by Marc Secchia
Closer. Closer blurred the busy intersection. One or two of the spiky, peat-brown Asjujians were beginning to react. He sincerely hoped that they had something clever like nets or magic to catch flying Humans, or this would end very badly in about five or six seconds’ time. Time to roar. Asturbar shouted at his girlfriend with all of his might, “IRIDIANA! WAKE UP!” He shouted so powerfully that a sharp pain seemed to attack his belly in the region of the Jewels, and then he distinctly felt a jolt pass through his body into hers. What? That felt eerie.
Nyahi moaned, “Uhh … what …”
“Change! Dragoness!”
“Whyeee …”
“We’re falling! Catch us, Nyahi! You have to change!”
Then, their time was up. Great, elongated cries rose from the Dragonkind as they reacted to what they most probably interpreted as an attack. Asturbar felt her roots coil and her branches tense, and then they smashed down atop one of the Asjujians’ heads, becoming deeply lodged between his spikes. Iridiana groaned. Her springy branches whooshed down and then up again, cushioning the worst of the almighty impact for her travellers, but Asturbar grunted as a five-foot splinter shot past his flank, excavating a nice trench there before its point lodged in his lower left forearm. The springiness tore him loose again. Chanbar was yelling like a frightened dragonet; he had a foot-long splinter protruding from the muscle of his backside. Yazina just bobbed up and down with a decidedly green smile pasted upon her lips. She had an arms-and-legs grip upon her branch and he suspected that a feral Dragon could not have torn her loose just then.
The hulking Emoflit they had crash-landed upon stiffened like the wood of which its armoured hide was primarily composed.
Such a hush fell, Asturbar knew it could only explode.
The beast bellowed hoarsely, BROTHERS! I’M UNDER ATTACK!
What, attacked by a few fleas? Still, his gruff blast was enough to make a man feel as if a Dragon had just cuffed him across the earhole.
Asturbar had a split second to appreciate the incongruity of their situation. Iridiana seemed firmly wedged between the jagged splinters of the creature’s head, which stretched around them to the width and length of a field – immovably stuck, unless she found the wherewithal to switch into a smaller form. Just now she was lolling again, clearly dazed by the impact. The Asjujian Emoflits must see something apparently growing out of their brother’s skull, a fuzzy-haired amethyst and mauve intruder, or perhaps a monstrous feathered arrow, for all they knew. Her colouration was certainly unique!
Pandemonium erupted.
Thundering, bellowing and smashing their paws upon the ground in a rage, the Asjujian Dragons sprang into action against the perceived assault – which was to say, they spun about in search of this imminent danger, clashed mightily, became stuck in each other’s spikes and raised such a hullaballoo of trumpet-like bellowing it was impossible to hear oneself think. Terrified and furious scent sprays blistered the air, while the greatest ones of their number launched fire attacks from their throats that hurtled upward, arced and slowed, and then began to fall back amongst their own kind with explosive detonations. These arboreal creatures actually burned, to his surprise, although Asturbar was sure given the reputed twenty-foot thickness of their hides that flames would not penetrate enough to injure any creature. Dense smoke billowed from the conflagrations.
The panic spread like wildfire. Dragons charged hither and thither, bellowing all sorts of nonsense and smashing into traffic jams of epic proportions measured in the tens of thousands of tonnes, but Asturbar did hear repeated variations upon two particular phrases booming upon his much-abused eardrums – the Shapeshifter Marshal! Upon the landing platform!
What? Could it be that Azhukazi was here? Surely too improbable a coincidence!
This was their chance! Only, he had no actual idea how to take it. Excellent foresight and planning, soldier! Turning to Chanbar, he rapped, “Get her awake. I don’t care how you do it.”
His grim face bobbled about as their Dragon joined the general charge toward an exit. “How do you wake a tree, may I ask?”
Asturbar exploded, “Suffering murgalizards, figure it out!”
