My escoas were drugged at daybreak by means of sev eral blow darts shot into the soft folds of their dewlaps, each blow dart as small as a young porcupine’s quill. The darts had been tipped with peshawar, or what Xxelteker sailors call h’xar, redivivus moth oil. Or at least, that’s what I supposed the darts had been dipped in; that was what we’d always used in the Clutch Re stables to subdue loose and fighting destriers.
The women tending the escoas debrided the necrotic tissue around the dragons’ snouts with swift confidence, nimbly picking soft splinters of deadwood and shards of bone and cartilage from the exposed tissue. I watched them closely as they worked, in case I had to repeat the procedure.
It was as I was bent over their heads that I realized why the women’s hair was the exact pale green of creeping moss. They’d woven the stuff amongst their locks in such profusion that moss and hair were one. I felt foolish that I’d not noticed it before.
Throughout my youth I’d heard greatmothers and aun ties tell lazy children in danku Re that if they didn’t get working, they’d turn into moss, just like the idle tree sloth. As with all effective threats, some truth resides behind their words: Sloths of a certain age are green from the creeping moss that has entwined itself amongst their hair during their protracted bouts of motionlessness. I’ve heard tell that sloths encourage moss growth on their young by coarsely weaving strands of it over their offspring. For cam ouflage, perhaps. Now that I could see the women’s green hair for what it was, I found it hard to believe I’d hitherto not recognized it as largely moss.
Just as the escoas started to come out of their druginduced stupor, the women flushed out the knuckle-sized holes they’d created, using a solution the color of Longstride’s eyes. They filled their cheeks to bulging with the solution and sprayed it out in a strong blast through their teeth. By way of fingers held up and brusque gestures, I was ordered to flush the gaping holes clean four times daily. Four gourds were filled with the solution and tied to the escoas’ saddles.
By late morn, the peshawar wore completely off and my escoas were mobile. The matriarch ordered three of the hunters who had found me to take me away.
I repeated the word
myazedo
many times, but received only disdainful looks: What
I
desired was insignificant.
I remembered what Fwipi had said, back in the arbi yesku:
It’s not the Djimbi way, to fight, to be aggressive.
Nothing could be so far from the truth when describing my captors. They were every inch warriors, predators, fighters. If more Djimbi tribes had been like them, Emperor Wai Soomi Kun would never have established an Archipelagic empire four hundred years ago, in the land known now as Malacar.
Longstride stood beside the matriarch to watch me leave, her chin lifted, her eyes fierce. Weeping sores covered her hands, from where she’d thrust venom into me during the mock-bestial rite; clearly she’d not been exposed to venom before. I knew all about those sores, because she’d woken me before dawn to show me the appalling blisters, grinning tightly, nostrils flared and pupils tiny with the pain. I had a few blisters of my own—lentil-sized and surrounded by angry skin—but had, of course, much more tolerance to venom than Longstride.
She’d dropped a gourd of what looked like mashed black mushrooms on my lap, and a slab of bloody meat. I ate the earthy pap and raw flesh in solitude, having slept the night alone in the matriarch’s yurt—though the numinous flight of my soul while I’d been enwrapped in venom’s embrace had been as far removed from sleep as Longstride was from benevolence. There was something in the mushroom pap reminiscent of the purgative Gen had given me to drain the desire for venom from my blood, for the cold tremors that had seized me upon awakening abruptly stopped.
Led by my Djimbi escorts, I traveled for a day and a night away from their camp, journeying back to where my captors had first found me.
Or so I assumed that was where we were going. One part of the jungle looked much like another, and we seemed to be retracing our steps.
But no. Late morn of the second day, we came out of the jungle onto a windy bluff. The Djimbi gestured at my escoas, then toward the canyon and river below us.
“Myazedo,” Jade-eyes said.
Hey-o. We had one word in common.
“Myazedo,” Jade-eyes brusquely repeated, gesturing at the ravine. I understood. I was to fly down there and find the myazedo camp.
Thanks were on the tip of my tongue, but the arrogant pride on Jade-eyes’s face halted my words. She had brought me there not because I had wanted it, not because I had asked for it, but because it had been
her
desire to do so. My gratitude would have earned contempt.
I wondered, then, why the matriarch and her people had performed their rite on me, why they had expended time and energy to bring me to the myazedo camp. When I’d left her, Longstride had still been wearing my lock of hair plaited amongst hers, and I still wore a lock of hers. When I’d cut her hair and braided it with mine during the rite, I’d felt as if a transaction had been completed.
Yet now there lingered a feeling of debt still owing.
A breeze riffled the edges of Jade-eyes’s green mane as she looked down at me from her sinewy height. The sharp angles of her dark-green-and-teak-brown face were preda ceous and proud. I disliked the idea of being beholden to her and her people.
I turned my back on her, tightened the surcingles of the escoas’ saddles, and tethered Warthog to Toadhunter by means of a crude rope that had been given me by the tribe. Warthog was tractable, and I expected her to follow me into the air without trouble. Still, I tethered her for assurance.
