Dragon Thief

by Marc Secchia

  “Later, Razorblades.” Kal turned to Tazi. “She’s a daughter to me. And, I think she likes you. Isn’t this perfect?”

  Poor woman, she could only track Riika’s departure with her eyes, unspeaking.

  “If I framed your face, I could sell it for an artwork called ‘The Astonished’,” he chuckled. “Aye, I’m a poor surrogate parent. I’m working on the taste in clothing business, but you know teenage girls. Just won’t listen. Do you think you could work on changing her mind?”

  “I think I could go to work on you! What–Kal, what is all this? Are you Kal or are you–”

  “I’m Kal,” he said. “Come sit on my lap and I’ll spin you a tale, o Tazithiel. Or–excellent intimidation in the growl there–I could give you the short and sharp version. Aye. Excellent idea. Ready?”

  Grrrrrr …

  “Very well. Welcome to the realm of King Ta’armion the entrepreneur, multi-Island industrialist, Dragonship builder, trader … well, we’ll be here a while if we go through all that. Here’s a riddle for you. Who is the king who is not a king, except in the world below?”

  Tazithiel did perch on his lap, but only in order to bring her fist into closer proximity with his jaw, Kal suspected. “The king who is not … why, that’s the King of Thieves, of c … of c-c …”

  “May I clarify, at this juncture, that most of the legends about me are wholly unfounded?” said Kal.

  “You’re … that king? ‘An eye in every household, a stronghold on every Island, the terror of the night is he’–that King Ta’armion? He of untold legions of thieves? Fabulous wealth–well, that bit’s true. He who brutally slew every contender to his underworld throne in such a welter of bloodletting–you monster, don’t you nod! Don’t–Kal!”

  “I told you I’m not a good man,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut. Why had he let himself become entangled with this woman? To know the pain and fear he knew now?

  “To think I let you …” Tazithiel fell silent.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t find a way to explain. Words are …” he waved a hand, trying to indicate that describing Riika was impossible to someone who had not met her, never mind his past.

  “I didn’t trust you, to be fair. What’s all this business, this industry, then?”

  “The road to reform.”

  “If those legends are so inaccurate, Kal–”

  He snapped, “The Guild gave me a drug called hendyne-ichor, Tazi. A little courage for the mission, they said. It turns men into cold, killing automatons, and bullies into monsters. I didn’t care who the hells I hurt or killed. I haven’t forgotten what I did–and I knew what I was doing, alright? Freaking feral windrocs, I enjoyed putting all those people ten feet under a carpet of fireflowers!”

  Kal’s panting filled the silence between them. He saw her horror; it cut him so deep, so physically, that he thought his body would start weeping blood.

  “How many women have you seduced?”

  He bobbed his right shoulder, blazing inwardly. In the light of what he had told her, what she knew of his reputation, this was her main concern? “Tazi, do you really want an answer–”

  “What’s the longest relationship you’ve ever had?

  “Well, years–that is, occasional recreational visits over a lengthy period of time.” Her expression reminded him acutely of the proximity of her fingers to the arteries in his neck. “Uh, in a single stretch? Ours has to be a close contender.”

  Drawing back, Tazithiel slapped his cheek with a resounding smack. “That’s for all the women of this Island-World.” Kal had barely begun to recover when she whacked him on the backhand, less forcefully. “That’s for entertaining that little minx, Jisellia.”

  “I did not ask for–ouch!”

  “That’s for not mentioning Riika. Typical male, communicating like your average tight-lipped lump of rockwood.”

  Kal felt his smarting ear. He grumbled, “Disgraceful Dragoness.”

  He sincerely hoped she did not decide to punish him for being the King of Thieves. That would not come with friendly bites and bruises; rather, a slow, deliberate claw sawing at his spinal column. Yet, even as he contemplated his fate, a brilliant, febrile smile curved her lips in a way that made Kal’s heart lurch so forcefully, it practically leaped out of his throat and ran off around the volcano, screaming.

  She said, “And this–this is from me.”

  When Kal surfaced, sans sanity, a few minutes later, the Shapeshifter Dragoness said sweetly, “Because I adore kings.”

  “Oh?”

  Matters were looking up. Heating up, too.

