by Becca Mills
I pulled out a slightly less dirty pair of jeans and tugged them on. And sent a silent prayer of thanks to the wrong dragon for dumping our packs on the floor of her lair along with us. Once everything was exposed to the light of day, there they were.
Almost all the stuff had come out of Williams’s, since I hadn’t bothered to cinch it closed after going through it, but hey, who’d complain about something like that?
He would, of course.
“This shirt has twenty-seven holes,” he said. His tone of voice made it sound like, You just stabbed yourself twenty-seven times, didn’t you?
Since my back was turned, I indulged in an eye roll. “Is that one of your tent poles over there?”
“Shit. Yeah.”
I watched him trudge across the flat surface of the air-mesa.
I was pretty sure he’d been out during that whole desperate fight in the dark. He’d been healed first, but by the time he’d come to, I’d been healed and Ghosteater and the right dragon had chowed down on the dead babies. There wasn’t a scrap left, and the two beasts weren’t saying a thing.
There was the long blood smear on the mesa’s surface, though.
And the scorched patch.
He’d eyed those, eyed me, looked angry.
I didn’t want to tell him about it. I wasn’t sure why. Thinking about it gave me a squirmy feeling.
The right dragon had pulled back a hundred yards or so. Ghosteater said it was because she couldn’t see us clearly when she was right on top of us.
The wolf was lying a few feet from my pack, panting.
I sat down next to him.
“So, what happened? Last I saw, you were digging into the wrong dragon’s heel like nobody’s business.”
His tail thumped the ground a few times. It must’ve been a happy memory.
Then he lifted his nose, sniffing at the breeze.
“The wind — it speaks, it touches, but it does not listen. It has always been that way.”
“The wind speaks to you?”
He looked at me patiently. “Yes, pup. But the wind-rivers here are different. They are thick. Tame. They listen. They called the right dragon for me.”
“So you were up there on the dragon with us? When it was flying?”
“Yes. She healed around me.”
“What do you mean?”
“My teeth found the tendon, but the flesh closed around me.”
“You were trapped inside her leg?”
God, how horrible. Like being buried alive.
Ghosteater’s tail thumped a few more times. “Clever beast. Worthy adversary.”
“Could you breathe?”
“No. I spoke to the wind. Then I stayed in the silence.” He glanced at the right dragon. “She released me.”
I gazed out at the dragon. It reminded me of standing in some “concrete canyon” in Manhattan — the looming wall of her blocked out everything else. When I looked south, I couldn’t make out the end of her tail. She had to be over a mile long.
“Does she have the piece of Eye of the Heavens?”
The wolf chuffed.
“What’s she waiting for? Do I have to do something?”
“She wants to speak to you, but they do not speak as you do.”
“You’ve spoken with her. Can you translate?”
“No.”
He didn’t elaborate. Maybe what the dragon had to say was private.
“Okay, well, I guess she’d better try to talk to me.”
The dragon’s head sank, her great eye coming in line with where we stood. She blinked slowly. When her lid opened, a thick, translucent membrane covered her eyeball. After a second, it retracted, sliding toward the corner of her eye like a wet drape.
“Not a good idea,” Williams murmured from behind me.
I looked back at him over my shoulder. “I don’t think she wants to hurt me.”
“Not the point. That thing is 220 million years old. It’s other. It talking to you is like you talking to a gnat.”
“I could talk to a gnat without hurting it.”
“What if you had to make it understand something, and it just wasn’t getting it?”
I saw what he meant.
Ghosteater stood and shook himself. “She will be careful.”
He trotted to the edge of the mesa.
A heavy hand landed on my shoulder.
“Ryder. Just get the thing you came for, and let’s go. It’s enough.”
I was tempted. I really was. But I needed to get everything, including information. For all I knew, the piece alone might be useless.
“No. If I don’t get everything I’m supposed to get, then I’ve wasted our time.”
He made a furiously exasperated sound and stalked away, swearing under his breath.
Well, at least he’s back to his old self.
The dragon stepped closer and swung her head over the mound. Then she stilled.
Ghosteater turned and looked at me expectantly.
I joined him. The dragon was just a few feet away. A single, massive scale filled my field of vision. It was the color of old maple bark and gleamed without being glossy, like unvarnished wood that’s been rubbed smooth by people’s hands over the course of decades.
Ghosteater nosed my hand. “Touch her.”
I put my hand on her. Like the wrong dragon, she was hard and cool to the touch. Her head was moving ever so slightly, rising a few inches as she inhaled, then sinking again. She smelled like blood.
I looked up but couldn’t see much — just a protuberance far over our heads, and above that, a glimpse of teeth.
I turned to Ghosteater. “What —”
An avalanche of sensations and images hit me: cold sand under my feet; the smell of salt air; cracked earth; my fingertips, puckered from water; heat; airless darkness; three blue balls in the palm of my hand; crying desperately; pond scum; my mother’s face; dirt under my fingernails; a tiny boat; and, through it all, need.
The feelings and pictures kept coming. They filled me. Overfilled me. Seared me. Then there was nothing.
