Dragonfriend (29 page)

Lia noted, “We should alert the monasteries on the way. There are at least five I can think of.”

“King Chalcion knows the location of our monasteries?” Master Jo’el gasped.

In a voice as bleak as a Cloudlands storm, she replied, “Don’t you trust me? Can you not distinguish between father and daughter?”

That was a sure way to lower a room’s temperature, Hualiama thought, meeting the Master’s stare with all the honesty she could muster. But he did not know her adoptive father as she did. King Chalcion was neither an easy man, nor a good father–she had earned bruises and contusions enough to prove that many times over in her lifetime.

He nodded curtly. “I trust
you
, Hualiama. Flicker will pass eight monasteries on the flight to Gi’ishior.” Turning to Master Ha’aggara, Jo’el said, “Compose message scrolls–small ones. One to request Sapphurion’s help without demanding it. He will know we refer to the law. The others to alert the monasteries.”

“Aye, Master Jo’el.” The young scholar bowed deeply, and departed at once.

Master Jo’el raised his hand. “Hualiama …”

She whispered, “I must go after Inniora. It’s my fault they took her, Master Jo’el.”

“You must rescue the Dragon.”

In a voice rife with bitterness, Lia muttered, “I’ve spent three months trying to work out how to move a mountain, Master. Should I move the mountain, I must bargain with Ianthine, a Maroon Dragoness who is a master of what Amaryllion calls a vile and twisted form of magic. And what part has the Tourmaline Dragon to play in this? He will thank us and fly away.”

Jo’el clapped his hands together. “By the Black Dragon’s own wings, who is Amaryllion?”

Lia bit her tongue. Oh no. Mercy … could she keep no secrets?

Tell him, little mouse. It is time.

The Master’s eyes flickered as though he, too, had heard the Ancient Dragon’s voice.

“Amaryllion lives beneath Ha’athior Island, Master,” said Hualiama, quavering of voice and heart. “He is the last of his kind, one of the Ancient Dragons.”

A bony finger stabbed toward her. “You know an Ancient Dragon?”

“He’s my friend.”

Master Jo’el’s expression seemed frozen somewhere between wanting to tell her off for a childish fantasy, and a compulsive desire to believe. The other Masters had no such reservations as they collected their respective jaws from somewhere in the region of the floor, amidst a chorus of undignified spluttering.

At length Jo’el asked, “Tell me, did this Ancient Dragon reveal anything more about the prophecy?”

Lia nodded. “He said, ‘The third great race of the Island-World will rise from the shadows. That is what Ra’aba fears.’”

If possible, their gathering grew even stiller as each person present tried to imagine what this statement might portend. The royal ward knew that every Master present wondered what manner of woman they had invited into their midst.

Hualiama answered their regard fire for fire. She refused to apologise for who she was. Let them splutter. Let Lia evince the courage of one who had befriended the mightiest of Dragons!

“Speak, Lia,” Jo’el commanded.

Lia held her audience spellbound as she recounted every detail of Amaryllion’s words. Mighty was the mental and physical beard-scratching of these monks, she thought with a smile. Even she sometimes felt as though she walked amidst dreams and visions.

After she had spoken, Master Jo’el noted, “I don’t believe a comet is due for another handful of years, Hualiama, but not all such portents are signalled. Our path is clear. You will ask the Tourmaline Dragon to find this Ianthine, and to return here once he learns the truth of your parentage. We will rally the monasteries and seek to alert Sapphurion. After that we find our King, and lay our plans to overthrow Ra’aba.” Unexpectedly, the dour monk chuckled, “What could be simpler?”

Flicker said, “A shame we can’t recruit a Brown Dragon to rescue Grandion, Lia–if one trapped him, surely another can blast him out?”

“No,” Lia said thoughtfully. “We need to secure the Dragon’s obligation to our cause. The scrolls of Dragon lore I read suggest that a life-debt holds great weight in Dragon society. That is, if he doesn’t consider it his duty to blast me for being on Ha’athior–oh. Blast … aye!”

Hualiama startled everyone, including herself, by leaping to her feet with a shout of triumph. Somewhat sheepishly, she found her seat again. Master Jo’el threw her a pointed look.

“Hydrogen bomb,” she blurted out.

“What’s the wretched girl talking about, Flicker?” Ja’al winked at the dragonet.

Flicker shrugged. “Been raiding the berry wine again, Hualiama?”

