The Year of the Dragon Omnibus

by James Calbraith

  “It’s better than seeing all your crops wither,” the third man snorted, “and all your livestock perish with famine.”

  “Don’t worry, Rhys, the Llambed boys won’t let us starve. Right son?”

  Huw raised a tankard towards Bran. He smiled weakly, knowing too well that if the crops would fail, the villagers would soon find somebody to blame, even though there never were any Weathermen at Llambed. Even his father showed some concern about the weather. There had already been recruiters from Gorllewin sneaking around the town — shifty, grey-hooded men, speaking an oddly twisted version of the Seaxe tongue, offering land and untold riches across the ocean.

  “Why, I can feel the rain coming already.”

  The man in the felt cap winced and rubbed his elbow emphatically.

  The weather was beginning to take its toll on Emrys. The dragon was of the race the scholars called Draco Palustris, a Swamp or Marsh Wyrm, said to be descended from the great Tarasques of the Rodanus delta. Its domain was the wet mud pits, peat moors and shallow brackish pools. Now the swamps along the Teifi river, which flowed through Gwaelod, were scorched dry and the beast’s parched body demanded moisture. Bran did what he could to accommodate the beast’s needs, but bathing in seawater brought only a little respite to the land-born creature. When Bran had to help with something at home he would have Emrys sleep by the well and, from time to time, pour buckets of cold water over the dragon’s jade scales.

  Sometimes when he glanced at the windows of their house, with its old walls painted bright red, he saw his mother observing these efforts with concern. The dragon was a constant source of problems — and mockery from neighbours, family and other pupils at Llambed. It was a child’s toy, the first dragon Bran had ever ridden. By the time of the Graddio most dragon riders would already have moved on to one of the large races, Belerion Crimsons, Forest Viridians or Highland Azures, but Bran grew attached to his mount and had never considered replacing it.

  The jade green drake looked particularly wretched next to Afreolus, Bran’s father’s mighty mount. Reserved for the noblemen and soldiers of the Royal Dragoons, the Mountain Silvers or Wyrmkings, as they were more commonly known, were rare and expensive. Larger than any other race, bred exclusively on the royal pastures of the Pictish Highlands in the far north or imported from overseas, these were the dragons with the most strength and stamina of all the known Western races, and Afreolus was a prime specimen.

  Dylan was spending most of the summer away from home, always finding something with which to busy himself. Between shopping excursions to Penfro, hunting trips with army colleagues and helping with research at the Llambed Academy, he was almost as rarely seen in the small, slate-roofed house as when he’d been sailing. They rarely talked. Most of their conversations turned to quarrels.

  Bran was restless as well. The days of reckless adolescence may have been over, but he did not care much for the duties of a grown-up yet. He wasted away the days swimming in the cold sea, wandering the hills, and picking berries and nuts in the forest. In the afternoons, when it was cool enough, he and Emrys flew around, training acrobatics over the green tops of the five-peaked Pumlumon, or chasing red kites over the Elenydd uplands, enjoying the solitude of the blue sky.

  On calm warm evenings they glided over the shaded hazel groves and slate-walled sheep pastures. Rising currents of the Ninth Wind carried the dragon effortlessly along the elm-lined brooks and across the green marshes, all the way towards the tall brick chimneys and iron towers of the Enchanted Mines along the southern coast, where the wizards cut deep into the Earth’s crust to reach the realms of the fire elementals. Sometimes the air got so hot and stagnant Emrys refused to fly. Then Bran wandered alone about the wilderness of Eryri, far to the north, until he reached the summit of the mighty Yr Wyddfa and looked down over the misty crags, ridges and peaks towards the northern sea and the dreaded Ynys Mon, the foreboding island fortress of the Druids, Guardians of Prydain, in a foolish hope of catching a glimpse of Eithne’s red hair among the oak trees.

  These were the limits of his world. Here, unbound at last from the walls of the Academy, he could go wherever he wanted. From Mon in the north to Ynys Dewi in the south, from the sunset-facing beaches of Gwyddno to the peaks of Brycheinniog where the dawn rose and the silver-haired Tylwyth Teg, the Fair Folk, danced around the ruined gate to their long lost homeland.

