He broke off as Saori tickled the underside of Elki’s throat with her dagger. “Prince of Fra’anior.”
“Aye?” Elki squeaked.
“What did that repulsive cultural gesture signify?”
Hualiama expected her brother to start babbling like a laughing dove surprised by a hunting cliff-fox. Instead, he fixed his grey eyes on the Eastern Islander. The corners of his mouth curved upward in a slow, quirky grin that even his sister had to admit, was not unhandsome. Though Elki said not a word, Saori seemed ensnared. The Eastern Isles warrior’s hand began to tremble. Her entire arm shook. A blush began at her collarbones, raced over the pulse suddenly fluttering in her neck, and exploded into her face.
Softly, the Prince said, “
That’s
what it signifies.”
“Oh,” Saori whispered.
Grandion had once electrified her with such a gaze. Lia’s own heartbeat escalated, thudding so loudly she was certain everyone knew the tenor of her thoughts. This was how the Tourmaline Dragon had melted her fears and her resolve, how taboos came to be trampled upon and the ways of two hearts–three in his case, of course–might dare to fly to treacherous, forbidden Isles. Fighting for calm, Hualiama moved to the starboard crysglass windows. Reason and prudence. Two words her heart clearly refused to listen to. She must crush her soul’s song. These feelings would only interfere with her mission to find the Scroll of Binding and return it, together with Grandion, to the Dragon Elders at Gi’ishior.
Her nape prickled. Magic. Concealed magic.
Suddenly rigid, only her eyes moved as Hualiama scanned the storm-dark afternoon sky. One of those strange, low-down Cloudlands storms had rolled in while they were fighting at Merx. Now, the storm front seemed to reach from the heavens above to the Cloudlands below, a massive rampart sweeping in from the northwest, consuming the Islands like a rolling avalanche. The weather had been too hot. Qilong’s orders had them racing for Tarxix, a small, usually unmarked Island lying forty leagues east and a few compass-points south of Merx. There, they must take shelter, for to be caught by those clouds spelled certain death.
But something else lurked out there. Something as deadly as the storm.
She called, “Brother, will you come here a moment?”
“If the warrior-maiden has finished shaving my beard,” he said, by his cheerful tone clearly oblivious to the premonition curdling her innards. “What is it, short shrift?”
Lia had never been more grateful for his strong hands on her shoulders. “I sense something out there. Hold me if I fall.”
Without waiting for any sign of assent, she pushed her senses out into the space around their Dragonship, already ten leagues out of Merx and five miles above the Cloudlands as they made their top speed. What had triggered her alarm? She saw nothing. She sensed …
Ah. I feel your presence, little one.
Elki’s grasp saved Lia from an inelegant collapse. That voice! She knew that voice!
Before she could cage it, a mental wail slipped free,
Razzior!
Aye, Razzior.
The slow, crackling whisper filled her mind.
I failed to burn you once, clever little Princess. I shall not fail again.
Lia curled against Elki. No. No, no … not him, the brutal Orange Dragon, scarred like Ra’aba … even by his mental touch she knew he possessed the power of
ruzal
, for it ignited a dark flickering within her own being, an involuntary reaction to his dominant, hateful cry.
Brethren, we are discovered.
“Lia. Lia!” Elki shook her by her shoulders. “What is it?”
“Razzior.”
“Razzior?” he echoed. “Oh, roaring rajals, no …”
“Not rajals.” Hualiama pointed aft, off the port side, where Razzior the Orange and his Dragonwing had materialised from thin air. Less than a mile separated them. “Roaring Dragons.”
“Suffering volcanic hells, that’s at least two dozen Dragons,” Elki swore. He abruptly shook her again, harder than before. “Snap out of it. Short shrift, you swallowed the power of an Ancient Dragon. What’re you going to do? Make a plan. Hide us? Shoot us across the Island-World like a comet? Escape? Knock those flying reptiles out of the sky?”
Heat detonated in her belly. Aye. There was one chance, and Elki had just voiced it. “Elki. How secure is that solo Dragonship up top?”