She knew he was referring to her flirtation with Grandion–the flirtation of a moth with a candle-flame.
Green is the colour of jealousy, dragonet,
she growled.

To the monks, Hualiama said, “I was thinking about how dangerously volatile hydrogen gas is.” Their blank looks only made her press on doggedly, “So, I thought … what if we made a long balloon and stuffed it down the tunnel, filled it with hydrogen, and then just blew the side off the mountain?”

“Brilliant!” crowed Ja’al.

Flicker beamed at her, showing every one of his tiny fangs. “You’re a genius, Lia. That Dragon had better have somewhere to take cover, though.”

“And you’d better have a very, very long fuse,” said Master Jo’el. “Or, run very fast.”

* * * *

“So, Human girl, let me understand the flight of your thoughts,” said Grandion, not long after the meeting concluded. “You propose to blow up this mountain with me still inside. If I survive, you want me speak to a mad Dragoness on your behalf, and find out the terrible secret of why you remember being raised by Dragons on Gi’ishior–a secret which might spell the end of all Dragons, if Ra’aba is right?”

“That’s about it,” said Lia, miserably. The incredulity in his voice was unmistakable. Mercy. Now she wished she had been less honest with him.

“In exchange for undertaking this crazy quest, you will rescue me?”

“Aye–no. I will rescue you anyway. After that, you have a free choice, Grandion.”

“Oh, a free choice? Your Highness is exceedingly kind.” His sarcasm stung, delivered with all the rich nuance of a Dragon’s vocal capability. “Perhaps you’re hoping the fabled draconic oath of obligation will force me to accede to your request? Did you read that in an old scroll somewhere?” Lia grimaced, about to reply, but Grandion cut in, “Girl, Dragons are creatures of high intelligence. I am not some stupid rock-dwelling lizard to be led about by the likes of you!”

His pronouncement came accompanied by a roar of fire which heated the rock she stood upon. Sweat pearled upon her brow. She must stink of fear; her courage, winged away to another Island.

Lia cried, “Grandion, you’re taking this entirely the wrong way.”

“Am I?”

“You could try trusting me! I’ve cared for you for three months!”

Ungrateful, despicable beast! She had to make him agree! Aye, her words had been less than eloquent. They had been desperate and broken–but surely, even this dim-witted lump of a Dragon could grasp the depths of her need? The sweep of events that drove her to stand upon a forbidden Island, that drove her to rise again and again above the murderous designs of Ra’aba and his minions? The grief of a family lost and now a friend kidnapped?

“Then why insult and threaten me, Human girl?” growled the Dragon, more puzzled than menacing. “You already hold my life in your paw. Do you not possess the power to leave me here?”

Heartache and loss abounded in her life, and now Lia faced more. The glut of her misery and woe would overspill a terrace lake. She who thought she knew Dragons … was a prize ralti sheep. Lia had misread Grandion and crash-landed the Dragonship of her hope on the rocks of his oh-so-Dragonish stubbornness and pride.

Naked despair thickened her voice as Hualiama replied, “If you knew me at all, Grandion, you’d understand that no power exists in this Island-World that could persuade me to abandon you to die beneath this mountain.”

Her words seeped away and returned to spark a roaring in her ears. Lia searched her deepest feelings. She saw ripples perturbing the magical veil of the Island-World, concentric circles diving inward and expanding outward simultaneously, their consequence, cataclysmic.

Even the silence held its breath.

She must speak her heart. Slowly, she added, “Grandion, you once spared my life. Therefore, I swear upon the sacred Spirits of the Ancient Dragons, and all that is dear to me, that I shall devote my life to succour yours, o mighty Tourmaline Dragon, and I promise to protect the Dragonkind against whatever terrible fate the future may hold.”

An overpowering stillness seemed to amplify around her oath, a power of truth she had never known existed. Though they existed as two separate beings, though the gulf between Human and Dragonish understanding was as measureless as the depths of the Rift storm, yet it seemed to Hualiama that a delicate yet unbreakable magical chain had come to link her heart to the Dragon’s third heart. When had that transpired? Sometime during her months of one-sided caring for Grandion? A shared fate which had drawn her to him before she ever knew his name? A destiny which lay together, beyond the Isles?

