Innocence Lost

by O. J. Lowe

  Screw thinking like this. The politics of the kingdoms was a million miles away from their situation. They’d get someone out to them to pick them up if they needed an emergency evacuation. Brendan had made it clear he’d arranged it. Brendan didn’t make mistakes of that magnitude. Wilsin had faith in him. He slapped his container crystal into his summoner, pushed the button.

  “We’re not going to walk,” he said simply. “We’re going to fly. Ever ride a dragon before, Ben?” He didn’t look at Reeves to see the expression on his face. Few people could hide their emotions about riding a dragon. The species was dying out. Fewer and fewer were being born in the wild. Callers had claimed too many in the distant past and now those selfish acts were taking their toll. The Senate had introduced legislation to stop the rampant claiming of creatures, but too little far too late. Wilsin looked at his own dragon, Aroon, realised he’d been damned lucky. Most dragons lived on preserves, far away from easy access to the general population. They were a protected species. He recalled something about a dragon that had been claimed in Premesoir a few years back and there’d been a national uproar about the town of Threll that their symbol had been taken.

  Aroon was a special dragon, he’d claimed as much before and he would continue to until the day he died. Lean and muscular beneath a coat of soot-black and acid-orange scales, Aroon’s wings flared out behind him, the size of paddle boats and coloured the musty green of leather. Six powerful limbs emerged from his body, four of them digging six spike-like claws into the deck, two developed forearms towards the front of his body, one of them clawing at an itchy point up across his serpentine neck, digging between the scales with abandon. The powerful tail thumped happily against the deck, tearing cracks in the wood.

  “Good boy, Aroon,” he cooed, striding over to pat the spirit on the neck. Aroon’s triangle-shaped face turned to look at him through beadily alert eyes, pointed jaws showing an impressive number of fangs as the dragon yawned. Touching a dragon was always like touching a warm piece of coal in his experience, the threat of the heat was there yet it wasn’t enough to burn. Unlike most dragons, Aroon didn’t have horns. He’d never seen the need for them. The lizard-like tongue slipped out between the mouth, licked at his hand. He tried not to wince, it was like being slathered with sandpaper.

  “A fine specimen,” Reeves said. “Do you object if I show him some attention?”

  “We’d both be insulted if you didn’t,” Wilsin smiled. “Aroon’s my buddy, aren’t you buddy?” He spoke directly to the dragon who growled in response, not a threat but almost akin to a purring sound. Like a giant cat. A ludicrous image came to his mind, he had to admit, one of Aroon curling up around him like a giant snoring tabby.

  Reeves reached up a hand, Wilsin coughed out the side of his mouth. “Careful! Take it slow. Don’t startle him. And for Divines sake, don’t touch the top of his head, he doesn’t like it.”

  Wouldn’t do if Aroon bit one of Reeves’ hands off. That would officially kick this rescue mission off to a bad start. Might not be the worst one ever but there was a chance it would be up there with the contenders if it did.

  “Hello there, drake,” Reeves said. Wilsin had heard the term before, an old word for dragon, some old tongue. Ancient Sidorovan, he thought. “You’re a fine fellow, aren’t you? Big and powerful and your wings are so majestic. I bet you can fly for miles with them, can’t you?”

  Reeves had done his research, Wilsin had to admit. Dragons were smart, some of them just as smart as some people and they knew immediately whether they liked you or not. If you irked them, they’d burn you. If you pleased them, there was no distance they wouldn’t go to accommodate you. Legends had them as jealous, greedy creatures filled with capriciousness. He’d never found that to be further from the truth. Always there would be those with a negative opinion and the need to shout it.

  Aroon might need to fly them for miles. Reeves had a point. Best to make sure he was up to it. The boat shook beneath their feet as the giant lizard stepped away from them, moved towards the river and started to lap at the surface of the water, slowly at first before the sound got more powerful and more frequent.

  “Didn’t answer my question,” Wilsin said. “You ever ridden a dragon before?” He couldn’t keep the smile off his face. Personally, he loved this part. It was like every childhood dream he’d ever had come to life right in front of his eyes.

  “I’ve ridden spirits before,” Reeves admitted. “I rode Master Baxter’s armoured bird. That, I didn’t like. Not very comfortable. How fast can he fly? Aroon?” The dragon looked up from the surface of the river at the mention of his name, eyes blinking in the morning sun. He was listening, Wilsin could tell that.

  “Clocked at least as fast as the average mag-rail,” Wilsin said nonchalantly. “Powerful as well. He can keep going and going, at least with one passenger. With two, it might be tricky. We’d need to make frequent stops. I don’t want to burn him out. I don’t want them to get too far ahead of us.”

  “Can’t have everything, David. You’ll spread yourself all over the place if you don’t stop trying to control everything. If we’re going to get there in time, the Kjarn’s will shall make it so. We can run, or we can walk, we may never make it there at all. What won’t help is worrying.” Reeves put a hand on his arm. “It doesn’t suit you. Come on, give me a smile.”

  Wilsin grinned, he couldn’t help but oblige despite the reluctance flooding through him. He gave it everything he could. Strangely, he felt better for it. Weird. Reeves seemed halfway convinced. “That’s better.”

