The Summer Dragon

by Todd Lockwood

  I was reminded again of the city of Cinvat in the valley, but instead of a forest of trees, a forest of stone had consumed and transformed this underground wonder. “Darian, look,” I said. But then the lantern flickered and died, and the most profound darkness I’d ever known swallowed us.

  Darian squeezed my arm, and I held my breath.

  “Maia . . .”

  “Shhh.”

  The silence was vast, and minor sounds like drips or our own guarded breathing were consumed.

  “Now what?” Darian whispered.

  “Listen.”

  Malik still followed us, moaning and panting. But something else reached my ears, from even farther away, so distorted by multiple reverberations off cave walls that it took me a minute to realize what it was: Footsteps. Many of them, as of a marching troop of men.

  “Darian! The Harodhi are following us now, too.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I hoped that the entire cave full of old dragons’ nests would become an inferno they couldn’t pass. That maybe the smoke of it would pour out and show Father which way to come.”

  “Fires need air. They only had to wait.”

  I fought panic. We needed to keep moving, but we couldn’t see. The risk of stumbling off a cliff face into a bottomless chasm was all too great.

  I sat down carefully, to not wake Keirr if she was sleeping, and pulled three arrows out of my quiver.

  “What are you doing?” Darian whispered.

  “Trying to make light.”

  I heard him sit beside me. “Good.” He said it wearily. He was not himself.

  Fumbling in the dark, I sliced a substantial piece of fabric off the hem of my jerkin. I pulled the wick out of the lantern—it was bone dry—and stuffed my fabric into the opening. Then I turned the lantern upside down.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m sopping the last of the oil out of the lantern.”

  There was just enough oil to dampen the fabric, which I wrapped around the wick. Then I placed the fletched ends of the three arrows around it and guided Darian’s hand to the shafts, where he could hold them in place. Some torn strips from my shirt kept the arrow shafts together just above and below his hand.

  “Isn’t going to work,” he said. “You can’t light oil without a flame.”

  “I have flint and steel.” I sighed. “In the bottom of my pack, under the baby.”

  Darian sighed too. “We have to have it. Give me more arrows and your knife. We need kindling.”

  “How did you start the fire in the tunnel last night?”

  “Two sticks and friction. It took me hours, and I rubbed my hands raw.”

  Malik’s panting and chuffing grew louder.

  “We have to hurry,” I said.

  He started whittling slivers of wood from an arrow shaft. “Flint and steel,” he said.

  I slipped my arms out of the pack straps and gently turned around, slipping one hand under Keirr’s chin. She awoke with a chirp. “Sorry, baby!” I petted her nose and chin and scratched behind her ear frills. She purred quietly for a moment, and then said, “Mowp?”

  Whittling noises continued as I loosened the drawstring and eased my arm into the pack, feeling down between the blanket and the bag, past her little body toward the bottom. She started to struggle. With my other hand I kept the top of the bag open only enough for her neck and my arm. She raked me inside the sack with her little talons, despite the blanket.

  “Ow! Blazes, little thing!”

  I encountered one of the potatoes, pulled it out, and set it beside me where I could find it again in the dark. Then I reached back in and felt around until I found the flint and steel in its little leather sack.

  “Here it is.” I held it out until Darian’s hand found it and took it from me.

  “Mowp?”

  “Yes! Yes, I’m getting it . . .” I located the potato again and smashed it against the stone. Then I held pieces up one by one for Keirr to nibble out of my hand.

  Malik’s growls grew closer, and Keirr honked her poppa-word again.

  “Keirr,” said a very large voice, from no more than a hundred yards away. Not a roar, but spoken like a word again, as when he’d touched her nose through the bars of the cage. It was followed by grunts and whuffs that might also have been dragon words.

  “Hurry!”

  Darian struck steel on flint, and the spark showed wood shavings and short sections of arrow shaft between the fletchings around cloth and wick. He struck again, and I looked back down our trail. He struck a third time, and I saw Malik’s good eye reflected back. He growled low. He was too close.

