by Marc Secchia
“Now she’s crossed the Rift?” Gang growled.
Turning, Aranya smiled sweetly over her shoulder at the Dragon, still lying on his side. “Mind you don’t faint, Gang.”
Gnarrr-grr-gnarr-gurrll-Aranyarr! He mangled her name beautifully.
“I think that means my shell-mother’s sister must’ve been your great, great-something-th grandmother,” Aranya faltered, rather failing to pinpoint the relationship with any accuracy whatsoever.
Itomiki murmured, “You’re a six hundred year-old fledgling?”
Aranya sighed. “No.”
Behind her, Gang snorted, “I give up.”
Huari said, “You thought Hualiama, implying that you know her, or at least, knew what she looks like.”
“She’s my Aunt,” said Aranya. “I’ve met her in my dreams.”
“Honestly, somebody bite me,” complained Gang. Graaarrrgghh! “Itomiki! What was that for?”
Itomiki, over a mouthful of Gang’s tail, produced a hundred-fanged draconic smirk. “Stow your miserable yapping, youngster. Aranya, do you mind? He’s bleeding all over this nice patch of grass.”
So she climbed Gang’s flank, and laid her hands upon him, and channelled her Storm-power into healing.
So much healing for others, and none for herself. Inside, Aranya felt as broken as her Island-World. Something was severely out of kilter, but what? She could not understand. Why, when fate laid so obvious a paw upon her life as to bring her together with these fine Dragons, did Aranya of Immadia still feel shattered, unfinished, stressed beyond endurance? The storm proclaimed her pyretic emotions more surely than words.
Now, Thoralian must know a Star Dragon stalked him in Herimor.
It was time for a Dragoness to hunt.
Raising her nose, Aranya sniffed the air curiously. South. South, and fast. There was Imbalance, a foreboding darkness that tantalised the edge of her senses …
“Dragons, we must fly,” she said decisively. “Where is your lair, Huaricithe? Where does it lie?” Before the Navy-Blue even answered, Aranya began to sense the location in the forefront of the Dragoness’ mind. Oh no. Her voice rose with a sharp snap-crack of wind, “We must fly on the wings of this storm. Rise, Dragons! Rise and follow … uh … with your permission, Marshal. Kindly. Fierily, I mean–ugh!”
The Dragoness just waggled a brow-ridge drolly.
Aranya folded her arms. “Sorry!” Gang sniggered behind her. Whirling, the Immadian snapped, “Gang! Since you appear to have been infected by some ridiculous worship bug–”
“Mind your tongue. That’s our sacred religion you’re insulting, girl,” growled another of the Shapeshifters.
“Sorry again, Islands’ sakes–by all the freaking, floating Islands, I’m sorry!” Aranya threw over her shoulder. “Gangurtharr, since you’ve so much to say for yourself, how’s about you volunteer to be my noble air transportation?”
“Me, with a Dragon Rider?” he thundered.
“Star Dragons usually demand the very best, but you–I guess you’ll serve as marginally acceptable seating for my worshipful rump.” Aranya gave the Dragon a huge wink.
Gang’s indignation shook the entire Archipelago.
* * * *
Ardan flicked the tassels on his lavender-striped shirt with annoyance. Could they not have found him a more–well, a more manly outfit? Bane thought he looked rainbows over Islands. When he caught the Western Isles warrior’s expression, Lurax, who had been downcast ever since Tixi’s torture, had cracked the first grin Ardan had seen from him in a month. Worth it? Aye. Worthless pride. He must become a better man.
Turning to the boys, seated behind him in harness on Imagitharr the Yellow’s back, he said, “Did I ever tell you the story of my first rajal hunt?”
Sapphire peeped, “No, mighty warrior.”
Ardan chuckled and scratched her beneath the chin. “You cheeky scruffling. Why don’t you catch a few insects?”
Sapphire’s mouth snapped aside faster than the eye could follow, returning with a seven-inch dragonfly. Its double wings waved feebly either side of her jaw. She made an immensely pleased ‘erp?’ and whirled her eye-fires at him.
“Clever girl,” he conceded. “Now, can you find Aranyi?”
He winced as the Immadian intimate form slipped out of his mouth.
Sapphire’s lustrous eyes considered him, suddenly as wise as the Islands were ancient. “Ari storm. Over mountains.”
Ardan nearly snaffled a dragonfly of his own as he gaped at the dragonet.
