Dragonfriend (35 page)

Down! Hualiama dived at the last instant, sensing movement behind her. The attacking Red Dragon missed his target by a whisker, ending his dive with a desperate slew as he realised he was beneath Grandion–an unhappy mistake for him. The Tourmaline kicked out viciously with his hind paws, opening huge gashes in the Red Dragon’s wings and flank.

“Ha,” Lia snorted. “Serves you–”

A massive weight slammed into her back, propelling her helplessly into the air. “Catch!” roared a Dragon.

Mercy! A Red swept toward her flying body, smirking with the air of a gleeful cat eyeing up a wounded rat. Play time for Dragons, Lia sensed. She was the plaything.

Just then, a Dragon’s wing slapped her backside from beneath. A glint of blue assured her that this was Grandion. Lightning seared her vision, spearing perfectly into one of the Red Dragons, seizing up all of his muscles for a vital moment as he crashed into Grandion’s hindquarters. The impact toppled Lia off the Tourmaline Dragon’s wing-surface, even as Grandion savaged the Red with a terrible bite to the base of his neck.

Hualiama could not tell the Reds apart in the thundering melee. She did not know which direction to look as she tumbled through the air. A Red Dragon’s muzzle thrust toward her, mouth agape as the Dragon tried to snap her in half. The picture in her mind was perfect, a dainty dance-step upon his lower lip, which would propel her out of the way … “Oof!” Lia smacked into the Dragon’s nose, right between his flaring nostrils. Somehow, she still gripped her blades. Thrusting instinctively from the hip, Hualiama ran her right arm right up to the elbow into the Red’s left nostril before she struck something soft and evidently sensitive. His head snapped about, rattling Lia like a monkey testing a nut for ripeness, before her arm suddenly worked loose in a spray of hot, golden Dragon blood.

With a warbling scream, the powerful Red flicked her high into the air.

Up she flew. Jaws, yawning open from beneath! Instinct saved her. Hualiama stretched out her legs in a dancer’s splits, bridging the Dragon’s gaping fangs from nostrils to lower lip as he pursued her skyward.

“Huh?” grunted the Red Dragon, evidently confused that his snack was misbehaving itself.

Lia had an insane split second to appreciate what damage a fireball might do to her delicate underparts, before Grandion came raging in to slap the Red open-clawed in the stomach. He ripped out a length of bluish entrails. “Lia!” Grandion roared.

The impact of the Tourmaline Dragon’s attack jolted her off the Dragon’s lips. Dropping on all fours upon the Red’s rotating shoulder, Lia crouched, coiled and ready, for less than a second before her second move was forced upon her by the Red chasing her off with a vicious nip. An agile leap took her onto the upper surface of the Red Dragon’s wing. She darted along the pliant membrane, trailing her blades behind her to open a long slice through the flight struts and wing surface, until she struck the secondary wing-joint bone. Ignoring the pain in her wrists, Lia stabbed deep, finding the major arteries feeding the Dragon’s wing. Her Nuyallith blade severed the controlling nerve-bundle. The Dragon slumped toward its maimed wing, flinging her aside …

Smack!
A Dragon’s paw. “Grandion!” she gasped, never happier to find huge blue talons clamped around her neck and upper chest.

“Not content to stay where I left you?” he snarled, giving Hualiama a hair-singing blast of the scorching inferno roiling in his throat.

“Not when my Dragon’s in danger,” she hissed back, twisting to scan the air around them. Count the Reds. One spiralled helplessly into the Cloudlands, his tattered wing no longer serving to keep him aloft. Just fifty feet less would have dropped him safely upon the peninsula. A second Red was grounded, the wounds in his neck and chest spurting golden Dragon blood with ghastly force. Grandion’s bite must have penetrated the ventricles of the Dragon’s second heart. Where was the third Red?

He growled, “
My
Dragon?”

“
My
Dragon Rider? Grandion, watch out–”

He reacted with a Dragon’s incredible swiftness. Somehow rolling to dodge the incoming fireball, Grandion lunged out with jaws agape to sink his fangs into the upper portion of the Red Dragon’s muzzle, up near the eyes and ear canals. A ghastly crackling sound ensued. Flesh sizzled. Sweetly acrid smoke poured out of his mouth for heartbeat after heartbeat, unending; Hualiama realised that Grandion had launched his most powerful Blue Dragon attack, lightning, right into the bite wound, cooking the other Dragon’s brain in the process. Mercy.

The Red Dragon fell, flaccid in death.

