Aranya (Shapeshifter Dragons) (42 page)

Ri’arion threw her a mock salute. “Go burn some Syla
kian beards, Dragon and Rider.”

“I’m to smack him over the head and take him to my lair?”

Zip whacked Aranya on the flank. “Go.”

“Just learning my lessons,” Aranya teased, brightening. It was just fear, wasn’t it?
Fear of the hundred and eighty-plus Dragonships beating over the Island toward the city, and a further forty still lurking up there in the mountains. Where was Sapphire? What was the dragonet doing? She clambered up onto the battlement, balancing on the edge. “They’re encircling the city, south and east, as my Dad said. Drawing our forces out there.”

“Ooh, Aranya, I wish you wouldn’t
teeter on the edge of nothing. It gives me the
oooooaaah!
”

They whizzed down from the castle before levelling out and powering southward, angling for Yolathion’s command Dragonship.

“You’re a Dragon. Learn to live with it.”

Zip tested the Pygmy bow and checked her oil pot and spark-stone. “Oh, let me give you as much sympathy
,” she growled. “Aranya, that line you gave me, ‘I’m all done with Sylakians, but a tall, dark and handsome Jeradian could still light my belly-fires’–that’s just plain silly.”

“I
said nothing of the sort!”

“Then stop dancing away from him and just say yes
. What do you have to lose? Or shall I thrash you till you’re dizzy either in Dragon or Human form, your choice?”

Aranya winged on,
hurrying over Immadia city. Whoops and cheers followed them. She had never been very popular as a Princess, she thought, too wrapped up in her own troubles and bitterness over her father’s remarriage. But a Dragon was popular. Maybe they thought she’d save them all.

She whispered,
“It’s only my heart.” Quickly, to cover her vulnerability, she added, “Zip, I can’t get over that I made you a Dragon.”

“Aranya
, if you apologise one more time I
am
going to thrash your scaly Dragon butt all over these mountains.”

Well, that sounded more like the Princess of Remoy she knew. Still, Aranya
pressed, “Zip, are you … alright?”

“Petal, that’s the difference between us. You like to wrestle with fate until it screams and bends to you
r will. I accept it.” She shrugged. “I guess we just have different natures, Aranya. You believe. I don’t believe until … well, I turn into a Dragon.”

Aranya did not know
how to respond to this.

Her friend smiled gently.
“I’m not running away again. Absconding once for the skies is enough, wouldn’t you say? There, that’s Yolathion on the starboard gantry. Do I make it two of the Dragonships with the above-sack catapults?”

“I see him.
Hmm–three of the big ones, Zip.”

“I know I imitated a dancing, moon-mad ralti sheep this morning, my friend,” said Zip, drawing a chuckle from her mount, “but I’m better now. You went a
little crazy before your transformation too, acting as unpredictably as a volcano about to erupt. I will be a Rider today. Learning to be a Dragon can wait.”

Aranya drew in close to the Dragonship–as close as her wingspan allowed.
Several of the burly Jeradian soldiers paled at the sight of a Dragon so near.

She called over to Yolathion, “We’ll start
to the southwest, Yolathion. We count three Dragonships with catapults and nets.”

Yolathion put his fist over his heart. “A Jeradian salute for thee, fair comrades
,” he called. “Watch for the signals back at the castle. Garthion will not wait long after the battle is joined. Go burn the heavens, Dragon and Rider.”

“You take care,” Aranya ca
lled back. “And, my answer is yes.”

Dragon and Rider shot skyward, taking advantage of the puffy cumulous clouds drifting over Immadia Island to mask their ascent, but Aranya did not miss the delighted smile that curved Yolathion’s lips before he
focussed more grimly on the business of war.

“That’ll motivate him,” Zip said, drolly. “So, let’s take a
quick hop over that cloud. How’s about actually landing on one of those catapult Dragonships? You disable the catapults while I shoot a couple of nearby targets?”

