Dragon and Phoenix

by Joanne Bertin

  “Hunh,” Raven grunted as he paused at the top of the path that led to the small patch of grassland the Llysanyins had taken as their own. Stormwind and the Two Poor Bastards stood, ears pricked, facing the sound of the drumming. From the way their tails twitched from side to side and Jhem’s hind feet shifted, Raven knew he’d guessed right.

  But where—Once more his gaze swept the nook. Still only three Llysanyins, and none of them was Boreal. “Rynna’s not back yet?”

  Was something amiss? Should he go look for her? That seemed a good idea until a part of his mind, less fogged with mesta than the rest, asked, Where?

  He shook his head. “Damnation,” he swore again and again, all his frustration bubbling up. He stood, fists clenched and feet wide apart, as the Llysanyins came up. As Stormwind snuffled his hair, Raven made a vow deep in his heart.

  Then he jumped up to Stormwind’s back. Jhem and Trissin crowded in behind.

  Zhantse bore a cloth-wrapped bundle in his arms as he strode across the painted chamber. His black eyes glittered with excitement.

  “Come,” he said. “This is not the place for you to see your destiny, Maurynna Kyrissaean. Come away.”

  Maurynna stood. Gods, but she wanted out of this place. The magic buzzed in her ears now, making it difficult to hear; vertigo snatched at her and retreated. Her only consolation was that Kyrissaean remained quiet. Had her dragon half been awake … Maurynna shuddered at the thought; then she took a deep breath, stumbling after Zhantse. The shaman lit a fresh torch from the pile and led the way into the tunnel to the outside.

  This time she was second in line, with Shima behind and Miune bringing up the rear. With each step, the thrumming in her bones faded until it was but a disquieting memory, like a bad dream that one doesn’t quite remember upon waking. As she stepped out of the passage and was under the night sky, Maurynna let her head fall back, and filled her lungs with the cool, sweet air.

  “It’s not a comfortable place, is it?” Shima said quietly as he stopped beside her.

  “You’ve never been there before?” she asked.

  “No, I’m not training to be a shaman,” he replied. One hand came up to rest gently on her shoulder, to both comfort and urge her on.

  She obeyed. Shima continued, “Tefira may enter the chamber, for he is Zhantse’s apprentice. He’ll discard the used torches we left there and replace them with fresh ones.”

  His sympathetic—but amused—tone said that it was just one of many boring duties his brother performed.

  They went on, the dry scraping of Miune’s claws following them along the trail. Zhantse didn’t stop at the bottom as Maurynna half expected him to; instead the shaman set off briskly for the gully, his jelah swinging jauntily from side to side.

  Ah, well; she supposed the suspense wouldn’t kill her. It would just torture her a little more.

  Stormwind paced along the canyon floor to the dancing ground, moving in the shallinn, the high, slow trot that paused between each beat. When they were within sight of the celebration, the Two Poor Bastards came up on either side and matched Stormwind. Given their size and the precision of their steps, Raven knew the Llysanyins would set jaws to dropping.

  Nor was he mistaken. Already they had been spotted; as friend called to friend, more turned to see. Raven slipped from Stormwind’s back. He jogged to meet Lark, now standing.

  “D’you think anyone will mind?” he asked.

  “They can truly dance?” Lark said as if she hadn’t heard him. And perhaps she hadn’t; she was gaping at the Llysanyins who cantered slowly in a circle. Now and again, at some signal Raven couldn’t see, they would rise up on their hind legs and reverse direction.

  Then Lark gasped, and answered her own question. “Dear gods,” she said in awe. “They can dance! Watch—whenever the rhythm changes … .”

  She was right. There were patterns in the drumming, and whenever the pattern changed, the Llysanyins moved with it. Raven stood, as captivated as the first time he’d seen them dance. More and more people crowded around them to watch.

  Someone pushed a drum into his hands. As if bewitched, he began drumming one of the Assantikkan rhythms the Llysanyins knew, Takka nih Bahari, “Dance of the Red Ghost.” Their impromptu dance flowed into the one they knew so well.

