I jumped back, startled.
“He’s not of this world,” Finesia said inside my head. “And he will destroy you if you don’t take his life first. You must embrace your destiny, Acolyte.”
“Maam?” Lieutenant Talato had stepped in between me and the patient. “Is everything okay?”
I looked past her to see that the gaunt, pale-faced man had now fallen asleep.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m going to get some rest, I think. It’s been a long day.”
“I’ll stand guard outside your tent, Maam,” Talato said.
And we both walked out into the bitter night.
In a way, I regretted leaving the warmth of the tent so early. I mean, the sleeping bag was pretty warm, and the sheepskin mat protected me from the hoary floor. But still the cold air stung at my cheeks. All the while, I lay on my back with the darkness whirling above me and Finesia running rampant inside my head.
I reached that point between dreams and reality, where I didn’t know whether I was awake, and as far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter. Finesia’s nattering voice abated in my head and the dreams came.
A majestic alabaster light replaced the void, and dark creatures whirled above me, not the shades I’d seen in my hallucinations earlier that day, but brilliant black dragons.
I woke up, and I realised the danger in such dreams. I needed the cyagora to push them away, but I didn’t have the strength to lift myself. Lieutenant Talato was outside. Yet I couldn’t force my mouth open wide enough to call her, and I couldn’t force my eyes open to will my body into action.
I was asleep, or was I? Besides me, I saw Talato’s backpack. Maybe she kept the cyagora in there. Unlikely, but there was a chance, wasn’t there? After all, the jar was far too big to fit in her pocket. She would likely, therefore, keep only some tablets on her, and a larger amount somewhere else.
I pulled myself up in the sleeping bag, and I rummaged around in her bag, feeling no guilt for rifling through her belongings. In it, I found clothes, and a selection of daggers meant for murder. Each one was a unique colour, and they looked exactly like red and white striped candy canes. Yet I found no cyagora.
But I wasn’t in the real world anyway but an imaginary one in my dreams.
And I couldn’t awaken. My eyelids were too heavy, my muscles too numb.
So, within this dream, I put my head against the trench coat I’d laid out as a pillow, and I drifted off into another world.
I woke up with a sour tang on my tongue.
I wasn’t at camp, and it was light outside.
There was no tent covering me. There were no troops around me. I had no sleeping bag. I was naked, alone, and shivering.
Above, the brown clouds roiled. Secicao, marvellous secicao, spraying the world with its aroma. Branches of it twisting out into a gloriously sodden sky. Its roots plunging into the soil, sapping out the chances of any life to grow here.
Secicao… I can breathe here without a mask.
And I’m alone.
Except I’m not.
For there’s another.
“Wench,” she says. Not Finesia, but Alsie Fioreletta inside my head. “You’ve been refusing to accept your destiny, and now I have been sent to destroy you. You will not take my place as Finesia’s right hand, I will make sure of that.”
I jump up off the floor, and find myself looking straight into Alsie Fioreletta’s brilliant green eyes. The cool secicao wind whips her raven hair against her face. It spills down her bare shoulders and over her naked back and breasts.
Yet, when I blink, I notice she’s not naked but tightly clad in a suit of black armour. She has a claymore strapped to her back, which she draws with surprising deftness and grace. She points the tip of the tremendous weapon at me, wielding it like it’s as light as a piece of hollow wood.
Fortunately, I’m not naked either but also resplendent in a hardy coat of leather armour, mine more brown. It’s flexible and I stretch out my legs. I have on my boots and garters, and I reach down to retrieve my knives.
“This will be our ultimate battle,” I say to Alsie out loud. “And I shall win, as I always do.”
“Not yet, you won’t,” she replies. “For you do not quite understand your true destiny. How can you assume what will happen when you have paid no heed to Finesia’s plans?”
I grit my teeth. “No! I shall never succumb to her will.”
“And that is why we must battle.”