If there was a controlling mind, they probably had seconds left before life became rather more exciting still. Thundering his discontent, their unwilling host Asjujian smashed headlong into one of his brother’s flanks, rolling the unfortunate smaller beast right off his paws. Only Asturbar’s grip prevented Yazina from flying out of Nyahi’s branches, but his teeth rattled in his head at the splintering collision. Then the beast charged off with lolloping disregard for life or limb, rallying his brothers with a series of explosive barks. Just his luck to pick some sort of leader, he thought, and tap him on the noggin. ‘Here we are – surprise!’ Without warning, the world turned sideways as the creature charged up an immense tree trunk, his talons ripping out great chunks of amber bark as he made the dash for the heights, uncaring of his tiny passengers. They must be no bigger than parasites to a creature of his size.
Twisting about, Asturbar scanned their surrounds as best he could. Chanbar was slapping Iridiana’s leaves in an attempt to rouse her. Honestly? He suppressed a violent idea to slap the previous Marshal’s head off his shoulders and see how far he could kick it off the Island. They ascended a vertical mile of tree trunk that vaulted skyward from the dense, impenetrable depths. Layer upon layer of foliage leading to darkness was all he could see below, while to the sides, the jungle giants continued for the few hundred feet the eye could see before the dense olive and emerald leaves cut off further sight, but he had no doubt they continued for many a league. They surged steadily out of the gloomier canopy layers to the lighter realm of chrysoprase and lime-green leaves above, and he saw many dozens of Asjujian Emoflits ahead of and around them, all racing for the heights. In their native element they were remarkably mobile and adaptable, climbing with the ease of a man sprinting upon level ground. Their deep-set crimson eyes burned balefully upon their goal.
White-blue patches of sky appeared between the boughs. Springing up onto the platform with a frighteningly supple bound, their impromptu conveyance shook his mighty head as he surveyed the chaos. Everyone and everything in that huge landing area was on the move. Dragonships slewed about crazily as they took off without, in several cases, first untying their hawsers. Traders battened down the hatches and deployed their crews in defensive positions around their vessels and their wares. Dragons – shells and shards! Lesser Dragons swarmed everywhere, evidently having been poking their muzzles into everyone’s business but now responding with battle-primed aggression to the gathering mayhem. Eyes glowed like the open maws of furnaces. Wings flared in readiness. Talons tore at the hefty planking under paw as they gathered in their battle-troops.
Which Shapeshifter Marshal had started this nonsense?
DRIVE THEM OFF! roared their transportation.
INVADERS! boomed another, then five or more echoed the call in thunderous chorus. This was the group-think for which Asjujians were famous. Their talons hewed and shattered great chunks of wood as they pawed at the footing, raising a staggering chemical stink as they prepared themselves.
After that slight but always airless and ultra-charged moment in a battle when two sides size each other up, the Asjujians lowered their heads and stampeded across the landing area. Anyone and anything that had the misfortune to stand in the way of these creatures was razed, demolished or simply bulldozed into oblivion. Sharp karak-kara-karakaa! sounds accompanied their hits as they fired huge wooden shards off of their bodies, turning each Dragon into a living shrapnel-firing device. He saw several Grey-Greens pierced through by the flying slivers of wood, pinned like insects to an entomologist’s board. Asturbar had never seen anything like it, but he knew they also needed to depart their thus-far-advantageous platform in a tearing hurry before they became the squidgy bits between a living battering ram and its next target.
It was useful surveying a battlefield from a perch approxim
ately one hundred and fifty feet above ground level. He could not see any sign of Azhukazi’s forces, but there were very many Shapeshifter colours scattered between the more brutish, standard Grey-Greens. He recognised none of them. Was this the Star Dragoness’ doing? She must possess the nous to sniff out Iridiana from a thousand leagues off, judging by her storm’s behaviour. As the charge scattered and the Dragonkind took to the air, he returned his attention to his girl.
“Darling! Now’s not the time to check out. Please.”
Clambering through her branches, he checked the lay of her trunk. Ouch. He had no doubt she would be hurting once she changed back. Plenty of spots of bark looked torn and battered. How to wake her? She needed a small form, maybe a dragonet.
“Be dragonet!” he yelled at her trunk.
Nothing.
“Be a dragonet! A flower! A pollinator.” Their Asjujian was lining up a Dragonship which had just disgorged twenty or thirty infantry wearing plate armour similar to what Asturbar used to wear. He kicked her squarely in the trunk. Arise, o Dragoness!