All she knew was that their hearts beat as one, and that the rhythm of that pulse was her life, throbbing out a miraculous, unstoppable torrent of magic, until her heart could bear no more …

The Dragon made a sound like a low, crooning sob, and when he spoke, it was with raw, quivering emotion. He declared, “Though it flies against every current of reason, I swear that I shall do everything in my power to aid and honour your oath, Hualiama of Fra’anior–out of my free will as a creature of flame and magic–for the gift of life must be honoured by all creatures under the twin suns, lest we fall into the Cloudlands and be lost forever.”

All the Island-World must marvel at these vows.

Magic swelled and undulated between them like the breath of a dawn wind misting the surface of a terrace lake. No breath would pass Hualiama’s throat. For a moment the veil of the unseen and unknowable seemed to draw aside, granting her a glimpse of the world-spanning ramifications of their simple words, a multi-dimensional tapestry of fate drawing together in a single time and place, lending
now
the infinite complexity of a universe of possibility. All would change. The Nameless Man’s cusp of history was already receding into the past, immutable.

Unthinking, in Dragonish, she whispered,
I thank thee, noble Dragon.

My soul-song gladdens the very stars, gracious Hualiama.

And so, having secured Grandion’s agreement to hide as far up the narrowing crack as he possibly could, the place where he said a trickle of water entered his cave, Lia returned–nay, fled–to the monastery to prepare her hydrogen bomb. Ten monks had worked for hours on gluing together sacks ten feet long and seven feet tall, connecting them with long hoses of hollow chengis vine.

Master Jo’el showed her the fuse he had braided and prepared. “It needs another two hours to dry,” he explained. “You’ll have five minutes after you light this to get as far away from that cave as possible. Do you have the hydrogen still? Enough meriatite stone and acid? Bellows and a pump?”

“All is prepared, Master.”

“Ja’al will help you set up the still. I want no-one else setting foot on the Holy Isle, for if that Dragon should seek revenge, we must minimise our transgression.”

“Aye, Master.”

She dared not speak of what had transpired between her and the beast. It was too fresh, too fragile to risk, trembling like a baby bird within her breast.

“Three hours of darkness remain. By dawn, be undercover. The sacks will take hours to fill with that small still. Take heart. Perhaps tomorrow evening, or the day after, you shall be ready. Pray Ra’aba does not return before that hour to complete his evil labours.”

Working rapidly, Hualiama and Ja’al ferried the necessary equipment over to Ha’athior Island. She worried about Flicker. Gi’ishior was a huge flight for a dragonet. Though dragonets were quick, they did not enjoy the stamina of Lesser Dragons. Flicker had estimated it would take him two or three days to reach Gi’ishior. He would stop at the hidden monasteries to rest. With one eye glued to the skies for Dragon-sign, Ja’al and Lia lugged their equipment around the treacherous path to the avalanche site. They stuffed everything down the hole and dragged the huge bags of Dragonship material to their desired locations along the tunnel.

Ja’al peered over her shoulder. “So, this is a hydrogen still?”

Lia nodded, biting her tongue as she concentrated on assembling the parts. “I’ll rest the acid bulb on this little stove to warm it gently, which speeds the reaction. Then I’ll drop chunks of meriatite into the acid where they’ll bubble away, and in the time it takes to toss a few ralti sheep at the Jade moon–hydrogen gas. This valve controls the gas outlet into this bag here, and the foot-pump drives the gas into the pipes leading to the sacks. Clear?”

“You know what? You’re weird.”

“I’m what?”

“Weird. What kind of Princess knows how to patch Dragonships and assemble a hydrogen still?”

“I keep telling you, I’m a royal ward–an imposter. Not a real Princess at all.”

“Royalty is an accident of birth,” said Ja’al, unexpectedly dropping a kiss on her cheek. “Chalcion may be a brute of a father and a respectable King, but I can guarantee he has no clue what a treasure he has in you.”

And he departed, leaving Lia to smile in bemusement, touching her cheek with a fingertip.

“Sooooo,” crooned Grandion, drawing out the word suggestively.

“He’s a monk. A friend. More like a brother, really.”

She babbled with the skill of the most empty-headed parakeet! Lia knew that the Dragon would not believe a single word.

On cue, he added, “Indeed, and I can safely reveal that I’m an overgrown windroc in disguise.”

Hualiama stamped her foot with unconvincing outrage. “Grandion! Ja’al is sworn to the Great Dragon’s service with vows of chastity, fidelity and service–”

“So that was a perfectly chaste kiss?”