by Janine Cross
Dim light ahead, cast from a flickering sconce situated in a junction where the corridor forked yet again. Two silhouettes appeared in that pool of light, one bandy-legged, one cloaked in a cape. I was trapped, front and behind. I stumbled. Fell.
“Mother!” I hoarsely cried, willing the haunt to appear and endow me with inhuman strength, even at the cost of being imprisoned forever within my own flesh.
Opalescence danced before my eyes, stippling the dark with blanched blue. Shattered into a thousand grains throughout me, the haunt incandesced, tried to coalesce. It felt as if hot drops of wax were trying to join together in my veins, yet cold water solidified them as isolated beads. The haunt was depleted, hadn’t had sufficient time to renew its strength.
“Mother, save me!”
“That’s her,” one of the sconce-lit silhouettes cried, and they broke into a run toward me. I looked wildly to the opposite end of the corridor: A Retainer dressed as an acolyte emerged from the darkness. He stopped and raised his arms, elbows akimbo.
I would be impaled on his spear.
“Mother!” I cried again, and metal streaked through the air like a blade of lightning, a dagger thrown by one of the two sconce-lit silhouettes. The dagger glanced off the Retainer’s left shoulder just as he loosed his spear; the spear sailed drunkenly through the air and hissed onto the ground a hand’s breadth from my body.
The scent of perfumed oils rushed by me as the caped figure launched itself at the Retainer and engaged in combat.
The second of the sconce-lit silhouettes reached me. A familiar face leered at me beneath a bald and scarred pate. I reeled, incredulous.
“You’ve led us a merry chase, rishi whelp,” the dragonmaster cackled.
I looked wildly at the wrestling shadows: Sconce light glinted upon golden locks. Kratt.
“No,” I said, baffled. “No.”
Sinewy fingers bit into one of my arms and hauled me upright. “We’ll be leaving now, hey-o,” the dragonmaster said.
“But Malaban Bri. Where’s Malaban?”
A thud: The Retainer fell to the ground. Kratt bent over him and a minnow of steel flashed in his hand. With a grunt, Kratt straightened, wiped his bloody dagger upon his cape, and approached us.
“To our dragons,” he grunted, barely casting a glance my way.
“Wait,” I gasped. “We can’t leave Misutvia.”
“Shut your lips, rishi get,” Kratt snarled, and I thought he’d strike me.
“She’s sister to Malaban,” I cried. “From Caranku Bri of Lireh.”
Kratt paused. A muscle in his jaw clenched like a fist. “We have the Dirwalan Babu,” the dragonmaster hissed, calling me Skykeeper’s Daughter in ancient Malacarite as he held up my arm as proof. “We leave now.”
Kratt ignored him and pierced me with battle-bright eyes. “You’re sure the woman hails from Caranku Bri?”
“She was imprisoned with me,” I answered breathlessly. “We talked. She’s at the end of this corridor, unconscious.”
“We waste time!” the dragonmaster growled, eyes rolling.
“I’d have the Caranku Bri of Lireh beholden to me, Komikon,” Kratt said, sheathing his dagger.
With a swirl of cape, he raced down the corridor. The dragonmaster twitched and gnashed his teeth until Kratt reappeared, Misutvia draped over his shoulders like a gharial carcass.
“We leave this place,” Kratt said shortly.
We reached the sconce-lit fork at the end of the corridor just as three daronpuis lumbered into view, robes and coiled braids askew from hasty dressing. Their collective bulk formed a wall in front of us. Beards trimmed into sharp arrowheads glittered with oil in the light of the torches they held.
“You should not have come, Waikar Re Kratt,” a daronpu with an aquiline nose growled.
“This is no mobasanin,” Kratt said, his voice as smooth and muscled as a python’s body. “This is a den of deviance, hidden from the eyes of all but a few. Now, step aside.”
“You’ll have to remain here a while longer, I’m afraid.”
“Will I, now?” Kratt said softly. “I doubt that very much. Unless I return to Clutch Re by tomorrow eve, the outriders who accompanied me here are instructed to inform not just my brother of the location and suspected purpose of this stronghold, but the Lupini of Clutch Cuhan and the Roshu of Ka as well. All will learn of the Ranreeb’s secret then, holy man, and Emperor Fa will be ill pleased.”