Panting hard with residual rage and effort, Grandion circled swiftly, checking that the Red who had fallen over the edge would not recover. Hualiama sucked in her breath as she saw the Dragon smash into an outcropping a mile below before cartwheeling away in an unnatural flurry of broken limbs and wings. Then the Tourmaline Dragon landed beside the final Red, who was incapacitated, too weak even to flex a talon in his defence.

Who sent you?
Grandion growled.

Razzior the Orange,
wheezed the other.
He knows all about your pathetic plan … to rouse the monasteries.
The Dragon’s eye, dulled now with the leaching away of his fires into the eternal darkness, lit upon Hualiama.
Who are you, Human, presuming to ride a Dragon? Such … has never …

The eye shuttered. The faint beat of his Dragon hearts fell silent.

May your soul burn in the eternal fires of all Dragonkind,
said Grandion, in a voice thick with regret.
Lia, I must dispatch these Dragons on their final journey. See to your dragonet. Be ready to fly.

I will be.

The scrolls of Dragon lore recorded at length the Dragonish practice of settling issues by open combat. Now, having experienced it for herself, Lia wished there were another way, for the travesty of seeing the fires of a Dragon’s very soul snuffed out, caused an Island’s weight of sorrow to lodge within her breast. As she walked up to where the dragonet lay, the powerful beat of Grandion’s wings blasted dust about her feet. He dragged the two Red Dragon corpses off the peninsula to drop them over the Cloudlands, sending them on their final journey.

Flicker raised his head at her approach.
You have become powerful, straw-head,
he murmured.
Who would have thought I raised you so well?

How Lia laughed!

* * * *

When Flicker awoke, it was to find himself in his favourite place in the world, which, he decided, only narrowly beat nosing about in a warm abdominal cavity for intestines. They flew in at cool altitudes never visited by dragonets, as if ascending the visible curve of the Island-World. He lay in Lia’s lap wrapped in her tunic top; she had stripped down to provide him a snug cloth burrow. If he was not mistaken, he had been bathed with something that teased his nostrils most agreeably. He would rather be chased by a thousand rajals than budge from this spot.

Lia and the proud Tourmaline Dragon conversed in low tones.

Three days travel to Rolodia Island,
said Grandion.
I know a fine place to roost this evening.

What of your wounds, Grandion?

Bah, mere cuts and grazes. What do you think your dragonet told them, Rider?

Rider? Flicker’s ire piqued at Grandion’s choice of words. But the growling of his belly fires mellowed when Lia said,
He won’t have told them anything, Grandion. He’s very courageous.

He’s a dragonet.

Lia stroked his neck tenderly.
He’s the bravest creature I’ve ever known.

Flicker suppressed a laugh at Grandion’s visceral reaction to her accolade. Pure, potent jealousy!

Who destroyed three Red Dragons this morning?
The Dragon’s tone was neither friendly nor particularly endearing.
Rending them limb from limb with my talons, I hurled those three weak-fires to their deaths in the Cloudlands!

Unexpectedly raising her voice in the fifteenth stanza of the vocal saga called
Saggaz Thunderdoom,
Lia responded:

Bestriding the sky as a tempest raises its battlements,

Saggaz Thunderdoom did smite his foes,

With claw and wing and breath of ice–

A low throb of laughter coursed through the Dragon’s body. “Point taken, Lia. I did wonder when you’d break into song. Well chosen, too, for that storm will strike us before the hour is ripe. Shall I rise above it?”

At the top of her lungs, she carolled:

Canst thou, canst thou?

My wingéd love, canst thou?

“Your what and how much?” spluttered Grandion.

“Unfortunate reference.” Lia fanned her heated face vigorously. “Uh–Grandion, can you do ice attacks? I saw a few tremendous lightning bolts back there.”

“You should see my shell-father …” He floundered to a halt. So, his father was a Blue Dragon? Flicker filed away that titbit of information. “Not yet, Lia. Age augments a Dragon’s powers, and I haven’t yet developed the power to generate ice. I can cool water for you, though–if you don’t mind that it comes from my water stomach.”

“Water you’ve spat up? I’ll take a rain check on that.”

“Ice idea,” agreed the Dragon, spotting the pun immediately.

“Oh, stop splashing words about!”

“Fine,
Hail
-iama, no need to storm at me.”

That was not even worth a groan. Grinning toothily over his shoulder at Lia and Flicker, the Tourmaline Dragon’s sweeping wingbeat quickened in tempo. He soared skyward, seeking to overfly the oncoming storm.

“Ra’aba and his allies grow in power,” Grandion noted. “They dare a daylight attack on the Isle of Gi’ishior itself? This bodes ill, my fair Rider. What say you?”

