by Marc Secchia
Kal eyed the horizon once more before ducking inside to a chorus of giggles. Tazithiel, thank the heavens and all five moons, was still making angry circuits of the Island-Cluster, hopefully working off a severe case of Dragon greed and her deep contrition at having injured her cherished Rider’s sceptre and adjacent parts. Or was it the scale which had burned him, while somehow protecting him from the Dragoness’ fire?
Yardi, at fourteen the third in line and boldest of her sisters, greeted him sweetly, “Islands’ greetings, Kal.” This with such a fluttering of eyelashes, Kal wondered that they did not snap off. “Mom, do we need to remove his trousers for treatment?”
“Get on that table, boy!” Chemi’s brown eyes flashed at her daughters. She bawled, “You girls got chores, or what?”
Kal rather suspected their chores would centre on the kitchen. Perhaps he ought to have worn a shirt. Then again, he was so sore, the added attention was surely no hardship.
Chemi growled, “You jump in a campfire, boy? What you done to your manlies?” The giggling! Chemi yelled at her daughters again; four brunette heads vanished behind a doorpost, but Kal could hear them tittering away back there. “Lie down. Don’t want none of your complaining. Always turning up at my door like a dirty brass dral with some hole or other in your hide. You bleeding clumsy for a grown man. Ha’aruka! Boy, where you gone hiding? Get me a bucket of fresh water–snippety-quick!”
“Yes, Mom.”
The door banged. Silence. Kal hissed as Chemi touched the blistered skin on his shoulder. “No charcoal in here. No cloth, neither. What kind of burn you got, boy?”
“Dragon fire,” said Kal.
At the same time, Ha’aruka came sprinting back inside, pallid and trembling. “Mom, there’s a-a-a …”
“Speak up! For a boy of fifteen summers you gone lost your tongue?”
Tazithiel strolled through the open doorway. Not Dragon-Tazi, but her Shifted form. She wore not a stitch of clothing. Kal reddened. Ha’aruka looked as though he had swallowed a bonfire. Dragonesses! Roaring rajals, did they have to flaunt themselves?
Then again, her flaunt-ability, if that was a word, was completely off the scale.
Without missing a beat, Mistress Chemi flipped a cloth over her son’s head and thrust him out of the room. The boy vented a low groan of frustration. Kal sympathised, oh aye! Meantime, the Mistress drew herself up to her full height, which was not saying a great deal, but her expression said far more. Kal beamed. Right, this should be fun, Mistress Chemi giving a Shapeshifter Dragoness the full brunt of one of her infamous broadsides.
Chemi scooted out a chair. “You with this worthless reprobate, great lady?”
Great lady? Kal almost choked in outrage.
Tazithiel seated herself as if this were the most perfectly natural behaviour in the world. From behind the doorway, he heard someone sigh, “Did summer just sit down in our kitchen?” and another, shyer voice, “She’s so beautiful.”
Wretched exhibitionist!
“He can be rather trying,” said Tazi, with a twinkle of her eye meant for Kal and his hyrax-bemused-by-a-cobra grin.
“You far too good for him, girl. Sweet young petal like you, it’s beyond my powers of reason what you see in that washed-up old geezer.”
Kal had begun to gasp in protest when the nude menace opposite somehow sabotaged his air supply with her Kinetic power, turning the word into a pained wheeze. “Geeeeee …” he whistled. He resorted to hand-signals to express his infuriation.
“Speechless, I see?” Chemi snorted. “Fine quality in a man, says I. Just you treat this woman princess-like, Kal, or I swear … I’ll have none of your cavorting and frolicking about like you done with those other poor petals–girls! Close your ears!” Kal hissed as she applied salve to his shoulder. “You been teaching my girls nothing good about men, you disgraceful lout. Ha’aruka, get your head back in that room this instant!”
“I’m reformed, I swear!”
Chemi smiled sweetly. “He reforms them two at a time.”
“Two?” Kal found his volume.
“Maybe I’m exaggerating a touch. Sure seems like it, though.”
“I’ve my methods for keeping him in line,” Tazithiel smiled, acting so innocent, Kal could gladly have throttled her. He wanted to yell something about Dragon fire, claws, talons, underhanded magical jurisdiction over his trousers, and …
“You two staying for dinner? Of course you are,” said Mistress Chemi, neatly slamming the door on any protest. “Great lady, you borrow yourself a dress. Mind you, I’m not putting my salve anywhere near his manlies. Might catch myself something ghastly.”
