by Marc Secchia
There it was. That little problem.
If he intended to save Tytiana, then it was clear that some fighting would be involved. Obviously. Good thing then that he was totally equipped for the task.
“Ha, what are these?” he asked, pointing to his primary and secondary wing joints. Each joint had two hook-like bony structures protruding forwards from them, about five inches long.
“Wing hooks,” said the dragonet. “Some Dragons believe those are vestigial talons. I have seen them used successfully in battle to hook and disable another Dragon’s wings.”
“Interesting.”
Flicker said, “What you do have to your advantage, is your Nikuko martial arts skills. I suggest that you apply them to your Dragon form. As in, I can only think of one other Nikuko-skilled Dragon in history – Jinichi. He was an able Dragon warrior. To other Dragons, physical size and age is everything and those together determine one’s position in the age-dominance hierarchy. However, respect can also be earned. Aranya was never the biggest, but she excelled in paw-to-paw combat against some mighty foes – Tahootax the Terrible, for example, a two-headed monster out of Herimor. They had to pick up the pieces after she was through with him.”
“She was amazing,” he said evenly, astonished at the detail of how his jaw worked. Wow.
“Aye, she is,” Flicker said, growing dewy-eyed.
Sound advice, though. If one sifted through the blather and the pretence that Flicker had personally attended to the key historical events of the last heavens only knew how many centuries, the dragonet truly had a depth of wisdom to offer. A Nikuko Dragon. Who would have thought? Could he wield two Dragon-sized swords in battle? Did he even need those? His body did look tough, lean and fast. With the superior Dragon reaction speed and strength he would enjoy in this form, he bet he could do some real damage – right before the part where they ate him live.
Flick. Unsheathe retractable talons. This is ridiculous. I have twenty swords all of my own.
So you do, youngling, said Flicker. Now if we can just train your recalcitrant brain to act like an actual Dragon, you might even become moderately impressive after I am done with you.
He borrowed a tactic out of Shalanya’s ‘how to handle Flicker’ scrolleaf. Ah, noble Flicker, I am so fortunate to stand in the presence of true greatness as I enter into the marvellous life of a Shapeshifter Dragon. I shall drink from the font of your –
The dragonet eyed him frostily. Compliments, I enjoy. Base fawning is plain disgusting.
Uh …
Giving him a sly nudge, the dragonet said, Can’t teach an old dragonet new tricks, can you?
Want to bet on that, noble Flicker?
Indeed. To his surprise, his companion seemed openly pleased by his brash response. We need to work out how to save your Tytiana. And, I need a favour from you.
Me?
Aye. That poor Albino Shapeshifter is crying out to see her Island-World. Short of drugging her and dragging her along, I’m at a loss as to how to defeat her phobia. But she might just listen to a young man she finds toothsome – if you can bring yourself to engage in such subterfuge, all in the cause of rescuing your beloved?
Jakani found himself nodding slowly. Frankly, I’d move the very stars for Tytiana, noble Flicker. Actually, I have an idea which might work, grounded in the Nikuko arts I’ve been studying.
Good. I was rather hoping you’d be a hopeless romantic like me. Remind me to tell you about Sapphire, Aranya’s dragonet companion. Now, she’s a feisty, many-fanged beauty who never succumbed to my evident charms – can’t imagine why …
Laughing together, they walked up to the higher castle levels to find the Princess and her Commander of the Immadian Armed Forces. It was time to hatch a plan.
* * * *
Around mid-afternoon, when she hoped the Dragons might be tired and sleepy, Tytiana pressed her hands to the forty-foot stone wall of the slaver pit and ignited her flame. This part she had right. In an instant, her nude body was engulfed in a living inferno of crimson, gold and orange, including her prosthesis, just as Jakani had pointed out. The wood did not even smoulder. Now for the difficult bit. Rising with control. She already sported a fine lump upon her forehead resulting from a previous botched attempt, and she had no desire to repeat thumping her head against a rock wall. Settle the orientation in her mind. Dampen, keep control! Regulate the output!
She lurched a foot upward. Got it.