I don’t need to listen to any more of her nonsense. I scream out in rage and I lunge forwards with a flurry of knife strokes. But Alsie’s sword transforms into a whip which she lashes around me, restraining me for a moment. She retracts the weapon, and transfers it to another hand, where it becomes a burning short sword. Then she vanishes, in a plume of black smoke.
I search around for the dragon, but find nothing. Impossible, she has to be here somewhere.
“What’s the matter?” she says from behind.
I spin around again, but there’s no sign of her.
“Have you already forgotten the nature of my abilities? I can make it so you can’t see what’s there. And I can also make you see what’s not there.” It’s as if I have an invisible monkey perched on my shoulder, nattering in my ear. I can’t see her anywhere, but she’s so close.
“Reveal yourself, Alsie Fioreletta. This is cowardice.”
“Said the barbarian to the master tactician… And this is why you’ll never truly win, because deep inside you cannot understand.”
And there she is, lying on a marble sacrificial altar in front of me. She wears a long royal red dress that shows off her slender shoulders. A brilliant light shines out from her alabaster skin. Her eyes are closed and she looks placid, as if sleeping. She has her hands folded on her lap, and one calf is crossed over the other.
“Give Finesia what she wants and end this now,” she says. “It is, as you said, our ultimate battle.”
My hands start to tingle as sparks dance around the metal of the knives.
“This is what you’ve always wanted, my dear,” Finesia says in my mind. “It shall complete you.”
I approach hungrily, and raise my right hand above my head, feeling the power coursing through the hilt of the weapon. I take a deep, satisfactory breath, and then I plunge the knife down into Alsie’s chest. She opens her eyes in shock and gasps.
Then, out of her wound emerges another plume of black smoke. I stand, panting, watching the patterns dance in the smoke, that soon conceals the body completely. After it subsides, both Alsie and the altar have vanished.
Next thing I know, I’m being grasped by firm hands from behind. Alsie’s voice rasps in my ear, an acrid unpleasantness to her flowery breath. “Do you really think it’s that simple, Dragonseer Wells? Our destinies are not meant yet to intertwine and still you insist on destroying me. One day, we will fight and only fate itself will determine who wins. And it won’t be until the day you finally learn to embrace what’s meant to be.”
I smell a whiff of something metallic and enticing. Exalmpora. And I want it.
“Do it,” Finesia’s says. “Claim your destiny.”
“No!” I say, wrestling within Alsie’s grasp.
“Do it, Acolyte. This will complete you… Or choose not to and accept your death.”
I try to bite at Alsie’s hand, but the grip’s too strong. I slash at her leg with one of my knives, but she already has my wrist in a hold that I cannot escape from. She twists this, causing pain to sear into my tendons. I let go of the knife and it falls to the floor.
But I still have the second one in my left hand. I squirm and draw strength from the rage inside me. I use this to plunge the knife into Alsie’s thigh.
She roars out from behind. But before she can transform into a dragon, I duck and throw her over my shoulder. She lies flat on her back on the ground, again clad in a suit of leather armour. I launch myself upon her, straddling her chest with my thighs as I go for her throat with my knife.<
br />
Vile creatures surround me, closing in. Once again, it's the shades. From their bodies, dark, wispy tentacles lash out into the air. They suck in all the light around them as they close in even further.
Soon, they’ll lunge, and if I don’t take Alsie’s life they will destroy me.
I ready myself to cut at the skin on Alsie’s throat.
But the shades open their mouths collectively and let out this terrible scream. It washes over the secicao jungle, plunging the sky into momentary darkness. The scream comes again and I drop my knife to the floor.
Alsie knocks it away with her hand, and it spins through the secicao, cutting through branches with its lightning infused blade as it goes.
“Auntie Pontopa,” a voice says, like a child’s. “Push her away.”
“Taka?” No, he mustn’t be here. This battle is between me and Alsie.
“Shut the voice out,” Finesia says. “Don’t let anyone claim your destiny as their own.”