“Zip, you’re still mad, aren’t you?”

“Shut your trap and do the flying, you brainless lump of Dragon-flesh.”

“Just don’t shoot the Dragons
hip underneath us, Rider.”

“Don’t
sneeze fire on it either, Dragon.”

Aranya rose into the clouds. She ghosted southward, keeping her ears tuned to the beat of meriatite furnace engines. Through a gap in the clouds they spied on the
western end of the Sylakian Dragonship fleet, gathered like a cheerful flock of sheep around the comforting bulk of a large, catapult-toting Dragonship. Clearly, a Dragon’s arrival was not expected.

At her signal, Zuziana lit their oil canister. “Ready, Aranya.”

Dragon-Aranya folded her wings. Her stomach lurched toward her throat. Fire churned in her belly, locked up behind the special muscular valves she had read about. Small fireballs, she thought. Or … “Meriatite,” she said. “They’re bunched up.”

Zuziana flicked a couple of lumps
into her mouth. Chomping away, Aranya broke free of the enveloping cloud. Her tail flicked to adjust her steep descent. She aimed directly for the largest Dragonship, braking at the last instant.

Dragon-Aranya growled, “Welcome to Immadia, boys
.”

Warriors yelled as the Dragon smashed into the wooden gantry, sending chunks of wood flying in all directions. A burning arrow whizzed off to her left.

“Unarmoured,” said Zip. “What’re they–”
WHOOOMP!
“–thinking?”

Aranya thumped one of the catapults with her tail, splintering the tensioning mechanism. “Don’t know.” She snapped at a would-be archer lining up a shot at Zip. “Quick.
Another.”

Zuziana’s following shot set
off a chain reaction amidst the closely bunched Dragonships. Three, four explosions; a wave of heat rolled over them. Fearing that the large Dragonship would also ignite, Aranya ran over the side and dived downward, spiralling between the closely-packed Dragonships. She knew this would take them briefly into the line of fire for the catapults and war crossbows, which were usually located beneath the hydrogen sacks alongside the cabin. But it would also protect them as the Dragonships would not fire at each other.

Zip missed her next
target, but a sudden fireball mushrooming above them announced her follow-up success. Aranya raced through the plume of smoke, darting around a Dragonship as she climbed toward the safety of the higher altitudes. She spat a stream of fire between her teeth, bathing the large Dragonship as she passed by.

“Too close
,” yelled Zip.

Aranya
peeled away at the same instant. Fire thundered behind them as the large Dragonship exploded. Multiple smaller detonations gave them a very bumpy ride. Aranya crashed into a cabin before recovering. Multiple quarrels hissed through the air toward her, but Aranya surged upward, throwing the Sylakians off their aim. Black smoke boiled behind them.

The
once-confident group of Sylakian Dragonships drifted apart in the wind, gutted.

They punched up into the clouds. Aranya knew a thousand pairs of eyes would be looking for a Dragon behind every puff of cloud, now.

“Check the castle,” ordered Zip.

“Where’s Sapphire?”

“Investigating that magic in the mountains. She isn’t back yet?”

“No–
and nothing at the castle, Zip.” She called in her mind,
Sapphire? Where are you?

“Then it’s the next
of those large Dragonships, Aranya. No chances. They’ve been alerted, now.”

Aranya flapped hard, crossing a half-league in a matter of moments.
“The ground assault has started,” she informed Zip. “Several thousand warriors. They’re torching the villages.”

Zuziana told
her to focus on the job at hand, probably well aware of the fires underlying Aranya’s words. After chewing more meriatite, she tilted her wings and sped out of cover several thousand feet shy of the Sylakian advance. A withering hail of quarrels and catapult-shot rose to greet them, winking deceptively in the sunlight, all deadly beauty. Aranya leaped skyward, then immediately flicked her wings to correct their course again as the shots passed fifty feet beneath them.

