by Marc Secchia
Ra’aba was on top of the palace! What? Had she heard right, her father bellowing in Dragonish?
Instinct sped her feet. Lia tore out onto the balcony, searching the skies frantically–great Islands! Her eyes bulged. How had Grandion managed to land himself in such a tangle? As she watched, the Tourmaline Dragon swept toward the Royal Palace, but a massive Green Dragon rode upon his back, gripping Grandion’s upper wings and flanks four-pawed while gnawing at his neck with his beak-like jaws. Lia realised that the bulky Green intended to force Grandion into a rough, possibly bone-shattering landing.
Backing up two steps, she bumped into Ja’al.
“Launch me with your power,” she demanded, judging Grandion’s flight path. He would pass close to the balcony, perhaps sixty feet distant.
“You must be joking–”
Lia snapped, “Now, Ja’al!”
No time to think. She broke into a dead sprint. As Lia leaped off the balcony, wind slammed into her back, propelling her like a Human arrow fired at the incoming Dragons. She thought to stab the Green in the eye. But Lia had misjudged. She smacked into the Green Dragon’s upper shoulder, right in the meat of the major flight muscle. A desperate tangling of limbs, flailing swords and an unexpected boost from both of the Dragons flapping their wings at the same time, ended up with a Human girl lying upside-down against the Green Dragon’s spine spikes.
Elegant as ever. Lia righted herself with an irritated wriggle.
Now, how much damage could a Human girl do with the equivalent of two metal toothpicks, to a hulking, hundred-foot Green Dragon with paws large enough to crush three of her at a time? Her eyes narrowed–aye! He had neck vertebrae, only they were twenty times the size of hers. Sheathing one blade, Lia danced out onto the Dragon’s neck. Time to quarry for a nerve. She slammed the blade down as hard as she could, and almost broke her wrists. Bone. But the Nuyallith blade had at least penetrated the Dragon’s scale armour, which was as much a surprise to her as it was to the Green Dragon, who unexpectedly found a Human Dragon Rider upon his back.
Get off me, you mosquito! he thundered.
The Green tried to shake his head, which was ineffective given how his fangs were stuck in Grandion’s neck. Lia stabbed twice more with the air of a butcher cutting up meat, feeling her way to the slight ridge between two neck vertebrae. With a sharp cry, she speared the blade hilt-deep.
The Green convulsed. Lia knew that most Dragon nerves and major blood vessels, even their hearts, existed in triplicate. A Dragon could lose a heart and still keep flying. But she imagined that few Dragon fangs could penetrate the narrow gap between their neck vertebrae, and certainly not with the precision of her blade. Lia hung on as her body flapped about like a tethered windroc, jerking the blade up and down and doing untold damage to the Dragon’s spinal cord. Suddenly, the wings drooped. The Dragon’s mouth slipped off Grandion’s neck.
Flaccid, the Green Dragon’s entire body weight drove the Tourmaline Dragon toward the ground.
Seeing trees whizzing by right beneath Grandion’s paws, Hualiama screamed, “Roll, Grandion!”
Her Dragon heaved himself sideways, a violent slew in the air. The Green slipped off Grandion’s spine spikes. Lia wailed as she tried to run up its neck, but the speed of the rotation was too much. She spun loose. The next instant, before she could even gasp, she collected the full weight of Grandion’s flailing tail-tip in her stomach.
“Oof!”
Lia saw black. Then the Dragon–her beautiful, deadly Dragon–whipped his tail around like a massive slingshot. Hualiama flew over the gardens she knew so well. Whap! She smacked into his paw. Grandion immediately did a second, fancy mid-air grab to catch her sword.
“Your weapon, Princess.”
“Thank you, Dragon,” she wheezed, accepting the blade. What she could see of his body was a bloodied, fire-blackened mess. A strip of membrane flapped freely from his left wing. A battle at Gi’ishior? Or the Green’s doing? She could not think about that now. Lia exclaimed, “Am I glad to see you! Ra’aba just vanished.”
“He’s up top, rallying his Dragons. Thanks for cleaning the slug off my back.” Grandion had that most disconcerting Dragon habit of looking backward while flying forwards, the better to grin at his captive. “Look, your King’s in trouble. Why don’t I set you down somewhere and go make a nuisance of myself?”