Tazi drawled, “I’m sure it won’t inconvenience me.”
“Here.” Chemi tossed the pot of salve to Tazi, who caught it deftly. “You won’t need much. Not for his manlies, anyways.” Howls of mirth erupted from the next room.
“Evidently not,” smirked the Dragoness.
Kal shouted, “Great Islands! Is there no justice in this world?”
* * * *
“Is my little Kally-wally comfortable?”
He was not, but Kal was not about to dignify Tazithiel’s barbs with a response.
Kal stared at the ninety-foot breadth of her wings, cupping and shifting huge volumes of air. He rode Dragonback as had many famous Riders before him, only their purpose was noble and their cause just–at least, those who followed the values of Hualiama, long-ago Princess of Fra’anior. She had established the Dragon Rider Academies to train peacekeepers and law-givers. Peacekeeping was a foolish notion. Land oneself slap in the middle of every manner of conflict? Unhealthy, unwise and naïve. Further, many Dragon Riders were as crooked as the infamous broken-trees of Ur-Naphtha Cluster in the West. Noble? Well, Tazithiel was nobleness incarnate, and that was one aspect of the gulf between their natures.
She said, “And his eensy-weensy manlies?”
“Hurting like a freaking–” Kal skipped a swear word. What was the point in moral superiority if he still thought the word? “Just hurting.”
“I’m sorry I burned you,” said Dragoness-Tazi. He was not convinced by her fiery contrition. “More herbs?”
“Kallion of the kingly sceptre has downed enough herbs to turn some of these Islands green,” he replied, gesturing at the tan barrenness far below. “How does anything live out here, Tazi?”
“Life is more tenacious than you might suppose.”
He wondered if she was talking about her experiences. “Let’s try not to tangle with any drakes, alright? I’m feeling sensitive.”
Tazithiel guffawed, “The best part was when Mistress Chemi started describing in detail how to apply the ointment, Kal. You could’ve carved holes through Islands with your expression!”
“Bah. Self-restraint. Who ever invented such a ralti-stupid idea?”
Chortling away with a volley of flame-hiccoughs, the Dragoness said, “Your favourite monks, no doubt. Kal, you can feel sensitive for a few days yet. We’re less than a day from your hoard and I, for one, appreciate how difficult it is to leave all that avarice behind.”
Tazithiel had acted subdued since her display of draconic lust which had come within inches of turning one purportedly rehabilitated thief into a Dragon’s breakfast. They discussed the protections Istariela must have placed upon her hoard, but reached no conclusions. Tazi knew of no Dragon magic which could thread a Dragoness of her size through the proverbial hole in the needle, nor one which responded to draconic avarice.
“Greed is the face of ugliness,” he said. “I should know.”
She winced palpably.
He worried about what they flew toward. His hoard had been one matter. Another, quite different concern lay ahead at Yin’toria Island. He should drop by. In his line of business, it paid to keep the staff hopping. Aye. A devious smile played about his lips. A Dragoness might provide just the medicine they needed, if she did not slay him first. Hopefully, her many-clawed tyrannical majesty would major on the playing and
pay less attention to the slaying.
She said, “Most of the drakes prefer the western periphery of the Island-Desert anyways. In this season, we should find a few other Dragon Riders strutting about, notching up kills. Hopefully friendly. No way under the suns the search could have spread this far, this quickly.”
“I prefer to leave hunt-and-kill operations to those patently designed from the ground up for such pursuits,” Kal replied. Now optimism? In his view, pessimism paved the road to a long life.
“So, my dear sweetmeat formerly called Kal, am I to understand you subscribe to the theory that the Lesser Dragons were designed by Fra’anior and his ilk?”
“You’re a Shapeshifter,” he said, alert to the threat implied in her words. “That’s different.”
“Hmm?” She blew a smoke ring over him.
“Your impeccably sinuous draconic physique is an ode so sweet–” Kal coughed unhappily as the happy little smoke-rings turned into acrid billows. “Smoking out this hard-working artist while he’s composing poetic praises to the glories of your every scale is hardly an appropriate expression of gratitude, Tazithiel. Consider yourself told off.”
“Methinks he avoideth the question.”
