Sea of Dragons (Quest of the Nine Isles Book 2)

by C. Greenwood

  SEA OF DRAGONS

  QUEST OF THE NINE ISLES, BOOK TWO

  C. Greenwood

  Copyright © 2017 C. Greenwood

  Edited by Victory Editing

  Formatted by Polgarus Studios

  Cover art by Michael Gauss

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Excepting brief review quotes, this book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written permission of the copyright holder. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, real events, locations, or organizations is purely coincidental.

  SEA OF DRAGONS

  QUEST OF THE NINE ISLES, BOOK TWO

  I lost everything when the Ninth Isle sank. My home, my family and the only life I ever knew. For generations my people, the dragonkind, proudly shared our island with dragons, defending the fierce beasts and soaring the skies alongside them. Now catastrophe has struck. Corthium lies beneath the sea, the mighty dragons are nearly extinct and, overnight, I have become the last of my race.

  But a glimmer of hope remains. There is still a chance I can restore the legacy of the dragonkind and return dragons to the world again. My mission is a dangerous one. With the help of my newly bonded dragon and my unpredictable companion, Basil, I must outwit scheming pirates and brave stormy seas in search of a new Sheltering Stone. Haunted islands, an elusive maker of magical maps, and a ruthless fleet of Gold Ship Voyagers lie ahead. Worse, the cunning pirate, Captain Ulysses, is determined to cripple my magic powers and steal them for a dark purpose. With time running out and the forces of my enemies assembled against me, only one thing is sure. My epic quest has begun.

  * * *

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  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  A horrible, thunderous noise made me look back toward the city. The sight that met my eyes was like one from a nightmare. From my vantage point atop a cliff, I could see that the entire island had been split into pieces and whole chunks of it were now sliding into the sea. In less than an hour, a great civilization that had stood for a thousand years was reduced to rubble. Worse, the angry ocean was churning and dashing wildly against the shore like a hungry beast eager to devour what remained.

  Its massive waves washed over the beach and flooded into the city, a great tide that carried away everything in its path. I saw winged figures rising before the flood, dragonkind taking flight like frightened birds to escape the destruction. But I knew none of the survivors now soaring above the submerged island would make it to the distant shores of the nearest land. Their flight only delayed their inevitable deaths.

  Behind me, Skybreaker seemed to sense the chaos, for the dragon let out an earsplitting noise that was something between a scream and a roar.

  Glancing back to see him straining against his chains and struggling to free himself, I realized he was as doomed as any of us. Chained to the pillars of the ancient watchtower, his wings would do him no good. He would go down with the rest of the isle.

  A strange impulse shot through me then, as unexpected as the urge that had made me touch the Sheltering Stone and begin all this horror. If the Ninth Isle and all its people were to be wiped off the earth, one last part of us could yet remain, a legacy of the dragonkind.

  I snatched up a loose chunk of rock and ran to where the great beast was bound between the pillars. Taking care to keep just beyond Skybreaker’s reach, I smashed the chunk of rock against the main chain. Sparks flew beneath my repeated blows until the link was crushed.

  Before I could move to the next chain, a cruel voice rang out across the cliff top.

  “Do you truly think to save yourself by fleeing on the back of a dragon while the rest of us die?”

  I spun around to find Milos, son of the king, climbing up onto the bluff. I hadn’t realized he had followed me out of the city. But here he was now, standing atop the cliff, a sharp spear clutched in his hands.

  “That beast is mad,” he continued, jerking his head toward Skybreaker. “It cannot save you. But it’s not too late for your death to save us, to undo the devastation you have brought upon your own people and this island.”

  He charged at me then, his spear upraised.

  Nearby, the dragon screamed and thrashed. There came a sudden metallic snapping sound. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one end of a shattered chain fly through the air. There was the thrumming noise of beating wings, and then a long shadow fell over Milos and me. We both looked up to see the magnificent and terrible sight of Skybreaker lifting into the air. In rising, he slammed against the closest pillars, setting them wobbling on their ends.

  Frozen in shock, I could only stare as one of those pillars crashed down on Milos, flattening my enemy where he stood.

  With a screech of victory, Skybreaker rose up into the darkening sky, a broad shadow outlined by evening stars. The wind from his flapping wings buffeted me like the gale of a storm, kicking up dust and loose pebbles and tossing my hair into my eyes.

  Now everything happened quickly. Torn by quakes and floods below and crashes above, the bluff I stood atop could take no more. All at once, the ground began to break up beneath my boots.

  With a sense of unbelieving horror, I watched the cracks in the ground shoot toward me, felt the rocks crumble from beneath my feet.

  Then I was falling, dropping like a stone.

  * * *

  I awoke with a start, heart pounding, my forehead beaded with sweat. It took me a moment to recover from the tumult of fear inside me and realize it was only a dream.