That just hurt his foot.
A roar of engines! Asturbar shot a glance over his shoulder. Dragonship incoming! The stricken vessel had been taken down by a spray of fifteen-foot wooden splinters. Nyahi, we NEED you!
BLAM! The air protested as she Shifted before apparently regaining full consciousness. An Iridium Dragoness whirled balefully upon him as Asturbar in a momentarily hilarious mishap booted his girlfriend powerfully right beneath the base of the tail, in an area he belatedly realised might provoke most Dragonesses to wrath. What! Her paws snapped out reflexively, left and right, deftly catching Chanbar and Yazina as they tumbled down her flanks. Boots?
To the Dragonship, quick! he yelled. They’re attacking!
Distraction. Perfect.
Iridiana took in their immediate situation with the speed of a Dragoness, but he had forgotten her visual incapacity – replicated with perfect faithfulness across her Shapeshifter forms, of course. Gripping him in her forepaw along with Chanbar, she cried, Where? Point me –
There! Go that way! UP!
Asturbar held his breath as the Dragoness swooshed low over a rising Dragonship, half-running across the sack as she left a trail of sharp puncture marks in her wake; half a second later, the Asjujian Emoflit wore the broken vessel upon his nose. The impact buffeted them sharply, but Iridiana managed to correct her mad flight several times to the tune of Asturbar’s increasingly impassioned cries as she air-wobbled toward the Dragonship.
“Now she’s a Dragoness?” Chanbar yelled.
“Do try to keep up!” Asturbar shouted back at him. “Where’s that cursed ship …”
There! Rekhoil and Jazgugis were being hustled off the Mistral Fires Dragonship by a group of soldiers supervised by three Lesser Dragons and a huge Yellow-Green Shapeshifter. What was going on here? This did not strike him as an Azhukazi-style operation. Way, way up there in the blue, he was certain he saw further Dragonwings, boasting substantial numbers, scouting the scene. Ergo, a well-laid trap. Suddenly his plan of escaping amidst the cover of the general mayhem did not seem so wise anymore – or was that a clash way overhead? A few yellow and orange spots of fireballs?
“To the Dragonship,” he ordered.
First plans first. Rescue their comrades. Maybe see to retrieving his precious record after that. Meantime, the Lesser Dragons gathered before them like a living wall, great hulking brutes each four times the size of Nyahi and her cargo, and he heard one roar, It’s the Marshal! Take him alive!
The Chaos Shifter’s charge stuttered as she clearly reacted to the sense of Dragonkind ahead; the fabled sixth or seventh sense, he had to assume, and … poof! She transformed into a bunch of quivering white daises. Yelling in shock and frustration, Asturbar, Chanbar, Yazina and the dracofloral bouquet bounced and skidded across the tough, dusty planks, thankfully very well worn by years of hard use, until they came to a halt about fifty feet short of the waiting Dragons, who looked on with devious smiles.
One crooked his paw. Come here, little Marshal.
Me first!
I’ll capture him!
Quicker than a Dragon’s blink, half a dozen fiery tempers erupted and the waiting bruisers sprang for the Humans in rambunctious concert. Asturbar whirled toward his girlfriend, thinking his need at her before he spoke a word. Nyahi, we need –
SSWWOOOOSSHHH!
Away they went! Asturbar sat upon Chanbar’s head; he appeared elongated to at least twenty feet tall, while his daughter’s yelling face bobbled about in their wash as the Dragons thumped together in a disbelieving pile of tangled wings and limbs, evidently wondering where or how their prey had vanished. They expressed their displeasure with flashing fangs and vicious snaps. Barely a second later, Iridiana hissed through the Steersman and the soldier, picking them up effortlessly upon a churning river of fantastical body-scapes before she nipped in through the navigation cabin doorway with another of her impossible existential flourishes, chuckled impertinently and deposited everyone in a heap together on the floor.
“Wow, that was awsocool!” Yazina enthused, her dark eyes sparking with excitement.
“Ha, what an escape!” said Rekhoil.
“Thanks, my gorgeous flower monster!” Asturbar enthused, not to be outdone.
Chanbar gagged and spewed his lunch upon his own boot.
