Shadowed By Wings

by Janine Cross

  The smell of death: the smell of my mother.

  Those unearthly shrieks: the sound of her love.

  The dragon before me bucked and yawed against her restraining muzzle, rage turned to fright. Dono and his helpers could no longer control her. The restraining hook notched into one of her nares ripped loose with a spray of blood, and she whirled and bolted out of the courtyard, dragging, for a short distance, one of the two apprentices holding the reins to her muzzle.

  Waikar Re Kratt moved from behind me and came into my view. With an inscrutable glance at me, he gestured at Dono to untie me.

  I slumped against my bindings and wept.

  When next I looked up, the Skykeeper was gone. The first star twinkled at me in her stead.

  By the time Dono finished unlashing me from the barrow, the dragonmaster had appeared. Ringus slipped from the dragonmaster’s side and unobtrusively joined the gathered apprentices before Kratt noticed him.

  The Komikon marched up to Kratt, chin braid swinging like an angry cat’s tail.

  “Lupini Re!” he barked. “What’s the meaning of this?”

  Kratt began languidly coiling his whip, running one palm over it, checking if any grit was embedded in the tightly woven braiding. He looked completely at ease, as if he’d just supped at banquet, not provoked the appearance of a deadly, supernatural creature.

  He didn’t answer the dragonmaster.

  Flushing, the dragonmaster whirled around to face his apprentices.

  “Get yourselves to the hovel, the lot of you! Have you nothing better to do than gawk at your future lord? Go, eat, sleep!” He turned back and stabbed a finger at me. “You stay.”

  A superfluous demand; I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. My legs were trembling violently and I was dizzy, breathing too fast. I shivered, feeling terribly, terribly cold, and the desire to curl up on the ground and close my eyes was intense.

  “Now, Lupini Re,” the dragonmaster said, his lower jaw thrust out pugnaciously, his eyes rolling as he struggled to retain a measure of control over his emotions. “Please tell me what in the name of Re just occurred here.”

  Kratt finished coiling his whip, hooked it back onto his belt, and with a lazy smile, regarded the dragonmaster.

  “I had need of proving that your deviant is indeed what you declared she was. Temple is anxious these days, Komikon, and that anxiety spills over into the Daron of my father’s Clutch. He pressures me to execute the girl as a rebel.”

  “She’s not Forsaken,” the dragonmaster said, glaring at me. “She’s no insurgent.”

  Forsaken?

  For a moment, I had the absurd notion that the dragonmaster knew I’d been abandoned as a child by my mother, that being forsaken had somehow branded me. Then I realized he was referring to the Hamlets of Forsaken, the agricultural communes that were springing up throughout Malacar without Temple’s consent—communes that functioned extremely well without Holy Wardens, egg stables, overlords, or Temple Statute.

  Communes reputed to be inhabited by insurgents plotting to overthrow the Emperor.

  “Insurgent or not, she challenges Temple,” Kratt said. “And Temple looks very unkindly upon any challenges as of late.”

  “You must ensure that the Daron leaves her be,” the dragonmaster growled, and his shoulders convulsed once, violently.

  “You will not direct me on what I should and should not do, old man. I believe I’ve warned you before.”

  The dragonmaster flushed. He rocked to and fro on his feet, muscles in his cheeks twitching in agitation.

  “Forgive me,” he eventually rasped, though he sounded anything but contrite. “I’m alarmed that you doubted her identity in the first place.”

  “Are you, now? I find that peculiar. You see, I’ve done much reading over the last few months, and I can find no mention of your precious prophecy anywhere.”

  “The Djimbi don’t record their prophecies!” the dragonmaster cried. “They sing, they tell stories, they … they …” He tugged his chin braid as he spluttered. “You’ve twice witnessed the appearance of the Skykeeper; what further proof do you need that the girl is what I tell you?”

  “The Daron is emphatic that she possesses an evil spirit. He says”—and here Kratt’s lips twisted with wry amusement, though his eyes went hard and bitter—“that the creature she summoned on Mombe Taro was but a demon.”

  “And now that you’ve seen it again, what do you think?” the dragonmaster demanded.

