by Marc Secchia
Now she would return home, and all she had to remember him by was his shirt.
What would she say to his parents? He had not died in glorious battle, as true Nikuko were meant to. No, he had been cast aside like an unwanted rag – like the useless lamko he always feared he was.
She wished she could have convinced him how much he mattered.
Chapter 20: Slaver Pen
ABLAZION FLEW WITH all the charisma of a stolid red brick. Surly. Petulant. Stuffed to overflowing with his own fires. As an adult male Red Dragon, he measured close to one hundred feet across the wingtips, and his build was as blocky as his block-headed personality, Tytiana soon decided. His thick neck and long, muscular tail never wavered from their course, while his shoulders looked built for ripping Islands asunder.
Another night in a Dragon’s paw? Yawn.
Glorious starry skies, however. Tytiana peered between the jail bars created by his talons, wondering what use it was praying to a dead Ancient Dragon like Fra’anior, when she received no answers. Just another strange facet of her magic, as if something indeterminable had passed from her to Jakani, or between them, in that fateful final second before he had plunged into the mists. Her head swam with scenarios. He landed headfirst in the biggest snowdrift the Island-World had ever seen. He became caught in the branches of a tree. The Star Dragoness herself appeared in a blaze of glory to snaffle him away half a second before he smashed into the side of Immadia Island. Five hundred dragonets wove a net which they miraculously slung between a few of those conifers she had seen, catching him with a clever team effort.
Oh, more the fool she.
The weird thing was, she spent that entire night dreaming the same dream. Over and over and over again, Tytiana dreamed she was the one falling from the heavens, only for an immense, gleaming black paw to sweep out of nowhere and catch her. Fade. Repeat.
Fra’anior? she would ask.
There was no reply. Oddly, upon waking to a dawn of translucent skies and crisp winds, she felt an inexpressible sense of peace. The grief was still present like a miasma lingering upon her thoughts, but she somehow knew that … everything would be alright. Tytiana must have spent twenty minutes or more trying to talk sense into her ridiculous thoughts. Clearly this must be some weird brain reaction to her bereavement, the chemistry all run awry.
Then, she heard a sharp whistle of wind. Graboom!
Ablazion shuddered from head to tail as a monstrous force struck them across the sky. Fire sprayed in an arc from his muzzle as the great Red vented a prolonged, stricken bellow, and then Tytiana screamed as she saw a blur of brown and a massive paw, talons outstretched, curve beneath the Red to peel a bed-sized chunk of hide right off of him, like a hunter skinning his prey with one deft stroke of the knife. The paw holding her clenched instinctively, in great pain. Before she could think, Tytiana found her fire had risen and she slowly seeped away through the gap in his talons, a gap which Jakani had made.
Huh?
Had she just become a blob of crimson fire-ooze? Delightful. Effective! She squeezed through a rat-sized gap in his clenched fist without apparent harm and thus escaped being crushed to death.
EXCORION!! A Dragon’s battle challenge thundered all around. A jagged forest of two-foot fangs clamped down upon Ablazion’s neck, just behind his prominent ruff of skull-spikes. Golden Dragon blood spurted forth as the two-foot fangs savaged the flesh, pouring over Tytiana in a blistering torrent. Her flame made the viscous gold liquid sizzle, and then she was dangling from the Red Dragon’s paw, clutching one of his talons which was thicker than her thigh, as the Dragons clashed savagely. She had no experience of Dragon combat, but it was very soon clear the surprise attack had been decisive. Ablazion wrenched himself free with a twisting motion of his body that flung her free, but Tytiana had barely flown fifteen feet when Excorion snapped her out of the air with blinding reaction speed. The impact of his paw made her see stars.
Then, as the paw shifted and the skies and Cloudlands seemed to whirl around her head before steadying again, she saw the Red fleeing with one paw cupped over his terrible injuries. Excorion belled out a great, bloodthirsty laugh, “Coward! Best of wind to make it to Gemalka!”
Ablazion looked as if he would drop at any moment.
