by Marc Secchia
At last, as the remnants of Azziala’s Dragonship fleet receded beneath them, Hualiama allowed herself a low laugh of release.
Then she saw further clusters of Dragonships rising from nearby Islands–from Dadak and Erak, and Irak just visible on the south-eastern horizon. She caught her breath. How many? None of the information she had received mentally made mention of additional fortresses and troops, but Lia knew now that Azziala and her twelve had withheld further, vital information. So much for trust. Well, Lia had burned, wrecked, destroyed and stampeded two hundred Dragons all over whatever non-existent trust she might have imagined between mother and daughter. Pensively, she observed several more Jade Dragons turning back. Affurion and his Dragonwing plunged into a cloud-bank, heading northeast at a rapid clip.
She slapped Grandion again, effervescing with joy. “Now fly East, my Dragon! Fly with all your strength to the end of the world!”
* * * *
Grandion slowly became aware of the caress of wind upon his scales. He realised he no longer dwelled in the strange roost of dark-fires and endless food, subject to the crushing bondage of the Dragon-Haters. Yet where was he now? And why did he sense a dominant mind enfolding his? Draconic cunning subdued his response. A Rider? A memory … a girl nearby, speaking in a curiously monotonous, disinterested voice. The same Human uttering the hateful words, ‘Dragon, obey. You are my slave.’ He was no one’s lackey! He was Grandion, shell-son of Sapphurion and Qualiana, a powerful Tourmaline of the Dragonkind!
Before he knew it, the Dragon’s rage erupted. Let me out! How dare you …
He spun away, blind. The Human girl sat stiffly on his back, making the sounds he knew were stifled sobs, furious and grieving. Regret squeezed his third heart. When would he learn she was fragile, her emotions like a Dragoness speeding up an Island’s league-tall cliffs before plunging down the far side at an even more dizzying pace?
Sorry, he growled snappishly. By my wings, you didn’t deserve–
Well then, don’t apologise if you’re going to sound like you’ve got the worst case of scale-itch in the Island-World.
The warmth of that rich, enchanting voice … ha-ha-rrrrraargh-ha-ha-ha! Grandion’s laughter pummelled the air into submission. Three times, she had plucked him from the darkness. I hurt you.
Grandion, darling Dragon, I’ve so much to tell you. We’ve escaped. She switched moods faster than a speeding Dragon. And we’re heading East over the Lost Islands and I found both my mother and father there but Ra’aba’s dead and will you listen and promise me, by your wings or mother’s egg or whatever, that you won’t hate me for what I have to say?
Grr. My head hurts when you babble like an excitable dragonet. Heads before necks, and shoulders before wings. My sight, please.
“That’s my sight,” she said lightly. Grandion’s anger burned, nevertheless.
His world flooded with colour. The Dragon gasped, “Look, Hualiama. The Rim-wall mountains–well, perhaps it is a mirage … they’re closer than I expected.”
“Under certain optical conditions it’s possible for an image to appear much closer and higher than it truly is,” Lia said, breathless with wonder. “I’ve experienced this with seeing non-existent Dragonships off Fra’anior Cluster. They’re definitely mountains, but look at how the horizon beneath them appears to waver.”
The fabled mountains that reached the sky, twenty-five leagues tall. So high, the Dragon realised, that the weather within the bowl they created must be a self-contained system separate from the world beyond. Such wing-shivering vastness–was the Island-World ten thousand leagues in diameter? Twenty? Though the peaks lay far beyond the realms of snow or air, they appeared tipped with white. Diamonds, he fancied. The jewel-hoards of Ancient Dragons.
“You’re the first Human to see the Rim,” said Grandion.
“Congratulations, I saw an atmospheric hoax,” said she, with that peculiarly Human brand of droll humour which so reliably itched his scales. “Those Islands down there are real. Remind me, Yukari said …”
“From the last Island, summon Siiyumiel using the Dragon’s Bell.”
“The Dragon’s–Grandion. Why didn’t you tell me before, you pesky, uncommunicative … male! What’s this Bell? Where will we find it?”
“You’ll know it when we get there.”
“That’s fighting talk coming from a Dragon recently on course to become Dragonship hide and shoe leather!”
Peace, thou beauteous crown of Fra’anior’s glory, he returned.