  Kratt studied me almost indifferently. “The renderings of Skykeepers that I’ve seen upon velum and parchment look remarkably like the creature she just summoned. Her creature does indeed appear to be a Guardian of the Celestial Realm.”

  “It is; it is! And think you what power you have, with a Skykeeper answering to this girl’s summons!” The dragonmaster clutched Kratt’s arm in his fervor. “Think what you might achieve with such a creature by your side!”

  Kratt looked back at him and disdainfully shook off the dragonmaster’s touch. “I require the Scroll of the Right-Headed Crane, Komikon. The Ranreeb insists upon seeing it himself. Now.”

  “It is safe, with someone I trust.”

  “That does me little good.”

  “The Ranreeb will destroy it.”

  “He’ll destroy this deviant if he doesn’t see the scroll for himself. Now is the time to bring forth your proof. I insist.”

  The dragonmaster gnashed his teeth.

  “Fine. I will … have it brought forth.”

  Kratt nodded in lazy satisfaction. “And does she understand dragonspeak yet?”

  The dragonmaster scowled and hunched his shoulders. He mumbled something. Neither Kratt nor I heard it. I found myself leaning forward, breath held, heart pounding.

  “Speak up, old man,” Kratt barked.

  “I said: She’s not yet undergone the rite in my stables.” A defensive, slightly defiant note crept into the dragonmaster’s tone. “I’ve been loath to subject her to it yet.”

  Kratt narrowed his eyes. “Is she or is she not the Dirwalan Babu?”

  “She is!”

  “Then why your reluctance?”

  The dragonmaster’s nostrils flared and again his eyes rolled. “I would first practice upon a few more inductees.”

  “I’m not known for my patience, Komikon. You told me your dragon was trained.”

  “She is.”

  “Then delay no more. Is that clear? I want the dragons’ secret before the Daron guesses my true purpose behind keeping the deviant in my stables. I want to see bull wings hatch.”

  One of his hands touched the whip coiled at his belt. “I’m under much pressure from Temple concerning her right now. Don’t force me to exert equal pressure upon you, old man. Get the Scroll of the Right-Headed Crane to me, and get her to lay with the dragon. Tonight.”

  NINE

  After Kratt left the stable domain, the dragonmaster summoned Dono from where he stood amongst the other apprentices, feigning interest in palm calluses and splinters. The dragonmaster spoke to him in a tense whisper, shot a harried look at me, then stalked out of the courtyard and disappeared into the night.

  Dono didn’t once look at me while we ate.

  Though truth to tell, I barely touched my gruel, which was cold because Ringus hadn’t the time or inclination to reheat it thoroughly, so addled was he—as were we all—from what had just occurred. Cold or hot, I had not appetite for the gruel, for I was badly shaken from Kratt’s deliberate provocation of the Skykeeper, and my thoughts were too cluttered to be concerned with such mundane matters as eating.

  For Kratt had talked about the rite, see.

  I was astonished that he knew of the secret rite where a woman and a dragon joined, and that he knew, too, that such an intimacy imparted the dragon’s unintelligible memories to the woman; dragonspeak, Kratt had called it. I’d spent half my life in a convent where such a rite had been routinely and clandestinely performed by a small group of holy women, and I’d
learned of the act only late in my adolescence.

  Certainly, rumors abounded throughout Malacar about perversions committed by the jungle Djimbi, but a wide assortment of atrocities were lavishly ascribed the Mottled Bellies, regardless of accuracy, and most were readily dismissed. So where had Kratt learned about the validity of the bestial rite?

  From the dragonmaster, I guessed.

  Somehow, Komikon Re knew about it.

  I want the dragons’ secret before the Daron guesses my true purpose behind keeping the deviant in my stables. I want to see bull wings hatch.

  That’s what Kratt had said.

  Which insinuated, shockingly, that those of high status in Temple might know of the rite, too.

  I clutched my head between my hands, my thoughts whirling.

  What did it all mean, Temple and dragonspeak?

  It came to me then, and I actually bolted upright with the epiphany.