Excorion’s paw twitched as if amused by the same thoughts that appalled her, then he brought Tytiana up past his flaming nostrils and clenched fangs until she could look him in the eye.
“Tytiana. We meet again.”
“Noble Dragon.” She made a bow in his paw, necessarily slight because his talons formed an armoured casement from her knees to her neck. “You were quick.”
He stared at her for such a long time, Tytiana did not know where to look. She kept her chin up and her demeanour calm, but inside she was alternating between burning heat and sickly chills. Being stared at by a Dragon’s fire-orbs was no comforting experience, but she realised that his gaze stirred the fire within her too – not as Jakani did, but in a different, challenging way. A rising, surging tingling filled her being that she had come to recognise as the presence of her own magic.
Excorion growled, “You truly don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“It appears that when I broke down the tower, I might inadvertently have saved you from a murderous plot.”
She inclined her head. “That much was clear as crysglass. I thank you, noble Dragon.”
“I mean, the intended murder of a daughter by her father.”
“The what?” Tytiana gaped. “What did you – where did you hear that?”
The paw gripped her painfully for a second, and then eased up. Heavily, Excorion said, “One hears many things about the High Master Juzzakarr. Many a tale of perplexing import does he spawn. One rumour is that he has penetrated the pirate cabals of Pla’arna in a way that no person or Dragon has done in hundreds of years, and influences them to his bidding. Certainly he has given the mercenaries of Merxx ample reason to mistrust his motives. He is already up at Gemalka, spinning a web both strange and fey; aye, moreover, I do scent perfidious winds caressing the Isles of late. One doesn’t know whom to trust. Tell me, what reason might your shell-father have to destroy you?”
“I …” she shook her head slowly, feeling as if she had been punched in the gut by Excorion himself. Jakani was an obvious choice. Or, her embarrassing behaviour? Worse, might he have learned who her true father was, if that was even an accurate hypothesis? “I really don’t know.”
“Magic is taboo upon Helyon.”
“My magic heals, Excorion. How is that – how does that land me up in a burning tower?”
“Is the High Master mentally unstable?”
“Possibly.” Could he be insane? Her teeth chattered as she shivered in visceral reaction. Dazed. Speaking words that struck her own ears with disbelief. “He calculates everything. I doubt it. He’s a very clever man capable of hiding many layers of subterfuge, and playing conflicting motives simultaneously. Sometimes he initiates things in the hope of learning from the reaction an unexpected strategy, for example, may elicit, but would he stoop to murder? I don’t think so.”
But her tone betrayed her doubts.
She felt ashamed just thinking about her father in this way. Cold, aye. Extremely ambitious. But a murderer? A manipulator of Dragons? Could Juzzakarr be hiding far darker purposes than she had imagined? What of that unaccountable weakness she sometimes sensed around him, as if she were a mouse helplessly shrinking from the strike of a falcon’s talons?
Flapping his wings just enough to keep hovering in place, Excorion said, “I received word you would be available that night, in that tower – not that the dire nature of your situation was in any way specified by that intelligence. But I don’t know from whom that message came, nor even whether it was draconic or Human in origin. You don’t know who else might have reason to try to kill you?”
“House politics can be brutal.”
“Ah, a backstab of the High Maste
r; a weakening of his capital?”
She explained how the first rumour had sent her to House allies at Gemalka and thus perhaps avoided that threat. The attack in the tower had been far more incisive and well-planned, she realised now. When the Dragon inquired, she told him of Jakani’s death, and again this information appeared to give him pause. He muttered something about all death being unnecessary.
Tytiana blurted out, “Dragons have a conscience? I mean –”
GRRAARRGHH!! “Be silent if you must speak the words of foolish hatchlings, nay, of lesser creatures! Humans were slaves of the Dragons and it is easy to see why when such fatuous, infantile drivel pours from your pathetic lips.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Dragons despise apologies!” The Dragon shook his fist, practically rattling her teeth around in her skull. “Now, I am a magnanimous creature. I will give you a second chance. Speak wisdom, should any exist beneath your skull, all afire with these peculiar, fiery filaments so unique amongst your kind.”