“Over … those mountains?” His finger pointed at the enormous Mesas. Mountains to humble a man, capped with white and glaciers that ever so slowly crept away from that snow-cap like spidery fingers reaching down to caress the world of Men and Dragons. They flew southward with the tall mountains upon their right flank, keeping high as they approached the Vassal States. Marshal Tixi had them all concealed with the strange glamour-magic these Herimor Dragons used, not a Ri’arion-special, hard-shelled and clear disguise, but more like tens of layers of ever-shifting gossamer veils blowing in a breeze. Misdirection. Intricacy. Enormous refinement aimed at producing … nothingness. A complete absence of clues, magical or mental, physical or emotional, that would point to the presence of Dragons, or to any hint of information pertinent to those Dragons.
He might as well have tried to read an invisible stone for all his efforts availed him, yet Ardan continued to work on trying to understand these Herimor Dragons. Everything about them was different. Linguistic nuance-indicators. Accent. Customs, such as first consuming the heart of their prey. Even their habit of singing Dragonsong and Dragon-lore while in flight, making every flight a lesson in reciting the histories, almost as if the Dragons sought to imprint a common mindset upon each other. He sensed the subtle moulding of his thoughts to their ways of thinking, and resisted. He was an Isles warrior, as stubborn as aged granite and about as pretty.
As they approached the Vassal States, he observed disturbance and war above clouds and below. They passed Islands devastated by Dragon fire. Down low, Dragons patrolled the borders of the Vassal States in a state of evident agitation. Here, for the first time, Ardan began to see cracks and clefts developing in a layer he had always considered inviolable–the Cloudlands. When asked, Imagitharr begrudgingly explained that to the South, near the mountains, there was an area of disturbance that Land Dragons called ‘the Upwelling’ which generated unusual weather patterns and broke up the Cloudlands from beneath. The Land Dragons also referred to the ‘Realms of Light’ where the twin suns broke through to shine into their vast realm.
Ardan had always considered the Cloudlands to be akin to the floor of the Island-World. Diving below with Leandrial had been one matter. Now, it seemed that they perched precariously above canyons of unknowable depth, the Air-Oceans of legend. Occasionally they saw Land Dragons below, and twice, the swirling movement of great bodies locked in battle.
Look at all the scavenger-Dragons, said one of the Dragons, pointing downward.
Ardan saw flocks and wings of what had to be all the scavengers in Herimor gathered to the feast. Some dived deep into the Cloudlands to retrieve hunks of meat so large, he could see them dangling from talons from five miles off. Others, bloated beyond endurance, rested on the floating Islands or winged torpidly toward the mountains for a rest. Grey windrocs, lesser chunugar storks and crimson-tufted valkors, all carrion birds, blackened the skies below the Dragonwing in their millions.
Thoralian has made his visitation, Marshal Tixi said darkly.
As they passed over the first of the Vassal States, the acrid stench of rotting flesh was enough to make the most hardened warrior blench. There must have been great battles here; all this was the aftermath. Tixi and her Dragons pointed to Islands slewed in the sky or sunk into the Cloudlands, Islands carpeted in dead Dragonflesh, and more obviously, the fires still raging on thirty or more outlying Islands of the independent Vassal States. Yet of Thoralian’s forces, they saw no sign sav
e the rippling patterns painted on the Cloudlands by the widespread migration of Land Dragons, all apparently headed South. Ardan had expected thousands of Lesser Dragons. Where were they hiding?
The Red Shapeshifter warned, Gather your glamour, Dragon-kin. Swift to the Straits to find the Star Dragoness. Ardan, do you sense her?
He said, There’s a mighty storm beyond the mountains, Marshal.
Her eyes flared to a burnt-orange colour. Do you dare to threaten me?
Facts, Marshal.
She snapped at her own shadow. How he missed his Shadow Dragon! Quietly, on the way, Ardan had tried to summon up his magic–any magic at all–and failed. He did not even feel a tingling, as Aranya had described during her recovery. All he had was his restored command of Dragonish.
Seen from an altitude of two leagues above the Cloudlands, the Vassal States were a tapestry of green and brown dots often linked by faint threads. This area was one of the greatest Human civilisations of Herimor, with Island-fortresses burrowed into the floating Islands and dwellings sprawling up the lower flanks of the Mesas. They built on a scale lavish beyond imagination. Twice, they passed cities over thirty miles long and four miles tall. The fortifications were purple, interlocking stonework, two hundred feet thick and the boundary walls, six hundred feet tall. Triple-hulled Herimor Dragonships, narrower in the beam than their Northern counterparts, but comprised of three balloons fastened side-by-side, plied the skies in their thousands. The Humans leashed verdant Islands to their shores at multiple levels to provide additional farmland and military emplacements, anchoring them on hawsers Lurax said were eighty-foot-thick, braided metallic ragions.
