Dragon Chameleon: Episodes 9-12

by Wilson, Sarah K. L.

  And now I knew what it meant to be Ko’roi.

  I was also starting to understand why a person might not want to be marked unless they were going to get all the markings.

  “Interesting,” Ambrosia said, a finger to her chin like she was considering everything.

  She spoke just in time. In a burst of realization, I left the metal rope binding me in place. I shouldn’t show her that I could mess with her magic, too. Not if I wanted to open the lock on our cage and sneak out later tonight.

  “I think we’ve learned what we need to know tonight, don’t you, Apeq?” she asked with a lovely smile.

  He nodded, tightly, and I forced his hand to let go of the lightning rod. Ambrosia scooped it up.

  “I’ve never been fond of these things,” she said. “I prefer pure power, not something defined by its own limitations. But I suppose we must use what we have.”

  The metal rope slipped from around the rock and snaked out to her open palm, settling there.

  “Come along, Tor. Let’s return you to your bed, hmmm? We’ll need you full of energy and ready to go for our talk tomorrow. Won’t we, Apeq?” She raised an eyebrow and Apeq stirred, his hands still frozen at his sides.

  I released them.

  “Yes,” he hissed through gritted teeth.

  This wasn’t over yet – clearly – but I kept my taunting to myself. I’d stirred him up enough tonight and I didn’t want to tip them off to what I had just learned – that I wasn’t really a prisoner here at all.

  Chapter Five

  “Did they torture you?” Bataar asked after our captors left.

  The wagon with our cage had been left beside the wagon with the doorway – both stuck deep in the ruts of mud that held them fast. The soldier’s tents had been pitched farther away where people could move without slogging through mud half-way up to their knees.

  “No,” I said. “Not that they didn’t want to.”

  They hadn’t even left any guards to watch our cage. The perimeter guards walked the perimeter of the camp not far from where we sat at the rear of the army, but I hadn’t seen one pass by since I’d been brought back.

  “What does that mean?” He was eating some kind of hot slop in a wooden bowl. He offered me some as I answered.

  “I could stop Apeq’s arms from moving. I have power over his tattoos. That’s new.”

  Bataar squirmed and I was conscious of the tattoo showing from under his sleeve. Well, he could just calm down. I wasn’t going to be forcing his arms to do anything.

  “You really need to focus on your responsibility,” Bataar said.

  “You really need to focus on your responsibility,” my shadow self repeated, in a higher voice. Great. Now he was a four-year-old – and still stuck in my head.

  “If you learned everything you can do now that you are Ko’roi that would be more helpful than charging off into every dangerous situation that pops up.”

  Charging off? I’d been trying to avoid trouble all this time and look what had happened! It came looking for me!

  “I’m going to sneak over to that doorway and give your theory a try tonight,” I said, pitching my voice low even though there didn’t seem to be anyone else around.

  “Tonight?” he sounded shocked.

  “Well, when else are we going to find a convenient doorway around? We’re in the Dominion now, and these things aren’t just hanging around on the landscape like they are back at your home.”

  Bataar rolled his eyes. “This Dominion of yours is very wet.”

  “Mmmhmm.” My thoughts were on the doorway.

  If I could open the lock – and I was relatively sure I could – then I would need to creep through the mud and try to get in there. I tried to ignore the tingling in my skin when I thought of returning to that burning world. Hopefully, those fires would be long out. Hopefully, Bataar was right and there was some way I could change that place to make it suitable to send all these golem souls to. The annoying thing about Bataar was that he seemed to be right a lot lately.

  Married man Bataar. I shook my head at the thought, my mind drifting to thoughts of Zyla. It had been days since she went down into those warrens. Had she succeeded? Had she found a safe place for the people of Estabis? Was she still alive?

  I wished she was here so I could tease her and convince her to help me with the soul-thing. That would be right up her alley.

  I sighed.

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Bataar said. “When you get there, let the doorway tell you what to do.”

  Nonsense. I did the telling. But he could think that was what I was going to do. I threw my bowl of slop down. It was awful stuff.

  “You can be the lookout. See if you can pile that blanket into a Tor-shape dummy.”

  Bataar paused. “I’m surprised that you aren’t just going to run. If you can open the lock like you seem to think you can ... well, that’s usually what you would do.”

  “You’ve convinced me that we need a more permanent solution to this problem.” This time it was my turn to pause. “But maybe you should leave the cage with me just in case we need to run.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” As always, he objected to a perfectly reasonable suggestion.

  “Because it might take you more than one try to make whatever it is work. And in that case, we need access to that door again.”

  “I don’t need you for that.”

  “If I escape, they’ll know you can open the lock and then they’ll find some other way to hold you and the plan will be ruined.”

  Of course, he was more concerned with doing something responsible than he was with saving his own skin. That was Bataar for you.

  I sidled over to the lock. No one was watching. No one was near. Not too far away, people ate and talked around cookfires or prepared gear for tomorrow’s march. All of them looked busy and preoccupied. I could wait until they all went to sleep, but if I did that, then every noise I made would draw attention. Better to try now when my movements were disguised by the noise of the camp.