  He could just wander these wild lands forever, chasing deer and falcon, growing old, watching Emrys grow and mature. He could live the life of a small town mage, settle down somewhere near Penfro, meet a nice girl… but of course his father would never have that. He had to come up with a better idea for his future and his time was running short.

  Old Huw’s rains neither came in July nor August. It was now September and while the evenings got somewhat cooler, the clouds were still scarce in the azure skies.

  The earthy scent of fresh peat and dew on wet heather rose on the breeze. Bran stooped as he neared the pond in the middle of the dried-up moor, hiding in the brambles and thorn. He brushed the sun-scorched yellow fern aside and sniffed. There it was; the unmistakable smell of sulphur and methane. It was very faint — a less experienced tracker would have dismissed it as the natural aroma of the swamp. The beast was very careful not to let itself be detected.

  The young stalker sneaked through the hazels and rowans around the pond, to stay downwind. He was now entering a shallow treacherous bog — the river flowed freely here in spring, but now it was all but dried out. It was harder to move quietly and smoothly. Soon Bran had to half-creep, half-swim in the brackish mire, his jacket now blackened with mud. He suppressed a sneeze.

  He could see it now, almost submerged in the shallow water, larger than a fully grown bull, horned head covered under a leathery wing, long tail coiled neatly around the scaled body, sleeping — or feigning sleep. Bran unsheathed his sword, pointed it in the direction of the creature and murmured the Binding Words. The spell was not powerful enough to fully chain its target, but it should make its movements sluggish and restricted.

  The dragon stirred as it detected magic. This was the moment to strike. Bran raised his sword and jumped ahead with a battle cry but his boot got trapped and he fell face-first into the water with a loud splash.

  By the time he got up, cursing, the dragon was fully awake. It bared its teeth, hissing at short intervals.

  “Oh sure, laugh”, muttered Bran, trying to wipe the mud from his leather tunic and squinting his bright green eyes, full of brackish stinging water. “I almost had you this time, you know.”

  The dragon yawned and stretched to its full six feet, still sluggish from the effects of the spell. Bran licked the blood trickling from his knuckles, grazed against something hard in the water.

  “What the Duw did I trip on? There shouldn’t have been any roots here…”

  He stooped to investigate by the light of a conjured flamespark and saw what looked like bones of some great ancient animal submerged in the mud. As the riverbed dried out in the heat, the falling water levels had revealed the ageless fossil. Bran touched the remains gingerly.

  “I wonder what it was. Something big — an elk maybe, or a wyvern — ”

  The blue gem on his left hand suddenly burned up with a bright, warm azure light. Bran stared at the jewel in disbelief for a moment, before something else drew his attention.

  “By Owain’s Sword…”

  The fossilised bones stirred and started moving, crackling, slithering in the mud like ivory snakes. Bran jumped backwards, frightened. Emrys whinnied anxiously as the shattered parts of the massive skeleton combined into one and the creature slowly started rising from the moor.

  There was now no doubt as to what manner of a beast had died and left its remains in the peat. What had once been a great dragon — easily twice the size of Emrys — towered over the boy menacingly, swaying and staggering as it tried to find its balance after waking from aeons of sleep.

  “W-we’d better go, Emrys,”
Bran stuttered, retreating onto the higher ground, searching for the wind goggles in his pocket.

  The ring was now almost burning his finger. The jade-scaled dragon crouched towards its master, whimpering. Through their Farlink connection, Bran felt primeval fear growing in his mount’s heart as the skeletal creature began stumbling out of the mud pool. The bone dragon spread its wings — or what remained of them. Names from the anatomy manual popped into Bran’s head — humerus, radius, phalanges… It felt surreal to see the skeleton in reality, in full scale, dried-up joints grinding against each other.

  Can it fly? Impossible, there is no membrane to give it lift…

  The jaws, still full of teeth, opened as if the beast wanted to roar. There was no roar — there couldn’t have been, the monster had no throat, but, disturbingly, there came a sound, a stifled, echoing humming rumble, as if from the depths of the Otherworld.