  There’d been a knot in the pit of his stomach, a knot he’d been worried would only grow and grow and grow until he choked on it, wanted to hurl it up with the contents of his breakfast, yet now it felt like all was well. The stress had faded, the unease was moving to the back of his mind and he stretched his arms out in front of him, testing the dexterity of his fingers as muscles strained under the efforts.

  “Right,” he said. “We might not see this boat again. Maybe we’ll get the chance to come back for it, but I doubt it. Our team is gone, they took most of their research to the grave with them and there’s nothing we can do about that. Frankly, I don’t care either. This always was a dumb venture under the circumstances. Search through every pack you can, find anything that will be immediately useful. If you think it’s useful, throw it into the middle of the deck. We need everything scavenged as quickly as we can manage. We’re burning daylight and our friends are out there.” He didn’t much care for any of them bar Brendan but that didn’t mean that they deserved to die. “Come on, Ben. Chop-chop! We move out in twenty.”

  Aroon had lazily taken to the skies, stretching his wings while they searched. It was important for a human not to go into a great period of exercise cold, the same went double for a dragon nearly four times the size of an average human. Wilsin kept an eye on him out the corner of his eye, watched as Aroon swooped down, body barely inches above the water and continued to follow the length of the waterway until almost out of sight before he swept into a powerful loop, wings flaring at the top of his ascension. A strangely beautiful sight, one soon be lost to the kingdoms.

  Not in his lifetime. He was certain of that. He finished rooting through the bags, focusing on food and weaponry and any sort of technology that could come in handy. Medicine too. He’d gone for Nmecha’s bag first, pulled out whatever pills and ointments he could find. Suchiga had sounded like he’d been injured in the commotion, he could still remember the sounds of bones cracking and screams as he’d been dragged away. Bandages, medical webbing, he secreted it all into his pack, moving the stuff around. He’d come to like the one-eyed doctor, going through his things like this felt disrespectful but what could he do? Nmecha, Bryce, Fazarn, they were all dead. The rest of them weren’t. They had to keep on living and if that meant looting what they’d left behind, so be it.

  He debated what to do with the bodies. They’d left them on the deck, out of the sun and wrapped bu
t if they were to abandon the boat as his plan was, it might be stood here for quite some time on the river, exposed to the elements. The implications of discovering it might be terrible for all. He wouldn’t want to be one of a boarding party who set foot aboard this abandoned boat and discovered sun-spoiled corpses. That sort of thing could traumatise a man. The stench alone would haunt you.

  Dumping them in the river felt even more disrespectful than stealing their possessions but it was probably the best option. He’d get Reeves to help him. If the Vedo thought it was wrong, it was almost certainly wrong but that didn’t make it any less necessary. The necessary things were often the hardest.

  He’d found all of Brendan’s spare charge packs for the weapons, the blaster rifles hadn’t been effective against them before, but they were better than nothing. Besides, before he’d been treating them like they were human. They weren’t. Their weak spots had to be different. He’d reloaded and wiped down the Tebbit in his hip holster, tucked the charge packs into a bandolier across his chest for easy access. He looked like he was ready to go to war. Both lukonium machetes hung across his back. They might be a better option if things got hairy, better than blasters in close.

  He felt laden down, like a camel, with weaponry when he saw Reeves. The Vedo just had his kjarnblade hung from his belt, hilt glinting in the sunlight. He’d gotten a pack together, clipped it around his waist on the other hip.

  “We need to move the bodies,” Wilsin said. He hadn’t been wrong when he’d expected the look of distaste on Reeves’ face. He might well have asked him to murder his mother or give away the secret location of his order’s greatest secrets. “Can’t leave them here.”

  “But… But…” He was struggling for an answer, Wilsin saw, he didn’t have one. He couldn’t blame him, he felt a bit sorry for him. All the training he’d gone through and he’d never thought he’d wind up in a situation like this, a sorry shit-show of a time.

  Welcome to working with Unisco, son, he thought. Shit happens, sometimes you can’t do a damn thing about it no matter how much you want to. You can’t control it. You just survive it.

  “What about their families?” Reeves asked, grunting with the effort as they humped Bryce’s body up against the railing, a few sparse droplets spraying them as the corpse hit the water. It floated for a moment before starting to sink, before their eyes.

  “What about them?” Wilsin said. He hated sounding like this, made out to be the bastard, but he couldn’t help it. The dead were the dead and the living had to be the priority. At least this way, their bodies would serve a purpose, would provide food for whatever lived in the river. He didn’t want to think about whatever that might be. This hadn’t even been a river a year ago, just a scar in the ground, and look now. “We’ll let them know that they died on the expedition. Tell them the truth. Their bodies are unrecoverable. It happens. They had to know this was a risk.”

  Didn’t mean that they’d like it. He also couldn’t bring himself to entirely care, as they went for Fazarn, dragged him to the railings and did the same. He was heavier in death than Bryce had been, the two of them were covered in sweat by the time they’d finished.

  “Seems a little impersonal,” Reeves said. “I mean, I’d want some sort of closure.”

