Samurai

by Jason Hightman

  Partly veiled in the drifting smoke, the Samurai continued their onslaught. The Dragon was badly injured and wailed. His sense of control was lost. Inside him, the firespell begged for use, his new blaze urging release.

  In a show of defiance, the Creature leapt up high into the air, and grabbed hold of Akira’s line just above him.

  Now the Dragon began to swing the cable back and forth as he viciously cursed the warrior, hating himself for taking time to play with his prey. Never feel delight in the kill, he told himself. Nature punishes joy. Just kill them, kill them. He swung the cable into the fire further down the alley, tossing Akira into the blaze.

  The Dragon then crawled up the cable and jumped away, scampering over the rooftops.

  Kisho got off one parting shot, but missed.

  Far below him, Aldric rose with Sachiko’s help.

  Suddenly, Akira emerged out of the blaze on the ground, armored head ducked down, his body tightened up, hands around his knees. He stood up with a raised fist, crazed, screaming with rage and pain.

  Taro pulled him away from the burning alley.

  Aldric turned. The silver-gold fire had left only one escape route, and that was clogged with fleeing people. With no other choice, Aldric and the Samurai joined the pushing crowd, and eventually broke free into the city.

  The rush from the alley became a riot of movement on the avenue, as a much larger crowd grew terrified of the smoke and fire.

  The Samurai stood and watched in shock as the entire boulevard became a giant, raging ocean of people, running and screaming, throwing themselves against each other, thundering over cars and bicycles. Rats scurried in the street below them, driven out by Dragonmagic, while the ground rumbled dangerously.

  Aldric’s first thought was of Simon—fear that he was in that mess, carried away or crushed in the stampede of humanity unrolling before him. But a strange feeling made him look upward, and he saw the Japanese Serpent high above on a rooftop, its silver-gold chest heaving with breath. The beast would need somewhere to hide and recover. But for now the Dragon stood examining—enjoying—his handiwork.

  The Thing was too weak to spin out his true fire, his full strength, but there were other pleasures in life. Almost as enjoyable as a fire…was a good riot.

  Down below, Aldric tapped Sachiko, and began moving away from the rushing crowd, trying to track the Dragon. Sachiko, Taro, and the other Samurai, now on the ground, hurried to follow him.

  There was still time to kill this monster.

  Outside, part of the building was burning, but inside, Simon and Key hadn’t even smelled the smoke. They had other distractions.

  Simon fell back, as the other tigers tracked into the hall, with gleaming eyes and low growls. Feeding time had come.

  The horrified people trapped in the hallway pressed back, quieting their shouting, awed by the creeping tigers.

  Key yelled and started to come forward, as Simon motioned him to stay back.

  Suddenly, Mamoru burst into the hall. He kicked at the rear tiger, and it spun around, roaring, while the others were jostled and turned in a snarling commotion to stare down the Samurai.

  Key started yelling at the animals, trying to distract them. Simon watched him, amazed, not sure if he should respect him or call him the stupidest person on earth.

  The tigers turned at the noise, seeming confused.

  The shocked and confused crowd hung back, whispering in terror, trying not to provoke the tigers. Simon and Mamoru were the ones closest to the angry creatures, and they could see the whispers were only agitating the beasts.

  Desperate, Key climbed up to the low ceiling and began monkeying his way across the wooden slats, trying to get above the tigers. But his hand accidentally struck some sort of a trapdoor in the ceiling and a dark passageway opened above his head!

  Everyone looked up.

  Butterflies fluttered out of the dark opening.

  It seemed to be a channel used for releasing prisoners to the tigers.

  “Up here,” said Key, and he put out his hand, helping Simon up. Wooden slats along the wall gave Simon a foothold, but he was hampered by his backpack. He looked back to see one of the tigers leaping at Mamoru, pinning him against the wall.

  Simon looked at Key, desperate for ideas, but the Japanese boy had slipped into the opening in the ceiling, and was up there muttering something about levers.

  “We need some way to bait them,” yelled Simon, crawling up behind him. “What are you wasting time with?”