  I want to see bull wings hatch.

  Kratt would only defy Temple if he had something great to gain by it. What greater thing than the answer to the mystery as to why eggs laid by domestic dragons never produced bulls?

  What unprecedented power and wealth would fall into Kratt’s hands if he learned the answer to that riddle, if he could one day hatch bull dragons in captivity!

  The very fabric of Malacarite society revolved around the scarcity of bulls, understand. The social and economic clout Kratt would have, should he have a stable filled with bulls, would be unparalleled. He could rent out stud services cheaper than every Clutch in Malacar. He could breed his bulls to his Clutch brooder dragons whenever he wanted, increasing his herd exponentially, without waiting to attend the Temple-controlled Arena. Indeed, he could even have his own Arena, one with fewer regulations, fewer tariffs than Temple’s.

  He could build his own empire. Waikar Re Kratt, child of a blue-eyed Xxelteker ebani, would become Temple.

  But first he needed the answer to the dragons’ secret, and he plainly thought that I, as the Dirwalan Babu, would understand the beasts’ ancestral memories and learn the secret if I lay before one of his destriers.

  A pair of feet appeared before me. I looked up, mind reeling, scarcely able to comprehend my situation. Dono stood before me.

  “Get up, hey-o,” he said, not unkindly. “You’re to follow me.”

  I licked my dry lips and my heart raced. I didn’t move.

  “Where are you taking her?” Eidon asked in his rich, low voice.

  “Dragonmaster’s orders,” Dono barked. In other words: Mind your own business.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Eidon nodded once, brusquely, and turned back to his game of darali abin famoo. He would show me guarded favor, yes. But he’d not raise a finger to protect me against the Komikon’s will.

  Dono extended a hand to help me upright. I stared at it. Here, finally, was the support from him that I’d so longed for. With a trembling hand, I reached out. His fingers closed warm and strong about mine. He wouldn’t meet my gaze, though, as I rose to my feet.

  “This way,” he grunted, and he started across the courtyard. Taking an unsteady breath, I followed him.

  We walked in silence. Not side by side, but with me several paces behind Dono. I shivered as I walked and trembled, and at first my thoughts raced wildly, dashing from Temple to Kratt, dragon tongue to enigmatic dragonsong. The maelstrom of emotion accompanying each half-formed thought overwhelmed me, and my thoughts grew more erratic and incoherent still. Eventually my mind shut down into a sort of catatonic state, and I walked as if in a trance.

  Through the stable yards we walked, beyond the grain silos, into a quadrant of the dragonmaster’s domain that I’d not yet entered. A great stone byre with a steeply peaked and tiled roof and massive upswept eaves loomed ahead. Our footsteps sounded muted as we approached it. The pungent musk-and-leather smell of a bull dragon, laced heavily with the citric tang of venom, dominated the air.

  Huge ceramic Skykeepers encircled the entire building, each shadowed visage more contorted and fierce than the last, each outspread wing touching that of its neighbor. As we passed the sentinels, clay eyes bored into our backs.

  It felt as if I were being watched by a thousand of my mother’s haunts.

  A breeze skulked about us. Above our heads came an eerie rainfall of rattling. I stopped and looked up. Hundreds of miniature skeletons dangled from the byre’s eaves.

  Dono paused, then turned to me.

  “Chimes,” he murmured, and his voice seemed intrusive in the sinister silence that followed the rattling from above. “Made from the foot bones of eight hundred dragons.”

  “Why?” I croaked.

  “The Gyin-gyin is carved onto each bone,” Dono explained. “Each time they clatter, it represents eight hundred recitals of the Temple chant.”

  The Gyin-gyin: the chant that evoked the triumvirate power of the Temple of the Dragon, the One Dragon in the Celestial Realm, and our Clutch bull. No evil could penetrate such protection.

  Then why did I feel that the place was so dark?

  Dono bent, picked something up from the ground. He hefted its weight a few times in his palm, then thrust it out to me.

  “Take this,” he said gruffly.

  I did. A coarse, dusty rock fell solid into my outstretched hand.

  “Hit me over the back of the head with it,” Dono said. “Then run.”

