Rage and sorrow bloomed in her breast. This was the final battle, she sensed. Hemmed in on all sides, she twisted and turned and spat fire and destroyed many Dragonships. The meriatite ran out. A quarrel glanced off her left flank and another bit a chunk out of her left hind leg. She did not bother to count the number of arrows that pinged off her hide or chipped her scales.
Aranya fought with all her cunning. She fooled two ships into crashing together. She dropped atop another, shredding the hydrogen sack. She hid beneath a Dragonship, upside-down, while Yolathion’s command struggled to find a clear shot at her.
All the while, Zuziana dangled from the straps like a rag doll.
Yolathion loomed above her, always Yolathion, directing the battle with signals from his great Dragonship. Aranya’s fires rose in her belly, the fires which had burned her throat before, but this time it was no surprise. Smaller, she thought. Perhaps smaller fireballs would hurt less. Maybe she’d save one of them for Yolathion; blast it right into his smug, unfeeling face.
Aranya made a break for the north, for a moment, springing clear of the pursuing Dragonships. They were over the Cloudlands now, she saw, battling lower and lower in the air as her strength faded–even now, as a swarm of the little Dragonships overtook her from behind. She doubled back. Time for Yolathion to feel her fire, she decided. Her flight was slow, her wing beats laboured, her breath rasping in her lungs. A different type of fire burned through her muscles. Aranya clenched her throat. Quick shots. She no longer cared for avoiding the quarrels. She could not think of them.
Her mouth gaped open. Fireballs seared the morning air–one, two, three, almost quicker than she could aim them. Two of the small Dragonships exploded. She twisted, firing at new prey–the flanks of Dragonships too near to avoid her shots. Debris rained about her. Black smoke filled the sky, drifting in veils across the brightening dawn. Her final two fireballs, aimed for Yolathion’s large Dragonship, splattered against a smaller one that swooped unexpectedly between them.
Aranya veered off, avoiding the fallout without jerking Zuziana about too much.
Pain lanced into her side near the base of her tail as she closed with the huge Dragonship. Catapult shot hammered into her body and wings. Crimson splashed across her vision. Maddened, Dragon-Aranya summoned a fresh burst of speed and rose above the top of Yolathion’s vessel, ready to swoop down upon it.
She heard a new sound on the wind, a low hissing sound.
Four hidden catapults atop the Dragonship had fired at once, filling the sky with rope. Netting, she realised, covering such a swathe of sky she stood no chance of avoiding it. Dragon-Aranya howled as the netting and ropes snarled her wings. Furnished with metal hooks, the nets clung cruelly. The ropes were tough, reinforced. Although her paws clawed madly, she only succeeded in fouling herself further. She fell.
The ropes jerked. The net drew painfully tight about her body, snarling her wings. Aranya coughed out a fireball in surprise, burning a small hole in the net. It splattered against the huge Dragonship’s cabin, setting it alight. Sylakian warriors leaped to douse the flames.
Aranya bit and fought and struggled until her lips bled, but found little purchase against the entangling nets. She could not get them between her teeth. Her claws sliced against what felt like metal. She tore several talons off her feet in her madness, before the pain registered on her senses.
The Sylakians began to reel in their catch.
Nets and winches, she realised. Perhaps, if she had been faster or smarter, or thought to use her Dragon fire to burn the nets, she might have escaped. But she had nothing left. Her fright seemed to have robbed her of the fire. Her neck twisted frantically, thrashing the net from side to side, as she was dragged unwillingly to the side of the Dragonship, and up it. Her claws splintered the cabin and shrieked against the armour protecting the hydrogen sack. All her vaunted power, all the ability to slice through the air in glorious Dragon flight, was lost now. The aerial fisherman had snagged his catch.
“Quick, get the Rider,” she heard Yolathion shout. “The beast will surrender once we have the Rider.”
Hands, many hands, reached from the gantry to attack the leather strap binding the saddle to her back. Aranya screamed. Not Zip! No, not Zip! Several warriors climbed the netting, working Zuziana loose through holes that fit her small frame. Aranya knocked one of the men off his perch. He fell shrieking to his death in the Cloudlands.
