Dragon Breeder 5

by Dante King

  I sighed. “I’ve got bad news for you, Zala. It’s the same the universe over.”

  “You don’t know what I have done, though,” Zala said. “I have slain my handler. I have cut at the hand of the Grand Master. The Shaykh Antizah might not have been the one directly striking at me with rod and whip, but he is the one who controls me, and who controlled that corpulent grotesqueness. He will surely punish me for killing one of my fellow tools.”

  I snapped my fingers under the catmancer’s nose, and she blinked. She gave her head a little shake and looked up at me.

  “Zala,” I said, a bit of my Earthly impatience asserting itself. “What in the sweet name of hell is going on here?”

  In reply, Zala reached up with both hands and pulled at the faded linen shirt that she was clad in. Part of me thought, just for a second, that this was some sort of ultra-blatant diversionary tactic. However, instead of just getting her melons out and then icing me, the catmancer exposed her chest—more specifically her breastbone.

  “What in the world is that?” Renji muttered, craning forward.

  Right between Zala’s breasts was a strange rune. I could not tell whether it was a tattoo of sorts, a brand, or some implanted insignia. It looked like a cat’s eye to me, with an eyelash that looked like a bird’s wing.

  “Zala, what is that?” I asked.

  “It is the mark of the Grand Master of One and All, the Shaykh Antizah,” Zala said.

  “You’re going to have to be a bit more specific than that,” I admitted. “I’m still not really following you.”

  “It is his proprietary stamp,” Zala explained, running a finger across the weird branding. “The Shaykh has all his catmancers stuck with it.”

  “Why?” Renji asked.

  “The Shaykh makes all of us, all his warrior slaves, undergo a dark ritual where the blood of the catmancers and the blood of their cats are combined with the blood of the Shaykh himself.”

  In a flash, I was reminded of my old, short-lived pal, Captain Remington Cade. He had been somewhat of a bigwig at the Drako Academy; in charge of Rank One Dragonmancers, and a man who thrived on squeezing as much power out of his primarily administrative role as he could.

  He had also been as crazy in the coconut as anyone I had ever met. We had been required to put the mad fucker down after finding out that he had been trying to blend the blood of captured dragons with those of his followers.

  “Through this ritual,” Zala continued, “the catmancers are irreparably bonded to the Shaykh, granting him vast power.”

  “How does he gain any power from such a union?” I asked.

  “Because the ceremony entails the catmancers binding their souls to him,” Zala said, and there was a note of hopelessness in her voice. “He has power over them, to cause them great agony should they not do precisely what he wants of them.”

  “He makes slaves of them—of you?” I asked. If I did not speak through grinding teeth, it was only because my jaw was clenched so tight at the thought of the Shaykh making slaves that my teeth had no room to maneuver.

  Zala nodded. “Yes. Slaves,” she said simply.

  Without any warning, before I could even answer this incredible revelation, Zala suddenly cried out. She sat back on her haunches and yowled at the sky, and the rune on her chest glowed a violent red.

  “Ah,” said a calm and controlled voice from behind me, “Mike Noctis, what a shame. I had had great hopes that the Mystocean visit could have taken place without revealing the secret of the Akritites, of my people.”

  It was Shaykh Antizah. Despite his sanguine voice, his eyes glittered with pent-up rage. His bearded face was grim. His mouth was flat. His expression dark and vicious.

  “Your secret?” I spat. “That little uncommunicated and covered up fact that you have been churning out slaves here, all for your own personal power? That little secret? Have you had visitors come to call lately, Shaykh?”

  The Shaykh sneered. “Not lately, no. But we have had visitors, yes. The Bloodletting Ceremony was revealed to us by emissaries from the Shadow Nations who arrived well before your foolish leaders even thought to come knocking.”

  I swallowed.

  “The Shadow Nations…” Renji said.

  “Yes, the Shadow Nations,” the Shaykh affirmed. “A theatrically melodramatic name, but there can be no denying they know a trick or two about magic. And they were willing to share it with me, in return for certain concessions.”

