Dragon's Heart (15 page)

Likkarn stepped around the drakk and, with a swift purposeful slice, cut the drakk's head off. Then, with his boot, he kicked the back of the creature's body, which sent it sailing over to the side of the stall.

The stench was now overpowering. Jakkin gagged, then fought down the impulse to throw up.
Not in the mask! Not in...
Grabbing off the mask, he vomited so hard into the straw, bits actually came out of his nose as well. Wiping his mouth and nose with his sleeve, he replaced his mask. His stomach was no longer roiling, but now he was having trouble breathing and his mouth felt as if he'd been eating fewmets.

Balakk and Likkarn ignored him. Instead they searched around the stall, rechecking every bit of it carefully—walls, floor, and joins.

Once his nausea had passed, Jakkin helped them in their hunt, though Slakk remained sitting on the straw-covered floor, rocking back and forth, his damaged hand cradled against his body.

Eventually Balakk found a small loose floorboard through which the drakk must have crawled. Slakk had missed that on his inspection, and for a brief moment, Jakkin thought he deserved what he'd got. But only for a moment. Slakk looked so miserable and hurt crouching there, not far from the drakk's awful head, that without thinking, Jakkin sent him a comforting ribbon of light.

Slakk never noticed.

I must have been mistaken about that sending.
But it had been so loud, so definite.

Balakk hammered seven nails into the board. He would have kept going, but Likkarn bent over and laid a hand on his shoulder.

"It's almost all iron and no wood now," he told Balakk in a soft voice.

"That will do," Balakk said at last. "That will do." And he stood.

They made another round of the stall but found no more loose boards, no holes in the floor. All the while, the smell continued to get worse. Even Auricle, three stalls away, complained, sending Jakkin pictures of bilious gray-green mud, popping and splattering.

Only after the men were sure of the stall did they check Slakk, who was now just whimpering. Balakk placed the mask over his face and patted his shoulder, though Slakk responded to that no more than he had to Jakkin's sending.

"I should have put the mask on him," Jakkin said.

"You had other things to think about, boy, as did we," Balakk told him, though Jakkin wasn't sure if he was referring to his getting sick or his looking about for the hole the drakk had come through.

"We can't get him to the hospice until Dark-After is done," Likkarn said. "Another few hours." He looked at Jakkin carefully. "But at least we can take him out of here. The smell alone will kill him."

"Or me," Jakkin said. The nausea had returned and he fought it down. He didn't want to throw up again, though he doubted there was anything much left in his stomach.

"Or any of us," Balakk added.

"Will you watch him, keep him warm?" Likkarn asked.

Jakkin had never heard the old bonder speak in such soft tones. "It's already warm," he said. He was sweating in his leathers.

"He'll be in shock, chilling. Keep a blanket around him. Bed him down near your Auricle, if she'll have him with that smell. Otherwise, you lie down by his side. He'll need it."

Jakkin shrugged.

"Only get that fewmetty knife away from him first."

"I'll send Arakk back here to take turns with you," Balakk said.

Jakkin nodded. He looked over his shoulder at the drakk's body. Even without a head it was still moving sluggishly.

Likkarn said gruffly, "That piece of worm waste must have been desperate for food."

"She had eggs in her belly," Jakkin told him.

"Ah. That explains it."

"Slakk smashed them."

Likkarn nodded. "Good boy."

They got Slakk to his feet, though he wouldn't let go of the knife, and led him as far from the little stall as possible. The stench followed them. Slakk had been drenched in the drakk's blood.

Auricle screamed when they came near, reacting to both the smell and the blood.
And possibly the knife, too.
She hackled as well, the back scales of her neck rising up like a small fan. No amount of sendings could quiet her, so they moved Slakk into a different stall, an empty one, halfway back down the corridor.

"When you can," Balakk whispered to Jakkin, "get the knife and wash it off with sand." There were boxes of sand along the corridors. Sand was always available to help clean out stalls. "Otherwise the blade will be eaten away by the blood."

"I will." Jakkin was actually more worried about Slakk suddenly using the knife on him than he was about blood eroding the blade. "I will," he repeated.

"And as soon as it's light, you can get him back to the bondhouse, and a bath for both of you." Balakk talked about them as he would a dragon.