  She bit his lip again. “However, liars displease me greatly.” Nibbling down to his chin, she added, “Seducing Dragonesses is foremost on my list of life-terminating offences.”

  “Ouch! Islands’ sakes, will you sheathe the fangs? That hurt.”

  Tazi breathed, “Mmm, o Kallion, my despicable Kallion. You’ve irretrievably corrupted me in favour of tall, dark, felonious men. I find your change of heart most … invigorating.”

  “Do you know you’re not making a straw’s weight of sense, woman?”

  “As for your tasteless jokes about sceptres …”

  “Obviously, I was telling the truth all along. I’ll just have to convince you about that. Robustly.”

  When his entire senior staff entered the conference room connected to Kal’s office an hour later and looked upward, it was to discover Shapeshifter and Dragon Rider passionately engaged in what could by no stretch of the imagination be termed polite recreational co-flying.

  Perhaps introducing them to the Dragoness could wait for the morrow.

  * * * *

  The cynical part of him had long ago worked out that his staff kept certain issues on hand specifically for the infrequent occasions the boss might deign to show up. Showing up thirty feet above the mahogany conference table in all his masculine glory? He would never live this down.

  Kal strummed his harp pensively. When he heard Tazithiel and Riika had been seen doing womanly things together, it had taken all his willpower neither to snoop nor interfere. When an Indigo Dragoness had raced for the skies with a girl on her back, he had been amazed, terrified and jealous enough to spit like a tayabak lizard. Maudlin old fool. Bah. The real fun was watching the sparks fly as those two had a run at each other.

  If they didn’t kill each other first, they might even become friends.

  His simple, private balcony atop the volcano had panoramic views of a suns-set which would make a poet swoon and tumble to his death over the edge. As was his habit, Kal sat on the low wall with his feet dangling over a two thousand foot drop, facing west.

  He bent to his instrument. Softly, he sang an old monkish lay called Fra’anior Rising:

  Above the Isles a storm of Dragons,

  Darkened my world,

  Above the clouds the wingéd ones,

  Roused the tempest, a peal of thunder crying,

  O Lord of Dragons, arise! Arise!

  An approving clicking of fingers greeted the final, rising high note. With a start, Kal turned. He had been so absorbed … his hands flailed. A touch of magic, however, restored harp to hand and rump to solid ground. Crossly, he willed his heartbeat to settle. He failed miserably.

  “Didn’t know I could do that,” Tazithiel teased.

  She wore a simple, long dress of sky-blue Helyon silk and elegant, jewelled heels in a design Kal had never seen before. Probably the latest fashion, lost on a man who had spent two and a half years abroad, mostly in a monkish prison. She needed no additional height, but his instant estimate settled upon three and a half inches. Her unbound hair tumbled down her back, glossy black with strong tints of sapphire blue. A lifetime’s habit of attention to detail brought to his notice a quarter-inch of toe belonging to a person hiding behind his Dragoness.

  Stepping aside, Tazithiel performed a passable Fra’aniorian introductory hand-twirl. “Behold.”

  Kal did. He beheld, and came within a raj
al’s whisker of losing his seat a second time. He beheld, and gasped a lungful of the Island-World’s sweetest air. Riika!

  His ward wore an ornate, high-collared Eastern tunic dress in a deep ochre colour that set off her dark, tumbling ringlets and creamy brown skin-tones perfectly. Her already high cheekbones, bespeaking her Helyon heritage, had been subtly enhanced with a dusting of pearlescent ochre makeup. Stunning! Kal felt a silly smile curve his lips, but he cared less than a pinch of dust for that. An artfully worked spray of crimson fireflowers adorned her hair. And then, flouting tradition in the most Riika of ways, the dress hung to mid-thigh, barely. The way she balanced on her unaccustomed tall platform heels, laced up her calves, reminded him of an awkward baby heron. Lissom. Delightful. Womanly in ways he had never perceived.

  “Riika?” he croaked.

  Colour, already present, flooded her cheeks. “Like, Sticky-Fingers?”

  “Smitten.”

  Kal wandered over in a daze. He had never seen her without weapons. Of course, she could kill in dozens of different ways with her hands, feet, knees and elbows … he looked over the trembling young woman. When had he ever seen her so nervous? So vulnerable, so needing an indication of his approval? A bane upon the fate that would spell her death! And he had been absent for over two years of what she had left. Sick despair gouged his heart as if Anubam claws scourged the living pith from within.