  “Hurry!”

  He struck again, and a spark stuck in the whittlings. He bent down to blow on it.

  “Avar, Darian.”

  He ignored me, blowing gently. A flame sprang up, and he nursed it with his breath. Suddenly the oil caught, and our makeshift torch sprang to life.

  “Let’s go!” he said.

  I grabbed the pack straps and hoisted Keirr onto my back again, then helped Darian upright. He limped desperately, cursing. Keirr cried plaintively on my back.

  Malik’s single eye shined back at me from no more than fifty yards away. It bobbed up and down with his stride. He wasn’t charging. That was good. But it meant he was pacing himself.

  “We have to move faster,” I said.

  “This light isn’t going to last long.”

  “Just move!”

  “Mowp?”

  “Baby . . . wait.”

  We labored on, and the chasm began to narrow. Echoes were sharper, more tightly spaced. The path began to climb again, clearly the handiwork of men.

  It became a numbing rhythm: climb a step, help Darian up, listen for Malik—whuffing still, grunting in pain. He seemed to be gaining until we reached the top of a stair and found another flat stretch, and then his sounds faded as he struggled up behind us. Darian pulled pieces of arrow shaft out of his pocket from time to time and poked them into the end of the torch to keep it going. The fletchings were long gone, the wick and fabric nearly consumed. Meanwhile, the tramping of feet grew louder.

  “There’s light ahead,” Darian gasped. I looked up. He was right. Beyond the next stair, past a cluster of misshapen columns, a faint blue glow illuminated the misty cavern air.

  “Is it daylight?”

  “I hope so.” His voice was a pained whisper.

  The torch began to gutter. I looked ahead to get a lay of the trail as best I could, in case we were suddenly fumbling in darkness. There was a switchback ahead, and another steep stair to climb. I groaned.

  Right before the turn, we came upon a large black lump. The donkeys, still strapped to the tongue of the cart, lay broken and dead in the trail. My heart sank. They had tumbled from the stair above, unable to negotiate the incline, bound together as they were. One had fallen and pulled the other with it. “Damn it.” Tears brimmed in my eyes. I was exhausted, but I’d dared to hope for a little bit of good luck.

  “Take some meat,” Darian said.

  “What?”

  “Quickly. Feast that baby so she’ll shut up.”

  He was right. I took my knife to a haunch, flayed the skin back, and carved off a big chunk of thigh, while Darian squatted down on his good leg, wounded leg stretched out in front, his head laid back against the wall. With nothing else to put it in, I wrapped the meat in my jacket. Keirr complained the entire time.

  Malik whuffed from the darkness. He was getting very close. The makeshift torch suddenly died. The last lumps of glowing cinder fell out of the embrace of the three blackened arrow shafts and winked out.

  “Donkey dung,” said Darian.

  I laughed briefly through my fear, and helped him up. “Careful—we’ll have to feel our way past this bend. But there
’s light ahead, up this stair.”

  Our eyes adjusted quickly to the glow from above. It was the equivalent of starlight, not easy to see by, but enough. I understood why Malik hadn’t gained on us—his progress had been made in the dark, with only one good eye. He’d kept up with us, fumbling every step of the way, following only his nose. When we reached the light above, would he catch up to us?

  “Faster.” I helped Darian up another step.

  He groaned.

  “Mowp?”

  “Shhh, baby. Hang on a little longer.”

  We climbed. Shortly I felt movement and heard crunching noises from the knapsack. Keirr had pulled her head back inside the bag and found the other potato. Oh, good girl . . .

  The top of the stair ended in a platform before one more switchback. By the glow from beyond, I could see that Darian’s cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunken. I looked back the way we had come, and though Malik was invisible, I still heard his labors somewhere below.

  In the distance behind us bobbed the orange glow of lanterns or torches, and I realized that the tramping of Harodhi feet had become louder. The soldiers appeared between columns for an instant, close enough to make out figures and the flashing of weapons.