  But Key stared back at him, looking over from a series of wooden levers. Calmly, the boy hit one and Simon heard a clicking below. Looking down through the trapdoor, he saw a wooden gate lowering in the middle of the hall.

  Mamoru saw it, too, and twisted free of the tiger, slipping to safety just as the big gate slammed down, trapping the tigers in the hallway.

  “I thought that was the right lever,” Key said simply.

  All right, thought Simon. From now on you handle the technical stuff.

  The crowd below broke into cheers for Mamoru. He smiled at them in tired triumph.

  “COME ON!” yelled Simon.

  Key found another lever, opening a gateway for the crowd to get out into the street. No sooner did the crowd shuffle onward than the wooden gate was rattled by the tigers, eager to get free from their traps.

  Mamoru leapt upward to the trapdoor. Simon helped pull him up.

  “You need to think about a diet,” Simon groaned.

  “You need to think about bigger muscles,” the Samurai retorted.

  He pushed away Simon’s hand. “The Tiger Dragon’s men, they overtook me on the street and threw me in there. I got lost from Taro and the others.”

  “Look,” whispered Key. Simon and Mamoru moved up to join him. He was pointing at a doorway up a ramp, where dozens of butterflies were clinging. The insects were bright blue and unnaturally beautiful.

  “The Serpent is there,” whispered Mamoru. “With luck, we can surprise it.”

  He took Simon’s sword from him and moved up the ramp toward the door.

  Mamoru forced it open.

  A Dragon stared back at them from the dark little bedroom.

  It was the Black Dragon of Peking.

  Amid the chaos of the Bombay streets in the hot afternoon sun, Aldric ran, leading the Samurai toward the building where the Dragon of Japan had crouched. Sachiko barrelled inside just behind them. It was an office building, with rows of desks and telephones, but no one was inside—the occupants were now rushing away madly in fear of fire.

  Aldric rushed up a stairway cluttered with papers and debris, and the others followed close behind him. The second floor brought the stink of something rotten and an infestation of flies. The insects swirled around in great swarms, the glass-paneled offices absolutely filled with the pests.

  Aldric batted them away, bowing his head to avoid the buzzing insects, and made his way down a corridor to a giant balcony, where a terrible stench mingled with the scent of fire and ash.

  Looking out across the city, he could find no sign of the Dragon on the nearby rooftops. But on his right, nearly abutting the office building, was the palace with the carved tigers. He could see that on its side, the second floor was covered with many boarded-up windows painted with Indian scenes. And perched at the ledge there, several pigeons wriggled in unison, their wings opening and closing nervously in exactly the same way. All of the birds were black.

  “Serpent,” said Taro.

  But Aldric was already sidling along the office ledge. He leapt across the narrow space to the Tiger Palace, and his momentum brought his body through the boarded-up window, which cracked apart easily, the pigeons scattering, as he landed in a dark bedroom.

  His eyes adjusted quickly, and suddenly he was staring at the Black Dragon of Peking.

  “Knight,” said the old Chinese Dragon. A canary chirped at his shoulder.

  “Dad,” said a voice, and Aldric looked past the beast to see Simon
standing at an open door with Key and Mamoru.

  There was only a split second for them to react to the shock of seeing each other before the other Dragonhunters burst through the window behind Aldric.

  “Kyoshi!” yelled Sachiko, but the boy froze, afraid to step toward her with the Black Dragon in his path.

  Taro raised his crossbow, but a hand materialized out of the darkness and pushed it down. Surprised, he didn’t resist. It was a female hand, and Simon watched in awe as a ripple of light swept up the woman’s arm, until it revealed her completely, lifting away the invisibility magic that had fooled even his St. George eyes.

  “Nobody fire a shot,” said the woman.

  It was Alaythia.

  Chapter 31

  ENEMIES AND ALLIES

  OUTSIDE THE PALACE, THE fire began to die out, its gold and silver mysteries instantly becoming nothing more than rumor and legend.

  There had been some damage, but the real problem was the rampant fear that followed. Authorities arriving on the scene couldn’t understand how flames could take on the colors of a metal junkyard; they couldn’t see how the blaze had started nor how it had gone out. In truth, the Japanese Serpent had brought an end to his own fire—no doubt because of the Tiger Dragon.

