by Laurence Yep
“Hey,” Koko protested, “get your mitts off him.”
“It tingled for a bit at first,” Leech said, glancing down at it, “but now it’s okay.”
The thread snapped and the Dancer floated upward, whirling away as delicately as the down from a dandelion, leaving behind a slender ribbon glowing like cold fire around Leech’s wrist.
25
Scirye
As they flew on, blind Upach was hungry for details about their encounter with the Dancers. They took turns telling her while she punctuated their remarks every now and then with an “Imagine that” or “I never.”
When they were done, Leech pulled back his sleeve to reveal the glowing ribbon around his wrist. “Why do you think they gave this to me?”
Koko leaned over to peer at it, his eyes reflecting sparks of green light. “You’ll never need a flashlight again, buddy.”
Leech gave it a little experimental shake. The light stayed steady. “It’s not that bright.”
“A small flashlight then.” The badger rubbed his paws together greedily. “Boy, if you could slice up one of those guys, you could maybe get a thousand ribbons. We could sell them at a buck a pop. No, make that twenty.”
“Don’t you ever think about anything except money?” Bayang snapped.
Koko rubbed his belly. “Sure, I think about food and how little of it I get.”
Leech ran a finger along the ribbon. It seemed to pulse in response, casting faint shadows upon his features. “I think it’s alive, though.” Smiling at it, he asked, “How are you, little fellow?”
“It’s not a pet,” Koko said.
Leech looked sheepish. “Maybe not, but then what is it?”
Fascinated, Kles slipped out of Scirye’s coat for a moment. “Perhaps the Dancer is curious and wants to share our adventure,” he speculated. “Maybe the Dancer can sense what’s happening through it. Or perhaps it will keep a record in its memory and then return to the Dancer sometime. Who knows?”
Leech raised his wrist so it was close to his lips. “Hello, can you hear me?”
Koko laughed. “It’s not a telephone either.”
“No,” Leech said firmly, “it’s a gift from that Dancer.” He held his wrist up and turned it. “This is where we are. Can you see all right?”
“If it can, then it would be an excellent way to spy on us,” Bayang said.
Leech, though, was enjoying his “gift” too much to be suspicious. Instead, he began trying to communicate with the strip the way Scirye had. Though he experimented with the lantern, he didn’t have much success.
After listening to Leech for a bit, Upach chided her mistress. “And here you are, wanting to trot around the globe when you have marvels like this right in your own backyard.”
“And once you leave, it won’t be the same when you return home again,” Bayang said. “I’m speaking from my own experience. There will be just enough changes so things won’t seem familiar—both in places and in people.”
Scirye gave the dragon a sympathetic glance. Perhaps that’s the way Bayang felt after a long mission, but right now Scirye was going to seize the opportunity to build up Roxanna’s confidence a little more. “Even though you say you’re bored, you must love this place deep down inside your heart. Otherwise, you wouldn’t bother learning so much about it. I envy you.”
Perplexed, Roxanna drew her eyebrows together. “Me?”
“I’ve never felt like that about any place where I lived. I don’t have any roots,” Scirye confessed, and felt Kles brush her cheek sympathetically.
“If that’s true,” Roxanna said cautiously, “I could almost feel sorry for you.”
“It is,” Scirye said, feeling a little pang of regret.
“I’ve never seen so many stars,” Leech admitted. “The city lights drown them out in San Francisco.”
Roxanna looked up at the blaze of stars in an opening in the clouds. “I’d miss the stars.”
“I think you’d miss more than the stars,” Bayang said. “Even though you say you want to leave, you seem so much a part of this land and sea.”
“Are you saying I’m as boring as this place?” Roxanna demanded.
Roxanna’s attitude reminded Scirye of a diplomat she had met once at a reception in Paris. He’d been a well-dressed little man with a chip on his shoulder. He took anything anyone said to him as an insult, and yet he was soon chatting with her mother as if they were old friends.
