Smoke and Shadow: An Epic Fantasy Progression Series (The Dragon Thief Book 3)

by D. K. Holmberg

  They rounded a corner, and in the distance the Dragon’s Jaw opened up.

  There were two parts of the city where the mountains didn’t stretch overhead and block out the view. Within those two sections, the city itself opened up, sprawling out. One was at the entrance, the place where he had come into the city the very first time when he’d come with Bingham and where he had passed through when he’d returned with Gayal. The other was on the back side of the city, at least what he assumed was the back side. It was the location of the Hatchery, spreading out and drifting outside the boundary of the Dragon’s Jaw.

  Ty had been concerned about the Hatchery ever since he and Dorian had spoken last, and though he had only been there one time, he worried about what he might find now that they were heading directly toward it. Dorian had not shared with him, but he worried about it.

  The closer they got, the more the ground shifted. Now the cobblestones had the same blue glow he had seen when he had been assaulted. It was a subtle and soft glow, but with Dorian along it was almost as if his cloak tamped down some of that glowing, as if the shadow dragon tried to suppress the light even from those cobblestones.

  They approached the building. It was a strange, domed building, made all of a pale stone and filled with the energy of dragon relics. Up close to it, Ty could practically feel that energy radiating out of it, and it left his skin tingling, a strange sensation that he didn’t really understand why he should be so aware of it, only that he was.

  He headed toward the door, placing his hand upon it, and then looked back at him.

  “What did you see when Gayal brought you here the last time?”

  “You mean the eggs or the dragons?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, there were the eggs inside the Hatchery, and there were the dragons in the yard outside of it. I suppose I don’t know anything more than that. Gayal didn’t really try to hide it from me.”

  Dorian frowned for a moment. “Did she show you the secret to opening the Hatchery?”

  Was that what this was about? Did he fear that Ty was somehow involved?

  Ty shook his head. “I didn’t even know that I had a connection to the dragon when I came here with her the last time. I think she suspected I had some sort of connection, but she hadn’t told me about it.”

  Dorian turned, and a burst of light shimmered from his hands, and the door came open.

  Perhaps he used the light dragon, or maybe there was another key.

  He doubted Dorian would provide an answer for him.

  He stepped into the Hatchery and waited for Ty to join him. When he did, he closed the door behind him, and with a looping of power coming off the shadow dragon, mixed with a bit of the stone dragon, the door closed. He had a very distinct sense that he was sealed inside.

  This part of the Hatchery was very different than the rest. There was the domed ceiling and alcoves set into the walls that held the eggs, but none of them had hatched. When he had been here before, he had touched some of those eggs and had been aware of the power within them but hadn’t seen anything else.

  “Does this look any different than the last time you were here?”

  “I don’t really remember anything other than the eggs,” Ty said.

  He surveyed the inside of the room. Faint blue light glowed, illuminating the alcoves, but it didn’t look any different than the last time he was here. There were the eggs, but knowing what he did of the king and his inability to hatch them, there wasn’t anything useful about those eggs. They were more decorative than anything else.

  He suspected they could be something more, but that was only if the king learned how to hatch them in some meaningful fashion. Otherwise, they would end up like the other dragons, twisted and stunted, smaller than the traditional dragons should be.

  “There is nothing different here. As far as we know, they didn’t breach the door.”

  Ty looked back at the door. It required power and dragons, but it required something else, then.

  “If they didn’t breach the door, then why did you want to show it to me?”

  “I needed to know if you could feel anything more.”

  It wasn’t him that he wanted.

  “You wanted the smoke dragon.”

  Dorian tipped his head in a brief nod. “That dragon has a protective instinct that we need right now. And if you can call upon it, we might be able to use that, but it’s unfortunate that you cannot.”

  “If the dragon isn’t reacting, maybe there isn’t anything here to detect.”

  Dorian sighed. “Perhaps not. My dragons aren’t aware of anything, either.” He waved for Ty to follow him, and they headed through the building, passing through the doorway before stopping. Beyond the door was a walled space where the dragons had been when he had been here before. They were small but powerful. Ty remembered the heat up close, a heat that he had never experienced from the dragons in Zarinth.

  The yard should have been filled with dragons, several of them, but now there were none. It was empty.

  “They pulled all the dragons away,” he whispered. “What would they do with them?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned to Ty. “It’s possible that Roson thinks that he can use the dragons to attack the kingdom, but it would be difficult with as few dragons as there were here.” Dorian’s gaze clouded. “Roson would have to know that the Dragon Touched would be powerful enough to counter anything that the dragons could do.”

  “Are you sure that the Dragon Touched aren’t with him?”

  “No,” Dorian said.

  It was a stark admission, and it was one that left him worried. If Roson James truly was working with the Dragon Touched even now, what protections did the kingdom have?

  Stripping away the Dragon Touched, then the dragons, would give him great power.

  “What is the king doing about it?”

  “He has us looking into it,” Dorian said.

  “What could Roson James really do with the dragons?” Ty asked.