I nod, and I grasp at Alsie’s throat with my hands. Power surges through me. My arms grow, my fingers become claws, scales crawl underneath my skin, my body writhes, and I roar up to the sky, ecstatic in pain.
One shade, a tiny ratty creature, comes up to me and looks upon me with those evil, white eyes. “Auntie, please. You don’t want to kill her.”
“Taka? Are you here?”
I lift myself slightly, giving Alsie enough room to slide away from me. Dragonheats, I’m letting her get away. She produces something from her pocket and something hits my head hard. But I recover my power quickly, dark secicao coursing through my veins.
I’ll defeat Alsie in dragon form if that’s what it takes. I’ll rip out her throat, removing her from the immortal coil.
But the terrible scream comes again, so strong it forces me to the ground. I clutch at my head in pain. Next thing I know, Alsie is upon me with a vial of green poison in her hand. I try to push back, but I lack strength.
Alsie pours the poison into my mouth, closes it, holds my nose, and yanks my head back by my hair. I have no choice but to swallow. The liquid travels down my throat – feeling like a massive solid lump.
Pain, intense pain. A throbbing in my head. Forces trying to take over my body. And something within me, fighting back. My body shaking as if wracked by a terrible disease. Sweat flooding to my brow. Stinging tears welling at the corners of my eyes…
Whiteness embracing the void. Everything white… No clarity for miles…
The wide scared eyes of my dragonelite guard, Lieutenant Talato, waving her hand in front of me. Over her right thigh, a gashing open wound.
“Maam? Are you back with us?”
“Lieutenant…”
She had me pinned against the side of the tent by my arms, her strength astounding. But once she realised I was safe, she ripped off a piece of her shirt and wrapped it around the wound on her leg.
I turned my head to see the jar of cyagora broken on the floor; the tablets scattered around it. At one end of the tent, I saw the malnourished man from the factory, lying dead on his bed, one of my knives buried deep into his chest. At another end, Taka was crouched down, crying into his hands.
He looked at me with red-rimmed eyes, and a tear dropped from his cheek. Then, he ran over to me and hugged me around the neck. “Please Auntie Pontopa, whatever you do, never do that again? Promise me?”
But without knowing what had just happened, I didn’t know what to say.
I felt remarkably tired all of a sudden. And so, I fell onto the hard, icy floor, and I drifted into a deep, silent sleep.
Part V
Travast
“Why is it that the imbeciles get all the fame, while scientists’ names can only be found in journals and textbooks?”
Travast Indorm
15
I woke up just before dawn on the same bed that the man from the factory had been resting on. I shifted my body, expecting to see myself lying in a pool of blood. But I was stopped by restraints clamped around my wrists and ankles. I jangled the chains in an attempt to get free, then I turned my head towards clean sheets. If they’d had blood on them, someone had wiped it away.
I took a deep breath, and then I lay back, and let the warmth from the embers of the fire pit wash over my cheek. The lanterns were still on, suffusing the inner walls with a soft, amber light.
Lieutenant Talato was sitting behind my head, in a chair. She stood up and walked over to me. “I’m sorry, Maam. But I needed to take precautions.”
“I understand,” I said. “And I cannot express the guilt I feel. I’m sorry, Talato.”
Talato’s eyes opened wide. “You mean you know you did it? You looked like you were sleepwalking or something, Maam?”
I nodded. “I was. Kind of. Look, it doesn’t take a genius to piece together what happened. How much cyagora did you give me?”
The lieutenant shook her head. “About three tablets in the end. I wasn’t sure how many it would take.”
“That should last a while. And presumably Taka used his scream… That’s what weakened me? Where is he now?”
“I don’t know what he did, Maam. He went back to General Sako’s tent and promised to remain silent about this. I don’t know about any scream. I saw Taka put his hand to his temples. I had no idea what he was doing, but he looked very focused.”
That made sense. The scream only worked in the collective unconscious and would have only hurt those that had a connection. The dragons would have felt it. But not the men in their tents, although they would have been awoken once the dragons started roaring.