Both escoas had misshapen snouts and were breathing stertorously through their mutilated nares, though their wounds were already visibly healing. As wind tossed vol leys of raindrops from the leaves of the trees behind us, the escoas snaked their necks first one way, then the other, as they surveyed the riverine canyon below. Their forked tongues quivered between their gums as they scented the air. They were alert and passably fed after the numerous gi ant millipedes and land snails and night-blooming orchids they’d foraged from the jungle. They were ready for flight.
By the time I was mounted on Toadhunter, my Djimbi escorts had melted into the jungle.
Toadhunter needed little urging to fly into the canyon, for neither she nor Warthog had had anything to drink since our capture. As I’d hoped, Warthog followed promptly into the skies, taking off the moment Toadhunter sprang from the bluff. We flew side by side.
It no longer terrified me, flight. Perhaps I was even a little exhilarated by the surge of muscle beneath me, the ripple of wing membranes outstretched in a glide on either side of me, the chill of the air and the sight of jungle swaying and rolling below like a multihued green ocean.
We were over a river, then
whoosh
! We listed and dropped a little as we soared over the long, long cataract plunging down into the canyon. The air was noticeably cooler in the ravine as Toadhunter descended.
I saw no fire smoke coming from the jungle forest that lined one side of the gorge. But the myazedo would be smart enough to cook only at dusk and before dawn, when smoke mingled with mist and was indiscernible from cloud.
Ahead of us lay a small stony beach cupped around one side of the deep pool into which the cataract thundered. Toadhunter back-fought the air, legs lowered for land ing, and I half stood in my saddle, legs flexed for impact, hands tight around the saddle rungs but arms not locked. With a rasp of sliding stone beneath her clawpads, Warthog touched down beside us in perfect synchrony. I was inordi nately proud of how smoothly we landed.
All three of us drank long of the cool, green water.
That was a far different river from the one where Toadhunter had landed after the storm. After eddying and swirl ing through the deep pool below the waterfall, the river poured down a rocky chute, surging and breaking in white caps over boulders and fallen trees. The rock walls of the canyon we stood in were green with moss and ferns, and everything dripped, not just from the deluge that had ham mered down from the cloud-clotted skies at dawn, but from the spray of the waterfall. The canyon was sheer rock wall on the far side of the river. Behind me, a belt of forest a mile deep ran along the river as the walls of the canyon rose up behind it in forested tiers.
I rendered the escoas flightless with rope and wing bolts. As they continued noisily sucking water, I climbed over rock and boulder and fallen tree, then wandered along the forest’s edge. I found what I was looking for: The trail had been compacted by many feet, over many years. I returned to the escoas, waited until they’d drunk their fill, then led them along the path.
I found the camp within a stone’s throw of the river. It looked much like Longstride’s village—nomadic, func tional—a cluster of bamboo huts interspersed among the trees. No people were visible.
“Tansan!” I called out. “Savga!”
“Here, cut me free!” The voice was hoarse with fury. I recognized it at once.
Glancing uneasily about the deserted camp, I tied the escoas to a tree, then followed the shouts to a leaning bam boo hut. I pushed the door cautiously with a foot. It was latched shut, wouldn’t budge. I lifted the wooden latch and the door swung open on creaking leather hinges. A flood of hoarse curses flowed out of the gloom.
My eyes slowly adjusted to the shadows. The drag onmaster sat against the far wall, hands tied behind his back, ankles bound and strung to the ceiling so that his legs were slightly elevated. His neck was held fast to the wall by what looked like a wire garrote. A knife swung from the rafters, tied with the same rope that bound the dragonmaster’s ankles.
Chill pimples broke out over my skin. My back crawled. “What happened?”
“Don’t stand there, yolkbrain; cut me loose, cut me loose!”
“Who tied you like this?”
“Are you deaf?” His eyes bulged from his head. Ugly weeping bruises encircled his throat like a black collar. “Cut me free, you ass-screwed whore.”
“A honeyed tongue, as always,” I said sourly. I ducked into the hut—it was no larger than the room Savga and I had shared in the Noua Sor tenement—and worked at the knot around the knife. “Who did this to you?”
“That brooder bitch from the arbiyesku, the mother of that puling kitten you’re so fond of— Ahh!”
He yelled as I cut the rope that held his ankles and his feet thudded hard against the floor. He shifted on his but tocks—his tailbone must have been mightily sore from that awkward feet-in-the-air position—and panted as he struggled to overcome the pain of blood rushing back to his feet.
I knelt before him.
He glared at me. “You did that on purpose.”
“I’m sick of how you talk to me. Time you changed your ways.”
“Rishi whore,” he rasped, chest heaving. “There’ll come a day when you’ll rue that; on the wings of the Dragon, I vow there will. You and that brooder bitch—”
I slapped him. He gagged as the garrote cut into his throat. “Her name is Tansan,” I snapped. “What happened to Savga, that Tansan did this to you?”
“The brat’s fine,” he gasped. “With her mother.”
“You brought Savga here?”
“Who else?” He coughed, a hoarse, parched sound. “Water.”
