Dragon Thief

by Marc Secchia

  No. Cyanorion, an oddly gentle, scholarly Dragon–as far as Dragons could ever be accused of gentleness–was right. The town seemed to have been attacked from beneath by explosions of rock, giving it the air of a smashed anthill. Buildings slumped into holes. Smoke rose from too many fires to count. Bodies lay scattered in the streets; people wandered the rubble dazedly, searching for loved ones. The destruction was total, and recent.

  Anubam. Kal beat his thigh in fury. Of course. There, in the centre of town, was an unmistakable, yawning black tunnel leading into the earth. This was why Aranya’s forces had not detected Talon. She had travelled underground–clearly controlling the Anubam, having stolen one or more of the creatures from the Ancient Dragon’s corral in the Island-Desert. They had blasted up from the depths and, as Tazithiel had pointed out, ploughed a town of thousands back into the earth it had risen from. Blasts of Dragon fire and acid had immolated any structure left standing.

  A volcanic eruption could not have been more devastating. He swallowed back bile. This was why Humans feared Dragons.

  They slowed as several Dragons met them above Jos. Kal recognised them as Academy Dragons, the sorry, battered remnant of the Dragonwing Aranya had asked to scour southern Jeradia for sign of Talon’s advance.

  He said, Aranya, this is the work of Anubam, impossible as it seems. Talon travels underground.

  What? The Amethyst fixed her enormous eyes upon him, her eye-fires burning so darkly, Kal felt her pain and fury lash his soul.

  Suddenly, a shining presence eased his pain. Kal’s right, noble shell-mother, Tazithiel agreed. We saw Anubam-sign when passing through the Island-Desert. We must question these Dragons with all speed, call in our forces and sprint to the Academy. That is Talon’s next target.

  Aranya inclined her muzzle. Thank you, Kal.

  Raising her voice, the Queen called, “Dragons. Riders. Ten minutes on the ground. Take what you require from that flock of ralti sheep. Tazithiel and I will debrief these Dragons. Focus on how we will defeat Endurion and Talon. We’ll strategize on the wing.”

  The Dragons’ report confirmed Kal’s worst fears. Talon and Endurion had attacked at dawn from the hole in the centre of town, the very hour Kal, Riika and Tazithiel had penetrated the fortress. After four hours of relentless butchery, the Lesser Dragons and four huge Anubam had disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. Kal looked to the suns and calculated Talon’s force was now five hours ahead. Disaster. Worse than disaster. He did not need to see Jisellia’s distraught reaction, or hear Cyanorion’s muted, elegiac Dragonsong to know what they all dreaded. Yet, how fast could an Anubam swim through rock? What had they seen in the desert?

  Observing all the long faces and muted belly-fires about him, Kal knew he must speak. Even if he lied, these Dragons and Riders must have hope.

  He grabbed Riika’s arm. With an overabundance of volume and cheer, he cried, “Tell me, Razorblades, how many Pygmies does it take to slay an Anubam?”

  His variation on a common joke made her double-take. Then she grinned fiercely at the listening Dragons. “Just one.”

  “One village?”

  “No. One Pygmy, one tiny cut at a time.”

  Jalfyrion snorted with laughter. “Aye, ‘tis the death of a million cuts.”

  Riika slapped the Red Dragon on his flank. “How many cuts are you going to take, Red? Tell you what, I’ll leave you as many as a dozen.”

  The Red’s brow-ridges drew down in fury, but then understanding ignited his eye-fires with swirls of blazing yellow. Dragon-kin, listen. JALFYRION! His impressive challenge belled over the broken town.

  TAZITHIEL! Although the Indigo Dragoness aimed her thunder at the sky, she still managed to send a couple of the younger Dragons into a wing-fluttering panic.

  With a prodigious fountain of fire also aimed aloft, Cyanorion belted out, ANUBAM-STEAKS!

  Fiery laughter, wild and ruthless and fey, erupted from the massed Dragons. Suddenly, belly-fires rumbled and fulminated. Fire backlit their fangs as inner infernos surged into throats. Their belligerent mood infected the Dragon Riders. Weapons winked in the afternoon suns-light. Fingers checked saddle girths and Dragon war bows. Chatter rose.

  Tazithiel clasped Kal’s shoulders with her paw. “Noble Rider.”