Zuziana raised the Pygmy bow. “Steady, girl.
That thing’s armoured like a castle.”

“Let’s teach them where the chinks are.”

The Princess of Remoy grunted something unladylike as her first shot stuck in the Dragonship’s armour but did not penetrate. Aranya blew flame over the upper gantry, setting two of the four catapults alight, and burning a few Sylakian beards in the doing. She snaked through the air as more crossbow quarrels converged on their position. Zip shot twice more before they passed over the huge Dragonship. She scowled as Aranya glanced over her shoulder.

“Dratted armour.
Warm up your fireballs, Aranya.”

Aranya ducked between two
Dragonships and rolled through the narrow gap, furling her wings almost completely to make the cut-through. Seeing the side of a Dragonship right ahead, she curled on a sudden whim and made a side-on landing. Her lips puffed.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
Three white-hot fireballs bombarded the Dragonship fleet.

Zip’s bowstring twanged.
Sss!
The smoking arrow hissed downward and sideways. Another Dragonship imploded, raining burning debris on the troops not far below. Her Rider already had another burning arrow nocked and ready. As the arrow sprang from the bowstring, so the Dragon sprang from the side of the Dragonship, rending it with her claws.

Through an opening between
the Dragonships, Aranya saw that the Sylakian fleet was beginning to spread out. Engines coughed and roared. They were going to swarm the city, she realised. She and her Rider had probably succeeded only in accelerating the invasion.

They screamed upward, taking three shots at the largest Dragonship before leaping free of the throng like a fish flipping out of water ahead of a predator. Aranya briefly checked for movement over the mountains before pivoting on her wingtip. This time Zuziana took the shot perfectly. The largest Dragonship
erupted in a sheet of flame, igniting the two ships nearest it. The air suddenly filled with quarrels and shot and she was jinking and dropping and firing fireballs with that characteristic
Pfft!
They worked along the frontline, taking down Dragonship after Dragonship in deadly concert before Aranya, in the thick of explosions all around them, suddenly had to knock half a spinning cabin aside with her neck to protect her Rider. She took a quarrel in her upper back at the same time. Zip screamed at her to climb.

“Damage check?” said Aranya. She scanned her
wings. “A few superfluous holes.”

“
What about that tree-trunk sticking out of your back?”

“Oddly, I don’t think it hit anything serious.
Hurts. No sign of Garthion–oh, there’s Sapphire. Isn’t that … yes.”

“The city gate’s under heavy attack,” said Zip. “A
couple of dozen Dragonships, a battering ram, I think … at least fifty ships nearing the city … Yolathion’s group wading into the mess …”

Beran’s
long-range war-crossbows spat a spread of four quarrels, unanswered; three Dragonships exploded, but Yolathion was about to come under serious pressure, Aranya saw. The Sylakians were too many. She and Zip had only dented the line. Dragonships from both camps were already in a serious tangle east of the city, exchanging volleys of thick catapult shot and spinning slowly to the ground or vanishing with a flash of light followed by palls of smoke. Beran’s forces had to yield ground steadily, outnumbered four or five to one.

Sapphire, what are you doing?

A blue streak whizzed joyfully toward them. Sapphire was so full of herself that it took Aranya and Zip a long while to get any sense out of her.

“I think she’s talking about friends,” said Zip.

Windroc bad. Rajal good,
Aranya said firmly. “Something about the windroc symbol, Zip.”

Zip waved meriatite at Aranya. “Eat.”
She turned to Sapphire.
Go. Help us.

Zuziana had talked Dragonish
. But Aranya only had time to blink before Sapphire hurtled back toward the mountains. “I don’t get it,” she said, judging the battle. “This way, Zip.”

“Something about scaring the bad man, that’s all I understood,” said the Princess of Remoy. “I’ve a feeling we’re about to see Garthion emerge.”

