by Laurence Yep
Lady Miunai pantomimed scribbling something. “Legends are written down long after what happened, so they give idealized versions of events. The real situations may have been more difficult.” She pursed her lips sympathetically. “At any rate, perhaps Nanaia wants you to go there.”
“I think it would be wiser,” the prince urged. “It won’t matter to Roland what he finds here if he can’t get Yi’s arrows. And in your homeland, your father can aid you.”
“Another trip with that windbag Naue?” Koko groaned, slapping his forehead. “You got any earplugs for sale?”
Bayang drummed her claws on her chair. “But where are the arrows buried in that city? We could dig for years and never find them. If we can stop Roland here, we won’t have to go to this City of Death.”
“What if Roland has gone there while this Badik has come here?” the prince asked.
“I don’t think Roland would trust anyone else with the parts of the superweapon,” Scirye reasoned. “He wants to collect them personally. So if Badik is here so is he.” She swung her legs off the bed. She was still a little woozy. “How long have I been out?”
“About an hour,” Bayang said.
“Should you ignore Nana’s command to go to the City of Death?” the prince inquired.
Scirye, though, was feeling annoyed with the goddess’s riddles. “Who knows what the goddess means for me to do in that city? I’m sure that Roland is here, and that’s what’s important at the moment. Once we get him, I’ll go wherever the goddess wants.”
Her legs wobbled a little when she tried to stand up and Kles rose into the air, grabbing hold of one arm with all four paws to hold her up. As valiant an effort as it was, the lap griffin wasn’t strong enough and Scirye would have fallen if the kobold doctor hadn’t caught hold of her the next moment. Though no taller than a child, he had the strength of a grown human.
With nods of thanks to her rescuers, Scirye straightened up. “I’m all right now.”
Prince Tarkhun rubbed his temples as if he suddenly had a headache. “Ai! Why did I promise to help you no matter what?”
Roxanna stiffened, switching from English to Common to scold him like some little nun: “If you gave your word, Father, you have to keep it.”
“That was before I heard they were fighting Roland and his dragon,” Prince Tarkhun argued in the same tongue as his daughter. “To destroy an island, to steal a treasure from a goddess—Roland’s scheme is on a scale so grand that I cannot even picture it. Lady Scirye should go to the Kushan Empire, where she’ll have powerful allies. She shouldn’t challenge the ocean in winter where the Arctic is as deadly an enemy as Roland. I would never have made my vow if it meant helping them go to their deaths.”
Roxanna pointed at her face. “I saw Nana’s statue move with my own two eyes. Lady Scirye is special to the goddess. So if Lady Scirye says she has to chase Roland onto the ice, then we have to help her.”
Concerned, Lady Miunai put her hand on her husband’s arm. “Yes, we have to give all the aid we can to Lady Scirye and her friends.”
“To refuse to help them is against all laws of honor and hospitality,” Roxanna protested.
Prince Tarkhun squirmed as he looked from his wife to his daughter, annoyed that the pair was ganging up on him. “If I have guests who want to jump from the roof, should I let them? The philosophers can debate what’s right and what’s wrong. I have to follow what my conscience tells me.”
“But Father—”
“Enough,” Prince Tarkhun commanded in Common to his wife and daughter. “I’ve made my judgment. What happened in the shrine is a sign that Lady Scirye is precious to the goddess. We must protect her, not help her commit suicide.”
He slipped back into English when he spoke to Scirye and the others: “I’m sorry, but I have to adjust my promise. I will assist you on your way to the Kushan Empire, where your father can help you, but I will not give you aid in this reckless pursuit of Roland. Until I can make travel arrangements, I must insist you stay here as our honored guests. We will give you every courtesy within our walls, but you will not be allowed to leave them.”
Turning, he beckoned to the nearest servant. “Fetch the chakar.”
14
Bayang
I was a fool, a fool! The only humans she could trust were the hatchlings, but because she had let her guard down with these treacherous Sogdians, they had trapped her.
But she would show them that it is not so simple to capture a warrior of the Moonglow clan.