  Bran managed to mount Emrys, his hands shaking with terror. He was trying to spur the terrified dragon to flight, when the bone monster flapped its wings and pounced onwards.

  “Duck!” Bran cried out loud and in his head.

  Emrys flattened itself in the marsh as the skeletal dragon, capturing the Ninth Wind in its phantom wings, soared above their heads. The monster circled in the sky once before swooping straight back at Bran, its jaws open, the unearthly noise rising again within the non-existent throat.

  The boy tugged on the upper reins and pushed his heels into the dragon’s sides. Emrys stood on its hind legs and spewed bluish methane fire. The skeletal monster reeled in its dive and ascended again, gaining altitude for another swoop. With a single beat of wings, Emrys leapt over the tops of the trees, and farther up. Alone, it would stand little chance against the dragon twice its size, but Bran had been trained to fight exactly this kind of aerial battle, and now it seemed his life depended on his skill.

  A summoned Soul Lance hardened in his hands into an unbreakable crystal. The bone dragon plunged forwards in a mad head-on charge, like a raging stag. Bracing himself for attack, Bran adjusted his goggles and raised the lance in an outstretched arm as he had trained so many times, although his hand was shaking with dread and excitement. He could not guess whether the weapon would work against a living skeleton — there were no internal organs to penetrate after all, no scales to pierce. He could only hope.

  He waited until he could feel the buffeting of the Ninth Wind coming from the skeletal wings. He tugged on the reins, banking Emrys to the left and pushed his right arm forwards. He missed — the lance hit the air. The bone dragon flew past, the stench of death around it so nauseating it almost caused Bran to fall off his mount.

  The bone dragon turned back and roared again. The tops of the trees beneath turned black and withered; the monster was spewing something from its maw, not fire or lightning, but some invisible veil of death.

  I won’t get another chance, Bran realised, spurring Emrys to a charge. The two dragons sped towards each other, air whistling around them. Bran closed his eyes and focused on the Farlink connection he had with Emrys. Only this gave Bran the precise control he needed.

  Down!

  Emrys’s wings folded and the beast dropped down, underneath the belly of the bone monster. Bran opened his eyes, breaking the Farlink, and struck upwards with all his strength. He felt the lance smash through the monster’s ribs and penetrate further, piercing through something that was as unlike a real chest and heart, as the unworldly rumbling was different from a real dragon’s dying roar.

  He let go of the lance — the weapon disappeared in an instant — a fraction of a second before the impetus would’ve broken his arm. He watched as the monstrosity tumbled downwards and crashed into the marsh below, bones scattering into pieces again.

  Emrys snorted and flew up higher and higher, until it deemed it was at a safe distance from the cursed pool. Bran was too exhausted and confused to command the beast, so he let his dragon do as it pleased for a moment.

  The blue gem on his finger was as calm and dark as it had always been.

  Bran welcomed the sight of the familiar, tall sandstone towers and oak tree groves of the Llambed Academy with relief. Usually he went go out of his way not to pass it, but this time he wanted to see something real, something certain, and he needed some answers.

  A flag with the four lions of Aberffraw flew proudly over the pile of grey stones. A remnant of a Norse castle, at the confluence of the Rivers Teifi and Dulas, only a few months ago had served as the Great Auditorium for the Graddio ceremony. The ruin had been left standing as a reminder of Owain the Wyrmslayer’s great campaigns against the Norsemen of Niflheimr and their Frost Armies. It was here, on the shores of Teifi, that the freedom of Gwynedd had been won once and for all, and the alliance with the oppressed Seaxe on the other side of Offa’s Dyke forged for the first time of many.

  The grapevine leaves clung to the cracked walls, lush green when the summer had begun then scorched yellow by August heat, growing scarlet now. The oak trees in the sacred groves turned golden-bronze. The college grounds, sprawling to the north and east of the castle ruins, were eerily quiet during the summer holidays, with only the gardeners and janitors remaining. Gone was the daily hubbub of hundreds of boys and girls, learning, training and playing around. Gone was the noise of dozens of dragons stationed in the Great Stables, the flapping of wings, roar of wyrm flame and crackle of lightning, but there were always lights and fires coming from the Research Tower, and there Bran landed his dragon.

