by Marc Secchia
When it was clear that he had finished speaking, the Marshal said, “Do you now receive my judgement, o Asturbar of the Azingloriax?”
“I receive judgement.”
What other choice was there?
“Therefore upon your given word, it is with regret that I, Marshal Chanbar of the House Chanbar, do decree that from this day forth, the man known as Asturbar is no longer welcome in this House or within its walls. He is banished by ward and word, by blood and bane. He is nameless, homeless and bereft of all inheritance. Furthermore, he is to be chained as a criminal and taken five days’ journey into the Doldrums, where he will be abandoned to a living death, denied the opportunity to perish in honourable battle or to take his own life. This is my sworn judgement.”
Bantukor’s breath hissed slightly behind him. Ah, now the regrets, former friend?
The garden was but a fleeting dream, his soul’s paradise. Unseeing, Asturbar bowed his head. “The Marshal has spoken.”
“Aye. Commander Bantukor, take this wanderer away.”
* * * *
A squad of ten Heavies marched Asturbar back across that wide field to the Dragonship landing pad, located on the southernmost peninsula of the large Island that the Mistral Fires called home. Large meant a mile wide by a just over three miles long, but like many Islands of this archipelago, it was not thick through its vertical dimension. Beneath and around the fringes of the Island, a dense, seething layer of helium-producing hentioragions, a type of subintelligent Dragonkind, made their living and kept the Island afloat, three to three and a half miles above the Cloudlands depending upon the season, the winds and an effect called tidal gravitation, referring to the mysterious courses of linked Islands and archipelagos. Some flotillas of Islands coursed thousands of leagues in stately circuit, returning to their original location in a matter of decades, whilst others followed shorter, more regular migratory patterns. Asturbar had heard of Islands which were whimsical, apparently baseless wanderers.
These soldiers were not survivors of his unit, save Bantukor. Was his first call of duty to ship Asturbar to the beyond?
No. Merely to see him aboard, and chained to a stanchion beside the navigation cabin.
Departing, the soldier’s right hand moved in a gesture they had used as boys, a hooked forefinger. The link of friendship. Asturbar stewed in bitter silence. He was jealous. Infuriated. Humiliated, too, for the abrupt end to his service rankled deeply. What else would he do out there? All he knew was soldiering.
He would survive.
The long, lean double balloon Dragonship rocked beneath him as the crew cast off. Heavy hawsers slapped down upon bare rock, to be coiled immediately by the ground crews and stowed for the next ship’s landing. The landing field was crammed with bulky transport Dragonships, Dragons and even transporter Dragons, called Bulks. Beasts unique to Wyldaroon, of reduced intelligence and great physical strength, boasting six long, leafy wings of rigid structure and six squat legs that made them resemble vastly overblown dragonflies, they could fly a day and a half on their wing carrying their own bodyweight in cargo strapped about their long torsos. Their diet was vegetarian in the main, but they would scavenge anything if left to their own devices. Bulks were low in maintenance, sturdy and long-lived. They would fight in a pinch but could be easily discarded.
Like grizzled infantry Commanders?
Well, he was young, but sometimes Asturbar felt terribly jaded. Too much death. Too much death-dealing! If his hand held no battle-axe, what could it learn?
The meriatite furnace engines of the long-range Dragonship roared, pouring hot air and volatile hydrogen into the sacks. The highly explosive hydrogen had enormous lifting power, but helium was close – he knew that experiments were underway to tap hentioragions for their helium, but so far, the animals had the exasperating tendency to perish when removed from their native substrate. That argued a magical link between those flatulent Dragonkind and their native Islands, which was a subject hotly debated between groups of scholars who tended to engage in sporadic bouts of fisticuffs or assassination when reason failed to impress parties of diverging views of the rightness of one position or another. This airship was designed as two long, compartmentalised balloons affixed side-by-side, like long tan caterpillars bulging at their segments. Ancillary lifting balloons were also affixed to the sides of the cabins on the underside and even around the turbine clusters, but being an exploratory vessel with extended flying range, the cargo areas were minimal, as was the crew capacity. Even the metal stanchion to which he was affixed would yield to his strength, he suspected.