  Stretching onto her tiptoes, Riika kissed his cheek. “Tears, you old sap?”

  “Pesky gnats!” Kal wiped his eye. “I’ll be strapped over a barrel and floated down a Cloudlands-bound river before I let you out of the house dressed like this, young lady!”

  Riika smiled radiantly. “Oh?”

  “Kal.” Tazithiel had that feminine skill of investing an entire conversation in one word.

  With a wicked grin, he said, “Any chance I can ditch that vexatious Shapeshifter Dragoness for you, o breathtaking splendour of the Isles?”

  Growl! Blush! Kal crinkled his eyes at Riika and Tazi, letting them see and feel his pride and pleasure. Then, he seated them at the dining-table and served dinner–a selection of Fra’aniorian sweetmeats and fruity bites in crisp pastry, washed down with an absurdly mellow berry wine borrowed with mild prejudice from the royal household of Fra’anior, some years back.

  “No wine for you, impudent sprite,” he snorted when Riika reached out.

  “Then none for you either, you ghastly child-abandoning degenerate,” she returned sweetly, but with a glint in her eye which hinted that serrated daggers would accompany a wrong reply.

  “Bah. Do you need any weapons bar your viper’s tongue?”

  Across from Kal, Tazithiel blatantly flirted with her eyes. “Go on, handsome. She’s fourteen.”

  “Double-bah served on the point of a poisoned quarrel!” he groused. “Outnumbered, disarmed, and outshone by however many million leagues it is to our twin suns. Half a glass, you little whippersnapper, and I’ll have a grateful ‘thank you’ or it’s straight to bed with no dinner.”

  Riika bobbed her head and said diffidently, “I’m nothing if not obedient, Kal. Thank you.”

  He almost choked on his wine.

  “So, we’ve a proposal for you,” said Tazithiel.

  “Tell me, o sweet muse, how did you convince my inexplicably respectful and compliant ward to change her ways?”

  “She took me flying! It was magical!” Riika’s eyes danced.

  “Do not concern yourself, you suspicious old codger,” Tazi asserted. Kal kicked her ankle ungently. “I most certainly did not pretend to drop her a couple of times, nor did I toss her in the air and shoot practice fireballs at her diminutive rump. We took a stately circuit of the Isles–”

  “She did loops and barrel-rolls and cloud-hopping!”

  Kal wished his eyes could roast holes in Tazithiel’s head–not for want of trying!

  “It was perfectly safe.” Assertive, but a lie worthy of the name.

  A firm glare passed between the two women. Bizarrely, they appeared almost the same age. “Safe?” snorted Riika. “I thought ‘safe’ was a four-letter word in Dragonish–wouldn’t you agree, Kal?”

  He said, “Along with nice, easy, weak, tame …”

  Riika added, “Soft, slow, ugly, meek, mild, cold …”

  The Shapeshifter blew a little flame ring over the table decorations. “Look. I’ve been practising.”

  “I imported those roses from Mejia at great expense, you wretch!”

  Tazithiel flicked her hair out of her deep blue eyes and fixed her gaze on Kal. “I propose we take Riika to Jeradia and enrol her in the Dragon Rider Academy.”

  Never was less a proposal and more a command spoken in the Island-World, Kal reflected sourly, disguising his feelings behind a deliberate sip of berry-wine. What an Island-quaking idea! However, too much could go wrong, for despite their earlier jokes, Riika was as safe as a pool of lava. She might murder a hapless student who looked at her the wrong way. She would probably thrash every weapons-master they had. His grin faded behind a choked-up feeling that climbed past his throat to prick his eyes. The girl he had left behind had flowered into a young woman. He had missed it, ralti-stupid fool that he was, chasing monkish lore around the Islands.

  She was dying.

  She might find happiness, however fleeting. Worse, a boy–whom Kal would interrogate with the implements of a thousand torture-chambers! Maybe, and he should know, just maybe this would be the Dragonride of her life. Aye. The choice was simple.

  Tazi said, “Kal, why the hungry-rajal smile?”