“Are there more Dragons coming?”
“Watch the skies, Dragon Rider,” he said, banking sharply. “Do me a favour. You need to distract Ra’aba for as long as possible. Can you do that?”
Hualiama knew what Flicker might suggest. She settled for wrinkling her nose at Grandion, her heart ululating its happiness within her mind. “I succeeded in distracting you, didn’t I?”
“Aye, most certainly,” he said, with great dignity but a detectable hiccup in his flight pattern. “They are some ways behind.”
“Great! Throw me at that tree, would you?”
Chapter 30: The Onyx Throne
Hualiama COULD HAVE burst into joyful song until Grandion said, “Don’t forget, the Dragons will not interfere until there is cause.”
Which meant, Grandion too. He would deal with Yulgaz and his minions, if he could. The rest was up to Lia and her allies.
Now that palace rooftop looked like the loneliest place in the Island-World.
“They’re destroying the town! How does that square with your policy of non-interference?” she complained.
Understanding struck. Lia had no need of Grandion’s dismayed growl to confirm her suspicions. Those Humans down there simply did not matter, not in draconic reckoning. All that mattered were Ra’aba’s recalcitrant Dragons and his rebellion against Sapphurion and the Dragon Elders. If a few Humans were trampled in the bargain, what of it? Humans were the lice in the armpit of the world, as Grandion had once told her.
Heartsore, sickened, Hualiama had no words.
Then, she indeed watched the skies and saw a Dragonwing breaking out of the clouds above Fra’anior. Greens. Uncountable Greens, like a flight of dragonets, only these were larger and angrier beasts by far. Sixty? Seventy? She could not count through the tears blurring her eyes. Dragon-thunder rolled before the Dragonwing as though a Cloudlands storm had voiced the sum of all its thunder at once. Massive wings churned the air. Talons curled beneath the incalculable tonnage of serpentine bodies cleaving their path to Lia’s Island home.
G-G-Grandion? Hushed. Overawed. This was the end of Fra’anior … they would tear the Island apart and every Human on it.
Be strong and unafraid, treasured Rider. Relief is at hand.
Lia gasped, How can we stand against so many? And she felt ashamed at her first thought–that Grandion had betrayed her.
I believe Ra’aba is the key. And I know who must confront him. She’s the bravest Human I know; she will find a way.
Hualiama gave the Tourmaline Dragon a dejected smile. Right.
Six Green Dragons dwarfed the Receiving Balcony atop the palace, guarding Ra’aba. Lia remembered hiding up there as a child to spy on her father’s meetings with the Dragons. The black paving stones were scarred by Dragons’ talons. The balance of the flat roof area was gardens with some surprisingly large trees. She had been told the intent was to keep the palace building cool in hot season. Now, Ra’aba used the Receiving Balcony as a command-post to instruct his Dragons. Even as they swooped down, Hualiama saw a Green leave and another arriving to take its place. Grandion released her into the crown of a tree, rushed on, and tackled the Green Dragon with an ugly snarl and a welcoming bite to his left wing.
Not for the first time, Lia crashed to a halt amidst leaves and branches. She clambered down the prekki fruit tree’s gnarled trunk. By this time, the Tourmaline Dragon was already rising toward the Green Dragonwing, one Dragon facing dozens. A strange power gathered within Grandion even as she watched. Dark clouds coalesced around her Dragon’s body, and lightning flashed between the clouds and his
gemstone scales. This was the harbinger of the fabled Blue Dragon power of storm winds and ice, she realised, Dragon lore she had only ever read about in the scrolls.
The twin suns, which dragonets believed were the eyes of the Great Dragon, flamed over the horizon, casting thick golden beams of light to gild the clouds and the Dragons in gloriously golden haloes, belying the destruction to come.
Hualiama focussed on Ra’aba. Her father.
Wait, straw-head.
Air puffed around her ears as Flicker landed on her shoulder. “Talk Island Standard,” she admonished him. No point in being killed for the wrong reasons, when she was doing such a fine job of trying to be killed for all sorts of other reasons.
“How are you planning to stop Ra’aba?”
“Attack,” Hualiama said grimly.
The dragonet said, “Try to use the knowledge of ruzal against him; maybe it’ll turn the Greens. The Dragons hate Ianthine–as you might, if someone can control your mind.”
