Dragonslayer

by Matthew Lang

  Zoul turned out to be at equal ease traversing flat ground as he was climbing near-vertical escarpments or over fallen trees in order to cross a wide gorge or river span. More than once, they climbed through the canopy to avoid herds of what appeared to be large dog-sized beetles foraging in the swampy ground by a river bend. Sometimes the group’s passage through the treetops would stir up small flocks of flying creatures that were strangely rhomboid in shape, sunlight glinting off feathers as small and fine as scales as they fled into the reddish sky.

  Many bumps and swipes from branches later, the group finally emerged at the top of a cliff, next to a thundering waterfall. The break in the vegetation was so sudden that Adam reared back, tugging at the reins frantically as the lizard thundered toward the brink, causing Zoul to turn and chirp at him quizzically. At the sound, the others reined in just ahead.

  “Come, we’re nearly there,” Darius said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the waterfall cascading over the edge of the precipice.

  “Nearly where? It’s a sheer drop!” Adam objected, forcing himself to relax his death grip on the reins long enough to rub the sweat from his eyes, leaving a muddy smear across his forehead.

  “We have a waystation at the foot of the cliff,” Darius said patiently. “It’s used by our scouts, so there will be supplies there.”

  “And we’re going to what? Walk straight off the cliff?”

  “Not off. Over,” Xavier said, urging his mount forward. “Just hold on tight and make sure you’re clipped in.”

  With that, the magister leaned low over his lizard’s back and disappeared over the edge of the cliff, the others in tow.

  “Did they just…? They didn’t just…? But that’s….”

  “They’re cave lizards,” Duin said, his voice low and strangely gentle. “Look at Zoul’s feet. He will not fall, and if you do not panic, you will not fall either. And if you do not panic, I will not fall with you.”

  Adam glanced down at the great lizard’s feet and noticed for the first time that they were sprawled like outspread hands and, instead of claws, ended in bulbous toes more reminiscent of a frog’s than a lizard’s. Pausing to check that he was still securely fastened into his saddle, Adam took a deep, steadying breath.

  “Hold on tight, all right?” he said.

  “As if my life depends on it,” Duin replied gravely.

  “It sort of does, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Adam laughed at that, a short sharp laugh, tinged with hysteria at the edges. “This is crazy. I can’t believe I’m seriously about to ride off the edge of a cliff.”

  “Not off, over,” Duin repeated. “Or down, to be more precise.”

  “I don’t know how you can be so calm about this.”

  Adam felt the furred man shrug. “It was a normal part of growing up,” Duin said. “I rode a hatchling up and down the cavern walls for hours on end when I was younger—before I was cast into the light, I mean.”

  “Cast into…. You mean here, the surface?”

  Duin nodded. “Yes. Trust me, we will be fine.”

  Some of the furred man’s calm must have rubbed off on him, because Adam’s legs trembled only slightly as he squeezed his knees gently, urging Zoul into a slow walk that took them step by reptilian step closer to the edge. For a moment, Adam saw only the lack of ground that was fast approaching, and then the view opened up, with the red of the sky and the sun hanging over the horizon in the exact same place it had been when they started their trek. Below them, a sea of never-ending foliage stretched out to meet the dusk, the wending curves of the river disappearing into the mass of green. Strange bellowing cries rang out from the forest below, and small flights of the rhomboid fliers were flitting through the foliage. Then the pressure of Duin’s body on his reminded him that gravity would soon be coming into play, and he dropped down so he was nearly flat against Zoul’s back.

  “That view was beautiful,” he murmured as Duin’s grip on his belt firmed and the man’s body pressed more closely against his own.

  “It was? I… suppose it was. I never thought of it that way before.”

  “Maybe you just see it too often,” Adam suggested.

  “No,” Duin said slowly. “I do not think I ever have. When I look at the land, I see ambush sites, hunting grounds, places to forage, and cover where I can travel without being seen. I have never stopped just to look at the view.”