Scirye had asked her mother if she had used some sort of spell, and she had laughed. “There wasn’t any magic involved. I just found a way to get him talking about himself. Most people have something interesting about them. As it turns out, he’s a champion archer and makes his own bows and arrows. He was just afraid of having people make fun of him for being a throwback, but when he found out I could shoot arrows from horseback he was more than happy to speak to me. We’re to visit his archery range next week.”
Scirye had gone with her mother and it had been a fascinating time because she’d gotten a chance to shoot at targets. When she’d even broken some of his expensive arrows, he’d just laughed it off.
Feeling she was doing a clumsy imitation of her mother, Scirye said, “Your whole life seems like one big adventure. Did your family teach you everything?”
“No,” Roxanna said shyly, “a lot of what I know comes from my Inuit friends, but that was before the freebooters made it too risky to leave the city.” The Sogdian girl spoke wistfully about the good old days before the freebooter raids had increased and when she could travel into the wilderness. A little urging from Scirye got Roxanna to tell them about her adventures, from saving a moose trapped in a bog to fighting off packs of wolves.
Scirye leaned back on her hands. “Up until now, the most dangerous thing I had to face was riding a bicycle when a taxi lost control and came at me.”
“Bicycles aren’t very practical up here,” Roxanna said. “There’s either too much snow or too much mud.” She leaned in close. “When I want to go for a ride, I get on a reindeer.” She laughed and that pleased Scirye. “But the first time I tried, I thought the antlers were like bicycle handlebars, so I tried to hold those instead of the reins. I wound up being pitched into a bog. I was glad to land in something soft, but it was messy.”
“I’d like to try that.” Scirye smiled. “Would you teach me?”
“It’s not very dignified,” Roxanna warned cautiously.
“That hasn’t stopped her yet,” Kles announced.
“And it never will.” Scirye laughed, glad to see Roxanna smiling again.
“What’s that, Roxanna?” Bayang asked, and banked in a circle until they could retrace their flight path. Bayang went into a gentle downward glide, leveling off several hundred feet above the surface until they saw the pair of furrows.
“Don’t go any lower,” Roxanna ordered, sounding more like her old self. “The downdraft from your wings might raise enough snow to cover the tracks.”
Careful to keep level, Bayang followed the tracks undulating over the surface until they met a tangle of more tracks. It made as much sense to Scirye as a ball of yarn that had unwound. Roxanna studied it alertly, leaning to first one side and then the other.
Even at this distance, Scirye caught the whiff of airplane fuel and saw the dark spots on the snow that might be oil. “Roland’s plane landed.”
“But where did the airplane go next?” Koko asked.
“I don’t know.” Roxanna pointed to numerous lines of small ovals that stitched across the landscape as if in some complicated knot. “But reindeer and sleds came here.”
“Freebooters?” Leech asked.
Roxanna nodded. “More than likely.” She waved a hand toward their right. “Put me down there and I’ll walk back here to examine the other tracks.”
Bayang set down where their guide directed, and Roxanna took her rifle. “Upach, you stay here and protect our guests.”
The ifrit paced back and forth restlessly as her mist
ress trekked back to the rendezvous spot.
“Your mistress is beginning to sound more like her old self,” Scirye observed to Upach.
Upach sighed in the barest of audible whispers. “Being the youngest and a girl, she’s always felt like she’s been in her brothers’ shadows, you see.”
Remembering the confident, capable girl they had first met, Leech said, “You could have fooled me.”
“My chick’s good at fooling everyone—so good she almost fooled herself. But old Upach, she knows,” the ifrit said.
They waited impatiently while Roxanna moved around the site, sometimes crouching to examine something left behind. Then she returned to them, high-stepping as fast as she could.
“Two people left the airplane and didn’t go back to it,” she said confidently. She swung her arm up and indicated the west. “I’d bet anything that Roland and Badik left the airplane and joined up with the freebooters. The freshest tracks go that way, both reindeer and sleds, and there’s a lot of them.”