  Zala was screaming next to me as the Shaykh started to apply the psychological thumbscrews to her, to kill her, without even touching her.

  “What are you doing to her?” I asked, trying to resist the urge to cross the space that divided us and tear the other man’s throat out with my bare hands.

  “I have her essence in my grip,” the Shaykh said casually. “She gave it to me, the fool. Zala is strong, though. If she does not offer her life to me as a good slave should, it might take me days to break her and drive her mind into the black depths of a pain-ravaged insanity that she cannot escape.”

  Days. Mere days.

  Struck by inspiration, and not wanting to have to put up with any more of Shaykh Antizah’s bullshit boastings, I hit the bastard with a concentrated blast of Forcewave.

  He hadn’t been expecting it. I hadn’t really been expecting to do it, if I was honest. However, I knew deep down that I couldn’t just go killing leaders of countries, no matter how much they might deserve it. Not just yet at any rate.

  The Shaykh was hurled backward and crashed through a wooden door that he had stepped through, half knocking it off its hinges.

  “Renji!” I cried, stooping to gather Zala up in my arms. “Renji, it’s time to go!”

  Renji was as chilled out as a fish on ice. She asked no questions. Her only response was to summon her gleaming Steel Dragon, Corvar, into being in the courtyard.

  “We ride together,” she said, keeping her eye on where Shaykh Antizah had disappeared.

  The Shaykh did not reappear. I was just wondering when or how he was going to get back at us when, from the depths of the palace, a horn began to sound.

  With the blasting of the Shaykh, Zala had stopped screaming and writhing. Now, she said, “That... is...the alarm call.”

  “Great,” I muttered.

  I tossed Zala up to Renji, who was already astride Corvar, and then climbed easily up behind her. Zala sat slumped between the two of us.

  “All aboard?” Renji asked.

  “Fly,” I said curtly, making sure that I was holding onto the stricken catmancer.

  We took off in a bunching of muscles and a rush of wings. Within seconds, we had left the palace and its alarm bell behind. We rushed through the cloudless sky, over the incredible city, dodging past a few high towers as we gained altitude.

  I barely had time to wonder how the hell I was going to let Tamsin and Hana know what had befallen us, when the Force Dragon, Fyzos, swept down from out of the sun. On his back rode my other two companions.

  “Where the…? How…?” I stuttered over the rush of the wind.

  “We were shopping in the bazaar,” Tamsin said with a tight grin. “When Hana and I came across, well, were accosted more truthfully, by a strange woman.”

  “She handed us something, Mike,” Hana called to me. “A small coin with a strange insignia.”

  “What kind of insignia?” I asked.

  “It’s a simple tower with a hawk hovering over it,” the bearmancer told me.

  “Not knowing what that meant or why the old crone had picked us out, we thought it was best we head back to the palace before you managed to land yourself in trouble,” Tamsin said.

  “And by the time we were halfway there,” Hana said, “the alarm started ringing and we took off.”

  “Zala,” I asked, leaning forward so that I could speak into the limp catmancer’s ears, “can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” came the weak reply. “The pain has receded, but it will come again soon, I gue
ss. As long as I am with you, the Shaykh will be able to find you.”

  “Did you hear what my friends said? About the coin and the insignia?” I asked. “What does it mean? Where does it come from?”

  Zala cleared her throat and hunkered in closer to me. Despite the warmth of the air we were speeding through, she looked as if she was cold.

  “I know… what the insignia means,” she said sluggishly, her voice slurring just a little. “All catmancers do. It is the insignia of a rebel faction.”

  “Rebels who stand against Shaykh Antizah?” I asked.

  Zala nodded with apparent effort. “They are said to gather in the desert, in an oasis that doesn’t exist.”

  Before I could ask the possibly futile question of where this nonexistent oasis was, the catmancer slumped backward against my chest. Looking at her, I saw that she was still breathing but apparently unconscious.

  Shit, I thought, the pain and agony that the Shaykh exerted on her must have been fierce, if it was bad enough to do that to a mancer.

