Dragonsblood

by Todd McCaffrey

  For only a brief instant she felt she had a connection.

  Dragons? The question came to her more as a feeling than a thought. Sick? How?

  And in that instant Lorana knew the answer. Across the link, with the greatest effort she could muster, she shouted out loud and in her mind, “Air!”

  Kindan felt Lorana go limp and caught her.

  “The door!” Ketan exclaimed in awe. “Look at the door!”

  The door to the second Learning Room was sliding open.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Parasite: A life-form inimical to its host, often killing the host to ensure its survival.

  College, First Interval, AL 58

  There’s no way we can be sure that our future student will be able to tell us which vec—” Tieran halted midword and cocked his head to listen.

  “It’s just thunder,” Emorra chided him irritably. “You can’t use that as an excuse to get out of this argument.”

  “Kassa said the weather would be clear tonight,” Tieran replied, still puzzled.

  “And Kassa is always right,” Emorra observed tartly.

  “About the weather, she is,” Tieran said. He started toward the door. Grenn met him, chittering wildly.

  “Where are you going?” Emorra demanded.

  “I’m going to check on your mother,” Tieran replied, following Grenn as the little fire-lizard scouted ahead. “Something’s not right.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Emorra said.

  “She’s not been looking well recently, has she?”

  Emorra frowned. “She’s been pushing herself too hard.”

  “It’s not like she’s still young,” the two said in unison and then stared at each other in surprise. Tieran broke the moment with a chuckle and they started up the stairs toward Wind Blossom’s quarters.

  “Air!” Wind Blossom shrieked.

  How Tieran covered the remaining distance to Wind Blossom’s room, he could never recall, but he was in the room and at her side instantly. Emorra arrived only a fraction later.

  Wind Blossom looked up at them, panting for breath.

  “It must be a seizure!” Tieran declared.

  “No, a heart attack,” Emorra said.

  Wind Blossom pierced them with her gaze. “I heard her,” she told them. “I heard her, she said air!”

  “Who said air, Mother?” Emorra asked.

  “The girl from the future,” Wind Blossom said. “She found me. She was so strong. I have never felt such power. She must have harnessed all the dragons of her time.” She glanced at them, eyes saddened. “She was looking for missing dragons. A lot of missing dragons—”

  “A thousand?” Emorra asked fearfully.

  Wind Blossom ignored the question, concentrating her strength on asking, “She knew, somehow she knew that I had a question—how did she?”

  Tieran and Emorra exchanged looks.

  “I’ll write a song, Mother,” Emorra said. “I’ll write a song to ask the question.”

  Wind Blossom brightened. “Yes, a song!” she agreed. She smiled up at her daughter. “Write a good one, love.”

  The breath left Wind Blossom’s lungs and she fell back to her bed with a surprised look on her face. Feebly she beckoned Emorra toward her.

  “Mother?” Emorra cried, arching forward, her ear close to Wind Blossom’s lips.

  “And then you’ll be free,” Wind Blossom whispered. Her last flickering thought was triumphant: There, Mother! I have freed them from you and the Eridani curse.

  For a long while afterward, Emorra stood over her mother’s bed, eyes streaming with tears.

  Then, without saying a word, she moved to her mother’s dresser, opened the top drawer, searched quickly, and pulled out the yellow tunic. She returned to her mother’s side and gently lifted the lifeless body, deftly maneuvering it until she had exchanged the yellow tunic for the white one in which Wind Blossom had died.

  “I did notice,” Emorra whispered, tears streaming down her face. Tieran laid a hand on her shoulder, and she grabbed it tightly with her own.

  “I don’t understand. Why did Wind Blossom need this clue?” Seamus asked M’hall. Everyone from the College and the Hold had gathered to mourn Wind Blossom’s passing, and Seamus had joined his brother, Torene, Tieran, and Emorra to find out what was going on with their research.

  “The gene mappers can only store so much information,” M’hall explained. “In order to eliminate unnecessary information, it was necessary to know whether the disease is spread by air, food, or water.”