  He answered Riika’s shining, hopeful scrutiny, “Feral Dragons could not convince me to leave you behind again. So you have my ‘aye,’ and gladly do I give it.”

  She was around the table, just a flash upon his blurry eyesight, and in his arms before he could say a word more. Kal gasped as a fierce hug made his ribs creak.

  Riika yelled, “You’re the best, the best, the very best … ever!”

  Curious how one forgot how young she really was. How she could not speak the word ‘father’ because of her past. How behind her Dragon-hide of an exterior, her heart had learned to soften, for someone had taken a chance. Broken her out of slavery. Esteemed her.

  “There will be rules, Razorblades. Conditions. You will obey them to the letter. For example, no slaughtering of hapless students.”

  “Rules for schmools,” she punned, rather poorly. “Kal … I … oh, windroc droppings!”

  She laid her head upon his shoulder, and wept.

  Chapter 15: Counterstrike

  From the Southern Archipelago, the Indigo Dragoness and her two Riders swept in a steady curve that bent ever northward. Four days out of Yin’toria, at a Dragon’s flying speed, they settled in for the long crossing to Elidia Island, just northeast of Mejia. Old haunts for the Dragoness. Tazi spoke barely a word in all this time. The weather retained the perfect southern balm of the late hot season, bar a squall that engulfed them midway during the crossing, dumped a load of hail on the intrepid threesome, and whistled on. None of the previous storm’s madness, Kal thought. Why had that tempest seemed so preternaturally bent upon their destruction?

  As a starry night mantled the Island-World and Tazithiel flew into the heart of the huge Yellow moon, covering fully a third of the sky, Riika fell asleep in Kal’s arms.

  The Dragoness spoke. “Riika said you would tell me her story.”

  He had been expecting this. Without preamble, Kal replied, “Riika was the offspring of a Pygmy girl chained by traders for entertainment aboard their Dragonship. The pregnant girl somehow escaped and found her way back to her village in the Crescent Isles. She was treated like dirt and died in childbirth. The babe survived, but as you see, she has mixed-race features. At her first birthday, the Pygmies threw her to the spirits to see if she would survive. Apparently a Dragon found her and brought her back to the village–so they kept her alive to honour the Dragon, but as the unwanted bastard of a white-skinned barbar
ian, they pushed her harder than any other young warrior in that village. They threw her into the forefront of every battle, thinking she’d die, which would have been convenient. But she survived.”

  Tazithiel’s fires boiled madly, but she did not speak.

  “When she was six, Riika’s father came back for her–we don’t know how he found out, but we know why. He took her and eventually sold her to the Assassins Guild at Franxx, but not before he had abused her in the foulest ways imaginable. Pygmies are natural-born warriors; sackweight for sackweight, the best fighters in this Island-World. Trained brutally and tortured, Riika was a valuable commodity and probably made her father’s fortune.” Kal made to spit, but did not want to soil Tazi’s back, small as the gesture might be. “The Assassins secured their prize by further torturing her, inducting her in their most diabolical secrets, and then drugging her with yi’tx’txi’taxnayt’x–” he pronounced the clicks carefully “–a poison which originated in Dramagon’s laboratories, I believe. Dragons are familiar with its use.”

  “She takes a grain of antidote every second day, or the poison attacks the nervous system, causing unspeakable pain. The body will convulse so violently, the victim usually breaks their own spine. They say the pain is worse than death.”

  “Four years ago, a business rival contracted Riika to assassinate me. She was already developing her legend with the Guild. But Riika failed her mark–for I have unexpected talents of my own. See this scar?” He indicated his neck, knowing the Dragoness would have no trouble seeing the puckered three-inch scar in the dark. “She came that close. The kid’s talented, given as she was only ten at the time. I was fortunate. We made a bargain. I took her in. I inquired at the Guild of Assassins for her treatment.”

  “They surrendered this information freely?”

  Kal knew his smile was a thing of malign cruelty. “I can be very persuasive when pushed. I felt … motivated. And let’s just leave it there, shall we?”

  Tazithiel’s rumble held a dispirited note. “So you keep Riika supplied with antidote?”

  “Aye. Problem is, there’s no known antidote for yi’tx’txi’taxnayt’x. What she takes only delays the inevitable.” Kal stared off into the darkness, wishing … “She’s got a few years left–two or three at most.”