An awful pain drove like spikes into her right wing–one of the joints. Three men smashed their hammers down on her wing-joint, over and over again. Aranya bellowed, pitching two of them off the Dragonship. The winches lurched and groaned against their moorings.
“Stop that!” Yolathion roared.
The winches resumed, creaking beneath her weight, drawing the Dragon up and over the bulge of the armoured hydrogen sack to the platform where Yolathion stood. His men cheered at the sight of her. Yolathion stood there, tall and grim. His dark eyes glittered as the soldiers reeled her in. Aranya flapped and fought, twisting and snarling, but it was useless. She lacked the strength to break the layers of ropes or tear the winches loose of their footings.
“Ha!” he cried. “I have my Dragon at last. How does it feel, beast?”
“GLORY TO SYLAKIA!” shouted his men.
Yolathion stalked down to take an arrogant stance beside her head. “I have your Rider, beast. Surrender, and I will make your death a merciful one.”
Aranya touched her tongue to the blood on her lips. She was tired, so tired of fighting. For a moment she simply lay there, breathing, her eyes closed and her lungs labouring against the agony of every breath in her abused throat. She knew her injuries were severe. Golden Dragon blood leaked out of dozens of wounds on her body. Aranya wanted nothing more than to lie down and die, for the hunter had won.
But she was a Dragon. She was the Princess of Immadia. And this man had tried to kill her before, and failed. She would not give up.
Aranya whispered, “Yolathion.”
He jumped back a foot. “The beast speaks!”
“Why do you wish to kill me?”
He drew himself up, his face set like stone and his voice stern. “Because you have brought shame to my command, Dragon. You destroyed many brave Sylakian warriors with your treachery. No Islander is safe. You’ve been set against me from the first. I vowed to destroy you, and so I shall. I’ll have your hide, Dragon.”
“But it was Sylakia’s hammer that first struck me,” Aranya returned. Breath hissed into her lungs, renewing her; but she was unable to heal the pain of her failure to keep Zuziana safe. “Your hand, Yolathion, held that hammer. Yet I held your life in my hand and let you live.”
“When did you hold my life in your paw, beast?”
His scorn returned the fire to her belly. “On Remoy, when I placed a scroll upon your pillow-roll. Remember Jeradia, it said.”
The warrior gaped at her. “That was you? How? Impossible! You lie, beast.”
“I know your disgrace, Jeradian,” said Aranya. “I know how you flung Immadia to her death, knowing she had saved your father. Now you will face dishonour twice over, for I will never surrender to you as long as I have breath to draw into my lungs.”
Yolathion raised his hammer, his face a mask of wrath. “I’ll strike you down where you lie, beast! How dare you lecture a Jeradian warrior about honour?”
Slowly, Aranya gathered her paws beneath her, even though Yolathion bellowed at her to lie still. She forced herself to stand. She gazed at him, long and deep, sorrowing, a gaze that stopped his hammer above his head. It could have been so different. But he was bent on serving Sylakia. He meant to kill her–again. He had hunted her with every fibre of his being. He hated her. He had driven his men to their deaths in order to bring her down, and the Princess of Remoy with her.
Aranya said, “If you have any regard left for the Princess of Immadia in that black heart of yours, Yolathion, then I beg you to treat my Rider with honour. Take care of her, pleas
e. I beg you.”
Anger and puzzlement warred in Yolathion’s expression as he stared at Aranya. “Do I … know you?”
“You do.”
Aranya transformed.
Abruptly, the net sagged. Two hooks snagged painfully in her skin, one behind her shoulder blade and another in her left buttock. She tore them loose; seeing in the fiery pain a punishment for her failure. She let the ropes drop around her ankles. The holes in the net were made with a Dragon in mind, not a Human.
She said, “I am Aranya, Princess of Immadia. Perhaps you know me better thus.”
Yolathion wheezed, “Aranya!”
She must look a sight, Aranya realised. She was covered in blood, wounded in more places than she could count. Her right wrist hung askew in an exact replica of what the Sylakian warriors had done to her wing-joint.