Chapter 22
Riding on a dragon’s nose was a whole new experience.
I looked down through the slight shimmer of thickened air. Far below, Eyry lay spread out in all its primeval glory. We were flying north. Arid plains had given way to sparse woodlands and then to denser forests of the kind we’d arrived in weeks ago.
Williams touched my arm and pointed off to the right.
I saw something glittering on the horizon. The sea.
I nodded, then looked down at the small sphere I was holding. It was about the size of a golf ball and sky blue. Even when it was still, there was movement to it, somehow — a kind of internal stirring. It had a strange, liquid feel, but no wetness came off in my hands. And it wasn’t always still. As I watched, it flowed up my palm and encircled my wrist.
It was a disconcerting object. I had no doubt it was alive.
Apparently, it had appeared in my hand after my tête-à-tête with the dragon. I’d been out cold at the time. I’d woken up with a terrible headache.
And unable to speak a word.
I could understand what people said. I could think clearly. I could even hear the words I wanted to say in my mind. But when I tried to say them aloud, gibberish came out. English, Baasha, French — it didn’t matter.
Ghosteater shifted against me and sighed.
According to Williams, he’d been quite upset when I passed out. When I woke up and couldn’t speak, he’d paced and whined, clearly distressed.
He’d asked the dragon to heal me.
She’d refused.
I stroked his head, feeling bad that I couldn’t reassure him.
The dragon banked to the east. Williams put an arm around me, but there wasn’t much danger. The beast was so massive I barely noticed the tilt. And we were nestled in a crevice between two scales, anyway. It was sort of like sitting at the back of a bus. You weren’t likely to roll down
the aisle and fall out the door just because it had to go downhill a bit.
I had a lot to think about.
Williams had been right about the difficulty of communicating with the dragon — I hadn’t understood most of what she’d said, and I’d been damaged in the process. But I’d grasped something before being overwhelmed. The pictures and sense-impressions didn’t add up to a coherent narrative. But I’d gotten this much: Eye of the Heavens needed my help. I was certain of it. Despite the ludicrousness of a being like that needing help from someone like me, I hadn’t a shred of doubt.
Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. The dragon had probably told me — tried to tell me, anyway. But I hadn’t gotten it.
Or maybe the info was in there, buried in the damaged part of my brain. If that was the case, maybe it would surface with time. Maybe that’s why the dragon had refused to heal me. Maybe healing the damage would erase the message.
That’s a lot of maybes.
I ran my fingertips over the blue band around my wrist.
What I needed was time. Time to let my brain heal, to see if anything else emerged.
I thought about the possibilities.
Things were different now than they’d been back in Demesnes. If Ghosteater were willing to help me, I wouldn’t have to go to the ice men. I could leave with him instead. What could Williams do to stop me? He wouldn’t stand a chance.
I entertained the thought for a long moment.
If I left with Ghosteater, I’d have to stay under his protection, at least for the time being. What would that mean?
Not living in a house somewhere, treating him like a pet. He was a wild creature.
So, I’d be traipsing around the wild with him, waiting for my brain to fix itself?
That didn’t sound right.
I wrestled with the situation. Eventually, I admitted I couldn’t count on getting any more out of what the dragon had said. Just wandering around, waiting for inspiration to strike — that wasn’t a good use of my time. I needed to find the answers myself.
What better place to do that than the worlds’ best library?
Yes. Yes, that was it. I’d go to the ice mothers and examine their library from top to bottom, whether they wanted me to or not. If I recovered more of the dragon’s message, great. If not, hopefully I’d find something in the library that’d help me understand what Eye of the Heavens was, what it wanted, and how I was supposed to help.
Then, one way or another, I’d do it.
It took a minute for the irony to strike me: I’d been so upset that Cordus had manipulated me with this ridiculous lie about going to the ice mothers’ library to research Eye of the Heavens, and now I was going to do just that — of my own free will.
Maybe it wasn’t a lie.
Maybe the whole solatium thing was a cover story after all.
I glanced over at Williams.
When we reached the ice men, would he introduce me as a scholar or a solatium?
He turned and met my eyes. As usual, his face was unreadable.
I looked away.
It didn’t matter if Cordus’s mission for me had been real. What mattered was that he’d altered my mind, tried to change who I was, tried to erase me and replace me with someone better.
I thought back to how I’d felt at the time — slavishly trusting, filled with a false sense of confidence, pathetically grateful to be thought competent and useful. And blind to all my true commitments. I’d walked away from my friends and family without a thought.
He’d made me into some kind of automaton, fueled by high-octane devotion.
I felt myself flushing with anger all over again.
Maybe Negus was right. Maybe Cordus was a fool. One day, I might be his peer — a potential ally, or at least a strong supporter. But did I feel like supporting him now?
As if in response, my gift stirred and coiled inside me like a sleepy python. I became aware of radiative potential all around me. It was there in everything. The air, the dragon’s scales, Williams’s body — it could all be transformed into heat. Or light. Or maybe —
Oh boy.
Had I woken my gift up for good in the wrong dragon’s lair?
It was a sobering thought. If I could burn an eight-foot reptile from the inside out, I could burn up a person — no problem.