The vessel purred aloft into the last rays of a magnificent suns-set. A thousand Isles speckled the vast panorama of a golden horizon, flaming crimson where it touched the Cloudlands, gathering a luminous treasury of rich yellows and golds before fading into the depthless purples of the gathering night. Thick fingers of golden light irradiated the flying Islands from behind, making them twinkle like glowing beads threaded upon the silken netting of yethiragions, the vinelike Island-binders that gripped and leashed Islands with extraordinary tenacity, holding them firm through even the mightiest tempests. Slowly, they turned southward, angling adjacent to the distant, snow-capped tips of the Majjikor Mountain range. This little-used route led directly into the geographical anomaly known as the Doldrums, a barren region devoid of tide or time, a vast Cloudlands desert of roughly seventeen thousand square leagues, broken by just a few widely scattered Island oases. The Mistral Fires’ home archipelago was located a mere hundred leagues beyond this becalmed region. One hundred and eighty leagues West lay the monumental Majjikor barrier with its sharply-tilted peaks, heavily serrated as though a blast from behind had sprayed the mountains into their current orientation, for all the world like the skull spikes of a majestic Ancient Dragon rooted somewhere far below the noxious, lapping Cloudlands.
Asturbar made a superstitious sign behind his back, then grimaced. Just a theory about the mountains’ formation.
Sweeping his eyes to the East, he gazed out over the hazy immensity of Wyldaroon, to some a fabled realm but familiar to him, and thought upon his long-lost homeland of Azingloriax somewhere out there beyond the Straits of Hordazar, the narrow entryway that separated Wyldaroon from Herimor proper. Herimor was settled by many great Houses of Humans and Shapeshifters and generally regarded as civilised – his upper lip curled – whereas Wyldaroon was a barbaric backwater, gathering Herimor’s detritus like swill slowly pooling in the lowest possible location. News travelled slowly. They would occasionally hear of wars or the fall of this House or that Line, and listen to strange tales of Dragon Riders or the mighty Inscrutables, said to be Island-Dragons that walked upon the very floor of the world.
So much magic. A whole Island-World awaited the explorer out there.
How could he endure the bitter solitude of exile?
Chapter 4: Oasis
FOR five DAYS and six nights, the Dragonship coursed into the unending barrenness, making a steady five leagues per hour mostly under manual propulsion, except when the crew needed to rest. Then the engines fired and the characteristic cheery bubbling of the hydrogen stills began, coupled with the phut-phut-phut of the gas and slag exhausts. At this speed, he knew from long experience they would traverse one hundred and thirty leagues per day, but such distances only scratched the surface of Herimor’s magnitude.
Denied the opportunity to release his hands – ‘my apologies, but orders be orders, sah’ – Asturbar had to endure the indignity of being fed the one meal he took per day, of having help to use the ‘heads’ or the open seat at the rear of the vessel where soldiers watered or decorated the Cloudlands, and of walking endless circuits of the gantry that surrounded the cabins. Eventually, the crew allowed him to take a turn upon the mechanism wryly called ‘the beast’ or various other euphemisms, some crude and some hilarious, that drove the turbines in manual mode. Marshal Chanbar had always begrudged ‘unnecessary’ expenses, the better to stuff his personal tr
easury with the profits.
Now a Dragon had his paw upon the purse strings. Asturbar grinned – grimly. Trivial consolations.
“You want to fly faster into exile, soldier?”
“Yes, sah,” he agreed.
The Steersman nodded. “Then get to work.”
Usually it took a team of four men to pedal the beast, for despite a complex gearing system, the turbines had to chop through air so still, it evinced the consistency of insubstantial glue, and the smooth leather drive belts generated their share of friction. The crew scoffed when Asturbar replaced an entire shift by himself, but they scoffed less when he only stopped pedalling seven hours later.
The sprawling range of serrulated peaks edged taller on the western and south-western horizon.