  Trills of wonder filled the night air. Raven drummed, and as, one by one, the Tah’nesieh drummers joined in as they caught the rhythm, the Llysanyins danced in the firelight.

  Maurynna knelt by the dying campfire. Zhantse went stiffly to one knee before her, with Miune on one side and Shima on the other. The shaman laid his burden in her lap.

  “It’s for you to open it—Dragonlord,” Zhantse said, hesitating only slightly over the unfamiliar northern word. At his gesture, Shima laid more fuel upon the fire. The young flames stretched up like scarlet towers reaching for the heavens.

  Maurynna stared down at the lumpy, cloth-wrapped bundle; she rested one hand upon it to keep it from sliding off. It was perhaps the length of her arm, slightly wider at one end than the other, and narrow. Grass string crisscrossed the length of it. It shifted under her fingers; she heard the faint scrape of metal against metal.

  Feeling vaguely as if she commited some kind of sacrilege, Maurynna pulled her small belt dagger from its sheath and slid it beneath the bindings. They parted easily before the sharp blade. She ran her fingers over the rough brown cloth; then, taking a deep breath, she eased the cloth back from the wider end of the bundle.

  A thick, round disk of iron appeared. What? she asked herself, and answered it in the next heartbeat: a sword pommel. That it was still unrusted told her much about how dry this desert was.

  But—a sword? She was no warrior. Morlen had chosen wrong; surely Linden was the one to wield this.

  Yet the burden had been laid upon her. Pressing her lips together in determination, she wrenched the covering back, revealing the hilt with its wrappings of leather so dry it disintegrated as the coarse fabric brushed against it.

  The wrapping caught on something entwined around the quillons. Maurynna freed it and found herself staring at what seemed to be a large, incomplete ring of black metal. The ends, she saw as she teased it loose of sword and cloth, were worked. A tiny glint of red winked at her.

  Her breath caught in her chest and she couldn’t speak. She scrubbed at one of the ends with the cloth; she knew now what she held. Her eyes stung with tears.

  Gradually a silver dragon’s head revealed itself from the tarnish of centuries. One of the ruby eyes was missing, but the other shone bravely in the leaping firelight.

  The tears slid down her cheeks. From all she’d heard, the humansoul Dharm had planned to renounce his hold on life, leaving the dragonsoul Varleran to live as a truedragon. So why had Varleran carried these bits of Dharm’s life with him? Truedragons didn’t cling to possessions as humankind did. Had Dharm changed his mind? Or was the releasing of a soul for her kind not like the shutting of a door, quick and final, but instead a slow drifting away, as one might slip into dreaming?

  She traced the curve of the torc with her fingers. This had been old when Linden was born more than six hundred years ago. Compared to her paltry two decades of life it seemed as ancient as the earth.

  She held it up before her face and studied it. What stories would it tell her if it could speak? What hopes and dreams died so long ago? She could almost feel the echo of them.

  Shima stirred, laid one slender log in the fire, then another; the flames leaped higher. Neither he nor the others asked questions, demanded answers. The vast stillness of their land echoed in them. She was grateful for it.

  But she had a question. But not—her courage failed her—quite yet.

  There was a thing that must be done now, and no way to do it, save to pass through the other side of hell. She wondered if the Tah’nehsieh would accept it. Maurynna drew herself up straighter. The warmth of the fire dried her tears.

  “This was Dharm Varleran’s—” Her mind could not fi
nd the Jehangli word for “torc,” if indeed there even was one, “badge of rank.”

  “Ah. So that’s what it is. Miune and I had always wondered,” the shaman said mildly. He and the youngling dragon nodded at each other as if to say Now we know.

  Would they take her next words so calmly? “It must go back to Dragonskeep.”

  *Of course,* Miune said.

  Zhantse nodded. “I understand.”

  She must have gaped at him, for he continued, “This bundle has never been one of the holy things of my people, but a charge laid upon us. We have merely been its guardians until the proper time.”

  The proper time. No more hiding, then.

  She swallowed hard. “Zhantse—just what is it that I must do?”

