by Paul Collins
Table of Contents
The Burning Sea
THE BURNING SEA Paul Collins and Sean McMullen
DRAGONS
DANTAR
VELZA
DANTAR
VELZA
DANTAR
DRAGONS
DANTAR
VELZA
DANTAR
VELZA
DANTAR
VELZA
DANTAR
VELZA
DANTAR
DRAGONS
The Burning Sea
Paul Collins is the author of 140 books,
including fantasy series The Jelindel
Chronicles, The Quentaris Chronicles and The
World of Grrym (in collaboration with
Danny Willis).
Sean McMullen is the author of over
a hundred fantasy and science fiction
novels and stories, including Souls in the
Great Machine and Voyage of the Shadowmoon.
He was runner up for the Hugo Award in
2011.
Also by Paul Collins
The Jelindel Chronicles
The Quentaris Chronicles
The World of Grrym (with Danny Willis)
The Earthborn Wars
The Maximus Black Files
Also by Sean McMullen
Before the Storm
Changing Yesterday
The Ancient Hero
Souls in the Great Machine
Glass Dragons
Voyage of the Shadowmoon
THE BURNING SEA
Paul Collins and Sean McMullen
First published by Ford Street Publishing, an imprint of
Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond VIC 3204
Melbourne Victoria Australia
hybridpublishers.com.au
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use
as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be
reproduced by any process without prior written permission
from the publisher. Requests and enquiries concerning
reproduction should be addressed to Ford Street Publishing
Pty Ltd, 162 Hoddle Street, Abbotsford, VIC 3067, Australia.
www.fordstreetpublishing.com
First published 2015
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Creator: Collins, Paul, 1954– author.
Title: The burning sea / Paul Collins, Sean McMullen.
eISBN: 978-1-925272-33-8
Series: Warlock’s child: bk 1.
Target Audience: For primary school age.
Subjects: Fantasy fiction.
Other Creators/Contributors:
McMullen, Sean, 1948– author.
© Paul Collins and Sean McMullen
© Cover design: Grant Gittus
© Cover illustration Marc McBride
Editor: Gemma Dean-Furlong
To Robyn Donoghue – champion for Ford Street
DRAGONS
Even an invasion fleet of five hundred ships is not very impressive from three miles above, and the watcher was not impressed. This was because he was bigger and more powerful than any of the warships below.
Dravaud circled lazily on vast wings, reaching out with senses that even the most learned of human wizards could never understand. Something familiar was down there, its presence faint but distinct. It was as tiny as a spark, yet a spark could set an entire city ablaze.
The fleet was following a bank of fog the size of a province, and both were driven along by the same wind. A netting of enchantment, more finely spun than a spider’s web, bound the fog at its edges, and the right words of unbinding would dissolve the netting and disperse the fog.
By then it would be too late for the enemy.
The dragon continued to circle, maintaining his height while he decided on which ship to select. There was the hint of another dragon down there. Only an egg or a hatchling, just a hint of life that is more than life. Are the humans taking a dragon chick into battle? Why would they do that?
DANTAR
For Dantar, the sight of the distant dragon was both exciting and terrifying. Although dragons seldom took an interest in human affairs, they were enormous and unpredictable, so humans had to take an interest in them. If
the dark, winged speck against the blue sky concluded that a few dozen burning warships would look pretty, it would not hesitate to plunge out of the sky and attack.
The weather seemed too good. In the epics that Dantar had read, great battles happened under cloudy skies, with lightning flashing in the background. On this day the sky was clear, the sea calm and the wind steady and predictable. It was as if the dragon had got the date for its attack wrong.
I’m fourteen and I should be at home, playing with the cat and doing homework, thought Dantar. Fourteen is a bad age to die. So is fifteen. Why am I here? My family is rich, I don’t need to work as a cabin boy on a warship.
Not a single member of the Invincible’s crew was below deck. Even Dantar and the three other cabin boys had been given light crossbows and told to fire at the dragon if it attacked. From the way his hands were shaking, Dantar doubted that he could hit even something the size of a ship.
All along the mid-deck the marines and sailors stood with their bows and crossbows ready, and on the forecastle and quarterdeck the artillery crews were standing by their ballistas and arbalests. If the dragon attacked it would be met with a cloud of iron bolts, arrows, firepots and arbalest lances.
Will it even notice? Dantar wondered.
Dantar was dressed as a very small sailor, and the sailors all wore white tunics over white trousers, so that they could be seen more easily if they fell overboard.
The ship was strangely quiet, and hardly anyone spoke. It was as if everyone aboard was preparing for death, because one puff of the dragon’s breath was all that was needed to destroy the ship.
The ship’s wizards and shapecasters were on the forecastle, their hands shimmering as they wove and shaped castings. They were a better defence than all the other weapons put together.
Air shapers could put turbulent winds under the dragon’s wings, and castings by the water shapers were the only shields against the firestorm of a dragon’s breath. The shapers wore robes that flowed like silk yet gleamed in the sunlight like polished steel. The cloth was indeed some sort of magical armour.