He glanced guiltily at Qilong. “I loosened the moorings …”
“Great!” Lia clouted her brother on the shoulder.
“Ouch, darn it, for a guppy you’ve a punch like an angry Dragon.”
Saori said, “What’re you two planning?”
The Dragons swooped in with terrifying speed, making at least thirty leagues per hour. They would be overhauled in moments. Hualiama rattled, “No time to explain. Razzior’s the Orange at the head of that Dragonwing. He tried to kill me before. I’m pretty sure he and my father are trying to overthrow Sapphurion and the Dragon Elders, with the heartening aim of restoring draconic rule and Human slavery to the Island-World.”
“Your father?”
“Saori, not now.”
“I’m coming with you,” said Elki.
“No. You need to save this Dragonship and everyone on it. The only person aspiring to commit suicide is me. I need to get up top. Now.”
Qilong said, “What’re you going to do?”
“Stuff your ears, alright? Block them in layers of cloth, you and all the crew. Get three men on the wheel. Secure everything you can within two minutes, and damp the engine fires. It’ll be a rough ride–I hope.” Lia stood on her tiptoes to press her lips to her brother’s cheek. “Fly strong and true, brother. Love you.”
“You too,” he gulped.
And then she was out of his arms and through the doorway, darting to the nearest hawser that would take her up to the sack. Razzior powered toward the Dragonship with strong, sure wingbeats. He had nothing to fear. Two dozen Dragons against one Dragonship? Easier than swatting a mosquito. But the Orange Dragon did not know what he was dealing with–hopefully. Lia only prayed she could summon the power she had summoned before, without destroying the Dragonship she stood upon. Would it buy enough time to escape? The black storm-front already rolled beneath the Dragonship, she saw, perhaps three miles beneath their position. From afar, the dark, massed vapours appeared deceptively calm.
Lia climbed rapidly, yet when she turned, Razzior was only two hundred feet abaft the Dragonship.
His fangs gleamed against the backdrop of darkness.
Ah, so good to see you again, Princess. No escape this time. No hiding places out here, between the Islands.
What do you want of me, Razzior?
She had to brace her stance against the wind’s buffeting. Hualiama’s long platinum strands whipped about her face as she tried for a confident glare, for the same audacity she had unexpectedly discovered when speaking to the Dragon Elders. This time she enjoyed no terrace lake brimming with courage. Razzior was right. Either her ploy would work, or the Island-World would be rid of one pesky royal ward and an airship full of Humans.
The Dragons slowed and spread out, confident of having cornered their quarry. Yulgaz the Brown was present. All told, fifteen Reds, five Greens, two Browns, a Blue Dragon and Razzior the Orange lined up off the Dragonship’s stern. When it came, the firestorm they could produce would rival that Cloudlands storm churning beneath them.
Razzior grated,
War multiplies across the Islands. My power grows. Soon, I will uncover the precious Scroll of Binding the Tourmaline failed so miserably to track down. With that knowledge, I shall compel all Dragons to join our new age of draconic dominion and justice.
She said,
I will not allow it, Razzior.
Great Islands, and now he cracked that smile that reminded her so keenly of Ra’aba, it seemed to Lia that it was her father’s lips forming the discomfiting, disdainful curve of Razzior’s muzzle.
You won’t allow it?
the Orange guffawed, and most of his Dragons with him.
You and what Dragon army? I see one pathetic little Human ensnared by my trap on Merx, and an everlasting drop into the Cloudlands. My fire-stomach holds a special fireball which shall wipe one bothersome Human, and the threat of the prophecy, off the face of the Island-World. FOREVER.
As he thundered ‘forever’, flame roared around his fangs and nostrils. There was so much power and heat in him, the entirety of Razzior’s body smoked. Lia did not wish to find out what that power portended.
Where was the magic? Would it not come? Yet even as she fretted, a faint tingling began in the mastoid bones of her ears. Without warning, an excruciating pain blossomed in her chest, a pain of fire uncontainable, a summoning of magic from across the vast leagues of the Island-World, gushing into a frail Human vessel.