Wobble! Skanky larvae, there it went. She scrabbled ten feet sideways, running her hands along the wall for balance, lurched back in the opposite direction again, and fell over onto her side. A whisper, “Ouch. That went well.”
Hmm. Stretch out upon her back. The Choice demanded her fiery featherbed. If only she could control the directional output, but it kept spurting this way and that, acting every bit as unruly as she expected her natural flame to be. Come on, Tytiana. Concentrate. Make this happen.
She levitated.
Wasn’t that in itself a victory?
Only, Jakani’s maxim to not overthink her abilities kept returning to the forefront of her mind. Aye. A good way to break her very expensive neck, mister!
There must be some way to get this right. Tytiana turned over on her personal bed of fire. Lazing on pure flame that somehow defied any law physics she knew of to provide a certain sense of solidity, as if it provided additional surface tension to air that was now behaving like an extremely buoyant liquid. When she was close to the ground and everything was safe, she could manage. It was only when the panic set in that she overreacted and suddenly it would all end up with a large bruise on her forehead.
The egg! That little scamp. There it was, resting with all innocence and an endearing wriggle atop Jakani’s discarded grey tunic shirt. She shook her head slowly. As a scientist, that made no common Isles sense whatsoever. As a person, she felt inordinately comforted by the fact that it had popped out of nothingness, because now the hope of expectation swelled in her breast. When the egg arrived, extraordinary things happened.
Shutter the eyes. Just relax, relax, relax … and drift.
Suddenly, she was eye level with the top of the cliff. Peering at Excorion’s shell-brother Brown snoozing beside a doorway perhaps three hundred feet distant. Vile cannibal. The cavern was huge! Suns-light filtered down through those holes way, way above her head. She saw that the pit stood right in the centre of this perfectly circular cavern, and then her brain remembered where she was and what she was doing. Tytiana stifled a scream as she plummeted, caught herself an inch from the floor by some miracle, and then shot backward so hard that her legs crumpled against the far wall. She heard and felt a dull crack emanating from her left knee.
“Ah!”
Lie still. Pretend nothing had happened. Hope the Dragon would not stir. Hope her magic would take care of the pain that had jolted through her thighs and hips. Great. Skanky plague rats, the impact had cracked the cup into which her stump fitted, supporting the connection between her foreshortened leg and the artificial calf and foot. That would need replacing.
Not a murmur up there. No. The inkling of regular draconic breathing strengthened in her awareness now to a regular soughing as she turned her attention to this detail, and then she heard his slumberous hearts-beat, the scratching of a cockroach or other insect over by the ablutions area, and a tiny scuffle behind the grating. The deaf girl was there, watching her with huge eyes. Tytiana extinguished her flame with a thought.
Sorry, she signed. I was trying to escape. Badly.
The girl’s eyes seemed moist with tears.
How could she understand what passed between them now? She could learn to fly, she knew. Her hearing was sharper than it had a right to be, when she focused her magic right. But she had zero mastery of whatever Shapeshifters were supposed to do, and here was – the hateful description slipped into her mind, cattle – a girl whose peril was greater than her own. Juicy cattle. Her body ignited again, unbidden. Her long titian hair swirled behi
nd her like a flaming cloak as she stalked across the pit, wobbling a little at the unfamiliar looseness in her artificial limb.
White knuckles gripped the bars.
Don’t be afraid. This is me. Tytiana. Extinguish herself? This time, the flame refused. It remained in her hair and flickered along her limbs as she signed, I have magic. But I’m just a girl like you. How old are you?
Thirteen.
I am sixteen. What’s your name?
C-Y-A-N-K-U.
“Cyanku?” The girl nodded, watching her lips. It’s a pretty name – exactly the colour of your eyes. Cyanku, how many are you?
Me? No, my people? Ah … she indicated, very many. Then, she built a little Island with her deft hands and showed Tytiana she meant just this one. Two hundred, maybe?
“Two hundred?” she gasped aloud. Cover the mouth. Two hundred? On this Island? How many Islands?
