by Laurence Yep
His eyes scanned the snow as he began to circle outward in an ever-extending spiral. At the same time, the otters started to search the area as well, but with their short legs they floundered about slowly.
Leech gave a cry of relief when he saw the dark circle lying on the snow.
He executed a loop, picking up speed at the bottom of the circle, and crouched, stretching out his hand to snatch up the ring, and then sped back toward the otters.
“Thank you for your help,” he said. “Will you go back to Uncle Resak and tell him what’s happening?”
Bobbing their heads, the otters began to make their way with difficulty back to the opening Roland had made in the ice. As Leech watched them leave, he heard Kles call, “Did you find them?”
Crossing his legs, Leech twisted around. He was relieved to see the griffin speeding toward him. “Yes, but I didn’t do a very good job of stopping them.”
“If they were easy to catch, they’d have been in jail a long time ago,” the griffin said, curving around the boy. “You seem to be intact after tangling with Roland and Badik. You’re lucky.”
“I know it,” Leech admitted.
Kles pointed his tail behind him. “The others are coming on the straw wing.”
Leech listened hard for his boastful racing partner. “So Naue came?”
“No,” the griffin said. “Bayang almost killed herself flying the straw wing up to the top of the glacier so we could launch it.”
Leech shook his head. “It’s hard to believe she could fly with those wounds. She must want to catch Badik a lot.”
Kles somersaulted in exasperation. “She did it for you, you ungrateful little numbskull. I suspect she considers it part of her penance for her past sins.”
“Oh,” Leech said. He tensed, waiting for that inner voice to find something sinister in Bayang’s sacrifice, but the voice was silent. Was it as stunned as he felt? “So she really wants to pay me back?”
Kles clacked his beak together. “And more than that. You don’t fight like that to get up that cliff just because your conscience is bothering you.”
“What was it then?” Leech asked, puzzled.
Kles darted in so close that Leech flinched. “She loves you like a mother!”
“That’s impossible,” Leech blurted out.
Kles spread both paws and wings apart resignedly. “The sad part is that I don’t think she realizes it any more than you do.” His eyes regarded the boy compassionately. “But maybe this is what happens when two people who have never been loved before suddenly get together.”
“What do you mean? I’ve got Koko,” Leech countered.
“Don’t fool yourself. Money is a tanuki’s only real love,” Kles said, and then gestured with a paw. “But first things first: Roland and Badik are getting farther away. We should try to find their trail so we won’t waste any more time when the wing arrives.”
While Kles took the left, Leech took the right, but his mind was only partly on the task. He was thinking over what the griffin had said. Bayang would sacrifice anything for him. But what would she do if she found out he was hearing Lee No Cha? He didn’t want to lose her friendship. He musn’t let her know about the voice.
After a few minutes he heard the griffin shout, “I found it.”
Leech followed Kles’s voice until he could see it himself. Badik’s footprints were deep ovals in the snow with grooves at the top that his claws had made. Every now and then between the paw prints was a short trench when he had brought his tail down.
Kles darted back to direct the wing in the right direction while Leech soared upward until the tracks looked like stitch marks on the snow. He glided along, waiting for the others to catch up and keeping an eye out for Roland and his dragon.
“You okay, buddy?” Koko yelled up to Leech. Kles and the wing were following the marks that Badik had left in the snow.
Leech swooped downward, waving his arm. “I’ve had worse tumbles. Remember when that gang was chasing us over the rooftops and I jumped?”
It was good to see the homely furry face peering up at him. “You would have needed a grasshopper’s legs to make it. Lucky you landed on that shed.”
“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Leech insisted as he paralleled the straw wing’s course. “It was skill.”
Koko dismissed his words with a skeptical wave of his paw. “Yeah, right.”
“You broke your promise, didn’t you, and tried to stop them on your own?” Bayang demanded from the control loops.
The dragon seemed more annoyed than affectionate. Leech wondered if the meddling griffin had misinterpreted everything.
“I thought I could sneak up on them.” Leech hesitated and then added, “Kles told me how hard it was to launch the wing. Thank you for what you did.”
Bayang shot an annoyed glance at the griffin and then looked again at Leech. “Scirye was worried.”
“Me?” the Kushan girl said. “You were just as anxious.”
“Now that Bayang knows he’s safe, she can afford to scold him.” Kles laughed.
“I think a certain griffin should keep his little beak shut,” Bayang snapped.
Leech was puzzled and a little hurt as they flew along. Was Kles making up stuff or was he telling the truth?
He needed time to think about everything, but that would have to come later—after they caught Badik and Roland. Leech wouldn’t survive if he let himself be distracted by other matters.
“I’ll scout ahead,” he said.
“Don’t go too far,” Bayang warned. “We should hit them together, not separately.”
After his last encounter with Badik and Roland, Leech could see the wisdom of that strategy. “Okay,” he said, and flew a hundred yards in front.
If they had not been pursuing their enemies, the boy would have enjoyed racing over the frozen ocean with his friends. But they weren’t here for pleasure.