"I wish it could be now," Jakkin said, his skin already itching for hot water and yellow soap. He could do it alone, could get back to the nursery house through the cold of Dark-After, but that would give away the secret. And it wouldn't help Slakk at all.

***

WHEN THE MEN finally left him alone with Slakk, Jakkin stared at his friend as if he'd never seen him before. The boy's face, gray and sunken, had only begun to soften, though that somehow made him look worse than ever. His hand clutching the knife, though, had not relaxed at all and was still tight around the handle.

"It's all right, Slakk," Jakkin said to him in the same soft tone he'd used with the hackling worm. "You're a hero. You can sleep now. Give me the knife."

Slakk said nothing, but held on to the knife till his knuckles turned white. He kept shuddering like a young dragon.

Jakkin remembered how Slakk had managed a sending—the blood-red rivers, the bones, that scream.
Or did I only dream it?
Jakkin wondered.

No, he may have been asleep at first, but he'd been wide awake when Slakk sent the blood and flames. And if Slakk could send and Likkarn could receive sendings ...
I need to find Akki as soon as possible, to tell her. It may be important.
He put a hand on Slakk's shoulder. "There, there," he said, trying to find his way back into Slakk's mind. He sent a calm river, a long meadow of green grass, then waited.

Nothing.

He tried again, this time sending a rainbow, all bright and cheery and easily picked up. But Slakk's mind was closed to him, and no amount of nudging and pushing could get it to open again.

"Never mind," Jakkin said, still speaking in soft tones. He led Slakk to a corner of the stall, where he might feel protected on three sides. Putting a blanket over Slakk's shoulders, Jakkin knelt and tucked it around Slakk's knees. All the while he crooned, "There, there, there," as if talking to a hatchling instead of a seventeen-year-old boy.

Just then Jakkin heard a strange sound and looked up. Slakk was weeping and the knife had fallen to one side.

"I'll hold on to this," Jakkin said, grabbing up the knife. Slakk made no protest. "You sleep. I'll stand guard the rest of the night."

Without any nod of agreement, or word to show that he'd understood, or even an acknowledging grunt, Slakk closed his eyes.

Jakkin couldn't tell if Slakk was actually asleep or only pretending. But true to his word, he stood over Slakk until Dark-After was done and the bell for morning rang through the incubarn, signaling day.

THE BATH took almost an hour and—hot water followed by cold—Jakkin still didn't feel clean. The drakk stench lingered on his hands and in his hair. He could taste it each time he swallowed.

And if he was bad, Slakk was worse, coughing frothily as Jakkin scrubbed his wrists where the drakk blood had soaked through the gap between leather and shirt. Then the cough turned deep, sounding like a death rattle. Of course it was really only his lungs trying to clear themselves of the drakk smell. Or so Balakk explained afterward.

Between them, Balakk and Jakkin got Slakk out of the bath and to the hospice, though it was clear that he hadn't been badly injured. A bit of burn on one hand was the worst of it. But he hadn't said a word to any of them since the drakk attack. Every now and then he whimpered piteously. And kept on coughing.

They left him at the hospice, with a visiting doctor from the nearest dragon nursery in attendance. Evidently Likkarn himself had been up at first light to drive off to fetch him.

"Don't worry," said the doctor, a man with a series of blood scores on his right cheek and neck. "A bit of rest, a bit of feeding-up should do him."

"That doctor knows more about dragons than men," Balakk said as they walked out into the sunshine. "It's the same thing he says when he looks at failing studs. 'A bit of feeding-up should do him.' He's an old fraud." He spit to one side, raising dust by the walk.

Jakkin laughed, a short sharp hough of a laugh, but remembered how it had taken days for him to adjust after his drakk hunt. And he'd never had his hands deep inside a drakk like Slakk had. "Will Slakk be all right?"

"Slakk his name and slack his mind. His body will be fine, though he'll have scars," Balakk said, which was not what Jakkin wanted to hear.

***

AS SOON AS they'd grabbed some breakfast they joined the drakk hunters.

"We don't go hunting on an empty stomach," Likkarn warned. "No food, no form." It was what was usually said about fighting dragons before they were taken to fight in the pits. It was the same thing for this drakk hunt.