D
ragon and Rider
dived into the thick of the battle. Sweeping eastward, they relieved King Beran’s Dragonships, gaining them space to retreat and regroup, before dashing over to lend Yolathion a helping paw, or arrow, or anything else he needed. The battle began to blur for the Dragon. All the high-speed manoeuvring required a huge output of energy; every time she looked up it was to see another Dragonship looming before them, or crossbow quarrels spitting toward them, friend and foe alike.

“Another
. Another,” Zip kept panting. She tossed her first empty quiver overboard and dug into her second with a vengeance.

The monk Ri’arion was down in the city, tearing into the squads of Sylakian soldiers who had managed to disembark from a few Dragonships to try to attack the gates from within. His long sword flashed as he spearheaded
a troop of Immadian soldiers into the heaviest fighting. Fire seared from his hands. He wielded his massive sword like an axe, chopping through armour where subtlety failed. Aranya dropped a fireball into a knot of several dozen Sylakians waiting for him and received a raised-fist salute in response. From without the city gates, the low, guttural chanting of the battering-ram team rose even above the roar of battle. A deep, hollow booming sounded as the gates quivered at every blow. Above, three dozen Sylakian Dragonships pounded the defenders on the wall. More motored up on the breeze, fighting tooth and nail with Yolathion’s reduced force and pressing them back moment by moment. Aranya saw the catapults and war crossbows within the city were in action now.

“The gate
,” panted the Rider. “If that goes …”

Aranya snarled, “Got it.”

At once the Dragon hurled herself toward the melee above the city gates. Yolathion’s forces were under attack from fore and rear. Aranya corkscrewed, dodging a spray of quarrels, before hosing a knot of vessels in front of her with all the fire she had in her belly. She shielded Zip with her body, but still, the furnace-blast sucked the air out of her lungs and made her Rider gasp and cough. Zuziana wiped her eyes.

“
And I just started to grow eyebrows again.”

“Sorry …”

“Beware left.”

Aranya dropped like a shot, but still snagged ropes on her tail. “Nets
.”

“Burn them off, Dragon
.”

Her head snaked past her Rider. Burn her own tail?
Whatever next? She described a narrow arc in the air as the moored ropes forced her flight-path toward a gaggle of three Sylakian Dragonships. Arrows pattered off her belly and port flank. A quarrel slammed into her right front knee. Aranya groaned at the pain, but still released a burst of fire that freed her from the netting.

“Up and under,” ordered Zip.

Yolathion and his crew were snarled together with four Sylakian Dragonships, drawn together with boarding hooks and ropes. Aranya saw the massive Jeradian smashing Sylakian soldiers off a gantry with his war hammer.

“Don’t hit that bunch
,” she ordered Zip.

Zuziana drew two arrows and held them ready in her fist. “Get me an under-armour shot at the big Dragonship. It’s thinner below, Aranya.”

“Two shots?”

“Shut the fangs and fly.”

Aranya dodged into a storm of arrows and catapult fire. She returned fireballs of her own, destroying two Dragonships below them as they passed by and homed in on the biggest. She angled her flight path carefully, adjusting her wings, dodging a spinning, flailing Sylakian warrior as he tumbled from above. Her Rider gasped as something struck her. Zuziana’s teeth ground together audibly, but she still took the shot; two arrows, darting like vengeful wasps beneath the overhanging armour of the large Dragonship.

KAARAABOOM!

Aranya hissed, “Excellent.” She coiled herself mid-air and sprang away from the wreckage as it spun lazily toward them, a rapidly-swelling cloud of superheated smoke and flaming debris, raining down on the soldiers on the ground, bringing momentary confusion to the attackers at the city gates.

Aranya swivelled her neck. “Oh d
ear … here comes Garthion.”

“Yolathion! He’s in trouble
.”

Dragon-Aranya flipped herself around in the air and swung her head to avoid a crossbow quarrel that scored her cheekbone. “Where?”

“There.” Zip flung out her arm.

“Zip, you’re hit
.”