Eyes narrowed.
“I propose instead that you stand aside,” Kratt murmured. “Alert the Ranreeb to what’s occurred here. He’ll deal with me as he sees fit. I’ve no intention of sharing what I know with other Clutch lords once I’ve returned to Cafar Re. Better Temple competes with just one man to learn the dragons’ secret, than with all the Clutch lords in Malacar.”
“No one would believe you,” sneered a daronpu, though he twitched as he said it.
“Shall we lay a wager on that, hmm?” Kratt murmured. “Now, step aside. You’ve no skill in combat, I’m sure.”
Nostrils flared. Hate was an acrid taste in the air.
A daronpu flicked a hand and ordered his colleagues to stand aside.
The journey back to Clutch Re lasted several days and a lifetime, knotted together like a ball of twisting, nested snakes. Starved and dehydrated, I swam in a sparkling fever, drowning, surfacing, sinking once more. I knew the exact moment we reached Clutch Re, though, for the thousands of incandescing grains of the haunt, scattered throughout me, burst from my skin in a visible cloud, and my psyche rushed into the gaps left behind from the haunt’s departure.
My body was mine, truly mine.
My anima stretched into my form with aching ease, too-long cramped by the haunt’s invasion. A bluish buzzard coalesced from the cloud, some distance to the right of the dragon I rode. The buzzard glided on an up-draft, carbuncled neck outstretched.
The haunt.
When next I awoke, I lay on a bed of dusty featon chaff, surrounded by lantern-lit stone.
I bolted upright with a cry. It had all been a dream; I was in the viagand chambers still!
A dragon snorted.
Heart pounding, I tried to place where I was. I struggled to my feet, using the stone wall beside me as support.
I was not in the viagand chambers, no. I was in an underground stable comprised of three small stalls, all of which were empty, save for the last, and in that stood an old destrier. She watched me with melancholic, sage eyes. Her wings trembled, folded tight over her dorsal ridge.
“Where am I?” I asked the old destrier, my tongue swollen from want of water.
Her cant eyes blinked slowly, slitted pupils not moving from mine. The diamond-shaped membrane at the end of her twiggy tail slapped against stone. Slap-slap. Slap-slap. The sound of blood and flesh imprisoned in stone. My heart beat in synchrony, blood and flesh imprisoned in rib.
I knew where I was, then.
In the gloomy stables beneath the domed pool of Cinai Komikon Re’s domain.
Home.
The dragonmaster woke me sometime later, and gave me broth to drink, paak to eat, a blanket to wrap myself in, and an enamel pot to use when the need took me. I pushed the paak aside, turned my nose up at the broth, and slept again, dreaming of dragonsong.
Again the dragonmaster woke me. Again the broth, the paak, the insistence that I eat and grow strong. I pushed the food away, teeth clacking together from cold. Chill slimed my skin.
The smell of the old dragon housed beside me was a maddening tease. It enticed, seduced, whispered of divine grace and union. The licorice-and-lime scent of venom was a memory of wholeness, of isolation transformed into unity and joy.
“Venom?” I asked the dragonmaster, though I’d not meant to; the words tripped from my self-willed tongue.
The dragonmaster stared at me, displeased. “You look to have enough of it in your blood, girl. I won’t give you more.”
A great weariness overwhelmed me at his words. I turned away f
rom him and curled onto my side in the bedding chaff.
“You have to eat, hey-o,” the dragonmaster growled. “Your sole purpose from this moment on is to recover, to train, to survive Arena! Are you listening?”
I was listening, but his words evoked nothing but weariness in me. I saw no reason to recover, to train, to survive, if I were to be deprived of venom the rest of my life. A harsh admittance, that, and one I’m not proud of, but it is the truth nonetheless: I had escaped the viagand chambers only to imprison myself in the desire to further my decline into addiction.
I was, once more in my short life, utterly dependent upon the dragons’ poison.
Perhaps you would not blame me, if you could but once experience venom’s numinous embrace, coupled by the stupendous passion of dragonsong. To hear such power and through the hearing become the power is a lure I’m certain no mortal could refuse. And how much more powerful a lure for one such as I, who had stood so close to understanding the dragons’ divine music!