  “Oh High Ones, Darian, they’re getting closer.”

  We took the first step, and he winced, gritting his teeth and panting. He tried to hop to the next step, but stumbled and nearly fell.

  “I’m sorry, Maia,” he whispered.

  “Don’t apologize,” I gasped. “Concentrate.”

  I heard water ahead, falling in a steady stream. Not a large stream by the sound of it, but enough to make splashing sounds.

  As we took the stairs, Darian paused at each step to get his good leg under him. When we reached the top landing, both of us collapsed in exhaustion.

  “A little farther.” I summoned what little strength I had left and helped Darian up again, lured on by the promise of a drink. We approached the columns at the top of the stair. Some were manmade, straight and fluted like the ruins in Cinvat; the rest were natural spires that seemed to pour from the roof and spill down the slope like frozen waterfalls.

  I hoped to pass through to a view of daylight, but what I found took my breath away. A huge, circular chamber had been hewn out of a natural cavern eighty or a hundred feet across, fifty or more feet tall. It was ringed with eight colossal fluted columns, some still standing clear, some vanishing into ropy waxen pillars. Ornately carved leaf and dragon motifs decorated foot and crown and filled a central flute between. Stone stairs climbed up or down between every pair of pillars, vanishing into black passageways. Four in all. The floor was strewn with bones of animals and dragons, and littered with boulders and shards from the ceiling. The ornately paved floor had been shattered where they fell.

  A low wall carved to resemble flower petals contained a pool some forty feet across in the heart of the chamber. A stream of water fell from the ceiling above to splash and dribble on a cluster of giant blue crystals in the pool’s center. These were the source of the eerie blue phosphorescence that filled the room. Time had encased them in an ornate, natural latticework of semi-transparent blue and green stone.

  It was beautiful, strange, and mesmerizing. But which exit would we choose? How would we decide before Malik or the Harodhi arrived? The many bones suggested that an exit was near. But which passage? The wheel track continued on across the chamber to the right, toward an opening that went down into black oblivion. Was that the right choice? Or would that lead us to Harodhi-land, as Darian had put it?

  Tears of exasperation stung my eyes. Darian could barely keep up with me as I led him into the vast room. Keirr’s weight dragged at my shoulders. I ached from head to toe.

  Between the pillars were carvings, depicting things I would never have imagined. Geysers of carved smoke rose above armies in advance. Men in bizarre, jointed armor assaulted towering buildings of peculiar seamless architecture. Strange airborne machinery did battle with dragons of magnificent proportion and breed. The water rippling over the blue crystals caused the light to shimmer, giving the carvings an illusion of movement. In my weariness, I couldn’t take it all in. My brain was numb, and I had one thought: Water.

  I stumbled to the pool and collapsed at its edge. Keirr complained at being bent over as I dipped my hands into the pool and drank deeply. It tasted of minerals and stone, but it was cold and wet. Darian hopped up next to me and fell with his chest atop the low ornate wall. He drank noisily as I lowered Keirr off my back and dipped water out for her, too.

  Over the fall and splash of water, I heard whuffing and snarls. I looked up, but Malik wasn’t in sight. Not yet.

  “Darian, we can’t stay here.”

  He lay panting next to the pool wall. “I can’t.”

  “We have to go, Darian.”

  “I can’t.” He slumped down even more.

  I struggled to my feet, grabbed his collar and pulled, but he made no effort to rise. I burst into tears. “Damn it, Dare.”

  He looked up at me with a face drawn and pale, eyes like ghosts. “I’m sorry, Maia.”

  I dropped next to him, my arms around him, weeping.

  He gripped my hands weakly.

  Keirr cried in my knapsack. “Mowp?”

  It was endearing, but so single-minded that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So I laughed through my tears. I released Darian, then dragged my jacket closer and opened it. The donkey meat had soaked the leather with blood. I opened the drawstring on the knapsack and let Keirr scramble out. She went straight to the meat and started licking it. I sliced pieces off with my knife to feed to her. She devoured them hungrily. At the same time, I pulled a strip of venison out of a pocket and took a bite, then found another and held it out to Darian. Our last. “Dare. Take this. You need it.”