  “Oh.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Helping me see it.”

  Adam smiled tightly. “Keep me alive long enough to keep seeing it and I’ll consider us even.”

  Duin’s replying chuckle was music to Adam’s ears. “I will make it my official job, if you like.”

  “I would like,” Adam said. “I would very much like. Seriously, though, I don’t have a clue where I am or what I’m doing here.”

  “I know,” Duin said softly. “But then, as you pointed out, up here, neither do they.”

  Adam looked down the cliff at the small figures of Darius, Esmeralda, and Xavier, easily twenty or thirty meters below them and descending with practiced ease.

  Adam snorted. “If they did, I probably wouldn’t be here, would I?”

  “I… do not know,” Duin said. “I am unsure if I really know them or their ways anymore.”

  “Just how young were you when you were exiled?” Adam asked.

  “I was a child still. The Rite of the Red Sun is the last test we face before we are accepted as adults.”

  “I meant how old were you?” Adam asked. “You know, in years.”

  “I do not understand. What is a year?”

  “The time it takes for the world to travel around the sun.”

  “And… how long is that?”

  “Three hundred and sixty-five days.”

  There was a slightly awkward silence. “What is a day?”

  “Okay, now you’re screwing with me,” Adam said. “Day, you know, time it takes for the world to turn… twenty-four hours, one day and one night.”

  “Night?”

  “Yeah, when the sun goes down and it gets dark and the moon is in the sky. Seriously, drop the clueless act.”

  “There is no moon.”

  “What?”

  “There is no moon,” Duin said, his voice strangely bitter. “I am told that once there was a moon that lit up a dark sky when the sun had gone to bed and did not shine her light upon us, but if there was, I have never seen it. Here we have this unchanging twitterlight, not these days and nights.”

  “I have them—you know, where I’m from.”

  “Truly? You are not just saying that?”

  “No. Why would I do that?”

  Duin shook his head. “I have no idea, but I would suggest not speaking of it to Magister Xavier. He would not take it well.”

  “Okay, but you’ll have to tell me why later,” Adam said. “Wait, are you saying the sun never moves… it never sets?”

  “Have you seen it move through the sky since you arrived here?”

  “Actually, no,” Adam said. “I was wondering about that.”

  “I am told that if you travel toward the light, there is a lifeless land without water, just dust and rock as far as the eye can see, and the brightness of the sun burns your flesh,” Duin said. “And if you venture into the dark, there is a frozen land where the only things to grow have no eyes and feed on muck.” Once again Adam felt the man shrug. “I have never wanted to test the truth of either story.”

  “And this here is what you call ‘twitterlight’?” Adam asked.

  “Yes. It means that between light and dark, or something, according to the… them.”

  “I just want to go home,” Adam said with a sigh, his temples beginning to throb as the exertion and dehydration caught up to him.

  “Sometimes, so do I,” Duin said. “But mine do not want me back, and…. I do not know where you are from?”

  “
A place called Australia,” Adam said hopelessly. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it?”

  “No, but I never bothered with surface maps. My family were tunnel hunters.”

  “That would still be a useful skill up here.”

  “I like to think it helped,” Duin agreed, and Adam thought he felt Duin grin.

  THE GROUND was a lot closer now, and the tail of the lizard in front of them was just disappearing into the thick waxy leaves of the canopy below. Once Zoul followed, Adam blinked repeatedly, his eyes struggling to adjust to the lack of light, so densely packed was the foliage. As they made their way down the final stretch of cliff accompanied by the roar of the water hitting the rocks below, Adam took in tree trunks as thick across as his beat-up old car was long, and the great cavernous spaces between them, pierced here and there with dappled shafts of reddish light, giving the entire area the feeling of an old vaulted cathedral that was beginning to molder. The rich smell of loam filled his nostrils, and from the corner of his eyes, he saw a flash of movement as something leapt from a nearby tree into the safety defined as “away from the big lizards.” He couldn’t say he blamed it at all.