  It was midnight in the Iron Temple. Hodai went to Pah-Ko’s chamber to see if this night, perhaps, the nira felt well enough to go to the ceremony.

  But Pah-Ko slept, and Hodai was unwilling to disturb him. He patted the blankets into place and slipped out of the room.

  As he entered the nira’s private balcony, a figure detached itself from the shadows. It was Haoro.

  Hodai grunted in terror. What did the priest want now? He fell back a step, his hands raised as if to fend off a blow.

  “Why so afraid, little Hodai? I come to tell you that this night, I shall keep my part of our bargain. After the midnight ceremony, come to the north tower, for tonight I give you your voice.”

  Stunned, Hodai stood transfixed as Haoro swept past him. A faint echo of a beautiful voice chimed in his ears.

  It was to be his at long last … .

  Hodai could barely wait for the ceremony to be over.

  Instead of answering immediately, Zhantse stood up and tossed a handful of what looked like rough pebbles into the fire. They sizzled and flared, hissing as they burned.

  Some sort of tree gum, Maurynna thought, like myrrh.

  As Zhantse chanted softly, thin white smoke rose and hovered above the fire. Maurynna’s nose twitched at the spicy, mysterious scent, and a chill ran down her spine as she watched the smoke collect.

  It’s as if there’s a giant, invisible hand catching it.

  Zhantse passed his hands through the smoke, gesturing first east, then west, then south, and then, last of all, north. At each motion a fragrant tendril broke off from the main column of smoke and floated horizontally in the indicated direction. Maurynna watched in astonishment and awe as one passed directly over her head. She tilted her head back to follow it, giving up only when she was in danger of falling over backward.

  She turned back to Zhantse. “Wh—what … ?”

  “To drive away any evil spirits that might bring ill luck,” the shaman said, “did they know our plans.”

  Urk. Now there was a comforting thought.

  Zhantse remained standing and stared beyond her into the darkness, his face grim. Maurynna resisted the impulse to look over her shoulder; there might be something there. The firelight lit the shaman’s face from below, turning the kindly, seamed dark face into a terrifying mask.

  Then the mask moved. “For many, many lives—almost since the beginning of the reign of the Phoenix—there have been a few brave men who have slipped into the slave camp below the Iron Temple. At the risk of their lives, they have mapped the caverns and tunnels beneath the Mountain of Nightmares, seeking the anchor of the power that kept the Phoenix imprisoned, gathering that information piece by painful piece. Many became lost and died slow deaths in the darkness under the mountain, or died under the hands of the guards before they could escape with what they knew.

  “But enough lived. Enough that we know the way to the cavern where the dragon lies.”

  He fell silent. A little voice in the back of Maurynna’s mind whimpered, Why do I get the feeling that finding Pirakos will be the easy part? She chewed her lower lip.

  A moment later she realized one hand was clenched upon the hilt of the sword. She forced her fingers open and turned her hand palm up; her palm was smeared with something that, for one heart-stopping moment, she thought was blood.

  But it was merely a trick of the firelight and the dust from the rotting leather that bound the hilt. She’d seen its like on old books in her Aunt Maleid’s library. Still, she found it disquieting and rubbed her hand clean on her breeches.

  “And once I find Pirakos?” she asked.

  “Then you use the key that you hold. For the one you seek is chained by a magic that will fall to the touch of cold iron wielded by more magic.”

  Maurynna tilted her head. “That doesn’t sound too impossible. So that means there’s a reef in these waters somewhere, doesn’t it?”

  A look of bafflement replaced the masklike expression. Shima spoke rapidly in their own tongue.

  “Ah!” Zhantse said, smiling. “We say ‘a boulder in the path.’” He drew a deep breath, serious once more. “The ‘reef,’ as you say, is that in order to free Pirakos, you must get close to him. Close enough that, once the final chain is loosed, he will be able to reach you.”

  Oh, gods, why does Zhantse sound so grim … ?

  “And that is where the danger lies. For Pirakos is mad, Maurynna Kyrissaean, mad with hate and rage and pain and bloodlust, all focused upon those who walk on two feet.”

  As she was forced to do. Damn Kyrissaean, anyway.