Razzior’s eyes bulged as he evidently sensed the massive force of magic concentrated in her breast.
What is this?
He bugled,
Burn her! Burn the Human, my brothers!
An inrush of air developed across the divide between the Dragons and the Dragonship, as the massed Dragonwing drew breath to stoke their Dragon fires.
Lia fell to her knees upon the soft, resilient air sack. Spreading her arms, she opened her soul to the knowledge of magic. Staggering. Breath-stealing. White tendrils of flame seared her vision. Below, many leagues away in the Cloudlands, she saw the smoky outline of a great Onyx Dragon. Amaryllion? Could it be that he lived?
She meant to cry, ‘Begone!’ But as the massed fires of twenty-four Dragons roared out of their long throats, their hatred spoken in tongues of flame, a different word emerged from her breast to resound across the deeps. It rocked the Islands upon their foundations.
BEZALDIOR!
* * * *
Grandion’s head snapped about so sharply that his neck-vertebrae popped with a series of sharp reports. His years-long blindness had caused his other senses to become extraordinarily sensitive. But he needed no great sensitivity to detect this perturbation. Stronger than the first two, it shivered every one of his scales.
She had become powerful. He whispered,
Hualiama.
Her name was a breath of cool air in his foetid underground cage. Her presence soothed the futile rage that had augmented in his chest since waking to the realities of his incarceration, and caused a clearer, whiter flame to flicker within his flame-soul.
Her. The inexplicable song of his fire. The source of hope long forgotten. She burned ever closer. The Dragon found that by holding an image of Lia in his mind, he could begin to keep the cage’s insidious, magic-denying power at bay. Deny the denier. The smoke of grim amusement belched from his nostrils. Ordinarily, a Dragon would take pleasure in the sight of his own fire or smoke. Grandion had to settle for sensing the prickle of particles upon his sensitive muzzle-scales, and listening for the unique properties of smoke-laden air swishing past his ear-canals.
What quality of a soft-skinned, hatchling-helpless little Human could so capture a Dragon’s regard? He had long pondered this question. The only conclusion he had reached with adamantine certainty, was that her power stretched beyond the power of an oath to bind his third heart, and that she caused the great arteries of his throat to throb with life. Her. A slip of a girl. Why did the rippling of her hair bewitch his eye? Why did her laughter resonate with his belly-fires? How did the softness of her perfect hide, the wondrous, multifaceted hints of her scent, cause a Dragon’s talons to wish to curl about her with delicate yet unbreakable custody, and make her his own?
No Dragoness had ever moved him as Hualiama did.
How his shell-father had raged. Sapphurion had betrayed his son, and condemned him to a quest every Dragon knew was an invitation to a guttering of his flames upon a faraway, forgotten Isle. How easily the Tourmaline Dragon had allowed himself to be brought low.
Now, his fires dampened almost to darkness. He was blind. Helpless. Weaker than a new-born, yolk-slick hatchling. Who was dependent now? Bound for years in a cage of unbreakable Dragon bone, what use was he to any beast under the twin suns? Hualiama would not have him. She must not. Grandion felt as though he had swallowed a bilious boulder of shame into his food-stomach, the second-most important stomach for Dragons after their fire-stomach. No, his fate was desolation.
Yet, she drew nearer, and he knew it was for him that she came.
A Dragon should know no fear.
S
Tunned, RAZZIOR and
his Dragon-kin tumbled toward the Cloudlands. But Hualiama had no chance to celebrate. The power of her cry slewed Qilong’s Dragonship violently, a twisting motion that knocked her solo Dragonship loose from its sabotaged moorings. Lia had half a second’s warning as the basket and balloon tumbled end-over-end toward her. She collected a bruising blow upon the back of her skull before toppling helplessly off the stern, past the rear turbines.
This time, there would be no Grandion to catch her.