  “And how do we know that this future rider understood the question correctly?” Holder Mendin, who had wandered over in time to hear the conversation, asked with a smirk.

  “We don’t,” Tieran answered. “If we find more dragons or fire-lizards dropping in on us, then we’ll find out that we’re wrong.”

  “If we do nothing,” M’hall added, “then we’ll only find out when our dragons become infected.”

  Mendin smiled, waving a hand toward Tieran and Emorra. “Well, surely these two marvelous youngsters will be able to whip up a cure in no time.”

  “No,” Tieran said. “We’d have to relearn what the future rider already knows—and we don’t know how long it’s taken her—”

  “Her?”

  “She rode a queen, Holder Mendin,” Emorra reminded him.

  “So our only hope for the dragons of Pern is to trust that you two”—Mendin gestured to Tieran and Emorra—“can complete the work that Wind Blossom had only just begun before her untimely demise.”

  “I’d say that they are the only hope for all of Pern,” Torene replied.

  Mendin quirked an eyebrow in amazement. “Indeed? And have they got the training that Wind Blossom did not?”

  “Wind Blossom had started on a line of inquiry which is proving quite fruitful,” Tieran said. “And, as always, she had a fallback plan prepared.”

  “Really?” Mendin asked. “And why not just use this fallback plan and save yourselves more trouble?”

  “Because the fallback is a method to make a watch-wher into a dragon,” Tieran replied. From the looks of the dragonriders, and Mendin himself, Tieran regretted his impulsiveness. “And that assumes that the watch-whers prove immune to whatever is attacking the dragons.”

  “So why would she do that?” Mendin asked. “If the watch-whers could succumb to the same illness?”

  “Well, they might not,” Emorra said. “Mother made some alterations to the watch-whers to make them somewhat more self-sufficient than the dragons.”

  “In case something happened to the dragonriders?” Torene murmured.

  Emorra nodded glumly.

  “Wise,” Torene decided with a firm nod.

  “So, as you can see,” Tieran said, “we still have to provide a cure for the dragons.”

  “Hmm,” was all Mendin said in response, his eyes flickering darkly as he wandered away.

  M’hall waited until Mendin was out of earshot before he turned back to Tieran and Emorra. “Can you do it?”

  “Well . . .” Emorra began, temporizing.

  “We can do it,” Tieran declared. Emorra gave him a surprised look, which he quelled with a firm look of his own.

  “Good,” M’hall said, even though the byplay was not lost on him.

  “I’ve been thinking of some things that might help,” Seamus interjected.

  “We’d be glad of anything,” Tieran replied.

  “Help how?” Emorra asked.

  “Well, there are several things,” Seamus expanded. “I’ve got one of the old RTG’s stored away. It’s not much use by itself because it’s low-powered, but there is one storage array still working, so I think I can couple the two of them—”

  “Excuse me, what’s an RTG?” Tieran interrupted.

  “Radio Thermal Generator,” Emorra replied. When she saw Tieran’s confused look reflected in the faces of M’hall and Torene, she added, “It’s a power generator with a long-lasting supply.
”

  “But the overall power’s not that great,” Seamus said. “So it’s not much use for most things. I think it’ll be ideal as a power source for these Training Rooms, however.”

  “Then we can run lights, right?” Tieran exclaimed happily.

  Seamus nodded and opened his mouth to say more, but Emorra cut him off.

  “You said there are several things—what else?” she asked.

  “Well . . . I’ve managed to save some of the old powered doors,” Seamus replied. “And I noticed that your mother recovered a voice recorder. I’ve been thinking of ways we could hook that up to a loudspeaker—”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Tieran asked.

  “So that we could speak to our students,” Emorra answered immediately.

  “I got Wind Blossom to show me how to use it,” Seamus added. He pulled from his pocket a small object that fit in the palm of his large hand. “She agreed that it would be an excellent idea, and she even recorded a short introduction.”