“Good idea. Watch this.”
As she loped forward, Flicker muttered near her ear, “I hate it when you say that, Lia. It always means you’re about to do something stupid.”
“Father! Father!” Hualiama waved cheerfully as she vaulted the low wall surrounding the Receiving Balcony and trotted toward Ra’aba, as if blissfully unaware of the Green Dragons turning to glare at her and a Dragonwing darkening the skies just half a mile away, now. “Islands’ greetings, father!”
“I am not your father!”
Ra’aba’s growl did not dissuade her. “Oh, Ianthine told me all about the bargain you struck with her, daddy. The power of ruzal in exchange for your service to Ianthine. Is that what you’re doing to these mighty Green Dragons? Are you controlling their minds just like the Maroon Dragoness wants you to?”
Having expected the Green Dragons to react, Hualiama was shocked when they only blinked their nictitating membranes at her. Not even a curl of fire? Something was terribly wrong with this picture. She had to work it out.
Ra’aba’s hand rested on the pommel of his sword, his expression poisonous. “Girl, you’ve been sticking your nose into secret Dragon lore. Shut your yapping little muzzle before I shut it for you!”
She settled for a coy approach. Dragons liked hatchlings. Nibbling her forefinger and gazing around her with assumed innocence, Hualiama said, “I just don’t understand why you’d try to kill your own daughter. Isn’t there some good left in you? Or has Ianthine stuck her talons so deep in your mind that you no longer know who you are?”
He laughed. Full of confidence, Ra’aba strutted toward her. “My Dragonwing comes, little Lia. Who would stop me?”
“A Dragon,” she said.
For a second, a shadow seemed to flicker behind his yellow orbs. Then, he shaded his gaze to take in Grandion’s lone attack on the Greens.
A smile just began to tug at his lips when a howl of wind carried to their ears, even across the distance separating the Dragons from the conflict around the palace. Mist billowed ahead of the Tourmaline Dragon’s flight, while blue-accented lightning blasted out of his body, a series of electrical discharges so powerful, the bolts lit up even the dawn sky. Multiple Green Dragons turned white with hoarfrost. Weighed down by tons of ice on their wings, more than a dozen Greens tumbled from the sky as if mossy boulders had, for an improbable moment, attempted to fly. Lia winced as the first Dragon smashed to the ground, literally shattering into pieces.
Fire blasted against her shoulder.
A dragonet’s cry of pain! Flicker’s torn wings brushed her face–he had protected her, she realised, from an attack she had not seen. Lia had no time to examine her hurts as the dragonet flapped away a short distance, attacking an archer who had crept up behind her. Ra’aba roared down upon her, vengeful. Her Nuyallith blades zinged out of their twin sheaths. Hualiama stopped his blades with a two-handed parry, swords crossed above her head, but his boot followed through to kick her in the sternum, right between her breasts.
Pain exploded in her chest. Lia fell backward, yet tucked in her head as she rolled, tapping the momentum of his kick to flip over onto her feet again. She was certain he had broken something. Ra’aba followed through with a sword-strike which shattered the stone planter she had fetched up against. Flicker rushed between them, his claws moving faster than a Human eye could follow, but Ra’aba’s uncanny speed saved him at the expense of a three-clawed furrow on his cheek.
The Roc’s sword trimmed an inch off Flicker’s tail as the dragonet whizzed past.
“I see I’ll have to take care of you myself,” said Ra’aba.
Lia wiped blood off her lip. “I’ve been longing for a father to do that for years.”
Ra’aba screamed into his attack, achieving a new pitch of strength that jolted her with every blow. But the stronger he became, the faster Lia danced, drawing on every ounce of knowledge Master Khoyal had poured into her to keep alive. They clashed furiously and ripped apart again, like two Dragons sparring. Lia became dimly aware of fighting on the internal stairs leading to the roof. Ja’al, Chago and Inniora had arrived, cutting their way through the Royal Guards still loyal to Ra’aba.
“Time’s running out on your reign, Ra’aba,” she said.
Up in the sky, Grandion still battled the Greens, but he had expended an enormous amount of power in that first, devastating attack. Lia sensed his tiredness. She had to stall Ra’aba further.