The girl shrugged, made a few tens with her hands, and shrugged again. Suddenly she was speaking in fast, swirling motions, and Tytiana caught something about living permanently underground – the men working deep in mines – the sicknesses – how they were prisoners – the Dragons bullying and preying upon people and stealing children away …
Crying again; shedding hot tears that carried her fire in glistening droplets that splashed and steamed around her feet, she reached through and drew the girl into her embrace, as best she could with the bars between them.
She caught Cyanku’s attention, and signed ineptly, I won’t leave without you. I promise.
You are that powerful?
If only. She would find a way. Move the Island-World, recruit the Star Dragoness herself, somehow she would find a way to make this right. She signed, No, on my own I am not. But … her sign language was not able to express her feelings. She touched the girl’s fingers to her lips. “I will not rest until I find a way to help, Cyanku. Even if I have to petition Fra’anior himself.”
Who could make such a vow? Yet, she felt at once more grounded and purposeful, as though her life had taken an unexpected bent that perfectly matched the tenor of the fires that animated her soul as she considered these people’s fate. This cause was just, her wrath a pure and righteous inferno.
Then, a rising commotion at the cave’s entrance alerted her. A familiar voice boomed, “So, this is where you’ve been keeping my runaway daughter? Lead on, noble Dragon!”
Tytiana blenched.
* * * *
When the Princess of Immadia lifted her dinky littlest finger, the Island-World leaped. That was Jakani’s impression, anyhow. With the decision made to fly to Tytiana’s aid, the Princess and her Commander initiated an incredibly rapid military deployment. Dragonships popped miraculously out of caverns. Hordes of purple-clad soldiers poured out of barracks, including Immadian ‘specialists’ who, he was assured, were very much like Nikuko warriors. Engineers, saboteurs, and infiltration experts. Harried Store Masters opened their warehouses and rooms to virtual plunder as the preparations reached a frenzied pitch, that despite its clamour and bustle, had a certain well-oiled military feel to it. They had apparently done this ten thousand times before.
Playing his part to the hilt, Flicker settled in for a well-deserved snooze.
Jakani went to convince Shalanya that she should be drugged up to the eyeballs and taken along. Her response was typically pithy. A dimpling of the cheeks, and a musical, “No way under the suns.”
How did Immadians do all that with their vowels? It was like listening to a songbird tootling a masterpiece.
“But we need you,” he protested. “I need you.”
“You’ll have Flicker.”
“But Shalanya –”
“Don’t you understand what a phobia is, noble Jakani? You’re very sweet, standing there giving me that soulful look with your gorgeous eyes, but it isn’t going to change the fact of who I am. Put me out there ’neath the open skies and I literally freeze up and wish to die. I can’t control the reaction. I’ve never actually flown … not far, as a Dragoness. Around the castle is the most I’ve ever managed and that landed me in bed for three days.”
“Haven’t you tried to hypnotise yourself with your psychic powers?”
“And how would I undo that?”
“Maybe I should kidnap you after all,” he snorted. “Manacles, chains, the whole fandangle. Apparently it runs in your family. Then I’d sell you to the first Prince I’d find and make me a fortune.” He rubbed his hands with a piratical air. “How much do you think a Princess of Immadia is worth? A couple of brass drals?”
“Shoo. Can’t you see I’m working here?”
“Working on what?” Jakani stepped around her desk, and before she could answer, touched and tapped several pressure points in rapid succession. He caught Shalanya’s head before it thumped upon her desk. “Alright, now listen to me. It’s too complicated to explain all at once, but I really need you to understand that what I’m going to try to do is provide you a key to help you overcome your agoraphobia. It will be subliminal at first so that your conscious mind, especially given your psychic skills, does not inadvertently hijack the process and return you to where you started. I also give you my oath that should this not work I will remove every last trace of what I have done from your mind. I apologise for taking advantage in this way, but I’d rather not fight the Dragoness who thumped me black and blue yesterday.”
Then, he worked over her for nearly an hour using Nikuko techniques that Hanzaki had told him were thousands of years old. The basal part of the mind, where fears and phobias lived, was difficult and intractable territory. When roused, one could find a powerful enemy or an astounding ally. So now, could he draw the fangs of this Dragoness?