  He pressed a button on the object’s side.

  “Welcome,” it said in Wind Blossom’s voice. “I am Wind Blossom. If you have come to these rooms for an emergency involving the dragons, then please step inside. If not, please leave immediately.”

  “Will that do?” Seamus asked, looking up at the others.

  Tears streamed from Emorra’s eyes.

  “That will do fine,” Tieran said emphatically.

  “Can you make three rooms for us?” Emorra asked through her tears. “We’ll have one for the lectures, one for lab work, and the final one for constructing the cure.”

  “How big do you need the rooms to be?” Seamus asked, pulling on his chin thoughtfully.

  Emorra and Tieran exchanged looks.

  “How many people would you say?” M’hall asked them.

  “I doubt more than fifteen,” Emorra said. “Any more would be too many.”

  “Fifteen’s a lot,” Tieran said dubiously. He pursed his lips for a moment and then nodded. “Fifteen’s the upper limit, then.”

  “No one’s used the stonecutters in a decade,” Seamus said, temporizing his answer. “But all the same, I think we can do that.”

  “Excellent,” M’hall replied, clapping his younger brother on the shoulder. “When can you start?”

  “Those doors,” Tieran interjected suddenly. “Can you control when they open?”

  Seamus frowned. “I could, but there’s always the danger that the controls would freeze,” he replied warily. “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to let our students into the lab or the workroom until they know what they’re doing,” Tieran replied.

  “So you want some way to test them before they get in?” Emorra asked.

  Tieran nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Well, we know what to use for the key to the lab,” Emorra said.

  “What?” The others asked in chorus.

  “ ‘Air,’ ” Emorra replied. “The only one who should know that answer will be our queen rider.”

  “Ex-queen rider,” Torene corrected sadly. M’hall met her eyes and they both shuddered in sympathy for that future rider.

  “She must be quite something,” Seamus agreed.

  “We can’t let her down,” Emorra declared. She turned to Tieran. “Let’s get to work.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It’s all that I can give you,

  To save both Weyr and Hold.

  It’s little I can offer you,

  Who paid with dragon gold.

  Upper Crom Hold, Third Pass, 28th Day, AL 508

  The sun was well past noon but the air above Upper Crom Hold was cold with winter winds blowing from the mountains to the north. Thin wisps of cloud were visible high up in the sky.

  A moment later, the wisps of cloud were smeared with other shapes. The shapes slowly resolved themselves as they descended. Thread.

  The air was not so cold that Thread froze. Slowly, silently, Thread streamed from the sky, floating on the winds and down toward the unsuspecting ground below. Once there, it would burrow, sucking all the life out of the land and spreading voraciously across the continent.

  The holders were all in their holds, well barred against Thread, waiting for the all-clear from the dragonriders of Telgar Weyr, sworn to protect them.

  There were no dragons.

  Those dragons had gone between and would never come back.

  Thread fell lower, into warmer bands of air near the ground. Soon they would touch and—

  A gout of flame licked the sky, then another, and another. Suddenly, the air was filled with flaming dragons and charred Thread.

  “Take a wing low!” D’vin ordered as the riders of High Reaches Weyr fanned out, weary from their jump a day into the future. Hurth roared, adding his own emphasis, and D’vin slapped his bronze dragon affectionately.

  “You tell them!” he roared out loud, grinning from ear to ear. She was right, he thought to himself.

  She is a queen rider, Hurth said, as though that were all that needed saying.

  D’vin nodded and turned his attention to the Thread in front of him. He was a dragonman, and this was his duty.

  No Thread would fall on Crom Hold while there were still dragons left at High Reaches Weyr, D’vin swore to himself.

  “Lorana?”

  Lorana opened her eyes. Kindan’s anxious face swam into view. She was lying on her back on something hard. Cold, too.

  “Are you all right?” Ketan asked, leaning over her.

  Lorana rolled to her side and raised herself on her arm.