  The events of that terrible day were real. The Ninth Isle had sunk, and it was all my doing. But it wasn’t sinking today. That tragedy was in the past. And right now I had a chance to stop it, a plan to undo some part of the horror I had accidentally been responsible for.

  I sat upright, bracing myself against the not-yet-familiar motion of the dragon’s wings beating to either side of me. I was safely positioned on Skybreaker’s back. I had fallen forward in my sleep, draping myself over his broad neck. Luckily, my place between his shoulder blades would have been difficult to fall from while I drowsed.

  I realized as soon as I moved that I wasn’t the only one who had been asleep.

  From behind, I felt Basil’s weight leaning against me where he must have slumped against my back while he slept.

  “Wuh…?” he murmured drowsily now, disturbed by my stirring.

  He had been supposed to stay awake and keep watch. But I didn’t reproach him for resting. I too had meant to remain alert but had given in to exhaustion.

  Anyway, there was little enough to see. The ocean stretched below us like a flat sheet of glass, an endless mirror reflecting the blue of the sky we soared through. I scanned the horizon but detected no sign of the land we looked for. Did it even exist? Or had I made a mistake in trusting Basil’s directions?

  I cast an annoyed g
lance over my shoulder to find my companion yawning and stretching. I had known this long-lost “cousin” of mine for only a night and a day. It was too short an acquaintance to judge him. But nothing I had seen yet made me hopeful.

  After the sinking of the Ninth Isle and my brief time stranded on a smaller island inhabited only by giants, I had fled to the floating city of Port Unity. I was searching for my aunt in the hope that she would aid me and my newly bonded dragon in finding a new Sheltering Stone to raise up the Ninth Isle again. Instead, I had found greedy pirates and dangerous Gold Ship Voyagers.

  Last of all, I had stumbled into the less-than-reliable Basil, who had informed me that my aunt, his stepmother, was in fact dead. I was truly the last of the dragonkind people. Pressured into joining me on what he clearly regarded as a mad quest, the young man made no secret of his eagerness to wriggle out of our bargain. We were on our way now to find some mysterious person who he claimed would be of help to my cause. Basil apparently felt that guiding me to this person would relieve him of any further responsibility to help me, leaving him free to go his own way. Privately, I had no intention of letting him out of our bargain so easily.

  But this wasn’t the time to say so.

  Instead, I asked him, “Are you sure we’re headed the right way? We’ve been flying half the day. Port Unity is far behind us, but we’ve yet to see any sign of this northern shore you spoke of.”

  “My directions are good,” Basil said, defending himself. “The only question is whether you’ve conveyed them well to this winged beast of yours.”

  He might be right. Thus far, the only way I had found to show Skybreaker where I wanted to go was by placing my palm against the dragon’s scales and sending him mental images. But it was hard to convey an image of a place I had never seen, based purely on Basil’s description.

  Besides, my bond with Skybreaker was new and I hadn’t had many opportunities to test its boundaries. It wasn’t long ago that we had met for the first time when I had freed the dragon from his chains during the sinking of the Ninth Isle. He had rescued me after my fall from the cliff and carried me away, the sole survivor of Corthium—and the last of my race. But I could never forget how tentative our bond was and how precarious was Skybreaker’s grip on the edge of reason. It wasn’t for nothing he had been known among my people as “the mad dragon,” a killer of men.

  Basil broke into my thoughts with an excited exclamation.

  I followed his pointing finger to see a smudge of green and gray on the horizon. As we drew nearer, the indistinct blur of colors resolved itself into a craggy shoreline where steep bluffs rose to meet dashing ocean waves. The sea looked angry here, the foamy tide smashing against the rocks with a ferocity that brought back memories of watching Corthium sink. As we came in over the cliffs, Skybreaker swooped so low I felt the blast of a strong wind pushing back at us from the rocks.

  I feared we wouldn’t find a safe place to land. But once we had cleared the bluffs, an ideal spot came into view, a peaceful cove sheltered from the rough sea by reefs and a curving, sandy beach. The water here was crystal clear. The beach was dotted with boulders and what looked like a few small houses that were little more than crude huts edging the water.

  It took me a moment to realize the cove was shaped like the grinning mouth of a skull, with two pools some distance away forming the eye sockets. Farther inland, the land rose in a peak that ran like a long spine into lush green forest. It was impossible to see what lay concealed beneath all that greenery.

  “Is this it?” I asked Basil. “The cove you spoke of?”

  When Basil agreed that it was, I tried to tell Skybreaker we should land here. But the dragon either didn’t understand my request or had his own ideas. He passed over the sandy beach and kept flying deeper inland. By the time I finally persuaded him to stop, we had left the cove far behind.

  The dragon swooped down into an impossibly narrow clearing and somehow managed to skid to a halt without crashing into the surrounding trees. Basil and I climbed down off his back and debated our options.

  “We could walk back to the cove,” I suggested.