Time would tell.
With the same well-oiled efficiency, the Immadian forces loaded up, fifty men to a Dragonship. The fleet would be fourteen strong – six hundred soldiers occupying twelve Dragonships, two supply vessels, and two Dragons – neither of which had ever actually fought in a battle. One would be incapacitated by his fear of heights, the other by any space other than a cave or a cosy house.
Jakani winced. What could possibly go wrong in this scenario?
But he had the Princess of his heart to win. Tytiana the Radiant. If he could only work out a way to scribe a ballad with a happy ending for them both …
With a barely perceptible lurch, his Dragonship was underway, rising into an Immadian noon sky as its nose turned toward the southeast together with the other vessels of their flotilla. The turbines thrummed busily, while the muffled burbling of the meriatite stills was like the small ornamental waterfall he remembered at the Gatehouse.
Jakani stood with a couple of guards at the rear gantry to enjoy the receding view of Immadia City, with its sloping slate rooftops and neat grid roads all covered in pristine snow, and the awe-inspiring white mountains behind. His fingers gripped the railing nervously. Too right his last flight had not ended well. One great big flop into a snow drift some thirty feet deep, spitting himself like a meat kebab on five small palikar pine trees. Thankfully a villager had seen his crash-landing and alerted the castle so that the army could come and cut him loose. He wished he had thought to go thank that person. Next time he visited Immadia.
Who was he to try to teach Shalanya how to overcome her fears?
O Fra’anior, be with Tytiana. Let her know that Jakani the unflappable Dragon is coming with a small army. Unflappable? Non-flapping? Either way described his abilities with uncomfortable accuracy! Even at the speed of draconic healing he had a day or two to wait before he could test his arms – the equivalent of his Shapeshifter wings – in any kind of flight.
Then, he would have to face his fears too.
Chapter 23: Daddy Dearest
CLAD IN HIS usual unrelenting crimson, High Master Juzzakarr took a legs-akimbo stance above the slaver pit as if he owned everything in sight, including the pit’s one and only denizen. Tytiana suppressed a shudder as she gazed up at him. His thoughts were plain.
Errant daughter wearing lamko tunic shirt. She had to admit, she could imagine few situations guaranteed to arouse his ire more certainly than this.
The protuberant toad eyes bulged as Juzzakarr glowered down at her. At length, he said, “I understand that the monkey is dead?”
Not, ‘Are you well?’ nor, ‘How glad I am to see you alive, daughter.’
“Island’s greetings, father,” she responded blandly. “Aye, the Dirt Picker is no longer with us.”
“Good. And you appear well.” He sounded personally affronted at her sound state of health. “Negotiations proceed with the Dragonkind, but I am here to be assured that you are thus far unharmed. Is that the case?”
“That is the case.”
“Good. Because I have received urgent report from Immadia that a disturbance has taken place. The spy was not able to determine its source, but it appears to coincide with the probable hour of your arrival there.”
Tytiana kept her face utterly stoic, but fire pulsing up her arms betrayed her feelings. Jakani! Could it be? Calling the report ‘a disturbance’ was a word choice unusual enough to pique her suspicions. Father was tugging at his web once again.
“A further report is due by tomorrow at dawn. It would be highly inconvenient for some if a boy who is able to walk through fire were to return to the scene of his crimes.” Juzzakarr laughed heartily. “You see, this is the story. We know the lamko set you up. They organised your abduction as payback for my punishing them, didn’t they? Lit a fire under your pretty backside, ha ha! A true shame the festering monkeys failed in their blatant attempt to avenge themselves upon the House by murdering her favourite daughter. But having caught wind of the plot, this lamko rat and my impressionable, hot-headed sixteen year-old decided to organise a little rescue – or shall I say, elopement – of their own. Thankfully the brave Heavy Dragonwing of Merxx was able to track the miscreants to their eventual destination and retrieve the Choice, but sadly, the boy did not survive. The daughter was returned in disgrace.”