“Methinks mine masculine mystery must mercifully remain mute.”
Thus they passed the hours of flight in banter and companionable silences, as the tireless wingbeat of an Indigo Dragoness propelled them ever westward, day by day, across the breadth of an Island-Desert matched in size only by the Cloudlands oceans themselves. Still, Kal would have preferred to imagine that life thrived beneath that toxic cloud-layer and not all was a pernicious wasteland. In the above-cloud world, the stultifying heat was barely relieved by the cooling effect of Dragon flight. No water. No terrace lakes, which ringed many Islands further north. There was no relieving greenery, only the cloudless, baking days and suffocating nights, and countless tan and brown Islands scattered across equally tan Cloudlands. The wind-borne dust swept off the Islands created setting suns so huge and ethereal, the twin orbs rivalled the Yellow moon for size.
The sense of desolation multiplied the deeper Dragon and Rider penetrated the trackless wilderness of the South. Kal could imagine the conflict which must have taken place here; battles which had toppled Islands upon each other or split them asunder. Some areas were merely piles of rock sticking a few hundred feet above the restless Cloudlands, as if the corrosive clouds sought to drag the shattered remnants to their final doom. In other regions he saw vaulting, undercut rock formations carved and smoothed as though eroded by long-desiccated rivers, through which strange and fey winds blew, making Tazithiel as skittish as a kitten playing on hot flagstones. Already tan of skin, Kal shucked his shirt and grew as bronzed as the statues in one of his display chambers.
In the evenings, they made camp in a hollow or nook sheltered from the incessant wind. More often than not, the Shapeshifter transformed into her Human form. Perhaps she guessed at Kal’s wariness of her Dragon-manifestation, he thought. Freaky how she could just appear out of thin air. What a refined filcher wouldn’t give for that power!
One such evening, ten days after they had left Kal’s lair, Tazi impishly curled her fingers around his biceps, carving his skin with pretend-talons. “Mmm, I could snack on this.”
“Given recent experience, I’m not entirely partial to becoming your snack. Watch out!”
She glanced casually at a deadly copper cobra, spitted perfectly through the skull by Kal’s throwing-knife. “Fine strike, Rider Kal.”
“Fresh snake for dinner? I’ll collect the wood.”
“You’re injured.” Tazi pursed her lips as she regarded Kal’s new, rather less charred trousers. “We need to safeguard the royal sceptre.”
“Well!” Kal hitched his fingers in his belt while puffing out his chest. “Just wait until I deploy the royal sceptre on you, Tazi. I’ll make you–”
“Only when it stops … oozing.”
“Tazithiel!” Kal turned purple, white–he did not know. “You’re disgusting! I’d appreciate a touch of sympathy from she who … oh. Welcome to my embrace, thou comeliest of Isles maidens.”
Pressing the supple length of her body against his and gazing upward through her eyelashes, the Shapeshifter murmured, “I’m most indescribably remorseful about the suppurating, pustulent, unsightly burns covering your epic manly parts, dearest Kal. If I could, I’d wave my fingers and–”
Epic? Ignoring the superfluous verbiage, she was a heavenly being descended to the Isles! And if she was teasing, he’d slap her down to the status of a bottom-feeding carp.
Quickly, he said, “Kiss it all better?”
“In your nasty dreams, you depraved troublemaker. No, I was just wondering … no.”
Kal searched her eyes, dizzied by the marvellous fate which bound him to this incomparable woman. Surely, he dreamed. Surely, she could not desire the likes of … him?
A smile curved Tazithiel’s lips. “I saw fresh rockfall today.”
“Huh?” He managed a highly intelligent bleat.
“Tomorrow, we’re going Anubam-hunting. You need to see a burrowing Dragon, Kal. It’s a unique experience in this Island-World.”
“What does that have to do with a perfect volcanic suns-set over Fra’anior, which fires the skies forge-red, and bathes the world in beams of ruddy light so thick a man should wish to stroke them?”
She produced a pout of quivering magnificence. “Hunting? Tomorrow?”
“As you wish, o monumental sky-princess.”
“Kal, my Human form prefers rather less of the superlative size comparisons.” Kal set about kissing her pout back into the shape of a smile. “Ooh, stop … you pirate … no, I was thinking … or not thinking, you wretchedly … metagrobolising man …”
Aye, may she gasp! Kal admired his handiwork. He really was a great kisser.