  I stared at him.

  “Do it, Zarq. Hard enough to knock me out. Make it look real.”

  I looked down at the rock in my hand.

  Looked back up at him.

  “The Komikon’ll whip you,” I whispered.

  His larynx worked in his throat. “I know.”

  “Dono—”

  “Just do it.”

  He turned his back on me.

  I stared at the round part of his skull I should hit. Stared again at the rock in my hand. I dropped the rock at my feet.

  Dono flinched at the dull thud, paused a moment, then turned.

  Disbelief, then anger, flooded his face.

  “I won’t do it,” I said. “I won’t strike another down.”

  “Don’t be yolk brained, Zarq! Do you have any idea where I’m taking you, what the dragonmaster’s going to make you do?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

  He digested that a moment and the muscles in his neck bulged. “You are a deviant. Aren’t you?”

  “It’s not the way you think it is.”

  “Those two inductees that disappeared from the hovel last month were brought here, Zarq. I’m the one who dragged their bodies out when the dragonmaster was finished with them.”

  “How many others, over the years?”

  He looked away, could barely answer. “Too many.”

  “What other apprentice knows?”

  “Just me.” He looked back at me and swallowed hard. He bent, picked up the rock. “I’ll knock myself out, then. Just run.”

  I reached out and placed a cold hand over his warm one.

  “I’ll survive it, Dono. Take me to him.”

  We turned the corner of Re’s byre, and beyond the great stable stood yet another sandstone archway. The dragonmaster stood beneath it, his bandy form silhouetted against a vast oval field of dust and scrub and great tree stumps. At our approach, the dragonmaster turned and began crossing the ravaged field.

  Dono followed. He walked slouched, as if against a gale, and refused to look at me.

  Trembling under the black sea of glittering starlight, I followed the dragonmaster and Dono across the blighted oval field, around the tree stumps, which, I could now see, weren’t tree stumps at all but stout stone pillars rising up from the ground, each topped by thick downward-pointing hooks. The ground itself had been rutted and scored by hundreds of dragon talons. A long, low building crowned by a silver-plated dome stood on the far side of the field. We were walking directly toward it.

  My heartbeat skittered and a dreadful anticipation pimpled the skin on
my arms.

  We reached the domed building. A wide, walled stone ramp ran the length of it, leading down to a gated tunnel that appeared to run directly beneath the building. In silence, the dragonmaster started down the ramp.

  How dark that tunnel at the ramp’s base. How chill the air wafting from its maw. I came to a stop.

  The dragonmaster reached the bottom of the ramp and paused before the gated tunnel. He bent over something, moved his arms; rusted steel screeched as he winched open the tunnel’s iron barricade.

  Shoulders hunched, Dono stared at the oval field. In the starlight, I saw a muscle in his jaw flicker. “This is where I wait,” he growled. “You go in there alone, with him.”

  I shuddered, shuddered again. Wrapped my arms about myself to stave off a little of the damp chill emanating from the tunnel.

  Slowly, I started down the ramp.

  The walls on either side of me were as high as my chin; I felt blinkered, felt as if I were being funneled into blindness.

  It was coarsely pebbled, that ramp, constructed from a stone-hard, seamless material, and it was as slick underfoot as if it had been recently dredged from a swamp. The slickness increased to an algae-thick film the closer I drew to the maw of the tunnel. Mosquitoes whined about my head.

  I entered the tunnel.

  One step. Two steps. Two clawful steps forward and then my feet touched water. I stopped. Cautiously, I shuffled forward a bit farther. Yes, water. The tunnel descended into water. What in the name of Re was this place?

  I would not descend blind into unknown waters. No. Clenching my jaw to still the clacking of my teeth, I looked back toward the entrance. Revealed by the incline behind me and the starlight seeping into the tunnel was that which I’d not seen before: a raised, narrow pathway that ran alongside the walled ramp I stood on. A raised pathway that was so narrow it would only just accommodate a fully grown man.

  With much scraping of knees and elbows, I clambered out of the walled ramp and landed, panting, on the adjacent pathway.