  “No, no, stay put!” Kindan ordered.

  Lorana ignored him with a shake of her head—a move she regretted as the room swirled before her eyes. She closed them for a moment, opened them again and stood up.

  “Lorana!” Kindan begged, looking at her anxiously. “You need to rest. You passed out!”

  Lorana shook her head in disagreement. She reached out with her senses, touching Minith. She felt Caranth sleeping fitfully.

  “No,” Lorana said feebly. “No, I’ve got to work.”

  “No, you’re too ill,” Kindan said.

  “I’m not ill,” Lorana replied testily. She quickly explained what had happened, how she’d grabbed for Minith and Caranth, using the dragons of the Weyr, and then, when she felt the dragons of Telgar Weyr being lost, had tried to grab them, too—and had failed only to discover herself connected to a distant someone, the Oldtimer she’d felt before, and how she’d answered the Oldtimer’s question.

  “I’m not ill,” Lorana repeated when she had finished. Without giving him a chance to answer, she moved past him, through the doorway that her word had opened and into the room beyond.

  Lights came up in the new room as she came in, but no voice greeted her. She looked around the room and her eyes lit up with wonder.

  “Kindan, come look!” she cried excitedly, heading toward the benches placed on one side of the room.

  Kindan followed her, with Ketan trailing behind. Salina paused in the doorway, taking in every part of the room in silent wonder.

  “Look, there’s the other door!” Ketan declared, pointing to a door on the far wall. “And it’s got the same press plate as the others.”

  He ran across the room and pressed the plate. The door slid open, revealing the first room they’d discovered.

  “We couldn’t open this door from the other side,” he said.

  “I think we were supposed to come this way,” Salina remarked. “I think the first door we came through was just for emergencies.”

  “So the rockslide activated it?” Ketan asked.

  “Well, we might as well get working,” Lorana said. “M’tal will be back from the Fall soon enough.” She looked at Ketan. “There are some injured dragons coming back now.”

  Ketan was surprised. “So soon?”

  “Everyone was disturbed when Telgar was lost,” Lorana replied.

  “Those who could
still hear dragons,” Ketan said, his eyes full of sorrow. He saw Lorana’s look and hastily added, “I would not have wanted to have been you just then.”

  Lorana managed a small, sour smile and shrugged. “If I hadn’t been—”

  “Our ancestors would never have known our peril,” Kindan finished briskly. He gestured around the room. “Where should we start first?”

  “I’ll go tend the dragons,” Ketan said, turning to leave.

  “You’ll be quicker going through that door,” Lorana said, pointing to the door leading to the Hatching Grounds.

  “So I will,” Ketan agreed in pleasant surprise. As he headed off, he called back over his shoulder, “I’ll send for you if we need help.”

  Salina waved acknowledgment and sauntered over toward Lorana.

  Lorana gravitated toward the cabinets on the left wall. There were three, just as in the first room. The nearest was also marked A. She opened it and drew back in awe.

  On the middle shelf of the cabinet was an ungainly object.

  “I know what that is,” Kindan declared.

  “It’s a microscope,” Lorana said, gently cradling it in her arms and placing it on the countertop behind her. She looked it over carefully, angled the reflecting mirror at the bottom to catch the light from overhead. She frowned for a moment, turned back to the cabinet, and then murmured happily as she found what she was looking for. “Here are the specimen slides!”

  “What have they got?” Salina asked.

  “What sort of magnification does that microscope have?” Kindan added.

  “Sixteen hundred,” Lorana answered, peering at the different lenses at the base of the barrel. She looked back at the slides, selected one, and slid it under the calipers on the microscope’s table, firmly holding it in place.

  She bent down over the eyepiece and very carefully adjusted the focus. With a gasp of surprise, she drew back.

  “What is it?” Salina asked.

  “A human hair,” Lorana replied, gesturing for the older woman to look. Kindan was next and just as impressed.

  They spent hours working with the microscope, examining the prepared specimens and commenting to each other about their findings.