  Simon thought he had it figured out: the two were meeting in a cease-fire. If the Japanese Dragon burned down Issindra’s den, it would certainly enrage her. It was risky enough for the Japanese Creature to be prowling and spying around the Indian palace. You couldn’t know what she would do in response…

  With just about everybody chattering at once, Alaythia kept the Samurai at bay as they stared in anger and amazement at the Chinese Black Dragon. Aldric took Alaythia’s hands, pulling her away from the Dragon, not saying a word. As Simon watched them, he felt a surge of joy that she was all right, but he was soon distracted by the Samurai, who were clamoring to know what was happening. Alaythia soon quieted them, but it took some time for events and histories to be sorted out.

  A few black buzzards drawn to the Black Dragon skittered and flapped about the storage room as Alaythia began to speak. It was much as Simon had thought. Back in New England, she had indeed gotten a powerful idea from her encounter with that Dragon skull: it was possible to contact a Dragon’s spirit.

  While Aldric and Simon slept, she dug up an obscure Celtic passage in the Book of Saint George that she’d never understood before, a spell for speaking to a Dragon. Using it, she began calling to the Black Dragon in her mind, on a plane of communication not understood by ordinary men. And the Black Dragon had answered.

  “How did you know you could trust him?” Simon asked her.

  “I didn’t,” she admitted. “But in that moment, we had the same mind—thoughts and feelings passed between us, and that made me feel somehow…safer. I was desperate. I knew the Serpents could sense my emotions and track me. I had to trust someone.”

  She had agreed to meet him in the Atlantic Ocean, a neutral place away from the territories of other Serpents. But the Ice Serpent had tracked him, and attacked them at sea. They escaped on her rented boat after the Black Dragon’s vessel was destroyed in the fight, leaving Simon and Aldric to pick up the trail.

  Alaythia and the Black Dragon had found refuge on an island near India. The Dragon told her he had been following the growing tension between the Tiger Dragon and the Japanese Dragon, and he knew a major confrontation was looming.

  Simon felt himself grow cold at the prospect of telling Alaythia the Japanese Dragon had tremendous new power, that he probably planned to unfurl his fire all over Asia, and perhaps create offspring with the same capability. Luckily, Simon was saved from this anxiety; Aldric told her instead, and as she stood there, shaken, he related their encounter with the Ice Dragon.

  She already knew the Ice Serpent was involved from their encounter in the Atlantic Ocean. She was not sure of his plan, only that he and the Black Dragon had grown to despise each other.

  Simon began to feel they were all being manipulated by the icy Creature, one way or another. But the Hunters had to admit, they didn’t know how the Ice Dragon fell into the mix with the other two Serpents. Unfortunately, Alaythia knew little more than they did. Oddly, as Alaythia recounted her story there in the palace, no one—not a Serpent nor one of its guardians—attacked the Dragonhunters.

  “They do not know we are here,” said the Black Dragon. “This is the lair of the Tiger Dragon, Issindra. She believes all that happens here is the result of her own magic. She does not suspect I am living within her very palace walls.”

  They were directly above a palace death chamber, one of the feeding rooms for the Tiger Dragon. Simon could see through knots in the wood below him, a bare floor covered in human bones, and coils of snakeskin. He suppressed a shiver.

  “She isn’t here,” Simon observed.

  “She is searching for the Japanese Serpent in the streets now,” said the Black Dragon. “We’re safe. She’ll not find me when she returns.”

  Taro eyed the Black Dragon suspiciously. “Maybe she doesn’t find you because she doesn’t want to. Maybe you and she have made a bargain.”

  “For what?” Alaythia asked. “If he meant to kill us, it’d be easy enough with one blast of fire right now.”

  “I want no more of warfare,” said the Black Dragon wearily. “There shall be no more battles for me. I am old, I have no children, and the only legacy I leave behind will be this help I bring to you. I have thought long and hard on this. There will be a place in the history books for me, perhaps, in your stories. Otherwise, as you say, I am ashes and dust.”

  Akira would have none of it. “You turn your back on your own kind?”