  But it would take us hours to return that way on foot, especially with the thick vegetation between us and the shore. And neither of us was enthusiastic about getting back onto Skybreaker and trying to fly back the way we had come. The dragon had been uncooperative before, and there was no reason to suppose he would like the look of the cove better if he flew over it a second time.

  After some discussion, we decided to walk deeper inland. Basil still refused to tell me exactly where we were going. I had the sense it might be because he was a little uncertain himself. I could only hope he had really been here before and knew what he was doing. He said we needed to find a village where we could talk with the locals. There had been scattered huts back at the cove, but it was no use thinking of those now. There was a swift-flowing stream near the clearing, and it seemed likely it would eventually lead us to a settlement of some sort.

  So we followed the water into a forest so heavily overgrown we could hardly make our way through. But what had started out as a rushing stream gradually slowed to a shallow trickle. The water that had been so fresh upstream grew dark and muddy. At the same time, the farther inland we went, the more the ground changed. We were coming into a marshy area, shadowed by ancient trees trailing drooping moss from their thick branches. Tall clumps of grass in our path concealed holes filled with dirty water. Soon we were up to our ankles in mud.

  I was beginning to be glad Skybreaker had refused to come this way with us. He had seemed determined to linger in the clearing, and so we had been forced to leave him behind. I had shown him a mental image of us returning by sunrise, but I still worried about whether he would wait there. Now as the land grew so swampy we could hardly make our way through, I decided it was just as well he had stayed behind.

  I wasn’t sure how long we had been wading through the weeds and muck when we finally spotted the rising smoke of a cook fire in the distance. A short time later, we saw the first house, a simple thatch-roofed hut little bigger than Basil’s old home in the crow’s nest of his abandoned ship back in Port Unity. Behind this house we saw another and another. The homes stood on solid wooden stilts that put them about three feet above the ground, presumably to prevent flooding or sinking into the muddy earth. If this was a village, it was a small one of perhaps a dozen families.

  Ragged dark-haired children ran and played between the scattered homes, accompanied by furry, round-faced doglike creatures whose sluggish and careful movements seemed to amuse the children. The sharp-toothed animals looked like they could be fierce if they weren’t so slow, but they must be friendly, for they were obviously treated as pets.

  There were adults too. We arrived just in time to see a group of men and women coming out from the surrounding trees, carrying woven baskets. I didn’t recognize the purple items in the baskets but assumed it was some sort of fruit that grew in the moss-covered trees of the marsh. The local people were similar in appearance to the off-islanders of Port Unity. Their skin was more bronzed, but they wore the same types of clothing, long skirts on the women and loose-fitting trousers and shirts on the men. Men and women alike wore open vests and belts with attached pockets, possibly for carrying the tools of their work.

  I was getting so used to the strange appearances of off-islanders I almost didn’t notice their lack of horns or scales anymore.

  “Hello there.” Basil hailed the people coming out of the trees.

  His shout attracted stares as we drew nearer. Then again, the stares might be for me. Sometimes I forgot how strange I looked to other people’s eyes, with my spiraling horns and the light pattern of scales across my cheeks and temples. At least my hand, radiating its reddish-purple glow of magic, was safely concealed inside its leather gauntlet where it would draw no attention.

  Nobody responded to Basil’s greeting.

  He tried again although his smile looked less confident in
the face of their silence. “We are visitors from far away,” he said. “We’re looking for someone hereabouts and hope you can direct us to him.”

  Some of the men and women looked at one another, shook their heads, and muttered. All of them continued walking on. Overhearing a few words of their conversation in passing, I realized the problem.

  “I don’t think they understand us,” I told Basil. “They’re speaking another language.”

  His obvious surprise at that information confirmed the suspicions I had felt all along. “You really don’t know what tongue they speak here, do you?” I accused. “That’s because you’ve never been to these shores at all. You claimed you knew where you were going, but really you’ve gotten us lost and have no idea how to find whatever it is you’re searching for.”

  He looked offended. “Don’t talk nonsense, cousin. We’re certainly not lost.” He adjusted his three-cornered hat, although it didn’t really need straightening. “We’re just in need of a little guidance. Luckily, this fellow looks as if he can provide it.”

  I followed his gesture toward a silver-haired old man who had broken away from the others to approach us. On his bent back, he carried a basket of the purple fruit slung over his shoulders. He held out two pieces of the fruit to us now, as if offering it as a gift. I suddenly remembered how long it was since I had last eaten. I had drunk from the stream back at the clearing when the water was still fresh and clear. But I hadn’t touched a bite of food since my last meal back in Port Unity.

  Basil must have been as hungry as I, because he eagerly accepted the fruit. I thanked the old man, although I knew he couldn’t understand me, and bit into the thin-skinned piece of fruit right away. It was round and plump and surprisingly sweet.

  The old man lingered to watch us eat and nodded with satisfaction at how quickly we devoured the food.