For once the dining room was quiet. Jakkin was glad of that. His mind was abuzz with everything that had happened. He couldn't have stood being further burdened by talk.

The hunters sat to one side, guzzling their takk and mint tea, and no one else in the room asked questions. It was as if the seriousness of the hunt ahead silenced them all.

Kkarina came into the room a half dozen times, on tiptoe, which—given her bulk—was pretty amazing. It was a kind of rolling walk, yet graceful.
Like Sssasha,
Jakkin thought. She never spilled a drop of the takk—or the tea—as she refilled cups. The slabs of lizard meat were eaten without a word said. Jakkin had three eggs, which he pushed around the plate, finally eating one because he had to. Even though it wasn't true, everything smelled of drakk to him.

At last the hunters were done eating and rose as a group, taking turns going to the johnnyloo. Then they met outside, where they formed two lines behind Likkarn and Balakk.

"Check your equipment now," Likkarn warned them. "There'll be no time to do it once we spot a drakk."

They each took a moment to look over their leathers, their masks, their knives and stingers. Jakkin put his right hand to his knife, checked the mask with his left. Thankfully it was a new mask and didn't stink. There weren't enough stingers to go around, and he—like Arakk and Tanekk, both about his own age—went without, having to rely only on his knife.
Well, Slakk did fine with just a knife.
But no matter how strongly he thought it, Jakkin couldn't convince himself. He felt vulnerable without a stinger, though he'd never actually used one and had no time to learn.

"We need to be well prepared, lads," Likkarn told them. "You all know what happened in the incubarn last night. If there are other females ready to lay eggs, we won't just have a drakk problem, we'll have a drakk
invasion.
"

There was muttered agreement from all of them. Jakkin bit his lip, imagining dozens of drakks swarming up through loose boards in the incubarn.

"That means we must be prepared up here as well," Likkarn added, touching a finger to his temple. His scarred face was fierce, the dead eye like an immovable white light, and he looked as if he were ready to take on the drakks all by himself.

How do we do that?
Jakkin wondered.
How do we prepare ourselves mentally?
He thought about Slakk in the hospice, about Auricle screaming her distress, about the beheaded drakk still moving sluggishly in the sand of the stall.
Stop thinking so much!
He wasn't preparing himself mentally, he was
un
-preparing.

But how was he to stop thinking so much when he kept flashing back to the one drakk hunt he'd been part of, more than a year earlier? Just remembering made his stomach churn again. He wondered if the other hunters felt this way, for many of them had been on that same hunt. In fact, many of them had been on more than one such hunt. When he glanced around, all he saw on
their
faces was a kind of grim determination. Likkarn with his eyes narrowed, Balakk moving his jaw left to right over and over again, Kkitakk rubbing a gloved hand across his face. Even Frankkalin seemed grimly ready, hawking a great glob of spit onto the sand and rubbing it in with the toe of his sandal. The other men were equally stolid.

However, the boys did not look so sure. Rather, they were wide-eyed, clearly fearful. Arakk, normally the sunniest of the group, was breathing too fast, his round face white, like the foam on the top of waves. There were only two spots of color on his cheeks, as if he had a fever. Then suddenly he looked up at the sky and screamed, "Drakk! Drakk! Drakk!" while jerking his fist up at the red sun, to give himself courage. To give
all
of them courage.

Likkarn watched him for a minute, eyes narrowing even further. At last, he said quietly, "Let's go."

They started down the road, heading toward the nearest stand of spikka trees, which was where drakk normally roosted. This copse was not more than two kilometers from the nursery.

"We should have cut those trees down last year," Likkarn said to Balakk, but loud enough for all of them to hear, "when we found that family of drakk nesting there."

Balakk shook his head. "Trees hold water," he said, reminding Likkarn what they all knew: in a desert area, trees are vital to keep a place alive.

Likkarn grunted an answer. But Jakkin understood that the old nurseryman was actually agreeing with Balakk. As did they all. Without water, there could be no dragon nursery. What was having to hunt drakks now and again compared to living in a desert empty of life?

They walked on in silence, though the sound of their boots crunching on the sandy road was a comment all its own.