  The forest below the cliff was thicker than the one they had left, and the air inside the bubble of its canopy was still and heavy with age. Thick beards of moss hung from tree branches, and Duin reached out to grab a good handful as they continued their journey down.

  “What’s that for?” Adam asked.

  “Tinder,” Duin said.

  “Oh, right.”

  The ground was surprisingly free from the dense undergrowth that had dominated at the top of the cliff, covered instead by a squishy layer of damp, rotting leaf litter and a network of sprawling roots that twined across the surface, creating uneven terraces that Adam was certain he would trip over, given half the chance. Thankfully, Zoul was much surer on his feet and had no trouble rejoining the others on the level surface.

  “Are we there yet?” Adam asked, only half in jest.

  “Almost,” Darius said, ushering them around a large boulder and up toward a great fissure in the rocky cliff face just large enough for a lizard to clamber through. It had been covered by a curtain of thorny creepers, which Xavier and Esmeralda were carefully moving aside to allow passage through them.

  “They look nasty,” Adam said.

  “They are,” Darius said absently, one hand on his saber as he kept a watchful eye on the jungle around them. “And they keep out anything that might lair in the cave.”

  “Clever.”

  “Necessary,” Darius said with a shrug. “We’ll enter once Xavier has made light.”

  “Made?”

  But then he saw Xavier was sprinkling a coarse powder into a stone bowl that was already half-filled with something greenish and lumpy. And then, as Xavier urged his mount into the narrow gap, Adam could see a pale greenish light shining outward from the bowl, casting a dim illumination on the rock face. Princess Esmeralda, looking tired and just a little bedraggled from the rigors of their journey, followed him in.

  “Go,” Darius said to Adam. “I’ll bring up the rear.”

  As Adam pushed forward, trying to stay close enough to the light source, he was relieved to see light shining from behind him, and realized Darius must have a similar contraption to the one Xavier was carrying. The crevice opened into what had probably once been natural caverns, now shaped by human hands into something more habitable. A number of creaky bunk beds, or rather bed frames, had been constructed by lashing lengths of bamboo together. There were no mattresses, just shorter lengths of bamboo lashed in place, but Adam was ready to fall onto one and pass out. There were lizard stables of a sort, which consisted of large individual stall-like spaces with nests of dried grasses where the lizards could be tethered. Obviously with their climbing abilities, a partial door would have been useless in keeping them in.

  Before settling into the main room, the three cave dwellers started unpacking the few belongings they had brought with them, including some bedding and foodstuffs that had been packed into Zoul’s netting. The stone bowls of light were placed in niches in the walls, casting their dim, unwavering glow around the room, and after being handed a smaller light dish, Adam and Duin were sent to investigate the storerooms, along with strict instructions from Magister Xavier not to let Duin hold the light bowl or the bamboo equivalent of a crowbar. Adam resisted rolling his eyes, then turned and led the way around the corner into a room of tightly sealed barrels and wooden crates. Many of them proved to be empty, but there was a fair amount of dried fruit and meat of some sort, several cloaks, a few pairs of leather boots, and two sets of armor. The boots and armor were largely made from what Adam now recognized as lizard skin. They also featured some of the thick blackish shell that Darius wore.

  “What is this stuff?” Adam asked.

  “Spider or beetle carapace,” Duin said, pushing his matted brown hair out of his eyes.

  Adam stopped and stared at his companion. “Wait a minute. Weren’t you… furry?”

  Duin smiled ruefully, the very human expression strangely out of place on a person Adam had previously associated with a short muzzle. “This is what I was like before…. Outside of light cast by fire or the sun… I look just like you… well, like the others.”

  Indeed, Duin now appeared to be a scruffy, dirty man who had been crawling along the forest floor. Or rather, a near-naked, scruffy, dirty man who had been crawling along the forest floor. Beneath the smears of mud and matted hair, patches of pale skin covering a lean, muscled body showed through. Here and there, Adam could see scars, one particularly noticeable one running across the man’s torso from what must have been a vicious slash. His face was long, and his features strong, if delicate in appearance. He also appeared much younger than Adam would have expected—except for his eyes. Duin’s brown eyes still held the same look of worldliness that Adam had first noticed back up the mountain.