“Then hop on, because that’s where we’re going too.” Bayang crouched against the snow. “And welcome back, Roxanna.”
26
Bayang
The sun was just creeping into the sky when they spotted the sled trails. “Roxanna, do you think that might be Roland?”
Scirye had been making a point of asking Roxanna questions, though up until now she had asked their guide to explain some feature in the landscape or about some aspect of Arctic life.
“Where, Lady Scirye?” Roxanna asked. “I think your eyes are playing tricks on you.” Though Roxanna continued to treat Scirye with a respectful deference, she had relaxed enough with Nanaia’s chosen to tease her a little.
Bayang could see nothing herself, but she was pleased to hear the female hatchlings chatting together like…well…hatchlings should. It was good for Roxanna, and it was also good for Scirye. From what little she and Kles had said, the dragon gathered that Scirye didn’t have female friends her own age.
Before this, Bayang had never been concerned with the petty affairs of humans. Even though she had spent a good deal of time among them, they had meant no more to her than if she had been living among squirrels. But these hatchlings had found ways to worm their way into her life.
“Please take us lower, Bayang,” Scirye said.
Bayang went into a gentle downward glide, leveling off several hundred feet above the surface. There were dozens of tracks, but all were hardly more than scratches on the surface. A breeze was blowing wisps of snow along like ghostly brooms. It wouldn’t be long before the tracks were obliterated.
“You have sharp eyes, Lady,” Roxanna observed. “I missed them.” It was a good sign that Roxanna no longer berated herself over a mistake.
Scirye had also been making a point to defer to Roxanna’s judgment. “Or could it be your father looking for us?”
“I don’t see how he could get ahead of us,” Roxanna said. “The tracks have to be fairly recent or the storm would have wiped them away.”
Bayang rose again into a bank of clouds. As she slipped into them, the moisture pelted her face in a steady drizzle. Then she began to skim along near the clouds’ belly, low enough to be able to see the ground as if through a gauzy curtain but far enough away that she hoped to appear like a darker patch of the clouds.
The faster she flew, though, the more the water vapor would condense and strike them like raindrops. She would have been able to stand it longer than her passengers, so for their sake she kept at a slow pace.
As they went on, it became easier to see the sled tracks because they were fresher and deeper. After a half hour, the ground became more irregular, with dips and rises everywhere, and the tracks split off in three directions as the group separated into smaller parties.
“Which one do you think has Roland?” Leech asked.
Bayang circled uncertainly. “Scirye, any hints from Nanaia?”
“Sorry. It’s not like I can call Her on a telephone,” Scirye said.
Bayang chose the middle set. “We might as well try these tracks as any.”
Farther on, the large chunks of ice began to litter the flat surface of the frozen sea. It was as if someone had broken a giant white vase on the floor and never bothered to pick up the pieces.
“W-we’ve come to the Wastes,” Roxanna said. Their guide was shivering so badly that it made her voice tremble. “For some r-r-reason, it’s a strange place where lots of pressure ridges got all crumpled together. Some say it’s the phantoms’ doing.”
The Wastes spread over an area that must have been at least a hundred square miles, if not more. Here the boulders of ice were the size of hills and so crammed together that they looked like buildings and the valleys between them like the crooked lanes of a city.
“I w-w-wouldn’t be in such a hurry to meet the ghosts,” Koko stammered between chilled lips.
Apparently the cold and moisture were getting to her passengers as well. Bayang’s own wings and body were feeling sluggish, so she was sure the hatchlings were suffering worse than she was. But they would all forget their suffering if they could catch Roland and Badik.
The sled tracks zigged and zagged around the obstacles. One wind sled, as large as one of Prince Tarkhun’s, had not turned in time and lay on its side, its mast broken. There was no sign of its crew, who, perhaps, had been picked up by one of the other sleds.
“I wonder if the freebooters raided the caravans to get the sleds as well as the plunder,” Bayang said.
“They have a lot to pay for, then,” Roxanna said.