Her brilliant plan had been to stand on the curve of the Dragonship’s sack, knowing that ripping her throat out to perform the magic would blast her backwards. That part had worked perfectly. Being struck by her own Dragonship–less perfect. She was fortunate not to have broken her neck.
Wriggling into a facedown, arms and legs outspread position, Hualiama looked about for the Dragons. Her eyes watered at the wind’s force. Razzior’s group had to be a quarter mile away, falling with flaccid wings and lolling necks. She had knocked an entire Dragonwing that far across the sky? Mercy. But her own Dragonship was falling faster than her. The stove had been cold for the better part of a week. There must still be some hydrogen left in the inner sack, but much would have leached away.
Tucking in her arms and legs, Hualiama tipped her feet up and her head down. The acceleration was immediate. Unholy windroc droppings! Lia whizzed down to the sack, stretching with every sinew in her body to snag one of the lashings on the port-side mast. Never had she been so grateful for rope-burn on her fingers. Pulse pounding, terror and adrenaline continued to fizz in her veins as she swarmed along the ropes and into the basket. Hualiama checked rapidly for damage. Half of the wood was missing, but the stove appeared to be intact–mostly.
Great. So she would just light up in the few seconds left before the storm engulfed her.
Think, girl! Throwing herself at the controls, Lia deployed the side-sails at the vertical, and then by degrees, adjusted them to brake the Dragonship and bring it into a gliding configuration. Of course, a twenty-four foot balloon had all the aerial prowess of a large, stubborn rock, but its sheer bulk provided useful wind resistance. The turbines! Pedal! Lia started her legs moving while her hands fumbled with the stove door. The wind kept slapping it shut. She jammed her splinted little finger, howled a string of nonsensical but nasty words, and stuffed handfuls of wood chippings inside.
She stole a glance over her shoulder. This time her throat corked up with a mixture of anger and trepidation. Razzior’s Dragonwing had evidently begun to recover, but not soon enough. Battalions of clouds rolled over the Dragons. Hopefully they would end up at the bottom of the Cloudlands. The royal ward knew she had problems of her own. Abandoning the pedalling, she shoved both of her hands into the stove and clacked the spark-stones together fervently. Come on! Catch on something, sparks! Casting about, she snatched up a strip of dry bark and bundled that inside.
Click. Click.
Yes!
The wind snatched her long hair past her face, almost into the stove’s hungry belly. Lia clipped the stove door shut, trusting that the small curls of flame would take swiftly to the kindling. What supplies did she have? Almost none. She pushed two water gourds beneath her pilot’s chair and found a stray prekki-fruit that still looked edible. She shoved it down the front of her tunic.
One moment she was in the clear, and the next, damp darkness enshrouded the Dragonship. Streamers of cloud whipped by on the wind, which caught the balloon and tossed it in a new direction–more southerly, toward the fabled volcanic ramparts of Franxx–said to be the tallest mountain in the Island-World–at least a week’s sailing under ordinary conditions. But these were far from ideal conditions. Dank, cloying gases rose with the storm blast. The rigging thrummed tunefully. Quickly, she eased the sails to reduce the strain. Lia tightened the additional, double-stitched sails aloft to allow the vessel to run freely with the wind. Now she could see just how flaccid the balloon was, for the blast dented it severely. The frame she had designed began to buckle under the stress.
“Come on, you beauty!” she yelled. “Fly the storm!”
Lightning split the darkness. She had never imagined flying like this–after all, who was foolish enough to fly a dirigible in a storm? Only one desperate enough. One pursued by Dragons. Just then, Razzior’s words struck her. Ensnared on Merx? Did that mean he had arranged the entire battle with the Men of Merx, and the trapped hatchling … with the intent of flushing her out? The storm was not cold, but Hualiama shivered so violently she almost tossed a chunk of jalkwood overboard. Razzior knew what she could do, for she had revealed her greatest power. Lia could not imagine how the Orange Dragon might use that knowledge against her, but the ice in her bones told her, he would. Aye, most surely.