Late that third day, beneath a cauldron of white-hot skies reflecting off the dazzling cloudscapes of endless, unbroken Cloudlands, Asturbar spotted an oasis away to the south, but they passed by during the night and forged on into the emptiness. How did one even map an area with no reference points? The crew squabbled over squandol, a popular strategy game played on a wooden board, gambled, quaffed eye-popping quantities of illegal shammabok rum, and smoked their long samko pipes in the lee of the cabin, pretending the Steersman was not watching. By the fourth day, he lashed the helm to course and joined his men. They offered Asturbar a pipe.
He grunted, “No narcotics, thanks.”
The crew laughed and ragged him boisterously, making crude jokes that ranged from his physical size to blushingly pointed instruction regarding his purported haplessness in the bedchamber. Smarting, Asturbar made the mistake of pointing out that ordinary women feared he might crush them. Ouch. The teasing that followed singed his ears.
“I’d take onkazu herb,” he offered, once he could slip in a cunning dagger-thrust of a word.
“Women’s weed?” snorted one of the men.
“Good for his metals,” said the Steersman, causing the crew members to exchange surprised glances. “The Azingloriax require specific metal oxides and trace minerals in their diet to support those heavy bones and ligaments. We should have a packet or two in the medical satchel.”
Impressive knowledge.
The sweet metallo-organic herb was tangy with its load of goodness, sending up a curl of ochre and turquoise smoke as it crisped in the deep, three-inch bowl of the long pipe the Steersman held for him. The herb had many medicinal uses, but Asturbar had never considered it one of his key dietary needs. How would he find food out here? Would there be water, greenery, winds to pollinate … for the heat was a suffocating monster in its own right, and the atmosphere so utterly still he imagined he spoke underwater. No echoes. It was as if they forged through the unending, incandescent heart of a silent forge. White Cloudlands below. White-suns skies above, an everlasting blue of achingly pale, delicate ferocity. How could life even cross this void? How could it take root, or hunt and breed and flourish?
The crew talked idly of family and home, and the Dragon’s impossible feat of magic. How he had breached the wards without breaching them. The gruesome sight of bones coming alive. Asturbar wondered privately if the Necromancer had first spread his power into his private boneyard, perhaps employing some innate property of Human bones to mask his draconic magic and thus evade the ostensibly inviolable wards. One of the men related the legend of the Yellow-White Marshal called Thoralian, who was rumoured to take new bodies and forms when it suited him, devouring the host’s spirit with his powerful draconic spirit.
The crew laughed sceptically, but one added, “I heard one of his guises was a Marshal called Re’akka, who flew an entire Island over the Rift together with a mighty Dragon army!”
“Huh. Suicide mission,” said another.
“He replicated his essence into other Dragons,” suggested a soldier, making a vulgar gesture with his fingers. “I’m in the mood for some replicating myself. Far too long, this journey. And –”
“You got a woman! None of that talk around the House, Garlu!”
“Out here, anything goes,” Garlu growled defensively.
“Those Dragons are crazy ambitious,” a younger soldier put in. “It’s said Re’akka wrote his legend by pursuing the greatest power of the age, the First Egg of the Ancient Dragons.”
“Shortest bout of immortality I’ve ever heard of,” quipped Garlu, returning to the fray. His comrades roared with laughter.
The Steersman hawked and spat blue spittle over the railing. “It’s magic itself that’s crazy. We could do without all these powers floating our very Islands! Only the Star Dragoness herself was pure – and is it not prophesied, that she shall rise again like the dawn, cleansing every iota of corruption from our unworthy beings? Be ready for that day, my friends. Prepare your souls! It shall be glorious, the advent of the indescribable, purifying fires of righteousness!”
Asturbar puffed at the pipe. The sacred religions of Herimor drew most of their inspiration from the Star Dragoness, whose fire gift had ignited all of Herimor some six or seven centuries before. Hualiama had been the most titanic of Marshals, the shining example for every Shapeshifter Dragon since, for she had selected from the uniform, colour-identical ranks of the Dragonkind those Dragons destined for the greatness of the Shapeshifter life, who could co-exist in both Dragon and Human forms, but more importantly, commanded the higher Dragon powers that allowed them to dominate their fellow creatures. Hence the Iolite Blue. His Blue colouration set him apart from the Grey-Green masses. Those Dragons were his minions, his expendables. From those early Shapeshifters rose the great Lines that amassed power to themselves, and from the leftover magic or ‘echoes’ – in the draconic view – those Humans who now wielded mighty magical powers of their own.