Infantryman Jazgugis seemed keen to count and recount his limbs, most likely to reassure himself that he had only two arms and no more than five fingers on each hand. After checking that Nyahi was not about to blow the Dragonship to pieces above their heads, Asturbar glanced out of the front window. The Grey-Greens had split into two groups, five examining the Dragonship with a malicious interest in its cargo, while seven or eight spread out to surround them, clearly intent upon ensuring that their prize remained cornered – oh! An ankle!
Asturbar’s eyes inadvertently lingered upon a slim, achingly perfect silver-blue ankle before the fascinating prospect of the nearby calf muscle captured his attention.
“I’m back,” Nyahi purred. “Don’t you dare look away, Big Boots.”
“Close your ears, Yazina!” Chanbar blurted out.
“You close your eyes first, father.”
Tearing his eyes away from the region of Iridiana’s kneecap, Asturbar forced himself to glance out of the forward windows. Life and death, after all. Still, that leg … utterly mesmerising!
Far more mesmerising than the mountain of debris sweeping toward them, barrels and dragonships and crates of merchandise all tumbling along like an avalanche, the densely spiked brown backs that humped behind that huge heap proclaiming its origin; the Lesser Dragons bursting into the air or uselessly blasting the rubbish with fireballs; a wild spray of splinters peppering their bodies with ghastly blades of wood and stitching holes in their wings, and with a soft pfft-pfft slicing through the hydrogen and hot air sack somewhere above the watching Humans, and then he was – moving! Reacting! Sweeping his companions together into his massive arms, Asturbar shovelled them toward the back of the room, behind the table and into some vague form of cover.
“Duck!”
He knew the gesture for a futile one. Just one spark in the wrong place …
In that instant, as he looked up again to see the windows shattering at the impact of a hundred and twenty-foot Grey-Green Dragon caught up in the mess, Asturbar thrilled to the lingering sensation of a tender kiss upon his cheek. “Boots …”
He really needed her to stop distracting him at crucial moments.
Then, darkness enwrapped them. Armoured darkness. Belatedly he realised, judging by the echoing nature of the nearby gasps, that Nyahi had reformed her body armour configuration into a simple eggshell shape and drawn it closed around her four companions – oh no, where was Jazgugis? Had he seen the man torn away as though slapped by an invisible hand? The air pressure in his ears fluctuated wildly. The noise outside was deafening, a screeching, scraping, everlasting tidal wave that swep
t the Dragonship irresistibly before it. Then came the toppling over the edge of nothingness.
Now seemed an opportune moment for a few curt, soldierly execrations.
SSSAAAA-BANG! A section of dirigible balloon which had remained whole, popped at an impact that rattled them about like dry beans in a gourd. They fell further. The following series of bumps and bangs seemed to come from all directions at once, making Chanbar moan at every jolt. Stanchions squealed and crysglass shattered. The jungle. They had fallen somewhere below the trading post, bouncing from branch to trunk to branch again, and Asturbar did not want to imagine the battering that Nyahi must be taking as she literally shielded them with her own life. Bracing himself across the width of their shell, he tried to ensure that the passengers did not knock themselves about too severely as they continued to fall for what seemed like forever. Once, they landed so hard that Chanbar cracked a tooth, rolled along a tilted surface, and then dropped again, but the final impact was much gentler than Asturbar had feared.
Where was the dirigible? Had they been flung free? Must have been, because this motion reminded him of floating. Yes, they were definitely bobbing about upon some liquid – he hesitated to assume water in this realm of liquescent stench. Ha, there was a result! He touched the shell. “Keep this form as best you can, Nyahi. I’ve a feeling that –”
KAAWHANG!! Teeth – unmistakably teeth, the sort that came attached to a temper of titanically foul proportions – tried to hack a sizeable chunk out of his girlfriend’s metallic hide. Asturbar could gladly have throttled that leviathan with his bare hands. A second attack from another direction presaged a thrashing struggle between two or perhaps more thunderously grunting monsters, which apparently caused them to lose interest in their quarry. The bubble craft slipped away on a weak current, occasionally pinging off what Asturbar took to be tree trunks rooted somewhere beneath a jungle lake or river.