For yes, I had been on the cusp of understanding the memories in the viagand chambers. I was convinced of it. I’d been able to recognize certain refrains, had oft guessed which images would appear with what strains. The polyphony was not all wild sound uncivilized by time and otherworld tune; order lay within the dulcet mosaic, and I alone—I felt sure of it—stood at the brink of understanding the enigmatic score.
I had climbed the ladder closer to the Realm. Given enough time, I would reach the uppermost rung of that ladder. But to reach said rung, I required more venom. More and more and more of it.
Over the next clawful of days, the dragonmaster grew to loathe me for my dependency and lust. Each time he visited me in his underground stable, he railed at me to eat, stand up, begin training for Arena, but as each day passed, I sank further and further into stupor and asked only for venom.
On the morning of the eighth day, I lay down before the old destrier housed in the stall adjacent to me. Alone, emaciated, addle minded, and desperate, I spread my legs before the destrier and offered her my sex.
With the peculiar instinct possessed by those who stand on the knife’s edge of sanity, the dragonmaster guessed at the depths of my desperation that day; he appeared in the darkled stalls at noon, when I’d not expected him, to discover me on the stable floor, thighs venom tarred from the destrier’s repeated feedings.
I believe I would have died that day, had he not come and interfered.
He tethered the destrier in her stall, then scrubbed my skin free of venom and forced a purgative down my throat. Foaming about the mouth, he railed at me, sounding for all the world as mad as I.
But the dragonmaster’s grip on sanity was, I’m ashamed to admit, much stronger than mine at that dismal point in my life, for the very next morn, he brought a visitor down to the secret gloom beneath the domed pool, and that visitor announced, in baritone fury, that I was to imbibe venom no more.
“What’ve you become, blood-blood?” the giant with the waist-long, cleft beard roared as he loomed over me, stooped beneath the stable’s low ceiling. Half of his pate was bald; the other half sported tufts of knotted black hair. Tussocks sprouted above each eye like windswept, cinder-black bush, and these furrowed at me in anger.
“Bleached and gaunt with toxin!” he roared, and the cobwebbed timbers loosed a film of dust upon us. “Servant to helplessness, maggot of despair, get to your feet and let me look upon you.”
“Daronpu Gen,” I whispered, dumbfounded and sprawled upon my featon chaff bed.
He windmilled his great, shaggy arms, his tattered and soiled tunic the snapping sail of a storm-gripped trawler. “What-what? It speaks, it moves, it lives. But does it obey? Get up, get up, let me look upon you, maggot!”
“Daronpu Gen,” I repeated stupidly, and the giant ducked into my stall, enclosed my left forearm in an enormous hand, and swept me upright. I gaped at him as a gamut of emotion further befuddled my venom-addled mind.
Daronpu Gen: the eccentric Holy Warden who had disguised me in an acolyte’s tunic and scapular and hidden me in his decrepit temple in Clutch Re’s Zone of the Dead. Daronpu Gen: the first other than myself to see my mother’s haunt, the first to call me Dirwalan Babu, Skykeeper’s Daughter. Daronpu Gen: the man who had shown me the scroll that stated that one such as myself could serve a bull as a dragonmaster apprentice.
His great, calloused hands cupped my cheeks. His waist-long cleft beard pressed against my chest and belly like a mat of desiccated weeds as he studied my eyes.
“You are missing, blood-blood,” he rumbled. “Misplaced yourself in venom’s deceptively beguiling swamps.”
He released my head, turned a quarter to bellow over his shoulder, “She must be weaned off the poison, man, else we won’t retrieve her from the noxious slough! Quicksand-sure, it’ll suck her down.”
“You tell me what I already know,” the dragonmaster growled, his skeletal face scowling at me from behind the renegade daronpu. “All she cares for is the stuff. She’s given up on life itself.”
“You summon me from my secret lair, bring me to this pit of nihilism, and endanger my life only to convince me my journey is futile? She can be weaned off, I tell you! It’s only a matter of knowing how best to counteract the craving in her soul.”
Daronpu Gen looked back at me, hands still cupped about my head. “How shall I rid this tainted desire from your blood, hey-o? Tell me, now.”
I looked away from him.
His grip upon my temples tightened; then he leaned suddenly into my face and pressed his savage forehead against mine. Rocking my head so that our foreheads rolled one across the other, he inhaled me into his lungs.