  Aye, gleaming fire-eyes or none, she should know better than to trust a worthless thief. What right had he to ride with these men and women who had worked, fought and lived for the chance to become Dragon Riders? Kal concealed his unease with a rakish smile. Opposite, Aranya inclined her head in a draconic bow. He could barely meet her gaze. Noble bucket of windroc vomit, he was. Bah. Where was his courage, his indomitable spirit? Kal knew fear. Squeamish, gut-clenching, sweat-inducing fear. Did none of these feel as he did? Did they not know many would die?

  Every instinct developed over three and a half decades of survival urged him to flee in the opposite direction, but for one thing. Talon would not stop at Jos, nor at the Academy. She would scatter bodies like chaff upon the winds. Even now, the stench of charred flesh choked his nostrils. This was not war, not the death of soldiers killed in glorious battle. This was wrong. Butchery.

  And if Aranya or Tazithiel could snatch victory out of these ashes, then they were greater miracle-workers than a despairing soul who had stolen life from the fangs of a Cloudlands-spanning storm.

  Was it fated that a thief should Ride a Star Dragoness? Kal did not know what to believe any more. New-Kal had thrown himself toward the fangs of a Dragoness. New-Kal neither turned his back, nor stood idly by. This Kal prepared his own noose for the gallows–but oddly, the thought cheered him. If needs be, he would go down lying and scheming, biting and stealing. He was not a nice man. He liked to threaten life’s neck with a handy garrotte and throttle it into giving him what he wanted. Somewhere there would be a key. Who better-placed to find it than a thief?

  The Indigo Dragoness regarded him strangely as Kal vented a fiendish chuckle. “What, Kal?”

  “I’ve an idea,” he said.

  * * * *

  Flying in a V formation spearheaded by Aranya herself, the Dragonwing hurtled northward shortly thereafter, riding the wings of a storm that blotted the remains of Jos city from sight, and extinguished the last of the fires which had ripped through so many of the wooden buildings. As they flew, Aranya outlined her strategy. Kal slumped in his seat. Honestly? Why not have the Dragons tie rocks to their own tails and dump themselves into the Cloudlands?

  “Talon and Endurion are creatures like any other,” she argued. “They grow tired and have a limited capacity for magic. We must ensure that they use up their resources. Then even this Talon must fail. Our plan has to be a massed, sustained attack, but delivered in a Dragon-cunning way.”

  Aranya certainly had thought through what she proposed. Kal had only one minor quibble. Her claver plan was doomed to failure. What kept his lips firmly clamped shut, was that he had no better ideas, save one.

  Playing with shadows.

  Kal voiced his idea reluctantly.

  Riika threatened him with her dagger. “No, Dad.”

  Aranya gasped, “No!”

  Tazithiel hiccoughed a fireball that passed perilously close to Cyanorion’s wingtip. “Absolutely not, Kal!”

  Mutinously, Kal said, “Look, we have to separate Endurion and Talon. There’s something weirdly symbiotic about their relationship, about the way they draw strength from each other. Disparage my intuition all you want, but that control she has over the physical realm … it’s similar to Tazithiel’s Kinetic magic, only augmented and distorted. Imagine having someone seize every bone in your body and twist it different ways at once? That’s her power. Many hands.”

  “Look, we don’t doubt your courage–”

  Aranya collected a filthy stare Kal used to spend long hours practising in a mirror. “But you don’t trust me. Forgiveness, aye. Trust? I know I haven’t earned any.”

  “Kal, don’t say that,” Tazi protested.

  “You
can mistrust my presence at your Academy, precious Queen, and doubt what my warrior-accountants will do to the place. That’s fine. I’ll admit I’m a wanted man on four hundred and sixteen Islands–at least, those I know of. My heart may be irretrievably tarred, but it’s the genuine article and it burns with real fire. Right in here.” Kal thumped his chest. “I close my eyes and see the charred skeletons of children back in Jos. Don’t you?”

  His cry was plaintive and raw, like the call of a hunting falcon.

  “We all do,” the Amethyst Dragoness rumbled, the dark-fires of grief shadowing her eyes. “Some of us have seen more destruction over more years than you can imagine, Kal. True courage is not blind. True courage knows the blackest nadir of despair, spreads its wings, and flies once more to the heavens to take up the fight. Again, and again, and again. The Dragon-phoenix takes form amidst what seems to be only dead ashes. That is what meeting you has reminded me, Kallion of Fra’anior.”