His Rider began to make a Dragonish purr, before snapping her teeth crossly. Well, I’ve a thing or three to share with you. Much of it, deeply troubling. May I, before we reach that Island?
Aye. Levity yielded to gravity.
Rather than speaking, the girl moved immediately to opening her memories for him. The Dragon became an observer to her tribulation and triumph at the Reaving, to her mother’s madness and her father’s murder, and though the implications brought turmoil to his thoughts, he understood there was a greater fear that afflicted his beautiful, fierce Rider’s soul. It cut to the quick of her being. Her soul cried, ‘How can anyone love me? How can anyone love this?’ Even Sapphurion’s betrayal had burned with a lesser fire.
The Tourmaline Dragon knew another truth. He had found the Scroll of Binding and completed the honour-quest given him by the Dragon Elders. He could restore his name. All he had to do was return the living Scroll to the Dragon Elders, or destroy Hualiama himself. His glory and fame would be celebrated forever among the Dragonkind, enshrined in legend and Dragonsong.
Did she suspect the murderous deliberations darkening his Dragon fires?
Had the great Dragon-Spirit Amaryllion foreseen all this? If so, why not simply destroy her outright? A prickle of seventh sense washed through his body, kindling the storehouses of his powers, and the fires which had seemed dammed up, suddenly coursed along new paths, physical, emotional and magical. Abuzz, the Dragon quivered with the force of his insight. He must stay the paw of retribution. A greater destiny lay as yet unclaimed. Have faith, Dragon! Show her the true fires of draconic wisdom!
As if attuned to his thoughts, the Human girl said, Will you be my strength, Grandion?
He replied, Always. You’ll never be alone.
* * * *
Hualiama quailed at the reservation she sensed in Grandion’s manner. The Dragon had every reason to despise her. He replied evasively to her probing, save to express his regret at her bereavement and his fiery draconic approval of her actions–so effusive in thanks was he, she blushed royally. Was he trying to divert her from his true feelings? Did he fear her new skills in being able to bind Dragons? Her heritage?
Yet he swooped gracefully, and brought them to a landing on an Island ledge overlooking the Cloudlands at the easternmost edge of the Island-World’s lands, a place of extraordinary, rugged beauty that sang to his third heart. Jagged cliffs cut away upon all sides of an Island no more than a quarter-mile wide, but five miles tall, jutting like an uncompromising Dragon’s talon above all of its neighbouring Islands to the west and southwest. Lia imagined the Ancient Dragons had raised up a marker to state, ‘Our work ends here.’
Beyond lay the ocean of Land Dragons.
A vertical gully carved into the mountainside above the ledge. The Dragon’s Bell hung in that space, a monstrous column of silvery metal ten times taller than Grandion’s hundred-foot wingspan, depending from a bar above and metallic-looking hawsers as thick as her waist.
Taking the perilous route down his shoulder, dropping onto his elbow and then hopping down to the ground, Lia turned and bowed to the Dragon. “Best get ringing, mighty Tourmaline Dragon.”
Using her gaze to help him aim, Grandion struck out with his tail.
BOOOOOOONNNNGGGG!
Lia had imagined a sweet chime. This was a note so deep it seemed to ripple down into the foundations of the Island, and from there, out into the vast wilderness facing them.
Grandion sang:
Arise, o brother of the deeps,
Siiyumiel-ap-Yanûk-bar-Shûgan,
Hearken to our call.
“Erm, what was that ap-bar sugar bit in the middle there?” Lia asked, her voice sing-song with wing-tugging notes of amusement.
“Some form of Ancient Dragonish. Who cares if we don’t understand it, as long as it works?”
Snarky Dragon. “You’re so sly. Stop yanking my hawser, Dragon.”
Grandion struck the bell and repeated the incantation twice more, while Lia covered her ears–uselessly–against the bone-tingling vibrations. They waited. The Human girl rubbed her neck and scanned the skies. Why had they seen no Dragons out here? Why did she sense unseen eyes, watching?
Placing a talon gently upon her shoulder, Grandion asked, “Do you remember dying?”