Taka… I’d forced him to use Finesia’s gift, drawing him even closer to her. That part hurt the most.
“Did anyone else see what happened?” I asked.
“Negative, Maam. The lights weren’t on in here, and then the dragons started making a commotion, so I heard the men running off to check on them. I doubted they even thought to look in this tent.”
“Probably for the best.” I wondered if the dragons had created a diversion to protect me. “Has anyone woken up yet?”
“No, Maam.”
I let off a sigh of relief. I had less explaining to do than I’d feared. I turned towards the crackling firepit to see a piece of charcoal break off and crumble into red-hot embers on the floor.
“You can release the restraints now,” I said. “I’m safe…”
Talato raised an eyebrow. “But can I trust you? What I saw, it looked like magic… The skin on your face started twisting, and you looked in so much pain, and then I could swear I saw scales. Did this Wiggea creature do this? Did he cast some kind of curse on you or something? Because I can’t find a rational explanation.”
I looked her straight in the eye. If she was going to be my bodyguard, she needed to learn how to safeguard me from every possible danger. “Is there a rational explanation to Wiggea, Talato?”
Talato looked down at her hands. “No, Maam. Try as I might, I can’t seem to think of what could have happened to him.”
“Then, it’s about time you started to accept that the world isn’t quite as you think. Faso’s science can’t explain this stuff. What you saw was the work of Finesia. This is what I’ve been so afraid of all this time.”
Talato’s face blanched. “It’s impossible. I’ve seen some strange things in life. But something taking over your mind like that and altering your physical substance without permission? No, that’s something I can’t believe… I’m sorry, Maam.”
“We may see things a little different, Lieutenant, and it’s up to you what you believe. But please, right now, I can assure you. The threat has passed.”
Talato looked me straight in the eye a moment. Then, she moved a little closer and perched herself on the side of the bed. She started unbuckling the leather straps around my wrists.
Soon, my legs were also freed, and I shifted the blanket away from me. Again, I wondered if I’d see bloodstains on my clothing but, remarkably, I couldn’t find a trace.
“What happened to the rest of the cyagora?” I asked. I remembered seeing the shattered jar last night, but there wasn’t a single shard of glass on the floor.
“I’ve retrieved them all and put them somewhere safe. Maam, with all due respect, I really think you should continue your course. What did Doctor Forsolano recommend? I don’t want to have to fight you again.”
I looked down at the makeshift bandage that staunched her wound – an olive-coloured piece of cloth, a patch of dried blood in the centre.
“I understand your concern, Lieutenant. But when I’m on cyagora, I can’t command the dragons. And without knowing exactly what we’re up against, we might need an organised force. What about the man, by the way?” A sour taste developed in my mouth. “Is he dead?”
“Yes, Maam. And I disposed of the body as soon as the coast was clear.”
“Do you know if anyone got something out of him, before…”
“No. But the medic didn’t feel his condition was because of his mental state alone.”
“What do you mean?”
“He found traces of a drug in his blood samples that might have caused his delirium. We called Mr Gordoni and Miss Winda in to confirm, and they said something about the drug being much like that one you caught Taka taking.”
My heart skipped a beat in my chest. “What is Travast Indorm up to?”
“I wish I knew, Maam. But there’s a lot more going on here, I think, than meets the eye.”
I stopped to gaze at the walls of the tent for a moment. The embers kept crackling in front of us, and a fox yipping in the distance punctuated the swishing of the wind. The sound of the tent door unzipping interrupted the relative silence. I turned to it, startled. The flaps gave way, to reveal General Sako’s stout figure, framed by darkness.
“Blunders and dragonheats! What are you both doing here yapping away at this time?” He turned to me, sitting on the bed. “What the hell happened to our prisoner, dammit?”
“He got away, sir,” Lieutenant Talato lied. “Slashed me with a knife and ran out the door.”
Dragonseers and Airships Page 73