“Let’s go!” Bayang snarled as she worked her transformation spell. The world blurred around her as her form changed, and through the magical sparks swirling around her she heard Koko wail, “But I haven’t eaten yet.”
Once again in her dragon perfection, Bayang picked up the tanuki by the scruff of his neck and dragged him from a divan. “Can’t you think of anything more than your belly, you furball?”
Koko squinted at Bayang. “Don’t you call me names, you walking handbag!” The next moment, he had changed into a pudgy badger.
“That’s more like it,” Bayang said, and flung him down. Catlike, he landed on all fours.
When a servant tried to stop her, Scirye hit him over the head with a silver platter, scattering chunks of meat in all directions. In the meantime, Kles had risen into the air and was using his paws to pummel another servant who tried to intervene.
Leech had pulled off his weapon armband and had expanded it into a ring to use as a weapon, but the other servants didn’t seem in any hurry to attack.
Bayang knocked over a table, goblets and plates crashing to the floor. “It’s now or never,” she called, and worked the expansion spell.
The next moment her body began to feel tight, almost painfully so. The air shimmered and whirled as the spell gathered matter from the surrounding area to add the needed mass. Then the people and furnishings seemed to be shrinking as she swelled in height, stopping before she wouldn’t fit through the doorway.
As soon as Bayang sat on her haunches, Leech helped Scirye scramble onto her back and then followed.
“I’m coming too,” Roxanna cried, hitching up her robe to reveal warm trousers of reindeer hide. Clambering over the debris, she ran straight up Bayang’s spine to join the other hatchlings.
“Roxanna, come down here this instant!” Prince Tarkhun jabbed his finger imperiously at the floor.
Defiantly, Roxanna straddled the dragon and wrapped her arms around Leech’s waist. “I’m sorry, Father. Someone in our family has to remember our duty to Nana and our honor.”
There wasn’t time to order Roxanna to listen to her father. Already Bayang could see some of the servants gathering by the large door to thwart their escape.
“Heads down,” the dragon instructed, and sprang forward, gathering speed as she went. The human barricade lost their nerve at the sight of a ton of scales and fangs and scattered before her like straw.
They would lose too much precious time if she had to stop and open the door, so closing her eyes, she lowered her head like a battering ram. The impact on her skull made her fangs clack together, but the door fell off its hinges and its lock mechanism spun through the air with a cloud of splinters.
Bayang skidded as she tried to stop and smashed into the tapestry-covered wall opposite the doorway. She thought the bricks behind the woven cloth gave way as if she had dented the hallway. “Everybody still there?”
“To your left,” Roxanna said.
I’ve seen how Roxanna bosses the Sogdian adults around, but now she’s telling a dragon what to do, Bayang thought exasperatedly.
Bayang turned in that direction, paws skittering along the floor and demolishing a cabinet as she tried to recover speed.
Kles shot ahead like a tawny arrow. “You’re leaving an easy trail for them to follow.”
“You try being stealthy when you’re learning how to be a ferryboat,” Bayang puffed.
Koko’s paws scrabbled on the floor as he followed them. “Hey, wait for b
aby.”
Behind them, Bayang could hear people shouting the alarm, but it would take a while for word to spread through a place as vast as the caravanserai and the dragon intended to take advantage of that.
Then she heard an all too familiar hum. Curling her neck around for a moment, she saw the flying disks spinning under Leech’s feet. Roxanna sat goggle-eyed, watching.
Leech was smiling self-consciously at having a new audience. “Kles can’t guard your rear if he’s scouting in front of you,” he said, and hopped into the air.
“Kles is an experienced flier and you’re”—Bayang could have gnashed her teeth with exasperation as the hatchling almost collided with a hanging chandelier—“still a beginner.”
Leech left it swinging back and forth behind him, the fire imps flaring angrily.
“Then don’t distract me,” he insisted, rubbing his head as he zipped backward out of reach.