  The Dragoness’ reaming gaze measured him, flicking to Riika and Tazithiel and back. “When a soul transcends the spectres of past and present, and the fear of an uncertain future, that is when its true nobility may be measured. Do not doubt that the moment we feel most broken is the moment when we can be our strongest.”

  Aranya raised a talon to point at him. “Keep that idea in reserve, Kal. Find another way. For I sense the key lies with you.”

  Give the thief the keys to the kingdom? Wise move, o Queen.

  * * * *

  Never had Dragons burned the skies as brightly as that day. They flew so high and fast, their wings left a puffy white jet stream of ice particles in their wake. The afternoon suns blazed through their trail, casting haloes and rainbows of luminous colours. Tazithiel, Aranya and powerful Cyanorion took turns to raise the Storm winds that drove the Dragons across the leagues of Jeradia’s mountainous interior with a speed that felt at once exhilarating and far too slow. Talon and Endurion seemed to have dropped off the edge of the Island, for all they saw of the adversary.

  The Amethyst Dragoness, flying overhead to supply her strength to a slipstreaming shield over the entire Dragonwing, said to Tazithiel and Kal, “I sense her. Talon. It is odd, for in the great harmonic song of the world as seen by Star Dragons, this seems more like a void, as if I know her by the absence of harmony. And that is impossible, for be they good or evil, every creature of this Island-World will create their own song of magic. This is your heritage, my shell-daughter, the heritage of one born of the stars, and her Rider, who is every bit as essential to her labours as the canvas, paints and brush are essential to the creation of a masterpiece.”

  Kal said, “Dramagon’s heritage was an absence of harmony.”

  The Indigo Dragoness grumbled, “Now you’re a font of Star Dragon lore, Kal?”

  “No,” said Aranya. “He quotes from the works of Hualiama Dragonfriend. She battled the accursed spawn of Dramagon, that Ancient Dragon and shell-brother of Fra’anior, whose shadow and dark-fires shroud the Islands even to this day. His hallmark was the corruption of magic. No creature better understood how to take what was good and pure, and pervert it to the works of darkness.”

  “A being of pure evil?” Tazi asked.

  “I don’t believe so.” Aranya projected a mental picture of the seven-headed Black Dragon. “Fra’anior spoke of Dramagon with great sadness and regret. At first it was the rivalry of shell-siblings, each endowed with unimaginable power, high intelligence and ambition. As they flew their separate Dragonflights over thousands of years, their rivalry grew bitter and malign. Even Fra’anior admits he did evil in the pursuit of what he conceived as good, and having inflicted enormous pain and suffering upon the Island-World, he chose to remove the Ancient Dragons to another time and place, to allow the lesser races of Humans and Dragons to flourish apart from the Ancient Dragons’ destructive warring.”

  Kal began to formulate a question in his mind, but Queen Aranya answered it before he spoke. “Aye, Kal. There are creatures which parasitize magic. Creatures of Herimor such as the Theadurial, who enslave the Land Dragons beneath the Cloudlands, and the Shadow Beast, the creature which attacked and massacred the Lesser Dragons of this world at the time of the Pygmy Dragon.”

  “We must consider how starlight can combine with shadow,” Tazithiel put in unexpectedly.

  Riika chuckled, “You sound like Dad.”

  The Indigo Dragoness snorted, “You chattering parakeet, what do you know of these lofty matters? Please, enlighten us.”

  Far from being cowed by a Dragon’s withering sarcasm, the half-Pygmy teenager replied, “I know that shadow cannot exist without light. And light shines most brightly in the darkness.”

  From her words rippled a silence at once as powerful as thunder, and as redolent of hope as dawn’s light dappling upon a tranquil terrace lake. This was great and inexplicable magic, like the binding oath Kal and Tazithiel had once spoken, which knocked them from the sky. And it seemed to Kal that seven great heads bowed in approbation.

  Every Dragon and Rider in their company stared at Riika. She coloured, but that definite little chin did not budge a hairsbreadth.

  Aranya’s eye-fires brightened until it seemed that stars blazed within her skull. She bugled softly, “This day, even the hatchlings sing a Dragonsong of hope.”

