by Marc Secchia
Kal startled when Tazithiel spoke. She had been so withdrawn. “Do you see what I see, Kal?” Her foreclaw traversed the Cluster ahead of them. “That’s the Dragon’s hind leg–there, follow those Islands with your eyes. Now, the wings, flaring northeast by southwest. And that Island must be Yanga. The Dragon’s forepaw.”
He fidgeted against the light saddle. “Suffering volcanic lava-spit, Tazithiel, do you have to put the freakish trembles into my stomach like that?”
Kal eyed the recumbent Island-Dragon with great unease. Tazi was right. Yanga looked exactly like a Dragon’s paw, its talons the roughhewn, deeply divided isthmuses that ended in a sharply-delineated line, as though the claws had been hacked off by some unimaginable sword-stroke or Ancient Dragon battle at the dawn of time.
“I only do it to hear you concoct another Kallion cauldron of linguistic licentiousness.”
“A what?”
“A brain-frazzling twist of phraseology.”
“A how much? Will you stop embezzling my abilities, woman–Dragoness?”
“Forsooth, thou rapscallion.”
Kal rolled his eyes, knowing she could sense it if not hear the fluid swizzling about in his eye-sockets. “I fear you’ve been bitten by a silly-bug. Find us a place to rest, o startlingly imposing paragon of inter-Isles haulage.”
“I know just the place,” she winked back over her shoulder at him, twenty tonnes of draconic immodesty.
She did. Kal’s jaw hung open and remained so as the Indigo Dragoness speared through the early afternoon sky to a landing on the southern aspect of the largest sinkhole Kal had ever seen–only, he soon realised, this was no sinkhole. It was a hole of unmistakably draconic origin quarried right through the base of the Island, revealing that they stood upon a gigantic overhang perhaps a half-mile thick. Some beast capable of carving a hole over two thousand feet wide had happily chewed its way right through the bedrock. Kal decided he would rather not exchange pleasantries with said beast. They would be more akin to un-pleasantries, and terminally brief.
Wishing for a pair of wings as he peered over the edge, Kal said, “I see trees growing down there. It’s so lush! At least five streams tinkling down from the top. Now, I also know this place, from the scrolls at least. It’s where Aranya met Ardan, right?”
She made a noncommittal rumbling sound deep in her chest.
“Everything suitably fiery on the inside, Tazithiel?”
“Hungry.”
Kal frowned. Aye, his sizzling princess could eat for Immadia. She had already devoured two wild ralti sheep and four small antelope since leaving the Academy. Still, she did not waddle. Tazi seemed sleeker than ever, even a touch on the lean side for a Dragoness.
She sighed. “I’m a lost egg, Kal, just searching for my roots. I don’t expect to find anything Island-shivering here, but it means something to see this place. Do you understand?”
“Aye.”
“Truly?”
“I know what it means to touch something–anything, no matter how trivial–of a parent you barely remember.”
Wafting Kal down from her back, Tazithiel clasped him momentarily in her paw. “Thank you, Kal. Would you mind if I left to hunt? I’ll bring you something tasty.”
“I’ll make camp in that little ravine back there, next to the waterfall.” He shrugged, and turned a quirky grin on the Indigo Dragoness. “Take as long as you need, my bright flame. I’ll wash off the travel stink and the bug-splatter. Make myself suitable for an Immadian Princess.”
Her eyes held a tracery of shadows, despite their constant flame. “You know how uncomfortable I am with that title.”
And she hurled herself off the cliff-edge with a sound like wind keening across forsaken Islands.
Hours passed in solitary pursuits. Kal carved himself a small reed flute and, sitting right on the edge of that great hole, played for a long while, mingling his melancholy tootling with the sound of the wind sporting amidst the rocks. While he played, he remembered the boy he had so fleetingly been, before life stole his childhood and forged a care-me-less thief and a brutish bandit, and later, a suave King of Thieves. Now he was Kal the influential Dragon Rider, noble as a steaming clod of windroc droppings.
Bah.