  “Dragons access a source of power,” Dorian said. “All dragons do. It’s something innate to them, but it connects them to something else. The dragons are powerful, but it’s that magic that they carry with them, magic that stays with them even after they are gone, that matters.”

  He looked over at him and found him staring into the yard, something about his expression different. It was a flatness to his eyes and a distance to his gaze.

  “You mean the dragon remnants.”

  “Remnants,” he said, grunting. “Dragon bones. You carry one on you.”

  Ty instinctively patted the dragon-bone dagger. “I’ve had it for a long time.”

  “And it’s useful because it’s powerful. That’s what most people know instinctively. Dragon bone is stored potential. The remnants of something greater. We know that there once were majestic dragons that were unlike any that are still seen today, but we don’t know what they felt like other than through their remnants.”

  “What about the relics?”

  “They are different. They don’t have the same stored potential that the remnants do. There are some who believe that the relics have their own sort of power, but we have not proven that.”

  Others like the king. Ty didn’t say aloud, but he thought it. Others like his mother, even. She had believed in the power of the relics. Even Bingham.

  “And then why would they want the dragons?”

  “Because they may believe that they can use those dragons to help them connect to other dragons. Either that, or they intended to simply overthrow the kingdom.”

  “We have long believed that other lands have access to powerful dragons. We are isolated here, protected by the ring of fire off to the north, the steam swamp to the south, and the fire fields off to the west. Even the ocean to our east offers us a level of protection, though it’s difficult to access it. The kingdom is protected. Isolated. But that may change. If they have dragons, if they have some way of drawing upon that power, the
n it stands to reason they might have been able to attack before now, but the fact they haven’t, that we have not seen them, implies another reason.” He shook his head. “Perhaps they don’t have the power that we believe them to have. Perhaps they were unable to reach it, or perhaps they have dragons much like we have.”

  “Like we had,” he said.

  Dorian nodded slowly. “Like we had,” he said.

  He stared around the yard, and it troubled Ty that there was no answer here, nothing that would explain what had happened here, only that something had happened to the dragons.

  He had a feeling that it bothered Dorian far more than the unsettled way he looked now. And he looked considerably disturbed. That he would be so worried was something he knew to be concerned about.

  “What do we have to do?”

  Dorian looked over. “We?”

  “You brought me here. You obviously think that either me or the smoke dragon or my experience with the dauvern matters in some way. What do we have to do?”

  “We have to find the dragons before they harm them.”

  “How do you intend to do that?” Ty asked.

  Dorian wore an expression that was a mixture of irritation and sadness, but it was the hopelessness in his voice that troubled Ty the most. “I don’t know.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ty stood in the street outside the Hatchery. In the daylight, it looked considerably different than it did at night, and though there were still shadows that streamed down on it from the Dragon’s Jaw, they weren’t nearly as dense and dark as the shadows that loomed over it in the evening. The ground didn’t glow with the same blue light, or if it did, he wasn’t quite as aware of it as he had been at night. There was something to the energy of the air around him, though, some aspect that filled him with understanding and trepidation.

  He hadn’t slept after Dorian had left him.

  He didn’t know why he had wanted Ty to go with him, though it had something to do with the smoke dragon and less to do with Ty, he was certain of that. Maybe it had to do with the dauvern, though even in that he didn’t know why there would be.

  Now that he stood here, he was aware of an absence of energy.

  It was a strange thing to notice. When he’d been in the city before, he hadn’t paid much attention to it, but now that the dragons were gone, he recognized that power was missing. It was as if the dragons themselves had created a layer of protection and energy within the city and having them no longer here changed things.

  He stared at the Hatchery.

  He had no way of accessing the Hatchery on his own, though he suspected the eggs still needed protection. He wondered how the Order had managed to reach the Hatchery.

  They might be Dragon Touched, but the Tecal had the key, didn’t they?

  Unless Roson James had found some other secret.

  One thought stayed with him.

  They needed to find the dragons.

  He had no idea if Dorian would include him in the search, but Ty intended to insert himself in the quest for the dragons. If the reason that the fake Order of the Flame had managed to acquire the dragons was because of him, or because of the dauvern, or because he had gone on that search for his brother, then he was determined to get the dauvern back, along with the dragons. He was determined to stop them, whatever it might take.

  He focused on the energy of the smoke dragon, thinking about the power that was there within him, wanting nothing more than the smoke dragon to respond to him, to provide him with a bit of energy and to reveal its presence, only the smoke dragon didn’t.

  After its awakening, he had felt nothing. It was almost as if the connection to the smoke dragon that had formed the day before, however strange and weak that might have been, had faded again. Maybe the smoke dragon had abandoned him. Maybe it had grown tired of his unwillingness and inability to provide it with whatever it needed.

  Maybe it was just his own failings.

  He had been troubled since learning that his mother had asked Bingham to keep an eye on him. That suggested to Ty that not only had she known that she was going to be gone for a while, but she would’ve known that his father was going after her. Why not leave some message for him? Why keep it so secretive?

  He didn’t have any answers. He didn’t know anything other than that he had been left. Abandoned.

  But that didn’t fit with what he knew of his mother.