Hualiama shook her head, more of a shiver. “Not even Azziala’s weird twin-voice scared me as much as when she said, ‘I always wondered if that child died of a broken heart …’ Oh, Grandion. Dragon egglings know their shell-mother’s voice from so early on. I’m sure Human babies must be the same. They must know if they are loved or not, and if they’re despised with such a deep, malign hatred … Grandion, how can a spirit leave a body and return days later? Surely the body decays? Perishes? Am I a freak? Some wicked spirit occupying a Human shell not her own?”
“Never. Lia, don’t ever think that.” As she doubled up, wheezing at the pain in her chest, the Tourmaline Dragon clasped her with his paw as his father once had, his talons folded over her chest and thighs like a cage of silvery swords. “These are your fears speaking. Your purpose is to rise above a loathsome birthright, to be greater than those who would strike you down. You’ll forge a suns-fire destiny where others would only fall.”
The Dragon quivered with the emotions he poured into his words. Lia gripped one of his talons in both hands, grateful beyond words. When her chest closed, it felt as though she would never breathe again.
“Besides, how Azziala can deny you’re her daughter, resurrected or none, is beyond my mind-fires,” grumbled the Dragon. “What does heritage matter? Nothing.”
“Everything,” Hualiama countered, knowing draconic beliefs on the subject. “What’s the only hour a Dragon doesn’t spend debating genealogies?”
“The thirtieth.” He completed the ancient saying with a snort of fire, and followed in rhetorical cadence, “Is our fate determined before we break the shell, taught us by our shell-parents, or grasped when we reach an age of understanding our true fires?”
“Predestined to be creatures of choice? Marvellous conundrum.”
“Perfectly logical to a Dragon.”
And a perfectly oblique way of encouraging his companion, Hualiama realised, smiling warmly at him. “Then I’ll take the barest smidgen of the first, half of the second and all of the third, if you please.”
“Say, rebellious Rider of a rebellious Dragon?”
“Aye, Grandion?”
“Did I ever tell you that in the seventh of the ascending fire-promises, or the seventh-sense promise, we Dragons swear by the light of Hualiama, the blue star?” After a moment, he added, “I can’t see properly. Are you crying?”
“Happy,” she sniffed. “Isn’t that sacred lore?”
“Are you not the Dragonfriend?”
A silence of kindred spirits surrounded Dragon and Rider. Hualiama scanned the Cloudlands, working to shut out the inveigling voice that insisted, ‘Dragon, obey. You will love me, forever.’ Yet the morning shone bright and fair, and only the growing heat was their companion for nigh an hour.
The Cloudlands stirred. Rational thought fled. All Lia knew was stupefaction.
Three ranks of dark, wet mountain peaks broke through the clouds several leagues distant, sailing toward their position on an unmistakable bearing, as though one Island journeyed to meet another. Beside her, Grandion stood immobile, but she heard the accelerated pulse of his hearts, and his belly-fires, after initially falling mute, amplified to a steady roar. His claws gashed the rock. Like the most majestic Dragonship in existence, the creature surged up from the deeps, until fully seven rows of peaks became visible, crowning a turtle-like carapace Lia’s gibbering mind estimated to be a mile wide and the stars alone knew how long–several times that? The Land Dragon comfortably dwarfed the Isle they stood upon, slowing as its approach trembled the ground.
“I–I thought A-Amaryllion was huge,” Lia faltered.
“Courage, Dragonfriend. I never imagined a beast like this inhabited our Island-World.” The Dragon bowed his muzzle and lowered his outspread wings, a draconic obeisance. “How honoured we are.”
The Land Dragon ground to a halt perhaps half a mile offshore, the clouds eddying about its body, water and mud sheeting off the stellated carapace. Then, with a series of explosions that sounded like hydrogen detonating, the Dragon’s foreparts began to separate like a bud breaking into full flower, the mountains tipping precipitately left and right. An unmistakably draconic head slithered forth, with skin like wrinkled lizard-hide and dozens of nose and facial horns surrounding seven blazing yellow eyes placed around the head’s hemispherical crown, and a beaked canyon of a mouth which could have swallowed their Island with room to spare.
The head pushed forward until Hualiama feared they would be splattered against the mountainside like luckless bugs on a Dragonship’s crysglass windows.
Siiyumiel-ap-Yanûk-bar-Shûgan hearkens to thy summons, creatures of the heights.