“Only a flesh wound,” said the Princess.

There was an arrow stuck deep into the muscle halfway up her thigh. That was no flesh wound. Blood seeped down to her ankle. But the Remoyan only gritted her teeth and gestured at Aranya to continue. Aranya dodged debris as she oriented on Yolathion’s decimated command. They had destroyed many Dragonships, but were less than half in number than when they had begun that morning. One of the Dragonships attached to Yolathion’s tangle was burning freely. Already, Sylakians and Jeradians alike had thrown out hawsers and were swarming down to the ground, fighting each other even as they shimmied down the ropes, fleeing the impending explosion. Yolathion was seeing to his men before himself–the brave fool.

“No
,” cried Aranya, seeing Yolathion in her mind’s eye engulfed in exploding hydrogen.

She swooped toward the interlocked Dragonships.

Claws extended, Aranya slammed four-pawed into the Dragonship’s cabin and hung on with her claws. “Ride?” she growled.

Yolathion
gaped at her.

“Ride! Now!”

He slapped those of his men he could reach. “Go, go. On the Dragon. Grab the tail, anything.”

Rapidly, a dozen Jeradians mounted up in an orderly scramble. The cabin began to buckle under the
ir combined weight.

“Take them,
” shouted Yolathion.

“Not without you
,” Zuziana screamed back.

“There’s no room
.”

With a shriek of overstressed metal, Aranya tore loose and fell. She gasped as she flapped hard under the weight of her load. Yolathion and two warriors
were left … what could she do? The Dragonships lurched down toward her. It would blow any moment.

“
Jump onto my wing!”

Yolathion and his men jumped. One of their boots snapped a wing strut. Aranya wobbled horribly in the air, throwing off one of the men, but Yolathion managed to hang onto her wing bone with one hand and help his comrade with the other. Dragon-Aranya spiralled downward, grabbing for the stri
cken Jeradian with her forepaws, but she missed.

Zuziana was shouting at Yolathion to climb closer to her body so that Aranya could balance her load better. It was all she could do not to fall out of the sky like a rock. Aranya battled
with all her strength, plucking the man out of the sky by the scruff of his neck. Her Rider screamed at her entire load to lean to the left. Suddenly, she was level in the air. Flapping mightily, Aranya brought them to a jarring landing right outside the city. Her injured knee buckled and she ate dirt as she landed.

Detonations
battered their eardrums and shook the earth beneath their feet. A tangle of cabins and struts crashed down ten feet from her left wingtip, but Yolathion and his men were safe–only to face up to two thousand Sylakian warriors, she saw. They were right alongside the city gates. The Jeradians were not exactly smiling and waving at their Sylakian counterparts.

“Go!” roared Yolathion, leaping off her wing. “Jeradians to me! Protect the Dragon!”

On the ground, she was a sitting target, Aranya realised. Quarrels tore the earth around them. Already the Sylakians, smelling opportunity, peeled off a number of Hammers–hundreds of armoured warriors–to attack her and her brave screen of Jeradians. Among them were Crimson Hammers, her hated enemies. Garthion’s best.

She glanced up to the mountains. Only two dozen Dragonships, she estimated rapidly, including Garthion’s enormous
four-hundred-foot flagship flying the windroc of Sylakia from a dozen flags. Where were the rest? What were they missing? But she had no time to think. Magic built rapidly in her chest, an unaccustomed pressure that she remembered as her Storm power, but this time suffused with energies she had no name for. Power spilled into her throat. She felt weak and drained.

“Aranya?” asked Zip. “Meriatite?”

“No. Close ears …”

Rising on her hind legs, the Dragon craned her neck over the Jeradians and opened her mouth. Her belly muscles rippled
powerfully. But it was not sound that erupted from her throat. It was a blue fireball, burning fiercely and brilliantly, so brightly that not even a Dragon could look upon it. The fireball arced languidly over the Sylakian troops as they ran forward to engage the Jeradians and the Dragon.