“I can taste the Skykeeper about you,” he murmured. “A faded taste, a ghostly presence, and tangled about it, I taste your very soul.”
Of a sudden, he pressed his lips against mine. His tongue twined round mine; revulsion shot through me. An obscure vortex flashed through my mind, a dizzying, blinding starburst display of light that I knew instantly to be his psyche.
He pulled away abruptly, rearing back and thwacking his head upon a rafter.
“So that’s the way to be rid of it, blood-blood!” he cried, and he swiped the back of one rangy arm across his lips. “I’ve the answer now, Komikon! I’ll mix the potion this very eve. And no venom must she receive. Not a drop of it.”
“You think her will to live will be restored by a mere herbal?” The dragonmaster gave a vigorous tug on his chin braid. “Look at her! What magics do you know that can imbue the will to survive in one so determined to die?”
“You assume too much, man. I see no defeat in her eyes, just fear and a lost will.”
“You speak foolishness.”
“Do I, now?” Daronpu Gen patted my cheek and smiled. “What about it, Babu? Of these two ranting old men who stand before you, who do you think is correct, the Komikon or I? What choice would you make: a stab at life, or surcease found in venom?”
He’d asked me a similar question once before, upon finding me amongst the smoking ruins of the Zone of the Dead. Life or death? he’d demanded of me, as I’d lain paralyzed by agony from both the loss of Kiz-dan and her babe, and the terrible wound of a Cafar guard’s sword. Pain or ease?
I’d chosen life then, spurred by the fantastical dream that one day I might kill Kratt, might have my own Clutch where a rishi babe would never be taken from its mother to serve Temple, where a rishi child would never watch her father murdered by a cruel bayen lord. A Clutch where a dragon would never be imprisoned, exploited, and abused through indifference.
My own bull dragon, my own dragon estate.
To kill Kratt.
Those, then, were what I’d once wanted. But now?
I’d come to understand that I was but a pawn in a game governed by others’ needs. Kratt desired the answer to the bull riddle in his bid to become more than just Temple’s overlord of a single Clutch. The dragonmaster sought the same answer, and was motivated by the belief that I was the
prophesied Skykeeper’s Daughter who would end the apartheid of the Djimbi and wrest Temple from the Emperor’s hands. The Ranreeb wanted the answer to the bull riddle for Temple, for the wealth and power such an answer would confer, though he believed me to be no Dirwalan Babu, just a deviant who might provide him with the riddle’s answer. But unlike Kratt, the Ranreeb knew that any woman could hear dragonsong during the rite; now that I’d escaped the Ranreeb’s fortress, I was a threat that must be killed.
Yes, I may have been imprisoned in the viagand chambers, may have wanted to escape. But no freedom awaited me beyond its walls, either.
“I want surcease,” I said, my legs folding beneath me.
I curled onto my side and burrowed my head into featon chaff. “I want to be one with the dragon forever.”
“It mumbles!” Daronpu Gen bellowed. “I hear it not!”
“She’s chosen the venom; you heard her as well as I did,” the dragonmaster spat, and I could envision his eyes rolling and his shoulders convulsing.
“She’s lost, man, that’s what I heard. Bogged down in toxic quagmire. Found and liberated, she’ll choose otherwise.”
“I’ve no time for metaphor. Arena draws nigh.”
“Keep her off the venom. Give me a day or so, and I’ll give her reason to survive Abbasin Shinchiwouk and continue the fight. Hey-o? Do that for a brother, would you?”
“The emancipation of our people lies there, in that stall! How can you be so sure—” the dragonmaster heatedly began, but the daronpu cut him off.
“Two days,” he cried, and his voice echoed down the corridor as he departed. “I’ll be back. Two days!”
He kept his word. He returned within two days.
But he was not alone.
I didn’t recognize the young boy standing before him, didn’t realize I should. In my febrile chill, I barely registered the rose color of his pleated tunic, the brand upon his forehead.
Daronpu Gen pushed the malnourished boy into my stall.
“I followed the Skykeeper’s taste, hey-o,” the daronpu said smugly. “Chased the traces of its flavor on the wind, wafting in feathered ribbons over the Clutch. Followed it to the Cafar, I did. Found this boy, outside his lady’s room. Smuggled him out under the dead of night. Speak, boy, speak. Tell of your night terrors.”