He was skimming over the surface so fast that he barely noticed the long yellow strip of paper with the red writing. He circled and came around again, seeing that a lead fisherman’s weight had been tied to it so it would stay in one spot.
He angled lower so that he was only inches above the snow and slowed to pick it up. The words looked like Chinese but not the modern words he’d seen in Chinatown. These looked like pictures and above them was a caricature of some demon.
What was it? Had Roland left some insult?
Compared to the guns and monsters, this seemed harmless, so Leech brought it back to the wing. “Look what I found,” he said, holding it up.
“Throw it away,” Bayang and Kles shouted at the same time.
“But it might be a clue if you can read it,” Leech protested.
Bayang jabbed a claw at it. “It’s a magical charm.”
“Get rid of it,” Kles added, waving his paws frantically.
Balling the paper up, Leech flung it away.
And not a moment too soon.
The paper burst with a bang and a cloud of smoke as fluffy as a cotton ball. But instead of dissipating, the smoke began to spin with a hissing noise until it was a globe. The air was filled with a howling noise as the sphere flattened suddenly into an oval.
Fierce winds began to tug Leech this way and that.
“Get away if you can!” Bayang ordered as the straw wing tilted crazily.
As Leech twisted around in the air, the snow rose in streamers like a tangled skein of white yarn to engulf him.
And then the boy was tumbling about in a howling world of white.
44
Bayang
It was all Bayang could do to stay with the wing, let alone steer it in the turbulent air. Despite Pele’s charm, the wind-driven snow stabbed against her eyelids like needles. She could only imagine the pain that the hatchlings were going through.
“Hold on,” she shouted. But there was no answer from any of her passengers. “Scirye? Koko? Kles?”
Through the screaming wind, Bayang thought she hear
d a muffled cry, but even her eyes, which could see just as well in the sea darkness as in daylight on the land, could find nothing in the swirling snow. She could not even tell if she was right side up or upside down. This must have been the whiteout that Roxanna had warned them about.
Roland had set a trap with a spell that would activate after a set period, creating an obstacle for his pursuers, and allow him to escape. The winds would suck up the snow covering the frozen ocean, creating a confusing white tempest. Stay in one place and you risked being buried and yet keep moving and you risked wandering in circles until you froze.
And the hatchling had been right at the center of the spell.
What was this terrible sense of loss, this agony? She and the hatchlings were of two different species, and as dragons measure time they had only been together for the blink of an eye. And yet she felt such pain. Such emptiness.
“Leech?” she wailed. “Scirye!”
Was it her imagination or did she see a flicker of green light in answer?
A sudden gust plucked her from the wing like an invisible hand and flung her away, the helpless plaything of the storm.
45
Leech
Unable to tell up from down, Leech was hugging his knees tight against his chest to form himself into a protective ball as the winds tossed him about. It was all he could do to breathe, for every intake of air clogged his nose and mouth with snowflakes. It was like being buried alive.
He had never seen snow before this trip and he’d be happy if he never encountered it again. He had seen, felt, and eaten more than his fill of it.
His eyes, starved for anything beside snowflakes, noticed the faint glow coming from his wrist. Suddenly he was desperate for company and he pulled his glove back to expose the Dancer’s ribbon. It slipped onto his palm, where it pulsed like green flame. Snowflakes sizzled against its sides, but it did not go out or even shrink.
In the short time they’d been together, he’d come to think of the ribbon as a friend or—maybe Koko had been right—as a kind of pet. “Can you help me?” he asked desperately. “My friends and I are trapped in the storm.”
The ribbon pulsed in response, but Leech wasn’t sure what it meant. Leech pleaded with it for several minutes, growing as frustrated as Scirye had when she’d been asking Nanaia to aid Upach.
Then, even with the wind screaming in his ears, he thought he heard Bayang.
As hope surged through him, the voice urged, Keep quiet. This is the perfect time to kill you and no one would ever know.
He thought of what Kles had said. Sure, Bayang could be an awful grump, but she had never raised a paw against him personally. Instead, she had sacrificed and suffered for his sake.
No, he told the voice, she’s my friend. And then he began to shout out loud, “Bayang? Help, Bayang!”
Suddenly he felt something tickle his wrist. It was the ribbon wriggling away and forming a compact sphere the size of a marble that suddenly flew upward, whipped about by the winds.
“Wait, come back,” he called, feeling even more alone than before. Even the Dancer’s ribbon had deserted him.
His back hit the frozen ocean surface so abruptly that it knocked the wind from him. Instantly, snow began to pile up around him and he fought to rise into the air again. Better to die in the sky than be buried on the land.
He wheeled through the air, as helpless as a leaf in a hurricane. All of a sudden there was a green glow to his right and he heard a sizzling sound like a giant frying pan cooking bacon. The noise increased so that the roaring wind seemed to fade into the background, and he could see stars peeking through a gap in the clouds.
He realized then that he’d been turned sideways and righted himself so the sky was now above him again and the sea below.
The hole continued to widen, green fire eating along its rim. Leech felt the elation rise inside him as he saw the Dancers flooding downward toward him. They formed a seething tunnel in the shape of a corkscrew that the pounding winds could bend but not break. As they grew closer, he heard sizzling sounds whenever the whirling snowflakes came into contact with them.