I remembered what had happened in the Octoworld isolate. I could burn up an army of persons.
I felt something slipping away from me.
“Innocence” wasn’t quite the right word.
Freedom, I thought. Freedom from making hard choices. That’s what I’m losing.
I shivered.
I’d been so frustrated with my own helplessness that it hadn’t occurred to me what a gift helplessness could be. I’d never had to hold someone’s life in my hands and make a conscious decision. I’d been spared that.
The dragon banked again. This time she didn’t straighten out. I realized she was descending. Her vast loop took us out over a turquoise ocean.
I thought of Terry, his essence a part of an alien sea until the fracturing of the universe or its frigid death or the draining of everything into that silence Ghosteater described — or whatever it was that would happen when all we knew came to a close.
I wondered about Ida and Mizzy, making their slow way back through Demesnes, with all its powers, only to face the horror of Blue Seas again.
I even spared a thought for Kevin, deserter that he was.
I thought I knew what made him do it. I understood feeling like you’re done. That it’s time to stop, time to be safe. I recognized a thread of that feeling in myself, now. I’d passed the test — come through terror, through loss, through death. I’d taken my damage. It should be time to curl up on Theo’s couch and listen to him and Andy ribbing each other, watch Zion roll her eyes and notice that Gwen was amused in spite of herself and hear Kara fit thirteen profanities into a nine-word sentence.
But it wasn’t time for that. Not at all.
The dragon’s gyre took us out again over the sea, and I looked down, remembering Mizzy’s story of the woman who saw her lover’s beauty and music in a shark’s eye.
I took a deep breath, and my gift stilled inside me.
It’s okay to see what you’ve lost reflected in the world around you, I thought. It only destroys you if that’s all you can see.
It wasn’t all I could see.
I’d have to make sure of that.
Ghosteater nosed my hand. “The path to the place of the ice men, pup.”
I smiled and ruffled his ears.
We were standing in front of a small ligature — little bigger than a normal room doorway. Freezing air was howling out of it, scouring the ground with particles of ice. The Triassic plant life around us looked like it was doing its level best to crawl away and hide. Mostly, it was just dead.
The dragon was some ways back — the cold probably wasn’t to her liking, either.
She’d landed very gently, coming to a hover just above the ground and then lowering her legs. I’d heard timber breaking, but I’d hardly felt it.
Once she’d set us down and we’d moved away, she’d promptly lain down, crushing everything beneath her. All I could see clearly of her now was a stretch of her lower jaw — a sheer wall a hundred feet high. The rest was just a dark shape in the mist, stretching into the distance like some long, craggy ridge.
Maybe if she lay there long enough, that’s what she’d become. She’d get dusty, then dirty. Small plants would colonize her. Then a few trees. Give her a few thousand years, and she’d look a lot like Rib Mountain.
The thought made me shiver. Maybe there was a stratum where Rib Mountain was a dragon. Graham had said it existed in the S-Em too. Now that I understood this world better, I knew there were probably many versions of it. Who’s to say they were all the same?
“How far to the ice men’s citadel?” Williams said.
Ghosteater stepped into the ligature and lift
ed his nose, sniffing and tasting the wind. After a number of minutes, he turned back. “Not far. One day’s run.”
“As humans travel?”
The wolf cocked his head, thinking. “I do not know. Four days?”
I had a feeling he was underestimating.
Williams’s expression said he was thinking along the same lines. “Will the dragon stay while we prepare?”
“She will sleep for some time.”
“Days? Months? Years?”
“Days.”
Williams looked disappointed, but I couldn’t see why. Surely we wouldn’t need months to prepare, and I bet no other predator would come within miles of her. A thousand toothy things were probably running away through the underbrush that very minute.
When Williams glanced my way, I tipped my head toward the ligature and tapped my wrist, as though counting the seconds.
He stared at me for a long moment, brows knit. Then he turned away and began setting up camp.
My change of heart probably perplexed him.
Oh well.
There wasn’t much I could do about it. Even if I could speak, I was oath-bound.
I grasped the loose skin at the nape of Ghosteater’s neck with both hands. His shoulder muscles bunched. Then, dark claws cutting down through the rocky scree as though it were sand, he pulled me up the last ten feet of the slope.
The crest of the hill had been blasted clear of snow.
Exhausted, I plopped down on a boulder and leaned over to nuzzle the wolf’s chin. Since I couldn’t speak, I had no other way to thank him.
Plus, his face was warm.
Williams trudged up, set down the small sled he was carrying, heaved off his pack, and sat down.
A minute or two passed in silence.
“There,” he said, pointing across the valley that lay before us. “See that glacier? The citadel’s at the top.”
The ice men built their capitol on a glacier? That didn’t seem sensible. Glaciers move.
But there it was — a huge mound rising out of the glacier’s head, gleaming white in the moonlight.
“We’ll need to make it up the talus slope. Once we hit the ice, there’ll be a road.”
I nodded and carefully straightened out my aching right knee. I’d fallen the day before and given it a good whack on a rock. The more exhausted I became, the more I fell. Not good.