The young Third War-Hammer gazed at her with the air of a man who had just had the living pith kicked out of him, Aranya thought. He glanced at the limp net, probably wondering where in the Island-World his captive Amethyst Dragon had vanished. He looked at her as though he had seen her clamber out of the grave–which she had, in a sense. He regarded her as a man desires a woman, even though she was in a pitiful condition. A softness and horrified regret entered his eyes. Aranya raised her chin, and stood tall and proud.
But the world spun around her, full of strange colours. Her strength was spent.
“Aranya,” he repeated. “How?”
She took a backward step. “I’m a Dragon Shapeshifter, Yolathion. We’re hard to kill. Please, take care of Zuziana. Promise me.”
“Aranya, stop!”
She almost did stop; the craving to yield to this man was so sweet. She almost listened to him, turned, and flung herself into his arms as she had wished to from the very first time she saw him. But her feet took another step, and another. The soldiers’ leers from behind his shoulder strengthened her. The ones who had smashed her wing helped firm her resolve.
“Farewell, Yolathion.”
“Aranya, I–”
She whirled, and flung herself in a graceful dive off the Sylakian Dragonship’s platform.
Chapter 18: Treason
For the second time in her life, the Princess of Immadia fell toward the Cloudlands, her body spinning end over end in a ghastly parody of flight that could only end in death. She fell past the unsuspecting Dragonships of Yolathion’s command. She fell faster than the golden rays of dawn sweeping down the brief crags of Tyrodia Island. She fell into clear air that grew thicker and warmer the closer she came to the Cloudlands.
She had a moment to think of what Yolathion might have said up there. I hate you? I love you? Go toss yourself into the nearest Cloudlands volcano, you evil, shape-changing enchantress?
But Tyrodia was not a tall Island.
The transformation took longer than usual. It felt torn out of her, a step beyond what her strength could bear. Drawing the deepest breath she had ever taken into her lungs, Dragon-Aranya plunged into the clouds.
She pulled out of her dive carefully, careful not to repeat her ligament-tearing first flight’s mistake. Aranya flew by instinct beneath the toxic clouds for as long as her breath could hold out–which, for a Dragon, was a good quarter of an hour if she did not flap hard. In her condition, she managed about half that time, but it was enough to take her a good long way from the pursuing Dragonships. Her right wing dangled at the last wing-joint. Every stroke of her wings grated the broken bones together.
Aranya flew long enough in the grey world beneath the Cloudlands to appreciate what might happen if she flew into an unseen spire of rock. That would be a relief from the white-hot pain of her broken joint. Strangely, the pain did not dull her senses. It gave her purpose. It made her focus, purifying the extraneous as a meriatite furnace burns off the slag to produce pure, refined meriatite for the acid bath. She flapped through the thick, liquid-seeming air, a slow-motion flying as if she were underwater.
Zuziana! She mourned the loss of her Rider. This was the only way to escape Yolathion. But she could not do it with a Rider. Perhaps their physician could help Zip, where she had been unable to. She remembered reading about the ravages of disease when she was younger; she feared that Zuziana was close to death.
Leaving her felt like death.
Aranya wanted to believe that she could steal Zuziana a second time from the Sylakians. That she must leave her friend with a man like Yolathion burned her to the core. His duty would be to return her to Sylakia Town for her execution–and he had shown himself to be a perfect slave to duty. It was all she could do to keep flying. A Dragon could do nothing for her Rider if she was incapable of flying. She already had a glued-together wing. Now she looked like she had scabies, there were so many wounds on her body.
Nak and Oyda would know what to do, wouldn’t they?
Aranya leaped out of the Cloudlands like a trout leaping upriver, and descended again. Please let the Sylakians be looking elsewhere. Please let them be struck blind.
After two hours of flying northwest from Tyrodia Island, groaning and writhing and wondering if every wing beat would be her last, Aranya overtook a trader’s Dragonship headed for Sylakia. It was the first Dragonship she had seen in what seemed like months which was not swarming with Sylakian troops. This, at last, was a stroke of good fortune. She hunted the trader with cunning, landed lightly atop its hydrogen sack and hitched a ride.