  I grabbed the lock, reaching out through the kinship I felt with the magic there, and pulled.

  The lock fell into my hand.

  Time to take the gamble.

  Chapter Six

  I left the lock on the cage so that no one would notice it was open.

  “Be careful,” Bataar whispered.

  Yeah, because I was totally going to start screaming that I was ‘Free, free, ah ha ha ha!’

  I trudged awkwardly through the mud, struggling as it built up under my boots and clung to every step. It was hard to move at all without making squelching sounds and I was grateful that I hadn’t tried it when the camp was asleep.

  It wasn’t far to the doorway cart, though in the mud it seemed to take an eternity. The golems that pulled the cart stood motionless, but when I approached, their muzzles turned to follow me. It was creepy how attracted to me these things were.

  I steeled my nerve and crept up the cart stairs, scraping the mud from my boots as I climbed. I circled the doorway, staying low, until I was on the other side of it. Now that I was here, I was getting nervous. What if it killed me to try to go back? What if it was still on fire? Time worked differently there. It could be a thousand years had passed on that side of the door, or only a few seconds. Zyla had said that there was nothing on the other side anymore. Did she know that for sure? What if I stepped past the door and there was nothing there at all? Would I die? Would I ever have existed at all?

  “I can’t stress enough how important it is to save yourself instead of walking through mystery doors,” my mimic said from the sidelines. He was free of mud, though still dressed in all black. “Oh, these old things? They’re just my funeral attire. I figured I’d wear them since you seem so keen on digging your own grave.”

  I ignored him, running a hand over my hair as I tried to calm myself. Sitting here wouldn’t give me any answers. There was only one way to get those. It was better not to think.
Thinking only got me in trouble. I took a deep breath and plunged into the doorway.

  A flash of cold and burning pain washed over me and then I was stumbling into the daylight on the other side of the doorway.

  Horror swept over me. Where once there had been massive, verdant trees and tangles of roots and wide green leaves, now there was nothing. I stood in an empty space well, not stood, just hung there like a puppet, but without strings. I could almost see an echo of what had been here before but blackened – burnt stumps as far as the eye could see. Some of the tree boles were still there – at half height but blackened and filled with holes. Others were gone completely. But everything was just a ghostly overlay over nothing at all.

  At least I was still alive. At least coming through hadn’t killed me. Would that have been true if I wasn’t the Ko’roi? If I hadn’t been able to see that swirling all around the shadows was that sense of affinity I felt for the doorways and the lock. That sense that I was connected to everything.

  I could see the threads of the pattern swirling all around where once there had been trees. It was strange. It was as if in seeing them I could see them as sprouts and saplings, as growing into maturity, as spreading and branching and becoming homes and then as the burned, dead things before me in the shadow image – and then as nothing at all. I could see it as if all those things were true at once.

  And out, across the horizon where the pink sun should be rising over the blackened landscape, I could feel a pull drawing me.

  “I wouldn’t follow that, if I were you,” the mimic said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m pretty sure that’s where souls go when they’re ready to move on. You’re here in the body. What do you think will happen if you go to the afterlife?”

  “Good point.”

  I tried to ignore the powerful pull of the horizon and focus instead on the weaving of the pattern around me. It was frayed at the edges, like it had been affected by the fire somehow.

  I focused on the threads, moving them, like I mentally moved the golems. It hurt my head, making it throb painfully as – yet again! – I was forced to maintain multiple thoughts at once, pulling one thing in one direction and another in a different direction. I was trying to pull the threads back into the pattern they’d been in when the trees were a mighty forest, but the best I could seem to do was pull them back to the pattern of when they had been saplings growing in the grass of the rolling fields.

  But now my imagination was running ahead of me as I worked.

  What if I didn’t want there to just be trees? What if I could carve out magnificent mountains with my mind? Large valleys with rock walls where the rock was carved by wind and rain into swooping umber forms with colorful grasses clinging to them? What if the trees wove between the rocks, their trunks bare and curving like dancers? What if a river ran through the center, watering everything around it and creating pools for flashing fish and bends for lazy boys to sit and fish? What if there were animals and birds? Things no one had seen before – bright and majestic?

  The threads wove and pulled, and my head hurt, hurt, hurt, my eyes burned and teared and then burned again and the sun burned hot on my skin and then slowly faded. There was ground now, beneath my feet. I sat on the ground as the hours ticked on, everything around me fading into the background as my mind worked fast and hard and painfully to put the weaves where I wanted them to go.

  There would be no trials here. There would be no one trapped and forced to run them. This would only be a welcoming place to send those people whose souls had been plundered from their bodies before they moved on to where they should go. It would eventually need a caretaker. Perhaps, in time, that would be me. But there was no time for that now. Right now, there was only the weaving, the restoring, the hoping it would all grow.

  When I finally surfaced from the work, stumbling to my feet, my mind aching, I felt an odd satisfaction.

  The dead heroes of legend had been right about me. I would reweave their world. And that was good, since I was the one who had destroyed it in the first place.

  “It won’t last unless there is someone to keep it going,” my mimic remarked, looking around. “And that’s going to take a lot of work.”