“You! I’ll smack that little-boy smirk right off your face,” she huffed. Her cheeks flamed; heat radiated from her body. “You just filched an important thought right out of my–”
“Kinetic powers for healing,” Kal prompted, although he was not sure why.
Her eyes lit up. “Yes. Yes! You’re a mind-reading genius!” Well, this conversation was definitely heading in the right direction. Not only the fulsome compliments, but Kal loved it when Tazi frolicked about in happiness, for with a pinch of luck such behaviour might extend to the pillow-roll. “Although how exactly, escapes me. This isn’t the first time either.”
“You still aren’t making sense, woman.”
“Oh, I am.” Tazi fixed a ravishing smile upon him. “I’m going to think that infection right out of your nether regions.”
Instinctively, Kal covered the suddenly tingling essentials with his hands. “You are not starting some crazy experiment on my … no! Not there!”
“Poor Kal, I can hear your friends snickering already. This gorgeous Shapeshifter enchantress is begging you to drop your trousers and you’re running away in fear?”
“It’s the Island of wisdom!”
* * * *
After a few false starts, Tazithiel succeeded in improving matters below the belt, so to speak. Kal lost his precious dignity and by morning, gained a visible improvement to the burn which stretched from his right hip, three quarters of the way across his abdomen. The White Dragoness’ scale had protected him from a fate most horrific. He noted Tazithiel’s pensive glance when she spotted him storing the trinket in his belt-pouch.
That morning they flew low, hunting Anubam.
Burrowing Dragons. Kal knew a few legends. Tazithiel seemed confident, but she was a seventy-foot flying fortress. The Human on her back was decidedly more squishable. Kal had a healthy respect for anything that could quarry holes the size of what he saw in these Islands.
The Dragoness flitted from Island to Island, hunting for fresh Anubam-sign. She found a newly excavated ten-foot hole in the flank of a vast horizontal column. “Tiny,” she sneered. “No fun here.” Kal eyed the
dark tunnel-mouth as they passed by. He was quite certain he saw burning eyes blink shut in the darkness, as if the creature within sensed his gaze. “Miniscule.” The Indigo Dragoness swished by another tunnel marked by a fresh landslide within which Kal spied numerous gemstones. Hmm. What did these Anubam eat, anyways? Could they be drawn out into the open?
Kal rooted though the saddlebags while Tazithiel imitated a dragonfly, darting from tunnel-mouth to tunnel-mouth. “This seems a busy Island,” she muttered. “I wonder where the mother of all Anubam might be?”
An affinity for gemstones had always fizzed in his blood. Kal extracted a fist-sized cluster of horiatite, the signature crystal of Ha’athior Island in his native Fra’anior Cluster, once a sacred Island of the Dragonkind but now inhabited by Humans. According to the Dragon lore the monks had taught him, an Ancient Dragon had once lived in the bowels of Ha’athior, a Dragon befriended by a Human girl. The mind boggled. Tazithiel was intimidating enough. Here, the Ancient Powers had toppled whole Islands and devastated them by the thousand.
If the time of the Ancient Dragons had passed, he wondered, how was it he had spoken to Fra’anior so clearly? What magic was that? For he sensed the Great Black Dragon was alive–somewhere, somehow. Imagine a titan like Fra’anior returning to the Island-World? He must dwarf the Islands.
Heavens above and Islands below, now he was worrying about mythical seven-headed tyrants from a past steeped in the blood and misery of Human slavery? Better to welcome a cataclysm that would swallow the entire Island-World into its fiery maw.
Kal raised the gemstone. Come and get it …
The Indigo Dragoness flinched as though he had pierced her belly with a twenty-foot Dragon lance. Kal–honestly, will you never learn? No Dragon’s stupid enough to be listening.
Bah. Fra’anior had calmed the storm on his request. Apparently. Perfectly true if a certain master battlement-dancer also had an ego as big and menacing as Tazi’s Shapeshifted Dragoness. That said, he had just developed an itching sensation on the nape of his neck, as though said Dragoness were drawing delicate circles on his skin with her daintiest talon. Kal scanned their surrounds. All was quiet. Caves and tunnels raddled the Islands as though they had been afflicted by some strange, wasting disease, and many Islands were merely mounded heaps of rock. Undermined and collapsed? Then where were the miners?