  If she had been after a relic that she had uncovered, or perhaps more relics, Ty might understand. She had gathered them, collected them, and had treated them as if they were some long lost friend, especially the relics that had been sculpted to look like dragons. Ty remembered finding her with three larger relics that she had set on the ground in their hearth room. She had been tracing her hand over them, as if petting them.

  “What are you doing?” Ty had asked. He was probably ten or eleven when this had happened, and though he had known even then that his mother had a penchant for dragon relics, he didn’t really understand it.

  “I’m talking to my friends,” she said, smiling at him. “Why don’t you have a seat, and you can talk with me.” Her golden hair hung down into her face, and she did not bother to brush it away. In the reflected light of the hearth crackling with flames, she seemed to glow. Then again, it had always been Ty’s feeling that his mother glowed often.

  “What am I supposed to say?” He settled down next to his mother, looking at one of the dragon sculptures. They were impressive. They came up to his mid-thigh, at least when he was standing, but when seated it was almost as if he could look into their eyes. He believed he could feel something from them. They felt so lifelike, a talent of whatever sculptor had made them.

  “You can tell them whatever you would like. I like to talk to them about what I’m doing, about the way the world has changed, and even just listen to them.”

  “You listen to the sculptures?” Ty had smiled at her, and he had waited for her to say something more, but she had kept her attention on the sculpture that she was looking at. “What do they say?”

  “It’s not what they say, but it’s what I can feel. If you listen, you might feel something as well.”

  “About what?”

  “About what comes beyond.” She smiled, and there was a hint of sadness in it. “That has been my quest, Tydornen. I have wanted to understand what comes beyond, and how we can come again.” She touched the nearest of the sculptures on the head, caressing it gently as if petting a cat. “One day we will have the answers. One day they will be free.”

  “What will be free?”

  “Why, the dragons.”

  He had laughed, looking at the sculpture, thinking that his mother was telling him a story.

  Maybe she had been chasing something else, though.

  Ty continued trying to feel for the smoke dragon, continuing to try to feel its energy, knowing that it was there, that there was something deep within him, but he knew also that he couldn’t call upon that power.

  He moved on.

  Ty couldn’t stand here too long. It would draw attention, and though he doubted that he would end up imprisoned for simply standing outside the Hatchery, he certainly didn’t need the risk. Several Dragon Touched made their way along the street, and Ty watched them for a little while, knowing that they were heading toward the fortress. He kept meaning to ask Dorian about the Dragon Touched, about how they served, and whether they were a risk given Roson James connection.

  He made his way along the street, wandering aimlessly.

  They needed answers, and he kept waiting for Dorian to find him, to help them know where to start, but he wasn’t sure what they would need to do, where they needed to go, or how they would do it.

  The dragons were gone.

  Then what?

  It was the kind of problem that needed a solution that was beyond him.

  It was the kind of problem that needed the Dragon Thief.

  Would his brother help?

  He found
himself wandering along the street where he’d been attacked. He paused where he remembered the false Order of the Flame member first assaulting him, looking along the street and seeing no sign of blood or disruption. Any blood that he’d shed had been scrubbed free of the cobblestones; either that or it had rained enough, even though he didn’t remember any rain coming through here.

  He studied the street, remembering the darkness that swirled around him, the energy that had been here, but there was nothing of the sort present in the daylight. Nothing more that he could feel. The energy had been here and a lingering sense of power, but nothing more than that.

  Ty rounded a corner.

  He had staggered along here.

  He remembered falling up against the building. He remembered the pain that he had felt, and still remained surprised that he did not suffer nearly as much as he expected to, given the severity of his injury. He should’ve been dead.

  He paused, studying the cobblestones again.

  There was no blood trail on the cobblestones, nothing to suggest the injury that he had experienced. There was nothing here. As he stared at the ground, trying to find answers, he felt a stirring.

  “Now you want to play?” he muttered.

  The dragon was there and making Ty aware of his presence, but did it even matter? He needed to figure out where the fake Order of the Flame had gone.

  “Can you search for them?”

  What he needed was the dragon to respond to him.

  No. What he really needed was the dragon to listen to him, so that if he were under attack, he would know how to use his power and could defend himself.

  He didn’t feel anything else.

  He straightened, looking along the street. He remembered trailing his hand along the buildings, blood staining the stone as he had staggered toward Albion’s meeting place.

  As he made his way through here, he didn’t see any sign of where he had lingered, and certainly nothing suggested he had left the walls covered with his blood.

  Had Albion scrubbed the layer of blood free? Why would he have done that other than to hide his passage? He meandered slowly, carefully, looking along the row of buildings until he came to Albion’s door. In the daylight, it looked different. Of course, in the daylight, he also wasn’t injured the way that he had been. He stared at the door and wondered if there was any sort of power within it, anything that might suggest the energy that Albion had access to. He had chased the Flame for a long time. He had his own connection to it. When Ty had seen him near Ishantil, he had seen his brother using what he believed to be Dragon Touched magic, though perhaps it wasn’t that at all. Maybe he had something from the priesthood that permitted him access to power that only looks that way.