Right, Dragon,
she said, in a voice like a whetted blade.
You will teach me everything you know about Juyhallith, the way of the mind.
In the next hour?
He wafted sulphurous smoke in her direction, a draconic way of amplifying negation.
Our time is short–do you not sense it?
Grandion gasped,
Hualiama! How, by the Spirits of the Ancient Dragons …
Her clothing rustled as, he imagined, she shrugged her shoulders.
The scent of the Island-World tingles upon the breezes. The balance changes. And a girl can stand tall with a Dragon beside her, Grandion.
She thought he grasped something of her essence, and then she made statements like this? Grandion ruffled his wing-membranes in consternation. Oh, to feel such a breeze buoying him up! The very thought aroused the melody of Dragonsong in his hearts.
He whispered,
And her Dragon can stand aside while his Rider revolutionises said Island-World …
Never aside, sweet Dragon. Never second-rate.
* * * *
Hualiama knew the precise moment she released the
ruzal
.
Grappling with that dark kernel of power was an exquisitely painful sensation she could only liken to trying to force food down a throat clawed repeatedly by a dozen dragonets’ needle-sharp talons. It was not natural. The magic needed to be torn free, gasping and bloodied, a ghastly birth of something within her that should never have seen the light of the twin suns.
Gaaaaarrgggh!
Lia wailed.
The magic of their Dragon-bone cage recoiled, before surging back to seal the tiny breach she had wrought.
Behind her, the Dragon’s agitated pacing increased exponentially. He had given up trying to comfort her as she forced herself to forge a channel to release the
ruzal
. Concern radiated out of the great beast, along with a heat in the cavern that only seemed to increase the harder Lia worked. A cold sweat shone on her skin as though she strained to vomit, but could not. When the
ruzal
licked out for the first time and Hualiama groaned, the Dragon’s massive paws shook the ground behind her.
“Stand back,” she called, holding out a hand. “I don’t know what might happen.”
“I felt that!” growled the Tourmaline.
“I know.”
The Dragon could still his entire being, it seemed–belly fires, breathing, even his hearts-beat if needed–for an instant, to listen. He rasped, “When we breach it, they’ll come.” She did not need to express her question; somehow, he knew. “I sense fresh movement in Shinzen’s hideout. Unusual sounds.”
“Dragons?”
“Nothing I could rend with my claw.” Sweltering air boiled over her shoulders. Despite the heat, Hualiama shivered. The Dragon said, “We need to work together. When you rupture the magic, I’ll try to tear into the wall with my claws and pull a few of those Dragon bones free.”
“I want you out of the way.” Hands on hips, Lia addressed Grandion with asperity. “I can’t guarantee your safety.”
“Yesterday, you said, ‘Never aside, never second-best.’ ”
“That’s not a word-for-word quote.”
Grandion showed her a hundred-fang smile. “Call me sweet again, I dare you.”
Fending his muzzle away with a straight-armed push, Lia turned back to the wall. Taking a deep breath and squaring her shoulders, she summoned up tentacles of dark magic, envisioning as Grandion had suggested, a shadowy pond which contained the
ruzal
–both as a focal point for her concentration, and as a means of limiting its spread into her mind. Lia’s imagination drew oily, black appendages out of the water, waving with animate purpose, which she determinedly shaped and extended toward the cage wall. Pain blossomed between her temples. Sweat pearled afresh on her brow. Hualiama’s back and shoulders creaked under the strain as she compelled the
ruzal
to bend to her will.
Her loathing of the process only served to strengthen the
ruzal
. Where had it come from? This knowledge seemed embedded in her psyche–had Ianthine implanted her terrible, corrosive magic within a Human baby? Sick, perverted Dragoness! Focussing on the cage, Hualiama scraped together every ounce of disgust, animosity and despair she had ever tried to blot out of her existence. As much as she loved the light, these things were part of her nature, too. She pictured Zalcion’s vile attack. She remembered Razzior’s invitation to run, because the pursuit and slaughter of a helpless Human excited him. She gagged at the foetid scents of Ianthine’s lair.