Abandoning dignity, Ardan gazed about with the inquisitive air of the dragonet on his lap and the enthusiasm of the boys seated behind him.
As swiftly as Dragons flew, it took two days of travelling with a stiff following breeze to leave the Vassal States in their wake and forge along the unbroken mountain massif, before they raised sight of the Inscrutables.
War. All-out war raged around an invisible perimeter circumscribing an Island-Cluster that stood, for a change, firmly rooted where it should be–deep beneath the Cloudlands, with numerous, heavily-forested Islands arranged in a perfectly regular heptagon. The largest mountains were positioned at the seven main points. Every one of the five hundred and eighty Lesser Dragons of Marshal Tixi’s expanded Dragonwing, courtesy of her allies, seemed to shiver at once. Ardan felt nothing untoward, but the Dragons muttered among themselves of ‘eerie glamour’ and even a ghostly, threatening presence. They shook their muzzles and dug their talons into their ear-canals as though suddenly aware of an excess of itchy wax.
Marshal Tixi seemed unaffected. “Huh,” she said. “War? That’s a hassle. We’ll fly around.”
Ardan gazed ahead, concentrating deeply. What was it about that place that felt so … attractive? Almost homely? Could it be that those Inscrutable Dragons employed some kind of Shadow power to defend their realm? As he watched, silver blurred out of nothingness. An attack from fresh air; winged dots tumbled into the Cloudlands. Unholy stinking fumaroles! What was that?
Then, at the very limit of his Human sight, he saw a brighter, almost-white dot flying above a great legion of Dragons. Thoralian! The faraway Dragon seemed to gesture. Suddenly, a shimmering dome appeared in the air right over those uncanny Islands. The Dragonwings of Thoralian’s command oriented on that gargantuan, impossible feat of shielding and began to hammer it with every attack at their disposal. The shield flashed and glimmered into and out of existence, but held. Again, counterattacks flashed through the shield. Dragons fell. They slid slowly and in great numbers down the shield’s low curvature before vanishing into the lapping amber Cloudlands, but Thoralian did not appear to relent.
That was his plan. His goal–Ardan narrowed his eyes. Why the Inscrutables? What great treasure did they hide that Thoralian would choose to expend his forces so recklessly?
The First Egg? Or yet another secret?
One of the Dragons pointed to the East, bugling in alarm, “Earthen-Fires, what’s that?”
Every eye turned to the dark smudge out there, halfway to the horizon, surging upward as if the Cloudlands’ murkiest depths sought to assault the sky. The disturbance spread as it humped upward, boiling leagues across the Cloudlands before their incredulous eyes, already a mile high and rising relentlessly. Ardan instinctively looked to the position of the suns and moons to judge if they might be seeing an eclipse. No. The positions of the four moons decried … he turned again, focussing his sight which had become uncannily sharp since his first transformation into a Dragon, there in the Western Isles. Thoralian’s forces broke off the attack. They soared. Withdrawing–why?
Back to the East. That was no storm. That was … Fly! he roared. Fly up and away! High as you can–nooooooow!
To the Marshal’s strident outrage, her entire Dragonwing obeyed Ardan’s bellow as though tugged by a single, invisible hawser. She was still yelling ‘hold!’ and ‘listen to me!’ as the Dragons powered for the sky, bugling in panic. Wow, Ardan congratulated himself. They knew as little as he why that precise inflection had galvanised them, but there was almost a hint of the feral about their reaction.
The Marshal flexed her wings powerfully. Black! You snivelling coward, what have you–
Ardan shouted right back, Islands! That’s Islands, Marshal!
For the long, long breath that the Marshal’s disbelief gripped her, nothing happened save the phenomenon’s inexorable skyward swelling and advance. Ardan did not even have words to describe such a tidal movement in the Cloudlands, a jumbled, rolling mixture of Islands and Dragonkind raised upon the backs of a sea of seething Land Dragons which swarmed so thickly, it seemed the entire Island-World had turned into Dragonflesh. This tonnage of incipient destruction bore down on the Inscrutables with a majesty surpassing description, surpassing terror. His heart froze.