‘What’s a good age to die?’ Dantar asked aloud.
‘Maybe ninety?’ said Marko, the older youth standing next to him.
‘Sounds fair. I’m fourteen, so why can’t I come back in seventy-six years and face certain death?’
‘Because you’d be hanged for desertion.’
‘But I want to finish growing, meet girls, and get a deep voice. Instead I’m here.’
‘I’m here too.’
‘Aye, but you’re seventeen.’
Marko was everything that Dantar was not. Tall and blond, he was handsome enough to be in the king’s personal guard, and he already had a beard. When he smiled his face was strangely lop-sided, though, as if he were too sad to smile with the whole of his face. He was the closest thing to a friend that Dantar had on the ship.
Dantar thought that the best thing about his own body was that it was not much of a target. He was short, wiry and thin, and looked younger than his age. His black hair let him merge into shadows and hide, but if the entire ship got flamed, being good at hiding would not keep him alive.
About half of the people on the Invincible were new to the ship, and many of those had never met before they had come aboard. Dantar had been carrying a book when he had boarded the ship at Haldan, and Marko had come up to him and
asked if he could borrow it when he had finished. Sailors who could read were rare, and for Dantar the ship seemed full of threatening strangers, so he was very relieved to have Marko as a friend.
‘Don’t worry, the dragon won’t attack,’ said Marko, who could hear Dantar’s teeth chattering.
‘So it’s going away?’ asked Dantar.
‘Just flying in circles. Dragons like to watch battles.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Ask a dragon.’
Up on the quarterdeck, someone was shouting.
Dantar caught only a few words, mostly about lost surprise, lost advantage, and the cat being out of the bag.
‘The admiral’s spitting nails because the Savarians will be able to see the dragon circling,’ said Marko. ‘They’ll know it’s looking at something behind the enchanted fog.’
‘Us?’ said Dantar.
‘That’s it. Something has to be pretty impressive to catch a dragon’s attention, and our fleet qualifies as impressive. Oh no! Brace yourself.’
Dantar took that as a cue to look up at the sky. The distant shape had broken off its circling, folded back its wings, and was dropping like a stone.
‘The dragon’s building up speed before attacking,’ said Marko.
‘Why attack us? We’re not being rude or anything.’
‘Dragons always attack the stronger side just before a battle.’
‘So dragons like losers?’
‘No, no! It’s to show that no matter how powerful humans might think they are, dragons are way ahead.’
‘We know that already!’
‘Nothing to worry about, trust me.’
The dragon spread its wings and leveled out, then came in low, barely above mast height, cutting across the vanguard of the fleet. Dantar watched as the winged shape grew and grew, heading straight for the Invincible.
This is it. I wonder if fish like char-roasted human, Dantar thought as wings wider than most villages drove the huge body toward them.
Its mouth opened and fire glowed green deep within its throat. Each tooth was bigger than Dantar was tall, and it had a lot of teeth. Its scales were as bright as polished steel, and enormous eyes saw him yet looked through him. The sharp spines that fringed its face and its head crest were folded back. Dantar had read that dragons did that before attacking.
‘Steady! Steady!’ shouted the marshal-at-arms.
‘Wait for my word . . . Fire at will!’
The dragon’s head was squarely in the sighting notch of Dantar’s crossbow as he squeezed the release lever. The air in front of him went grey with arrows, crossbow bolts and arbalest lances. Fire pots from the ballistas burst in splashes of flame along the dragon’s body, then green flames gushed from between its jaws.
This is going to really hurt, thought Dantar.
The flames poured through the uppermost rigging of the Invincible, then the enormous underside of the dragon swept over the ship.
We didn’t even scratch it! thought Dantar.
Turning, he saw that the warship sailing next to them was smothered in flames, and the dragon was ascending again, driving upwards with ponderous flaps of its huge wings.
‘Reload and stand ready!’ shouted the marshal-at-arms.
The stricken ship was blazing from forecastle to quarterdeck, and other ships steered to avoid it. Sailors were already climbing the ratlines with douse cloths to combat the fires in the Invincible’s rigging.
‘All dousers, weapons down and get into the rigging!’ shouted the warden of fires. ‘All dousers, get up to the fires.’
Dantar and Marko clipped cloths dripping with seawater to their belts and scrambled up into the rigging. Dantar looked back to the inferno that was the Intrepid as he climbed.
‘Why don’t we stop to rescue survivors from the Intrepid?’ he cried.
‘Because everyone aboard is dead!’ replied Marko. ‘And because –’
A yellow fireball erupted from the Intrepid, splashing burning oil hundreds of feet out across the water.
‘And because barrels of lamp oil explode if you put them in a fire.’
‘I thought we were dead,’ said Dantar.
‘So did I.’
‘What? You said we would be all right!’