The power swelled grotesquely. She was too good at this. Oh no. Oh …
I HATE YOU!
She meant the cavern, and Shinzen’s heartless capture of her Dragonlove. No Dragon deserved to die in captivity. Her hands spread involuntarily.
For your sake, Grandion.
The tentacles juddered as they impacted the Dragon-bone wall, making Hualiama’s body jerk about in a surreal parody of dance. They pulled at her in the region of her belly, plumbing her power, sucking her dry.
Ruzal
poured like fine dust into the gaps between the bones, leaching beneath the binding metal hawsers. The
ruzal
warped and undermined the beautiful edifices of Dragon magic.
Tears streaked Lia’s cheeks.
Grandion shoved past her, thrusting his talons into the wall. Dully, she heard him roar, heard the crack of bone separating from metal and rock, as the Tourmaline Dragon exerted his exceptional strength to tear a section loose. A thirty-foot segment of the cage framework sagged away, aged bones trapped in metallic netting.
“Again!” growled the Dragon.
“To your right paw,” she ordered.
“Nothing but rock?”
“Aye.”
The Dragon hooked his claws into the mesh and heaved, but nothing happened. Hualiama heard faint shouts in the distance. Grandion called, “Again. Wreck it.”
She was enervated. The strain of struggling non-stop for over thirty hours to trigger the magic had taken its toll, and Lia had little left to give. With a wrenching cry, Lia managed to weaken another ten feet of wall. Grandion ripped it away. She had to skip backward or face being crushed beneath the heavy Dragon bones.
“Again!” thundered the Dragon.
“Grandion … I can’t.” Hands on knees, she gasped for breath. The headache had bloomed to blinding proportions.
“What do you mean, can’t? There’s no such word!”
“I’ve nothing left. No strength. No–”
The Tourmaline’s poisonous expression corked the words in her throat. He growled, “Then find the strength.” When she hesitated, he exploded, “Don’t you understand what it means for a Dragon to be caged for three years? Three summers of no suns upon my back. Three summers–”
A despairing scream echoed mockingly in her ears as Lia failed to elicit so much as a ripple from her dark pond. She glanced at Grandion from beneath her lowered lashes, and winced.
The Dragon blazed, “That was the most miserable excuse for magic I’ve ever seen, you flameless lump of windroc excrement.”
Hualiama stared, before realising that the force of her glare was rather lost on a blind Dragon. “Grandion, insults fire up Dragons, not Humans.”
In a low, penetrating snarl, he continued, “You pathetic, two-legged dancing worm! Miserable cretin! I should have stamped out your woeful little existence the first time.”
“It’s not working. Shut your muzzle before you say something you’ll regret.”
Grandion’s voice deepened. “Your father never loved you. He loathed you with such brutal–”
She screamed, “Grandion!”
“Do you hear Ra’aba sniggering, Hualiama?” His hateful hiss spoke directly to her
ruzal
, causing it to quiver with unbearable relish. “From the moment you were conceived, he hated you, and he has never stopped hating you. He thinks you’re so pathetic, so loathsome, you’re like a cockroach he’d rather crush beneath his heel–”
The Hualiama of old might have curled up like a leaf tossed on a bonfire at his words. This Lia exploded like a hydrogen balloon sparked by a misfiring Dragonship engine. Fire surged, uncontrollable. The dark pool in her mind detonated, spewing power upward and outward, a great rippling of the fabric of reality grounded in the power of an Ancient Dragon, still alive and vital within her being. Lia saw minutely, the motes of dust springing free as the walls of their cage imploded, the instantaneous severing of metal hawsers thicker in diameter than her wrist, the tourmaline wings of a Dragon snapping shut overhead as Grandion’s Dragon-swift reflexes protected her from a rockfall–bones and rubble, she realised belatedly, the pulverised remains of their cage.
The Tourmaline Dragon heaved upward, scattering boulders and debris, plucking Lia free with his paws. She heard,
Swish-thud!