Speak wisdom? Tentatively, Tytiana said, “I did have one thought. Clearly I was set up to die; we know not by whom or why. But I wonder if the plot was not twofold – intending to point the finger of accusation at yourself? Or at certain Dragons?”
“I was meant to kill you?”
“The Herliss barbarians knew exactly where you hid us,” she said tightly, deciding to offer a version of the truth – hopefully not too much! “That was why we had to escape. We stole a Dragonship from them and sailed out into a storm, but Ablazion caught us just shy of Immadia Island and murdered Jakani without –” her voice cracked “– without mercy.”
Excorion’s growl was a terrible throbbing deep in his mighty chest. “Betrayed!”
“Aye. Both of us.”
At some considerable length, the Brown Dragon’s paw unclenched, and then he lowered her to his customary carrying position, beneath his chest. “This intelligence demands consideration,” he growled, all sullen with discontent. “We will fly by devious ways to Pla’arna Cluster and be there by evening these two days hence, avoiding your father’s presence at Gemalka. There, I will take counsel with allies among the Morazi Cabal.”
The most notorious pirate cabal of all! Her heart sank.
She had been a child before, untutored in the ways of the world. Now with grief and death all around her, and seeing the perilous yet majestic nature of the Dragonkind, Tytiana felt as if her heart was breaking and her soul quaking, yet being forged anew in the fires of a new destiny. If this was as Fra’anior wished for her, a creature of fires akin to the Dragonkind, would it not excoriate her very soul for the barrenness of the grief she knew?
As the Dragon turned now toward the southeast and Gemalka, Tytiana saw the distant red speck that was Ablazion stiffen and then plunge helplessly into the Cloudlands. Dead.
* * * *
He awoke from the strangest of fleeting dreams.
Flailing. Falling. Speared through and through. A weird vibration around his body; a person of authority speaking of cutting him apart.
Carrying. Falling again. Fire, oh, the agonising, all-consuming, sacrosanct wellspring of the soul’s verimost breath!
Darkness overwhelmed him. Spiralling into nightmares …
* * * *
He was Jakani.
Breathing.
Cocooned in metal. Coolness encased leg and arm, lay across his hips and torso, and even clamped his head in place with a painful band across his forehead. There was a thickness and a fey quality to these peculiar manacles he did not understand. All of him that could move was his fingers and toes, and his eyes. He rolled them carefully, squinting against the unbearably bright light that filtered through slats above him … no, through the thickest metal bars he had ever seen. Ten inches in diameter. He was inside a cage which put Excorion’s slaver cage to utter shame. It looked built to hold Dragons, only it was far too small – wasn’t it? A mere ten feet square by six tall.
In the centre of this cage, he had apparently been secured to a metal table of sorts with quite the most ridiculous assortment of metalwork some rabid blacksmith would have chortled over. His arms were splayed wide; beneath the foot-thick manacles he saw bandages stained with blood.
His arms?
A patch on his right flank seemed to have been bandaged too, although his eyes could not roll far enough to confirm that impression. The pain was signal enough, dampened sufficiently that he wondered if he might not have been drugged to boot. Weird. Oh. And his mouth was stuffed with a very effective-seeming gagging device, also metal, that clamped his tongue and jaw most uncomfortably.
“Awake!” someone said, military-sharp.
“Inform the Princess.”
“I’ll handle this slumberous varmint,” said another voice, which had tonal qualities Jakani thought he had never quite heard before. “Open the cage.”
“Aye, noble Flicker.”
The cage door did not creak. It whispered open upon well-oiled hinges. In a moment, Jakani heard a sound like old leather creaking, and a creature moved into his line of sight by the simple expedient of leaping up onto his chest. It was … a dragonet, he realised. A white dragonet! It was also very large, perhaps longer than he was tall, and it was giving him the benefit of a snarl full of needle-sharp fangs, plus an extra dose of a rancid meat stench riper than was generally regarded as safe by most carnivores.