Kal strolled back to the ravine and stripped down. He stank in more ways than he had ever accused Riika of stinking. As he stood thigh deep in a small plunge-pool beneath an overhang, playing dance-with-the-droplets with a waterfall barely worth the word ‘trickle’, he tried to summon anger at Aranya for forcing him to leave his ailing daughter behind and embark upon a madcap quest to satisfy a Star Dragoness’ existential itch. He could not. In his heart, he knew how badly he had misjudged her. Aranya had more than proven that the same love which had driven her across the Island-World to save her beloved Immadia from annihilation at the hand of the Sylakian Emperor, Thoralian, nigh three hundred years before, still burned fierce and proud in her chest. All Kal had seen was arrogance.
Ralti-stupid fool.
Kal returned from a place of unseeing abnegation to feast his eyes upon the unexpected pleasure of his ablutions being appreciated by a dozen-strong troop of fetchingly unclad Western-Isles warrior maidens.
Double-bah. Should he not admit his heart had just climbed his throat like a hasty dragonet tearing up a vine, claws bared, and the warriors were somewhat clad, and clearly discontented to stumble upon a handsome exemplar of muscular thief-hood standing stark naked beneath a waterfall?
Life could not all be roses, could it?
One of the women, a scarred brute with a blacksmith’s biceps, who stood at least half a head taller than Kal and probably outweighed him by ten sackweight, all of it muscle, gestured curtly with her scimitar. “Out.”
Kal’s feet decided obedience was better than pomposity.
“Cover the snake.”
Where on the Islands was a nice chunk of jealous Dragoness when he needed one? Tazithiel?
Silence.
Kal wondered how one charmed warriors such as these. Stooping for his trousers, he said, “I shall wrestle the python back into his lair, ladies, if it pleases you.”
“Wrestle the python? That little garter snake, eh, Zinjana?” called another of the women, whose one-eyed glare was a gut-slugging ode to hideousness. Kal knew he should not stare, but she looked as though she had been gnawed on at length by a rajal and afterward, been stitched together by a troop of monkeys.
Zinjana, the one built like a Jeradian gladiator, chortled, “Oh, Sundyni, I mistook it for a bit of string dangling there.”
Kal buttoned his trousers sulkily. What was it with women and insulting his manly jewels? They did not seem dissatisfying to a Shapeshifter Dragoness. Quite the contrary. But he glanced quickly at the empty skies before hitching his thumbs in his trouser pockets and giving the woman a flat, unfriendly stare. He was confident, right? These dark-skinned warriors only wanted a bit of sport before moving on. The object would be to provide that entertainment without losing any vital body parts, or by doing something Tazithiel might take exception to later.
One of the women, a fifty-something warrior with iron-grey hair who carried herself like a woman twenty years her junior, stepped forward. Like the others, she wore brief Western Isles body armour, a skirt that masqueraded more as a loincloth than clothing and was indecent on any one of a thousand Islands, and an array of weapons from an oversized scimitar upon her back, to a hunting bow and a brace of curved, serrated daggers adorning her right hip. She wore metal bracers upon her wrists, ankles and neck, and her hair was braided close to the scalp and reached halfway down her back. The braids were decorated with what Kal fervently hoped was not Human bones. Above her ritually scarred cheekbones, black eyes returned his glare without compromise.
“I am Kellira, Warlord of Yanga Island. Why are you intruding here, Dragon Rider, and where is your beast?”
Kal offered a truncated Fra’aniorian half-bow. “I am Kallion of Fra’anior, Rider of Tazithiel. She’s about.
Probably watching us right now.” He hoped. Fervently.
“Last I saw the beast, it was leagues south of here,” said Kellira. “Their kind aren’t welcome around here. We’ve got us a Dragon problem. A big one.”
Sundyni spat, in her flat Western Isles tones, “Dragon’s got a cave down below an’ keeps raiding our flocks. Last week he killed a warrior and burned two huts. Third time this year.”
“Feral?” asked Kal.
Kellira said, “Here’s my bargain, Rider Kallion. You get rid of that Dragon and we’ll let you keep your life.”
“I suppose I can ask her–”
“Ask? That’s not our way.” The Warlord raised a chorus of ‘aye’s’ from her warriors. “We know how you volcano-Islanders treat your women–kidnapping ’em, chaining ’em and keeping ’em as slaves.”
“Five hundred years ago, maybe,” Kal protested.
“Well, we reckon you got some payback coming, you filthy Dragon’s paw-licker.”