Tixi bolted for the sky, screaming, Follow me!
The Dragons beat their wings, locked in a race that seemed at once to stretch the space between hearts-beats to a painfully slow extreme, but simultaneously to unfold at a dreadful velocity. The wave surged. Churning. Rumbling. Looming over the shield-barrier around the Inscrutables like the most terrible war-hammer in history, poised to strike doom into the flesh of all mortal beings.
The comber curled and descended. Moments flitted by. Horror. Fear. Fleeing. Then came the mind-blowing impact. Dragons reeled. The compact Dragonwing ripped apart in a flash, as numbers of wings folded or snapped at the explosion that engulfed them. Stabbing his soul like invisible knives, there came the unbearable shrieking of Dragonkind in mortal agony. Ardan reeled in his Dragon Rider saddle, bleeding from burst capillaries in his nose and ears. Imagitharr’s wings folded like so much damp linen. He spiralled downward, aware of flickers of movement, a strangely oily Dragonsong … helpless, they were tumbled toward Islands tipping at impossible angles, as though their knees had been hacked out from beneath them.
Ardan’s lolling brought him an upward glance. Thoralian!
His view spiralled again. He wrenched his neck trying to watch–Thoralian must have attacked here while he was still there, out near the horizon … the Yellow-White conversed with Marshal Tixi as Imagitharr dropped away precipitately. On the next glimpse, Ardan observed a strange, baffled look fixed in her eyes, her mind already lost to the power of the Yellow-White’s psychic dominance. The second Thoralian. He had ambushed Tixi’s Dragonwing at the precise instant of that calamitous impact.
Ardan’s teeth rattled at a second impact as Imagitharr collided with a rolling Island, striking so hard he bounced hundreds of feet through the air … images blurred … Thoralian chewing … three metal-armoured Dragon talons slammed into his chest!
His consciousness gave up the unequal battle.
* * * *
Zuziana wept, inconsolable; curled into a foetal ball, clutching her stomach and the precious, precious lives within. How could she have gue
ssed? She was their mother, supposed to protect the three fragile lives awakening in her womb, but how could she hope to shelter them from Thoralian’s urzul? Ri’arion had returned. He was as distraught as she, raging, hurting Dragons in his fury, but then he calmed down with that frighteningly abrupt Nameless Man self-discipline to examine her.
Nothing. Not a trace.
No Dragon had sensed anything, yet she was chilled through. The Dragons searched and fulminated and argued. It must have been a nightmare, they growled. The old Marshal could certainly attack through nightmares; his magic could affect minds and produce physical effects. Brityx took Zuziana in paw, swathed in every cloak and blanket they possessed, and sang mellifluous Dragonsong to calm her down.
As the monk questioned her endlessly, Zip struck out furiously. “You don’t believe me!”
She split his lip. Ri’arion’s eyes blazed, but he said simply, “I must, and I do. Come. This is beyond my power. We must keep searching for Aranya. Perhaps she …”
His voice trailed off.
“Perhaps Leandrial’s Balance-magic can help?” Brityx put in.
“I don’t like this,” said Suk’itarix the Green. “It smells seventh-sense-charring. Why would he strike this little one? He cannot fear us; his forces are too great. Caring for his legacy through an Azure Shapeshifter? It seems an inordinate risk for one who calculates every risk and nuance with all the legendary cunning of Herimor.”
Ri’arion said, “Perhaps the Marshals seek to drive us to a battleground of their choosing.”
Right. Snivelling Princess of Remoy, to battle! Zuziana compacted her horror into a tight ball in her chest and trussed it with every shred of her willpower. “What news of Aranya?”
Rapidly, the Green Shapeshifter summarised, “Your friend apparently arrived in the form of a comet, four weeks ago, smashing four of Marshal Montorix’s barracks like an angry Dragon stamping on a bug. Taken to the Pits, she became a Gladiatrix called Aranya the Assassin, quickly building her reputation as she thrashed her every enemy in the arena including several legendary Gladiator Dragons. The last had a reputation across all of Herimor–an Orange-Red called Tahootax the Terrible, or Tahootax Two-Head. He was a Wing Commander in Marshal Thoralian’s armies; a mightier brute you have never seen. How your little friend … they say she blew him to the far side of the Rift.” She laughed softly. “For that feat, Aranya was purchased by Marshal Huaricithe, a sworn enemy of the old Marshal. They flew South less than two days ago.”