  “I don’t see anything peculiar about the ring, I’m afraid,” said Doctor Campion upon finishing a long examination of the jewel. “The band is a local work, of that I am sure. The gem seems valuable — a sapphire, I believe, although we would need to do an analysis to make certain. Interesting shape. Where did you say you got it?”

  “My grandfather.”

  “And he…?”

  “I… don’t know.”

  I never really asked about it.

  “Mm, mm.”

  The doctor nodded distractedly, playing with knobs on his telescope. They were sitting in the astrological observatory on top of the Research Tower. Doctor Campion was the only scholar who had time to meet with Bran at such short notice, as during the day he had little to do other than browsing through old horoscopes and solar tables in the library.

  “What about the bone dragon, Sir?”

  “This is an ancient land, boy, full of mysteries. You would not have heard of such things — it’s deep in the archives… Old, forbidden magic.”

  “You mean — raising the dead? It’s just a legend, isn’t it…?”

  “Nay, son.” The doctor leaned forwards and lowered his voice. “It’s more than that. The dead walked the land when the wars with the Sun Priests ravaged the world. It was almost the doom of us all…”

  The clergy of the Bull-slayer God, the Old Faithers of Rome, had once been sworn enemies of all magic users, so much Bran knew. It had taken two centuries of war to settle their mutual differences at last. Many gruesome tales were told of the terrible Wizardry Wars, but this one Bran had not heard before.

  “I’m not surprised,” the doctor said. “We have kept it secret — us, magic users and the priests alike… I’m only telling you this because you’ve already met one of those creatures, and because I know your father.”

  He leaned closer to Bran, his eyes narrow and focused.

  “It started with the Grey Hoods, the elite of the Sun Priests. They have discovered some ancient scrolls in the monasteries of Illyria, in the East. They were appalled at first, but when faced with defeat from the wizards they began to turn to anything that could give them advantage.”

  “Necromancy…” whispered Bran. The word had a dark taste on his tongue.

  The doctor nodded.

  “They were using it to raise fallen soldiers at first, but soon discovered that by using blood magic curses they could imbue the walking dead with great power, and keep them under control. They started raising our dea
d and send them against us. Then the wizards stole the secret and began doing the same. Not only with humans, but as you have also seen, dragons and other beasts. It was a travesty of a war; lifeless armies that could not be killed. Ere long the abominations learned to disguise themselves as if they were still alive. Bonds of trust have been broken — anyone could be killed at night and wake as an undead. Soldiers returning from the battles were no longer welcome home. And worst of all, some of the Abominations started to work together, turn against their masters…”

  “But we’ve prevailed in the end.”

  “At a great cost. We signed a truce with the Sun Priests, a temporary alliance against what we had created. Both sides had to agree to abandon such pursuits, destroy the Abominations, unravel the magic, erase the very memory of the evil power. You must have stumbled upon some remnant from just before the Truce, some bone golem cast in the river when the war was over.”

  Bran scratched his forehead, trying to absorb all he had just heard.

  “But what does my ring have to do with it?”

  “Oh, I don’t think it does, to be honest.” The scholar leaned backwards. “It must have merely resonated to the magical energies abundant in the marsh. Some minerals do that, nothing mysterious about it. It’s a neat trick, certainly, but that is all.”

  “I see…”

  “Mars is in Sagittarius,” the doctor added, raising a finger, “which means people and beasts awake, stir, become restless. The heat doesn’t help — there hasn’t been a summer this hot for decades. The water reveals what it had once taken. I would advise you to stay away from dried up riverbeds, landslides, ancient ruins… All these places may be dangerous right now.”

  “Yes Sir.”

  “You did well.” The doctor smiled and patted Bran on the shoulder. “To have faced such a creature and defeated it takes skill and courage, especially when riding such a weak dragon. I would expect no less from the son of Dylan ab Ifor.”