“Egg stealer!” shrilled the dragonet. “Miscreant! Invader! You miserable cretin, just let me at your craven yellow guts! I’ll string them up all around my warren as a warning to all ignoble null-fires spies and traitors who dare to assault my territory while the Star Dragoness herself is away! I will not suffer this challenge to my authority! What do you have to say for yourself, you despicable, shifty little bottom-feeder?”
“Murrggh?” said Jakani.
“Moron! Scabrous pirate! Slanderous popinjay of tattered dignity! Speak like the Dragon you are, you fiendish son of Dramagon!”
“Mrr-mmm?”
The dragonet flicked open its talons and pressed them to the pulse of his neck. That gesture garnered Jakani’s instant respect. Speak, o abhorrence incarnate!
Unh … what?
It suddenly crystallised in his awareness. The dragonet was speaking to him with his mind. And he was speaking back!
Thou brutish fool, thou barbarous nest robber, thou feckless blemish upon the face of Immadia’s peerless splendour! Durst thou backchat the mighty Flicker, aged scion of these hallowed shores, favourite companion of the original Star Dragoness herself, the peerless Hualiama Dragonfriend?
There was only one part of that verbal and mental battering he could process immediately. You’re old?
The dragonet’s eyes bulged furiously. Venerable! I am venerable, you scurrilous excuse for a scuttling scorpiolute! What do they teach spineless fledglings these days? Disrespect for elders? I will have your respect, boy, or I will personally shave your louse-ridden little –
Flicker, stand down, said a soft but authoritative female voice.
Phew. Jakani didn’t want to hear the end of that statement. He was so confused!
In a moment, the owner of the new, musical voice hove into view, and he realised by the dainty coronet she wore in her hair that this well-dressed girl must be a Princess of Immadia. She was rather younger than he had imagined. Pink of eye. Baby pink! Diminutive yet regal of bearing, she reminded him in some curious degree of Tytiana herself – who must think he was dead! His heart lolloped unhappily inside his chest.
How exactly was he still alive?
The strange girl had the same high cheekbones but a heart-shaped face and, if he were not being unforgivably unfaithful to the Choice of House Cyraxana, more than the average degree of physical beauty despite her ashen complexion and perfectly white hair. Was she an albino? He had never seen such a person before. The ballads styled them as evil or accursed in much the same way as his lamko heritage marked him; yet she was none of those things. Pretty indeed, and arr
esting of presence.
She said, Thief and invader, declare your name and station.
Uh … you speak – holy Fra’anior! What is this?
Dragonish, snarled the girl. Don’t pretend you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, you mendacious reprobate!
He was speaking the language of Dragons?
Somebody slap him awake from this ridiculous nightmare!
Told you this two-faced fleabag was trouble! Flicker interrupted heatedly. Where did you steal my precious egg from, you obnoxious, pustulent boil plaguing Humanity’s nether regions?
Your egg? The white one? Jakani groaned at the pain in his arms as he tried to shift position.
No, the egg-shaped one! Dunce!
Noble Flicker, said the girl. I was put in charge. I will interrogate the boy.
This was surreal. Here he was having a full-blown conversation without the need or actual ability to move his mouth. Moreover, the dragonet’s words created unfamiliar impressions and emotions in his mind, as if the Dragonish language itself conveyed far more information than he was used to, on a bewildering variety of levels.
Fine, play at being grown up, sulked the dragonet. I’m only your senior by eight centuries! But remember, my fangs and talons are right here, boy!
Name! snapped the girl.
Jakani. Jakani of Helyon, Your … um, Highness … of Immadia, I’d guess? Why am I trapped here?
What do you remember of your landing? asked the girl.
Not much. Where am I?
Inside my nice dungeon, exactly where you belong. Stepping forward with a smile so sweet Jakani was convinced she planned to exterminate him forthwith, the Princess placed a forefinger upon each of his temples, left and right, just below the huge metal clamp. I am the Princess Shalanya of Immadia, Albino Shapeshifter. Jakani, I command you to … REMEMBER!!