The elders should never have worried about him, sending her to kill him. The little idiot was quite capable of doing it on his own. Well, she’d save him despite his recklessness—in a purely professional sense, of course, and not because she was a spinster dragon trying to pretend she finally had a hatchling.
She’d treat this like a job, acting logically and without emotion. There was no question that their relationship could ever be more than client and bodyguard. Even if she carried out the task successfully, there was no way she could make up for assassinating those earlier selves.
But first things first. “Help us get outside and we’ll leave you there,” Bayang said to Roxanna.
Any other species would not have dared to defy a dragon. But human hatchlings, as Bayang was discovering, were different.
“Do you know how to survive out on the ice?” Roxanna challenged the dragon.
“Do you?” Scirye asked. “I thought you were cooped up inside the caravanserai.”
Roxanna’s voice instantly became respectful. “No, Lady. The freebooters have only been a big problem the last few years. Before that, they weren’t organized and wouldn’t tackle a large group.”
“I bet that’s Roland’s doing,” Koko said.
Roxanna sounded wistful. “I used to go out regularly with Father and my brothers on trading runs to the Inuit villages. So I’m as good as they are at camping out in the snow and hunting. I know this land as well as you do yours.”
“I left Kushan when I was small,” Scirye confessed. “I’m afraid I don’t know it at all.”
“That’s all right,” Kles shouted back to her. “That’s why you have me.”
Roxanna seemed puzzled by that. “Then where do you call home, Lady?”
“Everywhere,” Scirye said, “and nowhere. My mother was stationed in Istanbul and then Paris before being assigned to San Francisco,” she explained. “But her missions took her all over Europe and Turkey and around the Mediterranean. And when our ship landed in New York, we toured the eastern coast of the United States before catching the train to San Francisco.”
“I’d die to see even one of those places you’ve been,” Roxanna said, and then called out to Bayang, “Up those stairs.”
As she galloped toward the stairs a hundred yards away, Bayang suspected that there was more to Roxanna’s devotion to her family’s honor and the goddess. They also seemed like convenient excuses for finally having an adventure of her own.
Unfortunately, Bayang knew the Sogdian hatchling was probably right. The Arctic wilderness would be as deadly a foe as Roland and Badik. In fact, the dragon wasn’t even sure she could find her way out of the caravanserai without a guide.
“How come I keep attracting all these willful human hatchlings?” Bayang sighed. “It it some curse?”
“Hey, slow down, Stretch,” Koko panted. “My legs are shorter than yours.”
Bayang felt a sudden weight on her tail. Glancing behind her, she saw that Koko had leapt onto the appendage. Leech had flown in close and was helping the badger to wriggle to a higher perch on Bayang’s tail.
“If you ate less and exercised more, you could keep up,” Bayang scolded.
She depended on her tail to help her balance when she was on the ground, so the sudden weight there made it harder to keep on a straight line. She winced not with pain but with chagrin as her swinging tail smashed a table into kindling.
“Watch it. You got a passenger on the caboose,” Koko protested as he shook some large splinters from his fur.
“If you don’t pay your fare, you don’t get to complain,” Bayang snapped. But she was being so careful not to knock Koko off that she stumbled on the bottom step, barely managing to stay on her paws as she clattered up the staircase, which groaned under the combined weight.
Fortunately, the stairs proved sturdy enough, and at Roxanna’s instruction Bayang opened the door at the top. An icy wind blew into their faces as Bayang stepped onto the roof. The long night had claimed Nova Hafnia.
Upach was waiting for them, wearing all her furs and with the muffler wound around her head and an imp burning fiercely in a lantern by her thick, furry boots. Next to her were various bundles and lengths of rope. Clutched in her arms was a rifle in a long holster.
“When you told me you were going to chase Roland,” Roxanna explained smugly, “I suspected what Father would say. But I also saw the omen and knew she wanted you to leave. So I took some precautions for our escape.”
Bayang had never seen an ifrit with a rifle before, so as she pulled up beside the servant she nodded to the weapon. “Is that really necessary?”
“The rifle’s mine,” the Sogdian hatchling said. “I used to go hunting regularly, so I know how to handle it properly.”