She curled up and slept, numb to the world.
Aranya awoke above the deserts of eastern Sylakia. The night was young, with Iridith lording its sallow presence in the sky and a full Jade moon passing overhead, too. She worked on the worst of her wounds with her magic. There was a piece of crossbow quarrel stuck in her leg. The bleeding cuts and puncture wounds received most of her attention. But she quickly realised that her wounded wing joint needed to be set properly before she should try to heal it. She sensed there were several broken pieces inside.
The trader’s Dragonship provided fine transportation all the way up to the mountains of mid-Sylakia, where the Dragonship turned more to the north to skirt the mountains, while her path lay directly westward. Aranya intrepidly winged off.
That was a bad mistake. She found herself barely able to stay two hours in the air because of the pain in her wing, thus she entered the mountains during the daylight hours, only to be attacked by an iceroc. Aranya eventually defeated the bird, but left a number of her scales in the mountains. She waited for nightfall before taking off in intense pain and continuing her journey. Even her healing power barely dulled the pain.
The mountain crossing took far longer than she remembered. By morning, Aranya had battled over the mountains and was free to coast down the other side. This involved a dint of swift flying to outpace an enraged family of icerocs she scared up from their massive stick nests amidst the ever-icy peaks. Her broken wing flopped about agonisingly with every buffet of the wind. She cooled it in the high-lying snows, and later in the ribbon of lake which curved to the western periphery of the isle. When she could no longer fly, she walked. After endless hours of walking on the barren southern shore, she surprised an injured windroc aground and tore into it with a madness of hunger. After that Aranya summoned the strength to fly a little more, although it took all of her courage.
She crossed at the end of the lake, and her legs collapsed.
No. She had to push on. Any marauding Dragonship might happen upon her. The Sylakians would soon be searching for her again.
Aranya limped along on broken-toed, bleeding paws. She pushed through thick forests, seeking that tiny dell above the precipice, the dell with the hut, the hut with the two old people in it. She dreamed she heard Oyda calling to her. She dreamed of flying over the Cloudlands, but somewhere Nak shouted at her not to crawl on her belly like a worm. That was what she was reduced to, now. A belly-crawling Dragon, a Dragon who had almost crawled before the boots of the Sylakian conqueror and surrendered meekly to his mastery. Never! She cried in in the depths o
f her hearts. Never! She used her anger as a whip to push herself on.
She transformed herself. Even one-handed, the injured wrist tucked up against her body, crawling on bleeding knees, it was easier to move a small Human body than to drag a Dragon’s bulk through the forest.
During the darkest hour after moons-set, Aranya reached the dell. All was quiet.
She dragged herself through the streamlet and up to the front door of the hut. Her fist fell upon it, twice. She heard a shuffle within. Lamplight struck her face.
“Petal? Is that … oh, petal.” Oyda made a sound like a choked-off sob. “You poor girl … Nak! Nak, wake up, thou fool husband. Aranya has come home.”
Aranya leaned into Oyda’s arms and sobbed out her brokenness.
* * * *
Two days passed in fever-dreams. Aranya remembered little save Oyda’s gentle hands cleaning and treating her wounds, and holding her head as she spooned a thick vegetable broth down her throat. She recalled a cheerful fire blazing behind the grating, seen through the door into the hut’s kitchen-come-living-area. The mighty Black Dragon’s head appeared in those leaping flames, speaking to her. She raved, she cried, she sobbed brokenly over Zuziana’s fate and raged at Oyda to let her go and save her. She longed to fling herself into the abyss, never to fly again.
She told the old people everything which had passed, as though she wished to purge her soul of a well of bitterness. The worst was how they neither judged nor blamed her. Nak and Oyda had never been gentler or more accepting, despite her miserable catalogue of failures.
That evening, as she lay on a couch Nak had drawn close to the fireplace for her, staring despondently into the flames, she startled at a firm rap on the door.
Oyda laid down her rolling pin. “Nak, we’ve a visitor.”
Aranya (Shapeshifter Dragons) Page 24