  He didn’t take it.

  “Darian?”

  I looked over at him in panic, thinking that he had passed out or had even died. But he was staring at something with wide eyes. I followed his gaze to the wall above the passage where we had entered. There was a single carving.

  “It’s Getig,” rasped Darian, in awe.

  My breath caught in my throat. There was no mistaking him—the twisted horns like gnarled trees, the tall, elegant neck frill, the proud posture, even his immense scale next to the carved human supplicants at his feet—all were accurate. Carved by the people of Cinvat, long, long ago.

  The memory of Getig’s molten gaze flooded me with sudden warmth. Once again I felt an overwhelming sense of the enormity of creation and my tiny place in it, the essence of the Summer Dragon that had eluded my recall. It seemed so easy now that I wept tears of shame for having ever lost that memory.

  I looked around the room again. Above each of the four passages was another magnificent dragon of noble aspect. Clearly High Dragons, by their regal bearing and massive scale. Each was different; the one to the right had great stag-like antlers instead of horns, its frills and wings with edges scalloped like oak leaves. The one to the left was slender and lithe, with a graceful bearing and smooth features. The one opposite Getig was the largest, yet it had been carved in such a way that it appeared almost insubstantial. Background elements showed through it, the wings trailed away into clouds. Of the four, it was the only one that looked out of the carving directly at the viewer.

  “Waeges, Menog, and Oestara.” I named them from right to left. “Autumn, Winter, and Spring.”

  “What does it mean?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know.” I could barely speak.

  Keirr nuzzled my hands, looking for another pre-cut piece of meat, drawing me back to the moment. I sliced a bit off and fed it to her. I finished my plank of venison and continued to portion out the donkey meat to my wilding baby until, at last, she seemed satisfied. All but a few bites were gone. She came to me and put her nose in my face.
She licked my lips.

  I was so weary and overwhelmed that at first I didn’t realize what she wanted. But it soon came to me. It was simple. When wilding dragons finish a kill, they groom each other. She was licking my face to clean it of blood. If I were Keirr’s mother, I would do the same in return. And so, with tears in my eyes, I took her little head in my hands and kissed her nose as if I was a dragon dam and she was my qit. I kissed her mouth. I kissed her chin and tasted the blood that had dribbled there. I wept, and she licked the salty tears from my cheeks. I dipped some water from the pool and washed her face with my hands. She started to purr, and almost without thought I purred in response. Then I folded her into my arms and hugged her, stroking her cheeks and scratching behind her ear frills. I continued to kiss her lips and chin and nose, cherishing every second of connection, because I now knew what I had to do.

  Darian was losing blood and could be dying. I could not rescue him, carry this baby out of here, and contend with Malik too. I was responsible for Darian’s injuries. Whatever else happened, I needed to get Darian out of here, and I couldn’t manage all three of them. I had to give Keirr back to her father and save my brother’s life.

  It meant going to Avigal with Bellua, agreeing that I was cursed and that Getig had spurned me. But there was no other option left. Things had changed. I couldn’t save Keirr and Darian both. I was out of strength, and Darian was running out of time.

  I held her close and sobbed. She licked my ear, since my face was pressed into her smoothly pebbled neck. She made no sound as my shoulders shook with anguish.

  “Maia,” said Darian.

  His hand slapped my shoulder weakly. “Maia!” With urgency.

  I opened my eyes. Malik stood twenty feet away.

  TWENTY-TWO

  AN INSTINCT BURIED in exhaustion told me to run, but I held my breath instead, frozen in numb anticipation. How long had he been watching me?

  Keirr cocked her head at me quizzically.

  “Maia!” Darian scrabbled backward weakly. “You have to run.”

  If there was reason to run, it was already too late. I would never get Darian up in time.