Yo
lathion’s eyes rose, too. “Down,” he bellowed, and dropped on his face. Most of his warriors did the same.

Aranya raised her
left wing instinctively, shielding her Rider’s face from the quiet flare of light. That was the strange thing. It was as though a sun had landed on the field of battle, expanding soundlessly at first. An intense flare, suns-bright, lit up every vein and artery in her upraised wing. She smelled ozone, the smell that accompanies a close lightning strike, before a thunderclap followed the agonising dazzle. Aranya staggered. The men on the ground cried out. When she looked again, there was a hole in the Sylakian forces. The city wall sagged in a section two hundred feet long, its molten stones slowly slipping toward the ground. The battering ram was gone. A dozen Dragonships above it had also vanished.

All that remained was ashes drifting to the ground.

Yolathion scrambled to his feet. The armour over his shoulder was slashed open. He grinned at Aranya. “We’ll have to find some other Sylakians to fight, I guess! Thanks for the rescue.”

Dragon-Aranya grinned wanly at him. She felt sick.

“Jeradians, to me!”

More Jeradians trotted over a small rise behind them. In moments, Yolathion had several dozen warriors under his command, a tall, grim lot all told, save for
a youth who threw a quick grin at Aranya and Zuziana.

“Back to the city.
Let’s dent some Sylakian helmets.”

“He’s such a man,” said Zip. “
But he’s no monk. Aranya, are you alright?”

“That wasn’t a good idea.” She tested her wings,
before springing into the air with a laboured thrashing. “Too much power, Zip. I feel sick. I don’t think I could cough up a single fireball after that.”

“Come on, petal.” Her Rider patted her neck. “Do I need to insult you to get those fires burning again?”

“I’d rather just gnaw on Garthion’s head.”

“What’s happening
to the north? Mind, another Dragonship.”

Aranya gazed over Immadia city, beleaguered at a dozen points now, and up to the mountains. “I see ten Dragonships, twenty–where’s the rest of Garthion’s command? Where’s my Dad?”

“Focus, Aranya.”

“I’m
trying, Zip.”

She pushed her weary body up into the air, searching. The city’s defence was giving a good account of itself.
The catapult and crossbow emplacement teams worked with well-oiled efficiency, making the Sylakian Dragonships fight for every inch of ground–but the enemy were still many, harrying the city in three major groups, one of which was forging toward the castle. Aranya saw her father leading a charge against Sylakian ground troops up there, men landed by Dragonship within the city itself. He would soon come under attack from the air.

“Look, Ri’arion,” said Zip.

The monk was up on the battlements, organising ropes to haul the Jeradian troops up and into the relative safety–or mayhem–of the city itself. Bodies lay strewn across the battlements, the red of Sylakia mixed with the purple of Immadia. Aranya saw a group of Immadian women attacking a Sylakian soldier with pans, cutlery and even a chair.

“He needs to go up to his catapult,” said Aranya. “Shall we give him a ride?”

“After I down that Dragonship,” said Zip, dipping an arrow into their fire-pot. “Two of them. Darn. Need to refuel.”

Oil glugged behind her. Aranya gazed up again at the mountains. Garthion’s force motored down at their top speed toward the undefended rear of the city. King Beran would be surrounded. But what–what were those white dots up there? Birds? Her eyes narrowed, following the flight of two Dragonships
straggling Garthion’s main group. They had just appeared from behind a peak. The white dots mobbed the Dragonships. Attacking? Harrying?

“What in the Island-World?” she breathed.

“Aranya! Forward!”

Heeding her Rider’s call, Aranya surged through the air, driving her exhausted body on to a collision course with the two Dragonships Zip had pointed out.
Sss!
The first arrow was away. She banked, jerked into a vertical climb and furled her wing as a half-dozen crossbow quarrels rent the air. Only one struck her a glancing blow on the belly. No damage. Aranya righted her flight.