As the dirigible bobbed away like a cork tossed by black, foaming waters, she could only pray her brother and Qilong’s Dragonship crew would be safe. Had she done enough? She felt responsible for her younger brother. She should’ve turned around and kicked him out at Fra’anior.
Lia whispered, “Those who play with Dragons …”
* * * *
Night or dawn, it made no difference. All she knew of the Island-World was the darkness of shrieking winds and flurries of stinging hail which drummed against the balloon as though she fled from great catapults loaded with cold metal pellets. Perhaps she was higher–that was the reason for the cold. The sack had filled, eventually. The Dragonship flew on a more even keel, canted at thirty degrees from the vertical due to the fickle wind’s buffeting. Lia eked out her pitiful and now soaked supply of wood, and nibbled cautiously at the prekki-fruit. She dared not sleep. Already, the overstressed rigging had snapped twice on the starboard ‘wing’, forcing her to clamber out to affix new triple-strong lines or face being spun about helplessly, a leaf caught in an eddy.
Lia measured days by the growing knot of hunger in her belly. She sucked on wood chips, but that only made her belly shout louder. She could only guess where in the Island-World she might end up. When, one night, she realised the fingers of her left hand had frozen together, she had to sit on the hand to unthaw it. Tears of agony rolled down to her chin, and froze there like a ridiculous goatee. When she found a sack containing a handful of maggot- and weevil-ridden grain tucked beneath her dwindling woodpile, Lia performed a silly dance right there in her basket.
She burst into a rowdy ballad she had learned from Qilong’s men:
A handful of mouldy bread, my Island love,
A crazy dragonet and a cooing dove,
Is all we need for the flowering of …
Lo-ooo-ooovve! Aye, lo-ooo-ooovve!
Maggots, weevils and all, she munched every last grain. She needed the nourishment.
Days passed. Hualiama sank into a delirium of occasional activity, rousing herself to throw another jalkwood chunk into the stove, forcing her numb fingers to check the lines one more time. She searched the basket at least fifty times for any further scrap of food, but found none. Once, the clouds rolled apart to reveal unbelievably tall, jagged mountain peaks so close at hand she felt she could reach out and touch them–the very next second, rock ripped through the bottom of the dirigible basket and took with it the stove, the pilot’s chair, most of the control lines, and very nearly her left leg as she leaped aside. Only the safety line she had rigged kept her safe.
Lia stared through the hole at the mountain peak below. Franxx, perhaps? Then the storm closed in and tossed her across the Island-World once more.
She tried to fix the sails, but the last of her spare rigging lines had been lost. The Princess found herself holding imaginary conversations with Amaryllion, remembering how he had told her about a time in his youth. ‘The Cloudlands were not always present,’ his dry, vast voice resounded in her memory. ‘I remember gazing down from the peaks to the floor of the world, occasionally revealed through the mists, to see Land Dragons sporting there.’
Did she remember rightly? Then how had toxic gases come to fill the oceans between the Islands?
Lia knew the Dragonship was losing altitude. She lashed herself to a hawser, too weak to imitate a monkey in the rigging any longer. She slept, or slipped into unconsciousness for periods of time. Days later, a dark, rain-lashed Island heaved itself out of the Cloudlands directly ahead of her. It moved with majestic slowness, a moss-slick carapace with luminous bands she estimated at a mile long, slowly rolling beneath her Dragonship, until near the far end of the creature a pair of caves vented a phenomenal blast of moist, warm air that tossed the Dragonship way, way up into the breaking storm. A Land Dragon? She must be dreaming. Was it dawn? Or suns-set? Her sense of direction had been lost to the storm.
“Ho, Island-biter …” she moaned. “Aren’t you a legend?”
Beyond the creature lay another Island. A real Island. Galvanised, Lia tugged on the ropes to attempt to steer the Dragonship, but she missed that Island and swept over to a smaller, mountainous Isle. She had to land. Using her Nuyallith blade, Hualiama slashed the balloon open. Warm air hissed against her face. Suddenly, shouts came to her ears. The Dragonship scooted over a group of hunters, on a collision course with a small tent-camp hidden at the base of a group of towering trees.