  “Maybe Bataar will decide to do it. He’s a big fan of responsibility,” I said.

  “I think it has to be you,” the mimic said. “And you are woefully unprepared to care for anything.”

  “Well, I still have you, don’t I? I must be good at keeping something alive.”

  “Don’t kid yourself.”

  I was still arguing him mentally when I snuck back out the door into the sleeping camp. The sun was almost up.

  Chapter Seven

  I squelched through the mud in a crouch, hoping that the guards wouldn’t see me.

  I’d done it! I’d grown a new World of Legends with the power of my mind. It was a heady thing. And a sobering one. I was responsible for that place now. Along with a nation, a dragon, and a bunch of other people. I felt ill at the thought. Or maybe that was just my headache.

  I managed not to pass out until after I made it back into the cage and put the lock back on.

  “Did you -?” Bataar asked and then the world went black.

  I woke with a pounding headache. It was late afternoon and I didn’t recognize the place we were on the road. The ground here was stony and easier to travel than the muddy fields had been. Our cart rattled and banged as it jostled over the road, leaving my teeth clashing together with each jarring bump and my head pounding like a pair of dragons were tossing it back and forth.

  “Ungh,” I said.

  “Awake?” Bataar asked. He was beside me, a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry. I was just holding you still. If I don’t then you roll all over the cage bottom. It’s been a few days.”

  That sounded about like how I felt.

  “Thank you,” I said thickly.

  “Of course. And the World of Legends?”

  I looked around, squinting painfully in the bright sunlight, but no one was near enough to hear us talk.

  “I think it will be okay. It’s growing back. It’s a safe place to be.”

  He nodded. “Then we need to sing the souls of the golems back to the land of the dead.”

  “Sure,” I agreed, but before I could say more a horse rode up and ran parallel to the jostling cage. Ambrosia sat in the saddle, head held high and filmy blue dress swirling behind her in the wind. Her light blonde hair was loose and swirled behind her like a golden flag. I was beginning to realize that she always looked as fresh and innocent as a baby’s dream – and it was always a ruse.

  “We will be out of these mountains and heading down the road toward Questan by the end of today,” she said with a faraway smile. “Which means you need to be ready to give up your magic, Tor, or we are going to have to take it. I’m sure you understand. We can hardly afford a repeat of what happened in Estabis. Neither Apeq nor I am in the mood for that. And, of course, we need to continue to persuade the heads of the Ko’Torenth Houses that this invasion is a good idea. We still need their armies and resources for now. They’ll be arriving tonight by doorway. And you will be a good little boy, yes?”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “I love dancing like a trained bear.”

  She smiled. “You think that’s a joke, don’t you? But when I am done with you, you will beg me to make you into a dancing bear to entertain my guests.”

  I shivered. Somehow, the threat felt worse coming from her innocent looking lips.

  What I needed to do was to get a chance to talk to Bataar. We needed to get out of this cage – and fast. I’d healed the World of Legends and we had a plan to send the golems back to it, but if we tried that now without any help there was just no way that I could immobilize enough of them before they overwhelmed us. We needed an army for that.

  And that meant running might be our only option left. If we stayed, I’d face whatever this thing was that Ambrosia was threatening, and despite her p
retty, frothy looks, I was certain that underneath she was a woman of brimstone and steel.

  I was flat out of luck. As the hours passed and my teeth grew progressively more sore from the jarring cart ride, it became apparent that Ambrosia was not going to let me out of her sight. She rode, seemingly unaware of us, but if I so much as twitched, her eagle eye was on me in an instant.

  Frustration filled me, grinding at me like the rocks under the wheels of the cart. Biding my time was the only option while I was in a cage. And it was just so hard to do.

  I wished more than anything that Saboraak was here. If she was here, we would just leap on her back and fly away. I wished for her voice in my head scolding me when I was irresponsible or risky. With nothing else to do but worry, I set my mind to worrying as much as possible. I worried about Saboraak and about Nostar and the Greens. I worried about Zyla and about Lenora and Hubric and Kyrowat and Lee.

  I worried about how I was going to get all the golems immobilized and empty of power before they could overwhelm me. The best way would be on a dragon, but what if that wasn’t an option. Was there some way that I could do it without one? But every time I tried to think of one, all I could see in my mind’s eye were memories of Apeq reanimating all the golems I had stopped before.

  And now we were marching on Questan – yet another vulnerable city full of little children and innocents. I needed to stop this army before it got there.

  I didn’t know when I began to bite my nails, but they were ragged by the time the cart finally stopped.

  Chapter Eight

  Ambrosia waited beside our cage when it stopped, casually tying her horse to the side of the cage while soldiers brought her a folding camp chair and started a fire for her.

  I looked at Bataar and then looked at the horse and then back to him, hoping he realized what I was suggesting. He nodded slightly. It wasn’t the best way to escape this army, but it was an option and if I could get Bataar out of the cage and on the horse he could go and ... and what? Warn the city? The dragons would have already done that. Find Saboraak? How? I had no idea where she went and if she returned, she’d only be one dragon.