I considered making him answer my questions first, but then stood. He’d talk more with his throat lubricated. I went out to the escoas, emptied a gourd of medicinal solu tion into my mouth, sprayed the solution over the wounds on the dragons’ snouts, then took the emptied gourd down to the river. By the time I returned to the bamboo hut, the dragonmaster was slowly flexing his legs.
I held the gourd to his mouth.
He snarled. “What’s in it?”
“Water. It held medicine before. Drink.” I tipped it to his mouth. After a moment’s hesitation—eyes boring into me with fury—he drank.
With each swallow, the garrote cut against his bobbing larynx and his eyes flickered with pain. I felt somewhat contrite, that I was forcing him to drink with the garrote around him, but I dismissed the idea of releasing his neck until he’d answered my questions.
If I’d even release him then.
When he’d drained the gourd, I gave him a moment to recover himself. He spoke without prompting.
“Your puling kitten insisted you’d come. The brooder bitch that birthed her says the kitten sees through the Winged One’s eyes sometimes. So I was made to wait here for you.”
“Tansan. Her name is Tansan. And the girl is called Savga.”
He snorted. He’d never use their names.
“Savga said I’d come here?” I repeated.
“Her teat-nurse says the girl has dragonsight, but it’s a lie, to hide the bitch’s own weird powers and ill will against me. She left me here to die, simple. She’s a scheming, du plicitous blackheart, and not all what she seems to be, either. There’s something about her that reeks of the un natural—”
“She’s a strong person; you hate her for it. You prefer subservience and timidity in women.”
“Open your eyes, girl! There’s more to that woman than what’s apparent. I’ve seen the way these myazedo obey her; she uses dark magics, I’m sure of it.”
I remembered the illusion I’d briefly experienced at the tanners’ clan, during the myazedo meeting: the hazy, bonfire-lit image of Tansan taking the form of a dragon.
“So what if she sometimes uses Djimbi magics?” I snapped, uneasy. “Are you and Daronpu Gen the only ones permitted to know and use them?”
“Her talents are veiled, her purpose unknown. She can’t be trusted.”
“Don’t be stupid. She’s doing what you’ve only dreamt of: freeing her people. Petty jealousy turns you against her. Now, where have they gone?”
He took his time before answering, muscles working in his jaw. “Xxamer Zu.”
“When?”
“Two days ago. If not for you flying direct into the storm, we’d be with them now.”
“You flew direct into the storm, not me,” I flung back. “I was following
you
.”
“You talk shit, girl. Before the worst of the storm hit, I’d landed. You flew straight over us, no matter how your pul ing kitten screamed for you to stop. You were looking right down at us. We all saw you.”
“I what?” His imprisonment had tipped him over the edge. “You landed where?”
“On an escarpment, beside the egg-train road from Xxamer Zu to Fwendar ki Bol.”
I’d seen no such escarpment before the storm had hit us, had seen neither the dragonmaster nor Ryn land their dragons upon it. I certainly didn’t recall looking straight down at them, nor hear Savga screaming for me to stop.
And yet . . . all I
could
recall was our departure from the arbiyesku, and how the lightning flickering in the distance had looked almost hypnotic, and how the thunder booming overhead and the wind gusting savagely about had folded me into the soul of the storm itself, after which I’d known nothing but fear and the keen desire to survive.
“We waited for you till the worst of the storm swept down on us,” the dragonmaster hoarsely continued. “Then we took cover in the jungle. Even then you didn’t return. So we went on, followed the egg-train road afoot till the boy steered us off and brought us here.”
The strangeness of my flight into the storm was swept away by what the dragonmaster had said.
“The boy?
Ryn
took you to the myazedo?” I said, baf fled.
“Not that boy, the other one! Piah, Piah, use your tit-soft brain!”
“Piah is hardly a boy,” I snapped. “Is Ryn still alive?”
“If you can call his cowardice life, though I’ll grant the flea provides information readily enough, concerning the layout of the daronpuis’ stockade.”
“Ryn hasn’t been hurt, has he?”
He sneered. “The boy’s so scared he answers questions before they’re asked.”
“I promised him he wouldn’t be hurt.”
The dragonmaster shrugged, deeming my promise unim portant. I wanted to slap him again. Instead I felt behind his neck, to where the wire had been twisted tightly around a bamboo pole. “The myazedo took the dragons with them, yes? And they’ll have planned to attack Xxamer Zu at night.”
“
This
night,” he growled; then he swore as my fumbling caused the wire to cut through the bruised, tender skin on his throat. Too bad.
“We can reach them,” I said, thinking aloud. “We’ll fly low; we don’t want to be seen by Ghepp. He’ll have watch ers scanning the skies for incoming heralds, waiting for an escoa to arrive with a delivery from elsewhere so he can turn it around again and alert Temple of the theft of his winged dragons.”
I slowly peeled the wire away from the dragonmaster’s throat. He held himself intensely still as I did so, and I knew it must have been hurting. When the bloody wire was free, I told him to bend forward, so I could cut the bonds from his wrists, where his hands had been tied behind his back.