  “That is the way of my kind. Always in struggle and hatred. But, it seems, even a Dragon can get old enough to desire peace and quiet.”

  “Peace and quiet is not what awaits us,” Akira snarled.

  “No. The Japanese Dragon’s newfound power will plague us all. He stole that secret from my very own den. I am too weak to use the scroll’s firespell, but I consider it my fault that it still exists. I should have destroyed it. I will do what I can for you now. That is all I can do.”

  Taro tapped nervously at his scabbard. “The Tiger Dragon cannot sense you? Cannot find you here in her own domain?” he asked the Black Dragon.

  “Not even at this moment,” said Alaythia. “It’s this magic that I’m seeking from him. The ability to cloak a presence. I’ve been learning it slowly.”

  Alaythia told them the Black Dragon had allowed the tiger feeding to go on because he knew Simon and the others could fend for themselves and would be drawn to him. The servants of the Tiger Dragon put on this kind of spectacle regularly, and the Black Dragon had always saved the victims by putting the tigers to sleep. Simon could tell the Samurai did not seem willing to believe any of this yet.

  “You trust this Thing?” said Taro sharply.

  “I trust her,” said Aldric, nodding at Alaythia.

  Simon looked at the Dragon. “He helped us before. He’s not like the others.”

  “How good is this hiding-magic? We seemed to find him without trouble,” said Akira unhappily, staring at the Chinese Creature.

  “I had hopes you would.” The Black Dragon returned their gazes meekly, his tiny canary wriggling at his shoulder. “If I tried anything else to draw your attentions, that might have been overheard, detected. It was the best I could do.”

  “I didn’t want you to come,” Alaythia admitted to Aldric. “Dragons in a turf war is too dangerous for anyone. I wanted to handle this myself. But you kept poking your nose around.”

  “Your fear for me is what’s dangerous,” Aldric said, “to yourself and to all of us.”

  Alaythia frowned at him. “Guess what. I get to decide what’s dangerous for me. I even get to decide if I want to put you in danger or not.”

  “Can you tell if she’s trustworthy?” Taro asked Sachiko. She looked Alaythia in the eye, measuring her truthfulness, and Simon se
nsed the raw power in the air, two Magicians together for the first time in decades. The hair on his arms tingled.

  “I can’t be sure,” Sachiko said. “She’s powerful. If she wanted to, she could’ve struck us hard the moment we entered.”

  The Samurai were on edge, but for the moment they were appeased. They kept their weapons at the ready, watchful of the Black Dragon. But in the end, Simon felt they realized everyone had the same goal: to eliminate these two powerful Serpents before they joined together and created an army from their offspring.

  “The riddle and the problem,” said the Black Dragon, “is how to strike at the Serpents now.”

  “What do we know?” asked Aldric.

  He and the others huddled around the small Black Dragon in the dark room. The Japanese hunters never took their eyes off him. Sidelined, the boys hung back together and listened without drawing attention to themselves. According to Alaythia and the Black Dragon, who had eavesdropped on the palace for some time, the Tiger Dragon was now planning to meet with the Japanese Serpent to discuss how territories all over the world might be carved up. But Serpents never trust each other, and the situation could easily erupt into conflict.

  “The Tiger Dragon may have the upper hand,” Alaythia pointed out. “Now is the time for her to produce offspring; she’s been ready for this her whole life.”

  “Her advantage is the sleep chamber,” the Black Dragon explained. “At the top of this palace. It is as old as India itself. The jungle still lives within its walls, growing unnaturally. The room is covered in vines and overgrown trees, alive since the time when Issindra’s grandmothers ruled the continent. The chamber was built to kill rivals. Exactly how it works is her great secret. I have read in rare journals of the Old Age that the room was built of pillars of carved-stone snakes, and that any outside Dragon who enters becomes hypnotized by the sounds the stone Serpents make, and can never leave again.”

  “There are stories of this chamber in our writings,” said Taro.

  Aldric raised an eyebrow. Simon knew there was no such information in the Books of Saint George. “How is it,” Taro went on, “the Japanese Serpent doesn’t know of this?”