled down drunk in the churchyard of a Sunday evening, shagged out from ’cessive sermonizing. Princesses and such got noticed, do you see, but the primate proletariat were held cheap in those days—a dozen or so could be harvested in one area before a dragon had to wing on to pastors new. And your great-grandpap, he knew that. Made no mistakes, did he—could tell an overdressed merchant missus from a true damager duchess even by the shallowest starlight, plucked the former but shunned the latter every time. Still, like all of us he wondered what it was that made a human princess so very tasty and ’tractive. Why did they need to be so punishingly, paladinishly protected? Was it the creaminess of their savor or the crispiness of their crunch? Perhaps they bore the ‘bookwet,’ as those fancy French wyverns has it, of flowery flavors to which no peat-smoked peasant could ever respire? Or were it something entire different, he pondered, inexplicable except by the truthiest dint of personal mastication?
“Still, even in these moments of weakness your grandpap’s pap knew that he were happily protected from his own greeding natur
e by the scarcity of princessly portions, owing to their all being firmly pantried in castles and other stony such. He was free to specklate, because foolish, droolish chance would never come to a cautious fellow like him.
“Ah, but he should have quashed all that quandering, my little lizarding, ’stead of letting it simmer in his brain-boiler, because there came a day when Luck and Lust met and bred and brooded a litter named Lamentable.
“That is to say, your pap’s grandpap stumbled on an unsupervised princess.
“This royal hairless was a bony and brainless thing, it goes without saying, and overfond of her clear complexion, which was her downfalling (although the actual was more of an uplifting, as you’ll see). It was her witless wont at night to sneak out of her bed betimes and wiggle her skinny shanks out the window, then ascend to the roof of the castle to moonbathe, which this princess was convinced was the secret of smoothering skin. (Which it may well have been, but who in the name of Clawed Almighty wants smoothered skin? No wonder that humans have grown so scarce these days—they wanted wit.)
“In any case, on this particularly odd even she had just stretched herself out there in her nightgown to indulge this lunar tic when your great-grandpap happened to flap by overhead, on his way back from a failed attempt at tavernkeeper tartare in a nearby town. He took one look at this princess stretched out like the toothsomest treat on a butcher’s table and his better sense deskirted him. He swooped scoopishly down and snatched her up, then wung his way back toward his cavern home, already menurizing a stuffing of baker’s crumbs and coddle of toddler as side dish when the princess suddenfully managed to get a leg free and, in the midst of her struggling and unladylike cursing, kicked your great-grandpap directedly in the vent as hard as she could, causing him unhappiness (and almost unhemipenes). Yes, dragons had such things even way back then, foolish fledgling. No, your great-grandpap’s wasn’t pranged for permanent—where do you think your grandpap came from?
Dragon Book, The Page 29