  “Nature of the kingdoms these days, Ben,” Wilsin said. “We don’t always get what we want no matter how much we think we need it.”

  Surely Reeves should be putting this sort of practical non-sequitur out there. He’d always gotten the impression that might be the purview of the Vedo. Semi-mystic wisdom offered up even when you had no need for it. Baxter had given him that impression.

  “Look, if it bothers you that much, you can tell them what really happened,” he said. “But they won’t thank you for it. Trust me on that. They might tell you that knowing what happened is really the best thing. They’re wrong. Trust me. Ignorance is bliss, they say that for a reason.”

  “They also say knowing gives you closure.”

  “Okay then you give them a middle ground. Confirm they died. Tell them they died as heroes. Nothing you could do. There wasn’t, was there? You tried to save Bryce and you failed miserably.”

  That got a reaction as they lifted Nmecha. “I tried to save Bryce, I never could. He was too far gone and I’m not a Restorer. That’s just an unfair criticism.”

  “A Restorer?” Wilsin had never heard the term before, he raised an eyebrow with interest.

  “What you’d call a healer, I guess. That’s our word for them. Restorers can heal themselves and others of almost any wound, bring someone back from the brink of death if they’re fast enough. It’s never easy.”

  “You can’t all heal?”

  “It depends,” Reeves said. “I mean you people who can’t touch the Kjarn, you’re all good at different things, right? Why would this be any different?”

  He didn’t know, shrugged as his muscles complained under Nmecha’s dead weight.

  “There’s seven different fields to Kjarn manipulation,” Reeves said. “I don’t like using that term because it implies that we’re in control, but it’s the best word to explain.” The silent ‘damn you’ didn’t even have to be said aloud, Wilsin saw it in his face as clear as the sun above. “Each Vedo has a natural inclination towards one of them. It’s never obvious but you come into it as you train and start to understand more of the mysteries of the Kjarn.”

  “Why has nobody ever heard this before?” Wilsin wondered.

  “Because it’s a trade secret and how many Vedo have you ever had this level of conversation with?” Reeves asked. “David, we’re moving bodies together, I think we can speak candidly to each other.”

  Point, Wilsin had to concede. If doing something like this didn’t bring you closer to another person, then he didn’t know what would.

  “Anyway, seven specialities. Six of them can learn other basic skills from other fields but more complex ones remain out of reach. You could train for years and all you’d do is waste your time if you get me. So yeah, I can heal cuts and bruises, maybe a broken bone if it’s not too bad but what happened to Bryce was well beyond me.”

  “Yet you tried anyway?”

  “You told me to!” Reeves said, more than a little defensive. “I had to try. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked. I had to hope that things would work out. Maybe it’d have kept him alive long enough for us to try other methods. I don’t like blood, I think I did okay all things considered.”

  Wilsin sighed inwardly. Not Reeves fault then. He didn’t pretend to understand the Kjarn, but the explanation made sense. “So, what is your speciality then? Tell me it’s at least something useful for the situation up ahead. I saw you throw that fire at them. Can you do that again?”

  Reeves face fell. “Not like I did before. That was something else entirely. That’s the purview of Elementalists. Master Baxter does that. The showy stuff with fire and lightning, that’s what they do. Again, rest of us can conjure up a flame or a spark if we want but it’s not something we can really make a point of doing. It’ll never be as powerful or as potently sustained. What I did with the fire was transference.”

  “That another field?”

  “An element of mine,” he admitted. “I’m an Alchemite.”

  “What the bloody hells is one of those, then?”

  “What you saw. I can alter things. Transfer properties of one thing to another. That wood we cut up to make the fire? It was inorganic matter aflame. I transferred the properties from one of them to another. They might be alive but parts of them weren’t and that was enough. I didn’t even know if it’d work or not. Doesn’t on man or beast. Can’t directly influence them, I’m not a Manifold. Good job for us it worked, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Wilsin had to concede. He was right there. It was luck. It was more than lucky. They’d caught a break there. “What else can you do?”

  “I turned gold into lead once.”

  “Yeah?” Wilsin tried to keep the incredulity out of hi
s voice, failed miserably. “Why?”

  “Just to see if I could,” Reeves said with a shrug. “I mean, I know it’s not a valuable skill, not like the reverse. But I think understanding the theory helps sometimes. Look at it this way. Lead is worthless, and gold is precious. Yet they’re linked. At their heart, they’re both metals. Neither of them is alive. If you can find the link, it’s the easiest thing in the kingdoms to alter an element here, a twitch here and… I can’t really explain this as well as I’d like.”

  He placed a hand on the deck of the boat. “Pick me something. Anything. Something rare. Something precious. That’s what everyone inevitably wants to see.”

  “Okay,” Wilsin said. He thought about it for a minute, gave Reeves a smile. “Sapphires. Show me sapphires.” He didn’t doubt for a moment that the Vedo could pull it off if he desired to, but he seemed to want to prove himself. He’d let him have his moment in the sun. Trust him to end up partnered with a Vedo who wasn’t skilled with the fire and brimstone type of wrath they’d need. Reeves might need to feel validated, though he wasn’t sure. Confidence wasn’t one of the things he lacked for.