  I racked my brain then, trying to think where we were meant to go. We couldn’t just leave Akrit. We wanted whatever lay in this area of the Subterranean Realm that could be accessed via the Shaykh’s entrances, whatever secret we might find in the Fateseeker’s Cavern. And clearly there was something down there. I doubted that the Shadow Nations would have sent representatives bargaining and sniffing around if there hadn’t been.

  Would these rebels be able to help us?

  Would I be going beyond my mission parameters to enlist their help if they were willing to give it?

  These were key questions.

  And then there were all those catmancer women who were enslaved to the Shaykh through the Bloodletting Ceremony.

  I had to do something, but what?

  “Mike,” Noctis’ wise voice said, cutting through my scattered and flashing thoughts like a blowtorch through a stick of butter. “Mike, that worm you fought in the desert. You recall it?”

  It was a giant maggot as fat as a three-story building when it was lying down, I thought of saying. How in the heck am I not going to remember that?

  “Yes, I remember it,” I said. “Why?”

  “It was strange,” Noctis said thoughtfully in my head. “I believe it was not a mindless creature.”

  “Without being too abrupt and rude, Noctis,” I said as Tamsin’s dragon closed in to Corvar’s right wing, “what the hell are you getting at?”

  Noctis’ flash of thought was the mental equivalent of someone flaring their nostrils haughtily.

  “If you trust me,” he said, “you will go there. Go back to where you fought the worm. I feel as if the answer to what you are supposed to do, or where you are supposed to go, next will be revealed.”

  Seemed thin to me.

  Seemed fucking anorexic.

  But when had that ever stopped us?

  I relayed the instructions into Renji’s ear, and Corvar turned his head west and aimed for the desert that stretched out before us like a lethal, sandy sea.

  Chapter 12

  Despite all the thoughts and half-plans and schemes running through my dragon-shared mind, there was something undeniably soothing about the vista that stretched around us. It might have been a fat piece of nothing, that desert. There might have been nada of any real note to see or hear, but underneath it all, I got the impression that there was this huge throbbing power just beyond my ears and eyes.

  “What are… you thinking about, Dragonmancer,” Zala said, stirring feebly against my chest.

  I took a deep breath in. We were only flying at about one-hundred feet above the ground and the dusky air was pleasantly cool after the searing heat of the day.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” the catmancer said. “No one goes that quiet unless… they are doing… some serious prognosticating.”

  I snorted softly.

  “I guess I was just lost in philosophical thoughts,” I replied.

  Zala tried to sit up, but all she managed to do was roll her head across my shoulder. Her sable hair tickled my nose, and I had to raise my chin so that my lips weren’t buried in it. It smelled good, her hair, like pomegranates and white rose and cardamom.

  “Yes,” Zala said softly, her words still wrung with pain, “the desert… is like wine in that respect. Drink in enough... of it and a person will become an expert sage and dreamer in no time.”

  I laughed and, without thinking too much about it, put my arm around the catmancer. Just to make sure that she wasn’t going to slip off, you know.

  I liked to think that not too much surprised me nowadays, but the coming of the night did. It came in fast over the desert. As if the lack of clouds or hills or trees allowed the mauve dusk to flow in all the faster. The sky changed from azure blue to a deep purple as we flew on. The fires that seemed to light the sands from within dimmed.

  “We are not far now, Father,” Pan told me as the first stars appeared above us.

  “Only a couple more miles,” Brenna affirmed, not wanting to be outdone by one of her male siblings.

  I thanked the two dragons internally and then said to Zala, “So, this coin with the insignia on…”

  “The rebel tower and floating hawk?” Zala said.

  “Yeah. These rebels, they oppose the Shaykh presumably?” I asked.

  Zala sighed wearily. “Yes, they oppose him.” She seemed to be keeping to short, clipped sentences, as if they tired her less than long explanations. “It is not so surprising, really.”

  “No?”

  “No. Shaykh Antizah can be cunning and ruthless, yes. He can, however, also take the direct approach to ruling.”

  “The tyrannical approach?” I guessed.