Flicker decided he had heard quite enough from the Tourmaline Dragon, especially his disgusting insinuations of affection for Hualiama. Besides, neither of them were paying him the slightest attention.

“Ooh,” he groaned pitifully.

Much better. Now her green eyes did their crinkling at the corners that unfailingly turned his insides to goo. Questions followed. Flicker tried not to lap up Lia’s fussing too blatantly as he modestly recounted the inspirational saga of his journey from Ha’athior Island to Gi’ishior, where he had conducted an audience with none other than Sapphurion himself, convincing the Dragon Elder to fly to the monastery to investigate. But upon leaving the Halls of the Dragons he had been ambushed by Razzior, the Orange Dragon, who had stolen from him the final scroll meant for a monastery hidden on tiny Giaza Island, just offshore of Gi’ishior. Flicker had been tortured for any further information he might have.

“I told them nothing!” Flicker said, proudly.

Hualiama bent her head to kiss his muzzle, which made him purr with pleasure and Grandion’s eyes bulge fit to pop out of their sockets. “You are truly spec-uh, spec-ta … spectabulous,” she said, appearing to grow confused.

“What is this tinge of blue on your soft skin, Lia?” asked the dragonet. He laid his paw on her arm. “And these funny bumps?”

“Cold,” she said, rubbing her arms. “This air’s so thin, it bites.”

“Take your tunic,” Flicker offered, hoping that she would refuse. On cue, straw-head shook that mane of hers. “Please,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“You’ve a broken leg. And your wings, your beautiful wings make me think of butterflies swirling about my face.” Hualiama made a shooing gesture. “Pretty butterflies just like a pretty dragonet, are you singing to me? I like singing butterflies.”

The dragonet squeaked at Grandion,
What’s the matter with straw-head? Do something, you lumbering numbskull!

A
WARM FIRE
glowing between three tremendous boulders that comprised the entire crown of a tiny Islet a hundred leagues north of Gi’ishior, a portion of lightly grilled bat and the kindness of two friends, were all Hualiama needed to recover. Flicker treated them to a comical rendition of her altitude sickness, making up all sorts of nonsense Lia was convinced she could never have said, not if all the Islands of the world turned into mountains of purple jelly inhabited by singing draconic eels.

Resting against Grandion’s flank, with the warmth of a Dragon at her back and a fire dying to embers before her, Lia brushed out her long, wavy tresses, which unbound tumbled to the small of her back, as she tried to make sense of the day which had been. One question troubled her above all others. Best blurt it out before it burned a hole through her tongue.

“Grandion, did you murder that child?”

The Tourmaline Dragon heaved a sigh that raised such a gust, it almost snuffed out their campfire. “Must you ask?”

Hualiama wished she did not always feel she had to walk the narrow edge of her fears with him. In a small voice, she said, “Please. I must know.”

Grandion said, “That was the moment, Lia, when I realised matters had gone too far. Others had warned me. Would I listen? We stalked a child on Ya’arriol Island. I lay in wait in the densest part of the jungle, concealed, and she skipped right into my paw as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Singing, as you do.”

“Seeing me, she screamed.” Grandion’s digits curled as if he could still feel the child there, her heart fluttering in mortal terror; Lia could imagine the scene all too vividly. “Her eyes were wide, petrified, and so blue–like the child I remembered. Delicate, she quivered in my paw. Alive. A tiny fledgling, innocent of any wrongdoing. All of my murderous thoughts crashed in on me. I saw … the evil … and I asked myself, what had she done to deserve this? I was a hatchling killer, an egg stealer–not yet in deed, but certainly in my hearts. Most certainly in the dark fires of my Dragon hearts.”

Lia said, “Yet there is good in you, Grandion. You showed me mercy.”

“Aye. And I burned you.”

“You were feral.”

Grandion’s chuckle occupied a melancholy tomb beneath an Island-mountain of heavy thoughts. “Here we sit, Hualiama, representing the two great races of the Island-World. Human and Dragon. One young and vital, the other ancient and noble. Yet we Dragons have lost much. It is said we travelled from the stars. What calamity drove us hence? Have you ever asked yourself that? And what is nobility, if not a choice–not a birthright, as many Dragons believe, but the actions and choices of an honourable heart? Protect the innocent. Nurture the little ones. Stand against evil in all its forms. We must in all our deeds, exhibit integrity. We Dragons are the apex predators of this Island-World, for who dares hunt a Dragon? All the more, therefore, are these things asked–nay, demanded–of us.”