Bayang frowned. “In my experience, humans and guns are an accident waiting to happen.”
“While you may not have to worry about getting eaten by bears,” Roxanna countered, “the rest of us do.”
Koko raised a hand but didn’t wait for an acknowledgment. “D-do they include badgers on their dinner menu?”
Roxanna’s teeth flashed in a savage smile. “I think your fur would get in their teeth, but otherwise they’d manage.”
They could hear shouting from the central courtyard as if their pursuers were guarding all the doors, not realizing that Bayang was a dragon in disguise. It wouldn’t take long, though, before Prince Tarkhun and Lady Miunai directed their followers to the roof.
“What if Roland heads into the Wastes? Aren’t you scared of the phantoms?” Scirye asked.
“A good caravan leader has to look at the facts,” Roxanna declared. “I don’t think there are phantoms. Those stories have been around for centuries. Sure, people have disappeared, but they were hunters who probably had accidents.”
“So it’s just rumors?” Leech asked.
Roxanna bit her lip for a moment. “Um, no.” She straightened her shoulders. “There’s something there, but I don’t think it will harm us. I talked to an Inuit who wandered into the Wastes because he’d become lost. Though he heard howls and weird noises, he never saw anything, and whenever he turned in the wrong direction something nipped at his heels to head him the right way. He said it was more like whatever was there was herding him out of the Wastes like a reindeer.”
“Well, you’ve had your fun.” Bayang snagged Leech from the air and dragged him down. “But you’re going to ride on my back when we leave here. I’ll have enough to do without worrying about you flying solo.”
The hatchling looked stubborn. “I’ve done all right so far.”
“Lord Leech, you’ll have to take off your disks anyway.” Roxanna pointed to a row of boots in different sizes. “Your feet will freeze in just shoes.” Then she said to the others, “Better put on the furs.” Upach had fetched new fur coats, hats, and gloves. “I don’t think even your charms will keep out the cold where we’re going.
“I think I may need more than fur,” Koko said.
As the others dismounted and Leech reluctantly returned to the ground and restored the flying d
isks to his armband, Bayang began another expansion spell so she could carry their supplies.
Koko yanked on a coat with satisfaction. “There. A double layer of fur ought to keep the heat in and bear fangs out.”
Roxanna changed her clothing with the other hatchlings, but when she caught sight of Scirye’s feet she began chewing her lip.
“What’s wrong, Roxanna?” Scirye asked.
The Sogdian girl bowed from the waist, keeping her eyes on the floor. “I beg your forgiveness, Lady Scirye. But your boots look as flimsy as Lord Leech’s shoes.” She paused. “Unless you think the goddess will protect you from the cold.”
“Let’s not test it.” Scirye stood on one leg like a stork as she tried to remove the first boot. “I’ll just put them in the baggage.”
“No extra freight,” Bayang declared. “I think it’ll be all I can do to carry our supplies and all of you.”
Scirye was hopping on one leg as she tried to remove the first boot. “Can’t you grow just a few more inches?”
“More mass requires more fuel to move it,” the dragon explained.
“Eh? In English?” Koko asked. He was putting on a pair of boots himself.
“Every extra inch means I need to eat more food so I can fly,” Bayang said. “Which then means I have to carry more supplies and that means becoming even larger.”
Roxanna had fetched a pair of thickly padded boots from the pile of clothes that Upach had brought. Clutching them to her, she came over and knelt. “If Your Ladyship will permit, I’ll leave a note that the boots are to be saved for you. No one would dare touch them if they know they’re yours.”
The Sogdian girl shrank back when Scirye tried to support herself by putting a hand on Roxanna’s shoulder. So, looking a bit put out, Scirye sat down on the cold floor instead. As Kles fluttered down to help tug the boots off, Roxanna prostrated herself.
“Are you feeling faint?” Scirye asked.
“It would be disrespectful to be taller than you,” the girl answered humbly.
“There are a lot of people taller than me,” Scirye said. “You don’t expect me to cut off their heads, do you? Get up.”