And then he was standing at the bottom of a glowing tube that stretched through the storm to the stars above.
The wispy glowing body of a Dancer spiraled around him like a twirling veil, and Leech wondered if the ribbon had rejoined it. He felt a bit of regret that it had merged with its fellows.
“Thank you for rescuing me,” Leech said, “but how did you know I was in trouble?”
The Dancer pulsed in response as it circled him.
Leech would never really know. Had the Dancer understood him once the ribbon returned to its host? Or had the Dancer actually seen his predicament by means of the ribbon? Either way, he was grateful.
The Dancer wound part of itself around his wrist and tried to tug him toward the stars, but Leech twisted away, heading in the direction of Bayang’s voice. “I have to find my friends.”
His hands tingled as he tried to shove through the glowing wall, but as fragile as the delicate Dancers appeared, their bodies were as tough and elastic as rubber bands. They bent under the pressure but did not give way. If the winds were not strong enough to push them aside, Leech knew he could not.
The Dancers began to flash up and down the tunnel until Leech felt like he was inside a neon lightbulb.
The flashing stopped abruptly and the tunnel began to unravel, each Dancer slanting toward the frozen ocean, burning the snow as it went. Other Dancers joined with his savior to form a sheltering sphere around him.
“Bayang?” he called again.
“Here.” He heard her faint cry. “Are you all right?”
Now’s your chance, the voice said. You can get away while you leave her to freeze to death.
Leech ignored the voice again as he felt the relief wash over him. As he flew at a slant toward her, the sphere rolled through the air, keeping him in its shelter while other Dancers shot ahead to clear the way. “I’m coming. I’m okay,” he called. “What about you?”
“I’m fine too,” she said. “Keep talking.”
“The Dancers are helping us,” he said.
“Where did the Dancers come from?” she wondered.
“The ribbon brought them,” Leech said. He was hovering a yard above the surface now.
“Have you seen the others?” Bayang asked anxiously. “The wind snatched us right off the wing and I couldn’t catch them.”
“No,” Leech confessed, moving forward.
“Can you ask the Dancers?” the dragon inquired desperately.
“I’ll try,” Leech said, “but first let’s get together.”
He almost bumped into her. One moment there was a wall of swirling snow, and the next the dragon was there, head lowered against the savage winds and snow, a paw raised to plod along.
He was glad that he had not given in to that savage inner voice.
Dancers flitted around her, forming a dome large enough to hold them both. Though the dome constantly changed shape under the pounding winds, the sides held firm.
As Bayang lifted her head, surprised and grateful for the respite, Leech flung his arms around her neck.
“Am I glad to see you,” he said.
To Leech’s surprise, he felt her head nuzzling against him. “Not more than I am to see you. Thank Heaven. I thought I’d lost you.”
After the first delightful thrill, Leech didn’t know what to say and Bayang seemed to feel just as awkward. Now that they had finally acknowledged the bond that had grown between them, neither of them had a clue about what to do next. There was nothing in his abused childhood to use as a measuring stick. And he suspected that the dragon had a similar problem.
“You were right when you said words can’t erase our past,” Leech said.
Bayang pulled her neck up, looking uncomfortable. “Yes, unfortunately.”
Desperately Leech tried to put his thoughts into words. “But I figure you and me are in the same boat. We
both did bad things that we’d like to forget but can’t. What’s really important is that we’re both trying to change.”
“Yes,” Bayang said slowly as if savoring the notion. “Yes, I guess we are. But I imagine there are always going to be some bumps in our way.”
“But if we keep reminding ourselves that we’re friends, we can get over them,” Leech said hopefully.
Bayang smiled. “Words of wisdom from a mere hatchling.”
Leech tried to cover up his embarrassment by saying lamely, “Well, we shouldn’t be resting like this while they’re in trouble. We’ve got to find the others.”
He looked around the globe of Dancers, wondering how to find the savior Dancer among all the others. He noticed that more Dancers were arriving, tunneling through the snow in this area so that it quickly resembled pale Swiss cheese.
“What’s that?” Bayang pointed to a bright green hemisphere flashing to their right.
Dancers were already clearing a path for them. “Let me go first,” Bayang said. Her legs floundered through the layer of loose, newly fallen snow, but her paws trampled it so that Leech had no trouble.
They found Scirye huddled with her face against the snow, arms wrapped around Kles inside her coat. She was just looking up in amazement at the shielding Dancers.
“Am I happy to see you.” She grinned. The Dancers slipped away as she stood up.
“Are you all right?” Bayang asked.
“Yes, but I’m as sick of snow as Upach.” Opening her coat, she nudged the griffin with a finger. “Kles?”
He poked his head out, clacking his beak together in a yawn. “I was having such a good dream.”
“Well, this could have been a deadly nightmare for all of us,” Bayang said. She explained about how Roland had trapped them.
“We should go looking for Koko,” Leech said.
At that moment, though, a Dancer snaked through the storm to them.
“I think they found him,” the dragon said. She took the lead again while the children followed until they came to the delta-shaped wing.