  His skin was still marked with the same tiger stripes that adorned him when he was furred, although the pattern was much lighter and seemed more like an intricate set of tattoos than natural pigmentation. Of course, Duin’s sudden lack of fur also made Adam painfully aware that all Duin wore was a decidedly skimpy loincloth. Somehow, the knowledge that even with fur Duin had been just as naked barely five minutes ago didn’t help.

  “Adam?”

  “Sorry,” Adam said. “I just…. I didn’t know.”

  “I take no offense. I imagine there is a lot you do not know about here.”

  Adam snorted. “You can say that again.”

  Duin paused as if considering Adam’s words. “Well, yes, I could. But why would I?”

  Adam smiled. “It’s a figure of speech, Duin. Never mind. Let’s keep looking—if nothing else, you’re probably going to need some clothing now.”

  Duin smiled, although the expression did not quite reach his eyes. “I gave up clothes a long time ago, Adam.”

  “Maybe,” Adam said. “But the princess might take exception to your nudity in her royal presence.”

  “We shall see,” Duin said. “They did not keep much here, did they?”

  Adam brushed his hand over the thick layer of dust that lay over the lid of a barrel of bone-dry meat. “I guess they didn’t use it much. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to stomach that stuff, although I know I’m going to have to.”

  “You soak it first,” Duin said with a grin. “Something tells me there’s going to be a lot of water gathering.”

  Adam looked at wooden buckets that had been stuck in the corner. “Well, I guess that answers the question of what those are all here for.”

  When they walked back into the main chamber to make their report, Esmeralda, as Adam expected, had wrinkled her nose and given them instructions to fetch enough water for drinking and cooking, as well as “cleaning him up while you are out.”

  “I knew it,” Duin said with a rueful grin as they exited the short tunnel into the sunlight, each carrying two buckets,
and Adam with his gym bag slung over his shoulder. He’d noticed Xavier’s interest in it, possibly either for the fabric or color, and he wasn’t about to leave it behind. Darius escorted them up the tunnel with his lizard and a number of sharpened bamboo spears, and Adam assumed he was going off to hunt.

  DUIN’S SMILE was shy as he stepped out into the red light of the surface, and this time, Adam was watching as the fur literally sprouted from Duin’s skin and his face elongated into the now familiar muzzle. It was especially strange to watch Duin’s ears migrate up the sides of his head to their perch on top of it, twitching slightly as they swiveled in response to sounds Adam clearly couldn’t hear.

  “Are we going to be safe?” Adam asked, suddenly conscious of his broadsword being the only weapon they both carried. “Shouldn’t we bring Zoul?”

  Duin sniffed the air. “I think we’ll be all right,” he said as he led them through the leaf litter toward the pool at the bottom of the waterfall. “There aren’t any signs of kanak, and I don’t smell anything dangerous nearby.”

  “Kanak,” Adam said. “Those are the four-armed tall people who seem to want to kill us on sight, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why exactly do they want to kill us?”

  Duin shrugged. “Prestige, I think, although whether from kills or looting I am not sure. I never ventured near enough to a kanak settlement to find out—mostly because I have no wish to get eaten.”

  “They’d eat you?” Adam asked, nearly dropping his buckets.

  “They would eat you, given the chance,” Duin said, pushing past the few scraggly bushes that ringed the wide pool.

  “And you’re sure there’s none around?”

  “If they lived near here, they would use this lake for drinking, washing, and bathing, and there would be a path through the jungle by now. I see no consistent path, no broken branches to keep it clear along the way, so… I think we are safe.”

  Adam sighed, his muscles relaxing and releasing tension he didn’t know he’d been carrying around. “Okay, but if we get eaten, I’m telling on you.”