“Reckon you can capture me?” Kal mimicked her posture and tone, legs akimbo. He couldn’t toy with the handle of his dagger, but he could do a fierce glare. He just had to picture Tazithiel in one of her lightning-spitting moods. “I tell you what, Warlord Kellira. If your troop of piddling little washer-women can manage to catch me, I will gladly deal with your Dragon problem and give you a thousand gold drals to boot.”
Kal snapped his head out of the way of an arrow intended for the point of his nose.
“Very well,” Kellira growled, visibly disappointed that the arrow had missed. “Zinjana, fetch him.”
Crude wagers flew thick and fast between the women. Evidently, his chances were reckoned to be slim.
Zinjana approached him with a half-smile playing about her thick lips. She grabbed fresh air. Frowned. Grabbed a pawful more of the cleanest air in the Island-World. Kal had played this game more times than he could count during his early training as a thief. Training for agility. He goaded her with a few hearty laughs; hands curved like meat-hooks, Zinjana charged. Whirling, the thief seized her arm and propelled her high over his shoulder. The warrior emptied half of the pool with her splash.
“I believe I win that round,” said Kal.
Kellira cursed Zinjana roundly. “Sundyni! Be a good huntress and fetch me that stick of a foreigner.”
Sundyni cracked her knuckles gleefully. “My pleasure, Chief. You know how I got my scars, Kallion? Wrestling rajals. Lots of them.”
“You’re not very good at your job, are you?” Kal observed.
Before he could blink, a blade whistled toward his face. Kal dodged, rolled, leaped back with his abdominals sucked in to prevent being gutted like a hapless sheep. Islands’ sakes, this one was fast. No mind. He had a few Pygmy tricks up his sleeve. Riika had been an excellent teacher of hand-to-hand combat. Kal had quickly learned to counter her techniques or be crippled. Fascinating, the circumstances in which the Human spirit could find inspiration to excel.
Judging his moment, Kal pummelled the nerve-centres of her shoulders, and then finished Sundyni with a curt chop to the neck. He dusted his hands. “Two down. You swallowed a wasp over there, Warlord Kellira?”
The Warlord had turned a quite magnificent shade of prekki fruit purple. “Kyrinda!”
Another, younger warrior stepped forward, this one almost a head taller than Kal and built like a Dragonship, sweeping of curvature and magnificent in the beam. Her forearms were thicker than his waist and her legs, mobile tree-trunks. That was one titanic slab of womanhood, he thought, assessing this threat with an assured smirk. She was so well-built he doubted she could put two hands simultaneously to a scimitar’s hilt. A nimble thief would lead this so-called warrior about like a hound on a leash.
Kal bowed. “At last, a real woman.”
That was his mistake. The instant his line of sight lowered, Kyrinda reached into her hair and her hand snapped forward. Two darts missed, but the third scratched a line across his left bicep. Kal wobbled like a sot drowning in his tankard. Huh? His knees lived on another Island. He had begun to raise a hand in protest when a mountainous bosom slapped his left cheek, followed by the balance of an avalanche of flesh. Then, she simply sat on him.
“Gnaaarrrgh,” Kal groaned.
“That’s how it’s done.” Kyrinda slapped his backside heartily. “Nice and firm! Mind, I don’t think you’d last five minutes on my pillow-roll.”
The warrior-women hooted with laughter, making a range of suggestions that might have turned Kal’s face crimson with embarrassment had it not already abandoned crimson in favour of a desperate purple.
Kyrinda twisted his arm behind his back with worrisome ease. “Submit?”
Kal stared at the line of bushes opposite, across the pool. Just behind them stood the outline of a Shapeshifter Dragoness–at least, her Human form. Was this the optical shield Tazithiel had hinted at yesterday, or was he simply imagining her in terror of being rolled out for bread-dough beneath this wrestling prodigy? He could not penetrate the Dragoness’ disguise if that was truly her. With blackness closing in courtesy of his tortured lungs and no help apparently forthcoming from his darling little fire-starter, Kal had no choice.
A touch of Shadow later, and he wriggled free from the region of an oversized female backside. The temptation was irresistible. Kal swatted that behind with a mighty swing of his flat hand. Smack! “Nice and plump! Mind, I don’t think you’d last five minutes on my pillow-roll.”