She could not have aimed better had she spent months practising the manoeuvre. With a series of splintering crashes, the Dragonship tore a path right through the middle of the tent camp, piling up at least six tents on its nose before slamming to an abrupt halt against one of the trees.
Lia groaned, and heard other groans amidst the wreckage. She was alive. Grateful tears squeezed between her eyelashes.
Voices approached, speaking Eastern Dialect. Angry voices, querying which fool had thrown a Dragonship from the sky and were all the children safe? That much she understood. Hands found her snarled up in the rigging.
“By the Rim!” someone gasped, releasing her arm. “A foreigner.”
“A warrior,” said another voice, one accustomed to command. “Look at these weapons.”
“This is a Haozi hunting bow,” said another.
“Ancestors protect us, have you seen this hair? Such a wealth of shame!”
“You spit words like a cobra, Iyumi,” said the commanding voice, switching to Island Standard. “This is a Western custom. She is not one of us. Observe these ears. The girl hails from Fra’anior Cluster, or I miss my mark.”
Superstitious muttering filled Lia’s hearing. Someone said, “Rajal ears?”
Hualiama dragged her eyes open. Hard warrior-faces, all women’s faces streaming with rain, surrounded her. Fingers worked at her lashings, trying to bring her down from where she hung alongside the balloon. But she had eyes only for one person.
Reaching out, Lia gasped, “Saori? How …”
The woman flinched. Then she seized Lia’s hair in her fists and screamed, “What do you know of my Saori? Where is she?” She shook Lia until she felt like a cliff hyrax trapped in a rajal’s jaws.
“Go easy on the mite, Naoko.” An older, iron-haired woman pushed between them. “Even the spirits speak, given time.”
The woman called Naoko relented, but not for long. She began to bark orders, all the while shooting dagger-glares at Hualiama. They lowered the Fra’aniorian Islander now. A huge woman stooped over her, scooped her up with the ease of a Dragon, and took her to a warm place.
* * * *
Much later, as the unfamiliar birdsong of the Island’s eventide cheered the encampment, Lia awoke with a Dragon’s hunger snapping in her belly. For the first time in what seemed like weeks, she felt warm and comfortable. Rising from a pallet covered by an unusual, soft blanket, Lia padded around the tent’s neat central fireplace to peek out of the flap.
A solid arm halted her. “Lie down.”
Hualiama decided that there was little point arguing with a giant–for a giant this woman was, two heads taller than her, and wider than three of Lia stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Her eyes must have betrayed awe, for the woman laughed, not unkindly.
“I’m Miki of the Ippon people, the giants of the East,” she said. “Lie down, girl. You’re as sore used as a tired drumskin. I’ll bring you food and those eager to examine the innards of your brain.”
“Ah–thanks.”
Mercy. What manner of people were these who numbered giants among their kind, and whose trees dwarfed the nearby low hills? Lia peered around a little shyly at the encampment, taking in men caring for and playing with happy children or cooking over open fires, before Miki’s meaningful glance sent her scurrying back to her pallet. Was she their prisoner? Although someone had removed her weapons belt and the shoulder-harness for her swords, her weapons lay in a neat pile at the head of her pallet. One Nuyallith blade was missing–the red one. A terrible loss.
Lia had barely shuffled closer to the fire, drawing the blanket over her too-thin shoulders, when the tent-flap jerked open and Naoko ducked inside, followed by the gruff older woman and a handful of other warriors. They arranged themselves around the fire, kneeling, but there was nothing subservient in their manner. Eastern clothes. Cord-bound leggings, unfamiliar cloth for the clothes, shorn hair …
“Well?” Naoko demanded.
The older warrior threw her a quelling scowl. “I’m Akemi, Saori’s grandmother. Please, speak of her fate–is our Saori alive, or does she live among the spirits? Honour us with your tale, girl. What is your purpose here?”