  “Yes. When he came to power, he put his heel on the throat of Akrit. Keeping a stranglehold on the finances of everyday folk. If they were preoccupied each day with the simple task of getting by, it would leave less time to plot against him.”

  “Sounds like the man has always had a bit of an inferiority complex,” I said. “Had his back up against the wall as soon as he set foot into his special silk Shaykh boxers, or whatever it is that makes a shaykh.”

  “Politics in Akrit is fraught with peril,” Zala said. “Has always been this way.”

  “So, are there a lot of these rebels?” I asked.

  Zala chuckled, but the laugh turned into a cough. She gasped a few times while I held her safely and then said, “I am a catmancer. Was one of Shaykh Antizah’s most trusted and dangerous slaves. I know only what few whispers have come to my ears over the years. The rebels are secretive and shadowy—as they should be. A fate worse than death would await them should Shaykh Antizah or any of his slaves find them.”

  She touched the strange branding between her breasts. I thought I knew what she was thinking: that mark could draw the Shaykh to her. And, in turn, to us and these rebels that we were setting out to find.

  My musings were broken by Noctis.

  “We are at the sight of the battle of the worm,” he told me.

  I looked down. I couldn’t lie, it all looked like desert to me.

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “I would not say so if I was not sure, Mike,” Noctis said matter-of-factly.

  “Renji,” I said, leaning over Zala’s shoulder so that I could speak into the djinn’s ear. “Renji, get Corvar circling that patch of desert down here. Let’s see if we can see anything.”

  Renji nodded, and Corvar dipped his wing.

  We circled the patch of desert where we had apparently gone toe to… ass? with that gargantuan desert maggot. There was nothing there now, if that had been the place. No crushed, imploded corpse. I wondered what had become of it. Eaten or salvaged by some desert scavenger, maybe?

  The light was fading fast, but dragonmancers can see by the light of the moon and stars easily enough when required. The moon that was rising over the rim of the desert horizon was looking like it was going to sit like a polished s
ilver dollar in the sky soon enough.

  “Does anyone see anything?” I called to Hana and Tamsin as Fyzos and Corvar circled the area slowly.

  Tamsin’s midnight black hair was streaming out behind her like a black banner, while Hana craned down beside Fyzos’ flank, trying to discern anything on the sand dunes below.

  “Nothing,” Tamsin said.

  “Nothing—wait!” Hana said. “The coin!”

  Even from where Renji, Zala, and I were flying, I saw the sudden burst of yellow light emanate from Hana’s palm.

  With a startled gasp, the bearmancer fumbled the coin, and it tumbled into space.

  “Gods, I dropped it!” Hana cursed.

  The glowing coin fell down, down, down.

  It landed in the sand and sat there glowing for a few moments.

  And then, it disappeared—not the glow, but the coin itself.

  “Where the hell did that just go?” I asked no one in particular.

  With a great hissing sound, like a thousand snakes being roasted over hot coals, the sand where the coin had landed started to sink. Within two seconds, the floor of that particular patch of desert looked like dark orange, granular bath water that was getting sucked away, down the mother of all drains. The hiss rose to a roar and then, suddenly, there was a staircase entrance revealed in the previously blank canvas of the dunes.

  “I would like to say that that was intentional,” Hana said. “I’m not sure if that would fly though.”

  “Hey, you had the coin,” I said. “If there are any kudos to be handed out, then it’s going straight to you, Hana.”

  Renji must have given Corvar the mental nudge to descend, because a moment later, the sleek Steel Dragon had touched down. Renji dismounted first, and I passed Zala down to her. Beside us, Hana thumped down onto the sand before Fyzos had even set claw to earth.

  While Hana and Renji helped the weakened Zala along, I took the lead and walked over to the previously hidden staircase. Tamsin padded along behind me, dispelling Fyzos back into his crystal. Renji did the same with Corvar.

  The sun was almost completely set now. Night was in the ascendency. The mouth of the staircase looked to be built out of simply cut sandstone blocks, though much more than that I couldn’t make out in the dim light.