Flicker raced over to her once more, flying raggedly, trying to distract Ra’aba with his tiny fireballs. They sizzled against his tan skin, ignored and ineffective. In her mind’s eye, she saw the great Black Dragon, Amaryllion, and remembered the way his power washed over her, the feeling of flickering in her soul, as though a bonfire lived there. That was her power. One of the stranger, more mystical Nuyallith forms was called The Flaming Dawn, and as Master Khoyal’s memories replayed in her mind, she recognised how it mirrored a dance she had loved since she was a child, the Ancient Dragon’s fire-dance from the Flame Cycle dance-opera.
She had to neutralise Ra’aba. That was their only chance.
Leaping away from her father, taking a stance between two of his Green Dragons, Hualiama began to sing the part of Fra’anior summoning the ancient Dragon-Spirits to his aid. Her magic soared, light and ethereal, weaving shimmering threads of silver-trimmed blue.
Ra’aba froze in astonishment. His hand trembled, but his blade refused to rise.
A sacred tranquillity settled upon the gathering.
Lia’s rich voice carried into the vast reaches of an Island-World which for countless aeons had yearned for that stirring call. The Green Dragons aloft oriented on the sound, all thoughts of sacking the city apparently forgotten, acting as if obeying the command of a single mind.
Hualiama stepped into the opening movements of The Flaming Dawn with her eyes squeezed shut against the exquisitely painful welling up of her soul, the length of her spine tingling with an awareness of unfathomable magic. Throwing back her hood and liberating her hair from its pins, Lia poured herself into the dance sequence, the opening series of flying leaps designed to mimic a Dragon’s flight, now tight pirouettes in the pattern of a fireflower, her flutter-steps lightly gracing the flagstones around Ra’aba. Within her, flame rose lambent. If only she could soar on these fiery wings. If only she could fly like the massive beasts raining down around her now, filling the enormous rooftop gardens, gazing at her with the purest and most present astonishment she had ever seen scribed upon the faces of the Dragonkind. A soft chorus rose from them, a vibration produced in the base of a Dragon’s throat, causing the air to tremble in response.
Now, the clouds parted to reveal a second Dragonwing rushing toward Fra’anior from the west, from the direction of Gi’ishior, outnumbering the Greens by ten to one. Reds, Blues, Oranges and Yellows, and many shades of each; it seemed that the entire population of Fra’anior’s Dragons had been roused to war, and that was a sight to strike fear into t
he bravest heart.
A storm of Dragon swept down upon the Human Isle.
Lia sang and danced for unadulterated joy. How could she not? As she considered Ra’aba, it was with the eyes of a daughter for her father. She would have given half of the Island-World for him to have opened his arms and his heart to her, right then.
Instead, a shriek of mindless violence tore out of the man.
Ra’aba charged her.
Dropping to her knee, Hualiama swung her blades horizontally, left to right, even as she arched backward with all the suppleness of a dancer’s spine, allowing the wild arc of his blade to pass above her throat–in a dream, it seemed to her. Her blades etched fiery trails in the air as they slammed into Ra’aba’s ribcage, beneath his extended arm. A horrific wheeze tore from his chest at the impact. His blade clanged to the ground as he clutched his side, blood spurting from a fearsome wound.
Beaten. The man who had never been touched in battle, had been wounded by his daughter. Twice. He coughed, disbelieving. “How?” He staggered. “How did you–”
Softly, Lia said, “I’m sorry, father. I wished it could have been different.”
Ra’aba crashed to his knees, holding his side with his arm and his free hand. Gasping. Blood flecked his lips with each breath. And her heart turned to ice. What had she done? There was no joy in her victory, only a surfeit of pain. Father!
His left hand wobbled into the air.
Hualiama expected a plea. Instead, he rasped, “Bring me the King.”
The Brown Yulgaz rose over the balcony, clutching the King of Fra’anior in his great paw. He growled, “Lay down your weapons, girl, or I’ll kill your King.”
Lia stiffened. Terror reigned in her heart. Her true father threatened her adopted father. This was her worst nightmare come true. Hualiama knew she would have to kill one father or the other. Or both, she realised. She begged the skies, ‘What now, Amaryllion?’ In the eyes of the watching Dragons, this was a simple dispute between Humans. Whether Yulgaz allowed himself to be used as a tool or not, that would be judged later by the Dragon Elders, amongst themselves. The second Dragonwing was minutes away.