  Chapter 29: Revenge Served Fiery

  KAL WONDERED how simple words could sucker-punch reality right beneath the sternum. What manner of magic was this? Amongst all the libraries of lore written about Dragon powers and transformative Shapeshifter magic, this matter of world-shifting oaths and truths to give the suns pause in their stately course through the skies struck him as a glaring omission. He glared. The omission did not improve. So Kal did the only sensible thing.

  He dreamed nefarious, thieving daydreams.

  As the Academy volcano crested the northern horizon, Kal’s scheming mind gnawed at the question of how he could wrest this power to his advantage. For it seemed to him that the form of an utterance must matter far less than the intention of the heart that spoke it, and that intention must rise from a person’s soul as adamantine purpose, refined in the crucible of great need. If oath-power acted upon the physical realm, how much more must such a potential act upon the emotional, spiritual and magical realms? And if he thus could influence the realms of material and immaterial existence, could he not by dreaming greatly cause some impossible cosmic alignment to transpire, stealing as it were from a fate written in the stars, a new, most singular outcome?

  Who would have presumed to steal a Star Dragoness’ heart? Only a crazy dreamer.

  They needed to reach the Academy before Talon. They must. They needed to be there an hour ago. They needed not just a pretty rainbow slipstream. They needed to truly burn the skies. Surely, any Star Dragoness worthy of the name could become a falling star?

  Before he knew it, Kal muttered the Dragon Rider oath, Let us burn the heavens together … his voice choked off as the Shadow power pictured in his mind morphed into a new, cunning design. What if he modified her shield to create a leading vacuum, shaping the flow of Shadow-stolen volumes of air and depositing them behind her tail? Blasting them backward? Kal wrestled with the output, narrowing it down to the equivalent of a turbine engine’s exhaust.

  Without warning, they shot ahead as though fired from a Dragonship’s war crossbow.

  The Indigo Dragoness gasped, Kal?

  Suffering lava lakes … shields, Tazi!

  The Dragoness’ body stretched out beneath the force of her sustained acceleration, as lustrous and sleek as one of Riika’s flechettes, and her wings drew backward almost to her sides, yet they fluttered in the tiniest wingbeats Kal had ever seen a Dragon make, so rapidly that her wingtips became a blur, almost invisible. He could not tell whether his Shadow magic propelled them from behind or sucked them into a vortex, but where he expected to hear the wind howling, instead, Tazithiel’s shielding was so flawless that a hallowed silence descended upon the world about. There was t
he awareness of inconceivable velocity but scarcely any accompanying sound or vibration. Even the sensation of being crushed against her spine spike faded. He heard Riika’s bubbling laughter and the tiny popping of vertebrae in his neck as Kal swivelled to view the Dragonwing left literally in their dust, the Amethyst Dragoness’ jaw sagging in decidedly un-queenly perplexity–no, not dust, but haloed in a perfect white corona of what his startled mind identified as draconic white-fires, the magical fires of the original creation within which Dragons believed, all creatures and all reality existed.

  Tazithiel blazed a comet-trail across the sky. Faster. Faster!

  Kal popped his ears frantically as the pressure escalated. He saw Riika yawning repeatedly, doing the same. Tazithiel whipped past an Academy patrol so fast it appeared as if the Dragons were flying backward. The Indigo Dragoness yelled at them as she hurtled past, but before Kal could see if they had responded or not, Tazithiel was already a mile away and still gathering speed. Glancing back, he saw the Dragons buffeted so severely by her shockwave that two male Reds collided mid-air, an unthinkable insult in draconic circles.

  BOOM!

  The mountains of Jeradia resounded to the sonic boom of a Dragoness streaking for the Academy volcano.

  Leaning forward in his saddle, Kal whooped, “This is incredible, Tazithiel!”

  “This is madness,” she yelled back.

  “A good sort of madness,” Riika put in. “My only question is, how do we stop?”

  The Shapeshifter gasped, “That concussion we heard was us accelerating to a speed faster than sound. I’ve read the Dragon research. Sometimes a meteorite will travel so fast that people or Dragons hear an explosion.”

  Kal eyed the looming volcano, rubbing his eyes in disbelief. If they struck it at this speed, that would make a pretty smear on the rocks. “How fast, exactly?”

  “Something in excess of two hundred and twenty leagues per hour.”