As they flew over the labyrinth that was the Wastes, she noticed that snow had filled the gaps between the ice boulders, lying in drifts several meters high. Footing could be especially treacherous there, Roxanna informed them, because the drifts would mask any hazards like ice bridges too thin to support a person’s weight, or holes.
Eventually, they came to a clearing where all the sleds had been parked, their sails taken down. Bayang checked to make sure no one was around before she dropped lower to inspect the area. Numerous smaller tracks indicated that the freebooters had set off on foot into the maze itself.
Suddenly they heard a growl from the right, followed by shots and snarling sounds. Banking sharply, Bayang sped toward the noise of battle.
In a clearing surrounded by thirty-foot-high ice cliffs was the largest polar bear the dragon had ever seen. The giant bear had turned at bay, trapped by five freebooters.
Though they had their rifles up, none of them could get a clear shot without hitting the dozen horrible allies prowling restlessly in front of them. The monsters had the bodies of humans but the heads of dogs. Though they wore coats and trousers, their heads, feet, and hands were bare.
“Ajumaq!” Roxanna made it sound like a curse word. “This R-Roland must b-be truly evil if he would hire their k-kind. They poison everything they t-t-touch so that it d-decays quickly. All living th-th-things shun them because when Ajumaq t-touch actual flesh it w-will begin to rot away.”
“Does f-fur count?” Koko asked.
“I’m not s-sure,” Roxanna admitted, “but if you’re l-lucky, the first touch will only rot the hair away.”
“Oh, great,” the badger groaned. “I’ve been l-losing fur from worry. Now I got a new way to go b-bald.”
“R-relax,” Leech said. “Don’t you remember what R-Roxanna told us earlier about the temperature? Your exposed skin will freeze over long before it decays.”
“The bunch of you are just a b-bundle of j-joy, you know that?” Koko grumbled.
Suddenly one of the Ajumaq rushed in with an outstretched hand as if in a deadly game of tag while the freebooters cheered it on.
With amazing speed for an animal so big, the bear sidestepped and swung his paw, knocking the Ajumaq against the frozen wall. The monster lay very still in the snow.
Bayang began to back away. “Well, Roland’s not here, so we should keep searching.”
“We can’t jus
t leave the bear to die,” Scirye objected.
“This Tumarg thing of yours can be very inconvenient sometimes,” grumbled Bayang. “We need to keep our minds on our objective.” The excitement had gotten her blood flowing so she wasn’t stammering anymore. Perhaps the same thing would happen to the others.
From her early training on, the dragon had learned that her mission came before everything else. If it meant burying her scruples, then that’s what she did—even if she hadn’t liked it. By now, she couldn’t recall how many times she’d had to look the other way when she saw some crime being committed so she could maintain her disguise.
Maybe, she reflected, it’s not Scirye’s code but my own conscience being inconvenient now. Perhaps the hatchlings are helping me to remember a part of me that I thought had died a long time ago.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Scirye observed.
“I want to get even with the freebooters finally,” Roxanna agreed.
“Yeah,” Leech said, “every one of Roland’s gang that we take out now is one less we have to face later.”
“That’s as good an excuse as any other,” Bayang said. Feeling lighter of heart than she had in centuries, she landed on a cliff and crouched immediately. “Get off so I can help. The rest of you stay here. It’s my job to risk my life, not yours.”
“I can cover you from up here at least,” Roxanna said, and then told her servant, “Upach, fetch my rifle. And then cut the netting that holds our supplies. We don’t have time to undo it. Lady Bayang needs to be free to fly and fight.”
Bayang was relieved to see the Sogdian girl acting like her old self, but she said, “You should stay out of sight.”
“I may not know about goddesses or flying,” Roxanna observed, “but I’m very good at shooting a rifle. I’ve been in fire-fights before. Even when things were safer and I used to go with the caravans, there were occasional bandit raids.”
Bayang was not sure if it was a good thing Roxanna had gotten back this much of her old confidence. Human hatchlings are so rash! It’s a wonder that any of them survive into adulthood.