In one breathtaking raid upon the course of history, Hualiama the Star Dragoness had transformed the face of Herimor.
Some felt Her Worshipful Incandescence had much to answer for.
At the hour before dawn, on the sixth day out of port, the Dragonship hove to beside an oasis, brilliantly lit by a four-Moon conjunction of immensely full Yellow dominating the Western horizon, pinpoint White to the fore, crescent Jade above and a waxing Blue Moon to the North-eastern aspect. No night was ever fully dark. Despite the Moons’ lustre, the stars made thick, ropey bands across the darker portions of the skies, fading into a misty, milky background toward the edges of the Moons. Just a few tens of feet ahead, the first of an archipelago of Islands seemed to hover improbably in the void, lacking wings or any other obvious means of elevation or propulsion. Silently the floating landmasses waited, as if dreading the tread of a soldier’s boot. Peering ahead in the semidarkness, Asturbar clearly made out thickets of vegetation deeper within the Island lattice, and the trickle of running water teased his hearing. It was a veritable jungle thicket further in. Barren? Not at all. So many Islands! Perhaps two hundred or more in this flying formation, he could not rightly tell, for in places the hentioragions trussed them together compactly, whilst at the fringes the outliers were more widely spaced.
This was the place of his exile, then. The soldier in him made calculations. Terrain mapping. Possibilities. Priorities.
The man in him felt a tear trickle down his cheek.
Asturbar dashed the treacherous droplet angrily against the muscular hillock of his left shoulder. What? Again? He never cried – well, not since his boyhood, and then the instructors had beaten it out of him with military haste and meticulousness. How clearly he recalled the Drillmaster roaring in his ear, ‘Behaviour unbecoming to your uniform, boy! Never again!’
He still bore scars from the ensuing punishment.
The Steersman expertly brought the Dragonship in to a rare touchdown landing upon one of the upper Islands of the three-dimensional maze. Stepping across to the roughly circular Island of some one hundred feet in diameter, Asturbar reasoned that this was possible only because the Doldrums were so extraordinarily still. Did it ever rain here? Did the wind blow? Might clouds pass overhead, or would
the heat be unrelieved?
Turning, he said, “Manacles?”
For the first time on their journey, the Steersman looked desperately uncomfortable. Clearing his throat, he croaked, “We are commanded to beat you with staves, sah. Until you are bruised and bloody.”
He could only stare. Then, with a slight shake of his head, Asturbar knelt heavily, his knees sinking slightly into an inch-thick layer of bluish dust. “Carry out your orders, soldier.”
“My apologies, sah.”
“Accepted.” But when the men crept forward hesitantly, each looking to another for the lead, Asturbar suddenly found himself shouting, “Islands’ sakes, you cowards, be quick about it! I’ll make no defence.”
The first wuthering blow seemed to take forever to arrive. It struck his left triceps with a dull thud. Azingloriax skin was tougher than most and as resistant to punishment as a light suit of armour, but as best Asturbar knew, his nerves were as sensitive as any man’s. Another stave thumped into the meat of his right flank. The pain bit like a feral Dragon. Then there were blows raining down on his back, his shoulders, a cracking strike across his right eye. That would swell.
He knelt, and endured the beating for as long as they had heart to persist. Soon enough, soldier boots scraped away on the surprisingly large, crystalline flakes of dust and the silence and heat returned with redoubled force. Blood trickled into his right eye. Asturbar felt hands touching his wrists. A key scraped within the lock, and then with a sharp click, the double-banded steel manacles released. He eased his cramped shoulders with the first groan which had passed his lips.
The Steersman paused at his side. In a low whisper, he said, “A friend said that in a moment’s carelessness, a bag might be lost overboard of a departing Dragonship.”
Bantukor. Breath hissed between his already chapped lips.
Gruffly, he returned, “That man is a fine friend.”