Scalding, foetid air blasted over Grandion and Hualiama. The Land Dragon’s voice was massive beyond comprehension, gently modulated yet so potent with condensed magical energies that it knocked them tumbling, as helpless as newborn Dragon hatchlings. Groaning, the Tourmaline Dragon pushed back to his feet, bashing Lia to her knees. She raised a hand to her nose in a mirror-image of her Dragon’s motion. Both of them bled; one scarlet, one golden.
As quickly as the hurt had been caused, new magic pummelled them. Healing magic; a draconic apology. Now they were gasping, drowning, riding a torrent. The flow ceased abruptly. Lia flung out her hands to keep from pitching onto her face.
Shell-son of Sapphurion, noble-hearted son of flame, Alastior!
The voice was even further restrained, a dam-wall upon the point of breaking, vocalising its thoughts in packages that struck its listeners in great, heavy waves.
The Tourmaline bowed again, grace and fire united. Siiyumiel, Blessed Lord of the Deeps, Guardian of Wisdom of the Shell-Clan. Thank you for aiding us in our hour of need.
Thou I know, roared the great creature, inclining his head until four of his seven eyes burned upon them. Thou art Dragonkind. Who is thy tiny companion? Bearer of ancient fires … ah. Much of thy nature is a paradox shrouded in time, little one. My fire-soul devotes itself to thee.
Hualiama rubbed her eyes as the magic within Siiyumiel performed a draconic genuflection, great fire-wings spreading white-fires to the northern and southern horizons in her inner sight. She realised she saw his true draconic form, his fire-form, so different from the ponderous bottom-dweller, as beautiful and enigmatic as Amaryllion Fireborn had been in life and death.
She muttered, “Grandion, what’s he doing? What’s going on?”
The Dragon shook his muzzle, clearly nonplussed. Yukari said he’s the leader of the Shell-Clan Land Dragons, and the wisest Dragon loremaster in the Island-World.
After Amaryllion, surely?
Grandion hissed briefly at her, before addressing Siiyumiel, My gracious companion is Hualiama, Princess of Fra’anior, daughter of the Human Empress of these Isles.
Ah. The breeze generated by Siiyumiel’s exhalation continued for the full minute it took him to speak a single syllable. Could Dragons not simply say what they meant, rather than hinting at ten million enormously significant things they knew, but were never going to reveal? If there was any one trait of Amaryllion’s which had vexed her … Lia peered as much as she dared up into Siiyumiel’s swirling orange orbs, each
a flattish oval one hundred and fifty feet wide and sixty tall, and tried not to imagine plunging into those fiery pits and burning forever. She sensed nothing malicious in his fire-eyes, but rather the gravitas of great age and authority, and an alien Dragonsong as thrilling and far beyond her understanding as the stars lay beyond the Island-World.
The Land Dragon said, Speak thy need, Alastior.
Give him the recipe, Hualiama.
After explaining Grandion’s debility, Lia passed on the complex set of requirements Yukari had proposed. They waited. A quarter-hour later, the Land Dragon stirred.
I have analysed the molecular structure of this debility, little ones, and projected the effects of Yukari’s treatment with a ninety-eight point four two seven percentage accuracy. It is like this–he showed them a vast canvas of computation, hypotheses, effects and outcomes, shaded with probability factors, magical constructs and instillations, and a dizzying breakdown of the recipe he would prepare–ah, too much for your little minds? I shall summarise. The remedy will make you sick. Basic Dragon magic will fail you until the elements integrate fully into your physiological systems. Thereafter, you should experience a gradual return of your sight. I expect full healing within a … month, in your reckoning. I have begun to distil the necessary elements from my stores–from within my own body, little ones.
Hualiama smiled as the Land Dragon clarified her unspoken question. How can we thank you enough, Siiyumiel?
Share with me the wisdom of Amaryllion, Siiyumiel replied unexpectedly.
The Island-World had never seemed a stranger place than when a Land Dragon paused to afford a Human girl his regard. He listened with such vast, wholehearted attention, that his manner drew nuances and hitherto unrealised insights out of Hualiama. She spoke with greater fluidity than she might have thought possible, and after the briefest-seeming hour of her life, paused as Siiyumiel declared his work complete.