  Maurynna wanted to kick something in frustration, or weep in terror. Instead she just asked, “Must I go alone?”

  “No,” Zhantse said. “We could not ask that of you.”

  Thank the gods, she thought, nearly undone with relief. So Raven and I will go on to—

  The shaman said, “You’ll leave at the dark of the moon; that will give you a few more days to rest—and, since he’s memorized the route in a chant, Shima will go with you.”

  “Where were you?” Raven demanded when Maurynna finally got back to Lark’s house. He looked down at her from the opening to the upper floor. “You missed the dancing. The Llysanyins finally got to perform.”

  “Talking with Zhantse, Shima, and Miune,” she answered wearily. She shifted the bundle she carried to the crook of her other arm and started up the ladder.

  “What’s—”

  “Raven—please. I’m tired. I want to go to bed. I’ll tell you in the morning.”

  For a moment she thought he would block her way until she told him. But he retreated; she heard his feet scuffle along the dried clay of the floor. When she got to the top of the ladder, she was alone. Trying not to think of all she’d learned that night, she went to her own sleeping pallet behind a screen of plaited reeds, slipped the sword and the torc under her pillow, then undressed and got into bed.

  She pulled the blankets up to her chin and lay staring up into the darkness. Bad as this night had been, worse was yet to come. Wait until they told Raven he couldn’t go with her … . She groaned and rolled over.

  Hodai knelt on the floor, the blindfold Haoro insisted he put on before coming into the room bound tightly around his head. He clenched his hands together so hard they hurt. As unobtrusively as possible, he turned his head from side to side, trying to make sense of the faint sounds he heard.

  There were more people in the room than he and the priest, he was certain of it; but how many there might be, he had no idea. Although it frightened him to sit in darkness while all those around him walked in the light, he could understand the why of it. This was forbidden magic, he suspected, and the less he knew of who took part, the safer they were. Not everyone had a powerful uncle to protect them.

  But what was that scuffling noise, those grunts? Forgetting himself, Hodai turned his head toward the sounds. Someone cuffed him sharply on the ear. Hodai shrank away from any more blows.

  Then came words that drove all else from his mind: “We’re ready, Holy One,” a soft voice said.

  He heard the fizzling sound of incense catching, and a few moments later the sweet scent tickled his nose. Then a voice started a soft chanting; other voices joined it, and Hodai felt
a kind of pressure building in the air. It pressed on him, dug tendrils into him the way ivy dug into a stone wall. It sang inside him until his head spun, and he was afraid he would be sick.

  Dizzy now, he dimly heard a final voice join the chorus—Haoro’s, the only one he recognized. It reverberated in his head, on and on, until it seemed he’d knelt here forever.

  Then he became aware of a pressure building in his chest, rising up and up to his throat, and catching there, as if every song he’d ever heard dwelled within and now tried to escape. He held his breath in wonder and excitement.

  Yet the songs were trapped as they always were; he wanted to scream his frustration. Then came a muffled whimper and a soft thump, and then a finger traced a line across Hodai’s throat with something hot and wet.

  And then it happened. The lock on his throat was gone! Hodai opened his mouth and sang a high, clear note.

  There were murmurs of astonishment, and a hand clapped over his mouth, but gently. Haoro laughed softly and said, “Not so loud, little Oracle! Someone might hear. Now sit there, and leave the blindfold until I tell you otherwise.”

  Hodai nodded, waiting in a fever of excitement. Mysterious noises surrounded him; then he sensed that the room was empty. He raised his hands to the blindfold, but waited.

  “You may remove it now, Hodai.”

  He yanked it off. Haoro stood before him; the priest looked tired, but pleased. “Is it well, little Oracle?”

  Hodai took a deep breath. “It’s well.”

  The voice that belled forth from his lips nearly made him swoon with its beauty. He wanted to burst into song.

  Haoro must have guessed, for he said, “I think the first thing you should sing should be the Song, Hodai, to thank the Phoenix for this gift. But if you sing with the others, there will be awkward questions asked; let me first set the stage for a ‘miracle’ by the Phoenix.