As Kyrinda rose with a squeal of fury, Kal applied his boot heartily to the same location, propelling her headfirst into the pond. “I do believe–”
A scimitar whistled past his nose. Kellira stormed, “You cheated. You used magic.”
Kal shrugged. “The rules did not forbid magic.”
The warrior troop encircled him. Enough. Kal vanished.
“Freaking Shapeshifter!” Sundyni shouted.
“No, a very dangerous Enchanter.” Kellira narrowed her eyes. “Spread out. We need him to yoke the Dragon to our purposes.” Stooping, the Warlord scooped up a handful of dirt and tossed it around her in a shallow arc. “There! He’s hiding right in front of us.”
Three scimitars parted his nose, neck and navel. Thankfully, Kal sensed only a slight tugging as the blades swished through his incorporeal form. Drat. How long could he maintain the Shadow? Not forever. He ran toward the pool. A posse of women oriented on the very slight disturbance his body made in passing through the water. Had he emerged from the Shadow just then, he would have been wearing four daggers and a battle-axe between his shoulder blades before he left the water.
Kal bounded onward, shouting, Tazithiel! Any time now, please.
Just before the bushes, he turned to shout, “Watch out, the Dragon is right–”
Vanish! Kellira’s scimitar cartwheeled through his torso and lopped the top off one of the bushes before clanging against the stone beyond. Freaking feral windrocs! Where was that miserable reptile? Oh no … as the scantily clad warriors charged through the water toward him, Kal had a moment to be mesmerised by the image of a pack of female rajals hunting down a petrified deer.
“Ladies,” purred Tazithiel, shimmering into being right behind them.
“Feral Dragon!” howled Zinjana. Eight scimitars, three spears and a flurry of daggers bounced off Tazithiel’s scales.
The Indigo Dragoness just smiled. That alone was sufficient to herd a dozen tough warriors together beneath the waterfall, trapping them inside the natural curvature of the ridge from which the water had carved its plunge-pool.
Returned to his normal form, Kal growled, “About ruddy time, Dragoness.”
Tazithiel’s grin only widened. She gave it the works–simmering fires on her tongue, sulphurous smoke, even a dainty touch of lightning. Very artistic. “Oh, I was just admiring how a man handles negotiations with a troop of superb Western Isles warriors. Kyrinda, was it? I believe my incompetent Dragon Rider owes you a thousand gold drals.”
The woman’s face broke into
a bemused smile. “I think I’d settle for not being eaten, mighty Dragoness.”
Kal edged behind Tazithiel. He had no desire to be ironed out like new scrolleaf.
“I think you frightened him.” The women laughed collectively, but sounded like a wing of nervous dragonets. The Indigo Dragoness purred, “We’d be glad to look into your Dragon problem, Warlord Kellira. Do you know his or her name?”
Kellira said cautiously, “He seems very elderly, but no less dangerous for it. We were told he might be called Sha’anior?”
Tazithiel gasped a curl of fire.
“Who’s that?” asked Kal.
“One of my shell-brothers,” Tazithiel breathed. “Aranya said he had been lost long ago. Where would we find this Dragon, Kellira?”
Sundyni fixed them with a twisted smile. “Easy. Down the hole.”
Chapter 33: Dragons of the West
THe Dragoness spiralled down the hole with rather more enthusiasm than her Rider. Bait a feral Dragon? He would rather subject himself to Kyrinda’s tender yet undoubtedly overwhelming mercies, or hunt rajals with a dagger clasped between his toes.
Of course, the heinous girl-fiend would not listen to a word of refusal on his part.
Not for the first time, Kal mentally pelted the monks with heaps of rotten prekki fruit. Why had Master Ja’amba ever allowed him to liberate a Dragonship? If he survived the end of the world, he intended to have a far-reaching conversation with the monk about the nature of destiny.
Below, where the funnel-like hole opened out above ochre-tinged Cloudlands, Tazithiel and Kal found an abandoned Human hideout secreted within a deep horizontal crack, exactly as the Warlord had described. Tazithiel winged to a neat landing on the ledge, having no need to duck her head as the crack was over fifty feet tall at this point.