Bent over, hacking and coughing dust out of her lungs, Hualiama did not at first register what had happened.
Grandion roared in pain. He whirled, smacking Lia into the air with his tail. She absorbed the worst of the impact with her knee and a jarring blow to her forearm, rising to witness Grandion shouldering his way out of what had to have been the main doorway for the cage, a fifty-by-thirty foot hole leading to a tunnel. His spine-spikes were entangled in the Dragon-bone mesh–what was left of it. Her mouth fished for flies. Great Islands, what had she done? It appeared as if she had macerated the stone surrounding the chamber, collapsing it inward. That was not enough to reveal open sky, as she had seen through the ventilation hole at the top of their cage. A hundred feet of solid rock separated them from freedom.
Now there was a new aeration feature.
Grandion’s roar had an edge of pain, of panic. His tail lashed about, peppering her with stones the size of her head. This was hardly the moment to be stuck behind a feral Dragon!
Only one way out. Pouncing on Grandion’s half-buried upper rear thigh, Lia sprang as high as she could up his back. She caught a spine-spike. Steady! The Tourmaline thrashed about in a welter of fury. She felt heat rolling over her back, sucking her lungs dry. Oh, he had found his fire. Calderas full of fire. His roaring battered her ears and shook Shinzen’s lair at a stunning pitch, a madness rooted in the scent of freedom.
Swish!
Hualiama yelped as a crossbow bolt nearly parted her hairline. Six feet long and barbed to ensure a good hold in the flesh of a Dragon or Dragonship, one of those would make short work of any royal ward. She slipped on his damp-slick scales, but the rolling of Grandion’s muscles pitched her upright again. Lia’s line of sight topped his shoulder. Great Islands! Four crossbow teams faced them down the tunnel. The men raced to reload their weapons.
“Stone skin!” she yelled.
Grandion shot a fireball at them, so super-heated his flame spurted out white rather than yellow. It exploded against the first catapult on the tunnel’s left side, destroying it and the four engineers working the mechanism. Hualiama felt the impact beneath her as a quarrel slapped into his hide, a dull, wet sound as the shaft feathered in the enormous bulk of the Dragon’s left shoulder. Jerking about like a trout snaffled in a net, the Tourmaline Dragon hosed the tunnel with fire. What he lacked in accuracy, he made up for with blind fury. Catapults burned. Engineers ran for their lives.
She had no horror to spare for the carnage.
Grandion! LISTEN TO ME!
The Dragon stiffened beneath her. Suddenly, telepathic Dragon-speech was possible.
Save your fires. We’ll need them.
What do you see, Rider?
Tunnel. Leads deeper into Shinzen’s lair, straight ahead. You’ve cleared the immediate danger. Hurt?
Not badly.
No, he only had a couple of quarrels buried in his obstinate hide. Apparently not enough to stop an angry Dragon. Lia eyed the hawsers above her, stretched across his back.
Wriggle backward, Grandion.
What? We need to escape.
Shut your flaming gob-hole and listen to me! You’re dragging half a cave-load of Dragon bones after you.
I’ll snap these threads like–
Go stuff your overweening pride in a Cloudlands volcano!
Grandion only chuckled,
Told you those insults would work. You’ve Island-shaking power, Lia.
Aye, and his words were quarrels buried in her mind. She would never forget them. Her father had hated her since … forever. She snapped,
Back. Now.
Her voice shook in reaction. That much
ruzal
blasting through her being? She must not become a channel for hatred.
As the Dragon retreated, Hualiama advanced up his back. It took all of her strength to shift even one of the braided metal hawsers, until she realised she could direct Grandion to use his paws. Then it was easy–as long as long as a ninety-foot, freedom-crazed Dragon followed her directions. Not so straightforward. Lia realised that it was up to her to find a way out of Shinzen’s lair. She had to become Grandion’s eyes. Keeping them alive would require a miracle.
Then, she heard another Dragon’s booming battle-challenge.