‘I lied. The dragon had us lined up, then it turned its head and flamed the flagship. Dragons never flame flagships.’
‘What do I say if some girl asks what I did when the dragon attacked? “Well, I peed my pants”.’
‘Did you?’
‘No, but it was a near thing.’
VELZA
It had not been a good day for Dantar’s sister Velza. Normally fire magic was the most spectacular of the four casting types. Air magic was just shimmers, winds and fogs, water magic could raise waves and manipulate water to shape itself into tubes and shields, while earth magic could weaken walls or strengthen weapons. Fire magic castings were literally tangles of green fire, the same as dragons breathed, so that fire shapecasters could fight like very small dragons. Unfortunately, fire magic did not work over water.
The ship’s fire shapers were given crossbows, sworn in as marines, and told to shoot at the dragon when so ordered. The twelve shapers were divided into four squads.
Velza coped with being a young woman in an intensely male society by playing down anything that distinguished her as female. She wore her long brown hair tightly coiled and pinned up, wore the same knee boots and trousers as the male shapecasters, and had a white officer’s shirt under her shapecaster’s surcoat. She countered the fact that she was pretty by being cold or abrasive to everyone, and exercised on deck more than most of the men.
Now Velza was feeling foolish, because she and her squad could not use their fire shapecasting skills. She tended to blame herself for everything that went wrong, even things out of her control, so she was feeling strangely guilty because the dragon was attacking. As the enormous winged shape bore down on the ship, she ran through a checklist before her mind’s eye. This was her first time in action, and although she was frightened, she kept herself steady by trying to distract herself from the danger.
Crossbow loaded, sights adjusted, squad check – Squad check! Do squad check!
‘Shapecaster Pandas, check that your string is behind the bolt,’ she shouted. ‘Shapecaster Latsar, wait for the order to shoot this time!’
‘Checking, Captain,’ said Pandas.
‘Aye, Captain,’ said Latsar.
In the distance a cavernous mouth opened; a knight on horseback could have ridden in without touching the sides.
Shooting at that thing will only antagonise it, thought Velza. Why draw attention to ourselves?
In spite of her doubts, Velza fired on command and saw her bolt streak into the dragon’s mouth and vaporise with a bright flash. The dragon swooped over the ship, ignoring the barrage that rose to meet it. Someone nearby was screaming with agony. Velza looked around.
Pandas had shot himself and was writhing about in a circle centred on the crossbow bolt that pinned his foot to the deck. Velza and Latsar held him down while a carpenter’s apprentice was fetched.
‘At least you can tell the girls you were wounded in action,’ Latsar joked as the apprentice drew the bolt out with a lever clamp.
Pandas continued to scream.
‘You’re letting the squad down, Pandas!’ Velza hissed. ‘The whole ship can hear. Bear the pain like a warrior.’
If Pandas heard her words, they had no effect.
The surgeon arrived, and he was one of those annoyingly cheery little men who thought you could help people cope with pain by joking about it. Although he was hardly taller than Dantar, he had a very strong presence among the crew, perhaps because he so often stood between an injured man and death. Velza guessed that he was one of the oldest aboard the ship from his short grey hair and beard, yet he was fitter and more energetic than even her.
‘I’m afraid there’s no hope for your boot,’ he said as he sliced the expe
nsive boot off the youth’s injured foot. ‘Now this will make you feel better.’
He poured sharply scented oil on the wound.
This made Pandas scream even louder.
‘No bones damaged, you’re very lucky,’ the surgeon said as he bound up the wound.
Pandas continued to scream.
‘You’re also lucky nobody else was injured, it’s such a slight wound that I’d not bother with it after a real battle. On your way, now.’
Velza and Latsar carried Pandas off to the infirmary cabins under the forecastle.
Velza was both a female shapecaster and an officer. While there were other female shapecasters in the fleet, Velza had a problem not shared by the others: her father was the fleet’s battle warlock, outranked only by the admiral himself. Nobody actually said that her rank had been gained by her father’s influence, but a single mistake was sure to get tongues whispering, so Velza never made mistakes. Now one of her squad had shot at himself instead of the dragon, which was practically impossible to do by accident. There would be trouble.
‘Why did he have to scream so much?’ she muttered as she and Latsar stood staring at the distant patch of burning oil that had once been the Intrepid.
‘It might have been the crossbow bolt through his foot,’ Latsar replied.
‘The whole ship heard.’
‘And some of the other ships nearby, quite probably.’
‘What will the marshal think?’
‘He will probably charge Pandas with cowardice.’
‘It was an accident. Pandas is too much of a coward to shoot himself deliberately. I shall have to prove that, Latsar. If I don’t, he will be hanged
from a yardarm. Why did he have to do it? It will go on my record.’
‘Some people just don’t think, Captain.’
Although Pandas was the scholar of the squad, Latsar was the cleverest of them. Nobody ever won an argument with Latsar.
What now? Velza wondered wearily. Follow rules. Rule B17: Interview survivors and write a squad report.